The Success Principles teaches how to increase confidence, tackle daily challenges, live with passion and purpose, and realize all ambitions. Not merely a collection of good ideas, this book spells out the 67 timeless principles used by successful men and women throughout history. If taken together and practiced every day, these principles can transform life beyond the wildest dreams!

It is filled with memorable and inspiring stories of CEOs, world-class athletes, celebrities, and everyday people. It will give the proven blueprint needed to achieve any goal you desire.

Here are my takeaway points from the book. This thread is updated from time to time.

The Fundamentals of Success

Principle 1: Take 100% Responsibility for Your Life

Updated: 3 Jan 2021

  • You have to give up all your excuses.

  • You have to give up blaming and complaining.

  • Pay attention to small details. Results will not lie.

  • If you don't like your outcomes, change your responses.

  • Everything you experience today is the result of choices you have made in the past.

  • You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself.

Principle 2: Be Clear Why You're Here

Updated: 15 Jan 2021

  • What were you put on this earth to do?

  • What is the "why" behind everything you do?

  • Your inner guidance system is your joy.

  • Decide upon your major definite purpose in life and then organize all your activities around it.

Principle 3: Decide what you want

Updated: 21 Jan 2021

  • Early childhood "programming" often gets in the way of what you want.

  • Don't live someone else's dreams.

  • Stop settling for less than you want.

  • Make an "I want" list.

  • Make a "20 things I love to do" list.

  • Clarify your vision of your ideal life.

  • Build your inner global positioning system.

  • High achievers have bigger visions.

  • Don't let anyone talk you out of your vision.

  • Share your vision for maximum impact.

Principle 4: Believe It's Possible

Updated: 27 Jan 2021

  • You get what you expect.

  • The mind can achieve whatever it can conceive and believe.

  • Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can.

  • Believe even when you don't know how the requirements will be met.

  • The number one problem that keeps people from winning is a lack of belief in themselves.

  • You can be anything you want to be if only you believe with sufficient conviction and act following your faith.

Principle 5: Believe in Yourself

Updated: 1 Feb 2021

  • Believing in yourself is an attitude.

  • The choice of what to believe is up to you.

  • Give up "I can't."

  • Don't waste years believing you can't.

  • It's never too late.

  • You're never too young to start.

  • What others think about you is none of your business.

Principle 6: Use the Law of Attraction

Updated: 10 Feb 2021

  • We become what we think about all day long.

  • Ask for what you want, not for what you don't want.

  • Believe that you'll get what you want, then take action.

  • The law of attraction relies on the fact that everything is in a constant state of vibration.

  • You attract everything in your life that you radiate outward in thoughts, feelings, mental pictures, and words.

  • The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.

Principle 7: Unleash the Power of Goal-Setting

Updated: 15 Feb 2021

  • Write the goal in detail.

  • Reread your goal daily.

  • Things do not happen. Things are made to happen.

  • Set a big enough goal that you become someone worth becoming in the process of achieving it.

  • If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.

  • If you are bored with life, if you don't get up every morning with a burning desire to do things, then you don't have enough goals.

Principle 8: Chunk it Down

Updated: 25 Feb 2021

  • Use Mind mapping.

  • Plan your day the night before.

  • Make a daily to-do list and do first things first.

  • The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks and then starting on the first one.

Principle 9: Success leaves clues

Updated: 1 Apr 2021

  • Seek out clues.

  • Take advantage of all the available resources.

  • Connect the dots, which will require hard work, and frankly, most people don't want to work that hard.

Principle 10: Release the brakes

Updated: 9 Apr 2021

  • Change your self-talk with affirmations.

  • Everything you want is outside your comfort zone.

  • Don't wait 30 years to use the affirmation strategy.

  • The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

Principle 11: See what you want, Get what you see

Updated: 15 Apr 2021

  • Use Vision Boards.

  • Fuel your imagination with emotions.

  • Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life coming attractions.

  • Create a vision of who you want to be, and then live into that picture as if it were already true.

Principle 12: Act as if

Updated: 21 Apr 2021

  • Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.

  • To fly as fast as thought, to be anywhere there is, you must first begin by knowing that you have already arrived.

Principle 13: Take Action

Updated: 25 Apr 2021

  • Nothing happens until you take action.

  • Successful people have a bias for action.

  • Imagination means nothing without doing.

  • Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.

  • Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.

  • Fail forward because no one has ever become excellent or good except through many and great mistakes.

  • You can never learn less. You can only learn more. The reason that you know so much is that you have made so many mistakes.

Principle 14: Just Lean into it

Updated: 4 May 2021

  • Keep leaning and the path will appear.

  • Most of the life is on the job training.

  • A journey of 1000 miles begins with one step.

Principle 15: Experience your fear and take action anyway

Updated: 10 May 2021

  • Take a leap.

  • Scale down the risk.

  • You have to be willing to feel the fear.

  • Have a high intention and low attachment.

  • Fantasized Experiences Appearing Real (FEAR)

  • Authority is 20% given and 80% taken, so take it.

  • Do you want to be safe and good, or do you want to take a chance and be great?

