17 Principles of Personal Achievement by Napoleon Hill

Lesson 1: Definiteness of Purpose
Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement. Without a purpose and a plan, people drift aimlessly through life.

Lesson 2: Mastermind Alliance
The Mastermind principle consists of an alliance of two or more minds working in perfect harmony for the attainment of a common definite objective. Success does not come without the cooperation of others.

Lesson 3: Applied Faith
Faith is a state of mind through which your aims, desires, plans and purposes may be translated into their physical or financial equivalent.

Lesson 4: Going the Extra Mile
Going the extra mile is the action of rendering more and better service than that for which you are presently paid. When you go the extra mile, the Law of Compensation comes into play.

Lesson 5: Pleasing Personality
Personality is the sum total of one’s mental, spiritual and physical traits and habits that distinguish one from all others. It is the factor that determines whether one is liked or disliked by others.

Lesson 6: Personal Initiative
Personal initiative is the power that inspires the completion of that which one begins. It is the power that starts all action. No person is free until he learns to do his own thinking and gains the courage to act on his own.

Lesson 7: Positive Mental Attitude
Positive mental attitude is the right mental attitude in all circumstances. Success attracts more success while failure attracts more failure.

Lesson 8: Enthusiasm
Enthusiasm is faith in action. It is the intense emotion known as burning desire. It comes from within, although it radiates outwardly in the expression of one’s voice and countenance.

Lesson 9: Self-Discipline
Self-discipline begins with the mastery of thought. If you do not control your thoughts, you cannot control your needs. Self-discipline calls for a balancing of the emotions of your heart with the reasoning faculty of your head.

Lesson 10: Accurate Thinking
The power of thought is the most dangerous or the most beneficial power available to man, depending on how it is used.

Lesson 11: Controlled Attention
Controlled attention leads to mastery in any type of human endeavor, because it enables one to focus the powers of his mind upon the attainment of a definite objective and to keep it so directed at will.

Lesson 12: Teamwork
Teamwork is harmonious cooperation that is willing, voluntary and free. Whenever the spirit of teamwork is the dominating influence in business or industry, success is inevitable. Harmonious cooperation is a priceless asset that you can acquire in proportion to your giving.

Lesson 13: Adversity & Defeat
Individual success usually is in exact proportion of the scope of the defeat the individual has experienced and mastered. Many so-called failures represent only a temporary defeat that may prove to be a blessing in disguise.

Lesson 14: Creative Vision
Creative vision is developed by the free and fearless use of one’s imagination. It is not a miraculous quality with which one is gifted or is not gifted at birth.

Lesson 15: Health
Sound health begins with a sound health consciousness, just as financial success begins with a prosperity consciousness.

Lesson 16: Budgeting Time & Money
Time and money are precious resources, and few people striving for success ever believe they possess either one in excess.

Lesson 17: Habits
Developing and establishing positive habits leads to peace of mind, health and financial security. You are where you are because of your established habits and thoughts and deeds.

7 Areas of Constant Growth for an Extraordinary Life-Tony robbins

If you’re successful in your business, often you aren’t taking care of your body. If you’re taking care of your body, you may not be spending enough time with your kids. Or if your relationship with your kids is great, maybe your intimate relationship is suffering.

An extraordinary life comes from an unrelenting commitment to constant and never-ending improvement in all seven areas of your life. While all seven areas are important, there is a hierarchy that helps create peak performance and fulfillment. For example, if you don’t focus on health and your body, all the money, career success and contribution in the world will be worthless. You can’t experience an extraordinary quality of life without the vehicle that’s helping create it. Or if you spend time trying to solve your relationship issues and haven’t yet focused on your emotions, you’ll no doubt encounter problems.

Similarly, you must determine how you focus and spend your time in order to create a successful career. Once you’ve discovered how to add value in your work/career/mission, you can create a plan to grow your wealth. Spiritual growth and your capacity to celebrate and contribute is at the top of the pyramid because it’s the most opportune time to enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Eating the Elephant-By Brian Tracy

You have heard the question, "How do you eat an elephant?" The answer is, "one bite at a time." This metaphor applies to achieving any big goal, as well. How do you achieve a huge goal? You accomplish it one step, one task, one measure at a time.

