Eminent Success

"No one ever attains very eminent success by simply doing what is Required of him; it is the amount and excellence of what is over And above the required that determines the greatness of ultimate Distinction."

When an archer misses the mark, he turns and looks for the fault within Himself. Failure to hit the bull's-eye is never the fault of the target. To Improve your aim-improve yourself.

"Excellence can be attained if you: Care more than others think is wise. Risk more than others think is safe. Dream more than others think is Practical. Expect more than others think is possible.

No Excuse

Any excuse for non-performance, however valid, softens the character. It is a sedative against one's own conscience. When a man uses an excuse, he attempts to convince both himself and others that unsatisfactory is somehow acceptable. He is perhaps -unconsciously- attempting to divert attention from performance, the only thing that counts, to his own want for sympathy. The user is dishonest with himself as well as with others. No matter good or how valid, the excuse never changes performance.

The world measures success in terms of performance alone. No man is remembered in history for what he would have accomplished. History never asks how hard it was to do the job nor considers the obstacles that had to be overcome. No man ever performed a worthwhile task without consciously ignoring many a plausible excuse. Washington might have reported, “The Delaware was running ice that would have crushed our boats.” Lincoln might have said, "The people will simply not support a war to keep the South in the Union." Eisenhower might have said at Normandy (as the Germans did), "The weather made amphibious assault impossible."

To use an excuse is a habit. We cannot have both the performance habit and excuse habit. We all have a supply of excuses. The more we use them, the lower become our standards, the poorer our performance. The better we perform, the less plausible our excuses become.

Next time you want to defend your slothfulness, say instead (at least to yourself), "No excuse". Notice the startling effect this will have your self-respect. You will have recognized your failure. You will have been honest with yourself. You will be a step closer to the performance.

Failure Is A Choice Made By The Undisciplined

Failing to meet your objectives, regardless of what they are, is a choice, because something else has been given higher priority. If you fail, it is because you choose to fail.

We call some people "self-disciplined" and others we call "undisciplined." And what's fascinating is that one person can be disciplined at one thing but not at another. I know an extremely successful businesswoman who has run two different billion-dollar businesses. If you saw her in her business environment, you would say she was disciplined. However, this same woman has had an extreme weight problem for as long as I've known her, and so far she hasn't had discipline in that area of her life, even though she would identify it as an area of tremendous concern to her.

How can this happen? How can a brilliant person so strong and disciplined in one area of his or her life be so undisciplined and unsuccessful in another?

The answer is deceptively simple. Discipline always involves the act of reaching a goal, and it also reflects the level of commitment that is attached to the goal. Furthermore, our various personal commitments will be ranked in the order we consciously, or more likely unconsciously, believe fit with our life priorities. When goals are set halfheartedly and they don't reflect our top life priorities, there should be no surprise when we display low discipline and we fail.

The vast majority of us have no grasp of what our top life priorities are. And because we aren't conscious of them, we tend to move them around very fluidly. That's why weight may seem like a high priority on Monday but be lowered to a secondary importance below taste enjoyment by Friday. Likewise, fidelity might seem like the highest priority until temptation comes in our path. In general we allow ourselves to get in the habit of setting goals for which we are not truly committed, and then we beat ourselves up when we fail at achieving them. There is a huge difference between even a 99% commitment and a 100% commitment. Choosing to be disciplined about something means committing 100% to reaching the objective.

My great friend Wayne Dyer (author of The Secrets to Manifesting Your Destiny) is a wonderful example of what it means to be "truly disciplined." There was a time when Wayne had run eight miles every day for 21 years in a row without missing a day! That's over 7,665 days straight running eight miles a day with no exceptions! I don't know about you, but I'd be overwhelmed with the thought of attempting that. And yet to Wayne, it was a part of his day — every day — without exception. Now I think Wayne would admit he isn't disciplined at everything. But what allowed him to be so disciplined at this?

He simply made running the most, or certainly one of the most, important activities in his day, every day. The great thing about this is that you simply don't allow anything to get in the way of the most important objectives in your day. Everything else takes a lower priority. All of a sudden reaching the objective becomes easy. You become — disciplined.

