1.

His failure, and the failure of either of his sons to make

something extraordinary of themselves, baffles him because
he believes that the keys to success are contacts and
popularity. Unfortunately, in the business of sales, Willy has
outlived his contacts and his popularity (if he ever had it)
and is now unable to make any money. If a man's role is to
earn money to support his family, then Willy is a total
failure.
2. Willy believed that Bernard would never be successful,
despite his good grades, because Bernard was not well liked.
Willy taught his boys that if people liked them, they'd always
be successful. The key to success was not hard work, but
popularity. It's all about the image you create. Willy was
clearly wrong about Bernard; he grew up to become a
successful lawyer, arguing a case before the Supreme Court,
while Willy's sons grew up to become unsuccessful bums.
Willy believed that Bernard would never be successful,
despite his good grades, because Bernard was not well liked.
Willy taught his boys that if people liked them, they'd always
be successful. The key to success was not hard work, but
popularity. It's all about the image you create. Willy was
clearly wrong about Bernard; he grew up to become a
successful lawyer, arguing a case before the Supreme Court,
while Willy's sons grew up to become unsuccessful bums.

3. Another major factor in Willy’s denotation of success is the false

assumption that success must be quantifiable, and can only be
measured based on accumulated wealth and financial status. 
However, this assumption is not the case in the larger reality of
Miller’s play.  In the context of Willy Loman, most of his aspirations
cannot be quantified through money.  For example, although Willy
values positive social connections and human relationships very
highly, he has no quantifiable way of measuring his success in this
field other than the number of people attending his funeral.  Because
 Willy has no way to measure his progress socially, he incorrectly
interprets his own wealth to be an indicator for his own likeability,
ultimately causing him to fail socially.  Consequently, Willy’s failure to
be well-liked among both businessmen and his own family members
causes him to also fall short as an effective salesman (Jameson 247-
251).  Without the ability to maintain his job, Willy cannot sustain
himself or his family financially causing him to find himself trapping a
vicious cycle based on the delusion that money determines stature. 
As the play progresses, Willy’s definition of success, along with his
mental state, deteriorate and become more and more detached from
reality until he eventually commits suicide with the hope that the
insurance money that his family receives from his death earns him
some kind of admiration.  Willy states to an imaginary Ben:
4. Biff tells Willy that they're both ordinary men, common, just
like everyone else; this is not such a terrible thing in Biff's
eyes, but for Willy, being ordinary is equivalent to failure. He
wanted to be the best of salesmen, and he pretended that
he was. Willy realizes that his own son knows that he's a
fake, and that Biff's wish is only to confront the truth and be
an ordinary man. This is the summit of his failures. Willy can
think of only one way to prove that he's not a failure:
suicide.
5. ork out that way, and Willy Loman died a failure by his own
standards. Biff considers Willy's life a failure because he had
the wrong dreams. He spent too much time convincing
himself he could be a successful salesman, when what he
was clear he was skilled at working with his hands. If he'd
followed the right dreams, and confronted his abilities in a
realistic and honest way, he may not have been a failure,
and his life might not have ended this way. Even in death,
Willy Loman's plans fail; no one shows at his funeral, and his
life insurance policy doesn't cover suicide.
6. Expectations: Willy finds it impossible to understand how
someone who was as popular and well liked (the two keys to
 success in life) as Biff was in high school, could have grown
up to be such a failure. Willy always believed that Biff's
popularity would naturally lead to great success in the
business world. He would have a grand life. But that's not
the way things have worked out for Biff, and Willy is baffled
by it.
7. Opportunity: While Ben tries to tell Willy the secret of how to
make a fortune, Willy ignores him and insists that
personality and contacts are all you need to get rich. He
staked his entire future on his belief that being well liked
leads to success, and that's why his entire future was a flop.
He looked at Dave Singleman as the role model to a
profitable career in sales. He was no Dave Singleman, and
as a result, he ended up a sad failure of a man.
8. Conclu: Charley tells Willy that many successful men aren't
well liked, and yet still achieved success. He points out that
all the connections with people, real or imagined, don't do
any good unless you have a product to sell. Connections
must be used for something, and are useless by themselves.
This blows away Willy's belief that one needs only to be well
liked to achieve success; it's too late for Willy to change his
whole philosophy, and either way, he's still a failure by his
own standards because no one seems to like him much
anyway.
9. Conclusion: Willy's failures come from him setting unrealistic standards for himself,
and hopelessly trying to weigh his success with money. Provided the consequences
of Willy's actions, Miller teaches a very valuable lesson about the true nature
of success, and the realistic way to go about achieving it.