Identify Your Most Valuable Task

Ask your boss, "What one thing do I do that is more valuable than anything else?" Whatever his or her answer, look for ways to perform more and more of that task and to get better and better at doing it. It is absolutely amazing how much you can accomplish if you break your tasks down into bite-sized pieces, set deadlines, and then do one piece at a time, every single day.

Continuous and Never Ending Improvement

If you want to increase your hourly rate and your income, look for ways to get a little bit better at the most important tasks you do, every single day. Read one hour per day in your field. Listen to audio programs on your way to and from work. Take additional courses whenever you can. These activities will propel your entire career onto the fast track. When you invest an extra one or two hours per day in self-improvement, the cumulative effect on your greater ability to get results can be extraordinary.

Become a Learned Person

If you read fifteen minutes each evening, rather than watching television, you will complete about fifteen books per year. If you read the classics of English literature for fifteen minutes each day, in seven years you will have read one hundred of the greatest books ever written. You will be one of the best-educated and most erudite people of your generation. And you can achieve this just by reading fifteen minutes each evening before you go to bed.

Increase Your Income

If you are in sales and you want to increase your income, keep careful track of how many calls, how many presentations, how many proposals, and how many sales you are making each day, each week, and each month. Then set a goal to increase your number of calls, presentations, and proposals per day. Set a goal to increase your number of sales each week and each month. Every day, measure yourself against your own standards.

If You Measure It, You Can Manage It

In each area of your life, analyze your activities carefully and select a specific number that, more than anything else, determines your level of success in that area. Then focus all of your attention, all day long, on that specific number. The very act of focused attention will cause you to perform better in that area, both consciously and unconsciously.

Releasing-your-brakes-Brain tracy

How to unlock your subconscious brakes and move ahead rapidly in your life
Do you have any ideas or attitudes about yourself and your abilities that may be holding you back from great success and happiness? As it happens, everyone does.

Feeling Inferior
In her wonderful book You Can Heal Your Life, Louise Hay says that each one of us has feelings of inferiority that are manifested in the conclusion that we are not good enough. We think that we are not as good as other people, and we feel that we are not good enough to acquire and enjoy the things that we want in life. Very often, we feel that we don’t deserve good things. Even if we do work hard and achieve some worthwhile objectives, we believe that we are not really entitled to our successes, and we often engage in behaviors that sabotage our successes. The fact is that you deserve every good thing that you are capable of acquiring as the result of the application of your talents.

Ordinary to Extraordinary
You need to develop your beliefs about yourself to the point where they serve you every day in every way. Men and women who accomplish extraordinary things are just ordinary people who developed themselves mentally to the point where they were able to overcome the obstacles that stood in their way, and they kept on keeping on until the goal was attained.

The most harmful beliefs that you can have are what we call “self-limiting beliefs.” These are beliefs about yourself, most of which are not true; but they hold you back nonetheless. Sometimes you, or others, will say that you cannot achieve certain goals because you did not get enough education.

The humorist Josh Billings once said, “It ain’t what a man knows what hurts him. It’s what a man knows what ain’t true.” It isn’t the actual truth about yourself and your abilities that hurts you; it’s the things that you consider to be true and that have no basis in truth.

Make a Change
The starting point of changing your beliefs is to get up the courage to question them seriously. Question your basic premises. Check your assumptions. Ask yourself, “What assumptions am I making about myself or my situation that might not be true?”

It’s a fact that we fall in love with our excuses and our negative assumptions. We fall in love with our reasons for not moving ahead.The author Richard Bach wrote this beautiful line: “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.” Very often, we become the prosecuting attorney in the case against ourselves. We dispute and argue and attempt to prove to ourselves and others that our limitations are real. And the less justification these ideas or beliefs have, the more adamant we become in attempting to prove them to others.

