The secret to a successful life
There is a secret to living successfully - making your goals, generally enjoying things. And you can find it in classic texts such as Nightingale...
After 60+ years of living, and most of that (since about age 8, I figure) was spent working out how things work and why, I finally came down to this simple core basic for success:
Goal achievement.
Meaning, you have to set goals and go after them.
Once you set a goal, then "like attracts like". You then look for things that will help you achieve that goal, and those things start showing up.
It's really that simple. Of course, you have to test and incorporate what shows up into your daily life operation. But these all build on each other. The workable stuff is useful and you keep it around. You let the other stuff go - or give it to someone else to see if they can use them.
And so you are constantly pruning your own fruit tree, getting rid of the limbs and leaves that don't produce anything. What's left flourishes and becomes sturdy. It stays healthy and productive.
That "letting go" you also have to do on a daily basis. Turning everything else off that isn't aligned to what you are working on. People are "single-taskers" - the successful ones, anyway. We can each focus on a single thing at one time. Each instance of our lives, we are doing one thing, despite distractions.
I wondered the other day where I had lost a whole day of my schedule. It was because of some other task that I had to focus on. And the trips out into the heat, and the work in that heat, and recovering from the effects of that heat - all in a steamy Missouri summer - took that day.
At the end of it, I resolved to find out what I had done to lose a day. And reviewing what I had done simply showed I was working at accomplishing something else - by choice. Oh - and I had another distraction in my life. So this morning, I took that distraction into another room, and set out on my daily farm chores so that I could get back to this desk, this computer, mug of honey-sweetened coffee in my reach.
Here I am typing. Another successful day starting, full of successful accomplishments. But it also meant handling distractions (baby-sitting a dog who escaped and went back down the road to wait at her owner's house - who obviously wasn't there. So I walked her back to my house where she was "dog-tired" (as well as I) - and a few other incomplete things to ship off in the mail today. And shut down every other programs (or minimalized them) that I was running just so I could write this for you.
Goals. Focus. Eliminate distractions. Get back onto your plan to accomplish your goals. Or some subset of them that needs doing right now.
Earl Nightingale said, "Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal."
And he followed Napoleon Hill, who held that your first action is to resolve a Burning Desire for yourself: A Goal.
There are smaller steps needed to accomplish any big goal. So your progressive work to achieve these smaller steps will then forward achieving your big goal - the desire that is burning within you.
There is a magic to all this. And it has to do with what you believe in. You have to believe your goal is worthwhile, and believe in yourself. As you believe daily, you build your own faith. While you work toward that goal, you keep yourself open to help. "As you seek, you will find."
Again, it's Nightingale's "Strangest Secret" recording/transcript that give the clues to your finding everything you need to achieve your goals.
But first, you have to set them. And in that recording, he gives several ideas of how you can figure out an ideal to push for that is worthy of your efforts.
Right now, my ideals are to push this particular essay of his out into the world again. Because if the bulk of the people on this planet were working to help the rest of it - progressively realizing high, worthy ideals - then the world would be a much better place.
Want to improve something in your life?
Take Nightingale's final suggestion to heart, then:
"Start today. You have nothing to lose - but you have your whole life to win."