“I’m too old!”

I hear that excuse a hundred times a month when someone’s faced with a seemingly indomitable endeavor. That leaves me wondering… what precisely about age hinders you from getting what you want? It’s just a darned number after all!

Think about it. Alexander the Great of Macedonia conquered most of the known world at age 12.  Was he too young? Then there’s Mack who scaled Everest over the age of 45. He was handicapped. But he made it. Okay, those are extreme examples. But even today, you can find fantastic folks making waves despite their age. Check out this cool kiddblogger who’s building an internet empire at the age of 13. Before long,  he might be next great web emperor… like the two visionaries who started the world’s largest search engine under the age of 29.

 You know them. They own Google which is now a multibilliondollar enterprise. To think the company started in their backyard.

Next time you’re faltering because of your age, think again. Hundreds of others have made it. They were either too young or too old… but that didn’t stop them.

Fly high!

If age

The secret’s really simple. Next time a pile of work piles and you’re tempted to delay, simply stop. Then ask yourself:

“If I delay this today, am I being kind to myself tomorrow? Will tomorrow’s Me be mad at today’s Me for leaving an even larger pile of hell tomorrow?”

Analyzed from this viewpoint,  you may suddenly realize that there’s no payoff for delaying the inevitable. Might as well be done with it.

Do you have a pile of stuff gathering dust on your desk?

Your life each day can be viewed as a stream of connected events – some positive and some not so positive. The not-so-positive or negative events can cause great stress, but they have only the stress-producing power over you that you assign to them. Separate your perceptions, opinions, and value judgments of a negative event from the event. Affirm to yourself, “It’s just an event” and you will avoid triggering stress reactions.

Because time proceeds in one direction only, you do not have the power or the option to change the outcome of an event. But you have total power to choose how or whether you will respond or react to the event, thereby influencing succeeding events and outcomes. It is likely that, because of different beliefs, values, and opinions, four people who see exactly the same event will relate and react to it totally differently. But beliefs, values, and opinions are always in the mind, not in the event. Use that knowledge to separate your emotions from the events that occur in your life.

Probably 80 percent of the stress you experience during your life is created solely by how you use your mind. Learn to use your mind correctly, and your stress level will be automatically reduced. Use your mind as you always have and as those around you do, and your stress level will continue to build up until your body breaks down. Therefore, your goal is to stop reacting mentally and emotionally to what is going on around you, to perceive each new situation as just a neutral event. Then you can choose unemotionally what response to make. Your life stays under your control.

Daily life in today’s world is full of potentially stress-triggering events. The more active you are in your life, the busier you get, the more challenges you accept, and the more goals you set, the greater your potential for stress. Yet your stress level is something over which you can exercise almost total control, should you choose to.

To reduce stress, don’t make value judgments about people or events. A value judgment occurs when you inject strong opinions, beliefs, or feelings into or about an event. Value judgments include: good or bad, just or unjust, right or wrong, pleasant or sickening. None of these value judgments exists in the event itself, but only in how your mind chooses to perceive the event. The moment you begin to inject negative opinions, feelings, or beliefs into the event, you automatically stir up negative stress-producing emotions. Make a negative value judgment about the outcome of an event, an experience, or even another person and you end up upset and full of stress.

How many families have you observed in which there seem to be no shared interests or little interaction or quality time spent together? They’re not a family; they are just roommates. If you want roommates, find tenants who will pay rent but will not get involved in your business or personal life. Family members should not be treated as nonpaying tenants who just happen to occupy the same house.

Make dinner each evening with your family a commitment. Set an automatic business cutoff time. If you like to work late at the office, then schedule dinner at 6:30 or 7 p.m. Be there every time, no matter what you leave undone at the office. Don’t worry, it will still be there tomorrow. Ensure that your family spends at least thirty minutes together at the table each evening with meaningful discussions, a lot of humor, a lot of fun. Make it a family tradition.

If you want to spend quality time with your family at dinner without one of you being stuck in the kitchen cooking, serving, and cleaning up, then bring home take-out or have someone cook and deliver. Or share kitchen chores as a family, making that part of the quality time you spend together. Get creative – it’s your life.

If you become a slave to either office worries or to household chores, they will have power over your life. If, on the other hand, you treat your personal time as the most important time of your life, you will end up refreshed, less frustrated, and less stressed out, and you will have more positive energy each time you tackle new business situations and problems.

Schedule all of your personal activities on a “Daily Activities List.” Your daily business activities are scheduled on that same list. Compare the two schedules. Is there a conflict or the potential for conflict? If so then reschedule to avoid it. And remember, a scheduled personal activity, like a scheduled business activity, is an appointment that you are committed to keep. Don’t lose sight of why you work so hard – to be able to enjoy your personal life and to finance your personal dreams and goals.

