There are three habits that highly successful people embrace that most people do not. They seem counter-intuitive until you really dig in and look at what they are and understand why people are making them into habits.
Decide (Cut Off the Debate)
The first one is to be decisive. Highly successful people see opportunity and they decide. They don’t mull it over. They don’t let it marinate for weeks. They make a decision.
I don’t mean that they are haphazard about their decision making. They have a process they go through in their mind to assess whether the question they’re facing is good or not so good for them. When they have gone through that process, they make a decision.
The root word of decide comes from the Latin word decernere. It means “to cut off.” When you make a decision, you cut off all other options. You reduce the clutter. When you ponder all the options, including the bad ones, you add clutter to your life.
Act (Immediate Action on Challenges=Opportunity)
Successful entrepreneurs make quick decisions so they can keep moving forward, which leads to the second habit of successful entrepreneurs, and that is that they take action immediately. Once they’ve made a decision, they act. They don’t let doubt and uncertainty creep in, or if it comes up, they push it aside and say to themselves, “I’ve already made that decision. I’m moving forward.”
When these entrepreneurs or business owners make a decision and take action, they bump into challenges. We all see these challenges in the marketplace and there’s always an opportunity inherent within them. When you’ve made a decision to move forward and you meet a challenge, look for the opportunity within that challenge.
An example of how this has worked is the Great Depression. When we think of the Great Depression, what comes to mind? Soup lines, dust, despair, starvation… Do you know that during the Great Depression, more millionaires were created than ever before in history? How could this have happened? It’s because the people who were creative started looking for solutions. They began looking at the challenges and solving the problems. As a result, they became millionaires, and they were contributing to the country at a very high level.
Aim (Listen to the Feedback and Adjust)
Once you have decided, created your action plan, have taken action, you now need to adjust. The firing squad commander’s instructions, “Ready, Aim, Fire” are actually out of order. A better order may be, “Ready, fire, aim!” In doing so, they’ve taken action and can now look at the results and make decisions based on the feedback that they get. They actually aim as the third and final step. This way, they know what their target is responding to, and they then can see clearly how to move forward.