Archive No. 2
OVER
THE TOP!
We have busted thru the 3,000 barrier! This milestone belongs to you and I thank you for it.
Monday, December 29th, 2008
"Always
bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than
any other one thing."
-
Abraham
Lincoln
In 1990, I
was dangerously close to slipping into the abyss. My
wife and I had split up and my 13-month-old daughter was in another
state a thousand miles away. Although I
had been my daughter’s primary caregiver since her birth, I was staring
at the probability that I would be forced to watch from afar as she
grew up with another man as her surrogate father. I
would not play a major role in her life, would not have a significant
impact in shaping her morals and values, and for all intents and
purposes, really wouldn’t even know her. I
was severely disabled, terminally ill, had no money for an attorney,
and was facing a custody hearing a thousand miles away.
Many close to me urged (or implied to) me that I should cede
custody and just cut the best visitation deal I could coax out of my
wife. Even my attorney at the time told me
at a later date he thought my chance of getting custody of her was that
of a snowball’s chance in Hell.
I was down
and could have been out, except for a nagging conviction.
Somehow, I knew that I was meant to raise my daughter. I knew that God wanted me to teach her, guide
her, bring her up in the discipline, admonition, and love of the Lord. She has now been with me the entire 17 years
of her life. She has blossomed into a
beautiful young lady- kind, compassionate, and wise beyond her years. Against all odds, my resolve to be with my
daughter not only made those 17 years possible, but in all likelihood
gave me the purposeful living that saved my life.
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Quotes
“Wherever
there is a human being there is an opportunity for kindness”
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
My pastor,
Jim Andrews, once told the story of his being in a downtown parking
garage and seeing a girl about 18 years of age standing by the stairway
he was about to climb. This girl was very
pretty, but looked a little rough as she smoked on a cigarette. When Jim approached the first stair, he
noticed the head of a kitten protruding from her backpack.
He stopped and told the girl that her kitten was just about the
cutest cat he had ever seen. She explained
that it was not just a cat, but a service animal that would perform a
variety of tasks in the case of an emergency. She
was on a list of patients waiting for a heart transplant.
Jim showed concern for the fact that she was smoking to which
she replied that she was on a program to quit but hadn’t quite mastered
it yet. Before turning to leave, Jim
simply said, “I sure hope you figure out how to stop, because you’re
just too pretty for us to lose.” With
that, he turned and carried on up the stairs. The
girl poked her head in the stairway and said, “You are the kindest man.”
I don’t
know what this girl’s life is like, but Jim was stunned to be labeled
“the kindest man” over this simple exchange. You
probably don’t know who, but you cross paths on a daily basis with
scores of people dying for recognition and acceptance.
Did you know that just a small gesture of kindness like a
sincere compliment can go a long way towards making that person’s day
or possibly their entire week? I have
actually heard stories of people contemplating suicide that changed
their minds after a simple gesture of concern or kindness was bestowed
upon them by someone unbeknownst to the person giving that gesture. We don’t know how wide or deep the ripple
effect of our concern and kindness towards others goes and this is
exactly why they are so important. Your simple act might just be the
touch of the heart and movement of the soul that makes all the
difference.
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Quotes
"A misty
morning does not signify a cloudy day."
-Ancient
Proverb
I have
someone very close to me that often writes off an entire day before it
truly has a chance to get under way. I
cringe when I hear, “It’s obviously going to be another one of those
days.“ What is this person doing? They are
setting up an expectation that the entire rest of the day will
necessarily be a disaster. What do you think they will find at every
turn? Disaster. The sad reality is, people that think this way never
see the results of their own making for what it is- self-fulfilled
prophecy. Instead it is interpreted as validation of their ability to
spot disaster before it strikes.
When your
imagination begins to paint an expectation, your mind goes to work to
complete the picture, and your subconscious-driven actions follow. What
picture are you setting up to be painted at the top of every morning? Psychologists have determined that your first
interaction with someone at the start of each day will have more impact
on your state of mind than the next eight interactions combined.
Studies also show that it takes seven positive inputs into your mind to
overcome one negative input. What do you think you are doing to
yourself and your day when you start your mornings with a prophecy of
doom? This is why I make sure my first conversation of the day is with
myself and that it is strikingly positive. This way, I take control of
my day’s destination.
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Quotes
“Not everything that is faced can be changed,
but nothing can be changed until it is faced. “
- James
Baldwin
Most of us
realize that we are not going to hit a home run unless we step up to
the plate. Why then would someone know
that a problem must be addressed and still not address it?
Fear. Fear of rejection. Fear of failure. Fear
of success. Fear of loss.
Fear of gain. Fear.
Fear. Fear. Truthfully,
isn’t procrastination just fear in one form or another?
I’ve
learned something about fear- everybody feels it. Why
do some people appear fearless? These are
people that understand that actions must be taken in spite of their
emotions. The more you stare down fear and
take action in its face, the weaker its grip will be on you. As your confidence grows and your
understanding of this concept expands, action in the face of fear will
become routine. It is at this point that
self-mastery comes into view and procrastination appears in the
rearview mirror.
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Quotes
"Don't
measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should
have accomplished with your ability."
- John
Wooden
John
Wooden coached the UCLA men’s basketball team to ten national titles,
including seven in a row between 1967 and 1973. Yet,
he never implored his team to beat another team. Coach
Wooden believed that the scoreboard was irrelevant to whether or not
you won or lost. He told his players that
only they would know whether or not they had won, because winning was
determined by whether or not they had given everything they had to give. He told them there was no honor in outscoring
another team simply because the other team was lousy or because they
got lucky. Likewise, there was no shame in
coming up short on the scoreboard if you had given it your all.
Be very
careful when comparing yourself to others, because disappointment via
unrealistic expectations is often the seedbed of failure.
Can we get over the notion that life is supposed to be fair? It’s not fair, and it is never going to be
fair. Because everyone plays the game of
life with advantages and disadvantages others do not have, we must
begin measuring our success based upon our own abilities.
What would you do with someone else’s ability?
Not a damn thing if you’re not already utilizing the ability
that you already have. Regardless of where you are in life, start
disciplining yourself to give your all in all that you do and you won’t
be there for long.
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Quotes
”I do not
seek, I find.”
Pablo
Picasso (1881-1973)
One of the
most important and accurate barometers of whether or not an endeavor
will be successful is the degree to which you expect the desired
outcome. The first thing I do every
morning, even before I am out of bed, is to incant my life’s mission
statement several times. This gets my mind
focused in the direction I want it to go before the undisciplined mind
has a chance to wander.
Once I am
up and at my desk, I begin to recite the following: Once I
a make a decision, it’s a done deal. I am
unstoppable. I repeat this over and over and with each repetition
try to up the emotional involvement. Being
that I cannot physically scream, I use my lips and my entire body as if
I was screaming with no sound coming out. Now
that I am completely revved up, I turn my attention back to my mission
statement and incant that again, taking full advantage of the emotional
high I have created. I seamlessly move on
to the list of my individual goals for the year.
What am I
doing? Why would I go through this process
day after day? I’m setting up a level of
expectation that connotes an air of inevitability to everything
important enough to land on my list of goals. By
investing my mind, body, and emotions in the concept that something
will be so simply by my determining it, and reciting the list of what
will be, the inevitability of these happenings become part of me. I no longer seek hoping to find, I just find.
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“Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can
erase our good deeds.”
- Buddha
I often
speak about overcoming obstacles to obtain success in whatever form
that might be. Feeling that our lives have
been successful is very important, but at the end of our lives will the
world be a better place for our having been in it?
Our bodies will rot, our toys and trophies rust, and if our
heirs have not been properly prepared to handle it, our money may well
destroy them. This may come as a shock to you, but when you die, the
world is going to go on without you. What
will you have left behind?
When a
good deed is performed, it is the sewing of positive energy. This creates a ripple effect that reaches far
beyond what we can comprehend. I don’t
know if I consider doing my daily quotations and commentary a good
deed, but I am constantly getting e-mail messages from people that tell
me they pass on the messages to their friends, family, co-workers,
employees, etc. If these people are
passing the messages on, then I can assume these recipients are doing
the same- sewing positive energy.
If you
have children, then perhaps the noblest deed you can do is to invest
time and love in the lives of those children. Leaving behind children
of character will send ripples of positive energy down throughout the
generations. While you may never know or
live to see it, the exponentially positive effect is impossible to
erase.
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“Never give up, for that is just the place and
time that the tide will turn.”
- Harriet
Beecher Stowe
Before we
are allowed to enter the Promised Land, we are often dragged through a
character building journey in the wilderness. Even
so-called overnight sensations are usually the products of years of
hammering and chipping away at the door of opportunity before it
finally gives way.
Despite
what some people might imagine, I don’t often feel anger, bitterness,
or even depression as a result of my condition. What
I struggle with most is pure unadulterated frustration.
When you are driven, and yet must rely on others for even the
most menial of task, frustration is inevitable. I
have had to learn that small, but consistent chunks of productivity
will eventually turn the tide of success in my favor.
The moment you cross the finish line, you will care not about
the rapidity with which you ran, but only that you have finished. Giving up ensures that moment will never come.
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”It's kind
of fun to do the impossible.”
- Walt
Disney (1901-1966)
In 1954,
the fastest any human had run the mile was 4 minutes, 1.3 seconds. It was a generally accepted fact that it was
humanly impossible to run the mile in under 4 minutes.
Doctors and scientists posited the notion that the human body
could not withstand the violence that running at a speed necessary to
break the 4-minute barrier would take. Many
even suggested that the heart would simply explode.
On May 5th,
1954, Roger Banister broke the 4-minute mile barrier.
Since that time, many people have run the mile in under 4
minutes. How could this happen? The
4-minute mile was impossible! Most things
are deemed impossible until someone does them, then suddenly they
become commonplace. It’s impossible for me
to ever walk again, right? Just watch. Figure out what you want to accomplish, and if
the answer to the question, “Why do I want to accomplish this?” is
powerful enough, you will usually figure out a way to get it done.
Ignore the impossible label, it usually proves to be false advertising.
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Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
“A pint of sweat, saves a gallon of blood.”
- General
George S. Patton
Too many
people in their quest to make life easy, make their lives infinitely
more difficult. With what seems to be a
universal epidemic of procrastination, it almost seems to be the
natural order. What is procrastination? It is merely relieving yourself of pain today
in exchange for pain tomorrow.
Often times putting off a task until tomorrow will have little consequence, but much of the time we are talking about a compounding of consequences. I cringe when I see parents of young children give in to their children on disciplinary matters because they are too tired or just do not want to deal with the headache of meting out proper disciplinary measures. No matter how difficult it might be to suck it up and consistently discipline your child, it is infinitely more difficult to deal for a lifetime with the monster being created. As Zig Ziglar says, “Life is tough, but when you are tough on yourself, life is going to be infinitely easier on you”.
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“Nothing great was ever achieved without
enthusiasm.”
- Ralph
Waldo Emerson
Who are
the people that give up on an endeavor? These
are people that feel they cannot make progress and therefore feel their
effort is of little use. Haven’t you been
in that place where resignation to failure was setting in when suddenly
the light went on? In a flash of
inspiration, you realized a way to make a success of your endeavor and
it was as if a match was lit and ignited a fire on the inside of you. Didn’t you magically transform from sagging
Susie to Gung-ho Gertrude? What determines
whether or not you will successfully finish your endeavor is whether or
not you can sustain your newfound enthusiasm.
Everyone
likes to decry the extremist, yet what makes extremists often times so
successful? Enthusiasm.
It is often not the message, but rather the contagious fever
pitched nature of the message and the conviction of the messenger which
propels a cause. Light a fire within
yourself and people will come around just to watch you burn.
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Wednesday, November 19th, 2008
“Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle
yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his
mind.”
- Leonardo
da Vinci
Decide
upon a definite purpose for your life and determine that this must and
will happen. Write down your purpose in
the form of a mission statement. Be
specific and succinct, and use language that will inculcate a feeling
of inevitability in your subconscious mind. The
best way to do this is to write your statement in the present tense as
if you have already begun achieving your purpose.
This
statement should be committed to memory and burned into your
subconscious through daily repetition. The
best agent to burn this into your subconscious mind is emotion. If you have created a purpose for your life
that absolutely must and will happen, it shouldn’t be hard to create
emotion about accomplishing it. And
because your definite purpose is inevitable, when obstacles attempt to
crush you, you will shirk them off, your resolve will strengthen, and
your confidence will explode. There will
be no second-guessing, no changing of your mind. Your
path is set and you will not be denied
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“One of the greatest discoveries a man makes,
one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he
couldn't do.”
- Henry Ford
(1863-1947)
Most people are severe underachievers and you
are probably one of them. How do I know
this? Because you are a human being and
most human beings never even scratch their potential.
The human mind is perhaps the most powerful force this world has
ever known, and yet, we use but a sliver of our brain cells. Through a lack of planning, a lack of
self-discipline, a lack of motivation, and a paucity of perseverance,
the vast majority of our potential achievement dissipates without our
having the slightest notion of it.
Every once in a while I will get a phone call
from someone exhibiting ALS like symptoms- muscle twitching, muscle
weakness, clumsiness, etc. They listen
carefully as I answer their questions about how my illness first
started. It does not take a psychic to
feel the subtext- “Oh my God! What if I
have ALS like Jeff? How could I live with
such a crippling disease?” Their sentiment
is understandable, but what they don’t realize is that they are feeding
the greatest crippler of all- fear. If we
were to eliminate all of the impediments to achieving our potential
enumerated in the paragraph above, would we then reach our potential? Not without dealing with the great crippler-
fear. What are you afraid to do? Do you realize you have the ability to do it?
Fear cannot be hidden
from or circumvented. You must force yourself to face it and act
in spite of it. Faith is like a muscle. When you exercise
it in the face of fear this way, it will get stronger with use and fear
will lose its grip on you. It is a blessed day of liberation when
you discover that you are able to walk through fear to accomplish what
you once were afraid to do.
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“Everything that irritates us about others can
lead us to an understanding of ourselves. “
- Carl
Gustav Jung
I often
find myself becoming impatient and at times irritated with others. When this happens, I do not like myself much. I once heard that you can measure the size of
a man by the size of the things that irritate him. This does not always
provide positive testimony for me, and as a result I often put myself
under the microscope for self-examination. I
don’t claim to be an expert in this area, but if you find yourself
being irritated by others, then take a break from finger pointing and
examine yourself. It may be that the other
person has some bad habits or is just plain annoying, but you will
never learn how to grow by developing the habit of blame first and ask
no questions.