In the case of Wayne, I'm sure that over the 21-year period there were literally millions of things that he could have used as an excuse not to run one of those days. But, because it was one of his top priorities, nothing got in the way of Wayne's running. He ran when he had a fever, he ran in place on long flights, and during bad weather he would run up and down the halls of his hotel. That's discipline!

Here's a fun, potentially life-changing game I'd encourage you to play. Pick out an area of your life that you've had weak discipline in in the past. Set an objective relating to this area. Now, set that objective as your life's top priority — or at least put it in the very top few. Then set a minimum time that you will stay committed to this objective. I'd recommend a minimum of a month, but for this game you could even choose a week. If you can be disciplined for one week, you can be disciplined for as long as you choose. Now, this is going to mean repriori-tizing your time from your normal weekly schedule, but you'll do it — Why? Because it's your top priority!

While doing this, you're going to experience an interesting phenomenon. In the past, when you have set halfhearted objectives, your brilliant mind would start figuring out how to get around the objective to get you back to your comfort zone. However, now you'll find when it's your top priority, your mind works only on achieving the objective and taking you where you really want to go.

Susan Boyle’s Story

January 21st 2009 is not a date that Susan Boyle is ever likely to forget. ‘I will never forget it,’ she clarifies, in her unmistakeably Celtic brogue. It was the day that the shy, devout 48 year old stepped onto the stage of the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow for an audition on Britain’s Got Talent. Or to put it another way, the day her world turned 360 degrees on its head. In front of the three-strong panel of judges charged with divining which of this year’s British hopefuls really did have talent, the singing voice of Susan Boyle turned out to be a watershed moment neither she nor anyone involved in the show could possibly have foreseen. It is now both her and the show’s defining moment.

In her own haphazard fashion, during three and a half minutes of television airtime, later aired to slack-jawed intakes of breath in May of this year, Susan Boyle fashioned a new kind of fame. She elicited a moment of pure, molten zeitgeist. She broke every rule of the talent show book and tore up a considerable number of the pages of popular music marketing into the bargain. She symbolized an astonishing variety of the little-people’s revenge, quite by accident. Ms Boyle describes her own astonishing 2009 in refreshingly frank and simple terms. ‘All I did was to apply for a talent show. I was lucky enough to be chosen. That’s it in a nutshell.’ But something deeper was going on in the collective public consciousness. If the two watchwords of the 21st century have been ‘reality’ and ‘celebrity’, Susan Boyle had accidentally located a brand new point on the graph where they both intersected. One of Britain’s forgotten characters had rarely, if ever, been so memorable.

After her one audition for Britain’s Got Talent, in which she confounded the judges, the audience and then anyone with access to Youtube’s expectations by dazzling her way through a version of the song I Dreamed A Dream, from the musical Les Miserables, a tornado of opinionated column inches, speculation, rumination and conjecture around Susan Boyle grew feverishly. 300 Million You Tube hits and counting. She became the subject of op-ed newspaper columns, a front cover sensation in her own right. This unlikely candidate for the melting pot of the new star machine in 21st century Britain caused computer crashes, miles of newsprint and the sophisticated approval of Hollywood’s well-heeled and super-groomed A-list. Though the content differed wildly, everyone proffering their thoughts on the self-confessed ‘wee wifey’ seemed agreed on one point. That in 2009, to be free of an opinion on Susan Boyle was to be free of opinion itself.

For one brief moment, vanity itself collapsed. As that ancient old maxim – ‘Never judge a book by its cover’ – clanked around the globe with speedy viral intensity, it was as if the world was about to offer its first unspoken apology for prizing beauty above all else. Perhaps it would temporarily forget its grotesquely accentuated new heights of judgement. Or perhaps Susan Boyle was just a fleeting icon by which a microscope was shone on our more fickle presumptions. Whatever history gifts the Susan Boyle story in the long term, it is now her time to prove that there is more to this incredible woman than being the symbol for a moment of international reflection. She will do it in the exact same way she entered our consciousness in the first place. With the raw combination of strength and fragility, beauty and solitude that is her singing voice.

In some ways, Ms Boyle’s story is just the same as any woman with a voice in any choir up and down the UK. In her home town of Blackburn, she had been schooled in singing in churches and choral societies. She says now that, as a shy young woman with some learning difficulties, being hidden in the blanket of a collective singing arrangement offered her comfort. So in one other, crucial way, her story is entirely her own. The most unlikely chorister in the sea of voices stepped out of line and put her head above the parapet to be noticed. For Susan Boyle, though she would never deign to say so much herself, this was an act of personal heroism, the like of which she had never contemplated before.

