Traits Useful For Success (How to Improve Your Chances of Success)

If you look at self-made successful people as a whole, a few commonalities stick out.

The NAXALT losers will look for exceptions (as usual they are broke), but if you took a man or child and improved these traits in him, the probability of him becoming successful in the next 10 years goes way up.

High Energy and Youthfulness

Are you normally someone who likes to keep moving, or are you someone who is often “tired”?

If you do not have high energy, you have FAILED TO RETAIN YOUR YOUTHFULNESS.

Read The Real Goal of Training, fix everything you need to fix, and see your energy levels climb back up.

And stop jacking off to porn.

Extroversion

Are you able to talk to whomever you want without feeling “awkward”, or are you a shy and reserved person?

In life, you need to be able to connect with people. The lone wolf gets slaughtered.

If you are shy or introverted, you need to PRACTICE being around people.

Go and talk to as many people as you can.

Cold approach at least 1 girl a day.

It’s ok to get rejected. No one cares if you get rejected by a woman, or by a potential customer, or by anyone else.

If you take 100 shots and get 1 right, you get the kill. The 99 missed shots count for nothing. There is no penalty for trying.

Openness

Are you open to trying new ideas, or are you stuck to what you already know and aren’t willing to learn new things?

The problem with this question is that most people VASTLY overestimate how open they are to new ideas and skills, and underestimate how much they resist change.

Here’s a simple questionnaire that you can use to determine how open you are to new things:

• Have you made a cryptocurrency transaction so far?
• A restaurant you frequent introduces a new dish. Do you try it out?
• Have you used an AI agent to automate at least some of your work?
• Have you read at least 3 full books on an e-book reader (Kindle/Kobo)?
• When something in your house breaks down, do you usually find the fault and fix it yourself?
• You are invited to do something you’ve never done before (e.g. rock climbing or public speaking). Do you agree to go?

If the answers are mostly no, you are very low on openness and unwilling to learn new things. You are someone who prefers the status quo and does not like change (regardless of what you think of yourself).

For example, cryptocurrency tech has been around for over a decade. If you still haven’t learned it, it was because of a lack of trying.

On the other hand, if you enthusiastically learned about crypto and can accurately contrast it with the current financial system, you are likely high openness.

The point is, are you enthusiastic and wanting to learn more than most people? Because most people secretly hope things stop changing so they won’t have to make the effort of changing their ways.

Likeability/Sales

Everything in life is sales. Sales is your ability to make people feel how you want them to feel. If you are good at it, you are a HUGE asset that will serve you for life.

You need to get good at analyzing people, and learning to tailor your words to fit the situation and the audience.

Most people operate with the mindset that “I will behave in a natural way, and everyone will like me” which is the equivalent of “I will dress up however I want, and everyone will like how I look”.

Needless to say, most people have poor fashion sense, and are not very likeable and not very good at sales.

If you know anyone with good fashion skills, you’d know that they put effort into being good with fashion. The same is true of likeability/sales (barring the rare exception with gifted personalities).

If you want to get very good at this, read the 55 Essays by Corporate Machiavelli.

For 99% of people, reading this one book can take them further in their career than whatever technical skills they think they need.

This is because the bottleneck for most people is not technical skills, but their ability to manage people and their egos.

Risk taking capacity

If you talk to most self-made rich people, you’d find that they are not that smart.

I’m not saying that they’re dumb, but most will fall in the 100-120 IQ bracket. Nothing exceptional or Einstein level.

In fact, most of them will tell you that many of their employees are smarter than them.

And these smarter people keep working hard to make them richer. And to top it off, the smarter people KNOW that they are smarter than the business owner, and still keep working hard to make the business owner richer.

Why is this?

The reason is that the smart person is AFRAID of failure and afraid of losing what he already has.

What will happen if he tries to start his own business and fails? He will hurt his reputation, and lose a few years of income, and will end up behind his peers.

It is this fear that holds many men back from success.

Deep down they know it, and their employer knows it.

This is why standard practice in many industries is to slow down promotions after someone has a child and gets a housing loan… because they aren’t going anywhere. Too much to lose.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say that there are many people who would BENEFIT from getting into a controversy and losing their job and employability.

It would force them to take more risks instead of just trying to protect what they already have.

Not everyone will be successful, and many will be worse off, but many will find that god has made them capable of 10,000x more than what they are doing as a wage slave.

Alas, they will never discover what they could have been. Their paycheck is also their leash and shackles.

– Harsh Strongman