Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement (19 page)

This requires that you
specialize
,
differentiate
,
segment
, and
concentrate
. As the president of your own life and career, you must become absolutely excellent at doing one or two things that the market will pay the most for. You must then become continually better in those one or two areas.

■
YOU ARE EXTRAORDINARY

The fact is that you are extraordinary.You are born with unique talents and abilities that make you completely different from all other human beings who have ever existed. The odds of there being two people just like you are more than 50 billion to one. In fact, it will never happen.

There is no one who has the unique and remarkable combination of experiences, ideas, thoughts, feelings, education, and imagination that you do.You have within you, right now, the ability to be, have, or do virtually anything you can imagine. You are very much like Michelangelo’s block of marble, just lying there.You are like an incredible masterpiece just waiting to emerge.

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Great success and happiness come when you identify your natural abilities, and then concentrate on developing along the lines of your inborn talents. It is almost as though you are engineered for success in a specific way, and if you can find the area for which you were specifically designed, you will achieve more in a few years than most people achieve in a lifetime.

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LEAVE NOTHING TO CHANCE

You leave nothing to chance.You don’t hope for miracles or wish for a lucky break.You recognize that if it’s to be, it’s up to
you
.

Since you know you are going to have to spend the rest of your life working at
something
, you decide in advance that you will do what you love to do. You will become everything you are capable of becoming by developing your unique talents and abilities, wherever they lead. You will work only at something you enjoy, with people you enjoy, doing work that makes a difference in the world.

You set high standards for yourself. You think positively and constructively about your career and your future. You recognize that anything that anyone else has done you can do as well. Once you have decided what it is you want to do, you throw your whole heart into doing it in an excellent fashion. And as a result, you become
unstoppable
.

ACTION EXERCISES

1.
What is it that you really love to do? What activity gives you your greatest feeling of importance?

2.
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.

3.
What are the key result areas of your job? On a scale of 1 to 10, how good are you in each area?

4.
What one skill, if you developed and utilized it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on your life?

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5.
What is your area of excellence, your unique selling proposition, and the very best thing you do in your work?

6.
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?

7.
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?

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C h 7

a p t e r

Put People First

Personal relationships are the fertile soil from which
all advancement, all success, all achievement in real
life begins.

—Ben Stein

The people you know, and who know you in a favorable way, will do more to determine your success, happiness, and level of achievement in life than any other single factor. No one achieves anything of consequence by himself or herself.

In life, relationships are everything. My friend Charlie Jones says,
“You will be in five years what you are today except for the books
you read and the people you meet.”

Dr. David McClelland, author of
The Achieving Society
(Van Nostrand, 1961), concluded after 25 years of research at Harvard that your choice of a “reference group” would have more to do with your success than anything else. McClelland interviewed graduates of the university, as well as those who had attended his intensive seminars on achievement in American life. He tracked these people for many years. Many of them took what they had learned and did wonderful things with it. They built profitable businesses and successful careers.

However, many of the graduates failed to turn the information and ideas they had learned into later success. Why not? When he went back and surveyed them, he found that invariably they had returned to the same group of people they had been associat-118

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ing with before they had taken the advanced courses on achievement. As a result, they went back to the same old ways, the same old habits, the same old customs and manners of living. Because they were immersed in their old reference groups, nothing changed for them.

■
YOUR REFERENCE GROUP

Your reference group is defined as the people you consider yourself to be
similar
to. For example, if you belong to a particular church, the members of that church are part of your reference group. You consider yourself to be like them. If you belong to a political party, a bowling league, or a particular profession, people in those groups and organizations are parts of your reference group. You identify strongly with them.

Over time, through a process of
absorption
, you will adopt their attitudes, mannerisms, ways of speaking, levels of aspiration, and even their style of dress. Your reference group will exert an inordinate influence on the kind of person you become. You will adjust your goals, behaviors, and thoughts to be consistent with what you feel they will approve of. You see this with teenagers all the time.

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MAKE NEW CHOICES

All change in your outer world begins with a change in your inner world. Major changes in your inner world start happening when you change the people with whom you associate and identify. When you select a new reference group, or find yourself in a situation with different people, you unconsciously begin to change, almost in spite of yourself.

This change process works quite quickly. In my speaking and travels, I have worked with countless men and women all over the country and throughout the world who have taken this advice to heart. They have deliberately changed their reference groups. They have begun associating with different people in different organizations. Very soon, they began to think differently about themselves, and their outer worlds begin to change.

