The book of Ecclesiastes says, “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom; and with all thy getting get understanding.” Throughout the ages, the acquisition of wisdom has been considered the highest human calling. The men and woman that we admire the most, living and dead, are those who attained high levels of wisdom over the course of their lives.

In our daily life, we seek out people who have the wisdom, coming from experience, to give us advice and guidance to help us avoid pitfalls and achieve our goals faster.

Aristotle wrote, “Wisdom is an equal measure of experience plus reflection.” To develop wisdom for yourself, you must first have the experiences, and then you must reflect on them, extracting out of each experience every idea, insight, and kernel of knowledge that it contains.146

The Person You Become

Most people have a dream, desire, and goal to make a lot of money and become financially independent. Almost everyone dreams of becoming a millionaire someday. And this goal is eminently achievable if you want it long enough and hard enough and you are willing to do the work necessary to achieve it.

But the most important part of becoming a millionaire, of achieving any goal or reaching any important destination, is not the goal itself. It is the person that you have to become to achieve that goal.

To achieve something that you have never achieved before, you must become someone that you have never been before. You must develop qualities and characteristics that you have never had before. You must learn talents and skills that you have never learned before. To achieve great success, you must become a great person. To become truly successful, however you define it, you must become a successful person in your own heart and mind.

Character Is Everything

When we see or talk with people we admire or when we hear or think about them, we seldom consider them in terms of material accomplishments. Instead, the men and women who stand out in our thinking are those who have become exceptional as a result of the experiences that they had, the things that they accomplished, and the character that they developed.

Your great goal in life is to fulfill your complete potential and become everything you are capable of becoming. Your goal is to become an exceptional person, possessed of character, competence, and wisdom. Your responsibility to yourself is to do something wonderful with your life and make a real difference in the world. This is the real secret of success.

True success in any area is usually the result of hundreds and maybe thousands of small and large things that you do or fail to do. There is no “key to success” or “secret.“ As the writer Og Mandino once told me, “The great secret of success is that there are no secrets. There are merely universal ideas and principles that have been discovered and rediscovered over and over again.”

The three most important steps, discovered and rediscovered by virtually every successful person, are these:

1. Decide exactly what you want, write it down, and make a plan to achieve it. Decide upon your destination.
2. Take action. Launch toward your goal. Step out in faith. Take the first step with no guarantee of success. Take off on your journey.148
3. Be prepared to make continual course corrections every hour and every day of your life as you fly toward your destination. Expect an inevitable, unavoidable, and unbroken series of problems, difficulties, reversals, setbacks, and crises every day and week of your life. Since you cannot avoid them, your aim must be to respond to them effectively.

Make a decision right now to set your goal, take off, and make continual course corrections until you achieve all that is possible for you.