My daily struggle is to understand what is important, to my situation, in the constant barrage of information on the Internet. What can and should be ignored? Is my purpose to seek distraction, novelty and entertainment? Or is the goal and purpose to my Net Surfing to gain valuable knowledge? What do I hope to accomplish?
“There are things that attract human attention, and there is often a huge gap between what is important and what is attractive and interesting."
- Yuval Noah Harari
And Donald Trump has not helped make being informed easy with all his mixed messages.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
Transcribed from The Strangest Secret audio program by Earl Nightingale
Some years ago, the late Nobel prize-winning Dr. Albert Schweitzer was asked by a reporter, “Doctor, what’s wrong with men today?” The great doctor was silent a moment, and then he said, “Men simply don’t think!”
It’s about this that I want to talk with you. We live today in a golden age. This is an era that humanity has looked forward to, dreamed of, and worked toward for thousands of years. We live in the richest era that ever existed on the face of the earth … a land of abundant opportunity for everyone.
However, if you take 100 individuals who start even at the age of 25, do you have any idea what will happen to those men and women by the time they’re 65? These 100 people believe they’re going to be successful. They are eager toward life, there is a certain sparkle in their eye, an erectness to their carriage, and life seems like a pretty interesting adventure to them.
But by the time they’re 65, only one will be rich, four will be financially independent, five will still be working, and 54 will be broke and depending on others for life’s necessities.
Only five out of 100 make the grade! Why do so many fail? What has happened to the sparkle that was there when they were 25? What has become of the dreams, the hopes, the plans … and why is there such a large disparity between what these people intended to do and what they actually accomplished?
THE DEFINITION OF SUCCESS
First, we have to define success and here is the best definition I’ve ever been able to find:
“Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.”
A success is the school teacher who is teaching because that’s what he or she wants to do. A success is the entrepreneur who start his own company because that was his dream and that’s what he wanted to do. A success is the salesperson who wants to become the best salesperson in his or her company and sets forth on the pursuit of that goal.
A success is anyone who is realizing a worthy predetermined ideal, because that’s what he or she decided to do … deliberately. But only one out of 20 does that! The rest are “failures.”
Rollo May, the distinguished psychiatrist, wrote a wonderful book called Man’s Search for Himself, and in this book he says: “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice … it is conformity.” And there you have the reason for so many failures. Conformity and people acting like everyone else, without knowing why or where they are going.
We learn to read by the time we’re seven. We learn to make a living by the time we’re 30. Often by that time we’re not only making a living, we’re supporting a family. And yet by the time we’re 65, we haven’t learned how to become financially independent in the richest land that has ever been known. Why? We conform! Most of us are acting like the wrong percentage group and the 95 who don’t succeed.
GOALS
Have you ever wondered why so many people work so hard and honestly without ever achieving anything in particular, and why others don’t seem to work hard, yet seem to get everything? They seem to have the “magic touch.” You’ve heard people say, “Everything he touches turns to gold.” Have you ever noticed that a person who becomes successful tends to continue to become more successful? And, on the other hand, have you noticed how someone who’s a failure tends to continue to fail?
The difference is goals.
People with goals succeed because they know where they’re going. It’s that simple.
Failures, on the other hand, believe that their lives are shaped by circumstances … by things that happen to them … by exterior forces.
Think of a ship with the complete voyage mapped out and planned. The captain and crew know exactly where the ship is going and how long it will take and it has a definite goal. And 9,999 times out of 10,000, it will get there.
Now let’s take another ship and just like the first and only let’s not put a crew on it, or a captain at the helm. Let’s give it no aiming point, no goal, and no destination. We just start the engines and let it go. I think you’ll agree that if it gets out of the harbor at all, it will either sink or wind up on some deserted beach and a derelict. It can’t go anyplace because it has no destination and no guidance.
It’s the same with a human being. However, the human race is fixed, not to prevent the strong from winning, but to prevent the weak from losing. Society today can be likened to a convoy in time of war. The entire society is slowed down to protect its weakest link, just as the naval convoy has to go at the speed that will permit its slowest vessel to remain in formation.
That’s why it’s so easy to make a living today. It takes no particular brains or talent to make a living and support a family today. We have a plateau of so-called “security.” So, to succeed, all we must do is decide how high above this plateau we want to aim.
