Robert Frost and Bobby Thigpen by Ron White

Bobby Thigpen spent most of his career with the Chicago White Sox and had a good baseball career. However, I am sure that it's a little known fact that he also fancied himself as somewhat of a poet. That's right... a poet. The man to whom the White Sox turned in the ninth to mow down batters could have been the next Robert Frost.

Actually, that may be an exaggeration. His poetry most likely would not have received an “A” in any junior high English class. Thigpen, after his first full year in the Major Leagues, posted a 7 and 5 record with 16 saves and an ERA of 2.70. But, he did sense that the possibility of not being signed was real. He sent this short poem to White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf:

As I sit at home this off-season,
I wonder what the hell is the reason,
Why the club wants to be unfair,
Underpaying a player who can produce and care.

Reinsdorf could roll with the punches and promptly responded with some rhymes of his own.

I hope you are a really good pitcher,
Because as a poet you will never get richer;
If you are not pitching this year,
I will be sad but won’t fear;
Though you may be one of the best,
There’s always someone among the rest.

At this point it was getting fun. And Thigpen couldn’t resist but to respond with more poetry of his own. Thigpen sent this gem to his fellow poet:

It is true that my potential as a poet is very small,
But, in the ninth, who do you want to have the ball?
You say there will always be someone among the rest,
But, who do you want, them or the best?

Thigpen didn’t get his salary doubled like he wanted. But, he did get signed and had a nice career. Someone once said that, “Life is too serious to be taken seriously.” Thigpen is a man who had an unconventional and fun approach to a very serious issue, such as his salary. How often in business and life do you make a serious situation only more serious by being unnecessarily stoic. If we can learn any lesson from Thigpen, it would be to lighten up and have some fun.

Vitamins for the Mind by Jim Rohn: Concentration

The best advice I ever came across on the subject of concentration is: Wherever you are, be there.

When you work, work. When you play, play. Don't mix the two.

Give whatever you are doing and whoever you are with the gift of attention.

On the way to work, concentrate on the way - not the work.

Pay attention. Don't just stagger through the day.

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Let’s Go Do It. by Jim Rohn

To really help people in extraordinary ways, learn to deal in challenges. That is what sports is all about: challenges. That is what music is all about. The challenge to play so well, someone is inspired. The challenge to say it so well, someone gets it. The challenge to be so gifted in language that someone sees it. Insight is unbelievable; only human beings can do this.

The man closes his eyes and puts his hands over his eyes and says, “I see it.” You say, “No, you don’t; you’ve got your eyes closed.” No. There is more than one way to see. And all someone has to do is to see an answer that they can start on immediately, and within six months, their life could start to multiply and change. Within one year, the difference will be extraordinary, and a person who was lost now becomes a person of influence—just because someone helped them to see for the moment what was wrong and the possibility to change it. And then the challenge to go do it and do it well.

Now, here is the best challenge of all: “Let’s go do it.” Don’t always say, “You go do it. You change.” But rather, “Let’s get healthy. Let’s go change the world. Let’s build an enterprise. Let’s work on this together.” See, I always respond better to “let’s.” Sometimes it is hard to lift yourself out. It’s hard to be self-inspired at first. And if someone says, “Come on, let’s start a new program.” “Come on, let’s do exercises.” “Come on, let’s get healthy.” “Come on, let’s start something. I’ll be there, you be there, and you bring a guest and I’ll bring a guest—let’s start something.” That is so inspiring to have somebody say “let’s.” “Let’s do it.” “Let’s build a team.” “Let’s win the championship.” “Let’s walk off with the trophy.”

“Let’s.” Wow, there is something about that that can keep you awake at nights. There is something about that that turns on the juices. There is something about that that reaches deep in the soul. For a person could do extraordinary things when somebody says “Let’s.” “Let’s do it.” “I’ve got two with me already; if you’ll be the next one, we can conquer the world.” You say, “Whoa, together nobody is a match for us.” By yourself, you’re vulnerable; but with us, nobody is a match. You say, “Wow! I want to belong to that team.” So figure out ways to say “Let’s.”

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Taking the "Unknowns" to the "Knowns": Knowing Your Audience Can Make All the Difference in Presenting by Tony Jeary

From your audience’s viewpoint, your presentation must answer a simple question:

“What’s in it for me?” But in order to know what’s in it for your audience, you must first know who your audience is.

Begin by forming a mental image of your audience through the following checklist as soon as you schedule a presentation.

