Tag Archives: Achievement

How To Stay Focused For Automatic Success

Horizons

Once a long time ago I took a drive with a friend of mine. We started in Los Angeles, and our only goal was to make it to some city in New Jersey within a certain amount of time. I think it was something like five days. That’s about three thousand miles over five or six days, which is a lot of driving each day.

We had the route planned out, and our destination was clear enough, and the math was all figured out. Our basic plan was to wake up at six every morning, and start driving. We didn’t even figure on mileage per day, we just figured if we drove for twelve hours a day, with a minimum of stopping, we’d make it in time.

Sounds like a good plan, right? Only there was one thing we neglected to take into consideration. While this small detail didn’t affect the overall outcome of the trip, it made it a little bit more troublesome than we’d anticipated.

I had a friend once that really enjoyed math, and so he majored in math in university. He never really knew what he was going to do, he only knew that he liked math. He ended up being a high school teacher, but for a while he was a bit worried. When he graduated, he started looking through the want ads, and going to job seminars, and even went as far as to sign himself up with a few headhunters.

The thing about a degree in math is that by itself, it’s not all the applicable to very many industries. If you studied some kind of applied math like statistics, or actuarial science, you can do pretty well for yourself. I remember even reading several years ago about some huge ranking a major newspaper did on different jobs, using all kinds of factors like salary, working conditions, opportunities for advancement, etc. And an Actuary was ranked number one.

But my friend didn’t study any applications, just basic math theory. I think they called it foundations. Most people who focused on that aspect of math usually went on to get their PhD’s or something. Which was why my friend was a bit worried.

He figured just by doing something that he liked, that would be enough. Luckily, he really enjoys his teaching job, and he graduated when there was a severe shortage of math teachers in the public schools, so he could pretty much choose any school he wanted. But had he majored in something like history, or art or something, he wouldn’t have been nearly as lucky.

My other friend was much more specific. He studied a specific branch of electrical engineering. And when he was only halfway through university he already had talked to several different companies, and knew exactly what kind of people they hired, and what kinds of extra curricular backgrounds they liked for their fresh graduates. Needless to say, he was much more focused, and when he graduated he already had several offers lined up. And they were all for quite a bit of money. That must have been a pretty good feeling at graduation ceremony.

I went to this seminar once on goal setting. It was one of those local things they have every now and then down at the learning annex. This guy was saying that there are two kinds of goals. There are directional goals, and milestone goals. He said the directional goals are like walking toward the horizon. You will always walk in the same direction, but no matter how far you go, the horizon will always be a fixed location way off in front of you.

So long as you pick a point off in the distance, you’ll keep walking in the same direction. But if you only have a directional goal, it’s easy to get discourage, as you will never seem to make any progress. It’s tough to stay focused through will power alone.

On the other hand, there are milestone goals. Like if you pick something specific, and you know exactly what will happen when you achieve. Not only will you have something solid to look forward to, but you’ll also have evidence that you’ll collect along the way.

But if you only have a bunch of milestone goals, you could very well end up walking in a circle, so to speak. Each time you achieve your goal, you could pick another one, but if may take you back toward where you started. It’s easy to fall into a trap of oscillating back and forth between two extremes.

The best is to have a combination of the two. When you choose a solid directional goal, and several milestone goals that are lined up in the same direction, it would be like walking toward the horizon, and achieving several significant goals every so often along. These will be enough to keep you motivated and keep you going, and the horizon will always be there beckoning you to keep going. If you keep this up, pretty soon you’ll be accomplishing some pretty fantastic stuff, as they will tend to increase in size along the way.

The easiest way is to pick something way off in the distance, and then work your way backwards until you have several small pieces of achievements laid out in front of you just waiting for to start walking along your path and scoop them up along the way.

The funny thing that happened to us on the way to New Jersey was we’d get to six or seven at night, and figure we’d done enough driving. So we decide to stop for the night, only to look on our map and find that the next town wasn’t for another hundred miles or so. And when you’ve been driving for twelve hours, and you’re about ready for a cheeseburger and a couple beers, and a soft bed, another hundred miles is a long way.

But at least it was a hundred miles in the right direction. I’d hate to imagine what it would be like to realize we made a mistake and had to turn back for a hundred miles. That would be devastating.

