In Part IV, “Create Successful Relationships,” I’ll teach you a number of principles, as well as some very practical techniques, for building and maintaining successful relationships. In this day of strategic alliances and power networks, it’s literally impossible to build large-scale, long-lasting success without world-class relationship skills, including in social media.
Next, because so many people equate success with money, and because money is vital to our survival and the quality of our life, Part V is entitled “Success and Money.” I’ll teach you how to develop a more positive money consciousness, how to ensure that you have plenty of money to live the lifestyle you want, both now and after you retire, and the importance of tithing and service in guaranteeing your financial success.
Finally, in Part VI, because technology is so important today, I’ve honed down the most important principles that successful people follow in “Success in the Digital Age”—a look at how to master only the technology you need, how to “brand” yourself and develop a unique voice online, how to use social media to connect and develop valuable relationships, and how to use crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, and other Internet-based strategies to find the people and resources that can help you reach your most important goals.
HOW TO READ THIS BOOK
Everyone learns differently, and you probably know how you learn best. And though there are many ways that you can read this book, I’d like to make a few suggestions that previous readers have found helpful.
You may want to read this book through once just to get a feel for the total process before you start the work of creating the life you truly want. The principles are presented in an order that builds one upon the other. They are like the numbers in a combination lock—you need all the numbers, and you need them in the right order. It doesn’t matter what color, race, gender, or age you are. If you know the combination, the lock has to open for you.
As you are reading, I strongly encourage you to underline and highlight everything that feels important to you. Make notes in the margin about the things you’ll put into action. Then review those notes and highlighted sections again and again. Repetition is the key to real learning. Every time you reread portions of this book, you’ll literally “re-mind” yourself of what you need to do to get from where you are to where you want to be. As you’ll discover, it takes repetitive exposure over time to a new idea before that idea becomes a natural part of your way of thinking and being.
You may also discover that you’re already familiar with some of the principles here. That’s great! But ask yourself, Am I currently practicing them? If not, make a commitment to put them into action—now!
Remember, the principles only work if you work the principles.
The second time you read through this book, you’ll want to read one chapter at a time, then take whatever time necessary to put into practice that principle and the techniques that accompany it. If you’re already doing some of these things, keep doing them. If not, start now.
Like many of my past students and clients, you, too, may find yourself resisting taking some of the suggested action steps. But my experience has shown that the ones you most resist are the ones you most need to embrace. Remember, reading this book is not the same as doing the work, any more than reading a book on weight loss is the same as actually eliminating certain foods, eating fewer calories, and exercising more.
You might find it useful to connect with one or two other people who would like to join you as accountability partners and ensure that each of you actually implements what you learn. True learning only occurs when you assimilate and apply the new information—when there is a change in your behavior.
A WARNING
Of course, any change requires sustained effort to overcome years’ worth of internal and external resistance. Initially you may find yourself getting very excited about all this new information. You may feel a newfound sense of hope and enthusiasm for the new vision of your life as it can be. This is good. But be forewarned that you may also begin to experience other feelings, as well. You may feel frustration at not knowing about all of this earlier, anger at your parents and teachers for not teaching you these important concepts at home and at school, or anger at yourself for having already learned many of these things and not having acted on them.
Just take a deep breath and realize that this is all part of the process of your journey. Everything in the past has actually been perfect. Everything in your past has led you to this transformative moment in time. Everyone—including you—has always done the best they could with what they knew at the time. Now you are about to know more. Celebrate your new awareness! It is about to set you free.
You may also find that there will be times when you wonder, Why isn’t all of this working faster? Why haven’t I already achieved my goal? Why aren’t I rich already? Why don’t I have the man or woman of my dreams by now? When am I going to achieve my ideal weight? Success takes time, effort, perseverance, and patience. If you apply all of the principles and techniques covered in this book, you will achieve your goals. You will realize your dreams. But it won’t happen overnight.
Finally, it’s natural in the pursuit of any goal to come upon obstacles, to feel temporarily stuck on a plateau. This is normal. Anyone who has ever played a musical instrument, participated in a sport, or practiced a martial art knows that you hit plateaus where it seems as though you’re making no progress whatsoever. That’s when the uninitiated often quit, give up, drop out, or take up another instrument or sport. But the wise have discovered if they just keep practicing their instrument, sport, or martial art (or, in your case, the success principles in this book), eventually they make what feels like a sudden leap to a higher level of proficiency. Be patient. Hang in there. Don’t give up. You will break through. I promise you—the principles always work.
Okay, let’s get started.
It’s time to start living the life you’ve imagined.
