How you can reverse engineer success

You could say I’ve been studying successful people for the last 4 years. I’ve built my entire brand around doing more in less time, it means you have to steal the best tactics from the successful in order to survive.

“You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.” Warren Buffet

It’s clear that most people jump to adding more to the to-do list to improve. Yet, there is a surprising amount you can get done when you focus on shifting the bad habits you’ve got.

Read also: 13 tiny habits that lead to massive success

Here are 3 habits that mega-successful people don’t do, shift to this thinking and you’ll be on the road to success.

1. They don’t reinvent the wheel, they understand the market

It’s funny. When you start out online there is this aching pressure to say something radically new. To disrupt. To carve a new story nobody has heard before.

Obviously, it never happens.

The expectation destroys new writers. They stare at the blank page, everything they write gets deleted, and time runs out. A few things happen in the aftermath:

They make a habit of showing up but never producing anything.
They overthink every word and become prolific at pressing the backspace.
They get envious of others around them building in public, with words that have less sway than what they could write.
They live in this ‘I’m better than you’ world even though they’ve never written a single word on the internet.
They never actually built a habit of writing on the internet so all that potential goes down the drain.
Successful people know that you have to earn your racing stripes. You don’t get to show up once, write something and that’s it, you’re Tim Denning. That’s not how it works.

You don’t disrupt the market by showing up and breaking it in two. You disrupt it by slowly understanding what works and chipping away your narrative into the frameworks you believe the market is built on.

In other words, disruption comes from years of work. It’s more hammer and chisel than an explosion.

2. They don’t let their ego disguise shiny objects

I’ve been reading Justin Welsh’s startup story. The guy is obviously a genius.

Justin Welsh’s story
But there is one thing that stuck out to me over everything else. Welsh gave up $15k MRR because the income stream wasn’t in line with the life he wanted to build.

Yep, read that again.

That’s x3 the average person’s income because it didn’t align with his ideal life. Wow, pretty incredible. Sometimes, a lot of times, ego takes over. It’s the opportunity that you get taken with, the idea that you could be the person making all this money. It’s intoxicating.

It’s also a shiny object. The most successful people I see are able to put their egos aside and see clearly whether or not that object is shiny.

Then they relentlessly pursue the life that they desire.

Read also: The one rule of life that will open the world for you

3. They don’t ‘give in’ to negative comments, they use them as fuel

It’s easy to let negative comments take over. Someone says something, it hits a nerve, you feel the pain of it, and you’re on the verge of dropping into a sulk-fest. One that will likely destroy your productivity for the next few days.

Here’s the thing, successful know that the game will always come with naysayers. People argue you were lucky, you cheated, and it was a fix. Just scroll through your Twitter feed.

Examples everywhere of unhappy people ripping down successful people.

Those tearing other people down, they’re not building their tower. Here’s a good measure, if you’re struggling with listening to the naysayers.

Click on their profile.
Look at how hard they work.
Understand if you want to be like them.
If you do, listen to their ‘advice’. If you don’t (and I’ve got a feeling you don’t) then see it as evidence that you are moving in the right direction. If people you don’t respect are saying you’re doing a bad job, in a funny kind of way, it’s evidence you’re right on track.

Pulling it all together and putting a bow on it

Succeeding in the online world is hard, it takes a lot of work but the upsides are pretty incredible. Learn from those ahead of you, really soak in the lessons and implement those lessons they teach you.

In a nutshell, it’s this:

Don’t reinvent the wheel, understand the game.
Don’t mistake shiny objects for ego boosters.
Use the naysayers as evidence.
Do those things, and you’ll go further than you ever imagined.

Contributed by Eve Arnold

For more information and updates join our WhatsApp group HERE

Follow us on Twitter HERE

Join our Telegram group HERE