“Stop competing with others, start competing with yourself”
Highly successful people are in competition with no one but themselves. They are not interested in what others are succeeding at; they are not jealous. The only thing they are concerned about is becoming better than who they were yesterday.
“Successful people compete with others; highly successful people compete with themselves”
There is a big difference in being successful and high successful. Every single individual on this plant wants to be successful, so assuming that the average person is successful do you want to be successful? No! You want to be highly successful! A highly successful person is the one who has done something great and had an impact on the world.
It would be unfair to put David Smith & Warren Buffett in the same category of “Successful.” Why?
Let me explain you with the below table:
David Smith is an investor in stock market and my neighbour. According to the society he is successful, and they are right! But I am not concerned with being successful; instead I am concerned with highly successful people.
No take a look at this table; this will make my point much clear.
See, the title of the book says “what made them extraordinary” so even if your are reading this book it won’t be of much worth unless you change your perspective and lift your standards higher than the average. For me successful is average. The standards you hold for yourself defines who you become.
Do you want to be David or Warren? The choice is yours. I want you to be Warren :)
Society have made the range of successful people so broad that even average people are being counted in this category “Successful”
The society is full of mediocre people, to protect their ego and project themselves as good as highly successful people they have assigned themselves a title “successful people.” They are jealous and compete with other people. They don’t want people to become highly successful (because of their ego and insecurity) they force potential individual to follow the mediocre rules. For example – Our parent’s minds are conditioned by the society for years. Our parents want us to be successful but do not allow us to do something different and go out of our comfort zone, they want us to do what everybody else is doing because they think & believe that it is what success is.
“A sheep in a flock thinks she is the most pretty, until she sees a beautiful peacock pass by”
We don’t want bunch of useless robots calling themselves “successful” We want people who can make a difference in the world, this can happen only when you have all the qualities in the list.
Remember only “Highly Successful or Extraordinary” people make a difference in the world. So, you want to become highly successful, and not simply successful.
“Successful people are unknown, Extraordinary people are remembered for ages”
And the main difference in both of them is that David competed with other investors and Warren competed with himself. Anybody can be successful but only the finest can be extraordinary. I want you to replace “average” with “Successful” in your dictionary and add Highly Successful / Extraordinary at the top. You don’t want to be simply successful; you want to be highly successful and one of the ways to do it is to compete with yourself.
“If you continuously compete with others, you become bitter, if you continuously compete with yourself, you become better”
“The greatest artists like Dylan, Picasso and Newton risk failure. And if we want to be great, we’ve got to risk it too.” – Steve Jobs
How much do you score in this area from 1 to 10? ___