Invest in Yourself

I've heard this nugget of wisdom twice in the last week, once from one of the founders of modern success thinking: Earl Nightingale and again in different form from billionaire Bill Bartmann. It's solid advice and I thought I'd share it with you.

Earl eloquently but drolly expounded on the power of the human brain and correctly concludes that it, moreso than anything else in your life it will affect the level of success and enjoyment you achieve. However it is terribly underutilized but the vast majority of people.

Now I'm sure you are using your brain all the time. You use it at work, use it to figure out problems around the house, deal with family issues, romance issues, maybe exercise it with puzzles and problems. But how often do you sit down and proactively use it to plan out your life? Once in a while I'm sure. Once in a very long while.

What Earl proposes is that you use it a little more often than that. He suggests an hour a day. Yes, I agree, it'd be very difficult for most anyone to squeeze an hour out of every day but consider this. You might be spending time daily working out, or beautifying yourself, watching tv, browsing the internet, talking to friends and family, sleeping in, playing video games or even doing work around the house. Is any of that getting you closer to your goals and desires? No, it is not.

However through the consistant application of your mental facilities on the matter of how to achieve your goals, followed by action, surely you would see marked improvement.

Earl suggests that once you have a clearly defined goal (Bill calls them promises, which I like better) you spend that hour daily brainstorming for up to 20 ways to achieve that goal. You may not come up with 20 ideas and that's okay. In fact every idea you come up with for a week or two may be crap. You're not a certified genius after all but you don't need to be. All you need is one genius idea. Anyone who consistantly applies their abilities to solving the problem of how to achieve their goals will eventually come up with some gems. Keep refining those gems of ideas and eventually you'll come up with something truly compelling that no one else is doing. Why is no one else doing it? Because vertually no one else is applying their brains in this manner!! If they are, they likely have different goals than you anyway.

It is famously stated the Edison had over ten thousand failed attempts to create a lightbulb. No one says he was a moron or a failure becuase he had ten thousand ideas that didn't work. He's considered a genius because he continually applied his mind to finding the one idea that did. You can too.

If you met your future self, and they told you that you became amazingly successful by taking an hour a day to apply themselves to how to better achieve their goals, you would immediately rearrange your life to make room for that hour. You are not going to meet your future self obviously but you can meet the future of your desires in the same way.

Bill Bartmann's take was a little different. First off, not only does he state that you need a clearly defined goal or promise, he suggests that you create a business plan on how you are going to achieve that promise. In the same manner that a business lays out a course of action, budget and timetable to achieve the company goals you can do the same with your goals. Once you have your business plan Bill recommends you review it daily for twenty minutes. What are you doing that's working? What's not working? How can you do it better? Is the currently set goal serving you? Is it even your goal? Too many people are trying to achieve that which other people have told them they should be doing. Parents most notably.

By taking twenty minutes (much more digestible than an hour) daily to review your progress and brainstorming new ideas you will fastforward your progress.

If you were requested by your workplace to find ways of improving workplace efficiency you might find it a frustrating exercise but you would still do it because that's what you're getting paid to do. By finding ways to improve your own life inefficiencies and coming up with ideas on how to reach your promise you will be, in effect, paying yourself, as you will be consistantly making improvements in your life and increasing your earning potential.

You invest time in everything else around you - work, family, friends, responsibilities. Certainly you can take 20-60 minutes to invest in yourself.

What is Success?

If you follow my sister blog Preston's Path to Prosperity, you know, or at least I sure hope you do, that the premise is to document one person's rise from living an average, non-exceptional life to one that is truly outstanding and the thinking and beliefs that lead to that rise.

The problem is, it's a bit of a lie. Why? Because, I have already achieved success. However, you probably wouldn't define it that way.

By and large people have a very superficial definition of success. It looks something like this:

Must be a millionaire or better
Must hold a position of importance
Must have an attractive partner or partners
Must be healthy and in North America that generally means muscular/sexy body and plastic surgery so you have an attractive, youthful appearance as well as good overall health
Probably famous
Owns beautiful mansions, cars, clothes, etc.

I think most anyone would agree a rich, handsome, well built man with a gorgeous young wife and lots of ostentatious wealth would be a poster child for success.

Motivational Speaker Anthony Robbins understands this and that's the life he leads. He has to. Not for his benefit but for yours.

Let's face it, if Tony gave all his money to charity and lived and dressed very modestly, if he didn't work out and was as skinny as he once was, (although still healthy), if he married a very average or below average looking woman (even if she was an outstanding personality) and if you had never heard of him, you would not for a moment think he knew anything special that was worth listening too. At least, not without someone else recommending him.

So even though, at his core he was the exact same person, living his life exactly as he chose, living a life of boundless happiness, married to someone whom he loves and is loved by deeply, with fantastic knowledge that could change your life in an instant, you would not perceive him to have achieved success, at least not unless you got to know him. Anthony must have all those superficial signs of success on display so people will listen to what he has to say.

Here's another example of success that flys contrary to the thinking of the masses.

Mother Theresa.

