Darren Hardy Quotes

You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.

Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.

You alone are responsible for what you do, don’t do, or how you respond to what’s done to you.

Small, Smart Choices + Consistency + Time = RADICAL DIFFERENCE

It's not the big things that add up in the end; it's the hundreds, thousands, or millions of little things that separate the ordinary from the extraordinary.

In essence, you make your choices, and then your choices make you.

The first step toward change is awareness. If you want to get from where you are to where you want to be, you have to start by becoming aware of the choices that lead you away from your desired destination.

Seek out positive people who have achieved the success you want to create in your own life. Remember the adage: “Never ask advice of someone with whom you wouldn’t want to trade places.

The (Complete) Formula for Getting Lucky: Preparation (personal growth) + Attitude (belief/mindset) + Opportunity (a good thing coming your way) + Action (doing something about it) = Luck

Your biggest challenge isn’t that you’ve intentionally been making bad choices. Heck, that would be easy to fix. Your biggest challenge is that you’ve been sleepwalking through your choices.

A daily routine built on good habits and disciplines separates the most successful among us from everyone else. A routine is exceptionally powerful.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge.

Unsuccessful people carry their goals around in their head like marbles rattling around in a can, and we say a goal that is not in writing is merely a fantasy.

Forget about willpower. It's time for why-power. Your choices are only meaningful when you connect them to your desires and dreams. The wisest and most motivating choices are the ones aligned with that which you identify as your purpose, your core self, and your highest values. You've got to want something, and know why you want it, or you'll end up giving up too easily.

Consistency is the key to achieving and maintaining momentum.

The real cost of a four-dollar-a-day coffee habit over 20 years is $51,833.79. That’s the power of the Compound Effect.

If you are not making the progress that you would like to make and are capable of making, it is simply because your goals are not clearly defined.

There’s nothing wrong with ordinary. I just prefer to shoot for extraordinary.

The Compound Effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices

Losing is a habit. So is winning. Now let’s work on permanently instilling winning habits into your life.

No matter what has happened to you, take complete responsibility for it—good or bad, victory or defeat. Own it. My mentor Jim Rohn said, “The day you graduate from childhood to adulthood is the day you take full responsibility for your life.

The person who has a clear, compelling, and white-hot burning why will always defeat even the best of the best at doing the how.

It’s time to WAKE UP and make empowering choices.

And as long as you’re making choices unconsciously, you can’t consciously choose to change that ineffective behavior and turn it into productive habits.

The dream in your heart may be bigger than the environment in which you find yourself. Sometimes you have to get out of that environment to see that dream fulfilled. It’s like planting an oak sapling in a pot. Once it becomes rootbound, its growth is limited. It needs a great space to become a mighty oak. So do you.

We can all make powerful choices. We can all take back control by not blaming chance, fate, or anyone else for our outcomes. It’s within our ability to cause everything to change. Rather than letting past hurtful experiences sap our energy and sabotage our success, we can use them to fuel positive, constructive change.

Knowledge is not power. That’s a myth. It is the potential for power, but it is not power itself. It’s not what you learn or what you know; it’s what you do with what you know and learn.

All winners are trackers.

Starting is not most people’s problem, staying, continuing and finishing is.

Have you ever been bitten by an elephant? How about a mosquito? It’s the little things in life that will bite you.

Since your outcomes are all a result of your moment-to-moment choices, you have incredible power to change your life by changing those choices. Step by step, day by day, your choices will shape your actions until they become habits, where practice makes them permanent.

It’s not getting to the wall that counts; it’s what you do after you hit it.

If we want to succeed, we need to recover our grandparents’ work ethic.

Don’t wait another day to start the small disciplines that will lead you in the direction of your goals!

When you define your goals, you give your brain something new to look for and focus on. It’s as if you’re giving your mind a new set of eyes from which to see all the people, circumstances, conversations, resources, ideas, and creativity surrounding you.

Here’s the bottom line: You already know all that you need to succeed. You don’t need to learn anything more. If all we needed was more information, everyone with an Internet connection would live in a mansion, have abs of steel, and be blissfully happy. New or more information is not what you need—a new plan of action is. It’s time to create new behaviors and habits that are oriented away from sabotage and toward success. It’s that simple.

you make your choices, and then your choices make you.

Earning success is hard. The process is laborious, tedious, sometimes even boring. Becoming wealthy, influential, and world-class in your field is slow and arduous.