(Advertisement)

To learn how to easily set, and achieve both short term and long-term goals, click below to learn some powerful NLP secrets:

Success with NLP

Success with NLP

Are You A Leader Of Your Life? Or A Passive Follower?

How To Become a Relentless Heat Seeking Missile

One of the best ways to improve your communication skills with other people is to create a solid set of underlying objectives. Most people float through life with only a vague desire to avoid as much pain and discomfort as possible, and this comes across in their communication. They come across protective of their egos and hesitant to speak their true feelings for fear of rejection and ridicule.

Of course this can be a hard thing to overcome. We have been trained since we were children that it is dangerous to speak our minds. At first, everybody loved us. Every single thing we did was cute and adorable. But then once we hit two or three, we became sometimes cute, and sometimes a nuisance. And the times we were a nuisance, we were told through several different and subconscious channels of communication.

It’s not wonder then that public speaking is the biggest fear in America today. We have been so programmed to be uncertain of any response to our expression that we more often than not live under the illusion that it is safer to just be quiet and as expressionless as possible.

However, the great paradox of communication is that while we crave somebody that will give us inspiration and direction, the best solution is to simply be that person to others. Most people are sitting around waiting for somebody else to go first and lead the way. Most people don’t consider the idea that it is just as easy and natural to lead, as it is to follow.

One of the ways to do this is to simply choose a few things that you’d like to create in life. The more you focus on these, the more they will start to present themselves through your various interactions with people.

The sad fact is that most people don’t have any goals in life to speak of, other than the ones that were given to them by society. Get a decent job, get a family, put in an honest days work every day. Be a good model citizen and don’t cause any problems.

If that is what you truly want, then I’m all for it. Those that are the happiest in their jobs and relationships have actually taken the time to ensure it really is their choice to live that particular life. However, it is becoming more and more apparent that more and more people seem to be drifting along through life half asleep, hoping the general expectations laid down by the collective society will be enough to give them happiness. Often times it is not.

One way to get started is to sit down and think about the things in your life that really like, and the things you don’t like. Make a plan to increase the amount of things you like, and decrease the things you don’t like. Most people, obviously, have a pretty good idea of what they like and what they don’t like. Very few have taken the time to formulate a plan to get more of the good stuff, and less of the bad stuff.

Most people drift through life hoping that more good stuff will magically appear, and the bad stuff will be taken away by some benevolent god or government.

When you develop a solid plan, and start to focus on achieving it, your daily interactions with people will magically transform. You will be seen as somebody who has a clear objective in life. Somebody that knows what they want. Somebody to be respected.

This has a strange, perhaps metaphysical way of coming through in your daily conversations. Perhaps due to the large amount of communication that takes place below conscious awareness, people can pick up on the fact that you are on a mission of your own choosing rather than shuffling to the collective beat of society.

How do you get there? Pick a few major goals you’d like to achieve in a years time. Get really specific. Every day, focus on one of your goals. Spend a few minutes imagining it and making it truly compelling. Focus on each day with something, anything you can do to get you closer. Spend a few minutes every night mentally reviewing your day and highlighting any efforts you made in the direction of your goal.

Man is a nomadic creature, designed through evolution, or God, or Mother Nature, to be a seeker, not a follower. Man was designed to find a point far, far off in the distance, and to relentlessly pursue it. We were not designed, nor do we come close to our potential, by keeping our head down and obediently shuffling along.

Find that point off in the distance, whatever it is. Make it real. Visualize it. Pursue it. Achieve it.

And let nothing, no man, no woman, no institution of society stop you.

How To Increase Your Resilience For Guaranteed Success

How To Become A Guided Missile Towards Success

There used to be this guy that I worked with. He was kind of a quiet, serious type of guy. He was always focused on his job, which was good. He was an electronics technician. This was at a company that manufactured these big machines that were then sold to various manufacturers of various large commercial and retail products.

This guy’s job was to trouble shoot new designs. The engineers would come up with a new design for a machine, and build several prototypes. Then they would give them to this guy, who would run them through a whole range of different operating conditions, and then give them back to the design engineers with his report.

At first, they would give him specific things to look for, but they realized that he could do a far better job on his own. So after about year, they just gave him the machine, and pretty much let him play with it for a couple weeks. In his report he would list the drawbacks, the benefits and what he would like to see from an end user’s standpoint.

