Find Mentors you can emulate

“It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.”–Warren Buffett

A successful American businessman and fearless investor, Warren Buffett has identified one of the most important tips of being successful: seek mentors.

Buffett’s quote emphasizes that a person must reach out to those who know more in order to be successful.

Selecting successful people to fraternize with provides you with wonderful role models, free education, and information about how those people excel. As you spend time with them, you’ll tend to copy their behaviors, become more motivated, and achieve your own success.

Known for his common sense approach to investing and managing money, Buffett has applied this same mantra when finding mentors to emulate.

How to Apply Warren Buffett’s Tip to Your Life

Spending time with people who have more knowledge, business savvy, expertise, and even creativity can rub off on you. When you choose to spend time with people you want to be like, you’re provided with a treasure trove of information about how those peers work and achieve their goals.

Hanging out with them presents the wonderful advantage to you of being exposed to information that will help you reach your goals. To be inspired, hang out with the best.

Seek and find at least one mentor in your professional field. Soak up all the information he offers. Listen well. Observe how he approaches work and life. Then try to apply what you see and learn in your own life.

If you want to be more successful, surround yourself with successful people whom you can learn from and model after. You’ll be compelled to be successful, just like them.

Open your eyes opportunities are everywhere

“The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.”–Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand, a prolific writer born in Russia, experienced great success in her lifetime. Over 25 million of her books have sold and all of her books are still in print, although she died in 1982. Rand’s quote gets to the heart of the cultivation of success — recognizing opportunity and taking advantage of it. 

Her description of success being a ladder is apt because, in order to be successful, one must notice and take advantage of many opportunities throughout life. Her quote illustrates that each opportunity leads to another step up to the next opportunity.

Rand’s quote implies it’s rare to go from nothing to success in one step. Instead, you’re led to succeed through the opportunities you notice and take advantage of.

How to Apply Ayn Rand’s Tip to Your Life

• It’s best not to expect success to come all at once with little time or effort:

• Think of success as something you can achieve step by step.

• Each step or “rung” is an opportunity.

• In order to benefit the most, keep your eyes open to whatever opportunities come your way.

• The more opportunities you recognize and utilize, the more likely it is you’ll be successful.

Some opportunities will be disguised to look like obstacles or will present great challenges to you.

Open your mind to the possibilities that these situations bring to you. As you tackle each situation, consider it an opportunity and find a way to use it to your advantage. Those opportunities will help you progress up the ladder of success.

Those are successful were once failure, so Don't afraid of being failure

“Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.” –Dale Carnegie

The master of public speaking and communication and the author of, “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” Dale Carnegie is another example of someone who experienced great success in his work.

Carnegie stresses that you must experience discouragement and failure in your life in order to find success. He believed that through examining your experiences of failures, you can gain the knowledge that will propel you to success.

How to Apply Dale Carnegie’s Tip to Your Life

Instead of fearing failures and trying to avoid thinking about how you failed at something, look closely at your mistakes. You’ll surely learn how to avoid those mistakes in the future. Even your feelings of discouragement will eventually lead you down the path of success as you seek more positive outcomes.

Try this process to help you use your failures as stepping stones to success:

Ask yourself why something didn’t work. If you can figure out a probable reason, you can avoid the same process as you try new ideas that might work. Or if you’re developing a skill for your goal, you may decide that you just need more practice to fine-tune your skill.

Come up with a new strategy. Brainstorm ideas for new ways to approach your current challenge or get back on track toward your goal.

Try out your new idea right away. “Jumping back on the horse” will keep you moving toward your goal and allow you to avoid wasting time bemoaning your setback. If you let too much time pass before you continue on, your motivation could wane as you wallow in your misery.

Repeat this process if your new idea doesn’t work. There’s no shame in trying an idea that doesn’t achieve the goal. If your idea doesn’t work, learn from it and move on.

Consider your failures as an important education in what it takes to achieve. Whether you learn to stop doing something or that perhaps you should have done something differently, examine your failures and feelings of discouragement. Use them productively to then build your fact base for success.

Put your failure to good use; learn from it so you can continue on your path to excellence.

Above all, remember that the only way you can really fail is to give up. As long as you’re still working toward your goal, you haven’t failed in your quest. Failures along the way just let you know how not to do something. Your next idea may be just the one that brings you success!