As Jim Rohn put it to me, “Don’t let your learning lead to knowledge, or you’ll become a fool. Let your learning lead to action, and you can become wealthy. There’s nothing more pitiful than a guy who is smart and broke.

Newton’s First Law, also known as the Law of Inertia: Objects at rest tend to stay at rest unless acted on by an outside force. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless something stops their momentum. Put another way, couch potatoes tend to stay couch potatoes. Achievers—people who get into a successful rhythm—continue busting their butts and end up achieving more and more.

WAKE UP and realize that the habits you indulge in could be compounding your life into repeated disaster.

The biggest difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people are willing to do what unsuccessful people are not.

A good question to ask yourself before doing anything you think you fear is, “If I do this, am I going to die?” If the answer is no, then your fear is made up, grossly overdramatic, and it should have no power over you.

The great danger of the media is that it gives us a very perverted view of the world. Because the focus and the repetition of messaging is on the negative, that’s what our minds start believing. This warped and narrow view of what’s not working has a severe influence on your creative potential. It can be crippling.

Are you willing to make the difficult choices? To do what’s unpopular? It’s not easy, but remember this: When people are calling you out and calling you names, they’re really just calling you a leader.

You get in life what you create. Expectation drives the creative process. What do you expect? You expect whatever it is you're thinking about. Your thought process, the conversation in your head, is at the base of the results you create in life.

When you're creating an environment to support your goals, remember that you get in life what you tolerate.

Look, if you’re going to get better, you have to push yourself. If you push yourself, you’re going to fall. If you’re not falling, you’re not pushing. Falling is part of getting better.

You reap what you sow; you can’t get out of life what you’re not willing to put into it. If you want more love, give more love. If you want greater success, help others achieve more. And when you study and master the science of achievement, you will find the success you desire.

When you've prepared, practiced, studied, and consistently put in the required effort, sooner or later you'll be presented with your own moment of truth. In that moment, you will define who you are and who you are becoming. It is in those moments where growth and improvement live--when we either step forward or shrink back, when we climb to the top of the podium and seize the medal or we continue to applaud sullenly from the crowd for others' victories.

Everything in your life exists because you first made a choice about something. Choices are at the root of every one of your results. Each choice starts a behavior that over time becomes a habit. Choose poorly, and you just might find yourself back at the drawing board, forced to make new, often harder choices. Don’t choose at all, and you’ve made the choice to be the passive receiver of whatever comes your way.

You cannot see what you don’t look for, and you cannot look for what you don’t believe in.

The magic comes from becoming the person you need to be in order to attract the people or results you wish to meet or achieve.

Everyone is affected by three kinds of influences: input (what you feed your mind), associations (the people with whom you spend time), and environment (your surroundings).

New or more information is not what you need—a new plan of action is. It’s time to create new behaviors and habits that are oriented away from sabotage and toward success.

If you want to have more, you have to become more. Success is not something you pursue

If you want to have more, you have to become more. You have to grow into your goals.

Don’t miss the point. Spend your day pursuing the things you want said in your eulogy.

I have a serious challenge for you if you’re up for it. Want real feedback? Find people who care enough about you to be brutally honest with you. Ask them these questions: “How do I show up to you? What do you think my strengths are? In what areas do you think I can improve? Where do you think I sabotage myself? What’s one thing I can stop doing that would benefit me the most? What’s the one thing I should start doing?

In all areas of your life, look for the multiplier opportunities where you can go a little further, push yourself a little harder, last a little longer, prepare a little better, and deliver a little bit more. Where can you do better and more than expected? When can you do the totally unexpected? Find as many opportunities for 'WOW,' and the level and speed of your accomplishments will astonish you... and everyone else around you.

So no more whining about the cards you were dealt, the great defeats you suffered, or any other circumstances. Countless people have more disadvantages and greater obstacles than you, and yet they’re wealthier and more fulfilled. Luck is an equal-opportunity distributor. Lady luck shines on all, but rather than having your umbrella overhead, you’ve got to have your face to the sky. When it comes down to it, it’s all you, baby. There’s no other way around it.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, says that if we gave lottery losers each thirty seconds on TV to announce not, “I won!” but “I lost,” it would take almost nine years to get through the losers of a single drawing!

Courage is not the absence of fear—it’s feeling the fear and proceeding anyway. As Nelson Mandela said, “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

As Jim Collins said in our April 2010 SUCCESS feature, “If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.

The key to success is massive failure. Your goal is to out-fail your competition.

