Do something different the next 90 days than you did the last 90 days. Like picking up books to read, do something different: like the new health disciplines, your relationship with your family; whatever it is, it doesn't matter how small it is. If you'll start doing different things with the same circumstances—since we cannot change the circumstances, but we can change ourselves, we can change what we do—then he gave me another secret to success when he said, "What you have at the moment, Mr Rohn, you've attracted by the person you've become.
What you have at the moment, you've attracted by the person you've become. " A few little simple principles here: once you understand these, it starts to explain so much. Now, sometimes it's a little tough to take, blaming yourself instead of the marketplace; taking responsibility instead of putting it off on someone else.
That transition sometimes is a challenge in mission. This one was a little tough for me. She said, "Here's the secret, Mr Rohn: learn to work harder on yourself than you do on your job.
" Once I got that, it turned my life around. Learn to work harder on yourself than you do on your job. He said, "If you work hard on your job, you'll make a living; if you work hard on yourself, you can make a fortune.
" Wow! If you would have known me at age 25, you would have said, "Jim Rohn's a hard worker. " If you'd have known me, you'd have said, "I'm the guy.
I don't mind coming a little bit early, staying a little bit late; I don't mind that. " You'd have said, "Well, Jim Rohn's a hard worker. " You'd say, "Well, how come he's got pennies in his pocket and nothing in the bank and behind on his promises?
" Well, I was a hard worker, but I was working hard on my job, not on myself. I'm telling you, if you'll learn that simple little principle and start the process today—latest tomorrow; give you tonight to think it over and start this whole process of personal development—work on yourself. Make yourself more valuable to the marketplace.
I'm telling you, you can so dynamically change your income, and economics is the least of the values that you can start earning in terms of equity. If you'll start working harder on yourself than you do on your job, work hard on your skills, work hard on yourself, and develop the graces—all of the stuff necessary to become more valuable to the marketplace—I'm telling you, your whole life can explode into change. Promotions?
No problem. Becoming more valuable to the company? Telling you: no problem.
Money? No problem. Economics?
No problem. Future? No problem.
If you just go to work on the right thing—not getting things out there to change. Don't try to change the seed, don't change the soil, don't change the sunshine, don't change the rain, don't change the mix of seasons. Let the miracle of everything that's available work for you and start working on the inside.
Work on your philosophy, work on your attitude, work on your personality, work on your language, work on the gift of communication, work on all of your abilities, and if you'll start making those personal changes, I'm telling you everything will change for you. Mr Cha, over a five-year period before he died at age 49, taught me some extraordinarily simple things. He only went to the ninth grade in school, never finished high school, never went to college, never went to university, so he put his ideas and his experiences in very simple language, which I think for me—a kid from the farms of Idaho—that simplicity was so important because if it would have been technical, I'd have missed it; if it would have been mystic, I would have backed away.
But it was just basic, blunt, ABC, familiar stuff that I hadn't thought of before. He did start to remind me, and those ideas changed me. Mr Cha was the one when I said, "You know, this is all they pay," he said, "You've been working six years, Mr Rohn, how come you're not doing better?
" I said, "This is all the company pays. " He says, "Well, that's not true. " I said, "No, this is my paycheck; this is all the company pays.
" He said, "No, this is all the company pays you. " I thought, "That's a new way to look at it. " Right?
He said, "Doesn't the company pay two, three, four, five times this amount to other people? " I said, "Well, yes. " He said, "Well, then this is not all the company pays; it's all they pay you.
And if you qualified, wouldn't your income grow two, three, four, five times? " I said, "I suppose so. " He said, "We don't have to work on the company; we have to work on you.
" See, that was the beginning of what he called the phrase "personal development. " I told him things cost too much. He said, "No, you can't afford them.
" I thought, "Well, that's a new concept. " I hadn't thought about that. You know, we put some of the valuable things on the high shelf so you can't get to them until you qualify.
If you want the things on the higher shelf, you've got to stand on the books you read. Every book you read, you get to stand a little higher so you can get the things on the higher shelf. See, I learned those concepts; it was so incredible.
And here was the most important one: success is something you attract by the person you become. See, that phrase changed my life. Success is something you attract by the person you become.
Success is not something you pursue; it's like chasing. A butterfly—you can't quite catch it. Success is something you attract by becoming an attractive person.
See, those were new concepts to me. I'm just working hard, trying to make a living. Here's what he said to me: this changed my life.
