Create Your Own Future

11 Chapter

Create Your Own Future

The miracle, or the power, that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the promptings of a brave and determined spirit.

—Mark Twain

There can be no great courage where there is no confidence or assurance, and half the battle is in the conviction that we can do what we undertake.

—Orison Swett Marden

Every successful person has experienced countless temporary set- backs, obstacles, and even outright defeats, in the course of his or her life. But it has been the ability to respond positively and con- structively to these defeats and to bounce back that ultimately has assured success. This quality of bouncing rather than breaking will determine your success as well.

Dr. Abraham Zaleznik of the Harvard Business School did a study some years ago on the role that disappointment plays in life. Many people had researched and written on motivation and its rela- tionship to success. But Zaleznik was the first person who looked at the other side of the coin.

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■ THINKING AHEAD

If you are a normal, intelligent person, you will organize each area of your life to avoid failure and disappointment as much as possible. You will think ahead and anticipate what could go wrong. You will then take the necessary precautions to guard against setbacks and problems.You will weigh and balance differ- ent options. You will select the course of action that offers the greatest likelihood of success.

Nonetheless, no matter how well you think and plan, things will not always turn out the way you expect. Murphy’s Law says: “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Of all the things that can go wrong, the worst possible thing will go wrong at the worst possible time and cost the most amount of money.” Cohen’s Law then adds: “Mur- phy was an optimist!”

Therefore, disappointment comes unbidden. Disappointment comes in spite of your best efforts to avoid it. Disappointment is in- evitable and unavoidable. As sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, you are going to experience disappointments in life. And the more goals you set and the more things you try, the more difficulties and problems you will have.

■ THE ONE THING YOU CAN CONTROL

What Dr. Zaleznik discovered was that successful people respond to disappointment differently from unsuccessful people. His conclu- sion was that the way you deal with disappointment is an extremely good predictor of whether you will achieve success in your field, or in life overall.

Since you can’t always avoid disappointment, no matter what you do, the only thing that matters is how you deal with the disap- pointment when it comes upon you, unwanted and unexpected. Do you let it overwhelm you? Do you blow up, become angry, and blame or attack other people? Or do you roll with the punches, and respond effectively?

Successful people deal with disappointment by taking it in stride. Unsuccessful people allow disappointment to stop them. Successful people recover and continue forward. Unsuccessful peo-

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ple often quit and go back. Motivational speaker Charlie Jones says, “It’s not how far you fall but how high you bounce that counts!”

■ THE TRIGGER OF NEGATIVITY

Most negative emotions are triggered by frustrated expectations. You wish, hope, or plan for something to happen in a certain way, and when it doesn’t, you react with impatience and anger. This is quite normal. If you care about a result, you are going to be hurt if you don’t achieve it.

The challenge is that emotions are triggered instantaneously. For this reason, you can have very little control over your emotions and reactions at the moment that something happens to you. It is too late. When the disappointment occurs, you will react instinc- tively and habitually, depending on your previous experiences. When things go wrong, it is too late for you to think of fine and no- ble thoughts.You simply react.

Epictetus, the Greek Stoic philosopher, once wrote, “Circum- stances do not make the man; they only reveal him to himself,” and to others, for that matter. It is not the adverse situation that builds your character so much as it reveals your character as it exists at that moment.

■ PREPARE IN ADVANCE

One of the best ways to change your thinking, and your life, is to prepare for disappointment in advance. Set yourself up to bounce back quickly by practicing mental prepreparation.

Mental prepreparation enables you to prepare internally for the inevitable disappointments of life and work, even though you do not know what they are or when they will come.This is one of the most powerful of all thinking techniques that you can use to gain and keep control of your emotions, assuring that they are primarily pos- itive and constructive, no matter what happens.

In mental prepreparation, you begin with the premise that you are going to face all kinds of problems and difficulties when you de- cide to accomplish anything worthwhile in life. In fact, if you set a big, challenging goal for yourself, one that forces you out of your

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comfort zone, you are going to meet with countless obstacles and difficulties that you cannot now imagine.

This trial by endurance seems to go with the territory. Every time you try to be or do something more or different, problems of all kinds will arise in your path. If you are not prepared in advance, they can discourage you and drive you back into your comfort zone. Instead of waiting for the inevitable problems to occur, you mentally prepare for these inevitable difficulties before they happen. You say to yourself: “Today I will face all kinds of ups and downs, diffi- culties and setbacks, but I will not let them get me down. Once I start to- ward my goal, I will be unstoppable!”

