The-Common-Denominator-of-Success

 I had been brought up on the popular belief that the secret of success is hard work, but I had seen so many people work hard without succeeding and so many people succeed without working hard that I had become convinced that hard work was not the real secret, even though in most cases it might be one of the requirements.

And so I set out on a voyage of discovery which carried me through biographies and autobiographies and all sorts of dissertations on success and the lives of successful people until I finally reached the point at which I realized that the secret I was trying to discover lay not only in what people did, but also in what made them do it.

I realized further that the secret for which I was searching must not only apply to every definition of success, but since it must apply to everyone to whom it was offered, it must also apply to everyone who had ever been successful. In short, I was looking for the common denominator of success. And, because that is exactly what I was looking for, that is exactly what I found.

But this common denominator of success is so big, so powerful, and so vitally important to your future and mine that I'm not going to make a speech about it. I'm just going to "lay it on the line" in words of one syllable, so simple that anybody can understand them.

The common denominator of success—the secret of success of every person who has ever been successful—lies in the fact that "THEY FORMED THE HABIT OF DOING THINGS THAT FAILURES DON'T LIKE TO DO."

It's just as true as it sounds and it's just as simple as it seems. You can hold it up to the light, you can put it to the acid test, and you can kick it around until it's worn out, but when you are all through with it, it will still be the common denominator of success, whether we like it or not.

The Common Denominator of Success Page 2 of 9

It will still explain why people have gone into a business or profession with every apparent qualification for success and have...