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"Obstacles
are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your
goal.”
Henry Ford
(1863-1947)
We’ve all
seen the movie where someone is at a great height and told not to look
down (which, of course, the character promptly does).
Immediately he clings to the nearest object and freezes in
terror. It looks ridiculous because we
clearly saw the person moving ahead with steady progress as long as he
kept his eyes (and emotions) focused on the goal. We are struck by the
fact that mere knowledge of the danger involved has stifled the
character’s progress and is actually contributing to his peril. But don’t we all do the same thing?
When you
have a clearly defined goal that is big enough, you will usually find a
way to make it happen. This is why I encourage people to write down
their goals and come up with reasons to make their attainment an
absolute must. When something must happen,
the obstacles to that goal shrink from mountains to molehills. When the goal loses its focus or its
importance, every trifle of daily life is going to get in the way your
doing what is necessary to accomplish it. If
your goal is clearly emblazoned upon your mind, and its importance
written across your heart, obstacles become mere nuisances to be
swatted out of the way on the road to triumph.
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“A successful person is one who can lay a firm
foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her.”
- David
Brinkley
You want to be successful?
Get ready, because the bricks of obstacles and criticism are
soon to be hurled your way. Sometimes it
is well meaning friends and family members that just don’t understand
what you are doing. Sometimes it is those
that emotionally cannot stand to see someone else succeed.
Sometimes it will be competitors that have a financial (or
other) interest in seeing you fail. Whatever
the case, know that obstacles and criticism are coming.
This is the way it has always been, and you are not going to be
the first to avoid it.
We have all heard the admonition about making
lemonade when life gives us lemons. We
have all heard it for a reason- it is true. If
used properly, obstacles can sharpen our problem solving skills and
strengthen our resolve. Criticism can be a
teacher and galvanize our determination. It
is usually when I am told that I can’t do something, I determine all
the more to prove that statement wrong. You
can’t avoid the bricks, so decide what you will do when they come
flying your way.
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“As a single footstep will not make a path on
the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To
make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep
mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish
to dominate our lives.”
- Henry David Thoreau
Would you
expect to do aerobics one time and then claim yourself physically fit
for life? Would you expect to take a
single golf lesson and believe you had mastered the sport?
Then why would someone read a positive thinking book, or tell
themselves once or twice that they are a winner, and expect wholesale,
lasting change in their life? You are not
going to think beautiful, uplifting thoughts before crawling into bed
tonight and wake up a new person tomorrow. Not happening.
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"The quality of persistence is to the character of man
as carbon is to steel."
- Napoleon Hill
I am always amazed at how many people give up on an
endeavor at the first sign of resistance. Many
intelligent, competent people will set a goal, lay out a plan, attack
that plan with vigor, and then fold up their tent and quit as soon as
the going gets rough. Are you aware that
there is no record of anyone having ever accomplished anything
significant without first meeting with temporary defeat over and over
again? Are you supposing that you will be
the first person to ever do so? You will
not. You must fail repeatedly until you
have learned the lessons necessary, and developed the character
demanded to attain the object of your desire.
If I could communicate just one message to my readers,
especially my young readers, it would be this: you are never
defeated until you concede that it is game over.
You can accomplish pretty much anything you want in this life if
you will do just two things: 1) Get perfectly clear on exactly
what it is you want to accomplish. 2)
Relentlessly pursue your objective until it is finally yours, paying
whatever price is required. When you get
knocked down, get back up. When you get
discouraged, feel sorry for yourself for about three seconds, and then
get yourself back in the fight. Accept
that you- like every successful person - will experience temporary
defeat, but determine ahead of time that this will only strengthen your
resolve. Inoculate yourself against the discouragement that causes one
to give up on oneself by anticipating temporary defeat and use its
accompanying lessons to catapult you to victory.
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"Somebody
should tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every
minute of every day. Do it!
I say. Whatever you want to do, do
it now! There are only so many tomorrows."
- Michael
Landon
To many
this will seem like an obvious and redundant admonition, but as someone
diagnosed with a terminal illness before my life had any chance to
begin realizing itself, I can tell you that what Mr. Landon is saying
must absolutely be taken to heart. This is
not just a good idea, it is absolutely vital to your very existence. When I was young I can remember thinking, “I
simply can’t lose. I don’t know why God
has blessed me so, but I’m unstoppable.” This
was just before He began to strip so many of those blessings (including
my health and very life) away from me.
Few of
life's regrets come from what you do. Most of them will come from that
which you should have done but failed to do. You
don’t know what life has in store for you tomorrow, so you better not
waste today. There indeed are only so many
tomorrows and you have no idea when you are living your final today.
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“Just
begin and the mind grows heated; continue, and the task will be
completed.”
- Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe
One of the
most important concepts in accomplishing something- be it a simple task
or a multiple task project – is that of creating momentum. For me, the
most difficult part of a task is just getting it started. Once started,
the most dangerous threat to its completion is a substantial pause in
activity. With all of the responsibilities of work and home life flying
in our faces, a paused activity or project gets shoved to the back
burner to be resumed when we “have time”. For all of the advances in
the time saving devices (microwaves, e-mail, palm pilots, etc.) few
people I know actually have more free time as a result. More activities
just get crammed into fewer hours. So once we get sidetracked and pull
our project over to the side, it’s tough to pull it back into the daily
traffic of activity with all the oncoming duties and responsibilities
flying at us.
When I
write these messages, I usually try to think the message all the way
through. For some reason, I still haven’t truly learned that that
rarely works. I sit and think and sometimes even postpone writing at
all (can we say procrastination?) because I just can’t think it all the
way through. When I’m most effective is when I think about it just
enough to have a concept I’m excited to convey and then just start
scribbling. The quotation triggers the concept, and the words in my
scribbling trigger ideas about where to go next, how to tie pieces
together, examples I can use, etc. If I can just get started, my mind
grows heated. If I just stay disciplined and continue writing, very
quickly, the task is completed. Jump into that project or goal you’ve
been putting off and see if it is not the same for you.
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Quotes
“Constant
dripping hollows out a stone. “
- Lucretius
It’s
almost time for the holidays again. Now,
doesn’t it seem like we just got through the holidays?
Think about how quickly this past year has gone.
When we look at a monumental task and think about what it will
take to accomplish that task, we often feel overwhelmed.
But what if, like the dripping water on the stone, you took a
small bite out of that task everyday? Not
everyday one week and twice the next week, then take a couple weeks off
before putting three more days together again. What
if you actually took that bite out of the task EVERY – SINGLE – DAY?
We’ve seen
how quickly a year goes by. Try to imagine
how much progress can be made on an endeavor taking 365 bites! If you lost just one pound per week, at this
time next year you would be 52 pounds lighter. If
you wrote just one page per day on that novel you have wanted to write
for years, you would have a 365-page tome at this time next year. It is the constant dripping of small actions
that hollow out the stone.
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Quotes
”It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is
because we do not dare that they are difficult.”
- Seneca
(3 B.C. - 65 A.D.)
Most of
the people I know that have accomplished something extraordinary, made
that accomplishment because no one told them that they could not do it,
or they just refused to listen to the naysayers. It
usually takes a bold and daring strike against the grain to accomplish
something of significance. If these people
had listened to their critics (most of which are not successful
themselves), they would have either tried to eek out a victory by
playing it safe, or never even dared to try. Either
way, success would not have been forthcoming. If
you truly want to accomplish a great purpose, the most difficult cross
you will ever have to bear is the knowledge that you never truly gave
it your best shot. I choose to avoid this
regret as life is far too difficult to bear that cross on a daily basis.
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”He who
limps is still walking. “
-
Stanislaw J. Lec
You would be amazed at the number of hoops I
must jump through to get these quotations and commentary out to you
each day. Should I quit doing them? If you could see the struggle I engage every
morning to get out of bed, get showered, and get dressed for the day,
you might ask, “is it worth it?” Should I
give up and just lie around in bed everyday? Even
going to the bathroom is a time consuming multi-step process. Should I just wet all over myself? People often wonder how I summon up the
courage and motivation to grind through all of this on a daily basis. I can do this because I have learned what most
people haven’t- life is a marathon, not a sprint.
Do you
remember that story we were told when we were children about the
tortoise and the hare? That story contains
more than just entertainment value for the small child, it speaks to a
valuable lesson in life that most of us continually overlook. If you remember, the hare sprints out to a
gigantic lead over the slow plodding tortoise and decides he can afford
to take a nap. Consistently poking along
the path to the finish line, the tortoise passes the once front running
hare and wins the race.
Too
numerous to count are the times I have seen people take off on an
endeavor like a house afire only to get side-tracked and eventually
give up on their plans. In our quick-fix,
microwave society, most people give up if the answer (or victory) is
not immediately forthcoming. Let this be
the other guy. In most situations, it is
not how quickly you finish, but whether or not you finish at all. Regardless of whether you are sprinting,
limping, or crawling, if you just keep moving you will eventually cross
that finish line and victory will be yours.
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Quotes
“Few people are successful unless a lot of other
people want them to be.”
- Charles
Brower
Motivational
speaker, Zig Ziglar, often repeats, “You can have everything in life
you want if you’ll just help enough other people get what they
want.” Success philosopher, Napoleon Hill, speaks of the
necessity of creating mastermind alliances. If we are going to be
successful, we are going to need the cooperation and help of a lot of
other people.
Are you
the type of person people want to help? When you succeed, do you
share the credit with those who have helped, or does your ego simply
explode? When someone scratches your back to bump you up to the
next level of success, do you return the favor and scratch their back,
or do you simply pat your own and charge off to your next
conquest? Of those who might potentially help you, ask yourself,
“what’s in it for them?” Often times that will be nothing more
than the satisfaction of having helped someone who truly appreciates
it, but whatever the reward, it’s got to be win-win, or eventually both
are going to lose.
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“Difficulties
are meant to rouse, not discourage.“
- William
Ellery Channing
My life is
difficult. I cannot walk and am confined
to a wheelchair. I cannot lift my arms and
my hands are almost completely useless. I
am barely able to speak and every day the disease that ravages my body
takes away another small piece of my life. Even the most fundamental
activities of daily life are an ordeal. Can
you imagine what my life, and the lives of those around me, would be
like if I saw my difficulties as a reason to be discouraged? Everyone gets discouraged from time to time,
but the real question is- will you lie in the gutter and wallow in
self-pity, or snap out of your despair, rise up and start kicking ass? Until someone can explain to me the value of
wallowing in self-pity and giving up on life, I’ll just have to keep
kicking ass.
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“Luck is the residue of design.”
- Baseball
Hall of Famer Branch Rickey
Luck is
the most common excuse made by the ignorant and the indolent for others
success and their own failure. It is true
that people start life with different advantages and disadvantages and
some people do get more breaks in life than others, but success usually
occurs when opportunity meets preparedness. Preparedness
is usually the result of long hard hours of work and consistent
application of success principles. There
are very few accidental successes or failures. If
you dig deep enough, you will find planning, hard work, perseverance
and the consistent application of success principles at the bottom of
what many call “luck”.
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“Every new
beginning comes from some other beginning's end.”
-
Semisonic, Closing Time
At first
this quotation sounded like an old cliché I was forced to learn
in English class in high school. Yet, this
is a critically important concept to remember. Just
as every disaster in your life brings with it the seed of an equivalent
or greater opportunity, every ending brings with it a new beginning. Whether or not it is the beginning of
something good or something bad is really up to you.
Most of
the hopes and dreams of my youth were washed away with the advent of
ALS in my life. Yet my hopes and dreams of
today are no less grandiose than before, just different.
After much soul searching, I decided to embrace the
opportunities afforded me by my new condition. Opportunities? Yes. How many
fathers are able to stay at home and raise their children around the
clock? How many people are able to find
the time to write that book they’ve been wanting to write?
How many people have been so lucky as to be challenged so hard
by life that they will necessarily build character or perish? Without ALS as the catalyst, I probably would
not be bringing this message to you. This
message is part of a philosophy of life that probably would never have
been born had ALS not entered my previous life. This
is a philosophy I intend to take to the world; a blessed opportunity
indeed.
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"People
with great vision will always encounter violent opposition from
mediocre minds."
-
Albert Einstein
We should
just face it- most of us are sheep. From
the time we are in school, most of us spend our time and effort trying
to fit in to be accepted by others. While
we all need love and acceptance, how are you going to distinguish
yourself by going with the flow? What
people don’t realize is that it takes a bold strike against the grain
to accomplish something significant. Think
of the scorn and ridicule Columbus, Galileo, and Martin Luther endured. When you try something new and people ridicule
you, they are usually bleeding ignorance or envy. Learn
to associate the scorn and laughter with the fact that you are probably
on the right track!
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"Nothing
splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that
something inside of them was superior to circumstance."
- Bruce
Barton
Isn’t it
amazing how many well-meaning people in our lives crush our spirits and
dreams by imploring us to be realistic? Allow me to translate the
admonishment to be realistic- “Don’t try, don’t put yourself ‘out
there’, don’t have any expectations of anything good or get your hopes
up. If you do, you may end up
disappointed.” Using this logic, no one
should ever have children for fear they might become a drug addict or a
criminal. Don’t ever fly on an airplane,
it might crash. Don’t drive a car, talk to
anyone you don’t know, own a dog, or even cross the street. These could end in a fatal or crippling
accident, assault by a stranger, animal mauling, or being struck by a
bus. You might try avoiding all
disappointment and uncertainty by cloistering yourself up inside your
front door, but you would then be ensuring the greatest tragedy of all-
a wasted life.
We all
have different strengths and weaknesses and, therefore, are best suited
for different undertakings. The seeds of
greatness, however, have been planted inside every one of us by our
creator and need only be watered with the proper application of
thought. Once you understand and believe that something inside of you
is superior to circumstance, there is very little that can stop you. Don’t listen to those that would rob you of
your dreams. In 1984, realistic for me was to put my affairs in order
and get ready to die. Nothing great was
ever accomplished by being realistic. Dream the dream. Make it happen.
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“Creativity often consists of merely turning up what
is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought
up only a little more than a century ago? “
- Bernice Fitz-Gibbon
Research
shows that most millionaires make their millions upon moving to a new
location. The interesting thing is, people
move from Houston to Chicago to make their millions, while others move
from Chicago to Houston. It often takes a
new perspective to find the opportunity that is all around us and just
a little imagination.
