Robert Kiyosaki tells us that “The only difference between a rich person and poor person is how they use their time.” It’s truly amazing that we all seem to instinctively know that this comment is absolutely 100% true, yet most of us will do very little despite that insight, to put us on the other side of the Rich / Poor divide.

Stop and think about just how much time, energy, effort and thought you put into planning your vacation. Where you will stay, what you will do, what clothes you will wear, who you will see, etc., etc. etc.

Yet how many of us actually take the time to place the same meticulous attention into the details of precisely what we are planning in advance to be doing with or work day today, let alone our specific career goals for this week, this month, this year, this decade, so on and so on!

How much of your precious and unfortunately, “limited” time will end up getting totally wasted in pointless conversations about superficial subjects and cultural trivia? How much of your day will be lost aimlessly surfing the internet, updating your photo on Facebook, following celebrity gossip or sports talk on Twitter, or simply reading a bunch of mindlessly silly, mass mailed emails or funny or cute pictures of animals and people being videoed doing crazy things over on You-Tube?

Will you actually get to the gym before heading home after work, to keep your body and mind fit and running like a well tuned machine, in perfect sync or harmony? Or will you instead go meet some co-workers or friends at the local bar for a few drinks to just wind down and take the edge off. Exactly how does one keep his or her competitive edge, when everyday concludes with intentionally trying to take that edge off?

When you get home from the office, will you actually take the time to plan out and organize your itinerary for the next day, week, month, etc.?  Will you be sure to take, or more importantly … “MAKE” the time for you to fully prepare for your upcoming appointments and presentations, study the numbers and the details involved in that important account that you need to sell … or that huge company project that you need to ensure is profitably successful?

Or will it be another night of just vegetating on the sofa in front of the more than 200 channels of mush to fill your mind, heart and soul with. The answers to these questions are ALL 100% totally up to YOU and YOU alone! What will YOU do?

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John Maxwell said that “If we’re growing, we’re always going to be out of our comfort zone.” In other words, our natural, instinctive inclination to always seek out a calm, relaxed, safe and secure sense of being at ease and feeling right at home is precisely what we need to intentionally work to fight our way of, if we are ever going to successfully grow to reach our true potential.

That’s always the very toughest form of “self altering resolution” to stick to and push forward towards achieving, one that goes against our own naturally inherent and genetically programmed desire to avoid those very things that require that we experience real pain, effort, struggle and hardship to accomplish our goals.

That is the understanding necessary to truly reach the pinnacles of success and self satisfaction … the comprehension that we must actually; intentionally seek out those things that are complicated, over those things that are comfortable.

We all know that the most basic and foundational principals of physics tell us that if we are peacefully at rest, then we’re also no longer moving forward toward our goals … and any momentum that we may have once built up to drive us onward, has now, unfortunately been completely dissipated and the energy that was once behind that force, has since been completely lost.

Therefore, we need to continually force ourselves to avoid those paths of least resistance and actually seek out the way that will cause us to work, just like the caterpillar, who entered the cocoon of transformation, must now struggle for its very life in order to successfully escape that containment and rise up, now as the strong and powerful butterfly, able to soar above all of nature below it with grace and ease.

It’s the actually exertion and effort of fighting it’s way out of the cocoon, that gives the butterfly it’s necessary strength and confidence to go forward and experience it’s destiny.

In those cases where well meaning but uneducated people, who are feeling sad or sorry for the poor butterfly, try to help it to get out of the cocoon, or when the butterfly itself, simply isn’t willing to make the dedicated effort to fight it’s way into it’s next phase of existence, the butterfly will die, being too weak and sickly to survive.

Iron sharpens iron and only the gold that passes through the refiner’s fire is pure!

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Stephen Covey said “Live out of your imagination, not your history.” Wise words indeed; and some that we all need to continually consider and remind ourselves and each other of. Unfortunately, so many of us have self limiting beliefs about what we truly expect to accomplish in the future, based on nothing more than our  current tally accomplishments thus far achieved in the past.

But that’s simply not fair to you, to those who love and care about you, as well as the many people that will one day be positively affected and benefited from your up-coming grand successes that are just around the corner.

Never allow the negative, judgmental and limited beliefs that others; and perhaps even yourself, have regarding whether or not you have what it takes to one day become a true and undeniable shinning star of the future. No one, outside of yourself, is in a position at all to make any sort of assessment or decisions about what your ultimate destiny and success level is eventually going to be.

Experts, doctors, teachers and all kinds of professionals “know it alls” tend to make their prognosis, whether we actually ask for it or not. Luckily, very often these judges turn out to be dead wrong and had anyone actually listened to them, we never would have ever known the names, benefits and pure genius of people like Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, W.B. Yeats, Mahatma Gandhi, William Jennings Bryan, Richard Branson, Laura Ingalls Wilder, George Burns, and Colonel Harland Sanders, just to name a few.

