The One Degree Difference

Imagine an airplane being off course by only one degree. If this goes uncorrected, over long a long distance of say a few thousand kilometers, it could end up in a different country ! In the same way, much of what we do everyday, little as it may appear, will eventually have a great impact on the overall outcome of our lives.

On the positive side, making little improvements in our daily actions will eventually lead to significant result over time. A friend of mine once said that if we want to start jogging, all we need to do on the first day is to just wear the jogging shoes. Yes you are right, just wear them ! You do not have to go out jogging (of course, some of you will end up jogging because it would surely feel stupid just to watch TV in your jogging shoes). Then on the second day, just take five minutes to jog around the house. That's it. The next day add five more minutes and continue adding the time and distance as you go along daily. Pretty soon you will end up jogging full scale with the rest of the joggers you only watched passing by you everyday. The secret is to start small but consistently pursuing your goals by taking actions. I know so many people who started like this but are running marathons whenever they is one organized.

On the other hand, this is also how bad habits can start. As an example, ask any smoker how they started smoking. None will tell you they start smoking one pack of cigarettes per day from day one they tried cigarettes. They all start having one or two but work their way up to half a pack and pretty soon, without even realizing exactly when, they join the smokers circle full scale and even able to 'recruit' new members !

According to psychologists, if you do something continuously for twenty one days, it will become a habit. A permanent behavior pattern as psychologists would call it. As such, to marry these these two concepts,if you want to start a new habit, or master a new skill, all you need to do is to start small at first then gradually move up consistently for twenty one days. Once it has become a permanent behavior pattern, you will be on your way to mastery. This is because when an action has become a habit, it will be very difficult to stop. Once you continue doing something beyond the twenty one days, your habit will lead you to mastery.The old adage practice makes perfect comes to mind here.

Although this sound simple, there are a few things that you must be conscious of so that the one degree difference that you take on your lives do make an impact. The first is to have proper knowledge before practicing the new skill. To borrow a maxim from the golfing world, 'practice makes permanent'. Practicing the wrong swing will only make it difficult for you to correct later once it has become a permanent behavior pattern. As such, seek the right knowledge before starting anything new so that you do not have to struggle with corrections later when you are too deep into the new set of behaviors. Read at least a few articles before making changes because it might be too costly or even frustrating to reverse your behavior later. This is true either for starting something good or stopping from something bad . Do you know there are people who exercise a lot but do not get the desired result ? I am sure you have heard of body builders who died of heart attacks. That's the point I am trying to make here. Without the correct knowledge, even the effort of doing something good will produce not only undesired but in some cases the opposite outcome !

Apart from having the correct knowledge, it is also important for you to have a coach. This is so because most of time, as humans, it is not easy to spot and correct our own mistakes. It takes another person to easily notice and suggest improvements. As humans we also need the much needed encouragement to keep us going. so choose one we are comfortable working with and just take his feedback with an open mind. I find the most difficult part of having a coach is to decide at which point to 'surrender' completely to his knowledge. Sometimes, his methods can go against the knowledge you have gained from your readings. So, before getting a coach, do have a chit chat to find out if both of you are compatible because trust is the key here. If you do not trust your coach, your efforts can be as counter-productve as not having the correct knowledge.

Once you have these two areas sorted out, all you need to do is to make that little improvements, daily, consistently and continuously, and pretty soon you will start to enjoy different results in your lives !

How Friends Affect Your Success

Humans are created as social beings. Most of us accumulate friends and acquaintances as we go through our lives. Some friendships last and some do not. However, do you realize the quality of your friends and acquaintances influence or even sometimes determine the quality of your your success (or even failure) ?

Without this realization, sometimes people just let friends come into their lives and unknowingly allow them to shape their behavior, character and even destiny ! Of course you cannot be judgmental on people who want to become your friends. However, you have to have a certain level of control of who and what you should allow into your world because they do affect your level of success. So, while sometimes you do not want to be too choosy of who should be your friends, you should draw lines where your friends can influence you and make this clear to them very early in the friendship.

Let us see how much friends can influence us. Take the example of two people who exercise together. One goes to the gym with friends and the other person exercises alone. I am certain you will agree with me if I say that the person at the gym will be more easily motivated. Furthermore, for him, exercise can even be fun because he is doing it with friends. Not only that, they can also advise each other by comparing notes of their knowledge and experience. Of course the outcome of their exercise will determine a lot on the quality of the knowledge and experience they exchange. However, the likelihood of them doing well is a lot higher because they have a bigger pool of knowledge and experience.

When you compare to the person who exercises alone, he most likely will have a hard time to motivate himself and more likely to even give up. Of course there those special individuals who can be successful at this alone but these individuals are rare. Most people need the encouragement and support to go forward with major efforts like exercising, taking care of our health and nutrition, going into business etc. Unless you are a highly goal driven individual, you will need people around you to give you the right push to go forward.

