"A person is buffeted by circumstances so long as he believes himself to be the creature of outside conditions." - As A Man Thinketh

One of the great weaknesses of our society today is the growing attitude of victimization. Many people claim themselves to be victims of some outside force. "I had to file bankruptcy because of my ex-wife…", "If my company hadn't laid me off…", "If that driver hadn't pulled out in front of me…"

When we are victims of circumstances, or as James Allen says, a "creature of outside conditions", we have no power. We have given over the power in our life to the circumstances. The longer we give power to our circumstances the worse or circumstances become.

In his book, "Above Life's Turmoil", Allen writes, "You imagine your circumstances as being separate from yourself, but they are intimately related to your thought world. Nothing appears without an adequate cause."

To get control of our circumstances we must first acknowledge personal responsibility for being where we are. That was the hardest part for me because the "victim" in all of us doesn't want to take that responsibility.

When we take the responsibility we must then take control of our thoughts. And, yes, in the beginning that can be hard. It seems sometimes that it's our nature to first think negatively. But that's just because it's the habit we´ve developed. And like any habit, it can be changed by replacing it with the habit of thinking the right way.

One of my favourite teachers, Emmet Fox, writes: "You are not happy because you are well. You are well because you are happy. You are not depressed because trouble has come to you, but trouble has come because you were depressed. You can change your thoughts and feelings, and then the outer things will change to correspond, and indeed there is no other way of working."

And that´s worth thinking about.

--Vic Johnson

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Motivation is a contraction of motive and action. An inner force that compels behavior, it comes from within, not from any external circumstance. You know where you're going because you have a compelling image inside, not a travel poster on the wall, a financial statement with a big bonus, or a slogan in the hall. The performance of many externally motivated individuals begins declining as soon as they win contests of one sort or another. I've personally witnessed this among Super Bowl champions and World Cup teams that lost the incentive to maintain their excellence after winning the cup, the honors, and the cash.

If you're really committed to peak performance and leadership, you must motivate yourself from within. Studies of achievers show that inner drives for excellence and independence are far more powerful than desire for wealth, status or recognition.

The Inner Drive
Behavioral scientists have found that independent desire for excellence is the most telling predictor of significant achievement.

In other words, the success of our efforts depends less on the efforts themselves than on our motives. The most successful companies, like the most successful men and women in almost all fields, have achieved their greatness out of a desire to express what they felt had to be expressed. Often it was a desire to use their skills to their utmost in order to solve a problem. This is not to say that many of them did not also earn a great deal of money and prestige. William Shakespeare, Thomas Edison, Estee Lauder, Walt Disney, Oprah Winfrey, Sam Walton and Bill Gates all became wealthy. But far more than thoughts of profit, the key to their success was inspiration and inner drive by creating or providing excellence in a product or a service. All were motivated by the desire to produce the very best that was in them.

Go for the Inner Applause
The late Ray Kroc, a former neighbor of mine who founded McDonald's Corporation when he was in his fifties, stressed the importance of people working for the inner satisfaction, not just for the money. Ray said most people find it difficult to associate applause with their work when they can't hear literal applause – but the important applause should come from within. It is the faster heartbeat, the pride and satisfaction of accomplishment.

Kroc told the University of Southern California's Business School that the first thing a business executive needs is love of an idea.

If you don't love your concept, drop it. If you prostitute yourself at an early age by taking a job where the money is, you´ll be working for money all your life. Loving their work is particularly important for younger people. If they lose that love early, they may never grow to anywhere near their potential for self-actualization.

Hire People Who Have Empowered Themselves

An inner drive for excellence motivates you always to be the best you possible can in whatever you do. Leaders and managers should take special note hear. They must be careful in their use of external motivators – money, perks, prestigious offices and titles – in trying to inspire their team members and employees. Enduring motivation must always come ultimately from within the individual.

That's why empowerment and vision are so crucial to team performance and quality. Their power and their vision, not those of the leader must compel team members. Interviewing potential members, you should look for internally motivated individuals who hold their work important for its own sake, who love their field or their industry, who seek the exhilaration of testing their limits and contributing to the world. Be wary if they show more interest in your compensation package than in their contribution package.

Commit to achieving peak performance and leadership, by motivating yourself from within!
-- Denis Waitley

Perseverance is about as important to achievement as gasoline is to driving a car. Sure, there will be times when you feel like you're spinning your wheels, but you'll always get out of the rut with genuine perseverance. Without it, you won't even be able to start your engine.

The opposite of perseverance is procrastination. Perseverance means you never quit. Procrastination usually means you never get started, although the inability to finish something is also a form of procrastination.

