Define your ideals clearly. If you could be an excellent person in every way, what qualities would you have.? How would you behave?
You become what you think about most of the time. Identify one or more areas of your life where your thinking is having a major influence on your emotions, attitudes, or actions.
In what area of activity do you perform at your best? How do you visualize yourself in that area? How could you extend this act of visualization to other areas?
What kind of people do you most admire and respect? Why? How could you change your behaviour so that it is more consistent with that of the best people you know?
In what areas of your life do you like yourself the most? What sorts of activities give the highest levels of self-esteem and personal value? How could you do even more of these things?
You are a thoroughly good person. From this day forth, see yourself as the very best you can be, and refuse to accept any limitations on your possibilities.
Change your self-concept by continually thinking, talking, and acting as if you were already the person you would like to be, enjoying the life that you want and deserve.
Chapter 2 – Change Your Life
Resolve today that you are going to be completely happy person. Now ask, “What is it in my life that makes me unhappy or causes me stress?” Whatever your answer, decide to deal with it and eliminate it.
Recall an experience from your childhood that you are still angry about. Now reinterpret that experience positively and view it as a valuable learning experience.
In what areas of your life are you angry or resentful because you are sill blaming someone for something he did or didn’t do? Whatever it is, accept responsibility and get on with your life.
Don’t take things personally anymore. From now on, when people do not respect you or treat you as you wish to be treated, rise above it and go about your business.
Make a decision today to forgive everyone in your past toward whom you still feel angry negative emotion. Let them go and let yourself go at the same time.
Forgive yourself for every mistake you have made. If it is appropriate, go and ask forgiveness of the other person. Set yourself free.
Chapter 3 – Draeam Big Dreams
What one great goal would you set for yourself if you were absolutely guaranteed success?
Make out a “dream list”; write down everything you would like to have in your life someday, exactly as if you had no limitations.
Imagine your perfect lifestyle; if you were financially independent and you could live any way and anywhere you wanted, what would you change?
Make a list of 10 goals you would like to accomplish in the next year. From that list, select one goal that would have the greatest positive impact on your life if you could achieve it right now.
Write your most important goal on a separate piece of paper. Make it measureable and set a deadline for its accomplishment.
Make a written plan to achieve this one goal. Write out a list of everything you can think of that you will have to do to accomplish it.
Take action on your plan immediately. Once you have started, discipline yourself to do something every day that moves you toward that goal. Never miss a day until you have achieved it.
Chapter 4 – Decide to Become Rich
Identify the most valuable things you do at work. How could you organize your time so that you do more of them?
Resolve today to develop the habit of punctuality. Go on Lombardi time, and start arriving 15 minutes early for appointments.
Organize your day so that you come in and get started one hour earlier than your co-workers. Work through lunchtime, and stay one hour later.
Work all the time you work. Don’t waste a minute. If someone tries to distract you, say you have to get back to work, and then do it.
Look under your own feet for your personal acres of diamonds, opportunities to add more value right where you are. What could they be?
Resolve today to become financially independent. Become a student of money, wealth accumulation, and wealth creation. Becoming rich is a skill that you can learn.
Begin today to implement the 40 Plus Formula in your daily work life. Work on your job, or work on yourself to get better at what you do, 50 to 60 hours each week. Put yourself on the side of the angels.
Chapter 5 – Take Charge of Your Life
Resolve today to accept 100 percent responsibility for everything you are or will ever be. Instead of making excuses, decide to make progress.
Identify one area where you use the words “I can’t” when you think of the need to change or do something different. Now imagine that your limitations in that area are all in your mind.
In what parts of your life have you become comfortable, so much that you resist change, even if it would be an improvement? What could you do to get out of this comfort zone?
Identify one area where fear and doubt are holding you back from doing something that you want to do. Imagine that you were absolutely guaranteed success in that area. What would you do differently?
What are your favourite excuses for not making the decisions or taking the actions you need to if you want to achieve al your goals? What if your excuses were not true?
Desire and knowledge are the antidotes to fear and doubt. What could you do immediately to increase your knowledge in an area where you want to take action?
Identify one key area of your life that you have created with your own thinking. How could you change your thinking in that area to be more successful?
Chapter 6 – Commit to Excellence
What is it that you love to do? What activity gives you your greatest feeling of importance?
If you could be absolutely excellent at any one task or skill, what would it be? Set it as a goal and begin work on that skill immediately.
What are the key result areas of your job? On a scale of 1 to 10, how good are you in each area?
What one skill, if you developed and utilized it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on your life?
What is your area of excellence, your unique selling proposition, and the very best thing you do in your work?
If you could do only one thing all day long, what one task or activity would contribute the greatest value to your company and to your work?
Identify your heart’s desire, the one thing that you were put on this earth to do. If you could accomplish one great thing in your lifetime, what would it be?
Chapter 7 – Put People First
Make a list of 10 people whom it would be helpful for you to know. Write each of them a letter congratulating them on something they have just done.
