Cultivate GREATNESS | Personal Development

I find it particularly disheartening when I hear someone refer to a persons success and achievements as simply luck. Or even worse… dumb luck.

The word luck implies that the person had very little to do with the positive outcome they are currently enjoying. In fact, it even conjures up the idea that someone that is enjoying their success could have as easily achieved the result from doing something as simple as going to the local store and purchasing a lottery ticket and hoping for the best.

The reality is that “luck” in and of itself in virtually all the cases of those where one might define a person as being successful had little if anything to do with it. Very often, the exact opposite is true. Read the rest of this entry »

We don’t often think about the powerful effect our words and actions can have on others, but every now and then, the universe decides to show us.

This week, I had a profound experience at my local supermarket. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and the store was crowded. So much so that I almost didn’t go in when I saw the parking lot full of cars. I was tempted to leave and resume my normal weekday shopping schedule the following week, but since I really needed groceries and was already there, I figured I might as well get it over with.

As I made my way through the crowded aisles, I passed a man who looked familiar. I paused, pretending to read the label on a can of cat food as I observed him with occasional sideways glances. He seemed to hold a place of importance in my memory, though I couldn’t quite grasp when or where. After several minutes, I caught a remembered whiff of chalk dust and a nostalgic echo of his voice booming out across a quiet classroom, and it all came flooding back to me. He was Mr. Blaise, my high school Creative Writing teacher!
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Let’s put to rest the fallacy that success, in sales or any profession, is due to luck, chance, and/or hard work. There is nothing further from the truth. Think about it, you and I both know people who work incredibly hard, putting in long hours, they may even have two jobs, but they are not consistently (if ever) successful. Hard work certainly contributes to success, but hard work alone will not make you top-flight in your industry. Is success due, then, to luck or chance?

After years of study, in a multitude of industries, I have come to the conclusion that success is an absolute science. In other words, there are exact principles of thought and action that all top performers universally and consistently exhibit.

Let’s examine seven of these principles more closely: Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s how to get in touch with every talent, every ability you ever wanted for yourself, even if you’re convinced you don’t have a shred of ability in that area.

Physicists and mystics agree that all of time co-exists simultaneously. The way we experience time, with one moment following another moment after another moment, is (they say) an illusion. In reality, all moments of time are hanging around together, and our consciousness is threading its way through and among those moments of time.

(Just stay with me for a bit longer, and we’ll be past all this theoretical stuff.)
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Welcome to the September 4, 2023 edition of The CultivateGreatness.com Success Blog Carnival… which happpens to be our INAUGURAL Blog Carnival!!

This Blog Carnival will feature the best in Success and Achievement type blog articles. If you would like yours to be considered, please use the submit link at the end of this article. Thank you for reading and thank you for submitting.

Aleksandr Kavokin, MD, PhD presents How do they make a guinea pig out of you? Part 2 posted at RDoctor Medical Portal, saying, “how do they test the drugs on you.”

Brian Kim presents The Myth of Thinking Big posted at Brian Kim.net - Invest in Yourself and Make It Happen.

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Is the glass half full or half empty? Will this product, policy, strategy work or fail? Can I really achieve my dreams or am I living in fantasy-land?

These and hundreds of other questions are asked every day by well meaning and hard working people.

Lionel Tiger in his great book, Optimism, the Biology of Hope, written over forty years ago discusses how optimism impacts a person’s attitudes, outlook, success and health. He suggests that people who are less optimistic about life, the present and the future tend to get sick more frequently and often die sooner. In the book, Learned Optimism by Segleman, he discusses how each of us begins every project, activity, task, relationship, career etc. with either a YES or a NO or a YES I can and I will or NO I can’t and I won’t in their hearts. Read the rest of this entry »

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” said our Founding Fathers. The truths you will discover over the next ten days or lessons are self-evident, too, but they are profoundly difficult to practice. Even as I write this series, I find myself questioning whether I am practicing what I am recommending. So, consider the pursuit of happiness and success in work and life - a journey. And, you and I are fellow travelers. These practices will help get you started on that journey.

I wish life, family, and work were easy. Really. But, they’re not. The best of you struggle with concepts such as loving your work, balancing home and family life with work, and making the income that allows you to fulfill your dreams. You struggle with a lot more than that, too. Read the rest of this entry »

Goal Setting is an extremely powerful technique for accomplishment, but for Goal Setting to really be effective requires more than just writing down what we want to achieve. This article will present important steps that will help to define and achieve goals with more success.

Benefits of Goal Setting

Goal setting helps us determine our priorities, get organized, make big decisions, and realize our dreams. Almost all motivational experts incorporate goal setting as an important part of their programs. Zig Ziglar, when speaking of the Read the rest of this entry »

For hundreds of thousands of people, the dream of making an Internet fortune works like this: Earn pennies at a time in exchange for allowing Google Inc. or Yahoo Inc. to place advertisements on a personal or small-business Web page.

Take Andrew Leyden, former House Commerce Committee counsel and founder of a dot-com venture that failed, who started PodcastDirectory.com, a search engine for podcasts. As the site’s popularity rose from a hundred hits a month in 2004 to nearly a million now, Leyden started making the equivalent of an entry-level government worker’s salary — $30,000 to $40,000 a year — simply because people clicked on ads. That allowed him to work at home in Chesapeake Beach, Md., trying to make more money by attracting still more traffic to his site. Read the rest of this entry »

Leaders are developed not born. Anyone can develop into a leader. It requires the desire and will-power to become a Leader. The Leaders develop themselves through an un-ending process of self-study, self-improvement, education, training, and experience. I will attempt to guide you through that process.

Let’s first examine the definition and concept of Leadership. Leadership as a process deals with influencing others to achieve, attain or accomplish the objectives. In the process, available resources are deployed or used or utilized, to the extent needed or required, in order to attain the set objectives or the closest possible thereto. A good Leader achieves through a communication process to seek sense of achievement amongst the team that is on task and the organization as a whole. Read the rest of this entry »