A Millionaire’s Notebook: How Ordinary People Can Achieve Extraordinary Success – Steven K. Scott
Are you an ordinary folk – housewife, makeup artist, hair stylist, salesman, teacher, convenience store clerk, marriage counselor, carpenter, doctor, dog trainer, former P.E. teacher, or small business owner – wondering how you can take your life to a higher level of income and success in your career? If your answer is yes, then you have to read Steven Scott’s book: A Millionaire’s Notebook: How Ordinary People Can Achieve Extraordinary Success.
Learn how to achieve extraordinary success even when you have failed several times before, or told you will never make it by allowing Steve to guide you in this book. In this book, he pours out his experience of turning failure (he lost nine jobs in six years) and rejection into self-made millionaire.
If you desire to learn how to achieve life and financial success, I believe Steve Scott is worth listening to – he walks the talk.
Below is an excerpt from the book, enjoy!
Keys To Stellar Success
Unlocking the Doors To Success In Any Arena, Business or Personal
While locked doors are truly impassable barriers to many, they offer no resistance to those who hold the keys.
Anyone can succeed to a certain degree, but what does it take to achieve higher levels of success than you’ve ever thought possible? Success for an amateur rocket builder is buying a model rocket, installing a small engine, launching it, and sending it one or two thousand feet in the air. I did that when I was thirteen and loved it, but had our top rocket scientists of the fifties and sixties used that same standard for measuring their success, our national defense, our communications industry, our entire world would be radically different.
While this may be obvious, the underlying principle that it illustrates has been lost to countless millions: that success is not an inflexible yardstick by which we measure ourselves. Rather, it’s more like a tape measure that keeps lengthening faster than we are growing.
The first and single most critical factor in succeeding is gaining an accurate vision of what true success is for you! If you never get a clear picture in your mind of what you consider true success, you will miss it – and perhaps you won’t even travel in the right direction. What you consider success today is most likely very different from what you considered it to be ten years ago. And what you consider to be success ten years from now will most likely differ from what you consider success today. But we don’t live in yesterday or tomorrow, so we must start with a clear vision and definition of what we consider success today.
Identify or define in general terms what you consider success to be for you.
All of us have different priorities and desires. As a thirteen year-old model-rocket builder, my vision of success was a three-stage rocket where all three stages would ignite, propelling the rocket a thousand feet into the air, and the parachute would then open in time to bring the third stage safely back to earth. At the same time, America’s top rocket scientist Wernher von Braun’s vision of success was building a rocket that would put the first man on the moon and return him safely to earth. While our visions were similar in general terms (we both wanted to launch rockets and bring them safely back to earth), they were vastly different in three ways.
First, they were different in degree (my ship had to travel only a thousand feet up and a thousand feet down. Von Braun’s ship had to travel 230,000 miles, land on the moon, get back into orbit around the moon, and then travel another 230,000 miles and land safely on earth). So as you can see, visions of success differ first in degree. But our visions are also different in terms of personal challenge and ultimate outcome.
In terms of personal challenge, achieving my success involved spending a few dollars in a hobby shop, taking a few hours to build the rocket correctly, and spending a few minutes to launch and retrieve it. Achieving von Braun’s vision required billions of dollars, millions of man-hours from tens of thousands of people, and finding solutions to thousands of problems that had never been solved before. Achieving his vision required an incredible long mental and physical stretch, while mine required no stretch at all.
In terms of ultimate outcome, if I succeeded, I would get a brief thrill, the rocket would be salvaged, and the red ant in the nose cone would live to see another launch. If von Braun succeeded, three crew members would continue to breathe earth’s fresh air, and a whole new era of space travel would begin.
So when you begin to write down your general description of what you would consider success for you, start by thinking in terms of ultimate outcome, attaching the degree of success you’ve envisioned, and then clarify the personal challenge involved. For example, if you’re talking in terms of money, do you define the ultimate outcome of your success as $50,000 per year or $1 million per year? If you are talking in terms of a marital relationship, would you define your successful ultimate outcome as “a marriage that isn’t an emotional drain†or as “a marriage that is the most fulfilling area in life� Both are legitimate ultimate outcomes to seek but are significantly different in terms of degree and personal challenge required.
Finally, in general terms, clarify the personal challenge involved in terms of ease or difficulty. If it requires too little effort or stretch on your part, your vision of success in terms of ultimate outcome and degree is too low. You need to set your sights higher. If the personal challenge required seems ridiculously impossible, you may have to lower your sights, but don’t do that yet. Even “impossible†visions are often attainable when you seek to bring them about in a planned, orderly way.
When I was making $7,200 a year in my first job after college, it would have been ridiculous to set my sights at making $2 million a year. Today, if my sights were set at $2 million a year, I’d be looking backward. When did “the impossible†become “the achievable,†become a “step backward� Remember that success isn’t a yardstick, it’s an ever lengthening tape measure. What may seem impossible to you today can become achievable to you sooner than you think.
Identify and define in detailed, specific terms your visions of success (ultimate outcome, degree, and personal challenge).
