No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline (8 page)

Action Exercises:

 

Take out a sheet of paper and write out your answers to these questions.

 

1. Name three people, living or dead, who you most admire and describe one quality of each of them that you respect.

2. Determine the most important virtue or quality in your life that you strive the most to practice or emulate.

3. Identify those situations in which you feel the most confident, in which you feel like the very best person you could possibly be.

4. What situations give you your greatest feelings of self-esteem and personal worth?

5. If you were already an excellent person in every respect, how would you behave differently from today onward?

6. What one quality would you like people to think of when your name is mentioned, and what could you do to ensure this happens?

7. In what one area do you need to be more truthful and practice higher levels of integrity than you do today?

 

“The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might and force of habit. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him-and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires.”

MY GREAT REVELATION

 

When I was twenty-one, I was living in a tiny apartment and working as a construction laborer. I had to get up at 5:00 A.M. so that I could take three buses to work in order to be there by 8:00 A.M. I didn’t get home until 7:00 P.M., tired out from carrying construction materials all day. I was making just enough money to get by, and I had no car, almost no savings, and just enough clothes for my needs. I had no radio or television.

 

It was the middle of a cold winter, with the temperature at minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit, so I seldom went out in the evening. Instead, if I had enough energy, I sat in my small apartment at my little table in my kitchen nook and read.

 

One evening, late at night, as I was sitting there by myself at the table, it suddenly dawned on me that “this is my life.” This life was not a rehearsal for something else. The game was on, and I was the main character, as in a play.

 

It was like a flashbulb going off in my face. I looked at myself and around me at my small apartment, and I considered the fact that I had not graduated from high school. The only work that I was qualified to do was manual labor. I earned just enough money to pay my basic expenses, and I had very little left over at the end of each month.

 

I suddenly knew that unless I changed, nothing else was going to change. No one else was going to do it for me. In reality, no one else cared. I realized at that moment that, from that day forward I was completely responsible for my life and for everything that happened to me.
I
was responsible. I could no longer blame my situation on my difficult childhood or mistakes I had made in the past. I was in charge. I was in the driver’s seat. This was my life, and if I didn’t do something to change it, it would go on like this indefinitely, by the simple force of inertia.

 

This revelation changed my life. I was never the same again. From that moment on, I accepted more and more responsibility for everything in my life. I accepted responsibility for doing my job better than before rather than doing only the minimum that was necessary to avoid getting fired. I accepted responsibility for my finances, my health, and, especially, my future.

 

The very next day, I went down to a local bookstore at my lunch break and began the lifelong practice of buying books with information, ideas, and lessons that could help me. I dedicated my life to self-improvement, to continuous learning in every way possible.

 

For the rest of my business life, right up to the present moment, whenever I’ve wanted or needed to learn something to help me, I have returned to learning, to reading, to listening to audio programs and attending courses and seminars. I found that you could learn anything you need to learn in order to accomplish any goal you set for yourself.

 

Over time, I learned that fully 80 percent of the population never accepts complete responsibility for their lives. They continually complain, criticize, make excuses, and blame other people for things in their lives about which they are not happy. The consequences of this way of thinking, however, can be disastrous. They can sabotage all hopes for success and happiness later in life.