Set Priorities
Stress management requires that you take complete control over the activities of your daily life. This means that you plan your day, set priorities and work on high value tasks. The indispensable key to time management is concentration, the ability to focus single-mindedly on one thing, the most important thing, and to stay with it until it is 100% complete.
Create Chunks of Time
This is not only the hardest challenge that a manager faces, but the ability to concentrate single-mindedly is probably the rarest single ability in the workplace. Most of our important tasks take large chunks of time. We need to plan and organize our days in such a way that we allocate these chunks of time so that we can do the jobs upon which our success depends.
A Burst of Energy
The wonderful thing about setting priorities and concentrating single-mindedly is that, the very minute that you do these two things, you will begin to feel a tremendous sense of control and well-being. As you work progressively toward the accomplishment of your most important tasks, you will feel a flow of energy and enthusiasm. As you finish something that is relevant and significant to your company and to yourself, you get a burst of energy. Your self-esteem improves. You feel good about yourself. You have a wonderful sense of making measurable progress toward greater successful in your career. You feel like you are making a difference.
Action Exercises
Now, here are two ideas you can use immediately to concentrate single mindedly on the highest value use of your time.
First, analyze your work before you begin and then ask yourself, “What one thing, if I did it quickly and well, would have the greatest impact on my work?” Whatever it is, go to work on that one item immediately.
Second, once you have begun on a high value task, discipline yourself by repeating over and over, “Back to work, back to work, back to work!” This will keep you focused and on track until you finish the job.
The hardest part of achieving any goal is usually starting in the first place.
You have amazing possibilities and potential just waiting inside you, but most of them can die stillborn waiting for you to take action. The Nike commercial contains one of the best pieces of advice in the world: “Just Do It!”
“A journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step,” wrote Confucius.
Do you want to be happy? Do you want to be thin? Do you want to work at something you really enjoy? Do you want to make money?
Whatever it is, write it down. Take a few minutes for “gap analysis.” Look at where you want to be and then look at where you are.
Examine the gap that exists between the two and think about how you could close it, like building a bridge or staircase across an open space.
What would be your first step? What would be your second step, and so on? Most of all, what action would you take right now if you were guaranteed success?
What would you do if you had no fear of failure? What would be your first step on the staircase toward your goal?
All great accomplishments begin with a leap of faith into the unknown. They begin when you take action toward your hopes and dreams before you have any assurance of success.
Most people are paralyzed by the uncertainty that surrounds any new venture. They hesitate. They stop. They turn back.
But not you. You know that “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” You know that you have to stick your head up if you want to get above the crowd.
You know you have to go out on a limb if you want to get the fruit, because that’s where it is.
Go for it! Take that first step, and everything else will follow.
I began studying creativity more than 20 years ago. I thought it was an ability that was possessed by a few especially intelligent people, such as artists, writers and scientists. But as I delved further into the subject, I came to a remarkable conclusion: I am a genius! Not only that, but you, too, are a genius! In fact, probably 95 percent of the population has the capacity to function at exceptional levels. Everyone is creative to a certain extent. People are highly creative because they decide to be highly creative. It’s no miracle. Creativity is like any human faculty; it can be developed with practice and strengthened with constant use.
If you improve things in small ways, you are engaging in small acts of creativity. If you make major breakthroughs and improve parts of your life in extraordinary ways, you are demonstrating high levels of creativity. And the amount of creativity you use in your life is largely up to you.
If creativity is improvement, in what areas do you want to use it? The answer is simple. You want to use your inborn creativity to improve the parts of your life that are most important to you. You can use your creativity to improve your relationships, to increase your income and improve your business, and to assure yourself of higher levels of health and happiness. With that definition, you can see clearly that you have opportunities to be creative from the time you get up in the morning to the time you go to bed at night.
Creativity is like a muscle. If you do not deliberately and consciously flex your creativity on a regular basis, it becomes weak and soft. It loses its strength.
