The Starting Point for ALL Achievement!

Originally shared in A Daily Dose Of Leadership on June 16, 2020.

In Think & Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill stated that “Your BELIEF, or faith, is the element which determines the action of your subconscious mind.” In both the video summary of what we’ll be digging into through the next several blogs, as well as in the written summary I published as an article on my LinkedIn profile, I referenced what I believe to be A Cycle for Success in Any Endeavor! While that cycle is a bit more involved than wash, rinse, repeat, it’s really something anyone can apply if they’re just willing to do it AND have the discipline to remain consistent.

I landed on this idea while studying some content on The Maxwell Method of Selling that Cindy and I will be delivering in a few weeks for a local client. Our mentor who developed that curriculum made this statement about the sales process: “All success in sales is built on mastering one simple cycle in your own mind; Belief leads to thoughts, thoughts yield action, action produces results, and those results strengthen your belief.” But let’s be honest here… Any success we hope to achieve likely boils down to this same cycle!

And that’s really why I’m convinced that our BELIEF really is the starting point for ALL achievement!!!

On the opening page of the first chapter of The Magic of Thinking Big, another one of my top 10 favorite books, David Schwartz says that “some of the most practical success-building wisdom is found in that biblical quotation stating that faith can move mountains. Believe, really believe, you can move a mountain, and you can. Not many people believe that they can move mountains. So, as a result, not many people do.”

Hill and Schwartz, in two of the most influential personal development books of all-time, dedicate entire chapters to the importance of developing our belief and how much that belief will impact everything we put our hand to. Since they’ve already done that, there’s no need for me to rehash it here…

What I will suggest now though, just in case you’ve never developed the familiarity with either of those two books that you really should, is that we are utterly and completely responsible for creating and strengthening our own belief in order to achieve the success we’re after in our chosen fields. The media certainly isn’t going to do that for us! Their primary selling point is based on us living under the control of our fears rather than having a solid belief in what we can achieve on our own. And quite frankly, not many people around us will aid in building our belief; most people don’t have enough belief in themselves to even consider helping someone else… But every now and then, we do have the chance to receive mentorship from someone who can truly help us with that.

Regardless of who does or does not contribute to building our belief, the point is the same: we’re responsible for it. And we better take that responsibility seriously or we can’t even begin to hope to get much real value from what we’ll look at in the next blog!