Throughout history, the great wise men and teachers, philosophers, and prophets have disagreed with one another on many different things. It is only on this one point that they are in complete and unanimous agreement and the key to success and the key to failure is this:
WE BECOME WHAT WE THINK ABOUT
This is The Strangest Secret! Now, why do I say it’s strange, and why do I call it a secret? Actually, it isn’t a secret at all. It was first promulgated by some of the earliest wise men, and it appears again and again throughout the Bible. But very few people have learned it or understand it. That’s why it’s strange, and why for some equally strange reason it virtually remains a secret.
Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman Emperor, said: “A man’s life is what his thoughts make of it.”
Disraeli said this: “Everything comes if a man will only wait … a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and nothing can resist a will that will stake even existence for its fulfillment.”
William James said: “We need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and it will become infallibly real by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief.”
He continues, ” … only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them exclusively, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.”
My old friend Dr. Norman Vincent Peale put it this way: “If you think in negative terms, you will get negative results. If you think in positive terms, you will achieve positive results.”
George Bernard Shaw said: “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.”
Well, it’s pretty apparent, isn’t it? We become what we think about.
A person who is thinking about a concrete and worthwhile goal is going to reach it, because that’s what he’s thinking about.
Conversely, the person who has no goal, who doesn’t know where he’s going, and whose thoughts must therefore be thoughts of confusion, anxiety, fear, and worry will thereby create a life of frustration, fear, anxiety and worry. And if he thinks about nothing … he becomes nothing.
AS YE SOW, SO SHALL YE REAP
The human mind is much like a farmer’s land. The land gives the farmer a choice. He may plant in that land whatever he chooses. The land doesn’t care what is planted. It’s up to the farmer to make the decision.
The mind, like the land, will return what you plant, but it doesn’t care what you plant. If the farmer plants too seeds and one a seed of corn, the other nightshade, a deadly poison, waters and takes care of the land, what will happen?
Remember, the land doesn’t care. It will return poison in just as wonderful abundance as it will corn. So up come the two plants and one corn, one poison as it’s written in the Bible, “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” The human mind is far more fertile, far more incredible and mysterious than the land, but it works the same way. It doesn’t care what we plant … success … or failure. A concrete, worthwhile goal … or confusion, misunderstanding, fear, anxiety, and so on. But what we plant it must return to us.
The problem is that our mind comes as standard equipment at birth. It’s free. And things that are given to us for nothing, we place little value on. Things that we pay money for, we value.
The paradox is that exactly the reverse is true.
Everything that’s really worthwhile in life came to us free and our minds, our souls, our bodies, our hopes, our dreams, our ambitions, our intelligence, our love of family and children and friends and country. All these priceless possessions are free.
But the things that cost us money are actually very cheap and can be replaced at any time. A good man can be completely wiped out and make another fortune. He can do that several times. Even if our home burns down, we can rebuild it. But the things we got for nothing, we can never replace. Our mind can do any kind of job we assign to it, but generally speaking, we use it for little jobs instead of big ones. So decide now. What is it you want? Plant your goal in your mind. It’s the most important decision you’ll ever make in your entire life. Do you want to excel at your particular job? Do you want to go places in your company … in your community? Do you want to get rich?
All you have got to do is plant that seed in your mind, care for it, work steadily toward your goal, and it will become a reality.
It not only will, there’s no way that it cannot. You see, that’s a law and like the laws of Sir Isaac Newton, the laws of gravity. If you get on top of a building and jump off, you’ll always go down and you’ll never go up.
And it’s the same with all the other laws of nature. They always work. They’re inflexible.
Think about your goal in a relaxed, positive way.
Picture yourself in your mind’s eye as having already achieved this goal.
See yourself doing the things you will be doing when you have reached your goal. Every one of us is the sum total of our own thoughts.
We are where we are because that’s exactly where we really want or feel we deserve to be and whether we’ll admit that or not.
Each of us must live off the fruit of our thoughts in the future, because what you think today and tomorrow and next month and next year and will mold your life and determine your future. You’re guided by your mind.
I remember one time I was driving through e a s t e r n Arizona and I saw one of those giant earth-moving machines roaring along the road with what looked like 30 tons of dirt in it and a tremendous, incredible machine and and there was a little man perched way up on top with the wheel in his hands, guiding it. As I drove along I was struck by the similarity of that machine to the human mind.