As I have mentioned earlier, the quality of outcome depends on the quality of knowledge and experience of your friends'. This is the reason you must choose your friends. Underachievers will at best give you advice and opinion that are consistent with their mediocrity. Of course, your highly driven and energetic performers will give suggestions within the realm of their thinking patterns, habits as well as beliefs. There is no doubt that they will impact the quality of outcome, either way.

Conversely, I am sure you have seen or heard friends who tried to discourage you from doing good things. There is a simple explanation for this phenomenon. We all like the familiar. We know and have learnt to deal with the familiar and resist changes even though sometimes we know the change is for the better. When a friend is making changes you will need to deal with something new. You will naturally fear not being able to deal with this 'new development' that will certainly upset the status quo. The bigger the change the more the fear and the harder you will resist. As such you will naturally, try to achieve balance by ensuring this change does not occur even if it means stopping your friend's progress. I must add, most of the time, this happens at the unconscious level, and our friend does not even realize he is trying to stop your personal growth.

The worst thing about this is, mediocre people will most likely introduce you to other average performers (or if you are really not careful even losers). If one person can influence your outcome, imagine the effect of say ten people on your life. On the flip side, the good news is success will attract success. So, if you choose high achievers as you inner circle of friends, the quality of your outcome will tremendously skyrocket. They will not only inspire you, but also give quality advise and best of all introduce you to other people of the same caliber. So how do you create this kind of quality circle ? Easy, start with one person you know who is a high achiever. Then start to model his habits and behaviors. Needless to say, when he likes you, access to his circle of friends will be a matter of fact you can take for granted. From my personal experience as well as those high performers I have came across with, within weeks or months, you will start to experience different outcomes in your life.

So what do you do with "bad" friends ? Well, the choice is all yours. If they are truly your friends, giving them a helping hand should be expected you you once you have raised the standard of your life. Surely it is not you job to change them if they resist. The best you can do for them is to still have them as friends but not as part your inner circle of people who will chart you future.

Remember, you are actually the sum total of the expectations, experiences, knowledge and habits of the people around you. They can be your ally in achieving your objectives or your biggest enemies guarding your gate to success vigilantly.

The Law of 10,000 Hours

A recent study on human performance by British Scientist revealed that it takes 10,000 hours of practice for a person to become an ace in any field. The study was done at Berlin's Academy of Music by observing violinists who started as young as five years old. They started practicing between 2 or 3 hours a week and later increased the time they spent as time went by.

The discovery also showed that the practice must be focused, systematic, and done with the proper techniques. This actually makes perfect sense because in the golfing world there is a maxim that goes "practice makes permanent" as opposed the the one we are more familiar with, "practice makes perfect". It will actually be counter productive to practice the wrong thing and make it perfect because once the skill becomes automatic, it will be almost impossible to reverse.

Neurologist Daniel Levitin explained in a BBC science magazine Focus, "It seems it takes the brain this long to assimilate all it needs to know to achieve true mastery”. Top performers, according to this study, performed brilliantly after they have completed their 10,000 hours compared to those who have only touched 8000 hours.

Actually, humans are designed to achieve mastery through practice. If you look at all the natural skill you had to acquire like walking, talking and even eating, all takes practice for you to reach mastery. It is also interesting to note that once mastery is reached it is difficult to reverse. As an example, try to purposely take a fall. I mean really fall hard like you did when you learnt to walk. Or if you are more adventurous, try to take a fall riding a bicycle on purpose in the same manner. In my attempts, I experienced a sort of self-correcting autopilot mechanism kicking in to prevent me from falling no matter how hard I tried.

The insight form this study actually enables you to actually predict what you will be in the future. Just by look at what you are doing now, multiply that by 10,000 hours and you will know what you will be good at the end of the 10,000 hours. If you engage yourselves in activities that are going to impact you positively, 10,000 hours from today, you can can be assured of the result. In addition, this is talking about mastery level and performing brilliantly.

On the flipside, if you do nothing to improve your lives, and keep on doing that, you will also be brilliantly average !

I like it when Gary Player, one of the best golfers in this century, replied when people said he is always lucky to be able to get out of the bunker all the time, “the harder I work the luckier I get”. So you see that mediocre performers look at success as luck while top performers view success as nothing but sheer hard work.

So the next time you look as someone doing something well and it looks so easy, the question to ask is not how does he get to be so lucky to that so well while you cannot. Rather ask and imagine the commitment and pain that he has to go through to gain that level of mastery.

So, today, decide on what you want to master and perform brilliantly. Find a good coach and go at it for 10,000 hours and, as Zig Ziglar, one of the worlds best salesman and performance in the world would say it “see you at the top”.

Thinking Patterns of Successful People Vs Failures

The Thinking Patterns of Successful People Vs. the Failures

Do you know that most of the time the only difference between successful people and failures is in how they think ? In my line of work as a training consultant, I find this to be true all the time. One of the most obvious difference in thinking between successful people and failures is successful people do not make or take excuses in their thinking. They focus their thinking in doing and finding ways to implement worthwhile ideas. They focus more on how to make things work rather than finding blames on why things fail. Failures on the other hand will focus on their inabilities and focus their attention on the different excuses they can find to justify why an idea cannot be implemented. Result is the dependent on attention. What we focus on gets expanded. As such when we focus on excuses and failures in our lives, that will be the outcome of our lives.

