Live Sensical

(Edited from notes on a talk by Earl Nightingale.) You have only one boss and every person from the president of the largest corporation to the shoeshine boy has the same he is simply the customer. I want to tell you a little story that could make a wonderful difference in your life. You may already know about everything I’m going to tell you. If you do, you’re a remarkable person, and according to the latest statistics you belong to the top 5% of all the working people in the world. You’re to be congratulated. If you don’t know about the things I’m going to say, you’ve been holding yourself back, not only on the job but you’re also missing a big percentage of the greatest joy in life. I want to talk about your boss and your relationship with him. How you handle this relationship will determine your success or failure. It will determine how much money you make or do not make, and it will determine whether you’re a happy person or an unhappy person. So let’s talk about you and your boss. Who is your boss? You have only one and every working person, from the president of the largest corporation to the shoeshine boy, has the same boss. He is simply the customer. There never has been, there is not now, and there never will be any boss but the customer. He is the one boss you must please. Everything you own he has paid for. He buys your home, your cars, your clothes. He pays for your vacations and puts your children through school. He pays your doctor bills and writes every paycheck you will ever receive. He will give you every promotion you will ever obtain during your lifetime, and he will discharge you if you displease him. Sometimes, particularly these days of seemingly complex economics and big business, we lose sight of just what business is. It all started back during the most primitive times. A man, in order to fend for himself and his family, had to provide his own food and his own shelter. He had to do his own fighting and fashion his own rough clothes and crude weapons for hunting and materials for fishing. Later he had to manufacture his own farming implements. In short, each person had to personally take care of every department of his or her life. Naturally it came about that men and women with certain talents appeared. One person was particularly adept at fashioning spears, another at fishing, another at hunting, another at making garments, and so on. It was only natural that soon these individuals found that they could best spend most of their time in the pursuit of that at which they were most talented and trade their production for the production of others. As a result, the person who made spears found that others would give him a share of their food, clothing, and so on, if he’d provide them with spears. Thus, trade and commerce began. It’s far more complex today but still based on the same principle. A person’s money is the result of his production, and he trades it for things he needs and wants. And it’s here that logical discrimination comes into the picture. Since his money is the result of his work, it’s left to his discretion as to where he spends it. It is here that he assumes the role of boss. He will spend his money only with those whom he feels have earned it. And this is as it should be. You and I are exactly the same way. If someone treats you badly in any way, you instinctively feel that he has not earned your business and you will withhold it from him. Over a period of time this amounts to a really substantial penalty. Let’s say a family spends $100 a week for food, and because they’ve been mistreated or even get the feeling they’re not appreciated or liked, they stop doing business at one store and take their business to another one. That’s a penalty to one store of $5,200 a year and an increase of that amount at another store. In 10 years it amounts to $52,000. This amount of money can be lost by not realizing who the boss really is. The same thing applies to our clothes, drug items, hardware, cleaning, gasoline, automobiles, everything we purchase. The average family earns more than $42,000 a year. This money pays your salary and mine if we earn it. And our prosperity as individuals hinges directly on our attitude toward what we do for a living. The man who works on an automotive assembly line might not think much about the car at the point of sale, nor about the family who will eventually buy and travel in that car. But that family pays his salary, and they will withhold the purchase of the car on which he works if it does not earn their respect and admiration. If you doubt this even for a moment, think of the cars that once were popular and that can no longer be seen on the road. This applies to all products. Having earned a successful place in the economy should not be confused with keeping it. It must be earned every day, year in, year out. There’s not a single company that could not go out of business. Everything depends on how the boss is treated, the boss being the customer. And yet the customer is eminently fair, just as you are. He can be won back, and if he’s treated with the importance that he deserves, he can in a few years bring a lot of other people into your place of business. Let me tell you something you may not have thought about. If you get in your car and start driving across the country, you will pass many thousands of businesses, from small restaurants, drug stores, grocery stores, gas stations, to great sprawling corporate complexes covering hundreds of acres and employing thousands of people. By simply looking at each one you can tell how they’re treating the boss. Did you know that your rewards are in exact proportion to your service? That’s right. We’re paid exactly what we earn, but no more. And you can tell by looking at any business exactly what it has earned by seeing what it has. It’s the same with people. We get back exactly what we earn, but not a penny more. And this, again, is just the way it should be. A person might be underpaid for a while, but the scales of life must balance eventually and he will, in the end, receive just what he’s earned. There are of course two ways in which we’re paid for what we do. One is tangible in the form of money, and the other is intangible, but just as important. To many it’s more important. This latter form of payment comes in the form of inner satisfaction, in the form of joy as a result of accomplishment. It also comes in the form of satisfaction in position and the standing it gives us. So each of us is paid in these two ways: money and satisfaction. And there’s a very simple way to increase both of these forms of income. You may wonder how I can say that I can tell you of a simple way to increase your income from the standpoint of money as well as inner satisfaction. Yet I can, and you’ll be able to see and spend the results. First, I want you to understand and believe completely the great law that lies as the foundation of all life, business and personal. It is that our rewards in life will be in exact proportion to our service. The more you think about this and observe people and businesses in their true light, the more you’ll see the undeniable truth of it. Try as best you can to estimate the proportion of your total ability you have been giving to your work. I don’t think anyone gives 100%. I don’t think it’s possible to give 100% day in and day out. But estimate what you consider to be the percentage of 100% you have been giving to your work. Would you say it’s been 30%? 50%? Since your rewards will be in exact proportion to your service, you can increase your income both financially and from an inner satisfaction standpoint simply by narrowing the distance between what you have been giving to your work and the 100% of which it may be said you could give under ideal conditions. You don’t have to ask for a raise; the income will appear of its own accord and in the right time. You may want to question this, but try to take my word for it. The second point I want to make is this: If you will begin to do your work better, better than you’ve ever done before, you will immediately begin to receive incalculably more inner satisfaction. You’ll also find that what may have been a boring or uninteresting job will take on new meaning and interest. No matter what it is that you do during the entire working day, try in every case to do a little more than you have to, more than you’re being paid for. Because unless you do more than you’re being paid for now, you can’t hope for or justify an increase in pay. The third point is, each of us is interdependent. As I pointed out earlier, other people pay our salaries, buy our homes, clothe, feed, and educate our children. Therefore we depend on others for our very lives, just as they must depend on us. If we expect others to give us excellent service and fine products for the money we spend, doesn’t it make good sense that we should treat them the same way? Every hour spent at our work should be spent in the attempt to give the best of which we are capable, a baker’s dozen for the money our company’s customers spend for our products and services and with which our salaries are paid. A person who tries to get the maximum return for the minimum of effort is only kidding himself. Sooner or later the scales will balance. They must, for that is the law whether we like it or not. This kind of individual actually shrinks as a person, as a human being. He has no real place in a dynamic and swiftly changing world. The fourth point is to try each day to find some way in which the work you’re doing can be improved. Here again you’re guaranteeing an increase in your income in both categories. We all know the cynical type of individual who will laugh at this. I know them; you know them. But I don’t know one who could be said to be doing well, do you? I know lots of men and women at the top of their fields who live their lives every day in the way I have suggested. Rather than go along with someone who’s never proved in his own life that he knows what he’s talking about, I’d prefer to believe the one who said, “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” I feel, as I’m sure you do, that he was more qualified to speak than the know-it-all who is behind in his installment payments. Anyway, it’s worth a test. If you’ll follow my suggestions for the next year, you’ll be a different person, living a rich, rewarding, and meaningful life. Four things, all of them simple. One, remember that our rewards in life will be in exact proportion to our service. Two, by giving your work a larger percentage of your capabilities and talents, you will, you must, increase your income substantially. Three, since our lives depend on others, treat others in every facet of your life exactly as you want others to treat you. If you expect others to give you excellent products and services for the money you and your family spend, then you should make certain that your job is handled as excellently as it is possible for you, since it is the money of others that pays your salary. Four, try to find some way every day in which your work can be improved. And above all, know your boss. He’s the customer. Treat him with the respect, care, courtesy, and good humor he deserves. Remember, he pays all your bills every month. He will buy everything you will ever own. He may be coarse, crude, ignorant, selfish, conniving, and a thoroughgoing savage. He often will be. Here it is more important than ever that you treat him with all the care and attention you can muster. If you don’t and if you permit his attitude to affect yours, you’re admitting that he’s the stronger person. If you respond the same way he conducts himself, you’re admitting you’re no better than he is. Most people, however, are nice people. They’re people like you and me who want to be liked and want to get along, who want to be friends. They have problems and sorrows of their own about which we’re not aware. They have bad days and disappointments. Make sure that the time they’re with you is a high spot in their day and that they’ll want to come back, not just because of your company, but because of you. If you’ll do these things for a year, you’ll be surprised and delighted, and you’ll find you wouldn’t live any other way for the world. If you’re already living this way, you know what I mean. Follow these steps for one year and you will be a different person, living a rich, rewarding, and meaningful life: Remember that your rewards in life are in exact proportion to your service. Increase your service to others and your rewards will increase in proportion. Give your work a larger percent of your capabilities and talents to serve “the boss.” Treat others in every facet of your life as you want others to treat you. If you expect others to give you excellent products and services for the money you and your family earn, make certain that your job is handled as excellently as it is possible for you. Find some way every day in which your work can be improved to benefit “the boss.”   This special report now available on Amazon BONUS Free special report with audio Visit http://calm.li/solution-report Sign up for your access to my membership library at no-charge. This is being added to weekly, so don’t miss out.  The post Business Sales & Income: How to Please Your Boss appeared first on Live Sensical.

(Click here to download audio.) Stay Calm and Enjoy the Fake News …because it’s all fake and always has been. The problem, as usual, isn’t you. It’s how you think about the world. So don’t take it personally. This is really advanced Mindset Stacking techniques, where the Make Yourself Great Again (MYGA) book left off and the research continues… It’s true that the world is an illusion. Or rather, that’s a very workable truth. (Of course, test this for yourself and don’t take my or anyone’s word for it.) The people who get very tied up in how this world is going either watch a lot of news, believe what they hear from neighbors and friends and social media, buy into “making a difference” or “changing the world”, or generally take everything they experience very seriously. Sure, there is and always has been death and destruction. It’s part of how the Nature runs the world, and necessary to recycling things. But you don’t have to be afraid of it or fill your life with watching it on TV or in the movies. The advanced part of this is to take Levenson/Ponder releasing, Silva remote-influencing, and Huna principles all into one basket and look for the similarities. I don’t cover these in this book much. You’d have to look earlier to my “Freedom Is” or my massive “Winning Your Infinite Freedom” in order to get a lot of these. The short hand synopsis are these: Ponder points out in her Dynamic Laws of Prosperity book that we seem to be filled up to the brim with our own beliefs and mental habits, so you need to let go of some in order to make room for more prosperous ones to manifest. Levenson reached a high point from his releasing in just three months (after being told he was going to die) and then took 18 years to figure out what he had done. (My own research and summary of his data is in Freedom Is. His one book is out of print and his tapes are fragmentary.) He went back to both early Christianity and Eastern beliefs as part of his personal process. This is where the idea of “The World as an Illusion” first hit my own lines. (As a sidebar, Alan Watts also touches on this several times in his many recordings.) Jose Silva was researching into brain waves and mental healing about the same time as Levenson, and also in Arizona. His last research was into the delta wavelengths, those which occur just before sleep. At that level, you can communicate with anyone anywhere instantaneously, and with absolute truth. Originally named “UltraMind,” it’s been clinically re-titled “remote communication and influencing.” Huna comes in to explain how these all work. Their basic principles state, in part, that: “There are no limits. (We are all connected.)” “Energy flows where attention goes.” And, “Truth is as valuable as it is workable.” Below all of these is the Huna statement, “The world is what you think it is.” And that is very close to Nightingale’s “We become what we think about.” Recently, I was working on my own mindset restacking and dug into this, finding that it was true that there was a very possible way to communicate with exactly the people you need through Silva’s remote communication techniques. And at that level, the “reality” we’ve accepted as “true” is really just an illusion, a metaphor. A metaphor is just a tool we use to make sense of things around us, to give a model we can use like a hat and coat rack. To have a place we can hang things on and organize them. I should actually let you look these up for yourself and test them. One thing that showed up after the Make Yourself Great Again book was out is a simple way to test things: Ask yourself for any datum: How can I use this? How does this make me feel? What does this mean to me? How does this fit into what I already know? And, What action does this inspire me to take? Those are actually based on the Huna shaman techniques for understaning in four ways: Objective, Subjective, Symbolic, and Holistic. The point of taking action comes from the core of MYGA, which is that to succeed better we need to re-learn to Observe, Understand, and Take Action. By this time, you now see how all “news” is fake news. One parting shot at these knuckleheads is to understand that they have built their corporate media empires on the false idea that we will pay more attention to a car wreck than anything else. They think that it’s all “pain versus pleasure.” And taken to it’s logical end: Masochism vs. Gluttony. Of course, you look up Maslow and you see a wide variety of motivations. Read Gene Schwartz and you’ll  see that the desires we seek to fill with all our purchases are many, varied, and never use the same route twice. Meaning that the bulk of the marketing you are experiencing is also fake news, since it is mostly built on trite formulas that only ever worked once to any great degree. It’s the point that we are really here to experience joy. Our best ideas come when we are inspired (and that usually is due to being in Silva’s Alpha or Delta levels.) But as Nap Hill pointed out in “Think and Grow Rich,” imagination takes practice to get your best results. Here I suggest you start working at releasing that 95% wrong conventional wisdom that you’ve been accepting all your life. Then explore this idea that the reality you’ve taken as rock-solid truth may actually be an illusion which has been keeping you from manifesting all the health, happiness, and prosperity that has been possible all this time. Technically, you are unlimited in what you can have and be. Beyond your wildest dreams. The only reason you haven’t achieved, attained, or acquired anything and everything you’ve ever dreamed of has to do with the personal limits you’ve accepted for yourself. Now, if all this is a bit too much, let me tell you about some tools I created for you: They are called Mindset Stacking Journals and are available on Amazon and soon in bookstores both online and everywhere. These will help you practice how to test datums for workability (truth) and also practice your imagination. They have 90 quotes in them. You read one quote a day and then write down answers to the five questions above on the opposite page. Then get another one the next day and fill it out. And another the next, and so on. The quotes don’t duplicate across the 16 volumes, so you’ll have about four years of these. (By then, you could start all over again and get even more inspiration.) They are priced as inexpensively as possible for printed books as I could. (No, they aren’t ebooks, as the writing part is key to getting the most out of these.) Real simple. Amazing by result. Try what you learned today for yourself. See if this works for you. As Earl Nightingale said, “You have nothing to lose, but your whole life to gain.” Ready to start restacking your mindset? Your copy of Make Yourself Great Again as ebook or audiobook are waiting for you to download. Click here for Instant Access (bonuses in the back are outstanding…) PS. The paperback is available on Amazon and your nearest bookstore… The post Keep Calm, It’s Always Been Fake News – Mindset Re-Stacking appeared first on Live Sensical.

Download this audio – Click Here. Well, I did it again. Got all snarled up in the “news” cycles – and that this started making me have a sour outlook again. Made my blog posts a bit “snarly” as well. And I use “making me” very loosely. Because you control your own thoughts or you let them control you. And you control your own emotions or you let them control you. It’s all how you’ve stacked your mindset, the mental habits you’ve set up and keep running. People who live in joy as a mental habit live longer, more peaceful, more healthy, and more prosperous lives. This is proven over and over, but isn’t reported much. Look up stories of long-lived people and you’ll see that their lives aren’t spent in the spotlight as celebrities. Instead, they are quietly going about their lives and helping people around them as best they can. The problem with a bright-burning fire is that it runs out of fuel faster than a smaller one. This is why you see celebrities crash and burn their personal lives. The celebrities who seem to last the longest in movies are those who have the quietest personal lives. I know one who is intensely personal and always flies back to his remote ranch when he’s not making a movie. Instead of a several million-dollar mansion to put a big show on a little lot next to a lot of other million-dollar mansions on little lots, he’s got this big ranch away from everything, next to other big ranches, where people live very sensical lives in very natural surroundings. Like “The Skipper” from the old “Gilligan’s Island” show. He ended up buying a restaurant and had a table up front where he could greet customers when they came in. Enjoyed his celebrity and it brought him business. You met the owner when you visited his place. Nice guy. Here’s a key datum: People find what they are looking for. The but converse is true – if you aren’t looking for something, you never find anything. And this is why goals are important. And why negative goals are dynamite with a slow-burning fuse. You pick goals and you make them. The few real studies along this line have proved this over and over. The people who pick a goal, write it down, and then keep it in mind all the time, will eventually make that goal. Look them up for yourself. (There’s a link to these in my MYGA book appendix.) A “negative” goal is one you didn’t set, you haven’t written down, but it’s kept in your mind all the same. You get these negative goals by watching the news and listening to whatever is on the broadcast TV, radio, Facebook, and even your Kindle. They are recommending stuff to you all the time. And you’ll wind up being upset and irritated and suffer “empty-wallet” syndrome because you bought (or bought into) all they are suggesting to you. Usually on credit. So your paycheck is gone, but you still want more. It’s an addiction. That’s right – I just said that the “news”, broadcast entertainment, Facebook and social media, and Amazon are all keeping you addicted to their particular crack-cocaine content. And if you don’t actively choose what you are looking for, you’ll wind up with more of what you don’t choose. More ill-health, a shorter life-span, more misery, more anxiety, more upset. You’d think with all these people telling you what to do that you’d have some benefit out of this. Nope. Actually, there is a reason for success: you have to work at being exceptional. All success is exceptional. Look around at successes you see and you’ll find this to be true. Look for the exceptions in life and then you’ll find them. People who are quietly prosperous. People who pay their bills and taxes and live within their means can usually expand their means and so have everything and anything they really want. The trick to this is that you have to give up listening to other people about what you should want and search out your own real needs and desires. Hint: you won’t find these in the movies or on TV. Because they are all short-cutters and following-followers. They subscribe to this idea that people can be manipulated into buying their stuff. And it’s all just “stuff.” It has no permanent worth. (That’s the concept most “Internet Marketers” have – Keep Inventing Stuff to Sell. KISS.) This really goes to why reading is important. Go into the library and find the real classics. The books which have been checked out time and time again, and are popular regardless of the current fads. There are romances, and thrillers, and all sorts of fascinating genres. And the self-help books are there, and the non-fiction books as well. You wouldn’t think that hundred-year-old books would be helpful, but you’ll probably get the greatest help from them. Because they’ve already been selected for you. I tell you to go to the library as they will do the selecting for you. See, libraries only have so much shelf space. So they routinely go through and remove the books which aren’t checked out very much. That is the only way to make room for new books that people are asking for. And that process will find the classics that are worth studying. Now, the alternative is to go to Gutenberg.org and find the books which are downloaded regularly, like their top 100. You see, Gutenberg.org only deals in books that are in the public domain. So this is something like 70 or 100 years after the author passed away, more or less. If the book is still being downloaded after all these years, then you’ve got something that is a classic and has a reason for still being popular. Because they have a message that still benefits humanity. And guess what you won’t find there? News. Celebrities. Gossip. Politics. Because those things are temporary. “These, too, shall pass.” They are temporary, because they haven’t been tested for value. Exceptional successes have one thing in common: they give exceptional value with everything they do. And chasing throught the Forbe’s list of richest people, you’ll generally find that they have been doing this. Bill Gates gave the world the personal computer through his operating system. Michael Dell built them. Warren Buffett has been constantly looking for value and investing in it. I’ve once again needed to wean myself off the “news” completely. But I’ve now widened this out to include anything on social media, and any marketplace. Sure, I shop at Wal-Mart, because I can quickly get what I want whenever I want it. But it’s always with a list. And I go in, go straight to what I want, get it, then get out. On Amazon, I get that specific book someone else has recommended and then shut down that browser tab. On Facebook, I have one group that I go to at all, since the rest have gone dead. But I don’t leave that tab open, but check it once a week or so. And I only watch Facebook with an adblocker in place. You and I don’t have time to waste. We have time to invest. You can always invest and get returns on your money, lose it all and get it all back. But once you’ve spent the time you have here on this planet at this time, its gone. Invest wisely. What you do with that time is up to you, but I’d strongly suggest you live and work in joy. Dig up a copy of “The Secret” and watch the last section of that movie. Their conclusion, after filming all these various guru’s and editing their material into a common theme: we’re here to create and recieve Joy. If you go back to classic authors like Christian Larson, and the New Thought authors, you’ll find that they all have this in common. They say to dream big, dream of positive outcomes, of a better place for you and yours. Look up Maslow and you’ll see that there are a lot of higher motivations than just scabbing out an existence on this planet, in getting food, clothing, and a roof over our family’s head. Yet our broadcast media want to keep us exactly in that place. Because if we have a lot of wants, we can be sold a lot more things. And we’ll have to keep our day jobs and have to buy insurance, and re-elect government officials, and be in constant turmoil all the time. And that is an endless feedback loop. Or, you can go to the library and check out a stack of classic books. Sit in your now-quiet living room and read inspiring books. When you finish for the evening, your dreams should be more peaceful. You won’t be worrying about the violence in a country you’ll never visit. Or what is the latest fashion you should be buying. The next morning, pick up that card which is on the bedside table and read the goal you’ve set for yourself. Envision it already being accomplished. Get some ideas of what you could do that day to move your situation closer to achieving that goal. On your commute, play a classic audiobook instead of turning on the broadcast news. At lunch, sit with supportive, non-critical people who talk about constructive things. And find time to review that card with your goal again. After work, find out about their best predictions for the weather tomorrow, and then sit to read your book again. Rinse, repeat. You’ll have joy in your life, and the world will start improving around you. Try this for 90 days, leaving all the broadcast media severely alone. And purposely not clicking on anything which is an offer in your email. Just trash them. No social media. Spend your time with classics or envisioning your goal or things you enjoy in life (like family, Nature.) Then compare notes after you’ve marked off 90 days on your calendar to see how you are regularly feeling and how your life is going overall. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. And your life is only going to get better from here on out. – – – – If you like this, you’ll probably love my new book: Make Yourself Great Again! You can get a free copy, with links to all sorts of bonuses in the back. Click Here for Instant Download. The post Joy Trumps Hate and “News” – Live Longer and Healthier appeared first on Live Sensical.