I got a chance to teach this in Moscow and across Russia—three visits now, the fourth. Here's what he taught me: profits are better than wages. Nobody taught me that in high school; nobody taught me that.
I went to one year of college, and nobody taught me: profits are better than wages. Wages make you a living; profits make you a fortune. And how could you work on both—a living and a fortune?
He said, "Well, you could start part-time working on your fortune while you're working full-time on your living. " I thought, "Wow. " Now, he said it's fun to get up in the morning—not just getting up to go to work to pay the rent, but to get up to go to work to make a fortune first, to make a living for my family second, to make a fortune.
And he taught me how to make both a living and a fortune. Guess what I did? I learned how to make both a living and a fortune, and I found out anybody could do it once they get the information.
At age 25, I started receiving this extraordinary information. Here's what he said: your income is directly related to your philosophy, not to the economy. I thought, no one ever told me that.
I kept hoping the economy would change. He said, "No, your philosophy has to change. " I assured him that I had my fingers crossed.
He said, "That won't help. " Then what could I do to change my income and multiply it by two, by three, by five, by ten, and then multiply it by ten again? What could I do?
He started giving me the disciplines and the process of learning the skills to change my life. This was an extraordinary man; those were extraordinary times for me—life-changing in every manner that you can imagine, but very simple ABC concepts. Here's what I learned: not to search for the exotic until you've discovered the basic.
Those basic philosophies that he shared with me during that time were life-changing. Success is something you attract by the person you become. Success is not something you pursue, chase, or run after; success is something you develop, something you become.
You attract success. So, the whole key to unlocking all the treasures—whether it's economic treasures or spiritual treasures, financial, social, personal—every way you can possibly think of is by your own personal development. Then he added one more, which is so important, and it's probably worth the price of the seminar.
Here it is: what you become is much more valuable than what you get. What you become is much more valuable than what you get. The major question to ask on the job is not, "What am I getting here?
" The major question to ask on the job is, "What am I becoming here? " Not, "What am I getting? " What am I becoming?
So, it's very important what you become, because what you become attracts. If you become cynical, you attract cynicism; what you become attracts. So, this whole subject of personal development was so, so vitally important to me.
It changed my life. I was a millionaire by age 31, and that was just the economic part of it. It took me six years—from age 25 to age 31.
It was unbelievable. Remember, be a student, not a follower. Here's what you must always do: design your own personal life.
I'm very happy for people to take notes at my seminar, but I'm also just as happy if somebody says, "Hey, this is not for me. Tear up all these notes and throw them away. " That's just as valid for me, right?
Remember, be no one's disciple. Chart your own course; make what you do the product of your own conclusion. What I'm saying here is be your own person.
You don't have to be a model of someone else; you don't have to do it like anybody else, right? Do it like yourself. Buy what you want to buy; listen to what you want to listen to.
Make changes if you want to make changes, and don't make changes, right? It's your life, I'm telling you, and don't let anybody persuade you any different. Success is not a stereotype; success is not a Ferrari.
Success is not an automobile; it's not a house; it's not a place; it's not money in the bank; it's not a million dollars—that's not success. Success is the continual unfolding of the design of your own life and pulling it off. That's what success is—the continual unfolding of the design of your own personal life and pulling it off in whatever degree you wish.
That is success—successful in doing whatever you want to do that makes sense to you, for you, your family, your responsibilities. You can take on responsibilities or refuse responsibilities—that's strictly all up to you. We've been given the power of choice.
Every life form except human beings operates by instinct and the genetic code. Now, why not human beings? Because here it is: we've been given the dignity of choice.
We're not like a robot; we're not stuck like a tree, using up all the nourishment with nothing left. Now you die because you can't change location—not true! Humans can go north, south, east, west; humans can change, do anything they want to do.
We've been given the dignity. But here's what's interesting about all life forms except humans: every life form except humans strives to the max of its potential. How tall will a tree grow?
As tall as it possibly can. You never heard of a tree growing… half as high as it could. No, no, no, that is impossible.
A tree grows as high as it can, drives down every root it can, produces every leaf it can, extends itself as far as it possibly can. Every life form extends to the max, except human beings. Now, why not human beings?
Because we're not robots. We've been given the dignity of choice, and here's a couple of alternatives on the dignity of choice: to be part of or all of, you have the potential to be, and you got the choice. Do a little to make yourself comfortable and forget the rest, or do it all.
And there's nobody here to dictate you got to do it all; that's nonsense. You got to be rich because we live in a rich country; that's nonsense. You don't have to be rich.
