http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFx_TolJk64
I've written this book to challenge you to awaken the giant power of decision and to claim the birthright of unlimited power, radiant vitality, and joyous passion that is yours.
These blog posts are like little movies that depict a quest to greatness
Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all of our resources on mastering a single area of our lives. When we focus consistently on improvement in any area, we develop unique distinctions on how to make that area better.
One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular. In fact, I believe most people fail in life simply because they major in minor things. At a very early age, I developed a belief that we're all here to contribute something unique, that deep within each of us lies a special gift. You see, I truly believe that we all have a sleeping giant within us. Each of us has our own bit of genius just waiting to be tapped.
1) Creating lasting change
Making a true decision means committing to achieving a result, and then cutting yourself off from any other possibility. The way to make better decisions is to make more of them. Make sure you learn from each one.
Gaining a single distinction (sole piece of information) that can be used to change the course of your life empowers us to make better decisions and create the results that we desire for ourselves. You must know that in any moment a decision you make can change the course of your life forever: the very next person you stand behind in line or sit next to on an airplane, the very next phone call you make or receive, the very next movie you see or book you read or page you turn. It might even be something you already know and this is the time it finally sinks in and you begin to use it. Anything you choose to do could be the one single thing that causes the floodgates to open, and all the things that you've been waiting for to fall into place.
The three decisions that control your destiny are: your decisions about what to focus on, you decision about what things mean to you, and your decisions about what to do to create the results you desire.
It's likely that whatever challenges you have in your life currently could have been avoided by some better decisions upstream. Make a decision to start paddling like crazy in a new direction and to start planning ahead.
Your brain has already constructed an internal system for making decisions. This system acts like an invisible force, directing all of your thoughts, actions, and feelings, both good and bad, every moment that you live. It controls how you evaluate everything in your life and it's largely driven by your subconscious mind. The scary thing is that most people never consciously set this system up. Instead it's been installed through the years by sources as diverse as parents, peers, teachers, television shows, advertisers, and the mainstream culture.
This system is comprised by five components: 1) your core beliefs and unconscious rules, 2) your life values, 3) your references, 4) the habitual questions you ask yourself, 5) the emotional states that you experience in each moment.
I have determined that no matter what decisions I make, I'll be flexible, I'll look at the consequences, learn from them, and use those lessons to make better decisions in the future.
If you take action 10 times a day while other people act on a new skill 1 time a month, you will have 10 months of experience in a day, you will soon master the skill and will likely, ironically be considered "talented" and "lucky"
I became an excellent public speaker because, rather than once a week, I booked myself to speak three times a day to anyone who would listen. While others in my organization had 48 speaking engagements a year, I would have a similar number within two weeks. Within a month, I'd have two years of experience. And within a year, I'd have a decade's worth of growth. My associates talked about how "lucky" I was to have been born with such an "innate" talent. I tried to tell them what I'm telling you now: mastery takes as long as you want it to take. By the way, were all of my speeches great? Far from it! But I did make sure that I learned from every experience and that I somehow improved until very soon I could enter a room of any size and be able to reach people from virtually all walks of life.
No matter how prepared you are, there's one thing that I can absolutely guarantee: if you're on the river of life, it's likely you're going to hit a few rocks. That's not being negative; that's being accurate. The key is that when you do run aground, instead of beating yourself up for being such a "failure," remember that there are no failures in life. There are only results. Learn from those results.
Ultimate Success Formula:
In order to succeed you must have a long-term focus. Most of the challenges that we have in our personal lives come from a short-term focus. Success and failure are not overnight experiences. It's the small decisions along the way that cause people to fail. As a society, we're so focused on instantaneous gratification that our short-term solutions often become long-term problems. Our kids have trouble paying attention in school long enough to think, memorize, and learn partly because they've become addicted to instantaneous gratification from constant exposure to things like video games, TV commercials, and MTV (47).
Know that it's your decisions, not your conditions, that determine your destiny.
3) The Force That Shapes Your Life
What determines the difference in human actions? Pain or Pleasure. It is clear that humans are not random, everything we do we do for a reason. Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure.