Get this special report “How to Decide Your Business Career Success” from Amazon – now. An excerpt from the Amazon #1 bestseller How to Completely Change Your Life in 30 Seconds By Robert C. Worstell edited from notes on the talks of Earl Nightingale This special report consists of the following text and audio chapters: The Differences Between the Haves & Have-Nots The Life of the Unsuccessful Don’t Follow the Follower The Habit of Success The Difference Between the ‘Haves’ & the ‘Have Nots’ http://livesensical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/20151105-DifferenceBetweenHavesAndHaveNots.mp3 Meet two kinds of people – the “Haves” and “Have Nots” – and the one decision that separates them. People who fail to make the grade financially are seldom honest enough to admit that they really didn’t try and keep trying. So in order to justify their failure or mediocre lives, they dream up and pass along these excuses. I’ve discovered that the only difference between the people who earn big incomes and those who earn small incomes is that those earning big incomes decided to earn more. Without the decision to earn more, you can’t possibly think of ways to increase your income. This decision is the simple, yet elusive, difference between the Haves and the Have Nots. The moment you decide to go after wealth, success, or anything you desire in life, that is when you will start thinking about ways to accomplish it. What’s more, you cannot simply make the decision once and then relax. You must make the commitment again and again, and continually overcome your fears to turn back toward safety. The Have Nots do not want to do more than they have to -and that is why they continue to “have not.” Growth can feel uncomfortable, as it pushes us to step out of our comfort zone – to do more than what’s required of us. This is the trap of the Have Nots, and it is why so few people commit to the decision to become Haves. Success is available to everyone who commits to being successful. I hope you’ll decide to become a Have person. If you’ve read this far, you have probably already made that essential decision. Here are the next steps: 1. Start getting up a little earlier than you’re accustomed to. This gives you extra time that 95 percent of the people in this world are not using at all. One hour earlier a day gives you six extra 40-hour weeks a year. During this extra hour, take a refreshing shower, dress, get yourself a fresh, hot cup of coffee or tea, and then sit down to a clean sheet of paper. 2. Decide what you want in life. More wealth? Success? Happiness? More time with your family? At the top of the paper write down your goals. For example, let’s say you write down the amount of money per year that you intend to earn soon. That’s your financial goal. You don’t have to tell anyone. It’s nobody’s business but yours. 3. Start to think. Think about your goal and what it will mean to you and your family. See how many ideas you can come up with to help you reach that goal, ideas to improve what you now do for a living. Ways of increasing your contribution to match your income goal. 4. Try for five ideas every morning. Write them down and save those sheets of paper in a special “ideas” file. Focus on ideas within your line of work or expertise or area that you are most interested in. To think well and profitably, you must discipline your thinking. Keep your thoughts on course, controlled, and focused. Many or perhaps most of your ideas will prove fruitless. But some of them will be very good. A few will be excellent. And every once in a while you’ll come up with something truly outstanding. 5. Develop a sense of expectancy. That is, try to hold the feeling that the goal you’re shooting for is a sure thing and that it’s only a matter of time before it’s realized. Henry Ford didn’t start making cars until he was 45. A friend of mine started a new company at 65. He’s still going strong, and his new company has sales of better than $300 million a year. It’s never too late. 6. Change your attitude. Attitude has been called the most important word in the language. William James put it this way: “The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.” To change your attitude, begin to act like the person you most want to become. If you were already in possession of the goal you’re shooting for, how would you conduct yourself in all of your affairs? How would you dress? How would you talk? Well, do it now, and tomorrow, and the next day. Begin now to act the part of the person you most want to become. And you will end up becoming that person. The German philosopher Goethe gave us the secret when he said, “Before you can do something, you must first be something.” Practice your new attitude every day – every waking hour. Practice focused thinking a few minutes every morning and you’ll find yourself thinking all day long. The late renowned psychologist Dr. Abraham Maslow found that people who live close to their true capacity have a pronounced sense of well-being and considerable energy. They see themselves as leading purposeful and creative lives. Isn’t that what we all want to do? I believe it is. And it all begins the moment you decide to become a Have person and leave the Have Nots to their complaints and excuses. Five ideas a day is 25 a week if you don’t think on weekends. That’s more than 1,000 ideas a year. One idea can get you to that income you’re shooting for. The law of averages swings so far in your favor you just can’t miss. There are two kinds of people: the Haves and the Have Nots. The Have Nots think the only people who earn large incomes resulting in successful, luxury lifestyles are crooks, lucky, endowed with more brains or talents, privy to occult secrets, or born into wealth. These are only alibis, a way for the Have Nots to justify their failure or mediocre lives. Learn the secrets to a successful life among the Haves and leave the Have Nots to their complaints and their alibis. – – – – The Life of the Unsuccessful http://livesensical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/20151105-LifeOfTheUnsuccessful.mp3 What separates the unsuccessful from the successful? When I think about unsuccessful people, I think of those men and women who seem to be at the mercy of forces over which they seem helpless or uninterested in influencing. I was raised as a boy in such circumstances and came to know them well. I watched people who seemed helpless to do anything about their problems. Their most serious shortcoming was of course lack of education. They took their cues from those about them, which is the self-defeating cycle of the poor -they’re always following the wrong group. More than any other factor, perhaps, the unsuccessful person can usually be identified with a group that is at the mercy of events. The unsuccessful person has things done to him or her. The successful person seeks autonomy and makes his or her own plans and has the self-esteem and inner excitement and knowledge to know that those plans can be followed, barring a calamity over which he or she can exercise no control. The unsuccessful person tends to focus on the calamity or ride with the punches. The successful person gives; the unsuccessful person takes. But since we cannot reap more than we sow, the unsuccessful person, sowing little, reaps little. Have you ever heard someone say, “I do no more than I’m paid to do.” Sure, we all have. And that person has stuck himself in a no-win fix. Doing no more than he’s paid to do, that man can never earn more than he’s receiving, other than just cost-of-living raises. He is an unsuccessful man. His attitude has got him stuck in a corner, and until or unless something changes it, in that corner, he’s going to remain. There’s nothing at all that unsuccessful people have or do that successful people do not have more of and do better. Unsuccessful people are not stronger or in better physical condition than successful people. They’re not better parents, wives, or husbands. About the only thing you can say about the unsuccessful is, as the well-known saying has it, God must have loved them. He made so many of them. The word poor still applies to far too many human beings in the United States. I keep hearing politicians say that we still have not reached the proper distribution of income. But income is not a factor of distribution; income is earned by someone. If it is given to the poor, as it should be, it’s because it was earned by someone else. A country as rich as the United States should have a level of subsystems below which no one should be permitted to fall. But what is needed most is the kind of education calculated to help people help themselves. And for those who cannot help themselves, the old, the sick, the incompetent, subsistence and clean, healthful surroundings should be one of our most important national goals. But the unsuccessful serve in one important way. We need the millions of unsuccessful people from whose ranks we can recruit the successful people of the future. Where do you think successful people come from? That’s right, they come from unsuccessful people. They are each an original, never before seen upon planet earth, with deep abilities and talents just lying dormant, waiting for the fertilization, the irrigation of good ideas and enthusiasm to get them started growing. Even her Royal Highness, the Queen of England, had unsuccessful ancestors, if you go back far enough. As human creatures, we all started even somewhere in time. And for every successful family, there was someone who had the drive, ambition, and determination to break from the crowd and start the ball rolling … to free himself from the ranks of the unsuccessful and venture into the camp of the successful. – – – – Don’t Follow the Follower http://livesensical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/20151105-24-DontFollowTheFollower.mp3 95 percent of people never succeed because they’re following the wrong group. Processionary caterpillars travel in long, undulating lines, one creature behind the other. Jean Hanri Fabre, the French entomologist, once led a group of these caterpillars onto the rim of a large flowerpot so that the leader of the procession found himself nose to tail with the last caterpillar in the procession, forming a circle without end or beginning. Through sheer force of habit and, of course, instinct, the ring of caterpillars circled the flowerpot for seven days and seven nights, until they died from exhaustion and starvation. An ample supply of food was close at hand and plainly visible, but it was outside the range of the circle, so the caterpillars continued along the beaten path. People often behave in a similar way. Habit patterns and ways of thinking become deeply established, and it seems easier and more comforting to follow them than to cope with change, even when that change may represent freedom, achievement, and success. If someone shouts, “Fire!” it is automatic to blindly follow the crowd, and many thousands have needlessly died because of it. How many stop to ask themselves: Is this really the best way out of here? So many people “miss the boat” because it’s easier and more comforting to follow -to follow without questioning the qualifications of the people just ahead -than to do some independent thinking and checking. A hard thing for most people to fully understand is that people in such numbers can be so wrong, like the caterpillars going around and around the edge of the flowerpot, with life and food just a short distance away. If most people are living that way, it must be right, they think. But a little checking will reveal that throughout all recorded history the majority of mankind has an unbroken record of being wrong about most things, especially important things. For a time we thought the earth was flat and later we thought the sun, stars, and planets traveled around the Earth. Both ideas are now considered ridiculous, but at the time they were believed and defended by the vast majority of followers. In the hindsight of history we must have looked like those caterpillars blindly following the follower out of habit rather than stepping out of line to look for the truth. It’s difficult for people to come to the understanding that only a small minority of people ever really get the word about life, about living abundantly and successfully. Success in the important departments of life seldom comes naturally, no more naturally than success at anything -a musical instrument, sports, fly-fishing, tennis, golf, business, marriage, parenthood. But for some reason most people wait passively for success to come to them -like the caterpillars going around in circles, waiting for sustenance, following nose to tail -living as other people are living in the unspoken, tacit assumption that other people know how to live successfully. It’s a good idea to step out of the line every once in a while and look around to see if the line is going where we want it to go. If it is not, it might be time for a new leader and a new direction. – – – – The Habit of Success http://livesensical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/20151105-HabitOfSuccess.mp3 Do each day all that can be done that day. You don’t need to overwork or to rush blindly into your work trying to do the greatest possible number of things in the shortest possible time. Don’t try to do tomorrow’s or next week’s work today. It’s not the number of things you do, but the quality, the efficiency of each separate action that count. To achieve this “habit of success,” you need only to focus on the most important tasks and succeed in each small task of each day. Enough of these and you have a successful week, month, year, and lifetime. Success is not a matter of luck. It can be predicted and guaranteed, and anyone can achieve it by following this plan. But most people live a life of quiet mediocrity and never achieve the success they truly desire because they get impatient. They want easy success or none at all. They see the path to success as a frustration, an impediment. Each day spent short of the ultimate goal is viewed as a time of failure and as an annoyance. As such, they get distracted by hundreds of little things that each day try to get us off our course. Yet the successful among us know the truth: If the end goal is all we desire, we simply cannot put in the time and effort it takes to be a success when it counts – each day -and therefore cannot lay the foundation for tomorrow’s success. Pay no attention to petty distractions. Enjoy the easy days and shake off the bad days. Stay steadily on your track. Concentrate on each task of the day from morning to night and do each as successfully as you can. Know full well that if each of your tasks is performed successfully, or at least the greater majority of them, your life must be successful. Like this? Go ahead and share it. And leave a comment if you want. This article is also available as a new Kindle release on Amazon. (Soon available on iTunes, Nook, GooglePlay, and Kobo.) PDF for this special report is available for no-charge download Click Here Now. Haves and Have-Nots, How to Decide Your Business Career Success from Robert C. Worstell The post Entrepreneurship, How to Decide Your Business Career Success appeared first on Live Sensical.

Nine Steps for Solving Any Problem (Taken from notes on talks by Earl Nightingale.) Transcript: For any problem, no matter how big or complex it may be, there is a solution. Use these nine steps to find it! What are the similarities in problem solving, decision making, and goal achievement? Actually, they’re alike in many ways. A decision that must be made is little more than a problem awaiting a solution. We might even call it a simple problem. When we’re faced with a decision, we rarely have to choose between more than two or three alternatives, whereas, in solving a problem, we sometimes face what seems to be an endless list of possibilities. And, what about goal achievement? Isn’t a goal a point we wish to reach? The problem is to move from where we are now, to where we want to be. So, problem solving, decision making, and goal achievement are all closely related functions of creative thinking. It’s important that we keep this in mind. The first step in solving any problem is to define it. You should always be sure you understand a problem before you go to work on its solution. Next, you should write down everything you know about the problem. This information might come from your own experience, from books that contain background and statistical data, the Internet, or from friends and business associates who know something about the area in which the problem lies. Third, decide whom to see. List the names of people and organizations that are recognized authorities on the problem. This is your opportunity to go “all out” for the facts. After determining who can help you, contact them, talk with them, and pick their brains for all the information they possess that can help you solve the problem. After doing this, be sure to make a note of each thing that’s germane to the problem. Don’t risk forgetting anything that could help you find the solution. The fifth step in solving a problem creatively is called “Individual Ideation.” This is personal “brainstorming,” or thinking with the brakes of judgment off! Don’t try to decide whether an idea is good or bad -just write it down the moment it comes to you. You can pick and choose – what you’re after is a lot of ideas. Remember the four rules for brainstorming: (1) No negative thinking; (2) The wilder the ideas, the better; (3) A large number of ideas is essential; and (4) Combination and improvement of ideas is what you’re after. One idea often leads to another, better idea. Don’t worry if some of your ideas seem far-fetched or impractical. You’re looking for all the ideas you can possibly find. Don’t reject any write them all down! Then Group Brainstorm. This is your opportunity to put the minds of others to work on the problem. Handle this session the same way you did your “Individual Ideation.” No negative thinking, no criticism at this stage; the wilder the ideas the better; get as many ideas as possible; and, try for idea combination and improvement. Write down all the ideas the group comes up with. When you have all your ideas written down, rate them for effectiveness and facility. The effectiveness scale ranges from “very effective” to “probably effective” to “doubtful.” And the facility scale ranges from “easy” to “not so easy” to “difficult.” The rating of ideas will clearly indicate the likely success of any possible solution. Of course, it’s best to consider first the idea or ideas that are rated both “very effective” and “easy.” Suppose you’re a manufacturer. And suppose your sales and marketing team brainstorming comes up with some ideas to increase sales. Let’s say one of the ideas is to revamp completely one of the products that your company is offering to the public. Let’s rate this idea in terms of effectiveness. You know the present product meets a need and is acceptable to the buying public. What about an entirely changed product? Without a lot of marketing tests and then a period of actual manufacturing for sale, it would be hard to say just how effective this idea would be in increasing sales. Better rate it “doubtful” And how does this idea of completely revamping one of the products check out in the facility area -“easy,” “not so easy,” or “difficult”? It would be “difficult,” wouldn’t it? It would require new engineering, new tools, new manufacturing plans, new packaging, and new marketing methods. Suppose, however, that one of the salesperson’s ideas is to run TV advertisements for the company’s product on one of the major television networks. This would be “probably effective” and would be “not so easy,” but it could be done. Let’s say another idea is to set up a new sales incentive program, a program directed to those people who are at the front of the problem, the salespeople. If it were a well-designed and – implemented incentive program with predictable compensation for increased performance, it would stand a good chance of being “very effective.” It would be relatively “easy” to do. It should increase the company’s sales. There are many other evaluation yardsticks you might use. Two more are time and money. Try rating your ideas against these measurements. For example, in the case of a manufacturer who wants to increase its sales, certainly to change the product would take a great deal of time and money. And to advertise it on a popular network television program would cost a great deal. On the other hand, to introduce a new sales incentive program might be neither too costly nor too time consuming. Remember, when you evaluate your ideas, measure them against these four yardsticks: effectiveness, facility, time, and cost. Every idea you have may not be worth creative action, and that’s why you must skillfully evaluate each of them. But once you’ve carefully judged your ideas, take action. Enter your ideas into an “Action Plan”: decide who should do it, when it should be done, when to start, and how to do it. These are all important considerations because the execution of the solution is just as important as the solution itself. Be certain to give yourself a deadline for putting your plan into action. We work hardest and most efficiently when we know there is a definite time element involved. So, make a note of the date when you must put your solution to work. It’s good to remember that timing is often critical when a new idea is introduced. Carefully calculate the deadline in the light of the general situation. You might write down a second date -the one by which you intend to have the action completed and the problem solved. Remember what was said earlier about problem solving, decision making, and goal achievement? They have a great deal in common. They can all be attacked in much the same way. For any problem … no matter how big or complex it may be … there is a solution. All you have to do is find it! History is filled with people who believed a problem did not have a solution and they did not find it, and people who believed there was a solution and they did find it -same problem, different perspective, one successful and one not. Which type of person will you be? Remember these steps for brainstorming your ideas: 1. Define the problem. 2. Write down everything you know about the problem. 3. Decide what people and resources to bring into the solution. 4. Make a note of everything that is germane to the problem. 5. Conduct a personal brainstorming Individual Ideation. 6. Utilize Group Brainstorming and rate your ideas for effectiveness, facility, time, and cost. 7. Evaluate your ideas for the best options. 8. Create an “Action Plan.” 9. Give yourself a deadline for putting your plan into action. This is an excerpt from a new release on Amazon, “2 Amazing Ways to Solve Your Problems.” Soon available on iTunes, Nook, GooglePlay, and Kobo. Get your complimentary PDF and audio files for this release – currently available only at LiveSensical.com.  The post Nine Steps for Solving Any Problem appeared first on Live Sensical.

The Great Problem-Solving Tool (Taken from notes on talks by Earl Nightingale.) Transcript: Successful people are not without problems. They’re simply people who’ve learned to solve their problems. All creatures on earth are supplied at birth with everything they need for successful survival. All creatures except one are supplied with a set of instincts that will do the job for them. And because of that, most creatures don’t need much of a brain. In the Pulitzer Prize – winning playwright Archibald MacLeish’s play The Secret of Freedom, a character says, “The only thing about a man that is man is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.” That’s uncomfortably true. Take the magnificent bald eagle for example. To see one of them swooping down and pluck a live and sizable fish from the water on a single pass is astonishing. More astonishing still is the eagle’s eyesight. And because of its need to see small rodents moving in the grass from high altitudes or a fish just inches under the surface of the water, its incredible eyes take up just about all the space in its head. For the eagle, its eyes are the most important thing, and everything else works in unison with them. Its brain is tiny and rudimentary. It doesn’t think or plan or remember; it simply acts in accordance with stimuli. And it’s the same with most other living creatures. Even the beautiful porpoise, with a much larger brain, and the chimpanzee are easily tamed and taught. Only one takes 20 years to mature and has dominion over all the rest on the earth itself, and has today the power to destroy all life on earth in a couple of hours. Only one is given the godlike power to fashion its own life according to the images it holds in its remarkable mind. The human mind is the one thing that separates us from the rest of the creatures on earth. Everything that means anything to us comes to us through our minds, our love of our families, our beliefs, all of our talents, knowledge, abilities. Everything is reflected through our minds. Anything that comes to us in the future will almost certainly come to us as a result of the extent to which we use our minds. And yet, it’s the last place on earth the average person will turn to for help. You know why? You know why people don’t automatically turn their own vast mental resources on when faced with a problem? It’s because they never learned how to think. Most people will go to any length to avoid thinking when they’re faced with a problem. They will ask advice from the most illogical people, usually people who don’t know any more than they do: next-door neighbors, members of their families, and friends stuck in the same mental traps that they are. Very few of them use the muscles of their mind to solve their problems. Yet living successfully, getting the things we want from life, is a matter of solving the problems that stand between where we are now and the point we wish to reach. No one is without problems. They’re part of living. But let me show you how much time we waste in worrying about the wrong problems. Here’s a reliable estimate of the things people worry about: Things that never happen: 40%. Things over and past that can never be changed by all the worry in the world: 30%. Needless worries about our health: 12%. Petty miscellaneous worries: 10%. Real legitimate worries: 8%. In short, 92% of the average person’s worries take up valuable time, cause painful stress, even mental anguish, and are absolutely unnecessary. And of the real legitimate worries, there are two kinds. There are the problems we can solve, and there are the problems beyond our ability to personally solve. But most of our real problems usually fall into the first group, the ones we can solve, if we’ll learn how. The average working person has at his or her disposal an enormous amount of free time. In fact, you’ll see if you’ll total the hours in a year and subtract the sleeping hours: If we sleep 8 hours every night, we have about 6,000 waking hours, of which less than 2,000 are spent on the job. Now this leaves 4,000 hours a year when a person is neither working nor sleeping. These can be called discretionary hours with which that person can do pretty much as he or she pleases. So that you can see the amazing results in your own life, I want to recommend that you take just one hour a day, five days a week, and devote this hour to exercising your mind. You don’t even have to do it on weekends. Pick one hour a day on which you can fairly regularly count. The best time for me is an hour before the others are up in the morning. The mind’s clear, the house is quiet, and, if you like, with a fresh cup of coffee, this is the time to start the mind going. During this hour every day take a completely blank sheet of paper. At the top of the page write your present primary goal clearly, simply. Then, since our future depends on the way in which we handle our work, write down as many ideas as you can for improving that which you now do. Try to think of 20 possible ways in which the activity that fills your day can be improved. You won’t always get 20, but even one idea is good. Now remember two important points with regard to this. One, this is not particularly easy, and, two, most of your ideas won’t be any good. When I say it’s not easy, I mean it’s like starting any new habit. At first you’ll find your mind a little reluctant to be hauled up out of that old familiar bed. But as you think about your work and ways in which it might be improved, write down every idea that pops into your head, no matter how absurd it might seem. The most important thing that this extra hour accomplishes is that it deeply embeds your goal into your subconscious mind, starts the whole vital machine reworking the first thing every morning. And 20 ideas a day, if you can come up with that many, total 100 a week, even skipping weekends. An hour a day, five days a week, totals 260 hours a year and still leaves you 3,740 hours of free leisure time. Now this means you’ll be thinking about your goal and ways of improving your performance, increasing your service six full extra working weeks a year, 61/2 40-hour weeks devoted to thinking and planning. Can you see how easy it is to rise above that so-called competition? And it’ll still leave you with seven hours a day to spend as you please. Starting each day thinking, you’ll find that your mind will continue to work all day long. And you’ll find that at odd moments, when you least expect it, really great ideas will begin to bubble up from your subconscious. When they do, write them down as soon as you can. Just one great idea can completely revolutionize your work and, as a result, your life. Each time you write your goal at the top of the sheet of paper, don’t worry or become concerned about it. Think of it as only waiting to be reached, a problem only waiting to be solved. Face it with faith and bend all the great powers of your mind toward solving it. And believe me, solve it you will. This puts each of us in the driver’s seat. This is an excerpt from a new release on Amazon, “2 Amazing Ways to Solve Your Problems.” Soon available on iTunes, Nook, GooglePlay, and Kobo. Get your complimentary PDF and audio files for this release – currently available only at LiveSensical.com.  The post The Great Problem-Solving Tool appeared first on Live Sensical.

