Trickle Down Mindset: The Missing Element in Your Personal Success (10 page)

back to top

Time

Success is a process, not a destination.

You are bound to work for the rest of your life. Even if you reach a certain level of success, the world won’t stop at that place.

People are incapable of enjoying the same state for an extended period of time.

Time is your only asset; anything else is just a function of time.

Every action gives results; sometimes it’s experience, sometimes feedback, sometimes the output you desired. It’s never in vain.

Your body will accompany you to the end.

You will die.

You will live in the memory of others.

The fruits of your work may serve others long after you are dead.

Each of your past experiences may be used to your advantage; each of them helped to shape who you are now.

You don’t know your hour. Use each minute to its fullest.

Work on your important goals every day.

You can only act now; the past is settled, the future is still undefined.

Your past is not equal to your future.

You can do only one thing at a time; choose wisely which one.

Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most.

People

Providing value is at the core of being rewarded; providing value to people is the most profitable.

People are the most important; respect them, serve them, love them.

Your family is a microcosm and reflects your inner world and your potential achievements in wider society.

Humans are interconnected.

As long as you feel you are serving others, you will do the job well.

Do to others what you would like to be done to you.

Every human is a child of God.

Every human is your brother or sister.

Who you become is more important than what you have.

Who someone else is, is more important than what he has.

Real success doesn’t happen at the expense of others.

When a man works, he not only alters things and society, he develops himself as well. He learns much, he cultivates his resources, he goes outside of himself and beyond himself. Rightly understood, this kind of growth is of greater value than any external riches that can be garnered. A man is more precious for what he is than for what he has.

Character

Courage is not the absence of fear; it’s acting against the fear.

You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

You should only fear that you won’t measure up to your standards.

A comfort zone is a comfort pit.

Growth costs and hurts. The price of staying in place is exponentially higher.

If you think you have all the answers, you’d better look for different questions.

Your habits determine your net worth.

The wicked people and fools both get what they deserve. The fools get it earlier.

Ask the questions.

If you seek, you will find.

Do what you say you are going to do.

Don’t lie.

Keep your promises.

Walk your talk.

Keep your body in good shape; it’s your support system.

Smile at everybody and everywhere.

If you quit, you won’t reach your goal.

The only failure is in not trying.

When your philosophy is right, then your consistency is right, too.

Do it until you achieve it.

Not everything is attainable. But nothing is attainable when you do nothing.

The patient man can always afford to wait.

You won’t break if you bend.

Spirituality

If you don’t believe in something beyond the matter, you are limiting yourself to “just” the human level.

Be grateful for everything.

Practice gratitude.

Only love is rewarded in Heaven.

You don’t belong to yourself. You are created.

Your role is to develop your humanity to the highest standards you are capable of.

Development requires attention to the spiritual life, a serious consideration of the experiences of trust in God, spiritual fellowship in Christ, reliance upon God’s providence and mercy, love and forgiveness, self-denial, acceptance of others, justice and peace.

The social order and its development must invariably work to the benefit of the human if the disposition of affairs is to be subordinate to the personal realm and not to the contrary.

Attitude

You are responsible for everything in your life.

Accept that you will be learning for the rest of your life.

Keep a journal.

I don’t feel the best every day, but I’m gonna bring the best.

Guard your speech.

Read books.

Learn continually.

Mind over matter.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

Dream, visualize, use a vision board.

Write down your goals.

Tracking is the foundation of growth.

To increase your chances of success, double your ratio of failures.

Motivation doesn’t last. That’s why it’s recommended daily.

Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.

Your personal philosophy is the greatest determining factor in how your life works out.

Progress is your duty.

Follow the right people.

Mimic successful people.

You can hedge. Just think it over twice.

back to top

“Numbers are the name of the game.”

― Jim Rohn

You don’t need more details or more knowledge to develop your personal philosophy. You need to start implementing what you’ve learned or just refreshed in your mind. I could go into more detailed instructions, but it would be highly repetitive and it’s already insistent enough. Besides, all the instructions won’t help much if you don’t apply them. You are the main architect of your personal philosophy. You need to decide where to start and with what level of intensity. You must choose success blocks appropriate to your situation. So, no more preaching on my part, just a quick rehearsal.

Why work on your personal philosophy?

Because it determines almost every output in your life. No school, no trainer, no coach, no book, no personal development program, no info product can transform your life without your cooperation. Unfortunately, this factor seems to be overlooked. Academies, coaches, and gurus are focused far too much on providing an incentive to pay them rather than giving you an incentive to get results. They give promises and 30-day guarantees for your revolution, but fail to supervise the process of implementing this revolution.

