Successful individuals understand that success is a process. The good news is that anyone can process success into their life. Yet so few understand what that process should be or how to even begin. In my five-year research study on the daily habits of wealthy and poor people, which I share in my book, Rich Habits, I was shocked by one discovery I made: financially successful people did not understand exactly why they were successful. Many regurgitated platitudes such as "hard work", "work ethic", "getting a good education", "seeing opportunities", "doing more than your job requires", “being in the right time at the right place”. All very accurate and salient points. But all wrong. Success has very little to do with work ethic, education, intelligence or random good luck. Success is a process. It requires that you adopt good daily habits; what I call Rich Habits. It requires that you perform certain rudimentary tasks every day, day in and day out. The fact is the process for success is oftentimes a boring, lonely, grunt-like process. But it is a process. There are four interdependent stages that every successful person passes through:

#1 Action Stage
In order for you to begin the process of bringing success into your life you need to take action. These actions often involve taking risks. This first stage stops most in their tracks, as most people are averse to risk. Despite the fact that everyone desires financial success in their lives, very few are willing to take on the risk that is necessary to create that financial success. It may be taking on a new, challenging job. It may involve taking on more responsibilities in your existing job. It may involve quitting your job and starting your own business. It may involve spending an inordinate amount of personal time, at the expense of family time or recreation time, in order to create something of value. It may involve investing all of the money you have to take advantage of an opportunity that presents itself. Financial success requires action which requires risk of some sort.

#2 Mistake Stage
Human beings learn best by failing; by making mistakes. Failure and mistakes are like railroad tracks on the neural pathways of our brains. The bigger the failures/mistakes the better we remember them. Big failures/mistakes translate into long-term memory. Successful people are no different than everyone else when it comes to mistakes. They make plenty of them. In fact, I believe successful people make more mistakes than unsuccessful people. What sets successful people apart from everyone else is that they do not let the fear of failure or mistakes stop them from taking some action or taking on some activity. Why is it that so many are afraid to fail or make mistakes? Our schools are to blame. We are conditioned early on in school that making mistakes is bad. We make enough mistakes we get an F on a test or project. We get enough F’s on our tests/projects and we fail the course. Teachers punish students for making mistakes. They are reprimanded and made to feel inadequate for not meeting the standards of the teacher, school or society.. This conditioning stays with us through our adulthood, like an albatross around our necks. 
 
#3 Learning Stage
Successful people are not afraid of failure or of making mistakes because they look at them as opportunities to learn what not to do. Edison mastered this stage in his creation of the incandescent light bulb, having failed over and over again, each time learning what would not work. Wealthy people just see failure/mistakes differently than everyone else. They expect failure/mistakes in their lives. Because of this expectation, they are able to react thoughtfully to the failure/mistake. They are able to think their way through the failure/mistake; to learn from it. Because unsuccessful people are intimidated by failures/mistakes, they try to avoid them. That is too bad as it is the failures/mistakes that teach us the best lessons. They offer us an opportunity to learn. The learning stage involves analyzing what went wrong, how and why. It requires some work in studying the action that caused the failure/mistake in order to determine what not to do.  

#4 Change Stage
Stages 1-3 are meaningless if you fail to move through stage four: change. Change requires that you apply what you’ve learned from your failure/mistakes in order to avoid repeating them. While making mistakes is okay, repeating your mistakes is costly and will prevent you from becoming financially successful. You cannot repeat your failed actions and expect different results to follow. You must learn from your mistakes and change what you are doing.

Analyzing how children learn to walk is an excellent example of how to succeed by moving through each of the success stages. When a child tries to walk for the first time (Stage One - Action) they invariably fall (Stage Two - Mistake). Over time they learn what not to do (Stage Three - Learning) and then they change how they walk (Stage Four - Change). It is the fourth stage, change, which enables children to master the skill of walking. Without change they would never walk. Children move from one stage to the next instinctively. It’s unfortunate that we are conditioned in life to avoid failure and mistakes. The byproduct of avoiding failures/mistakes is that we also avoid the opportunity for financial success.