Winners’ Ways: Sharing Strategies of Successful People—How They Did It and What You Can Learn from Them

By Adebola Alabi

Winners Ways is a book that seeks to encourage and motivate readers so that they can achieve success in life. The book explores examples of real-life people that found their purpose in life and, in the process, also found success. It shares biblical passages to drive home the message that all humans are created uniquely and that God has blessed everyone with talents and ideas to make them live a successful life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jan 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781973613152

Adebola Alabi

Adebola is an engineer by profession and he is passionate about personal finance, leadership, and change management. A dynamic and highly efficient individual who has been a source of inspiration to many others, he is driven to help people discover their true callings and bring out the best in everyone in his circle of influence. He has started and participated in many successful businesses including some startups in the United States. An avid reader, writer, and a motivational speaker with the mission of creating winners in everyday people. He is a member of Project Management institute and a certified PMP credential holder. Adebola is a fitness enthusiast, and he enjoys playing soccer at any opportunity. He is a member of the book club in his local church and he is a MBA graduate from University of Houston.

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Copyright © 2018 Adebola Alabi.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (AMP) are taken from the Amplified Bible, Copyright © 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked MSG are taken from THE MESSAGE, copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Scripture quotations in this publication are from the Common English Bible.

© Copyright 2011 by the Common English Bible. All rights reserved. Used

by permission. (www.CommonEnglishBible.com

<http://www.CommonEnglishBible.com> )

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ISBN: 978-1-9736-1314-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-1316-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-1315-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017918649

WestBow Press rev. date: 01/17/2018

Dedication

To my awesome parent, who instilled the can-do spirit in me. Your belief in me and words of wisdom have always helped in my journey in life. I am grateful for all the love, prayers, and guidance you’ve given me all my life. I am who I am today because of your prayers.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I give all praise to God for giving me the ability to put this book together. I never knew that writing a book will be so time consuming yet very fulfilling. I thank God for giving me the grace, ideas and knowledge all through the project.

I appreciate my loving and amazing wife, Arinola and our children for putting up with me during those countless hours spent researching and writing this book. Without your support and co-operation, this wouldn’t have been possible.

There is no way I could possibly thank every single person that helped me or impacted the delivery of this book in one way or the other, but I definitely want to say a special word of thanks to:

Temitope Jegede, for all the support and help you offered during the course of publishing this work. Your contributions are invaluable.

Tunde Badru, my Pastor, your messages and leadership helped motivate me to stay more focused and find meaning in my life.

Lanre Olabinjo, my mentor, thank you for steering and guiding me on the right path during the publication of this book.

I am indebted to the amazing publication team at WestBow Press, A Thomas Nelson & Zondervan Publication Company for the excellent professional job you did from start to finish on this project. Thank you Brian Fox, Venus Gambosa, and Bob De Groff.

I am grateful to you for buying this book. I have offered several stories about different people in this book to serve as inspiration to you. Many of these people are ordinary people who by making the right decisions did extra-ordinary things. My prayer for you is that you will find inspiration in the book and be able to discover your own success path with fulfillment and happiness doing what you are meant to do in life.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part 1—’Tis the Beginning

Chapter 1     Anatomy of a Champion

Chapter 2     Tune Out the Noise

Part 2—Show Me a Man

Chapter 3     Attitude Is Everything

Chapter 4     Back Up Your Plans with Action

Part 3—Know Thy Strength

Chapter 5     Define Your Niche and Understand Yourself

Chapter 6     Stand Out from the Crowd

Part 4—Feed Thy Dream

Chapter 7     Nurture Your Passion

Chapter 8     Knock Down the Impossibilities on Your Path

Part 5—Run Thy Race

Chapter 9     Awake the Dreamer Inside

Chapter 10   Live Out Your Purpose

Chapter 11   Love Your Life – Don’t Compare

Chapter 12   It’s Time to Soar

INTRODUCTION

Don’t we all desire to be winners in our various fields of endeavor? Wouldn’t you want to stand up tall and get an ovation from your friends and loved ones after achieving a feat? Everyone desires to be a winner; we all want to be successful in everything we do. I have observed in life that everybody, whether young or old, wants to be champions and achieve success in different areas of endeavors. They want to excel in sports, academics, business, careers, finances, health, relationships, social life, and spiritual life. Why do some succeed while others fail? Why are some so far behind in the game of life while others are well ahead? Why do some ride nice cars and live in nicer homes than others? What does it take to become a champion? Can anyone win in this game of life and become as successful as he or she desires? The answers to these questions and many more are in this book.