  • Progress always involves risk, you can't steal second base and keep your foot on first.

Principle 16: Be willing to pay the price

Updated: 15 May 2021

  • Practice, Practice, Practice.

  • Willing to do whatever it takes.

  • Find out the price you have to pay.

  • Practice speecific things consistently.

  • Pain is only temporary, the benefits lasts forever.

  • It's not the will to win that matters, everyone has that. It's the will to prepare to win that matters.

  • The big secret in life is that there is no secret, whatever is your goal, you can get there if you are willing to work.

Principle 17: Ask! Ask! Ask!

Updated: 25 May 2021

  • You've got to ask.

  • Start asking today.

  • Be clear and more specific.

  • Ask as if you expect to get it.

  • You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by asking.

  • Asking is the world's most powerful and neglected secret to success and happiness.

Principle 18: Reject Rejection

Updated: 31 May 2021

  • Rejection is a myth.

  • Just say next instead of no.

  • SWSWSWSW - Some will, Some won't, So what, Someone's waiting.

  • Success consists of going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

  • Take rejection as someone blowing a bugle in the ear to wake you up and get going, rather than retreat.

Principle 19: Use Feedback to your Advantage

Updated: 27 June 2022

  • Feedback is the breakfast of champions.

  • Be willing to ask for feedback.

  • It pays to ask.

  • The most valuable question:

    • On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the quality of our relationship/service/product during the last week/2 weeks/month/quarter/semester/season?
  • Make the above question a weekly ritual.

  • Look for patterns in feedback.

  • Acknowledge and take action on received feedback.

Principle 20: Commit to Constant and Never Ending Improvement (カイゼン)

Updated: 1 July 2022

  • We have an innate desire to endlessly learn, grown and develop.

  • We want to become more than what we already are. Once we yield to this inclination for continuous and never ending improvement (カイゼン Kaizen), we lead a life of endless accomplishments and satisfaction.

  • Improve in small increments.

  • Decide what to improve on and never skip steps.

  • You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.

Principle 21: Keep Score for Success

Updated: 4 July 2022

  • You have to measure what you want more of

  • Measure what you want, not what you don't want

Principle 22: Practice Persistence

Updated: 6 July 2022

  • Most people give up just when they're about to acheive success.

  • It's not always going to be easy.

  • "No" is a word on your path to "Yes". Don't give up too soon. Not even if well-meaning parents, relatives, friends, and colleauges tell you to get a "real job". Your dreams are your job.

  • Never give up on your hopes and dreams

  • Never back down. Never, Never, Never Give up.

  • Hang in There!

  • It's always too soon to be quit.

  • We usually overestimate what we think we can accomplish in one year, but we grossly underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade.

  • For every failure, there's an alternative course of action. You have to really look for it and find it. When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.

  • Difficulties are oppurtunities to better things, they are stepping stones to greater experiences.

Principle 23: Practice the Rule of 5

Updated: 18 July 2022

  • Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.

  • If you go everyday to a very large tree and take five swings at it with a very sharp ax, eventually, no matter how large the tree, it would have to come down.

  • A minimum of five things in a day, every day, day in and day out - for over time.

Principle 24: Exceed Expectations

Updated: 19 July 2022

  • It's never crowded along the extra mile.

  • If you are willing to do more than you are paid to do, eventually you will be paid to do more than you do.

  • Give something above and beyond what is expected.

  • Make a commitment to be world class and exceeding expectations starting today.

Principle 25: Drop out of the "Ain't it awful" Club and Surround Yourself with Successful People

Updated: 26 July 2022

  • You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

  • Pay any price to stay in the presence of extra ordinary people.

  • Confidence is contagious, So is lack of confidence.

  • There are two types of people - anchors and motors. You want to lost the anchors and get with the motors because motors are going somewhere and they're having more fun. The anchors will just drag you down.

  • Be selective and don't hang around anybody that you don't want to be with. Period. For me, that's been a blessing, and I can stay positive. I hang around people who are happy, who are growing, who want to learn, who don't mind saying sorry or thank you and are having a fun time.

  • Surround yourself with only people who are going to lift you higher.

  • Make a consious effort to surround yourself with positive, nourishing and uplifting people, people who believe in you, encourage you to go after your dreams and applaud your victories. Surround yourself with possibly thinkers, idealists and visionaries.

Principle 26: Acknowledge your positive past

Updated: 26 July 2022

  • I look back on my life like a good day's work, it is done and I am satisfied with it.

  • Research has shown over and over again that the more you acknowledge your past successes, the more confident you become in taking on and successfully accomplishing new ones. You know that even if you fail, it won't destroy you, beacuse your self-esteem is high. And the more you risk, the more you win in life. The more shots you take, the more chances you have of scoring. Knowing that you have had successes in the past will give you the self-confidence that you can have more success in the future.

  • Create a victory log and list atleast 100 successes.

  • Display your success symbols.

  • You are a living magnet. What you attract into your life is in harmony with your dominant thoughts.

  • Reward your inner child.

  • A sense of completion.