You could spend hours amusing yourself with all the different guides floating around the web that claim to teach you how successful people think. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t help you become more successful because these guides don’t deliver on their claims.
They identify beliefs that successful people hold, like ‘Rich people think poverty is the root of all evil’ and ‘Rich people believe in acquiring specific knowledge’, without telling you how to develop these.
In other words, they tell you what successful people think rather than how successful people think. The give you the surface level appearance rather than the deep mechanisms at play, and if you end up following their advice, you’ll spend the rest of your life imitating a successful person, rather than becoming one.
So, to make sure you get real results and start transforming your life, here is the base-level psychological difference between successful people and average people and what you need to do to start developing that mindset.
How Successful People REALLY Think
When you’re standing on the outside, looking in at the world of success and money and power and influence, it’s easy to slip into the mindest that successful people are somehow smarter, or luckier, or just plain better at life than you are. After all, if they can get the kind of success that you can only dream of, they must know something that you don’t.
After spending hundreds of hours talking to incredibly successful people doing world-changing things, I can comfortably say that this assumption is 100% wrong.
Their success isn’t because they’re smarter, that they’re luckier, that they’re better looking, or that they were imbued with some magical powers after being born under the right planetary alignment. Their success isn’t due to gifts or opportunities that just weren’t given to the average person. Their success stems from something much simpler and much deeper.
Successful people aren’t capable of getting better or more insightful answers to the same questions that average people work through. They’re not able to process information faster or divine deeper insights into common problems. Successful people work from a totally different mental construct to the average person.
Successful people question their reality through a different framework, which means they’re not getting better answers to the same questions, they’re actually asking different questions altogether.
If you’re new to the world of upgrading your Life OS, this might seem like a bizarre concept so let me break it down for you.
Success Foundations
Success in any area of life is the total of the actions you take, day in, day out, in that area of life. It’s the cumulative total of everything you do, think, and say towards a goal. The information you need is freely available on hundreds of different websites, and you just need to find the right stuff and put it into action.
If you devote all your time and energy to drinking and partying, you’ll become a successful partier. If you devote all your time your time and energy towards raising a family, you’ll become a successful parent. And if you devote your time and energy towards building a business empire, you’ll eventually become a successful business person.
The more you actions you take down a particular path in life, the more success you get in that path. Success is really that simple.
It might take research, it might take time, it might take energy, but if you commit to a particular path and possess the physical traits necessary to achieve that goal, with enough determination and commitment, you’ll get there.
Therefore, achieving success is really about the effective allocation of your time and energy resources. It’s about taking your limited time and energy resources and putting them to use in the best way possible.
And it’s how you use your free time, or more importantly, the psychological framework you use to determine what to fill this time with, that determines how successful you’ll become.
An Average Answer to an Average Question
When an average person is thinking about the best way to use their free time, they ask themselves a seemingly obvious, and simultaneously unproductive question: “What do I want to do with my free time, right now?”
When they’re sitting in the log-jam traffic on the way home from work, they ask themselves: “What do I want to do with my free time, right now?”
When they’ve walked through the door and collapsed on the couch, they ask themselves: “What do I want to do with my free time, right now?”
When they wake up on a Sunday morning to see the sun slowly climbing through the sky, they ask themselves: “What do I want to do with my free time, right now?”
The answer is to typically indulge their senses in some way.
- “I’d like to listen to the radio.”
- “I’d like to watch TV.”
- “I’d like to get takeaway.”
- “I’d like to sleep in.”
And while this feels good, it doesn’t help them become more successful. It doesn’t take them closer to an incredible life. It doesn’t help them deal with the major challenges they’re facing. And it doesn’t help them move forward and make progress towards their dreams.
It leaves them feeling slightly better, but without having faced any real major barriers.
An Empowering Answer to an Even Better Question
To the average person, the successful person is simply more driven, or more focused, or able to come up with a better answer to the same question of “What do I want to do with my free time, right now?” But the truth is that they’re not. They don’t have a better answer to the same question; they actually ask a different question.
When the average person is driving home and asking “What do I want to do with my free time, right now?”, the successful person is asking: “What action or activity’s going to provide the biggest return on investment?”
When the average person walks through their door and asks “What do I want to do with my free time, right now?”, the successful person is asking: “What action or activity’s going to provide the biggest return on investment?”
When the average person wakes up on a Sunday morning and asks “What do I want to do with my free time, right now?”, the successful person is asking: “What action or activity’s going to provide the biggest return on investment?”
This change in question results in a big difference in the answer.
While the average person wants to listen to the radio, the successful person recognises that listening to an audiobook about building a successful business will provide the biggest ROI.
While the average person wants to watch TV, the successful person recognises that a 20 minute meditation followed by some reading will provide the biggest ROI.
While the average person wants to sleep in on a Sunday morning, the successful person recognises that going for a run will provide the biggest ROI.
This doesn’t mean the successful person doesn’t ever listen to the radio or sleep in or get takeaway. It just means that they do it when they can clearly see how it will provide the best ROI.
Where does the difference come from?
This difference doesn’t happen by accident. Successful people aren’t focussing on ROI through luck and average people aren’t focussing on what they want to do out of some evolutionary glitch. There are driving forces behind everything we do, and it’s no different in this case.
Before I spill the beans and give you the secret, I want you to think: Why would someone focus on return on investment over just doing what they want to do? What would need to be different in their life for that to be the natural way they engage the world?
Do you think they’re just wandering aimlessly through life or do you think they have clearly defined goals?
Do you think they’re waiting for someone to hand them the life they want or do you think they’ve taken full responsibility for creating it?
Yes, they’re leading questions, but hey, I’m a nice guy, and I’m making this easy for you.
The two core elements that mean a (successful) person focusses on ROI rather than just doing what they want are:
They know exactly what kind of life they want to create
They have a crystal clear image and clearly defined goals and markers on the path to that life. They’re not just wandering through life hoping that things work out well. They know where they’re going, what they want, and how they’re going to get there.
This clearly defined and intrinsically rewarding endpoint means they feel rewarded and fulfilled when they take action towards that endpoint and the closer they get, the more fulfilled they feel. As humans are intrinsically motivated to feel good, they, therefore, want to take the actions that get them closest to that endpoint as often as possible.
This results in them constantly seeing the actions that will give them the biggest ROI because it makes them feel good.
2. They’ve taken full responsibility for creating their vision
Having a vision of the life you want to create is powerful, but if you haven’t taken responsibility for creating that future, then you won’t be driven to focus on ROI. You’ll be sitting around on your arse waiting for someone else to do the heavy lifting while you reap the rewards.
It’s only when you’ve taken full responsibility for creating your ideal future that you’ll be driven to take action and therefore, want to know which actions will give you the biggest ROI.
These two factors combined give successful people the natural foundation to focus on ROI over just fulfilling their immediate desires.
Putting This Into Action
Knowledge is great, but nothing changes until you take action. This means that if you’re going to change your life, you need to know only know about this, but use it.
The first step is taking our seven-day FREE challenge. You can access it in the LifeOS Academy transformation portal, and it costs you absolutely nothing. Take the free challenge now: Upgrade your decision-making
If you get value from that programme and you decide you want to lay the complete foundations that make this your natural mindset, rather than forcing yourself to remember to do it, then you need to signup to our complete LifeOS Optimisation Program.
At just a few bucks a day, it’ll give you rock-solid foundations that’ll mean you don’t have to try and implement all these ideas as separate, individual pieces, you can just change the core foundations and everything else will flow in line. You’ll also get access to our members-only support forum and guidance from our trained instructional team.
Take control of your life today: LifeOS Optimisation Program.