BrianTracy – No Excuses: The Power of Self Discipline Notes
Self discipline is the most important thing for achieving goals successfully.
Your ability to make yourself do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not is the key to success.
You can know every success principle in the world, but it won’t do you any good unless you can discipline yourself to put those principles or any knowledge you acquire intellectually into action and practice, and continue to do so.
With self discipline everything works, without self discipline, nothing works.
Self discipline weighs ounces, regret weighs tons.
The most important word when it comes to self discipline is the word “sacrifice”. People who are going to be really successful in the future, are willing to make sacrifices in the present in order to guarantee that future. By sacrifices we mean they’re willing to put in the long hours, they are willing to get up earlier, they are willing to work harder, they are willing to stay later, they are willing to invest and save their money, even when they don’t have a lot, knowing that with compound interest, it will grow and grow over time.
Sacrifice means that you have the ability to discipline yourself. That you have the ability to delay gratification in the short term, so that you can enjoy far greater rewards in the long term.
Eat your dinner before you eat your dessert. Successful people do the hard work first, what is important and essential, and then they reap the rewards afterwards.
The payoff for practicing self discipline is immediate.
You are not punished for your sins, but by them.
You are either punished or rewarded for the actions you take immediately on an emotional as well as physical level.
When you practice self discipline, you actually like and respect yourself more.
The more you like yourself, respect yourself and value yourself on a minute to minute basis, the better is your attitude, the better is your reaction to other people, you just feel happy inside. And wonderfully enough, when you practice self discipline, when you exert yourself to do what you know you should do, even though there’s endless temptations to do something fun and easy, when you discipline yourself to do what needs to be done your self esteem goes up. You actually like yourself more, your self-image improves, you actually see yourself as a better person. And your self-image determines your performance. The person you see in your mind will be the person you’ll be on the outside. When you practice self discipline, and especially in physical exercise, but in any self discipline action, your brain releases endorphins, and it actually makes you happy to practice self discipline, to take control of yourself and actually make yourself do the right thing and complete it.
You feel good about yourself in the moment and the effect that it can have on your future can be tremendous.
Fortunately, self discipline is a habit that you can learn with practice and repetition. If you do something over and over again, you eventually develop a habit.
The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people have success habits. The most important success habit they have is the ability to make themselves do what they know they should do at any given moment. Wonderfully enough, if you practice it over and over again, it finally locks in.
Many people get into the habit of taking the easy way out, looking for shortcuts and so on. So they actually get into a comfort zone of doing things that are harmful to their long term future. And they actually feel uncomfortable completing tasks or starting on their most important action steps and tasks.
However, by practicing self discipline and doing what needs to be done at the right time, will increase your comfort zone and it will become easy to start on your most important tasks and completing projects because its now a locked habit.
Everything is hard before its easy.
Developing the habit of self discipline is hard, and be patient with yourself because you’ll most likely slip back all the time throughout your life. All your life you’ll have to fight this battle. But every time you fight and win you feel better about yourself.
It only takes about 21 days they say to develop a new habit, so you can lock in the foundation of the habit, simply by practicing self discipline every single day without exception, for 21 days.
The common denominator of success is that successful people make it a habit of doing what unsuccessful people don’t like to do.
What is it that unsuccessful people don’t like to do? The same things that successful people don’t like to do, but they do it anyway, because they recognize that that’s the price of success.
Exercising at the end of the day when we’re usually tired is a good example of this. Do we look forward to exertion and perspiration and physical strain?
No, but successful people do it anyway, because they recognize that physical exercise is the price to pay for looking good, feeling healthy and live vibrantly with lots of energy.
There’s lots of things in life that you don’t like to do. But you do them so that you can do the things you really want to do. Only by doing the things you don’t want to do, you create the opportunity to do all the things you want to do for yourself and your family. Be willing to pay the price in the present to enjoy the great rewards in the future.
Every exercise of discipline in any area, strengthens disciplines in any other area.
Every weakness in discipline also weakens discipline in any other areas as well.
The first discipline of all is the discipline of clear thinking, versus fuzzy thinking.
The discipline of clear thinking is the most important, because the way you think and the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your decisions and choices. Your decisions and choices determine the actions you take.
The actions you take determine your results. Your results determine the quality of your life. And it all starts with you thinking clearly.
To think well and clearly it is required that you practice a few techniques.
First of all you need to set off time to think. You need to create long unbroken chunks of time. The rule is that fast decisions are usually wrong decisions.
Especially fast decisions involving people or money, are usually wrong decisions.
So if you’re going to make a decision that will have long term consequences, then you have to give it a lot of thought and look at it from every possible angle before making a decision. The more carefully you think about a decision the better the quality of that decision will be when you finally make it.
Successful people through experience, sometimes even painful experience, learn to take their time in making important decisions.
One of the very best ways that you can develop the discipline of clear thinking is to sit in solitude for 30-60 minutes when you have a major problem or a major issue in your life. Solitude has been discovered and rediscovered throughout all the history of man as the most powerful of all thinking tools.
If you sit calmly by yourself with no noise and no distractions, just sit quietly, which takes tremendous discipline the first few times you do it, at about 25 or 26 minutes your mind goes clear, and any problem that you’ve been working on the solution just pops into your mind. Any issue that you’ve been dealing with the answer just comes to you. It’s almost like a miracle. When you practice solitude you activate your superconscious mind and your intuition. And something you’ve been having trouble with or wrestling with suddenly becomes clear and you know exactly what to do.
Simply take 30 – 60 minutes out of the day and sit quietly by yourself and allow your mind to calm. The most amazing things will happen. You’ll start making better decisions, you’ll start to hear what is called the still small voice within.
Here is another way to think better and more clearly. When you’re dealing with any kind of situation, write down every detail of the problem or situation.
Take a sheet of paper and the rule to follow is “Think on paper”.
Write down every detail of the problem on paper. The most amazing thing happens between the head and the hand. As you’re writing down all the details, sometimes exactly the right choice pops out at you. It becomes clear, but you would not have triggered that superconscious solution if you hadn’t taken the time to think on paper.
Aristotle said that wisdom, which is the greatest of all human desires, is the ability to make good decisions, which is a combination of experience plus reflection.
In other words you have an experience and then you reflect on that experience and you think about what does that experience mean to me? How can I use that? How can I learn from it? The best way to reflect on your experiences is to go for a walk. Just go for a walk without distracting yourself in any way for 30-60 minutes. And while you’re thinking and reflecting about something that is going on at work or at home, you’ll be amazed at the quality of ideas that will come into your mind.
To improve your thinking talk it over with someone else you like and trust.
Give them the details of the situation and ask them to give you their feedback and their perspective. Sometimes, and especially if you’re in a great relationship, the other person can give you a perspective that completely changes your ideas.
A good way to think better is to, especially if you’re frustrated or having difficulty, ask: What are my assumptions, what am I assuming about this situation that may not be correct? Ask yourself: What if my assumptions are wrong?
What if my basic assumptions about this relationship, this job, about this product, service or investment is wrong? Then what would I do?
Here is the key to good thinking: Be open to doing something completely different. Be open to admitting the possibility that you could be wrong and doing something completely different. And what that does is it opens up your mind and your perspective so that you can see all kinds of possibilities that you may not have seen before.
Clear thinking is the first of nine disciplines and it’s the discipline practiced by the most successful, happiest and wealthiest people in our society.
The second discipline is the discipline of daily goal setting.
The discipline of daily goal setting will change your life. This single discipline alone will revolutionize your life, it is really that powerful. Why is this? Because we know that focus and concentration is essential to success. There are some things that are helpful to success, but focus and concentration are indispensible.
If you cannot focus and you cannot concentrate, you will have to work for someone else who will make you focus and concentrate, who will supervise you.
Wonderfully enough, the ability to focus and be clear on what you want and then to concentrate single mindedly on achieving it, are both habits and disciplines that can be learned through practice.
So in the discipline of daily goal setting you start off by asking yourself this big question: “What do I really want to do with my life? What do I really, really, really want to do with my life? Why am I here? What is my mission in life?
If I could do anything at all, what would I want to do with my life?”
There’s a great question that you can use to clarify this.
