When I was growing up, I was fascinated by stories of successful men and women and how they made and lost their fortunes, and then made them over again. I read about the importance of a prosperity consciousness in the book, Think And Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill, several times. But I never fully understood what it meant until about five years ago. Then it hit me and I’ve never been quite the same since. Every aspect of my life has improved dramatically, especially in the area of accumulating wealth, since I finally understood what it meant by a prosperity consciousness.

Here are two of the most exciting principles ever discovered in the long search by mankind for the secrets of health, happiness and great personal wealth.

The first principle is this. All causation is mental. All causation is mental. That means that everything that you are or ever will be will be as a result of how you use your mind. You are merely a mind with a body to carry it around with. The entire man made world that you see is simply an expression of thought. Your entire life is an expression of your own thinking. And since the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life, if you improve the quality of your thinking, you must, you will, inevitably improve the quality of your life.

The second principle is what we call the law of expectations. This law says that whatever you expect with confidence, positive or negative, becomes your reality. If you confidently expect to succeed, if you confidently expect to learn something from every experience, if you confidently expect to become wealthy as a result of applying your talents and abilities to your opportunities and you maintain that attitude of confident expectations long enough, it will become your reality. It will give you a positive optimistic cheerful attitude that will cause people to want to help you, and will cause things to happen the way you want them to happen.

Here are two things you can do immediately to practice these principles in your day to day life:

First, start thinking today in a positive, optimistic, confident way about personal and financial success. Continually imagine what differences it would make in your life if you were financially independent. This is the starting point of developing a prosperity consciousness.

Second, develop your own attitude of positive expectations. Look for the good in every situation. Look for the valuable lesson in every setback or difficulty. Be positive and cheerful about everything that happens and you will be amazed at the difference it makes in your life.

Pratice Crisis Anticipation
The first is called “crisis anticipation” and it involves looking ahead as far as you can and asking, “What could possibly change or go wrong that would threaten our survival?”

Think About The Worst Possible Event For example, what would you do if interest rates doubled, as they have done in the past?

What if your best-selling product, or service, suddenly stopped selling, as often happens in high-tech industries in times of rapid change.

What if a key executive died unexpectedly or your offices with all your records were destroyed by fire? What if you lost your key customer or major source of revenues?

These and other questions can only be asked and considered by the leader, the person ultimately charged with the overall responsibility for results.

The failure to think through possible crises in advance can open you and others to fear, panic and confusion if something goes wrong.

Plan For A Crisis
The Greek philosopher Epictetus said, “Circumstances do not make the man; they merely reveal him to himself.” A crisis is the genuine test of courage and effectiveness in a leader.

You can greatly improve your abilities to function in a crisis situation by thinking it through in advance and by developing contingency plans — just in case.

Determine What Can Go Wrong
The second technique is called the “master method” of decision making. It involves asking, “What is the worst possible thing that can go wrong in this situation?”

Once you’ve asked the questions, you must decide whether or not you can live with those consequences.

For example, in an investment, or new product introduction, or new promotion, the worst possible outcome may be that you will lose every penny. Can you live with that? Can the company survive?

There are many different types of decisions and one of them is the decision you cannot afford to make. Most big failures result because someone made a commitment of resources without carefully considering the worst possible outcome.

Do What Billionaire’s Do
John Paul Getty, the great oil billionaire said that one of his secrets of success was to always determine the worst thing that could happen in any investment — and then make sure it didn’t happen.

Action Exercises
Here are two ways to apply these techniques to your own situation:

First, make a list of the three worst things that could happen to your business or your department. Then develop a strategy to deal with these situations if they occur.

Second, practice “crisis anticipation” in each key area of your life. Look into the future and imagine a major setback.

What would you do if they happened?

Your aim should be to work on yourself and your thinking until you reach the point where you absolutely, positively believe yourself to be a total winner in anything you sincerely want to accomplish. When you reach the point where you feel unshakable confidence in yourself and your abilities, nothing will be able to stop you. And this state of self-confidence comes from, first, understanding the functioning of your remarkable mind and, second, practicing the techniques of mental fitness over and over, until you become a completely optimistic, cheerful and positive person.