Just suppose you’re sitting at the controls of such a vast source of energy.
Are you going to sit back and fold your arms and let it run itself into a ditch?
Or are you going tokeep both hands firmly on the wheel and control and direct this power to a specific, worthwhile purpose?
It’s up to you. You’re in the driver’s seat.
You see, the very law that gives us success is a double-edged sword. We must control our thinking. The same rule that can lead people to lives of success, wealth, happiness, and all the things they ever dreamed of and that very same law can lead them into the gutter. It’s all in how they use it … for good or for bad.
That is The Strangest Secret! Do what the experts since the dawn of recorded history have told us to do: pay the price, by becoming the person you want to become.
It’s not nearly as difficult as living unsuccessfully. The moment you decide on a goal to work toward, you’re immediately a successful person and you are then in that rare group of people who know where they’re going.
Out of every hundred people, you belong to the top five.
Don’t concern yourself too much with how you are going to achieve your goal. Leave that completely to a power greater than yourself.
All you have to do is know where you’re going. The answers will come to you of their own accord, and at the right time.
Start today. You have nothing to lose and but you have your whole life to win. 30-DAY ACTION IDEAS FOR PUTTING THE STRANGEST SECRET TO WORK FOR YOU: For the next 30-days follow each of these steps every day until you have achieved your goal. 1. Write on a card what it is you want more that anything else. It may be more money. Perhaps you’d like to double your income or make a specific amount of money. It may be a beautiful home. It may be success at your job. It may be a particular position in life. It could be a more harmonious family. Write down on your card specifically what it is you want. Make sure it’s a single goal and clearly defined.You needn’t show it to anyone, but carry it with you so that you can look at it several times a day. Think about it in a cheerful, relaxed, positive way each morning when you get up, and immediately you have something to work for and something to get out of bed for, something to live for. Look at it every chance you get during the day and just before going to bed at night.
As you look at it, remember that you must become what you think about, and since you’re thinking about your goal, you realize that soon it will be yours. In fact, it’s really yours the moment you write it down and begin to think about it.
2. Stop thinking about what it is you fear.
Each time a fearful or negative thought comes into your mind, replace it with a mental picture of your positive and worthwhile goal.
And there will come a time when you’ll feel like giving up. It’s easier for a human being to think negatively than positively. That’s why only five percent are successful! You must begin now to place yourself in that group. “Act as though it were impossible to fail,” as Dorothea Brande said. No matter what your goal, if you’ve kept your goal before you every day, you’ll wonder and marvel at this new life you’ve found.
3. Your success will always be measured by the quality and quantity of service you render.
Most people will tell you that they want to make money, without understanding this law. The only people who make money work in a mint. The rest of us must earn money. This is what causes those who keep looking for something for nothing, or a free ride, to fail in life. Success is not the result of making money; earning money is the result of success and and success is in direct proportion to our service. Most people have this law backwards. It’s like the man who stands in front of the stove and says to it: “Give me heat and then I’ll add the wood.” How many men and women do you know, or do you suppose there are today, who take the same attitude toward life? There are millions. We’ve got to put the fuel in before we can expect heat. Likewise, we’ve got to be of service first before we can expect money. Don’t concern yourself with the money. Be of service … build … work … dream … create! Do this and you’ll find there is no limit to the prosperity and abundance that will come to you.
Don’t start your test until you’ve made up your mind to stick with it. If you should fail during your first 30 days and by that I mean suddenly find yourself overwhelmed by negative thoughts and simply start over again from that point and go 30 more days. Gradually, your new habit will form, until you find yourself one of that wonderful minority to whom virtually nothing is impossible. Above all … don’t worry! Worry brings fear, and fear is crippling.
The only thing that can cause you to worry during your test is trying to do it all yourself. Know that all you have to do is hold your goal before you; everything else will take care of itself.
Take this 30-day test, then repeat it … then repeat it again. Each time it will become more a part of you until you’ll wonder how you could have ever have lived any other way.
Live this new way and the floodgates of abundance will open and pour over you more riches than you may have dreamed existed. Money? Yes, lots of it.
But what’s more important, you’ll have peace … you’ll be in that wonderful minority who lead calm, cheerful, successful lives.
The Strangest Secret Earl Nightingale Conant 1950's Origional FULL 31:35 Min.