• Create a profile of the average audience member-include age, background, marital status, education, income, and job
• Create a list of people your audience would likely admire
• Talk with former attendees of the same types of presentations
• Talk with former presenters who’ve addressed similar groups
• Interview the client or event planner if available
• Request a list of likely audience members, then pre-poll them by calling in advance to see what they expect

Knowing your audience is crucial if you want to satisfy their needs. According to David Freeborn, an experienced speaker and presenter, there are four basic categories or mental states of those in the audience. They include:

The Prisoner—this is the person who would rather be anywhere other than indoors listening to another talk. Someone else sent him to your seminar. Prisoners are not responsible for being there…but they are responsible for what they take out of there!

The Vacationer—this is the person who volunteers to go to any seminar, figuring it’s better to be in a meeting than at work, home, or wherever else he’d normally be. He’s happy to be there, but for the wrong reasons, but count on vacationers to help you have a good time.

The Graduate—this is the person who thinks he doesn’t need to be there because he already knows this stuff. Create opportunities for them to share their knowledge and wisdom with others.

The Student—this is the attentive, hard-working, perfect audience member who wants to hear what you’ve come to say. He is eager to learn and share and, like a sponge, ready to absorb all he can to help him be more effective personally and professionally.

Once you’ve done this audience research, answer the following 5 questions:

1. What knowledge about my topic do they bring to the table?
2. Will they be for me or against me? Why?
3. Who are the people they most admire in their organizations and who are they most likely to admire outside their organizations?
4. What things have worked with similar audiences in the past, and what things haven’t?
5. Why was I asked to present?

This single audience reference page will do wonders for taking the “unknowns” to the “knowns”. After all, knowing your audience is one of the most crucial foundations to a powerful presentation.

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Vitamins for the Mind by Jim Rohn: Emotions

Emotions will either serve or master, depending on who is in charge.

Our emotions need to be as educated as our intellect. It is important to know how to feel, how to respond, and how to let life in so that it can touch you.

Civilization is the intelligent management of human emotions.

Measure your emotions. You don't need an atomic explosion for a minor point.

Women have an incredible ability to pick up on emotional signals. For example, there are some wolves that are so clever they have learned to dress up like sheep. Man says, "Looks like a sheep. Talks like a sheep." Woman says, "Ain't no sheep!"

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Maintaining Honesty and Integrity by Jim Rohn

For a leader, honesty and integrity are absolutely essential to survival. A lot of businesspeople don’t realize how closely they’re being watched by their subordinates. Remember when you were a kid in grammar school, how you used to sit there staring at your teacher all day? By the end of the school year, you could do a perfect imitation of all your teacher’s mannerisms. You were aware of the slightest nuances in your teacher’s voice—all the little clues that distinguished levels of meaning that told you the difference between bluff and “now I mean business.”

And you were able to do that after eight or nine months of observation. Suppose you had five or 10 years. Do you think there would have been anything about your teacher you didn’t know?

Now fast-forward and use that analogy as a manager. Do you think there’s anything your people don’t know about you right this minute? If you haven’t been totally aboveboard and honest with them, do you really think you’ve gotten away with it? Not too likely. But if you’ve been led to believe that you’ve gotten away with it, there might be a good probability that people are afraid of you, and that’s a problem in its own right.

But there is another side of this coin. In any organization, people want to believe in their leaders. If you give them reason to trust you, they’re not going to go looking for reasons to think otherwise, and they’ll be just as perceptive about your positive qualities as they are about the negative ones.

A situation that happened some years ago at a company in the Midwest illustrates this perfectly. The wife of a new employee experienced complications in the delivery of a baby. There was a medical bill of more than $10,000, and the health insurance company didn’t want to cover it. The employee hadn’t been on the payroll long enough, the pregnancy was a preexisting condition, etc., etc.

In any case, the employee was desperate. He approached the company CEO and asked him to talk to the insurance people. The CEO agreed, and the next thing the employee knew, the bill was gone and the charges were rescinded.

When he told some colleagues about the way the CEO had so readily used his influence with the insurance company, they just shook their heads and smiled. The CEO had paid the bill out of his own pocket, and everybody knew it, no matter how quietly it had been done.

Now an act of dishonesty can’t be hidden either, and it will instantly undermine the authority of a leader. But an act of integrity and kindness like the example above is just as obvious to all concerned. When you’re in a leadership position, you have the choice of how you will be seen, but you will be seen one way or the other, make no mistake about it.