Procrastination essentially is believing at some level that taking action in this moment would be more painful than just putting it off. Yet when we put off something for so long, suddenly the pressure to do it is too great and you link to your brain that not taking action is more painful than putting it off.
Even though you know that all these actions would benefit you--that they could definitely bring pleasure to your life--you fail to act simply because in that moment you associate more pain to doing what's necessary than missing the opportunity.
For most people, the fear of loss is much greater than the desire for gain. Why is it that people can experience pain yet fail to change? They haven't experienced enough pain yet; they haven't hit what I call emotional threshold (you hit a level of pain you weren't willing to settle for anymore).
We've all experienced those times in our lives when we've said, "I've had it--never again--this must change now." This is the magical moment when pain becomes our friend. It drives us to take new action and produce new results. What motivated that decision? It was the desire to remove pain from your life and establish pleasure once again: the pleasure of pride, comfor, self-esteem, living life the way you've designed it.
Of course, there are many levels of pain and pleasure. A sense of humiliation can be rather an intense form of emotional pain. Feeling a sense of inconvenience and boredom are less intese levels of pain, but they still factor in the equation of decision-making.
Likewise, pleasure weighs into this process. Much of our drive in life comes from anticipating that our actions will lead to a more compelling future, that today's work will be well worth the effort, that the rewards of pleasure are near. And there are many levels of pleasure as well. Ex: the pleasure of ecstasy which is intense may sometimes be outweighed by the pleasure of comfort. It all depends on an individual's perspective.
One decision that has made a tremendous difference in the quality of my life is that at an early age, I began to link incredible pleasure to learning. When I began to see that what I could share helps people increase the quality of their lives, I discovered the ultimate level of pleasure!
What are some of the experiences of pain and pleasure that have shaped your life? For example, whether you've linked pain or pleasure to drugs certainly has affected your destiny. So have the emotions you've learned to associate to cigarettes or alcohol, relationships, or even the concepts of giving or trusting (57).
Pain and pleasure linkages produce a processional effect in our lives. The negative neuro-association for beer affected many of my decisions in life. IT influenced whom I hung out with at school, how I learned to get pleasure: I used learning, laughter, sports. I also learned that it felt incredible to help other people.
I also never used drugs because of a similar experience: when I was in the third or fourth grade, the police department came to my school and showed us some films about the consequences of geting involved in the drug scene. I watched as people shot up, passed out, spaced out, and leaped out of windows. As a young boy, I associated drugs to ugliness and death, so I never tried them myself. My good fortune was that the police had helped me form painful neuro-associations to even the idea of using drugs. Therefore, I have never even considered the possibility.
Thus, if we link massive pain to any behavior or emotional pattern, we will avoid indulging in it at all costs. We can use this understanding to harness the forces of pain and pleasure to change virtually anything in our lives.
Empowering Beliefs:
Disempowering Beliefs:
I've written this book to challenge you to awaken the giant power of decision and to claim the birthright of unlimited power, radiant vitality, and joyous passion that is yours.
These blog posts are like little movies that depict a quest to greatness
Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all of our resources on mastering a single area of our lives. When we focus consistently on improvement in any area, we develop unique distinctions on how to make that area better.
One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular. In fact, I believe most people fail in life simply because they major in minor things. At a very early age, I developed a belief that we're all here to contribute something unique, that deep within each of us lies a special gift. You see, I truly believe that we all have a sleeping giant within us. Each of us has our own bit of genius just waiting to be tapped.
1) Creating lasting change
- step one: Raising your standards. I wrote down all the things I would no longer accept or tolerate in my life, as well as the things that I aspired to becoming
- step two: Empowering beliefs --this sense of certainty--is the force behind any great success throughout history.
- step three: In order to keep your commitment, you need the best strategies for achieving results. The best strategy in almost any case is to find a role-model, someone who's already getting the results you want, and then tap into their knowledge. Learn what they're doing, what their core beliefs are, and how they think.
- If you can set a higher standard and get yourself to believe you can achieve, then you certainly can figure out the strategies.
- IN LIFE LOTS OF PEOPLE KNOW WHAT TO DO, BUT FEW PEOPLE ACTUALLY DO WHAT THEY KNOW. KNOWING IS NOT ENOUGH! YOU MUST TAKE ACTION.
