Trickle Down Mindset: The Missing Element in Your Personal Success (8 page)

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“You cannot change your destination overnight,

but you can change your direction overnight.”

― Jim Rohn

In the previous chapter, we concluded that you are at this point in your life because your beliefs, thoughts, and actions led you to this exact point. And it’s not a bright point or you wouldn’t be looking for ways to improve your life.

So, are you a complete failure? Your negative self-talk may tend to agree with that not-so-gently put question, but I am sure you are not.

First of all, you are alive. It means that you have already gathered years of experience and winning experience at that. There are some of your peers who didn’t make it. You did. That’s no small feat.

Secondly, you are reading this book. It says a lot about you. Obviously you can read. You also want to improve your life. That means you have a high enough level of integrity to realize that you are not perfect. You are able to admit mistakes. You are humble and willing to learn. You have stuck with me so far, enduring my frequent religious references, so you are religious yourself or open minded and tolerant.

I could go on with the list of your positive traits for a few more paragraphs, but I think you get the point. You are not a complete failure, whatever your external circumstances are. Your current personal philosophy is a mishmash of right and wrong beliefs and habits. You can build on what you have. And you shouldn’t rush this redevelopment.

Yes, it would be nice to have a new shiny personal philosophy tomorrow that would skyrocket you to the ranks of millionaires in a few months. But it is unreasonable to expect it to happen. Forget about instant gratification. Forget about quantum leaps. Consider those terms as the products of an alien civilization. Absolutely foreign and incomprehensible.

You are a human being and rapid transformation is not a trait you are equipped with. Your brain doesn’t work that way. If it meets with a rapid change, it reacts with instant resistance. But when you introduce changes slowly and gradually, your subconscious won’t even recognize them as changes. It will sublimate them and after some time it will defend those new ideas as its own. Gratification and quantum leaps will come. But they will be the fruits of a long, consistent effort. That’s how they
always
materialize.

The bad news is that you just can’t change your life in a single moment. The good news is that you can instantly change your life’s
direction
. Once you decide to adjust, to incorporate one idea or concept into your mind, the overall direction of your life will drastically change. And the longer you stick with this adjustment, the more drastic change will materialize. Think of a plane starting in New York and heading to Los Angeles. A tiny change of course of only one degree will change its destination by 40 miles. Just three degrees south or north is the difference between San Diego and Bakersfield. That’s the gap between errors in judgment and disciplines.

Another thing I want you to contemplate when you are beginning to reconstruct your personal philosophy is your life span. How long will you live? Well, you don’t know. You can hope at most to live a certain number of years. But no matter if you are a teenager or a venerable sage, no matter if you will die in an accident, of sickness, or old age, one thing is sure: you will live as long as it takes.

And guess how long your personal philosophy will serve you? Yep. Until the end of your life. In my opinion, as a believer, it will serve you much longer than that. It will serve you into infinity.

You may not believe that and that’s fine. Forget the afterlife. The impact of your personal philosophy will continue beyond your lifespan. Even if you are reduced to a heap of proteins, your past choices will affect others. For example, if saving money was part of your philosophy, you will leave an inheritance for your relatives and/or charities of your choice. If creation was a part of your philosophy, you will leave a legacy of paintings or musical works or writings. If Jim Rohn hadn’t changed his personal philosophy, he wouldn’t have left numerous audio programs and books for others to develop themselves. I would have been a different person without that and you probably wouldn’t be reading this book right now.

So it’s good to emphasize the long-term perspective in your philosophy. Don’t worry about naysayers who claim that it will keep you from achieving your short-term goals. If that’s the case, then those goals were not worth achieving. Just focus on your daily job and lifelong vision and you will exceed your goals. Before publishing
Master Your Time
, I would have been stoked if I’d earned 5 percent of my salary but I had
no
immediate goals connected to it. I was only focused on creating the best possible book for busy people interested in increasing their productivity. And a new book was just a small puzzle in the big picture of my life. I was taken completely by surprise when that book became a bestseller. Since then the lowest level my royalties have reached have been 16 percent of my salary.