Was she rich? Heavens no. She lived an extremely modest life.
Was she beautiful? Internally yes, where it mattered but she not a women men would look twice at.
Did she hold a prestigious position in life? Not my most people's standards.
Did she have an attractive mate? Not a worldly one, no, never.
Was she healthy? Yes, but not in the Hollywood sense that North Americans use to define it.
Did she own lots of great things. No.
Was she famous? Yes, but she did not seek it nor would it have made her any less of a success if she wasn't.

Let's face it, if you took her out of her religious attire and put her on the streets people would sooner think she was a baglady than a truly successful person. I'm sure you would agree they would be horribly wrong.

So then how do we define success? What makes a person successful?

The difference between a successful person and everyone else, is a successful person is defining the life they live while everyone else is allowing life to define them.

To put it another way, successful people are walking in faith. They are asking God for what they want and walking towards that in faith that the Lord will provide. They are not limiting what they are asking for, for they know that the Lord has no limitations. They are not living in doubt or fear.

Although they face daily uncertainy because the way forward is not clear it does not disway them. They have come to the firm realization that like walking through a dense fog, as you make each step forward you'll be able to see your immediate surroundings and take another step forward. Even when they do bump into something, that's okay, they expect and accept that that is going to happen. They just move around the obstacle and keep going. If they come to a wall they trust God will provide a way over, under, around or through and diligently search for that until they find it. If they step off an abyss they know God has a rope around them and will pull them back up. So while it may frighten for the moment, they do not doubt in their heart they'll soon be back on solid ground. In time they make it to where they are going.

Everyone else meanwhile avoids the fog, worried they'll get hurt or lost or merely be directionless because they don't know where they are headed to begin with. So they either move away from the fog, and have their path defined for them by the fog of life or sit still, not going anywhere, until the fog and their life passes away.


So to succeed you must have a clear vision of where you want to be that emboldens you, you must have deep lasting faith in your heart that you will arrive there and you must, must, must be taking action to achieve that vision (do not wait for God to place it before you, boldly go and claim it).

Vision, faith, persistant action those are the hallmarks of success. Even if you have not yet arrived, you are defining what life you are living and that is success.

What everyone else is doing, irregardless of their place in life, irregardless of how many of the superficial signs of success they have, is merely existing.

So our poster child of success could be rich and famous because of his parents, could have a gorgeous partner and many fancy things because he has money, he may even be given ownership of the family business but without vision, faith and persistant action of his own, he is still merely existing and is no more spiritually rich or fulfilled than a pauper. He is not successful, he is merely a dim shadow of the success that came before. So do not put stock in those worldly things.

Success is a state of mind, a state of being. And I have already arrived.

20 Years - Don't Let Life Pass You By

On Saturday I was contributing my time to a Christian Concert event (http://www.musicinthesquare.com/). A friend and I decided to take lunch at the Wendy's across the street. We arrived at an ideal time as there was also no line ahead of us but one quickly formed behind us. As we were being served the manager opened another cash to help out. Upon seeing the manager my friend remarked she thought that the manager (a woman) looked familiar. So she went over to talk to her and sure enough, they did.

My friend had worked with this woman at Wendy's 20 years ago (and I had worked next door at Culture's) and here this woman was was still working at Wendy's 20 years later.

20 years of Wendy's?? No offense to the fine establishment that Wendy's is but we had a hard time grasping that reality. In those twenty years we had each held half a dozen different jobs and had our own businesses, gaining unique experience from each position along the way. What experiences has she had in 20 years of working at Wendy's? A whole lot of the same old, same old.

Now to be fair, it's possible she left Wendy's pursued other things and for whatever reason returned, although I doubt it. I doubt anyone would return to Wendy's once they had expanded themselves in their careers. Regardless, if someone told her 20 years ago this is what she would be doing now, without question, she would have venomously called them a liar and assured them she would not. So what happened?

Without interviewing her on the matter we can only speculate but some of the answers are clear.

Comfort - Staying at Wendy's was more comfortable than trying to do something new. Possibly she has limited education or just doesn't believe she's all that bright. Either way she has vastly underestimated her own potential and allowed herself to settle for what was easy and safe.

Fear - There's always some fear in changing careers. Fear you may not be successful in your new job. Fear you will be rejected and never find another job. Fear you may not like your new job. Fear can conjure all sorts of ridiculous notions into your head.

Doubt - Clearly she doubts she could do better. Ties closely into fear.

Lack of Vision - Does not have any dreams or vision for her life. So she's just cruising down the river of life, caught in the current, seeing where it goes, better or worse.

Lack of goals - As above. She's not setting goals for herself. Even if she doesn't have any dreams or aspirations, she should still have been goal setting to get ahead in her life. After 20 years she should, at least, be regional manager, not still working front line manager.

Not before we pass judgement on this lady let's look at ourselves first. While very few of us, nowadays are in the same career for 20 years, many of us are stuck in some area of our lives where we haven't really moved on. Most likely, we aren't even aware of it or if we are, we choose not to think of it. Reflect for a minute on all areas of your life. Is there some area where you've allowed yourself to sit for 5, 10, 20 years? Looking back 20 years, are you now where you would have envisioned yourself being at this point in your life? If not, why not? Most likely for these same reasons.

Do not allow any more time to go by, you've been idle long enough. Decide, right now to change. Define what you want that change to look like and then take immediate action.

Don't allow the next 20 years to slip through your fingers.