Coaches care about you. They've spent years focusing on a particular area of expertise and they've continued to make key distinctions about how to produce results more quickly. By utilizing the strategies your coach shares with you, you can immediately and dramatically change your performance. Sometimes your coach doesn't even tell you something new, but reminds you of what you already know, and then gets you to do it. This is the role, with your permission, that I'll be playing for you.
2) Decisions: The Pathway to Power
A decade can pass quickly can't it? Where were you back in 2003 (10 years old; in 4th grade - 1st year of Hoover Elementary with Sam, Dylan, Caitlin, Camille)? What were you like? Who were your friends? What were your hopes and dreams? If someone had asked you, "where will you be in ten years?" what would you have told them? Are you today where you wanted to be back then?
More importantly we should be asking ourselves, "How am I going to live the next ten years of my life?" (I will be 30 years of age) How am I going to live today in order to create the tomorrow I'm committed to? What am I going to stand for from now on? What's important to me right now, and what will be important to me in the long term? What actions can I take today that will shape my ultimate destiny?
The most powerful way to shape our lives is to get us to take action. We must take control of our consistent actions. You need to set and live by your high standards no matter what happens in your life.
Making a true decision means committing to achieving a result, and then cutting yourself off from any other possibility. The way to make better decisions is to make more of them. Make sure you learn from each one.
Gaining a single distinction (sole piece of information) that can be used to change the course of your life empowers us to make better decisions and create the results that we desire for ourselves. You must know that in any moment a decision you make can change the course of your life forever: the very next person you stand behind in line or sit next to on an airplane, the very next phone call you make or receive, the very next movie you see or book you read or page you turn. It might even be something you already know and this is the time it finally sinks in and you begin to use it. Anything you choose to do could be the one single thing that causes the floodgates to open, and all the things that you've been waiting for to fall into place.
The three decisions that control your destiny are: your decisions about what to focus on, you decision about what things mean to you, and your decisions about what to do to create the results you desire.
It's likely that whatever challenges you have in your life currently could have been avoided by some better decisions upstream. Make a decision to start paddling like crazy in a new direction and to start planning ahead.
Your brain has already constructed an internal system for making decisions. This system acts like an invisible force, directing all of your thoughts, actions, and feelings, both good and bad, every moment that you live. It controls how you evaluate everything in your life and it's largely driven by your subconscious mind. The scary thing is that most people never consciously set this system up. Instead it's been installed through the years by sources as diverse as parents, peers, teachers, television shows, advertisers, and the mainstream culture.
This system is comprised by five components: 1) your core beliefs and unconscious rules, 2) your life values, 3) your references, 4) the habitual questions you ask yourself, 5) the emotional states that you experience in each moment.
I have determined that no matter what decisions I make, I'll be flexible, I'll look at the consequences, learn from them, and use those lessons to make better decisions in the future.
If you take action 10 times a day while other people act on a new skill 1 time a month, you will have 10 months of experience in a day, you will soon master the skill and will likely, ironically be considered "talented" and "lucky"
I became an excellent public speaker because, rather than once a week, I booked myself to speak three times a day to anyone who would listen. While others in my organization had 48 speaking engagements a year, I would have a similar number within two weeks. Within a month, I'd have two years of experience. And within a year, I'd have a decade's worth of growth. My associates talked about how "lucky" I was to have been born with such an "innate" talent. I tried to tell them what I'm telling you now: mastery takes as long as you want it to take. By the way, were all of my speeches great? Far from it! But I did make sure that I learned from every experience and that I somehow improved until very soon I could enter a room of any size and be able to reach people from virtually all walks of life.
No matter how prepared you are, there's one thing that I can absolutely guarantee: if you're on the river of life, it's likely you're going to hit a few rocks. That's not being negative; that's being accurate. The key is that when you do run aground, instead of beating yourself up for being such a "failure," remember that there are no failures in life. There are only results. Learn from those results.
Ultimate Success Formula:
- clearly decide what it is you're absolutely committed to achieving
- you are willing to take massive action
- you notice what's working or not
- you continue to change your approach until you achieve what you want, using whatever life gives you and using all the best possible resources along the way.
