Thursday, March 28, 2024 Mar 28, 2024
59° F Dallas, TX
Advertisement
Office

Susan Arledge: Some Annoying Things Successful People Do to Be Successful

When I started in the real estate business, the first piece of unsolicited advice I received came on a card taped to my phone. It read: “Successful people form the habit of doing what unsuccessful people don’t want to do.” It sounds like simple advice, but ask any athlete how many repetitions it took to perfect that swing or to master that shot, and you realize that success in any field is all about the repetitions.
By |
Susan Arledge
Susan Arledge

When I started in the real estate business, the first piece of unsolicited advice I received came on a card taped to my phone. It read: “Successful people form the habit of doing what unsuccessful people don’t want to do.” It sounds like simple advice, but ask any athlete how many repetitions it took to perfect that swing or to master that shot, and you realize that success in any field is all about the repetitions. A lot of people just tire of the constant repetitive nature of striving for success.

Eric Barker, who writes the blog, Barking up the Wrong Tree, recently compiled a great list of reasons why some people are so annoyingly successful. These reasons are definitely worth considering as we move into 2014:

1. Successful people never quit working. They are busy all the time. Although IQ is significant, researchers have found it is the hard worker who is often more successful. As V. S. Pritchett once said, “Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.”

2. Time is not a limitless commodity. Successful people learn when to say “No.” The reason busy people have so much time to accomplish things is that they tell most people “no.” They need to be focused on what they are doing and not on what others are doing. Or as Warren Buffett said, “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.”

3. Successful people focus on getting better, rather than just being good. They also tend to focus on their strengths and ignore their weaknesses.

4. They have vast and extensive networks. My friends, Chris Ryan and Bob Pond  are two of the best networkers that I have known. Both are true proponents of the concept of servant leadership, recognizing that helping others achieve success will almost always result in unexpected opportunities for your own success. Pay it forward, and remember the hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.

5. Successful people are lucky, but they don’t wait for luck, they create luck. As Darrell Royal said, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

6. They have “grit,” or perseverance. Click here to see what Angela Lee Duckworth, a former seventh grade math teacher, had to say about grit in one of her TED talks.  She found IQ was seldom the difference between the grades earned by her seventh grade math students; they all were able to learn if they worked hard enough. Grit, Duckworth said, exists apart from IQ and was actually much more predictive of success than IQ.

Grit is having the perseverance and passion for long-term goals and staying with those goals day in and out. Living life like it’s a marathon. One quality that the greatest geniuses of all time had in common sounds an awful lot like grit. It’s a willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty.

7. Successful people have coaches and mentors. It was probably a teacher or coach that you thought way too demanding or harsh, but likely made you work harder and give more effort than you thought possible. A mentor is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be.

Susan Arledge the managing principal of Cresa Dallas, is constantly striving to become more annoying, to work without stopping, and to learn to say ‘No’ more often—for selfish reasons, designed to create the free time necessary to watch 26,000 hours of NBC’s coverage of the Sochi Olympics. Sochi, purportedly the warmest place in Russia, is approximately 36 billion miles from anything, but Arledge will be watching the Nordic Combined without any idea what a combined is, while wondering how the heck curling ever became an Olympic sport, and where Kyrgyzchekivstan (formerly Uzbrykhigyzstan) is.

Related Articles

Image
Hot Properties

Hot Property: This Preston Hollow Modern Has Limestone as Old as Dinosaurs

Designed by Todd Hamilton, the mansion features lots of organic elements, including a shell stone only found in Texas.
Image
Restaurants & Bars

Vinito Is the Little Wine Shop That Could—Sell Mexican Wine

In Oak Cliff, two best friends are quietly wooing customers with the vines and unique blends of Mexico.
Image
Business

Experts Weigh In: What the NAR Settlement Could Mean for DFW’s Residential Market

Rogers Healy, Briggs Freeman's Russ Anderson, and Allie Beth Allman's Keith Conlon share insights on the landmark National Association of Realtors lawsuit.
Advertisement