Watching Donald Trump on his presidential campaign has been an entirely novel experience for the world, and especially for Americans, who are hard-wired to expect political correctness and well-drafted speeches from candidates generating yawn-inducing tepid fare. Look at Hillary Clinton – with due respect for her achievements she has no salsa! As a highly polarizing individual, Trump, on the other hand, has people either shaking their heads in perplexed incredulity or quivering in jaw-dropping awe in an unprecedented run for the most powerful position in the United States.

From a weekly reality show he has transitioned effortlessly into a daily reality show.

Regardless of political opinion, no one can deny his success as a real estate magnate with a superior business acumen that has built his billion-dollar empire. On a personal level, owning a tiny piece of his real estate in Chicago and living in it for several years, interacting with him (peripherally) during board meetings, reading his books, and watching his TV show for years have all made me recognize him as a powerful force in the business world, someone from whom I have learnt many things.

Do I think he is qualified to be the next American president? I have serious reservations though I agree with a few things he says. He is smart but not a genius, especially judging him from the cringe inducing public goof-ups that we are being forced to witness. In his own words, successful people do not need to be super smart – instead they need to know how to surround themselves with smart people.

However, most successful people like him have some traits that are common which have been critical in their success. Here’s what I think are five simple and basic attributes of successful people. Note that it’s ‘successful’ people, not ‘smart’ people!

Discipline

There is a behavior modification strategy that clinicians like me teach smokers for smoking cessation. It’s called the delay strategy – whenever there is an urge to smoke, look at your watch and wait before you grab that cigarette. You can wait for seconds or minutes. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you try to delay lighting up. Once you have waited for a pre-decided amount of time, you can light a cigarette, provided you still have the urge to smoke. However, if you notice that the urge is gone, you don’t have to smoke.

Periodically, you increase the delay time and eventually you will notice that the urge passes away before you light your cigarette. Bingo! That’s when you hit the smoking jackpot. You will smoke one less cigarette that day. In time, you will be able to delay lighting up long enough for every urge to pass, because that’s the natural history of urges – they are temporary and always pass. It’s a painfully slow process that needs intense self-control. But with slight tweaking, we can replicate it to get rid of any poor habits that we may have – eating, sleeping, drinking, iPhone, or video games. Eventually, we can discipline ourselves with long-standing results.

This is what successful people practice on a daily basis in all aspects of their life. They delay self-gratification from a poor habit. Sleep on time, wake up early, exercise regularly, eat healthy, drink in moderation, and don’t smoke or abuse drugs. Self-control is critically integral to success and strict discipline leads to increased productivity. The quality of personal management can transform someone from mediocrity to high achievement. Once we start getting good results it gets easier to say no.

If you don’t believe it, just remember that almost always, unsuccessful people have poor habits and lack of self-discipline, and if they could replicate the self-will that successful people adhere to, they would start to achieve the same results.

Focus

In a popular teaching moment in the Bhagvad Gita, the supreme military expert and mentor, Drona, tests his highly skilled students by placing a wooden bird in a tree and asking them to aim their bow and arrow at it’s eye. He then proceeds to question them about what they see. Each student describes the bird, tree, sky, flowers and everything else around them.

To their dismay, Drona dismisses them one by one without letting them shoot.

Finally, it’s the turn of Arjun, his most accomplished pupil and the protagonist of Mahabharat, an epic narrative of the Kurukshetra war of which the Gita is a principal part. As Arjun pulls up his bow and arrow to aim at the bird with an unwavering and steadfast gaze, he says that all he can see is the bird’s eye. Pleased with the answer, Drona lets him shoot and in seconds the bird is on the ground with the arrow in its eye.

Moral of the story – focus on your goal and never lose sight of it. Tunnel vision is 20/20.

Having clearly defined goals leads to focus. Long-term goals in the bigger picture are important but daily goals that are specific and measurable are more critical. It comes down to actually getting a pen and paper and writing down the tasks we need to complete today (for the more technologically inclined, yes the iPhone reminders or notes will work!) and completing them in a decent time frame.

In the Harvard Written Goal study, MBA students were surveyed about writing down their goals. Only 3% did it, while 13% had goals in their mind, and 84% had no goals. Ten years later, the same students showed remarkably different career paths – the 13% earned double of the 84% and the 3% made 10 times the rest of the 97% of the class combined!

You choose which category you want to belong to.

Self-awareness

By this, I do not mean sitting in the lotus position with eyes closed and chanting Om!

That kind of self-awareness may be good for the soul but has less value in becoming successful. I specifically mean the ability to understand profoundly our personal strengths and weaknesses. More important than knowing our strengths, we MUST know what our weaknesses are. Indeed, very few people can articulate clearly what they consider their strengths and even less their weaknesses. If we don’t know ourselves, how will we grow?

An easy way to do this is to use the Reflected Best Self (RBS) exercise for strengths and a modified version of it for weaknesses. Ask ten people in your life about what they consider your strengths, write them down, regroup them into themes, and write a brief summary for future leverage. Do the same for your weaknesses, and work on them for improvement.

Keep your strengths (friends) close and your weaknesses (enemies) even closer.

Adaptability

Bruce Lee, the incomparable martial artist from Hong Kong, used to advice his peers and students to be like water – shapeless yet able to take any shape, yielding yet able to drip and crash, soft yet able to penetrate the hardest rock, formless yet able to squeeze through cracks. It can go far and wide and is rarely contained by its surroundings, yet always preserves its compliance.

His point was to emphasize the importance of flexibility –in physique as well as in mindset – while underscoring the value of tranquility. Putting limits on anything can limit success whereas keeping an open mind and adapting quickly to circumstances opens up possibilities that are limitless.

When I was a child I remember umpteen discussions about 5-year plans and10-year plans. These were revered strategic blueprints that heralded the essence of measurable successes of individuals, governments, and businesses. Not so anymore – in current times of unpredictability, such a fixed vision is worthless or even risky. Transformative innovation, admittedly riddled with perils, leads to revolution.

A supple mind is the strongest asset of the consummate innovator.

Curiosity

It killed the cat, I know. But do you know what happened to the incurious cat? She lived a long life chock-full of tedium that was peppered with monotony and ennui amidst copious sprinkles of drudgery, all comingled to create a torpor of indolence until she died an insipid death due to sheer boredom.

Well, maybe I exaggerate. But it was pretty close to what really happened to her. Sadly, most people prefer to be incurious. Cultivating curiosity is not one of our key objectives as a community. It is considered a sin to be restless. The comfort of a dreary but moderately well-paying job is imposing. Such people remain mediocre. Their only target is retirement – the pension plan, the 401K, the mortgage pay-off, all aimed at anticipating a comfortable living when they are old. They don’t know that that they sacrificed life itself to prepare for inevitable death.

A blistering example is Steve Jobs. He was known to his peers to be a hungry mind. He once took calligraphy in college out of curiosity. It carved the path for the classic fonts we use on our computers. Albert Einstein once famously said, ‘I have no special talents. I am just passionately curious.’ Look where it got him.

We are relentlessly taught that rote learning is the best, that knowing facts and numbers will bring us success, that exploring things off the beaten path will lead us to doom. Sometimes it does. But sometimes it doesn’t. And how will we know until we vet our curiosity?

Be curious, my friends! Success comes to the inquisitive.