Your Ultimate Success is Being an Exception to the Rules

We’ve been taught from birth (most of us, anyway) that success is like winning the lottery, and that all life is a tragedy, filled with dangers and catastrophes.

However, this isn’t true. It never has been. There are exceptions to everything considered “normal.” Success depends on being an exception – being exceptional.

Yes, life and living isn’t easy, it isn’t always predictable, the weather isn’t storm-free. Occasionally, you’ll run into “gulley-washers” as they call big rain storms around here. You know, the kind that the news likes to talk about when a tornado takes out someone’s house and flips over cars.

(Of course that’s only reported in huge populated areas, not wide open countries. Like that “tree falling in a forest” concept – if a tornado touches down in a farmer’s crop field and no one gets hurt, is it really news?”)

To a lot of people, more than are commonly suspected, Success is a lot like that.

To the News media, they always are hyping up the near impossible – where someone wins the lottery. It doesn’t matter that millions of people made it possible with their 2-dollar and 10-dollar purchases. The news is always about the winners. And the hype is about the millions they won.

What they don’t tell you is that 70% of the winners go bankrupt, twice the national average. The majority of the people remained just the same as they were, just about as happy, same spouse, same friends. For over 40 percent, the money was gone in a few years. Statistics showed they gave away what they didn’t spend. [See http://calm.li/1TRzO2Z]

Why is that important? To me, it seems to point out that money doesn’t equate to success.

But if you study the classics, you’ll find that it never has. Money has always just been a symbol. And what it stood for was how much value you were giving others. Simple. You get as good as you gave. And you can’t get without giving first.

So if you want to be extremely rich, the logic says that you have to help people get extremely rich. Very simple. The value you have to give to others has to be exceptional if you are going to live an exceptional life yourself.

An article I read recently pointed out the obvious fact: All the extreme successes you read or hear about are exceptions. They aren’t the usual or the common.

What that seems to say is that if you want to be successful, you have to become an exception to the usual. Like those sayings that are passed around, “If you do the opposite of what passes for conventional wisdom, chances are you’ll be better off.”

The trick is to look at what conventional wisdom means. Look it up in wikipedia (of course that’s edited from time to time.) It’s commonly accepted ideas that match your current beliefs and are unexamined.

The main word in all that is “unexamined.”

That’s a built-in failure waiting to happen.

The other interesting point about successful people is that they tend to hang around with other successful people. They live in rich neighborhoods, not ghetto’s. That’s been pointed out as how come lottery winners don’t hang onto the money. They were never trained, or didn’t study, on what to do with money.

Claude M. Bristol (in his “Magic of Believing“) told a bit about this. He was vice-president of an investment banking firm during the Depression and made it boom by what he discovered. However, what he said to do in order to get more money into your life is to hang around with other people who had a lot of money in their lives.

I started another course recently which had Jack Canfield spilling his secrets about how to make bestsellers. And one thing he said is that the thing he did was to find people who had bestsellers and ask them what they did to make their books that way.

Of course, this goes back to if you want to be successful, you need to study people who were successful. That’s what Napoleon Hill did. And he was refining his studies right up to the year he died. In his last bestseller, “The Master Key to Riches” he stated that there was something called Cosmic Habitforce which explains how this works.

The general point is that we communicate in many more ways than are known to Science. The habits we have can be passed on to people we associate with and live around. So when you start “rubbing shoulders” with the successful, then you are going to get these habits.

Now Nap Hill took 20 years of shoulder-rubbing to get his interviews and write his first bestseller. And then kept studying successful people for the rest of his life, which was somewhere around another 45 years*.

Of course, you could say this is all a pipe-dream, a scam. After all, how do you get to “hang around” rich folks in their expensive homes and exclusive clubs.

The trick is to read and listen. You simply turn off your TV set and start reading and listening to successful authors. Of course, I recommend you start with the books on this site, but you could start anywhere. You just have to know that those people were verified successes, and not just “accidental millionaires” (which does happen at least as often as winning the lottery.)

The guys that are authentic (and write about it) usually started out from modest beginnings, made their fortune and kept it. Guys like W. Clement Stone, Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar, and so on.

You want to fill your life with this type of reading. And fill your ears with this type of audio books. If you want to become exceptionally successful, you are going to have to re-program yourself to think and act in exceptional ways.

You’re going to have to develop mental habits that only exceptional people have.

And this isn’t easy. But it’s done every year by more people than you suspect. Because the news only tells about the extreme cases, and is more devoted in its daily reports to who and what causes the most massive destruction that day. They won’t tell you human interest, or inspirational, or motivational stories for more than 5% of their total news time.

Again, turn off the news. Choose what you want to read, view, and listen to. Choose to study success and fill your mind with only that.

Then you’ll be able to see all the opportunities around you to make your success every single day.

To do anything else is to guarantee you are going to keep your day job until they finally retire you or lay you off for good. Between then and now, you’ll have multiple chances to be and act exceptional, and get exceptional results.

Your life, your outcome is exactly what you wish it to be.

It’s all your choice.

As always.

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(*Hill interviewed Andrew Carnegie in 1908, and published “Law of Success” in 1928. In 1937, 9 years later, he came out with “Think and Grow Rich.” In 1945, 8 years later, he published “Master Key to Riches.” Hill died in 1970.)

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Your action steps today:

1. Look over what I’ve told you and test it for yourself.

2. Make a list of successful people who have books or audio material you can review regularly.

3. Set up your schedule (like when you used to listen to or read news) so you can start studying these successful people.

4. Take notes of what you find out. Start carrying a notepad or moleskin notebook with you just for these and other ideas.

5. Do this all week. Compare how you are feeling and what great ideas you’ve had in that week to the week before.

Thanks for doing all you do.

​​​​​​​See you next time.

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