Ask people why they procrastinate and you'll often hear something like this: "I'm a perfectionist. Everything has to be just right before I can get down to work. No distractions, not too much noise, no telephone calls interrupting me, and of course I have to be feeling well physically, too. I can't work when I have a headache." The other end of procrastination - being unable to finish - also has a perfectionist explanation: "I'm just never satisfied. I'm my own harshest critic. If all the it's aren't dotted and all the t's aren't crossed, I just can't consider that I'm done. That's just the way I am, and I'll probably never change."

Do you see what's going on here? A fault is being turned into a virtue. The perfectionist is saying that his standards are just too high for this world. This fault-into-virtue syndrome is a common defense when people are called upon to discuss their weaknesses, but in the end it's just a very pious kind of excuse making. It certainly doesn't have anything to do with what's really behind procrastination.

Remember, the basis of procrastination could be fear of failure. That's what perfectionism really is, once you take a hard look at it. What's the difference whether you're afraid of being less than perfect or afraid of anything else? You're still paralyzed by fear. What's the difference whether you never start or never finish? You're still stuck. You're still going nowhere. You're still overwhelmed by whatever task is before you. You’re still allowing yourself to be dominated by a negative vision of the future in which you see yourself being criticized, laughed at, punished, or ridden out of town on a rail. Of course, this negative vision of the future is really a mechanism that allows you to do nothing. It's a very convenient mental tool.

I'm going to tell you how to overcome procrastination. I'm going to show you how to turn procrastination into perseverance, and if you do what I suggest, the process will be virtually painless. It involves using two very powerful principles that foster productivity and perseverance instead of passivity and procrastination.

The first principle is: Break it Down.

No matter what you're trying to accomplish, whether it's writing a book, climbing a mountain, or painting a house the key to achievement is your ability to break down the task into manageable pieces and knock them off one at one time. Focus on accomplishing what's right in front of you at this moment. Ignore what's off in the distance someplace. Substitute real-time positive thinking for negative future visualization. That's the first all- important technique for bringing an end to procrastination.

Suppose I were to ask you if you could write a four hundred-page novel. If you're like most people, that would sound like an impossible task. But suppose I ask you a different question. Suppose I ask if you can write a page and a quarter a day for one year. Do you think you could do it? Now the task is starting to seem more manageable. We're breaking down the four-hundred-page book into bite-size pieces. Even so, I suspect many people would still find the prospect intimidating. Do you know why? Writing a page and a quarter may not seem so bad, but you're being asked to look ahead one whole year. When people start to do look that far ahead, many of them automatically go into a negative mode. So let me formulate the idea of writing a book in yet another way. Let me break it down even more.

Suppose I was to ask you: can you fill up a page and a quarter with words-not for a year, not for a month, not even for a week, but just today? Don't look any further ahead than that. I believe most people would confidently declare that they could accomplish that. Of course, these would be the same people who feel totally incapable of writing a whole book.

If I said the same thing to those people tomorrow - if I told them, I don't want you to look back, and I don't want you to look ahead, I just want you to fill up a page and a quarter this very day - do you think they could do it?

One day at a time. We've all heard that phrase. That's what we're doing here. We're breaking down the time required for a major task into one-day segments, and we're breaking down the work involved in writing a four hundred-page book into page-and-a-quarter increments.

Keep this up for one year, and you'll write the book. Discipline yourself to look neither forward nor backward, and you can accomplish things you never thought you could possibly do. And it all begins with those three words: break it down.

My second technique for defeating procrastination is also only three words long. The three words are: Write it Down. We know how important writing is to goal setting. The writing you'll do for beating procrastination is very similar. Instead of focusing on the future, however, you're now going to be writing about the present just as you experience it every day. Instead of describing the things you want to do or the places you want to go, you're going to describe what you actually do with your time, and you're going to keep a written record of the places you actually go.

In other words, you're going to keep a diary of your activities. And you're going to be amazed by the distractions, detours, and downright wastes of time you engage in during the course of a day. All of these get in the way of achieving your goals. For many people, it's almost like they planned it that way, and maybe at some unconscious level they did. The great thing about keeping a time diary is that it brings all this out in the open. It forces you to see what you're actually doing... and what you're not doing.

The time diary doesn't have to be anything elaborate. Just buy a little spiral notebook that you can easily carry in your pocket. When you go to lunch, when you drive across town, when you go to the dry cleaners, when you spend some time shooting the breeze at the copying machine, make a quick note of the time you began the activity and the time it ends. Try to make this notation as soon as possible; if it's inconvenient to do it immediately, you can do it later. But you should make an entry in your time diary at least once every thirty minutes, and you should keep this up for at least a week.

Break it down. Write it down. These two techniques are very straightforward. But don't let that fool you: these are powerful and effective productivity techniques that allow you put an end to procrastination and help you get started to achieving your goals.

