Habits of Successful People

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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

Success

365 ratings

University of Pennsylvania

Success

365 ratings

Course 1 of 4 in the Specialization Achieving Personal and Professional Success

Do you want to be more successful? This course was designed to help you define what success means to you, and to develop a plan for achieving it. Wharton Professor G. Richard Shell, an award-winning author and the creator of the popular Wharton School course on the meaning of success, created this course to help you answer the questions that arise when you consider how best to use your life. Drawing on his decades of research and mentoring, Shell offers personalized assessments to help you probe your past, imagine your future, and measure your strengths. He then combines these with the latest scientific insights on everything from self-confidence and happiness to relationships and careers. Throughout, he shares inspiring examples of people who found what they were meant to do by embracing their own true measure of success. Get ready for the journey of a lifetime—one that will help you reevaluate your future and envision success on your own terms. Students and executives say that Richard Shell’s courses and executive training programs have changed their lives. Let this course change yours.

From the lesson

Week 2: How to Think About Success on Your Own Terms

In this module, you'll learn how to think about success on your own terms. You'll explore ways of looking inside yourself, and into your past, to find the values and capabilities that you have determined for your personal success. You'll identify your "four diamonds" - the capabilities you have in your own heart and soul to develop the inner and outer success that will be most satisfying to you. You'll learn the two habits that successful people share, as well as the four different ways you can renew your success values. By the end of this module you'll have a deep understanding of what success is for you on your terms, and how to sustain and renew your beliefs in the face of challenges.

Where Are Your Diamonds?18:42

Habits of Successful People5:49

Success Values26:04

Where We Are2:18

Meet the Instructors

Richard Shell
Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics and Management
The Wharton School

So we talked about the four diamonds, the capabilities that are coming from

within you that you can access by looking into your past,

looking into your personality and so on.

I want to talk now about two habits that people who you might

define as successful tend to have.

Now, we have to be careful in this course about using the word success.

So I just want to make sure that you know where I'm coming from.

By successful people, I mean people who have somehow integrated these two

dimensions, the outer life of career, achievement,

and whatever is going on in the social world, and

the inner life of personal fulfillment and happiness and satisfaction.

So how are the balances struck?

I think successful people have somehow managed to put the two together.

One habit that people who have this combination going for them tend to have

is that they are spontaneously excited,

enthusiastic, and they are people who tend to learn from the mistakes they make.

Because they're getting the energy from the inner life

to apply it to the outer life, when they meet an obstacle,

the energy tends to power them through the barrier, the mistake, the failure.

And they can get up and brush themselves off and keep going because

they are pursuing a source of satisfaction that intrinsically motivates them.

So if you think of a kid, a very small child.

We have two sons, and I remember when the first one was born and

was just beginning to crawl and then didn't walk and just crawled.

And I remember thinking to myself, I had this terrible fear that

they were going to be the first child who couldn't ever learn to walk.

Because he just kept crawling.

And then one day he got up and sort of held himself up.

And then he stumbled across and fell on his face and got up again and

started walking some more.

And the whole excitement that a child has when they're learning to walk,

even though it means that they end up falling down and

ending up getting banged around a little bit.

They have that intrinsic excitement about this autonomy that they're experiencing,

the mobility that they are experiencing, and the huge

expanse of what they can explore when they can walk is what I'm talking about.

So successful people have this

inner energy that's helping power their outer achievements.

And it means that they can be resilient, and that they are in learning mode.

So, that's habit number one,

is that spontaneous excitement about what it is that you're doing.

Habit number two is the Willingness to be Dissatisfied.

Now there's a whole school of thought in success studies and

you know psychology that it's the power of positive thinking and everybody is

supposed to think positive and be happy and then that's the secret to success.

I actually don't think so.

In my experience, it's when I've been the most dissatisfied,

the most unhappy with my status quo that I have discovered the necessity,

the urgency of making a change and moving myself in a better direction.

So I think you can, it's certainly helpful to be able to be happy and

it's certainly helpful to think positive when you are experiencing a setback and

you know that your excitement will take you forward.

But I think it's just as important to recognize and acknowledge

dissatisfaction when it occurs, you're not happy with the boss you have.

You're not happy with the neighborhood you live in.

You're not happy with the opportunities that are available with the education

that you have.

You're not happy with the way the political system's working.

And it's out of those dissatisfied moments and

the emotions that you feel that new actions then begin to get conceived.

And you begin to see given this dissatisfaction, how can I fix it,

how can I move in a new direction, how can I power myself out of this status quo and

into a change that promises to be better for me?

So, I believe in listening to your dissatisfaction as a source of motivation.

And I think those two habits are things that I've noticed around me in people who

I conceive to be successful in the sense that they've combined this inner and

outer dimension in certain ways.

The first is their kind of resiliency and

their excitement and their ability to get up when they fall down.

And the other is they listen to their dissatisfaction,

they respect their own dissatisfaction as a source of motivation.

And then they begin looking to see who's done it better than they'd have or

who's done it differently, and they seek those people out and

start getting new ideas about how they can make their own lives better.

So four diamonds, two habits, and

you'll be surprised to hear what we're going to talk about next.

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