The interesting thing was that the design engineers would use him for a large part of their research and development efforts, as his input was extremely valuable. It was also a good experience for him; having only a two-year degree he was giving input at the level usually reserved for upper management and senior level engineers. They would usually give him a product several different times during the stage of development, and with his input, they eventually created a device that was unmatched in that particular industry.

I was reading this self-development book the other day. It was talking about how some people choose their goals. Most people have a vague wish, take a couple steps, and get discouraged when everything doesn’t turn out exactly the way they want it. Which is kind of funny because since most people don’t really know exactly how they want things, it’s kind of hard to know when you get there.

But this book was saying that people should design their goals, and then think of themselves as a guided missile. What many people don’t know about guided missiles is the incredible amount of feed back from the environment they use to keep reprogramming themselves. They literally make hundreds of thousands of calculations along the way to their target, and are always adjusting their trajectory. If guided missiles were like people, they’d give as soon as they left the launch pad.

I was reading this book recently about how people tend to give meaning to events based on their opinions of themselves, and of their expectations of the outcome of the event. Two different people will do exactly the same thing, but they each will have a completely different interpretation of what went down. And based upon their interpretation, what they do next will be completely different.

So after a while, if one person is always looking at results, and adjusting their behavior to get better results, then they will usually get what they are looking for.

But somebody else, who instead of getting instant gratification sees only failure, will usually give up. They might try a bunch of different things, only to think that they fail all the time. This will destroy their self-esteem and their belief in their ability to get what they want out of life.

The first person will see a world filled with opportunities, while the second person will see a world filled with problems and limitations. And although the second person likely won’t ever admit it, it’s all based on how they choose to think of events that happen. The secret, according this book, was that all you have to do is change your interpretation of events, and you can pretty much do anything, with a long enough time line.

The other thing this book mentioned was to think more in the future instead of immediate gratification. If you are always looking for immediate pleasure, you usually won’t get anything that lasts very long. Kind of like planting seeds. Some plants grow very quick, but don’t produce much. Some take a while to grow, but when they finally reach maturity, they produce fruit year after year, without much effort on your part.

And my friend finally started his own consulting business, helping companies to design all different kinds of machines. Last I heard he just got a huge contract with a major automobile manufacturer. He has about twenty people working for him that he collected along the way. Word on the street is that his net worth is well into the millions. Not bad for a two year degree technician.

How to Achieve Anything

As you sit there, reading this post, feeling the feelings in your chair, you might begin to recall a time when you thought about something that you wanted in life. Perhaps it was a new car, or a relationship, or a box of chocolate flavored marshmallows. If you’ve ever had the experience of wishing for something that didn’t come true, then this article is for you. In this you will learn the exact steps to take that will turn those “wishes” into strong desires that will in turn manifest into reality.

I’m not sure if this works because there is some underlying metaphysical principle that governs our lives, or if it is because of the unique nature of our brains due to the complex process of evolution. Either way, this simple process has brought untold riches and happiness to many people. Unfortunately, throughout time, some of these truths were twisted and misinterpreted, either on purpose or accidentally, to achieve social control and power. If you’ve heard about the controversy of Napoleon Hill’s original “Think and Grow Rich,” manuscript, with respect to organized religions, you’ll understand the power of these techniques.

The process is simple, but it does require some diligence, and some patience. It is quite a shame that the vast majority of people throughout time have lived lives of “quiet desperation,” when there is this simple method that can get you exactly what you want.

The first step is to create an absolutely clear goal of what it is that you want. You have to make sure that you truly want it, and you haven’t been brainwashed by society or church or your family into thinking that you want this. This may take some time, so be patient. Dig through your desires until you find one that you can really accept if it comes true without reservation.

The second step is to put it in present tense writing. Clear, concise, accurate writing. I own a red convertible, 1967 corvette. I have six pack abs that I can see in the mirror every morning when I wake up. I have a golf handicap of 10.

The third step is to come up with at least three or four mind pictures of what your goal looks, smells, tastes, sounds and feels like. Take your time and come up with as many rich representations as you can.