■ PRACTICE CRISIS ANTICIPATION

In business consulting, we teach a way of thinking called “crisis an- ticipation.” I encourage decision makers to look six months to a year into the future and ask the question, “What are some of the negative things that could happen that would derail our plans? Of all of them, what are the very worst things that could happen?”

We then make a list of all the different setbacks or unexpected emergencies that could occur that would threaten the enterprise. For example: A competitor could come out with a new product or service that was better and/or cheaper than ours. Interest rates could go up. Government could place new taxes and regulations on our activities. Costs of fuel or raw materials could increase. A key person or persons within the organization could depart for some reason. A key customer or customers could leave and go to a com- petitor. Competitors could cut their prices below costs in order to take business away. The economy could tip into recession and the overall market could shrink dramatically.

In each of these cases, the ability of the company to respond quickly and effectively could determine its very survival.These pos- sible reversals and setbacks should be thought through in advance. The best rule is “no surprises!”

Royal Dutch/Shell of the Netherlands has one of the most complete forward planning processes of any company in the world. It has developed over 600 scenarios to deal with problems that might occur around the world in areas where it has oil and gas op-

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erations. As a result, the company is seldom surprised by anything that happens. It is never caught off guard. It always has a backup plan ready to go. It has also become one of the most continuously profitable and successful companies in the world. Thinking ahead really pays off.

■ LOOK INTO THE FUTURE

What works for large and small corporations can work for you as well.You should practice crisis anticipation regularly in everything you do. Look down the road of your life, like a traveler, and imagine some of the negative things that might happen and how you could respond to them.You will be amazed at how much more positive and confident you will feel when you have already developed alter- native courses of action to some of the worst things that could hap- pen in a particular area.

For example, what would you do if you lost your job today? The idea of losing one’s job is a major fear for most people, affecting 37 percent of the working population according to one study. I re- ceived a letter recently from a gentleman who told me that his fear of losing his job, which he recognized was completely irrational, was so great that it was paralyzing him. It was actually holding him back from doing the kind of work that he had to do in order to keep his job. His fear and his lack of alternatives were actually increasing the likelihood that he would be laid off.

■ YOUR NEW JOB

Sometimes I ask people in my audiences, “What is your next job go- ing to be?” For most people this question comes as a surprise.They have not even thought about what their next job is going to be. But we know that the world of work is changing at a rapid rate.The fact is that you have already changed jobs several times. It is virtually in- evitable that you will change jobs again, and perhaps sooner than you expect.What is your next job likely to be?

When I explain that each person must be preparing for his or her next job, it is a new idea for most people.They either have not thought about it or don’t want to think about it. But the only

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question is this: “What level of knowledge, skills, and ability will you require at your next job in order to continue to earn the kind of money that you want to earn in the future?”

If you don’t think about this question in advance, you may be forced to think about it when your time has run out and the ques- tion is forced upon you.

■ YOUR NEW CAREER

After audience members have thought about what their next job is going to be, I then ask the second question, “What is your next career going to be?” What entirely new field, industry, business, or line of work are you going to be in 5 to 10 years from now?

According to employment experts, a person starting work to- day will have an average of 14 or 15 full-time jobs, each lasting two years or more, over the course of a working lifetime. He or she will also have as many as five different careers, in completely dif- ferent fields, each of which will require new kinds of knowledge and different skills.

Much of what you know about your current work will be obso- lete within five years. Because of rapid changes taking place in every area, your existing store of knowledge, information, ideas, and skills will be of little value.These will have no relevance or application to the job market and the economy of the future.You will need new knowledge and skills if you want to survive and thrive in an increas- ingly competitive society.

This is why Peter Drucker said, “The only skill that will not be- come obsolete in the years ahead is the ability to learn new skills.”

■ CONTINUALLY THINK AHEAD

You probably recall the famous comment by hockey star Wayne Gretzky.When he was asked by a reporter for the secret of his suc- cess on the ice, he replied by saying, “Most players are pretty good, but they go to where the puck is. I go to where the puck is going to be.”

This observation is directly relevant to you. Where is your puck going to be three to five years from now? Where is your puck going to be 10 years from now? Taking a long-term perspective on your

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work life enables you to make better decisions in the short term. As strategic planner Michael Kami says, “Those who do not think about the future cannot have one.”

Look into your future and begin to imagine and anticipate some of the twists and turns that might occur. If you lost your job today, how would you react? What would be your first thought? The great majority of people, when they think about losing their jobs, go into a form of panic.They have no idea what they would do.

