Select One Goal.
Once you have written out your ten goals, imagine for the moment that you can achieve all of the goals on your list if you want them long enough and hard enough. Also imagine that you have a "magic wand" that you can wave that will enable you to achieve any one goal on your list within twenty-four hours.
If you could achieve any one goal on your list within twenty-four hours, which one would have the greatest positive impact on your life right now? Which one goal would change or improve your life more than anything else? Which one goal, if you were to achieve it, would help you to achieve more of your other goals than anything else?
Whatever your answer to this question, put a circle around this goal and then write it at the top of a clean sheet of paper. This goal then becomes your "Major Definite Purpose." It becomes your focal point and the organizing principle of your future activities.
Make a Plan.
Once you have written out this goal, clearly and specifically, and made it measurable, set a deadline on your goal. Your subconscious mind needs a deadline so that it can focus and concentrate all your mental powers on goal attainment.
Make a list of everything that you can think of that you could do to achieve your goal. Organize this list by sequence and priority.
Select the most important or logical next step in your plan and take action on it immediately. Take the first step. Do something. Do anything.
Resolve to work on this goal every single day until it is achieved. From this moment forward, as far as you are concerned, "Failure is not an option." Once you have decided that this one goal can have the greatest positive impact on your life and you have set it as your major definite purpose, resolve that you will work toward this goal as hard as you can, as long as you can, and that you will never give up until it is achieved. This decision alone can change your life.
Use "Mindstorming" to Get Started.
Here is another technique you can use to dramatically increase the likelihood that you will achieve your most important goal. This is the most powerful creative thinking technique I have ever seen. More people have become wealthy using this method than any other way.
Take another clean sheet of paper. Write out your Major Definite Purpose at the top of the page in the form of a question. Then discipline yourself to write a minimum of twenty answers to the question.
For example, if your goal is to earn a certain amount of money by a certain date, you would write the question as, "How can I earn $x.x.x by this specific date?"
You then discipline yourself to generate twenty answers to your question. This exercise of "mindstorming" will activate your mind, unleash your creativity, and give you ideas that you may never have thought of before.
The first three to five answers will be easy. The next five will be difficult, and the last ten answers will be harder than you can imagine, at least the first time you do this exercise. Nonetheless, you must exert your discipline and willpower to persist until you have written down at least twenty answers.
Once you have generated twenty answers, look over your list and select one of those answers to take action on immediately. It seems that when you take action on a single idea on your list, it triggers more ideas and motivates you to take action on even more of these answers.
The Great Law of Cause and Effect.
The most important application of the law of cause and effect is that "thoughts are causes, and conditions are effects."
Your thoughts create the conditions of your life. When you change your thinking, you change your life. Your outer world becomes a mirror-image reflection of your inner world.
Perhaps the greatest discovery in the history of thought is that "you become what you think about most of the time." Moreover, the teacher John Boyle said, "Whatever you can think about on a continuing basis, you can have."
Napoleon Hill, author of the success cla.s.sic Think and Grow Rich-which was first published in 1939 and is still selling today-said, "Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve."
When you think about your goal continually and work on it every day, more and more of your mental resources will be concentrated on moving you toward that goal-and moving your goal toward you.
The discipline of daily goal-setting will make you a powerful, purposeful, and irresistible person. You will develop self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-respect. As you feel yourself moving toward your goals faster and faster, you will ultimately become unstoppable.
In the next chapter, I will explain how the use of self-discipline to develop personal excellence is the most powerful step you can take to achieve all your material and emotional goals.
Action Exercises: 1. Resolve today to "switch on" your success mechanism and unlock your goal-achieving mechanism by deciding exactly what you really want in life.
2. Make a list of ten goals that you want to achieve in the foreseeable future. Write them down in the present tense, as if you have already achieved them.
3. Select the one goal that could have the greatest positive impact on your life if you were to achieve it, and write it down at the top of another piece of paper.
4. Make a list of everything you could do to achieve this goal, organize it by sequence and priority, and then take action on it immediately.
5. Practice mindstorming by writing out twenty ideas that could help you achieve your most important goal, and then take action on at least one of those ideas.
6. Resolve to do something every day, seven days a week, to achieve your most important goal until you are successful.
7. Continually remind yourself that "failure is not an option." No matter what, resolve to persist until you succeed.
Chapter 5.
Self-Discipline and Personal Excellence.
"We are what we repeatedly do; excellence then is not an act but a habit."
-ARISTOTLE.
You are your most valuable a.s.set. Your life, your potential, and your possibilities are the most precious things you have. Thus your great goal in life should be to fulfill that potential and become everything you are capable of becoming.
Your ability to learn, grow, and fulfill your potential is unlimited. Today, people are graduating from high school and college in their seventies, learning new subjects and developing new capabilities. Your ability to learn and remember can continue throughout your life if you keep your brain alive, alert, and functioning at its best.
