Affluence, in many ways, has sickened us as a society, as it will sicken any society, as it sickened the ancient Roman society and made it into a soft, overripe plum ready for picking by the hungry hordes. Affluence without corresponding wisdom and maturity makes the human creature ridiculous. There is nothing more ludicrous, more pitiful, than the human being who thinks he already knows enough. Affluence causes us, if we’re ill-equipped to handle it, to lose sight of what’s important and what isn’t. We tend to forget what brought affluence in the first place, which was meaningful, quality production that made this nation strong and the miracle that it became. It was productivity, hard work, and meaningful goals. Production, ladies and gentlemen, is the key to the solution to our problems as a nation, as a community, as a family, and as individuals. Meaningful, intelligent production, quality production, and if possible, with flair.
Now, the United States has softened in certain areas, as we’ve found by the productivity and inventiveness of Japan and West Germany and France, and some other countries which are striving very hard to get what we’ve got. We still lead in many, in most important areas, and we’re waking up in many others. General Motors will spend over a billion dollars in R&D (research and development) this year, as will IBM. Being successful should never be confused with remaining successful; those are two distinctly different animals. And may I respectfully inquire how much you, as a person, are spending on R&D this year? How much of your take-home pay are you pumping back into quality products calculated to make you a more intelligent, creative, productive human creature?
MAKE UP YOUR MIND
You know, once we decide on what we really want, we’re certainly amazed at how little it really is. And then we discover that we can have what we want. We can have everything we want, if we’ll simply make up our minds as to what it is. People don’t have trouble achieving their goals; their difficulties stem from not setting them, from drifting, from being subject to every vague wind, every breeze and tide. We’re like ships, quite often, without rudders, subject to every wind and tide. Let me suggest that you turn your car into a learning center, that you listen while you’re driving. Build your office and home library of books. Spend an hour a day in the lonely hours reading, thinking, listening, setting goals, making notes, coming up with new and better, more effective, more creative ways of doing a better job of serving those you have chosen of your own free will to serve. If you’ll do that, you need have no worries about the future.
ENTREPRENEUR TIP
We are living in the golden age of content. There is so much information out there (on any topic) that it’s like drinking from a firehose. To focus your learning patterns, curate your content around topics that interest you right now. One great way to do that is to choose a topic each month, then build yourself a reading and podcast list that reflects that theme.
I hope I didn’t give the impression that I’m anti-technology; I’m not. There are some towering and exciting problems that need solving in the world right now, and I’d like very much to see the United States solve more of them, and I think we can expect that. I believe that very soon now, we will find, we will develop an alternative fuel that will liberate the whole world from the domination of an anachronistic fossil fuel, and then the oil barons can try selling sand. As far as we know, there’s very little market for sand today. But we must keep technology in its place. It’s exciting, it’s wonderful, it’s scary at times. It’s awful, too, as we find new and more efficient ways to destroy ourselves. But there’s nothing on Earth, ladies and gentlemen, more important than a human creature. A little girl or boy or an old man or woman, of any color whatever, in any country on this planet.
DEFINE HAPPINESS
Let me give you the definition of happiness. It’s the best one I’ve ever found. It was given to us by a man believed by some to be the smartest man who ever lived, John Stuart Mill. It goes like this: “Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness. On the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means but as itself an ideal end.” That’s the secret. Aiming at something else, he concluded, people find happiness by the way. It’s only when we’re doing something as an end in itself that happiness, like a butterfly, comes and settles on our sleeve.
Now in closing, a couple of reminders. Quality production is the answer. Production, good, quality production as a person. The great Abraham Maslow, president of the American Psychological Association, used to say that, “You judge a human being the same way you judge an apple tree: by its production.”
And Dean Briggs put it this way. He said, “Do your work. Not just your work and no more, but a little more than is expected. That little more is worth all the rest. And if you doubt, as you must, and if you suffer, as you must, do your work. Put your heart into it and the sky will clear. And then, out of your very doubt and suffering, will be born the supreme joy of life.” Believe it or not, that’s where it is.
SET GOALS AND BE A LIFELONG LEARNER
Number two, set goals. Goals that are worthy of you.
Three, keep that education going, every day, a little bit. Learn to be a little smarter, a little gentler, a little kinder, a little more effective every day as a human creature. You’ll never be bored, and you’ll never get old. Our education should end when we do, and not one day before.
This kind of an education I’m talking about will help us learn to love what doesn’t cost much, and to love reading and conversation and music, and to do our work as well as we can learn to do it. To become professionals in a world of amateurs. To love people, even though they’re quite different from us. To love life for its own sake and to love the sunrise and the sunset and the beating of rain on the roof and windows, or the gentle fall of snow on a winter day. This kind of an education helps us learn to love the companionship of dogs and the laughter and gaiety of children. But most of all, this kind of a daily education in those lonely hours will teach us to be free. Free from blind and mindless conformity, from tribalism and superstition, from the domination of things and the opinions of others.
