Gifted to me by Dima Shpak. Highly practical, instructive, repetitive, lacking nuance, optimistic — in other words, a self-help book. My hope is to begin implementing some of the practices (particularly with regard to goal setting, writing, and skill development).
Quotes:
CHAPTER 1: CHANGE YOUR THINKING, CHANGE YOUR LIFE
Men resemble their times more than their fathers
Your thoughts create the conditions of your life
If you change your thinking, you change your life.
The quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life.
The top 10 percent of people in terms of income and income growth think about what they want and how to get it. They think about where they're going and how to get there.
Top people think about what they want and how to get it. Average people think about what they don't want and who's to blame.
What you think about most of the time is determined by your self-concept.
Your self-concept is the bundle of beliefs about yourself, your abilities, and your world that determines the way you see the world around you.
The greater clarity you have about your ideals, the easier it is for you to make the best decisions in the short term in order to become the kind of person you want to be in the long term.
develop clarity about who you are, what you believe in, what you really care about, and what you stand for.
everybody plays a picture in their mind before they go into a situation. Successful people replay the picture of a previous success; unsuccessful people replay a picture of a previous failure.
Choose to think of your best experiences prior to every event.
The very act of setting big goals causes you to like yourself more and to see yourself in a more positive light.
The biggest obstacle to maximum performance, happiness, health, and everything you want to accomplish is your negative emotions. They are mostly based on fear and doubt. They're usually triggered by destructive criticism from one or both parents in early childhood.
The two negative habit patterns that hold most people back are the fear of failure and the fear of rejection or criticism.
The starting point of transforming your thinking is to change your explanatory style-the way you interpret your experience to yourself.
There is no failure in life, only feedback. Remember, everything happens to you for a reason.
The keys to success are, first of all, you have to know exactly what you want. Second, you have to determine the price you'll have to pay. Third, you'll have to resolve to pay that price.
it takes five to seven years for you to achieve mastery in your field
Ask yourself this question on a regular basis: what one skill, if I developed it in an excellent fashion, would help me the most to achieve my financial goals?
CHAPTER 2: UNLOCKING YOUR POTENTIAL
Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than facts." Inspirational speaker Denis Waitley said, "Your imagination is your preview of life's coming attractions."
It's like a teeter-totter: the higher your self-esteem, the lower your fears; the more you like yourself, the less you fear failure and the less you feel criticism. The more you like yourself, the more willing you are to try different things because you know that temporary failures or disapproval don't reflect on your value at all.
the law of control. It says that you feel positive about yourself to the degree to which you feel you are in control of your own life.
Stress comes from feeling that you are controlled by outside people and circumstances.
your intensely held beliefs become your realities. The law of belief says that you always act in a manner consistent with what you believe.
your outer world tends to correspond to your inner world like a mirror image. Wherever you look, there you are.
your primary job in life is to provide the mental equivalent of what you want to enjoy on the outside.
If you cannot write down an idea, making the connection from the head to the hand, you probably don't understand it.
Your goal should be so clear that a child could read it and explain it exactly to another child.
The law of accumulation says that success is the result of hundreds and even thousands of small efforts and sacrifices that no one ever sees or appreciates.
You can never tell where great ideas are going to come from, so you have to take in a lot of good ideas.
CHAPTER 3: MOTIVATING YOURSELF TO PEAK PERFORMANCE
Nobody’s smarter than you: nobody’s better than you. They are just doing different things in a different way.
if you don't consciously and deliberately talk to yourself in a positive way, you default automatically to negative thinking.
Think and talk about what you want and how to get it, because whatever you think and talk about, you're going to draw into your life.
Whenever something goes wrong — whenever you have a problem — immediately stop and say, "Well, that's good," then go into the situation and find out what is good.
Great souls are those who learn great lessons from small events.
Responsibility is the dividing line between childhood and adulthood.
As Henry Kissinger said, "All you get for solving problems is the authority to solve even bigger problems."
There seems to be a direct relationship between positive, constructive action and self-confidence.
Goethe said, "Everything is hard before it's easy."
CHAPTER 4: HOW TO INFLUENCE OTHERS
Approximately 85 percent of your success will be determined by your ability to communicate effectively with others.
your ability to persuade others is the highest form of emotional intelligence that you can develop and the true measure of how effective you are as a person.
Ed Foreman used to say, "If you can see Joe Jones him through Joe Jones' eyes, you can sell Joe Jones what Joe Jones buys."
Start off by thinking about the other person, and you'll be amazed at how much better a communicator you are.
The more questions you ask, the more control you have in the conversation.
Liking is the most important factor in communicating effectively in business. The more people like you, the more open they are to buying from you. Credibility and trust are the most powerful reasons for being persuaded by another person.
CHAPTER 5: GOALS: THE BUILDING BLOCKS
Success is goals; all else is commentary
Napoleon Hill once said, "The primary reason for failure is that people do not develop new plans to replace those plans that didn't work."
CHAPTER 6: TIME MANAGEMENT
You can’t manage time; you can only manage yourself -Peter Drucker
CHAPTER 7: WEALTH CREATION
To achieve financial success, you must continually seek ways to add value to whatever you are doing. Resolve to always put in more than you take out, to add more value than you charge.
There are never any traffic jams on the extra mile.
The key qualities required to start and build your own business, the major sources of wealth in our world today, are courage and skill. Everybody starts off with a lack of courage and a lack of skill. But when you do the thing you fear, the courage comes afterward. When you use the skill in which you are weak, the ability comes afterward.
No: you do it with the skill that you have, and additional skill comes afterwards. This is the key to success.
Study and understand every aspect of any investments you make for the rest of your life. If you don't understand an investment, don't put your money into it.
CHAPTER 8: HOW TO BECOME A MILLIONAIRE
You can get everything you want in life if you just help other people get the things that they want. -Zig Ziglar
self-discipline is the master key to riches: the discipline to make yourself do what you should do when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.
CHAPTER 9: THE KEYS TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Once you start, focus 80 percent of your time on sales and marketing
Learn from every mistake and experience. You’ll find that all business is trial and error.
CHAPTER 10: SELF-DISCIPLINE
Jim Rohn said, "Discipline weighs ounces, but regret weighs tons."
The payoff for practicing self-discipline is immediate … you like and respect yourself more. Your self-esteem increases, your self-image improves, your brain releases endorphins that make you feel happy and proud.
Thomas Edison once said that thinking is the hardest discipline of all, which is why so few people do it.
Aristotle once said, "Wisdom, the ability to make good decisions, is a combination of experience plus reflection."
Courage is a habit developed by practicing it whenever it is required. As Emerson said, "Do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain."
Actor Glenn Ford once said, "If you do not do the thing you fear, the fear controls your life."
As Thomas Jefferson said, "The harder you work, the luckier you get."
Jim Rohn is famous for saying, "Work at least as hard on yourself as you do on your work."
CHAPTER 11: THE CHALLENGE RESPONSE
Sometimes it seems that problems are the number one fact of life … That’s why problem-solving is one of the most important skills you need to gain for success.
The only real antidote to worry is purposeful action in the direction of your goals.
Mark Twain said, "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear."
the realty principle facing the world as tis rather than as you wish it would be.
CHAPTER 12: SIMPLIFYING YOUR LIFE
Unhappy people have one thing in common: they have no clear goals — no sense of direction. They have many wishes and hopes and desire, but do not have goals to which they are committed.
Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy? -Gerald Jampolsky