But once you develop the right personal philosophy, you will get more clarity about whether or not any given program is for you, whether or not you are willing to pay the price in time investment and sacrifices, not just in money. And you will be able to implement almost anything you decide is worth pursuing.

You can change and you can change rapidly, but it will cost you. You can revolutionize your personal philosophy quickly, but in order to do it you need to revolutionize your life. Your current philosophy has been forming for years; you need extraordinary measures to rebuild it quickly. But you can examine yourself, and target traits, concepts and beliefs that stand in your way. Then you can chisel away at them and develop good routines one by one. You will accelerate the natural process of reshaping your philosophy by applying your awareness, attention, and focus.

Start by changing your data sources. Examine the inputs you are exposed to in your everyday life. Check how much time you spend watching TV and on YouTube. Check the social media you use. How much do you read and what kind of materials. Are they books, magazines, or short stories? What kind of books—pop fiction or non-fiction? And so on.

Numbers are very tangible, not some woo-woo talk about philosophy, interpretation, and a higher purpose. They are technical, mechanical, something your conscious secular mind can grasp. You can easily introduce and track your disciplines regarding data sources. Read ten pages of a self-help book a day; listen to a single podcast episode while commuting; stop watching TV news altogether; watch a classic movie once per week; follow a new blog and read one post a day; join a group on social media and interact there five minutes a day. It’s all easy to do, easy not to do, and easy to track. It’s easy to build new habits around these activities.

I guarantee that if you stick to your new routine for an extended period of time, you will change. If you start a daily activity, give yourself at least 100 days to notice this change. When starting a weekly one, be prepared to continue it for the next couple of years.

The internal interpretation of facts (external data) and your experiences (external data plus your emotions) is less tangible. It is also more important. You can bombard yourself with different messages, but if you dismiss all of them with an incorrect interpretation, you won’t get any results; that’s the example of reaction to your sustained action. That way you nullify the effect of the law of small errors and consistent discipline. A mere change in what kind of information you consume may be useless if you proactively sabotage those messages.

The best indication that your interpretation is not working against you is that you regard new elements of your personal philosophy as true. Once they are true in your mind and in your soul, you don’t have to worry about consciously cultivating them.

You need to change in order to change your results. That’s why change in both the sources and quality of information you habitually absorb is necessary. That’s why your internal interpretation, your self-talk, must change. It’s not a matter of learning and applying some fancy technique that will help you lose weight, save more money, get more friends, or whatever else you are after. All the knowledge and skills you possess are dependent on your personal philosophy. Without the change in philosophy, you may experience some success with those new techniques, but then the yo-yo effect will kick in. You will be back to your starting position.

back to top

“If anyone else has done it, you can do it, and if someone else hasn’t done it, you can do it first.”

― Jeremy Frandsen’s grandma

The facts are that 80 percent of people are not satisfied with their lives. About 15 percent don’t accept their situation and struggle to squeeze more out of their lives. And only about 5 percent reach their dreams.

Whatever data sets you examine, this distribution is clear. I researched only the data of multi-level marketing (MLM) companies and online ventures. But the data confirmed the gut feeling we all have: success is not common. Even if you live in Beverly Hills, if you open your eyes, you will notice that, yes, there are a lot of mansions around, but there is also an army of drivers, bodyguards, gardeners, and maids. The proportions are the same.

To achieve success, you must not only
do
what the top 5 percent does, you must
think
the way they do. Adopting someone else’s beliefs is not a small feat, otherwise the world would be full of Einsteins and Bob Proctors. But if you utilize the natural process of reshaping your worldview, which takes place every minute in your head, the change in your mindset is possible and much easier to attain.

There are other factors indicated as the philosopher’s stone of success. Some say that confidence is the mysterious ingredient. Others, and not just small fish, but big figures like Thomas Edison or John D. Rockefeller, say it’s perseverance. I say it’s those traits and a bunch of others, like wisdom and flexibility. They are important but they are all secondary to your system for conduct of life. Your personal philosophy determines what level of confidence, perseverance, or flexibility is characterizing you. When you adopt the right beliefs and make them your own, you can develop the above-mentioned traits to the levels that characterize successful people.

Perseverance comes from personal philosophy. I was quite persistent before my life transition. For example, I have been doing pushups every single day for about four years. But since I introduced some changes in my philosophy I also write, do pull-ups, eat veggies and fruits, study the Bible, read books written by saints, look at my vision board, repeat my personal mission statement, practice speed reading, keep journals, pray with my kids, and do a few more things on daily basis. Once I accepted the law of small errors and consistent disciplines as true, I had no problems with perseverance.