Most people think in a very fuzzy way of what they want to do with their life, because they’re preoccupied with all of their problems in life.
So what you do is to remove all of your problems by asking yourself this question: “Imagine that you received 10 million dollars in cash today, tax free, but at the same time you got a diagnosis from the doctor that said that you’re going to die in 10 years. You’ll have superb physical health for 10 years, but you’re going to die in 10 years. So if you had 10 million dollars in the bank, no financial worries, what would you really want to do with your life? What would you do more of or less of? What would you start up or stop completely? What would you get into or out of, if you had 10 million dollars and 10 years to live?” Imagine no limitations on what you could do, be or have. Use the magic wand technique, Imagine that you could wave a magic wand and suddenly you’d have all the time and all the money, and all the friends and all the contacts, and all the talents and all the abilities, you would have everything that you would need to be or do anything you wanted in life, what would you change, what would you do?
Just imagine that for the moment, because most people get so preoccupied with their limitations and with what they don’t have and it holds them back from deciding on what they really, really want.
The next thing you do is to take a spiral notebook and write down 10 goals that you’d like to accomplish in the next 12 months. Write your goals in the present tense as though they already existed. Say “I earn x amount of dollars by December 31st 2009”. “I achieve this goal by June 30th 2010” and so on.
When you give your subconscious mind a deadline it works on it 24 hours a day. When you write down a goal make sure it is positive.
Don’t say “I will quit smoking” say “I am a non smoker”. Don’t say “I will lose weight”, say “I weigh x number of pounds”.
When you give your subconscious mind a command in the present tense that is contrary to your current situation, your subconscious mind goes to work to resolve this dynamic tension, and make your external reality consistent with your new orders, new commands and new goals.
And always write your goals in the personal tense. Use the word “I”, because only you in the whole universe can use the word “I” relative to yourself.
You say “I earn, I drive, I achieve, I acquire, I accumulate, I live in”. In other words always follow the word “I” plus an action verb.
Then you take down a spiral notebook and you write down at least 10 goals.
You can work on 10-15 goals at a time, but never less than 10.
Your subconscious and superconscious minds have incredible power so give them lots of stuff to work on. And then what you do is every single day you write down and rewrite your goals. Every single day you take out your spiral notebook and write out your goals once more. Do this every morning before you start your day.
By doing this you reprogram your subconscious mind every single day towards your desired results.
This will change your whole life, that’s a promise. Simply do this for 21 days and you will see changes that are astonishing, People report back all the time saying that after doing this one single exercise they accomplished 8 of them in 6 months, or 5 in a week, or accomplished most of them within 12 months. It will transform your life.
Give it a try, there hasn’t been a single person in the world who hasn’t given anything less than a raving feedback and stories of what happens when they begin to practice the discipline of daily goal setting.
The third discipline is the discipline of daily time management.
The rule is that every minute spent in planning, saves 10 minutes in execution.
So discipline yourself to plan your day thoroughly before you begin, will save you at least 10 minutes for every minute you’re planning, and according to research it will increase your productivity by 25-50%, maybe even double your productivity for every day that you plan.
You see if you’re not working from a plan, then you’re just responding and reacting to whatever is going on. Somebody comes in, the phone rings, there’s an interruption or a problem and you’re off and running. But if you have a plan you just keep working on the plan. It gives you a track to run on, so you just keep working on the plan.
Begin the discipline of daily time management, by making a list.
Start off with a sheet of paper, think on paper, and write down everything you have to do during the course of the day. The very best time to make this list is the night before you’re starting the tasks. If you do this, your subconscious mind will work on your plan all night long and you’ll often wake up in the morning with great ideas to implement your plan.
Once you have a list and before you do anything else during the day, when it comes up, write it down before you do the task.
Don’t do it unless it’s written down. Respond to a call, write it down, open a mail, write it down. There’s something about writing it down before you begin that gives you control over your time and your life.
Then you organize your list by priority before you begin. Use the 80/20 rule, that says that 20% of the items on your list will account for 80% of the value.
Which are the most valuable? Use the ABCDE method of time management, which is based on considering the consequences of doing or not doing the items on your list.
An “A” task is something that you must do. It has serious consequences if you do it or don’t do it.
A “B” task is something that you should do, but it only has mild consequences
A “C” activity is something that is nice to do, but has little consequences for your life.
The rule is this: Never do a B task, when you have a A task left undone, never do a C task when you have a B task left undone.
Discipline yourself not to do things that are of low value.
That is one of the greatest of all disciplines for success in life.
Now in the ABCDE method “D” stands for delegate.
And what you do is you delegate everything you can possibly think of that somebody else can do. Don’t do the task just because you can do the task, if you can delegate the task, do it.
“E” stands for “Eliminate”. The rule in time management is that you have to think of the things you’re not going to do as well as the things you’re going to do.
And you have to think of the things you can eliminate everyday, so you will have more time to do more “A” tasks that has serious consequences for your life.
So once you have your list you take all the “A” items and you list them.
So you have “A1”, “A2”, “A3” and so on, then you do “B1”, “B2”, “B3” and so on. You make your “not to do list” by stroking out the things that you don’t have to do today, and the rule is: If it does not have to be done, it has to not be done.
And then you start on your “A1” task, the most important thing and you start on it first thing in the morning.
This is the hardest of all self disciplines to learn, it is the essence of Tracy’s teachings worldwide, it is the key to supercharging the quality of your life and your results. And then you discipline yourself to concentrate on your “A1” task, until it is 100% complete.
If you can start every morning with a list, organized by priority, and start on your number 1 important task and stay with it until it is done, you will supercharge your life, you will release endorphins in your brain that will cause you to feel fantastic. You will motivate yourself and energize yourself and propel yourself into all your other tasks. You will get twice as much done on any day where you start and complete your major and most important tasks first thing in the morning, than you would on any other day not doing it.
The discipline of time management will then spread to all your other disciplines.
When you can demonstrate each morning that you have the self control, self mastery and self discipline to start and complete your most important task, you just feel fabulous about yourself.
The fourth discipline is the discipline of courage.
This goes back to what we said earlier about forcing yourself to do what you know you should do, especially in the area of courage.
The biggest obstacle to success is the fear of failure, it’s the fear that it won’t work out. It’s the fear of loss, of time or money or emotion. It’s a fear that goes back to early childhood and the only way we can succeed is by overcoming this fear, and this fear is captured in the words “I can’t”.
Fully 80% of the population is paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake. Why? Because in growing up you make lots of mistakes and you didn’t like how it felt, so eventually you become conditioned to not take any risk at all. So you have to overcome this in order to realize your potential. Remember, it is not you who are being rejected, it is simply your behavior, which can be changed.
What we know, is that courage, and the courage to face fears, is a habit, and it’s developed by practice. Just like typing with a typewriter, or riding a bicycle, you can actually develop the habit of courage, by practicing courage whenever courage is required.
Aristotle said: “If you desire to have a quality that you don’t have, act in every instance where the quality is called for as though you already had it, and you will have it.”
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”
What he said was to confront your fears. Now the natural human tendency, to seek the path of least resistance which hurts you in the long run, is also to avoid fear causing or fear inducing situations. Most of our fear problems seem to be attached to other people for the most part. It is confronting our boss, confronting a bad relationship, confronting a prospect, cold calling, calling up customers, facing rejection, failure, embarrassment and so on.
Instead of avoiding your fears, which will enable them to live on, confront your fears and the deaths of those fears are certain.
One of the best ways of confronting and killing these fears once and for all is to get a job as a salesperson doing cold calling and selling door to door on prospects. This job will get you pounded every single day. You’ll have to get rejected, have people slam the door in your face, have people shout at you, swear at you, and you have to do it every single day.
But if you do it and you get over it, you will reach a point where nothing will stop you for the rest of your life.
Not only will this generate you a lot of money, it will enable you to become fearless and unstoppable.
The reason you want to confront your fears, is not because of the incident itself, it is for what it does to your character. You want to demonstrate to yourself that you can face down a fear and look it straight in the eyes and suddenly it goes away, and you realize that your fear was in your own mind.