You don't have to do it all; you can do a little. Do some, do some more. Take advice but don't take orders.
Take information, take training, take teaching, but don't take orders from anyone that tells you how you need to live, and what you need to own, and what you need to do. Somebody says, "Well, you need to be successful. " That's a personal choice—being successful.
What we teach is the possibilities, the possibilities, and everybody chooses. Take a little, take a lot, do some, do nothing. Abraham Lincoln said, "Since I would be no one's slave, I will be no one's master.
" Excellent philosophy. If a guy says, "Hey, I'm soon cashing it in. I'm heading for the mountains.
I'm going to live in a little cabin, live off the land, and feed the squirrels," if he goes and does that, guess what? He's a smashing success. Why?
He's doing what he designed to do, and went and did it, and pulled it off. You can't say, "No, no, that's not successful. " That is the epitome of success: giving a design to your life and going to pull it off, making progress in that direction that satisfies you.
If it doesn't satisfy you, make alternatives and you change. And if you get some better ideas, sure, you may follow someone's suggestion, ideas, but not orders. Design your own life like you want it; that will fit.
Now, if you take on some responsibilities, now you got to consider those. Yes, you can ignore your responsibilities, but you won't feel good about that. Guess what the old prophet said: "Some things that taste good now in the mouth turn bitter later in the belly.
" So you don't want to sacrifice. We all must suffer one of two pains, regardless of your choice of lifestyle and what you want to do. We must all suffer one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.
And what we suggest to everybody is to consider the disciplines, because disciplines weigh ounces; regrets weigh tons. You don't want to substitute a discipline for a regret. In our opinion, that would be a poor choice.
Now, you can do it, but some things are poor trade-offs. The old prophet said, "What if you gained the whole world, but it cost you your soul? " Would that be worth it?
And with a bit of intelligence, we say no, that doesn't seem worth it. Even if you got the whole world, if you traded your soul, that experience would be so bitter and so awful and so devastating, it wouldn't be worth it. What if you got some gain by greed instead of legitimate ambition?
I'm telling you, it might taste good upfront, but it's going to turn bitter in the belly. A bit of that advice saves some people from devastation. They say, "Well, you're right; I better think twice about that.
" So we must confront all laws: spiritual laws, agricultural laws, basic laws, fundamental laws. We must confront all of those, but you still now can design your own life. A little, a lot, go east, north, south.
Now let me pass on one great rule to you, which has been discovered in interviewing self-made millionaires. Self-made millionaires look into every failure for something good. They say, "There's got to be something good in this that I can benefit from.
" And surprise, surprise, they always find it. Second, self-made millionaires always seek the valuable lesson in every setback, obstacle, or temporary failure, and they always find the lesson. Now, what do failures do?
Failures whine and cry and think about what they've lost and blame their problems on someone else. Successful people say, "What can I learn from this that will make me smarter next time? " And my promise to you, "Those who seek, find.
" If you go looking for a valuable lesson in the biggest problem that you're facing today, you'll always find the lesson. Here's another possibility: your biggest problem today could be the biggest gift that you have ever received because it may contain within it the lesson that will make you successful. If you stop thinking about what happened and who's to blame, and you start looking for the gift within your problem, sometimes it can transform your life.
The next key is to dedicate yourself to lifelong learning. Now, what takes you from rags to riches is personal development—personal professional development. In the 21st century, as Peter Drcker says, knowledge and skill are the keys to the 21st century, and the only thing that will be relevant, the only skill that will be relevant in the 21st century, is the ability to learn new skills because virtually everything you know is becoming obsolete at a rapid rate.
Stephen Covey says that your current knowledge base has a half-life of two years, which means that half of everything you know will be irrelevant within two years, and two years from now, half more. So if you're not continually learning and upgrading your knowledge and. .
. Skills: you're not staying in the same place. As Pat Riley, the basketball coach, says, if you're not getting better, you're getting worse.
If you're not constantly learning, you're actually falling behind. So here are the three keys to continuous learning. Number one is to read in your field for 30 to 60 minutes each day.
In other words, turn off the television, turn off the radio, put aside the newspaper, and just read in your field. The very best places to read, by the way, are books—read best-selling books written by the most successful people in your field because books contain a wealth of riches that can enable you to function at a far higher level and get much better results than you could before. So read for 30 to 60 minutes a day.
I've had countless people tell me over the years that reading an hour a day has doubled and tripled their income within a year. The second thing you should do is take every course that you possibly can. The courses and seminars available to you in your field are given by professionals and have been developed over years and years.