If people criticize you for your ideas, or if you have concluded that you are not particularly creative, you will tend to be more passive and submissive, and look to others for new and better ways of solving problems and achieving goals. However, if you start to practice creative thinking along the lines that I’m going to share with you, you will be absolutely amazed at how smart you really are.
I used to think that you had to be highly intelligent to be creative. Then I found that intelligence is not just a matter of IQ. There are many people with high IQs who got excellent grades in school but who are doing very poorly at life. They are working at jobs they don’t like and earning salaries that are far below their potential. They probably haven’t come up with a creative idea in years.
Intelligence is a way of acting. If you act intelligently, you are intelligent. If you act stupidly, you are stupid. That’s all there is to it. You can decide to be highly intelligent and highly creative simply by doing the things that highly intelligent and highly creative people do. If you do these things over and over, you’ll soon get the same results. People around you will be talking about how bright and full of ideas you have become.
There are three basic qualities of genius. Since you are a genius, you should know what they are and apply them regularly.
The first quality of genius is open-mindedness. People who are fluent, flexible and adaptive in their thinking are far brighter than those who are rigid, mechanical and straitlaced. The more open you are to new ideas and possibilities, to new approaches and solutions, the more creatively you will function.
Most people tend to fall into what are called “thinking traps.” They assume that there is only one right answer to a problem; in reality, there could be several right answers. They jump to conclusions, assuming that because one thing happens, it’s the reason for another thing’s happening; there may be no relationship at all between the two events. Sometimes people think that the problem has to be solved immediately; often, the problem can be deferred for some time, and often it’ll solve itself if left alone. People think that certain problems have to be solved without spending any money; often, if the solution is important enough, it’s a good idea to spend money on it.
Another thinking trap people fall into is thinking they have to solve the whole problem; sometimes, solving just a part of the problem is enough at the time. A final thinking trap is thinking that it’s your problem and you are the one who must solve it; often, it’s someone else’s problem, and the very best thing for you to do is to turn it over to that person and refuse to get involved.
The second quality of genius is the ability to concentrate single-mindedly on one problem at a time–and to stay with it until it’s solved. Highly creative people focus on single questions and single problems, while uncreative people diffuse their mental energies trying to do several things at once. They work on this and work on that. They pick something up and put it down. Then they go on to something else and come back. Often they are scatterbrained, and if they do come up with ideas, their ideas are shallow and poorly thought-out.
The difference between diffusion and concentration in creativity is the difference between gentle sunlight and sunlight concentrated through a magnifying glass. Your job, in increasing your creativity and enhancing your intelligence, is to concentrate your powers where they can do the most good.
The third quality of genius is the ability to approach problems systematically. People who throw themselves at their problems often become frantic and confused. They take a haphazard approach to thinking, and then they are amazed when they find themselves floundering and making no progress.
In his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker makes the point very clearly that innovation must be a systematic process. It must be planned and organized. It’s too important to be random and haphazard.
Here is a 10-step method you can use to think systematically. With this method, you develop your creativity to genius levels.
1. Change your language from negative to positive. Instead of using the word “problem,” use the word “situation.” Or call it a challenge or an opportunity. If a sale falls through, you can say something like, “This is an interesting challenge. It is an opportunity for me to improve my sales effectiveness so this doesn’t happen again in the future.”
The more positive your language is, the more confident and optimistic you will be when approaching any difficulty. The more creative and insightful you will be in identifying solutions and breakthrough ideas.
2. Define your situation or difficulty clearly. What exactly is the challenge you are facing? What is causing you the stress and anxiety? What is causing you to worry? Why are you unhappy? Write it out clearly in detail.
Sometimes what you are worrying about is what’s called a “cluster problem.” It’s a series of small problems clustered together. You need to sort them out and define them separately.
3. Ask, “What else is the problem?” Don’t be satisfied with a superficial answer. Look for the root cause of the problem rather than get sidetracked by the symptom. Approach the problem from several different directions.
For example, if your business is slow, you could ask, “What exactly is the challenge facing me?” Your first answer might be that sales are down. But what else is the problem? How else could you phrase your answer to make the problem more amenable to a solution?