31:35 - 4 years ago
Earl Nightingale Conant The Strangest Secret 1956 1950's
There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure. « The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow. » Socrates "You leave old habits behind by starting out with the thought, 'I release the need for this in my life'." ~ Wayne W. Dyer
Passive marketing makes very little money. You need to light the fire to get heat....
Uploaded on May 16, 2011
Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 after a 12-year absence from the company he had founded. Apple was close to bankruptcy at the time. Over the next decade Jobs not only revitalized the company, but turned it into one of the most important brands of our time.
In those first months when the media was writing off the company as irrelevant and Apple employees/investors were not sure of the future, Jobs held an informal staff meeting.
What he told his employees at the time rings as true today as it did then:
"Marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It's a very noisy world. We' re not going to get a chance for people to remember a lot about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what they want them to know about us. Our customers want to know what we stand for. What we're about is not making boxes for people to get their jobs done. Although we do that very well. Apple is about more than that. We believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. That's what we believe."
Watch vintage Steve Jobs footage on Apple. This is a rare 22 minute presentation given by Steve Jobs on 1980. This video was gifted to Computer History Museum by Regis McKenna and can be found on their online exhibit about Steve Jobs here: http://www.computerhistory.org/highlights/stevejobs/
Steve Jobs on fundamentals of Marketing, the Apple brand and an unaired version of the "Think Different" TV commercial, which featured Steve Jobs as the narrator. (1997)
Evolutionary Dr Pepper ad spurs religious kerfuffle
Dr Pepper
This ad has created an online uproar.
By Ben Popken, NBC News contributor
Dr Pepper marched directly into controversy a week ago when it launched its “March of Progress” ad campaign. And the uproar has not abated.
On Sept. 13, the soft drink maker posted to its Facebook wall an ad using the classic “March of Progress” image tweaked to promote the “evolution of flavor.”
The whimsical ad showed a chimpanzee dragging his knuckles, followed by a semi-erect hominid reaching for a Dr Pepper, followed by a fully upright man walking and gulping a Dr Pepper.
The images are captioned “Pre-Pepper,” “Pepper Discovery,” and “Post-Pepper” respectively.
Sounds harmless. Even banal. But about 7,000 comment and nearly 33,000 likes later, the ad is still provoking reaction by creationists who say it promotes the theory of evolution.
Some are even threatening to boycott Dr Pepper. That in turn has stoked evolutionists to make counter comments. Then there's folks jumping on the pig pile just for laughs.
After all, we are talking about a soda pop ad, right?
The debate also blew up on popular link-sharing site Reddit, whose users flooded the thread to mock the outrage and post parody comment, further inflaming the debate and spreading the conversation ... Dr Pepper has posted over 450 images to its Facebook wall since 2009. Most garnered a few hundred comments... proving:
He’s the only entrepreneur to have built eight separate billion-dollar companies in eight different industries — and he did it all without a degree in business.
"Had I pursued my education long enough to learn all the conventional dos and don'ts of starting a business I often wonder how different my life and career might have been," he writes in his new book,
1. Don't do it if you don't enjoy it.
Running a business takes a lot of blood, sweat, and tears (and caffeine). But at the end of the day, you should be building something you will be proud of.
Branson says, "When I started Virgin from a basement in west London, there was no great plan or strategy. I didn't set out to build a business empire ... For me, building a business is all about doing something to be proud of, bringing talented people together and creating something that's going to make a real difference to other people's lives."
2. Be visible
Sir Freddie Laker, a British airline “tycoon.”
“Make sure you appear on the front page and not the back pages,” said Laker. “You are going to have to get out there and sell yourself. Make a fool of yourself, whatever it takes. Otherwise you won’t survive”.
3. Choose a unique name for your brand
4. You can't run a business without taking risks.
5. The first impression is everything. So is the second.
Branson thinks of one of his favorite sayings when advising about taking business risks: “‘The brave may not live forever—but the cautious do not live at all!’”
Every business involves risks. Be prepared to get knocked down, says Branson, but success rarely comes from playing it safe. You may fail, but Branson also dares to point out that "there's no such thing as a total failure."