It doesn't matter how smart you are or aren't, you need to make up in hard work what you lack in experience, skill, intelligence, or innate ability.

Lou Holtz, the famous football coach, knew it was what you did after you did your best that created victories.

The question we should be asking ourselves is: "Who do I need to become?

Consume those 'popular' things, and you'll be part of the common, average pack. But that's ordinary. There's nothing wrong with ordinary. I just prefer to shoot for extraordinary.

Your brain is not designed to make you happy. Your brain has only one agenda in mind: survival.

Effective sales is about finding a perceived need and helping someone fulfill it.

Your only path to success is through a continuum of mundane, unsexy, unexciting, and sometimes difficult daily disciplines compounded over time.

The day you graduate from childhood to adulthood is the day you take full responsibility for your life.

If you are not making the progress that you would like to make and are capable of making, it is simply because your goals are not clearly defined

you only hear stories about the one winner, not the millions of losers.

Never take advice from someone you wouldn’t trade places with.

I want you to know in your bones that your only path to success is through a continuum of mundane, unsexy, unexciting, and sometimes difficult daily disciplines compounded over time.

It doesn’t matter how smart you are or aren’t, you need to make up in hard work what you lack in experience, skill, intelligence, or innate ability. If your competitor is smarter, more talented, or experienced, you just need to work three or four times as hard. You can still beat them!

You have to be willing to give 100 percent with zero expectation of receiving anything in return,” he said. “Only when you’re willing to take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work will it work. Otherwise, a relationship left to chance will always be vulnerable to disaster.

The truth is, complacency has impacted all great empires, including, but not limited to, the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. Why? Because nothing fails like success.

I had always thought of sales as a way to get something, I could now see it as a tool for giving. For the first time, I began to understand the strange, wonderful irony that sales isn’t about selling at all.

If you want to have more, you have to become more. Success is not something you pursue. What you pursue will elude you; it can be like trying to chase butterflies. Success is something you attract by the person you become.

Right this moment: Pick an area of your life where you most want to be successful. Do you want more money in the bank? A trimmer waistline? The strength to compete in an Iron Man event? A better relationship with your spouse or kids? Picture where you are in that area, right now. Now picture where you want to be: richer, thinner, happier, you name it. The first step toward change is awareness. If you want to get from where you are to where you want to be, you have to start by becoming aware of the choices that lead you away from your desired destination.

In that seminar I attended at eighteen, the speaker asked, “What percentage of shared responsibility do you have in making a relationship work?” I was a teenager, so wise in the ways of true love. Of course I had all the answers. “Fifty/fifty!” I blurted out. It was so obvious; both people must be willing to share the responsibility evenly or someone’s getting ripped off. “Fifty-one/forty-nine,” yelled someone else, arguing that you’d have to be willing to do more than the other person. Aren’t relationships built on self-sacrifice and generosity? “Eighty/twenty,” yelled another. The instructor turned to the easel and wrote 100/0 on the paper in big black letters. “You have to be willing to give 100 percent with zero expectation of receiving anything in return,” he said. “Only when you’re willing to take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work will it work. Otherwise, a relationship left to chance will always be vulnerable to disaster.” Whoa. This wasn’t what I was expecting! But I quickly understood how this concept could transform every area of my life. If I always took 100 percent responsibility for everything I experienced—completely owning all of my choices and all the ways I responded to whatever happened to me—I held the power. Everything was up to me. I was responsible for everything I did, didn’t do, or how I responded to what was done to me.

Come again? Am I saying that your four-dollar-a-day coffee habit is going to cost you $51,833.79 in twenty years? Yes, I am. Did you know that every dollar you spend today, no matter where you spend it, is costing you nearly five dollars in only twenty years (and ten dollars in thirty years)? That’s because if you took a dollar and invested it at 8 percent, in twenty years, that dollar would be worth almost five. Every time you spend a buck today, it’s like taking five dollars out of your future pocket.

If you haven’t already clearly defined your values, you may find yourself making choices that conflict with what you want. If, for example, honesty is a big thing for you, but you hang out with liars, there’s a conflict. When your actions conflict with your values, you’ll end up unhappy, frustrated, and despondent. In fact, psychologists tell us that nothing creates more stress than when our actions and behaviors aren’t congruent with our values.

If the nose of a plane is pointed only 1 percent off course, it will ultimately end up about 150 miles off course. Such is the case for your habits. A single poor habit, which doesn't look like much in the moment, can ultimately lead you miles off course from the direction of your goals and the life you desire.

