Who doesn’t like winning?
From spelling bee championships, dog shows, and the world series on TV it’s very obvious how exciting being a winner is and what a drag it is to lose.
This doesn’t have to be in sports. It can be in any area of your life that’s important to you.
You’ve set out on a diet, and you actually lose that extra weight—you’re smiling, you’re excited, you’re getting new clothes. If you get off track and don’t get the job done, you are frustrated—and usually, this frustration is not accompanied by a great, fun trip to buy more fun things for your wardrobe to wear. No, you wait until you lose the weight to do that.
You may not have fun thinking about competition and the idea of winning and losing that much but it affects every area of your life.
Most of the time you’re competing against yourself and you either make the things happen that you want or you let yourself get beat.
The sooner you learn to play to win in life, the sooner you are going to start enjoying it. Nobody wins all of the time but having some successes along the way sure makes things a whole lot more pleasurable and satisfying.
Some of the eggheads have tried to take the competition out of sports for young children but it doesn’t work. The parents may not be keeping score but the kids do.
They know who the winner was and who lost.
Life is all about competition and if you won’t compete, you are going to get left behind by the people who will compete.
Life can be tough but most of the time it’s fair, and you reap what you sow.
Life can be tough but most of the time it’s fair, and you reap what you sow. Click To Tweet
Every good thing has a price. You have to plant the seed, water it, and keep the weeds away if you want your beautiful flower or your crop to grow.
I’ve played sports from the time I was eight years old, all the way through high school. Except for recreational leagues, my competitive career ended in high school because I wasn’t good enough to move up to college sports. But all that competition paid off big for me because I learned what winning tasted like.
I also learned what losing tasted like, and I found that I much rather win than lose. I learned that winning was worth the price.
A friend of mine went to Las Vegas and had a great time playing blackjack. His game plan was to start with $200 and quit when he lost it. He walked away with $1300 and a huge smile on his face. And ready to share with anyone who asked how it happened.
“I read the book!”
He said, “I’ve realized most people just go to Vegas, walk in a casino and start playing without any preparation whatsoever. I thought that there had to be a better way so I got a couple of books on blackjack. By learning the rules I could at least get some kind of strategy, and a of sense of how you played the game to put the odds in your favor.
I read the book and it worked!
I knew I was not guaranteed success but I knew how to set the odds in my favor and walk out a winner. Most people go in blind, no strategy, no game plan, and they get wiped out quickly. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
If you’re going to do something, you ought to learn the rules first and I did.”
We don’t have a choice, we’re living it. We’ve got to compete. We’ve got to perform.
Otherwise we’re just taking what life gives us—handouts, charity, and that’s never anything great. In fact, it’s humiliating. It’s frustrating. You can lie to yourself and pretend none of this matters to you and you are above it all but that’s just living in denial.
No one wants to be average. No one wants to just be a face in the crowd.
We all want to do something great with our lives.
The bottom line is if you’re going to be fulfilled and enjoy your life, you’ve got to learn how things work so you can make your efforts count and start to take control over what happens to you.
How can you be the winner of the game if you’ve never learned the rules? You can’t. If you’re going to compete in anything successfully, you’ve got to know the basics.
If you’re going to compete in anything successfully, you’ve got to know the basics. Click To Tweet
What I’m talking about are simply the things we all have to learn so we know how to operate and put ourselves into the best position to get the results we want.
Usually if we’re highly driven, we can piece a winning strategy together step-by-step but it can take decades to do it without help.
The greatest advantage is to have role models and mentors that will give you a picture of these patterns of success, and even better if you know them well enough to ask questions when you get stuck along the way.
I was one of those fortunate people. About 12 years ago I realized I would have had no chance of having the success I did if I had not been given much timely council along the way by a few super successful leaders.
That caused me to immediately start my thinking about the vast ocean of people who did not have that advantage. I realized I was sitting on a wealth of information that a lot of people would be very excited to discover—just like I was in my late twenties.
That’s why I wrote my book, Serial Winner, as a way of giving back to the new generation coming up.
The goal was to compress my experiences into a few hours of simple reading so those looking to move up quickly in life could get the fundamentals down as quickly as possible and start moving up fast.
