Day19: Richard St. John

The reason: The success law 2.0

Richard St. John gave his talk at TED in 2006. At the talk we cut 2 hours presentation down to 3 minutes and 30 seconds in excellent way. He summarized 8 key factors which can lead people to the success. By listening to this most of listeners might have thought the rules are simple enough to try. However, he spent 7 years to interview 500 successful people to find out these rules. And he is trying to pass them on to Kids now.

Looking back American history, there is the person also did the same thing by interviewing and analyzing 500 people. He found out why they were successful people and published the book “Think and Grow rich” in 1937. Actually, there was the strong influence of Andrew Carnegie who selected 500 people for Napoleon Hill.  So interestingly, both Richard St. John and Napoleon Hill study 500 people to find out the rules for success. I call it success law 1.0.

However, the speed of success now should be much faster than 77 years ago. However, the basic rules sound same. That reminds me that knowing is not enough so we must do. There is huge difference at that time of 80 years ago. We could learn much faster, do faster, travel wider, communication now is much easier, and finally TED is free as long as you have access to internet. So only the difference between success people and not success people is whether or not they actually do.  But anyway, I will review here these 8 key factors to success.

  1. Passion

The most important key is this. “Passion” Successful people do their job with incredible passion. They even might pay to do the job. They do the job for love not for money. Interestingly money comes anyway when people do something with great passion.

  1. Work

The successful people work hard any other person around them. But they also have fun to do that. So, reasonable suggestions are we might do the job which has something fun for us or we have to find fun things on our work. And then, we could do hard work on the job.

  1. Focus

The successful people do something with great interest and focus their power to accomplish few things.

  1. Persist

The successful people make persistence effort. Be persistence even when we are failure, even when we have to face with criticisms, rejections, assholes, and pressures.

  1. Ideas

The successful people have good ideas. To have creativity to come up with ideas, there are simple things we can try which are “Listen”, “Observe”, “Be curious”, “Ask questions”, “solve questions”, and “make connection”.

  1. Good

If people want to success, we have to be insanely good at so something. There is no secret to be good at something, just practice, practice, and practice.

  1. Push

To be successful, people work hard and push themselves. Push ourselves from self-doubt (I am not good enough, I am not smart enough) and shyness. Pushing is sometime very hard so that God invented the mothers to push us.

  1. Serve

The successful people are thinking that they are privilege to serve as a profession to the people. To be millionaires, we can’t serve ourselves. We need to serve the others something of values.

So now, it’s time to apply to our life.