Our choices are often shaped by our culture and upbringing. They can be so entwined in our routine behaviors and habits that they seem beyond our control.

What's popular is average, it's what's common. Common things deliver common results.

over that feast of fear, worry, negativity. Same deal when you tune into the evening news after work. More bad news? Perfect! Your mind will stew on that all night long.

Leadership expert John C. Maxwell said, “You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.

Start tracking at least one behavior

All winners are trackers. Right now I want you to track your life with the same intention: to bring your goals within sight.

You cannot manage or improve something until you measure

No matter what you learn, what strategy or tactic you employ, success comes as the result of the Compound Effect.

The most challenging aspect of the Compound Effect is that we have to keep working away for a while, consistently and efficiently, before we can begin to see the payoff.

Give ten companies the same products, and there will always be a number one and a number ten. Because it’s not about the products. It’s about the people behind them.

The Compound Effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices.

A daily routine built on good habits is the difference that separates the most successful amongst us from everyone else.

According to research, it takes three hundred instances of positive reinforcement to turn a new habit into an unconscious practice—that’s almost a year of daily practice!

You have to dream, and you have to have some imagination to say, ‘Here’s a big goal, now let’s go conquer it.’

You alone are responsible for what you do, don’t do, or how you respond to what’s done to you. This

If you’re going to get better, you have to push yourself. If you push yourself, you’re going to fall. If you’re not falling, you’re not pushing. Falling is part of getting better.

Isn’t it comforting to know you only need to take a series of tiny steps, consistently, over time, to radically improve your life?

The person who knows how to get, keep, and cultivate a customer gets paid the most. Period.” @DarrenHardy #JoinTheRide

Want to sell more? Stop selling. Help instead.

There’s only one certainty in business: You can’t succeed if you quit.

Work is gonna suck 95% of the time. But that other 5% is freaking awesome!

Can’t find your passion? Don’t check between the couch cushions. It’s already in you!

Almost every great achievement began with someone finally getting ticked off, saying, “Enough!” and standing up to fight.

DNA has nothing to do with success. Turn your genes into overalls and get to work.

People don’t resent you for being brave. They resent themselves for being afraid.

you will get in life what you accept and expect you are worthy of.

If all the people around you are happy with you, you are not doing great work.

The dream in your heart may be bigger than the environment in which you find yourself. Sometimes you have to get out of that environment to see that dream fulfilled.

What makes work fun is doing meaningful work.

The thought, ‘I can’t’ is a lie. We use it to excuse ourselves from trying.” @DarrenHardy

The ultimate success of a product or service is 10 percent product quality and 90 percent sales. Nine

Become aware of and make choices that support the expansion of your life.

Choose to be 100 percent responsible. Eliminate all you excuses and get freed by the choices you make by taking personal responsibility for them . Make choices to take control.

Psychological studies reveal that 95% of everything we feel, think, do and achieve is a result of a learned habit.

It’s easy to be distracted by the job of growing your business. But never forget that your job as a leader is also to grow people.

If you’re falling short of your income goals, it’s because you waste time doing low-value work. That’s it. That’s the only reason.

The activities you are most afraid of are the activities that can cause a breakthrough in your success. Step into them.

It’s a funny thing; the more I practice, the luckier I get.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said so eloquently: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge.

On habits: The older they are, the bigger they get, the deeper the roots grow, and the harder they are to uproot. Some get so big, with roots so deep, you might hesitate to even try.

Attune your mind to abundance. The world looks, acts and responds to you very differently when you start your day with a feeling and orientation of gratitude for that which you already have

Don’t let your learning lead to knowledge, or you’ll become a fool. Let your learning lead to action, and you can become wealthy. There’s nothing more pitiful than a guy who is smart and broke.

Approach your goals like this, ‘This is my mountain, and I’m going all the way to the top! You are either going to see me waving from the summit or lying dead on the side. I am not coming back!

In my most painful moments on the bike, I am at my most curious, and I wonder each and every time how I will respond. Will I discover my innermost weakness, or will I seek out my innermost strength?

To up your chances of success, get a success buddy, someone who’ll keep you accountable as you cement your new habit while you return the favor. I, for example, have what I call a “Peak-Performance Partner.

No. Sales—effective sales—is not “finding a need and filling it.” Effective sales is about finding a perceived need and helping someone fulfill it. If the customer doesn’t perceive the need, there is no need.