There is magic in long-term thinking, the one utilizing the law of errors and disciplines. The long-term perspective is fruitful even within a short time span, but the opposite is not true. Chasing medium-sized goals one after another without thinking about the long-term consequences is likely to lead to emptiness.

Knowledge Items:

- You are not a complete failure.

- It is unreasonable to develop a new shiny personal philosophy tomorrow.

- The long-term perspective is fruitful even within a short time span; the opposite is not true.

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“Garbage in, garbage out.”

― Anonymous

I encourage you to first address your data sources. Change the media from which you obtain information. Change the amount of time you employ to get information. I don’t mean you should turn off your TV for good because you enjoy watching 30 minutes of the evening news every day. Don’t focus on what’s wrong with the current way you gather data. It’s helpful if you target the most destructive data inputs responsible for your worldview, but it’s not necessary to develop an improved personal philosophy.

All you need is to introduce positive changes and focus on them. New beliefs and ideas will challenge your current philosophy and habits. With time, you will realize what was wrong. And you won’t have to struggle to give up on those not-so-supportive input sources. You will want to dedicate more time to your new and effective ways of conducting your life. The old customs will naturally die out.

To stick with those changes, develop new habits. It’s essential to adopt new habits of ingesting information. You need automatic routines to take care of this element of reshaping your philosophy. Changing your social environment and the interpretation of your experiences is much harder than changing your data sources. You need more conscious effort to master them. That’s why you should employ habits in those cases, too. Don’t stop at changing what you read or listen to. Develop new habits that will help you meet new people. Make a habit of examining your speech patterns, your self-talk, and your thoughts.

Everything is easier when you use automatic routines. A common theme across the whole personal development realm is to use the power of habits to your advantage. This advice is not a recommendation of theoreticians. It was tested in practice time after time. Successful people almost unanimously recommend the use of habits as the most formidable tool for reaching one’s goals. Jim Rohn, Leo Babauta, Jeff Olson, Stephen R. Covey, John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Edison—all of them were employing habits in their pursuits.

Your brain was designed to utilize habits. They just work. It’s not willpower. It’s not the purpose, drive, or vision. It’s not the attractiveness of new activities. Habits are the most effective tools of transformation. Use this aspect of your brain to maximize the transformation and ease the effort of introducing the change.

The best way to develop new habits is to build them on the old ones. When I decided to transform my life, I had a habit of doing a Weider series in the morning for fifteen minutes. It never occurred to me that I could utilize this time. One of the first new habits I adopted was listening to audio programs during this exercise. It opened my mind to a variety of ideas. Over a period of almost two years, I listened to a few audio books, several audio programs, and hundreds of podcasts. My most profound experience involved with this discipline was learning a variant of Muscle Testing Techniques, which I used the very same day in practice. It was my first milestone to overcoming my shyness. It led me to writing my book
From Shy to Hi
.
I did nothing more than commit to listening to audio for fifteen minutes a day and it changed my life and the lives of others.

All the leaders are readers. I heard this slogan numerous times and felt good about myself because I’m an avid reader. I read in Norton Beau’s
Extreme Confidence
that he has been studying the lives of successful people for over three years, and he has not came across
a single
extremely successful person who
did not
read books.

I can’t preach reading books strongly enough. Ditch all the excuses! Just do it. If you read at least ten pages of a good book every day, it will translate to eight to ten books read within one year. If it seems daunting because you don’t like to read, start with a couple of pages a day. The worst thing you can do is to ignore this advice and not read at all.

You are lucky to live in the Internet era. There are a multitude of blogs on every subject imaginable. You can learn about parenting, healthy eating, starting a new business, becoming an author, and a thousand other things. Carefully select two or three blogs in an interesting area and follow them very closely. I recommend you avoid “gurus”—popular blogs with gigantic followings. Find someone closer to your level, who has had some success but still has time and a desire to interact with his audience. This kind of interaction on the Internet touches on another pillar of rebuilding your personal philosophy: meeting new people. Not only does the blog owner count, but also his followers. The comments section is a great place to meet new acquaintances. You get two advantages with one stroke. You can also automate your blog readings by using RSS feeds.

