Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement

Commit to Excellence
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7
Put People First
Personal relationships are the fertile soil from which 
all advancement, all success, all achievement in real 
life begins.
—
Ben Stein
The people you know, and who know you in a favorable way, will do
more to determine your success, happiness, and level of achieve-
ment in life than any other single factor. No one achieves anything
of consequence by himself or herself.
In life, relationships are everything. My friend Charlie Jones
says,
“You will be in five years what you are today except for the books
you read and the people you meet.”
Dr. David McClelland, author of 
The Achieving Society
(Van
Nostrand, 1961), concluded after 25 years of research at Harvard
that your choice of a “reference group” would have more to do with
your success than anything else. McClelland interviewed graduates
of the university, as well as those who had attended his intensive
seminars on achievement in American life. He tracked these people
for many years. Many of them took what they had learned and did
wonderful things with it. They built profitable businesses and suc-
cessful careers.
However, many of the graduates failed to turn the informa-
tion and ideas they had learned into later success. Why not? When
he went back and surveyed them, he found that invariably they
had returned to the same group of people they had been associat-
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ing with before they had taken the advanced courses on achieve-
ment. As a result, they went back to the same old ways, the same
old habits, the same old customs and manners of living. Because
they were immersed in their old reference groups, nothing
changed for them.
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