7 Ways Successful and Fulfilled People Think Differently

We pay to kill cockroaches and spiders. In
Thailand, they pay to eat cockroaches and
spiders.
As different forms of thinking separate cultures,
it’s also the case between those who are happy
and successful, and those who aren’t. Great
change has always come from thinking outside
the box. Familiarity often turns our box into a
prison without realization, crippling our potential
success and sapping our happiness.
To reflect, assess, and challenge our personal
forms of thinking is healthy and necessary for
growth.
Related: Fearless and Fulfilled: 7 Steps to Finding
Business Success and Happiness
Here are seven ways successful and fulfilled
people think differently:
1. They pursue curiosity, not passion. The most
popular life advice—follow your passion. It’s
prevalent because it is wise. The only problem,
it’s easier said than done. And we spend much of
life on a frantic goose-chase. In order to follow
your passion, you need to find it. That’s where
most of us need help—try make soufflé without a
recipe.
Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert gave
many an “Aha moment” recently—forget about
passion, follow your curiosity: “Passion is rare;
passion is a one-night-stand. Passion is hot, it
burns. Every day, you can’t access that…but
every single day in my life there’s something that
I’m curious about—follow it, it’s a clue, and it
might lead you to your passion.”
Her advice comes with good company, echoing
Einstein who remarked, “I have no special talent. I
am only passionately curious.” The late Steve
Jobs, in his commencement speech reflected on
his success: “Much of what I stumbled into by
following my curiosity and intuition turned out to
be priceless later on.”
Curiosity is the vehicle that takes us from finding,
to living our passion; it builds the bridge.
2. They make friends with stress. Stress is seen
as a negative, and appropriately so. Plenty
of research shows that stress causes
neurological damage and increases the risk of
cardiovascular disease.
But what if stress is the enemy only because we
perceived it to be? For 10 years, health
psychologist Kelly McGonical taught on the
damaging effects of stress but now seeks to undo
that whole decade after coming across new
research .
In a survey, 30,000 people were asked how much
stress they experienced in the last year, and
whether they believed stress was harmful for
their health. Those with high degrees of stress
indeed had severely affected health, not least
being a 43 percent increased risk of dying.
However, that was only the case among those
who also believed stress was harmful for their
health. Those who experienced a high level of
stress, but didn’t view stress as harmful, had the
lowest risk of dying, even beyond those who
indicated little stress.
Typically in stressful situations, our blood vessels
constrict and heart rate shoots-up. But the
science has shown, when you change your mind
about stress, you change your body’s response
to stress.
Another study comes from Matthew Nock of
Harvard University and Wendy Berry Mendes of
the University of California. Participants were
given three minutes to prepare, then deliver, a
speech before critical and negative judges. They
were divided into two groups, with half of all
participants having a history of social anxiety.
One group was primed beforehand to perceive
their stress as helpful, that  their pounding heart
was gearing them up for action, while their
increased breathing was bringing more oxygen to
the brain. As a result, those who viewed stress as
helpful were less anxious and more confident.
Physiologically, their blood vessels stayed
relaxed and cardiovascular response mirrored
that of joy and courage.
Nobody is immune to stress. It’s not whether we
experience stress, it’s how we
respond. Understanding stress as your body
bringing in reinforcements to defeat a challenge,
rather than being defeated, isn’t just motivational
fluff, it’s a biological shift. You’ll literally live
longer, and feel better.
3. They see chain reactions. It only takes one
falling domino to knock over the rest. Successful
people rarely make isolated decisions but join the
dots between actions and the outcomes.
To take the company to the next level, Paul
O’Neill, former CEO of aluminum manufacturing
giant Alcoa didn’t focus on advertising
and marketing, or research and development. He
focused on safety, reducing days lost to
workplace injury by 90 percent. Within a year the
company’s profits hit a record high. When O’Neill
retired, profits were five times higher.
O’Neill says, “I knew I had to transform Alcoa.
But you can’t order people to change. So I
decided I was going to start by focusing on one
thing. If I could start disrupting the habits around
one thing, it would spread throughout the entire
company.”
On the surface, they’re unrelated: profit margins
and workplace safety. But successful people
have the ability to see the relationship between
the ‘unrelated.’
Our thinking is often compartmentalized. That
keeps things neat, linear and logical but builds
walls we cannot see through. Successful people
always look for connections and relationships.