They have been tested, tested, and tested again. The person who is talking to you for several hours has spent thousands of hours learning their subject. They have dry-tested this or done test runs with thousands of other people.
When you take a course, you can learn enough information in one or two days more than you could learn in two or three years or maybe even a lifetime—all distilled and put together. People often say, "I can't afford a course. " My response is that you cannot afford not to buy books and you cannot afford not to go to courses.
Some years ago, I had a dentist who was very successful; he was recommended to me by a friend. This dentist retired at the age of 53, and just before he retired, he sold his practice for about $2 million. Just before he retired, he shared his story with me.
He said that about eight years prior, he had attended a dental Congress in Hong Kong. He had flown all the way from California to attend this International Dental Congress because there were specialists giving private lectures and plenary sessions on the side. He attended one session that focused on a particular technique of cosmetic surgery developed by a dentist that no one else knew about, where you could basically straighten out a person's entire front jaw so they looked beautiful at a very low cost and with a very high level of effectiveness.
He came back and began implementing this in his practice, and people began flying from 500 to 1,000 miles away; even other dentists sent their family members and themselves to see this dentist. He was able to charge whatever he wanted to charge. Eight years later, he retired as a self-made millionaire at the age of 53 to enjoy his money for the rest of his life—all from what he learned in one session at one convention.
Now, that's a true story, and maybe it's an exception, but you can never tell where the information is going to come from. The third way that you can upgrade your skills is to listen to audio programs in your car. The average driver drives 500 to 1,000 hours a year—25,000 to 50,000 miles.
If you listen to audio programs in your car, according to the University of Southern California, you will get the equivalent of almost full-time university attendance just by listening to learning material as you drive around. It can totally and profoundly change your life. Very importantly, here's an interesting point: the more you commit yourself to becoming the best person you can be, the more you like yourself and respect yourself.
The more energy you have, the bigger goals you set for yourself, and the more you persist. When you invest in yourself, read, learn, and upgrade your skills, you're telling yourself, "Wow, I am a person with a great future, and it's up to me to maximize my potential. " Your self-esteem goes up, your self-respect goes up, your sense of personal pride goes up, and you start to get promoted more and paid more in every part of your life.
Get around the right people. This is a key to becoming a self-made millionaire. Dr David McLain at Harvard did studies for 25 years looking into why it is that some people succeed greatly in life.
What he found was that as much as 99% of your success in life is going to be determined by what he called your reference group. Your reference group consists of the people with whom you habitually associate—the people you associate with at work, at home, your church, your political party, and your social circle. What he found is that changing a person's reference group can totally transform the way they think.
Why? It's because we are like chameleons and we absorb, through the skin, the attitudes, opinions, behaviors, style of dress, and style of speech of the people with whom we associate most of the time. If you start to associate with winners most of the time, you'll find that they have a totally different worldview—they're positive, upbeat, focused, learning, growing, and passionate about what they're doing.
You start to become like that. Next, be prepared to climb from peak to peak. One of the keys to becoming a self-made millionaire is to realize that life is never one continuous train; it’s always up and down.
Just like climbing a mountain peak, you. . .
have to go down into the valley before you climb the next peak. So, all of life is cycles and trends; all of life is cycles and trends, and there are upcycles and down cycles, and there are uptrends and downtrends. The question is, what is the general direction of your trends?
We say this: life is two steps forward and one step back. Successful people focus on the two steps forward, and then they protect themselves on the downside so that each time there’s a step back, they’re still further ahead than they were before the next one, which is to develop resilience and bounce back. Developing resilience and bouncing back is one of the key qualities of self-made millionaires because, as I said right at the beginning, most things won’t work.
This is a very interesting point: you’re going to be knocked down over and over again, and what we know is, as my friend Charlie Jones says, you have to bounce, don’t break. And when things go wrong, bounce. So, what I learned many years ago was this interesting technique called mental rehearsal, which says that you mentally prepare for the inevitable downturns before they occur.
You say, "All right, in the course of life, things are going to go wrong, but when they do, I'm not going to become upset; I’m not going to get mad or angry or anything else. I am just going to take it, learn from it, pick myself up, and keep going. " Sometimes I ask this question: does anybody here have any problems?
Everybody says yes; everybody’s got problems. Well, here's the rule: all of life is a continuous series of problems; they never end. The problems just keep on coming, like the waves of the ocean.