Here are some different ways of answering that question. You could say that sales are down. You could say also that you are not selling enough. You could say that people are not buying enough. You could say that people are buying too much of your competitor’s product. Or you could say that people are not buying your product the way it is currently produced or packaged. Or that people are not buying your product the way you are selling it, for the reasons you think they should or in the quantity you need them to buy it for you to be financially successful.
In each case, by changing your definition of the problem, you change your possible approach to the solution. You expand your possibilities. You become more creative. You unlock more of your inner genius.
4. Ask, “What are my minimum boundary conditions?” What must the solution accomplish? What ingredients must the solution contain? What would your ideal solution to this problem look like? Define the parameters clearly.
5. Pick the best solution by comparing your various possible solutions against your problem on the one hand and your ideal solution on the other. What’s the best thing to do at this time, under the circumstances?
6. Before you implement the decision, ask, “What’s the worst possible thing that can happen if this decision doesn’t work?” I remember once spending all the advertising money of the company I was working for on a single advertising campaign. I was convinced that, even at a low rate of return, sales would more than justify the expenditure. I failed to ask that question about the worst possible outcome. I got blindsided by the “fallacy of large numbers,” which says that if you advertise to an enormous number of people, the odds are that you will get a certain number of sales. What happened was that I got no sales at all from the advertising. As a result, I almost ruined the business. I should have asked, “What effect would there be on the business if the advertising did not work at all?”
In fact, before you make any expenditure of money or effort in trying to achieve your goal, you should evaluate what would happen if your decision were a complete failure.
7. Set measures on your decision. How will you know that you are making progress? How will you measure success? How will you compare the success of this solution against the success of another solution?
If you decide to sell or market in a particular way, how will you know that you have made the right decision? How will you define success? Make it measurable. Then monitor it on a regular basis.
8. Accept complete responsibility for implementing the decision. You might want to delegate responsibility for the implementation of the action steps to someone else. Many of the most creative ideas never materialize because no one is specifically assigned the responsibility of carrying out the decision.
9. Set a deadline. A decision without a deadline is a meaningless discussion. If it’s a major decision and will take some time to implement, set a series of short-term deadlines and a schedule for reporting. If you have a one-year goal to increase your income, break the goal into months, and then break the months into weeks. Break the weeks into days and the days into hours. Then discipline yourself to do the things you need to do every hour of every day to assure that you achieve your weekly, monthly and annual goals on schedule.
With the deadlines and sub-deadlines, you will know immediately whether you are on track or falling behind. You can then use your creativity to alleviate further bottlenecks or choke points.
10. Take action. Get busy. Develop a sense of urgency. The faster you move in the direction of your clearly defined goals, the more creative you will be. The more energy you will have. The more you will learn. And the faster you’ll develop your capacity to achieve even more in the future.
The world is full of creative individuals who have wonderful ideas. But almost all of them fall down when it comes to implementation. This is where you can excel. The future belongs to the creative minority who not only can think but also can take action and put their ideas into effect.
You can solve any problem, overcome any obstacle or achieve any goal that you can set for yourself by using your wonderful creative mind and then taking action consistently and persistently until you attain your objective. Success is a mark of a creative thinker, and when you use your ability to think creatively, your success can be unlimited.
If you want to be the best, find out what the top people do and then do it yourself. The top 3 percent of Americans in all fields act as if they “own the place.” They look upon everything that happens in their companies as though they own 100 percent of the stock. They take everything personally. They feel personally responsible for sales, quality, profitability, distribution and cost-effectiveness. They are totally engaged with their work, and with their products and services.
Would you like to make more money? Go to the nearest mirror and negotiate with your boss. The person in the mirror is the one who determines how much you earn, how well you do in your profession and how much you get paid for it.
Here’s an exercise for you: On the first day of each month, take your personal checkbook and write out a check for the amount of money you want to earn that month and date it for the last day of that month. Make it payable to yourself. Sign it. For the rest of the month, concentrate on figuring out how you are going to make payroll, just like a company president. If you have to increase your sales in order to increase your paycheck, your job is to figure out how to do it. You are the president. As the president of your own professional sales corporation, your current employer is your best client.