I strongly dislike learning from videos, but you may prefer this. And there are a lot of valuable video materials on the Internet. As with blogs, there are a multitude of specialized channels on YouTube. To expand your horizons, I recommend TED talks. If you prefer to consume content offline (as I do), there are free tools that allow you to download videos from most of the sites, including YouTube. I recommend
Flash Video Downloader
if you use Firefox or
HD Transform
.

Audio is another way to get new ideas and knowledge. You can utilize a lot of opportunities to listen to audio materials: doing household chores, exercising, commuting, driving, going shopping. The list is endless. You can subscribe to your favorite podcasts and download them automatically into your device. You can even find some valuable TV programs to follow. It’s hard for me to imagine, but there are
some
such programs. Skip the trash. I don’t have time to go through garbage, that’s why I don’t turn on the TV at all. I can find all I need to learn on the Internet and consume the content in the way I want, at the time I prefer.

With such a variety of data sources, you can surely find something that will work
for you.
Nowadays we are more threatened with information overload than with data scarcity. So carefully choose a couple of new inputs and develop new habits of plugging into them. Some useful ideas:

- Read ten pages of a good book a day

- Listen to one podcast episode a day

- Watch one TED talk a day

- Read a single specialized blog post a day

- Listen to educational/motivational audio materials for fifteen minutes a day

- Read a single random blog post a day (just type an interesting topic into Google)

Approach these activities like any other serious habit-building activity. Design the process. Try to connect your new habits with existing ones, like I did with my exercises. Find your cue, a trigger for starting an activity, like leaving a book on your bedside table, so every time you lie down, you read ten pages of it. Set alarms or reminders. Track a new habit. Make it a point to do both the habit itself and track it every day.

Action Items:

- Develop at least one single new data-absorbing habit.

- Connect your new habits with existing ones; find your cue

- Track a new habit.

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“He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.”

― Lao Tzu

Begin from within yourself. You know yourself in the most intimate ways. You are a mine of information about you. Sadly, most of us never try to touch this repository of self-knowledge. Ever.

I was able to avoid self-analysis for almost sixteen years. A few very serious conversations with close friends or family members, a yearly retreat with my church community where I was given obligatory spiritual exercises —that was all.

If you feel resistance against self-analysis, you can probably relate to my feelings from that period. I didn’t want to look deep inside myself because I generally despised myself. Only a thin layer of good intentions and good deeds was worthy of praise. Under it was a deep reservoir of laziness, complacency, and middle-class comfort. On the other hand, when I started serious analysis after my transformation, I was terrified of an eventual greatness in me. Both things— below the surface of my life and above it—were uncomfortable to contemplate, so I tried very hard to not think about them at all.

However, you can speed up the process of upgrading your personal philosophy by getting to know yourself.

It makes perfect sense. Of course, you can organize some kind of retreat, sit with a list of life and death questions, meditate upon them, ponder them, and resolve them from within, let’s say, within three days. But have you three days to spare? You are busy living! Besides, you are not static. New questions will appear in your life sooner or later. The old answers will slightly evolve. A simple daily discipline is a better solution for facing life’s challenges. And one more thing. If you drain yourself answering all the important questions, you may be overwhelmed by the answers. You will suddenly realize how much work is awaiting you and how much effort you need to put into straightening out contorted parts of your life.

Self-examination is part of a personal philosophy for many successful people. Socrates, the Greek philosopher who invented the term “philosophy” had a motto: “Know thyself.” Many successful people recommended journaling as a way to keep in touch with yourself and to adjust your personal philosophy. Among famous diarists were Lewis Carrol, the author of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
; Virginia Woolf, an English novelist; British Prime Minister Winston Churchill; and many American presidents including George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Ronald Reagan, and Harry S. Truman.

Keeping a daily journal is a great discipline for constantly maintaining a high level of self-knowledge. It will reveal the truth about you piece by piece. You will rebuild yourself one bit at a time. The revolution may be stretched out, but it will become a lasting one, and it won’t be any less impressive than the one done within three days.

