A well-regarded insurance agent spent several years compiling information on what makes a successful person. He was astounded by his results.
Of course, like most of us, I'd been brought up on the popular belief that the secret of success is hard work, but I'd seen so many men work hard without succeeding and so many men 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 men and women 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's exactly what I was looking for, that's exactly what I found.
He expected to find a correlation between gender, race, age, I.Q. or other hereditary factors out of human control; conversely, in his report titled "The common denominator of success" he found something entirely different: "The common denominator of success – the secret of success of every person who has ever been successful – lies in the fact that the person formed the habit of doing things that others don't like to do…Because successful people have a purpose strong enough to make them form the habit of doing things they don't like to do."
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