The speed with which reaction to her performance picked up gravitas proved an incendiary media hotbed. But it was most surprising for the woman at the centre of it. ‘It started off with the [Scottish newspaper] Daily Record visiting my door. And it ended up with TV stations from all over the world camping out on my street waiting for interviews and stories. I’d peak behind the curtains in the house, saying ‘what in God’s name is going on here?’ Then the phone calls started. My number was still in the book at that particular time, so anybody could get it and the phone was ringing 24 hours a day. It was constant. People were ringing me who I couldn’t understand because of their accents. All sorts of nationalities. Lots of Americans. It was absolutely unbelievable if I’m being honest.’ She is self-deprecating about why she should have caused such a furore. ‘A woman who went on with mad hair, bushy eyebrows and the frock I was wearing had to be noticed. Come on!’

Such is the quick nature of today’s star system, in September, just four months after her TV debut, Susan Boyle made her live TV comeback. She performed a rarefied take on The Rolling Stones Wild Horses, re-orchestrated to gently clasp the exact timbre of her natural talent, on the show’s US cousin, America’s Got Talent. An unprompted standing ovation followed. Outside of the unruly cyclone of her fame, there is something within the voice of Susan Boyle that is absolutely perfect for our times. At a moment when Dame Vera Lynn and Barbra Streisand are topping the album charts, there is something peculiarly modern about her improbably status as holding the international record for most pre-ordered album of all time. As the dust settles on the sheer wattage of conversation that she has prompted, it is time – as they say – to face the music.

Ms Boyle’s debut album was put together during the summer of this year. She first entered a recording studio in July in Edinburgh, to test how her vocals would respond to tape. The results shocked both her and veteran producer Steve Mac. Decamping to London, she fashioned the record over two months, picking songs that resonated with her, that pricked something within that she felt ready to unleash through music. ‘It was important that I could feel everything I was singing,’ she says, cutting straight to the core of why music can be such a useful release, an escape valve from the everyday.

A disarming mix of the sacred (‘My faith is my backbone,’ she says) and the secular, there is not a moment on it that is not moving. It is pitched exactly within the framework of the year she has enjoyed and, at well-documented times, endured. It is a collection of covers and original material that cuts a swathe into the interior life of the woman who is arguably the most intriguing, not to mention instantly recognisable character yet to be produced by the reality talent medium, the decade’s defining TV genre.

When she hurts, it hurts. Her rousing rendition of Madonna’s You’ll See is a riposte to the children that picked on her in the playground. The new composition Who I Was Born To Be is an astonishing testament to self-belief against some startling odds. Yet when she dreams, we dream too. Because of her uncanny knack of picking a song so perfect for her tale at that very first audition, Ms Boyle has become synonymous with the word ‘dream’. Her flawless album rendition of I Dreamed A Dream may come as no surprise, but it still manages to pick every individual hair from the back of your neck and yank them to attention. A country ballad version of Daydream Believer delicately seals the deal of her being synonymous with the concept of dreaming.

For this is Susan Boyle’s tale. The fearlessness to dream about something other than the lot life has handed you. The chance to escape. The pivotal role of music as a conduit to go to another place, sometimes lodged at the outer recesses of your imagination, and to allow that new place to blossom. Yes, this is Susan Boyle’s tale. It is why it connected with so many unsuspecting people across the world. In another nutshell? If she can dare to dream, so can you.

http://www.susanboylemusic.com/gb/story/

Nothing Fails Like Success

Are you struggling to make changes or respond to changing conditions? I know many people right now are being forced to change the way they work or live because of our turbulent environment. What we might all consider in these times is what the great historian Arnold Toynbee once said:

Nothing fails like success.

What does that mean exactly? Well, if you consider the challenges you’re facing, you might just be using an old approach that isn’t equal to the challenge. In other words, when we have a challenge and the response is equal to the challenge, that’s called success. But once we have a new challenge, the old, once successful response no longer works. That’s why it’s called a failure.