Whatever they are, resolve to challenge them. Hold them up to the light. Imagine that you had absolute confidence in yourself in a particular area. Then, act as if it were impossible to fail, and it shall be!

3 Steps to Success
Here are three steps you can take immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, accept that you are as good and as talented in your own way as anyone else you will ever meet. There is nothing you can’t accomplish if you really want it.

Second, challenge a belief or idea about yourself that is holding you back. What if you had extraordinary ability in that area? What difference would that make in your life?

Third, stop making excuses for lack of success. Instead, start making progress. Think and talk about what you want and then get busy making it come true.

Lincoln's Creative Touch

Mr. Shoaff's Simple Strategies to Success by Jim Rohn

My first mentor, Mr. Shoaff, over a five-year period of time before he died at age 49, taught me some extraordinarily simple things. He only went through the 9th grade in school. He never finished high school, never went to college, never went to a university. So he put his experiences and ideas in very simple language, which, I think for me - kid from the farms of Idaho - was so important. When I would say, "This is all the company pays." Mr. Shoaff would say, "No, that is all they pay YOU." I thought, "That is a new to look at it." I told him things cost too much. But he said, "No, you can't afford them." Well, that was a new concept for me. He promised that if I would improve, then I would qualify for more money. So I learned that we don't have to work on the company, we have to work on ourselves.

If it had been technical, I would have missed it. If it had been mystic, I would have backed away. But it was just basic, blunt "a-b-c" familiar stuff that I hadn't thought of before. For me it was the beginning of what he called "personal development".

Mr. Shoaff also taught me that life puts some of the more valuable things on the high shelf so that you can't get to them until you qualify. If you want the things on the high shelf, you must stand on the books you read. With every book you read, you get to stand a little higher.
And the "biggie" that forever had an impact on me, "Success is something you attract by the person you become." That phrase changed my life. Success is not to be pursued, but to be attracted by the person you become. Put your energy into becoming a better you, the best you. Learn the skills. Practice the skills. Attract the success.

These simple strategies and ideas helped change my life, forever, for the better. Thank you, once again, Mr. Shoaff.

Achieving Your Dreams

While most people spend most of their lives struggling to earn a living, a much smaller number seem to have everything going their way. Instead of just earning a living, the smaller group is busily working at building and enjoying a fortune. Everything just seems to work out for them. And here sits the much larger group, wondering how life can be so unfair, so complicated and unjust. What's the major difference between the little group with so much and the larger group with so little?

Despite all of the factors that affect our lives - like the kind of parents we have, the schools we attended, the part of the country we grew up in - none has as much potential power for affecting our futures as our ability to dream.

Dreams are a projection of the kind of life you want to lead. Dreams can drive you. Dreams can make you skip over obstacles. When you allow your dreams to pull you, they unleash a creative force that can overpower any obstacle in your path. To unleash this power, though, your dreams must be well defined. A fuzzy future has little pulling power. Well-defined dreams are not fuzzy. Wishes are fuzzy. To really achieve your dreams, to really have your future plans pull you forward, your dreams must be vivid.

If you've ever hiked a fourteen thousand-foot peak in the Rocky Mountains, one thought has surely come to mind "How did the settlers of this country do it?" How did they get from the East Coast to the West Coast? Carrying one day's supply of food and water is hard enough. Can you imagine hauling all of your worldly goods with you... mile after mile, day after day, month after month? These people had big dreams. They had ambition. They didn't focus on the hardship of getting up the mountain.

In their minds, they were already on the other side – their bodies just hadn't gotten them there yet! Despite all of their pains and struggles, all of the births and deaths along the way, those who made it to the other side had a single vision: to reach the land of continuous sunshine and extraordinary wealth. To start over where anything and everything was possible. Their dreams were stronger than the obstacles in their way.

You've got to be a dreamer. You've got to envision the future. You've got to see California while you're climbing fourteen thousand-foot peaks. You've got to see the finish line while you're running the race. You've got to hear the cheers when you're in the middle of a monster project. And you've got to be willing to put yourself through the paces of doing the uncomfortable until it becomes comfortable. Because that's how you realize your dreams.