Developing Your Attitude Among Mentors

How do I become like those I admire?

In the book The Master Key to Riches, author Napoleon Hill interviewed over five hundred of the most successful men of his era – including Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison – to get some insight in to how these geniuses and high achievers had attained their high degree of success in life.

The results of this study were published in the form of The Law of Success, an encyclopedia of seventeen principles that were common in the thinking of all these men. One of the main principles is the mastermind idea. This idea basically states that we become like those individuals we surround ourselves with.

In fact, a variety of things in our immediate environment have an impact on our day to day lives – from the movies we watch to the books we read and beyond. This is a key way of maximizing one’s potential for a healthy attitude that will lead one to new plateaus of success.

Everyone has a choice in life. It is possible to allow outside factors to have an influence on our thoughts, attitudes, and goals in life. They can have an impact in a negative way, by letting underachieving, degrading people with bad attitudes play a dominant role in our lives; or we can eliminate those people altogether from our lives and focus on surrounding ourselves with more positive influences. Each individual is the master of his or her own environment. Nobody else should be allowed to influence that.

How do I surround myself with Mentors?

The best way to succeed in any kind of business is to surround oneself with highly successful individuals who are currently operating in that field. Those individuals can be thought of as mentors – people who you can turn to as role models and guidance throughout your career.

Once you have defined which aspect of a particular business you wish to pursue in life, you should then make a list of colleagues in that particular field who you have the utmost respect for. Of course, it is not possible to surround oneself exclusively with individuals who are more successful than you happen to be.

But by understanding this, you can purposefully choose to surround yourself with such people as often as possible, and thus spend less of your time surrounded by individuals who block your growth or consume your day to day life with trivial matters.

Next Page: Should I drop my old friends?