Knowing what it takes to get to the top – Part 1

Only once you understand what it takes to become successful will you ever have a chance to reach the top. I am writing a two part article on two aspects that I believe are key and that is two aspects of 100, but I would really like to write about these as I feel they are very important.

When I was coming out of high-school I had the choice to stick around with my crew or move out of the area. Growing up around southwest Detroit didn’t exactly set you up well with a network of positive \ motivating friends so I made the choice to move 45 minutes away to a better area.

At that point I was still in my teens but as I did consulting and met new people in the business world I started surrounding myself with motivated \ intelligent people. Now at my age you do not find many under 20 that fit that bill so I was hanging out with people in the mid to late 20’s or even older. Some call it growing up fast but I knew the influence I would get from these people and the things I could learn from them would pay off greatly.

I can think of so many people that I have benefited from during the early years of my career. I can think of one that wrote a “Savings” program in Fox Pro so you could quickly see how fast you can reach X amount of wealth with compounded interest and we constantly had talks about business and investing. Another gentlemen was much older then me and had already exited Honeywell after a very long and successful career with them. As a multimillionaire I had no choice but to listen to him out of respect on how he gained his wealth. This was an education at 20 that many do not get opportunity to enjoy. In the same sense if I was focused on my old friends and people my age, I would be thinking about Friday night clubbing instead of all the other positive things I did.

I came up with this article on Saturday as I was out with a friend of mine that is a only a few years younger then me as he is 26. Around the table he is surrounded by people in their 30’s and I had to crack the joke that he is hanging out with the old crowd. Then I started to look back on how I did the same thing.

I know for a fact that the positive and motivated people I surrounded myself with during the startup of my career has greatly effected the out come of my success. For those looking to become wealthy or wanting to have an overly successful career you need to look at the people around you and if you see negative people around you then it is time to cut them out like cancer. I have had way to many people in my life that tried to bring me down and things only got better as I surrounded myself with more positive people.

Look for part 2 of this article soon.

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