To Your Success,
Jim Rohn

Decide How to React
It is not what happens to you that counts. It is how you react to what happens to you, especially when you have unexpected problems of any kind.

Here are four things you can do to assure that your attitude is the very best it can be, under all circumstances.

Focus on the Future
First, whatever challenges you face, focus on the future rather than on the past. Instead of worrying about who did what and who is to blame, focus on where you want to be and what you want to do. Get a clear mental image of your ideal successful future, and then take whatever action you can to begin moving in that direction. Get your mind, your thoughts, and your mental images on the future.

Think About the Future
Second, whenever you´re faced with a difficulty, focus on the solution rather than on the problem. Think and talk about the ideal solution to the obstacle or setback, rather than wasting time rehashing and reflecting on the problem.

Solutions are inherently positive, whereas problems are inherently negative. The instant that you begin thinking in terms of solutions, you become a positive and constructive human being.

Look for the Good
Third, assume that something good is hidden within each difficulty or challenge. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, a major proponent of positive thinking, once said, “Whenever God wants to give us a gift, he wraps it up in a problem.’ The bigger the gift you have coming, the bigger the problem you will receive. But the wonderful thing is that if you look for the gift, you will always find it.

Seek the Valuable Lesson
Fourth, assume that whatever situation you are facing at the moment is exactly the right situation you need to ultimately be successful. This situation has been sent to you to help you learn something, to help you become better, to help you expand and grow.

Decide to Be Positive
A Positive Mental Attitude is indispensable to your success. You can be as positive as you want to be if you will simply think about the future, focus on the solution and look for the good. If you do what other successful people do, if you use your mind to exert mental control over the situation, you will be positive and cheerful most of the time. And you will reap the benefits enjoyed by all successful people.

Action Exercises
Here are three steps you can take immediately to put these ideas into action:

First, become solution-oriented with every difficulty you face. Make a habit of looking for the answers to your questions, the solutions to your problems.

Second, seek for the valuable lesson in every adversity. Make a list of every idea or insight you can gain from every setback or difficulty.

Third, think on paper. Take some time to write out every detail of the problem, and then take the most logical next step to solve it.

-- Brian Tracy

In my years teaching people to be successful, I have seen that basically people break their lives down into two major parts: Wealth-building and the rest of their lives. Having done a lot of reflection on these two topics - wealth and life - I am coming to some new conclusions about how to perceive the two.

Until recently I thought that there was a significant difference in how we should tackle the two areas. In fact, I thought that the two topics should be addressed in almost opposite fashion.

You see, wealth-building is just math. While life -- Life is art.

Think back with me to high school. Most of us were required to take math and most of us probably took art as well.

Now, think about your final exams in the two areas. Your math paper was graded on hard facts:

Ten times ten is always one-hundred
Thirty divided by three is always ten
Seven plus seven is always fourteen
Fifty minus twenty-five is always twenty-five

There is always just one answer in math. The answers are hard fact, set in stone. Math is a science. It is formulaic. You can know the outcome before it happens, every time.

But what about your final art project? Art is much more subjective. "Beauty," they say, "is in the eye of the beholder." There is no one right answer.

Think of the different styles of the famous artists:

Renoir. Monet. Picasso. Rockwell. Warhol.

Different people find different styles beautiful, and that is what makes art, art.

So how does this fit with wealth-building and life? Wealth-building is like math:

If you add $1000 to your retirement account each month and gain seven percent interest over twenty years, you can know now how much you will have then. It is math. If you buy a rental property for $200,000 now and it increases in value by three percent a year, you know exactly how much you will be able to sell it for in ten years. The beauty of math is in the knowing. You can work the system, set it on auto-pilot and the math does the work for you, and you know the outcome.

But life? Life is art. And that is the beauty of life. You do not know how it is going to turn out. Life, like art, is always changing. Different people provide different colors. When you make a mistake, you can go back, erase it or even paint right over it. You can change the scenery. Life, like art, is ever evolving, and what looks good to one person is of no interest to another. And that is what makes life beautiful.

Another lesson I think we can draw is that in life we should do our math, of course, but life isn't made up of just wealth-building. Wealth-building should serve our ability to live our lives. Jesus, the master teacher, said that our lives are not made up of the abundance of our possessions. He didn't mean that possessions aren't good, just that wealth isn't what life is all about.

So let me ask you: Are you spending more time on your math or your art? Do your math. Everybody should do their very best at their wealth-building plan so they can take care of themselves and their families.

But life is about the art. What does your canvas look like? What kind of picture are you painting? What kind of pot are you creating? What kind of statue are you sculpting? Take your time, make bold strokes, use brilliant colors, and make of your life the most beautiful masterpiece that you can.

In other words, do your math so you can focus on your art.

To Your Success,
Jim Rohn

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