Happiness and Success – “The Magnificent 7”

1. People succeed because they take pains to succeed. They work at it and don’t just hope for something better while doing nothing to change themselves.  Effort and practice, and patience and understanding. The value of this is the truth about genius; successful, happy people are often more distinguished for resolution and perseverance than for their talent. Mr Matai’a’s favourite, “hard work beats talent when talent is hardly working.’ Happy, successful people, make passion and purpose more important than ability.
2. Success is the reward of those who “don’t live in the instant gratification world” e.g. I did one day at the gym why haven’t I got abs yet or I played the guitar for an hour one day how come I can’t play Stairway to Heaven yet.  We learn to do things by doing them over time. One of the great secrets of success is perseverance and practice. A head-wind is better than no wind. Whoever got anywhere in a dead calm?
3. A fatal mistake is to imagine that success is some stroke of luck. The harder people work the luckier they seem to get.  In some form or other, we pay for luck through effort; or we go away empty-handed.
4. Everything good needs time. Don’t do work in a hurry. Hurry slowly. It is true that good things take time. Go into details; plan, it pays in every way. Time means power for your work. Mediocrity is always in a rush. Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing with consideration. Genius is nothing more nor less than doing well what anyone else can do or chooses to do badly.
5. Be orderly, disorganised work is never good work.
6. Success is no accident. Success demands time with our head, heart and soul connected to determine the words, actions and deeds of our mouth our feet and our hands.
7. One of the great helps towards happiness and success is to recognise the difference been what we can control and what we can’t control and work with a positive attitude on improving the things we can control. With things you can’t control its still about a positive attitude, because moaning about things you can’t change is using up energy that you could be using more wisely on things you can change.