Italian psychologist Dr. Roberto Assagioli left us two remarkable pieces of writing, Psychosynthesis and The Act of Will. In those books, Assagioli brought his remarkable intelligence to bear on the entire subject of human potential and human happiness. He studied the mind and personality for his entire lifetime, and he came up with several ideas that are profoundly simple and powerfully effective in helping you and me to lead happier, more satisfying lives. In The Act of Will, he laid out a series of psychological principles, or laws, that can be very helpful to you in understanding the way your mind works and how you can take control of it.

The third of Assagioli’s laws is that images or pictures, either from within or from the outside, will trigger thoughts and feelings consistent with them. In turn, those thoughts and feelings will trigger behaviors that lead to the realization of the pictures. For example, when you become absolutely convinced that you are a total winner and you are meant to be a complete success in anything that you really want to do, every picture or image that you see that somehow represents winning to you will trigger thoughts of what you could do to achieve that same state. The picture will also trigger the feeling of excitement that will motivate you to take action.

A friend of mine who was a sales manager had a simple technique to make new salespeople successful, and it worked in more than 90 percent of cases. When he hired a salesperson, he would take that person to a nearby Cadillac dealership and force the person to trade in his current car on a new Cadillac. The payments on the Cadillac would be substantially more than the new salesperson had ever imagined paying, and he would strongly resist getting into the commitment. However, the sales manager would insist until, finally, the salesperson bought the new Cadillac and drove it home.

No matter how unsure or insecure the salesperson felt, when his spouse and friends saw the new Cadillac and he experienced the pleasure of driving it down the street, he began to think about himself and to see himself as a big success selling his product. And in almost all cases, it turned out to be true. Those salespeople went on to become great successes in their field.

Take every opportunity you can to surround yourself with images of what success means to you: Get brochures on new cars; get magazines containing pictures of beautiful homes, beautiful clothes and other things that you could obtain as a result of achieving the success that you are aiming for. Each time you see or visualize those images, you trigger the thoughts, feelings and actions that make them materialize in your life.

Assagioli’s fourth law is that thoughts, feelings and images trigger the words and actions consistent with them. This is another way of saying that your inner impressions will motivate you to pursue the outer activities that will move you toward the achievement of your goals.

Assagioli’s fifth law is that your actions will trigger thoughts, emotions and images consistent with them. That has been referred to as the Law of Reversibility. It is one of the most important success principles ever discovered.

Simply, that law says that you are more likely to act yourself into feeling than you are to feel yourself into acting. On many days, you wake up feeling not as positive and optimistic as you would like. However, if you act as if you already have the feeling that you desire, the action itself will trigger the feelings and the thoughts and mental pictures consistent with them.

In her book Wake Up and Live, Dorothea Brande said that the most important success secret she ever discovered was this: “Act as if it were impossible to fail, and it shall be.”

In the book, she goes on to explain that you need to be very clear about the success that you desire, and then simply act as if you already had it. Act as if your success were inevitable. Act as if your achievement were guaranteed. Act as if there were no possibility of failure.

The wonderful thing is this: You can control your actions easier than you can control your feelings. If you choose to exert control over your actions, those actions will have a “back flow” effect and trigger the feelings, thoughts and images that are consistent with those of the person you want to be, of the person who lives the life you want to live.

There is a principle called the Law of Expression, which says that whatever is expressed is impressed. This means that whatever you say, whatever you express to another in your conversation, is impressed into your subconscious mind.

The reverse of this law is that whatever is impressed will, in turn, be expressed. It will come out. Your conversation reveals an enormous amount about you, the kind of person you are and the things that you believe about yourself and others.

In identifying those laws, one of the most important facts I discovered is that your brain is a multisensory, multistimulated, extremely complex, interactive organ. Everything that you think, imagine, say, do or feel triggers everything else, like a chain reaction, or like a series of electrical impulses going out in all directions and turning on lights everywhere.