One of the most challenging areas of leadership is your family. Leadership of a family demands even higher standards of honesty and integrity, and the stakes are higher too. You can replace disgruntled employees and start over. You can even get a new job for yourself, if it comes to that. But your family can’t be shuffled like a deck of cards. If you haven’t noticed, kids are great moral philosophers, especially as they get into adolescence. They’re determined to discover and expose any kind of hypocrisy, phoniness, or lack of integrity on the part of authority figures, and if we’re parents, that means us. It’s frightening how unforgiving kids can be about this, but it really isn’t a conscious decision on their part; it’s just a necessary phase of growing up.

They’re testing everything, especially their parents.

As a person of integrity yourself, you’ll find it easy to teach integrity to your kids, and they in turn will find it easy to accept you as a teacher. This is a great opportunity and also a supreme responsibility, because kids simply must be taught to tell the truth: to mean what they say and to say what they mean.

Praise is one of the world’s most effective teaching and leadership tools. Criticism and blame, even if deserved, are counterproductive unless all other approaches have failed.

Now for the other side of the equation, we all know people who have gotten ahead as a result of dishonest or unethical behavior. When you’re a kid, you might naively think that never happens, but when you get older, you realize that it does. Then you think you’ve really wised up. But that’s not the real end of it. When you get older, you see the long-term consequences of dishonest gain, and you realize that in the end it doesn’t pay.

“Hope of dishonest gain is the beginning of loss.” I don’t think that old saying refers to loss of money. I think it actually means loss of self-respect. You can have all the material things in the world, but if you’ve lost respect for yourself, what do you really have? The only way to ever attain success and enjoy it is to achieve it honestly with pride in what you’ve done.

This isn’t just a sermon, it’s very practical advice. Not only can you take it to heart, you can take it to the bank.

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Vitamins for the Mind by Jim Rohn: Desire/Motivation

Humans have the remarkable ability to get exactly what they must have. But there is a difference between a "must" and a "want."

The best motivation is self-motivation. The guy says, "I wish someone would come by and turn me on." What if they don't show up? You've got to have a better plan for your life.

When you know what you want, and you want it bad enough, you will find a way to get it.

Motivation alone is not enough. If you have an idiot and you motivate him, now you have a motivated idiot.

Without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value.

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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The Key to Winning by Denis Waitley (excerpted from Becoming an Authentic MVP)

People often ask me, what is the most critical attribute of a winner in life? Without hesitation, I answer that believing you deserve to win is the key. If you believe in your dreams when they’re all you have to hang onto, you begin to try. If you feel you have potential or talent, you’ll invest in it. If you believe you’re worth the effort, you’ll put in the time and energy. If you think you can, you’ll learn how.

Healthy self-esteem is perhaps the most important and basic quality of a winning human being.  You want to be able to say: “I like myself. Given my parents and my background, I’m glad I’m me. I realize I may not be the best-looking in the group, but I always look and do my best in every group. I’d rather be me than anyone else in the world.” This is the self-talk of a winner. Winners have developed a strong sense of self-worth, regardless of their status. They weren’t necessarily born with these good feelings, but they’ve learned to like themselves through practice.

The most successful companies in the world know that valued employees are their most precious resource. Valuable employees pass their value on to customers. The result? Excellence and quality. They are the most powerful competitors in the world marketplace. Instead of comparing ourselves to others, we should view ourselves in terms of our own abilities, interests and goals. We can begin by making a conscious effort to upgrade our lifestyle, education and personal development. You always project on the outside how you feel on the inside.

Core values radiate like rings, as when a pebble is thrown in a pond. The self-centered constantly seek approval from and power over others. They try to impress them with their worth rather than express concern for others' well-being. And their outward appearances usually involve ways to hide their real thoughts and intentions.

The value-centered give of themselves freely and graciously, constantly seeking to empower others. Open and modest, they have no need for conceit, the opposite of core value. Feeling good about who they are, and not needing to talk about their victories or line their walls with celebrity photos, people with core values spend much of their time "paying value," as I call it, to others. When praised, they share the spotlight. When they make mistakes, they view them as learning experiences and accept responsibility.