There are many books about success. I consider some of the books out there to be very useful and valuable, while most others are full of misconceptions about success. In our society today, we have been conditioned to think about success only in terms of material wealth. While it is good to be wealthy, measuring success based on material possession alone is incomplete in the grand scheme of success in life. This is because success can mean different things to different people; to some, having good health, families, and children will be considered as being successful. Some others consider success as being happy, working in a certain job, or living a certain lifestyle. Fame, power, and prestige are what some other people use to evaluate success. And to many people still, being happy is success in their view. So to correct this misconception, I would like to establish that True success should be measured by how happy you are doing what you are meant to do here on earth. I also like how Maya Angelou framed it; she said, Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it. This book will examine real-life successful people and share the strategies that they used to achieve their success.

My belief is that we are all gifted and endowed by God in one way or another. While some have a head start because of the help they receive, others have struggled and worked really hard in order to be successful. I have seen and known many seemingly ordinary people turn their lives around and become champions in their chosen fields. I decided to study these people and see what they have in common, if anything. What does it take to be like them? Is there anything that successful people have in common? Is there a formula that can be tapped into in order to become a successful individual? What exactly does it take to become a champion? This book will explore proven strategies that anyone can apply as he or she seeks to become a winner and champion in a chosen field of endeavor.

I have observed the lives of many people and how their decisions impacted whether they were successful in life or not. I observed the difference between winners and losers in society. I studied the lives of successful people and their habits; I noticed how they spent their time, the kind of associations and relationships they keep, and how they utilized the power of association to become even more successful. The not-so-successful people in society also have some common attributes that keep them at a subpar level of performance in their endeavors. The main difference that I observed between successful and unsuccessful people is in their patterns of thinking and their actions. The word of God says, As a man think in his heart, so is he. The question is: how do you change your pattern of thinking to become as successful as you can be?

I am an avid reader, and through the various books that I had read in my early life, I got the motivation to live a purpose-driven life. I made up my mind from a very young age not to be mediocre; I have the determination to live an extraordinary life and to maximize my potential. I, too, just like most people, have had my share of negligence and lack of focus that derailed my ambition for many years. I have experienced several ups and downs. I have made up my fair share of excuses and reasons that prevented me from fulfilling my purpose of creation. Growing up as a young boy, my friends and I shared different dreams and aspirations; some of us planned to be doctors, pastors, teachers, senators, and even presidents. After over two decades of these various childhood ambitions, I could not help but notice that many of us have yet to fulfill those dreams. What happened to our dreams? I asked myself. What I observed is that we somehow outgrew those lofty childhood dreams. Some allowed naysayers to talk them out of pursuing their dreams, while many others gave up when they encountered road bumps. Majority of people end up settling for less, with the consequence of being unhappy with their lives. The real champions, on the other hand, tend to reinvent themselves. They never quit in the face of difficulty in achieving their goals; they follow their dreams no matter what. They press on, and they recalculate and re-strategize until they are able to achieve their God-given purpose. If you are determined to become a champion and maximize your potential on earth, then you need to know how champions are different from average people.

In today’s dynamic world, the ease of access to information provides an opportunity for the continuous advancement of mankind. You do not have to wait until age sixty to become a millionaire or billionaire anymore. Anyone can become whatever he or she desires to be; you only have to work hard and study what successful people have done and find your own path by learning from their experiences. If you want to be a champion as an investor, study Warren Buffett. If you have the talent and want to be a champion as a basketball player, then go and learn how Lebron James trains himself. Or if you have a talent for soccer, then you need to be as disciplined as Cristiano Ronaldo. If you want to climb the corporate career ladder, study top management or the CEO of your company. If you want to be a business owner, read more about the likes of Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Cuban, and Jeff Bezos. The Internet has made it easier to connect with these champions and learn more about their lives and achievements. There are many other low-profile achievers around you. You only need to look! The goal of this book is not to make you be exactly like these people but to know and learn the strategies and qualities that helped them achieve success so that you can learn from them and find your own path to become successful.

The fundamental strategies that you need to adopt in order to make it to the level of champions and winners are revealed in this book. Reading this book alone will not guarantee your success in the journey of life; you will need to let the strategies act as your guide. You can write out or highlight any words of wisdom that resonate with you and reference them from time to time. You will need to have a paradigm shift and make up your mind that you can turn your life around, that you can go from ordinary to becoming a high achiever and fulfilling your God-given purpose on earth. Think of it this way: God did not put you on earth just for sleeping and waking up, going to work and paying the bills. No, there is more to life than that. God created us for some specific purposes; you need to harness your creative mental capacity to discover your purpose. You need to work passionately to achieve the purpose. You may fail or experience setbacks during the journey, but don’t give up; persevere and move on. You can have fulfillment and happiness, and the easiest way to achieve this is to know why you were created in the first place. It is my hope that this book will help you to discover what you are passionate about, motivate you to work hard at your passion, and guide you through the process of becoming a champion.