Education is the process by which we narrow the gap between where we are and what we are, and what we want to be and become. A great American educator, Dr. Gilbert Hiatt of Columbia University, said, “Wholeness of mind and spirit is not a quality conferred on us by nature or by God. It is like health, virtue, and knowledge: We have the capacity to attain it, but to achieve it depends on our own efforts.”
In your dealing with people of all ages (little, tiny children, old people, everybody in between), remember they want three things more than anything else in the world, and so do you and I. And they want them in this order of importance. Number one: They want recognition, the opposite of anonymity, more than anything in the world. Recognize them, listen to them, look at them and they’ll bloom like flowers in a garden. Two: They want stimulation and change, the opposite of boredom. Keep things changing. Don’t let things settle down to the dull, dreary ruts of boredom. And three: They want security. But it’s in third place, and there are several kinds of security. They want to be secure in our love, secure in our word, secure in our integrity, the product we sell, the people we are. Let’s give them what they want, and they’ll respond marvelously.
And let me close with this little poem written by one of my favorite poets, the Nobel Prize-winning poet from Calcutta, Rabindranath Thakur: “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I woke and saw that life was duty. I acted and behold, duty was joy.”
Believe it or not, ladies and gentlemen, that’s it.
ENTREPRENEUR ACTION ITEM
How to Live with Purpose and Stay Focused on Long-Term Goals
Nightingale reminds us to set goals that are worthy of us. In other words, set goals that enrich both your business and your life for the long term. Let’s think about it this way. Your habits are broken down into two categories: instant pleasure and delayed. Everyone has some instant
habits, things like social media or TV or squeezing your dog’s squishy face, and everyone has some delayed habits that connect to your bigger-picture visions of health, happiness, and wealth. That’s normal. All balanced humans have both.
But if you’re hungry for more purpose, happiness, wealth, and meaning, you’ve got to be long-term dominant. There’s no other way around it. And that means learning how to plan.
Without an action-packed daily plan that connects you to your future, you’ll automatically fill your time with mostly instant pleasure, like social media, watching videos, or reading inspiring articles. Instant pleasure is great, don’t get me wrong. But like sweets, it’s best after you’ve eaten your main meal and only in small doses.
The thing is, most people don’t know what their main meal is. So they go through their day hungry for purpose and needing direction, then they settle for occupations of their time that don’t lead to tangible gains. Instead of doing that, think about how you can form a better, stronger way to achieve your goals, one day at a time. Here are some steps you can take to make those long-term goals a reality.
Get Crystal Clarity on Your Yearly Goals
What career do you want to be in? Where do you want to be in your health and fitness journey? What fun and self-love goals would make this the best year of your life? What do you want to learn? What are your financial goals? And how do you plan on giving back? These are the six major areas that your goals will fall into. So have a seat and write out each category:
Career
Health/fitness
Fun/self-love
Learning
Financial
Giving
Then meditate on exactly what you want in each of those categories. Write those goals down. That’s your yearly planner—you’ll reflect on this every time you do a monthly planning strategy.
Set a Recurring Date for Monthly Strategy Sessions
You’d be surprised at how many people lack clarity on their long-term vision. But of those who do know what they want, hardly any of them will take the time to break down their “elephants” into smaller, more digestible chunks. So you have a bunch of people with awesome dreams like “I’m going to write for The New York Times!” and their action steps look like this:
“Write for The New York Times!”
That lofty goal must be broken down into sections that can be accomplished month by month; otherwise it just won’t happen. The same is true for whatever goals you have in mind. So give yourself 30 minutes to an hour each month for a monthly planning session. During this recurring appointment with yourself (which is best done on Sundays), you’ll reflect on your long-term goals and your notes, and you’ll brainstorm realistic milestones that can be achieved in 30 days.
For the fictitious New York Times writing goal, that might involve writing every day, finishing the book Writing Tools, researching your first ten publications, starting your own blog, and pitching the publications you researched.
For your dreams? You’ll just have to sit down for your monthly planning session and see. Set a recurring reminder in your phone once a month to reflect on your yearly goals and craft your monthly planner. Break your monthly goals into the same format as your yearly ones: career, health/fitness, fun/self-love, learning, financial, and giving goals.
Make a Weekly Action Plan Every Sunday
Now that you have a monthly strategy of how you’ll tackle your yearly goals, you’re ready to break those goals into weekly action plans. This is where you’ll convert every monthly goal that isn’t already an action step into one you can look at in the morning and say, “I’m going to do THAT!”
