It was once said that it doesn’t matter whether you think you’ll succeed or fail, you’re probably right.
If you want to find success in life, you must believe and know that you will succeed. Without a positive attitude, you won’t achieve positive results.
Categories: Personal Growth
Are the terrorists winning? If my girlfriend is right, they might just do that come Tuesday.
First, some background. I think Valentine’s Day is a sham – a day for bad boyfriends/husbands to buy their women flowers, and for bad girlfriends/wives to do that ‘thing’ we all know they should do more than twice a year. Certainly nothing that I, or anyone else who celebrates their considerable other every day, needs to bother with.
It is in this spirit that I have cancelled Valentine’s Day every year for the last three years, and we were all set for a fourth – and then these ignorant, savage terrorists come along and do this:
“We will not let anyone sell these cards or celebrate Valentine’s Day,” said Asiya Andrabi, the group’s leader, as she held a burning poster in her hand. “These Western gimmicks are corrupting our kids and taking them away from their roots.”
“They barged in, grabbed cards and posters and burnt them outside. Most of the cards were not even Valentine cards. It is difficult to do business with such threats looming overhead,” he said.
Now my girlfriend is threatening to take off my Support Our Troops ribbon if she doesn’t get pink carnations and a Starbucks travel mug; she keeps telling me the terrorists will win if I cancel Valentine’s Day again, and I certainly don’t want that!
UPDATE: She just called me a ‘traitor to freedom.’ I don’t know how much more I can take of this!
MORE UPDATES: This is what I have to put up with, via MSN Messenger (from the other room):
Sarah says:
ROSESSarah says:
ON TUESDAY!Sarah says:
or else they winSarah says:
and freedom, jack bauer, bush and USA losesSarah says:
YOU WANT THAT???Sarah says:
jack bauer would NEVER let the terrorists winSarah says:
NEVERSarah says:
jack bauer would buy me carnationsSarah says:
a million so that the terrorirsts (sic) lose
Oy!
Categories: Personal Growth
Chris, over at Laws of Achievement has a post up on ‘getting things done’ and it’s worth the read:
Control. Without complete control of your daily agenda, you will never maximize the potential you have to achieve your goals.
The real beauty of effective time management is that it is not a complex matter. Rather, it is quite simple and requires nothing more than a well devised gameplan, comprised of realistic priorities
- start with a basic schedule; simplicity over complexity
- know what your time-oriented priorities are; develop lists and charts to visualize where you want to be in accordance with a realistic deadline
- DO NOT WASTE TIME; as Benjamin Franklin once noted,
“Dost thou love Life? Then do not squander Time; for that is the stuff Life is made of.”
The premise of my notion is clear; either you control your Life or your Life controls you. Make the choice!
Chris and I know each other from College, where we spent many days smoking Cubans at La Casa Del Habana talking about life.
Last year, I co-ordinated his bid for an executive position on U of T’s student union, and I can confidently say that Chris is one of the most organized people I’ve ever met; he is incredibly efficient and always achieves at the highest levels.
Categories: Personal Growth
If you want to change the fruits, you will first have to change the roots. If you want to change the visible, you must first change the invisible.
T Harv Eker
Categories: Personal Growth
Everything I do, and every decision I make either moves me towards my goal, or away from my goal.
Categories: Personal Growth
A good friend, Chris Chadwick, has started a blog, Laws of Achievement. Chris is one of the most driven people I know – he was once described as the only person who lists ’succeeding’ as a hobby – and is very growth oriented.
Check out his site, it’s a great source of inspiration. I only wish I had the good habits he has.
Categories: Personal Growth
This morning (10 minutes from now, actually), I have my first Role Play call, which I set up through Richard Robbins International, the organization I work with to improve my business.
My Coach suggested that I set up daily Role Play calls with other Realtors from across North America, and for a half hour every morning, work on our phone technique.
Sounds simple, but most people don’t work on their skills, and the ones that do are to embarrassed to do it with a real person (they prefer to be more ‘normal’, and talk to themselves ala the Wife in American Beauty). I’m going to help the other Realtors improve their phone effectiveness, so that they can secure more face to face time with prospects, and they’re going to help me improve my phone effectiveness too!
It’s easier to get to the top if you let other’s help you…
Let me ask you this. What can you do today to enlist the help of others?
Categories: Personal Growth
Every week, I’m going to give you some insight into why I work hard every day.
This week’s reason comes from Zenith, in the form of their Chronomaster XXT Open Automatic Chronograph, which uses the famous El Primero movement. I want to buy one of these before the year is up.
She’s a beaut, isn’t she?
Categories: Personal Growth
Richard Robbins, the man I credit with showing me how to think differently, encourages everybody he works with to schedule your work schedule around your personal life, not the other way around. What’s the point of being in business and making money if we’re spending nights and weekends with clients?
In that spirit, Tonight I will be watching American Beauty with my girlfriend, the Redhead. I’m studying the wife’s character so I can know what not to do in my Real Estate career.
PS – if you want to buy some real estate as an investment, contact me! I’m putting together a program for my clients to build their wealth quickly through acquiring income producing properties.
Categories: Personal Growth
From Bruce Mau Design:
Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an articulation of statements that exemplify Bruce Mau’s beliefs, motivations and strategies. It also articulates how the BMD studio works.
1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.
4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.
6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.
14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.
15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.
16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.
30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between “creatives” and “suits” is what Leonard Cohen calls a ‘charming artifact of the past.’
34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea — I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.
35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.
40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.
41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.
42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.
43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.
Make it a Great Day
Categories: Personal Growth