Here’s a wonderful thing about overcoming fears, if the fear of failure is summarized with the feeling “I can’t”, psychologists have found you can actually short circuit or override the fear, by saying to yourself very strongly “I can do it!” So whenever you’re afraid of anything, talking to somebody, confronting someone, dealing with something, say to yourself over and over again “I can do it!” and then just do it! And you’ll be amazed the fear disappears. Its almost like “poof” it’s gone!
If you short circuit your fear and follow through and take action despite of it, and you do this repeatedly and eventually you develop the habit of courage.
Here’s an exercise for you. Identify one fear situation today and use that as your challenge, use that as your test case. Face the fear down, smash it, look it straight in the eyes and deal with it direct head on, like a car hitting a wall until the fear is gone.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll look up and you’ll be a different person, for the rest of your life you’ll know that nothing that you’re afraid of, can stop you.
The fifth discipline is the discipline of excellent health habits.
Your goal should be to live to 100 in sound physical health.
Today the average life span in industrialized countries is approaching 80, which means that 50% of people will die above that and 50% of people will die below that.
If you’re well informed, which if you’re reading this you probably are, you will probably live to be 90, 95, or 100 years old. So set a goal to be 100 years old.
Ask yourself this question: “I want to live to be 100 years of age and be in great shape at the same time, what would I have to do in order to reach that goal?
What kind of life would I have to live physically in order to reach that goal?
First of all, design your ideal body. If your ideal body was perfect, in other words, weight, fitness, tone, stretch, flexibility, everything. If your body was perfect, what would it look like, and then make a list of all the things.
When you were a child your body was perfect and if it isn’t now, it only means you forgot to do a few things or you’ve done a few things you shouldn’t have done.
Start off with a clear picture of your perfect body and recognize that that is possible for you.
A great idea is to look in some of the magazines that contain pictures of people with beautiful bodies and cut out their pictures and cut out their heads and replace a picture of your head on their body. Then put these pictures around your house so that you see it every day everywhere. So that your subconscious is constantly seeing that picture of you in beautiful shape, beautiful condition and your subconscious starts to go to work on turning that vision and goal into reality.
Put it on your refrigerator door, put it on your bathroom mirror, just carry it around and start thinking of yourself as being superbly fit and healthy in every respect.
Discipline yourself to exercise daily. The very best time to do this is first thing in the morning, even if its just stretching, going for a walk, riding a bicycle.
Basically any form of physical fitness, it doesn’t matter what it is, if you do this first thing in the morning, your body will continue to burn calories throughout the day starting right after your morning exercise.
Not only will your blood be highly oxygenated and you’ll be more alert overall from your workout first thing in the morning, but you will also develop the discipline of starting on something you normally wouldn’t want to do and getting it done early on during the day.
Highly successful people get up at 5 or 5:30am and workout for 30 minutes or 60 minutes before they start planning, organizing or executing their day.
If you can discipline yourself to do that, it will have an enormous impact on your life.
Also when you exercise first thing in the morning for 30-60 minutes, your brain releases endorphins, which make you feel happy, exhilarated, more creative, more positive, more eager to get to work. So morning exercise just starts you off in a fantastic mental and physical condition.
Eliminate foods containing wheat, sugar and refined salt.
Eat fruits, vegetables and proteins.
Drink lots of water.
Eat before 6pm, everything you eat after 6pm you accumulate.
Everything you eat before 6pm burns up before you go to bed.
Don’t eat within 3 hours of going to bed.
Get a checkup at the doctor for a complete physical once a year, get your teeth cleaned 4 times a year. There’s a direct relationship between your gum health and the rest of your body.
Remember the Nike motto in regards to self discipline: Just do it!
If you think it’s a good idea, just do it! Don’t waste time, don’t make excuses, just do it!
The sixth discipline is the discipline of regular saving and investing.
One of the greatest goals that we have in life is to become financially independent. One of the greatest worries we have in life is our bills and our debts.
The greatest fear we have in life is poverty, or ending up our life with no money.
So the very act of starting to provide for yourself financially transforms your thinking about yourself and your life. It makes you a happy person.
So set a goal of financial independence. Make a solid and firm decision that you’re going to be financially independent. And resolve to get out of debt and stay out of debt.
To get out of debt and stay out of debt you have to discipline yourself.
When you’re in debt you are trapped and you won’t be able to do any of the things you want to do until you get out of debt. So if you’re in debt, your job is to get out of debt.
Here is a very interesting point from a smart money manager:
When we are young, we associate money with pleasure.
We get our first allowance and we go and spend it on candy.
So we become conditioned to think that when we have money we go spend it on something that gives us pleasure. This is transferred to adulthood.
Whenever we get a substantial amount of money our first thought is to spend it on something that gives us pleasure.
This view on how to handle money is not beneficial to you and is in fact quite the opposite. What this does is that it keeps you broke all your life.
What you should do instead is to rewire or recondition yourself.
Instead of saying “I like spending money”, you say “I like saving money.”
And you begin to think about how much you enjoy having money in the bank.
How much you enjoy saving. How much enjoy delayed gratification.
How much you enjoy the idea of moving towards financial independence.
When you develop the habit of being happy about saving money you start to find yourself more and more careful with your expenditures.
The rule for financial independence is to save from 10-30% of your income throughout your life. And as your income grows, keep saving more and more and invest it wisely. Use compound interest to increase your saving amount substantially without risk to losing any of it.
Don’t worry too much about the stock market going up and down.
The average increase on the US stock market over the last 100 years is 8-10% each year, taking good years and bad years into consideration.
Even if you’re in debt you can save a percentage of your income.
Start with 1% and gradually as you get used to living on less and less increase the saving percentage to 2,3,4,5% and so on over time.
Within a year you’ll have developed a habit of living on 85-90% of your income, and automatically saving the balance.
You can even have the amount deducted from your paycheck automatically so you never see the amount in your regular account.
Your paycheck goes into the bank and the amount is automatically deducted into your savings account or to an investment account. Soon you develop the habit of living on less than you earn, and you change your thinking from “I enjoy spending” to “I enjoy saving.”
A key way to saving money is to delay and to defer major purchase decisions.
If you think about buying a car, a stereo, a washing machine or a new computer, if you think about it for 30 days, in many cases you won’t buy it at all. Or if you do buy it, you’ll make a better decision before you do so.
One of the smartest things of all is to buy things that are used rather than things that are new. Did you know that millionaires never buy new cars?
According to studies millionaires wait until the cars are 2 years old and is coming off lease, or has been driven for 2 years and someone is trading it in and is still under warranty for another 3 years. You can even get extended warranties on many cars. You can turn it in on a service shop, they’ll clean it up and give you another 5 year warranty on a 2 year old car.
How much would this save you? Between 10 and 20 000 dollars on a new car.
What do you do with that money? You save it and let it grow with compound interest.
If all you did was buy a used car every 5-8 years, drive it until it falls apart and then buy another one, then the money you’d save just from buying cars can make you rich. It can accumulate with compound interest into hundreds of thousands of dollars by the end of your working lifetime.
If you’re going to invest, the rule is to investigate before you invest.
2/3rds of all success in investing or business, is avoiding making mistakes by making the wrong decisions, or by making decisions too quickly.
So if you’re going to invest in anything the rule is: Spend as much time investigating the investment as you spent making the money.
You’ll find that quick investment decisions are invariably poor investment decisions. Only invest in things that you know and that you understand.
Don’t invest in somebody else’s idea or scheme or business, only invest in things that you know.
The number one rule is: Don’t lose money!
Whatever you do don’t lose money, if there’s a possibility of losing a little bit of money and you do it, you’re probably going to lose a lot
So be very careful. Once you earn the money hold on to it.
It is easy to lose money, but its hard to earn and keep it, and it’s the most important discipline of all.
Another discipline is to pay cash as often as possible and for as much as possible. Get rid of all your credit cards except for one and only use that one when you really have to.
Be very active in paying for items in cash, this will really hyposensitizes you to how much it’s costing, and causes you to spend less money.
W. Clement Stone said: “If you cannot save money, the seeds of greatness are not in you” The primary reason why you save your money and accumulate it carefully is because it gives you two things. First of all it gives you freedom.
You know you got money in the bank. If you don’t like your job, you can walk away from it, because you got money in the bank.