When I asked Richard Branson if he felt luck played a part in his success, he answered, “Yes, of course, we are all lucky. If you live in a free society, you are lucky. Luck surrounds us every day; we are constantly having lucky things happen to us, whether you recognize it or not. I have not been any more lucky or unlucky than anyone else. The difference is when luck came my way, I took advantage of it.” Ah, spoken like a man knighted with wisdom. While we’re on the topic, it’s my belief that the old adage we often hear—“Luck is when opportunity meets preparation”—isn’t enough. I believe there are two other critical components to “luck.

Most people never live up to the potential they have been given. The results they produce and the life they experience are only a tiny fraction of what they are truly capable of. Why? What stops us? Only one thing: fear.

Most people are operating at a fraction of what they are really capable of. As the leader you will need to find the unique seeds of greatness buried in each member of your team. You need to remove the weeds (fears, inhibitions, uncertainties), water and fertilize (invest in their personal growth), and provide the sunshine (your positive attitude, belief in them, and example) to transform that miraculous seed inside them into a bountiful harvest of results and productivity.

The people with whom you habitually associate are called your “reference group.” According to research by social psychologist Dr. David McClelland of Harvard, your “reference group” determines as much as 95 percent of your success or failure in life.

My son, you have just demonstrated the power that habits will have over your life!” the teacher exclaimed. “The older they are, the bigger they get, the deeper the roots grow, and the harder they are to uproot. Some get so big, with roots so deep, you might hesitate to even try.

The Compound Effect—the positive results you want to experience in your life—will be the result of smart choices (and actions) repeated consistently over time. You win when you take the right steps day in and day out. But you set yourself up for failure by doing too much too soon.

What motivates you is the ignition to your passion, the source for your enthusiasm, and the fuel of your persistence. This is so important that I made it the focus of another book, Living Your Best Year Ever: A Proven System for Achieving BIG GOALS (SUCCESS Books, 2011). You MUST know your why.

For instance, have you ever been going about your business, enjoying your life, when all of sudden you made a stupid choice or series of small choices that ultimately sabotaged your hard work and momentum, all for no apparent reason? You didn’t intend to sabotage yourself, but by not thinking about your decisions—weighing the risks and potential outcomes—you found yourself facing unintended consequences. Nobody intends to become obese, go through bankruptcy, or get a divorce, but often (if not always) those consequences are the result of a series of small, poor choices. Elephants Don’t Bite Have you ever been bitten by an elephant? How about a mosquito? It’s the little things in life that will bite you. Occasionally, we see big mistakes threaten to destroy a career or reputation in an instant—the famous comedian who rants racial slurs during a stand-up routine, the drunken anti-Semitic antics of a once-celebrated humanitarian, the anti-gay-rights senator caught soliciting gay sex in a restroom, the admired female tennis player who uncharacteristically threatens an official with a tirade of expletives. Clearly, these types of poor choices have major repercussions. But even if you’ve pulled such a whopper in your past, it’s not extraordinary massive steps backward or the tragic single moments that we’re concerned with here. For most of us, it’s the frequent, small, and seemingly inconsequential choices that are of grave concern. I’m talking about the decisions you think don’t make any difference at all. It’s the little things that inevitably and predictably derail your success. Whether they’re bone-headed maneuvers, no-biggie behaviors, or are disguised as positive choices (those are especially insidious), these seemingly insignificant decisions can completely throw you off course because you’re not mindful of them. You get overwhelmed, space out, and are unaware of the little actions that take you way off course. The Compound Effect works, all right. It always works, remember? But in this case it works against you because you’re doing… you’re sleepwalking.

Indulging in our bad habits doesn’t seem to have any negative effects at all in the moment. You don’t have that heart attack, your face doesn’t shrivel up, you’re not standing in the unemployment line, and your thighs aren’t thunderous. But that doesn’t mean you haven’t activated the Compound Effect.

can all make powerful choices. We can all take back control by not blaming chance, fate, or anyone else for our outcomes. It’s within our ability to cause everything to change. Rather than letting past hurtful experiences sap our energy and sabotage our success, we can use them to fuel positive, constructive

Creating new habits will take time. Be patient with yourself. If you fall off the wagon, brush yourself off (not beat yourself up!), and get back on. No problem. We all stumble. Just go again and try another strategy; reinforce your commitment and consistency. When you press on, you will receive huge payoffs.

