And you make your list for each day the evening before,
and you always work from a list. And why do you make it the evening before?
The primary reason is if you make a list the evening before
the subconscious goes to work on your list while you're asleep.
And during the night, the subconscious will solve problems
and bring insights to you and you wake up in the morning
with insights, ideas, intuitions, answers that will make your day more productive.
If you do not have clear goals for your life,
you are condemned forever to work for those who do.
You see in life, it's very simple. Either you are working toward the
accomplishment of your goals or you're working toward the
accomplishment of other people's goals. So here's three questions that you can ask.
The first question is, what would you do,
what would you set as a goal for yourself? What would you want to be or have
if you just won a million dollars in the lottery? What would you do if you just
want a million dollars? You get all the time and money,
you're completely free to decide to do anything you wanted.
If you won a million dollars, what would you do differently?
Think about that, hold that in your mind. The second question is,
what would you do if you just learned today that you only had six months to live?
What if you only had six months to live? What would you stop doing?
What would you do more of? Who would you spend time with?
Now the answer to that question is very interesting
because what it tells you is what you really value,
what is really important to you. And what we have found
is that self esteem, satisfaction, happiness in life
comes from getting your goals and your activities congruent with your values, with your priorities,
with what you consider to be really important. Now here's the third question.
The third question is, what one great thing would you dare to dream
if you knew you could not fail? If you knew beyond a shadow of a
doubt that you could not fail, what one thing would you set
as a goal for yourself? Because sometimes answering
that question will tell you the one thing that you've
been put on this Earth to accomplish. One final point with regard to goals
is that goals must be in writing. You must write them down, you must rewrite them,
you must define them, you must redefine them. The top one percent
of successful people in every area have very clear, specific written goals,
and most of them carry their goals around with them.
Make a list. In fact, it's been
discovered that if you make a list before you begin any task or job,
you will immediately improve your productivity by 25 percent.
How do you make a list? Well, you make your list for the week,
the Sunday or the Saturday before, and you make your list for each day
the evening before, and you always work from a list.
And why do you make it the evening before? The primary reason is
if you make a list the evening before the subconscious goes to work on your list
while you're asleep. And during the night the
subconscious will solve problems and bring insights to
you and you wake up in the morning with insights, ideas, intuitions, answers
that will make your day more productive. The most important reason for using
the list, though, however, is this.
Is that when you use a list and you work down the
list and you check things off each time you check something off on a list
it gives you a feeling of accomplishment. It's been well said that happiness
is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. That happiness is the step by step accomplishment
of the tasks necessary to accomplish a worthy idea.
And a successful life is based on a series of successful days,
and a series of successful days is based on working on a list,
one step at a time. The next principle
is the principle of procrastination. Overcoming procrastination is absolutely critical,
but there's two kinds of procrastination, there's positive procrastination
and negative procrastination. Positive procrastination
is when you procrastinate on doing low priority tasks,
is when you procrastinate on doing things that do not contribute
very much to your major goals.
Negative procrastination is when you procrastinate on what is called your most important tasks.
There is an interesting point, is that the tasks are either urgent,
which means they have to be done now or they are important,
which means they don't have to be done now, but they have very high impact on your future.
So you overcome procrastination with a very, very simple method.
Was developed by W. Clement Stone when he was a young man,
he built a fortune of 500 hundred million dollars and this is one of the central principles
of his life. It’s simply this.
Every morning when you get up say over and over to yourself,
“do it now, do it now, do it now, I do it now…” Whenever you have this tendency to procrastinate,
program your subconscious mind with this automatic conditioned command,
“do it now, do it now, do it now…”. The key to overcoming procrastination
is to develop a sense of urgency.
Be the kind of person who gets things done quickly,
be the kind of person who launches fast on a task. One of the ways to launch fast on the task is,
take the task and break it up, what is salami slicing it.
Slice the peace of the salami, don't try to eat the whole peace of salami,
just eat one slice at a time. Take your task and break it up into small peaces,
and do one peace at a time. Say over and over to yourself,
“do it now, do it now, do it now…”. Do you know that less than
2% of the population have a sense of urgency
and that there is not an example of a successful person anywhere
who does not have a sense of urgency? That if you just develope a sense of urgency,
when somebody gives you a task, that you get on it into it fast,
that alone would move you into the top ranks in a very short period of time.