Work: What tasks at work have been left without being finished? Is your work schedule manageable? Is your office a mess? Do certain jobs seem to wait stacked up on your desk forever? When was the last time you cleaned out your files? How orderly is your desk? What changes can you make at work, to create an ideal place where you can live your dream? Have you been intending to ask for a raise?

Are your travel and expense reimbursement forms up-to-date? What about other records you are responsible for keeping? What meetings need to be scheduled? What equipment needs repair? What improvements would you recommend? What have you been wanting to communicate to your employer, your employees or your coworkers? Any letters that could be written? Make a plan to do these things now.

Relationships: Consider each person in your life. What truths have been left unsaid? What messages need to be delivered? What regrets, resentments, hurts, criticisms and apologies have been withheld? What stands between you and this person? What prevents you from being completely open and honest with him or her? What keeps the two of you from meeting each other’s eyes unguardedly? What lies, half-truths and withheld truths need to be cleaned up? What broken promises and agreements need to be acknowledged and resolved, either by keeping them or by making a new agreement?

What can you do to repair or resolve any damaged relationships? Do you need to forgive someone? What amends do you want to make, if your actions have hurt or damaged someone else? Is there a relationship that has died or become injurious and needs to be ended? What acknowledgments do you want to give to people who have made special contributions to your life? Make a list of letters you will write, phone calls you will make, and talks you will have in person.

Finances: Is your current income enough, or do you need to find a way to increase it? What will you do? Is your check-book balanced? Is your money being handled the way it will need to be handled when you are living your dream? There’ll be no time for interruptions from creditors then, and worrying about how to make ends meet. Better get in practice right away: plan a budget and stick to it. Pay all your bills. Contact everyone you owe money to, and make arrangements you can keep, to pay them. Also, collect any money that is owed to you or your company.

Are your tax records current? Do you owe any taxes? Do you need some help figuring or managing your taxes? Are your tax files organized and accessible? What else needs to be done to organize your financial records and bring them up to date?

Your strategy is to plan a non-priority event or activity in between getting ready and the time you intend to leave the house. Plan time to do some paperwork or make a phone call. Then, if you get into a time squeeze, the time lost can be made up by skipping that non-priority activity, and you still leave on time. Those who are habitually late are generally still getting ready when it’s time to leave.

Ever lose your car keys? What a question! Couldn’t remember what pants or pocketbook you left them in? Common sense would ask how many times car keys have to be lost before it becomes obvious that a systems approach is needed for keeping track of those elusive little rascals. Although systems approaches may be a part of your everyday business or career life, few people have employed the power of systems, even simple ones, to their personal lives.

Let’s say that you’re leaving home for an important appointment. You’ve misplaced your car keys again and it takes twenty minutes to find them. What happens to your attitude? You get angry at yourself or whoever misplaced the keys, and suddenly you’re operating under stress. After you finally find your keys and race to the car, you continue experiencing finding yourself slowed down by heavier than usual traffic that causes you to hit every red light. Now your whole day is rolling downhill and out of control. By noon you’re saying to everybody, “It’s just one of those days.” And it all began with one minor, easily preventable event – misplaced car keys. Without a systems approach to that problem, the same scenario is destined to repeat itself over and over no matter how vehemently you swear that it will never happen again.

Using positive affirmations is a proven technique that works miracles in many lives. Ideally, you should look yourself in the eye as you make these positive affirmations. Don’t be shy; go ahead and get started! Repeat the following statements to yourself every morning to get your day and week off to a great start:

“I clearly understand that failure is an event, not a person; that yesterday really did end last night; and that success isn’t final and failure isn’t fatal because I only fail if I quit.”

“I have the courage to admit a mistake and to say that I was wrong. I have the courage to ask for help and the courage to say “I don’t know.” I have the courage to continually strive to be the person that I am capable of becoming.”

“I have vision in my life, which means that I see not only with my eyes but also with my heart.”

“I am successful because I believe that to be truly educated, I must be mentored – either in business or in my personal life, by reading or by association – by superior minds with greater skills and mature spirits.”

“I discipline myself to do the things that I need to do when I need to do them, because I know that doing them will enable me someday to do the things I want to do when I want to do them.”

“I clearly understand that if I develop yearning power and apply learning power, I will increase my earning power.”

“I am successful because I don’t confuse activity with accomplishment. I know that I can’t make it in life as a wandering generality, so I am a meaningful specific.”

“I am like an eraser. I recognize my mistakes, I learn from my mistakes, and then I erase those mistakes from my memory.”

“I move forward in my life every day, even if it’s only a tiny step, because I know that great things are accomplished with tiny moves, but nothing is accomplished by standing still.”