My friend Nathaniel Branden taught me—and countless others—that self-esteem can't be bought, won in an arena, measured by a stock portfolio, or displayed in a fashion model's figure or an entertainment star's profile. Self-esteem is a profound belief that you deserve to be happy and successful, combined with a trust or confidence in an ability to manage life's challenges. It is as necessary for human development as oxygen, as basic as the carbon from which diamonds are formed. I used to think that diamonds were so sought after because they glitter, but discovered that they 're actually so valuable because they're almost impossible to destroy. Formed at the earth's core and very rare, they hold their value indefinitely.

Perhaps you have already developed the wisdom to know that the diamonds you seek are waiting to be uncovered in your own backyard—the backyard of your mind—where your sense of values and your self-worth are embedded. The simple truth is that if we have no internalized feelings of value, we have nothing to share with others. We can need them, depend on them, look for security in them—but we can't share or give an emotion to anyone unless we possess it. The diamond is inside us, waiting to be discovered, shaped, and polished. Self-acceptance, as we are right now, is the key to healthy self-esteem—seeing ourselves as worthwhile, changing, imperfect, growing individuals, and knowing that although we aren’t born with equal mental and physical uniforms, we are born with the equal right to feel deserving of excellence according to our own internal standards.

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Accentuating the Positive by Tony Alessandra

It's been estimated that we each have upwards of 50,000 thoughts per day. How many of yours are negative? Sometimes you have to do a mental spring cleaning to get rid of those negative ones that have become ingrained attitudes. Stopping self-destructive thoughts is like stopping any other bad habit—it takes time and effort.

Among the most effective ways to do this are visualization and affirmations. Affirmations are positive statements about yourself that you repeat over and over in your head until they're programmed into your subconscious.

Visualization, or "imagineering" as Walt Disney called it, is mentally picturing yourself the way you want to be. You've heard the old saying "I'll believe it when I see it"? Well, the reverse is also true: "I'll see it when I believe it!" Affirmations and visualizations may not feel true at first. They may not even be true! But they can become so.

Consider what happens when you tell yourself over and over, "I'm lousy at remembering names." There will never be any improvement there. So if you catch yourself saying, "I'm terrible at remembering names," stop and immediately say to yourself, "I'm good at remembering names."

Or consider the effect of telling yourself, "I'm feeling pretty good today." Or "I can lose ten pounds." Or "I am good at getting people to see things my way." Anything you say to yourself over and over will actually influence your reality.

Writing down your affirmations in some handy place—above your desk, on your bathroom mirror, on the dashboard of your car—will help keep them in mind as well as in sight. Use affirmations and visualizations to project what success will feel like and look like. Imagine, in as much detail as you possibly can, how you feel as the boss singles you out for exceeding your quota, or how the audience hangs on your every word during your speech, or how your confident presence causes heads to turn everywhere you go.

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Vitamins for the Mind by Jim Rohn: Parenting/Relationships

One person caring about another represents life's greatest value.

Your family and your love must be cultivated like a garden. Time, effort, and imagination must be summoned constantly to keep any relationship flourishing and growing.

The greatest gift you can give to somebody is your own personal development. I used to say, "If you will take care of me, I will take care of you." Now I say, "I will take care of me for you if you will take care of you for me"

The walls we build around us to keep out the sadness also keep out the joy.

There is no greater leadership challenge than parenting.

If you talk to your children, you can help them to keep their lives together. If you talk to them skillfully, you can help them to build future dreams.

Leadership is the great challenge of the 21st century in science, politics, education, and industry. But the greatest challenge in leadership is parenting. We need to do more than just get our enterprises ready for the challenges of the twenty-first century. We also need to get our children ready for the challenges of the 21st century.

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Forging Your Character by Jim Rohn

Personal success is built on the foundation of character, and character is the result of hundreds and hundreds of choices you may make that gradually turn who you are at any given moment into who you want to be. If that decision-making process is not present, you’ll still be somebody—you’ll still be alive—but you may have a personality rather than a character, and to me that’s something very different.

Character isn’t something you were born with and can’t change, like your fingerprints. It’s something you must take responsibility for forming. You build character by how you respond to what happens in your life, whether it’s winning every game, losing every game, getting rich or dealing with hard times.

You build character from certain qualities that you must create and diligently nurture within yourself, just like you would plant and water a seed or gather wood to build a campfire. You’ve got to look for those things in your heart and in your gut. You’ve got to chisel away in order to find them, just like chiseling away rock to create the sculpture that previously existed only in the imagination.

But the really amazing thing about character is that, if you’re sincerely committed to making yourself into the person you want to be, you’ll not only create those qualities, you’ll strengthen them and re-create them in abundance, even as you’re drawing on them every day of your life. That’s why building your character is vital to becoming all you can be.

