Three Electrifying Success Techniques You Can Use -
Courtesy Of Orison Swett Marden

Orison Swett Marden interviewed many of the leading figures in politics and industry around the turn of the twentieth century. The purpose of publishing these interviews was to give the ordinary person in the street an insight into how success is achieved.

One of Marden’s favorite interviewees was Thomas Edison. Edison possessed many success-oriented characteristics, but was most famously recognised for his dogged persistence. Once he was committed to a goal, he would stick with it regardless of the criticism he received. He never looked on failure as a disaster. He interpreted it simply as an event that did not produce the desired outcome. As such, it was a source of information and a stepping stone to creating a different method.

Persistence, to Edison, didn’t mean doing the same thing over and over, if the first attempt failed. It meant accepting responsibility for the results, then analyzing why that particular method wasn’t working. Crucially, he then looked for other possible ways to reach the goal. True persistence, then, is the ability to find a creative alternative every time a method fails. Persistence is essential to achieving any worthwhile goal - and will be sorely tested by the inevitable obstacles and criticism encountered along the way to success.

Along with persistence, Edison’s other success techniques could be summarized as:

1. Defining his goal in writing. Writing down the goal ensures it is precise. Keeping a goal only as a thought, however, would allow it to remain nebulous and therefore hard to communicate to anyone else. Once it is properly laid out in words, it can be analyzed and expanded.

2. Exploring the broad ramifications of the achievement of the goal. Looking for all the possible implications of the goal will help in the process of proving whether it is worthwhile and achievable – and reveal the size of the task at hand. For example, quite apart from determining the best filament to use as a light source in an electric bulb, Edison had to develop an efficient electric dynamo, devices for maintaining constant voltage, safety measures such as fuses and insulation and a network to conduct the electricity. All of these had to be in place for the dream of widely available electric lighting to become a reality.

3. Encouraging others to share the dream of what the achievement of the goal and its wider consequences would mean. Finding the consequences that might benefit other people is crucial to bringing them on board when the goal is too large to achieve without outside help.

Anyone familiar with Edison’s achievements will be aware of the enormous benefits we are all still enjoying thanks to his work – and most importantly, his type of success–oriented thinking.

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If you want to know more about Orison Swett Marden and how his works inspired Napoleon Hill, W. Clement Stone, Norman Vincent Peale, Anthony Robbins, and many others then visit http://www.MardensKeysToSuccess.com where you can also gain FREE access to Brendan McKeogh's mini-course on Marden plus a FREE copy of the first chapter of "Marden's Keys To Success."
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