self improvement

Most of us come to admit that life is short. Once you
reach the age of forty the fact that life is short sticks in your
mind.You can use your own mortality as a way of staying
focused.
The awareness of your mortality can even motivate you
to quicken your pace of accomplishments.
You have 24 hours in every day, 168 hours in a week,
and about 16 waking hours every day. That’s 112 waking
hours every week.
If you are a 40-year-old man with a normal life
expectancy, you have approximately 16,425 more days to
live, assuming you live to age 85. Women live three years
longer on average. If you decided to find 20 minutes a day
over a five-year period, you would accumulate about 609
hours of “extra time” to do what you wanted. Those 609
hours could change your life.
If I were to invest my 609 hours into learning to
paint, don’t you think after 609 hours I would be pretty
knowledgeable about painting? Imagine what new things
you could accomplish if you improved your life twenty
minutes at a time every day.
Leo Tolstoy, the famous Russian writer, said, “Everyone
thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing
himself.”
In the entertainment field, an actor with as few as five
years acting experience can become a director because of
what he has learned about directing on-the-job.
In Working Smarter, a cassette program by Michael
LeBoeuf, Ph.D., published by Nightingale Conant Corp.,
the following story appeared: “Charles Schwab, when he
was President of Bethlehem Steel many years ago, called in
Ivy Lee, a consultant, and said to him, ‘Show me a way to
get more things done with my time, and I’ll pay you any fee
within reason.’ Lee replied, ‘Fine. I’ll give you something
in 20 minutes that will step up your output at least 50%.’
With that, Lee handed Schwab a blank piece of paper and
said, ‘Write down the six most important things you have to
do tomorrow and number them in order of importance. Now
put this piece of paper in your pocket. First thing tomorrow
morning look at item one and start working on it until you
finish it; then do item two, and so on; do this until quitting
time and don’t be concerned if you’ve only finished one or
two. You’ll be working on the most important ones anyway.
If you can’t finish them all by this method, you couldn’t
have done it by any other method either, and without some
system you’d probably not even have decided which was the
most important.’
Then Lee said, ‘Try this system every working day.
After you’ve convinced yourself of the value of this system,
have your men try it. Try it as long as you wish, then send
me a check for what you think it’s worth.’
Several weeks later Schwab sent Lee a check for $25,000,
with a note, proclaiming the advice, ‘the most profitable
he’d ever followed.’ The concept helped Charles Schwab
earn 100 million dollars and turned Bethlehem Steel into
the biggest independent steel producer in the world.”
Charles Schwab thought enough of this idea to pay
$25,000 for it, but only after he and his workers used it and
proved it worthwhile.
Since early on in my career, I have used a similar “To
Do List.” I’ve found that the list helps me accomplish more
and accomplish it faster. The to-do list keeps me focused
and I avoid wasting time on the less important things.
I’ve presented you with a system worth $25,000, a gift
for organizing your time. Try this system for four weeks.
Then, look back and see how much you have accomplished.
How much would you pay for such a system? I’ve found the
system worth thousands of dollars to me over my twentyplus
years in sales.
Anyone who stops learning is old
whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone
who keeps learning stays young. The
greatest thing in life is to keep your
mind young.
–Henry Ford
Inventor/Automobile Manufacturer
(1863-1947)

One Sunday morning I felt shocked to see in the local
newspaper an obituary of a 24-year-old man who had died
in an automobile accident. He was to be married in less than
a month to my cousin’s daughter. I felt shock, sadness, and
utter desperation in searching for a reason why we had lost
the young man in a freak, arbitrary accident. I thought of my
cousin’s daughter, who had celebrated her wedding shower
a few weeks earlier and had received beautiful gifts.
I wondered about this young man’s sudden death and it
finally sank in: there are no tomorrows guaranteed to any
of us.
You know what you expect and what you want to
happen tomorrow, but you don’t know what other events
will change your life, change your future, or whether you
will even be alive.
Today is the only day to live, to dream, and to act.
The present time is all you have as your “guaranteed
time.” You need to say to yourself, “I cannot allow my dreams
and goals to lie dormant inside me. From this day forward, I
will write down all the things I want to accomplish. I must
plan and set into motion the actions that will accomplish my
great goals.”