Your most precious financial a.s.set is your earning ability . Your ability to work is your primary source of cash throughout your life. You could lose your home, your car, your bank account, and everything you own, but as long as you have your earning ability, you can earn it all back-and more-in the months and years ahead.
Your Biggest Investment.
Most people don"t realize this. They take their earning ability for granted. But it has taken you your entire life to develop your earning ability. Every bit of education, experience, and hard work that you have invested in learning your craft and developing your skills has gone into building this a.s.set.
Your earning ability is very much like a muscle. It can increase in strength and power year by year as the result of regular exercise. Likewise, the opposite is true, too: If left alone or ignored, your earning ability, like your muscles, can become weaker or even decline because you have simply failed to upgrade it continually.
In other words, your earning ability can be either an appreciating or a depreciating a.s.set. An appreciating a.s.set is something that grows in value and cash flow every year as the result of continual investment and improvement. A depreciating a.s.set, on the other hand, is something that loses value over time and finally reaches the point at which it is "written off," being of little or no further value. The choice is yours as to whether your earning ability is increasing or decreasing month by month and year by year.
You Are the President.
See yourself as the president of your own "Personal Services Corporation." Imagine that you were going to take your company public on the stock market. Would you recommend your company as a growth stock, continually increasing its value and earning ability each year?
Or would you describe your company as one that has leveled off in the market place, that is not really going anywhere in terms of increased value and income? Would you recommend stock in "You, Inc." as an excellent investment? Why or why not?
What Got You Here Won"t Get You Any Further.
Some people are actually losing value each year, declining in earning ability, because they are not continually upgrading their knowledge and skills. They don"t realize that whatever knowledge and skill they have today is rapidly becoming obsolete. It is being replaced by new knowledge and skills that, if you don"t have them and someone else does, you will be in danger of being overtaken by your compet.i.tion.
Join the Top 20 Percent.
In Chapter 1, I mentioned that the 80/20 rule applies to income: The top 20 percent of people in our society earn and control 80 percent of the a.s.sets. According to Forbes, Fortune, Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, and the IRS, by many estimates the top 1 percent of Americans control as much as 33 percent of the a.s.sets.
The most interesting discovery in income inequality is that most millionaires, multimillionaires, and billionaires in America are first generation. They started with little or nothing and earned all their money by themselves in one lifetime.
In America, there is a high level of income mobility, which means you are able to move from the lower levels of income to the upper levels. Almost everyone who is in the top 20 percent today started in the bottom 20 percent. From that point, they began to do something different with their time and their lives, and as a result, they put themselves squarely onto the upward escalator of financial success.
No Limits on Your Potential.
The average income increase in America is about 3 percent a year, just about the same as the rate of inflation and cost of living increases. People whose income is increasing at 3 percent a year seldom get ahead. They have a job, which can also be thought of as an acronym for "Just Over Broke."
But the fact is that no one is better than you, and no one is smarter than you. If someone is doing better than you are today, it is simply proof that he has learned how the Law of Cause and Effect applies to his work, and he has begun doing the things that other successful people have also done. The application of the Law of Cause and Effect to your personal life is "learn and do."
The achievement of personal excellence is a decision you make-or that you fail to make. But in the absence of a commitment to excellence in your chosen field, you automatically default to average performance-or even mediocrity. No one becomes excellent accidentally or by just going to work each day. Excellence requires a definite decision and a lifelong commitment.
The Keys to the Twenty-First Century.
Knowledge and skill are the keys to the twenty-first century. Becoming the best person you can possibly be and moving to the top of your field require the application of self-discipline throughout your life. Mental fitness is like physical fitness: If you want to achieve either, you must work at it all your life. You can never let up. You must be continually learning and growing-every day, week, and month-throughout your career (and in other areas of your life) if you"re going to join the top 20 percent and stay there. To earn more, you must learn more.
Abraham Lincoln once wrote, "The fact that some have become wealthy is proof that others may do it as well."
What others have done, you can do as well-if you learn how. Everyone who is at the top was once at the bottom. Many people who come from average or poor families with average incomes or who grow up in average circ.u.mstances have gone on to become some of the most prominent people in their fields. And what hundreds of thousands and even millions of other people have done, you can do as well. The philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote that "the very best proof that something can be done is that someone else has already done it."
Ordinary into Extraordinary.
Very often, you see people who don"t seem to be as intelligent or as talented as you are who are nonetheless accomplishing remarkable things with their lives. There is nothing that will make you angrier than to see someone who seems to be dumber than you doing better than you. How can this be?
The answer is simple: At a certain point in their lives, they realized that the key to success was personal and professional growth. It was a dedication to lifelong learning.
The good news is that almost every important skill is learnable. Every business skill is learnable. Everyone who is proficient in any area of business was at one time completely ignorant in that area. Every sales skill is learnable. Every top salesperson was once a beginning salesperson and unable to make a call or close a sale. All moneymaking skills are learnable as well. Almost every wealthy person was once poor. You can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself.