Andrew Chan

The common denominator of success --- the secret of success of every man who has ever been successful --- lies in the fact that he formed the habit of doing things that failures don't like to do."

It doesn't seem to matter which type of success you're after; if you are interested in financial success, you save and invest where others don't. If it's physical health you're after, you exercise and watch what you eat, while the rest of us eat corn chips while watching TV. If you're after sales success, you sell when the other guys lay back and rest.

The things that failures don't like to do are the very things that you and I and other human beings, including successful men, naturally don't like to do. In other words, we've got to realize right from the start that success is something which is achieved by the minority of men, and is therefore unnatural and not to be achieved by following our natural likes and dislikes nor by being guided by our natural preferences and prejudices.

Success, after all, is purely a matter of doing something until it becomes habit. Often, it is something that you don't want to do.

When you think about it, almost every day, we do things that we probably don't want to do. We get up when the sun still hasn't risen. We pay the bills, when we really just want all the bills to magically disappear. All these things are a learned behavior, and most likely, we do them out of pure habit.

In the same ways that we have formed these habits, we can form positive, successful ones. We can be the masters of our own future, if we just decide to do those things that we need to do, whether or not we like doing them.

Sir James Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, (the story of a boy who refused to grow up, and who always did what he liked, not what he needed to do,) said it this way: "The secret of happiness is not in doing what we like to do, but in liking what we have to do."

Such is life. We need to start a habit of doing what we need to do, when we need to do it, despite whether it's easy or not.

Anyone can do what's easy. It takes a superior person to do what's worthwhile, whether it's easy or not. And people who take that path inevitably become superior, successful people, no matter where they start out.