By making the decision to go from employee status to being the president of your own organization, you have made the critical decision to become the primary creative force in your life. You no longer see yourself as a victim or a passive recipient of what happens in the economy. You are an active agent. You are in charge. You go out into the workplace, and you make your own life and your own living. You sell your services to the highest bidder and you deliver the very best services possible for your personal sales corporation. Instead of waiting for things to happen or hoping that things will happen, you make things happen.
As the president of your own company, you are in charge of every activity of your business. You are in charge of sales, marketing, production, quality control, distribution and administration. You are in charge of your training department, constantly working on yourself to increase the value of what you do so that you can charge more for it in the marketplace. You are in charge of every aspect of your life both, both personal and professional.
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First make out a check to yourself for the amount of money you want to make next month. Then make a plan of activities for achieving your goal.
Second, break your monthly desired income down into daily and hourly rates of pay. Make sure that everything you do pays you your desired hourly rate.
Einstein once said, “Every child is born a genius.” But the reason most people do not function at genius levels is because they are not aware of how creative and smart they really are. I call it the “Schwarzenegger effect.”
No one would look at a person such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and think how lucky he is to have been born with such tremendous muscles. Everyone knows that he, and people like him, have worked many thousands of hours to build up their bodies so they can compete and win in bodybuilding competitions.
Your creative capabilities are just the same. They actually grow as they are used. But you don’t need to spend thousands of hours to increase your creative-thinking abilities. By practicing a few simple exercises and applications, you can start your creative juices flowing, and you may even amaze yourself at the quality and quantity of good ideas you come up with.
Let’s start off with the definition of creativity. In my estimation, after years of research on this subject, the very best definition of creativity is, simply, “improvement.” You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or an artist to be creative. All you have to do is develop the ability to improve your situation, wherever you are and whatever you are doing. All great fortunes were started with ideas for improving something in some way. In fact, an improvement needs to be only 10 percent new or different to launch you on the way to fame and riches.
It has been estimated that each year, driving to and from work, the average person has about four ideas for improvement, any one of which could make him or her a millionaire. The problem is not that you don’t have the ideas you need to accomplish anything you want, but that you fail to act on those ideas. Most people dismiss their own ideas because they think those ideas cannot be very valuable if they were the ones who thought of them. Thomas Edison, arguably the most successful creative genius in human history, once said that creativity is 99 percent perspiration and only 1 percent inspiration. Extensive research on creativity tends to bear him out.
There are four generally accepted parts of the creative process: There is preparation, where much of the work is done. There is cerebration or rumination, where you turn the matter over to your subconscious mind. There is realization, where the idea or ideas come to you. And finally, there is application, where you work out the creative idea and turn it into something worthwhile. Of the four, preparation seems to be the most important, and it involves gathering the right data and asking the right questions.
Your success in life will be determined largely by the quantity of ideas that you generate. It seems that the quality of ideas is secondary to the quantity and that, if you have enough ideas, one or more of them will turn out to be prizewinners. You can begin building your creative muscles with focused questions. Here are a few examples:
What are we trying to do?
How are we trying to do it?
What are our assumptions?
What if our assumptions are wrong?
All improvements begin with questioning the current, existing circumstances. If you are not making progress for any reason, stop and think, and begin asking yourself the hard questions that will stimulate your mind to consider other possibilities.
When they were doing the research to land a man on the moon, scientists were stumped for months and even years. They could not figure out how to send a rocket to the moon with enough fuel to land on the moon, blast off, break the moon’s gravity and come back to Earth. The problem was that if the rocket had that much fuel to start with, it would be too heavy to take off from the Earth in the first place. Finally, they began to question the assumption that the lunar rocket ship had to land on the moon. When they questioned that assumption, the scientists concluded that a main rocket could orbit the moon while a smaller module dropped to the surface of the moon and then rejoined the orbiting rocket for the trip back to Earth.