HENRY JAMES
American-born author of 20 novels, 112 stories, and 12 plays
PART ONE
The Fundamentals of Success
Learn the fundamentals of the game and stick to them. Band-Aid remedies never last.
JACK NICKLAUS
Legendary professional golfer
P R I N C I P L E
1
TAKE 100% RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR LIFE
You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself.
JIM ROHN
America’s foremost business philosopher
One of the most pervasive myths in the American culture today is that we are entitled to a great life—that somehow, somewhere, someone (certainly not us) is responsible for filling our lives with continual happiness, exciting career options, nurturing family time, and blissful personal relationships simply because we exist.
But the real truth—and the one lesson this whole book is based on—is that there is only one person responsible for the quality of the life you live.
That person is you.
If you want to be successful, you have to take 100% responsibility for everything that you experience in your life. This includes the level of your achievements, the results you produce, the quality of your relationships, the state of your health and physical fitness, your income, your debts, your feelings—everything!
This is not easy.
In fact, most of us have been conditioned to blame something outside of ourselves for the parts of our life we don’t like. We blame our parents, our bosses, our friends, our coworkers, our spouse, the weather, the economy, the government, our astrological chart, our lack of money—anyone or anything we can pin the blame on. We never want to look at where the real problem is— ourselves.
There is a wonderful story told about a man who is out walking one night and comes upon another man down on his knees looking for something under a street lamp. The passerby inquires as to what the other man i
s looking for. He answers that he is looking for his lost key. The passerby offers to help and gets down on his knees and helps him search for the key. After an hour of fruitless searching, he says, “We’ve looked everywhere for it and we haven’t found it. Are you sure that you lost it here?”
The other man replies, “No, I lost it in my house, but there is more light out here under the street lamp.”
It is time to stop looking outside yourself for the answers to why you haven’t created the life and results you want, for it is you who creates the quality of the life you lead and the results you produce.
You—no one else!
To achieve major success in life—to achieve those things that are most important to you—you must assume 100% responsibility for your life. Nothing less will do.
100% RESPONSIBILITY FOR EVERYTHING
As I mentioned in the Introduction, when I was only one year out of graduate school, I had the good fortune to work for W. Clement Stone. He was a self-made multimillionaire worth $600 million at the time. Stone was also America’s premier success guru. He was the publisher of Success Magazine, author of The Success System That Never Fails, and coauthor with Napoleon Hill of Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude.
When I was completing my first week’s orientation, Mr. Stone asked me if I took 100% responsibility for my life.
“I think so,” I responded.
“This is a yes or no question, young man. You either do or you don’t.”
“Well, I guess I’m not sure.”
“Have you ever blamed anyone for any circumstance in your life? Have you ever complained about anything?”
“Uh . . . yeah . . . I guess I have.”
“Don’t guess. Think.”
“Yes, I have.”
“Okay, then. That means you don’t take one hundred percent responsibility for your life. Taking 100% responsibility means you acknowledge that you create everything that happens to you. It means you understand that you are the cause of all of your experiences. If you want to be really successful, and I know you do, then you will have to give up blaming and complaining and take total responsibility for your life—that means all your results, both your successes and your failures. That is the prerequisite for creating a life of success. It is only by acknowledging that you have created everything up until now that you can take charge of creating the future you want.
“You see, Jack, if you realize that you have created your current conditions, then you can uncreate them and re-create them at will. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“Are you willing to take one hundred percent responsibility for your life?”
“Yes, sir, I am!”
And I did.
YOU HAVE TO GIVE UP ALL YOUR EXCUSES
Ninety-nine percent of all failures come from
people who have a habit of making excuses.
GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER
Chemist who discovered over 325 uses for the peanut
If you want to create the life of your dreams, then you are going to have to take 100% responsibility for your life as well. That means giving up all your excuses, all your victim stories, all the reasons why you can’t and why you haven’t up until now, and all your blaming of outside circumstances. You have to give them all up forever.
You have to take the position that you have always had the power to make it different, to get it right, to produce the desired result. For whatever reason—ignorance, lack of awareness, fear, needing to be right, the need to feel safe—you chose not to exercise that power. Who knows why? It doesn’t matter. The past is the past. All that matters now is that from this point forward you choose—that’s right, it’s a choice—to act as if you are 100% responsible for everything that does or doesn’t happen to you.
If something doesn’t turn out as planned, you will ask yourself, How did I create that? What was I thinking? What were my beliefs? What did I say or not say? What did I do or not do to create that result? How did I get the other person to act that way? What do I need to do differently next time to get the result I want?
