If We Are Related, We Shall Meet

The closing words from probably the greatest book I have ever read and probably will ever read. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Also part of a longer quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In this post, I want to take a different direction. I want to give your mind a different diet from the regular posting done on this blog focused on personal achievement.

How strongly do you believe in the phrase, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”? Or “Birds of the feather always stick together”? Or “If you want to soar like an eagle don’t hang out with chickens.”?

In the context of success and achievement, they all suggest that your personal victories in life will be determined by who you consciously associate with most.

Do you believe this to be true?

Before you pick your side and decide whether or not this is fact or fiction… I would like to explore this concept a little further. You may pass judgment after.

In my pursuit to become a successful person in life, I have stumbled across a forest of obstacles. I have met with more show-stopping challenges than I have personal victories. How can one tell? The time between two major victories in my life is very far apart.

Like many, I go through a lot of challenges and obstacles. I keep most of my failures to myself.

But during these tough and trying times, I have never once felt truly defeated. I get upset, feel discouraged, often scared… but never really lost.

Eventually, after taking the time to rest or heal, I get back to the striving. Having learned how to overcome the challenge.

I owe this way of hustle… to my ever-developing tendency to seek solutions to my many problems.

If I don’t know how to do something, I will find out how. If I don’t know what to say, I will find out how. If I don’t know how to get to where I’m going… I will find out how.

I’m getting better at “finding out how” because that is what I’m always doing. You get better at what you do most, right?

Before deciding to get into business for myself, I did what I always did… I decided to find out how to get into business. That search for truth, led me to discover a whole ocean of authors who were ready to tell me exactly what I needed to do… step by step.

Their knowledge and experience in topics I knew nothing about, helped me prepare mentally, physically, financially, and especially emotionally for what I was about to go through. Had I not gone through most of that material… I can almost promise you, I would not be writing this today. Or do most of the things I’m currently doing.

A lot of my worry, anxiety, fear has been suppressed and even eliminated because I now know what to expect… and more importantly what I need to do if I’m going to succeed in my ventures.

My destination get’s clearer with each passing day. With each time I acquire more knowledge on what lies ahead. With each time I take steady, slow, small but significant action towards accomplishing milestones.

What I had realized is that my story was not unique. In more ways than one, even you who are searching for your own truth can relate to a lot of the hardships one must face while trying to accomplish a significant goal.

I was almost brought to tears when the fact really sank in… that there exist people in this world ready to share their experiences… specifically what they needed to do, to overcome their difficulties to attain the lives they always wanted.

Information and material to help many in the same fields not repeat a lot of the mistakes that would have easily made a large majority of dreamers quit. Almost as if… someone wants us to succeed.

But this material, this knowledge this “secret” to personal achievement was only going to be easily accepted by the man or woman already with desire, to seek it.

If you want to succeed so much that you are willing to learn… then believe me… you will eventually succeed.

But who am I to be saying such bold statements? What success do I have to my name that permits me to share this and many other posts on personal development?

If success is a mansion, then progress represents the individual bricks that were used to complete that mansion. I have never seen a mansion pop into existence from thin air. Have you?

I don’t have a world-defined huge success story attached to my name. But I have personal progress which happens to be the building block to my self-defined and world-defined success.

I’m all about small and significant strides towards the life I want.

My progression has led me to meet some of the best minds in the world on the topics I desire to master myself.

Having read, watched, and even listened to the many men and women who have gone before me in my fields of en-devour… I have been nothing but truly humbled by the privilege to get the knowledge that so many can only dream of acquiring.

Do you really need to physically stand in front of a great visionary these days to get an important message from them? Are you absolutely sure that the only way to network with great minds that could take your life to the next level is by being physically in front of them?

If so, then you may have not yet opened your mind to the possibilities that lay in front of you today.

For you may not have also realized just how many people have opened up businesses that have no physical location but make more money than most would dream of making in a lifetime.

That communication between teacher and student no longer has to be within the walls of a classroom.

That the library is no longer the one and only place where those seeking knowledge on how to begin farming… can acquire the instruction.

We live in interesting times. Where the distance between those we admire and us… grows smaller and smaller with each passing year.

By reading text on a screen or viewing an image, it is now possible to know what someone 1000 miles away from you… had for breakfast (of course… if that sort of information interests you)

Depending on how you look at it… to know that much information can be compared to you “hanging out” with that person. Following them around.. commenting on their current activities.

You like what they do if you keep up with it. Otherwise, just like in the physical world, you would leave their presence if you were tired of being around them.

I haven’t read much about the law of attraction, but I do believe that you gravitate towards that which represents you. You become more of who you already are in life. You become more of what you repeatedly do. You become more of who you allow yourself to hang around most.

My belief is that you will become great because you hang around the great. Because you learn from them. Emulate them. Do as they did and not just say as they said.

Does any of this make sense to you?

If it doesn’t, then I hope for what it’s worth… I was able to at least entertain you with my attempt to write complicated (and flawed) English sentences :)

But if it does make sense to you in any small way… then if we are related, we shall meet.