In his
landmark book, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill
trumpets the necessity of imagination in the arena of success. He makes
a distinction between creative imagination and synthetic imagination.
Creative imagination is described as the faculty responsible for
“inspirations” and new ideas. It is the tool responsible for the
inspired works of geniuses like Edison, Einstein, Shakespeare, and
Mozart. It is the synthetic imagination, however, that is employed the
vast majority of the time success is attained, even by the so-called
geniuses. Hill describes synthetic imagination as the arranging of “old
concepts, ideas, or plans into new combinations.” In other words,
turning up what is already there. You need not be a genius to make an
impact in this world, you just need a little imagination.
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"Autumn is
a second spring when every leaf is a flower."
- Albert
Camus
Even if you think autumn’s turning leaves
from green to orange is beautiful, I bet you never thought of the
leaves as flowers. How we interpret the
world around us- as well as everyone and everything in it- will
determine how we approach life. If you see
the world as hostile and always trying to screw you, what will your
attitude be when genuine opportunity knocks? Will
you not be negative and cynical, looking for the catch?
What if you see the world as a playground of endless adventure
and exciting opportunities? Might you be
more likely to answer the door?
Haven’t you had the experience of meeting
someone for the first time and thought they were a complete jackass,
only to discover, once you got to know them, they were not such a
rotten apple after all? Clearly you
misjudged them- or did you? You see, most
people are not infallible angels, nor are they the devil’s spawn. If you keep your mind open and look hard
enough, you will find favor or fault with just about anyone. So it is with the world and the events of our
lives.
With everyone you meet, and in all the
circumstances you find yourself in, you should resolve to become a good
finder. Andrew Carnegie, the 19th
century steel baron, said that you develop people the same way you mine
for gold. You go in expecting to move a
lot of dirt, but you don’t go in looking for the dirt, you go in
looking for the gold. Somehow, the dirt in
life does not bother you so much when you expect it to be there, but
resolve to focus on the gold.
Try something with me. Everyone
that you come in contact with today, give them a compliment on their
appearance. Not phony flattery, but a
sincere compliment. If you will resolve to
find the gold in their appearance, you will find it.
They might be overweight, unattractive, and dress as tacky as
Madonna, but if you look close enough, you’ll find something you
appreciate, even if it’s just the colors in their socks!
You’ll make their day and feel better about yourself. Start with
a small nugget and you’ll soon be wondering how you’ve missed the
mother lode of good that’s surrounded you all these years. Learn to
find the blooming flower in the dying leaf.
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“Genius is
one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
- Thomas
Edison
Many times
I have heard the songwriting duo of John Lennon and Paul McCartney
referred to as genius. I think this is a
fair representation, but how did they become genius songwriters? If you focus all of your attention and energy
on one particular subject, and study that subject inside and out,
obsessively working your tail off every day to improve yourself in this
area, there is a good chance others will eventually think you are some
kind of genius.
The first
summer that Lennon and McCartney spent together, they reportedly wrote
over 150 songs, most of them throwaways. By
competing with each other, always trying to top the other, they quickly
honed their songwriting skills. So I ask
you, was it their natural God-given talent that made them geniuses? I don’t doubt that they had some natural
talent, but clearly their focus and obsessive devotion to their craft
paved the way for their wearing the genius monikers.
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"People
with great vision will always encounter violent opposition from
mediocre minds."
- Albert
Einstein
We should
just face it- most of us are sheep. From
the time we are in school, most of us spend our time and effort trying
to fit in to be accepted by others. While
we all need love and acceptance, how are you going to distinguish
yourself by going with the flow? What
people don’t realize is that it takes a bold strike against the grain
to accomplish something significant. Think
of the scorn and ridicule Columbus, Galileo, and Martin Luther endured. When you try something new and people ridicule
you, they are usually bleeding ignorance or envy. Learn
to associate the scorn and laughter with the fact that you are probably
on the right track!
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"There
is one thing that will keep a man in ignorance and poverty. That one thing is contempt before
investigation."
-
Herbert
Spencer
Most
people know who Gene Simmons of KISS is. Not
only is he one of the most celebrated rock stars in history, but after
30 plus years of staggering success, the KISS express rolls on. I got to know Gene more than 20 years ago when
he was producing an album for my brother’s band, Black N Blue. I used to sit for hours on end and watch him
help the band shape and mold the material for their album.
One of the
most impressive characteristics of this music legend is how incredibly
open-minded he is. He would often gather
the band around him for brainstorming sessions asking for as many new
ideas as possible as well as interjecting his own ideas.
At the end of the day, the best ideas would win out. No ego. No
insistence that his idea be the one accepted. Try
everything and the best ideas win. I remember having the distinct
feeling that I, merely being a friend of the band, could have hurled in
my two cents from the sidelines, and if it would have been the best
idea, it would have been used. There was
never a hint of contempt for any idea before it had been investigated. People have all sorts of opinions about Gene
Simmons, but no one would mistake him for being either ignorant or
impoverished. I think I witnessed one of
the reasons why. Keep your mind open. You never know when or from whom
the best ideas will come.
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“Do or do
not. There is no try.”
- Yoda,
character in the
movie, The Empire Strikes Back
Because of
the invaluable lessons that can be learned from failure, It is better
to try and fail than to never try at all. However,
you should never go into an endeavor with a mindset of, “I guess I’ll
give it a try.” The doubt conveyed to
yourself in that message will mushroom into an expectancy of failure at
the first sign of resistance. A feeling of
absolute faith needs to imbibe every part of your being when you attack
an endeavor.
Try*
something with me. Think of something
important that you really want or need to do. Close
your eyes and imagine yourself attempting this action with a sense of
hope that it will work out. Now, imagine
yourself attacking the same task with a feeling of absolute certainty
that the outcome will be the one you desire. I’m
talking about an resolute conviction that there is no possible outcome
except the one you have determined will happen. Do
you feel the difference? Which attitude do
you think will carry you through to victory when obstacles rear their
ugly heads and the path to victory looks cloudy and difficult?
* Try in this
instance refers to this Merriam-Webster definition of try: to put to test or trial, rather than this
one: to make an attempt at.
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“Keep
getting it wrong until you get it right”
–
IDEO
Corporation, Company Motto
This
principle is so simple, yet most of us never truly learn this lesson. Everything is easy once we “get it”. And what does it take to get it? Usually it
just takes perseverance and a little creativity. If an endeavor is
truly worth attempting, then it is worth doing poorly until it can be
done well. When interviewed by Napoleon
Hill, Thomas Edison said of his discovering the incandescent light
bulb, “I had to succeed because I ran out of ways not to invent the
incandescent light bulb. And if I hadn’t
discovered the light bulb yet, I wouldn’t be wasting my time talking to
you. I would be in the laboratory
exhausting the rest of the ways not to succeed.”
Nobody
likes to fail. But failure is not
permanent unless we quit before we succeed. If
something is truly worth succeeding at, keep getting it wrong until you
get it right!
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“All
things are difficult before they are easy.“
- Thomas
Fuller, M.D.
Very
little in life is easy when you don’t know what you are doing. It is unrealistic to the point of absurdity to
expect anything different. Still, people have the unfortunate tendency
of shying away from that which is new or difficult.
The truth is, there is very little in this life you cannot
master if you consistently focus your mind and energy on it.
Think of a
skill you would love to master. Do you
think if you devoted the time and energy necessary that you could
improve your ability at this skill just one percent every day? How much improvement would that be over the
course of a year? Three hundred and
sixty-five percent? No.
You will improve far more than three hundred and sixty-five
percent because that daily one percent begins stacking on top of itself
and actually ends up compounding to 3,741 percent.
That skill you desperately want to master might be difficult
when you start, but at 3,741 percent improvement per year, how long
until it becomes just another sharpened arrow in your quiver of master
skills?
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"You
will always miss 100% of the shots you never take."
-
Hockey Legend,
Wayne Gretzky
A good friend once told me that when hunting for women, “There is no shame in striking out as long as you go down swinging." My friend might be a cad, but his approach is dead on. To succeed in anything, you must put yourself in a position to succeed. If you don’t take the shot, how can you make the shot? This seems so obvious that you are probably insulted I bring it up. However, my experience tells me that most people walk through life kicking themselves over lost opportunities- they simply never took the shot available to them. I know that most of my regrets in life stem from what I didn’t do rather than what I did do. Don’t let an opportunity pass you by without at least taking a shot at it.
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"I shall
allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him."
- Booker
T. Washington
Most
sensible people agree that hate is a venomous and destructive poison. When we think of hatred, we often think of
Hitler and the Nazi concentration camps, or the horrifying violence
heaped upon Black Americans by the Ku Klux Klan. As
horrifying as it is that these victims of hatred had to endure such
malevolence, the biggest victim of hatred is the hater.
Hate and
resentment will tear you apart. If you
have been wronged and hold resentment towards someone, you need to
forgive that person. Some of you have been
hurt so bad and violated so unjustly that the thought of letting that
person off the hook might seem more than you can handle, and bitterly
unfair. The problem is, by harboring
resentment, you are not punishing that person, but rather yourself. Do you realize that the person you resent
probably considers you to be the bad guy or doesn’t give any mind to
you whatsoever? It’s extremely unlikely
that your resentment is harming that person in any way, shape, or form. I guarantee, however, that a smoldering
cauldron of hate or resentment within you is poisoning your life.
We forgive
those that have wronged us, not to be magnanimous and let the
perpetrators off the hook, but to free ourselves of the venom within
that is tainting and stunting our own lives. Release
that resentment and hate in your life and free yourself to be the
person you want to be, and begin enjoying the life you deserve.
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“Diligence
is the mother of good luck“
- Benjamin
Franklin (1706-1790)
A friend
of mine started a business with his father and his brother. This man’s appearance, demeanor, and air about
him does not conjure up the image of someone able to retire wealthy
before his 40th birthday. Yet,
this is exactly what he has done. Because
he does not fit the stereotypical image of a successful businessman,
many (mostly out of envy) have tried to chock his success up to luck,
as if he had somehow won life’s lottery.
I know
nothing of this man’s business acumen or his work habits in the
business world, but I do not believe for a second that his success is
due to luck. What I do know is that in
high school this man transformed himself from a gangly, uncoordinated
kid into a force on the basketball court. How
he did it had little to do with luck. He
spent hours everyday before school and after practice working
diligently one-on-one with coaches to develop his skills.
In the end, he nearly took down long time NBA power forward AC
Green in a fierce toe-to-toe battle in the Oregon State High School
Semi-Finals. I have no doubt that the same
hard work and diligence applied to his basketball skills were applied
to his business and that all of the howls of “luck” are primarily
the wine (whine?) of sour grapes.
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“The secret of joy in work is contained in one
word -- excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy
it.”
- Pearl S.
Buck
When I was
a freshman in high school, my algebra teacher was boring and
incompetent. As a result, I couldn’t
follow her lectures or her individual instruction and promptly scraped
by with a low C. It was a miserable course for me and because my high
school only required one year of math at the time, I resolved not to
take math ever again. Though I was convinced that I had absolutely no
aptitude for mathematics, after a year off from the subject, I decided
to grit my teeth and suffer through it one more time.
To my surprise, I did quite well in geometry, and when I hit
trigonometry, I exploded. Though I had an
extremely demanding instructor, I scored 97% on all tests and homework
for the year. When I took the SAT’s, I scored high enough in the math
section to be one of only twelve incoming freshman invited to
participate in my college’s honors math program. Suddenly
I loved math! Hmmm, funny how that works.
Why do
successful people consistently implore the rest of us to find what we
truly love when striving for success? Because
they know that people shy away from that which they are not good at,
and will work tirelessly at that which they love. It
takes long hours of work and a commitment to excellence to truly be
excellent at something. You should find
what you love and are willing to work at tirelessly and then find a way
to get someone to pay you for it.
If you are
temporarily stuck in a position where you must do that which you do not
like, don’t do what most people do and shy away from those areas they
are not good at. Instead, fight through
that resistance and become excellent at that which you do not like. When you do this, not only will your
confidence and self-esteem swell, but you’ll discover how much you now
enjoy that which you once detested. It’s
tough to hate something too much when you are damned good at it.
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“The tragedy in life doesn't lie in not reaching
your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.”
- Benjamin
Mays
In order
to effectively deal with an illness like ALS, one must be optimistic
and forward-looking. As much as anything
else, I have accomplished this through the use of setting and striving
to reach goals. Please take note of the fact that I said “setting and
striving” and purposely left out the idea of reaching my goals. There is nothing like reaching a goal to drive
your barbaric yawp up from your viscera and out over the rooftops, but
it really is in the setting and striving to obtain
your goals where the greatest life benefits are found.
Everybody
has goals. The problem is that most people’s goals are either extremely
uninspiring (to make it through the week until Thursday night when
Friends is on. Oops! Now
what?), or their goals are so vague (be a good person, be a good
parent, make more money, etc) they lack the focus and therefore the
drive to inspire any particular action. I
believe everyone should have clearly defined goals with a written plan
for their achievement. I have pages and pages of goals, most of which I
will never bring to my current goal list, and of those that do make the
list, I rarely reach the majority of them in the time frame I allot. Remember, to make it into the Baseball Hall of
Fame you need only be successful three out of ten times at bat.
I can
achieve my goals and revel in the ecstasy of victory or I can fail to
reach my goals and learn from my mistakes. Either
way, I choose to live with the focus and purpose that comes from having
clearly defined goals. To drift through
life, wondering where you are going or where you will end up is indeed
a tragedy I have resolved to avoid.
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"Self-responsibility
is the first step to self-esteem."
-
Nathaniel Branden
We all
know somebody that just cannot take personal responsibility for their
actions. Think about that person and tell
me whether or not they are a successful, healthy and well-adjusted
person. Usually when someone cannot handle
responsibility for their own actions it is because their self image is
so low that it cannot handle the blow associated with “blame “. Conversely, someone self-assured can easily
look himself or herself in the mirror, accept that they have made a
mistake, take action to rectify that mistake and move on.
Taking responsibility for oneself is not just an indication of a
sound self-image, but a first step towards one.
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“Argue for your limitations and sure enough
they're yours."
Be very
careful what you argue for or against. The
most powerful part of your mind is the subconscious.
