How to Be a Success

That’s from the first chapter on the “Attributes of Success.”

As I read that I thought of Steve Jobs.

As you may know, but I *didn’t* know until I started digging into Yogananda and his wisdom, Jobs read Yogananda’s An Autobiography of a Yogi as a teenager when he visited India. Then, apparently, he read it once a year for the rest of his life.

And... He arranged to have that book given to everyone who attended his memorial service as the *very* last gift they received from him.

Powerful hint, eh?

So...

When I read that passage I thought of Steve Jobs for two reasons.

I think he is the PERFECT embodiment of BOTH the creative/Spirit-inspired “initiative” that Yogananda tells us we need to have AND the tenacious “will power” we need to bring that inspired vision to life.

Jobs is the living embodiment of making the impossible become possible—a man who tapped into the creativity of the Infinite Creator to, repeatedly (!), “create something no one else has ever created.” (Right?)

I think we can capture the essence of both of those essential, complementary qualities in two separate quotes. Let’s go with the Crazy Ones for the creative insights then we’ll talk about Jim Collins for the creative will power.

First: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

btw: I’ve memorized that and repeated it in my head *at least* a thousand (!) times. I imagine Steve talking to me. Listen to him reciting that in this video here.

Now, I think that captures the creative Spirit side of things.

Now it’s time to invite my all-time favorite business strategist/thinker Jim Collins to the party so he can share some wisdom from my all-time favorite business book to capture the entrepreneurial drive it takes to bring that inspired vision to life.

In Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0, Collins tells us: “You can look at life as a search for that one big winning hand, or you can look at life as a series of hands well played. If you believe life comes down to a single hand, of course, you can easily lose. But if you see life as a series of hands, and if you play each hand the best you can, there’s a huge compounding effect. Bad luck can kill you, but good luck cannot make you great. As long as you don’t get a catastrophic stroke of bad luck that flat-out ends the game, what really matters is how well you play each hand over the long haul. How will you play this hand and the next—and every hand you’re dealt?

Imagine if after having been booted out of Apple in 1985, Jobs had said ‘Well, I got a really bad break, a bad hand. Game over.’ What if he’d lost his work ethic and his passion? What if he’d turned hurt into bitterness, instead of creating and moving forward? I used to think of Jobs as the Beethoven of business—a particular creative genius with a compositional body of work (the Macintosh as his third symphony, the iPod as his seventh, and the iPhone/iPad as his ninth). But my view has changed. I’ve come to see him more as the Winston Churchill of business—a hyper-resilient soul who exemplified the simple mantra, ‘Never give in, never, never, never.’”

There ya go. Want to do the impossible? Connect to something bigger than yourself for the Divine inspiration. Then STAY CONNECTED to that power to go through all the inevitable obstacles to bring that vision to life.

Spotlight on YOU. What are you here to do? What’s your MISSION in life? Are you ALL IN?

I’m all in on helping you get your Soul Force to 101 so you can give the world all you’ve got as there’s simply NO OTHER WAY we will meet the historically significant challenges we face and create a world in which 51% of humanity is flourishing by the year 2051 unless YOU (and ME and ALL OF US) do the hard work to move from Theory to Practice to Mastery Together TODAY.

Want to fulfill your destiny? You must be able to FOCUS your mind.

As I read that passage and reflected on the fact that ALL successful men and women “devoted much time to deep concentration and meditation”—even if they didn’t *call it* meditation—I thought of Raymond Kethledge and Michael Erwin’s great book Lead Yourself First.

The book is all about “Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude.” One of the Heroes they feature is General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Of course, Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II. As leader of all Allied troops in Europe, he led “Operation Overlord,” the amphibious invasion of Normandy across the English Channel that changed the tide of the war and the course of history.

How did he craft the strategy that changed the world?

Here’s a hint. He tells us: “Make big decisions in the calm.”

Here’s how Kethledge and Erwin put it: “Clarity is often a difficult thing for a leader to obtain. Concerns of the present tend to loom larger than potentially greater concerns that lie farther away. Some decisions by their nature present great complexity, whose many variables must align a certain way for the leader to succeed. Compounding the difficulty, now more than ever, is what ergonomists call information overload, where a leader is overrun with inputs—via e-mails, meetings, and phone calls—that only distract and clutter his thinking. ...

Solitude offers ways for leaders to obtain greater clarity. A leader who thinks through a complex problem by hard analytical work—as Eisenhower did before D-day—can identify the conditions necessary to solve it. A leader who silences the din not only around her mind, but inside it, can then hear the delicate voice of intuition, which may have already made connections that her conscious mind has not.”

Call it whatever you want but remember: “The foundation of both analytical and intuitive clarity is an uncluttered mind.”

That’s another one of those passages so densely packed with wisdom we could spend a weekend unpacking it and still just be getting started.

But, alas, my job is to deliver more wisdom in less time so let’s quickly connect that wisdom from a yogi to Stoicism and Buddhism and modern self-help then send you on your way to practice!