Your brain is programmed to seek out the negative—dwindling resources, destructive weather, whatever’s out to hurt you. So when you switch on that radio on the way to work and get bombarded with all those reports about robberies, fires, attacks, the tanking economy, your brain lights up—it now will spend all day chewing

If you’re the type of person who’s always thought of “sell” as a four-letter word, this is good news for you. You can now replace that with another four-letter word: HELP. How can you help? How does your product or service address someone’s deepest need or fear? What problem does it solve? How does it make a positive difference?

Choices are at the root of every one of your results. Each choice starts a behavior that over time becomes a habit. Choose poorly and you just might find yourself back at the drawing board, forced to make new, often harder choices. Don’t choose at all and you’ve actually made the choice to be the passive receiver of whatever comes your way.

Instead of thinking that he has to deprive himself, or take something out of his diet, he thinks about what he can have instead. He fills his focus and his belly with what he can have, so he no longer has attention or hunger for what he can't. Instead of focusing on what he has to sacrifice, he thinks about what he gets to "add in". The result is a lot more powerful.

The instructor turned to the easel and wrote 100/0 on the paper in big black letters. “You have to be willing to give 100 percent with zero expectation of receiving anything in return,” he said. “Only when you’re willing to take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work will it work. Otherwise, a relationship left to chance will always be vulnerable to disaster.

On the Craft of Writing:  The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by Shawn Coyne The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White 2K to 10K: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love by Rachel Aaron  On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing by Libbie Hawker  You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) by Jeff Goins Prosperity for Writers: A Writer's Guide to Creating Abundance by Honorée Corder  The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield Business for Authors: How To Be An Author Entrepreneur by Joanna Penn  On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark On Mindset:  The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan The Art of Exceptional Living by Jim Rohn Vision to Reality: How Short Term Massive Action Equals Long Term Maximum Results by Honorée Corder The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg Mckeown Mastery by Robert Greene The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer The Game of Life and How to Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy Taking Life Head On: How to Love the Life You Have While You Create the Life of Your Dreams by Hal Elrod Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill In

Luck, circumstances, or the right situation wasn’t what mattered. If it was to be, it was up to me. I was free to fly. No matter who was elected president, how badly the economy tanked, or what anybody said, did, or didn’t do, I was still 100 percent in control of me. Through choosing to be officially liberated from past, present, and future victimhood, I’d hit the jackpot. I had the unlimited power to control my destiny.

It’s not until situations are difficult, when problems come up and temptation is great, that you get to prove your worthiness for progress. As Jim Rohn would say, “Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.” When you hit the wall in your disciplines, routines, rhythms, and consistency, realize that’s when you are separating yourself from your old self, scaling that wall, and finding your new powerful, triumphant, and victorious self.

The earlier you start making small changes, the more powerfully the Compound Effect works in your favor. Suppose your friend listened to Dave Ramsey’s advice and began putting $250 a month into an IRA when she got her first job after graduating from college at age twenty-three. You, on the other hand, don’t start saving until you’re forty. (Or maybe you started saving a little earlier but cleaned out your retirement account because you didn’t notice any great gains.) By the time your friend is forty, she never has to invest another dollar and will have more than a $1 million by the age of sixty-seven, growing at 8 percent interest compounded monthly. You continue to invest $250 every month until you reach sixty-seven, the normal retirement age for Social Security for those born after 1960. (That means you’re saving for twenty-seven years in contrast to her seventeen years.) When you’re ready to retire, you’ll have less than $300,000 and will have invested $27,000 more than your friend. Even though you saved for many more years and invested much more cash, you still ended up with less than a third of the money you could have had. That’s what happens when we procrastinate and neglect necessary behaviors, habits, and disciplines. Don’t wait another day to start the small disciplines that will lead you in the direction of your goals!

There’s a story about a man riding a horse, galloping quickly. It appears that he’s going somewhere very important. A man standing along the roadside shouts, “Where are you going?” The rider replies, “I don’t know. Ask the horse!” This is the story of most people’s lives. They’re riding the horse of their habits, with no idea where they’re headed. It’s time to take control of the reins and move your life in the direction of where you really want to go.

There’s a story about a man riding a horse, galloping quickly. It appears that he’s going somewhere very important. A man standing along the roadside shouts, “Where are you going?” The rider replies, “I don’t know. Ask the horse!” This is the story of most people’s lives; they’re riding the horse of their habits, with no idea where they’re headed. It’s time to take control of the reins, and move your life in the direction of where you really want to go.