All I needed to do was to start a new activity and track the results. As long as I kept doing this new thing, the results were unavoidable. I observed it in several different areas of my life, which led me to the belief that it’s universal for every human activity. That’s why I stuck with my writing.

I was writing for eight months and earned less than $80. Anyone with the wrong personal philosophy would have given up. His flawed philosophy would have justified quitting: “Well, this clearly doesn’t work, so you need to find another path,” or “Hard work is overhyped. Sit down and enjoy your day instead of working like crazy.” But I continued and you read my seventh book.

Everything is possible with the help of the right personal philosophy. Everything that has ever happened, happened because of someone’s philosophy—Lech Walesa’s, Albert Einstein’s, Nelson Mandela’s, Martin Luther King’s, Gustav Eiffel’s.

And it is so easy to remodel your philosophy! You just improve the natural process you are already using. It’s not complicated. All you need to do at the beginning is to open your mind a bit and read, listen to, and watch different things than you did previously. Do it consistently and the transformation will take place.

It is doable. It happens all the time. Most people manage to discard or dismiss all the ideas that challenge their status quo and stay the same…today. Tomorrow they will receive new inputs and another chance to shift their personal philosophy.

You may still be doubtful about whether you can do it. The only answer I have is that if I can do it, anyone can. I was content with my system for conduct of life. I graduated from university, my career was steadily progressing, my kids were growing healthy, life wasn’t bad. I spent more than ten years without reading a single personal development book. What for? I “knew” that it was all “rubbish,” wishful thinking, and opium for the masses. It couldn’t work in my life. I tried it and I “knew” it.

But then my life became stale. I was fired from my job and in the new one, my salary didn’t grow very fast. My wife started to dream about a house and we were in no position to buy one. My savings weren’t increasing at all. I gained some weight. Life wasn’t cozy anymore. Then I read
The Slight Edge
and decided to give its philosophy a try. I didn’t suddenly get woo-woo, believing in the Law of Attraction or mumbling affirmations all day long. I just changed the books I read and started to listen to personal development audio materials. For almost three months I did nothing more.

Once I wrote my personal mission statement in November 2012, things started to move faster. I created my first blog, I made new online acquaintances, I wrote my first book. Two years later here I am not quite recognizing myself. My personal philosophy has transformed dramatically. I think differently and act differently.

And there are tangible results of those philosophy changes in my life. Concrete outputs. Seven books published. Thousands of copies sold. Hundreds of mails to/from my readers. Dozens of blog posts published and the traffic to my blog has increased. People follow me! That’s incredible! I have friends who read my entries on Lift every day. Who am I to be looked up to? But it all happened.

Your personal philosophy is an integral part of you. It will be with you as long as you breathe. Don’t neglect to work on it because your life didn’t quite work out as you dreamed it would. Being low in your life is a great starting point for transformation. You don’t have much to lose. You have a lot to gain. You are frustrated to the point that you are willing to change and get out of your comfort pit.

One belief I got out of my transformation is that it is much better to change before you have to. Transform yourself because you want to have a better life, not because you have to escape the smoking ruins of your old one. Don’t just react; act in advance. Be prepared for whatever the future will bring. Start now. Right this minute. Before you put down this book, plan. Decide which single tiny discipline you will practice: Reading specific kinds of books? Reading a professional periodical? Following a few blogs? Subscribing to a useful YouTube channel?

Make it a consistent discipline. Practice it daily. Do it day after day, week after week, month after month. Consistency equals lasting results. Consistency builds momentum. Do something every day and you are harnessing the law of nature to work for you.

Never give up. Consider all of your small failures as feedback loops. Learn from them. Track your progress. Whatever discipline you start you need to simultaneously start the tracking process. Describe it in a measurable rate. Ten minutes or ten pages. One podcast episode, one video or fifteen minutes of them. One chapter of the Bible. Two financial articles from a business magazine. A couple of phone calls. Five minutes in an online community. Only if you track those seemingly trifling activities can you observe your lapses and their reasons. Feed your mind with facts; don’t let it fight you with imaginary pictures and judgments.

That’s it. I wish you determination, consistency, and resolve. You don’t need anything more to succeed. Go and work on your philosopher’s stone. From now on, begin turning everything you touch—relationships, health, finances, parenting, education—into gold.

Godspeed!