By the Law of Concentration, whatever you dwell on grows and increases in your life. When you think and talk about the virtues and values that you most admire and respect, you therefore program those values deeper and deeper into your subconscious until they begin to operate automatically in every situation.
Whenever you exercise your self-discipline and willpower to live your life consistently with those values that you most aspire to be known for, you begin to move rapidly along the path to becoming an excellent person.
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?
Chapter 3
Self-Discipline and Responsibility
“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.”
—J. PAUL GETTY
Y
our ability and willingness to discipline yourself to accept personal responsibility for your life are essential to happiness, health, success, achievement, and personal leadership. Accepting responsibility is one of the hardest of all disciplines, but without it, no success is possible.
The failure to accept responsibility and the attempt to foist responsibility for things in your life that make you unhappy onto other people, institutions, and situations completely distort cause and effect, undermine your character, weaken your resolve, and diminish your humanity. They lead to making endless excuses.
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.
From Childhood to Maturity
When you are growing up, from an early age you become conditioned to see yourself as not responsible for your life. This is normal and natural. When you are a child, your parents are in charge. They make all your decisions. They decide what food you will eat, what clothes you will wear, what toys you will play with, what home you will live in, what school you will attend, and what activities you will engage in during your spare time. Because you are young, innocent, and unknowing, you do what they want you to do. You have little choice or control.
As you grow up, however, you begin to make more and more of your own decisions in each of these areas. But because of your early programming, you are conditioned unconsciously to feel that someone else is still responsible for your life, that there is still someone else out there who can or should take care of you.
Most people grow up believing that if something goes wrong, someone else is responsible. Someone else is to blame. Someone else is guilty. Someone else is the villain and they are the victim. As a result, most people make more and more excuses for the things in their lives, past and present, that make them unhappy.
Get Over the Mistakes Your Parents Made
If your parents criticized you or got angry with you for mistakes you made when you were growing up, you began to unconsciously assume that somehow you were at fault. If your parents punished you physically or emotionally for doing or not doing something that pleased or displeased them, you felt inferior and inadequate.
When your parents withheld their love to punish you for not doing something they demanded, you might have grown up with deep feelings of guilt, unworthiness, and undeservingness. All these negative feelings could then intersect to make you feel like a victim, like you were not responsible for yourself or your life once you became an adult.
The most common feeling that we have as adults if we have been raised in a critical home environment is the feeling that “I’m not good enough.” Because of this feeling, we compare ourselves unfavorably to others. We think that other people who seem to be happier or more confident are better than us. We develop feelings of inferiority. This can become an emotional trap.
The Fatal Fallacy
If we think for any reason that others are
better
than us, we unconsciously assume that we must be
worse
than they are. If they are “worth more” than we are, we assume that we must be “worth less.” This feeling of inadequacy or worthlessness lies at the root of most personality problems in our lives as well as most political and social problems in our world, both nationally and internationally.
To escape from these feelings of guilt and worthlessness that have been instilled in us as the result of destructive criticism in childhood, we lash out at our world, other people, and situations. In any part of our life with which we are unhappy or discontented, our first reaction is to look around and ask, “Who’s to blame?”
Most religions teach the concept of sin, which states that whenever something goes wrong, someone is to blame. Someone has done something bad. Someone is guilty. Someone must be punished. This whole idea of guilt and punishment leads to ever-increasing feelings of anger, resentment, and irresponsibility.
An Attitude of Irresponsibility
Our courts today are clogged with thousands of people demanding redress and payment for something that went wrong in their lives. Backed up by ambitious plaintiff lawyers, people go to court demanding compensation, even if they themselves are completely at fault for what happened—
especially
if they are at fault.
People don’t want to accept responsibility. People spill hot coffee on themselves and sue the fast food restaurant that sold them the coffee in the first place. People get drunk and drive off the road and then turn around and sue the manufacturer of the fifteen-year-old car they were driving. People climb up on a stepladder and lean over too far, falling to the ground. They then sue the ladder manufacturer for their injury. In each case, people are attempting to escape responsibility for their own behaviors by blaming someone else, making excuses, and then demanding compensation.
Eliminating Negative Emotions
The common denominator of all people is the desire to be
happy
. In its simplest terms, happiness arises from the
absence
of negative emotions. Where there are no negative emotions, all that is left is positive emotions. Therefore, the elimination of negative emotions is your great business in life if you truly wish to be happy.
There are dozens of negative emotions. Although the most common are guilt, resentment, envy, jealousy, fear, and hostility, they all ultimately boil down to a feeling of
anger
, directed either inward or outward.
Anger is directed inwardly when you bottle it up rather than expressing it constructively to others. Anger is directed outwardly when you criticize or attack other people.
Psychosomatic Illness
Negative emotions are the major causes of
psychosomatic
illness. This occurs when the mind (
psycho
) makes the body (
soma
) sick. Negative emotions, especially as expressed in the form of anger, weaken your immune system and make you susceptible to colds, flu, and other diseases. Uncontrolled bursts of anger can actually bring about heart attacks, strokes, and nervous breakdowns.
Here is the great discovery: All negative emotions, especially anger, depend for their very existence on your ability to
blame
someone or something else for something in your life that you are not happy about.
It takes tremendous self-discipline to refrain from blaming others for our problems. It takes enormous self-control to refuse to make excuses.
It takes tremendous self-discipline for you to accept complete responsibility for everything you are, everything you become, and everything that happens to you. Even if you are not directly responsible for something that happens, like hurricane Katrina, you are responsible for your responses, for what you do and say from that moment forward. It takes tremendous self-mastery for you to take complete control of your conscious mind and deliberately choose to think positive, constructive thoughts that enhance your life and improve the quality of your relationships and results. But the payoff is tremendous.