There is nothing like achieving the success you want to make you grateful, but eventually the newness wears off and you forget to be grateful. There are so many opportunities to be grateful each and every day and so many reasons to do so. For one thing, people around you will be happier and much more willing to spend time with you. You’ll also be happier yourself and have a more positive attitude. You’ll also find that everyone is more willing to help you when they know that you’re grateful for everything that you have and everything that you receive.
People Who Feel Entitled
You have probably encountered people who feel entitled. They somehow believe that they deserve to have success without working for it, even though all of the other successful people in the world have had to work their butts off to get where they are. These people are always negative, they whine and complain about any work that they have to do and believe that the world should be handed to them on a silver platter. If you are one of these people, stop! If you just know people like that make sure you avoid ever falling into that trap because it is a pit of negativity that is very difficult to crawl out of.
Be Grateful for Your Opportunities
Be thankful for the opportunities that you have. If you live in a developed country, think of all the people around the world who don’t have the opportunities that you have. Think of people who not only don’t have access to the Internet and the ability to start their own business online, but they don’t even have access to clean water or electricity. The opportunity to build a business and achieve that much success is nothing to be scoffed at. If you have that opportunity, you are a very lucky person and you should be grateful for it.
Also, you should be grateful for the teachers that you have in the information that you’re able to acquire, from the Internet or whatever sources you are using. You should be grateful for the teachers that you have, that they have the knowledge to teach and that they are willing to teach you.
There actually are successful people out there who don’t subscribe to this particular thought model, instead taking the approach that the more people they shared the secret of their success with, the more competition there will be, which will apparently somehow devalue their own success, even if it’s not the same industry. However, most successful people are really grateful for those who help them get where they are today.
You’ve probably heard of Tony Robbins. Tony is a motivational speaker, author and very successful individual. Even with as much success as he’s had, and all the things that he has done to create this environment for himself, he is still immensely grateful to the people who helped him get where he is today. In a recent interview with success.com Robbins said that he is still grateful to his earliest mentor, a man named Jim Rohn, who motivated Tony Robbins when he was very young.
Follow Tony’s example and be grateful because there are benefits; not only the ones mentioned in the first paragraph of this chapter, but also some pretty amazing benefits for your business itself. Science can’t seem to find a metric to measure, but people that are grateful for all the opportunities that they had and all of the people who have helped them, are more likely to be successful than those who are not, and are usually several times more successful.
Practice Being Grateful until You Get it Perfect
It’s okay if you don’t feel that you’re at the point where you can be very grateful. Like anything else, being grateful takes practice. You might actually have to think hard about what you have to be grateful for when it comes to your online business, or you may have to wait until you actually do have something to be grateful for. The point is, start changing the way that you think. This grateful attitude goes along with everything else in this book. You are just being grateful because you should, you’re being grateful because it changes you as a person; it makes you a better person and it magnifies your success.
Start a Gratitude Journal
One of the things that you can do to become better at being grateful is to start a gratitude journal. A gratitude journal is when you sit down at the end of the day and write down some of the things that you’re grateful for. You can use your computer, you can use a piece of paper and a pen or even a smart phone app if you prefer. Just as long as you spend a little time each day thinking about what you have to be thankful for, writing it down and using it to further your success.
Ways That You Can Show Your Gratitude
One of the things that you can do to give back is use whatever assets that you have gained from being successful to help someone else. If you’re an Amazon affiliate, and you’re getting your first check from Amazon for just over $100, if you can afford it donated to charity, or take it down to your local soup kitchen to help buy groceries or even outsource some of the things that you need for your business so that other people can make money too.
If you can show the world that you’re grateful, the world will keep giving you opportunities and information to help you be successful. It sounds hokey, like some sort of new age philosophy, but it truly is the way this thing works and if you talk to anyone who has achieved a decent level of success they will tell you that positive attitude, gratefulness and a willingness to learn are all keys to success.
I can’t even tell you how many people I come across who say, “I’m a failure”. “I don’t have it”. “I suck”. Life sucks. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Every single year, I get poor. I’m stuck.
These people are not low IQ individuals. They’re not ugly. There’s nothing in their appearance that makes them inferior. Instead, it’s their attitude that dooms them to a life of mediocrity, struggle, and frustration.
If you’re reading this article, chances are you’re feeling these things you’re feeling that your life follows a pattern where one day is basically the same as the day before it.
There’s really not much change in your life. Before you know it, you feel that you’re stuck in your life. It’s as if the script keeps playing over and over. It’s the same boring old movie again and again. Same movie, different day and then, comes the conclusion. Death.