The only break in this unbroken series of problems will be the occasional crisis. So, life will be problem, problem, problem, problem, problem, problem, crisis. It’s like the waves of the ocean: six problems and a crisis, six problems and a crisis.
This means that everybody here is either in a crisis right now, has just gotten out of a crisis, or is just about to have a crisis. So, what we have found is this: the hallmark of superior people, based on 30 years of research, is how you respond to a crisis, how you deal with problems, and how you respond to a crisis. What we found is that superior people look for the solution to every problem.
They don’t allow themselves to become upset and angry when something goes wrong; they say, "Okay, what’s the solution? " and they become intensely solution-oriented. When you have a very intense problem, it stimulates creativity to solve the problem.
So, what you do is you write and define the problem clearly. If you have a problem, you say, "Wait a minute, what is my problem? What is it that I’m worried about?
" Write it down, and the very act of defining a problem clearly often triggers the solution to the problem. One last technique that I want to give you with regard to your major definite purpose: if you only do these two things as a result of our time together, they will transform your life. You’ve already identified the one goal that can have the greatest positive impact on your life.
Now, what you do is you take that goal and write it at the top of a page in the form of a question. You say, "Let us say your goal is to double your income. " That could have a major impact on your life.
You ask, "What are all the things that I could do to double my income in the next 12 months? " Write it as a clear question. Even better, if you’re earning $50,000 a year today, write, "What could I do to earn $100,000 over the next 12 months?
" The more specific the question, the better. Then you devote yourself to writing 10 to 20 answers to this question. You must write a minimum of 20 answers: work harder, work smarter, start earlier, stay later, change occupations, upgrade my skills, whatever it is.
Keep forcing yourself to write until you’ve written 20 answers. We call this mind-storming. The first three to five answers will be easy; the next three to five answers will be difficult; the last ten answers will be incredibly difficult.
But I have given this exercise to people who’ve gone on to become millionaires so many times I’ve lost track because they often find that the 20th answer changes their whole life. If you’ve ever done this once, it’s absolutely staggering. More people have become millionaires with this simple idea of mind-storming, what I call the 20-idea method, than any other single method of creative thinking ever discovered.
Once you’ve got your 20 answers, pick one answer and take action on it immediately. Once you’ve got it, it doesn’t matter what it is; just take one answer and take action on it, and that will keep you thinking and acting creatively all day long. The next key to becoming a self-made millionaire is to become an unshakable optimist.
An unshakable optimist means that you think and talk about what you want most of the time. Optimists think and talk about what they want; they look for the good in every situation; they seek the valuable lesson; they are constantly feeding their mind with great ideas, which opens up new perspectives. What I have found is that optimists have three wonderful qualities.
Number one is they learn more things; as a result, they dramatically increase the likelihood that they will learn the right thing at the right time. Number two is they try more things, which dramatically increases the likelihood that they’ll try the right thing at the right time. And number three is they persist.
Never give up. Optimists make a decision that once they've decided they're going to become wealthy, they just never stop until they achieve that goal. Now, will they have many setbacks, obstacles, and difficulties?
Do you know that almost everybody succeeds in a different direction from what they originally intended or from what they originally thought? But they just keep going, almost like a football player running down the field—running, blocking, changing, moving back and forth continually—but never lose sight of the goal. So, optimists learn more things, try more things, and persist longer.
I want to leave you with the last two qualities of self-made millionaires. The second to the last quality is that they develop the qualities of courage and persistence. I said before that the biggest single obstacle to success is the fear of failure.
The antidote to the fear of failure is the habit of courage. What we know is that you need two types of courage to succeed. The first type of courage is the courage to begin.
It's the courage to launch with no guarantees of success. Someone once said that if all obstacles must first be removed, nothing will ever get done. So, successful people are willing to think, plan, make decisions, and then take action with no guarantees.
We say, "Leap and the net will appear. " Take action with no guarantees and then learn. The second part of courage is the courage to endure.
It's the courage to persist; it's the courage to keep on keeping on. It’s to make the decision in advance that you will never give up. No matter what happens, you will never give up.
You will get knocked down over and over again, but you'll never give up. The interesting thing is that if you make that decision in advance, you'll find yourself continually bouncing back. So, courage means the courage to begin and the courage to endure.
The final quality of self-made millionaires—and Napoleon Hill called this the master key to riches—after studying 500 of the richest people in American history, he said it's the quality of self-discipline. It's the ability to make yourself do what you should do when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not. The quality of self-discipline is the quality that will make you a big success.
It's the ability to force yourself to do what you know you should do.