First, the Stoics. As you know if you’ve been following along, Stoicism is my preferred flavor of ancient wisdom. We now have Notes on DOZENS of my favorite books on the subject.

We can pretty much go to any of them to make the parallel-wisdom point but let’s go with A.A. Long’s great book on Epictetus’ wisdom calledHow to Be Free.

Here’s what Long has to say about freedom:“The chief constraint on personal freedom in ancient Greece and Rome was what Epictetus knew first hand, the social practice and indignity of slavery. It was slavery, the condition of being literally owned and made to serve at another’s behest that gave ancient freedom its intensely positive value and emotional charge. Slaves’ bodily movements during their waking lives were strictly constrained by their masters’ wishes and by the menial functions they were required to perform. But slaves, like everyone else, had minds, and minds as well as bodies are subject to freedom and constraint. You can be externally free and internally a slave, controlled by psychological masters in the form of disabling desires and passions and cravings. Conversely, you could be outwardly obstructed or even in literal bondage but internally free from frustration and disharmony, so free in fact that you found yourself in charge of your own well-being, lacking little or nothing that you could not provide for yourself. The latter, in essence, is the freedom that Epictetus, the ancient Stoic philosopher, made the central theme of his teaching.”

True freedom. It does a Heroic Stoic Yogi’s mind, body, and soul good!

Now for the parallel Buddhist wisdom. In The Dhammapada, Buddha echoes the second part of this wisdom: “Little by little a person becomes evil, as a water pot is filled by drops of water... Little by little a person becomes good, as a water pot is filled by drops of water.”

btw: Epictetus echoes THAT wisdom as well. He tells us: “No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.”

Now let’s have fun with a modern metaphor from Alan Cohen’s Spirit Means Business. He tells us: “If you open a lid of a washing machine during the agitation cycle, you find gray, smelly water full of the dirt and residue from the clothing you are washing. If you didn’t understand how the washer machine works, you would think something had gone terribly wrong; the process is supposed to clean the clothes and make them look and smell nicer, and now they appear worse. But if you know that the agitation process is part of the greater picture and the clothes will be cleaner when the dirt is washed away in the next cycle, you can relax and know that everything is working out as it should. Likewise, when people or events show up that agitate you, reframe the situation such that the grimy stuff has been drawn to the surface solely for the purpose of purging what has been undermining you, and the entire process will ultimately improve your situation.”

Little by little we become good—just as a water pot becomes filled with water and a washer machine cleans our clothes. But only if we exercise our power of will to create true freedom. Moment to moment to moment. Let’s master ourselves, create true freedom, and get a little purer TODAY.

In the introduction, I mentioned that Yogananda reminds me of some other early 20th century teachers like Orison Swett Marden and Napoleon Hill. It’s time to invite THOSE guys to the party to share their wisdom.

First, Orison Swett Marden. Note: THAT guy has also become one of my favorite teachers. I’ve reread a few of my Notes on his wisdom many times over the last year. Check out An Iron Will, He Can Who Thinks He Can, The Miracle of Right Thought, andMaking Life a Masterpiece.

In fact, as I type this I’m looking at a framed quote on my desk by Marden. It says:“Most obstacles melt away when we make up our minds to walk boldly through them.”

Then there’s Napoleon Hill.

He and Yogananda must have been drinking from the same wisdom fountain when he wrote this inThink and Grow Rich: “If the first plan which you adopt does not work successfully, replace it with a new plan; if this new plan fails to work, replace it in turn with still another, and so on, until you find a plan which does work. Right here is the point at which the majority of men meet with failure, because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.”

P.S. In terms of doing things you don’t think you can do, yesterday I created a Note on Joe De Sena’s new book on how to create mental toughness for families. It’s called The 10 Rules of Resilience. He tells us: “But here’s the thing about me: when my brain—or anyone else, for that matter—tells me Don’t do it, I feel an immediate desire to do the opposite.”

Spotlight on YOU: What’s the #1 thing you might *think* you can’t do but, deep down, you KNOW you actually CAN DO IT? Got it? ... Good. ... WOOP it and go dominate it. PROVE TO YOURSELF that you can do it.

If we want to succeed in theultimate AND “normal” sense of the word, we MUST prioritize our own personal development of “heavenly qualities.”

Now... Yogananda wrote this nearly 100 years ago. Imagine what he’d say about today’s attention-economy-driven sources of distraction and the “Over-activity” that brings out the worst of “Mr. Idleness.” BOTH of those paths lead to misery. The solution?

Yogananda tells us to apply “system and science” to improve our “health, prosperity, and social life.” You know what I thought when I read that? I thought, “EXACTLY. We need to integrate ancient wisdom and modern science to systematize our Big 3: ENERGY (‘health’), WORK (‘prosperity’) and LOVE (‘social life’).”

Here’s to hitting our Heroic Targets all day every day and experiencing true success... TODAY!!