Here’s what I’m talking about.
We all know people in life who seem to move from success to success, with barely a pause or dip in between. The kind of people that are always talking about their next big project or goal. The ones who are always excited about something.
These people have limitless energy, which they use to accomplish more and more. They are role models and opinion-makers who act and speak with confidence. They always seem ahead of the game, and always seem to stay on their feet leading to rewarding lives.
These people are serial winners. In a world full of people who almost win, they are the few who do it again and again.
To most of us who want to duplicate their success, serial winners are confounding. They seem to have the ability to shed the negatives in life and attract the positives. We ask, “How do they find the energy or time?” “How did they get there so fast?” “How do they fit it all in?”
We just don’t understand how these people achieve what they do. It’s almost like a magic trick. It happens right in front of our eyes but we don’t know what is happening or how they’re doing it.
We want similar things—big opportunities, fulfillment, success, fun—so we try to follow their mannerisms, their style, their attitude, the way they talk, the way they dress. Yet we still seem to be missing some important piece.
Serial winners leverage a cycle of winning actions to make consistent progress.
They do something every day that puts them or keeps them on course for the things they want in life. By focusing on what they can and should do, they manage themselves out of tough, demoralizing situations.
The result? They are always moving forward, following their passions, having fun, and contributing to the world.
They think differently and as a result they work differently. They respond differently. And now I’m going to tell you something exciting. The ideas and strategies they use will work for you too once you understand what they are.
What about you? Are you achieving everything you want to achieve? Are you making the progress you would like, or do you feel stuck?
Is there something great you want to make happen in your career, your life, or even the world?
The cycle of winning can help. Because the only difference between you and a serial winner is five basic actions.
There’s no patent on action.
I’ve had big successes, but I also had to accept food stamps for a time just to keep my wife and two young boys from going hungry.
Today I’m a multimillionaire, but I once had a boss label me ‘Turkey of the Month’ in a company-wide newsletter (not kidding). I know what it is to have nothing go right, to be passed over for promotions, to be the one applauding others who were getting ahead. But I’ve learned a lot about success and winning along the way.
When I started my career, I knew I didn’t have a chance of making something great out of my life unless I paid attention.
I studied the winners I knew closely. I asked a lot of questions. (I’m surprised people didn’t start walking the other way when they saw me coming.) And I figured out what I had to do—step by step, detail by detail—to improve. I caught on to the fact that the people who were winning weren’t better than me.
They simply did things that I wasn’t doing.
I learned something important: nothing can keep us from doing what the winners do.
Nothing can keep us from doing what the winners do. Click To TweetLife is too short to figure everything out on your own. My biggest advantage has been the incredible circle of advisors and mentors in my life: “Bullet Bob” Turley, professional pitcher and winner of the Cy Young Award; Edward Roberts, “the father of the personal computer”; and my cousin, Art Williams, founder of the A.L. Williams & Associates life insurance company.
Everything I’ve achieved, I’ve achieved by watching the best.
Over the years, I figured out the go-to moves—the cycle of winning that the most successful people use to achieve what they want. The winners who return to this cycle again and again, day after day, have serial success.
These five actions get them on track and help them stay on track.
What are they? Decide. Overdo. Adjust. Finish. Improve.
It’s true—these concepts aren’t complicated—but the greats from every walk of life talk about using them to win. So why don’t more people win?
Because most people don’t really understand them, don’t apply them, or don’t apply them consistently.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” they say. But what they believe is that these actions seem too simple to be important. There must be something more to it, right? So they keep looking for a more complicated answer that doesn’t exist, ignoring the valuable answer they’ve already been given.
Again, this is why I wrote the book, Serial Winner—to help people discover the patterns of action that could catapult them to a new level of success and happiness.
Here’s the bottom line: Anyone who wants more out of life and is frustrated enough to do something about it can learn and apply what winners do, starting with these fundamentals.
So if you ever find yourself asking, “Who says I have to sit on the sidelines? Who says I have to live on the leftovers of people who are doing the things I would like to do?” this is where you should start, too.
