6 Characteristics of Successful People

Because I never trusted my talents, my looks, or my luck, and had little or no business connections, I decided to study what successful people did and tried to mimic it. Then I studied what unsuccessful people did and tried to avoid it. I read many books on this subject, graduated from the Dale Carnegie course on Positive Thinking and Public Relations, which culminated in co-founding a company that bundled this information in short, easy-to-digest courses that we taught to medium / upper-level executives of major companies such as Southern Foods, Coca-Cola, etc.

Now my life has consisted of many ups and downs, but I firmly believe that with God's help, we can all live a life that honors Him and serves others, and that to me is the definition of a successful life. 

So without further ado, here are my six traits shared by successful people (with an emphasis on the life of Andrew Carnegie):

Van Morrison - In The Garden

 Rarely does a week go by where I don't partake of the beauty and genius of Van Morrison's music. 

The Great Restoration of Ourselves (John Ortberg)

 

The Power of The Cross

"The Message that points to Christ on the Cross seems like sheer silliness to those hellbent on destruction, but for those on the way of salvation it makes perfect sense. This is the way God works, and most powerfully as it turns out. It’s written,

I’ll turn conventional wisdom on its head,

I’ll expose so-called experts as shams.

So where can you find someone truly wise, truly educated, truly intelligent in this day and age? Hasn’t God exposed it all as pretentious nonsense? Since the world in all its fancy wisdom never had a clue when it came to knowing God, God in his wisdom took delight in using what the world considered stupid—preaching, of all things!—to bring those who trust him into the way of salvation.

While Jews clamor for miraculous demonstrations and Greeks go in for philosophical wisdom, we go right on proclaiming Christ, the Crucified. Jews treat this like an anti-miracle—and Greeks pass it off as absurd. But to us who are personally called by God himself—both Jews and Greeks—Christ is God’s ultimate miracle and wisdom all wrapped up in one. Human wisdom is so cheap, so impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. Human strength can’t begin to compete with God’s “weakness.”

Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have the saying, “If you’re going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God.”"

(1 Corinthians 1:18-31) The Message Translation