The Importance of Celebration

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But I do want to talk to you guys about the last piece of the puzzle, and that is celebrating. You know, people who are successful have a tendency to anticipate success. How many of you guys, like raise your hand if you struggle with self-confidence? Any of you guys out there struggle with self-confidence? Almost every single person Adam. I look at that.

People have a tendency to expect success. And I can remember when I was taking my licensing exam, I was super duper nervous. This was like the biggest exam, I had just gotten a master’s degree and I don’t know how many of you guys know this, or don’t know this, but a master’s degree in counseling is 100% worthless unless you match it with a license.

So I just spent all of this time getting this master’s degree, and now I got to sit for this license. Which is a 200 item exam, multiple choice, and if you don’t get the right number, correct, which I think was, was 103, you don’t have a license. And now you just wasted two and a half years of your life and like $40,000. And I was super nervous about this test.

And I happened to be reading a book at the time, I don’t even remember the name of the book, but I do remember talking about successful people anticipate success. And I was just thinking, man, I’m going to anticipate success about this. And I knew people who were taking the test and they were keeping it secret because they were afraid if they failed, they didn’t want to have to tell people that they failed and they were keeping it secret that they were taking the test.

And I was like, successful people anticipate success so I was not keeping it secret. I was telling everybody I’m taking my licensing exam. I purposely scheduled my licensing exam on my birthday, right? November 7th, 2006, I purposely scheduled it on my birthday.

And people were like, aren’t you afraid it’s going to ruin your birthday. And I was like, no, I’m giving myself a birthday gift of passing the licensing exam. And then there was an ice cream cake place at the time around here. It’s closed now. It was called Carvel. And when I was a kid, I used to like to go to Carvel Ice Cream for my birthdays.

So I went to Carvel Ice Cream and I ordered a cake and I wrote, ‘Congratulations Elliott on your passage of the exam’. I literally planned the celebration weeks in advance because I wanted to anticipate success. And on the day that the license exam came, I sat and I took the exam and I passed it. I remember, excuse me. I remember like it was yesterday.

I took the exam on a computer and I walked over and they printed my results right there and they handed it to me, and it said passed on it. And I went to my job and I ate ice cream cake. And I cut up all the ice from cake and gave it to all the people who, who I worked with at the time. And I sat back and I thought planning the celebration actually helped because I was like setting the intention.

And I did things along the way that are in line with success. Now it’s not a hundred percent and it doesn’t work every time or whatever, but I can tell you successful people anticipate success. And part of the anticipation of success is being able to think about like, how am I going to celebrate crossing the finish line of a particular journey or of a particular goal?