I know it sounds depressing. It’s definitely discouraging but I want you to understand where that mindset leads to. It definitely doesn’t lead to a happy place. If there was any doubt before, now you have the answer.
People who screw up in the past think it seals the rest of their life. Your past mistakes don’t have to define you.
No matter how bad you screwed up in the past, it doesn’t have to hold you back unless you let it hold you back. When you keep repeating scenes in your head of being rejected, humiliated, embarrassed, betrayed, or oppressed.
What do you think happens? Do you think you get justice in the here and now? Do you think you change the material fact of what happened in the past? It does not. It’s not like the movie Back to the Future and you got flying Delorean that you can jump into like Marty McFly. It doesn’t work that way. What happened in the past happened. What you can change is your interpretation.
What you can change is its effect on you in the here and now. Claim this power. The key to external change which is happening in you right now your appearance, your work, your business, the amount of money in your bank account, how big your house or apartment is.
All across the board is an internal change. Change your relationship with your past and you change your future. Does your past condemn you? Does it make you feel small, weak, and powerless?
Well, you can change how you interpret your past. Internal changes mean changing your thought patterns, assumptions, beliefs, and emotional habits. While it’s perfectly true that the world doesn’t care about your feelings, it cares about your actions.
It aims at results. Where do you think those results come from? It comes from your thoughts because when you think about your situation in a certain way; you end up in an emotional state. In that emotional state, you make certain decisions.
When you make those decisions, you change your world because you acted. What if you can change your thoughts? What if you can change your assumptions about your past?
Your life doesn’t have to feel like a runaway roller coaster where the moment you think about something negative, everything has to end up with a negative choice again and again and again.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Please understand that you are always in control because you can always choose how you interpret things. You can always choose what you think about it. You can always choose what you dwell on.
Do not let go of that power. That would be the height of irresponsibility and I hate to say this and it’s painful because when I first realized it when somebody said it, it hurt me. It stung.
That was precisely the point because at that point I grew. You do it to yourself. You really do. I know it doesn’t make much sense. Who wants to live a frustrated life?
Who wants to feel this pain? But you do it yourself. The answer, stop doing it. Take responsibility. You can do it. Do something else.
There’s common mythology about success. They’re supposed to be independent. They’re supposed to be strong. They’re supposed to be lone thinkers.
It’s as if they came up with a vision of the future and through their own sheer effort, sacrifice, and focus, they turned that vision into reality. Well, that image of the heroic, maverick, and successful person happens from time to time.
It is far from the most common cause of success. Successful people eagerly ask for help. They do this because they know they’re not jacks of all trades. They can’t do anything. They have specializations but they also know success requires other parts.
For example, if you want to be a successful online entrepreneur selling stuff online, you may be good at promotions, marketing, product selection, web design, or affiliate marketing.
There are so many moving parts but chances are you probably will only be good at one thing or two things if you’re lucky. What do you do with the rest of the picture? Do you try to do a half-assed job with the rest of the pieces?
Your success is the sum of its parts and more. If you have only two good parts and the rest is junk, what do you think will happen? Successful people focus on their core competency. They focus on what they’re good at.
These are the linchpins of their success. For everything else, they ask for help. Help can come in many forms. You can delegate. You can outsource. You can collaborate. You can put up things for discussion and brainstorming and then come up with implementations.
Whatever the case may be for these other things, you’re not relying on yourself. You are tapping into the eternal truth that two heads are better than one especially for brainstorming and coming up with ideas.
Believe it or not, when you are in a room full of people and you’re trying to solve a problem, you solve the problem in a way that doesn’t add 1 to 1, 1 to 1 is 2. But when you are in a group of people, exponential ideas come about.
This should not be unexpected because people look at the world in different ways. Different people have different vantage points. They have different points of view. They have different experiences and this can be a very helpful resource.
Why don’t you do it? Well, most people struggle because of pride. That’s what it is. If you pick at that pride and dig deep, it leads to fear. Don’t let pride or fear hold you back from victory and success. That’s what you’re doing when you refuse to ask for help.
It doesn’t make you look weak. It doesn’t make you look like an idiot. It doesn’t make you look like you are a failure and screw up. It does none of that because even the most successful people eagerly ask for help.
I’m not just asking for help. They eagerly seek it out. You’re not less of a person because someone helped you along the way. What’s important is you pay it forward. I’m not saying about paying back the person.
It’s more than that. It’s about paying it forward. When you become successful, there will be other people trying to be successful that you will encounter. Help those people because somebody who achieved success in the past helped you get on the way.
That’s how you pay it forward. If that person helped you once, help others a thousand times. A thousand different people, help them individually.