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Choices by Darren Hardy

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. Every decision, no matter how slight, alters the trajectory of your life—whether or not to go to college, who to marry, to have that last drink before you drive, to indulge in gossip or stay silent, to make one more prospecting call or call it a day, to say I love you or not. Every choice has an impact on the Compound Effect of your life.

This chapter is about becoming aware of and making choices that support the expansion of your life. Sounds complicated, but you’ll be amazed by its simplicity. No longer will 99 percent of your choices be unconscious. No more will most of your daily routines and traditions come as a reaction to your programming. You’ll ask yourself (and be able to answer), “How many of my behaviors have I not ‘voted on’? What am I doing that I didn’t consciously choose to do, yet continue to do every day?”

By employing the same idiot-proof strategies I’ve used to catapult my own life and career, strengthened by the Compound Effect, you’ll be able to loosen the mysterious grip of the things that are unwinding your life and pulling you in the wrong direction. You’ll be able to hit the pause button before stumbling into idiot territory. You’ll experience the ease of making decisions that lead to behaviors and habits that support you, every time.

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. Half the time, you’re not even aware you’re making them! 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. 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 become 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 sleepwalking.

For instance, you inhale a soda and bag of potato chips and suddenly realize only after you polished off the last chip that you blew an entire day of healthy eating—and you weren’t even hungry. You get caught up and lose two hours watching mindless TV—scratch that, let’s give you some credit and make it an educational documentary—before realizing you spaced on preparing for an important presentation to land a valuable client. You blurt out a knee-jerk lie to a loved one for no good reason, when the truth would have worked just fine. What’s going on?

You’ve allowed yourself to make a choice without thinking. 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.

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Vitamins for the Mind by Jim Rohn: Asking/Belief/Resolve

Asking is the beginning of receiving. Make sure you don't go to the ocean with a teaspoon. At least take a bucket so the kids won't laugh at you.

There is no better opportunity to receive more than to be thankful for what you already have. Thanksgiving opens the windows of opportunity for ideas to flow your way.

Resolve says, "I will." The man says, "I will climb this mountain. They told me it is too high, too far, too steep, too rocky and too difficult. But it's my mountain. I will climb it. You will soon see me waving from the top or dead on the side from trying."

Disgust and resolve are two of the great emotions that lead to change.

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Scolding: One of Communication's Tools of Last Resort by Jim Rohn

You have to be very careful of scolding. Scolding, as a last resort, may be necessary but you must be very careful. Scolding someone is like giving them a cut, giving them a small cut with your words on the hand. Maybe it will serve its purpose, and the cut will heal and everything will be okay. You needed to get their attention. But you must not do it every day, all the time. Some children end up with psychological scars because they have been cut (scolded) every day. Scold, scold every day and they wind up psychologically disadvantaged because of that kind of treatment. Because somebody has the words, but words that are cruel; and they use them too often, all the time rather than saving them up as a tool of last resort. They just cut and scold all the time, and kids sometimes have a hard time working out of this because of that kind of environment. "Too severe, it's too severe," we say. In some countries if you steal, they cut off your hand. In our country we'd say, "That's a bit too severe isn't it?" But guess what they say—“It is very effective." Ask someone who has stolen, "Did you ever steal anything else?" And most assuredly they will answer, "Are you kidding with just one hand - No!" So it is effective, but we say too severe.

So parents, let me talk to you about cruel and unusual scolding. You must be gifted in thinking of ways to effectively communicate with your children. Now sometimes severity is needed as a last, last resort. John Kennedy's father, "Old Joe," said this to John, and you will see when I give it to you that it will serve you in so many ways. Now here is what "Old Joe" said: "If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change." I am sure you got that message now.

If it is not absolutely necessary to scold, then it is necessary not to scold. If it is not necessary to use sarcasm, then it is necessary in your communication not to use sarcasm. If it is not necessary to get angry, then it is necessary not to get angry; you get the idea.

If a parent screams all day at her children, the kids finally get used to it. They learn to say, "Momma, she just screams all day." Kids come over to visit and the kids say, "Don't mind Momma, she's just a screamer, she just screams all day." So the kids are just used to it. But now here is the big problem... when the 3-year old child heads for the street and a truck is coming and Momma screams; and nobody pays any attention.

See Momma should save up her screams, so the day it becomes a necessary tool of last resort, and she does scream, the world stops! See that's the key. These are called, "Tools of Last Resort." Use them well!

