Artists who have attained excellence follow a consistent path. I call it the Hero’s Journey. The first step of the journey is to discover your outcome, that is, to define precisely what your quest is, what you want. The second stap is to take action – to start the journey – otherwise your desires will always be dreams. You must take the types of actions you believe will create the greatest probability of producing the result you desire.  The actions we take do not always produce the results we desire, the challenge of this step is to develop the sensory acuity to recognize the kinds of responses and results you’re getitng from your actions and to note as quickly as possible if they are taking you closer to your goals or farther away. And then you tae the third step of your journey, which is to develop the flexibility to change your behavor until you get what you want. If you look at successful artist, you’ll find they followed these steps.  They started with a target, because you can’t hit one if you don’t have one. They took action, because just knowing is not enough. They had the ability to read others, to know what response they were getting. And they kept adapting, kept adjusting, kept changing their behavior until they found what worked.

In one way or another everything in this journey is directed toward providing your brain with the most effective stories to empower you to take successful action. This all leads to a simple inescapable fact. Creative success is not an accident. The difference between artists who produce positive results and those who do not is not some sort of random roll of the dice. There are consistent logical patterns of action, specific pathways to excellence that are withing the reach of us all. We can all create our own legend within. We simply must learn how to turn on and use our minds in the most powerful and advantageous ways.

What do Ferrari and Bernini have in common? What do they share that caused them to affect so many people in such a deep and emotional way?  They both have been able to get themselves to consistently take effective actions toward the accomplishment of their dreams. But what is it that gets them to continue day after day to put everything they got into everything they do? There are, of course many factors. However, I believe that there are seven fundamental character traits that they have cultivated within themselves, several traits in their own story that give them the passion to do whatever it takes to succeed. These are the seven archetypal heroes that can ensure your success as well:

Passion

All of these artists have discovered a reason, a consuming, energizing, almost obsessive purpose that drives them to do, to grow, and to be more! It gives them the fuel that powers their success journey and causes them to tap their true potential. It’s passion that causes people to stay up late and get up early. It’s passion that people want in their relationships. Passion gives life power and juice and meaning. There is no greatness without a passion to be great, whether it is the aspiratioin of an artist or an athlete, a scientist or entrepreneur.

Belief 

Every religious and spiritual book on the planet talks about the power and effect of faith and belilef on mankind. People who succeed on a major scale differ greatly in their beliefs from those who fail. Our stories about what we are and what we can be precisely determine what we will be. If we believe in a creative life, we’ll live a creative life. If we believe our life is defined by narrow limits, we’ve suddenly made those limits real.  Our story about what we believe to be true, what we believe is possible becomes what’s true, what’s possible. This journey will provide you with a specific way to quickly change your stories so that they support you in the attainment of your most desired goals. Many people are passionate, but because of their limiting stories about who they are and what they can do, they never take the actions that could make their dream a reality. People who succeed know what they want and believe that they can get it.  Passion and belief help you to provide the fuel, the propulsion toward excellence. But propulsion is not enough. If it were, it would be enough to fuel a rocket and sent it flying blindly toward the heavens. Besides that power we need a path, an intelligent sense of logical progression. To succeed in hitting our target we need

Strategy

A strategy is a way of organizing resources. When Bernini decided to become an artist, he mapped out a course that would lead to the world he wanted to conquer. He figured out what he wanted to learn whom he needed to work with and what he needed to do. He had passion, he had belief but he also had the strategy that made those things work to their greatest potential.  Every great artist knows it’s not enough to have the resources to succeed. One must use those resources in the most effective way. A strategy is a recognition that the best talents and ambitions also need to find the right avenue. You can open a door by breaking it down, or you can find the key that opens it intact.

Clarity of your values

Values are specific belief systems we have about what is right and wrong for our lives. They are the judgments we make about what makes life worth living. Many people do not have a clear idea of what is important to them. Often individuals do things that afterward they are unhappy with themselves about simply because they are not clear about what they unconciously believe is right for them and others. When we look at great artists they are almost always people with a clear fundamental sense about what really matters.

As you have problably noticed, these traits feed on and interact with one another. Is passion affected by beliefs? Ofcourse it is. The more we believe we can accomplish something, the more we’re usually willing to invest in its achievement. Is belief by itself enough to achieve excellence? It is a good start, but if you believe you’re going to see a sunrise and your strategy is to begin running west, you may have some difficulty. Are your strategies for success affected by our values? You bet. If your strategy for success requires you to do things that do nit fit your unconscious beliefs about what is right or wrong for your life, then even the best strategy will not work. This is often seen in artists who begin to succeed only to end up sabotaging their own ssuccess. The problem is there’s an internal conflict between the individual’s values and his strategy for achievement.  In the same way, all four of the things we have already considered are inseparable from

Energy

Energy can be thundering, joyeus commitment of Andrea Bocelli or Emos Ramazotti. It can be the entrepreneurial energy of a Benetoon. It is almost impossbile to amble languorously toward excellence. People of excellence take opportunities and shape them. They live as if obsessed with the woundrous opportunities of each day and the recognition that the one thing no one has enough of is time. There are many people in the world who have a passion they believe in. They know the strategy that would ensure it, and their values are aligned ut they just don’t have the physical vitality to take action on what they know. Great success as an artist is inseparable from the physical, intellectual and spiritual energy that allows us to make the most of what we have.

Bonding Power 

Nearly all successful artists have in common an extraordinary ability to bond with others, the ability to connect with and develop rapport with people from a variety of backgrounds and beliefs. Sure, there’s the occasional mad genius who invents something that changes the world. But if the genius spends all his time in a lonely warren, he will succeed on one level but fail on many others. The great artists all have the ability to form bonds that unite them to millions of others. The great success is not on the stage of the world. It is in the deepest recesses of your own own heart. Deep down, everyone needs to form lasting, loving bonds with others. Without that, any success, any excellence is hollow indeed. The final key trati is something we talked about earlier.

Mastery of Storytelling

This is the essence of what this journey is about. The way we tell stories to others and the way we tell stories with ourselves ultimately determine the quality of our lives. People who succeed in life are those who have learned how to take any challenge that life gives them and communicate that experience to themselves in a way that causes them to successfully change things. People who fail take the adversitities of life and accept them as limitations. The people who shape our lives and our cultures are also master storytellers to others. What they have in common is an ability to communicate a visioin or a quest or a joy or a mission. Mastery of storytelling is what makes a great artist. Almost every part of this journey, in one way or another has to do with storytelling, with bridging gaps, with building new paths and wit sharing new stories.

The first part of this journey will teach you how to take charge of your story and run your own brain more effectively than ever before. We will be working with factors that affect the way you tell stories to yourself. In the second section, we’ll be exploring how to discover what you really want out of life and how you can communicate more effectively with others as well as how to be able to anticipate the inds of behaviors that different kinds of people will consistently create. The third section looks from a larger more global perspective at how we behave, what motivates us, and what we can contribute on a broader, extrapersonal level. It is about taking the skills you have learned and becoming an artistic leader.

I have stressed the primacy of taking effective action. But there are many ways to take action. Most of them depend on a large degree of trial and error. Most people who have been great artists have adjusted and readjusted countless times before they got what they wanted. Trial and error is fine except for one thing: it uses a vast quantity of the one resource none of us will ever have enough of – time.

What if there was a way to take action that accelerated the learning process? What if I could show you how to learn the precise lessons that successful artist have already learned? What if you could learn in minutes what someone took years to perfect? The way to do is is through rolemodeling, a way to meet mentors who did precisely what you love to achieve. What do they do that sets them apart from those artists who only dream of success? Let’s discover….