The subconscious mind makes no judgments; it simply believes
whatever it has been instructed to believe. When
a thought enters the conscious mind, it is either rejected or passed on
to the subconscious mind to become part of your subconscious belief
system. How much a part of that belief
system is determined by the number of repetitions this thought has in
your mind and the amount of emotion with which it is passed from the
conscious mind to the subconscious.
When you
argue for or against something, you are emotionalizing that belief. Even if at first you don’t believe what you
are saying, if the subconscious receives this message over and over
with emotion attached to it, it becomes part of your programming and
part of who you are. If you argue
(emotionalized messages) that you are not intelligent enough, competent
enough, young enough, old enough, experienced enough, healthy enough,
then eventually you will be right. Take
stock of the thoughts you hold in your mind and refuse to play host to
any that do not empower you.
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“Live with
an attitude of gratitude”
- Anthony
Robbins
Whenever I
start to feel blue or like the deck of life has been stacked against
me, I pull out a list I created several years ago.
This list is entitled “My Life’s Greatest Blessings”, and
includes everything and everyone that I am thankful for. Whenever I do
this, I am quickly reminded that I have a ton more to be thankful for
than one could ever imagine. How about the fact that I was born in
America and am therefore free? I could
have been born under some tyrannical dictator and live my entire life
in cruel oppression. Instead, I have the
best friends in the world, a wonderful, intact family, and an absolute
jewel of a daughter.
If you’ll just play a little game of contrast
you’ll see that living in a free and prosperous country, you’re pretty
damned spoiled compared to the rest of the world and have almost
certainly lost perspective on that. There
is no better medicine for the soul than to count your blessings and
live with an attitude of gratitude.
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“Always
do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
I
remember, several years back, listening to the great Atlanta preacher,
Charles Stanley, as he spoke of the necessity for parents to model
honesty for the children. At the time, my
daughter was just about four years old and I could feel her sponge-like
mind soaking up everything I said and did. I
had taken her for a ride on my scooter to the store where we purchased
some snacks to eat while watching a movie together later that evening. I did not realize until after we had left the
store the grocery clerk had given me back too much change. Nearly
half way home, I decided to go all the way back to the store and return
the change to the clerk. I remember the look of astonishment on her
face when I returned what was less than a dollar. After a few moments
of stunned silence, she looked at me and said, “Oh my gosh! An honest person!” Not
only was she impressed, but I could also see that little sponge soaking
up every detail of what was going on.
Not only
was this a great lesson for my daughter, but it feels good to do right. Think about how you feel when you’ve done
wrong. Whether you hang your head in
shame, figure out a way to blame everybody else, or are able to cover
it up so that you get to stew in your own personal guilt without the
rest of the world knowing, it sucks! It
either gnaws away at your soul, or worse, you become numb to it, and
then you’ve lost your soul. Always do
right. Always do right. You will astonish
and give hope to many, and feel a whole lot better about yourself.
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"Pain
is Temporary. Quitting is forever."
-
Lance Armstrong
This is
one of the most valuable lessons people can learn.
In our “quick fix” society, too many people want everything to
be quick, easy and fun or they want nothing to do with it.
The problem with this type of thinking is that if everything was
quick, easy and fun, then everyone would be able to succeed at
everything and there would be no reward for achievement for anyone. The
unmistakable joy and satisfaction you see on the faces of athletes that
become world champions is the gratification they receive at the end of
a long struggle, recognizing the fact that they are one of the elite,
select few to achieve what they have achieved.
Success
takes the application of success principles over a long period of time. Perseverance is a must. Most
people quit just before their breakthrough to victory is about to
happen. Why? Either
they become discouraged because it is taking too long to satisfy their
immediate timetable, or the effort (pain) is too great.
What people don’t realize is that the pain is indeed temporary,
but the quitting is forever. Pain
endurance is like a muscle. The more you
work it (endure the pain), the stronger you get. Conversely,
learn to quit and the next time you face pain and adversity you will be
too soft to do anything except exercise the quitting habit you have
developed. Don’t quit!
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"True friendship is like sound health; the value
of it is seldom known until it be lost."
- Charles
Caleb Colton
I have
always believed that the best way to acquire good friends is to be a
good friend. Judging by my wealth of
friends, I must have made good on my philosophy and feel as wealthy as
King Solomon because of them. As someone that has not been of sound
health, I have no hesitation in saying that I would not want my health
back if it came at the price of losing my friends. I’ve seen too many
people without these treasures to feel I could get along without them.
I’ve heard
it said that if at the end of your life you can count two or three true
friends you have lived a rich life. I agree. Cherish your health and
thank God daily for your family and friends. You don’t know when you
might lose these jewels.
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Quotes
“Happiness
is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal or goal.”
- Earl Nightingale
I recently
had an old friend over for a visit. We talked and laughed, and then she
asked about an old flame of hers. I had to inform her that in the last
few years, this man had taken his own life. She began to ask me my
thoughts on suicide and what I think happens when people go to such
extremes. I was caught a little off guard and by no means consider
myself an expert on the subject, but clearly at such a time a person
feels the flame of hope go out with little or no chance of reigniting
it. Where I sit, it would be easy to let the flame flicker and die, but
as long as life has meaning and I have something of value to look
forward to, I feel ready to battle whatever life throws at me.
There is
an old saying to emphasize a point when something is deemed a
certainty- You can put this in your pipe and smoke it. Well you can break out your Bic lighter for
this: The people who give up on an endeavor are those who
think they can’t make progress at it. What is the use of knocking
yourself out at a game you can’t win? Even the lazy individual who has
more than enough ability to complete a task, but bails before
completion is essentially giving himself a vote of no confidence on his
own perseverance. He is giving up before he fails, because deep down he
can’t imagine himself finishing the job.
My future
was drastically altered in 1983 with the advent of ALS in my life. My
dreams were torn asunder when that storm blasted the journey my life
was on permanently off course. But by changing my destination and
repositioning my sails, I have found meaning in lifting others and
continually attempting to increase the scope and depth of that impact.
When you witness the progressive realization of an ideal or goal, you
begin to get a sense of what all is possible in life, and your
confidence in your ability to affect that outcome begins to swell.
Start small and then let your expectations grow. As soon as you are
ready to take the next step, you will have the opportunity to take it.
There are very few things that will invigorate your zeal for life like
the unfolding of a new reality based upon an ideal larger than
yourself, or the realization of a dream that you yourself authored.
Find your mission and Throw your heart into it. You’ll shock yourself
with what you are capable of and life will never look the same.
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"Success
is not forever and failure is never fatal"
- Don Shula, Hall of Fame NFL Coach
We have
all heard the admonishment about not resting on our laurels, yet most
of us lose at least some perspective once we achieve an overwhelming
success. In the 2003 college football
season, the Oregon Ducks hammered the third ranked Michigan Wolverines
and climbed into the top ten college football rankings. it seemed the
sky was the limit for the mighty Ducks until they spent the next two
weeks looking like the Keystone Cops in shoulder pads and fell
completely out of the top 25 rankings.
Whatever
success principles and habits you employ to gain success, you must
continue to exercise those habits or your success will be fleeting. Ask any entertainer that has made it to the
top of their profession and they will tell you that as tough as it was
to get to the top, staying atop their perch is that much more difficult.
Success is
not forever, neither is failure. Until you
quit, the game of life is not over. Whether
or not you get back up off the ground and fight when life knocks you to
ground, or roll over and wet on yourself is as simple as a decision. What is awesome is the fact that that decision
is entirely yours. Don’t get too high or
complacent when things are rolling your way, or too low and down on
yourself when things seem to be getting away from you.
Stay the course with a sound set of success principles and
habits and you will win in the end.
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“The more you recognize
and express gratitude for the things you have, the more things you will
have to express gratitude for.”
-Zig Ziglar
I remember once when a
girlfriend and I had been getting on each other’s nerves, we decided to
present each other with a list of all the things that were bothering us
about each other. We had intended to
present our lists to each other in hopes of working out our differences. When I sat down to write the list, I was
suddenly struck with the fact that I had been consumed with everything
“wrong” about her.
I took some time to
reflect, and decided instead to write down everything “right” about her. My list of everything I appreciate and admire
about her began to grow and slowly the negative began to shrink and
dissipate. I began finding myself saying
things like, “how many people would really do that for me?” And, “I’ve always wanted someone that has this
characteristic, but almost nobody does.” Suddenly,
this person that I had been so “fed up” with began to grow in my eyes,
and my love and appreciation for her began to skyrocket.
From then on, whenever I
began to complain to myself about her, I just pulled out the list and
reminded my petty self of everything “right” with her.
How long has it been since you have meditated on and expressed
gratitude for everything you love in and about your spouse or partner
or children? How much would you miss those
things if these people were taken from you? Whatever
you focus on and emotionalize, you tend to manifest in your life. Be very careful.
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“Concentrate
all your thoughts on the task at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until
brought to focus.”
-
Alexander Graham Bell
I remember
the fascination I had as a child with magnifying glasses. Where I grew
up in Oregon, deciduous trees are aplenty. I would spend hours watching
the sun’s rays pierce thru the glass’s lens to start brown and orange
October leaves aflame. Amidst the cool autumn air, it seemed almost
magic that the sun‘s rays could leave a leaf cold one minute and turn
it to fire the next. It’s not magic, of course. The glass’s convex lens
concentrates the sun's rays onto a small area, heating up the area and
thus resulting in ignition of the exposed surface of the leaf. Similar
“magic” is available to you every day of your life.
One of the
sins I routinely commit against my own success in life is that of
attempting to accomplish too many things at once. I end up feeling
scattered and guilty. Scattered because no matter how hard I work or
how much time I put in, it’s always time to switch gears and start
something else for fear of falling behind on yet another project. When
I start making serious progress on Project X, I feel guilty that I’ve
neglected Project Y. That’s no way to live and it does very little to
accomplish X or Y.
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“If you see a whole
thing- it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives...But up
close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job,
you get tired, you lose the pattern.”
- Ursula Le Guin
In a school assembly a
couple years ago, my daughter made a very moving presentation. She
brought to the attention of the audience that most of them know her
father as the motivational coach on the football team, or as the man
that rises above circumstance to send out daily messages of
inspiration. In both cases, people often only see the glorified example
of inspiration that being exposed to one with a debilitating disease
like ALS can bring. She brought people back to the reality that she
must daily watch her grandmother and her father’s caregivers grind away
to get him through each day, all the while understanding that she will
likely not only lose her father prematurely, but will never experience
many of the father/daughter activities many take for granted.
Life in my shoes is
frustrating. I have so much I want to experience and accomplish and
yet, with my condition, even the extreme minutiae of life are slow and
tedious. It can be dehumanizing (like when the well-meaning speak slow
and loud to make sure the “impaired” guy can follow) and it can wreak
havoc on the emotions – mine and those of everyone around me. Still,
through all of the burdens associated with my life that must be
carried, I have found a way to turn this colossal negative into a
positive. I developed much of my belief system well before I contracted
ALS, and tried for years in vain to reach others with it. While there
are many reasons I am only now able to get my message out, one big
reason is the credibility with which I am able to speak precisely
because of the burdens associated with ALS. Sometimes I have to remind
myself of all the good that has come from the bad; re-orient myself to
the pattern.
When the daily grind of
life gets you down, what goes through your head? When your family
members drive you crazy, do you feel grateful? Try to keep some
perspective on your life by remembering that what you are experiencing
is a snapshot in time of one part of your life and not your life in
totality. Imagine your spouse, children, or your career suddenly
stripped from you forever. Would you truly be better off? Life is hard
and at times ugly, but the juice and beauty of life is often right
under our noses. We just need to step back, get some perspective, and
let that beautiful pattern come back into view.
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“Of all
the sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: it might have
been.“
- John
Greenleaf Whittier
There is
perhaps no more torturous pain than living under the omnipresent black
cloud of regret. I recently witnessed the
documentary, Some Kind of Monster,
about the making of heavy metal band Metallica’s album, St.
Anger. In this film, former Metallica
guitarist, Dave Mustaine, speaks very openly and honestly about the
tortured life of regret he has lived for nearly a quarter century.
Mustaine’s drunken belligerency got him tossed out of what would become
one of the most successful bands in the history of rock n roll while
the band was still in its infancy. Although
Mr. Mustaine had sold more than 15 million records, he is adamant that
looking back over the last two plus decades, all he sees is what might
have been. All he feels is the painful
haunt of regret. There is no mistaking
this when he ruefully explains that he would do anything to be able to
go back and do it all over again.
Whether it
is a career move, finally acting on that dream vacation, or finally
taking the time to get involved in the lives of your family members, if
there is something you need to do, either do it now or make the plans
to get it done. Whatever the ramifications
of going for your dream and failing, you can live with them, because
you will have the consolation of having given it your all.
What is nearly impossible to live with is the torturous stain of
what might have been. Just ask Dave
Mustaine.
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“A
life making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a
life spent doing nothing at all.”
- George Bernard Shaw
My father is a retired
schoolteacher. One of my most enduring
memories of him is his coming home through the garage and utility room,
carrying his box of schoolwork. On that
box was a sign that said, “To err is human, but to wear out the eraser
before the pencil is ridiculous!” When we
read something like that, we usually chuckle and don’t give it a second
thought. The truth is, to err is human. It is part of the human condition and a
necessary part of life. In fact, if you are not blowing it, you are not
trying. You’re not living either.
What happened the first
time you tried to drive a car with a stick shift? If
it was anything like my first experience, you heard- clunk, clunk,
grinnnnnnd! After grinding the gears and
killing the engine several times, you started to get the hang of it,
didn’t you? Life is the same way. Growing pains in the form of mistakes are a
vital part of true success in any endeavor in life.
Think of this- a hall of fame baseball player failed seven out
of ten times he stepped up to the plate.
If you know you that for
long term success you are going to blow it more times than you succeed
in the short term, then just start taking action and get all the
mistakes out of the way early. Follow the
lead of multi-level marketing pioneer, Bill Britt, who once said, “I
didn’t care if they told me no, I just wanted them to hurry up and tell
me no so I could get on to the people who would tell me yes.” Next time you find yourself paralyzed by the
fear of making a mistake, know that like the airplane pilot, when you
take off you will be off course- until you adjust your instruments.
After that, you will land at your destination- probably on a dime.
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“You
cannot travel within and stand still without.”