In order to succeed you must have a long-term focus. Most of the challenges that we have in our personal lives come from a short-term focus. Success and failure are not overnight experiences. It's the small decisions along the way that cause people to fail. As a society, we're so focused on instantaneous gratification that our short-term solutions often become long-term problems. Our kids have trouble paying attention in school long enough to think, memorize, and learn partly because they've become addicted to instantaneous gratification from constant exposure to things like video games, TV commercials, and MTV (47).
Know that it's your decisions, not your conditions, that determine your destiny.
3) The Force That Shapes Your Life
What determines the difference in human actions? Pain or Pleasure. It is clear that humans are not random, everything we do we do for a reason. Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure.
Procrastination essentially is believing at some level that taking action in this moment would be more painful than just putting it off. Yet when we put off something for so long, suddenly the pressure to do it is too great and you link to your brain that not taking action is more painful than putting it off.
Even though you know that all these actions would benefit you--that they could definitely bring pleasure to your life--you fail to act simply because in that moment you associate more pain to doing what's necessary than missing the opportunity.
For most people, the fear of loss is much greater than the desire for gain. Why is it that people can experience pain yet fail to change? They haven't experienced enough pain yet; they haven't hit what I call emotional threshold (you hit a level of pain you weren't willing to settle for anymore).
We've all experienced those times in our lives when we've said, "I've had it--never again--this must change now." This is the magical moment when pain becomes our friend. It drives us to take new action and produce new results. What motivated that decision? It was the desire to remove pain from your life and establish pleasure once again: the pleasure of pride, comfor, self-esteem, living life the way you've designed it.
Of course, there are many levels of pain and pleasure. A sense of humiliation can be rather an intense form of emotional pain. Feeling a sense of inconvenience and boredom are less intese levels of pain, but they still factor in the equation of decision-making.
Likewise, pleasure weighs into this process. Much of our drive in life comes from anticipating that our actions will lead to a more compelling future, that today's work will be well worth the effort, that the rewards of pleasure are near. And there are many levels of pleasure as well. Ex: the pleasure of ecstasy which is intense may sometimes be outweighed by the pleasure of comfort. It all depends on an individual's perspective.
One decision that has made a tremendous difference in the quality of my life is that at an early age, I began to link incredible pleasure to learning. When I began to see that what I could share helps people increase the quality of their lives, I discovered the ultimate level of pleasure!
What are some of the experiences of pain and pleasure that have shaped your life? For example, whether you've linked pain or pleasure to drugs certainly has affected your destiny. So have the emotions you've learned to associate to cigarettes or alcohol, relationships, or even the concepts of giving or trusting (57).
Pain and pleasure linkages produce a processional effect in our lives. The negative neuro-association for beer affected many of my decisions in life. IT influenced whom I hung out with at school, how I learned to get pleasure: I used learning, laughter, sports. I also learned that it felt incredible to help other people.
I also never used drugs because of a similar experience: when I was in the third or fourth grade, the police department came to my school and showed us some films about the consequences of geting involved in the drug scene. I watched as people shot up, passed out, spaced out, and leaped out of windows. As a young boy, I associated drugs to ugliness and death, so I never tried them myself. My good fortune was that the police had helped me form painful neuro-associations to even the idea of using drugs. Therefore, I have never even considered the possibility.
Thus, if we link massive pain to any behavior or emotional pattern, we will avoid indulging in it at all costs. We can use this understanding to harness the forces of pain and pleasure to change virtually anything in our lives.
Empowering Beliefs:
- If I constantly keep trying to find strategies to do better in any area of my life (golf, relationships, etc.) I will eventually succeed. I will never have tried "everything."
- All people have a light side to them, even Darth Vader did.
- The only true security in life comes from knowing that every single day you are improving yourself and your life in some way.
Disempowering Beliefs:
- I don't think that I have the God given talent to become a professional golfer.
- Some people are just not nice
- When I'm awkward I feel like people don't want to be with me.
- I have to hold onto what I've got now otherwise I could lose a lot of my things
- I feel insecure about losing my finances, my college career, my friends, my golf game.
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