Living the Significant Life (9 page)

Do you understand now what the wealthy businessman above is saying?

Thomas Edison had a dream of making a working electric incandescent lightbulb. Yet time after time, his experiments failed. After about the hundredth time, one of his frustrated young associates said to him, “Can't you see that this isn't destined to work, that you're not going to succeed? You've failed one hundred times already!”

Edison replied, “I have not failed at all. I have successfully determined one hundred ways that it will not work; therefore, I'm one hundred ways closer to the one way it
will
work.”

Failure and success are just two more things we make up. To Edison's assistant, the great inventor had failed a hundred times. But to Edison himself, he had succeeded a hundred times in learning what
not
to do.

Is it helpful for you to define or describe yourself as a failure? Perhaps you think that if you fail often enough, you'll get to a point where you just can't stand it anymore and you'll start succeeding. That's called
backward motivation.
Why not start right now by acknowledging your successes instead?

Here's a great exercise: list ten successes you've had today in the spaces provided below. Even if you're reading this just after you've awakened early in the morning and you don't think you've done anything successful yet, think again, then list ten successes you've already had today.

How did you do? Did you have trouble listing ten successes? If you did, that's a clue that the way you define things is not serving you and not encouraging you. You still think it works to pile up failures until there's no more room for them and you'll just
have
to succeed.

Did you get out of bed this morning? That's a success. Did you shower, shave, or brush your teeth? Did you pray? Those are successes. What else did you do today
?
That's a success; that's a success; that's a success!

You
must
get into the habit of defining your actions and the results that occur in your life and work as successful. Honestly—that's all success is. It's a habit. And like any other habit you have, you learn it by repetition. You do it over and over and over and over, until it's something you do without thinking.

You made a habit of tying your shoes. You don't think about
how
you do it anymore; you just do it. At first you had to do that whole “Rabbit runs around the tree and down through the hole” business, but after a while, tying your shoes stopped being a rabbit and started being a habit. It takes no thought; you just do it.

Success (or failure) is just the same. If you set a task for yourself that every evening before you go to sleep you will list (in writing) ten successes—or twenty-five or fifty, if you're impatient and want the crash course—then very soon you will establish the habit of success.

Can you imagine a better habit to have? I guarantee you can do this. It's easy and fun—and it works!

We call these ingrained, habitual attitudes
habitudes.
This is the habitude you need to have if you want to avoid failure, disappointment, poverty, and loneliness.

We want to stress that
failure
and
poverty
do not mean the same thing. For the sake of this book, we're assuming that most people desire financial success along with all the other successes of a richly rewarding life. After all, in this Western culture of ours, you're going to require money to achieve many of the goals you've set for yourself. In a very real sense, money is required for freedom in today's world. But there are many poor people who are not failures—and many rich ones who are!

The
fear
of poverty, however, has the same root as the fear of failure.

Poverty and wealth are diametrically opposed. If you don't want poverty, you simply must stay away from it—on all levels, not just financial. There's emotional poverty, social poverty, intellectual poverty, and more, just as there is abundance in all these areas. Avoiding these poverties may sound difficult to do, but as we said earlier, one of the few things over which you have true and total control is your thoughts—and remember, your thoughts can ultimately shape your reality. We want to be clear here. This is not a book about the “law of attraction.” We absolutely do not believe in blaming the victim. Those who suffer from horrible diseases or are victims of crime are not to be blamed. The victims of the tsunami in Asia or the earthquake in Haiti did not bring it in themselves by their thoughts. Sometimes, bad things happen. This is not meant to be a theological work. We are simply saying that we have more control than most of us think.