Learn How Successful People Get Ahead of the Curve

If you can get ahead of the curve, you are well on your way to becoming successful. I’m using the term successful to cover a lot of things we would like to be; happier, richer, less stressed out, thinner or fatter. The list is endless. You can decide what constitutes successful for yourself. I believe you will agree, what you find here will be important to achieving whatever end result your are personally aiming for.

What does getting ahead of the curve mean and why is this important to me?

Getting Ahead of the Curve can mean many things. Here are a few of the meanings.

· Knowing what is probably going to happen and taking the appropriate actions to either benefit from what will take place or to take actions to prevent something negative from happening to you.

· Something is going to happen and you have no control over it. Based on this information, you have time to make the best of the situation.

· You learn from what has happened in the past, know what is coming and make better and different decisions this time around.

· Based on information available to you, you make an uneducated guess as to what might happen and plan accordingly.

· You take preventive actions to protect your position in case the situation changes and your left with little or no time to react to the new environment.

If you are a stockbroker, getting ahead of the curve would mean finding good new stocks, doing your homework, finding out more about them than the rest of the brokers and being the first to recommend this new stock to your clients. Being ahead of the curve really means applying your self diligently to whatever endeavor you are doing and investing your time in the right areas to enable you to come up with more answers than questions. Getting ahead of the curve means, on Wednesday something is going to happen to you at work; you have an important meeting. You would get ahead of the curve for this meeting by spending time on Monday and Tuesday getting ready for this important meeting.

This is the classic difference between someone who will hold a successful meeting and some one who will not. The person who holds the successful meeting will organize his time in such a fashion that the unimportant things that could rob him of his meeting preparation time, will not be allowed to creep into his schedule. This person will set aside 2 hours on Monday and 2 hours on Tuesday to prepare for the meeting and will actually spend those 4 hours doing just that; preparing for the meeting. That is how he will get ahead of the curve; the curve in this case is the meeting.

Do I need to tell you what the unsuccessful meeting holder will do? If he even gets to the point where he thinks about spending time on Monday and Tuesday to prepare for the meeting that will be as far as he gets. When he arrives at the meeting on Wednesday, late, he excuse will be that he didn't have time to get ready for the meeting. He had plenty of time over the last two days, he simply choose to spend that time on other tasks.

Why is getting ahead of the curve important to me?

It’s only important to you if you want to be successful. It occurred to me quite a while ago that some people are just not prepared to pay the price required to be successful. The price in this case is the desire, as you go from day to day and as important tasks and jobs come up, to either spend time, money, energy, and resources on these tasks and do them well, or you can just go with the flow and take what comes along.

I’ve outlined here the ways and means to become more successful then you are now. Remember, success is a relative and subjective concept; we all have to decide what success will mean to us.