When he brought them business, when he was young, they were glad to
see him. But now his old friends, the old buyers that loved him so and
always found some order to hand him in a pinch -- they're all dead,
retired. He used to be able to make six, seven calls a day in Boston. Now
he takes his valises out of the car and puts them back and takes them
out again and he's exhausted. Instead of walking he talks now. He
drives seven hundred miles, and when he gets there no one knows him
any more, no one welcomes him. And what goes through a man's mind,
driving seven hundred miles home without having earned a cent? Why
shouldn't he talk to himself? -- From Death of a Salesman by Arthur
Miller In February, 50 years from when it first opened, Miller's classic
returned to Broadway to rave reviews. Ben Brantley of The New York
Times wrote: "I will always be haunted by the image of Brian Dennehy
as Willy Loman. He seems to kidnap you by force, trapping you inside
Willy's psyche...I could hear people around me not just sniffling but
sobbing." Today's audiences are drawn to the revival in no small part
because its tragic lessons still apply to business and life. Humans remain
adverse to change even as the world transforms around them. As they
did a half a century ago, conditions are evolving quickly, and
businesspeople who fail to keep up with them are left behind. Mergers
and acquisitions, global competition, and the Internet are forces
reshaping the workplace just as in Willy Loman's day, chain stores had
dislodged the personal element -- the jokes, the back slapping, the
relationships -- on which the 63-year-old salesman had built his career.
Loman worked for one company for 36 years opening new markets in
"unheard-of-territories" only to helplessly watch the son of his retired
boss switch his salary to commission. Other problems troubled the
salesman. Loman's two sons had adopted his formula for success, and
that formula -- the popular, hale and hearty fellow would thrive -- failed
to bring Loman's sons prosperity. Loman would have recognized today's
sales environment where, more than anything else, an Internet
revolution is displacing company loyalists who made names
communicating to customers the benefits of a particular product.
Increasingly companies are turning to Web pages to do much of the work
once covered by these traditional salespeople. Neil Rackham, coauthor
of Rethinking the Sales Force (1999, McGraw-Hill), takes an
extreme view: "There's little doubt that the direct effect of e-commerce is
to make more than half of sales jobs go away. Many existing salespeople
are just talking brochures, and electronic brochures are much more
informative, more accessible, and cheaper than brochures with feet." The
technology-driven transformation that is now striking manufacturers
emerged early in financial services. When customers used to call
brokerage firm Charles Schwab & Co., they would speak to a salesperson
who would buy or sell stocks on their behalf. Today customers can log
onto www.schwab.com and complete the same transaction without
human help -- and at a cheaper price. To compete with Schwab and other
online rivals, Merrill Lynch & Co. recently began offering online trading
to a select group of customers. The giant brokerage house wants to
become the top portal for financial information and services with its
salespeople providing critical wisdom to help customers make the right
choices. Achieving that goal involves new skills and behaviors, which
some of its 15,000 brokers may fail to embrace. "How do you think
Merrill Lynch brokers are feeling today?" questions Rackham. "They're
nervous." They're nervous because just as it was in Willy Loman's time,
change is difficult. Miller acknowledges this fact in his original preface
to Death of a Salesman: "The quality in such plays that does shake us,
however, derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the
disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and
who we are in this world. Among us today this fear is as strong, and
perhaps stronger, than it ever was." Those who confront such a fear, and
remake themselves to suit the new business environment are the ones
who will survive and prosper. Already this is happening. Salespeople are
going back to school to update their skills, and they are returning better
listeners. Leading professionals are tailoring their company's products to
fit customers' special needs often in combination with other companies'
products. "It's not persuading, it's understanding," explains Rackham. At
Microsoft, for example, salespeople who less than a decade ago were
content to communicate to prospects the benefits of standard software
now spend their time pulling together a package that includes Microsoft
products as well as goods from outside firms, even the competition,
including training sessions and systems integration services. In other
cases, traditional salespeople are leaving sales for new careers or to start
a new business. Such options mean few have to follow the suicidal road
Willy Loman chose: As the car speeds off, the music crashes down in a
frenzy of sound, which becomes the soft pulsation of a single cello
string. -- Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller

1. Smart goals
2. Explore
3. Overconfidence
4. Patience
5. Digest the failure
6. Grab opportunity
7. Expectations
8. Time management
9. Life balance
10.Adaptability
11.Trust
12.Calm
13.Perceptions ( assumptions )
14.Savings
15.Positive mindset