Luckily none of these people refused to allow the “so called” experts to officially declare them “Losers” and neither should anyone else … including you.

Just think how many other geniuses, heroes, innovators and benefactors to the world there would have been, making the world a better place, but their gift was sadly snuffed out by some authority figure who deemed them to be “unworthy” of the necessary encouragement, opportunities and inspiration to bring their unique skills and insights to manifested fruition.

Don’t let this happen to you or any one else that you know and certainly, never do this to yourself or someone else. Like a farmer who carefully prepares the soil, sews the seeds and tends to the fields until the harvest is fully ready,  we must continually be patient and allow each person, like each individual crop, time to develop and sprout, grow and bring forth fruit, all in their very own unique time.

Rushing to judgment about anyone’s potential, especially your own, is not only a huge personal mistake, but potentially, a crime against all of humanity.

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W. Clement Stone said “Be careful the environment you choose, for it will shape you; be careful the friends you choose, for you will become like them.” While this seems to have been a constant word of warning that all of us have continued to receive throughout our lives from our parents, teachers, clergy and others figures of authority, sometimes it takes a gentle reminder of a friend or colleague to help keep the true value and power of the message at the forefront of our mind.

The fact is, whether you fully understand exactly why it happens, if you tend to hang out with highly creative, intelligent, talented and successful people, you will start to become more highly creative, intelligent, talented and successful yourself.

Likewise, if you choose to hang out with people who are negative, full of doubt and judgment, who tend to lack a high level of confidence, character, creativity, charisma and competence, you will  begin to diminish in your own personal and professional expressions and experiences of these more positive and desirable qualities and begin to become just like them, yourself.

People often say that “we are what we eat” and to a great extent that is true, but even more accurate and life changing is the realization that we are what we think and believe, what we say and focus upon.

If we make a dedicated effort to only focus our attention and consciousness on purely positive, powerful, productive and profitable thoughts and beliefs, then that will be the nature of the results that we will program our minds to deliver. If we let the negative, doubtful, judgmental and dark thoughts and beliefs over-cast and crowd out the light of our creative and positive thoughts, it’s at our own peril.

Whether we hearken back to the now proverbial wisdom of Robert Half’s famous quote “Birds of a feather flock together” or even further back to the earliest known reference in 460 B.C. by ancient Greek philosopher Democritus, who said that “Creatures flock together with their own kind,” the truth found in the statement is just as accurately powerful today, as it was nearly 7,000 years ago.

People tend to hang out and surround themselves with other people who are just like them. So now you need to ask yourself, which force is truly the most powerful … nature or nurture?

Will your future be decided by mere genetics, social expectations or cultural conditions, or will you choose to bask in the presence of higher principals? What you decide to do and believe regarding that question will prove to make all the difference in the world to your future happiness and ultimate chance of success.

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Jim Rohn said that, “Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion.” This is a very important truth for us to keep reminding ourselves of.  A lot of very well intending people tend to believe that by constantly filling their minds full of all sorts of positive, inspirational and encouraging thoughts; they are on their way to happiness and success.

The truth is, unless we all learn to assertively exert the self discipline to actually follow through with these words of wisdom and consistently apply them to our lives and businesses, they will become nothing more to us than a well meaning, but temporary enlightenment, soon forgotten.

It’s important to remember that positive, inspirational and encouraging messages are a lot like healthy, nutritional food for thought, in the sense that, you don’t just eat once and you are set for life. Truthfully, it’s so vitally important to the success of our continued, progressive growth, strength and health; that we regularly feast on these pure and powerful principals of positive productivity.

Just like with physical exercise, it’s wonderful to have all the books, videos and audio tapes that “show and tell” you exactly how to become fit, strong, healthy and vibrantly energized, but if you don’t actually apply the principals and do the exercises on a consistent and dedicated basis, you really aren’t going to get much out of this vitally valuable information.

At first it will take a very conscious effort to actually schedule and plan out precisely when, where, how, why and quite possibly …with who … you will set these affirmations into “active motion.” Just as you would make the time to meet with a loved one, close friend, valued associate or premier client, you need to treat yourself with the respect and care to schedule some time with yourself.

Use that time to go over your positive quotes, truths and principals and lay out a blueprint plan of exactly how these ideas can be implemented in order to actually have the desired effect that you so sincerely seek. Treat yourself like you would any other V.I.P and put some serious planning into your success strategies.

Pretty soon, it will not only become second nature and almost habitual, as you develop the skill of quickly organizing ways to accurately utilize these positive affirmations with pin-point accuracy and efficiency. Then, with your mind now trained like a well programmed computer, you will naturally take in brand new information and instantly know exactly how that idea can actively benefit you.