“Today I will seriously look for the good in every situation and find something about which to praise every person who works with me. Today I will be friendly to the people I work with and will treat them as though they were completely responsible for my career. Today I will
express gratitude for the career that I have and the society of which I am a part, and specifically for my family and friends. I will also express gratitude for the fact that my career is rewarding in ways that go far beyond financial remuneration.”

As you write each of your goals, set an initial target date for its completion. Since, in general, a goal is something you intend to have accomplished within one year, your target date will normally fall within the next twelve months. There is, of course, a fine line between desire and possibility. Though you might desire to accomplish your goal by tomorrow at the latest, the reality is that the accomplishment of any goal takes time. The amount of time required is usually a function of the resources, money, and knowledge needed, as well as the number of other steps you must take to accomplish the goal. Your aim is to pick a target date that combines the best of desire with the best of what’s possible.

There is also a fine line between realism and doubt. Once you have written a goal, negative thoughts can creep into and muddy the process. Thoughts like “I don’t really have the money or the smarts” may make the goal seem unattainable, or the time it will take seem infinite. You have within you the absolute power to accomplish any realistic goal on your list, so mentally eliminate doubt from the process at the out-set.

When you first write any goal on your list, you probably won’t have at hand all the resources required for its eventual accomplishment. If you did, it is a safe bet that your goal would already be a reality. Your strategy in picking a target date is to calculate mentally the reasonable time it will take you to gather the resources and the additional knowledge necessary to achieve your goal. Don’t spend a lot of time picking your target date, since later you will have the option of lengthening or even shortening it as you discover in more detail what will be required.

Setting target dates for all your goals establishes the velocity at which you will work to achieve them. If you double the time you expect it will take to achieve each goal, obviously you have to put in only half as much effort and time each day to meet your target date. However, the downside is you could have accomplished twice as much in the same amount of time and you will not experience the same level of satisfaction that you would from accomplishing more in less time.

Conversely, if your target dates are not realistic and far too short to be practical, you can create feelings of frustration because things are not happening according to schedule, or you may even begin to feel that you are just not a person capable of achievement. Feelings of frustration and self-doubt are unnecessary and can be eliminated by setting realistic target dates. There is no way to cook a three-minute egg in two minutes. Reaching goals does take time. Push yourself into action but allow yourself adequate time.

Consider that there is no limit to the laundry list of activities which you can choose to delegate your time. Therefore, there will rarely be a day during your life when you feel “tied up.” Think back. Can you ever recall a day when you felt that you had accomplished all the things you needed to do and would like to have done? I definitely cannot remember one. However, what’s key is not that everything gets done during a chosen day, but that the activities that are most vital to the achievement of your dreams have been concluded on a schedule set by you. To feel good about how you utilize time does not require being hectic every moment, or regularly playing “catch-up.” Positive feelings and the mental rewards coupled with real accomplishments are fashioned through effectiveness, since only effectiveness creates results.

Believe it. If you can double your effectiveness, by definition you can complete twice as much in the same amount of time. You will double the momentum at which you realize your objectives, and you will cut in half the time it takes you to reach your dream.

To boost your effectiveness, apply the 20/80 rule. Just twenty percent of the behavior on which you could opt to spend your time will generate 80 percent of the results you’re after. On the contrary, spending energy on the other 80 percent of your possible activities will produce only 20 percent of the outcomes you’re after including only 20 percent of the total sense of satisfaction from attainment.

When it comes to attaining your dream, just 20 percent of your activities will take you along your path faster and farther than others. Recognize that 20 percent and then splurge the lion’s share of your time, mental and physical energy on their accomplishment. Focusing first on the completion of that 20 percent is what alters energy-wasting efficiency into results-producing effectiveness.

Remember: it would be a misuse of your time to spend effort on anything not in the top 20 percent of the activities on your list, at least until that 20 percent has been fully satisfied.

Born in squalor, he fought tooth and nail to survive the slums, enter a good university- and now, runs a multitude of companies.

We had a long talk over Coke Last last night (yep, beer’s no good for powerhouses) and I discovered we both lived by similar principles. These tenets helped us survive the tumult of life:

- You can’t be everything to everybody

- Don’t waste time befriending mad dogs.

- Admit there is no perfection, but strive for it nonetheless.

- Never underestimate the delight of real simplicity in lifestyle.

- Avoid unecessary complications.

- Consider first what is worth fighting for.

- Focus your mind on the pleasant aspects of life.

- Concentrate on things that can enhance your situation.

- Forget what is irrevocably painful or ugly.

- Frustration paralyzes efficiency. Ditch it.

- When you feel like a loser, look back at all those shining moments. There’s no such thing as a loser.

- Never procrastinate- cut through the chase and get things done. Or you’ll suffer tomorrow.

- Realize that men aren’t created equal. That’s a fact. But we all deserve equal opportunities.

- There will always be leaders and followers. Not everyone can be president.

- There is no cut and dried formula for success. Run for the hills when someone sells you one.