In this post I will share with you a part of the last section of my most successful workshop (in terms of sales) for executives and corporations.

The section called “Tactics of Extreme Producers”. If we want to get better, a great and reasonable strategy is to observe people more successful than us, regardless of the area in which they have accomplished their success, and try to discover the habits that these people have and then to acquire as many of them as possible, because we are the products of what we consistently do… We are not what we do once in a while, but what we repeatedly do, however small or negligible it seems. We are our habits. This is the compound effect.

Success, as I mentioned in another post, is the result of doing the fundamentals (small and very feasible daily challenges) perfectly, every day, for a long period of time. Good habits are just that: small doable steps towards a desired direction, which in time, move us substantially on the way of our dreams. Similarly, habits that are not aligned with our dreams and pursuits – regardless how insignificant they seem – are probably the reason why we never achieve what we desire.

Would you like me to give an example of how the insignificant becomes majorly significant in time? Yesterday a beloved person of mine and I, were talking about smoking. So she says that she does not smoke too much – in relation to whom someone would ask – but only eight cigarettes a day. The plausibility of the way she said it made the statement sound perfectly normal. After all, with all the polluted air we breathe daily, 8 cigarettes look like a minor surcharge.

But wait for a minute … How long does my beloved friend smoke? 15 years. This means 5,475 days, with eight cigarettes each day leads to 43,800 cigarettes. Assuming that half of those were smoked for relaxation purposes, that is without doing anything else at the same time, we arrive at the conclusion that my friend has sat 21,900 times to enjoy a well rolled cigarette. If we now assume that to smoke a rolled up cigarette you need only 5 minutes (being generous enough, I have included the rolling time) we have 109,500 minutes or else 1,825 hours. To read one page of a standard size book, you need about 2.5 minutes which translates to 43,800 pages in 109,500 minutes. If we assume 300 pages per book, we finally reach the beautiful number of 146 books that the my beloved friend could have read instead of smoking to relax. Books on the topics of her interest, her work, philosophy, history, art, etc. Would you think that her life would be different if she had done that? Inevitably it would. The insignificant if repeated, becomes highly significant over time.

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Let me now return to the tactics of the extreme producers and share with you some of their tactics that you could find useful.

Tactic # 1: Arrange your routines

There is not a single successful man or woman without strict schedule. If you want to become successful, you must have clarity. In order to have clarity you must know exactly what you do and why you do it. In doing so, you build routines. Routines and rituals are a kind of prison, they restrict us but at the same time they create a channel through which our strengths and potential can flow untrammeled. Without strict routines every creative power is dissipated, is lost. If you want to succeed Build stringent programs for at least five days of the week.

Tactic # 2: Ultimate Personal Responsibility

You cannot succeed if you don’t take personal responsibility for the results you produce. Within this post I can not dwell extensively on the topic of responsibility, but I will share with you a formula that I learned from Jack Canfield personally. The results of your life are the sum of the events that happen to you – a variant we can’t influence – with your responses to them, over which we have control. The equation is this:

Events + Responses = Results

Losers deal with what they cannot change; the events. Successful only interested about the things they can do something for; their responses.

Tactic # 3: Be surprisingly honest

Tactic # 4: Be incredibly kind

These two tactics go hand in hand. If you want to succeed, contrary to what losers or supposedly successful say, you must become totally honest. Every single time! However you have no right, because you are honest, to become rude. Rudeness destroys teamwork, human relationships and impoverishes the efficiency both of the one that displays it and the one who receives it. You must say exactly what you think, believe and feel right, but you are required to do so in a fruitful way that does not insult anyone but rather inspire others to become better.

Tactic # 5: Make sure always to give unique value

“If you want to become a billionaire go and help one billion people.”

What distinguishes highly successful people from the rest is that the products and the services they provide create huge value for the people that buy them. A value that is certainly greater than the price they pay. If you want to be successful this is an one way road. Find what your strengths are, focus on them and put them in service of others. Use your strengths to make people’s lives more beautiful, better and more complete.

Tactic # 6: Constant and Never Ending Improvement

The condemnation of the failed is not failure but her temporary success and her complacency in it. We live on a planet which has gravity and everything in this wide wild world tends to fall down. So here are two ideas with respect to gravity and to the general tendency of the world to decline.

• The only way to get better, is trying to become a better (a provocatively new thought and reflection).
• The only way to stay as you are, is trying to become a better.

If you leave something to chance, it will become worse. If you try to improve something, it may become worse again. But in the latter case lies the hope and the possibility for it, to actually get better. The only way to keep things the way they are right now is by trying to make them better. If you want to be successful don’t ever consider to stop improving and refining.

All my best,
Konstantinos Karypidis