The fourth step is to get in the habit of repeating your goal to yourself several times a day, while picturing the various images of it in your mind. It’s very important to feel a strong emotional appreciation for your choice. At first this may seem fruitless, as you will feel weird imagining that you have something that you don’t. Be patient. This is the part where most people fail. They try this a few times, and after a week without a sack of money magically appearing on their doorstep, they give up. If you don’t feel a strong emotion at first, keep doing this. You will be building actual neurological pathways in your brain every time you visualize this. The more you do this, the easier it will be to do, and the more real it will seem and the easier it will to really feel that sense of appreciation for what you are creating. It’s important to feel the appreciation in the present, as if you already have this.

You should do this visualization step several times a day, for five minutes or so each time, and as you fall asleep every night. Again, this crucial step is the reason so many people don’t achieve what they want in life. We are too distracted by TV, news, swine flu, anything else that keeps us from quiet reflection. Don’t give to the giving up your thoughts to brain candy.

The best way to get started with this is choose something easy; to make sure that this really works. Simple personal habits good for this, like smiling and saying hi to strangers as part of your personality. Or waking up naturally at a certain time every morning. When you easily achieve this, you can move on to bigger and better things.

For resources, I recommend the following books:

Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
Dr. Maxwell Maltz, Psycho Cybernetics
Dr. Joseph Murphy, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind

There is nothing that you cannot achieve with the right use of your mind.

How to Create a Powerful Burning Desire

If you’ve ever read any books on goal achievement, or read any articles on the subject, I’m sure that you’ve heard the oft repeated phrase of “burning desire” or “white hot desire” or some other description. The idea being that you need to make sure that when you create a goal, it’s not some half baked wish that you kind of sort of hope might maybe come true someday, if everything goes ok, and as long as you don’t get in trouble. You need to charge your visualized picture of your realized goal with such strength of desire your brain will work on making it come true, even when you are not paying attention.

The problem is, few people have the discipline and the willpower to even create a visualization of a realized goal, let alone charge it several times a day with white hot burning desire. There are several reasons for this that I’d like to explore, and to come up with ways to help you create a goal, and charge it with sufficient desire in order to make it a reality, instead of some pie in the sky wish.

Imagine what it was like back in the old days. No, I don’t mean the old days before the Internet, I mean the really old days before agriculture. Many scientists believe that mankind lived in our present physical and mental state under the conditions prior to agriculture for at least a hundred thousand years. Living in groups of fifty to two hundred, life was tough. There wasn’t a consistent source of food, so we had to wander, and follow whatever we could to eat. Because humans are generally considered omnivores, meaning that we can eat pretty much anything, we generally took whatever we could find. Plants, animals, roots, each other.

In each group of hunter-gatherers, there was generally one “Alpha” male. Several studies done on chimps show that the alpha male gets most of the food, and most of the sex. The rest of us hacks had to fight for ours. Imagine what it was like living in this state. Always hungry. Living with desire as a constant companion, reminding us to always search and creatively think of ways to get our basic needs met.

Fast forward to today. When we’re hungry, we just stumble over to the fridge and shove food in our mouths. When we are thirsty, we drink. When we want sex, well, there’s always the Internet, if you catch my drift. We have come to think of any desire as a temporary inconvenience that needs to be quickly gotten rid of in the quickest way possible.
Is it any wonder so many people today are overweight, and underpaid? It is any wonder that so many of us drift through a life of mediocrity, never summoning the courage to demand from life what we really want?

The first step then, is to make friends with desire. Focus on the feeling of desire itself, instead of any frustration that comes up when it can’t be immediately pacified. Learn to live with desire. Hunger is your friend. It keeps you motivated to shun short-term sugary fixes, and focus your energies and creativity on more worthy, long-term goals.

The first step, of course, is to follow any good procedure to create well-formed goals. You can google “well formed goals” or search this site for ways to do this. When you have a well formed goal, the next step is to create three or four rich visualizations of what you will see, hear, feel, smell and taste when the goal is realized. Driving your new car, enjoying your new house, seeing and feeling the new paycheck. Choose three or four rich, descriptive, fully associated pictures of your goal. Once you have a few pictures, you need to charge them.

Whenever you feel a desire, pause for a few moments before rushing to fulfill it. Breathe in the desire and experience the feelings in the now. Let go of any thoughts about the future, or imaginations about the past. Fully feel your desire. Now while you are still feeling the emotional now feeling of your desire, focus on one of your visualizations. Focus on your visualization until the physical/emotional feeling of the desire subsides.

