Principles for Success: “The Five Step Process” | Episode 3

• [Ray] Principles for Success: An Ultra Mini-Series Adventure in 30 minutes and in eight episodes. Episode three: The Five-Step Process.

We've discussed how important it is to reflect carefully after experiencing pain. When I did this, I was usually able to discover principles that would prevent me from repeating the same mistakes in the future, and I could see that being successful simply consisted of five steps.

Step one is to know your goals and run after them. What is best for you depends on your nature, so you need to really understand yourself and know what you want to achieve in life.

Step two is to encounter the problems that stand in the way of getting to your goals. These problems are typically painful. If handled badly, some of them can lead to your ruin. But to evolve, you need to identify those problems and not tolerate them.

Step three is to diagnose these problems to get at their root causes. Don't jump too quickly to solutions. Take a step back and reflect in order to really distinguish the symptoms from the disease.

Step four is to design a plan to eliminate the problems. This is where you will determine what you need to do to get around them.

And step five is to execute those designs, pushing yourself to do what's needed to progress towards your goal. A successful life essentially consists of doing these five steps over and over again.

This is your personal evolution, and you see this process everywhere. It's just a law of nature. Think of any product, any organization, or any person you know, and you will see that this is true for them.

Evolution is simply a process of either adapting or dying. Conceptually, it looks just like the five-step process I've described. As you push through this often painful process, you'll naturally ascend to higher and higher levels of success.

I've found that when I did it better, my struggling never became easier because the more capable I became, the greater the challenges I would take on. Because different people are strong and weak at different things, most people can't do all five steps well.

Not facing this reality means you could stretch further than you should, and as the heights get greater, your falls could also be greater. Sometimes terrible things happen to all of us in life.

They can ruin us, or they can profoundly improve us, depending on how we handle them. Something like this happened to me in 1982. In episode four, I'll show you what happened and the lessons I learned.