Select three people with whom you can form a business/career type of mastermind group. Invite them to meet with you weekly for breakfast or lunch.
Join at least one association that holds regular meetings in your community and begin attending every one. Volunteer to serve on one of committees, and get involved.
Examine each of the people with whom you regularly associate, in business or socially. Are these the right people for you to have as members of your reference group?
Develop a personal development plan to prepare yourself to become the kind of person that you would like to meet and spend time with. Take control of your own future.
Take a Dale Carnegie course in public speaking, or join a chapter of Toastmasters International. Learn to speak on your feet.
Resist relationship entropy; keep in regular touch with the most important people in your personal and business life. Call or visit someone today.
Chapter 8 – Think Like a Genius
Begin today to create your own personal library of books in your field. Read 30 to 60 minutes each day, underline, and take careful notes.
Examine your recent unexpected successes and failures in your business. Could they be indicative of a trend that you can take advantage of?
Approach each problem in your life systematically. Imagine that the solution is exactly the opposite of what you are currently doing.
Continually expose your mind to new ideas and viewpoints. Ask lots of questions. Consider the possibility that you could be wrong.
Listen to educational audio programs in your car. Turn your car into a mobile classroom, a “university on wheels.”
Select an area where expertise can help you to move ahead in your career. Develop a plan to study and learn everything you possibly can in that area. Be the best at what you do.
Associate only with positive, optimistic, creative, happy people who are going somewhere with their lives. Get around winners if you want to be one.
Chapter 9 – Unleash Your Mental Powers
Define your most important goal or problem in the form of a question and write it at the top of a page. Then, generate at least 20 answers to your question.
Make a list of your most pressing problems or obstacles to achieving your goals. What is the simplest and most direct solution to each one?
Think of your most important goal and ask, “Why have I not achieved that goal already?”
Identify the constraints or limiting factors that determine how fast you increase your income. What can you do right now to alleviate these constraints?
What are the intelligences that you seem to be better at than others? How could you organize your life and work so that you are capitalizing more on these intelligences?
What have you been good at in the past? What activities give you your greatest feeling of importance?
What parts of your work give you the highest return on energy? How could you structure your work and your life so that you are spending more time in these areas?
Chapter 10 – Supercharge Your Thinking
Resolve today to talk to yourself positively, using affirmations phrased in the positive, personal, present tense. Be your own cheerleader.
Make a set of three-by-five index cards with each of your goals written out in the form of an affirmation. Review these cards twice a day, morning and evening.
Look for something good in every problem or difficulty. Practice being an inverse paranoid, convinced that there is a vast conspiracy to make you successful.
Create a mental picture of your most important goal, exactly as if it were already a reality. If possible, cut pictures of your goal out of magazines and study them regularly to program them into your subconscious mind.
Get the feeling that would go with the success or the goal that you desire. Imagine that you have to pretend the emotion of joy, happiness, or satisfaction in an audition for a role in a movie. Fake it until you make it!
Imagine that your life was perfect in a particular area. What would it look like? How would you feel? How would you describe it?
Before falling a sleep each night, mentally rehearse the key events of the coming day. Visualize and emotionalize them turning out perfectly in every way. Then go off to sleep with a smile on your face.
Chapter 11 – Create Your Own Future
Resolve that you will bounce rather than break. Examine your biggest disappointment in life right now and determine how you can learn or benefit from it.
Identify the three worst things that could happen to you in the months ahead. What is your plan to avoid or minimize their possible negative effects?
Select your biggest worry or problem right now and determine how you can learn and grow from this difficulty. What is the most important lesson that it contains?
Practice the Edison approach to life. Calmly accept that every temporary setback is merely a way of identifying a way that does not work. Therefore, it is a success.
No matter what happens, think about your goals and what you can do right now to achieve them. Get busy.
Identify the trends in your business. Which way is the market going? If things continue the way they are today, what decisions or changes will you have to make?
Ask two questions about your most recent important experience: What did you do right? And what would you do differently next time? Resolve to learn every possible lesson from every setback or difficulty.
Chapter 12 – Live A Great Life
Determine your three most important values in your personal and family life. What do you believe in and care about the most?
Resolve to live in truth with yourself and others, without compromise. In what area of your life are you not being perfectly honest with another person?
“To thine own self be true.” Examine the areas of your life where you experience stress, dissatisfaction, or unhappiness and determine if you are compromising one of your values.
What kind of a company would your company be if everyone in it was just like you? What could you change immediately to make your company a better place?
What would you do and how would you spend your time if you learned today that you had only six months left to live? Your answer to this question will reveal your true values.
“People don’t change.” Since this is one of the laws of life, what changes should you make in your life and relationships, at home and at work, to accommodate this fact.
Practice truthfulness in all things. In what areas do you need to accept the world as it is, rather than the way you would like it to be? Be honest with yourself.