“We must be the epitome – the embodiment – of success. We must radiate success before it will come to us. We must first become mentally, from an attitude standpoint, the people we wish to become”.
~ Earl Nightingale
I wish I had the opportunity to meet Earl Nightingale, unfortunately, he passed away before I was born, but what a wise man he was.
This quote is so powerful, yet so many people foo foo it away. If you’ve studied the law of attraction you’ll come to understand that you must radiate success from every fiber of your being before success will come into your life.
So, what do I mean by success?
Well, that’s a question only you can answer. Because success means something different to every single person.
What is your definition of success?
The most straightforward definition of success from Earl Nightingale is: it’s the progressive realization of a worthy goal.
When you are actively pursuing your goals and dreams, that’s a success! vs. just sitting around waiting for something to happen or even worst not having any goals at all.
We must always be thinking about our goals whether it’s big or small, focus on that.
Napoleon Hill once said
“Whatever the mind of man can conceive and bring itself to believe it will achieve”. Now when we combine that with what Earl Nightingale said “We become what we think about”, success is sure to follow.
An important exercise you should consider doing is: to write down, with pen and paper, what your definition of success is, what your goal is. You must have a chief aim, a main goal to focus on, not 20 or 30 main goals, but just one and focus on that until you achieve it because our minds cannot focus on 20 different things and expect to achieve everything.
It doesn’t matter how long it takes you to achieve your chief aim as long as you are actively working towards it, thinking about it every single day.
I’m going to share with you an exercise my mentor took me through years ago, which helped me focus on the right goal, the goal that was in my sweet spot and allowed me to achieve success in Toastmasters.
About 8 – 10 years ago I was heavily involved with Toastmasters and one of my goals was to develop my leadership skills. My specific goal was to become an Area Director and then Division Director. This was a big goal for me because I’ve never been in a major leadership role before.
I focused on this goal extensively and realized that the only way to get into that role was to have a high teachability index and focus on the left side of the training balance scale. I’ll be talking more about those two concepts in later articles.
My mentor taught me this simple yet very effective exercise.
He told me to grab a piece of paper and a pen and take 10 – 15 minutes and write down anything and everything I wanted to achieve if money and time weren’t an obstacle. Once I completed that first step he then told me to go back and assign a number to each of my goals on a 0 – 10 scale. 0 being there was no way I could conceive of achieving the goal and 10 being, yes I can absolutely achieve that within the next 6 – 9 months.
At that time, I assigned a number 7 to the goal of being an Area Director. What’s interesting is that I was told to pick one goal that had either a 7 or 8 next to it.
Having a number 7 or 8 next to a specific goal is important because it’s in the sweet spot, meaning it wouldn’t be a super easy thing to accomplish and at the same time not too difficult to achieve, but it will require some effort to accomplish.
Now, when we combine that with what I learned from reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. I realized that if a goal is too easy to achieve we’ll quickly lose interest and more than likely stop working towards it and if it’s too challenging we won’t even try to achieve it because we’ll quickly become discouraged.
James Clear Atomic HabitsYou can click on the above title to download the audiobook from Audible.
I encourage you to do this exercise for yourself.
When you start working on a goal with a 7 or 8 next to it and begin thinking about working towards it, you’ll naturally be inspired to start taking action. And by doing so you’ll enjoy the activity of working towards that goal. If you don’t enjoy doing the activity your goal is probably too big and not in the sweet spot.
And, this is one of the secrets to being the epitome – the embodiment of success that Earl Nightingale talks about. It helps us to radiate success with every fiber of our being before we have achieved it so that we will achieve it.
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