“The Greatest Problem Solving Tool” http://livesensical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/20151015-TheGreatestProblemSolvingTool.mp3 “9 Steps for Solving Any Problem” http://livesensical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/20151015-9StepsForSolvingAnyProblem.mp3 Show Notes: 2 Amazing Ways to Solve Your Problems An excerpt from the Amazon #1 bestseller How to Completely Change Your Life in 30 Seconds By Robert C. Worstell – edited from notes on the talks of Earl Nightingale PDF for a special report based on this episode is available for no-charge download Click Here Now. I – Nine Steps for Solving Any Problem For any problem, no matter how big or complex it may be, there is a solution. Use these nine steps to find it! What are the similarities in problem solving, decision making, and goal achievement? Actually, they’re alike in many ways. A decision that must be made is little more than a problem awaiting a solution. We might even call it a simple problem. When we’re faced with a decision, we rarely have to choose between more than two or three alternatives, whereas, in solving a problem, we sometimes face what seems to be an endless list of possibilities. And, what about goal achievement? Isn’t a goal a point we wish to reach? The problem is to move from where we are now, to where we want to be. So, problem solving, decision making, and goal achievement are all closely related functions of creative thinking. It’s important that we keep this in mind. The first step in solving any problem is to define it. You should always be sure you understand a problem before you go to work on its solution. Next, you should write down everything you know about the problem. This information might come from your own experience, from books that contain background and statistical data, the Internet, or from friends and business associates who know something about the area in which the problem lies. Third, decide whom to see. List the names of people and organizations that are recognized authorities on the problem. This is your opportunity to go “all out” for the facts. After determining who can help you, contact them, talk with them, and pick their brains for all the information they possess that can help you solve the problem. After doing this, be sure to make a note of each thing that’s germane to the problem. Don’t risk forgetting anything that could help you find the solution. The fifth step in solving a problem creatively is called “Individual Ideation.” This is personal “brainstorming,” or thinking with the brakes of judgment off! Don’t try to decide whether an idea is good or bad -just write it down the moment it comes to you. You can pick and choose – what you’re after is a lot of ideas. Remember the four rules for brainstorming: (1) No negative thinking; (2) The wilder the ideas, the better; (3) A large number of ideas is essential; and (4) Combination and improvement of ideas is what you’re after. One idea often leads to another, better idea. Don’t worry if some of your ideas seem far-fetched or impractical. You’re looking for all the ideas you can possibly find. Don’t reject any write them all down! Then Group Brainstorm. This is your opportunity to put the minds of others to work on the problem. Handle this session the same way you did your “Individual Ideation.” No negative thinking, no criticism at this stage; the wilder the ideas the better; get as many ideas as possible; and, try for idea combination and improvement. Write down all the ideas the group comes up with. When you have all your ideas written down, rate them for effectiveness and facility. The effectiveness scale ranges from “very effective” to “probably effective” to “doubtful.” And the facility scale ranges from “easy” to “not so easy” to “difficult.” The rating of ideas will clearly indicate the likely success of any possible solution. Of course, it’s best to consider first the idea or ideas that are rated both “very effective” and “easy.” Suppose you’re a manufacturer. And suppose your sales and marketing team brainstorming comes up with some ideas to increase sales. Let’s say one of the ideas is to revamp completely one of the products that your company is offering to the public. Let’s rate this idea in terms of effectiveness. You know the present product meets a need and is acceptable to the buying public. What about an entirely changed product? Without a lot of marketing tests and then a period of actual manufacturing for sale, it would be hard to say just how effective this idea would be in increasing sales. Better rate it “doubtful” And how does this idea of completely revamping one of the products check out in the facility area -“easy,” “not so easy,” or “difficult”? It would be “difficult,” wouldn’t it? It would require new engineering, new tools, new manufacturing plans, new packaging, and new marketing methods. Suppose, however, that one of the salesperson’s ideas is to run TV advertisements for the company’s product on one of the major television networks. This would be “probably effective” and would be “not so easy,” but it could be done. Let’s say another idea is to set up a new sales incentive program, a program directed to those people who are at the front of the problem, the salespeople. If it were a well-designed and – implemented incentive program with predictable compensation for increased performance, it would stand a good chance of being “very effective.” It would be relatively “easy” to do. It should increase the company’s sales. There are many other evaluation yardsticks you might use. Two more are time and money. Try rating your ideas against these measurements. For example, in the case of a manufacturer who wants to increase its sales, certainly to change the product would take a great deal of time and money. And to advertise it on a popular network television program would cost a great deal. On the other hand, to introduce a new sales incentive program might be neither too costly nor too time consuming. Remember, when you evaluate your ideas, measure them against these four yardsticks: effectiveness, facility, time, and cost. Every idea you have may not be worth creative action, and that’s why you must skillfully evaluate each of them. But once you’ve carefully judged your ideas, take action. Enter your ideas into an “Action Plan”: decide who should do it, when it should be done, when to start, and how to do it. These are all important considerations because the execution of the solution is just as important as the solution itself. Be certain to give yourself a deadline for putting your plan into action. We work hardest and most efficiently when we know there is a definite time element involved. So, make a note of the date when you must put your solution to work. It’s good to remember that timing is often critical when a new idea is introduced. Carefully calculate the deadline in the light of the general situation. You might write down a second date -the one by which you intend to have the action completed and the problem solved. Remember what was said earlier about problem solving, decision making, and goal achievement? They have a great deal in common. They can all be attacked in much the same way. For any problem … no matter how big or complex it may be … there is a solution. All you have to do is find it! History is filled with people who believed a problem did not have a solution and they did not find it, and people who believed there was a solution and they did find it same problem, different perspective, one successful and one not. Which type of person will you be? Remember these steps for brainstorming your ideas: 1. Define the problem. 2. Write down everything you know about the problem. 3. Decide what people and resources to bring into the solution. 4. Make a note of everything that is germane to the problem. 5. Conduct a personal brainstorming Individual Ideation. 6. Utilize Group Brainstorming and rate your ideas for effectiveness, facility, time, and cost. 7. Evaluate your ideas for the best options. 8. Create an “Action Plan.” 9. Give yourself a deadline for putting your plan into action. II – The Great Problem-Solving Tool Successful people are not without problems. They’re simply people who’ve learned to solve their problems. All creatures on earth are supplied at birth with everything they need for successful survival. All creatures except one are supplied with a set of instincts that will do the job for them. And because of that, most creatures don’t need much of a brain. In the Pulitzer Prize – winning playwright Archibald MacLeish’s play The Secret of Freedom, a character says, “The only thing about a man that is man is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.” That’s uncomfortably true. Take the magnificent bald eagle for example. To see one of them swooping down and pluck a live and sizable fish from the water on a single pass is astonishing. More astonishing still is the eagle’s eyesight. And because of its need to see small rodents moving in the grass from high altitudes or a fish just inches under the surface of the water, its incredible eyes take up just about all the space in its head. For the eagle, its eyes are the most important thing, and everything else works in unison with them. Its brain is tiny and rudimentary. It doesn’t think or plan or remember; it simply acts in accordance with stimuli. And it’s the same with most other living creatures. Even the beautiful porpoise, with a much larger brain, and the chimpanzee are easily tamed and taught. Only one takes 20 years to mature and has dominion over all the rest on the earth itself, and has today the power to destroy all life on earth in a couple of hours. Only one is given the godlike power to fashion its own life according to the images it holds in its remarkable mind. The human mind is the one thing that separates us from the rest of the creatures on earth. Everything that means anything to us comes to us through our minds, our love of our families, our beliefs, all of our talents, knowledge, abilities. Everything is reflected through our minds. Anything that comes to us in the future will almost certainly come to us as a result of the extent to which we use our minds. And yet, it’s the last place on earth the average person will turn to for help. You know why? You know why people don’t automatically turn their own vast mental resources on when faced with a problem? It’s because they never learned how to think. Most people will go to any length to avoid thinking when they’re faced with a problem. They will ask advice from the most illogical people, usually people who don’t know any more than they do: next-door neighbors, members of their families, and friends stuck in the same mental traps that they are. Very few of them use the muscles of their mind to solve their problems. Yet living successfully, getting the things we want from life, is a matter of solving the problems that stand between where we are now and the point we wish to reach. No one is without problems. They’re part of living. But let me show you how much time we waste in worrying about the wrong problems. Here’s a reliable estimate of the things people worry about: Things that never happen: 40%. Things over and past that can never be changed by all the worry in the world: 30%. Needless worries about our health: 12%. Petty miscellaneous worries: 10%. Real legitimate worries: 8%. In short, 92% of the average person’s worries take up valuable time, cause painful stress, even mental anguish, and are absolutely unnecessary. And of the real legitimate worries, there are two kinds. There are the problems we can solve, and there are the problems beyond our ability to personally solve. But most of our real problems usually fall into the first group, the ones we can solve, if we’ll learn how. The average working person has at his or her disposal an enormous amount of free time. In fact, you’ll see if you’ll total the hours in a year and subtract the sleeping hours: If we sleep 8 hours every night, we have about 6,000 waking hours, of which less than 2,000 are spent on the job. Now this leaves 4,000 hours a year when a person is neither working nor sleeping. These can be called discretionary hours with which that person can do pretty much as he or she pleases. So that you can see the amazing results in your own life, I want to recommend that you take just one hour a day, five days a week, and devote this hour to exercising your mind. You don’t even have to do it on weekends. Pick one hour a day on which you can fairly regularly count. The best time for me is an hour before the others are up in the morning. The mind’s clear, the house is quiet, and, if you like, with a fresh cup of coffee, this is the time to start the mind going. During this hour every day take a completely blank sheet of paper. At the top of the page write your present primary goal clearly, simply. Then, since our future depends on the way in which we handle our work, write down as many ideas as you can for improving that which you now do. Try to think of 20 possible ways in which the activity that fills your day can be improved. You won’t always get 20, but even one idea is good. Now remember two important points with regard to this. One, this is not particularly easy, and, two, most of your ideas won’t be any good. When I say it’s not easy, I mean it’s like starting any new habit. At first you’ll find your mind a little reluctant to be hauled up out of that old familiar bed. But as you think about your work and ways in which it might be improved, write down every idea that pops into your head, no matter how absurd it might seem. The most important thing that this extra hour accomplishes is that it deeply embeds your goal into your subconscious mind, starts the whole vital machine reworking the first thing every morning. And 20 ideas a day, if you can come up with that many, total 100 a week, even skipping weekends. An hour a day, five days a week, totals 260 hours a year and still leaves you 3,740 hours of free leisure time. Now this means you’ll be thinking about your goal and ways of improving your performance, increasing your service six full extra working weeks a year, 61/2 40-hour weeks devoted to thinking and planning. Can you see how easy it is to rise above that so-called competition? And it’ll still leave you with seven hours a day to spend as you please. Starting each day thinking, you’ll find that your mind will continue to work all day long. And you’ll find that at odd moments, when you least expect it, really great ideas will begin to bubble up from your subconscious. When they do, write them down as soon as you can. Just one great idea can completely revolutionize your work and, as a result, your life. Each time you write your goal at the top of the sheet of paper, don’t worry or become concerned about it. Think of it as only waiting to be reached, a problem only waiting to be solved. Face it with faith and bend all the great powers of your mind toward solving it. And believe me, solve it you will. This puts each of us in the driver’s seat. Earl Nightingale’s 8 Step Method to Solve Any Problem from Robert C. Worstell on Slideshare.net Also, please enjoy this short video on problem solving… http://livesensical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/8WaysToSolveProblem.mp4 The post Two Amazing Ways to Solve Your Problems appeared first on Live Sensical.

The Self-Help Detective Engine that Out-Sherlock’d Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle gave Sherlock Holmes life apparently just to bring another tragedy to this world. Throughout his stories, Holmes continued to ruin his life and nearly killed himself twice. Sliding into drugs (The Sign of the Four) or wrestling Professor Moriarty over Reichenbach Falls (The Final Problem) aren’t particularly ways to live long and successful lives. Holmes did say in that last book that his rewards for solving cases had finally left him financially independent. (Eventually, he retired to a small farm and took up beekeeping, as in His Last Bow.) His numerous comments concerning relationships with women showed them to be a distraction to his main love, which was deductive forensics. His only known sustained relationship was with a woman who had bested him intellectually. His only known relative was an admittedly smarter older brother, who Sherlock viewed as lazy, mentions him little, and visits him less. No parents ever surfaced or were discussed. But is that a way to live your life? A recluse. Monastic. Addiction in remission. No familial relationships of note. None of us would probably choose that sort of existence. Holmes obviously missed in his deduction of his own life. How can I say that? Because I’ve been there, done that, and lived to tell the tale. What I found in my own adventures could be called a Detective Engine, in Victorian English, but is really a simple life-analysis system you or anyone can apply to sort out and improve their lives. The Game is Afoot! If you would take Scientific Methodology in its simplicities, and then trace it back to the fundamentals of Logic, then you’d have a very workable model to solve things. What can it solve? Just about anything you throw at it. I haven’t found anything yet that stumped it. Let’s take everything back to simplicities: Logical thought is apparently based on comparison of two datums, which predicts a third. If you want to run through all you’ve been taught on logic, you’ll see this pretty much covers the basics. Of course, the Academics make it complex. That’s what they are paid to do. But you can run through your AND, OR, NOT, and XOR statements if you want. They all depend on a minimum of two datums being compared and this results in, or predicts, a third datum. Analysis is the same as this, just use “patterns” instead of “datum.” And this then can be made incredibly complex to the point of incomprehensibility. Data Analysis has been twisted to mean complex mathematical calculations based on huge datasets of information. What we are looking for is an analysis system you can keep in your mind, that you can count on your fingers. How to Build a Thunking Machine (In Your Own Backyard) The trick is that the more complex you make a system (like a machine) the easier it is to break down. The more complex an analysis machine, the more easily flawed are the results. An interesting study I found recently was that around 50% of any particular scientific study can be proved false, due to their errors in method or bias. You can then say that out of all the studies, half contradict the other half, or that Science is half-wrong all the time. But we are only really interested in stuff that works. For you and me, this means being able to test the data and systems we run across in order to choose which of these make things better for us. And we define what is “better.” When I was working all this over, years ago, I found that there were some rules for analysis: 1. Anything can be compared to anything. 2. Comparisons make their own rules, which gives a corollary: 2a. An analysis using one comparison doesn’t necessarily get accepted in another field. These then started to explain faith, imagination, common sense, fiction writing, art, and others. (You’ll have to see my book on this, “Go Thunk Yourself, Again” to get the blow-by-blow – it’s about page 20 of the paperback.) But logic itself isn’t an analysis system. What I was after was: To develop a base analytic engine which is capable of evaluation of any bulk of data or particular problem/situation humankind is confronting through living on this planet at this time. Yes, that’s heady. But I did it. Let’s break that down: 1) A base analytic engine – was built out as a system. Meaning that it a) it works on microcosmic scale as well as macrocosmic, b) had to be whole, bullet-proof, naturally functional, c) anyone accurately applying such a system should get results routinely. 2) Capable of evaluation of anything – huge in concept, but pretty sensible. Simply has to work and make sense out of anything you throw at it. Now there simply wasn’t anything out there that fit the bill. There was something called Analytic Philosophy, also called Philosophical Analysis, but it’s problem was that the academics had complicated both sides of that coin, so it went nowhere. Revenge of the Internet Trolls on Baker Street You have to keep in mind that corollary: whatever you analyze won’t necessarily be accepted by others, no matter how true and workable your results are. This was discussed by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where he coined the phrase “paradigm shift.” Scientists used to be burned at the stake as heretics for publishing statements counter to the then-current belief systems. Now it’s all virtual (in most countries) and you will merely get flamed through drive-by troll comments instead. My experience over the past 50 years is that people don’t easily give up their pet belief-systems. Often, they won’t even inspect data that doesn’t directly and obviously support that which they believe. This is also a definition for “conventional wisdom.” And the sheer unworkability of such an approach has led to statements such as, “If you find out where everyone is going, move in the opposite direction and 90% of the time, you’ll be much better off.” The people who won’t examine alternate opinions or views, and who actively shut them down, are just making themselves into victims. This is stupidity, plain and simple. You can also see this in our Universities, where it was recently pointed out that an MBA isn’t used to start a business, it’s used to get a job. That point is also found in the list of the richest people in America. The top 20 were either college dropouts or got degrees from relatively unknown Midwestern universities as undergrads. Only 1 of these (and not the richest, either) actually graduated from an Ivy League school. This explains why 50% of scientific studies are wrong: Bias blocking perception. You can’t see what you won’t look at. Jesus pointed this out, along with the concept that people also weren’t hearing with their natively-installed ears. Then, when you keep getting involved in “trying to please everyone,” you’ll get tied up doing nothing but apologizing. (That may be the reason they troll to begin with – just to throw you off your game.) The Little Detective Engine That Could All that I’ve pointed out to you here and now actually works. It can be factually proved. You just have to master four abilities or mental habits: 1. Your analysis machine will only work to the degree you are brutally honest with yourself and everyone around you, every single peace of information you come across. You have to look at what is actually there. You have to honestly see what you are looking at. Only then can you do any sort of analysis on it. 2. Be able to idealize what is possible for that area, that individual, that operating system you want to fix or improve. 3. Next after that, you have to be able to see things in sequences. You have to be able to envision how things are put together. Like any good mechanic, you have to be able to take things apart to see what piece isn’t working right, and then fix that one point and put everything back together. (Some call this “maintenence.”) 4. Then you have to compare what you fixed and how it’s running with the highest ideal for how it was or should or could be running. How is what you’re looking at working, comparing against what its ideal working condition is, estimate what it would take to fix it or upgrade it against how it will work when you get done. And you may have to fix a smaller part first in order to fix a larger whole. You make have to back up and figure how to acquire some missing part that needs to be replaced. But the four points above remain: a. Brutally honest observation of what is, what you are actually looking at. b. Envision a better ideal for what you want to sort out or fix. c. Find the sequences that are in operation and what part of that could be improved in order to move toward that ideal. d. Compare your new operating basis with the ideal you wanted at the start. The only limits to all four of those conditions is what you have to work with. You have to deal with what you can actually change or improve in that environment. There also may be limits to the ideals you can envision. That means you might have to slightly or radically change your mind. You can build a better analysis engine, a detective system, to help you improve the life you are living and the goals you want to achieve. Of course, like the old joke about the number of psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb, there has to be a real want to change. Sherlock Holmes constantly worked within his knowledge of the law and it’s imperfect operation. He observed and deduced constantly. What he never apparently studied were his own living conditions and personal ideals. Had he done so, he would have been able to move into a higher quality of life. And that is all I’ve tried to interest you in doing today. It’s your life to live. You can live it anyway you want. You can improve it to any quality or quantity you could possibly dream of. First you have to see that you are living, and how you are living. Then you have to envision how much better it could be. After that, it’s working out what logical steps you would have to take (and in what order) in order to wind up with that result. All along the way, you will have to compare the results you’re getting against the results you want. And then adjust what you are doing in order to more closely approach that ideal you are looking for. Right now, that’s the simplest way I can tell you how to improve your life and live a better one. Choose well. Believe well. Idealize well. As usual, it’s up to you and you alone to decide your own choices. While I’ve observed that not everyone has developed these mental abilities, anyone could. Regardless, the future you and everyone else are heading toward is built from the ideas you and they create today. Have fun with this. The post The Self-Help Detective Engine that Out-Sherlock’d Holmes appeared first on Live Sensical.

Your Ultimate Success is Being an Exception to the Rules We’ve been taught from birth (most of us, anyway) that success is like winning the lottery, and that all life is a tragedy, filled with dangers and catastrophes. However, this isn’t true. It never has been. There are exceptions to everything considered “normal.” Success depends on being an exception – being exceptional. Yes, life and living isn’t easy, it isn’t always predictable, the weather isn’t storm-free. Occasionally, you’ll run into “gulley-washers” as they call big rain storms around here. You know, the kind that the news likes to talk about when a tornado takes out someone’s house and flips over cars. (Of course that’s only reported in huge populated areas, not wide open countries. Like that “tree falling in a forest” concept – if a tornado touches down in a farmer’s crop field and no one gets hurt, is it really news?”) To a lot of people, more than are commonly suspected, Success is a lot like that. To the News media, they always are hyping up the near impossible – where someone wins the lottery. It doesn’t matter that millions of people made it possible with their 2-dollar and 10-dollar purchases. The news is always about the winners. And the hype is about the millions they won. What they don’t tell you is that 70% of the winners go bankrupt, twice the national average. The majority of the people remained just the same as they were, just about as happy, same spouse, same friends. For over 40 percent, the money was gone in a few years. Statistics showed they gave away what they didn’t spend. [See http://www.statisticbrain.com/lottery-winner-statistics/] Why is that important? To me, it seems to point out that money doesn’t equate to success. But if you study the classics, you’ll find that it never has. Money has always just been a symbol. And what it stood for was how much value you were giving others. Simple. You get as good as you gave. And you can’t get without giving first. So if you want to be extremely rich, the logic says that you have to help people get extremely rich. Very simple. The value you have to give to others has to be exceptional if you are going to live an exceptional life yourself. An article I read recently pointed out the obvious fact: All the extreme successes you read or hear about are exceptions. They aren’t the usual or the common. What that seems to say is that if you want to be successful, you have to become an exception to the usual. Like those sayings that are passed around, “If you do the opposite of what passes for conventional wisdom, chances are you’ll be better off.” The trick is to look at what conventional wisdom means. Look it up in wikipedia (of course that’s edited from time to time.) It’s commonly accepted ideas that match your current beliefs and are unexamined. The main word in all that is “unexamined.” That’s a built-in failure waiting to happen. The other interesting point about successful people is that they tend to hang around with other successful people. They live in rich neighborhoods, not ghetto’s. That’s been pointed out as how come lottery winners don’t hang onto the money. They were never trained, or didn’t study, on what to do with money. Claude M. Bristol (in his “Magic of Believing“) told a bit about this. He was vice-president of an investment banking firm during the Depression and made it boom by what he discovered. However, what he said to do in order to get more money into your life is to hang around with other people who had a lot of money in their lives. I started another course recently which had Jack Canfield spilling his secrets about how to make bestsellers. And one thing he said is that the thing he did was to find people who had bestsellers and ask them what they did to make their books that way. Of course, this goes back to if you want to be successful, you need to study people who were successful. That’s what Napoleon Hill did. And he was refining his studies right up to the year he died. In his last bestseller, “The Master Key to Riches” he stated that there was something called Cosmic Habitforce which explains how this works. The general point is that we communicate in many more ways than are known to Science. The habits we have can be passed on to people we associate with and live around. So when you start “rubbing shoulders” with the successful, then you are going to get these habits. Now Nap Hill took 20 years of shoulder-rubbing to get his interviews and write his first bestseller. And then kept studying successful people for the rest of his life, which was somewhere around another 45 years*. Of course, you could say this is all a pipe-dream, a scam. After all, how do you get to “hang around” rich folks in their expensive homes and exclusive clubs. The trick is to read and listen. You simply turn off your TV set and start reading and listening to successful authors. Of course, I recommend you start with the books on this site, but you could start anywhere. You just have to know that those people were verified successes, and not just “accidental millionaires” (which does happen at least as often as winning the lottery.) The guys that are authentic (and write about it) usually started out from modest beginnings, made their fortune and kept it. Guys like W. Clement Stone, Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar, and so on. You want to fill your life with this type of reading. And fill your ears with this type of audio books. If you want to become exceptionally successful, you are going to have to re-program yourself to think and act in exceptional ways. You’re going to have to develop mental habits that only exceptional people have. And this isn’t easy. But it’s done every year by more people than you suspect. Because the news only tells about the extreme cases, and is more devoted in its daily reports to who and what causes the most massive destruction that day. They won’t tell you human interest, or inspirational, or motivational stories for more than 5% of their total news time. Again, turn off the news. Choose what you want to read, view, and listen to. Choose to study success and fill your mind with only that. Then you’ll be able to see all the opportunities around you to make your success every single day. To do anything else is to guarantee you are going to keep your day job until they finally retire you or lay you off for good. Between then and now, you’ll have multiple chances to be and act exceptional, and get exceptional results. Your life, your outcome is exactly what you wish it to be. It’s all your choice. As always. (*Hill interviewed Andrew Carnegie in 1908, and published “Law of Success” in 1928. In 1937, 9 years later, he came out with “Think and Grow Rich.” In 1945, 8 years later, he published “Master Key to Riches.” Hill died in 1970.)   Your action steps today: 1. Look over what I’ve told you and test it for yourself. 2. Make a list of successful people who have books or audio material you can review regularly. 3. Set up your schedule (like when you used to listen to or read news) so you can start studying these successful people. 4. Take notes of what you find out. Start carrying a notepad or moleskin notebook with you just for these and other ideas. 5. Do this all week. Compare how you are feeling and what great ideas you’ve had in that week to the week before. Thanks for doing all you do. See you next time. The post Your Ultimate Success is Being an Exception to the Rules appeared first on Live Sensical.