The mental logjam was broken, and the rest is history. Asking focused questions—hard questions that penetrate to the core of the matter—is the real art of the creative person. The next step is to have the courage to deal with all the possible answers.
Once you have come up with a possible solution, ask yourself, “What else could be the solution?” If your current method of operation were completely wrong, what would be your backup plan? What else would you or could you do? What if your current procedure or plan turned out to be a complete failure? Then what would you do? And what would you do after that? All of those questions will force you to think further and come up with better answers.
The second way to build your mental muscles is with intensely desired goals. The more you want something and the clearer you are about it, the more likely it is that you will generate ideas that will help you to move toward it. That is why the need for clearly written goals and plans for their accomplishment is repeated over and over. Any intense emotion, such as desire, stimulates creativity and ideas to fulfill that desire. And the more you write down your goals and plans, and review them, the more likely it is that you will see all kinds of possibilities for achieving those goals.
The third generator of creative-thinking muscles is pressing problems. A good question to ask ism “What are the three biggest problems that I am facing in my life today?” Write the answer to this question quickly, in less than 30 seconds. When you write the answer to a question in less than 30 seconds, your subconscious mind will sort out all extraneous answers and give you the three most important ones.
When you have your three most pressing problems, ask yourself, “What is the worst possible thing that can happen as a result of each of these problems?” Then ask yourself, “What are all the things that I can do, right now, to alleviate each problem?” If you have a problem that is worrying you for any reason, think about what you could do immediately to begin alleviating that concern. This is a prime use of your creative powers. So a key to success in creative thinking is clarity. Take the time to think through, discuss and ask questions that help you to clarify exactly what you are trying to accomplish and exactly what problems you are facing at the present moment. Just as fuzzy thinking leads to fuzzy answers, clear thinking leads to clear answers.
A second key is concentration. Put everything else aside and concentrate single-mindedly on focusing all your mental powers on solving one single problem, overcoming one particular obstacle or achieving one important goal. The ability to concentrate on a single subject without diversion or distraction is a hallmark of the superior thinker.
A third key is an open mind. The average person tends to be rigid and fixed in his thinking about getting from where he is to where he wants to go. The creative thinker, however, tends to remain flexible and open to a variety of ways of approaching the problem. The average person has a tendency to leap to conclusions and determine that there is only one way to achieve a particular goal. The superior thinker, on the other hand, tends to be more patient and willing to consider a variety of options before moving toward a conclusion.
There is one other creative concept that can be very helpful when it is used in combination with what we have already discussed, and it is called the “limiting step.” Between you and any goal you want to achieve or any problem you want to solve, almost invariably, is a limiting step or a “choke point” that determines the speed with which you move from where you are to your destination. This limiting step may be another person, a particular obstacle, a specific difficulty or even a lack of some information or skill. Invariably, there is a particular factor that determines how fast you get there.
Your job is to think about it and decide what it is, and then go to work to remove it. For example, if you are in sales, your limiting step may be the number of prospects you have. If this is the case, then your job is to use all your creative capacities to increase the number of prospects until that is no longer a problem. Then, of course, there will be another limiting step, and your job is to go to work on that.
If you have a business, your limiting step may be the number of qualified people who are responding to your advertising. If this is the choke point that hinders the amount you sell and the speed at which your company grows, it behooves you to concentrate your mental powers on relieving that bottleneck. You must concentrate your very best thinking abilities and the thinking abilities of others on increasing the number of qualified prospects that your advertising and promotional efforts attract.
In relationships and misunderstandings between people, there is almost invariably a sticking point or subject area that needs to be resolved in order to bring about harmony again. Your first job is to identify this limiting step and then find a way to alleviate the difficulty to the satisfaction of everyone involved.
You are a genius, and you were born with the potential for exceptional creativity. But creative abilities are latent. They are like muscles that grow with use. You can increase your creative powers by using them, over and over, in every situation, deliberately and specifically, until creativity and a creative response to life is as natural to you as breathing in and out is. There are very few things you can do that can have a more powerful positive impact on your entire life than becoming excellent in creative thinking. And you can if you think you can.