The second thing it gives you is opportunity. If an opportunity comes along you’re prepared to take advantage of it , you don’t have to say “I’m sorry, I don’t have any money, I can’t afford it, I’m broke.” And people just shake their head in pity and just walk away.
As an adult you should always have opportunity money put aside, and when you have it you feel great about yourself. The difference between a person with a little money and a person with no money is like night and day.
A person with a little money feels great, a person with little money always feels inferior, anxious, worried, concerned, irritable, short tempered.
You know exactly what I’m talking about.
The seventh discipline is the discipline of hard work.
There’s nothing that will help you more than for you to develop a reputation as a hard worker.
In the studies of self made millionaires they said that the millionaires originally didn’t have better education, better talent, better knowledge, but they were willing to work harder than anyone else. Most self made millionaires work 60 – 70 hours per week for 5-10-15 years before they break through. Most other people are trying to get by on 5 days a week, and then during those 5 days a week they don’t work very hard at all.
Thomas Jefferson was asked if he believes in luck, his reply was the following:
“Yes I believe in luck, and the harder I work, the luckier I become.”
So the harder you work, the luckier you become. The harder you work the more opportunities you have, the more doors open up to you, the more opportunities you see.
The average worker wastes about 50% of their time with idle chit chat with their co workers, taking coffee breaks, reading the paper, lunches, surfing the internet, doing all kinds of things that don’t contribute anything to the work.
So here is the rule that will make you successful, happy and rich:
Work all the time you work.
Don’t waste a single minute, work all the time you work all day long until you’re done. If someone interrupts you, say that you have to get “back to work”.
Nobody will ever stop you when you say you have to get back to work.
They’ll go away. Remember that the greatest time wasters of the world are other people who take up your time with idle chit chat and worthless gossip.
You have to avoid time wasters, in every single company, these people go around and they’re like a virus. They infect every person they talk to, stay away from timewasters.
Here’s a way to double your productivity, performance, outcome and income as well as become one of the most valuable people in your industry: Its very simple, start 1 hour earlier. And when you start, get to work. If the starting time in your company is 8:30, start at 7:30 or 7. Where are you going to get the time? Get up earlier and get going. Work through lunch, there’s no law saying that you have to go out and kill and hour or an hour and a half at lunch.
Eat at your desk, eat quickly or eat on the go. Use that time to work. Don’t use that time to hang around.
Work when you’re at work and have your fun later, knowing that you’ve done a fantastic job and you’ve gotten a lot done.
And finally work one hour later. Be the last one to leave, be the person that turns off the lights.
This has similarities to an entrepreneurial startup, a business in this situation is usually being run by someone who is really driving it forward and you’ll find that the business owner is usually the first one there, works through the whole day and is usually the last one to leave.
The business owner is usually working on Saturdays and Sundays as well.
At the end of the day the business owner got a beautiful home and house on the hill, beautiful cars, beautiful vacations, a balcony, a yacht, and everyone is saying “Boy, that guy sure is lucky.”
No, they’re not lucky, they just worked all the time they worked.
If you work 3 extra hours, start earlier, work harder, stay later, you will add 6 hours of productive work to your day.
Every hour of uninterrupted work when nobody is there, translates into 3 hours of productivity when there’s people around interrupting you.
So keep asking at work: “What is the most valuable use of my time right now?”
When you get your answer, do only that.
Keep saying “Back to work” whenever you get distracted.
The eighth discipline is the discipline of continues learning.
The rule is: To earn more you must learn more.
If you want to earn more than you’re earning today, you must learn new knowledge and skills that make that possible.
Jim Rohn said: “Work at least as hard on yourself as you do on your work.”
How do you do this? You read material within your field of work daily.
You read 60 minutes a day on material within your field of work a day.
A little in the morning and a little in the evening. This will translate into one book a week. One book a week will translate in over 50 books a year.
The average adult reads less than one book a year.
If you read more than 50 books a year that’s the equivalent of getting a PhD in your field, every single year.
Just reading every day will make you one of the most proficient, most skilled, and ultimately one of the highest paid people within your field.
Listen to CDs in your car, the average person drives 500 to 1000 hours a year.
That’s the equivalent of 3-6 months of 40 hour weeks.
That’s the equivalent of 1-2 fulltime university semesters.
Just listening to educational material in your car, will make you one of the best informed people in your field.
And finally in continues learning, attend seminars.
Take courses, take structured courses given by experts, given by authorities.
You can learn more in a half day or a day from an expert than you might learn on your own in years.
Sometimes you can walk out of a seminar with a new idea that will increase your income 5 times within the first 30 days.
Ideas like this in the form of wisdom nuggets will change your life forever.
The average income in America increases about 3% a year.
With additional knowledge and skill, you increase the rate at which your income goes up.
If you get new knowledge and skill, you learn more, your income goes up 10% per year. You’ll double your income in 7 years. If your income goes up 25% per year, you’ll double your income in 2 years and 8 months.
In other words, the more you learn, the more you earn.
The benefits of continues learning are life changing.
Here’s the final ninth discipline, the discipline of persistence.
The discipline of persistence says that the greatest test of self discipline is when you persist in the face of adversity and you drive yourself forward to complete your tasks 100%.
The test of self discipline is when you can drive yourself to keep on keeping on, even when everyone around you feels like quitting and you feel like quitting as well.
Courage has two parts, the first part of courage to begin, the courage to start, the courage to launch, in the face of failure with no guarantee of success.
But the second part of courage is the courage to endure, the courage to persist and to keep on going when you’re tired, when you’re disappointed, when nothing is working, and there’s no guarantee of success and maybe even a very large likelihood of failure.
This is really important:
We say that: Persistence is your measure of your belief in yourself and what you’re doing.
If you truly believe in the goodness and rightness and value of what you’re doing you will persist regardless of what’s happening on the outside.
The more you believe in the rightness and goodness of what you’re doing, the more you will persist. And wonderfully enough, the more you persist the more you believe in yourself and the more you believe in the value of your work.
Persistence seems to change your character.
In reality persistence is self discipline in action.
In the final analyzes, your persistence is your measure of self discipline.
Self discipline leads to self esteem. Every time you practice self discipline you feel better about yourself, which leads to greater persistence, which leads to even greater self discipline, and you get on to an upwards spiral in life.
Napoleon Hill said: Persistence is to the character of a man or a woman as carbon is to steel.
You actually make yourself, you shape yourself, you form yourself, you build yourself into a superior human being, a better and stronger person by persisting when you feel like quitting.
Remember, every time you have the tendency to quit, every time you feel like giving up or cutting corners or stopping before you finish your task, say “wait a minute, this is a test! This is a test of my character. This is a test to see what I’m made of. And it’s not what I’m working on that counts, it’s the person I’m becoming by either persisting or quitting.”
So always persist until you have completed the task.
And as you burst through your brain floods with endorphins and you feel wonderful about yourself. Eventually you develop a habit of persistence and you become unstoppable.
Here are the seven benefits of practicing self discipline in every area of your life:
1. The habit of self discipline guarantees your success.
Every single successful person has that fundamental quality of persistence and tenacity, that fundamental quality of self discipline to make themselves do what they should do, whether they feel like it or not.
2. When you practice self discipline you’ll get more done, faster and better than other people. You’ll get more results, you’ll become more productive, you’ll have higher levels of performance. You’ll bring yourself to the attention of people who can help
you and support you and move you forward.
3. You’ll be paid more and promoted faster at any job in any situation.
The people with high levels of self discipline who get the results, are the ones who are immediately
moved to the front of the line of life.
4. You’ll have a greater sense of self control, self reliance and personal power. You’ll feel that you can do anything that you put your mind to because you have the ability
to make and discipline yourself to do it anyway.
5. Self discipline is the key to self esteem, self respect and personal pride.
Every time you discipline yourself you like yourself more. Every time you discipline yourself you see yourself as a better person. Every time you discipline yourself you feel great about yourself, you feel personally proud of yourself.
It affects your personality in a very positive way.
6. The greater your self-discipline is, the greater your self confidence will be, and the lower will your fear of failure and rejection be. Eventually you’ll develop a type of self confidence that will enable you to walk through walls.
7. With self-discipline you’ll have the strength of character to persist over all obstacles until you succeed. With self-discipline you achieve personal greatness.