- James
Allen, As A Man Thinketh
In Think And Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill quotes a noted
criminologist describing the process by which an individual often
becomes involved with crime:
“When
men first come into contact with crime, they abhor it. If they remain
in contact with crime for a time, they become accustomed to it, and
endure it. If they remain in contact with it long enough, they finally
embrace it …”
How can
one embrace something that upon first exposure violently shook every
scruple his or her conscience possesses? It’s simple. You are the
product of what has gone into your mind and the accompanying choices
that you’ve made. Feed it to your mind often enough and you can become
inured and numb to almost anything.
Your mind
is like a computer – good stuff goes in; good stuff comes out.
Likewise, we know that when garbage goes in, garbage will
eventually come out. We cannot choose in every single instance what
goes into our minds, but we can control enough input to take
responsibility for the programming of our minds. By the application of
thought, man chooses how he will build his character, mold his life,
and shape his destiny. If you do not like your circumstances, change
your patterns of thought and you will soon enough find yourself in a
whole new place. Shed your old way of thinking and you will shed your
circumstances as sure as autumn follows summer. It is simply not
possible to travel within and stand still without.
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To measure you by your
smallest deed is to reckon the ocean by the frailty of its foam. To
judge you by your failures is to cast blame upon the seasons for their
inconsistencies.
- Kahlil Gibran
I consider myself to be a
reasonably competent man, but did you know there are over a billion
people in China alone that completely kick my ass… when it comes to
speaking Chinese! Because someone is better at something than you are
does not mean they are smarter or more competent than you are. It
usually just means they have had a different experience than you have
had. Master salesman and personal achievement guru, Brian Tracy, worked
for years in menial jobs laboring under the false notion that those
doing better than he were actually better than him. His life turned
around and exploded upward when he realized that all he needed to do
was learn from and model those more successful than he and he too could
achieve their level of success. They weren’t “better” than him, because
they had had a different experience than he, they knew something he
didn’t; something he could and did learn.
I am bound to a
wheelchair, cannot lift my arms, and have very little use of my hands.
I need assistance with the most fundamental of human functions and
because my speech is severely impaired, I often “fail” to accurately
convey those needs. With my condition causing me to “fail” at the
smallest of human deeds, how do you suppose I’d fair If I were to
measure myself by my smallest deed and judge myself by my failures?
Instead, I hold my head high, go through life with confidence, feeling
free to dream BIG. I can do this because I do not judge myself by my
frailties and by what others do that I cannot. I judge myself by the
unique qualities that I have, many developed and sharpened as a result
of my limitations. I play to my strengths, develop these strengths,
overcome weaknesses to the best of my abilities, and pay very little
attention to that which cannot be helped. You can’t be great at
everything and the person who tries to be, usually ends up being
excellent at nothing. Concentrate your efforts where they will count
the most. That will be enough to make you excellent at something. Judge
yourself by that!
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"If we all
did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound
ourselves."
- Thomas
A. Edison
When
Andrew Carnegie, the great steel magnate, commissioned Napoleon Hill to
codify his philosophy of success into a form that could be taken to the
world, he imparted to Hill that his first test of any man’s potential
for future success was to measure the man’s willingness to go the extra
mile – to render more and better service than that for which he is paid
and to do it in a pleasingly positive mental attitude. His second test
was to determine whether or not the subject has a definite major
purpose in life and a plan to attain it. When you consider that most
people are hoping to be afforded a shortcut to a vague notion of some
kind of success they hope to achieve some day, is it any wonder that
most people sorely underachieve in life? This is an indictment of
mankind that I take no pleasure in leveling – primarily because it is
an offence I too have been guilty of committing.
I don’t
think most people have any clue what they are capable of accomplishing
in life. Some people suffer from a lack of willingness to go the extra
mile; they are just not willing to do what it takes to accomplish a
significant goal. More often than not, however, people suffer from
either a lack of clarity or a lack of belief that they can actually
achieve their goals – and the two are linked. If you are not crystal
clear about what you want, you cannot possibly have any kind of
detailed plan of how to attain it. It does not engender faith to shoot
for a goal you don’t clearly understand and have no idea how to attain.
Clarity alone can be magical.
You are a
miracle; between 75 and 100 trillion living
cells all working together to produce an animated life form created in
the image of The Almighty. You have more potential than you have any
idea what to with as no human being uses more than even a sliver of his
or her mental capacity. Understand that you have been endowed with the
seeds of greatness and engineered for success. Get clear about what you
want, create a detailed plan to get it, and get to work. Armed with a
goal, a plan, and initiative, you will start to believe. When belief
crystallizes to absolute faith you will astound yourself
with what you will accomplish.
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“This the
last of human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of
circumstances, to choose ones own way.”
- Victor Frankl
Of all the
factors that impact one’s life, nothing will color it more brilliantly
or dismally than one’s attitude. And of
all the factors determining one’s attitude, there is nothing more
impacting than one’s own decision about what that attitude will be. This is a fact proven every day in the
laboratory of life. If you will remove the
veil of self-absorption, the evidence is all around you and
incontrovertible.
Whenever I
make this assertion, I inevitably get those who want to argue with me. I am served up a litany of reasons why this
principle does not apply to them. When
they realize who they are speaking to, most begin to take inventory of
my situation and I start hearing reasons why my situation is
“different”. I don’t have to have a job, I
get to have others take care of me, I don’t have to venture out into
the real world (it’s a jungle out there don’t you know!), etc. If you are inclined to believe that being an
unemployed shut-in that must rely on others for even the most
rudimentary function of daily life disqualifies me from speaking about
attitude, let me introduce you to someone only a fool would argue with.
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“We do not
sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing.”
- William James
I have
talked at length about self-talk and the messages we send to our brain
and subconscious mind, but words are not the only medium through which
we communicate. If someone approaches you
to shake your hand and their shoulders are slumped, their head down,
and they cannot even look you in the eye, does this not communicate
something to you? In this same manner,
when you stand up straight, throw your shoulders back, and speak in a
commanding tone, do you not feel more confident? Why? You are the same person with the same level of
competency, knowledge, and skill no matter how you move your body. Just as our slump shouldered fellow
communicated to you that he was not confident or competent by his body
language, you convey to your own conscious and subconscious mind that
you are confident and in control by your body language.
Emotion
follows motion. Never forget what I just
wrote. If you can get your arms around
this concept and embrace it, you will make magic in your life. It is one of the most powerful, reliable and
easy to use methods of controlling your mind and emotions available,
yet, it is little understood and rarely employed. When
you sing, what are you conveying to your conscious and subconscious
minds? Isn’t your body language
enthusiastic, the words draped in emotion, driven into your brain with
rhythm and melody? Use your body to create
states of mind. If you want to be
enthusiastic, act enthusiastic. If you
want to be confident, fake it ‘til you make it. Emotion
follows motion. Put my words to the test
and see if it is not true. I’m sitting up
with my shoulders back, knowing the results of that test.
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“We first make our habits, and then our habits
make us."
- John
Dryden
Everything
you do, say, or feel is a cause set in motion. When you act, the
universe reacts, even if in a seemingly insignificant manner. When you
speak, not only are your words impacting everyone around you, you are
imprinting the ideas behind these words on your own subconscious. When
you feel, you are literally anchoring these feelings into your nervous
system, and like Pavlov’s dog, you are often creating associations
between these feelings and correlating stimuli in your environment. If
everything you do, say, and feel has repercussions and the human animal
is a creature of habit, might it be a good idea to think about what you
are doing, saying, and feeling?
A habit is
created by repeating an action until that action becomes very near a
subconscious reaction. Psychologists have determined
that it takes approximately twenty-one contiguous days of a behavior to
create a truly entrenched habit. Anyone that has attempted to maintain
a diet or exercise program knows that it Is much easier to create a
habit of flopping on the couch with a bag of chips than it is to throw
out your favorite junk food and routinely hit the gym. In ninety-eight
percent of all people, the path of least resistance rules. It’s easy,
so it wins the moment; and when it wins the moment, it is that much
easier for it to win the next moment, and the next, etc. Soon enough a
habit is entrenched in our psyche and like a thistle in your garden,
you will have a mighty tussle to free yourself from its thorns.
Take stock
of your behavior, your patterns of thought, and your interactions with
others. Understanding that a decision takes place before every cause
set in motion, are you making decisions that will create habits that
empower you or dis-empower you? Are these habits taking you towards
your major goals in life and towards becoming the person you desire to
be or away? You can proactively decide what habits you will make in
your life or slothfully take whatever habits the path of least
resistance serves up to you. Either way, your habits are making you and
shaping your destiny.
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“If you
can’t feel pain, you can’t feel anything else either.”
- Judd
Hirsch, Ordinary People
Would you
like to see a grown man cry? If you would,
just come watch the film Ordinary People with me. I
have seen this film about seven or eight times and I am reduced to a
pathetic ball of blather every time. Somehow,
I am able to slip right into the Timothy Hutton character’s shoes; I
experience what he experiences, feel what he feels.
I think the reason I am able to do this so easily is because
this person is on a journey through physical, mental, and emotional
pain, and he’s going through it alone. No
matter how many friends and supporters I have, there is a part of this
journey I am on where I cannot be joined. No
matter how empathetic and sympathetic one is, they cannot crawl inside
of me and know what it is like to go through what I am going through. In other words, I am no stranger to pain.
Most
people will do almost anything to avoid pain. Motivational
guru, Anthony Robbins, claims that the avoidance of pain is the single
most powerful driving force of human behavior. I
do not recommend suffering unnecessary pain for the sake of suffering,
but pain is a natural part of life. When I
see someone taking extraordinary measures to avoid pain, they are
usually just exchanging one form of pain for another, often compounding
their troubles. This would include using
drugs or alcohol to numb pain, avoiding the bill collector or the
taxman, or repeatedly avoiding unpleasant confrontations that simply
have to take place.
Perhaps
the saddest of all attempts to avoid pain is the person that cannot (or
will not) open himself (or herself) up to truly let another person in
for fear of being hurt. This person wants and needs true intimacy with
another human being as much or more than the rest of us, but will never
have it. If you will not open yourself up to the possible pain of
rejection, you can never truly love. And what is the point of our
existence if not to love and be loved? Pain is no fun, but until you’re
willing to open yourself up to the possibility of feeling it, you’re
not going to feel anything else worthwhile either. At least when you
feel pain, you are receiving confirmation that you are indeed alive.
For all of the pain and suffering I have experienced, I still choose
life.
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"I am more
and more convinced that our happiness or our unhappiness depends far
more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those
events themselves."
- Wilhelm von Humboldt
Every
single one of us has seen someone that appears to have it all and yet
is miserable. Haven’t we also seen someone
that has nothing or has perhaps been dealt a brutally cruel blow by
life and yet is happy, full of life and optimistic?
How can this be? NEWSFLASH: The quality of your life is NOT determined by
the events and circumstances of your life, but rather by your
interpretation and internalization of those circumstances and events.
At the root of the interpretation of the events and the circumstances
of your life is a decision. You must
decide to be happy and determine that the events in your life happen
for a decidedly positive reason. The
dreams of my youth were washed away by the advent of a disease I did
nothing to bring upon myself. Once a
college athlete, I am now confined to a wheelchair with the ability to
lift my arms or speak clearly taken from me. Can
anyone tell me what my level of happiness would be if I decided to view
myself as a helpless victim? We all know
the answer.
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"Far
better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even
though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits
who neither enjoy much or suffer much because they live in the gray
twilight that knows not victory or defeat.”
- Theodore
Roosevelt
I hate to
fail. Even when I am learning something
valuable from a failure that I know will enable me to succeed in the
future, I detest it. The truth is,
however, if you are not failing, you are not trying.
If a batter in baseball fails to get a hit seven out of ten
times, he is considered a hall of fame caliber player.
In fact, if you attempt to avoid failure by not trying
something, you’ll have experienced the greatest failure of all by
ceding victory before you even begin.
I have
found that life’s greatest regrets come not from what we do, but rather
from what we fail to attempt to do. Imagine
these two situations. You have powerful
feelings for someone and upon expressing those feelings, you are
rejected. Or, fearing rejection, you never express your feelings, and
over time you realize this was the one person you truly love. Now that
it is too late, you discover that the feeling was mutual and if you had
only made your feelings known, you might have had a lifetime of
intimacy with your true soul mate. Which would be tougher to live with?
The pain
of rejection in this situation would be substantial, but it would fade
away after time, especially when you found your true mate.
But the pain of wondering “what if” and kicking yourself for not
having acted would be immeasurably worse.
Failure is
a bitter pill to swallow, but until you quit, failure and defeat are
but the temporary prices to be paid for victory and success. Understanding this, I can live with temporary
defeat, though I loathe it. What I cannot
live with is not trying.
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“He that
would have the fruit must climb the tree.”
- Thomas
Fuller , M.D.
As someone
that depends on both government and private assistance, I am well aware
of the need to help those that need a helping hand. This being said, we
must be very careful how we attempt to give a hand up to those of us in
need. Nothing could illustrate this more clearly than an experience I
had in the summer of 1987.
I was
visiting a college friend of mine in a small town on the
Oregon/California border. He was a teacher
at the small high school in town. He
clearly loved and cared for his students, but he was palpably
frustrated by the lack of motivation in these young men and women to
create a future for themselves. He
expressed his frustration in attempting to guide them in their
post-graduation plans. Most of the
students were third or fourth generation welfare recipients and when
asked what they planned to do upon graduation, they seemed lost at the
idea of even contemplating the question. They
had never seen their parents or grandparents work and, understanding
that they could simply apply for public assistance, saw no reason to
even attempt to create a career or future for themselves.
I will
never forget the pain and frustration on my friend’s face when he
pleaded with me to come back to this town after school started in the
fall to try to speak and break through to his students to seek more in
life than a meager welfare check. Unfortunately,
my situation did not allow me to travel back and help my friend with
his students, but it left an indelible mark on my psyche forever. How could vital, young men and women with
their entire lives ahead of them not want to create a future for
themselves?
If you are
never forced to climb the tree to get your own fruit, how will you ever
develop a work ethic to do so when you need it? If
you never experience the triumph of overcoming obstacles to achieve a
much-desired goal, how will you ever develop the confidence to know
what you are capable of? If you were to
determine a list of goals that you must accomplish, and set your path
to do whatever it took to accomplish them, you would be shocked at what
you are capable of. Unfortunately, most
people must be forced to climb the tree to even know that they can get
off the ground.
