5 Things Successful People Have That Others Don’t

Put the highly successful people of this world next to everyone who hasn’t got there yet, and a pattern shows up. It isn’t luck, and it isn’t talent alone. There are a handful of things they have that most people don’t.

I go through five of them in the video. Here are the first three properly, and a taste of the last two.

1. A specific plan and a strategy

We all have goals: financial freedom, a business, a dream home, the right person in our life. Setting the goal is the easy part. Getting from point A, where you stand today, to point B, where you want to be, is where most people get lost.

There are two phases, and you need both.

First, test. Read, watch, take courses, learn from mentors, and then try things yourself so you feel them on your own skin. Not every piece of information you consume is right, and not everything people tell you is true. Random moves are fine here, because this is how you find out what works and what doesn’t. Some of those random investments will even pay off.

Then, plan. Once you know what works, stop moving in random directions. Lay out the exact path from A to B: the moves, in order, and then execute them. Random moves can bring a return. A plan is what gets you to a specific goal in a reasonable time.

And the side effect is the real prize: you train your mind to build good strategies, and that skill carries over to every goal after this one.

2. Something of high value to offer

That can be information: what you know may hold the key to someone’s business, or someone’s way out. It can be a skill: photography, editing, design, being able to talk to people. And yes, it can be money, the resources to back someone else’s idea.

Don’t rank one above the other. An investment without an idea is nothing, and an idea without investment is nothing either. Which is why the third thing matters so much.

3. A well-trained sense for what things (and people) are worth

A successful person can look at an idea, a product or a person and judge, pretty accurately, what it’s really worth. Will this ad grab people? Will this song land? Will this hire pull their weight?

That sense comes from experience, and from being hard on your own work first. Before anything I make goes out, it passes through a lot of filters of my own. If you show people a draft, they’ll say “yeah, it’s fine”. If you show them something that survived ten rounds of your own criticism, they’re impressed, and you stand out from everyone else competing for the same attention.

The same honesty applies to yourself. Joining a company and expecting a raise after a month, when others have sacrificed there for years, is a badly calibrated sense of worth. Prove it first. Very often you’ll find you are worth it, because you’ve put the work in. Just make sure you have, before you expect the world to see it.

The other two

4. A massive ego, built on a strong foundation. Plenty of people have the ego without the foundation, and that ego is easy to crush. In the video I talk about why the most successful people are often the most humble, and why you sometimes have to put your head down before you earn your rank.

5. Not caring what anyone thinks. Good opinions or bad ones. I explain why doing things for yourself, not to be seen, is exactly what ends up getting you seen, and what it looks like to work quietly behind closed doors while people make up stories about you.