Self discipline is the most important thing for achieving goals successfully.
Your ability to make yourself do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not is the key to success.
You can know every success principle in the world, but it won’t do you any good unless you can discipline yourself to put those principles or any knowledge you acquire intellectually into action and practice, and continue to do so.
With self discipline everything works, without self discipline, nothing works.
Self discipline weighs ounces, regret weighs tons.
The most important word when it comes to self discipline is the word “sacrifice”. People who are going to be really successful in the future, are willing to make sacrifices in the present in order to guarantee that future. By sacrifices we mean they’re willing to put in the long hours, they are willing to get up earlier, they are willing to work harder, they are willing to stay later, they are willing to invest and save their money, even when they don’t have a lot, knowing that with compound interest, it will grow and grow over time.
Sacrifice means that you have the ability to discipline yourself. That you have the ability to delay gratification in the short term, so that you can enjoy far greater rewards in the long term.
Eat your dinner before you eat your dessert. Successful people do the hard work first, what is important and essential, and then they reap the rewards afterwards.
The payoff for practicing self discipline is immediate.
You are not punished for your sins, but by them.
You are either punished or rewarded for the actions you take immediately on an emotional as well as physical level.
When you practice self discipline, you actually like and respect yourself more.
The more you like yourself, respect yourself and value yourself on a minute to minute basis, the better is your attitude, the better is your reaction to other people, you just feel happy inside. And wonderfully enough, when you practice self discipline, when you exert yourself to do what you know you should do, even though there’s endless temptations to do something fun and easy, when you discipline yourself to do what needs to be done your self esteem goes up. You actually like yourself more, your self-image improves, you actually see yourself as a better person. And your self-image determines your performance. The person you see in your mind will be the person you’ll be on the outside. When you practice self discipline, and especially in physical exercise, but in any self discipline action, your brain releases endorphins, and it actually makes you happy to practice self discipline, to take control of yourself and actually make yourself do the right thing and complete it.
You feel good about yourself in the moment and the effect that it can have on your future can be tremendous.
Fortunately, self discipline is a habit that you can learn with practice and repetition. If you do something over and over again, you eventually develop a habit.
The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people have success habits. The most important success habit they have is the ability to make themselves do what they know they should do at any given moment. Wonderfully enough, if you practice it over and over again, it finally locks in.
Many people get into the habit of taking the easy way out, looking for shortcuts and so on. So they actually get into a comfort zone of doing things that are harmful to their long term future. And they actually feel uncomfortable completing tasks or starting on their most important action steps and tasks.
However, by practicing self discipline and doing what needs to be done at the right time, will increase your comfort zone and it will become easy to start on your most important tasks and completing projects because its now a locked habit.
Everything is hard before its easy.
Developing the habit of self discipline is hard, and be patient with yourself because you’ll most likely slip back all the time throughout your life. All your life you’ll have to fight this battle. But every time you fight and win you feel better about yourself.
It only takes about 21 days they say to develop a new habit, so you can lock in the foundation of the habit, simply by practicing self discipline every single day without exception, for 21 days.
The common denominator of success is that successful people make it a habit of doing what unsuccessful people don’t like to do.
What is it that unsuccessful people don’t like to do? The same things that successful people don’t like to do, but they do it anyway, because they recognize that that’s the price of success.
Exercising at the end of the day when we’re usually tired is a good example of this. Do we look forward to exertion and perspiration and physical strain?
No, but successful people do it anyway, because they recognize that physical exercise is the price to pay for looking good, feeling healthy and live vibrantly with lots of energy.
There’s lots of things in life that you don’t like to do. But you do them so that you can do the things you really want to do. Only by doing the things you don’t want to do, you create the opportunity to do all the things you want to do for yourself and your family. Be willing to pay the price in the present to enjoy the great rewards in the future.
Every exercise of discipline in any area, strengthens disciplines in any other area.
Every weakness in discipline also weakens discipline in any other areas as well.
The first discipline of all is the discipline of clear thinking, versus fuzzy thinking.
The discipline of clear thinking is the most important, because the way you think and the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your decisions and choices. Your decisions and choices determine the actions you take.
The actions you take determine your results. Your results determine the quality of your life. And it all starts with you thinking clearly.
To think well and clearly it is required that you practice a few techniques.
First of all you need to set off time to think. You need to create long unbroken chunks of time. The rule is that fast decisions are usually wrong decisions.
Especially fast decisions involving people or money, are usually wrong decisions.
So if you’re going to make a decision that will have long term consequences, then you have to give it a lot of thought and look at it from every possible angle before making a decision. The more carefully you think about a decision the better the quality of that decision will be when you finally make it.
Successful people through experience, sometimes even painful experience, learn to take their time in making important decisions.
One of the very best ways that you can develop the discipline of clear thinking is to sit in solitude for 30-60 minutes when you have a major problem or a major issue in your life. Solitude has been discovered and rediscovered throughout all the history of man as the most powerful of all thinking tools.
If you sit calmly by yourself with no noise and no distractions, just sit quietly, which takes tremendous discipline the first few times you do it, at about 25 or 26 minutes your mind goes clear, and any problem that you’ve been working on the solution just pops into your mind. Any issue that you’ve been dealing with the answer just comes to you. It’s almost like a miracle. When you practice solitude you activate your superconscious mind and your intuition. And something you’ve been having trouble with or wrestling with suddenly becomes clear and you know exactly what to do.
Simply take 30 – 60 minutes out of the day and sit quietly by yourself and allow your mind to calm. The most amazing things will happen. You’ll start making better decisions, you’ll start to hear what is called the still small voice within.
Here is another way to think better and more clearly. When you’re dealing with any kind of situation, write down every detail of the problem or situation.
Take a sheet of paper and the rule to follow is “Think on paper”.
Write down every detail of the problem on paper. The most amazing thing happens between the head and the hand. As you’re writing down all the details, sometimes exactly the right choice pops out at you. It becomes clear, but you would not have triggered that superconscious solution if you hadn’t taken the time to think on paper.
Aristotle said that wisdom, which is the greatest of all human desires, is the ability to make good decisions, which is a combination of experience plus reflection.
In other words you have an experience and then you reflect on that experience and you think about what does that experience mean to me? How can I use that? How can I learn from it? The best way to reflect on your experiences is to go for a walk. Just go for a walk without distracting yourself in any way for 30-60 minutes. And while you’re thinking and reflecting about something that is going on at work or at home, you’ll be amazed at the quality of ideas that will come into your mind.
To improve your thinking talk it over with someone else you like and trust.
Give them the details of the situation and ask them to give you their feedback and their perspective. Sometimes, and especially if you’re in a great relationship, the other person can give you a perspective that completely changes your ideas.
A good way to think better is to, especially if you’re frustrated or having difficulty, ask: What are my assumptions, what am I assuming about this situation that may not be correct? Ask yourself: What if my assumptions are wrong?
What if my basic assumptions about this relationship, this job, about this product, service or investment is wrong? Then what would I do?
Here is the key to good thinking: Be open to doing something completely different. Be open to admitting the possibility that you could be wrong and doing something completely different. And what that does is it opens up your mind and your perspective so that you can see all kinds of possibilities that you may not have seen before.
Clear thinking is the first of nine disciplines and it’s the discipline practiced by the most successful, happiest and wealthiest people in our society.
The second discipline is the discipline of daily goal setting.
The discipline of daily goal setting will change your life. This single discipline alone will revolutionize your life, it is really that powerful. Why is this? Because we know that focus and concentration is essential to success. There are some things that are helpful to success, but focus and concentration are indispensible.
If you cannot focus and you cannot concentrate, you will have to work for someone else who will make you focus and concentrate, who will supervise you.
Wonderfully enough, the ability to focus and be clear on what you want and then to concentrate single mindedly on achieving it, are both habits and disciplines that can be learned through practice.
So in the discipline of daily goal setting you start off by asking yourself this big question: “What do I really want to do with my life? What do I really, really, really want to do with my life? Why am I here? What is my mission in life?
If I could do anything at all, what would I want to do with my life?”
There’s a great question that you can use to clarify this.
Most people think in a very fuzzy way of what they want to do with their life, because they’re preoccupied with all of their problems in life.