Everyone has had some success in their lives. The winning play, that salary raise or bonus for exceptional work, the top score in an exam. For the vast majority of humankind, these are the exception rather than the rule. You can have a win, but they seem few and far between. Out of any training course, the outrageous successes are statistically 1 in 10,000 students – and even then, it’s unlikely that just that one course enabled that success. But those successes are held up as the example, so that the other 9,999 people will pay their course dues to get their chance at it. For some, success in life is about the same odds as winning the lottery. For others, everything they touch turns to gold. Can anyone actually make their own success into an always-on ability? Is there some success spigot or tap a person could turn on and fill their life up to the brim and then some? Napoleon Hill thought so. You know him from his perpetual bestseller, “Think and Grow Rich.” But did you know that Hill actually had three such bestsellers, and each one made him a millionare at least? But in between, he lost every fortune except the last. And that one was accomplished just before he died. Earl Nightingale had a completely different life. One of a handful who survived the Pearl Harbor bombing aboard the Arizona, Nightingale later transferred to a training base in North Carolina. Seeing a radio station under construction near the base, he got a part time job during his off-duty hours as a radio announcer. When mustered out of the service, he worked for 2 1/2 years full time for an Arizona station, and then announced one day he was going to Chicago to get a job at one of the big stations there. Buying a one-way ticket, within three days he had a contract with the biggest radio station in the nation. Nightingale’s story gets interesting after that. He found a copy of Hill’s Think and Grow Rich in a used bookstore in Chicago, just months after getting settled into his top-level announcing job. That weekend, he discovered what he later called “The Strangest Secret” while reading that book. First, though, he put Hill’s philosophy to the test. Nightingale had a few businesses going on the side. Applying what he had read, he quickly doubled his income. As a test, he applied that book’s principles once more and again quickly doubled his income . Within two years of accepting that top-flight job, he resigned to run his businesses full time. The next break occurred when he was getting ready to take a vacation. His insurance business salesmen needed an inspirational talk to keep going in his absence, as he wouldn’t be there to give them his routine pep talks as usual. At 4 in the morning, he was inspired. Rising quickly, he went to his study and started writing. He pulled many books from his shelves and found that all these authors were saying the same thing – that one idea he had gotten while studying Think and Grow Rich years earlier: “We become what we think about.” That was the theme to his recording for those salesmen. That recording turned out very popular. So popular, that these salesmen made copies of that recording and played it for their friends and family and clients. The demand became so great, that Nightingale arranged with his friend, Lloyd Conant, to press it into a 78RPM LP record. Without real promotion of any kind, it became the first Gold record to sell over a million copies as a “spoken word” album. That one recording started an entire industry for recorded personal development materials. Nightingale-Conant is still the premier company in this field a half-century later. In that recording, Nightingale mentioned other books to read. These authors also found uncommon, and permanent success: Dorothea Brande discovered one phrase which turned her hum-drum editing job into a brilliant career as an editor and author. Her phrasing – “Act as if it were impossible to fail.” Her book, “Wake Up and Live!” continues to sell today as a timeless success classic. Claude M. Bristol faced certain financial ruin as the vice-president of a Investment Banking company during the Depression. One night he had an epiphany. All that he had studied up to that point about belief suddenly came home to him as a way to defeat the cultural pessimism that had taken hold in his company and the nation. He ransacked his own library, and those of others to study this. He started talking to his own sales team about what he had uncovered. They applied the ideas and techniques he outlined to double and then again double their sales. Income for the firm soared and continued to rise. Requests mounted for him to talk to their clients’ staffs. And similar results occurred where he did. He wrote a short book and had it printed, just to keep up with the demand for his talks. Soon he was doing nothing but lecturing about this “Magic of Believing” philosophy. (And you can see Hill’s influence in his book at various points.) A few years before his death, he had to come out with an expanded version due to the mounting demand and to document his own continuing research into the subject. Another relatively unknown author pieced together the missing points that Hill had touched on in his three books. As he completed his tour of duty as a World War II vet, he was attending college and speaking about the Hill philosophy as a part-time paid activity. His name was James Breckenridge Jones. Continuing to study and compare Hill with related authors. Jones finally decided to put what he had studied to the test. Tens of thousands of dollars in debt, Jones took out another loan to start a business from his living room. Within four years, he was worth tens of millions, and had thousands of sales associates across the continental U.S. representing every state. His personally-trained executives started companies of their own, becoming “millionaire-makers” in their own right. Jones only book, “If You Can Count to Four…” was written using this same philosophy to inspire, produce, and publish it. His book quickly achieved bestseller status. What did these people know and apply which made their success permanent? How did they even out their own momentary high attainment into a continuing upward path? The secrets they used have been detailed in their books and that one lecture. They are all there. You just have to read (or listen) to them over and over until everything sinks in for you. Once you start believing and acting in this philosophy of living, in earnest faith, all doors open up for you and stay open. Everything you need to form your success starts showing up – many have been there all the time, but you had to start seeing them with your new eyes. It’s not an easy road you start out on. Your own doubts rise to plague you and try to stop your progress. But the solution to these roadblocks are all found inside that one talk and these four books. Study, re-study, and re-study again. Make their few datums sink into your consciousness to become a reflexive habit of success. For that is the way to make success permanent: 1) Search out those people who have studied successful people. 2) Personally absorb the uncovered philosophy of success and make it a habit in your own life. 3) Test everything you study for yourself and prove that you can make it work in your own life. 4) Set and achieve big, and then bigger, and then even bigger goals. Your success is the result of your beliefs about yourself. You truly “Become What You Think About.” You can actually “Think and Grow Rich” — and stay that way, for whatever “getting rich” means to you. Yes, you can make your success permanent. You can have and be anything and everything you’ve ever wanted. This site is devoted to just helping you achieve that for yourself. It was built using the principles from these books. What’s your next steps? Some ideas have flashed into your mind by now. Take out a pad of paper and Make a list of everything you’ve ever wanted to be and have. Number these in terms of importance to you. Then write out your plan to make it happen. And start working on that plan right now. This is how it all starts, by taking action this very moment. Good luck to you, and luck to all of us. The post Can You Make Your Own Permanent Success? appeared first on Live Sensical.

(Click for larger view) Living Sensical A Manifesto About 5% of the population know for a fact that the world is filled with endless opportunities and that a person can be and have whatever they want, by learning what they need to know from freely available sources. The other 95% don t believe it and work to make sure no one else does either. What you believe is your choice. It always has been, always will be. You ve never been trained how to think rationally. Instead, you ve been emotionally mis-programmed to have knee-jerk reactions. That allows you to remain a wage-slave and sold just about anything. Your diet has been filled with mass-produced food stuffs that are causing more diseases instead of maintaining consistent good health. Conventional business is consistently promoted based on short-cuts, which are based on deceptive economic theory. People are taught to chase money as an object instead of increasing the value of produced goods and so, their exchange value. The result: 1% of our population controls 90% of the wealth. Most people go to work at jobs they hate, with no secure retirement, living in fear of being fired. People should love what they do and do what they love but have no clue how to leave the rat-race treadmill they are on. Routes to resolve the above are well booby-trapped. Each of these influence the others directly, so attempting to solve one without the others usually ends poorly. Powerful tools that could solve these problems have been also the most discredited. The problems embedded at the level of just making a living and staying alive have kept people from even seeing these tools, much less putting them to work at finding solutions. Sound familiar? Read on The biggest problem you have stems from what you haven t been taught. It s not on any curriculum in any school I don t know that it ever has been. The government ignores this, but talks about it all the time. Several authors through history have written books with this in the title, but never get around to actually defining it for anyone. It s said that it s something you learn when growing up but ask your parents about this and you ll get a blank look. Practically, this is harder to talk about than sex and there aren t even any scandalous magazines printed about it. Yet everyone can do this. Everyone can practice this. Everyone can learn how to improve their skills with this. This is probably the first time a simple explanation for this hidden subject has been put into words, let alone print: Sensical (Sensible, Makes Sense ) is where Emotional thought agrees with Rational thought. If you read nothing further, I ve done my job here. Take that definition and test it for yourself. When you can emotionally get behind something, and it is the logical thing to do then it s a sensible action to take. You ll find that you will do sensical/sensible things and not do non-sensical things (unless you are a comedian, or a politician. Comedians who become politicians, well ) The point of this book is: Accept all data conditionally test everything you hear, read, or experience. Adopt only those ideas and facts when you ve proved them to be workable for yourself. I ll tell you why this works and how as we go along Get Your Copy Now.   Available in all formats from all major book distributors and sellers: paperback: Amazon | Lulu hardback: (coming soon) ebook: Amazon | iTunes | Lulu | PDF “Living Sensical A Manifesto” by Dr. Robert C. Worstell on Ganxy (Note: regular discounts available through our Lulu showcase as much as 50% off!) Join our newsletter and receive instant access to no-charge PDF downloads of classic works. The post Living Sensical A Manifesto Robert C. Worstell appeared first on Live Sensical.

(Now available as an Amazon ebook.) Acres of Diamonds Every kind of work has enormous opportunity lurking within it. The opportunities are there now, clamoring to be noticed. But they cannot speak or print signs for us to read. Our part of the bargain is to look at our work with “intelligent objectivity”. If we have the wisdom and patience to intelligently, effectively explore the work in which we’re now engaged, to explore ourselves, we would most likely find the riches we seek. The story – a true one – is told of an African farmer who heard tales about other farmers who had made millions by discovering diamond mines. These tales so excited the farmer that he could hardly wait to sell his farm and go prospecting for diamonds himself. He sold the farm and spent the rest of his life wandering the African continent searching unsuccessfully for the gleaming gems that brought such high prices on the markets of the world. Finally, worn out and in a fit of despondency, he threw himself into a river and drowned. Meanwhile, the man who had bought his farm happened to be crossing the small stream on the property one day, when suddenly there was a bright flash of blue and red light from the stream bottom. He bent down and picked up a stone. It was a good-sized stone, and admiring it, he brought it home and put it on his fireplace mantel as an interesting curiosity. Several weeks later a visitor picked up the stone, looked closely at it, hefted it in his hand, and nearly fainted. He asked the farmer if he knew what he’d found. When the farmer said, no, that he thought it was a piece of crystal, the visitor told him he had found one of the largest diamonds ever discovered. The farmer had trouble believing that. He told the man that his creek was full of such stones, not all as large as the one on the mantel, but sprinkled generously throughout the creek bottom. The farm the first farmer had sold, so that he might find a diamond mine, turned out to be one of the most productive diamond mines on the entire African continent. The first farmer had owned, free and clear … acres of diamonds. But he had sold them for practically nothing, in order to look for them elsewhere. The moral is clear: If the first farmer had only taken the time to study and prepare himself to learn what diamonds looked like in their rough state, and to thoroughly explore the property he had before looking elsewhere, all of his wildest dreams would have come true. The thing about this story that has so profoundly affected millions of people is the idea that each of us is, at this very moment, standing in the middle of our own acres of diamonds. If we had only had the wisdom and patience to intelligently and effectively explore the work in which we’re now engaged, to explore ourselves, we would most likely find the riches we seek, whether they be financial or intangible or both. Before you go running off to what you think are greener pastures, make sure that your own is not just as green or perhaps even greener. It has been said that if the other guy’s pasture appears to be greener than ours, it’s quite possible that it’s getting better care. Besides, while you’re looking at other pastures, other people are looking at yours. A man I knew in Arizona began with a small gas station. One day, while one of his young attendants filled a man’s gas tank, he watched the customer while he stood about waiting for the job to be finished. It dawned upon him that the man had money in his pockets and there were things he needed or wanted that he would pay for if they were conveniently displayed where he could see them. So he began adding things. Fishing tackle, then fishing licenses, hunting and camping equipment, rifles, shot guns, ammunition, hunting licenses. He found an excellent line of aluminum fishing boats and trailers. He began buying up the contiguous property around him. Then he added an auto parts department. He always sold cold soft drinks and candy, but now he added an excellent line of chocolates in a refrigerated case. Before long, he sold more chocolates than anyone else in the state. He carried thousands of things his customers could buy while waiting for their cars to be serviced. All the products he sold also guaranteed that most of the gas customers in town would come to his station. He sold more gas. He began cashing checks on Friday, and his sales grew. It all started with a man with a human brain watching a customer standing around with money in his pockets and nothing to spend it on. Others would have lived and died with the small service station, and they do. My friend saw the diamonds. Many service station operators, upon seeing a wealthy customer drive in, might say to themselves, I ought to be in his business. Not so. There’s just as much opportunity in one business as another, if we’ll only stop playing copycat and begin to think creatively, in new directions. It’s there, believe me. And it’s your job to find it. Take the time to stand off and look at your work as a stranger might and ask, Why does he do it that way? Has he noticed how what he’s doing might be capitalized upon or multiplied? If you’re happy with things as they are, then by all means, keep them that way. But there’s great fun in finding diamonds hiding in ourselves and in our work. We never get bored or blasé or find ourselves in a rut. A rut, remember, is really nothing more than a grave with the ends kicked out. Some of the most interesting businesses in the world grew out of what was originally a very small idea in a very small area. If something is needed in one town, then the chances are it’s also needed in all towns and cities all over the country. You might also ask yourself, How good am I at what I’m presently doing? Do you know all there is to know about your work? Would you call yourself a first-class professional at your work? How would your work stand up against the work of others in your line? The first thing we need to do to become a “diamond miner” is to break away from the crowd and quit assuming that because people in the millions are living that way, it must be the best way. It is not the best way. It’s the average way. The people going the best way are way out in front. They’re so far ahead of the crowd you can’t even see their dust anymore. These are the people who live and work on the leading edge, the cutting edge, and they mark the way for all the rest. It takes imagination, curious imagination, to know that diamonds don’t look like cut and polished gemstones in their rough state, nor does a pile of iron ore look like stainless steel. To prospect your own acres of diamonds, develop a faculty we might call “intelligent objectivity.” The faculty to stand off and look at your work as a person from Mars might look at it. Within the framework of what industry or profession does your job fall? Isn’t it time for a refreshing change of some kind? How can the customer be given more value? Each morning ask yourself, How can I increase my service today? There are rare and very marketable diamonds lurking all around me. Have I been looking for them? Have I examined every facet of my work and of the industry or profession in which it has its life? There are better ways to do what you are presently doing. What are they? How will your work be performed 20 years from now? Everything in the world is in a state of evolution and improvement. How could you do today what would eventually be done anyway? Sure there’s risk involved; there’s no growth of any kind without risk. We start running risks when we get out of bed in the morning. Risks are good for us. They bring out the best that’s in us. They brighten the eye and get the mind cooking. They quicken the step and put a new shining look on our days. Human beings should never be settled. It’s okay for chickens and cows and cats, but it’s wrong for human beings. People start to die when they become settled. We need to keep things stirred up. Back in 1931, Lloyd C. Douglas, the world-famous novelist who wrote The Robe, Magnificent Obsession, and other best-selling books, wrote a magazine article titled “Escape.” In that article Douglas asked, “Who of us has not at some time toyed briefly with the temptation to run away? If all the people who have given that idea the temporary hospitality of their imagination were to have acted upon it, few would be living at their present addresses. And of the small minority who did carry the impulse into effect, it’s doubtful if many ever disengaged themselves as completely as they had hoped from the problems that hurled them forth. More often than otherwise, it may be surmised, they packed up their troubles in their old kit bags and took them along.” The point of the article was simply, don’t try to run away from your troubles. Overcome them. Prevail right where you are. What we’re really after is not escape from our complexities and frustrations, but a triumph over them. And one of the best ways to accomplish that is to get on course and stay there. Restate and reaffirm your goal, the thing you want most to do, the place in life you want most to reach. See it clearly in your mind’s eye just as you can envision the airport in Los Angeles when you board your plane in New York. Like a great ship in a storm, just keep your heading and your engines running. The storm will pass, although sometimes it seems that it never will. One bright morning you’ll find yourself passing the harbor light. Then you can give a big sigh of relief and rest a while, and almost before you know it, you’ll find your eyes turning seaward again. You’ll think of a new harbor you’d like to visit, a new voyage upon which to embark. And once again, you’ll set out. That’s just the way this funny-looking, two-legged, curious, imaginative, tinkering, fiddling dreamer called a human being operates. He escapes from problems not by running away from them, but by overcoming them. And no sooner does he overcome one set of problems, but he starts looking around for new and more difficult pickles to get into and out of. If you feel like running away from it all once in a while, you’re perfectly normal. If you stay and get rid of your problems by working your way through them, you’re a success. Start taking an hour a day with a legal pad and dissect your work. Take it apart and look at its constituent parts. There’s opportunity there. That’s your acre of diamonds. DIAMOND MINING To prospect your own acres of diamonds and unearth the opportunities that exist in your life right now, regularly challenge yourself with some key questions: How good am I at what I’m presently doing? Can I call myself a first-class professional at my work? How would my work stand up against the work of others in my field? Do I know all I can about my industry or profession? How can the customer be given a better break? How can I increase my service? There are rare and very marketable diamonds lurking all around me. Have I been looking for them? Have I examined every facet of my work and of the industry or profession in which it has its life? There are better ways to do what I’m presently doing. What are they? How will my work be performed 20 years from now? Everything in the world is in a state of evolution and improvement. How can I do now what will eventually be done anyway? The Fog of Worry (Only 8% of Worries are Worth It) According to the Bureau of Standards, “A dense fog covering seven city blocks, to a depth of 100 feet, is composed of something less than one glass of water.” So, if all the fog covering seven city blocks, 100 feet deep, were collected and held in a single drinking glass, it would not even fill it. And this could be compared to our worries. If we can see into the future and if we could see our problems in their true light, they wouldn’t tend to blind us to the world, to living itself, but instead could be relegated to their true size and place. And if all the things most people worry about were reduced to their true size, you could probably put them all into a drinking glass, too. It’s a well-established fact that as we get older, we worry less. With the passing of the years and the problems each of them yields, we learn that most of our worries are not really worth bothering ourselves about too much and that we can manage to solve the important ones. But to younger people, they often find their lives obscured by the fog of worry. Yet, here’s an authoritative estimate of what most people worry about. Things that never happen: 40 percent. That is, 40 percent of the things you worry about will never occur anyway. Things over and past that can’t be changed by all the worry in the world: 30 percent. Needless worries about our health: 12 percent. Petty, miscellaneous worries: 10 percent. Real, legitimate worries: 8 percent. Only 8 percent of your worries are worth concerning yourself about. Ninety-two percent are pure fog with no substance at all. The Flame of Hope Every person is born with the basic drive to persevere. No matter how crushed, how defeated, how demoralized, when all hope seems gone, there is, in the healthy person, a small, indistinguishable flame of hope like a faint but persistent pilot light that stays alight, much like the fire ancient man used to carry with him as he moved from place to place. Almost everyone comes to a place in life when going on seems futile, even ridiculous – when he seems overwhelmed by a suffocating mattress of events and situations, and desires just to sit down in the middle of the road and let the world and everything in it go to blazes. So he sits down for a while. But then the vibration of the world seems to make itself felt in his bones. Pretty soon, he raises his head and begins to look around. After a while, he takes a couple of deep breaths, gets slowly, painfully to his feet, wobbles there for a minute or two, and then he starts out again. Often as not, around the next bend in the road, he’ll find the reason he kept going. And he’ll shudder at the thought of how close he came to giving up. His hope lies in movement and time. If he does not get up and start moving again, he’s done for. But he has this natural drive to keep moving along the road. As long as he keeps heading for what he’s looking for, what seemed like the end of the world for him will be nothing more than a bad dream, and a part of the preparation he needed to qualify for the achievement his perseverance has brought. Movement, time, and the law of averages; I remember reading about the manager of a major-league ball club who kept a rookie on the team and in the lineup because even though he wasn’t hitting anywhere near what was expected of him, when he struck out, he struck out swinging. He wasn’t just standing there watching strikes go by. And, as the manager expected, he soon started getting wood on the ball and bringing his average up to where it belonged. Discouragement seems to be part of life, but the reason people prevail is because of this built-in drive to keep going. BONUS Audio and PDF for this special report are available at livesensical.com Click here now. The post How to Mine Your Own Acres of Diamonds appeared first on Live Sensical.

