People are often puzzled as to why a successful man continues to be successful, while unsuccessful people tend to remain unsuccessful. It's like the line in the song: "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer." This is really not true. The poor, do not, as a rule, get poorer; but they do tend to remain poor; or at least at the bottom of the economic ladder, while the more successful and affluent tend to become even more successful.I think we have to agree that we're creatures of habit. People at the bottom of the economic scale are bound by the habits that have resulted in their lack of financial success as the more successful people are bound by theirs. And, as Eric Hoffer has pointed out, there is a conservatism of the very rich.
People in general tend to avoid anything that smacks of change. You'd think the unsuccessful would welcome any kind change, but they don't. They have grown used to their way of life and feel that change might be for the worse.
A successful person has set up a momentum like a heavy flywheel and he keeps this momentum going through the habits that resulted in its getting started in the first place. Having formed good, productive habits, and staying with them day in and day out, week in and week out, the successful person builds for himself an enormous cumulative success factor; a kind of tidal wave that follows along behind him for perhaps three to five years, possibly even longer, but eventually breaks over him with the successful accumulation of his long-standing maintaining of good habit patterns.
On the other hand, the occasional good fortune that seems to effect the unsuccessful in a sporadic, hit-or-miss fashion is the result of his occasional tentative steps into the edge of the river and then back out again, instead of riding with the current in mid-stream.
A good, effective act will always produce a good effect; but the effective acts must be maintained in a daily, habitual way if we are to enjoy the continual success and build the cumulative effect I spoke of.
The unsuccessful hasn't really set anything in motion and kept it in motion. He'll start something rolling and then he'll stop and watch while it slows down, loses its balance and finally topples over. I'm doing a good job of mixing my metaphors, but success is like a rolling wheel with the only motive power coming from the person who started it going. It's always more difficult to get a wheel rolling, than it is to keep it going once it's in motion.
The successful people run into set-backs, and obstacles, but these are fairly minor. And they seem to know that if they'll just stay with it, have faith in what they're doing and where they're going, sooner or later they'll have it made. And that's what happens. One of the least known factors about success is knowing how long it takes to succeed, and understanding the importance of momentum- constant motion, the formation of good habits.
So, if you've wondered why the successful and the unsuccessful tend to remain that way, those are my reasons.
Success in life is not so much a matter of talent or opportunity as it is of concentration and perseverance. And as Sheridan said: "The surest way not to fail is to determine to succeed."
-Earl Nightingale
As a Depression-era child, Earl Nightingale was hungry for knowledge. From the time he was a young boy, he would frequent the Long Beach Public Library in California, searching for the answer to the question, "How can a person, starting from scratch, who has no particular advantage in the world, reach the goals that he feels are important to him, and by so doing, make a major contribution to others?" His desire to find an answer, coupled with his natural curiosity about the world and its workings spurred him to become one of the world's foremost experts on success and what makes people successful.
