When I speak of highly successful people, I’m not referring to people who inherited their wealth or people whose lottery ticket happened to hit. Rather, I’m talking about people like you and me who are responsible for their own success—however each of us chooses to define success. In doing the research for this book, whenever I talked to others about highly successful people, the comment I heard most often was something like, “Wow! That person really has what it takes.”
In almost all cases, the characteristics that seemed to separate these highly successful people from the masses was a magical quality called “it.” Everyone was quick to point out that highly successful people possessed this quality, but no one could explain to me what “it” was.
As I pressed for specifics, I found the answers fell into three categories. The first category was that these highly successful people have an amazing ability to draw other people to them—amagnetic personality, if you will. In other words, if these people were selling something, customers seemed to jump out of the woodwork just for a chance to buy from them.
Although this ability may sound wonderful at first, being able to draw other people toward you sounds more like an ability you would inherit than an ability that you could learn. So I said to myself, there has to be a more concrete answer to this question, something that interested people can more easily sink their teeth into.
The next category of answer was that these people have an unbelievable ability to get other people to go the extra mile on their behalf. This answer interested me, because as any successful person eventually learns, success in this life is not tied so much to what you can do for yourself as to what you can get others to do on your behalf. If you try to do everything by yourself, you very quickly find yourself constrained by the limitations of what one person can physically accomplish. On the other hand, if you can enlist the active support of others, your potential becomes virtually unlimited. I liked what I was hearing in this answer, but I was still convinced that a better answer was possible, so I continued my search.
The next category of answer was the one that grabbed me. It said that these highly successful people have a wonderful ability to get other people to stand in line just for the privilege of doing them a favor! As simplistic as this might sound, this was the common thread that tied all highly successful people together. They all had a whole army of people chafing at the bit for the opportunity to do something nice for them. This is what the rest of this book is all about. It will give you the specifics of how you can get your customers (those people on whom you are dependent for your success) to stand in line just waiting for the chance to do you a favor. The process highly successful people use to get people to enthusiastically go the extra mile on their behalf is called Win-Win Negotiation.