Being different means standing up, standing out, and
leading. Too many people are content to be followers. Do
you dare to be different?
One must plan to be different. You can start to love
being different so that “being different” will become a good
habit. You can make a plan and practice being different.
You do not have to be like everyone else. You can mentally
note each and every time that you are different. You can go
out of your way to do something that makes you stand out
from the crowd.
Be different – be better! You can’t miss with that
attitude. With a new modified success attitude, you will
become successful.
John Quincy Adams said, “If your actions inspire others
to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you
are a leader.”
The inventor of the disposable Gillette razor blade,
King Camp Gillette, was a traveling salesman who sold
bottle stoppers. He got the razor idea one morning in 1895
while shaving with a dull razor. It took 8 years of pure
struggle and frustration to market the first double edge
disposable shaving blade to the public. He had to find the
right combination of metal alloy and tempering.
He also had to find the financial backing needed. In the
process, he experienced tremendous ridicule and failure. It
was almost too much to bear.
In 1903 the first Gillette blade and razor were sold to
the public, and since then more than 100 billion Gillette
blades have been sold.
“I didn’t know enough to quit,” the inventor once said.
“I was a dreamer who believed in the gold at the foot of the
rainbow. I dared to go where wise ones feared to tread.”
Gillette had absolutely no experience in inventing, in
engineering, or in working different forms of metals and
alloys.
He had not the slightest idea of what he would encounter.
But he had an idea, a dream, an inspiration and a belief that
it could be done and, despite all the obstacles, he achieved
his goal.
Don’t you think there were more experienced and
knowledgeable experts, engineers, and inventors than Mr.
Gillette who could have invented this fantastic razor? No
doubt there were thousands of people who had the potential
to invent a new and better razor. What held them back?
Apparently no one else had the foresight, imagination,
or the burning desire to replace the antiquated shaving
instrument that everyone accepted as sufficient. Others
couldn’t visualize a piece of metal as thin as paper, yet
strong enough to slice through tough whiskers.
At times, your common sense will interfere with your
creative imagination. Your common sense will tell you all
the reasons you cannot do something and all those reasons
are likely true. But then you have to stop to realize your
brain has something greater than common sense.
We are each born with creative imagination. Successful
people are the ones who have learned how to apply their
creative imagination in order to achieve greater goals.
Being successful can mean being more imaginative, not
necessarily being smarter than someone else.
If your common sense says no, that’s the time to test
your options. It’s your creative imagination that has the
ability to overcome every it-can’t-be-done attitude and
common sense worry.
Consider how much any inventor has had to endure
ridicule during the development stage of the invention. The
criticism and the negativity from others could easily have
defeated all the major inventors. Imagine the world without
all the major inventions if the inventors had given up. Too
many people give up on their ideas, telling themselves, “I
can’t do it.” That amounts to accepting defeat before they
have even tried.
Thomas Edison was laughed at when he tried to sell
the idea of the light bulb. People did not understand the
concept; they were happy using their gaslights. His skeptics
kept asking, “How does Edison expect to light anything
without using a flame or a fire of some kind?”
Skeptics have a difficult time in accepting change.
Thomas Edison is a great example of someone who did
not give up. From his creative imagination and hard work,
we have his legacy of the electric light bulb, motion pictures,
the telephone transmitter, the stock ticker, the phonograph
and the electric pen for the mimeograph.
Thank God, Thomas Alva Edison did not let his skeptics,
his common sense, and all his failed experiments defeat
him. I wonder how many times his common sense started
telling him, “It can’t be done.” Success means you have to
be willing to risk not listening to your common sense.
Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone,
had a difficult time convincing others the telephone invention
would work. People accepted the telegraph as the means
of communication because that already worked and people
follow what works. Bell used his creative imagination to
go to the next step: imagining that people could speak into
a piece of metal and their voices would travel across the
country over a wire in a split second.
To use your creative imagination will require research
and hard work.
You can succeed in your ultimate goal if you have the
conviction to persevere through all the negative attitudes
and through your failed attempts.
Your goal may not come easily, but success usually
comes to those who persist, those who choose to be
different.