A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.—Bob Dylan

Part 1—’Tis the Beginning

Dango had summoned all of his loyal and longtime employees to the inner chamber in his exotic mansion on that cloudy morning. His sleep had been disturbed; he just could not stay asleep. He tossed and turned on his bed all through the night, his mind occupied with the thoughts of his employees and their welfare. He knew that he paid his employees decent and competitive salaries, but he was also aware of the many financial struggles that the men and women who worked for him went through in their daily lives. He knew that many were unhappy in their homes, and some were not completely satisfied with their careers.

Ever since he had become a merchant, he helped many of his employees and their families to meet different financial challenges; he had mentored some others to start their own businesses. He had developed good relationships with most of his employees, and most of them were very comfortable discussing their personal issues with him. He knew that the majority of them were not flamboyant; he could see how they struggled to make ends meet. He established a welfare department in his organization to cater for the immediate financial needs of his employees, but he noticed that in the past five years, the amount of outstanding loans had been increasing in the organization. He was concerned yet unsure of why the workers were not living up to their full potential or happy with their lives. Anyway, he made up his mind that he must do something to help them. He was sad to see many of his employees working so hard yet unable to make ends meet. He noticed that the morale of his people was going down and the motivation to achieve results was disappearing. He noted that for every single happy person, there were thousands of unfulfilled people around. Is it the recent change in government or the crash in the economy that is making people downcast? he wondered. If only I could help in a way to alleviate people’s struggles, to help them discover the greater power within, then I will help to contribute to lifting humankind out of its current doldrums.

As he stepped into the palatial hall for the all employees meeting, the first question that came to his mind was, Where would you all love to be in life? He went on to announce to the employees the main reason he had called the meeting. He stood on the podium with an audience of about one hundred staff members, and he expressed with his usual candor how deeply worried he was that his employees were not living up to their full potential. I have been feeding you fish; now I want to teach you how to fish. In the next five days, I will be going over a series of teachings on how to become a winner. This is not mandatory, but I encourage each of you to participate. Your life is about to experience a turnaround, he said, and he ended the meeting.

Chapter One:

Anatomy of a Champion

When you open your mind, you open new doors to new possibilities for yourself and new opportunities to help others.

—Roy T. Bennett

In my quest to know more about successful people all around the world, I began to read anything and everything I could lay my hands on that would tell me more about these people. I read their biographies, I watched their movies, I listened to their speeches, I followed them on Twitter, I read books and blogs about them, and I studied their way of life in order to learn from the champions. What I discovered was that there is really no one-size-fits-all quality or requirement for being successful. Rather, there are several qualities possessed by these men and women, and they vary from one person to another.

Warren Buffett is known for his special skills and prowess in understanding business fundamentals and his ability to look at financial statements and pick companies that will provide awesome rates of returns. He is a very focused and disciplined investor; he always has clear objectives whenever he invests in any company, and he is not afraid to admit whenever he is wrong. His ability to remain focused on his end goal is what made him one of the greatest investors of our time. He has a long-term perspective in all of his investment decisions, and he is an expert at delayed gratification. Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, is not a stock-market guru like Warren Buffett, but he is one of the most prominent entrepreneurs who is an expert at building long-lasting businesses with the aim of selling goods at high volume and relatively low price to his customers. Bezos is a prolific entrepreneur and master disruptor that is using his skills in business to help solve challenges in ecommerce for his millions of people all over the world. I call these people who excel at what they do the winners and champions in society.

It took Warren Buffett decades to get to where he is today. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the youngest billionaires in the world, is certainly not an overnight success. He developed an interest in computers at the early age of twelve, by creating a messaging program called Zucknet; he later went on to create several other software programs as a result of his keen interest in computers and programming in general. He is someone who knows what he wants in life, and he knows his strengths; that was why he dropped out of Harvard to focus on developing Facebook. Today, he is one of the most powerful individuals in the world according to Forbes magazine. I will say that passion, focus, and vision are some of the key qualities that made Zuckerberg the kind of man he is today.

The start of the journey to a successful life is to determine what you enjoy doing most, being ready to give everything it takes to focus on those things and creating value by using it to solve problems around you. If you want to be an athlete, you must be ready to develop your physical strength and well-being. You should get ready for strenuous and breathtaking exercises that will test your limits and help to develop your skills to make you better at your game. If you want to be an investor, be prepared to learn about financial statements; you will also need to develop the discipline necessary to know when to invest and when to pull back. If you want to learn about how to run a business, find someone who is doing a similar business and learn from that person. No matter what your situation or position is in life, find what you love doing and explore ways to turn it into products or services that can benefit more people, and you will be able to have a successful endeavor.

Who Is a Champion?

I always did something I was a little not ready to do. I think that’s how you grow. When that’s that moment of Wow, I’m not really sure I can do this, and you push through those moments, that’s when you have a breakthrough. —Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO

One very important fact that I have learned over the course of my career is that success and failure have some immutable connections. Failure, in my