The wonderful things in life are the things you do, not the things you have.
—Reinhold Messner, adventurer and explorer
Success leaves clues.
—Tony Robbins
When Arnold Schwarzenegger was growing up, he was in big trouble.
Born and raised in a little village in Austria, he had plastered the walls of his room with images of muscular men in tiny bathing shorts in eye-catching colors. His parents called the family doctor (there were no shrinks in rural Austria at that time!). The doctor came to the house to see if there was something “wrong” with the boy.
After having examined Arnold, he told the boy’s mother: “Listen, there’s nothing wrong with the kid; he’s just very, very ambitious.”
Who Is Your Role Model?
You may say whatever you want about Arnold, but he is certainly one of the greatest goal setters of all time. Before he came to the United States, he had already carved out a plan. First, he was going to make it big in bodybuilding, but not only big: he was going to become the biggest bodybuilder of all time. Then he was going to go into the movies, and then into politics. He even predicted that he would marry a Kennedy.
We know that all of this came true.
He certainly had everything going against him, from his upbringing to his accent, to the way bodybuilders were perceived in Hollywood, to loads of other misconceptions, prejudices, and limiting beliefs that he was going up against.
But he was dead set on his goals, and that was all that mattered.
On his way to his successes, Arnold constantly surrounded himself with the images of his role models. Kids do this all the time. But when we “grow up” and become adults, we think it’s foolish to plaster our walls with images of role models that we want to emulate.
In his great book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki describes how he constantly uses role models in whatever he does to get better results and improve his skills. When he’s on the golf course, he pre-tends to be Jack Nicklaus or Tiger Woods. When he’s engaged in a deal, he pretends that he’s Donald Trump. When he tackles anything to do with investing or finances, he pretends that he’s Warren Buffett.
All the great inventors, artists, businessmen, and athletes of our time use role models to inspire them and to help them push the bound-aries of whatever they think is possible.
Today, it’s easier than ever before to find out everything about the role models who truly motivate you to reach the stars and your greatest potential. “The web is the biggest library in the world, and it’s always open,” my fellow Club of Budapest member Paulo Coelho likes to say. It gives you unlimited access to the role models who really inspire you and lets you zoom in on them 24/7.
Success Leaves Clues
When you tune in to your role models, a fantastic phenomenon kicks in: you begin to acquire some of their skill sets.
As soon as you focus on someone intensively and over time, you tune into that person’s worldview.
This means that you actually start to copy his or her belief systems and can then apply those systems to any activity or skill in your life, career, or business.
This is a fantastic tool that life presents us with! It’s paradise.
Even if you have no education and no prior experience in whatever it is you are setting out to accomplish, you can tune in to your role models. Suggest to yourself that you will model their worldview and skill sets. This way, you can copy their beneficial and constructive traits even faster. It’s like a giant supermarket where you can literally choose and pick what you want to become.
It’s Your Focus and Willpower That Count—
Not Your Genetics, Heritage, or Background
Reinhold Messner is arguably the greatest mountaineer of our time.
He has broken all records and was the first person to climb Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen. He was also the first person to ascend all 14 “eight-thousanders” (peaks higher than 8,000 meters or 26,000 feet) in the world.
Doctors examined him to find out what made his body so special that he could do the seemingly impossible and accomplish physical feats that no other human being had ever pulled off. They found a shocking truth: he was totally average. His genetics had dealt him no upper hand when it came to his physical abilities.
What he had, however, was an immense power of the mind, a focus and concentration and unwavering willpower. This was what really set him apart.
The same goes for you. Whatever you are setting out to do, whatever you want to be or have, or whoever you want to become, you can do it.
You can even push the boundaries of what the world of today thinks is possible, whether you’re an athlete, a businessman, an entre-preneur, somebody working in a nongovernmental organization, an artist, or a student.
You can make us all realize that there is more out there. You can show us the true potential of what we all can accomplish by growing beyond what anyone else has ever done.
As we discuss in another chapter, any information you want is available to you if you focus on it. Your desire will draw it to you. The same thing is at play here: you start to acquire the skill set of your role model by focusing on those skills with enough passion and desire.
This way, you create a powerful magnetic force that will draw to you the skills and belief systems that you need in order to reach your goals.
This force will make you adapt in the best way possible so that you can soar to unexpected heights, reach your dreams, acquire and display the same characteristics, and even go beyond what your role model has accomplished. In the end, as with everything in life, you are limited only by what you believe is possible.
Like a magic sponge, you will draw the information you need to you and adapt it to your personality. That’s the power of the mind that our scientists have only begun to scratch the surface of.