Let’s say that you are driving down the street, listening to the radio and thinking about a variety of things. Suddenly, you hear a song that you associate with an old romance that you had many years before. Instantaneously, your brain reacts and re-creates all the sensations that were present when you were with that person a long time ago. You instantly get a mental picture of the person. You see and remember where you were and what you were doing when the song was playing back then. You feel the emotion that you experienced at that time. You recall what was going on around you-the sounds, the season, the lights, the people and the activities. You temporarily forget whatever you were thinking about and are transported, in a split second, back across the years. Sometimes, the emotion that you recall is so intense that it brings you close to tears or fills you with happiness.

That is the way your mind works. By understanding that, you can make your mind work for you as a powerful engine of growth and development. You can consciously surround yourself with a series of sensory inputs that bombard you with messages and cause you to think and feel like a total winner.

Thinking like a winner is the first step to living like a winner. You do become what you think about most of the time. You are not what you think you are; but what you think, you are. In fact, you are what you most intensely believe. And if you think like a winner and do the things that winners do to keep their minds positive and optimistic, you will be a winner.

They studied factors like education, intelligence, being born into the right family, or having the right connections. In every case, they found individuals who had been born with every blessing in life who did poorly. They also found individuals who had been born or come to this country with no advantages at all who had been extremely successful. What was the distinguishing factor?

They finally determined that there was only one key attitude that mattered. They called it “Time Perspective.” Time perspective refers to the amount of time that you take into consideration when planning your day to day activities and when making important decisions in your life.

People with long-time perspective invariably move up economically in the course of their lifetimes. When you spend weeks, months and years developing your skills and ability and expanding your experience in order to be successful, you have long-time perspective. The average professional person has a time perspective of 10, 15 and 20 years. Begin to see that everything that you are doing today is part of a long-time continuum, at the end of which you are going to be financially independent or financially unfortunate. People with short-time perspective think only about fun and pleasure in the short term. They have what economists call “The inability to delay gratification.” They have an irresistible tendency to spend every single penny they earn and everything that they can borrow.

When you develop long-time perspective, you develop the discipline to delay gratification and to save your money rather than spending it. The combination of long-time perspective and delayed gratification puts you onto the high road to financial independence.

Now, here are two things you can do to develop the attitudes of financially successful people:

First, think long-term about your financial life. Decide exactly how much you want to be worth five years, ten years and twenty years from today. Write it down. Make a plan. Take action on your plan every single day.

Second, develop the ability to delay gratification. Instead of buying something on impulse, put off buying decisions for a day, a week or even a month. Decide in advance to “think it over” before you buy anything. This can change the way you spend money almost immediately.

By utilizing your earning ability to its fullest, you can bring thousands of dollars each year into your life. By applying your earning ability to the production of valuable goods and services, you can generate sufficient money to pay for all the things that you want in life.

The amount of money that you are paid today is a direct measure of the extent to which you have developed your earning ability so far. The first corollary of the Law of Capital says: “Your most precious resource is your time.” Your time is really all you have to sell.

How much time you put in and how much of yourself you put into that time, largely determines your earning ability. Poor time management is one of the major reasons for poor productivity and underachievement in every industry in America. It is the number one problem for both managers and salespeople in every field.

The second corollary of the Law of Capital says: “Time and money can be either spent or invested.” One of the smartest things that you can do is to invest three percent of your income every month back into yourself on personal and professional development, on becoming better at the most important things you do. In fact, if you just invested as much in your mind each year as you do in your car, that alone could make you rich.

Invest one hour of your time reading in your field every day. Listen to audio programs in your car. Attend every course that can advance you in your career. Get personal and professional coaching to help you to get the very best out of yourself.

There is nothing that will give you a bigger and better “bang” for your buck than reinvesting a part of your time and money back into your capability to earn even more.

All wealthy and successful Americans have learned this sooner or later, and all poor and unhappy Americans are still trying to figure it out.