(Now available as an Amazon ebook.) A Time to Risk or Sit In 1965, Robert M. Manry, a copy editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, sailed from the United States to England in a 13-foot sailboat – 3,200 miles across the North Atlantic in a boat so small you’d hesitate to take it out on Lake Michigan or Long Island Sound as small-craft warnings were flying. For 78 days Manry and his tiny 36-year-old sailboat battled one of the toughest stretches of saltwater on earth. Gales blew the boat on its side. Manry tried to nap during the day and sailed at night so that he could try to avoid being run down and chopped into kindling and hamburger by great ocean-going steamers. On several occasions, he was washed over the side in heavy seas. Each time he would haul himself back aboard by a lifeline he kept tied to himself in the boat. He suffered terrible hallucinations, the result of having to take so many pep pills to stay awake during the long nights. Why? What made him do it? It wasn’t publicity; he went about the whole thing so quietly practically no one knew what he was up to. He thought no one would pay attention to him, and that was fine with him. The reason was that he had dreamed of sailing the Atlantic ever since he had been a small boy. He bought the dinky old boat for $250. He completely rebuilt her, taught himself navigation, and practiced long-distance sailing on Lake Erie. He told his wife the real reason for his embarking on so incredible a journey in so vulnerable a craft. He said to her, “There is a time when one must decide either to risk everything to fulfill one’s dreams or sit for the rest of one’s life in the backyard.” Now this is why Mr. Manry went sailing over the mountains of deep water in a boat only about twice the size of your bathtub. This is why he sat in his tiny open cockpit and weathered storms that caused the passengers to clear the weather decks of giant ocean liners. He was fulfilling a dream he’d carried in his heart since he’d been a small boy. As a result, offers for books and magazine articles poured in to him. Cleveland gave him a hero’s welcome, as did the 20,000 people who wildly cheered the successful end of his voyage when he arrived in Falmouth, England. It’s been proposed to Congress that Manry’s boat, Tinkerbelle, be placed in the Smithsonian Institution alongside Charles Lindbergh’s plane, Spirit of St. Louis. But all this fame and sudden stature in the eyes of the world – this was not why he made the trip. It was because he believes that there is a time when one must decide either to risk everything to fulfill one’s dreams or sit for the rest of one’s life in the backyard. Courage, the courage to finally take one’s life in one’s own hands and go after the big dream, has a way of making that dream come true. It seems to open hidden doorways from which good things begin to pour into one’s life. But only after we’ve made the journey in our own way. For Manry, at 47 years of age, it was sailing 3,200 miles of the North Atlantic. Each of us must make his own voyage through darkness and danger to the light that beacons in the distance. A journey to fulfillment … or sit in the backyard. The Entrepreneurial Adventure It takes longer than we realize, and the journey is an arduous one. But, one day we wake up, and we’ve achieved a kind of independence never known or perhaps understood by the employee, no matter how high he or she may travel in the hushed corridors of executive country. All business activity in the United States and its territories began as entrepreneurial adventures. Trace any corporation back to its beginnings, or the beginnings of its parent corporation, or the beginning of its parent’s corporation, as is sometimes the case, and you’ll find it began as an idea that would fill or help fill a need or desire on the part of human beings who would become customers. We look today at a complex multinational organization like IBM and forget that the company began in the mind of a single human being. Anyone who starts or causes to be started a business venture, is an entrepreneur. The entrepreneurial adventure is endlessly attractive to those endowed with entrepreneurial spirits, adventurers, in varying degrees, whose visions of the future tend to be hopeful and enthusiastic, rather than defeatist. The entrepreneur is the person who says, “I think it’ll be a big success.” The non-entrepreneur says, “You’re going to lose your shirt.” A survey taken many years ago of the most successful people in a large American city turned up the fact that most of their ultimate success depended in large measure on the jobs they had lost; whether they had resigned or had been fired wasn’t all that important. And under questioning, those very successful people thought about that interesting fact for perhaps the first time and shuddered to think of what their present lives might have been like had they clung to one of those early jobs which, at the time, seemed so important to them and their families. Now they’re not all entrepreneurs, of course, but they were people with faith in themselves and their ideas, which is the mark of success, wherever it’s found. During those important steps in their careers, they were no doubt warned by well-meaning relatives and friends to hang on to that job they had held, and lectured on the dark and dismal pitfalls of venturing off on something as ephemeral and evanescent as an idea. But of course, good ideas are not as ephemeral or evanescent as their status in thought might indicate to the more fearful. They’re the most important things on the planet earth, and it’s producing ideas that raises the human being to his or her highest levels of achievement. Ideas solve problems and make our lives infinitely more interesting and rewarding, less dangerous, better fed, better employed, richer in countless ways, and wonderfully more comfortable. Without ideas, we’d still be sitting in the trees grooming one another. All the creatures on the planet have life-saving techniques. Some are fleet of foot, others sharp of claw and fang. There are fish in the deep, dark trenches of the ocean that dangle tiny lanterns above their waiting jaws. But for the human being, there is the brain, the idea producer, to save his or her skin in a myriad of ways. And the United States, the first nation in history with the word happiness in its official chartering papers, offers a number of options to those desiring to share in the good life. One of those options is the right to go into business with little more than an idea and the determination to succeed. The idea that results and a person running the risks of starting his or her own business depend strictly upon the person – regardless of background, education, previous level of accomplishment, and aspirations. For most of us, going into business is a pursuit beset by many problems, irritations, headaches, sleepless nights, long hours, and low pay. Ah, yes, being in business for one’s self does not necessarily mean an inordinately high income. On the contrary, it often means very little or no income at all for long periods of time. But once the business hits, whether it takes five years or 15, you’ve got the world by the nether parts. You decide what you’re worth in the salary and bonus departments. And the company can pay for much that would ordinarily come out of an employee’s pay. America’s top executives working for large multinational corporations usually earn more in salary and perks, stock options, and bonuses than the great majority of entrepreneurs. But the entrepreneur has something else. He has control. And once the business is truly successful, which means it’s probably in a state of happy expansion, he or she can hire the best executives to run things while he or she takes a few months’ rest in Hawaii or Greece or plays golf in Nairobi and does a bit of deep-sea fishing in the Seychelles. You say it might take 15 years for that kind of success? Yes, I do. But how long would it take you if you worked for IBM or Chrysler, 15 or 20 years I suppose, if ever, right? And the 15 years aren’t all pain and suffering and sleepless nights. There’s a lot of joy in there, too. There’s the joy of seeing your own ideas in action and of watching your own ideas and efforts win against the competition. There’s the joy of watching the money pour in along with the orders. There’s a, sort of, kind vindication in that. When I resigned from CBS, my friends told me repeatedly what an idiot I was. I had reached the top. I went to work in the beautifully paneled brass-trimmed elevators of the world-famous Wrigley Building in Chicago. I rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous, and I earned top dollar in my profession. Man, I was on top of the heap. I had it made, and I was only 28 years old. But I dreamed to be an entrepreneur – in total control of my destiny – and as my friends learned, it does little good to remonstrate with an entrepreneur. Christopher Columbus, brilliant navigator that he was, could have spent his life in peace navigating up and down the coastal waters of Europe and remaining within the known boundaries of the period’s world’s maps. But at the edges of the known waters there appeared the terrifying legend: “Here there be dragons.” And it was there that Columbus desired to sail. And it’s there that every entrepreneur desires to sail. It’s interesting to note that on the maps beyond the known world, there was never a legend reading, “Here there be unlimited opportunity for exploration, no doubt much gold and silver and precious gems, and strange creatures living beyond these boundaries waiting for discoveries and development for the daring and intrepid sailor.” Even though it had always been that way before, no one ever suggested that it might also be that way in still undiscovered areas. It’s the natural proclivity of cartographers and advice givers to look upon the unknown as bad. For they, like children going into a darkened basement alone, feel that the dark and the unknown must hold strange and fearful creatures unimaginable in the known and lighted world. They cannot think otherwise. It’s their nature. Yet, at the time of Columbus, not a single live dragon had ever been seen upon the planet earth by anyone. Dragons were, in fact, fairytale creatures, yet they always inhabited the uncharted regions of the world. It said so right on the maps. So when you get an idea that you think will result in an excellent business of your own – and it needn’t be a new idea by any means – keep it to yourself and your secret notepad for a period of time while you simmer it on the rotisserie of your mind’s consciousness and unconsciousness. Let it turn while you view it from every angle. Look at it from the standpoint of the worst possible scenario. If it’s a good, sound idea, it should survive even the worst times, as good businesses do. It usually takes longer than we realize when we begin. At the decision to become an entrepreneur, we seldom take into consideration the length and arduous nature of the contract. But if our idea is sound, and if we are sound, and if we fully understand the concept of service and the importance of working capital and constant upgrading of our product or service, and if we have the perseverance of Columbus, we’ll wake up some fine morning to find ourselves one of the competent ones of our generation. We’ve achieved a kind of independence never known or perhaps understood by the employee, no matter how high he or she may travel in the hushed corridors of executive country. Is Your Personal Corporation Growing? Every person is, in reality, in business for himself or herself in that each is building his or her own life regardless of who happens to write his or her paycheck. So for the purpose of this message, think of yourself as a corporation. You hold the office of president of this corporation, and you’re responsible for its success or failure. You and the members of your family are stockholders in your corporation, and it’s your responsibility to see that the value of the stock increases in the years ahead. If your company is growing, it will have a tendency to continue to grow. In other words, you’re doing things right. Conversely, a company that is going backwards or shrinking has a tendency to continue to go backwards or shrink until acted upon by an outside force. All responsible company officers know that unless the company is growing, it’s developing the first signs of death. As the head of your personal corporation, you must realize that this same law applies to you as well. However, a person has a tremendous advantage over even the largest corporation. Think of any large multinational corporation. Can it double its production in a single day? Of course not. Can it double its sales in a single day? Of course not. It would like to, but its growth must be gradual and steady because of the interconnecting complexities of operating such a large organization. Yet a person can double, triple, quadruple his or her effectiveness in a month or less. It’s like comparing the movement of a single scout to the movement of a great army. Can you grow and improve as a person at least 10% a year? Of course you can. In fact, experts estimate a person can increase his or her effectiveness anywhere from 50% to 100% and more within 30 days. History is filled with people who exceeded their previous performance to an almost unbelievable extent. People in management and in production who multiplied their effectiveness many times. Students who moved from failing grades to straight A’s and the Dean’s List. People in sales who found they could, through the proper management of their abilities, minds, and time, sell as much of their company’s products in a single month as they had previously sold in an entire year. Think about what that means. If you waste even an hour of productive time every work day, it adds up to 250 hours a year. That time wasted could shut your corporation down! You can earn nothing with the doors closed. What is your time worth an hour? Multiply this by 250 and you can see what you’re throwing away. Now whether your employer pays for this wasted hour or not is unimportant. Life will not pay for it. How much are you worth right now, today, as a corporation? What’s your value today, to yourself, your family, your company? If you were an outside investor, a stranger, would you invest in this corporation? A company growing at the rate of 10% a year will double in size in about eight years. What attention are you giving to the growth of your personal corporation? BONUS Audio and PDF for this special report are available at livesensical.com Click here now. The post 3 Adventure Guides for Exceptional Entrepreneurs appeared first on Live Sensical.

(Now available as Amazon ebook.) Tips for Setting Goals A clinical associate professor of psychiatry, Dr. Ari Kiev, writes, “Observing the lives of people who have mastered adversity, I have noted that they have established goals and sought with all their effort to achieve them. From the moment they decide to concentrate all their energies on a specific objective, they began to surmount the most difficult odds.” Dr. Kiev continues, “The establishment of a goal is the key to successful living. And the most important step toward achieving an objective is first to define it. I’m sure you have at least 30 minutes a day in which to list your thoughts. At the end of that time, choose from the possible objectives you have listed, the one that seems the most important, and record it separately on a single card. Carry this card with you at all times. Think about this goal every day. Create a concrete mental image of the goal, as if you’ve already accomplished it.” The doctor points out, “You can determine your special talents or strengths in a number of ways, ranging from psychological tests to an analysis of the unexpressed wishes in your dreams. No method works for everyone. You might start, for example, by clipping and posting newspaper articles that interest you. After 30 days, see if there isn’t some trend suggestive or a deep-seated interest of natural inclination. Keep alert to the slightest indications of any special skills or talents, even when they seem silly or unimportant. “From this exercise, you should be able to get some sense of potential strengths. Whenever you discover a strength or talent, think of five possible ways to develop it. Write these down on a card as well, and check them periodically to keep them fresh in your mind.” So take the good advice of psychiatrist Dr. Ari Kiev, and don’t be afraid of failure. As Herodotus wrote, “It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half of the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what may happen.” Uncover Your Primary Goal If you are like so many millions who don’t know what it is you want sufficiently to name as your primary goal, I recommend you make out a want list. Take a note pad, go off by yourself, and write down the things you’d really like to have or do very much. One might be a beautiful new home or a trip around the world, a visit to some special country or place. It might be a yearning for a sailboat or motor yacht, or if you’re an avid fisherman, you might want to go salmon fishing in Alaska or trout fishing in New Zealand. It might be a business of your own or a particular position with your company. It might be a certain income that will permit you to live the way you’d like to live. Or, a certain amount of money in good investments or in a savings account. How about a special make of car? Or an addition to your present home? Just write down everything you can think of that you would really like to see come about in your life. Then when you’ve exhausted your wants, go over the list again and number the items in the order of their importance, and make number one your present goal. What Is Your Intermediate Goal? Did you ever see Jack Nicklaus play golf? He was a golfing phenomenon never before seen in the world of golf, winning more major championships and money than any other golfer who ever lived. Yet if you watch him carefully, you can learn more than how to lower your handicap. You can learn a key strategy for success. Each time Jack got ready to hit the ball, he’d have an intermediate aiming point, just a short distance from the ball. This intermediate aiming point was on line with the route he wanted the ball to travel. He would look down the fairway toward the green, then at the intermediate aiming point, then at the ball. His first task was to get the ball to pass over the intermediate point. If it did that, it would probably land very near the point on the fairway or green he had selected. It was always interesting watching his head and eyes move to the intermediate point, then to the distant point, then back to the intermediate point and back to the ball. When he was ready, and not a moment before, he would uncork that legendary swing that left the gallery gasping and whooping with admiration and wonder. The ball would compress flat and be off and away on its considerable journey. It was the same with his short irons near the green. He always had an intermediate point with which he could line up his club head and the ball. We need intermediate aiming points, too, before we can successfully reach a substantial distant goal. To write a book, one must write the first chapter, then the second, then the third, and so on. The book is first in outline form. The chapters are roughly sketched as to subject matter and content. One can get a mental picture of the book in final form with its color dust jacket coming from the printer; that’s the goal. But first, there’s that first chapter, then the second, and so on. Each chapter must be successfully completed as an integral part of the project before the project’s complete. And it’s much the same with our big goals and how we look at goal achievement. All we can see is it as completed, with ourselves right in the middle of it. There we are; the job’s done. That’s where we want to land. But first there are the intermediate points to successfully complete. And it’s the intermediate points that often prove too much or too difficult or too time-consuming for the person to spend all that time completing and polishing. These are often the core skills, vital to the completion of the final project. Here we find the person who wants to amaze a friend through his skill at the piano but doesn’t want to put in the time and effort to learn to play. This is the person who’s forever looking for shortcuts. He or she daydreams, but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of the intermediate goals, ah, that’s too hard or boring or time consuming. Want to write books? How about mastering the language first? Want to get rich in real estate? Study the business first. The first step of the successful person is commitment. There are no ifs or buts about it. He or she is fully 100 percent committed to the achievement of the goal and willing to take whatever intermediate steps are required. When bridges are burned, there’s no escape route on which to come tiptoeing back when things get rough. Commitment to all the intermediate goals, 100 percent. When that happens, the goal is as good as accomplished. Fake It Till You Make It When I was an announcer/writer at radio station KTAR in Phoenix, Arizona, my goal was to become a network announcer in Chicago or New York, the national headquarters of radio at that time. I listened to the network announcers and practiced reading commercials as they did so that the copy sounded spontaneous and ad-libbed. I studied the delivery of every first-class network announcer in the country, and soon I could sound very much like them. Every commercial I read on the air at KTAR, whether for the local mortuary or sporting goods store, I read as though it were a national commercial for the most world-renowned company. I gave so much pizazz to the local commercials my announcer friends soon dubbed me “Network” and kidded me – found my efforts ludicrous. They were helping me on my way. “Why do you knock yourself out on those ridiculous commercials?” they’d ask. And I would smile and go about my business. I would listen every day to those men and women who were at the very top of my field, and no matter how mundane the copy or humble a place of business, when I stepped up to the microphone, I had a picture of the entire country listening to every word I spoke. I gave it my very best – always. And after 2 1/2 years of KTAR in Phoenix, I felt I was ready for the big time. I told my friends I’d soon quit and head for Chicago. My announcement was met with unbelieving stares and the most vociferous arguments. “There are 450 union card – carrying announcers walking the streets of Chicago trying to get work in the big stations there,” I was told. But my mind was made up, and I bought a one-way ticket to Chicago. In Chicago I took a room at the old Chicagoan Hotel in the Loop, bought a copy of the Chicago Tribune, and turned on my portable radio. There were two target radio stations. They were the two biggest and the best at the time, WBBM CBS in the Wrigley Building on Michigan Avenue, and WMAQ NBC in the Merchandise Mart. I tackled WBBM first. I’ll never forget that first day in those beautiful, posh surroundings. The marble floors, the uniformed elevator starters, those fabulous brass and glistening hardwood elevators. Al Morey was program director at the time. He was most cordial and immediately led me to a large nearby studio for an audition. He gave me a fist full of copy that included some tricky commercials and part of a newscast. The studio was as impressive as the rest of the place, very large for one thing, with a concert grand piano and sound effects paraphernalia. I walked to the standing microphone and looked into the darkened engineer’s room beyond the slanting glass. There was an old-time engineer, and Al Morey nodded his head and threw me a hand cue, and I began. After my interview he told me he’d let me know, and the next day I repeated the process at WMAQ. Then I waited. Finally, Al Morey called. I not only had the job, I was under contract for more money than I had dreamed of earning. My 2 1/2 years of doing network commercials for a local radio station had paid off, and I was now a CBS network announcer on a station whose coverage blanketed most of the Midwestern United States, to say nothing of the country’s second largest metropolitan market. Indeed, I had arrived. I was giddy with a sudden inflation of my self-esteem. I was a passable writer, and I could hold my own with any announcer in the country. I was off and running. My preparation had paid off. Where were all those 450 unemployed union card – carrying announcers? It’s Not the Destination In the great Greek poem by Constantine Cavafy titled “Ithaka,” we are reminded that it is the voyage and the adventures on the way that count, not the arrival itself. This seems to be a most difficult truth to understand. This is not to say that a person’s goal in life is unimportant. On the contrary, it’s vital. For without a goal, a distant destination, we would not be on the trip at all. Instead we’d run around in circles, endlessly following the shoreline around our tiny island. Every person needs a great and distant goal toward which to strive. But in traveling toward it, he should try to keep in mind that the fabled land he seeks has shores much like the one he left behind and that its purpose is not so much a resting place but, rather, the reason for the trip. Where a person goes is not nearly as important as how he gets there. That a house is built is not all that important. It is the manner in which it is built that makes it great, average, or poor. That we live is not nearly as important as the manner in which we live. Misunderstanding this often keeps people in a state of unhappiness and anxiety. They forget to enjoy the trip. They forget what they’re really looking for, or what they should be looking for: the discovery of themselves. This is the island toward which everyone should journey. It’s a difficult journey, beset, like the travels of Ulysses, with many dangers and hardships. But it gives real meaning to life, and there are many rich rewards to be found along the way – all kinds of serendipitous benefits. It means asking the questions that are hard to answer: Where am I going? Why am I going there? What do I really want, and why do I want it? Am I gradually realizing my potential? Am I discovering my best talents and abilities and using them to their fullest? Am I living fully extended in my one chance at life on earth? Am I really living? Who am I? These are the questions everyone must ask himself and answer. As Emerson said, “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.” Whatever you’re looking for must first be found within you, whether it be peace, happiness, riches, or great accomplishments. Everything we do outwardly is only an expression of what we are inwardly. To ask for anything else is as absurd as looking for apples on an oak tree. So the person who knows what he wants, knows what he must become, and he then fixes his attention on the preparation and development of himself. As he grows toward the ideal he holds in his mind, he finds interest, zest, and joy on the journey. He looks forward to tomorrow, but he also enjoys today, for it is the tomorrow he looked forward to yesterday. He knows that if he cannot find meaning and value in his present, he will very likely be missing it in his future. Today is the future of five years ago. Are you enjoying it as much as you thought you would? Have you progressed to the point you wanted then to reach? The Cure for Procrastination Have you ever noticed that the longer you look at something you should be doing, the more difficult it seems to appear? That the longer you put off something you should do, the more difficult it is to get started? A good deal of frustration and unhappiness could be avoided if people would just do what they know they should do. The great newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane once wrote, “Don’t exaggerate your own importance, your own size, or your own miseries. You are an ant in a human anthill. Be a working ant – not a ridiculous insect pitying yourself.” Strong language, maybe, but there’s a lot of sense in it. A person carrying a heavy weight is all right as long as he keeps moving. The minute he stops, puts the weight on the ground, and sits down to rest, the weight seems to become heavier; the distance to be traveled, greater; and the work, just that much more unpleasant. Sometimes it must seem to everyone that things have piled up so high that there’s just no way of digging out. But there is. Pick the thing that’s most important to do, and simply begin doing it. Just by digging in, you’ll feel better, and you’ll find that it’s not nearly as bad as you thought it would be. Keep at it, and before long, that pile of things to do that seemed so overwhelming is behind you – finished. What overwhelms us is not the work itself. It’s thinking how hard it’s going to be. It’s seeing it get larger every day. It’s putting if off and hoping that somehow, through some miracle, it will disappear. The Chinese have a saying that a journey of a thousand miles begins with but a single step. And that step accomplishes two things. First, it automatically shortens the distance we still have to travel, and, second, and just as important, it makes us feel better, more hopeful – it strengthens our faith. If a person will just keep putting one foot in front of the other, he will be taken into new and exciting places, see new and interesting things, and think thoughts that never would have come to him if he’d remained at the starting point. Then the journey is finished. He wonders how or why he could ever have sat so long and worried and stewed about the time and trouble it would involve to do what he knew he should do. If you’ll think back, you’ll remember that you’ve always been happiest, most contented, after having finished a difficult project or faced up to a responsibility you were worried about. It’s never as bad as you think it’s going to be, and the joy that will come with its accomplishment makes it more than worthwhile. Work never killed anyone. It’s worry that does the damage. And the worry would disappear if we’d just settle down and do the work. As Calvin Coolidge put it, “All growth depends upon activity. There is no development physically or intellectually without effort, and effort means work. Work is not a curse; it is the prerogative of intelligence, the only means to manhood, and the measure of civilization.” BONUS Audio and PDF for this special report are available at livesensical.com Click here now. The post 6 Effective Solutions for Goal Achievement Problems appeared first on Live Sensical.

