The 5 Success Senses
As humans, we are born with 5 senses: sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste.
However, success requires 5 other senses:
1. Common sense (how to avoid "stupid" mistakes)
2. Tactical sense (how to achieve an objective)
3. Strategic sense (how to achieve a goal)
4. Business sense (how to make money - more and more)
5. Political sense (how to lead others by skillfully shaping perceptions and wielding influence)
By the time a young person becomes an adult, he/she usually has acquired common sense. Well, supposedly!
Tactical, strategic, business and political senses are harder to acquire. Parents would be making a mistake if they assumed their kids can learn these four senses at school.
There is an eleventh sense, which is very difficult to acquire: the sense of who we naturally are and, by extension, who we are destined to become.
Without this 11th sense, a person has no "I" and merely becomes a part of "they" -- the crowd where everybody thinks alike and obeys the same fears.
All the great artists and scientists -- and all great leaders -- in history have succeeded in escaping the force of gravity exerted by the masses. They achieved excellence by first achieving independence.
Aristotle wrote that "excellence is a habit." I would clarify further by saying that excellence is the habit of following one's bliss. In other words, by doing what you really, really, really WANT to do, you become really, really, really GOOD at it.
Strangely enough, when others around us have mastered the tactical, strategic, business and political senses, they are often able to influence us to forget about our eleventh sense. That is, they make us ignore who we truly are. In doing so, they render us powerless.
The key to success is to continually develop and sharpen all our 11 senses.
However, success requires 5 other senses:
1. Common sense (how to avoid "stupid" mistakes)
2. Tactical sense (how to achieve an objective)
3. Strategic sense (how to achieve a goal)
4. Business sense (how to make money - more and more)
5. Political sense (how to lead others by skillfully shaping perceptions and wielding influence)
By the time a young person becomes an adult, he/she usually has acquired common sense. Well, supposedly!
Tactical, strategic, business and political senses are harder to acquire. Parents would be making a mistake if they assumed their kids can learn these four senses at school.
There is an eleventh sense, which is very difficult to acquire: the sense of who we naturally are and, by extension, who we are destined to become.
Without this 11th sense, a person has no "I" and merely becomes a part of "they" -- the crowd where everybody thinks alike and obeys the same fears.
All the great artists and scientists -- and all great leaders -- in history have succeeded in escaping the force of gravity exerted by the masses. They achieved excellence by first achieving independence.
Aristotle wrote that "excellence is a habit." I would clarify further by saying that excellence is the habit of following one's bliss. In other words, by doing what you really, really, really WANT to do, you become really, really, really GOOD at it.
Strangely enough, when others around us have mastered the tactical, strategic, business and political senses, they are often able to influence us to forget about our eleventh sense. That is, they make us ignore who we truly are. In doing so, they render us powerless.
The key to success is to continually develop and sharpen all our 11 senses.
posted by Super Peter at 7:53 PM
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