The spirit, the will to win,
and the will to excel are the
things that endure. These qualities
are so much more important than
the events that occur.
–Vince Lombardi
Football Coach
(1913-1970)

Be unique. Be different. Stop following the crowd.
Listen for the sound of that distant drum. The successful
person and the average person approach life differently.
The average person, it seems to me, likes to take the easy
way out. It’s almost as if the average person wants to get
through work just to rush home to do very little, or nothing
at all.
Television is often a thief of your time and can easily be
the source of your losing 15 minutes a day that could be used
to accomplish more worthwhile goals. Perhaps watching
one less television show will create better opportunities for
yourself. Why watch other people become successful when
you can apply yourself to those extra 15 minutes every
day?
People can too often fail because they do not “stay
focused.” Remember that staying focused on the small
goals is the way you accomplish the final goal. Think for
a moment about a movie camera. Until the lens focuses
on a particular object, everything is blurry. Although you
may want to accomplish many different things in unrelated
fields, you may be dabbling in many fields at the same time
and not putting enough energy into one goal.
Instead, remain focused, as if you are trying to line up
a photo of a rose, capturing it in sharp detail. The camera
lens has to stay focused or everything becomes blurry.
You must stay focused and not try to do everything at
once. To hit a home run in baseball, you must have the bat
make contact with the baseball at precisely the right part
of the bat, hitting the right part of the ball exactly with the
right force of the swing. Any deviation from these elements
can result in a complete miss or a pop-up. It takes minute
differences to hit the ball just right for a home run.
Focus. You may find it hard to stay focused at first.
Remember this rule: a new habit takes about three weeks
to form.
In a 1985 monthly publication of Insight, there is an
article about Andrew Carnegie, the great steel maker, who
was asked by a reporter, “How is it possible to have 43
millionaires working for you at the same time?”
Mr. Carnegie answered, “They weren’t millionaires
when they started working for me.” The reporter asked,
“Well, what happened?” Mr. Carnegie replied, “We believe
in rewarding excellence in performance, and these men have
developed themselves to the degree that they have become
millionaires.”
The reporter asked, “How do you develop so many
people?”
Andrew Carnegie replied this way: “I develop men
exactly the same way you mine gold. In order to get an
ounce of gold, you move tons and tons of dirt. But you don’t
go looking for the dirt; you go looking for the gold.”
When interviewed by Success Magazine in 1898
Thomas Edison was asked, “What’s the first requisite for
success?” And Edison answered this way: “The ability to
apply your physical and mental energies to one problem
incessantly without growing weary. You do something all
day long, don’t you? Everyone does. If you get up at 7 A.M.
and go to bed at 11 P.M., you have put in 16 good hours,
and it is certain with most men that they have been doing
something all the time. The only trouble is that they do it
about a great many things and I do it about one. If they took
the time in question and applied it in one direction, to one
object they would succeed.”

The older one gets, the faster time seems to move. It
is my observation that life goes by too fast. Most young
people feel it is taking an eternity to become 18 and then
21, so strong is the urge to be considered an adult man or
woman. The young man of 21 will soon discover that time
seems to move at a faster speed than he realized when he
becomes a 35-year-old man. That childhood urge to speed
up time will now change into a wish to slow it down when
the man reaches 45 and 50. Where are you in your life’s
journey? Is time speeding up or slowing down for you? At
what stage are you?
Do your days seem crammed full of obligations, tasks,
deadlines, with a lot less spare time? Are there days when
you are so stressed that you would like to drop out of
society? Dropping out of society, and disappearing from all
the stresses is basically a fantasy, one we all experience at
one time or another.
You cannot control the speed of time, but you can control
what you accomplish within your limited time. The proper
use of work in a time period creates greater success.