However, in my work with many thousands of successful people, I have found that they have one particular attitude in common. They all know with complete assurance that if they lost their jobs they could walk across the street and get another job tomorrow. They are so good at what they do, and so confident in their abilities, that job loss to them would be merely an inconvenience.They have lots of options.

As I mentioned in Chapter 6, there is a way to determine how good you are in your field.What is the number of job offers you get on a regular basis? Just as a store or restaurant can measure its suc- cess by the number of customers or patrons it attracts, you can measure how valued and respected you are for what you do by counting the number of people who want to hire you and use your services. How are you doing?

■ EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

Sometimes I ask audiences what they would do if their entire indus- try disappeared overnight.They shake their heads and they say that can’t possibly happen.Then I point out that the defense industry in California literally collapsed in the early 1990s and over 400,000 highly competent defense engineers and executives, with many years of education and experience, were rendered obsolete. Their jobs were not only gone; they were gone forever. Each of these thou- sands of competent, capable men and women were forced into the position of going out into the marketplace, developing new skills, and going to work in entirely new fields.

The collapse of the dot-com mania wiped out more than 90 percent of the Internet jobs and companies that had sprung up across the country.The collapse in the telecom sector led to layoffs

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of many thousands of workers. The decline in recent years of the frantic investment activity that had been seen during the 1990s trig- gered the layoffs and firings of tens of thousands of people in the fi- nancial services industries. It goes on and on, and will continue. Only the names of the industries will change.This rapid shift in jobs and industries is going to happen more and more often to more and more people.

■ YOUR FINANCIAL LIFE

The world of finance and investments is constantly changing. The markets are increasingly volatile. The old philosophy of “buy and hold” is no longer relevant to the world of today, and tomorrow. If you have money invested, you should be thinking continually about what might happen if your investments went bad and you lost all your money.You should always be preparing against the worst pos- sible outcome of a particular investment.

There is a direct relationship between how much time you in- vest in thinking about and planning your financial life and how likely you are to become financially independent. According to Dr. Thomas Stanley’s interviews with thousands of self-made million- aires, they share a common characteristic: they spend far more time thinking about financial matters than the average person.

The average adult, even though he or she worries about money much of the time, spends only two to three hours per month actu- ally thinking about his or her finances, usually at bill-paying time. The average affluent American, in contrast, spends 20 to 30 hours per month thinking about his or her money. As a result, they make far better spending decisions and more intelligent investments than the majority. They become increasingly skilled in money matters, and eventually pull ahead of their peers.

■ THE STRATEGY OF NAPOLEON

The French general Napoleon dominated the continent of Europe for almost 20 years. He led his armies to victory in dozens of bat- tles, and lost only three battles in his entire career. He lost almost 600,000 men when he invaded Russia, failing to anticipate the

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cold of the Russian winter. Greatly weakened from the Russian campaign, he subsequently lost the battle of Leipzig, which led to his being exiled to the island of Elba. And finally, he lost at the battle of Waterloo due to a series of miscommunications with his field generals.

It is often forgotten that he won many other battles, small and large, and is considered to be one of the three greatest military ge- niuses of history. (Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan were the other two.) Napoleon had developed a quality that helped him to achieve victory, which you also can develop. It is called extrapolatory thinking.This is the ability to think and plan several moves ahead in whatever you are doing. This way of thinking involves your consid- ering every possible event that could occur, and then making provi- sions for them, well in advance.

Napoleon personally felt that his thoroughness and depth of preparation, carefully considering every detail, were his key to vic- tory.This quality was demonstrated by his phenomenal ability to ar- rive onto the field of a potential battle and then to think through every single possible twist and turn of the battle to its logical con- clusion—before the first shot was fired.

Once he had completed his preparations, he could take his posi- tion at his command center to direct the battle. No matter what news he received from any part of the battlefield, he was always ready with an immediate response. Many people thought that his quickness of response under fire was because he was a brilliant thinker, which he was, but that was not the secret of his success. His secret was that he had thought through every possible eventuality, in advance.

■ EXTRAPOLATE FROM THE PRESENT

This ability, to think through every major situation in your life in advance, is a way of thinking that you can learn with practice.The better you become at anticipating future events based on current facts, the better your life will be.You will be able to minimize re- versals and maximize opportunities. Thinking this way will give you an edge over others who simply react and respond to what- ever happens.