The third corollary of the Law of Capital says: “One of the best investments of your time and money is to increase your earning ability.” The purpose of corporate strategic planning is to increase “return on equity” or ROE.

This requires organizing and reorganizing corporate activities so that the company is earning a higher return on the capital invested in the organization.

In your work life, your personal equity is your mental and emotional capital. Your job then is to earn the highest possible return on your human capital, to increase your “return on energy.” This way of viewing yourself must become a key part of your attitude throughout your work life.

Now, here are two things you can do to apply this law immediately:

First, take a list of your output responsibilities, the things you do that represent accomplishments, not activities. Examine the list and rank the tasks by priority, on the basis of the value of the work to your company.

Second, take a list of all the things you do, day in and day out. Take this list to your boss and ask him or her to rank your tasks in terms of how valuable he or she considers them to be.

Then resolve to work on your most valuable tasks every minute of every day.

The achievement of financial independence will require a tremendous number of small efforts on your part. To begin the process of accumulation, you must be disciplined and persistent.

You must keep at it for a long, long time. Initially, you will see very little change or difference but gradually, your efforts will begin to bear fruit. You will begin to pull ahead of your peers. Your finances will improve and your debts will disappear. Your bank account will grow and your whole life will improve.

The first corollary of the Law of Accumulation says: “As your savings accumulate, you develop a momentum that moves you more rapidly toward your financial goals.” It is hard to get started on a program of financial accumulation, but once you do get started, you find it easier and easier to keep at it.

The “momentum principle” is one of the great success secrets. This principle says that it takes tremendous energy to overcome the initial inertia and resistance to financial accumulation and get started, but once started, it take much less energy to keep moving.

The second corollary of the Law of Accumulation says: “By the yard it’s hard, but inch by inch, anything’s a cinch.” When you begin thinking about saving ten or twenty percent of your income, you will immediately think of all kinds of reasons why it is not possible.

You may be up to your neck in debt. You may be spending every single penny that you earn today just to keep afloat. If you do find yourself in this situation, instead of saving ten percent, begin saving just one percent of your income in a special account, which you refuse to touch.

This small amount will begin to add up at a rate that will surprise you. As you become comfortable with saving one percent, increase your savings rate to two percent, then three percent, then four percent and five percent, and so on.

Within a year, you will find yourself getting out of debt and saving 10%, 15% and even twenty percent of your income without it really effecting your lifestyle.

Now, here are two things you can do to apply this law immediately:

First, decide upon your long-term financial goals and then resolve to work toward them one step at a time. The first steps are the hardest and you must discipline yourself to avoid backsliding into old habits.

Second, practice the law of accumulation in other parts of your life as well. Resolve to master a subject one page at a time. Lose weight one ounce at a time. Learn a language one lesson at a time. The cumulative effect can be enormous.

Make Your Money Work For You
What this means is that, you are not wealthy just because you earn a lot of money. You are only wealthy when your money works for you. To become wealthy, your main job is to acquire money and then put it to work making more money for you.

Add Value Continually
The key to creating wealth is simple. It is called “adding value.” Successful people are those who are always looking for ways to add value in some way to a person, a company, a product or a service.

Do It Faster
Here is an example of adding value: Domino’s Pizza. The founders of Domino’s Pizza took a common food, offered by thousands of little restaurants and added a value to the pizza by delivering it more rapidly than anyone else. The added value of speed enabled Domino’s to create a billion dollar empire and made the founder of Domino’s, Tom Monahan, one of the richest men in the world.

Buy It Cheaper Somewhere Else
Another way to add value is to buy something in one place at one price and then make it available in another place for another price. For example, buying a product or service manufactured in Europe or Asia, importing it to the United States and making it available to people to whom it was not available before, is a way of adding value for which you can charge a higher price.