FAILURE is probably the most fatiguing experience a person ever has. There is nothing more enervating than not succeeding—being blocked, not moving ahead. It is a vicious circle. Failure breeds fatigue, and the fatigue makes it harder to get to work, which compounds the failure.
We experience this tiredness in two main ways: as stan-up fatigue and performance fatigue. In the former case, we keep putting off a task that we are under some compulsion to discharge. Either because it is too tedious or too difficult, we shirk it. And the longer we postpone it, the more tired we feel.
Such start-up fatigue is very real, even if not actually physical, not something in our muscles and bones. The remedy is obvious, though perhaps not easy to apply: an exertion of willpower. The moment I find myself turning away from a job, or putting it under a pile of other things I have to do, I clear my desk of everything else and attack the objectionable item first. To prevent Start-up fatigue, always tackle the most difficult job first.
Years ago, when editing Great Books of the Western World,
I undertook o write 102 essays, one on each of the great ideas
discussed by the authors of those books. The writing took me
2½ years, working at it—among my other tasks—seven days
a week. I would never have finished f I had allowed myself
to write first about the ideas I found easiest to expound. Applying my own rule, 1 determined to write the essays in strict
alphabetical order, from ANGEL WORLD, never letting myself skip a tough idea. And I always started the day’s work with the difficult task of essay-writing. Experience proved, once again, that the rule works.
Performance fatigue is more difficult to handle. Here we are noçrcluctanc to get started, but we cannot seem to do the job right. Its difficulties appear insurmountable and, however hard we work, we fail again and again. That mounting experience of failure carries with it an ever-increasing burden of mental fatigue. In such a situation, I work as hard as I can— then let the unconscious take over.
When I was planning the 15th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, I had to create a topical table of contents for its alphabetically arranged articles. Nothing like this had ever been done before, and day after day I kept coming up with solutions that fell short. My fatigue became almost overpowering.
One day, mentally exhausted, I put down on paper all the reasons why this problem could no! be solved. I tried to convince myself that what appeared insoluble really was insoluble, that the trouble was with the problem, not mc. Having gained some relief, I sat back in an easy chair and went to sleep.
An hour or so látêr, I woke up suddenly with the solution clearly in mind. In the Weeks that followed, the correctness of the solution summoned up by my unconscious mind was confirmed at every step. Though 1 worked every bit as hard, if not harder, than before, my work was not attended by any weariness or fatigue. Success was now as exhilarating as failure had been depressing. I was experiencing the joy of what psychologists today call “flow.” Life offers few pleasures more invigorating than the successful exercise of our faculties. It unleashes energies for additional work.
Sometimes the snare is not in the problem itself, but in the social situation—or so it appears. Other people somehow seem to prevent us from succeeding. But, as Shakespeare wrote, “The fault, dear Bnitus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.” Why blame other people and shrug off our own responsibility for misunderstandings7 Doing a job successfully means doing whatever is necessary—and that includes winning the cooperation of others.
More often, the snare that blocks us is purely personal. Subject to human distractions, we let personal problems weigh on us, producing a fatigue-failure that blocks our productivity in every sphere. A friend of mine went into a decline over a family problem that she had let slide. Her daughter had secretly married a man she thought her father would disapprove of. The daughter told her mother but made her promise to keep silent. Worrying about the problem, and carrying a burden of guilt over the secrecy, exhausted the mother. Her fatigue spilled over into her job and turned her usual successes there into failures. She was saved from Serious depression only when other people intervened and told the father—who didn’t display any of the anticipated negative reaction. It seems incredible that a person can allow his or her life to get snarled up in this fashion, but that is how problems can fester if they aren’t solved as they come along.
So, our first step should be to use inexplicable fatigue that has no physical base as a radar—an early-warning system— and trace the fatigue to its source; to find the defeat we arc papering over and not admitting. Then we must diagnose the cause of this failure. In rare cases, it may be that the task really is too difficult for us, that we are in over our head. If so, we can acknowledge the fact and bow out. Or the block may simply be in refusing to confront the problem. In most cases, it can be solved by patient attention to the task at hand—with all the skill and resolution we can muster. That, plus the inspired help of the unconscious.
I have already given an example of one way of achieving a breakthrough. First, put down all the reasons why the problem is insoluble. Try to box yourself in, like Houdini, so no escape appears possible. Only then, like Houdini, can you break out. Having tied yourself up in knots, stop thinking consciously about the problem for a while. Let your unconscious work on untying the knots. Nine times out of ten, it will come up with a solution.
The worst mistake ‘.c can make is to regard mental fatigue as if it were physical fatigue. We can recuperate from the latter by giving our bodies a chance to rest. But mental fatigue that results from failure cannot be removed by giving in to it and taking a rest. That just makes matters worse. Whatever the specific stumbling block is, it must be cleared up, and fast, ‘fore the fatigue of failure swamps us.
Human beings. I believe, must try to succeed. This necessity
built into our biological background. Without trying to define performance, to doing tasks and solving problems as they come along. it is experiencing the exuberance, the joy, the “flow” that goes with the unimpeded exercise of one’s human capabilities.
Success, then, means never feeling tired.