So what you do is to remove all of your problems by asking yourself this question: “Imagine that you received 10 million dollars in cash today, tax free, but at the same time you got a diagnosis from the doctor that said that you’re going to die in 10 years. You’ll have superb physical health for 10 years, but you’re going to die in 10 years. So if you had 10 million dollars in the bank, no financial worries, what would you really want to do with your life? What would you do more of or less of? What would you start up or stop completely? What would you get into or out of, if you had 10 million dollars and 10 years to live?” Imagine no limitations on what you could do, be or have. Use the magic wand technique, Imagine that you could wave a magic wand and suddenly you’d have all the time and all the money, and all the friends and all the contacts, and all the talents and all the abilities, you would have everything that you would need to be or do anything you wanted in life, what would you change, what would you do?
Just imagine that for the moment, because most people get so preoccupied with their limitations and with what they don’t have and it holds them back from deciding on what they really, really want.
The next thing you do is to take a spiral notebook and write down 10 goals that you’d like to accomplish in the next 12 months. Write your goals in the present tense as though they already existed. Say “I earn x amount of dollars by December 31st 2009”. “I achieve this goal by June 30th 2010” and so on.
When you give your subconscious mind a deadline it works on it 24 hours a day. When you write down a goal make sure it is positive.
Don’t say “I will quit smoking” say “I am a non smoker”. Don’t say “I will lose weight”, say “I weigh x number of pounds”.
When you give your subconscious mind a command in the present tense that is contrary to your current situation, your subconscious mind goes to work to resolve this dynamic tension, and make your external reality consistent with your new orders, new commands and new goals.
And always write your goals in the personal tense. Use the word “I”, because only you in the whole universe can use the word “I” relative to yourself.
You say “I earn, I drive, I achieve, I acquire, I accumulate, I live in”. In other words always follow the word “I” plus an action verb.
Then you take down a spiral notebook and you write down at least 10 goals.
You can work on 10-15 goals at a time, but never less than 10.
Your subconscious and superconscious minds have incredible power so give them lots of stuff to work on. And then what you do is every single day you write down and rewrite your goals. Every single day you take out your spiral notebook and write out your goals once more. Do this every morning before you start your day.
By doing this you reprogram your subconscious mind every single day towards your desired results.
This will change your whole life, that’s a promise. Simply do this for 21 days and you will see changes that are astonishing, People report back all the time saying that after doing this one single exercise they accomplished 8 of them in 6 months, or 5 in a week, or accomplished most of them within 12 months. It will transform your life.
Give it a try, there hasn’t been a single person in the world who hasn’t given anything less than a raving feedback and stories of what happens when they begin to practice the discipline of daily goal setting.
The third discipline is the discipline of daily time management.
The rule is that every minute spent in planning, saves 10 minutes in execution.
So discipline yourself to plan your day thoroughly before you begin, will save you at least 10 minutes for every minute you’re planning, and according to research it will increase your productivity by 25-50%, maybe even double your productivity for every day that you plan.
You see if you’re not working from a plan, then you’re just responding and reacting to whatever is going on. Somebody comes in, the phone rings, there’s an interruption or a problem and you’re off and running. But if you have a plan you just keep working on the plan. It gives you a track to run on, so you just keep working on the plan.
Begin the discipline of daily time management, by making a list.
Start off with a sheet of paper, think on paper, and write down everything you have to do during the course of the day. The very best time to make this list is the night before you’re starting the tasks. If you do this, your subconscious mind will work on your plan all night long and you’ll often wake up in the morning with great ideas to implement your plan.
Once you have a list and before you do anything else during the day, when it comes up, write it down before you do the task.
Don’t do it unless it’s written down. Respond to a call, write it down, open a mail, write it down. There’s something about writing it down before you begin that gives you control over your time and your life.
Then you organize your list by priority before you begin. Use the 80/20 rule, that says that 20% of the items on your list will account for 80% of the value.
Which are the most valuable? Use the ABCDE method of time management, which is based on considering the consequences of doing or not doing the items on your list.
An “A” task is something that you must do. It has serious consequences if you do it or don’t do it.
A “B” task is something that you should do, but it only has mild consequences
A “C” activity is something that is nice to do, but has little consequences for your life.
The rule is this: Never do a B task, when you have a A task left undone, never do a C task when you have a B task left undone.
Discipline yourself not to do things that are of low value.
That is one of the greatest of all disciplines for success in life.
Now in the ABCDE method “D” stands for delegate.
And what you do is you delegate everything you can possibly think of that somebody else can do. Don’t do the task just because you can do the task, if you can delegate the task, do it.
“E” stands for “Eliminate”. The rule in time management is that you have to think of the things you’re not going to do as well as the things you’re going to do.
And you have to think of the things you can eliminate everyday, so you will have more time to do more “A” tasks that has serious consequences for your life.
So once you have your list you take all the “A” items and you list them.
So you have “A1”, “A2”, “A3” and so on, then you do “B1”, “B2”, “B3” and so on. You make your “not to do list” by stroking out the things that you don’t have to do today, and the rule is: If it does not have to be done, it has to not be done.
And then you start on your “A1” task, the most important thing and you start on it first thing in the morning.
This is the hardest of all self disciplines to learn, it is the essence of Tracy’s teachings worldwide, it is the key to supercharging the quality of your life and your results. And then you discipline yourself to concentrate on your “A1” task, until it is 100% complete.
If you can start every morning with a list, organized by priority, and start on your number 1 important task and stay with it until it is done, you will supercharge your life, you will release endorphins in your brain that will cause you to feel fantastic. You will motivate yourself and energize yourself and propel yourself into all your other tasks. You will get twice as much done on any day where you start and complete your major and most important tasks first thing in the morning, than you would on any other day not doing it.
The discipline of time management will then spread to all your other disciplines.
When you can demonstrate each morning that you have the self control, self mastery and self discipline to start and complete your most important task, you just feel fabulous about yourself.
The fourth discipline is the discipline of courage.
This goes back to what we said earlier about forcing yourself to do what you know you should do, especially in the area of courage.
The biggest obstacle to success is the fear of failure, it’s the fear that it won’t work out. It’s the fear of loss, of time or money or emotion. It’s a fear that goes back to early childhood and the only way we can succeed is by overcoming this fear, and this fear is captured in the words “I can’t”.
Fully 80% of the population is paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake. Why? Because in growing up you make lots of mistakes and you didn’t like how it felt, so eventually you become conditioned to not take any risk at all. So you have to overcome this in order to realize your potential. Remember, it is not you who are being rejected, it is simply your behavior, which can be changed.
What we know, is that courage, and the courage to face fears, is a habit, and it’s developed by practice. Just like typing with a typewriter, or riding a bicycle, you can actually develop the habit of courage, by practicing courage whenever courage is required.
Aristotle said: “If you desire to have a quality that you don’t have, act in every instance where the quality is called for as though you already had it, and you will have it.”
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”
What he said was to confront your fears. Now the natural human tendency, to seek the path of least resistance which hurts you in the long run, is also to avoid fear causing or fear inducing situations. Most of our fear problems seem to be attached to other people for the most part. It is confronting our boss, confronting a bad relationship, confronting a prospect, cold calling, calling up customers, facing rejection, failure, embarrassment and so on.
Instead of avoiding your fears, which will enable them to live on, confront your fears and the deaths of those fears are certain.
One of the best ways of confronting and killing these fears once and for all is to get a job as a salesperson doing cold calling and selling door to door on prospects. This job will get you pounded every single day. You’ll have to get rejected, have people slam the door in your face, have people shout at you, swear at you, and you have to do it every single day.
But if you do it and you get over it, you will reach a point where nothing will stop you for the rest of your life.
Not only will this generate you a lot of money, it will enable you to become fearless and unstoppable.
The reason you want to confront your fears, is not because of the incident itself, it is for what it does to your character. You want to demonstrate to yourself that you can face down a fear and look it straight in the eyes and suddenly it goes away, and you realize that your fear was in your own mind.
