The best way to learn is to look at those who have gone before you. Who has already achieved what you want to achieve? If you’ve got your eye on the C-suite, here are five tips from some of the world’s most successful executives who have all been CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

Tim Cook (CEO of Apple Inc.)

Tim Cook believes that if you want to succeed you need to be able to collaborate. Cook doesn’t mean just being a nice person who is easy to work with. He means that you are able to work so well with others that 1 + 1 = 3. The whole is worth more than the sum of the parts.

To be a good collaborator you need to be able to add value to the ideas of others and be comfortable with other people adding value to your ideas. This means you also need to be able to share credit. Someone who is a great collaborator is more valuable to Apple than someone who is a strong individual contributor.

The output of true collaboration is innovation and Apple has been one of the most innovative companies in the world for decades.

Abigail Johnson (Chairwoman, CEO and President of Fidelity Investments)

Abigail Johnson, and a raft of other uber successful executives, believe that successful people are intellectually curious. Intellectually curious people have a thirst for knowledge and go wide and deep when discovering a new field of area of interest. They are always learning. The “leaders are readers” principle (another tried-and-true success tip) is founded on having intellectual curiosity.

When you have intellectual curiosity you are able to cross-pollinate your knowledge of different subjects and this allows you to be innovative. You see things from different angles and perspectives that other people don’t have. It also allows you to be nimble and agile as you are in a perpetual search for ways to do things better. As agility is one of the biggest predictors of a company’s success, intellectual curiosity can make you a thought leader and change maker in your organisation.

Meg Whitman (former President and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprises)

Meg Whitman has had a stellar corporate career and at the time of writing is the US ambassador to Kenya. A core value of hers has always been maintaining your integrity. If you are ever asked to do something by your employer that you are not comfortable with and you don’t think is right, Whitman advises you get out of that company as fast as possible.

If you continue to remain with a company that has shady business practices then there are two likely scenarios. The first is that you will become accustomed or blind to the dodgy practices over time and may find yourself slipping over to the dark side. On the other hand, even if you stay clean you may find your career is tarnished if the company is ever embroiled in a scandal. Arthur Andersen, anyone?

Your reputation takes your entire career to build and can be lost in an instant. Protect it.

Angela Ahrendts (former Senior Vice President or Retail at Apple Inc; former CEO of Burberry)

Angela Ahrendts has held very senior positions at a number of companies, which means that there have been several times in her career where she has embarked upon a new learning curve. Ahrendts’ top tip is to ask questions, don’t make assumptions.

We’ve all heard the aphorism “when you assume you make an ASS out of U and ME”. The people who ask the best questions are always going to win because they will learn the most and understand the most. People who ask questions are much less likely to make mistakes that are a result of them getting the fundamental details wrong.

Some people like to brag that they never ask a question that they don’t know the answer to. This works as a strategy in certain situations but makes no sense as a career rule. You can’t know everything and so even if you are the most senior person in the company there are going to be times when you ask questions from a place of genuine ignorance.

Asking questions shows a willingness to learn. It also acknowledges that other people might have valuable input of their own. Not only can you not know everything, you frequently don’t know what you don’t know so the best way to discover what you don’t know is to ask questions. Don’t fear people laughing at you because you asked a question. More often than not there is someone else in the room who had the same question but wasn’t brave enough to ask it themselves.

People who are able to ask the questions that everyone else wants to hear the answer to are highly respected by their peers. They are also seen as better collaborators and better communicators, two skills that are at the top of the list if you want to get to the C-suite.

Jeff Weiner (former CEO and current executive chairman of LinkedIn)

Jeff Weiner is a huge advocate of the power of putting a routine around as much of your life as possible. When you sleep, eat, exercise, hold meetings, spend time with your family – it can all be put in to a schedule as recurring events. If you want to get as much done as possible then don’t waste time having to decide in the moment what to do about tasks that you do every day.

We make up to 35,000 decisions a day and if you’re running a Fortune 500 company (or aspiring to run one) then you want to be making as few decisions as possible because the decisions that you are making are so important that they can affect the lives of tens of thousands of employees, or even the wider community depending on what your company does.

Routine doesn’t make things boring, it gives you room to be creative elsewhere in your life where that energy is better spent. It makes you more efficient and more productive because the easy decisions are already made for you and you’re not wasting time and energy battling with emotions and the devil on your shoulder who is trying to talk you into or out of something.

Routine gets a bad rap but the opposite of routine is chaos. Chaos creators never make successful executives.

We hope you enjoyed these five success tips. It doesn’t matter where you are in your career journey you can use all five tips immediately. Good luck!