We have to examine our paradigms (our view of things), our tools, our skills to determine if we’re approaching the problem in the right way. As a first step, we may even step back and make sure we’ve correctly defined the problem. Then we need to see if, based on the evidence of results or lack of results, if we need a new approach.

As you ponder your challenges, consider if you need a new mindset, a new skillset or toolset. You may need to adjust your view, try a different perspective or a new way to think about it. Then you may need to acquire some new skills or tools to tackle the problem. What ever the case, you may need to find a new model to drive success. This can be an exciting proposition because you will most likely find new growth and development in the process—this is success!

Remember: nothing fails like success. Be vigilant and be ready to continually learn and adapt to new challenges, which will surely come your way.

Stephen R. Covey

Success of the Far Side of Failure—Learning from Failures

Successful people often share similar characteristics. But I have come to believe that the single thing they have most in common is that they find success on the far side of failure.

What do I mean by that? I find that almost all successful people have experienced significant failures in life or in their work, but they have learned from their failures.

On the other hand, people who don’t recognize their failures or don’t seek learning from them, are often the ones failing again and again. Why? Because they haven’t learned the lessons from the failure—they haven’t gained self-awareness or understanding; they haven’t understood others or their marketplace; they haven’t developed the maturity for humility and integrity—and they find themselves repeating their mistakes again and again.

Think about the failures or mistakes you have made. How did you respond to them? What outcomes did you get? How have they helped you today? How have they not helped you—do you have something still to learn from your failures?

If you want to make significant progress in your life, don’t forget to find success on the far side of failure!

by: Stephen R. Covey

The Banks and Your Savings

The banks have it good.

Imagine, you have a business where people stand in long lines to give you their hard earned money. They put up with lousy service, pouty cashiers, no chairs, not even cellphone access, knowing that you are just going to give them less than a one percent (1%) return for their money, annually. Yet they do it. And they do it gladly, thinking that they are doing themselves a favor.

Sometime ago, it dawned on me. I am a creditor, and my bank is my debtor. Ergo, I should have the upper hand. Ergo, I should have been waited on hand and foot, treated with utmost respect, wooed, wined, dined. They are, after all, getting my money and using it to finance their various investment schemes.

But that is not the case.

Since then I have seriously, seriously questioned the system (albeit only in my mind).

See this: when I borrow, I get charged at least 10% per annum for a housing loan, 19% to 30% for a car loan, 3.5 % per month for credit card purchases (that’s 42% per annum!). When they borrow, they charge themselves less than 1% per annum. Something is not right.

To think that a lot of the money that they have is from the pockets of poor people who know no better than to put their money in banks.

Okay, admittedly, yes, banks do a great service. They are the barometer of economic stability (or instability). They fall and the whole world falls.

But a bank is a facility and should be treated as such, a temporary parking space for money, and then the money should be put somewhere else so it can make more money for those who are entitled to it – you and me – who worked hard for it. If the money is left to rot in almost interest-free savings accounts, inflation (general increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money) would work it’s magic and the money is no more.

This is dangerous. Very dangerous. But few people know, or pay heed.

What to do?

1. Own the bank. Buy stocks of your bank. This way, you would actually get a share of the pie and not be the mere and meaningless “creditor”. Their growth is your growth. Their profit, yours. You will be part of the inner circle (you do have a voice in annual stockholder meetings) and not just a bystander who is left holding an empty bag (or passbook). Please be warned, though, that stocks are usually high risk. Do not do it if you have not studied the market or know how the market works.

2. Invest in their products. They have time deposit accounts and other savings accounts that offer higher interest, or insurance products that you can invest in. Although the gains are at very conservative rates (4% to 8% per annum), it will still outdo the <1%>

3. You can put your money in the Unit Investment Trust Fund (UITF) of your bank. This includes money market funds, bond funds, balanced funds and equity funds. The gains are not assured but your money has the potential to earn interest that is higher than 8%. A caveat to those who need easy access to their money, though: investment in these kinds of funds should be long-term.

Banks are a piece of the puzzle. It is a means, not an end. Yes, you should still have a savings account and a checking account but you should make your bank a conduit and not a destination.

Know what your bank offers. Ask questions, look for options, be smarter. Move that money sitting there in your less than 1% per annum savings account now.

Be rich,

Issa

Article by Issa. Art by D. Copyright 2009.
Website: www.YouWantToBeRich.com