Here’s a wonderful thing about overcoming fears, if the fear of failure is summarized with the feeling “I can’t”, psychologists have found you can actually short circuit or override the fear, by saying to yourself very strongly “I can do it!” So whenever you’re afraid of anything, talking to somebody, confronting someone, dealing with something, say to yourself over and over again “I can do it!” and then just do it! And you’ll be amazed the fear disappears. Its almost like “poof” it’s gone!
If you short circuit your fear and follow through and take action despite of it, and you do this repeatedly and eventually you develop the habit of courage.
Here’s an exercise for you. Identify one fear situation today and use that as your challenge, use that as your test case. Face the fear down, smash it, look it straight in the eyes and deal with it direct head on, like a car hitting a wall until the fear is gone.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll look up and you’ll be a different person, for the rest of your life you’ll know that nothing that you’re afraid of, can stop you.
The fifth discipline is the discipline of excellent health habits.
Your goal should be to live to 100 in sound physical health.
Today the average life span in industrialized countries is approaching 80, which means that 50% of people will die above that and 50% of people will die below that.
If you’re well informed, which if you’re reading this you probably are, you will probably live to be 90, 95, or 100 years old. So set a goal to be 100 years old.
Ask yourself this question: “I want to live to be 100 years of age and be in great shape at the same time, what would I have to do in order to reach that goal?
What kind of life would I have to live physically in order to reach that goal?
First of all, design your ideal body. If your ideal body was perfect, in other words, weight, fitness, tone, stretch, flexibility, everything. If your body was perfect, what would it look like, and then make a list of all the things.
When you were a child your body was perfect and if it isn’t now, it only means you forgot to do a few things or you’ve done a few things you shouldn’t have done.
Start off with a clear picture of your perfect body and recognize that that is possible for you.
A great idea is to look in some of the magazines that contain pictures of people with beautiful bodies and cut out their pictures and cut out their heads and replace a picture of your head on their body. Then put these pictures around your house so that you see it every day everywhere. So that your subconscious is constantly seeing that picture of you in beautiful shape, beautiful condition and your subconscious starts to go to work on turning that vision and goal into reality.
Put it on your refrigerator door, put it on your bathroom mirror, just carry it around and start thinking of yourself as being superbly fit and healthy in every respect.
Discipline yourself to exercise daily. The very best time to do this is first thing in the morning, even if its just stretching, going for a walk, riding a bicycle.
Basically any form of physical fitness, it doesn’t matter what it is, if you do this first thing in the morning, your body will continue to burn calories throughout the day starting right after your morning exercise.
Not only will your blood be highly oxygenated and you’ll be more alert overall from your workout first thing in the morning, but you will also develop the discipline of starting on something you normally wouldn’t want to do and getting it done early on during the day.
Highly successful people get up at 5 or 5:30am and workout for 30 minutes or 60 minutes before they start planning, organizing or executing their day.
If you can discipline yourself to do that, it will have an enormous impact on your life.
Also when you exercise first thing in the morning for 30-60 minutes, your brain releases endorphins, which make you feel happy, exhilarated, more creative, more positive, more eager to get to work. So morning exercise just starts you off in a fantastic mental and physical condition.
Eliminate foods containing wheat, sugar and refined salt.
Eat fruits, vegetables and proteins.
Drink lots of water.
Eat before 6pm, everything you eat after 6pm you accumulate.
Everything you eat before 6pm burns up before you go to bed.
Don’t eat within 3 hours of going to bed.
Get a checkup at the doctor for a complete physical once a year, get your teeth cleaned 4 times a year. There’s a direct relationship between your gum health and the rest of your body.
Remember the Nike motto in regards to self discipline: Just do it!
If you think it’s a good idea, just do it! Don’t waste time, don’t make excuses, just do it!
The sixth discipline is the discipline of regular saving and investing.
One of the greatest goals that we have in life is to become financially independent. One of the greatest worries we have in life is our bills and our debts.
The greatest fear we have in life is poverty, or ending up our life with no money.
So the very act of starting to provide for yourself financially transforms your thinking about yourself and your life. It makes you a happy person.
So set a goal of financial independence. Make a solid and firm decision that you’re going to be financially independent. And resolve to get out of debt and stay out of debt.
To get out of debt and stay out of debt you have to discipline yourself.
When you’re in debt you are trapped and you won’t be able to do any of the things you want to do until you get out of debt. So if you’re in debt, your job is to get out of debt.
Here is a very interesting point from a smart money manager:
When we are young, we associate money with pleasure.
We get our first allowance and we go and spend it on candy.
So we become conditioned to think that when we have money we go spend it on something that gives us pleasure. This is transferred to adulthood.
Whenever we get a substantial amount of money our first thought is to spend it on something that gives us pleasure.
This view on how to handle money is not beneficial to you and is in fact quite the opposite. What this does is that it keeps you broke all your life.
What you should do instead is to rewire or recondition yourself.
Instead of saying “I like spending money”, you say “I like saving money.”
And you begin to think about how much you enjoy having money in the bank.
How much you enjoy saving. How much enjoy delayed gratification.
How much you enjoy the idea of moving towards financial independence.
When you develop the habit of being happy about saving money you start to find yourself more and more careful with your expenditures.
The rule for financial independence is to save from 10-30% of your income throughout your life. And as your income grows, keep saving more and more and invest it wisely. Use compound interest to increase your saving amount substantially without risk to losing any of it.
Don’t worry too much about the stock market going up and down.
The average increase on the US stock market over the last 100 years is 8-10% each year, taking good years and bad years into consideration.
Even if you’re in debt you can save a percentage of your income.
Start with 1% and gradually as you get used to living on less and less increase the saving percentage to 2,3,4,5% and so on over time.
Within a year you’ll have developed a habit of living on 85-90% of your income, and automatically saving the balance.
You can even have the amount deducted from your paycheck automatically so you never see the amount in your regular account.
Your paycheck goes into the bank and the amount is automatically deducted into your savings account or to an investment account. Soon you develop the habit of living on less than you earn, and you change your thinking from “I enjoy spending” to “I enjoy saving.”
A key way to saving money is to delay and to defer major purchase decisions.
If you think about buying a car, a stereo, a washing machine or a new computer, if you think about it for 30 days, in many cases you won’t buy it at all. Or if you do buy it, you’ll make a better decision before you do so.
One of the smartest things of all is to buy things that are used rather than things that are new. Did you know that millionaires never buy new cars?
According to studies millionaires wait until the cars are 2 years old and is coming off lease, or has been driven for 2 years and someone is trading it in and is still under warranty for another 3 years. You can even get extended warranties on many cars. You can turn it in on a service shop, they’ll clean it up and give you another 5 year warranty on a 2 year old car.
How much would this save you? Between 10 and 20 000 dollars on a new car.
What do you do with that money? You save it and let it grow with compound interest.
If all you did was buy a used car every 5-8 years, drive it until it falls apart and then buy another one, then the money you’d save just from buying cars can make you rich. It can accumulate with compound interest into hundreds of thousands of dollars by the end of your working lifetime.
If you’re going to invest, the rule is to investigate before you invest.
2/3rds of all success in investing or business, is avoiding making mistakes by making the wrong decisions, or by making decisions too quickly.
So if you’re going to invest in anything the rule is: Spend as much time investigating the investment as you spent making the money.
You’ll find that quick investment decisions are invariably poor investment decisions. Only invest in things that you know and that you understand.
Don’t invest in somebody else’s idea or scheme or business, only invest in things that you know.
The number one rule is: Don’t lose money!
Whatever you do don’t lose money, if there’s a possibility of losing a little bit of money and you do it, you’re probably going to lose a lot
So be very careful. Once you earn the money hold on to it.
It is easy to lose money, but its hard to earn and keep it, and it’s the most important discipline of all.
Another discipline is to pay cash as often as possible and for as much as possible. Get rid of all your credit cards except for one and only use that one when you really have to.
Be very active in paying for items in cash, this will really hyposensitizes you to how much it’s costing, and causes you to spend less money.
W. Clement Stone said: “If you cannot save money, the seeds of greatness are not in you” The primary reason why you save your money and accumulate it carefully is because it gives you two things. First of all it gives you freedom.
You know you got money in the bank. If you don’t like your job, you can walk away from it, because you got money in the bank.