Improve The Life or Work of Others
All manufacturing and marketing is based on this principle of added value. All importation and distribution aims to add value. Performing a service that enhances the life or work of another person adds value. A dentist who takes away pain is adding value. An accountant who saves a client money on taxes is adding or actually creating value. A salesperson who introduces a new product or service to a customer that helps that customer in some way is adding value. All financial success, especially business success, is based on adding value. It is based on the old saying, “Find a need and fill it.”

Combine and Recombine The Elements of Value
All successful business is based on someone bringing together the factors of production, such as labor, capital, raw materials and management, and creating a product or service that a customer will pay a price for that is in excess of the cost of producing it.

How All Fortunes Are Made
Adding value is the way that all fortunes are made. Whenever you see an opportunity to give people what they want at a price greater than it costs you to produce that product or service, you see an opportunity to make a profit, build a business and begin moving toward financial success. Almost any business or occupation can make you financially independent if you can find a way to add enough value.

Action Exercises
Now, here are two actions you can take immediately to add more value to your time and activities:

First, take the time to be absolutely clear about what it is that people want and need to improve their lives and work. The more clear you are about their real needs, the easier it is for you to satisfy them at a higher level.

Second, look for ways to add value to what you are doing every day in every way. Never be satisfied with the status quo. One small idea to add value can be the starting point of a great fortune.

You can unlock your inner potential only when you’re doing something that you really love to do. You can fulfill your innermost aspirations only when you’re doing something that interests you, something that holds your attention, something in which you can become completely absorbed.

And this is the key to unlocking the giant within. You must dream big dreams and do what you love to do. You must decide what’s right for you, what will make you happiest, before you decide what’s possible. You must set ideal standards and goals and results as your aim and then determine how to accomplish them.

In his book The Act of Will, Roberto Assagioli, the Italian psychiatrist, said that the starting point of great individual achievement is the definition, by yourself, of the ideal result that you wish to accomplish.

Take some time to determine your ideal lifestyle. Take some time to determine the kind of person you’d like to be, and the kind of person you’d have to become in order to live the kind of life that you’d like to live. Remember, you can’t accomplish it on the outside until you become it on the inside.

I recently read a beautiful line in a book: “In order to achieve things you’ve never achieved before, you must be willing to do things you’ve never done before.”

To unlock your inner potential, you must set very clear, challenging and, yet, realistic goals and then make plans to accomplish them. You need to work, step-by-step, every day, in the direction of your dominant aspirations. You need to develop an unshakable level of self-confidence that makes you virtually unstoppable.

Momentum is the key to long-term success. The momentum theory of success simply says that while it may take 10 units of energy to get you moving in a particular direction, it takes only one unit of energy to keep you moving once you’re in motion. You have the principle of momentum working in your favor.

For example, if you’ve come back from a vacation of a week or two weeks, you’ll notice that it takes you several days to start working at peak efficiency again. This is part of the momentum principle. When you stop, it’s hard to get started again. But once you’re moving forward, it’s easy to continue moving forward.

How do you use the momentum principle in your life? Well, it’s simple. You decide upon one key quality that you need to develop in order to accomplish one key goal that you want to accomplish. Then every single day, you work simultaneously on developing that quality and on taking steps toward the accomplishment of that goal. Once you put the ball into play, you keep the game going, every single day, without stopping.

Let’s say that your goal is to become financially independent. To do this, you have to pay off all of your existing debts and build up a cash reserve of three to six months of living expenses. When you reach that point, your entire personality will change. You’ll be more clearheaded, you’ll be more positive, you’ll be more determined, you’ll be more optimistic, you’ll be a finer and better human being when you absolutely know that you’re not dependent upon anyone for your living expenses. You’ll be able to choose the job you want to do and go to the places you want to go. You won’t have to tolerate any situation that you do not enjoy or that you feel isn’t the best use of your personal potential.

If you simultaneously work on strengthening your self-discipline and using it to achieve the goal of financial independence, you’ll become a better, stronger and more powerful human being. You’ll cast off the bonds of helplessness and begin to feel that there’s nothing in the world that you can’t do or be or have.