Many years ago, I began studying economics. I wanted to know why it was that some countries and some parts of countries were more successful economically than others.
Before my study was finished, I had spent more than 4,000 hours and assembled a vast library of books on the subject of economics. I attended conferences on business economics and national economics, and eventually got an MBA degree in which I had to study both microeconomics and macroeconomics. I finally learned a little bit about the subject.
The bottom line is simple: incentives!
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev once said, “Call them what you want, it is incentives that moves people to action.”
In every country, and every part of every country, wherever you create incentives for saving, investment and productive business activity, you have prosperity, growth, job opportunities and hope for the future.
Wherever you create disincentives, in the form of higher taxes, regulations, government control, corruption, favoritism and political trade-offs, you decrease prosperity. In the states that have the highest taxes and regulations on business, you have the highest rates of unemployment and the lowest rates of income increase.
In the policy silly season that we are experiencing right now, you have two major schools of thought. One school of thought says that the key to prosperity is to punish businesses through taxes and regulations as much as possible.
For example, oil companies invest tens of billions of dollars in drilling oil fields, building pipelines, leasing tanker ships, building refineries in the U.S., building pipelines throughout the U.S. to get gasoline to various places, and then delivering the gasoline to your local station. For this, they charge less per gallon of gasoline than it costs for a bottle of water purchased at the convenience store. Oil companies earn an average of 7 percent on gross sales. Now Congress wants to pass an $18 billion tax on all companies to punish them for their activities.
In economics today, you have the “Something for Something Party” vs. the “Something for Nothing Party.” One party offers to give endless amounts of free money to voters if they will support the party in November. The other party says that the only way that you can become prosperous is by producing something of value and selling it at a profit.
The great tragedy in politics is that most politicians have never worked in a private business, never started or built a private business and never made a payroll. They know nothing about how business functions. This is why the average politician in Washington or in the states is convinced that businesses earn an average of 50 percent profit on sales. They are living in a cloud cuckoo world completely divorced from reality.
The fact is that businesses create all wealth. Businesses create all employment. Businesses pay all taxes. When governments place a tax on businesses, the businesses can do several things. They can pay the tax and pass the costs on to their customers. They can pay the tax and reduce the wages, benefits and incentives for their employees by a similar amount. Or they can move away to a place where taxes are lower. They can even shut down, as many large businesses have been forced to do. But businesses are merely tax collectors for the welfare state.
Coming back to the subject of incentives, there is only one number that counts in our economy: the rate of new business formation. Businesses collapse, merge or shut down at a rate of 6 percent to 7 percent per year. Therefore, new businesses must be created at a rate of 7 percent to 8 percent per year or more for the economy to remain stable. This is an economic number that has never changed.
Wherever state or country creates a large number of incentives for new businesses to start up, new jobs are created, new wealth is created, prosperity and opportunity are made available to more people, and the country grows.
When you look at the political policy and statements made by people running for office, simply ask this question: “If these policies are enacted, will this increase the incentives to start new businesses. Will it increase the incentives for savings, investments and the risks necessary to create economic opportunity?”
By the way, whenever there is an election, the out party always claims that the economy is in terrible shape. Most American elections are determined by the state of the economy at the time of the election. If you want to get elected, offering change of some kind, you must declare loudly that the situation is terrible.
If your friends in the newspapers take up the cry, they will also say, day and night, that the economy is in terrible shape. We need new leaders. Vote for the other guy.
Don’t be taken in. In the final analysis, government cannot create jobs. Government cannot create prosperity. Government can only redistribute wealth by taxing the people who are producing it and giving it to the people who are not producing it.
When governments redistribute wealth, they punish the successful and the productive, and they reward the unsuccessful and the unproductive. They reverse the system of incentives in a negative way. All that a government can do is make it more attractive or less attractive for new business startups. That’s all you need to know.