The second thing it gives you is opportunity. If an opportunity comes along you’re prepared to take advantage of it , you don’t have to say “I’m sorry, I don’t have any money, I can’t afford it, I’m broke.” And people just shake their head in pity and just walk away.
As an adult you should always have opportunity money put aside, and when you have it you feel great about yourself. The difference between a person with a little money and a person with no money is like night and day.
A person with a little money feels great, a person with little money always feels inferior, anxious, worried, concerned, irritable, short tempered.
You know exactly what I’m talking about.
The seventh discipline is the discipline of hard work.
There’s nothing that will help you more than for you to develop a reputation as a hard worker.
In the studies of self made millionaires they said that the millionaires originally didn’t have better education, better talent, better knowledge, but they were willing to work harder than anyone else. Most self made millionaires work 60 – 70 hours per week for 5-10-15 years before they break through. Most other people are trying to get by on 5 days a week, and then during those 5 days a week they don’t work very hard at all.
Thomas Jefferson was asked if he believes in luck, his reply was the following:
“Yes I believe in luck, and the harder I work, the luckier I become.”
So the harder you work, the luckier you become. The harder you work the more opportunities you have, the more doors open up to you, the more opportunities you see.
The average worker wastes about 50% of their time with idle chit chat with their co workers, taking coffee breaks, reading the paper, lunches, surfing the internet, doing all kinds of things that don’t contribute anything to the work.
So here is the rule that will make you successful, happy and rich:
Work all the time you work.
Don’t waste a single minute, work all the time you work all day long until you’re done. If someone interrupts you, say that you have to get “back to work”.
Nobody will ever stop you when you say you have to get back to work.
They’ll go away. Remember that the greatest time wasters of the world are other people who take up your time with idle chit chat and worthless gossip.
You have to avoid time wasters, in every single company, these people go around and they’re like a virus. They infect every person they talk to, stay away from timewasters.
Here’s a way to double your productivity, performance, outcome and income as well as become one of the most valuable people in your industry: Its very simple, start 1 hour earlier. And when you start, get to work. If the starting time in your company is 8:30, start at 7:30 or 7. Where are you going to get the time? Get up earlier and get going. Work through lunch, there’s no law saying that you have to go out and kill and hour or an hour and a half at lunch.
Eat at your desk, eat quickly or eat on the go. Use that time to work. Don’t use that time to hang around.
Work when you’re at work and have your fun later, knowing that you’ve done a fantastic job and you’ve gotten a lot done.
And finally work one hour later. Be the last one to leave, be the person that turns off the lights.
This has similarities to an entrepreneurial startup, a business in this situation is usually being run by someone who is really driving it forward and you’ll find that the business owner is usually the first one there, works through the whole day and is usually the last one to leave.
The business owner is usually working on Saturdays and Sundays as well.
At the end of the day the business owner got a beautiful home and house on the hill, beautiful cars, beautiful vacations, a balcony, a yacht, and everyone is saying “Boy, that guy sure is lucky.”
No, they’re not lucky, they just worked all the time they worked.
If you work 3 extra hours, start earlier, work harder, stay later, you will add 6 hours of productive work to your day.
Every hour of uninterrupted work when nobody is there, translates into 3 hours of productivity when there’s people around interrupting you.
So keep asking at work: “What is the most valuable use of my time right now?”
When you get your answer, do only that.
Keep saying “Back to work” whenever you get distracted.
The eighth discipline is the discipline of continues learning.
The rule is: To earn more you must learn more.
If you want to earn more than you’re earning today, you must learn new knowledge and skills that make that possible.
Jim Rohn said: “Work at least as hard on yourself as you do on your work.”
How do you do this? You read material within your field of work daily.
You read 60 minutes a day on material within your field of work a day.
A little in the morning and a little in the evening. This will translate into one book a week. One book a week will translate in over 50 books a year.
The average adult reads less than one book a year.
If you read more than 50 books a year that’s the equivalent of getting a PhD in your field, every single year.
Just reading every day will make you one of the most proficient, most skilled, and ultimately one of the highest paid people within your field.
Listen to CDs in your car, the average person drives 500 to 1000 hours a year.
That’s the equivalent of 3-6 months of 40 hour weeks.
That’s the equivalent of 1-2 fulltime university semesters.
Just listening to educational material in your car, will make you one of the best informed people in your field.
And finally in continues learning, attend seminars.
Take courses, take structured courses given by experts, given by authorities.
You can learn more in a half day or a day from an expert than you might learn on your own in years.
Sometimes you can walk out of a seminar with a new idea that will increase your income 5 times within the first 30 days.
Ideas like this in the form of wisdom nuggets will change your life forever.
The average income in America increases about 3% a year.
With additional knowledge and skill, you increase the rate at which your income goes up.
If you get new knowledge and skill, you learn more, your income goes up 10% per year. You’ll double your income in 7 years. If your income goes up 25% per year, you’ll double your income in 2 years and 8 months.
In other words, the more you learn, the more you earn.
The benefits of continues learning are life changing.
Here’s the final ninth discipline, the discipline of persistence.
The discipline of persistence says that the greatest test of self discipline is when you persist in the face of adversity and you drive yourself forward to complete your tasks 100%.
The test of self discipline is when you can drive yourself to keep on keeping on, even when everyone around you feels like quitting and you feel like quitting as well.
Courage has two parts, the first part of courage to begin, the courage to start, the courage to launch, in the face of failure with no guarantee of success.
But the second part of courage is the courage to endure, the courage to persist and to keep on going when you’re tired, when you’re disappointed, when nothing is working, and there’s no guarantee of success and maybe even a very large likelihood of failure.
This is really important:
We say that: Persistence is your measure of your belief in yourself and what you’re doing.
If you truly believe in the goodness and rightness and value of what you’re doing you will persist regardless of what’s happening on the outside.
The more you believe in the rightness and goodness of what you’re doing, the more you will persist. And wonderfully enough, the more you persist the more you believe in yourself and the more you believe in the value of your work.
Persistence seems to change your character.
In reality persistence is self discipline in action.
In the final analyzes, your persistence is your measure of self discipline.
Self discipline leads to self esteem. Every time you practice self discipline you feel better about yourself, which leads to greater persistence, which leads to even greater self discipline, and you get on to an upwards spiral in life.
Napoleon Hill said: Persistence is to the character of a man or a woman as carbon is to steel.
You actually make yourself, you shape yourself, you form yourself, you build yourself into a superior human being, a better and stronger person by persisting when you feel like quitting.
Remember, every time you have the tendency to quit, every time you feel like giving up or cutting corners or stopping before you finish your task, say “wait a minute, this is a test! This is a test of my character. This is a test to see what I’m made of. And it’s not what I’m working on that counts, it’s the person I’m becoming by either persisting or quitting.”
So always persist until you have completed the task.
And as you burst through your brain floods with endorphins and you feel wonderful about yourself. Eventually you develop a habit of persistence and you become unstoppable.
Here are the seven benefits of practicing self discipline in every area of your life:
1. The habit of self discipline guarantees your success.
Every single successful person has that fundamental quality of persistence and tenacity, that fundamental quality of self discipline to make themselves do what they should do, whether they feel like it or not.
2. When you practice self discipline you’ll get more done, faster and better than other people. You’ll get more results, you’ll become more productive, you’ll have higher levels of performance. You’ll bring yourself to the attention of people who can help
you and support you and move you forward.
3. You’ll be paid more and promoted faster at any job in any situation.
The people with high levels of self discipline who get the results, are the ones who are immediately
moved to the front of the line of life.
4. You’ll have a greater sense of self control, self reliance and personal power. You’ll feel that you can do anything that you put your mind to because you have the ability
to make and discipline yourself to do it anyway.
5. Self discipline is the key to self esteem, self respect and personal pride.
Every time you discipline yourself you like yourself more. Every time you discipline yourself you see yourself as a better person. Every time you discipline yourself you feel great about yourself, you feel personally proud of yourself.
It affects your personality in a very positive way.
6. The greater your self-discipline is, the greater your self confidence will be, and the lower will your fear of failure and rejection be. Eventually you’ll develop a type of self confidence that will enable you to walk through walls.
7. With self-discipline you’ll have the strength of character to persist over all obstacles until you succeed. With self-discipline you achieve personal greatness.
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