Your brain is not designed to make you happy. Your brain has only one agenda in mind: survival. It is always watching for signs of "lack and attack." Your brain is programmed to seek out the negative--dwindling resources, destructive weather, whatever's out to hurt you. So when you switch on that radio on the way to work and get bombarded with all those reports...your brain lights up--it will now spend all day chewing over that feast of fear, worry, negativity.

If you’re soliciting applicants to fill one of the exclusive seats on your ride, the headline should talk about the opportunity to work with other extremely talented, fun, passionate, and high-character people who are fired up about the great mission, challenge, and vision you are trying to realize. Explain how you invest in your people to help them grow, develop, and achieve their goals—professionally and personally. Then (maybe) footnote the compensation package.

Every incomplete promise, commitment, and agreement saps your strength because it blocks your momentum and inhibits your ability to move forward. Incomplete tasks keep calling you back to the past to take care of them. So think about what you can complete today. Additionally, when you’re creating an environment to support your goals, remember that you get in life what you tolerate. This is true in every area of your life—particularly within your relationships with family, friends, and colleagues. What you have decided to tolerate is also reflected in the situations and circumstances of your life right now. Put another way, you will get in life what you accept and expect you are worthy of.

All of the hows will be meaningless until your whys are powerful enough. Until you’ve set your desire and motivation in place, you’ll abandon any new path you seek to better your life. If your why-power—your desire—isn’t great enough, if the fortitude of your commitment isn’t powerful enough, you’ll end up like every other person who makes a New Year’s resolution and gives up too quickly and reverts to sleepwalking through poor choices. Let me give you an analogy to help bring it home: If I were to put a ten-inch-wide, thirty-foot-long plank on the ground and say, “If you walk the length of the plank, I’ll give you twenty dollars,” would you do it? Of course, it’s an easy twenty bucks. But what if I took that same plank and made a roof-top “bridge

You don’t need to learn anything more. If all we needed was more information, everyone with an internet connection would live in a mansion, have abs of steel, and be blissfully happy. You do not need new information—you need a new plan of action.

The ripple effect of helping others and giving generously of your time and energy is that you become the biggest beneficiary of your personal philanthropy.

Whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe, and enthusiastically act upon… must inevitably come to pass!

We all come into this world the same: naked, scared, and ignorant. After that grand entrance, the life we end up with is simply an accumulation of all the choices we make. Our choices can be our best friend or our worst enemy. They can deliver us to our goals or send us orbiting into a galaxy far, far away. Think about it. Everything in your life exists because you first made a choice about something. Choices are at the root of every one of your results. Each choice starts a behavior that over time becomes a habit. Choose poorly, and you just might find yourself back at the drawing board, forced to make new, often harder choices. Don’t choose at all, and you’ve made the choice to be the passive receiver of whatever comes your way. In essence, you make your choices, and then your choices make you.

¿Desea opiniones sinceras? Busque personas que le aprecien lo suficiente como para ser honestas y hágales las siguientes preguntas: “¿qué te parezco’ ¿Cuáles son mis puntos fuertes? ¿Qué aspectos crees que puedo mejorar? ¿EN qué aspectos crees que me perjudico a mí mismo? ¿Qué me beneficiaría dejar de hacer? ¿Qué debería empezar a hacer?”.

Everything you need to be amazing is already inside you.

estudios sicológicos revelan que el 95% de lo que sentimos, pensamos, hacemos y logramos es el resultado de un hábito aprendido. Todos nacemos con instintos, por supuesto, pero sin hábitos. Es con el paso del tiempo que los desarrollamos. Desde niños aprendemos respuestas condicionadas que conllevan a reacciones automáticas (es decir, involuntarias) en muchas situaciones.

Si no progresas tanto como te gustaría y sabes que eres capaz de hacerlo, eso significa que todavía no has definido bien tus objetivos”.

Aquello que imaginas con intensidad, deseas de corazón, crees con sinceridad y lo trabajas con entusiasmo, ¡forzosamente, tiene que salirte bien!”.

El éxito real y duradero requiere de esfuerzo, ¡y mucho!