(Now available from Amazon  – click here.) How to React to Stress Two young boys were raised by an alcoholic father. As they grew older, they moved away from that broken home, each going his own way in the world. Several years later, they happened to be interviewed separately by a psychologist who was analyzing the effects of drunkenness on children in broken homes. His research revealed that the two men were strikingly different from each other. One was a clean-living teetotaler; the other, a hopeless drunk like his father. The psychologist asked each of them why he developed the way he did, and each gave an identical answer, “What else would you expect when you have a father like mine?” That story was revealed by Dr. Hans Selye, internationally renowned Canadian physician and scientist known as the father of stress. A medical pioneer, he devoted the majority of his years to the exploration of biological stress. And he related the story of the two sons of the drunken father in an article for New Realities. And the story demonstrates a cardinal rule implicit in stress, health, and human behavior. According to R. H. Schuller, “It is not what happens to you in life that makes the difference. It is how you react to each circumstance you encounter that determines the result. Every human being in the same situation has the possibilities of choosing how he will react – either positively or negatively.” Thus, stress is not necessarily caused by stressor agents; rather, it is caused by the way stressor agents are perceived, interpreted, or appraised in each individual case. Outside events and people upset some more than others, because they are looked upon and dealt with in entirely different ways. The stressors may even be the same in each case, yet the reaction will almost always be different in different people. Armed with that kind of information, it would seem that we can greatly improve our reactions to stressful situations. We can actually prevent stress from negatively affecting our lives. What seems to be a cruel world to one person might be filled with challenge and opportunity to another. It is our reaction that makes the difference. The Devil’s Wedge Are you familiar with the old fable about the devil’s sale? It’s interesting. And like most old fables, it has a moral that’s worth thinking about. The story goes that Satan was having a sale of his wares. There on display and offered for sale were the rapier of jealousy, the dagger of fear, and the strangling noose of hatred, each with its own high price. But standing alone on a purple pedestal, gleaming in the light was a worn and battered wedge. This was the devil’s most prized possession. For with it alone, he could stay in business, and this was not for sale. It was the wedge of discouragement. The devil prizes the wedge of discouragement above all else because of its enfeebling, demoralizing effect. Hatred, fear, or jealousy may lead an immature person to act unwisely, to fight or run or grab, but at least he acts. Discouragement, on the other hand, harms more than any of these – it causes you to sit down, pity yourself, and do nothing. This doesn’t have to happen, but unfortunately it all too frequently does. Not until we realize that discouragement is often a form of self-pity do we begin to take stock of ourselves and our predicament and decide to act, to do something that would take us out of an unpleasant situation. The answer to discouragement, to self-pity, then, is intelligent action. The billionaire and founder of Combined Insurance Company, W. Clement Stone, formed the habit in the early days of his career of saying, “That’s good!” whenever anything happened, good or bad. Most of the time, of course, it was something good. But even when he learned of a near calamity, a deadly serious situation that would have sent a lesser man scurrying for cover, he smiled and said, “That’s good.” Then as his associates shook their heads in resigned disbelief, he’d tear headlong into the problem and find what was good in it. Invariably, some elements in the situation could be turned to advantage, and he would find them and, more importantly, act on them. Everyone has days or even successions of days when nothing seems to go right. Yet if we understand that something good can usually be grounded in almost any situation, we’ll go quietly, efficiently to work on the most important part of the problem, the one that can be turned to advantage. Self-pity or inactivity cannot possibly help the situation. The only rational course to follow is to re-evaluate and move forward. Some of the most successful have at one time or another been forced by a stretch of poor productivity to analyze their methods and use of time. Now a dry spell is no fun for anyone, but it’s often the only situation extreme enough to get us to look at ourselves – to find out that what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and what it is – is the best possible way it can be done. As Emerson said, “When a man is pushed, tormented, defeated … he has a chance to learn something.” Here’s something else to think about: Discouragement very often comes on the heels of crisis. And it’s been said that crises are thoroughfares; we can go either way, up or down. We go up out of a crisis by doing something constructive; we go down by wallowing around in our problems and feeling sorry for ourselves. Discouragement, which comes to all of us sooner or later, is a test of nature. Those who refuse to yield to it, in time pass through discouragement to the smooth and sunlit seas beyond. And what once seemed to be a storm with such voracity that it blotted out the whole world is soon forgotten. Whenever you face discouragement, try to keep in mind three vitally important points. First, discouragement is often a form of self-pity, an expensive emotion we can get along very well without. And the most effective antidote for self-pity is intelligent action. Next, within any discouraging situation, there’s almost always lurking an opportunity for growth, maturity, and future success. There’s something good about it. And, finally, discouragement should be kept in its proper perspective. What may at the moment seem like the end of the world won’t seem so important in 10 days or won’t be very important in 10 months. Take the long-range view and you can’t be defeated by momentary setbacks. The Chinese have a saying that if you live with a disaster for three years, it will turn into a blessing. Being human qualifies us for some occasional pressure by the wedge of discouragement, but we have within us the strength to pull away and use it to our advantage. The next time you’re tempted to feel discouraged about something, try taking the attitude of W. Clement Stone. Simply say, “That’s good,” and then start finding out what is good about it. A Commitment to Laughter One of the enriching blessings of growing older all the time is that it has a way of improving one’s sense of humor – or at least it should. The person without a good sense of humor is a person to avoid as though he were a known carrier of the plague. Horace Walpole once said, “I have never yet seen or heard anything serious that was not ridiculous.” And Samuel Butler said, “The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken seriously.” It has been said that seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow. Oscar Wilde said, “It is a curious fact that the worst work is always done with the best intentions, and that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves very seriously.” I remember that when I was in the service, one of the toughest jobs I had was to keep from laughing at the wrong times – during an admiral’s inspection, for example. There is nothing funnier than the seriousness of the military, especially high-ranking military. The fancy costumes, the panoply, the shining sabers, the serious faces – it was all, to me, hilariously funny. We can be serious about situations. When a youngster is ill or hurt, or someone insults your spouse, you can get very serious about the situation in a hurry. But that’s not taking ourselves seriously. That’s different. The thing that bothered me about Hemingway, as much as I admired his work, was that I thought he tended to take himself too seriously. He didn’t seem to be able to laugh at himself. And I think he suffered from this flaw in his character. I have found it a good rule of thumb to be slightly suspicious of anyone who takes himself too seriously. There’s usually something fishy there someplace. I think this is why we love children so much: Life is a game to them. They will do their best at whatever work is given them, but they never seem to lose their ebullient sense of humor; there is always a sparkle of humor in their eyes. When a child lacks this, he is usually in need of help. Dictators are famous for their lack of humor. The mark of a cruel person is that he doesn’t seem to be able to see anything funny in the world. And, a sense of humor was what was so great about Mark Twain. No matter how serious the subject, he could find the humor in it and bring it out. All the great comedians have this ability to see what’s funny in the so-called serious situation. They can poke fun at themselves. There are those who believe that a sense of humor is the only thing that has kept the human race from totally extinguishing itself. People who are emotionally healthy, with a sense of proportion, are cheerful people. They tend to look upon the bright side of things and see a lot of humor in their daily lives. They’re not Pollyanna’s – they know what’s going on and that a lot of it’s not at all funny – but they don’t permit the dark side of things to dominate their lives. To my mind, when a person lacks a sense of humor, there’s something pretty seriously wrong with him. Samuel Butler said, “A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities as well as those of other people will keep a man from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing.” It took a sense of humor to write that, and only people with blank spaces where their senses of humor should be will find it offensive. There’s something so healthy about laughter, especially when it’s directed at ourselves. There are times for all of us when all the laughter seems to be gone, but we should not permit these periods to last too long. When we’ve lost our sense of humor, there isn’t very much left. We become ridiculous. We must then go to war against the whole world, and that’s a war we cannot win. Falling Isn’t Failing Mary Pickford used to say, “Don’t look at the sudden loss of a habit, or a way of life, as the end of the road; see it instead as only a bend in the road that will open up all sorts of interesting possibilities and new experiences. After all, you’ve seen the scenery on the old road for so long, and you obviously no longer like it.” The breaking of a long-time habit does seem like the end of the road at the time – the complete cessation of enjoyment. Suddenly dropping the habit so fills our minds with the desire for the old habitual way that, for a while, it seems there will no longer be any peace, any sort of enjoyment. But that’s not true. New habits form in a surprisingly short time, and a whole new world opens up to us. For those who have tried repeatedly to break a habit of some kind, only to repeatedly fail, Mary Pickford said, “Falling is not failing, unless you fail to get up.” Most people who finally win the battle over a habit have done so only after repeated failures. I remember in Arthur Miller’s play The Price, the father lost everything during the stock market crash of 1929 and, for the rest of his life, sat in a room in the attic of a relative. That’s failing. It seems some people lack the stamina, the energy, to do it all over again or to make a new start. For them, it’s just the end of the road, and they’ve come to a full stop. Many lead such superficial lives, have so little depth of mind and spirit, that the sudden loss of income or material things is too much for them, and they jump out a window or retreat into insanity. So if you’ve been trying to start in a new direction, you might do well to remember the advice of Mary Pickford: It isn’t the end of the road; it’s just a bend in the road. And falling isn’t failing, unless you don’t get up. A successful life is built on the foundation of successful tasks – each completed in the pursuit of perfection – one day at a time. A goal sometimes seems so far off and our progress often appears to be so painfully slow that we have a tendency to lose heart. It sometimes seems we’ll never make the grade. We come close to giving up – falling back into old habits, which, while they may be comfortable, lead to nowhere. Well, there’s a way to overcome this inevitable barrier to success, and here is the secret: Every great achievement is nothing more than the collection of smaller achievements done to perfection. Even the “impossible” has been accomplished through the relentless pursuit of success, one day at a time. Have you ever seen a bricklayer starting a new building by putting the first brick in place? You are struck by the size of the job he has ahead of him. But one day, almost before you realize it, he’s finished. All the thousands of bricks are in place, each one vital to the finished structure, each one sharing its portion of the load. How did he do it? Simple, one brick at a time. And so is the pursuit of success and greatness. A lifetime is composed of days, strung together into weeks, months, and years. A successful life is nothing more than a lot of successful days put together. As such, every day counts. Just as a stone mason can put only one stone in place at a time, you can live only one day at a time. And it’s the way in which these stones are placed that will determine the beauty, the strength of the tower. If each stone is successfully placed – with care and quality – the tower will be a success. If, on the other hand, they’re put down in a hit-or-miss fashion – irrespective of quality – the whole tower is in danger. Seems simple. Yet, how many people do you know who live like this – focused on “just getting through” each day instead of on the “success” of each day. Which are you focused on? BONUS Audio and PDF for this special report are available at livesensical.com Click here now. The post How to Prevent Stress from Ruining Your Life appeared first on Live Sensical.

