Posts Tagged Average Person
Prepare for Your Journey
Posted by davev in Start Thinking, Take Action on October 7, 2010
By Brian Tracy
Preparation is the mark of a professional. Preparation is also the mark of a successful person in any field. As you move upward in any occupation, you will find that the top people spend far more time in preparation than the average person does. The top 10 percent in any field are always more thoroughly prepared in every detail than those who struggle for a living in the same occupation.
Guard Against the Worst
For me, as a professional speaker and seminar leader, the worst thing that could happen would be for my luggage to be lost and for me to arrive without the clothes and seminar materials that I need for my speaking engagement. To guard against this situation, I carry all my essentials on board with me, never out of my sight. Because of this habit of advance planning, I have never had an insurmountable problem because of baggage delays or losses. On the way to your destination, in the achievement of your most important goal, continually ask yourself, What are the worst possible things that can happen? And then guard against them.
Plan for Any Eventuality
The mark of a superior thinker is that he or she assumes that the worst will happen and makes provisions against it. Napoleon Bonaparte was once asked if he believed in luck. He replied, “Yes, I do. I believe in bad luck. I believe I will always have it, and I plan accordingly.”
Refuse to be Passive
My traveling experiences have taught me two things. First, prepare for the worst. No matter what anyone tells you, be prepared for the possibility that he or she will not follow through. Second, be proactive, not passive. Instead of becoming angry or depressed, get busy and get going. Find an alternative. Refuse to accept the current situation if it is not satisfactory. Instead of waiting for things to happen, make things happen.
Prepare a Checklist
Pilots carefully review a checklist prior to every flight. Even if they have flown thousands of hours and have been active pilots for twenty years, they still go through the checklist every single time. You should prepare a checklist as well. No matter how many times you have made the same trip, you should review your checklist once more. Never trust to memory. The failure to check just one critical detail can leave you stranded and maybe even put your destination out of reach. As you proceed toward your personal destinations and struggle toward your goals, the consequences of not following your checklist will not be as severe. But it is not unusual for a business to go broke or a person to lose all his or her money because someone failed to pay attention to a critical detail.
Action Exercise
Get in the habit of making checklists for big and small tasks. Make checklists for travelling and for work related tasks.
Increase Your Earnings 1000%!
Posted by davev in Start Thinking, Take Action on June 8, 2009
Here’s an exercise for you; imagine that it’s possible for you to ear n ten times your current annual wage. If you’re ear ning $25,000, imagine for a moment that it’s possible for you to ear n $250,000, a 1000% increase.
Believe In Yourself
The first reaction of most people to that exercise is to smile briefly and then to begin thinking about why it isn’t possible. One man said to me, “If you knew how many years it’s taken for me to get to what I’m ear ning today you wouldn’t be suggesting that I could ear n ten times as much.”
There Are No Excuses
Mark Twain once wrote that there are a thousand excuses for every failure but never a good reason. The tragedy of the average American is that whereas his or her main preoccupation seems to be money, or the lack thereof, the average person has the inherent potential to ear n far more than he or she is doing currently.
Can Someone Be 10x Better?
Is the manager ear ning $250,000 per year ten times as smart as the manager ear ning $25,000? 10 times as experienced? Does he or she work 10 times harder? Of course not. None of these are physically or mentally possible, but there are people in every business ear ning many times more than others with the same average age, experience and intelligence.
I.Q. Doesn’t Really Matter
In fact, a few years ago in New York, a thousand men and women were selected at random and tested for I.Q. Between the one having the highest I.Q. in this sample and the one with the lowest, there was a difference of only 2 1/2 times. But between the person ear ning the most, who by the way, was not the one with the highest I.Q. and the one ear ning the least, who was not the one with the lowest I.Q., there was a difference of 100X in inc ome.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do to start increasing your earnings:
First, identify the highest ear ning, most successful people in your field and find out what it is that they are doing differently from others who aren’t doing as well. Resolve to copy them every day.
Second, set a goal to double your earnings over the next two or three years and then figure out what you’ll have to do to achieve it. Get started!
