"A year from now you will wish you had started today."

Make a list of things that a year from now you will wish you had started today.  Imagine a year's gone by and you've made zero progress.  What would you have wished you had been doing in that year?  Start now.  Work it into your daily activity.

Sirena_m: What are some of the ways you keep yourself from losing control when handling the tough areas of your business?
Running a business can be stressful – there’s nobody there in the morning to make you go to work, there’s nobody to tell you what you need to do next; it’s down to you to motivate yourself to keep going. The way I do that is by making sure that what I am doing absolutely feels like what I should be doing with my life. It sounds cheesy, but if you don’t truly believe in what you are doing, it’s not going to be easy to motivate yourself when things aren’t going so well.

Click HERE to read more wise words from this entrepreneur - this guy's only 20 years old!!!  All I can say is be brave with your ideas, folks.

From SuperJam's "About Us"

SuperJam™ is a range of 100% pure fruit jams; sweetened with grape juice and made using Super Fruits, such as blueberries and cranberries.

SuperJam was created by Scottish jam-maker Fraser Doherty, after being taught to make jam using his Gran’s secret recipes at the age of fourteen.

From humble beginnings, the company has gone on to sell millions of jars, has won a variety of awards and is even exhibited in the National Museum of Scotland as an example of an ‘Iconic Scottish Food Brand’.

Jim Rohn's Challenge to Succeed CD #1

The challenges you will meet on the road to success are far less difficult to deal with than the struggles that come with being ordinary.

A half dozen principles make 80% of the difference.

Start a whole new process.

Soon you'll enjoy the full harvest of reward.

The challenges will go into full retreat when you see how simple success is.

Work harder on yourself than you do on anything else.

Discover new emotions: How you FEEL about what you KNOW is what makes the biggest DIFFERENCE

You can become so involved in the process of earning a living that you forget the choices you have in designing your own life!

Where do I go from here?

We must develop a philosophy of life.

Time is more valuable than money.

There are 5 major pieces to the life puzzle - 5 things to work on for the rest of your life.

What makes life worthwhile?


What makes life work well?

Keep looking for the few things that make the most difference.  Then spend most of your time on those few things. (Time Management)  Most people major in minor things and fail for this reason.

There's only about a half dozen things you need to master!  These are the basics, the fundamentals.  The fundamentals of life, of living well...there are just a few!   Once you know them, you know them.  Once you got it, you got it!  There's no new ones.  Truth is old. 

So we got to establish our philosophy.

Human beings have the ability to think and process information.  Only human beings can tear up the old life script and create a whole new one. 

Your philosophy is always the root.

Outside circumstances is the wind, but you choose the set of your sail.  Set your sail with the books you read, the thoughts you think, the postive, uplifting people you hang around with, your activity.

Master the ability to come up with ideas.

Here's my personal 1/2 dozen things that make my life work right now:
1.  Simplify, simplify, simplify
2.  Daily gratitude
3.  Face fear fast - your greatest life is on the other side of your fear
4.  Measure activity - what gets measured improves
5.  Develop and diversify skill set
6.  Keep priorities - major in the major things, minor in the minor things

Here's my life philosophy (that is always being refined)
Live life on the Slight Edge: constant, never-ending improvement; when I improve myself, everything in my life improves for me.

*I published this post a year ago, and now I'm re-posting it now because it's worth remembering.


In an interview with Darren Hardy, the publisher of SUCCESS magazine, he makes an incredibly important point to carry with you in your journey of personal development.

If you're a PD (personal development) newbie or even if you've been around a long time, you've probably experienced bouts of feeling overwhelmed by all the information. There's just soooooooo much to learn and you want to consume it all. You're jumping from book to book, audio to audio, program to program, blog to blog, etc. You're wired up with exciting information about how to improve your life in a million different ways and you feel great!

But then a few months or even a couple years pass by and though you feel and see some positive effects, you also realize that you haven't really applied what you've been learning. Yes, your life and overall sense of well-being has improved, but you know in your gut that you could and should be achieving more progress faster. And then the guilt starts setting in. This is what Darren Hardy called "personal development frustration" in his interview.

So how do we avoid it?

Darren Hardy says your mind is like an empty glass and it will hold whatever you put in it. Now imagine all the negative we encounter as we go thru our day. That's dirty water going in your glass whether you like it or not. The only way to get that dirty water out is to flush it with a continuous stream of clean water. That clean water is the positive input of personal development.

So, every day you have to keep that stream of positive input flowing constantly to flush out the negative, but the secret to avoid feeling overwhelmed by all the wonderful things you want to implement is to simply pick one thing that you want to focus on and apply it consistently and persistently starting right now for the next 30 to 90 days. Now, that stream of general PD input is still flowing because you can never take a break from flushing your mind because the monsters of negativity never take a break, but what you've done is allowed that stream of information to go into the background so that you can focus on one, specific thing to start applying in your life.

So pick your one thing now! Do you want to start implementing that investment plan that you read about 2 years ago? How about that exercise routine that sounded so good on the cd you listened to last month? Pick one thing and as Darren Hardy said: "Drive it deep!"

Next, we will take a look at our dreams and goals.  We are half-way through the year, folks!  We are going to examine where we stand with our personal goals and refresh, revamp, and revive that list.

And last, we are going to identify the half a dozen habits that will propel us forward in alignment with our dreams and goals.  As Jim Rohn says, success is not complicated.  Success is simple.  It all comes down to about half a dozen practices that you do on a consistent basis that create all of your success.

What do you need to bring?  A notebook and pen.  You'll be taking lots of notes!
  

Thought: There are people in this world who have multi-million dollar companies and yet do not have a personal office area.  Interesting.  What does this mean?  Well, all business have different needs, but it's easy to see how technology can eliminate alot of the "stuff" that we think we need to be productive.  In fact, getting rid of the stuff might actually make us more productive.

Dan Sullivan, co-founder of "Strategic Coach" (a $25 million dollar company) says a couple of significant things about "the office".

- just get rid of the office

- the office is where entrepreneurs go to hide from opportunity

- it can be part of an inferiority complex because entrepreneurs struggling to establish themselves fall into thinking that a nice, big office helps serve to validate their business.

- your office quickly becomes a mess of incomplete work that steals your energy and makes you discouraged

Hmmm, reminds me of the 37signals guys.  They also have a multi-million dollar company and they require NONE of their employees to come into "the office".  They do this because they believe that real work never gets done in the office.  They ask, "Where do you go when you really need to think and get stuff done?"  The answer is NEVER "The office."  Seems to be working out for them.

I don't think your office needs to look like the pic above.  But having a desk that is completely clear by night time might be a thought.  I used to think I needed a desk with alot of space for alot of stuff, but I decided to go without an "office space" for a while and...

1)  I haven't missed a thing.

2)  I've been getting more things done.

3)  I've been more focused on events, experiences, and people - being out in the marketplace and making things happen.

4)  Everything that used to take up physical space can be transferred to "The Cloud".

5)  My laptop even broke down and I haven't even really missed that either.

6)  Throwing away stuff feels like I'm throwing away my excuses.