If I were you, I would consider keeping a journal as your main indicator of how serious you are about this whole “adjusting personal philosophy” thing. It’s a simple activity. Everybody can keep a journal. With the level of technology we have achieved, you can be even limbless and keep an audio or video journal. But the vast majority of our society has two strong hands, good eyesight, and has mastered the skill of writing (or typing), yet still doesn’t keep a journal. Not doing so is an error in judgment repeated over time. And absolutely any kind of journal qualifies. Even a food journal can be a valuable source of self-information. Keep a food journal for a couple of months and you will recognize patterns. Are you consistent? Are your cheat days devolving into cheat weeks? Are you better at abstaining from your favorite (and caloric) foods or at introducing a new type of healthy food? Do you prefer regularity or novelty? Many people track their moods in their food journals or note down the time and duration of every meal. All this data can be translated into your character’s traits.

How you structure your journal is entirely up to you. It may be a very focused kind of journal, such as a food, time, or a gratitude journal. Or you may ramble for five minutes each evening about your emotions like a teenager. Techniques can be freestyle too: Video, audio, or online blogs or just good old school notepads and pens work. There is only one iron clad rule when it comes to doing it right: do it consistently.

Before my transformation, I had never kept any kind of journal longer than a couple of months and the last time I did so was when I was a teenager. Now I keep six of them:

1. My daily Bible study, where I write just a few sentences about the specific fragment I found speaking to me that day;
   
2. Gratitude journal about my wife, where I write at least one thing I’m grateful for or about her.
   
3. Gratitude journal for my kids, where I write at least three entries about each of my three kids.
   
4. General purpose gratitude journal, where I write about 10 to 20 things I’m grateful for this very day. I include also my daily achievements in that journal; I’m grateful for them too.
   
5. My progress journal, where I write everything I did for my business that day and, from time to time, some ruminations.
   
6. My self-analysis journal.
   

I didn’t start them all at once. It was a gradual process that took me about nine months.

I encourage you to start by tracking your data sources. Carry a pocket notepad with you at all times for one week and jot down what you read, listen to, watch, and with whom you speak and meet. You can extend the scope of this discipline: note the time each of these took you, track if you label this input as positive or negative, the conversation subjects (small talk, job, spirituality), and whatever else comes to mind.

Start journaling today. Only you can reveal the treasures that are hidden inside you.

If you want to take massive action from the start, when your motivation is at its peak, do some hefty self-examination sessions. I can’t replace you in this task, but I can provide you with some support. I give you questions and exercises. Answer them all at once or one by one, in one or ten sessions, in this particular order or one that is more suitable for you. You are in charge of this mission. It’s up to you.

What activities are you trying to avoid? Why?

What do you consider your greatest failure? Why?

What do you consider your greatest success? Why? Was it hard to choose this one? Can you think of more success examples?

What are you good at? Why?

What have you always wanted to do but have been afraid to attempt?

List your life’s goals. Imagine you have no limitations, that success is guaranteed. Which one goal would you choose to achieve? Why this one?

Imagine that you have only six months left to live. How would it change your actions?

Recall the time when you felt most loved. Why did you feel loved then?

Visualize how your life will be in 5, 10, and 20 years from now if you don’t make any significant decisions during these years. Imagine letting your life “go with the flow.” Dwell on your finances, health, relationships, personal growth, spirituality, career. Do you really want your life to look like this? What is missing in these pictures? Think more in terms of values and feelings than of physical possessions.

Visualize your own funeral. Who is there? What are your family, friends, church members, and work mates saying about you? Write your own specific eulogy. Actually write it out.

Don’t stop at these tasks. Seriously consider forming a self-analysis habit. Once you start, you will find it easy to continue. Each morning I sit down with a pen in my hand and for about ten minutes, I write about myself:  my goals, problems, plans, obstacles, dreams, achievements, struggles, relationships, etc. At the beginning, I was afraid I would quickly exhaust the topics but a year later, I still have a fresh subject to ponder. Human nature is amazingly complex. You will find something worth thinking about every time, I assure you.

I usually ask myself a question and try to answer it comprehensively. For example, how would you like your life to be in ten years? If I find the subject too ample, I continue answering the question for the next day.