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If you work for a company, you should be thinking through the worst possible things that could happen in the next six months to a year that could affect your job and your security. If you own the company, you should identify the worst possible things that could affect the survival and health of your enterprise. You and your spouse should discuss possible problems and difficulties that might occur in your family life, and then make plans to guard against them.

■ TAKE NECESSARY FINANCIAL PRECAUTIONS

You often read about people who failed to insure properly and consequently lost their cars, their homes, and sometimes all of their possessions. They failed to look into the future and ask what the consequences to their life would be if a fire occurred in their home or if they had a traffic accident and they were not suffi- ciently insured.

One of the smartest things that you can do to preserve your fi- nancial well-being is to develop a regular savings program.Your goal should be to save 10 percent and more of your income, off the top, each month, from each paycheck or income source. There are few things that will give a greater sense of confidence and control than for you to know that you have a cash reserve set aside in the event of an unexpected emergency. In contrast, there is nothing that will cause you more stress and tension than to be living on the edge of your financial resources, unable to deal with a financial emergency or a need of any kind.

W. Clement Stone once said, “If you cannot save money, then the seeds of greatness are not in you.”

■ LIVE WITHIN YOUR INCOME

Your ability to save money and to discipline yourself to live within your income is a key measure of your ability to succeed in life. If you do not have the internal self-control to refrain from spending everything you earn, this suggests that you probably don’t have the discipline necessary to succeed in other areas of your life. Although

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the Bible says that the love of money is the root of all evil, it is far more likely that the lack of money is the root of all evil.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of saving your money and building up a cash reserve is that it enables you to take advantage of oppor- tunities when they arise, as they always do. In the movie Field of Dreams, a profound idea was expressed: “If you build it, they will come.” In the financial world, this means that if you accumulate money through hard work and saving, you will attract into your life opportunities to invest that money to earn even more.

■ BECOMING A MONEY MAGNET

The Law of Attraction is very powerful in monetary matters.When you save even a small amount of money and put it in a bank ac- count or a carefully chosen mutual fund, you create a certain force field of energy around that money. This energy somehow begins to attract even more money into your life. As your savings and invest- ments grow, the magnetic power of your money grows even stronger. The more money you accumulate, the more money that will be attracted to you, and the more opportunities you will have to accumulate even more.

When you think about your money and the pleasure it gives you to have money in the bank, you increase the energy field around your money and you attract even more. This force field becomes even more powerful when you love your money. When you think about your growing financial reserves with intense happiness, you intensify the energy around your money and you attract even more. When people say that it takes money to make money, they are right in two special ways. First, your ability to save money and build up a nest egg is a measure of whether you have the ability to earn even more money and whether you can be trusted with money. Sec- ond, when you put together even a small amount of money, you will attract opportunities to accumulate an even larger amount.

■ A SUCCESS STORY

A participant came up to me at a seminar recently and asked if I re- membered him. I told him that unfortunately I spoke to too many

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people each year to remember all of them. He reminded me that he had attended my two-day seminar about six years before. He was quite shy so he waited at the lunch break until everyone had left. He then told me about a most remarkable series of events that had hap- pened to him since the seminar.

When he came to my seminar, he was a used car salesman. He had two children and was in his early thirties. He was earning an av- erage income and was up to his neck in debt. He was living in a rented house with his family.

At the seminar, he decided that his biggest source of worry was the fact that he was in debt and had no money in the bank. So he set a goal to get out of debt and to save $30,000 over the next five years. This was a huge goal for him, considering his circumstances and his past. He had not been out of debt since his teens.

■ TAKING ACTION

Nonetheless, in faith, he wrote down his goal, made a plan, and be- gan working on it every day.This decision activated his mental pow- ers. Because of the Law of Correspondence, the Law of Attraction, and the Law of Subconscious Activity, among others, things began to change for him far faster than he had imagined. He actually achieved his financial goal in only three years. He was out of debt and had $30,000 in the bank.

One day, his boss, the owner of the dealership, called him in and asked him if he was interested in a business opportunity. He was quite flattered and asked his boss to explain. His boss said that he had observed how much better he had become as a sales- man, and he had also heard that he had saved up some money from his income.

This salesman was shy and cautious, and asked his boss what he had in mind. His boss told him that he had been approached by the automobile manufacturer in Detroit and asked to recommend someone who would be interested in opening a new car dealership in the same city in a growing part of town. The boss said he was willing to recommend him, and back him in this dealership. He would go in with him as a full partner if he were willing to put in his money as well.