Their thinking is not just linear, but holistic. They
don’t just study parts, but see the whole. They’ve
learned to put Humpty-Dumpty together again.
4. They ask more questions than give
answers. Our egos paralyze us the moment
we’re about to ask a question. That fear of
judgment is crippling. Rather than asking and
gaining new knowledge, we protect our image and
remain mired in our lack of knowledge.
Indeed, ignorance is bliss. Successful people are
ignorant of judgment and protecting their ego.
They prefer growth in asking questions. The
inability to ask inhibits our personal growth. Jim
Collins and Morten Hansen note in Great by
Choice, top leaders of “10x companies” (those
who beat their industry indexes by ten times or
more) were continually asking “What if?” as a
means to improve.
Related: The Single Most Important Habit of
Successful Entrepreneurs
The simple act of asking questions revolutionized
and characterized the Toyota Motor Corporation.
The famous 5-Whys developed by Sakichi
Toyoda became the benchmark of their
production system. It was a simple but highly
effective strategy for getting to the root cause of
any problem and has been adopted by
organizations all over the world.
5. They contribute before gain. Doing something
for nothing is a shock to the system. It goes
against the grain of our capitalistic culture in
which there is service only with exchange. But
contribution without expectation or strings
attached is a trademark of many successful and
fulfilled people.
Princess Diana is remembered for that
quality, encouraging people to “carry out a
random act of kindness, with no expectation of
reward, safe in the knowledge that one day
someone might do the same for you.”
Dr. Adam Grant, organizational psychologist,
studies pro-social behaviors in business and
leadership. His New York Times Bestseller, Give
and Take presents a compelling case that you
don’t need to be ruthless to get ahead Techniques
such as doing “five-minute favors” for others and
reconnecting with erstwhile acquaintances can
reap long-term career rewards.
Grant explains that pro-social behaviors have a
profound effect on our depth and the breadth of
relationships, “and so you end up with a wider set
of relationships and a richer, more meaningful set
of connections.” Indeed, we all know the power
and importance in networking.
There is a paradoxical boomerang effect from
focusing on the success and wellbeing of others
that results in our own success and wellbeing.
Zig Ziglar said, ”You can have everything in life
you want, if you will just help other people get
what they want.”
It’s motivation to sow in someone else’s field
rather than just our own.
6. They schedule time for nothing. Success is
synonymous with hard work. David Bly said it
perfectly, “Striving for success without hard work
is like trying to harvest where you haven’t
planted.” But hard work often turns into hectic
work. Taking-action becomes 24/7.
However, some of the most accomplished people
highlight a counterintuitive habit. Their hectic
schedule includes allotted times for absolutely
nothing. Of course, the times of nothing are far
from nothing. Although physically unproductive,
these times allow information they’ve been
exposed to mix, mingle, and marinate, then
produce new ideas and insights.
Creativity experts and psychologists call it
the Incubation period. Creativity is often defined
as the synthesis of disparate information.
Consciously, we only catch a drop of the ocean
that our mind is exposed to. Professor Timothy
Wilson highlights the power of our unconscious
mind in his book, Strangers to Ourselves. Our
conscious mind processes about 40 bits of
information per second, whereas the unconscious
processes eleven million bits per second.
Incubation allows for absorption and interaction
between the two..
Successful people regularly schedule time for
‘nothing’ when incubation can take place. They go
for a stroll, eat lunch alone, sit in a park. It
worked for Einstein: “Although I have a regular
work schedule, I take time to go for long walks on
the beach so that I can listen to what is going on
inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie
down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the
ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in
my imagination.”
Someone worth learning from.
7. They value experiences over objects. There’s
very few material possessions we can place a
“priceless” tag on. But plenty experiences for
which that’s possible: the new car will be
outlasted by the work ethic you cultivated to
purchase it; the new house will need renovations,
but its the talent you’ve acquired that pays for the
renovations.
What we gain materially will always come as a
byproduct of who we become intellectually,
emotionally, mentally, spiritually. It’s not what you
get, but who you become.
Fulfilled and successful people place more value
on the experience than the object. Who we
become creates much more value, not only for
ourselves, but for those around us and far beyond
what any object is able to.
THAI NGUYEN CONTRIBUTOR
WRITER, 5-STAR CHEF,
INTERNATIONAL KICKBOXER,
SPIRITUAL TEACHER.