When you set clear goals or objectives for yourself, when you dream big dreams and then determine to become the kind of person who’s capable of achieving the kind of goals that you want to achieve, you convince yourself, at a deep, subconscious level, that you’re absolutely unstoppable. You realize at last that nothing in the world can hold you back except your own thinking, and you don’t even let your own thinking limit your potential.

If you learn to be powerful and develop self-confidence by working progressively, every day, toward becoming the kind of person you want to be, and toward living the kind of life you want to live, you’ll unlock the giant within you, and it will never go back inside.

Believing in Yourself

In her wonderful book You Can Heal Your Life, Louise Hay says that each one of us has feelings of inferiority that are manifested in the conclusion that we are not good enough. We think that we are not as good as other people, and we feel that we are not good enough to acquire and enjoy the things that we want in life. Very often, we feel that we don’t deserve good things. Even if we do work hard and achieve some worthwhile objectives, we believe that we are not really entitled to our successes, and we often engage in behaviors that sabotage our successes.

The fact is that you deserve every good thing that you are capable of acquiring as the result of the application of your talents. The only real limitation on what you can be and have is your absence of desire. If you want something badly enough, nothing in the world can stop you from getting it, if you are willing to persist long enough and hard enough. Over and over, we find that our beliefs, more than anything else, act as the brakes on our capacities. We have high hopes and dreams and aspirations, but we let doubts creep in and undermine our competence and effectiveness.

You need to develop your beliefs about yourself to the point where they serve you every day in every way. Men and women who accomplish extraordinary things are just ordinary people who developed themselves mentally to the point where they were able to overcome the obstacles that stood in their way, and they kept on keeping on until the goal was attained.

Psychologist William James of Harvard University said that beliefs create the actual fact. The reason for this is because we always act in a manner consistent with our innermost beliefs and convictions. If you believe yourself capable of accomplishing good things, you will walk and talk and act like it. Your behaviors will actually make your beliefs a reality.

The most harmful beliefs that you can have are what we call “self-limiting beliefs.” These are beliefs about yourself, most of which are not true; but they hold you back nonetheless. Sometimes you, or others, will say that you cannot achieve certain goals because you did not get enough education. Sometimes you will say that it is because of your gender or race or age or the state of the economy. Many people blame their parents or their bosses or their families or their current relationships for their failure to make progress in life. Others say that there is no opportunity in their particular area or their particular field. Some complain because they have no money. Others complain because they received poor grades in school or did not go to, or finish, college. Still others say that they have never had a natural talent or ability for a particular field.

The humorist Josh Billings once said, “It ain’t what a man knows what hurts him. It’s what a man knows what ain’t true.” It isn’t the actual truth about yourself and your abilities that hurts you; it’s the things that you consider to be true and that have no basis in truth.

The starting point to change your beliefs is to get up the courage to question them seriously. Question your basic premises. Check your assumptions. Ask yourself, “What assumptions am I making about myself or my situation that might not be true?”

It’s a fact that we fall in love with our excuses and our assumptions. We fall in love with our reasons for not moving ahead. Even if someone comes along and challenges those reasons, even if someone tells you that you have the capacity to accomplish marvelous things, you will argue with him. If someone tells you that you can do far better than you’re doing right now, you will come up with reasons to dispute this person’s greater belief in your potential.

The author Richard Bach wrote this beautiful line: “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.” Very often, we become the prosecuting attorney in the case against ourselves. We dispute and argue and attempt to prove to ourselves and others that our limitations are real. And the less justification these ideas or beliefs have, the more adamant we become in attempting to prove them to others.

What beliefs might you have that are holding you back right now? Think about them. Remember, most of our self-limiting beliefs have no basis whatsoever in fact. They are based on information and ideas that we have accepted as true, sometimes in early childhood, and to the degree to which we accept them as true, they become true for us.