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Zig Ziglar On Manners by Zig Ziglar

Today, we too rarely practice good manners... When we neglect to require our children to say “thank you” when someone gives them a gift or does something for them, we are raising ungrateful children who are highly unlikely to be happy. Without gratitude, happiness is a rare thing. With gratitude, the odds go up dramatically that happiness will be the result.

A classic example of the validity of gratitude in action is the story of Roy Rogers. After he starred in his first movie, he began receiving huge stacks of fan mail that he wanted to answer. However, his salary of $150 a week did not even cover the required postage. He talked to the head of Republic Pictures in the hope that the studio would handle some of his fan mail. He was summarily turned down and told he was foolish to think about answering fan mail because nobody else did. It took too much time and money.

Roy Rogers, one of the genuinely good guys of life, couldn’t buy that. It was his conviction that if someone thought enough about him to write a letter, he should have enough respect for the person to answer it. Fortunately, the movie that caused him his “problem” also made him so popular that he could go on a personal appearance tour. He traveled many miles and performed countless one-night stands to raise the money to pay the salaries of the four people it took to answer his fan mail.

As a result of answering fan mail, he built a fan base that was faithful to him and remained faithful to him many, many years later. Yup, the good guys and the good gals really do win. So, develop some manners, respect others, and be grateful for what you have.

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Create That Winning Feeling by Bob Proctor

I believe we would all agree that having a winning feeling is prerequisite to achieving outstanding results. A person can’t possibly expect to win if they’re constantly focusing on failure! The real secret here is to capture that winning feeling of success as often as you can to create the environment necessary to succeed.

If you’ve been a little down in the dumps, feeling insecure or perhaps not feeling as confident in your ability as you’d like, I have a great tip for you. My suggestion to anyone looking for a success track to run on, or to a person who is looking to get back on one, is to start capitalizing on short-term victories. That means specifically focus on tasks you can achieve daily. The principle is to start with an adversity over which you can succeed, and gradually take on more and more difficult tasks. Nothing succeeds like success.

Another technique used by many people in developing or maintaining a winning feeling is what we call the reflection method. Think back during a time where you were really successful at something… we all have times to which we can relate. It could have been a sale, a particular speech, a school play, or standing up to the town bully. Each one of us can reflect back on a moment in time to recapture that winning feeling.

Professional sports coaches often replay winning games of the past for their team prior to a big game to stimulate and create a winning feeling!

Years ago, a good friend of mine had left his job and a company that he had worked with for many years. He was one of the top VPs with his company and had done extremely well. He had left because he wanted to start his own business. I told him he could use one of our offices until such time as he was ready to open up his own office.

In any event, I happened to be in the office one afternoon and Grant, who normally was very upbeat and positive, was really having a difficult time. After a few moments of small talk, it became apparent what the problem was. Grant had hit the terror barrier and the possibility of starting his own company was overwhelming him… he just didn’t think he could do it. Here’s a man who had risen to the top of his field, made a high six-figure income for years… and yet was still having doubts as to his ability to start his own company.

I asked Grant to go home, get a notebook and start to write down all of his accomplishments; as far back as he could remember. The look on his face was priceless—I’m sure he thought I’d lost my mind. I told him that the accomplishment could be small or large… it didn’t really matter. The point was to focus on something positive. I still remember him asking, “Well, what if I only fill half a page.” I just smiled and asked him to do his best and start writing.

Monday morning came and Grant was back in the office with a notebook full of accomplishments. I smiled and said, “You must have been fairly confident, you picked up a good sized notebook!” We both had a good laugh. Grant went on to build a multimillion-dollar financial planning company and later franchised the operation to extend across Canada and the United States!

This is a great exercise for anyone needing a bit of a boost. What would give you a winning feeling of pride and satisfaction? Remember… a winning feeling is a confident feeling and one that forgets misses, and reinforces successful attempts.

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Giving by Zig Ziglar

Marian Anderson got her start by scrubbing floors for ten cents an hour so that she could buy a pawnshop violin. The church she attended recognized her rare talent and raised money for a professional voice teacher to work with her. When the teacher pronounced her ready, she went to New York where critics crucified her. She returned home to regroup. Her mother and her church encouraged her and paid for more lessons.

Because of the intense racial prejudice in America, she went to Europe and took the continent by storm. She came back to America and sang at the Lincoln Memorial with more than 60,000 people in attendance. She sang "O Mia Fernando," "Ave Maria," "Gospel Train," and "My Soul Is Anchored in the Lord," among other songs...