¿Con quién pasas más tiempo? ¿Quiénes son las personas a las que más admiras? ¿Son esos dos grupos de personas exactamente iguales? Si no es así, ¿qué los diferencia? Jim Rohn me enseñó que nos convertimos en una combinación de las cinco personas con las que pasamos más tiempo. Rohn decía que podemos adivinar la calidad de nuestra salud, actitud e ingresos con tan solo observar a quienes nos rodean. La gente con la que pasamos tiempo determina qué conversaciones atraen nuestra atención y a qué actitudes y opiniones estamos expuestos. Con el tiempo, empezamos a comer lo que ellos comen, a hablar como ellos hablan, a leer lo que ellos leen, a pensar lo que ellos piensan, a ver lo que ellos ven, a tratar a la gente del mismo modo que ellos la tratan, incluso a vestir igual que ellos. Lo gracioso es que, casi siempre, ignoramos estas similitudes entre nosotros y ese círculo de cinco personas.

Así, mientras sigas tomando decisiones de manera involuntaria, no podrás elegir conscientemente cambiar ese comportamiento tan ineficaz para convertirlo en hábitos productivos. Por lo tanto, es hora de DESPERTAR y de tomar decisiones que te den más control sobre tu vida.

small, seemingly insignificant steps completed consistently over time will create a radical difference.

It’s estimated that Americans (twelve and older) spend 1,704 hours watching TV per year. That averages out to 4.7 HOURS per day. We’re spending almost 30 percent of our waking hours watching TV. Almost thirty-three hours per week—more than one whole day each week! It’s the equivalent of watching TV for two solid months out of every twelve!

We’ve lost sight of the good, old-fashioned value of hard and consistent work.

inevitably

賽跑要贏，取決於步調。

你的生活是你自己創造的。你的期望影響了整個創造過程，你有哪些期望？你的期望，就是你想的東西。你的思考過程，也就是你在腦裡的談話，是你在人生中創造成果的基石。所以，問題是：你在想些什麼？哪些事物正在影響、支配你的思想？答案

你心中的夢想，可能比你身處的環境還要大。有時，你必須走出那些環境，才能夠看見你的夢想實現。

你為自己樹立什麼標準，你的生活就會成為那種水準。

撞牆並不是一道障礙，而是一個新的機會。

敢於不同，做出人意料的事

Before we dig in, I have one warning: Earning success is hard. The process is laborious, tedious, sometimes even boring. Becoming wealthy, influential, and world-class in your field is slow and arduous.

辨識你三個最好的習慣——那些可以支持你最重要目標的習慣；辨識使你偏離你最重要目標的三個壞

他們維持的習慣、紀律、例程及一貫性是開啟動能的鑰匙，大魔出現後，他們就變得銳不可當。

生活其實就是許多體驗的集合；我們的目標，應該是提高美好體驗的頻率與強度。

Remember, consistency is a critical component of success.

Nothing fails like success.

Short term pleasures create long term pains and short-term pains create long term pleasures

No se puede ver lo que no se busca y no se busca aquello en lo que no se cree.

And as long as you’re making choices unconsciously, you can’t consciously choose to change that ineffective behavior and turn it into productive habits. It’s time to WAKE UP and make empowering choices.

If you say you’re a dedicated professional, but you show up late and unprepared, your behavior rats you out every time.

What’s simple to do is also simple not to do.” The magic is not in the complexity of the task; the magic is in the doing of simple things repeatedly and long enough to ignite the miracle of the Compound Effect. So, beware of neglecting the simple things that make the big things in your life possible. The biggest difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people are willing to do what unsuccessful people are not. Remember that; it will come in handy many times throughout life when faced with a difficult, tedious, or tough choice.

It doesn’t matter how smart you are or aren’t, you need to make up in hard work what you lack in experience, skill, intelligence, or innate ability.

You cannot hang out with negative people and expect to live a positive life. So,

The difficulty lies in being able to break away from the pack and pursue other slipstreams or wormholes. Darren

There is a one thing that 99 percent of “failures” and “successful” folks have in common—they all hate doing the same things. The difference is successful people do them anyway.

Whatever I want in life, I’ve found that the best way to get it is to focus my energy on giving to others. If I want to boost my confidence, I look for ways to help someone else feel more confident. If I want to feel more hopeful, positive, and inspired, I try to infuse that in someone else’s day. If I want more success for myself, the fastest way to get it is to go about helping someone else obtain it.

Kenneth Cole, he said it this way: “Success has less to do with what we can get ourselves to do and more to do with keeping ourselves from doing what we shouldn’t.

When Steve Jobs was asked of all that he and Apple had created which he was most proud, his answer was, “I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.

What’s the master skill of productivity? Learning to say No.