6. Perfection is unattainable.
7. The customer is always right, most of the time.
8. Define your brand.
9. Explore uncharted territory.
10. Beware the "us vs. them" environment.
The workplace should be one in which the boss and his or her employees communicate well and work together toward the same goal. “If employees aren’t associating themselves with their company by using ‘we’, it is a sign that people up and down the chain of command aren’t communicating,” says Branson.
If you think there might be discrepancies or tension between employees and management, Branson advises to check with the middle management first to try to uncover the source of the problem and address it head-on.
11. Build a corporate comfort zone.
Employees must feel free and encouraged to openly express themselves without rigid confines so they can do better work and make good, impactful decisions.
"This may sound like a truism," begins Branson, "But it has to be said: It takes an engaged, motivated and committed workforce to deliver a first-class product or service and build a successful, sustainable enterprise."
12. Not everyone is suited to be CEO.
A manager needs to be someone who “brings out the best in people,” someone who communicates well with others and helps an employee learn from a mistake instead of criticizing them for it.
13. Seek a second opinion. Seek a third.
Branson says you must learn to be a good listener in order to succeed, and that means bouncing “every idea you have off numerous people before finally saying, ‘We’ll give this one a miss,’ or ‘Let’s do it.’”
That means being thorough and deliberate before executing any decisions. In business, seeking a variety of opinions "can save you a lot of time and money," says Branson. "Don't tell people about others' suggestions until you've heard what they have to say. In the end you may decide that the best advice is to walk away—and later find out it was the very best solution."
14. Cut ties without burning bridges.
Business ventures with another person, be it a friend or a partner, don’t always work out. If this is the case, successful entrepreneurs know when to part ways.
But just because you decide to go in another direction doesn’t mean things have to end badly, especially with a friend, says Branson. Handle any problems quickly and head-on, and end the relationship as amicably as possible.
15. Pick up the phone.
great to be tech-savvy, but don’t text or email when you should be calling. "The quality of business communications has become poorer in recent years as people avoid phone calls and face-to-face meetings, I can only assume, in some misguided quest for efficiency," Branson says.
Problems are more difficult to solve by text or email, and “there is nothing efficient about allowing a small problem to escalate,” says Branson, when it could have been easily addressed with a phone call.
16. Change shouldn't be feared, but it should be managed.
“Companies aren’t future-proof,” says Branson, and nothing lasts forever. An entrepreneur should be prepared to adapt, and avoid being nostalgic about the company itself.
"Sometimes you have to take your company in a new direction because circumstances and opportunities have changed." If this is the case, Branson advises that you should "find ways to inspire all employees to think like entrepreneurs ... so the more responsibility you give people the better they will perform."
17. When it comes to making mistakes, bounce back, don’t fall down.
Your decision will not always be the best decision. Everyone makes mistakes, but the best thing you can do in the face of a mistake is own up to it.
Honesty isn’t just the best policy, it’s the only policy, notes Branson. When a mistake is made, don’t let it consume you. Uncover the problem and get to work fixing it.
18. Be a leader, not a boss.
Branson sees the classic image of “the boss” as an anachronism. Being bossy is not a desirable trait in a manager, he says. A boss orders while a leader organizes.
"Perhaps, therefore, it is odd that if there is any one phrase that is guaranteed to set me off it's when someone says to me, 'Okay, fine. You're the boss!'" says Branson. "What irks me is that in 90 percent of such instances what that person is really saying is 'Okay, then, I don't agree with you but I'll roll over and do it because you're telling me to. But if it doesn't work out I'll be the first to remind everyone that it wasn't my idea.'"
A good corporate leader is someone who doesn't just execute his or her own ideas, but also inspires others to come forth with their own.
“The secret to inner peace and lasting happiness is kindness—not random acts of kindness or simply being nice, but rather, kindness as a way of life.”
- Michael Chase
“Ample sleep needs to be a priority in your life, not just for a high beauty quotient but to ensure basic health, particularly as you get older.”
- Robert Tornambe, M.D.
“Without the illness I would never have been forced to re-evaluate my life and my career. I know if I had not had cancer, I would not have won the Tour de France.”
--Lance Armstrong
"In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins; not through strength, but through persistence."
Buddha
Thought for the day: You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying over the future. ~ unknown
"Nothing limits achievement like small thinking; nothing expands possibilities like unleashed imagination."
- William Arthur Ward
"Be kind to each other. It is better to commit faults with gentleness than to work miracles with unkindness."