Experiment with putting off the short-term satisfaction of your desires. If you desire is for food, wait a few moments before eating. Realize that your feeling of hunger can be tapped to power your desire of your goal. If your desire is for water, pause, and imagine the desire as your goal. When you eat or drink, imagine your desire as being fulfilled. Practice as well with your breath. Exhale completely, and wait until you feel a real desire to breath. Before inhaling, experience your visualization. As you inhale and feel the sweet breath fill your lungs, see your goal being achieved as well. There’s a reason those who have achieved greatness describe their success and “eating drinking and breathing their goal.”

If you want to really turbo charge your desires, experiment with your sexual desires. Feel the sexual desire, release any imaginations and feel only the physical feeling. Then while feeling and appreciating that feeling and desire, visualize your goals. The more often you can do this, and the longer you can charge your goals each time, the better. Napoleon Hill devoted a whole chapter to this in “Think and Grow Rich.” You an google this as well and read the entire chapter, or even the book, online for free. I would recommend keeping your own copy handy to refer to when you are waiting in the dentists office or at Starbucks.

Desire can be a source of fantastic power, or daily frustration, all depending on how you use it in conjunction with your mind and imagination. Many people throughout history have known this, but few have been able to truly tap this power for incredible success. There is no reason why you can’t start now to create the life of your dreams.

Permalink

Four Power Sources for Success

In all the interactions that you’ve ever had, all the interactions you ever will have, there are only four things that are in your control. Luckily, these four sources of power are all you will ever need to achieve any dream, manifest any goal, and create any situation that you desire in life. These are not something you need to go out and get. You cannot buy these, you cannot steal these. You need do absolutely nothing to attain these, for you already have them.

These are your thoughts, your emotions, your words, and your actions.

Everything you see around you was created with these. All things tangible and intangible. From the great Sphinx to the very computer screen you are now reading, all were created with only these four powers.

Lets see how you can tap them now.

Thought

Those ideas you have floating around in your head. The result of billions neural synapses firing to create mental images. Created by evolution or God, to assist you in moving through the world to plan, learn and conquer. Have a look on the article regarding focus to get an idea how you can begin to control your thoughts, so that they don’t control you.

Emotions

Emotions arise in our minds when we use our thoughts to give meaning to events. Suppose you sit next a cute girl (or a cute guy, depending on your gender or tastes) at a coffee shop. As soon you sit, you notice that she inhales, and then turns her body slightly away from you. What just happened? If you assume that she finds you repulsive, and turned so she wouldn’t have to face you, what emotion would that cause? If you assume she finds you irresistibly attractive, and suddenly became very shy, what emotion would that cause? The secret here? Any meaning you give to a situation is perfect. The important thing is not whether it’s accurate or not, because we never really know why other people do what they do, but what emotions we create in ourselves by giving certain meanings to things.  When you start to pay attention to how you interpret the world around you, you can start to play around with giving different meanings to give yourself better emotions. This takes time and effort, and I will be writing several future articles to that end, so stay tuned.

Words

Words can be powerful. Words can be eloquent. Speeches throughout history have moved people to great heights of goodness and love, and to evil, horrible depths of destruction. A kind string of words can convince somebody not to kill themself. A kindly said “hello” can change a persons complete outlook. The Jurassic 5’s The Verbal Herman Munster said “..word power can plow through acres of cornfields, paragraphs cut like warm steel..” When you begin to pay attention to the words that you use, you can become incredibly powerful. It’s no coincidence that the ‘spell’ which describes the correct order of letters in a word is the same ‘spell’ that describes the correct order of words in a magic incantation.

Actions

The vehicle that carries the sum of our power is our actions. What we do. How we do it. Not just large physical movements. Body language, facial expressions, smiles, frowns. Our actions and words can synchronize together to either display a congruence so powerful that we can become kings, or with such chaotic psychosis that people steer wide to avoid us altogether.

Our reality is indeed a reflection of how we manage, control and use our four powers to our advantage. By releasing the childishly dependent strategy of hoping for free gifts from others, you can realize that when you harness your four powers for great achievements, you will receive more abundance than you ever imagined possible.

Good thoughts lead to good feelings, which naturally spawn congruent words and actions which lead to success. If reality is not how you like you need only go to your source of power. Change your thoughts, change your world.

Permalink