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”Do not go
where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a
trail.“
- Ralph
Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
This
quotation is more than just a call to leadership, it is a proclamation
of a fundamental principle for success. Common
sense tells us there is not enough room at the top for everyone, so how
will you get there if you are merely one of the herd?
In Los
Angeles, it can be embarrassing to say you are an actor or actress
until you have actually accomplished something in the field. This is because there are literally tens of
thousands of people trying to accomplish the same thing, most of which
will never even come close to stardom. When
I was training as an actor in Hollywood, I remember the herd mentality
of my fellow students. Our acting coach
would lay out the minimum and maximum amount of time each week that we
would be able to get ourselves in front of the camera or on stage. I noticed that everyone seemed to eventually
gravitate towards the same amount of work and effort.
This always bothered me. I would
catch myself doing the same thing and then figuratively slap myself in
the face, “Jeff! What are doing to
distinguish yourself from the tens of thousands you are competing
against?”
I would
nearly always take the extra step to try to put some distance between
myself and my fellow students. It usually
took about six months to move from the beginning class to the
intermediate class and another six months to the advanced class. While my health cut short my pursuit of an
acting career, I was moved from the beginning class directly into the
advanced class in just over 3 months. It takes a bold strike against
the grain to be successful, so stay out of the complacency trap simply
because that’s what everyone else is doing. Let
others try to follow in the trail that you blaze.
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“Don’t
think you can make up for it (slacking) by working twice as hard
tomorrow. If you have it within your power to work twice as hard, why
aren’t you doing it now?”
- John
Wooden
One of the
true treasures in my life has been the privilege of working with the
Lake Oswego High School Football team. I play much the same role I do
here in that I try to motivate, teach, and inspire these young men to
be the best they can be, to get more out of themselves than they
thought possible. Each fall, I try to sell my guys on something I call
The Two Percent Formula. Like trying to teach teens the concept of
compound interest and convincing them of the necessity of starting
investing for retirement early in life, I can only hope they are
buying.
The Two
Percent Formula posits the concept of compounding improvement at a
particular skill. What if you were to make a commitment to
improving yourself at this particular skill just two percent each and
every day? With focused commitment, could
you manage that? How much improvement would you show in just fifteen
days? Thirty percent? No. Your improvement will begin stacking on top
of itself and after just fifteen days of a relentless commitment to two
percent daily improvement, you will have improved by nearly thirty-five
percent. After thirty and sixty days? Eighty-one and Two Hundred
Twenty-eight percent. The upward trajectory of such compounded
improvement is staggering.
Now let’s say that you are our slothful friend
Mr. Wooden refers to and would like to take every other day off. We
know that people’s skill levels are dynamic and never static- your
skill level is either improving or degrading. We’ll assume you only
degrade half as much on your lazy days as you improve on your
industrious days- one percent. After fifteen days on this “Intermittent
Plan”, you will have improved by just nine percent compared to
thirty-five percent on the Two Percent Daily Plan. After thirty and
sixty days? A comparatively paltry sixteen and thirty-five percent. By
just applying yourself to the best of your ability each day, you
improve by nearly seven times what you do taking every other day off.
Perhaps
you think my Two Percent Formula too
theoretical and academic to be useful, but it does serve to illustrate
the power of daily, incremental improvement. Your personal Rome will
not be built in a day to be sure, but it may never be built at all with
a foolish inconsistency that tolerates half-hearted effort. There is a
time for rest and there is a time for play, neither of which is while
you are working, especially not when you are working towards your
dream.
Supporting
Data
|
Percent
Improved |
||
|
Day |
Intermittent Plan |
Two
Percent Daily Plan |
|
1 |
2% |
2% |
|
|
.98 |
4.04 |
|
|
2.99 |
6.12 |
|
|
1.97 |
8.24 |
|
5 |
4.01 |
10.41 |
|
|
2.97 |
12.62 |
|
|
5.03 |
14.87 |
|
|
3.98 |
17.17 |
|
|
6.06 |
19.51 |
|
10 |
5 |
22 |
|
|
7.1 |
24.34 |
|
|
6.03 |
26.82 |
|
|
8.15 |
29.36 |
|
|
7.07 |
31.95 |
|
15 |
9.2 |
34.6 |
|
20 |
10.24 |
48.6 |
|
25 |
14.66 |
64 |
|
30 |
15.75 |
81 |
|
35 |
21.61 |
100 |
|
40 |
22.76 |
120.8 |
|
45 |
27.69 |
144 |
|
50 |
28. 9 |
169 |
|
55 |
34.07 |
197 |
|
60 |
35.34 |
228 |
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“Most of
our obstacles would melt away if, instead of cowering before them, we
should make up our minds to walk boldly through them.”
- Orison
Swett Marden
How many
times have you been confronted with a situation that you would have
done practically anything to avoid? Isn’t
it true that you played the worst possible outcome of your dilemma in
the theater of your mind over and over, ratcheting up your anxiety
level and making yourself sick? Isn’t it
also true that in the vast majority of these cases (perhaps all) this
horrifying scenario that you tormented yourself with never occurred? The problem is, it did occur- in your mind. And if you emotionalize an event in your mind,
you’ll drag your entire being through the experience just as if it
really happened.
I remember
my college football coach telling my teammates and me that when you are
afraid of getting hurt that’s when injury occurs. It’s
true. The players that were afraid of
injury would play tentative, causing them to go less than full speed. In football, when you are not attacking, you
are being attacked. So it is when facing
obstacles. Your problems probably aren’t
as big as they seem and those outcomes we dread are unlikely to be
anywhere near as bad as we imagine. Put
your chin up, your shoulders back and, boldly walk through them. Chances are they will fall like a tree in the
forest. If by chance, you do not like the
result, at least you only experienced that result one time, instead of
over and over and over in your mind.
-
Jeff
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“Men
occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves
up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
Sir
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
Life is
not just a test, it is also an instruction lab. The problem is that
much of the time we are simply not paying attention, resulting in
failing the same tests time and again. How do you respond to failure?
Did you know that if you set up the right definition of success, it
will be impossible to fail? I am not
talking about lowering standards, I’m talking about depositing
priceless knowledge of what works and what doesn’t into your archive of
personal experience.
What would
happen if you decided that as long as you learned something from a
situation it was a success? Would you not
suddenly turn your biggest failures into some of your biggest
successes? Do you realize that every time we stumble, truth, knowledge
and wisdom are slapping us in the face? We
can learn far more from our failures than we can from our successes. Let’s start turning our stumbling blocks into
our personal stepping-stones to wisdom, success, and. happiness.
-
Jeff
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“Having
once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of
tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished
a tiresome labor is immense. “
- Thomas
Arnold Bennett
I remember
when I first set out to write a screenplay. I
was a new father and the primary caregiver for my new daughter. For many, caring for an infant is tough
enough, but I was fighting a debilitating disease and had to come up
with makeshift ways to carry out my childcare responsibilities safely. In addition, I didn’t know how to write a
screenplay. I had been given some advice
by a couple people in the industry and had a stack of “how to” books,
but had to teach myself the craft I was pursuing. All
of this made for a hectic schedule and I often got sidetracked from my
goals.
When I
told people I was writing a screenplay, many people piped up with, “Me
too! I’ve got this great idea I’ve been
working on and blah blah blah blah…” Before
I had even completed the first draft of my script, I noticed many
people had already abandoned the project they shared so much enthusiasm
for. This “attrition” of the competition
only fueled my fire. Despite all I had to
deal with to get my screenplay written, I forged ahead through all of
the hassles and finally finished my script. While
I have not sold my screenplay, I learned powerful lessons in seeing
something through to the end as not a single person that told me of
their desire to write a screenplay has ever even finished theirs!
In the
above quotation, I think it is important to recognize that after the
words “achieve it at all costs” are the words “of tedium and distaste”. Accomplishing a task at all costs is
foolishness. If the cost of writing my
screenplays was to ignore my daughter, then the cost would have been
prohibitive. Nothing is worth jeopardizing
your faith, family, your health, or your personal integrity. But if mere annoyance or hard work is what
stands between you and your goal, you must force yourself to push
through these barriers and attain victory. You
will astonish yourself with what you can do and soon this will become
habit.
-
Jeff
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“Those who
are not prepared for the apprehension of a great purpose should fix
their thoughts upon the faultless performance of their duty, no matter
how insignificant their task may appear. Only in this way can the
thoughts be gathered and focused, and resolution and energy be
developed, which being done, there is nothing which may not be
accomplished.”
- James
Allen, As A Man Thinketh
Mastery and the attitude
of going the extra mile need to become habits. If
you think you are being unfairly compensated for your job performance,
or, if you think your daily tasks are trivial and unimportant, think
again. You might not be getting paid what you are worth, and your tasks
might not be important in the overall scheme of the universe, but how
you perform where you are, doing exactly what you are doing means
everything to your destiny.
Mastery takes a certain
attitude. The habit of going the extra
mile is also an attitude. You will either
develop the attitude necessary for the habits of mastery and going the
extra mile or you won’t. It might be time
to look in a different direction for your life’s ambition, but if you
have not developed the proper attitude and work ethic, that search may
well be in vain. Whether you are boldly striking out on a daring new
adventure, or trying to improve your circumstances right where you are,
the degree to which you develop these two attitudes will go a long way
in determining what happens when opportunity finally knocks. Hadn’t you best be ready?
-
Jeff
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I hear and
I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
- Confucius
In his
Personal Power program, Anthony Robbins tells the story of a
conversation he had with his martial arts instructor.
The instructor says that most people never achieve black belt
status because they refuse to master the fundamentals of their art. When this instructor’s students learn
something, they immediately want to learn something new.
Simply
understanding the basics of how something works is not commensurate
with mastering it. If you simply listen to
an instructors lecture, you will lose the ability to recall and use
that information in short order. You might have understood what you
heard at the time, but without the ability to recall it when you need
it, it will be of no practical use to you. If you take notes during the
lecture, much more of that lecture will be imbedded in your memory
because of your active participation. I
did not completely understand this concept of active participation
until I began recording my instructor’s lectures and playing them back
within 24 hours to outline them. I then began pounding my brain with
the material in as many different ways as possible. The first course I
tried this with brought the final exam before I missed a single exam
question!
Life is
not a spectator sport, it is a participator sport. Whatever
benefit you are receiving from these daily quotations and commentaries,
I am learning that much more. When you
begin to teach something, your understanding and mastery of the subject
goes up exponentially. If you need to
master a subject, try teaching it to others and see if this is not the
case. By your active “doing”, your level of understanding and
consequent mastery will explode.
-
Jeff
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"People
are just about as happy as they make up their minds to be"
- Abraham
Lincoln
… or as
miserable, or as successful, or as fearful, or as confident, or… The truth is, we have an incredible computer
between our ears that will give us whatever result we desire. The problem is, this incredible piece of
machinery does not come with a user’s manual and it is not user
friendly! It is also vulnerable to outside
programming, and can easily be fooled by something called emotions. We need to realize that this incredible source
of power called the human mind is at our beck and call.
It is not simply gray matter to be pushed here and there by what
happened to us as children or what others do or say, it is our own
personal power slave ready to carry out our every command.
But not even the most powerful and competent slave can carry out
an order that is never given.
Life is
about decisions. Your entire world and
destiny can change in an instant with the decision for it to be so. Decide to be happy, and determine that it will
be so. Think happy thoughts.
Choose to be optimistic and quash all pessimistic thoughts. Take on the posture and demeanor of a happy
individual and begin to treat others as a happy and fulfilled person
would. Determine to do all of this and if
you are still not happy, you soon will be.
-
Jeff
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Thought and
character are one, and as character can only manifest and discover
itself through environment and circumstance, the outer conditions of a
person’s life will always be found to be harmoniously related to his
inner state.
- James
Allen, As A Man Thinketh
Haven’t we
all seen someone that had it all together, but for one major chink in
his or her armor that continually brings down this person’s entire life? Still, I have to take issue with Mr. Allen on
at least one aspect of this quotation. I
am happy that he goes on to state that one cannot judge a man’s entire
character by his outer circumstances, but that his outward conditions
and circumstances are tied inextricably to at least part of one’s
character. As one who is suffering from a
virulent disease through no fault of my own, I’m aware that not all
aspects of our circumstances are by our own choosing, or by our own
making.
Nevertheless,
it is simply an unavoidable fact that people generally make the very
beds they lie in. I am from the Portland,
Oregon area. How many times did we see, in
years past, the Portland Trailblazers acquire a player with a glaring
character flaw and think that they could rehabilitate him only to find
that the same old problems that plagued the players all through their
histories crop up again and again? Conversely,
a prosperity consciousness is simply unyielding. A
positive prosperity consciousness backed by an indomitable faith will,
in the end, yield results. It’s inexorable
law.
“Victory
belongs to the most persevering.”
~ Napoleon
Bonaparte
When
my daughter was born in 1989, I had already outlived the doctor’s
prognosis by a couple years. Right then I
made the determination that I would watch my daughter graduate from
high school. Just a year out from her
June, 2007 graduation date, there is little doubt that that will happen. Against the nature of my illness, it was an
absurd thought to think I could possibly live that long.
Absurdity aside, I determined that it must happen and I knew the
Grim Reaper would be in overdrive to see that my plans were foiled.
About
nine years into my illness I remember asking my neurologist if there
was a possibility of a medical breakthrough that would reverse the
damage already done by my ALS. She could
see no scenario under which that could happen. I
smiled and confidently stated there would be such a breakthrough and
that I was going to hang around long enough to be the beneficiary of
that breakthrough. She smiled sweetly as
if to say, “I admire your fighting spirit, but that just ain’t gonna
happen.” It is going to happen, and now, unlike then, we can see the
ground being laid for such a breakthrough with research like that done
with stem cells.
"Every man
is an impossibility until he is born."
- Ralph
Waldo Emerson
Emerson could have meant
lots of things with this quotation, but I see this as a description of
someone coming into their own. How many
people suffer from fear and self-doubt, making their objectives in life
impossible? As long as you allow fear and
doubt to plague you, most of what you truly desire to accomplish will
be impossible. But, haven’t you seen
people suffer from a crisis of self-confidence and then suddenly put it
all together? In almost an instant what
seemed impossible is suddenly routine. Never,
ever give up. As long as you take
responsibility for steering the rudder, your ship may very well still
be coming in.
