Act. Adapt. Achieve.

By Dean Erickson

Author Dean Erickson reveals tools and techniques to help readers achieve their dreams and reach their greatest potential. Building upon his previous book, Choose Your Story, Choose Your Life, he encourages readers to live their best lives, this time by guiding them to take necessary actions to achieve their goals and by empowering them to adapt when things do not go as planned.

An honored athlete, Ivy League graduate, former Wall Street trader and working actor, novelist, and now CEO of investment advisory firm Bionic Capital, Erickson has achieved many of his personal and professional goals. In this book, he illustrates and details his innovative Idea Circle, a repeatable success process distilled from his experiences.

Packed with motivation and information, including his Success Worksheets to help keep you on track, Act. Adapt. Achieve. is ideal for anyone who desires to live their best life and achieve their dreams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean Erickson
• Release date: Sep 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301536948

Dean Erickson

Dean Erickson is the founder and CEO of Bionic Capital LLC, a registered investment advisory firm. He worked on Wall Street as an options trader and risk arbitrageur after graduating from Brown University in 1982. He gained the Chartered Financial Analyst designation in 1987.After Wall Street, he stumbled upon acting and enjoyed the creative process. He guest-starred on Frasier, starred as Gabriel Knight in the awarding-winning video game The Beast Within, and acted in several Shakespearean productions. He began writing and created multiple movie scripts before writing a mystery thriller, No One Laughs at a Dead Clown, under the name, DC Erickson.When a computer glitch caused the loss of his outline for novel number two, he turned to the personal development genre. Choose Your Story, Choose Your Life was published months later. His most recent book Act. Adapt. Achieve. introduces his innovative Idea CircleTM which explains the process of achieving success. The book offers other tools and techniques to help readers achieve success more quickly and consistently in any endeavor.Dean has worked full-time in the investment advisory business since 2006, and at Bionic Capital since its founding in 2009. He is happy to say he has created his perfect job, and he loves his boss.Prophetically, he was voted Most Versatile by his high school senior class a long, long time ago. More recently, he was elected to the Midcoast Maine Sports Hall of Fame and the Maine Basketball Hall of Fame.He lives in California with his wonderful wife, Lisa.

Book preview

Author's Note and Disclaimer

One of the themes of this book is about taking personal responsibility. I take responsibility for every word and image included in Act. Adapt. Achieve., whether it be deemed good, bad, or indifferent. How you use this book and its well-intentioned contents is entirely up to you.

Due to the realities of the legal system and that it only takes one reader to not accept their own responsibility to ruin my day, please consider this disclaimer. Use the information in this book at your own risk.

Acknowledgements

Thank you always to my lovely wife, Lisa, who is the most supportive, wonderful, and fun person I know. And thank you to my friend and former English teacher, Dan Wallace, who is probably the smartest person I know. They both helped make this book significantly better, and I am grateful for their skill, patience, and friendship.

Introduction

The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems.

Mahatma Gandhi

This is a book about taking action to achieve your desired success—whatever it may be. Now is the time for you to create a new job, your own company, better relations with a child, more overall happiness, and anything else you want.

Too many people hope for success more than they plan and work for it. Rather than simply hoping the universe will provide, know that you already have everything you need to achieve success. You just have to accept responsibility and use what you already possess.

Break away from whatever has been holding you back. You may be afraid because you’re not sure how to get started. And, if you don’t start, you’re already finished. This book is about starting, finishing, and getting whatever you want—even if it turns out to be better than what you’d first imagined.

I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

Thomas Jefferson

This book will help you to take charge and take control instead of leaving your life to chance and chaos. People tend to be luckier when they’ve taken actions to improve their odds of success. Thomas Jefferson knew it and so must you.

Act. Adapt. Achieve. deals with practicalities and specifics that will be recognizable as reasonable and logical, not  wishful generalities that can’t be proved or disproved. Although the concepts described herein are relatively simple and can benefit anyone, the path to success isn’t always a smooth one and, thus, not everyone will aggressively pursue it. It’s easier to hope than it is to act.

If you do choose to achieve, this book will help you get beyond hoping to take positive, thoughtful actions toward your goals. I’m all for dreaming, visioning, believing and sometimes even asking, but, without doing, thinking, adapting and then doing some more, you will be relying on blind luck or coincidence for success. Neither is within your control nor generally repeatable. Wouldn’t it be nice to understand how success can be achieved and repeated? Act. Adapt. Achieve. will show you how.

I encourage you to use the principles explained in this book to help you take well-considered actions to create success, attain wealth and happiness, live the life of your dreams, and help solve the world’s problems.

The rest will be up to you.

Chapter One

No Secrets to Success

∞

The heights by great men reached and kept

Were not attained by sudden flight,

But they, while their companions slept,

Were toiling upward in the night.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, learning from failure.

General Colin L. Powell

No Secrets to Success

There are no secrets to success; there is only information you may not know yet. Secret implies mystery, selectivity, and exclusion. Marketers often use the word to entice people to buy their wares, a book, a course, or a coaching program, but achieving success isn’t a mystery. It isn’t exclusive to those who buy one course or another; it isn’t only for a select few. Success can be achieved by anyone; in fact, success is achieved billions of times by billions of people every day. Every one of us achieves numerous small or large goals every day.

We get up, shower, get dressed, have breakfast, drive to work, do our jobs the best we can, and then navigate traffic to get back home safely. Add thousands more successfully accomplished tasks each day, like holding our anger when cut off in traffic, managing varied personalities at the workplace, plowing through mundane paperwork without complaint, or making a supportive phone call to a grieving friend, and you can begin to understand the huge number of tasks we accomplish each day while coming through relatively unscathed to reach the next day.

With each task, you go through a series of steps, physically and mentally, and manage all of your thoughts and actions with an eye on accomplishing your goal. Small goals or larger goals are achieved through a similar process, and you’ve been practicing success all your life, possibly without realizing it.