Your beliefs about reality are based on a thousand influences, many of which began even before you were aware of what was going on. You have beliefs that are deep and beliefs that are shallow. Deep beliefs, with regard to your religion or your political party or your family, or especially yourself, are very hard to change. Shallow beliefs are easily changed. And many of your beliefs are in fact very shallow. They have no substance to them whatsoever. If you challenge them hard enough, you’ll find that they are made of tissue paper. They’ll simply blow away.

You can always tell what your true values and beliefs are by looking at your actions. It isn’t what you say or wish or hope or intend that demonstrates what you really believe. It’s only what you do. It’s only the behaviors that you engage in. It’s only the actions that you choose to undertake. Your values and beliefs are always expressed in your actions and behaviors.

And out of your actions come all of the elements of your life. You are where you are what you are because of what you’ve said and done in the past.

The wonderful thing is this. Each of us is in a state of becoming. Many years ago, a great teacher of mine said that each human being is a “becomingness.” You are constantly evolving toward the fulfillment of your individual possibilities. You can become anything you want by sitting down at the keyboard of your own mental computer and beginning the process of programming in new beliefs.

To develop beliefs that serve your life better than your current beliefs, decide exactly where you want to end up sometime in the future. Dr. Roberto Assagioli calls this you “ideal result.” Robert Fritz, in his book The Path of Least Resistance, calls this your “future vision.” The clearer you are about your ideal result or future vision, the easier it is for you to alter your actions and behaviors in the short term to assure that you get where you want to be in the long term.

Once you’ve clearly decided on the person you would like to become, you are on the path toward developing new beliefs. You then discipline yourself each day to behave exactly as you would if you were already that person.

That simple technique, the “act as if” technique, is extraordinarily powerful. The more you act like the person you want to be, the more consistent your attitude will be with that person’s. Your attitude will have the back-flow effect of affecting your expectations. Positive expectations will have the back-flow effect of building beliefs that are consistent with them. And your beliefs will exert an influence on your values.

You have no limitations on your potential except for those that you believe you have. Remember this wonderful little poem: “If you think you’re beaten, you are. If you think you dare not, you don’t. If you would like to win, but think you can’t, It’s almost certain you won’t. Life’s battles don’t always go To the stronger or faster man, But sooner or later the man who wins Is the man who thinks he can.”

People succeed not because they have remarkable characteristics or qualities. The most successful people are quite ordinary, just like you and me. Most of us start off poor and confused. We spend many years getting some sort of direction in our lives. But the turning point comes when we begin to believe that we have within us that divine spark that can lead us onward and upward to the accomplishment of anything that we really want in life.

Help Your Customer’s Business
When you deal with a businessperson, you can be sure of one thing: that person thinks about his business day and night. It is very close to him. It is dear to his heart. And if you come in and talk to him and ask him questions about his business, looking for ways to help him run his business better, the customer is going to warm up to you and want to be associated with you and your company.

Differentiate Yourself From Your Competitors
As a partner, you should always be looking to help your customer to cut costs and improve results in his or her area of responsibility. You should look for ways to help your customer in non-business areas as well. You should position yourself as someone who cares more about the success of your customer than anything else, even more than you care about selling your product or service. This approach to partnering in profit with your customer is a key way to differentiate yourself and to keep your customer for the indefinite future.

Practice The Reciprocity Principle
There is a principle of reciprocity in business that is extremely powerful. It is simply this: If you do something nice for someone else, they will feel obligated to do something nice for you. You should be looking for opportunities to go the extra mile, to do more than you are paid for, to put in more than you take out. By extending yourself, you improve your positioning in the customer’s mind and increasingly differentiate yourself and your company from your competitors who are after the same business. If you do this long enough and strong enough, you will eventually develop the partnership to the point where your competitors don’t have a chance against you.

Action Planning
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, think about how you can help your customer’s customer with your product or service. Take time to understand how your customer uses your product to do his business better.

Second, focus on increasing your customer’s profits and financial results. Show your customer that doing business with you is both satisfying and profitable in the long run.