Reasons for Rich or Poor
Why do some people retire rich and most people retire poor? This subject has fascinated philosophers, thinkers, mystics and teachers throughout the ages. There have been so many cases of hundreds or thousands and even millions of men and women who have started with nothing and become financially independent that people are naturally curious to know why it happened and what are the common rules or principles that others can apply to become wealthy as well.
Why People Become Rich
One illustration of this key principle is called the Parable of the Talents. In the Bible it says, “To him that hath, shall more be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away.”
Accumulation Leads to More Accumulation
What does it mean? In the modern world we say, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” The fact is that people who accumulate money tend to accumulate more and more. People who don’t accumulate money seem to lose even the little bit of money that they have. Why should this happen? The great success principle, the single idea that explains human destiny, is simple. It says, “You become what you think about most of the time.”
Control Your Thoughts
And whatever you dwell upon grows in your reality. You create your entire world by the things you choose to think about and how you choose to think about them.
It just so happens that wealthy, successful people fill their minds with thoughts, words, pictures and images of wealth, affluence, success, productivity and solutions to problems in the marketplace, most of the time. These thoughts trigger the reticular activating cortex, the part of the brain that makes you more alert and sensitive to things that you have decided are important to you.
Activate Your Reticular Cortex
For example, if you decide to invest in a mutual fund, you will start to see news and information about mutual funds everywhere. Mentions in newspapers and magazines will jump out at you. These notices have always been there, but now you have sensitized your brain to pick them up and draw them to your attention with far greater frequency and vividness. This is the function and power of your reticular cortex.
Avoid Poverty Thinking
On the other hand, what do poor people think about most of the time? Unfortunately, poor people fill their minds with thoughts of scarcity, lack, poverty and being unable to afford things. They are always thinking and talking about how little money they have, how much things cost and how they wish things could be better financially. What they think about most of the time is how little money they have.
Think Like Wealthy People Think
Wealthy people from an early age think about how much they have, how much they want and all the different things they can do to acquire and earn the money and things they desire.
Find Out How Rich People Think
Here’s a rule for you. If you want to become successful, find out what failures do, and don’t do it. If you want to be wealthy, find out what poor people think about, and avoid thinking in those ways. Instead, find out how wealthy people think. Find out what they read. Find out how they spend their time. Study their lives, read their stories and autobiographies, and listen to their words when they are interviewed and on tape. The more you find out what financially successful people think and talk about most of the time, and do the same things, the more rapidly you will enjoy the same rewards they do.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do to put this Parable of the Talents into action:
First, make a decision today that from now on you will think and talk only about the financial success that you desire. At the same time, you will refuse to talk about or dwell upon your financial problems.
Second, instead of saying, “I can’t afford it,” instead ask the question, “How can I afford it?” When you think of something that you want or need that you don’t have the money for at the time, the only question you ask is, “How?” How can you get it? What can you do to achieve it? What are your options? How can you get from where you are to where you want to go? This type of attitude will change your life.
The Essence of Business Success
The essence of a successful business is really quite simple. It is your ability to offer a product or service that people will pay for at a price sufficiently above your costs, ideally three or four or five times your cost, thereby giving you a profit that enables you to buy and to offer more products and services.
Add Value in Some Way
The key to a successful business is to add value by bringing the product or service from another place to where you’re selling it, or by creating the product or service and selling it at a price higher than your total cost of production. You become wealthy by either selling a few products or services at high prices, or by selling many products or services at lower prices with smaller profits.
The Best Strategy of All
The best strategy, of course, is to aim to sell a larger volume with a smaller profit on each item. Most great fortunes in America have been made selling large quantities of products over a wide area, thereby broadening the market and reducing your dependency on just a few customers.
Go From the Known to the Unknown
Early in my business career, I learned another key rule for business success and it’s simply this. Start off in an established field and only experiment with new products or services out of your profits from your established business.
Success Leaves Tracks: Follow Them
One reason many entrepreneurs fail is that they have grandiose ideas of being the first into the market with a brand new, untried, unproven product. Don’t you fall into this trap. As you begin to magnetize your mind with visual images of wealth and success, as you begin looking everywhere for profitable ideas, you will begin to attract into your life the people and opportunities you need to achieve your goals. I’ve learned from long experience that you must learn to trust your intuition, your gut feeling concerning any business decision.