Now it’s time to get very specific in terms of your vision of success in any area you desire more success. Once again we start with ultimate outcome and degree, and then move into the area of personal challenge. But this time we’re going to get painfully specific. If you don’t go into this kind of detail, the ultimate outcome you desire and the degree of success you desire will always remain out of reach – a dream or a mirage.
Back to our example of your vision of a successful marital relationship. If you’ve defined success in this area as “a relationship that isn’t an emotional drain,†you would now list the specific negative attributes about the relationship that makes it emotionally draining and the specific change to each negative attribute that you think would need to take place for the relationship not to be draining.
For example, you might list the negative attributes you want to change as criticism, complaining, screaming at the kids, and fighting. Next, you would list the specific ultimate outcomes and degrees to which you want each one changed; for example:
1. Instead of constant criticism you would like to receive lots of praise and occasional helpful suggestions.
2. Instead of complaining, you’d like to see appreciation
3. Instead of screaming at the kids, you would like your mate to correct them with a firm but softer tone of voice.
4. Instead of fighting, you’d like to be able to discuss differences of opinion in a more respectful manner.
Next, list the tasks involved in pursuing these ultimate outcomes; for example:
1. Make personal changes you need to make to be an example to your mate (such as replacing your own criticism of your mate with praise; using softer tones of voice and avoiding accusations to keep arguments from escalating into fights; correcting your kids without expressing anger).
2. Determine what you want to say to your mate on each issue and create a positive way to say it.
3. Assign a time for discussing each issue.
Reconsider your definition and vision for each area of success, evaluating the personal challenge that vision requires.
Starting with your general vision, and then working through each specific item you’ve written down, ask two questions:
Is the personal challenge great enough to require a stretch mentally, emotionally, spiritually, or physically?
Is meeting the challenge possible, considering the situation and the internal and external resources available?
If your vision of success does not require enough personal challenge to stretch you, there will be little satisfaction or lasting benefit in achieving that success. If that is the case, this is the time to revise your goal upward. In our example, instead of defining a successful marital relationship as “one that isn’t emotionally draining,†you might want to redefine success as “a marital relationship that is emotionally fulfilling.†Add to the lists you made above those attributes or qualities that would transform the relationship from an emotional drain to one that is satisfying and fulfilling.
If, on the other hand, you look at your general vision and your specific lists and the personal challenge requires significant stretching, you need to look at both the general vision and specific lists in terms of the internal and external resources available to you. For example, if you’ve begged your mate a hundred times to stop criticizing you and the criticisms have only increased, you may deduce that one more request is not likely to change anything. So now you have to consider your vision of that ultimate outcome in light of both the internal and external resources available to you. On the internal side, do you have the ability to create and use an emotional word picture that would help your mate understand how his or her criticism makes you feel? Or do you have the patience to handle a gradual reduction of criticism?
On the external side, Can you get your mate to visit a marriage counselor with you? Can you get your mate to watch Gary Smalley’s “Hidden Keys to Loving Relationships†videos? Or can you recruit the help of friends or family?
Achieving anything significant in life always requires recruiting external resources. Whether it’s enlisting the help of a marriage counselor, borrowing from a bank, or gaining wisdom and encouragement from a mentor or partner, achieving maximum success in any area of our life requires outside sources of help. To think you can maximize your success without outside help means your goals are too low or you’re not being realistic. Show me anyone in America who has achieved significant success in any area of life, and I’ll show you tremendous outside resources that were called on to achieve that success.
If you have reconsidered your vision for success in light of the personal challenge required and the internal and external resources available to you, and determined that achieving it is impossible, don’t lower your sights or vision yet. That may ultimately be necessary but not until you have applied the next two keys.
Find, recruit, and utilize the external sources necessary to achieve maximum success in a given area.
If your vision of success seems out of reach in light of the internal and external resources available to you, your next step toward success is to find, recruit, and effectively utilize the external sources that will enable you to achieve your vision.
First, you have to identify as many possible external sources as you can, in both general and specific terms. So for your marriage, in general terms your list might include the following:
1. Minister or other church counselors
2. Licensed marriage and family therapists
3. Books on marriage or relationships
4. Videotapes on marriage or relationships
5. Other couples that you and your mate respect
6. Mutually respected family members.
Once your general list is completed, get specific and write down the names or titles of the external resources that fall into each general category you’ve listed. This may take a little or a lot of research. For example, there are probably dozens or even hundreds of therapists in your city, but how do you know who the good ones are? That’s where the work comes in. Do your homework, whether it’s seeking referrals or reading book or tape reviews.
Now that you’ve identified your possible external resources, you have to recruit their help. If it’s a counselor, that means a phone call or a visit; if it’s a book, it means a trip to the bookstore. In business, whether you’re trying to enlist the help of a banker, a mentor, or a partner, you’re going to have to create an effective presentation (oral, written, or both) in order to recruit a worthy resource. Strategies and Tips for Creating Irresistible Sales Presentations and Ad Campaigns on page 104 gives you the essence of the elements necessary to a good presentation. If you’re thinking in terms of recruiting partners or mentors, you should review the “Notebook for Success†section of Chapters 4 and 5.
This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you.
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