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Og Mandino said, “Take the attitude of a student, never be too big to ask questions, never know too much to learn something new. Sometimes our own success and expertise can be the biggest stumbling block to our ability to continue to get better and better at what we do.

When we are new at something, we have an enthusiastically open and excited mind that is always, continually looking to learn as much as we possibly can. Then over a period of time, as we work ourselves into a position of respect and leadership in a particular field, we start to think of ourselves more as teachers and less as students.

It is our ability to maintain that keen interest and dedicated desire to know as much as we can possibly learn about our field of endeavor, that keeps us fresh and constantly at the top of our game. The difference between being a winner and being a champion is that commitment to always maintaining the attitude of the student.

Ask any coach about why legendary NBA superstars like Michael Jordan, Jerry West, Bill Russell, Larry Bird, Kobe Bryant and Pete Maravich were so dominant at what they did and they will tell you that all of them were consummate students of the game.

The biggest danger and stumbling block to any professional’s extended success is the far too common and all too human tendency of beginning to feel confident and satisfied enough by the past victories of yesterday that one begins to simply rest on one’s laurels and mistakenly become a legend in one’s own mind.

Today, more than at any other time in history, things are moving, evolving and changing so dramatically and rapidly, that we can’t ever afford to take a passive position and simply sit back with confident assurance, assuming that we already know everything there is to know about the field that we have come to know as an expert in.

One of very the best ways to ensure that you keep your mind open, stimulated, pliable and continually learning is to hang out with more younger colleagues and associates, who may be a little bit hipper to what’s going on with the latest tools, updated technologies and current discoveries providing advantages today and tomorrow.

Remember, the very best way to maintain the students mind, is to teach others what you have learned over your career. Their questions and perspectives will keep you young and moving progressively forward.

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Tony Robbins said, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” It’s so important for all of us to avoid allowing ourselves to get caught up in robotically repetitive ruts.

Even some of the most successful, creative, wise and insightful entrepreneurs occasionally find themselves beginning to take the path with least resistance, resting on their laurels and going about their business as if by “habitual ritual.”

Even when those strategies prove initially successful, there is a danger in putting one’s life or business on “auto-pilot” and without recognizing the patterns, getting stuck, spinning in circles, and going nowhere.

But it’s those negative habits and failed principals that really do damage to our goals and objectives, when they are repeatedly relied upon, even when they show no real sign of progress.

They say the definition of insanity is “continuing to do the same thing, over and over again and for some odd reason … expecting different results.”

So why and how do we sometimes fall into these repetitive thought patterns, where we can see something isn’t working but we feel compelled to just give it one more try. Is the old proverbial “Never change horses midstream” idea, or could it be the old adage, “Dance with the one who brought you?”

Those are both noble ideas, but if the horse that you are ridding out of the stream falls over dead, your commitment to keep riding it is going to get you no where but the bottom of the river. If you insist on dancing with the one who brought you, even if they have hooked up with another dance partner, you are going to end up looking foolish, sad and pathetic.

So be open and aware to what’s working and what isn’t, and when you begin to see patterns and repeat outcomes, then by all means, definitely stick with what’s successfully working for you … but when a plan, no matter how great it seemed, continues to fall flat on it’s face and fails to yield the results needed, you need to be able to react quickly and make changes before serious damage is done.

If part of your business plan simply isn’t fulfilling its intended purposes, you need to act quickly as Captain of your “Ship of Dreams”, to re-navigate and effectively alter your currently charted course, before you find yourself on a direct path to a giant iceberg, perfect storm, coral reef or dangerously shallow waters.

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Dale Carnegie said  ”Act enthusiastic and you will be enthusiastic.” As simple as that may sound upon first reading, this short sentence is one of the most helpful and important ideas for us to store away in our memory banks, to be withdrawn with interest, over and over again, whenever we experience moments of stress, fear, exhaustion or being overwhelmed by our current circumstances.

Sometimes the most significant truths are the simplest and shortest, so don’t allow yourself to mistakenly underestimate the vital value of these words without truly understanding the productive power that they hold and offer to you.

Give it a try. Over the next seven days, whenever you’re feeling a bit blasé’, force yourself to act energized and excited and then watch with amazement at exactly what happens. On groggy mornings when the alarm clock sounds and you really don’t feel like jumping up out of bed, tell yourself that you’re full of energy, ideas and excitement and enthusiastically leap up and go take on the day.

Guess what will happen? Before you even realize it, you actually “will” be full of energy, ideas and excitement. You’ll discover that those tasks that you’d been dreading and postponing are quickly conquered with ease. So much ease in fact, that you’ll start to feel silly that you’d been putting them off for so long.