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The final outcome of this story was that his boss helped him set up the new dealership; he helped him with all the purchasing, in- ventory, parts, service department decisions, and staffing. After two years, his boss sold the half share back to him, so he ended up own- ing the dealership 100 percent.

Then he said to me, “And today, I’m a millionaire.” He said, “Six years ago I was a used car salesman, and today I am a million- aire.” He was one of the happiest people I’ve ever met. He said if he had not taken that advice from the seminar and begun saving his money and getting out of debt, he would not have been in a position to take advantage of that opportunity when it came along. He said, “Taking your seminar probably saved me 20 years of hard work, and maybe even a lifetime.”

This story applies to your life as well. One of the most impor- tant actions that you can take to remain positive and optimistic is to prepare mentally, financially, and physically in advance. Think through what might possibly happen and make plans to prepare for opportunities. Make plans and put aside reserves to minimize or es- cape the consequences of a financial setback. This way of thinking, of planning ahead in every area, is a mark of the superior individual.

■ TWO MAGIC QUESTIONS

Here are two questions that you can ask to turn failure into success. I call these the magic questions because of the incredible power they have to improve your life.You can ask them and benefit from them after every experience.

The first question is, “What did I do right?” No matter what you do, or how it turns out, whether it is a success or a failure, you should do an instant mental replay of the event and assess every- thing that you did right in that situation.

Even if it turns out badly, or was a complete failure, there were always things that you did that were correct. If you can isolate the positive parts of your performance and write them down, you will be preprogramming your mind to repeat the things that you did right in the next similar situation.

The second magic question is, “What would I do differently?”This is an excellent question because it forces you to think positively

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about what happened and how you could do better. Ask yourself, if you had to do it over again, how would you change or improve your performance or behavior in that situation? What would you do more of or less of?

Be sure to write down your answers.This ensures that you cap- ture them before you forget. Each time you try something new or different, immediately sit down with a pad of paper and answer those two questions: “What did I do right?” and “What would I do differently?” Both of these questions are positive and they both re- quire positive responses.Your answers prepare you, consciously and unconsciously, to do even better next time. Both sets of answers keep you focused on improvement rather than regret.

■ POSITIVE VERSUS NEGATIVE THINKING

Both winners and losers examine how they performed after an im- portant event. But underachievers almost invariably rehash the mis- takes they have made, the expenses they have incurred, and the failures they have experienced. High achievers, in contrast, those who think positively about themselves and their lives, are constantly reviewing the best parts of their performance and making plans to repeat those actions the next time.

When you think about what you did right and what you could do differently next time, your mind will be completely positive.Your creativity will be stimulated.You will see all kinds of opportunities and possibilities for improvement that you would have missed com- pletely if you allowed yourself to feel sorry for yourself after an un- successful event.

■ BUSINESS AND SALES

If you are in business, you should ask these questions regularly of yourself and your key staff: “What did we do right?” and “What would we do differently next time?” Remember, most things you try will be unsuccessful the first few times. By asking these questions, you extract the greatest value possible from the situation. Treat

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every experience as an opportunity to learn something that can help you next time.

If you are in sales, use this method after every sale. Immediately after a sales call, successful or not, ask the magic questions. This quick review will dramatically increase the speed at which you learn and grow as a sales professional.

Make this instant replay a part of your life. Use this method re- peatedly so that it becomes automatic. No matter how disappoint- ing the setback or difficulty may be, you will soon be preprogrammed to learn the most from the situation and to extract every kernel of good that you can possibly get from it.

When you combine this method with mindstorming—forcing yourself to generate 20 answers to each question—you will be ab- solutely astonished at the number of great ideas and insights for growth and improvement you will come up with. These ideas will dramatically increase the speed at which you become one of the best in your field.

■ THE EDISON APPROACH

Thomas Edison, the greatest inventor of the modern age, was con- vinced that experimentation was simply a process of elimination. He therefore kept accurate records of every experiment. Once he had decided that an invention was possible, he dedicated himself to eliminating the ways that wouldn’t work until the only method left standing was the one way that would work. As a result, he became the greatest inventor of the modern age and one of the wealthiest businessmen in the country.You should do the same.

From now on, each time you try and fail, shrug it off as a learn- ing experience that just moved you one step closer to success. As Henry Ford once said, “Failure is merely an opportunity to more intel- ligently begin again.”

■ YOUR RECOVERY RATE

When you experience a disappointment of any kind, your natural reaction is to feel stunned emotionally.You feel as though you have