Home > Articles > Motivation > The 7 Rules Of Success
The 7 Rules Of Success
I have been thinking about success, about what it means and how you achieve it for the last three years.
In that time I’ve talked to the successful people whose stories are in this book about how they do what they do.
I wanted to take the mystery out of success, to lay bare the thinking behind great achievement and to expose the strategies and secrets of outstanding individuals. This is the core of The 7 Rules of Success.
I have been able to identify the 7 Rules that great modern achievers follow, the ones that you too can use to transform your life. All the achievers in this book follow all these rules, but I have selected four people for each rule who demonstrate it most forcefully.
Apply the thinking, follow the strategies, adopt the behaviour, and experience the results. I believe that what you read here will prove invaluable to you in your journey through life, in your quest for success, whatever that means to you, whatever age you are. Use this book as your success manual, your rulebook. All you need to get started is a notebook to jot down responses to the questions I’m going to be asking you to answer and an appetite for success.
The Meaning of Success
Earlier success guides have really just conflated success with having lots of money. The success they focused on was overwhelmingly material, a rags-to-riches guide. Given the times they were written in, this was entirely appropriate and their authors had often pulled themselves out of terrible poverty to great wealth themselves.
They came mainly from the US in the 1930’s and 50’s when the country had suffered the Great Depression of the 1930’s and two world wars. Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937) and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), surely the bible for salesmen everywhere, sold in their millions.
Then came Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), and W. Clement Stone’s, Success through a Positive Mental Attitude (1960). All are classic self-help guides, written for a generation raised on the American Dream of freedom through affluence.
Nowadays, we in the developed world enjoy greater prosperity and comfort than our forefathers could ever have imagined.
We work fewer hours: we have more disposable income; we’re better educated and we are cushioned by a social welfare system that supports us from cradle to grave. We’ve really never had it so good. We should be the happiest generation. Yet we’re not.
Happiness and Success
Depending on which study you look at, we’re less happy than we were 50 years ago. Why is it that happiness levels have not risen in the past 50 years, despite massive increases in personal and state wealth? Research points out that once people reach an ‘adequate’ income, additional wealth rarely has any further positive effect on happiness or satisfaction.
Even economists are pointing out that economic growth and prosperity cannot be read as indicators of happiness. This is what Andrew Oswald, Professor of Economics at Warwick University said in May 2004
‘The improvement in prosperity over the last 30 years has had no effect on reported levels of life satisfaction or happiness in the UK and that is quite remarkable. This is a serious challenge for policy makers as it appears to be very difficult to make people happy in the Western world.’
Wealth has increased much faster than happiness partly because governments have striven to increase people’s spending power rather than taking a broader view of what makes them feel good.
Richard Layard, a leading British economist and advisor to the Labour government, has just published a book that asks: ‘What is the point of economic policy if not to make us generally happier?’ In Happiness: Lessons from a New Science he calls for a radical revision of public policy and suggests an emphasis away from wealth-creation to happiness as the ultimate goal.
Our definition of what makes for a successful life is undergoing a re-evaluation. We’re questioning the value of an affluent life bought at the cost of our health and a shortened lifespan; or a work life so demanding that we neglect our kids and feel drained of energy and joy.
We’re questioning an economic prosperity that may be unsustainable and destroys much of the planet for our children. We’re increasingly uncomfortable with a lifestyle that relies on child labour and sweatshops in poorer countries.
We’ve come to prize time over money, knowing it’s the one thing we can never get back once it’s gone. We’re beginning to reaffirm the importance of personal relationships and many of us long for a less driven, more relaxed way of life.
I believe that there has been a fundamental shift in our attitude to success. It’s been coming for a while and now its moment has truly arrived.
We’re seeking fulfilment. We want a life less mundane and materialistic: more meaningful and significant. We want to choose our own fate, determine our own destiny, without restriction. Our post-war affluence has made us ambitious.
More of us are educated than ever before, our horizons prized open, our aspirations limitless. Easy travel has made the world a smaller place, widening our perspective, exposing us to other worlds and ways of life. Some will say this is the reason we are less content, more restless than our forefathers of fifty years ago. I say, it’s the challenge of freedom and opportunity.
It can be either a burden or a gift.
We’re no longer willing to just make a living, however lucrative. We’re not content to just do a job so that later we’ll be able to afford to do what we really love. All of us are taking a close look inside to see what it is that we really want.
And we live with the contemporary notion of personal responsibility: that the direction of our lives is down to us. We can create our results. We don’t have to live the life we were born into, or the one we were schooled to follow. Life really is what you make it.
Modern Psychology has taught us that we choose how we think. For years the experts believed that we were pre-programmed in our early years and had little control over our thinking. Not any more.
The good news is that we can choose to think that we are in charge of our destiny and alter our behaviour accordingly. We can decide to ramp-up our thinking to become more proactive, enterprising, resourceful and dynamic.
Living an ideal life, based on our definition of success is the name of the game. And the greatest stumbling block to accomplishing your dreams is always within.
Success is Personal
Success is what you make it mean. It can also change over time. I am regularly confronted by wealthy individuals who enjoy all the status and trappings that comes from being at the top of their professional tree, yet feel like losers. Why? Because it’s the life of their parent’s dreams and aspirations, not one that feels right or fulfilling to them.
Or they look to the next five years of relentless work that their peers are prepared to put up with to achieve partnership and further prestige and realise they can’t carry on faking commitment. Success nowadays is more personal than for any other generation.
The trick is to figure out what success looks like to you and go after it. Keeping up with the neighbours is over.
This is an extract from the introduction of Fiona Harrold's new book, "The 7 Rules Of Success" out in January from Hodder Mobius and available from us now here.