One day a reporter asked Marian what the most satisfying moment in her life was. Without hesitation, she responded that (it was) when she was able to tell her mother that she did not have to take in any more washing. The reporter asked, "What did your mother give you?"

Marian Anderson responded, "Everything she had."

That's greatness, and giving everything we have is our key to greatness.

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Vitamins for the Mind by Jim Rohn: Success/Failure

Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.

Don't take the casual approach to life. Casualness leads to casualties.

It's too bad failures don't give seminars. Wouldn't that be valuable? If you meet a guy who has messed up his life for forty years, you've just got to say, "John, if I bring my journal and promise to take good notes, would you spend a day with me?"

Success is not so much what we have as it is what we are.

Success is 20% skills and 80% strategy. You might know how to read, but more importantly, what's your plan to read?

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Personal Development – The Plan by Jim Rohn

Now, here is my definition of success: A few simple Disciplines practiced every day. Do you see the distinction? A few disciplines... Here's a little phrase we've all heard, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away." And my question to you is, "What if that's true?" How simple and easy is that plan?

The fact is, when you look at successful people, you will almost always discover a plan behind their success. They know what they want, they work out a plan that will get them where they want to go, and they work their plan. It is the foundation for success. We as humans have the unique ability to affect change in our lives; it is through our own conscious choice when we engage in the miracle process of personal development that we are able to transform our nature and our lives.

t is the combination of the materials and your open attitude towards learning, driven by the diligent following of a plan that is right for you, that will make this year the kind of success you want it to be. So let me challenge you to be no less sincere, be no less committed to the advancement of your philosophy, the set of your sail, your plan.

So, what are some good ideas on developing a plan that will work well and take you to the finish line powerfully and in style? Here are some major points to keep in mind:

Develop the Plan for You. Some people are very detail oriented and they will be able to follow an intricate plan closely. Others are a little more "free-wheeling" and not really "detail" people. That is okay too. In all the years of my speaking to audiences worldwide, people have asked the question, "What plan is the right plan?" And my answer, the plan that fits you. Your plan, the one you develop that is unique to you and for you. You see, each of us is unique and motivated by different factors and you've got to develop one that is right for you and fits you. Some plans will not be as intricate as others but we all must have a plan, along with goals in that plan, to move us along the program. If you are a free spirit type, don't tell yourself you are going to spend 2 hours a day with a book and tapes and journal. It probably won't happen and you will get discouraged! Whatever your personality, your strengths and your weaknesses, develop the plan around them! This is not a one-plan-fits-all proposition.

Establish Times to Spend Working on the Material. It may be every Sunday night. It may be 20 minutes each morning. It may be in the car listening to the CD's every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Whatever it is, set the times and do it. In your step-by-step plan, put down points that you can accomplish every week. They should be specific and achievable. Develop the discipline and take those steps every day, which will move you closer to your goals and where you want to be.

Keep a Journal. Take notes. It may be on paper, it may be on a micro-recorder. Mr. Schoaff taught me not to trust my memory, but to write it down, to find one place to gather the information that affects change. And that advice has served me well all these years. Record the ideas and inspiration that will carry you from where you are to where you want to be. Take notes on the ideas that impact you most. Put down your thoughts and ideas. Brainstorm with yourself on where you are going and what you want to do. Record your dreams and ambitions. Your journals are a gathering place for all the valuable information that you will find. If you are serious about becoming wealthy, powerful, sophisticated, healthy, influential, cultured, unique, if you come across something important write it down. Two people will listen to the same material and different ideas will come to each one. Use the information you gather and record it for further reflection, for future debate and for weighing the value that it is to you.

Reflect. Create time for reflection -- a time to go back over, to study again the things you've learned and the things you've done each day. I call it "running the tapes again" so that the day locks firmly in your memory so that it serves as a tool. As you go through the material in this plan, you will want to spend time reflecting on its significance for you. Regularly set aside time - here are some good guidelines for times to reflect: At the end of the day. Take a few minutes at the end of each day and go back over the day - who'd you talk to, who'd you see, what did they say, what happened and how'd you feel, what went on. A day is the piece of the mosaic of your life. Next, take a few hours at the end of the week to reflect on the week's activities - I would suggest at least one half-hour. Also during that weekly time, take a few minutes to reflect on how this material should be applied to your life and circumstances. Take a half day at the end of the month and a weekend at the end of the year so that you've got it so that it never disappears, to ensure that the past is even more valuable and will serve your future well.

