Strategies, tactics, tips, and tricks on how to succeed. Lessons learned by one man in his 50 plus years. The book focuses on choosing the right spouse and career.

The right goals

Unlike most success books that encourage you to choose whatever extremely high goals your heart desires, this book emphasizes the importance of choosing the right goals. If you choose your goals carefully, you are far more likely to achieve them and far more likely to be happy when you do. Choosing the wrong goals will greatly lessen your chances of success, waste years of your life, and can cause serious problems like family or health difficulties.

You belong somewhere and with someone. High achievement is difficult. Make sure you choose a goal that best matches your strengths and weaknesses so you have the optimum ability to compete against others who are pursuing the same goal. Succeeding tells you how.

Choosing the wrong goal is like getting on the wrong international flight at an airport. You will waste a great deal of time and money flying to the wrong destination. You will be very unhappy when you get there. Then you will have to spend a lot more time and money getting from there to the correct destination. In life, choosing the wrong goal wastes years or even decades, not just the hours or days that are wasted by taking the wrong flight.

Don't overdo it

Choosing unnecessarily high goals is a common mistake. A goal is not like an item on a kid’s Christmas list. No one is going to give you what you want. Rather, a goal is like a to do list or a shopping list. You can put whatever you want on the list, but then you must pay the price. The higher the goal, the higher the price. Too often, persons with youthful inferiority complexes spend years pursuing some extremely high goal in the mistaken belief that achieving it will “show” the peers who gave them a hard time in middle school or high school. Succeeding also makes sure you do not overlook the hidden costs, like divorce, of many high accomplishments.

Your goals should include living a balanced life—family, friends, health, finances, education, and so forth. Setting too high a goal and placing the highest priority on that goal can prevent you from achieving necessary balance.

High goals

High goals are fine. Author John T. Reed reached several high goals in his life like making a million dollars, getting degrees from West Point and Harvard, being listed in Who’s Who in America for many years, appearing on TV shows like 60 Minutes, writing over two dozen well-received books, as well as celebrating a 30-year marriage and raising three fine sons. His experience has also been varied from being the son of an alcoholic father to living in the country, suburbs, and big city to serving a tour as an Army officer in Vietnam to working for a large corporation and small companies to coaching 35 athletic teams to successful self-employment and extended bachelorhood. He also failed significantly in various pursuits and thereby learned many important lessons. Succeeding will tell you how to achieve high success, but it will constantly remind you to go for enough, not more; and to pursue what suits you, not just some goal chosen solely based on how much you think it will impress others.

Succeeding urges you to reject “Little Old Me-ism” and “Little Old You-ism” and substitute “All They Can Say is No-ism” instead.

Succeeding covers the importance of integrity and ethics and how to preserve them in a world that is generally hostile to character. It emphasizes the importance of avoiding drug and alcohol abuse and tips on how to do that. It covers family as well as athletic and business success.

Practical tips

Most success books are rah rah. “You can do it!” Succeeding is more how to do it.

Examples include teaching you to

• rehearse for certain situations
• do a reconnaissance for other situations
• survey your talent
• choose the right medium in which to compete
• how to gather accurate information about possible careers
• the power of mastering the important, mechanical, anyone-can-do-it aspects of whatever you choose to do
• the extra boost provided by ability to speak in public or write
• how to avoid the fatal habit of excuse-making
• back doors and short cuts to certain goals
• the surprising success rate the direct approach often achieves
• avoiding faux experts
• the surprising mistake of assuming the competition is better than you
• tap into the halo effect when possible
• the make-yourself-scarce technique
• the actual level of effort required for some high achievements
• practical ways to make an honest living in a world generally hostile to honesty
• avoiding the “tenure” trap

‘The System’

Author John T. Reed and his college classmates felt deprived of female companionship in their bachelor days at then all-male West Point, rural Army posts, and in Vietnam. So he and his roommate developed The System—a way to meet attractive girls that was spectacularly successful. They met and dated hundreds of girls who were national and local beauty queens, an NFL cheerleader, girls who became movie and TV stars, models, major football bowl game queens, as well as hundreds of often more attractive girls who would never enter a beauty contest. Reed met his wife of 33 years through The System. Succeeding explains the details of how The System worked.

Giving Succeeding to a young person
Many adult readers have been impressed with Succeeding and wanted to give it to their children to read. One asked me about what age would be appropriate to do that. Here is my answer:

Around 14, but it would vary from kid to kid. When they begin to show an interest in, or at least receptivity to, information about their post high school future. Pushing such information on a kid before the kid is receptive would be ineffective and probably counterproductive. On the other hand, the earlier the better once receptivity arrives.

The receptivity date can be advanced by such things as a college tour. That changes the idea of going to college from an abstraction to a concrete reality. When I told my oldest he needed to raise his grades to get into a good college, he shrugged it off. When he was sitting in Coach Caron’s office at Pomona College, looking out the picture window at the golf-green perfect football field and hearing Coach Caron say, we really want you here, but I am concerned that we can’t get you in because of your English grades, it got his attention for the first time.

Also, certain chapters in Succeeding must be taught at the age when the issue arises. For example, sobriety is a crucial issue for 12-year olds. Little Old Meism becomes an issue when high school starts. The student’s receptivity to the book probably varies chapter by chapter according to what’s going on in his life at the moment so you could probably introduce the lessons from some chapters earlier than others.

I am clueless regarding daughters. I never had a sister or a daughter. My wife says the same rules would probably apply to daughters.

You will be surprised at how much you can achieve

Your mother’s statement that you can do anything if you set your mind to it was almost true. You can achieve much more than most people think. You cannot achieve things that require talents that you do not have or things that you are poorly suited for. Author John T. Reed was surprised at how much he achieved and wonders how much more he could have achieved if he had a book such as this earlier in his life.

• Front Cover
• Front Matter (Copyright date, acknowledgments, etc.)
• Reader comments
• Find ways to win not excuses for losing
• Table of Contents
• Index
• Business or vacation trip packing list
• Errata
• List of all Reed books