Flood Your Mind With Ideas
Read every publication, explore every opportunity. Remain open to all ideas. But in the final analysis, trust yourself. Trust your inner voice to tell you the right thing to do. All great businesspeople become great by listening to their inner guide. It will never fail to lead you to your highest good and heaven help the person who refuses to listen to it.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do to start a successful business by trusting your intuition before you make a final decision:
First, always remember that the key to success in business is your ability to add value to your customers by providing them with something they want and need at a price that enables you to make a profit. Keep your thinking focused on the benefit that your customer will enjoy from what you are offering.
Second, get all the information you possibly can. Speak to as many people as possible. And finally, sit down quietly by yourself and listen to your intuition before you make the final decision. This is the best investment of all.
Your job is to organize your life and work to minimize surprises and problems. However, this is not always possible, in spite of your best efforts.
Use the ‘worry buster’
If you are already facing a fear- or worry-inducing situation, here are the four steps of what we refer to as the “worry buster.”
Clarity is everything
Step Number One: Define the worry situation clearly in writing. Fully half of all problems can be solved just by clearly defining them. Remember, “Accurate diagnosis is half the cure.”
Assume the worst
Step Number Two: Determine the worst possible outcome of the situation. What is the absolute worst that can happen?
Be willing to have it so
Step Number Three: Resolve to accept the worst should it occur. The first step in dealing with any negative situation is to be willing to have it so. Once you resolve to accept the worst, your mind will become calm and clear, and you’ll be ready to take some constructive action.
Take action
Step Number Four: The final step is to immediately begin doing everything you possibly can to improve upon the worst.
The antidote to worry
Remember, worry is merely a sustained form of fear caused by indecision. The only antidote to worry is purposeful action. Get so busy doing something about your situation that you don’t have time to worry. As you take action, your confidence, courage and sense of control will return and wipe away your fears.
Action exercises
Here are two things you can do to get rid of your worries:
First, make a list down one side of a page of all the situations causing you any stress or worry at the moment.
Second, on the other side of the page, write out the worst possible thing that could happen as a result. You’ll be amazed to see much of your worry disappear with this exercise.
A major stimulant to creative thinking is focused questions. There is something about a well-worded question that often penetrates to the heart of the matter and triggers new ideas and insights.
Questions Stimulate Creative Thinking
Some of the best questions I’ve found for business problem solving are the following:
Clarify your desired result
Question #1: “What are we trying to do?” Whenever you become frustrated with slow progress for any reason, step back and ask this again and again.
Analyze your current methods
Question #2: “How are we trying to do it?” If you are experiencing resistance, perhaps your method is wrong. Be willing to objectively analyze your approach by asking, How are we trying to do it? Is this the right way? Could there be a better way? What if our method is completely wrong? How else could we approach it?
Could you be wrong?
Question #3: “Are we right?” It requires courage to face the possibility that you may be wrong, but it also leads to your seeing new possibilities. The rule is: Always decide what’s right before worrying about who’s right.
Question your assumptions
Question #4: “What are our assumptions” about the person, the product, the market or the business? Could we be assuming something that is incorrect? Time management expert Alec Mackenzie once wrote, “Errant assumptions lie at the root of every failure.”
What if your unspoken or implied assumptions were wrong? What would you have to do differently?
Put past decisions on trial
Another form of focused questioning is what I call “zero-based thinking.” This method requires that you regularly put every past decision on trial for its life by asking, “If I had not made this decision, knowing what I now know, would I make it?” If I had not hired this person or gotten involved in this project, knowing what I now know, would I do it over again?
If the answer is no to one of these questions, then your aim should be to get out of the decision as fast as possible. Be willing to cut your losses and try something else.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do to trigger more and better ideas.
First, be very clear about exactly what it is that you are trying to do. Write it down and describe it as if it were already achieved.
Second, question your assumptions continually. What if there were a better way? Be willing to try something completely different.
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