7 Strange Secrets for Winning Big (Now available as an ebook on Amazon, and everywhere else.) 1. The Strangest Secret Becoming As We Think Around the time he turned 12 years old, Earl Nightingale found himself in the Depression-era Tent City of Long Beach, CA. His father had left the family and they had nowhere else to go. Along with his mother and the rest of his family, this was a rude shock. Young Nightingale noticed for the first time that there were (as he later phrased it) Have’s and Have-Not’s. Some people had money and some didn’t. He became interested in finding out why. He could see the difference in their attitudes, but wondered if there wasn’t some secret that the Haves knew and the Have-Nots didn’t. Nightingale started his search in the Long Beach public library, since it was obvious that the people he lived around would have no clue. He would take home stacks of books and return them on time, dutifully scoured for clues. While he didn’t find that secret there, he did immerse himself in what became a love of reading. (This resulted later in life of a personal library of over 6,000 books.) This reading improved his ability in English and also gave him lessons in integrity, honesty, and other needed relationship skills. He also found he wanted to learn to write. Then came World War II. As a Marine volunteer, he was one of the few survivors on board the Arizona during the Pearl Harbor attack. What is also little known is that he found a local radio station that welcomed his volunteer help during his off-hours at the base. Later transferred to training duty in North Carolina, he got employed for night and weekend work at a local radio station there. Mustered out as a civilian, Nightingale got an announcer position at the Phoenix, Arizona radio station KTAR. There, he found that he was able to listen to the great announcers of that day and learn their style, as well as learn how to write news and ad copy. After 2 ½ years, he quit his job and bought a one-way ticket to Chicago. Two days after he arrived, he was under contract to the biggest radio station there. It was in Chicago in 1949 that he found a copy of Think and Grow Rich in a used bookstore. By the following weekend, he had come across a six word phrase that he later became famous for, We become what we think about. For a young man of 28, Nightingale was already on a high career path, but note his acceleration after this point: He left the CBS announcer job to join WGN as a writer-producer in 1950. He became the voice for the dashing radio adventurer Sky King, from 1950 1954. Also in 1950, Nightingale created and hosted a 90-minute daily talk show, reported to be the basis for the modern talk show format. The success of this radio show led to a television version on WGN-TV. He wrote, produced, and starred in this show from 1950 1956. During his time at WGN, he was also in demand as a public speaker. It was in 1956 that he had achieved his childhood dream and retired at the age of 35. By then, he had started and managed several corporations and sales firms, one of which was a life insurance agency. According to Nightingale, he was attempting to go off on a long vacation, and wanted to leave that agency with a recording that would keep them motivated, as they were used to weekly talks from him. The Strangest Secret was the inspired result. The word of mouth for this recording built demands for additional copies. A friend, Lloyd Conant, was able to get this pressed into 78RPM LP records. That record became the first spoken word album to achieve Gold Record status, for sales over one million units. Nightingale later said that this was achieved with no advertising of any kind. By 1960, he and his friend formed Nightingale-Conant and started a new industry of personal development recordings, which continues to this day. Nightingale meanwhile had started producing a daily radio show, Our Changing World, which ran for nearly 30 years (1959-1989) at a pace of 5 shows per week. This achieved a legacy of nearly 7,000 recordings and worldwide acclaim. If you count it up, you’ll find that he had four or five careers during his lifetime, all successful. His many landmark productions set a high bar for everyone who followed. You can see from the above that after he made what he termed his greatest discovery, his achievements increased in size and scope. Earl Nightingale is credited with first naming this idea as the Strangest Secret It’s strange because it’s been written and re-discovered by great thinkers over and over for eons. Yet it remains a secret to the bulk of humankind. In The Strangest Secret, he mentioned many famous authors who had the exact same idea. Not too oddly, it’s also found as the core principle as was taught by the ancient Polynesians, the oldest surviving philosophy known today. The best translation has this as: The World Is What You Think It Is. What Earl Nightingale came across in that used bookstore in Chicago was actually a statement of the most powerful concept known to humankind. And that is where we start. Consider this: You Become What You Think About. Test this for yourself. See if it is workable. See if your life doesn’t change remarkably as did Earl Nightingale’s and those who have also discovered this idea on their own or from others. – – – – Next, we’ll build on this. And you’ll learn why you need to test this, and everything you’ve been told, for yourself… 2. Tasting Before Swallowing Self-Limiting Beliefs The old parable tells of a young boy was walking along the beach with a bucket. He found a crab and placed it in the bucket. Having no lid, the crab quickly climbed up and out. Dismayed, the boy caught another crab and put it in the bucket, but had the same result. An old fisherman walking nearby chuckled and came over to the visibly frustrated boy. You may not believe me, the fisherman said, but put two crabs in there together and neither will make it out. The boy shrugged and thought it over as the old man left. It couldn’t hurt. So he caught two crabs and placed them both inside his pail at the same time. When one tried to get out, the other would pull him back down. As the boy continued to catch crabs and place them there, the same effect continued. That night, the boy had many cooked crabs to eat. – – – – While this is an old parable, it’s also been studied scientifically and found to be true. And it’s applicable in our own culture. You’ve probably seen this in your own life. An idea you have is shot down by the people around you as a reflex, instead of their listening and being supportive. In the Wikipedia article on this, it’s explained as a way of thinking best described by the phrase, ‘if I can’t have it, neither can you.’ Bucket crab people will carp and criticize (privately or publicly) anyone and everyone who succeeds in breaking the mold they are following. You’ll find them saying things like lucky break, born with a silver spoon in their mouth, right place in the right time, and even less considerate bunch of crooks, lie, cheat, and steal to get what they want, inside network, cabal, and conspiracy of the rich. But all these are false claims, merely justifications for their own failures. This is also the basis of conventional wisdom, which has been defined as ideas or assumptions so readily accepted they go unquestioned. The trick to this is in that word unquestioned. Throughout history, those who have escaped the conventional wisdom bucket did so by questioning everything they were told or read or heard. As Mark Twain said, Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. Out of Forbes’ top 20 richest people in the U.S., you’ll find that most were decidedly middle class when they started. Most of these either didn’t finish college or graduated from an unknown, non-Ivy League college. Only one was both born into a rich family and graduated Princeton but you’ll also see he made his fortune mostly independent from his family’s. If you look at the most historically influential leaders in media and business, you’ll see that they are extremely self-made. Nightingale, as covered, came from poverty. So did Napoleon Hill, Andrew Carnegie, W. Clement Stone, Thomas Edison, and many others. In Dr. Thomas Stanley’s studies on Millionaires, he finds that the bulk all had in common that they came from very modest backgrounds, that most were 2nd generation immigrants, and lived very frugal lives as they built their fortunes only to give it all away before they died. Their children were gotten through advanced college degrees and mostly became well-off professionals, but never achieved the wealth that their parents did. The results of bucket-crab thinking have made our society a defensive mess of protective mechanisms to cushion the slow decline for the bulk of our population into dependent poverty. In The Strangest Secret, Earl Nightingale stated some statistics which seem alarming. Out of one hundred people at age 25, after 40 years: 1 will wind up rich. 4 will wind up financially independent, 5 will still be working, and 56 will be broke. And this tends to check out with statistics found recently. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did a study (Published in June 1990, SSA Publication No. 13-11871) and concluded that 96% of Americans do not reach financial independence by age 65. Thinking like crabs in a bucket has institutionalized such thinking in our schools. Children are grouped by ages, by test scores, and regimented at an early age to conform and to fit in. They are taught the age-old game of follow the follower. Everyone tries to be like the rest, without even inspecting to see if where everyone else is going is where they really want to end up. Teachers seem to have been taught more about schooling which is defined as techniques for keeping a mass of children together on a set schedule than they are about actual individual learning. Education has become centralized and mandated, so that everyone comes out the same, nearly identical. While there are some exceptions, the educational rule is that one-size-fits-all. This again points to the college misfits like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Rachel Ray, Mark Zuckerberg, and Walt Disney who made their fortunes in spite of the educational system. The social media we currently have is no different. The commonly-held idea of success in marketing is to have some piece of content go viral and become widely shared. Yet such marketing methods by themselves have never translated into long-term success for any individual or company except for those which are paid to host the social platform itself. The real successes on the Internet aren’t necessarily even well known. The plan of having A thousand true fans can be financially sound for almost any small business. And those fans might very well be in a very tiny location nearby. This is why you have to taste before you swallow anything and everything you hear, read, or experience. All the floods of data you receive are probably false. They’re being spread by people who want to be popular, to be at the height of the latest fad. For politicians and government-affiliated, this means being politically correct at any cost to integrity. You have to test anything and everything that comes across your plate. Anything and everything. This probably means you’ll need to resolve your beliefs down to those few core data which enable you to evaluate other data against them. Usually, such core data are held as natural laws, which generally hold up in all circumstances. This book gives you seven of these but of course you are going to have to test each and every one of them for yourself. If you follow the follower, what do you get? Mostly, what everyone else gets. A faulty way of having security in old age at best. And overly-high taxes to pay for other’s benefits before then. Society has always been able to protect the majority with props and handouts as long as they vote a certain way. The truly successful trained themselves to think differently from those around them. They put in place methods to reduce or eliminate the criticisms and free advice of those around them. If you want to be truly successful, you can’t bucket crab your way through life. You need to check out who you are following and see if they are going the direction you want. If not, then find a true leader who is going your way. You are going to have to test and check everything you’ve been taught since you were born to find out if they are workable truths that can help you be what you want to be and have what you want to have. – – – – There’s probably undiscovered gems in that training as well. One such phrase is widely misunderstood and ignored, although it’s in most of our religions and philosophies. This one datum is also what made Andrew Carnegie the richest man on the planet in his time, and Napoleon Hill used to make three fortunes for himself… 3. Golden Rule Know This and Get The Gold You’ve heard of the Golden Rulefrom Sunday School. But our modern society has relegated this to the feel good category of disposable datums. Those who know its secret meaning profit outrageously. And the bucket-crab thinkers refuse to look and discover what the rich are actually doing, so the conventional wisdom they adopt gives completely wrong reasons for how the successful actually thought and grew rich. Napoleon Hill starts out his classic with the mystery of what this hidden datum is, saying that it’s repeated over a hundred times through the book, but will only reveal itself when the time is right. You have to go to the last chapter of his earlier bestseller Law of Success in order get the secret. That secret is the Golden Rule. This isn’t just treat others as you’d like to be treated. Hill has it as you can’t get without giving first. Earl Nightingale had similar meaning for it that of Cause and Effect. You will be rewarded in exact proportion to the service you provide. He held, along with earlier philosophers, that money is nothing more than an indicator of the value you’ve been providing to others. As well, that your home, cars, clothing, the clubs you belong to, the street you live on, all of these are indicators of how you’ve been rewarded for the service you’ve provided others. Test this for yourself. While there are fakes, people who live far beyond their means, the way most people live shows just how much they are making. This in turn shows how much they are helping others. Top-flight CEO’s can earn incredible amounts, but they are held accountable for everything their million- and billion-dollar corporations are producing. And they live in some truly swanky surroundings. They can afford to. Of course, there are a few exceptions. Warren Buffet still lives in the modest Nebraska home he bought a few decades ago. Some well-paid actors have bought rustic and nondescript ranches far off the beaten path (but with the continually-rising land costs, you can figure out the pretty penny it cost them.) The point is, again, that as you give, so you will receive. Content Marketers have found this to be the best way to promote their brand online give incredibly useful material in volume and then you’ll build a loyal audience that actually will demand that you offer something to them they can pay you for. Conventional advertisers who stick to the 50’s short-cut advertising gimmicks are having a hard time finding real ROI for the schlock they produce. People would rather pay for ad-free subscriptions so they can binge-watch TV episodes, without being interrupted by some pitch. Meanwhile product placement within hit movies and episodes (where they pay part of the production costs to have their brand included) can increase sales markedly. It’s the perceived value which is important. You have to give before you can get. Nightingale tells the old story of a guy sitting in front of a wood stove and demanding heat before he’d add the wood. Service and valuable product come before you are rewarded. Treat others with value and then they’ll treat you with value you’ll receive that commodity called money. This is the real Golden Rule – the Rule of Gold. And now you know how to use it to get your own. – – – – And how do you know you’re succeeding in what you do? It’s in the choices you make. One key choice most people never make, and this winds them up as part of the 95% Bucket Crab Club. The top 5% all have this one choice in common, and as a lifelong habit… 4. Goals – Map Your Destination Before Setting Sail You’d never just send a ship out of harbor with no destination in mind and expect it to come back with a profit. But people do that with their lives. They blindly stumble through their life, following everyone around them, who in turn are probably following them. All acting like a flock of sheep running as a massed group away from any supposed danger. Most people only go to work because everyone else is going to work. They have no personal goals, neither does anyone they are following. There are some urban legends that both Harvard and Yale did studies on their graduates, each finding that those with goals made more money than other graduates who went about their careers without setting them. Well, there never were any studies done, anyway at those places. The truth is that people with named goals, especially if they put them in writing, do succeed much better in life than those without. Gail Matthews of Dominican University did do such a study, and it’s well documented online. What she found: the more people actually specified, reviewed, and put accountability practices into place, the better they did. The most studies about goal-setting were probably done by Edwin Locke, who did such studies for over 40 years. The most recent summary (1981) found that naming specific, challenging goals and then checking them against progress regularly not only lead to higher performance in 90% of the cases, but also created a positive feedback loop of improving employee engagement, which impacted optimism, which in turn positively impacted individual performance. Neat, huh? Write down your big goal and check your progress daily. Your progress will keep you upbeat, which improves your progress even more. Even though the Ivy League studies were fiction, they are still spread (and written about in books) as if they occurred because the basic premise is true. You can test this for yourself and prove it in your own life. How to Uncover Your Primary Goal Earl Nightingale revealed the way to do this: Take a note pad, go off by yourself, and write down the things you’d really like to have or do very much. One might be a beautiful new home or a trip around the world, a visit to some special country or place. It might be a yearning for a sailboat or motor yacht, or if you’re an avid fisherman, you might want to go salmon fishing in Alaska or trout fishing in New Zealand. It might be a business of your own or a particular position with your company. It might be a certain income that will permit you to live the way you’d like to live. Or, a certain amount of money in good investments or in a savings account. How about a special make of car? Or an addition to your present home? Just write down everything you can think of that you would really like to see come about in your life. Then when you’ve exhausted your wants, go over the list again and number the items in the order of their importance, and make number one your present goal. Again, the schools have never taught this. Even in the business classes. You have to study successful people in order to find successful ideas, habits, systems. You can’t continue to study the leaderless crowd to find anything about real success. All you’ll find is shipwrecks (which is mostly what shows up on the evening news and our 24-7-365 cable news channels.) You’ll need to shut out all the channels in your life which aren’t bringing you useful data and concentrate on those that do. One recent survey of the highest producers found that they would watch TV only an hour a day but read books regularly. While lower-income workers were watching TV as much as 6-8 hours daily and reading little. Your drive and interest has to be devoted to success if you want to succeed. As you narrow down your studies to the most successful, you’ll sharpen your own goal into a burning desire as Napoleon Hill phrased it. And the more challenging that goal, the more success you will have. As the old phrase, If you shoot for the stars, you’ll reach the moon. Again, test this for yourself. Find out if these studies were correct by seeing if they work for you. The only thing worse is having no goal at all and just drifting through a pointless existence and getting old meanwhile. – – – – With all these studies, you may just strike it rich with your own gold mine. This is a resource everyone has, if they’ll only use it… 5. Gold Mine Finding Millions Between Your Ears There is a story that a reporter in 1949 Chicago asked Nobel-prize winner Dr. Albert Schweitzer, What s wrong with men today? After a brief pause he replied, The trouble with people nowadays is that they don’t think enough. We are taught in school how to read, how to write, how to do math. There is a long list of test scores which are supposed to be attained by students in schools in various subjects or those schools will not receive their funding. What you won’t see in their curricula is teaching the skill of how to think. You’ll find them teaching how to argue and debate, how to write persuasively, what is logic, what is the scientific method of research. All of these are dependent on thinking, yet no school teaches the subject itself. Do you know how to become inspired? Do you know how to get ideas? Do you know how to brainstorm? Exactly my point. There are a few individuals who have studied this independently. Napoleon Hill tells of a Dr. Elmer Gates who had a room devoted just to researching new ideas. It was sound proof, had no windows, and only a single light. That switch was on a table, along with a pad of paper and a pen. Dr. Gates would enter that room and sit comfortably in the darkness, considering all he knew about the subject at hand. When inspiration appeared, he would turn on the light and write furiously, sometimes for hours. Only when he was done writing would he review what he had written. Gates would sometimes be astonished at the result, since it was very often radically different than any known science in the area. In his time, Dr. Elmer Gates ran the largest private and non-commercial laboratory in the United States. He held 43 patents, completed over 200 for others, taught dogs to see color in the dark, as well as discovering that human emotions affected body chemistry. Dr. Gates was perhaps the first known person in history who got paid for creative thinking. And he studied and wrote all he knew about that subject, yet his writings are mostly unknown. To our modern educational system, people who could creatively think at will would not fit into the rigid disciplines of teaching and schooling. What if a student suddenly found a new process that wasn’t in the textbook or known by the teacher? That student would be quickly brought back under control, or if insistent, disciplined. This is perhaps the reason for dropouts. That ability to think creatively is undoubtedly the reason our maverick millionaires and billionaires earned their extreme wealth. Being able to harness creative thinking is like having your own personal gold mine. Actually, every single manufactured object around you is the result of an idea or several. All the food you eat is brought to you by mechanisms and systems which were invented. Even though Nature produces in abundance, without the ways and means of bringing this food to the average table, most of humankind would starve within a month. Our progress as a species is the result of independent thinking, outside of what is taught in our schools, in spite of what passes for schooling, teaching, and education. Our 5% mavericks imagine and create the advances which the 95% masses utilize to survive. Yet it cannot be taught in schools or all discipline, it is thought, would be destroyed. Original thinking is a threat to education, even though our school systems only exist because someone thought them up to begin with. But thinking is quite simple. People think every day. They simply never learned how to replicate the process which gives them their bright ideas. Like all that’s covered in this book, it’s a secret hidden in plain sight. Practically, reading Hill’s book will tell you the basics of it. And there are others that can be found. Earl Nightingale probably said it simplest where he recommended the practice he used daily for most of his life: Get up an hour early before work. Shower, get dressed, pour yourself a cup of hot coffee or tea. Sit down at a table or desk in this quiet time with a pad of paper and a pen. Write down your goal at the top of the page. Next, write down all the ideas you can that would improve your progress toward that goal. If you can get 5 ideas a day, that’s 25 a week, about 1,250 in a year. You only need one good one to make a breakthrough which will enable you to leap forward toward that goal. The cautions are these: a. This isn’t easy at first, but comes faster as you practice. b. Most of your ideas won’t be any good. The point is that you only need a few really good ones to radically improve your life. And the side benefit is that you’ll keep thinking throughout the day. Keeping a pad of paper near you during the day, or an app on your smartphone during your commute (providing you aren’t the one driving) so you can record every idea as it comes up. You see, you’ve been trained all your life to not think creatively. Yet creative thinking is the most valuable and rewarded type of thinking you can do. Inventions are often worth millions if they are thought up, and are followed through. The person who doesn’t practice thinking is effectively refusing to mine the richest and most inexhaustible vein of ore that exists the one in their own mind. – – – – There are, however, arbitrary limits on what you can do, how much you can achieve. And they’re summed up in a single word… 6. Magic Word – Attitude Determines Result. Often, the most lampooned and criticized methods can turn out to be the most effective. Again, this is the result of our bucket-crab upbringing. It’s easier to say no than yes, it’s easier to criticize than objectively study and appreciate. Emile Coué is today either highly respected or the butt of jokes. Practically, it’s illegal to run a clinic today with the techniques Coué used. He had floods of people pressing to get in to his clinic daily in order to get cured of their ailments. And all he would do is to talk to them, to get them to change their minds, to practice these new thoughts. Today, advertising about curing people by changing their mind would get you shut down by the FTC, the FDA, and investigated by the FBI for mail fraud. Yet, in the early 1900’s, Emile Coué was able to actually cure people within minutes of starting his interview with them. His emphasis was that attitudes of the mind created health or illness in the body. By changing the attitude, the body would respond accordingly. His research into hypnotism (another much-maligned subject) showed that repeated statements over time would produce a change of result. Coué found that a person could apply this treatment themselves as an affirmation, and not require a specialist. This was called auto-suggestion. His blanket phrase was recommended to all, Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better. The failures of others in this area are also explained in the outline above. People who believed more strongly, more emotionally that they could not be helped would not be. Claude Bristol, who wrote the bestseller Magic of Believing, stated that the people who were not helped by Coué‘s affirmations were those who simply put no feeling behind it. They didn’t feel it, and so they didn’t believe it would work. And so they got the result they actually believed in which was failure. Contrary to most popular ideas, emotions can be changed at will. Most people don’t realize that movies and books use this data on them all the time. By involving a person in the plot of a book or movie, removing them temporarily from their current worries and concerns, these movies can make them feel highly elated, deeply upset, or infatuated with love. These are all emotions that they themselves think they cannot control in their own lives. Yet the movie created this emotion in them with nothing more than a series of visuals, dialogue, music, and some sound effects. William James, known as the Father of American Psychology, in his Principles of Psychology, stated, The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind. In The Gospel of Relaxation he clarified, Actions seems to follow feeling, but really actions and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. In short, your attitudes affect your life and these attitudes can be altered by simply acting the part. Probably one of the most effective affirmations was used by W. Clement Stone through most of his life. And he lived to be 100. Try this for yourself: Get a mirror where you can stand and see your whole face. Look into your own eyes directly. Repeat this phrase: I feel happy, I feel healthy, I feel terrific! You should have noticed a change in your feelings simply on saying this. Now say it again, this time really acting the part. Note the stronger feelings that appear. By doing this daily, particularly at the beginning of each day, it sets a new habit in place. Norman Vincent Peale confirmed this, Start each day by affirming peaceful, contented and happy attitudes and your days will tend to be pleasant and successful. Remember – better results are obtained with practice as practice makes permanent. – – – – One last piece to your puzzle remains. How to best serve the world and gain your rewards… 7. Life’s Short, Art’s Long Create a Body of Work I often recall a biography of Michelangelo, while I can’t recall the title or the author. The story of his life is summed up in a credo he lived: Vita Brevis, Ars Longus – Life is short, Art is long. Michelangelo’s constant drive, according to the biographer, was to leave a body of work. From other biographical accounts, his prodigious output was more the native drive of this genius. His river of interest kept him producing art from a young age right through to his death. This huge body of work, from sculpting to casting bronze to painting while lying on his back under the Sistine Chapel ceiling, all of these showed his passion for living and an intense talent which somehow manifested from his hands, arms, and heart. His art was outstanding from age 14 to his death at 88. Modernly, this work ethic is disregarded. Our cultural climate of instant gratification seems to tempt people to fly from one career to another without mastering the skills they need for successful living. But are we really just seeing that the top 5% will have a drive and dedication to their goal which then has a by-product of that body of work? In all of us lives this native spirit of excellence, of serving our fellows with the respect and appreciation they deserve. Michelangelo gave us a life example of someone who was dutiful to a higher calling than those who surrounded him. He wasn’t skilled in social graces, but created works which invoked emotional responses in those who viewed his art. Such was his mastery and inspiration, as well as his drive to demonstrate that divine influence. That drive is accessible to any of us. You’ve been given 6 major tools, which could be considered as statements of natural laws or principles. They are that powerful. But you’re going to have to prove that for yourself. Meanwhile, your life continues on. Regardless of anything and everything you do, your life just keeps getting another day older in every moment you exist. What you are going to do with that life depends on your ideas and drive to create value. You now know that what you think creates your life. As well, that you can change what you think and how you feel about it. Meanwhile, you’re surrounded by the bulk of humankind who don’t and never did understand diddly about how to really succeed in life. And for the most part, any success they have is in how well they fit into the mold already created for them. You, however, know how to think for yourself. You know how to set and make your goals. You know to test everything for yourself, not to accept conventional wisdom about something being either bad or good. You are different. And that is how you found this particular set of writings. Both of us have a lot of work ahead. That’s our body of work sitting there, waiting for us. Like anything, it’s a huge challenge, a goal you can keep out in front of you to chip away at every day. Moment by moment, day by day, piece by piece, all your life will be represented in the quality and value you’ve put into your life-work. Above all, don’t look back at what you’ve done. Look forward to what you still have left to produce. What’s up ahead is art, waiting for you. Keep that vision front and center in all you do. Your rewards will be just to that degree. Huge or not-so-much. Your choice. As always. Postscript The underground classic DVD, The Secret, ends in a scene similar to it’s beginning. The producer is walking alone along a beach. This time, she is cheerful, optimistic, confident. And she is about to leave you a last message. (Most people don’t see this, so I wanted to point it out.) Finally, she grasps a long stick and is writing something in large letters over the sand. The camera pans out and up so we can read over her shoulder as she finishes: Feel Good. For all the dark presences you have have in your life, you’ve already been exposed to the seven points which can bring you your freedom from these dark ones. If you are already a member of the 5%, these principles will just consolidate your gains. They’ll enable you to live better in all aspects you may be concerned with. But if you want to move out of the 95%, then just follow those 7 steps above. (Anyone who seriously wants to stay in the 95%, where it’s safe, won’t be reading these writings anyway…) But consider again the first lesson: We Become What We Think About. These bad influences are only as bad as you consider them to be. For they can only gain their power from persuading those about them that they should be feared, that their criticism has any effect at all. This is their only protection, against enemies that don’t really exist. This is the legacy of the bucket crab mentality and training. It’s all an illusion. What you believe truly creates your unlimited strength. It’s that word, Believe. That’s what makes your world into the one you’ve always wished and dreamed of. You know what you believe to be true. Know also by practicing what you’ve learned here. Test everything, all of it. Prove it to yourself that it works in your own life. And find other truths that hold up through your testing. Know that you can only get as well as you give. And this giving must be openhanded. Even to those who will refuse your gifts. It is their loss, not yours. Know and keep your goal always in front of you, always just ahead. Make this your Burning Desire in life, your sole motivation. Should you ever achieve that goal, then select a larger one yet, and an even bigger one after that… Know your mind is the richest source of gold and treasure. Your ideas and imagination will bring everything you need to make you rich in both spirit and body. Know that your feelings are your own to create through every moment of the day. By your actions you can lift your emotions to any height you require. And know that its your continuing body of work which is the real value you leave for others. It brings you wealth, health, and happiness in this world and forever. These few things I know to be true. And I give them now to you. Test them, adjust them, make them your own. What you know in your heart is true. Be true to your heart. BONUS Get your no-charge copy of 2 Amazing Ways to Solve Your Problems Audio and PDF for this free special report are available for instant download. Click here now. The post 7 Strange Secrets for Winning Big – Get Money, Happy, Healthy appeared first on Live Sensical.

Why is the world in such awful shape – or is it simply our media which insists on bringing us consistently bad news? Why do politicians and advertisers think we are so stupid to fall for their obvious tricks? How are a minority few really “making it big” but being over-represented as the norm? It seems to be explained by a 95 to 5 split replacing the 80/20 rule. You’ve probably heard of Earl Nightingale’s Strangest Secret. In this Gold recording, he brings up an interesting social breakdown of top performers and the rest of humanity. His statistics laid out the results of 100 people starting out at age 25 being studied 40 years later: 1 ended up rich, 4 ended up financially independent, 5 were still working, and 54 were broke. Of course, this was first recorded in 1956, and no source was ever named. I chased this down and found a reference to a 1990 Social Security Administration study (SSA Publication No. 13-11871) and they concluded that 96% of Americans do not reach financial independence by age 65. Why this strange income gap? What conditions are making it necessary for people to have some sort of government bailout to continue living in retirement? It’s All About Conformity Nightingale traced this back to conformity. Throughout our lives, we are trained to “follow the follower.” We are not taught to be entrepreneurs. We are not taught in the fine art of creative thinking. We are not even taught how to make and pursue our own goals. Rather, our colleges and schools teach us that “you have to go along to get along” and other conformist ideals. We are carefully taught to get a job and let the company plan for your retirement, even if its only a 401-K. Of course, if you track the richest 20 people in America, you can quickly see that they either didn’t finish college, never went, or attended a non-Ivy League school. Only 1 of these 20 actually started from a rich family and finished an Ivy League education. The rest were from decidedly middle-class origins at best. Yet, they are individually worth billions. The rest of American humanity limps along with no real reason to exert the extra effort to “get rich,” as there are so many safeguards and “safety nets” in place that it appears it’s impossible to outwardly fail at anything during your working years.. The surprise is that you are out on your own once you hit retirement. Savings or not, 401K or not. Social Security or not. Of course in our day and age, the punch lines waiting for you are many: Social Security is mostly or all eaten up by Medicade payments. If you are laid off close to retirement, most people find it harder to get another job at that age – and so there are calculated figures of close to 100 million unemployed in this country even though our government says we are back down to the 5% range. While the number of businesses being started by the retirement-age crowd is higher than ever, these are being started by “old dogs” who are learning the new skill of entrepreneur on their own dime. Why has this 90-95% group sat back and waited instead of learning entrepreneurship in their spare time during those earlier 40 years? The Revenge of the Bucket Crabs You could call this the revenge of the bucket crabs. The old parable and scientifically-proved fact, is that while a single crab in an open bucket will climb its way out, two or more crabs will keep each other in. And so our modern hyper-sensitive, politically-correct culture. Most of the success stories that we look up to brought themselves up from poverty and in prejudiced times to high states of accomplishment and wealth. In today’s world, all you need is a community organizer to discover any number of wealthy, guilt-ridden patrons and government grants that can support any number of otherwise unemployed minority protesters to popularize your cause in the media. Several people have become well known for their ability to protest in front of major corporations in return for perennial grant funding. Yes, you know who these are. Why aren’t these same people reforming education so that young people of any color or orientation are trained in building businesses, even as a solopreneur? Because they take the easy road out. Short cuts abound in this culture as the majority support the hyper-critical bucket-crab culture. What Our Economy Is Built On – Crabs The interesting bottom line is in discovering that the bulk of our consumer-based economy is built on the backs of these same bucket crabs. They buy all the electronic gismo’s, the phones, the clothes, the cars, and get the sub-prime and regular loans for their over-sized houses in neighborhoods they can’t afford. People are trained to live pay-check to pay-check and to pay off college loans and credit card loans right up to the point they can’t anymore – which is usually when they are retired willingly or unwillingly. These are the bucket-crab majority, who make our fast-food restaurant chains and pharmaceutical supply companies rich. These are why there are infomercials and e-mail spam. These are the people who keep watching our advertisement-interrupted television programs as much as 6-8 hours daily. Why? Because everyone else is doing it. Because their favorite celebrity told them to. Because their politician promised them. And what do they have to show for it when retired or lose their job? Nothing. They then become fodder for the protest organizers who pay them and feed them if they’ll just march here or there. They have to move in with their children. They wind up in a government-paid retirement home. And they have no one to blame but themselves. No One to Blame But Ourselves Look around you. Look at what you read and watch and listen to. How much of this is helpful to you in starting and operating your own business? How much of this helps you earn a passive income source to help you live out any lack of a regular job? Most of the social media and magazine articles are either entertainment, hyper-critical, or simply distractive. Don’t look to the evening news for inspirational or motivational material. By actual count of a national news program, they’ve been arriving in homes for 30 minutes 7 days each week for decades. Out of those 210 minutes, only 5 were dedicated to uplifting material – at 5 minutes before the hour on Friday. (You probably know this network.) That’s not even 5% of their programming time. And fully a third of that time slot was used for what? Advertising, mostly for pharmaceuticals. And what about their other programming? It’s all bucket-crab material. Lots of “reality” type shows. Or you see politicians or celebrities in unusual scenes that would never happen in real life. Or slanted “investigative reporting.” All interrupted every 12 minutes or less by yet another pitch. The Trick to Surviving and Prospering There’s a trick to surviving. It’s called be the 5% and profit off the 95%. That’s not cold or calloused or negative. It’s a fact. You can’t get people to buy your product unless it’s very high quality, very valuable, and very available. Otherwise, you have to constantly bring out new products and spend most of your budget on advertising. The 95% are trained to go along, get along, and do and buy what they are told. The 5% train themselves to find out what people want and then provide it with better value and distribution than anyone around them. This is how Sam Walton of Wal-Mart became the richest person on earth in his time. This is how Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, and Warren Buffett make their billions. It’s no secret. It’s a decision they made early on. You can, too. It’s never too late to quit being an ordinary crab and start becoming exceptional. The Revenge of The Bucket Crabs – In Entrepreneurship, You Become Who You Follow from Robert C. Worstell BONUS Get your no-charge copy of 2 Amazing Ways to Solve Your Problems Audio and PDF for this free special report are available for instant download. Click here now. The post Revenge of the Bucket Crabs – You Become Who You Follow appeared first on Live Sensical.

