One of the curious things about life is that success and happiness are it’s nature. The very function of it’s movement through our lives. Yet while many of us live a life, we find happiness and success fleeting at best. Or we find them in some parts of our life but not others. We keep hearing about the secrets of success, yet it still eludes us.
Napoleon Hill spent 20 years researching the subject for Andrew Carnegie, resulting in the 1937 book Think and Grow Rich. It’s still in print, now being read by a third generation. It’s based on 16 principles* or pointers to follow. One of them is the well known Mastermind group.
Richard St. John interviewed 500 TED participants over 7 years on the question of success. He found 8 common factors*, similar to some of Napoleon Hills. Essentially, find where your passion meets what others value and do lots of it.
Similarly, Jean Chatzky recently released a book The Difference, identifying 20 key traits* shared by the wealthy. She observed that adding just a few traits to your existing outlook can switch your balance into being a “mover”, climbing the success ladder. She observes that many of the well-off have failed but climbed back up again.
Many of the points they raise can seem obvious. But do we practice them? Why not?
A big one is money itself. Many of us have some very resistant attitudes about the green stuff with highly conflicting messages. Lynne Twist explores this in her excellent book, The Soul of Money.
But let’s go back to Napoleon Hill. What is much less known is that after his book was published, he found that it didn’t work for everyone. After another 20 years research, he found the 17th principle, something most people are not aware of. He called it the Cosmic Habitforce.
This is a very interesting term. We know the value of culturing good habits and that habits program the sub-conscious habit mind. But Cosmic? This goes into a deeper layer of habit, the law of cause and effect. What is often called karma or the influence of the past. In other words, there’s a deeper habit or inclination we’re carrying that’s having an impact on our results – both good and bad.
We’ll come back to this shortly. But first, let’s get a little clearer on how our life works. Then we can understand our role and how we can make it work for us.
Davidya
*See Addendum for lists
Part 2 >
Part 3 >
Part 4 >
Addendum >
Last Updated on April 8, 2014 by
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