A few years after I met Mr. Stone, Dr. Robert Resnick, a psychotherapist in Los Angeles, taught me a very simple but very important formula that made this idea of 100% responsibility even clearer to me. The formula is:
E + R = O
(Event + Response = Outcome)
The basic idea is that every outcome you experience in life (whether it is success or failure, wealth or poverty, health or illness, intimacy or estrangement, joy or frustration) is the result of how you have responded to an earlier event or events in your life.
If you don’t like the outcomes you are currently getting, there are two basic choices you can make.
1. You can blame the event (E) for your lack of results (O). In other words, you can blame the economy, the weather, the lack of money, your lack of education, racism, gender bias, the current administration in Washington, your parents, your wife or husband, your boss’s attitude, your employees, the system or lack of systems, and so on. If you’re a golfer, you’ve probably even blamed your clubs and the course you played on. No doubt all these factors do exist, but if they were the deciding factor, nobody would ever succeed.
Jackie Robinson would never have played major league baseball, Barack Obama would never have become president of the United States, Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington would never have become movie stars, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer would never have become U.S. senators, Bill Gates would never have founded Microsoft, and Steve Jobs would never have started Apple Computers. For every reason why it’s not possible, there are hundreds of people who have faced the same circumstances and succeeded.
Lots of people overcome these so-called limiting factors, so it can’t be the limiting factors that limit you. It is not the external conditions and circumstances that stop you—it is you! We stop ourselves! We think limiting thoughts and engage in self-defeating behaviors. We defend our self-destructive habits (such as drinking, smoking, and not getting enough sleep) with indefensible logic. We ignore useful feedback, fail to continuously educate ourselves and learn new skills, waste time on the trivial aspects of our lives, engage in idle gossip, eat unhealthy food, fail to exercise, spend more money than we make, fail to invest in our future, avoid necessary conflict, fail to tell the uncomfortable truth, don’t ask for what we want—and then wonder why our lives don’t work.
2. You can instead simply change your responses (R) to the events (E)—the way things are—until you get the outcomes (O) you want. You can change your thinking, change your communication, change the pictures you hold in your head (your images of yourself and the world), and change your behavior—the things you do. That is all you really have any control over anyway. Unfortunately, most of us are so run by our habits that we never change our behavior. We get stuck in our conditioned responses—to our spouses and our children, to our colleagues at work, to our customers and our clients, to our students, and to the world at large. We are a bundle of conditioned reflexes that operate outside of our control. You have to regain control of your thoughts, your images, your dreams and daydreams, and your behavior. Everything you think, say, and do needs to become intentional and aligned with your purpose, your values, and your goals.
IF YOU DON’T LIKE YOUR OUTCOMES, CHANGE YOUR RESPONSES
Let’s look at some examples of how this works.
I remember living in Los Angeles during a terrible earthquake. Two days later, I watched as a CNN reporter interviewed people commuting to work. The earthquake had damaged one of the main freeways leading into the city. Traffic was at a standstill, and what was normally a 1-hour drive had become a 2- or 3-hour drive.
The CNN reporter knocked on the window of one of the cars stuck in traffic and asked the driver how he was doing.
He responded angrily, “I hate California. First there were fires, then floods, and now an earthquake! No matter what time I leave in the morning, I’m going to be l
ate for work. This sucks!”
Then the reporter knocked on the window of the car behind him and asked the second driver the same question. This driver was all smiles. He replied, “It’s no problem. I left my house at five A. M. I don’t think under the circumstances my boss can ask for more than that. I have lots of music and my Spanish-language lessons with me. I’ve got my cell phone. I have coffee in a thermos, my lunch—I even brought a book to read. So I’m fine.”
Now, if the earthquake or the traffic (the event) were really the deciding variables, then everyone should have been angry. But everyone wasn’t. It was their individual response to the traffic that gave them their particular outcome. It was thinking negative thoughts or thinking positive thoughts, leaving the house prepared or leaving the house unprepared that made the difference. It was all a matter of attitude and behavior that created their completely different experiences.
I’VE HEARD THERE’S GOING TO BE A RECESSION; I’VE DECIDED NOT TO PARTICIPATE
A friend of mine owns a Lexus dealership in Southern California. When war in the Middle East broke out, people stopped coming in to buy Lexuses. My friend and his sales team knew that if they didn’t change their response (R) to the event (E) of nobody coming into the showroom, they were going to slowly go out of business. Their normal response (R) would have been to continue placing ads in the newspaper and on the radio, then wait for people to come into the dealership. But that wasn’t working. The outcome (O) they were getting was a steady decrease in sales. So they tried a number of new things. The one that worked was driving a fleet of new cars out to where the rich people were—the country clubs, marinas, polo grounds, parties in Beverly Hills, Westlake Village, and Lake Sherwood—and then inviting them to take a spin in a new Lexus.
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