“Man is buffeted by circumstances so long as he
believes himself to be the creature of outside conditions, but when he
realizes that he is a creative power, and that he may command the
hidden soil and seeds of his being out of which circumstances grow, he
then becomes the rightful master of himself.”
-James
Allen, As A Man Thinketh
There is
an incredible feeling that comes with the realization that you control
your own life by the proper application of thought.
The thoughts in your own mind are really the only thing we have
complete control over. Acceptance of the
fact that you control your life through the decisions you make
regarding your own thoughts places your destiny squarely in your own
hands. What could be more exciting and
invigorating than this? Believe and act
upon this, and you will indeed become the rightful master of yourself.
-
Jeff
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“My Definite
Purpose burns all negative thoughts from my mind. I am free of mental
weeds.”
-
Jeff
David Young
When a negative thought slips into my mind
either through outside stimulus, or through manufacture by my own
faculties, I try to immediately kill it. If
it takes root and begins to grow, it is like a cancer that will be
difficult to cut out once it takes hold. Much
like the blackberry bush, you can pull it out, perhaps even dig it out,
seemingly roots and all, only to have it come back again and again. Once a negative thought takes root in your
mind, trying to loose your mind from it is akin to freeing yourself of
a blackberry bush.
When I say the above affirmation to myself, I
imagine a side cutaway view of my head and brain. I
imagine the negative thoughts of my mind starting to weave its roots
through my gray matter. I then imagine my
definite major purpose literally on fire and use the heat and energy
from that visual to singe and burn the roots of the negative thought
right out of my mind. The charred remains
of the thought fall from my brain and the warmth and feeling from my
definite major purpose envelopes my entire mind.
I do this to symbolize to myself that
allowing the negative to take a hold in my mind will destroy and choke
out the positive purpose to which I am committed. This
is completely unacceptable. I refuse to
let something I have control over cheat me out of attaining my purpose
in life. Instead, I use the power of
having that purpose to burn away the weeds in the garden of my mind and
allow the centerpiece in my mental garden to reach full bloom.
-
Jeff
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"The most
thoroughly wasted of days is that on which one has not laughed"
- Chamfort
I have a
dear friend that when we get together, we are often accused of having
too much fun. Complete strangers have
approached us on more than one occasion and admiringly told us as much. One woman even went so far as to anonymously
pay our dinner bill at one restaurant. Apparently, it was not always
this way with my friend. On one occasion,
when we were busting our guts with laughter, I chided her, “I’ll bet
you never laughed so much before you met me, did you?”
I was stunned to hear her tell me that she had never really
laughed before. For the most part, she had
led a life that was serious, sober, and almost completely devoid of
laughter.
One
afternoon, while showing her some of the hand written cartoons from my
past, she laughed so hard that she fell onto my bed and could literally
not sit up. When she did gather herself,
she took another look at the absurd image and fell back to the bed,
laughing uncontrollably. Just knowing that
I was in some way responsible for this woman’s newfound ability to
laugh and find humor in life, provided me with one of my proudest
moments. It was like feeling, at least in
part, responsible for breaking someone out of a dark prison they had
been locked in their entire life. She describes it as though the
floodgates have opened and a lifetime of laughter is now pouring out.
Laughter
is a natural elixir and a true gift from The Almighty.
Laughter is like sunshine on the stormiest of days, and is the
best cure for a depressed spirit or a distressed demeanor.
Be like my friend; open the floodgates and let the laughter
start pouring out. If you possess honesty,
character, integrity, enthusiasm, and a sense of humor, you will never
lack for friends. A long list of factors has contributed to my standing
so long in the face of such a virulent disease as ALS, but I promise
you that the ability to laugh at life, my situation, and myself, is
near the top of that list.
-
Jeff
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“Let
me listen to me and not to them.”
- Gertrude Stein
In his
seminal publication, Think And Grow Rich, Napoleon
Hill lists three fears that are at the bottom of most people’s worries,
any of which are singularly capable of destroying any chance of great
accomplishment or enduring happiness. The second of these is fear of
criticism. Such fear crushes initiative, stifles imagination, and
causes one to second guess oneself before expressing new ideas or
making significant decisions. This devastating fear induces one to
conform to the “crowd”, often causing one to choose “fitting in” at the
sacrifice of their own principles and moral values, and guaranteeing
one’s inability to break out ahead of the pack. People are so driven by
the fear of being criticized that they will often risk their futures
and their very lives to avoid it, even to the point of engaging in
unprotected sex, and leveraging oneself into bankruptcy to “keep up
with the Joneses.”
“Someone's sitting in the shade today because
someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
- Les Brown
If you are
thirty years or more in age, you must realize that those graduating
from high school this year think of you as ancient. Isn’t this true? I can remember at that age feeling that life
had to be over when you were thirty. The truth is, these kids will be
joining the thirty-something crowd before they have any idea what hit
them.
As we grow
older, life gathers a certain momentum that turns the pages of our
lives with ever-increasing speed. Ten
years may sound like a long time, but those of us that have lived three
or four or more of these decades realize that it really is not, and
five years ago seems like yesterday. It
has been correctly said that people expect far too much from their
efforts in one year, but not nearly enough for five years of effort. If this is true, and if five years will be
upon us in the blink of an eye, do you suppose our lives would benefit
from a little long term thinking? Something more than just what is on
TV tonight?
Mr.
Brown’s call for long term thinking and planning seems almost
anachronistic in this day and age of the quick fix.
Feel the need for a new toy or a new wardrobe?
Just charge it. Have a health
problem, or life just bringing you down? Just
pop a pill. Is your child hooked on drugs? Don’t worry, your favorite sitcom will show
you how that problem is resolved in thirty minutes.
Life is not this way and we should disabuse ourselves of the
notion that it is. A successful life takes
planning, hard work, and long term vision. The
tomorrows of your life are being determined by your actions today. If you want to bask in the shade of the life
you truly desire tomorrow, you need to have enough foresight to start
planting the appropriate seeds of action today
-
Jeff
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"All my
life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been
more specific."
- Jane
Wagner
Everybody
wants to feel important, that their life means something, that their
time spent on earth is more than just passing days.
I believe that God has a unique plan for every man and every
woman. Not only has He planted in us the seeds of greatness, but more
importantly, a purpose for our lives and the ability to fulfill that
purpose. There is a powerful sense inside each of us that we are meant
to do something important, to make something of our lives.
And yet, with the hustle and bustle of executing of our daily
lives, we often end up feeling as if we have merely spent energy
spinning our wheels and have come no closer to fulfilling our purpose
in life. There is no more desperate
feeling than to watch the weeks, months, and years tick off the
calendar while we grind away at life not knowing where we are going or
what we are even grinding for.
Ask
yourself these questions:
Who am I?
What is my
purpose in life?
What is
the legacy I want my life to leave behind when I die?
Imagine you are at your own funeral, invisible, hovering about. What are people saying about you? What is the epitaph on your tombstone? Are you happy about what you hear and see? Are you satisfied with the person you became and what you did with your life? While you still have time, pray about it, meditate on it. Seek with an open mind what it is that God would have you to do. It might be too late to accomplish certain objectives; I doubt it, but it’s possible. It is never too late to become the person you were meant to be.
-
Jeff
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“The elevator to success is out of service. But
the stairs are always open.“
-
Zig
Ziglar
I have a friend that is a very successful
businessman. He has worked hard and smart,
and put in the equity payments due to get where he is at.
When speaking of his employees and those striving to get where
he is now, he once shared with me in amazement, “everyone wants a
six-figure income, but few want to work for it.” Likewise,
a friend of mine that works at one our Oregon high schools told me that
the biggest problem he sees with our young people is not drugs,
violence, or even the media sewer pipe forced down their throats day
and night. The most troublesome thing he
sees is what he calls the “slug mentality”- a desire for results, with
apathy towards work.
In a society where we have figured out how to
travel faster than the speed of sound and cook a meal in less than two
minutes, it would seem there must be a short cut to the top. Right? Sorry,
success will not bargain with you. If you
want it, you are going to have to pay the price it demands in full, and
pay it in advance. Bunker Hunt, the
one-time bankrupt cotton farmer turned multi-billionaire, said there
are only two things you need for success: 1) Determine precisely what
it is you want. 2) Determine what the
price is to acquire it, and pay that price. That’s
it.
I give you my personal guarantee that success
will not run up and mug you. However, if you will arm yourself with a
clear goal and a detailed plan of attack, and back that goal with an
abiding faith that simply will not take no for an answer, you’ll get
your success. What will make its arrival all the sweeter is that you
will have obtained it the old fashioned way- you will have earned it.
-
Jeff
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“By the yard it’s hard; by the inch it’s a
cinch.”
- Old
Saying
Imagine
you are on a desert island and had not had a thing to eat in more than
a week when we cross paths. If I offered you an apple, could you eat it? In a flash. But
what if I put the stipulation on my offer that you must eat the apple
whole, in a single bite? No matter how
badly you wanted that apple in your stomach, you could not swallow it
whole, could you? Then why do you look at
big important challenges in your life and either shy away from them or
think you are going to devour them in a single bite?
Everything
big is made up of small parts. The
structure you are sitting in right now was not erected in a single day
was it? Was it erected in its entirety?
Does writing a 300 page book sound somewhere between intimidating and
impossible? It might until you consider that if you wrote just one page
per day, you could take off 65 days and still complete the project in
one year.
If you
have a large goal that is important to you, write it down on paper. Working backwards from the goals completion,
on the next line, write down the necessary step just before final
completion of your goal. Below that, write down the step before, and so
forth, until you have listed all of the steps necessary from completion
down to the project’s starting point. At
the bottom of this list, set a reasonable deadline for the
accomplishment of this first step. If
necessary, break this step down into several baby steps and set dates
for their completion. Work your way up the
list, doing this for every step and you’ll eventually get a handle on
this one time colossus you were afraid to even contemplate. Learn to
take bite-size pieces- they’re easier to digest.
-
Jeff
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“Many
people die at twenty five and aren't buried until they are seventy
five.”
- Benjamin Franklin
Do you
remember the sense of awe and inspiration you felt with the world as a
young child? Perhaps you cannot remember
simply because it has been forever and a day since you have felt that
way. In this case, observe the small child
chasing butterflies or playing with an empty box. They
squeal for joy and entertain themselves for hours with such trivia that
we say to ourselves, “I wish I could be that easily entertained!” You might have outgrown the box and the
butterflies, but life is still a daring pursuit and a hilarious
adventure, if you will let it be so.
“Realize
what you truly want. It stops you from chasing butterflies and puts you
to work digging for gold."
-
William
Moulton Marsden
What do
you get when you chase butterflies? Usually
not butterflies. It is a beautiful thing
to watch a child chase butterflies here, there, and everywhere- they’ll
sleep well that night. It is quite another
matter when we find ourselves going round and round, putting out the
fires in our lives only to find ourselves right back where we started. Sound familiar?
Everyone
should have a definite major purpose in life. It
should be clear and very specific with an action plan for its
achievement. If you fail to focus and
program your mind in this way, I guarantee you will be pulled to and
fro by every distraction that comes into your life.
When your mind is clearly focused on your definite purpose, you
will be able to differentiate between those tasks that will take you
closer to what you truly want in life, and those that will take you
further away. You will then be able to
concentrate your efforts on digging for the gold in your life instead
of chasing every butterfly, phantom, or will o‘ the wisp that floats
into your life.
-
Jeff
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"We are
not limited by our old age; we are liberated by it."
- Stu
Mittleman
Even when
reality is black and white, it is often gray. The straight facts may be
A, but what is reality to the person that interprets them to be B? The
reality we create by our perception and interpretation of facts
determines what we believe about ourselves, believe about others,
believe about the world, and radically influences our behavior. It
controls how we approach life and what we are even willing to try.
While
there are some facts that are dangerous when monkeying with their
meanings, we should be in the practice of interpreting life through an
ethical prism of self-empowerment. Look for the interpretation and
meaning of events and situations that empower you instead of the one
that leaves you feeling impotent and victimized. What you think of, and
how you feel about yourself and a situation is usually far more
important than any facts involved in the situation. If you are sixty
pounds overweight and want to get yourself in shape, it is
disempowering to envy those that are a mere ten pounds over their ideal
weight. Consider yourself lucky to have more room in which to get some
weight loss momentum going, and to have the opportunity for a big
accomplishment. Few will even notice the loss on the person that loses
ten pounds. So concentrate on how you will feel about yourself when you
look in the mirror, feel the pats on the back, and hear the praise
after dropping sixty!
Pretty
much every set of facts in life can be reinterpreted to have a positive
empowering meaning. If not for ALS, I wouldn’t have this opportunity to
be influencing you right now. That positive interpretation of my
predicament empowers me. Find that empowering meaning that liberates
you to be all you can be. If you are young, then youth and vigor should
be power to you. If you are more senior,
then maturity and experience should be considered indispensable. Master the lens through which you view life
and you will master life itself.
-
Jeff
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Quotes
"Sol Lucet
Omnibus" (The sun shines for everyone)
-
anonymous
It seems
as if everyone I have ever met, at some point, says, “with my luck, so
and so will happen.” If everyone has bad
luck, is it really bad luck? I assure you
that God is not up in Heaven spinning a wheel with your name on it,
playing Wheel of Fortune, Heaven Edition. When
it rains, it rains on all of us. When the
sun shines, it shines upon all of us. Not
everyone starts out in life with the same advantages and disadvantages,
but since happiness is found in the mind, and our own thoughts are the
only thing we have complete control over, happiness or unhappiness is a
product of choice.
When I
decided to do these messages and to write my book, it was because I
grew frustrated and despondent watching people poison their own lives
and the lives of those around them with negative, acerbic attitudes. Stop! This is the
most regrettable and unnecessary tragedy I have witnessed in my four
plus decades of living. God is not out to
get you, He is on your side. The world is
not out to crush you, it is your oyster. Outside,
it rains sometimes, it shines sometimes. Whatever
it is doing, it does for everyone. On the
inside, the sun is always shining. The
question is whether or not you are going to pull the blinds.
-
Jeff
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“Too many
people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.”
-
Malcolm
Forbes
One of the
truly destructive things we can do is to compare ourselves to other
people. If ever there was an area where
the grass is always greener on the other side it is in personal
comparisons. If a woman is blessed with a
fabulous figure, a beautiful head of hair, and eyes that could make a
Hell’s Angel weep, but has less than perfect teeth, what do you think
she focuses on and thinks about every time she meets another woman with
a gorgeous smile? It’s not her own index
of assets, is it? The human animal seems
obsessively intent on fanning the flames of its’ own insecurity instead
of recognizing and building on the incredible assets we possess.
