Ingredients of the"Success-Type" Personality and How to Acquire Them

JUST as a doctor learns to diagnose disease from certain symptoms, failure and success can also be diagnosed. The reason is that a man does not simply "find" success or "come to" failure. He carries their seeds around in his personality and character.

I have found one of the most effective means of helping people achieve an adequate or "successful" personality is to first of all give them a graphic picture of what the suc­cessful personality looks like. Remember, the creative guidance mechanism within you is a goal-striving mech­anism, and the first requisite for using it is to have a clear-cut goal or target to shoot for. A great many people want to "improve" themselves, and long for a "better person­ality," who have no clear-cut idea of the direction in which improvement lies, nor what constitutes a "good personality." A good personality is one which enables you to deal effectively and appropriately with environ­ment and reality, and to gain satisfaction from reaching goals which are important to you.

Time and again, I have seen confused and unhappy people "straighten themselves out," when they were given a goal to shoot for and a straight course to follow. There was the advertising man in his early forties, for example, who felt strangely insecure and dissatisfied with him­self after receiving an important promotion.