19.8.09

The differences between the successful and the mediocre

few years ago some scientists set out to find the best way to predict whether a person will become successful or not. They discovered that there are two areas in which there are big differences between the highly successful and the average, and these two areas make the best predictors of success.

It's interesting that many of the commonly held beliefs as to what constitutes an advantage in the success game turn out to be wrong. For example, most people when asked say that being born into a rich family is a great advantage when it comes to getting wealthy. The research discovered that this in not actually the case.

Similarly age is not an important factor. There are people who become successful at a young age and others who don't become successful until they are much older; in fact some achieve their success very late in life.

The amount of formal education that a person has is not a large influencing factor in a person's overall success in life. Successful people come from all levels of the formal education system and failures are also spread across the board when it comes to official education.

The first of the two strong predictors of success may come as a surprise to many people. It is the size of the person's vocabulary and in particular their ability to draw from smaller of larger vocabularies depending on who they are speaking to.

Although this may initially appear to be a surprising result it probably isn't so surprising once you stop and think about it. A large vocabulary combined with an ability to adjust the vocabulary to the particular listener is probably a sign of good communication skills in general. We live in language based societies and the better we can use our language the more doors of opportunity we can open.

The second strong predictive quality should come as no surprise. It is the amount of reading that a person does in the field of personal development. Successful people are readers and in particular they read books that help them become more fully developed human beings.

It is also interesting to note that the highly successful people tend to read most of these self development books many times. They are not just reading for interest, they are reading to absorb the information and to put it to use in their life. Most of these successful people have favorite self development books that they read each and every year.

So what does all this mean for you and your life?

It probably means that you should ask yourself how well you use your primary language and it probably means that you should also ask yourself how many personal development books you read and how many of those do you read multiple times to help you absorb the learning and make it a part of your day to day life.

You could set a goal to increase your self development reading. You could also set a goal to read each of those self development books 3 or 4 times. It might prove interesting to see just how much your life improves if you do.

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