By mid-day you’ll have accomplished twice as much as you’d hoped to have done by day’s end … and instead of feeling run-down, you’ll be blown away by how much your energy and excitement levels have increased over the day, as you successfully blaze though your “To Do List,” almost effortlessly.

When the last item on your daily agenda is triumphantly finished, you’ll feel a strong urge to begin prepping for and possibly even tackling some of tomorrow’s “To Do List,” as you still have plenty of energy to spare and want to give yourself the advantage of a powerful and productive “head-start” on the day to come.

Even more exciting; you begin to realize that fearing and worrying about stuff is a complete waste of your precious time and energy. Now you know that it actually takes less time, energy and effort to decisively conquer and complete a project than it does to worry and find reasons to postpone or avoid it.

Over the next week, make a point of forcing yourself to act enthusiastic and just “Go For It” whenever you’re feeling tired, scared, worried or just a little bit unsure of yourself … and see, with total amazement, what actually ends up happening.

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Zig Ziglar said “You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” Not only is this statement 100% totally true, but it is one of the most powerful, effective, easy to understand and simple to apply expressions of the principal we’ve all come to know as the “Golden Rule.”

For thousands of years, successful and wealthy merchants all around the globe have put their own spin on the concept and utilized it to consistently amass vast riches beyond our wildest imaginations.

No matter what words you use to describe or express this truth, the fact remains that countless entrepreneurs throughout history have been blessed by simply running their business by the powerful proven principal: “Treat others as you would want them to treat you!”

Mother Theresa was asked how she managed to remain so healthy, strong, up-beat, energized and encouraging while lovingly serving the needs of others for so long in some of the most deplorable human conditions witnessed anywhere on Earth.

She smiled and calmly explained that she just never wastes any of her time and energy thinking or worrying about herself, but focuses all of her attention and efforts on the needs of those that she is caring for, and all the blessings that she receives are a natural and supernatural result of her dedication to serving others.

Major business moguls throughout the centuries have spoken freely about the so called “trickle down” effect of putting everything they have into the success and satisfaction of their clients and customers, only to reap enormous rewards for themselves during the process of focusing on fulfilling the needs of others.

So how does this work? Well, if you and your business are universally regarded for being truly and selflessly customer based and client driven, do you think that reputation might help you to increase business share and grow your company?

Then, with lots of highly enthusiastic, potential customers and clients diligently seeking your services, might that free you up to pick and chose who you really enjoy working with and doing only the work that you sincerely enjoy doing most?

Can you now continue to charge a very fair price for your talents, insights, abilities and efforts, while doing ONLY the work you really truly love to do?

Perhaps now you begin to understand exactly why the “Golden Rule” truly rules!

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Sir Francis Bacon said “A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.” This is a time tested truth coming to us from an eclectic entrepreneur who served as England’s Attorney General and Lord Chancellor, before going down in history as a world famous author, jurist, philosopher and scientist.

“Success leaves clues!” Those who pay close attention to what’s going on all around them will pick up on those clues and be successful on a highly consistent basis. You know those people, who, no matter what, always seem to at least one to three steps ahead of the rest of the crowd. How do they keep doing that?

These consistently successful people are often viewed by others, especially their competition, as simply being very lucky. But the truth is, “in life and business, you make your own luck!” Good or Bad Luck is self created by choosing to pay close attention what’s going on all around you or by allowing yourself to be too bored,  distracted, busy or lazy to take any real interest.

Being a genius in the eyes of your friends and allies or merely lucky according to your jealous, frustrated competitors is often simply a matter of Paying Attention!

When people are talking at lunch, dinner, breaks, parties, weekend functions or business related events, make it a serious priority to really listen to what they’re saying. Tons of important advanced news of upcoming changes, opportunities, promotions, expansions or cut backs in projects, departments and companies often hit the human “rumor mill” long before they’re ever officially announced.

Be sure to ask relevant, intelligent questions and then, do some “due diligence” investigation and research into the situation to see what’s actually happening and if it might prove to provide an opportunity to be creatively and effectively jumped upon, before the everybody else begins to get wind of the news.

Asking pertinent questions is also a sure sign of taking sincere interest in what someone is saying. Not only will you be getting inside information that could be valuable to you, but at the same time, you’re developing a much deeper sense of connection and friendship with a person who could prove to be a powerful ally throughout the process of “creating your own opportunity” with this information.

“Real Intelligence” in business isn’t necessarily your I.Q. score, but more often than not, the “intelligence” (data / info / details) that you gather by keeping your eyes, ears and mind continuously open, while thinking outside of the box for new angles, asking sincere and intelligent questions while more deeply developing strong relationships with those positioned for mutually beneficial assistance.

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