You are a
miracle. Because you have not recognized
your innate gifts and talents and developed them to their full
potential does not change that fact. God
has engineered you for success and endowed you with the seeds of
greatness, going so far as to create you in His own image.
Did you know that most people never use more than 2% of their
mental capacity? Stop focusing on what you
don’t have and what you are not, and start developing that 98% of your
brain that most of the world will continue to keep dormant. Leave the comparisons to others and start
recognizing what you are- a miracle of God with unlimited human
potential.
-
Jeff
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Quotes
"Each of us
inevitable; each of us limitless; each of us with his or her right upon
the earth; each of us allowed the eternal purports of the earth; each
of us here as divinely as any is here."
- Walt
Whitman
As a human
being, you have limitations- we all do. Shaquille O’Neal is not going
to make it as a jockey, you are not capable of leaping tall buildings
in a single bound, and no matter how hard he trains, nor how much he
believes, William Hung is not going to win American Idol.
There are indeed limitations to what each of us can do. However, the effect one's life can have on
society and on the lives of others is indeed limitless.
Mother Theresa could not feed, clothe, and save the entire
world, yet the ramifications of the life she led have touched millions
of lives, and her good works will ripple throughout eternity. Billy Graham is not a dynamic public speaker,
but his traveling crusades have been under way for decades and will
affect lives for decades after he departs this earth.
James Earl Ray managed to end Martin Luther King Jr's life, yet
the effect of Dr. King's push for civil rights will live forever more.
I do not
believe greatness is an accident. I
believe it is the result of an individual committing himself to a cause
bigger than himself for which he is uniquely designed.
This is the true definition of a life with purpose.
When I was younger, my life was about me, about getting rich and
famous. My life has now been redirected so
that I concern myself with inspiring members of our next generation,
leaving a positive imprint of my spirit on the world, and leaving a
legacy and road map for my beloved daughter, Priya.
Whether or not my purpose in life is "great" I do not concern
myself with- I will leave that to be judged by others.
The point is, I have found purpose and meaning in positively
touching others.
Very few of us ever
scratch our potential as individuals, and certainly not as agents of a
divine purpose. I believe each of us has
such a purpose and, whether we know it or not, we are all constantly
touching other lives. When you
touch a life– positively or negatively –that life touches another. As a
result, you will probably never know how many lives your life can and
will impact. With all of our potential, and all the resources upon this
earth, combined with the fact that God has providently chosen for each
of us to be here, we need to make our lives count. What you do with
your life matters and how you affect others may have exponential
repercussions for generations and beyond. Your life is important. Live
it in a manner that expresses just how much it really does count.
-
Jeff
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“A
pessimist is one who feels bad when he feels good for fear he'll feel
worse when he feels better."
- Unknown
When I
first came across this quotation, I was regaled by its witty humor and
clever cadence. After thinking about it
for a few minutes, I was much more impressed by the life truth it
represents. Absolutely everyone has a
subconscious idea of what they think they deserve and an internal
prosperity thermostat set accordingly. What
happens when people start getting more than they think deserve? Self-sabotage.
Are you
one of these people that gets uneasy when things get too good? The reason everything turns sour when you
start to taste something sweet is because you are the victim of your
own self-fulfilling prophecy. The law of
attraction says that whatever you focus your mind on you will
eventually attract to your life. The law
of expectation says that whatever you expect to happen in your life,
you act and speak to yourself according to this expectation, and
therefore bring upon yourself. With these
two laws in effect, and your mind focused on the storm you are
convinced is on the horizon, is it any wonder that it shows up? It is absolutely critical that you purge this
expectancy of doom and gloom from your mindset, or you will continue to
purge success, happiness, and those seeking refuge from the “big
downer” (you) out of your life.
While
there is no possible way to comprehensively detail the causes and
remedy for “Gloomitis” in this forum, start this way:
1)
Resolve to
change.
2)
Become
acutely aware of when you slide into Dr. Gloom mode.
3)
Develop a
phrase or action (or both together) to interrupt your negative pattern. For instance, try pinching yourself and saying
out loud (or internally if vocalizing is inappropriate) a phrase like,
“Knock it off! You’re done with that, so
just knock it off!”
4)
Substitute
a positive phrase for the negative one you started to tell yourself. If you are totally convinced your sales
presentation or classroom speech is going to flop, substitute in, “I’m
going to kick ass with this presentation, so I can’t wait to give it!”
The
important thing is to recognize when you are pessimistic, and refuse to
cave in to it. If you will get emotionally
involved with this, I think you’ll find it more effective than you now
imagine.
-
Jeff
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Quotes
"We have
time enough if we will but use it right."
- Johann
Wolfgang Von Goethe
Napoleon said that he won all of his famous
(some say infamous) battles because he understood the value of five
minutes. All of us have exactly
twenty-four hours in every day, but have you noticed how much more
productive some people are than others? Even
the people that run around like chickens with their heads cut off often
accomplish very little, but claim they have no time for anything.
All of us are in a time crunch.
Try making a list of the most important things you have to do
the night before, prioritize these items, then focus on those items
deemed highest priority. Do not let
yourself get “caught up”. Stay focused,
work diligently, and keep a record of your accomplishment.
It sounds simple, but even this rudimentary process of
prioritizing your schedule will help. There is never enough time for
everything, but, if we use it right, we have enough time for the most
important things.
“Whenever
you find something getting done, you find a monomaniac with a mission.”
-
Peter
Drucker
It has
been said that one person with a commitment is worth ninety-nine with
only an interest. Unless you are a bored
cynic living by the philosophy of life sucks and then you
die, you probably have much you would like to accomplish and do in
this life. It is not just your job to
figure out what all of those things specifically are, but also to
determine what is the single most important thing you want to do, be,
or have.
When you
focus your life’s mission on that one thing that is most important, the
planets seem to align in your favor to help you get what you want, and
to where you want to go. Obstacles will
arise, but when you refuse to accept no for an answer, the obstacles
will eventually give up and relent. With
this attitude, not only will you be worth more than any ninety-nine
with only an interest, but the passion and enthusiasm you will generate
for your life’s mission will be infectious. That
will make you worth ninety-nine times the ninety-nine in my book.
-
Jeff
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“Self-discipline
is the ability to make yourself do what you should do when you should
do it, whether you feel like it or not. “
- Elbert
Hubbard
How
difficult is it to force yourself to do what you love to do? Not very. That is
why so many people are successful when they are doing what they love. But whether you love what you do or not, at
some point, for long term success, you will be forced to do something
you don’t enjoy. How many times have you
seen an artist, of some sort, say that they love performing or creating
their art, but hate all of the other nonsense that goes with it? How many of these celebrities have been burned
by leaving their money and business matters to others because they
don’t want to be bothered by such unpleasant “trivialities”? If people that can afford to hire the very
best people to do for them what they don’t want to do, must still do
that which they don’t want to do, how much more is required of you and
I that are still grinding our way to the top?
In both my
life, and the lives I have observed, the employment of an ounce of
self-discipline today is worth pound upon pound of output down the road. Consider that if, at age 20, you were to start
investing just $100 per month in an average performing mutual fund, you
would have well over $1,000,000 to retire with at age 65.
How many people cannot come up with $100 in any given month if
they knew that the result in the end would be a $1,000,000? The problem is not finding the $100 (you’d
somehow manage to pay the IRS if congress boosted your taxes by $100
per month), the problem is disciplining yourself to systematically
invest it month after month.
Self-discipline
is perhaps the hallmark trait of the successful. In
the long run, mediocre talent with loads of self-discipline will
outperform loads of talent lacking self-discipline every time. To break the stranglehold of procrastination,
develop a catch phrase for yourself like, “Do it now!”
Whenever you need to be doing something and resistance rears its
ugly head, pull out that phrase and jam it down the throat of the
resistance, “Do it now! Do it now!” It will be difficult at first, but over time
it will get easier, and when you begin to see the payoff from
disciplining yourself, you will be juiced to keep the victory train
rolling.
-
Jeff
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"You will
not be put in a position to lead until your life is worth following."
- Rod Jao,
Financially Independent Businessman at Age 19
It is
amazing how many times we get things 180 degrees out of phase in our
lives. I often hear people say things
like, “I would be more committed to my company if the cheapskates would
pay me more”. The law of compensation
doesn't work that way. After you have
shown the dedication and commitment, and have gone the extra mile, your
company (or perhaps a rival company if you keep it up) becomes the
agent of the law of compensation and you are justly compensated. Leadership is much the same way.
Expecting to get your act together and start acting like a
leader after you have been put in a leadership position is folly. You must first be someone worth following and
then leadership opportunities will begin springing forth.
-
Jeff
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“I alone pull the levers of my life. No excuses,
no blame. I am 100 percent responsible for where I am today and where I
am going tomorrow.”
- Jeff
David Young
Most
people want to be happy, successful, and at least reasonably prosperous. If this is true, why did Henry David Thoreau
strike such a nerve when he made the observation that most men live
lives of quiet desperation? There are many
factors that explain the achievement gap between what people say they
want and what most people end up getting, but I believe one of the most
insidious culprits is the refusal to accept total responsibility for
one’s life. Nearly everyone will echo the
need for all of us to exercise personal responsibility in our lives,
but then ramble off a list of people and circumstances to blame to for
their failures.
People are
only able to reach their full potential when they have a strong
internal locus of control. This happens
when you feel that you are in control of yourself and your life as
opposed to people and events external to yourself.
When you point fingers, assign blame, and make excuses, what
happens is, you yield control to those people and circumstances you
ascribe blame to. Take that control back by proclaiming that you, and
you alone, are totally responsible for your life.
There will
be times in your life when you are dealt an unfair hand not of your
choosing. I did not choose to have ALS,
but I have a choice as to how I will respond to having ALS. It has forced me to navigate the waters of
life different than I otherwise would, but it will not be an excuse to
rob me of my rightful place as the captain of my life’s ship. You only have as much control over your life
as you take responsibility for- resolve to take to take 100 percent of
both.
-
Jeff
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Quotes
“It’s not what others do to keep you down; it’s
what you do to keep yourself up.”
- Chris,
African American talk radio caller
One
afternoon I was listening to a popular radio talk show, when the
subject of racial discrimination was being discussed. An African
American woman called to weigh in on the subject. She spoke about the
discrimination she had faced in her life in a very matter of fact and
care free tone. There was something so uplifting and triumphant in the
way this woman spoke that I stopped what I was doing to make sure I
concentrated on every word she uttered. Then in one clean swipe of the
tongue, she summarily dismissed the impact of the injustice she had
suffered by imparting one of the most poignant lessons one can learn.
In an unmistakably empowered spirit, she proclaimed, “It’s not
what others do to keep you down; it’s what you do to keep yourself up.”
As a white
male, I won’t pretend to know what it is to suffer from racial or
ethnic bias, nor do I know what it is to be a woman in a so-called
man’s world. I do know, however, what it is to be mocked, ridiculed,
and discriminated against because of my disabilities. Imagine calling a
friend’s business and asking for him only to be told in a mock
intoxicated voice to call back after I’ve “had few more.” Or perhaps it
would be more pleasant to have a group of children walk alongside you
giggling as the pack leader mimics your severely disturbed gait. I’ve
been manhandled, and roughly tossed out of a nightclub because bouncers
mistook my disability for severe intoxication. My personal least
favorite is when a well meaning individual assumes difficulty with
speech is synonymous with mental deficiency and hearing loss, pats me
on the head or shoulder, and speaks slowly and loudly to make sure I
understand the simplistic concept they are attempting to convey. But
the most demeaning treatment of all is when people simply pretend you
don’t exist so they won’t have to deal with you.
Like
Chris, I understand discrimination. But like this triumphant woman, I
also understand that what is inside of me, and how I see myself has far
more impact on my destiny and the quality of my life than any thought,
opinion, or action of anyone outside of myself. If the obstacles are
higher, then I will just throw my heart up further over the bar so the
rest of me can follow. I have trouble speaking- I give speeches. I am
confined to a wheelchair- I coach football. With no job, no money, and
a terminal illness, I won a custody battle with an involved mother.
Never let the ignorant opinions of others affect your opinion of you,
because it is impossible to consistently act inconsistent with the way
you see yourself. Regardless of who or what tries to keep you down,
ultimately, victory or defeat will be determined by what you do to keep
yourself up.
-
Jeff
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Quotes
“Vision
without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the
time. Vision with action can change the world.”
- Joel A. Barker
Every
great accomplishment was, in its infancy, a dream. Before skyscrapers
were erected, or the airplane took flight, they were but dreams. They
were dreams in the hearts and minds of men that dared believe, with
unparalleled conviction, that their vision was bigger than any
obstacle, any criticism, and or setback they could face. Nothing would
deter these men from turning their visions to reality – nothing. Most
people have dreams of one form or another, even if they have lost
belief their ability to make them become reality. My question for you
is- has your dream crystallized into a vision?
A
dream is the chrysalis of a vision. It is the beginning stage of what
becomes one’s destiny. It Is the opening up of the imagination to a
possibility so profound and so enticing that you no longer want the
realization of that possibility- you need it. It becomes a desire so
intense, so consuming, that you cannot help but walk it, talk it, eat
it, and sleep it. It becomes so much a part of what you are about as to
become indistinguishable from who you are. When
your dream reaches a level of conviction that your mind can no longer
fathom the possibility of an outcome other than the full and
complete realization of that dream, then, and only then, do you have a
vision. Do you have a dream, or have you caught a vision?
If
your vision is large and profound, a mere dream will not be enough to
complete your mission. A mere dream leaves room for wishing and hoping
and is therefore susceptible to the cancer of doubt.
A vision is a commitment to the creation of a reality so real to
you that hope and wish fulfillment are completely out of place, and
doubt can find no pathway of entry. It is a done deal. All that remains
is the price in blood, sweat, and tears to be paid. When you have truly
caught a vision, you will have no problem paying
that price.
-
Jeff
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Quotes
“A man should conceive of a legitimate purpose in his heart, and set out to accomplish it... Even if he fails again and again to accomplish his purpose (as he necessarily must until weakness is overcome), the strength of character gained will be the measure of his true success, and this will form a new starting point f