3 Traits of Highly Successful People

What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the podcast. So, I was thinking today, what are the attributes that I see recurring amongst the most successful people that I’ve met? And I was trying to distill it because I’m all about, you know, the idea of the simplest system is the most effective system. A lot of times, we create these convoluted, complex systems, and in the process, we obscure true effectiveness. So how do we get down to the bare bones? The first principles. What are the fundamental requirements necessary to being a successful person? And I thought I would challenge myself and see, can I come up with three. Three traits, three attributes that you simply cannot be successful without? And I think I got them. I think I got them here. All right, so the first attribute, the first skill is something that we learned about from the book grit by Angela Duckworth.

Now, in this book, and this is a really played out example, everybody talks about the marshmallow test, right? In this example, what they did is they sat some kids down, and they said, hey, I’m gonna leave the room, and I’m gonna come back in ten minutes, and then I’m gonna put a marshmallow on the table. Now, you can eat that marshmallow. That’s totally fine. But if you don’t eat that marshmallow, when I come back, if it’s still sitting there, I’ll give you two marshmallows. And so, you know, this is a cruel little form of torture, asking these kids not to eat the damn marshmallow. But what they were interested in was to track, okay, of the kids who delayed the gratification, that were able to wait until the researcher came back to get that second marshmallow. What was the. The long term consequences of this from a life, you know, perspective? And so they tracked these kids over a number of years to see how they performed in school and how they performed in life.
Generally speaking. What they found was that the kids who were able to delay the gratification, to wait that 1015 minutes to get the second marshmallow, they tended to have better long term outcomes in terms of some of the more, we’ll call conventional measures of success, in terms of finances and happiness and all that stuff. So, this gave birth to the idea of grit, which is grit is the ability to delay gratification in pursuit of a long term goal. Then the people who are the grittiest people who can delay that gratification the longest are gonna be the ones who are the most successful. Now, this is an interesting study because, and I don’t think anybody’s ever followed up on this to see, the more interesting question I have is not whether or not you are or are not gritty or do or do not have the ability to delay gratification. It’s simply a matter of how long you’re able to delay the gratification. And for different people in different situations, in different contexts, and having different goals, it’s going to be different periods of time. So it’s not a binary.
Right. It’s a spectrum. And so my question is, like, how gritty are you? And I think this is something that can be improved. Truthfully, when I was very young, I had no ability to delay gratification. I was very impulsive. Chalk that to the ADHD. I’ll just take what’s in front of me right now. Couldn’t really think about long term consequences.
And this got me into a whole lot of hot water in my twenties because I kept delaying or I kept ignoring the. The long term, inevitable consequences of actions I was taking in the short term. For instance, I wasn’t brushing my teeth, wasn’t flossing enough. I ended up losing a tooth. Classic example. Another one who is racking up big bills and finding myself one day, $80,000 in debt. Right? So this is what happens when you’re not able to delay gratification. Now, you would look at me in my younger years and think, Anthony is going to be screwed if we think that the ability to delay gratification is a fundamental trait of success, because he does not have this.
Right. And I do. I believe that the number one trait of success that I’m going to list here, and these are in no particular order, but the number one that we’re talking about here is the ability to delay gratification. Now, I had to learn this skill much later in life, but I think I’m at a point now, as I’m on the cusp of 40 years old, where I can say I have a very high tolerance for delaying gratification. The timeline upon which I can go without seeing a result or without receiving some kind of reward for my actions is far longer than it was when I was much younger. I think it’s much longer than the average person as well. So that’s the first thing. That’s the first trait that I see recurring in successful people, is they’re able to put in the work for years and years and years without seeing the fruits of that labor.
And they just. They. The timeline upon which they measure how long they’re willing to wait is longer than average. So that’s number one. That’s the first trait is the ability to delay. The second trait is the ability to focus. And again, like these traits that I’m sharing with you today, these are things that I really struggled with, and we’ve gone deep into my struggles with focus. And again, we can blame ADHD, but I think, just more broadly, the world is designed in a way to separate us from our attention.
It’s an attention economy at this point. The time you spend on social media, spend on Netflix, time you spend watching the news, it’s a constant battle out there being waged for our attention. It’s a war that a lot of us are just kind of outgunned in. But the people who are the most successful are the ones who are the most able to guard their focus not only from external distractions, but from internal distractions. What I mean by that is the shiny objects, the shiny objects that say, oh, I could go do this thing and that thing. I could pursue this opportunity or that opportunity. The most successful people that I’ve met are. Are the ones who are able to pick a path, delay the gratification, and stay focused on that path without getting sidetracked.
That’s seriously the key there. And it leads into the third trait of all successful people, which is they’re consistent. They show up consistently. It’s not just about delaying the gratification one time. It’s about consistently delaying the gratification. It’s not about focusing this one time. It’s about showing up every single day at this time and focusing intently on this one thing. The ability to show up consistently over time, that’s like a real bifurcation.
And I think in the results of most people, if you just looked at them and say, what is the variable that seems to be separating this person’s success from this person? A lot of times, it’s just the timeline upon which they perform the activities and how many times they performed it. So the more consistent you are in showing up and executing the thing, the more likely you are to have success later on, if you can do it on a long enough time frame, if you can delay that gratification. Right. So those are three traits that I see recurring over and over and over whenever I meet a successful person. I’m shocked by how few of them are extraordinary in any kind of meaningful way, except for these fundamentals, these foundational skills, these traits of being able to delay gratification. They always have great focus, and they have the ability to be consistent and do the work for long periods of time. It’s remarkable, but I find this really encouraging because there’s nothing inherently difficult about or not difficult, but there’s nothing inherently outside of our grasp. For the average human when it comes to these traits, it’s something that’s accessible to every single one of us with, you know, a little bit of intention, a little bit of diligence.
And I’m not going to say it’s easy, but it’s well worth it. So those are the three traits of highly successful people. I hope you have these. If you do not, then start working on them. And if you need help with that, just know we’re going to be launching the beyond the apex community. I know I’ve been saying this for a long time. I’ve been dragging my feet on it because I want it to be really dope. But this is a community for entrepreneurs who want to learn how to maximize their return on life.

It’s going to be fairly exclusive. We’re going to keep it fairly small so that I can really work on one on one or small group coaching. I don’t want to have this big thing. So if you’re interested in learning more about that, you can shoot me an email, respond to this with a comment and I will get you on the waitlist. And as always, appreciate you being here. We’ll catch you in the next episode. Until then, stay hyper focus, my friends.