The Profile of a Creative Person REACH FOR IDEAS The creative person realizes that his mind is an inexhaustible storehouse. It can provide anything he earnestly wants in life. But in order to draw from this storehouse, he must constantly augment its stock of information, thoughts, and wisdom. He reaches out for ideas. He respects the mind of others -gives credit to their mental abilities. Everyone has ideas -they’re free -and many of them are excellent. By first listening to ideas and then thinking them through before judging them, the creative person avoids prejudice and close-mindedness. This is the way he maintains a creative “climate” around himself. Ideas are like slippery fish. They seem to have a peculiar knack of getting away from us. Because of this, the creative person always has a pad and a pencil handy. When he gets an idea, he writes it down. He knows that many people have found their whole lives changed by a single great thought. By capturing ideas immediately, he doesn’t risk forgetting them. [Note: a great way to save ideas easily is to Text-Message them from your cell phone to your main email account. You are rarely without your cell phone, and this allows you to record your idea for later review and action.] Having a sincere interest in people, our creative person listens carefully when someone else is talking. He’s intensely observant, absorbing everything he sees and hears. He behaves as if everyone he meets wears a sign that reads, “My ideas and interest may offer the hidden key to your next success.” Thus, he makes it a point always to talk with other people’s interest in mind. And it pays off in a flood of new ideas and information that would otherwise be lost to him forever. Widening his circle of friends and broadening his base of knowledge are two more very effective techniques of the creative person. ANTICIPATE ACHIEVEMENT The creative person anticipates achievement. She expects to win. And the above-average production engendered by this kind of attitude affects those around her in a positive way. She’s a plus-factor for all who know her. Problems are challenges to creative minds. Without problems, there would be little reason to think at all. She knows it’s a waste of time merely to worry about problems, so she wisely invests the same time and energy in solving problems. When the creative person gets an idea, she puts it through a series of steps designed to improve it. She thinks in new directions. She builds big ideas from little ones and new ideas from old ones: associating ideas, combining them, adapting, substituting, magnifying, minifying, rearranging and reversing ideas. BE CREATIVE FOR YOURSELF Creative and productive people are not creative and productive for the benefit of others. It’s because they’re driven by the need to be creative and productive. They’d be creative and productive if they lived on a deserted island with no one benefiting or even aware of what they were doing. They experience the joy of producing something. That others benefit from it is fine, but only secondary. This is a story of the painters who were before their time. Renoir was laughed at and rejected not only by the public but by his own fellow artists, yet he went right on painting. Even Manet said to Monet, “Renoir has no talent at all. You who are his friend should tell him kindly to give up painting.” A group of artists who were rejected by the establishment of their time formed their own association in self-defense. Do you know who was in that group? They were Degas, Pissaro, Monet, Cezanne, and Renoir. Five of the greatest artists of all time, all doing what they believed in, in the face of total rejection. Renoir, in his later life, suffered terribly from rheumatism, especially in his hands. He lived in constant pain. And when Matisse visited the aging painter, he saw that every stroke was causing renewed pain, and he asked, “Why do you still have to work? Why continue to torture yourself?” And then Renoir answered, “The pain passes, but the pleasure, the creation of beauty, remains.” One day when he was 78, finally quite famous and successful, he remarked, “I’m still making progress.” The next day he died. This is the mark of the creative person … still making progress, still learning, still producing as long as he or she lives, despite pain or problems of all kinds. Not producing for the joy or satisfaction of others, but because he must. Because it brings pleasure and satisfaction. Four Techniques for Creative Revolutions To spur your mind to new action, think combination, adaptation, substitution, and rearrangement. What are some of the best techniques for using our creative faculties more effectively to solve problems, make decisions, achieve goals, and better fulfill our ultimate human responsibility, which is to think? Here are a few I have learned: Think Combination Everything you see, hear, touch, taste, and smell during the day offers you the opportunity to consider new combinations. When you brush your teeth, you might think of a toothbrush that contains the toothpaste in the handle. You might combine your mirror with a motto reminding you to start the day right. It might read, “How can I increase my service today?” or “Have no small dreams!” That’s thinking combination. A simple pencil is a combination of wood, carbon, rubber, paint, and metal. You can come up with great ideas that can lead to profits, patents, and even billion-dollar companies by finding new combinations yourself. Here are a few ways entrepreneurs have profited from thinking combination. Think Adaptation Velcro was created through adaptation. In 1948, George de Mestral, a Swiss engineer, returned from a walk through a field of weeds one day and found some cockleburs [burrs] clinging to his cloth jacket. After studying one of the cockleburs under a microscope, he noticed it was a maze of thin strands with burrs (or hooks) on the ends that cling to fabrics or animal fur. He then recognized the potential for a practical new fastener. It took eight years to experiment, develop, and perfect the invention, but now Velcro is a well-known, incredibly useful product. Velcro has even been further adapted for making all kinds of products better – from shoes that use Velcro instead of laces, to adjustable Velcro wrist straps on boxing gloves. During the next year you are going to see the result of people thinking adaptation and coming up with ideas worth millions of dollars. Why couldn’t one of these people be you? The only limit to what you can achieve by adapting old products to new uses -old methods to new applications -is the limit of your own creativity. Think Substitution When you think substitution, ask yourself how you might substitute a different idea, product, or material for the one now used. For example, soy burgers are the vegetarian’s substitute for meat products. You can also take an existing product and make it better through thinking substitution. Take, for instance, luggage with wheels. This was a wonderful invention because it eliminated the need to carry luggage. But, for years the wheels were made of cheap plastic, often only a step better than dragging your luggage on the ground. It wasn’t until recently that someone decided to replace these cheap plastic wheels with the high-speed ball-bearing efficient wheels from Roller skates. This substitution created a better wheeled suitcase and made for happier travelers. In short, don’t assume because a particular thing has always been used in the past, that you have to use it now. Perhaps there’s a substitution that will work better or last longer, or cost less, or be lighter, or more colorful, and so forth. Think substitution. Think rearrangement How about turning something upside down? What’s the problem with typical ketchup, mustard, and salad dressing bottles? It’s hard to get the contents out, especially when the contents are running low. The solution? Manufacturers are now creating the bottles to stand upside down so the contents are always easy to get out. What do you work with that can benefit from this kind of thinking? What can you turn around … revolutionize? Rearrange things, change pace, alter sequence, start from scratch. This type of thinking works for everyone. For instance, salespeople can use these creative techniques to discover new applications for products or services, new ways to emphasize customer benefits, new ideas or product combinations to solve customer problems, better ways to organize their time and effort. If you want to spur your mind to new action, think combination, adaptation, substitution, and rearrangement. You’ll be amazed with the ideas you’ll develop. Before long, you’ll be thinking in each of these ways as a matter of daily course. This kind of thinking increases the scope of your mind power and enables you to achieve fuller use of your mental capabilities. Let your mind work for you. Take nothing for granted. Everything can be changed, improved. The only thing you can count on for certain is change. Don’t wait for it -be an agent of change. Help bring change about. Follow Your River Are you immersed in your “river of interest” or simply watching your life from the shore … afraid to get your feet wet? There are two distinct kinds of successful people. There are what I call the river people and the goal people. Let’s take a good look at the river people. River people are those fortunate people who find themselves born to perform a special task. Mozart and da Vinci were river people. There are thousands of river people living today. They’re the people who know from childhood what they want to do with their lives. River people seem born to spend their lives in pursuit of their interest. And they throw themselves into their rivers 100 percent, busying themselves with whatever it happens to be. They don’t tend to think about the idea of success or the making of money; they simply spend their lives doing the best they can in their river of interest. And they’re often responsible for some of the largest achievements and institutions on earth. We all know the stories of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. The businesses that have grown from their inventions encircle the globe and are among the largest on the planet. Einstein was such a person, of course, but there are thousands of them that we never hear of. They are people who would be perfectly content in their fields of interest with only a modest maintenance diet and a roof over their heads. Their work is everything. But because they usually render a very valuable service in the performance of their work, be it in the arts or sports or commerce, they’re usually well rewarded for their efforts, though they may struggle for years before recognition and success come to them. Dr. Abraham Maslow talked about such people. He said, “One could say a good match is like the perfect love affair or friendship in which it seems that people belong to each other and were meant for each other. In the best instances, the person and his job fit together and belong together perfectly, like a key in a lock, or perhaps resonate together like a sung note which sits in a sympathetic resonance, a particular string on a piano keyboard.” And Maslow said, “Simply as a matter of the strategy and tactics of living well and fully, and of choosing one’s life instead of having it determined for us, this is a help.” It’s so easy to forget ultimates in the rush and hurry of daily life, especially for young people. So often, we’re merely responders, so to speak, simply reacting to stimuli, to rewards and punishments, to emergencies, to pains and fears, to demands of other people, to superficialities. It takes a specific, conscious effort, at least at first, to turn one’s attention to intrinsic things and values. Perhaps seeking actual physical aloneness. Perhaps exposing one’s self to great music, to good people, to natural beauty, and so forth. Only after practice do these strategies become easy and automatic so that one can be living totally immersed in his or her river. I believe that each of us, because of the way our genetic heritage is stacked, has an area of great interest. And it’s that area that we should explore with the patience and assiduity of a paleontologist on an important dig where it’s a region of great potential. Somewhere within it, we can find that avenue of interest that so perfectly matches our natural abilities, we’ll be able to make our greatest contribution and spend our lives in work we love. If we can find our river of interest, we need only throw ourselves into it, fully committed, and there spend our days learning and growing and finding new emerging fields of interest within its boundaries. The River or the Goal For some, the river may be a particular branch of science; for others, one of the arts. There are some physicians, for example, who are so wrapped up in medicine that they hate to leave; even after a 16 hour day, they can’t wait to get back to it. These people are happiest and most alive when they’re in their river -in whatever business or career or profession it happens to be. And success comes to such people as inevitable as a sunrise. In fact, they are successes the moment they find their great field of interest; the worldly trappings of success will always come in time. Such people don’t have to ask, “What will I do with my life?” Their work is a magnet for them, and they can’t imagine doing anything else. We all know such people, or about such people. Doing what they do is even more important to them than the rewards they earn for doing it. The second group of successful people are those who are goal-oriented. These people have not found a particular river, necessarily, and can be quite happy doing a number of things. It’s the goals they set that are important to them, and they’re quite aware that there are many roads that can lead to their goals. Someone once said, “Americans can have anything they seriously make up their minds to have. The trouble is that most of them never make up their minds about anything.” Goal-oriented people do make up their minds about what they want, and they keep their eyes and their enthusiasm on the goal they’ve established until it becomes a reality in their lives. Then they set a new goal, if they’re wise. One of the problems with this latter group is that after achieving a number of goals and becoming quite successful, they can run out of goals and become listless and unhappy. But not the river people. Their interest in what they’re doing never fades. So if you’re going to be a big success, chances are you need to be a river person or a goal-oriented person, or both -the two groups are not mutually exclusive. The post Creative People Win: How to Problem-Solve by Mind appeared first on Live Sensical.

Hello again, Glad to have you finding this podcast or opening this email. Thanks, as usual, for all you’ve done this week to help people around you. Even if they didn’t seem to appreciate your help, I do. You can almost feel it from here – and can, if you really concentrate enough. But that’s a story for another day. Today, I’ll just bring you up to date on everything and then give you a funny recording I heard this week. A forgotten Earl Nighingale piece that really gave me some chuckles – so I thought you’d like it, too. First, what we did this week. You now have another ebook in your membership library. Of course, it’s also available on Amazon, iTunes, and (shortly) everywhere else. It’s titled “Why Ninety-Five Fail, Only Five Succeed.” And it’s also another short read with linked audio inside it. (Smart person that you are, you’ll see that the podcast was out a couple of days ago with the full transcript, so you can read it there.) If you like it, please go now to Amazon and leave an honest review. Even if you don’t like it. Because this will help others find it faster. And the more successful people we can help on their way, the better the whole place becomes. Otherwise, we’re getting out some regular podcasts each week as we work our way through “How to Completely Change Your Life in 30 Seconds.” Do check these out if you can. Nice to listen to on the commute, or when you’re out in Nature walking around for exercise like some of us. I was just compiling the recordings for Claude Bristol’s Magic of Believing, which will start showing up shortly. That’s a helluva book. We’re also going to start it off with his TNT: It Rocks the Earth. The unfortunate part to both of these is that I couldn’t find unabridged audio versions to share with you, so the transcripts don’t match exactly. When we get a chance to go back through all these, I’ll see if we can’t fix that in the future. This Week’s Recording As I said, I was chuckling out loud when I listened to this recording. Earl Nightingale has a very dry humor, and you’ll find little barbs here and there throughout most of his recordings. The term is “a wry wit,” I believe. In this one, the second in his long out of print “Direct Line” series, he gives both barrels to our education system, and then goes onto a bit of a roll describing some other social stand-by’s. That’s right down our alley with what I covered in the Living Sensical manifesto. (That reminds me, I do need to get this recorded for you.) The Direct Line series came out on cassette starting in 1971 and is fairly easily found on the Internet.  Nightingale-Conant doesn’t seem to have copies that I have found. If you do find a CD version, please let me know so I can upgrade these. Let’s get going here. Oh… Do make sure you’re subscribed to this podcast so you don’t miss a single episode. And also, join our membership to get no-charge access to our expanding member library, with another benefit of getting an email every week with the updates we have for you, just like this one. For now, please enjoy the next 30 minutes listening to the Dean of Personal Development, Earl Nightingale. – – – – Well, how did you like that? I plan to get this series up as a podcast on it’s own one day. The trick is to getting it transcribed, which costs a bit of coin. If you want to support this effort, then buy my books on Amazon or iTunes or other places they’re published. And do leave reviews wherever you can. I do this just so other people can find this great material and improve their lives. The income I recieve goes mostly right back into site development, meaning that I can afford to spend more time getting great books out to you. And that’s a virtuous cycle. Thanks again for all your help and all you do. If you liked this podcast, please leave a review on iTunes (which helps them recommend it to others) or leave a comment in the show notes. See you next week. The post Funny Podcast Update: How to Publish and Laugh, too. appeared first on Live Sensical.

This ebook now available on Amazon and iTunes Don’t Follow the Follower 95 percent of people never succeed because they’re following the wrong group. Processionary caterpillars travel in long, undulating lines, one creature behind the other. Jean Hanri Fabre, the French entomologist, once led a group of these caterpillars onto the rim of a large flowerpot so that the leader of the procession found himself nose to tail with the last caterpillar in the procession, forming a circle without end or beginning. Through sheer force of habit and, of course, instinct, the ring of caterpillars circled the flowerpot for seven days and seven nights, until they died from exhaustion and starvation. An ample supply of food was close at hand and plainly visible, but it was outside the range of the circle, so the caterpillars continued along the beaten path. People often behave in a similar way. Habit patterns and ways of thinking become deeply established, and it seems easier and more comforting to follow them than to cope with change, even when that change may represent freedom, achievement, and success. If someone shouts, “Fire!” it is automatic to blindly follow the crowd, and many thousands have needlessly died because of it. How many stop to ask themselves: Is this really the best way out of here? So many people “miss the boat” because it’s easier and more comforting to follow – to follow without questioning the qualifications of the people just ahead – than to do some independent thinking and checking. A hard thing for most people to fully understand is that people in such numbers can be so wrong, like the caterpillars going around and around the edge of the flowerpot, with life and food just a short distance away. If most people are living that way, it must be right, they think. But a little checking will reveal that throughout all recorded history the majority of mankind has an unbroken record of being wrong about most things, especially important things. For a time we thought the earth was flat and later we thought the sun, stars, and planets traveled around the Earth. Both ideas are now considered ridiculous, but at the time they were believed and defended by the vast majority of followers. In the hindsight of history we must have looked like those caterpillars blindly following the follower out of habit rather than stepping out of line to look for the truth. It’s difficult for people to come to the understanding that only a small minority of people ever really get the word about life, about living abundantly and successfully. Success in the important departments of life seldom comes naturally, no more naturally than success at anything -a musical instrument, sports, fly-fishing, tennis, golf, business, marriage, parenthood. But for some reason most people wait passively for success to come to them – like the caterpillars going around in circles, waiting for sustenance, following nose to tail -living as other people are living in the unspoken, tacit assumption that other people know how to live successfully. It’s a good idea to step out of the line every once in a while and look around to see if the line is going where we want it to go. If it is not, it might be time for a new leader and a new direction. Success: A Worthy Destination It’s been said that Americans can have anything they want. The trouble is, most don’t know what they want, and so they drift through life taking circumstances as they come and settle for “good enough.” Yet, 5 percent of the population does achieve an unusual level of success. And here is their secret. The stories of people achieving unusual success despite all manner of handicaps never fail to capture our attention. They’re inspirational to be sure. But they’re much more than that if we study them closely. The boy whose legs were terribly burned and who was told he’d be lucky to ever walk again becomes a champion track star. The woman blind and deaf from infancy becomes one of the most inspirational figures of the century. And the poor children who rise to fame and fortune have nearly become commonplace. In this age of unprecedented immigration, we see examples of people who start off in this world with virtually nothing and within a surprisingly short time have become wonderfully successful. What sets these people apart, people with vast handicaps such as not knowing the language, not knowing the right people, not having any money? What drives the boy with the burned legs who becomes the champion runner or a Helen Keller, blind and deaf who becomes one of the most inspirational figures of our time? The answer, if fully understood, will bring you and me anything and everything we truly want, and it’s deceptively simple. Perhaps it’s too simple. The people we’ve talked about here and the thousands currently doing the same thing all over the world are in possession of something the average person doesn’t have. They have goals. They have a burning desire to succeed despite all obstacles and handicaps. They know exactly what they want; they think about it every day of their lives. It gets them up in the morning, and it keeps them giving their very best all day long. It’s the last thing they think about before dropping off to sleep at night. They have a vision of exactly what they want to do, and that vision carries them over every obstacle. This vision, this dream, this goal, invisible to all the world except the person holding it, is responsible for perhaps every great advance and achievement of humankind. It’s the underlying motive for just about everything we see about us. Everything worthwhile achieved by men and women is a dream come true, a goal reached. It’s been said that what the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve. It’s the fine building where before there was an empty lot or an old eyesore. It’s the bridge spanning the bay. It’s landing on the moon. And it’s that little convenience store in Midtown Manhattan. It’s the lovely home on a tree-shaded street and the young person accepting the diploma. It’s a low golf handicap and a position reached in the world of business. It’s a certain income attained or amount of money invested. What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve. We become what we think about. And when we’re possessed by an exciting goal, we reach it. That’s why it’s been said, “Be choosy, therefore, of what you set your heart upon. For if you want it strongly enough, you’ll get it.” Americans can have anything they want. The trouble is they don’t know what they want. Oh, they want little things. They want a new car; they get it. They want a new refrigerator; they get it. They want a new home and they get it. The system never fails for them, but they don’t seem to understand that it is a system. Nor that if it’ll work for a refrigerator or a new car, it will work for anything else they want very much, just as well. Goals are the very basis of any success. It is in fact the definition of success. The best definition of success I’ve ever found goes like this, “Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal.” Or in some cases the pursuit of a worthy “ideal.” It’s a beautiful definition of success. It means that anyone who’s on course toward the fulfillment of a goal is successful. Now, success doesn’t lie in the achievement of a goal, although that’s what the world considers success; it lies in the journey toward the goal. We’re successful as long as we’re working toward something we want to bring about in our lives. That’s when the human being is at his or her best. That’s what Cervantes meant when he wrote, “The road is better than the inn.” We’re at our best when we’re climbing, thinking, planning, working. When we’re on the road toward something we want to bring about. With our definition, success being the progressive realization of a worthy goal, we cover all the bases. The young person working to finish school is as successful as any person on earth. The person working toward a particular position with his or her company is just as successful. If you have a goal that you find worthy of you as a person, a goal that fills you with joy at the thought of it, believe me, you’ll reach it. But as you draw near and see that the goal will soon be achieved, begin to think ahead to the next goal you’re going to set. It often happens that a writer halfway through a book will hit upon the idea for his next one and begin making notes or ideas for a title even while he’s finishing work on the one in progress. That’s the way it should be. It’s estimated that about 5% of the population achieves unusual success. For the rest, average seems to be good enough. Most seem to just drift along, taking circumstances as they come, and perhaps hoping from time to time that things will get better. I like to compare human beings with ships, as Carlyle used to do. It’s estimated that about 95 percent can be compared to ships without rudders, subject to every shift of wind and tide. They’re helplessly adrift, and while they fondly hope that they will one day drift into some rich and bustling port, for every narrow harbor entrance, there are 1,000 miles of rocky coastline. The chances of their drifting into port are 1,000 to 1 against them. Our state lottery is a tax on such people. So are the slot machines in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Someone wins from time to time to be sure, but the odds are still there … stacked steeply against them. But the 5 percent who have taken the time and exercised the discipline to climb into the driver’s seat of their lives, who’ve decided upon a challenging goal to reach and have fully committed themselves to reaching it, sail straight and far across the deep oceans of life, reaching one port after another and accomplishing more in just a few years than the rest accomplish in a lifetime. If you should visit a ship in port and ask the captain for his next port of call, he’ll tell you in a single sentence. Even though the captain cannot see his port, his destination for fully 99% of the voyage, he knows it’s there. And then, barring an unforeseen and highly unlikely catastrophe, he’ll reach it. If someone asks you for your next port of call, your goal, could you tell him? Is your goal clean and concise in your mind? Do you have it written down? It’s a good idea. We need reminding, reinforcement. If you can get a picture of your goal and stick it to your bathroom mirror, it’s an excellent idea to do so. Thousands of successful people carry their goals written on a card in their wallets or purses. When you ask people what they’re working for, chances are they’ll answer in vague generalities. They might say, “Oh, good health or happiness or lots of money.” That’s not good enough. Good health should be a universal goal. We all want that, and do our best to achieve and maintain it. Happiness is a byproduct of something else. And lots of money is much too vague. It might work, but I think it’s better to choose a particular sum of money. The better, the clearer our goal is defined, the more real it becomes to us, and before long, the more attainable. Happiness comes from the direction in which we’re moving. Children are happier on Christmas morning before opening their presents than they are Christmas afternoon. No matter how wonderful their presents may be, it’s after Christmas. They’ll enjoy their gifts, to be sure, but we often find them querulous and irritable Christmas afternoon. We’re happier on our way out to dinner than we are on the way home. We’re happier going on vacation than we are coming home from it. And we’re happier moving toward our goals than even after they’ve been accomplished, believe it or not. Life plays no favorites. Yet of one thing you may be sure, you will become what you think about. If your thinking is circular and chaotic, your life will reflect that chaos. But if your thinking is orderly and clear, if you have a goal that’s important for you to reach, then reach it you will. One goal at a time. That’s important. That’s where most people unwittingly make their mistake. They don’t concentrate on a single goal long enough to reach it before they’re off on another track, then another, with the result that they achieve nothing. Nothing but confusion and excuses. By thinking every morning, every night, and as many times during the day as you can about this exciting single goal you’ve established for yourself, you actually begin moving toward it and bringing it toward you. When you concentrate your thinking, it’s like taking a river that’s twisting and turning and meandering all over the countryside and putting it into a straight, smooth channel. Now it has power, direction, economy, speed. So decide upon your goal. Insist upon it. Demand it! Look at your goal card every morning and night and as many times during the day as you conveniently can. By so doing, you will insinuate your goal into your subconscious mind. You’ll see yourself as having already attained your goal, and do that every day without fail, and it will become a habit before you realize it. A habit that will take you from one success to another all the years of your life. For that is the secret of success, the door to everything you will ever have or be. You are now and you most certainly will become … what you think about. The Habit of Success Do each day all that can be done that day. You don’t need to overwork or to rush blindly into your work trying to do the greatest possible number of things in the shortest possible time. Don’t try to do tomorrow’s or next week’s work today. It’s not the number of things you do, but the quality, the efficiency of each separate action that count. To achieve this “habit of success,” you need only to focus on the most important tasks and succeed in each small task of each day. Enough of these and you have a successful week, month, year, and lifetime. Success is not a matter of luck. It can be predicted and guaranteed, and anyone can achieve it by following this plan. But most people live a life of quiet mediocrity and never achieve the success they truly desire because they get impatient. They want easy success or none at all. They see the path to success as a frustration, an impediment. Each day spent short of the ultimate goal is viewed as a time of failure and as an annoyance. As such, they get distracted by hundreds of little things that each day try to get us off our course. Yet the successful among us know the truth: If the end goal is all we desire, we simply cannot put in the time and effort it takes to be a success when it counts – each day -and therefore cannot lay the foundation for tomorrow’s success. Pay no attention to petty distractions. Enjoy the easy days and shake off the bad days. Stay steadily on your track. Concentrate on each task of the day from morning to night and do each as successfully as you can. Know full well that if each of your tasks is performed successfully, or at least the greater majority of them, your life must be successful. This ebook now available on Amazon and iTunes. Get your no-charge copy of Earl Nightingale’s 2 Amazing Ways to Solve Your Problems With Audio and PDF available for instant download. http://livesensical.com/go/8problemsolving/ Click here now. The post Why Ninety-Five Fail, Only Five Succeed -Business Career Choices appeared first on Live Sensical.