Usually, everyone advises us to learn from our own mistakes. Those tips are sound, but they're only half the story. One should also learn from personal successes. The downside of studying mistakes is that too much time is spent focusing on the negative in life. The good thing about studying success is that we focus on the positive aspects of our lives. There are things in life that go right. When you study them, you can see that they went right because we directed them that way.
Few people today believe in chance and luck, nor do they believe that some things happen arbitrarily. Accordingly, it may be right to believe in what works because we are the ones who have made it so by our choice of timely and right attitude and behaviour that generate favourable results. Only by studying successful situations can we increase the likelihood that those successes will be repeated.
In addition to studying our own successes, it's beneficial to examine the successes and winning strategies of others. There's nothing wrong with identifying the traits of the people we admire and then incorporating those traits into our own personalities and strategies. That doesn't mean we should try to be something we're not. However, if we know or have the opportunity to observe people who generate superior results by applying strategies and characteristics that we admire, it is worth the effort to study those people and take them as examples. We may not admire everything about them, but those things that stand out in a positive way can be singled out and embraced.
An interesting question arises: what sets apart those at the top from those who are average? Sports stars, for example, are those who are paid millions but do not run faster or can do more push-ups than those who barely survive on the team. They differ in something else, and we need to understand what that is.
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