Here is good material for such an exercise. Examine your attitude toward the advice I have already written about: the law of errors and disciplines,, long-term perspective, personal responsibility for your life’s outputs, the importance of self-analysis. Ask yourself, “Do I believe this is true? Why? Why not; then what’s true in this regard? Which of my experiences support my point of view?”

I’ll continue to emphasize this point. It’s
your
personal philosophy. You own it. You must embrace those “right” pieces as your own. Maybe they are not right for you, maybe you have been diagnosed with end-stage cancer and long-term perspectives are not valid for you. I don’t know, but you know yourself and your situation. Use that knowledge.

One of the almost universal pieces of successful people’s philosophies is “stop hanging out with negative people.” For me it was not acceptable. Tell me how the “negative” people are supposed to change if they have no example to follow? From where should they get inspiration to transform? Severing my relationships with them was in my eyes like abandoning them. I embraced two other bits of philosophy.

First, that I’m solely responsible for my reactions. No one can “drag me down” if I don’t allow it first in my mind. I didn’t consciously break any relationships. I changed the things I was focusing on. I almost stopped playing the computer games and my favorite card game. My playing buddies see me
a lot
less often.

Second, that I must be the change I want to see in others. I don’t dwell on their “negativity.” I don’t mull over how they behaved unjustly towards me or how their philosophy and deeds are wrong, debilitating, and not constructive. That’s their life and they can do whatever they wish with it. I focus on being the best “me” I can be.

Maybe I could progress faster without them. Quite possibly. A million millionaires are preaching this rule of ditching the disturbers, so it must have some merit. But I still progress nonetheless and I feel much more “me” doing it my way.

Another idea for self-examination is creating and using your personal mission statement. It’s your personal constitution, which “focuses on what you want to be (character) and to do (contributions and achievements) and on the values or principles upon which being and doing are based.”
[1]
Composing your own mission statement is a self-examination experience in itself, but it’s just the beginning. Once you have it, you refer to it every day; you read it, listen to it, repeat it in your mind. It’s enough to know those words by heart to examine every information input through them. You almost automatically correct your actions to be in accordance with your mission.

A personal mission statement is a very effective tool for transformation. I vote for it. I attribute 80 percent of my progress to it. If you want to write your personal mission statement, visit my blog and follow the guidance:

www.expandbeyondyourself.com/how-to-write-personal-mission-statement/

All of the above examples are just that—examples. Those disciplines worked well in my case but won’t necessarily be as effective for you. Don’t restrict yourself to just them. You will find your way to discover your own unique methods to observe your self-talk, your internal interpretation of the events from the outside world.

Why all this hassle with self-examination? Well, apart from it being indicated as a success factor by numerous sages, for this kind of job—developing your personal philosophy—you must realize what parts of your present worldview hinder your progress. You want to remodel yourself. In order to do that you need to know what your “shape” is right now. Transforming your mental constitution is very similar to character-forming disciplines the Stoics practiced. The word “character” comes from the Greek word meaning to chisel or the mark left by a chisel. A chisel is a steel tool used for making a sculpture out of hard or difficult material, like granite. You are like an unformed clod of matter that needs chiseling to bring out the outstanding sculpture hidden inside. The excess matter must be discarded, chiseled out to reveal the statue inside. To do that, you need to make an internal inventory.

Does it mean that you will have to stop being yourself and transform into someone else? In a way, yes. But it’s you who consciously determines what to choose and—most important in this phase—what to discard from your current philosophy.

It’s not New Age stuff. Benjamin Franklin did something similar, which also gives some consideration to the importance of habits. You can check it out here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20203/20203-h/20203-h.htm#IX

The master sculptor doesn’t focus very much on which piece of excess matter to discard. He has a vision of what is hidden in the clay and he steadily aims to materialize this vision. Benjamin Franklin did the same by defining the virtues he wanted to master. You just need to be aware that some parts of your present constitution are disturbing. However, your main task is to form a new personal philosophy, not to analyze the old one.

Benjamin Franklin is worth mimicking. Focus on what you want to achieve. List all of those traits and goals. Form appropriate habits to achieve them. Build new healthy elements of your personal philosophy.