You may not have a mentor guiding you through life but the Internet makes it easy to follow in the footsteps of successful people whose accomplishments are documented in news stories and Web biographies. If you want to know how some guy got rich you can usually learn just by searching for his biography or finding interviews he has given in the past.
But I can tell you what most successful people do to become successful:
- They put together a simple plan that is easy to follow
- They develop relationships with people who can help them
- They set lots of goals that all contribute toward their greater success
If I had to choose which of those three things is most important I would go with the relationships. Your personal network is your power. The more people you know who can and will help you the more successful you tend to be in life. You don’t want to run around with your hand out asking for money. What you want is advice, referrals to good service providers, and the wisdom born of experience.
Anyone who can guide you through a complicated business process, and who is willing to do that for you, is a great friend to have.
Now that you know the secrets to everyone else’s successes you’ll be able to see through some of the hyperbole that motivational experts and BS artists are handing out. No one just creates a successful company overnight. Someone has to open doors. Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t become rich because they invented a search engine. They became rich because other people gave them resources to start their company and build their search engine (starting with Larry Page’s father when Larry was only six).
Mark Zuckerberg didn’t become rich because he found a cool idea for creating a social network. He became rich because he put together a team of people who helped him execute the idea. Facebook did not just happen overnight. It was the culmination of several people’s ideas that Zuckerberg and his friends put together.
And these kinds of technology success stories are nothing new. In the 1980s Nicholas Bredimus took his experience with the airline and hospitality industries and started a computer software company that revolutionized travel reservations. While he was President of AMR Travel Services (an internal travel agency for American Airlines) Bredimus had helped to oversee the development of a multi-company reservations project called Confirm with the Hyatt Hotels, Marriott Corporation, and Budget Rent-a-Car.
When he started his own company Bredimus already knew the needs of the industries he was targeting and he had a full rolodex with names and phone numbers. He leveraged his relationships into a successful network of business partners and clients that changed air travel reservation systems forever.
If you don’t have these kinds of relationships now, start getting out there to meet people. Learn to work with others and leverage their skills and experience for your benefit. But remember that you also have to help other people. This is a circle, not a one-way street.