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AS A MAN THINKETH

The Law of Correspondence says that your outer world is a mirror of your inner world. It says in the Bible, “As a man thinketh, so is he.” This means that as you see yourself and think about yourself in your conscious mind, your perception of outer world changes and conforms to fit a picture consistent with it. This is the central message of this book.

The most influential factors in your thinking and feeling will almost always be the other people in your life. Successful people are those who form the habit of associating with other positive, success-oriented people. Unsuccessful people, by default, end up associating with people who are not going anywhere with their lives. Both sets of people become more and more like the people with whom they most identify.

■
FORM A NEW REFERENCE GROUP

If you really want to change your thinking and your life, make a decision today to begin associating, in every area of your life, with other men and women whom you admire, respect, and look up to.

Resolve to associate with people whom you enjoy and from whom you can learn. Work and socialize only with the kind of people that you want your children to be like when they grow up. When you set these kinds of standards for your interpersonal relationships, your whole life will begin to improve almost immediately.

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DEVELOP YOUR OWN NETWORK

Your network is composed of the number of people you know, both directly and indirectly. These are people over whom you can exert some influence and who can in turn exert some influence over you.

The most successful people in our society, at every level, are those who know the greatest number of other successful people.

They organize their lives to meet these successful people by deliberate design, not by accident. And so can you.

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few contacts, yet in no time at all, they become some of the best-known and most respected people in their new field. Why does this happen? It is because they apply the principles of creative networking to their new lives.

They immediately begin to form new, positive reference groups.

They put into action a plan to develop as many good, high-quality relationships as possible within the shortest period of time.

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BUILDING YOUR NETWORK

Here is a great exercise for you. Over the course of the next six months to a year, make a list in a notebook of the 100 most important people in your community. As you gather these names from the newspapers, from conversations, from news broadcasts, and from your work as you move around, begin to think of how you could get to meet and know these people. Remember, the more people you know and who know and think about you in a positive way, the more successful you will be in every area of your life.

Once you have your list of 100 people, you should add to it regularly. Begin to network systematically with these people. Once you have a name, think of how you could communicate with that person. The simplest way of all is to write a letter expressing your opinion on something that the individual is involved in, or simply expressing your congratulations on the person’s success for something recently achieved.

Be patient when you start to expand your circle of contacts.

Don’t expect the person you wrote to call you back or to come in your door to meet with you.You are in the business of sowing seeds.

Sometime down the road, you may see that the person has done something else and you can write another letter. Over time, these little efforts will begin to bear fruit.

■
PATIENCE PAYS OFF

I write letters continually to people that I meet throughout the country. I always send a copy of a poem, sometimes a book, sometimes an audio program or something that I feel the other person would enjoy.

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of people. Now, wherever I go, people come up to me and remind me that I wrote to them and sent them something, often years ago.

A couple of years ago, I was in Washington, D.C., at a high-level conference, and a senior person from one of the largest organizations in the nation’s capital came up to me and reminded me that I had written to him and sent him something five years before. He still remembered. After this meeting, over time, I got to know him very well. He has now introduced me to a variety of other powerful people. These new relationships have turned out to be very enjoyable and productive for me. They all started with me sitting down and writing a friendly letter.

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ADVANCING YOUR CAREER

Fully 85 percent of the best jobs in the United States are filled through
contacts
, rather than through want ads or recruitment agen-cies. Someone has the need for a particular job to be filled and lets it be known within a network. The word goes out from person to person, and an individual who could never be found any other way often surfaces and is directed, as the result of personal connections, to a job for which the person is well suited.

Many people have found that by broadening their contacts whenever they got a chance, they have changed their work lives profoundly. When they did change careers, they just happened to know the right person who was in the right place to make the right introduction to get the right job that saved the individual years of hard work in reaching that same level of responsibility and income.

■
BE A JOINER

The major focus of networking developed by most high-achieving men and women and self-made millionaires is their regular involve-ment with groups, clubs, and associations that contain members who can be of assistance to them in their particular fields.

In my own experience, moving from one city to another, I found that by joining certain clubs and organizations and getting involved, I was able to develop more friendships and make more progress in a couple of years than many people had made in 10 or 20 years.

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Make a decision, right now, to join one or two clubs or associations. The first association you should join should be the one for your profession or occupation. If you are in real estate, join the real estate board. If you are an entrepreneur, join an entrepreneurial association. If you are in sales, join a club like Sales and Marketing Executives International.

When you join a professional association, don’t make the mistake of merely attending the meetings and going home. This is what 80 to 90 percent of the members do. They may get some benefit from their membership with the organization, but nowhere near as much benefit as you can get by becoming more involved.