How people repeatedly determine an individual's private success: when someone in their respective group satisfies the group's widely sought after but only attainable by a few temporal and spatial demands, the members of that group will uniformly recognize that individual as having achieved success. This is a universally recognized secret of individual success, which is also known as socially acknowledged success.
Let C represent success, X represent the level of an individual’s knowledge, skills, and experience, S represent the individual's creative thinking ability, Z represent self-purchase ability, N represent the individual's happiness, and J represent opportunity. After twenty years of research, Napoleon Hill derived a formula for the secret of success:
C = [(X + S + Z)N]^J
This formula explains the secret of success as the sum of an individual's level of knowledge, skills, and experience, their creative thinking ability, and their self-purchase ability multiplied by their happiness, all raised to the power of opportunity. In other words, success is an exponential value where the exponent is the size of the opportunity, and the base is the sum of the individual's level of knowledge, skills, and experience, their creative thinking ability, and their self-purchase ability multiplied by their happiness.
From this formula, it can be seen how critical opportunities are to individual success. Opportunities are something one may encounter but are fundamentally difficult to seek out. When the opportunity equals zero, regardless of how high the individual's level of knowledge, skills, and experience is, no matter how strong their creative thinking ability or self-purchase ability, or how happy they are, the numerical representation of their success will always be the same—equal to 1. When the mathematical representation of the opportunity is greater than 1, the individual's success will depend on their non-zero level of knowledge, skills, and experience, some degree of creative thinking ability, and a certain level of self-purchase ability, while being willing to make sacrifices for happiness, resulting in corresponding success.
If the opportunity is a negative number, meaning there is a certain opportunity but it has a negative orientation (i.e., it is an unlucky opportunity), then the value of success will be less than 1.
Success can actually be divided into two major categories: ordinary success and socially recognized success. When C is less than or equal to 1, the individual's success is merely ordinary success. Only when the individual's C value is greater than 1 does the success become socially recognized success. As the C value increases, the recognition and value of the socially recognized success continue to rise.
There is indeed a difference between an individual's ordinary success and socially recognized success. An individual who achieves socially recognized success must have also achieved ordinary success, and an individual who achieves ordinary success must have also achieved socially recognized success. However, only when an individual satisfies the demands of their temporal and spatial context, which are widely pursued by many individuals but only attainable by a few, does the individual achieve socially recognized success.
In order to obtain the secret of socially recognized success, an individual needs to continuously improve their level of knowledge, skills, and experience, enhance their creative thinking abilities, and continuously develop their self-purchase abilities, while maintaining happiness. However, one should not assume that possessing a relatively high level of knowledge, skills, and experience, strong creative thinking abilities, strong self-purchase abilities, and happiness in all aspects guarantees socially recognized success, because opportunity still plays a crucial role.
When an individual can satisfy the demands of their temporal and spatial context, that individual is in a successful environment. For an individual, happiness ultimately stems from satisfying the demands placed upon them by their temporal and spatial context. This is the most fundamental secret of individual success, also known as ordinary success.
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