Take our fictitious NYT yearly goal, for instance, with the “build a website” monthly goal. Building a website is time-consuming and can’t happen in one swoop. So you reflect on that big goal and see how you can break it down.
(This is called strategizing. And the more you do it, the better you get.)
For week one of month one, that might look like this:
Draft copy for “about me,” contact, and homepages.
Research your favorite websites and take notes on how you want your site to look.
Edit ten of your best articles for blog page.
Week two might involve reading a book/watching video tutorials on building a WordPress website and picking a theme—if you’re going to do it yourself. Or if you’re paying for a site, you’d talk to five developers, compare prices/products, then select one for the job.
You’re going to use the same planning format as you’ve done with your monthly planner: career, fun/self-love, etc., except that you’ll add one new section, “Daily Non-Negotiables.” That goals section is simply for the things you have to do every single day to be your best. That could be writing an article per day, doing a specified amount of exercise, reading the relevant books, etc.
Once you’ve concluded your weekly planning session, you’ll know every single action you’re going to take this week to be a balanced, purposeful, and successful human. That means you don’t have to worry about whether you’re doing enough anymore or have anxiety about what you should plan in a day because it’s all there in your weekly action plan.
Write Out Your Top Goals in a Daily Planner
Once you’ve come up with a monthly strategy and weekly action plan, you’re already in the top 5 percent of planners in the world. Seriously. Nobody does this stuff, and it’s so easy! But as soon as you start using your weekly action plan as a reference for your daily plan, you’re unstoppable.
All you have to do is flip your planner back to your weekly action plan, see what five or so goals you could kick butt at today, and write those goals down in a new daily planning page. This takes all of two minutes.
Just make sure to include checkboxes next to each goal, and set reminders for the critical ones—and you’re officially a planning expert. But more than that, you’ll consistently accomplish the long-term habits that bring you the health, happiness, wealth, and purpose you’ve been dreaming about.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Self Development
Earl Nightingale
In the last chapter, you read motivational author Earl Nightingale’s take on overcoming adversity. He was no stranger to hard times, having been born at the dawn of the Great Depression. For a short time, Nightingale and his single mother had to live in a tent city after his father abandoned them. Later, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps and was on the USS Arizona when it was attacked at Pearl Harbor. He was only one of a handful of Marines who survived the catastrophic attack. He later went on to a successful radio career, and his broadcast program “Our Changing World” became the most syndicated radio show in history.
In 1960, he founded the Nightingale-Conant Corp. with Lloyd Conant, which remains one of the biggest sellers of motivational content. He died in 1989.
Here, in this essay, Nightingale discusses the role of self-development in a successful life and career.
COLLECT YOUR ROCKS WISELY
You can tell what you value most highly by assessing your past decisions, by seeing what you have, in fact, achieved. What you possess, what you place importance upon, what you felt has been worth striving for, what you wish to be, what you value most highly. When we look at ourselves in the light of our originality and realize we still cling to vestigial fears no longer needed, as useless as the disappearing limbs of the whale, as we stand in the arch of our experience and see the untraveled world before us, and despite the nagging doubts that must plague us from time to time, I think we have to agree with Tennyson’s Ulysses, and say, “Come, my friends. ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
I got my inspiration for this piece when I reread one of the “Markets of Change” series which appeared in 1970 in Kaiser News, published by Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corp. and edited by Don Faben. That was one of the finest series of publications I’ve ever had the joy of reading, and I feel genuinely sorry for any person who did not have the opportunity to r
ead them, and the artwork and the typography were as great as the original scholarly writing. The piece begins like this:
Once upon a time, there evolved upon this planet an organism that was ill-suited for survival. It could not run fast enough to escape its enemies. If caught, its teeth and claws were small protection. It was too big to hide under a leaf and too weak to burrow deeply into the ground. To survive, it took refuge in caves, where a fire at the entrance kept predators at bay. If the fire ran out of fuel, this creature could hurl rocks, and thus drive all but the most determined enemies away. Its security was measured by the amount of firewood it could accumulate and the number of rocks it could gather and store in the cave against the terrors of the night.
All other creatures grew bigger teeth or learned to run faster. Alone among all the creatures on Earth, the one we’re describing turned to things for its survival. This was, in the end, to make all the difference. After a while, this creature learned to cultivate some edible plants to supplement the food it could get by gathering and hunting. Growing food was at best uncertain and in any event depended on the seasons, which could not be controlled. And the creature began to store its surplus foods. His security against the vagaries of nature was measured by how much he could grow and how much he could store. Well-being was measured quantitatively: the more, the better. From the very beginning, he was motivated by fear: fear of pain, fear of death, fear that there wouldn’t be enough. In time, these creature’s activities produced so much that it became more convenient to represent the accumulation of things with other things, smaller and easier to carry, or to exchange.
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