August 7, 2018 by Dymphna

Truth Bomb Tuesday: The common ingredient of success

What do all successful people have in common? This:

I wanted to share a few examples of successful students with you today, and highlight the one thing I think they all have in common.

First up, everyone has a different definition of success, and that’s the way it should be.

For this little exercise, I’ve picked “replace my income” as the definition of success.

Some people might want to focus on growing their wealth, other people might actually like their jobs (no it’s true. It happens.) But a lot of people want to replace their income so they can free up time for other things.

So here’s a few examples (not their real names). What do they have in common?

Mandy: She came from a poor family, and was working in a real estate office as an admin assistant. After coming to me, she realised that you didn’t need your own money to make deals happen, and she used her sharp personal skills to pair up vendors with investors, using a joint-venture structure to carve out a cut for herself. She replaced her income in eighteen months.

Tom: He was university educated and worked in finance, and had a sizeable income to replace. But he had great borrowing capacity and a lot of well-resourced contacts. He went straight into medium scale development (after we got his PPR sorted and got his trust structures in place!). It took him five years to replace his income.

Gina: A single mum with a smidgen of equity in her own place, Gina wasn’t willing to take any gambles. But she built a granny flat on the back of her house and used the equity to run a string of successful boarding house deals. She replaced her income in under 5 years.

Jason and Amy: Jason was a camera man and when he broke his leg and got side-lined from work, he knew he needed another strategy. And so he and Amy develop a formula for taking massive profits out of developments, putting very little of their own money down and taking very little risk. Now they’ve done $28 million dollars worth of deals and have a massive passive income stream in place.

Now, what do all these people have in common?

My guess is you probably can’t see anything these people have in common, right?

(I hope so. Of all the student’s I’ve had who replaced their income, I was trying to pick the most diverse group of four I could!)

The point I’m trying to make is that, at a superficial level, there is no one ingredient to success. It’s not educational background. It’s not work experience. It’s not starting financial position, nothing.

But deep down, there is something that I can see.

It’s in the way they live their lives.

I’m wondering what to call it – maybe an earnestness? A commitment? A diligence of care to their own lives? Something like that.

Failure happens when you let go of the reins. When you give up. When you resign your life to the course your on, and start to think that its all out of your hands.

Only dead fish go with the flow.

Success comes when agency meets action.

That is, when you accept that your life is your own responsibility, and then start putting that responsibility into action.

Strategy is still important, but there are many strategies that will work if you have that bit right.

And by that I mean, I feel like I help all four of these students become successful. But I didn’t make them successes. They were successes when they came to me.

They were already taking an active interest in their own lives, their own development, and where they were going.

As far as I can see, and I’ve been in the game a long time now, this is the only factor successful people have in common.