As a wise man once said, “You must dream big dreams, for only big dreams have the power to move the minds of men.” When you begin to dream big dreams, your levels of self-esteem and self-confidence will go up immediately. You will feel more powerful about yourself and your ability to deal with what happens to you. The reason so many people accomplish so little is because they never allow themselves to lean back and imagine the kind of life that is possible for them.

A powerful principle that you can use to dream big dreams and live without limits is contained in what Elihu Goldratt calls the “Theory of Constraints.” This is one of the greatest breakthroughs in modern thinking. What Goldratt has found is that in every process, in accomplishing any goal, there is a bottleneck or choke cord that serves as a constraint on the process. This constraint then sets the speed at which you achieve any particular goal.

What Goldratt found is that if you concentrate all of your creative energies and attention on alleviating the constraint, you can speed up the process faster than by doing any other single thing.

Let me give you an example. Let us say that you want to double your income. What is the critical constraint or the limiting factor that holds you back? Well, you know that your income is a direct reward for the quality and quantity of the services you render to your world. Whatever field you are in, if you want to double your income, you simply have to double the quality and quantity of what you do for that income. Or you have to change activities and occupations so that what you are doing is worth twice as much. But you must always ask yourself, “What is the critical constraint that holds me back or sets the speed on how fast I double my income?”

A friend of mine is one of the highest-paid commission professionals in the United States. One of his goals was to double his income over the next three to five years.

He applied the 80/20 rule to his client base. He found that 20 percent of his clients contributed 80 percent of his profits, and that the amount of time spent on a high-profit client was pretty much the same amount of time spent on a low-profit client. In other words, he was dividing his time equally over the number of tasks that he does while only 20 percent of those items contributes 80 percent of his results.

So he drew a line on his list of clients under those who represented the top 20 percent and then called in other professionals in his industry and very carefully, politely, and strategically handed off the 80 percent of his clients that only represented 20 percent of his business. He then put together a profile of his top clients and began looking in the marketplace exclusively for the type of client who fit the profile; in other words, one who could become a major profit contributor to his organization, and whom he in turn could serve with the level of excellence that his clients were accustomed to. And instead of doubling his income in three to five years, he doubled it in the first year!

So what is holding you back? Is it your level of education or skill? Is it your current occupation or job? Is it your current environment or level of health? Is it the situations that you are in today? What is setting the speed for you achieving your goal?

Remember, whatever you have learned, you can unlearn. Whatever situation you have gotten yourself into, you can probably get yourself out of. If your real goal is to dream big dreams and to live without limits, you can set this as your standard and compare everything that you do against it.

The three keys to living without limits have always been the same. They are clarity, competence, and concentration.

Clarity means that you are absolutely clear about who you are, what you want, and where you’re going. You write down your goals and you make plans to accomplish them. You set very careful priorities and you do something every day to move you toward your goals. And the more progress you make toward accomplishing things that are important to you, the greater self-confidence and self-belief you have, and the more convinced you become that there are no limits on what you can achieve.

Competence means that you begin to become very, very good in the key result areas of your chosen field. You apply the 80/20 rule to everything you do and you focus on becoming outstanding in the 20 percent of tasks that contribute to 80 percent of your results. You dedicate yourself to continuous learning. You never stop growing. You realize that excellence is a moving target. And you commit yourself to doing something every day that enables you to become better and better at doing the most important things in your field. Concentration is having the self-discipline to force yourself to concentrate single-mindedly on one thing, the most important thing, and stay with it until it’s complete.

The two key words for success have always been focus and concentration. Focus is knowing exactly what you want to be, have, and do. Concentration is persevering, without diversion or distraction, in a straight line toward accomplishing the things that can make a real difference in your life.

When you allow yourself to begin to dream big dreams, creatively abandon the activities that are taking up too much of your time, and focus your inward energies on alleviating your main constraints, you start to feel an incredible sense of power and confidence. As you focus on doing what you love to do and becoming excellent in those few areas that can make a real difference in your life, you begin to think in terms of possibilities rather than impossibilities, and you move ever closer toward the realization of your full potential.