Set Goals. While we are going to cover this soon enough in upcoming weeks, let's just remember that your plan is the roadmap for how you are going to get to your goals, so you have to have them. Of all the things that changed my life for the better (and most quickly), it was learning how to set goals. Mastering this unique process can have a powerful effect on your life too. I remember shortly after I met Mr. Shoaff, he asked me if I had a list of my goals, and of course I didn't. He suggested to me that because I lacked a set of clearly defined goals that he could guess my bank balance within a few hundred dollars... and he did! Well, Mr. Shoaff immediately began helping me define my view of the future, my dreams. He taught me to set goals because it is the greatest influence on a person's future and the greatest force that will pull a person in the direction that they want to go. But the future must be planned, well designed to exert a force that pulls you towards the promise of what can be.

Act. Act on your plan. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful so many times is that the successful simply do it. They take action, they aren't necessarily smarter than others; they just work the plan. And the time to act is when the emotion is strong. Because if you don't, here's what happens - it's called the law of diminishing intent. We intend to act when the idea strikes us, when the emotion is high, but if we delay and we don't translate that into action fairly soon, the intention starts to diminish, diminish and a month from now it’s cold and a year from now it can't be found. So set up the discipline when the idea is strong, clear and powerful - that's the time to work the plan. Otherwise the emotion is wasted unless you capture the emotion and put it into disciplined activities and translate it into equity. And here's what is interesting: all disciplines affect each other; everything affects everything. That's why the smallest action is important -- because the value and benefits that you receive from that one little action will inspire you to do the next one and the next one... So step out and take action on your plan because if the plan is good, then the results can be miraculous.

We are at the beginning of a fantastic journey that is going to help us become all that we want to - so let's get going!

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Vitamins for the Mind by Jim Rohn: Impact

"The greatest step toward success is self-confidence. The greatest builder of self-confidence is self-esteem, and self-esteem comes from doing the daily things you know you should do. Sometimes your self-esteem will start to soar when you make some critical decisions--decisions to walk a new road, to start a new direction, to start a new discipline."

"We are all affected by five things. But the most important thing that affects us is our dreams--our ability to see the future. But here's why we don't reach into the future. We're trapped either by regret of the past or the routine of the present. So make sure that the greatest pull on you is the pull of the future."

"What you want will pull like a magnet. Here's the other part. What for? Purpose is stronger than object. It's the 'What for?' that's even more powerful than the object. And the more you can describe in detail to stir the emotion and the intellect and the spirit and the soul, then the more powerful the 'what for' is." 

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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Don't Be a Complainer by Jim Rohn

Complaining. There's room for legitimate complaining, but if you let this deadly disease of attitude - complaining – loose, it will conquer you. Complaining can take over your life, destroy you and leave you without anything. Nobody wants to take along a complainer. Nobody wants to promote a complainer.

Nobody wants to live with one. Nobody wants to be a partner of one. Nobody wants to have one around. Complaining leaves you out of more opportunities than you can possibly imagine if you let it take over and grab you by the throat. If you don't think complaining is bad ask the children of Israel of Old Testament fame. Now let me say something right here, they are typical of us all (if we had ourselves in a similar position); their story just happened to get in the Book.

The story says that the children of Israel are slaves in Egypt. God performed a series of dazzling miracles and gets them out. Now they have their freedom and are heading for the Promised Land. But... the tragedy of the story - they never got there. Reason - from day one they started to complain.

They griped about the food - they had just been delivered from slavery and they are complaining about the food?! They complained and cried and griped about the water. In the desert they HAD water to drink, but... it didn't taste that good?! They complained about the leadership... that had just delivered them from slavery?! They complained that it was too hot, too cold, too far, too difficult, and too rocky. They cried for years - forty to be exact. Finally, God said I've had it – trip cancelled!

The story says that they died in the desert and never reached the Promised Land - after all that trouble! I believe this story teaches two things:

1) Indulge in complaining long enough and you will get your future cancelled - future promotions, future opportunities.

2) Even God himself can only take so much complaining.

I think you get my point. Complaining is not for the winners in life. You must focus on what you can do, not what you cannot. And you must focus on the opportunities not the difficulties. When you do this you will not only inspire yourself but you will be an example for others to follow as well.

Resource for this post: Jim Rohn's Official Newsletter

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