9 Success Factors for Personal Growth: Moving Forward to Achieve Your Best Life

There are nine success factors that you must know in order to start moving forward in life.  Each one of these success factors has been proven to be critical in the achievement of the best life possible for any given person. By systematically implementing one or more of these success factors into your life, you can put your foot on the accelerator of your own career and achieve the best life for yourself.

1. Education

The first of the nine success factors is education. In our society, the highest paid people are those who know more than the average. They know more of the critical facts, ideas and information than the average person in their field. As a result, they can make a more valuable contribution in a knowledge based society and live the best life possible. They are valued more, respected more and ultimately paid more money and promoted more often.
The rule is that, “to earn more, you must learn more.” If you want to increase your level of income and achieve the best life for yourself, you must increase your level of intellectual capital and thereby the value of the knowledge component in what you are doing.

2. Skill

The second of the nine success factors that you can use to achieve the best life possible is simply “Skill.” Your level of ability in your field will determine the quality and quantity of your results. The better you get at what you do, the easier it is for you to start moving forward to get a particular level of results.
As you increase your skill, through study and experience, you get better and better at doing the small things that increase the speed and predictability of your results.

3. Contacts

The third success factor for moving forward and achieving the best life is by developing an ever widening circle of contacts. You will find that every major change in your life is accompanied by a person or persons who either opens or closes doors for you. The possibility of the best life for you will be determined by the number of people who know you and like you and who are willing to help you.
In order to broaden your network of contacts, you must network continually, at every opportunity. There seems to be a direct relationship between the number of people you know and how successful you are.

4. Money

One of the most important of the success factors, is “money.” Having money in the bank gives you greater freedom and the ability to take advantage of opportunities when they come along. If you are broke, or in debt, you have very few options open to you.
One of the most important things I ever learned in life is that you are only as free as your options. If you have no options, you have no freedom. If you are stuck in a dead-end job that you cannot leave because you have no money set aside, you have put a brake on your potential. You are locked in place and have no option for moving forward. You can end up spinning your wheels and losing months and years of your time by the very fact that you have no choice but to accept whatever is being handed to you.

5. Good Work Habits

The fifth of the success factors that enables you to get far more done in a shorter period of time is simply “good work habits.” Your ability to increase your ROTI, or “Return on Time Invested” can enable you to accomplish vastly more in a shorter period of time than another person who is disorganized and sloppy.
Developing good work habits requires that you think before acting. You make a list and set priorities on the list before you begin. Good work habits require that you consider the likely consequences, positive or negative of what you are doing.

6. Positive Mental Attitude

The sixth success factor for your career and life is to reduce the amount of time that it takes you to achieve your goals is by developing a “positive mental attitude.” A positive mental attitude is very much a decision that you make. Remember, you become what you do. If you engage in the same activities that positive, confident, optimistic people engage in, you will eventually become one of them and live your best life possible.
Anyone can remain positive when things are going well. It is your ability to look for the good in every situation that you see positive and start moving forward in life.

7. Positive Image

The seventh of the success factors you can incorporate into your lifestyle, and one that can help you achieve the best life for yourself, is the development of a positive image. People judge you by the way you look on the outside, by the way you appear. The fact is that you judge everyone else by the way they look on the outside, as well. Taking time to present an attractive image in your person, your clothing, your grooming and your accessories can have an inordinate impact on the doors that open for you and the people who are willing to help you start moving forward in your life.

8. Creativity

Creativity is another wonderful way to start moving forward in life and to increase the speed at which you achieve your goals. Creativity is something that requires that you continually look for better, faster, easier, cheaper ways to get the job done. Remember, one good idea is all you need to start a fortune.

9. Character

Perhaps the most important of the success factors to accelerating your life is your character. Self-discipline combined with honesty will open countless doors to you. Trust is the foundation of all relationships. When people know you and believe in you and are convinced that they can trust you to keep your word and do what you say you will do, they will feel that they are far more likely to get the things they want through you, to get the things they want, faster, sooner, easier and with greater certainty.

Thank you for reading this article on moving forward and living the best life possible. Do you know of any other success factors that can help accelerate your life and career? Please share your thoughts and comment below!

