How to predict future success

Past performance is a predictor for future success.  You may be saying to yourself, “Wait a second, that’s not right.”  I know, I know, you’ve heard all of those investment commercials talk about their inability to predict future profits.  And that is mostly true.  You need to look to the past in order to make a guess about the future.  But it’s just a guess.

I can see your future

 

What about people?  We are creatures of habit.  Find people with productive habits.   Most people are who they are because they are comfortable doing what they do.  Think of someone who is a top performer.  They probably have always been a top performer or they were trained or learned at some point to be a top performer and they continue to do so. 

On the flip side of the coin look at someone who struggles.  They don’t have bad luck, they never learned know how to succeed.  They fail a lot and don’t learn from their failures.  They are the people who tend to do a lot of finger-pointing without reflection on their own actions.

You can look at past performance and you can probably guess that a person will continue to be successful.  Success breeds success in most cases.  Sometimes failure breeds success too, for example Thomas Edison’s nine thousand attempts to make a light bulb. 

Sometimes it’s hard to see which efforts will bear fruit.  I’d choose the person to work with who has proof of success over the dreamer who has ideas without anything to show for it. 

Having said all that, I’ll be back tomorrow at 6:30 am with a new blog post.  The family is on the mend and thank you to everyone who sent me tweets or emails asking.  I really appreciate it.