My Mentor,
Brian Tracy

Critical Success Factor: Developing a Moral Character to Achieve Greatness

No matter what you do, your ultimate goal, beyond what you are trying to accomplish at the moment, is to achieve your own happiness and become a good person. An individual can exercise a key success factor for developing a moral character to achieve the kind of happiness everyone longs for.
People are successful in life to the degree to which they can organize their world in such a way that they are genuinely happy. The only difference between people in this area is that some people are better at achieving their own happiness and others are not particularly successful. Some people make choices and decisions that make them unhappy and worse off than they ever would have been if they had done nothing at all. But always, happiness is your goal.

Strive to Become a Good Person

In his time, Aristotle examined the human condition and came to a remarkable conclusion.  He said that, “Only the good can be happy, and only the virtuous can be good.” This is one of the major breakthroughs in philosophy. Imagine! You can only be happy if you are a good person, and you can only be a good person, and you can only be a good person if you practice the virtues that are associated with goodness.
What this means simply is that, if you want to have a wonderful life, you must continually strive to become a good person. Any deviation from this course will lead you to lower levels of happiness and dissatisfaction. Every single time you act consistently with the highest virtues that you know, you feel happy and strong inside, your self-confidence and self-esteem go up and you become more effective in your relationships and in your work.  Virtue is its own reward.  It pays for itself in the inner feeling of pleasure and contentment you have when you live consistent with the best you know.

Develop a Moral Character

In order to achieve happiness and become a good person, you must know that character is the greatest success factor of all. If you want to change your outer world, you must go to work, like a computer programmer at a keyboard, to reprogram your subconscious mind, your world of values, beliefs, and inner convictions so that the person you are inside is exactly the mental equivalent of the life you want to enjoy on the outside.
Your reputation is your greatest asset. Your reputation can be defined as how people think about you and talk about you when you’re not there.  As you know from your own experience, when people talk about you in either positive or negative terms, and you find out about it, it has a major impact on your thinking and your emotions, either positive or negative.
Because of the Law of Attraction, as you develop a moral character, and live more and more by the highest and best virtues that you know, you will become a happy and good person. You must always strive to exercise this success factor and develop a moral character.

Success Factor for Greatness

If character is the greatest success factor to your life, the fundamental component of one’s character is trust. In relationships, trust is the glue that holds it all together. It is impossible for us to proceed in any kind of a relationship unless we trust and feel confident with the other person.  All good friendships are based on trust. All strong families are based on trust. And in companies, which are larger business families, trust is the fundamental ingredient that determines the success and prosperity of the enterprise.
The very best companies to work for have high-trust environments. Everyone in the company, at every level, absolutely trusts and believes that what people say is true. In almost every company of value, telling a lie can be a sufficient reason for losing your job.
The ultimate expression of trust is truthfulness. Your very best friends and closest associates in life will always be those who tell you the truth. The willingness to be absolutely truthful with yourself and others is the critical mark of a person of outstanding moral character. If integrity is the core quality then truthfulness is the most obvious expression of integrity.
Shakespeare said, “And this above all, to thine own self be true. Then, it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”  You must always be absolutely be true to yourself. This means being true to the very best that is in you. This also means that you always do your very best in every situation, especially at work where people are counting on you.  If the inner expression of integrity is truth, then the outer expression of integrity is quality work and quality behavior under all circumstances.
In Abraham Maslow’s studies of self-actualizing people, he found that one of the characteristics of the most advanced people he found was that they were extremely objective and truthful about themselves, about their strengths and weaknesses, and about their situations in life. They never tried to convince themselves of things that weren’t true. They exercised the success factor of character and “lived in truth” with themselves. As a result, they were able to live in truth with others.
Refuse to compromise your moral character. Refuse to pretend or wish or hope that something is not true, when in your heart, you know it is.
This means that you live in truth with everyone around you. You state your truth simply and honestly. You do not stay in relationships that are wrong for you, or do things that you do not agree with or believe in. You do not say things to people that are not honest and sincere expressions of your true beliefs. You adamantly insist on living in truth in every aspect of your life and strive to become a good person.
What are your thoughts on the greatest success factor of all? Do you agree that an individual’s moral character is important for one to develop in order to achieve happiness in life? Please comment below and share with others if you enjoyed this post!

My Mentor
Brian Tracy