In contrast, the mindset of successful people is always saying to themselves that the solution to a problem is not there yet because they have not tried enough. Failures always think they have tried too much. In fact some failures even has rules about how many times they should try something. After that their brains will go into a massive block and then it will issue the instructions give up. When this happens repeatedly, it will become an autopilot reaction. Imagine some people master the art of trying and never giving up while some refine the skill of making excuses and even turn it into an art form !

On the other hand, successful people always challenge themselves to try new methods all the time. When faced with an undesired outcome, they will find different ways of doing things. In fact, even if they cannot get the result, they take the attitude that the solution is there, only they are not seeing it. Other people might come along and see the solution and they will respect that and go along to solve the problem. Failures on the other hand takes a mysteriously different approach. In that situation many of them becomes too proud to even acknowledge, let alone accept the solution.

Think of how many solutions to problems has gone by in many big corporations simply because management do not want to accept solutions from their subordinates. In my experience as a training consultant, I have seen many situations where good solutions gets ignored because management do not want to recognize the staff (ironicaly, these are people they hire and keep on paying every month !). To top that, in some situations, they even blame their staff of not being creative !

So, the next time we try to do something new or solve a new problem, always ask ourselves weather we are using the thinking patterns of the successful or otherwise . Once we detect a flaw in our thinking, immediately break that pattern and start to think in the opposite direction. When this happens you will start to see new options and different routes to interesting possibilities. Just because we cannot solve the problem does not mean there are no solutions. In fact, if we only look around us, things that are commonplace like the radio, television, airplanes, electricity to name but a few are all products that comes into reality because some one thought that they are possible and keep on trying to find solutions when others gave up. They were all impossibilities to those who gave up on those ideas.

Building Self Confidence With Words (1)

"You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you." James Allen.

Often people think that there are those who are naturally confident and those who has to struggle in this area. In this article series I will discuss three methods to create self confidence.

Method one is by using words. Yes it is that easy, words ! We actually take word for granted because we have used them all our lives without realizing how powerful words affect us. Words start and end wars ! Words can actually affect how we think and feel. And because humans are generally emotional beings first, how we feel will have a direct impact on how we act and that will influence the outcome of all our efforts. In my mind, the two main ways we use words can be divided internally and externally.

Internally, the choice of words we have when we are faced with challenges, for instance, will greatly have an influence on how we think and feel. If we say " my God, I will die", when given a task to present for example, then that will weaken us and thus whatever effort we produce later will parallel those words. On the other hand if we say, "...great, here comes an opportunity to expand and increase my skill", then the efforts that follows will definitely have a better outcome !

As such, be careful when choosing words in your minds. In effect, every moment of our waking lives as humans we run monologues in our minds. The quality of that monologue will significantly affect the quality of our actions and therefore our outcomes. No wonder some people are more energetic than others and some are more motivated than others.

Further than that, this concept leads us to the idea that we can largely control the outcome of our efforts. If we do not like any outcome presented to us, then change the internal scripts and pretty soon we will get a different result. This is because we can control the words we want to allow as our dominant thought. Afterall we are what we think of all day long. To quote Tyron Edwards, Thoughts lead on to purposes; purposes go forth in action; actions form habits; habits decide character; and character fixes our destiny.

Among sources of words that we allow into our thought, thus our realm, are songs, conversation with other people, the newspaper, the internet, the television, the radio and a myriad of medium that we use in this modern day and age. I suggest if we want to control how we feel and think we must choose what we hear and watch and read everyday. This is active scanning of the media so that we do not passively allow everything presented before us to enter our minds and effect us. We must treat our minds like a garden by choosing the plants to grow and keep while getting rid of weeds continously.

Napoleon Hill said it best to summarize this point when he said "You are searching for the magic key that will unlock the door to the source of power; and yet you have the key in your own hands, and you may use it the moment you learn to control your thoughts".So the next time you think, be aware of the words you use. Analyze them and change accordingly if you find that you are using words that weaken instead of empower you.

Externally, how we use words on others will also affect how we interact with others. Externally, how we use words on others will also affect how we interact with others. Sir Arthur quipped, “Wise sayings often fall on barren ground; but a kind word is never thrown away." We will remember kind words for very long time. In fact I do remember some of the kindest words said to me more that 30 years ago ! Imagine how deep words can effect others. it goes without saying that if we want to positively improve our relationship with others, we need to start looking at our connection at the word level and then work our way up.

My personal favorite words from the wise.

Empty heads have long tongues – Bruce Lee

Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something. – Plato

Language has three important uses--it expresses thought, conceals thought, and takes the place of thought. –Unknown

The words we say will teach if we practice what we preach. --Unknown

By swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach. --Winston Churchill

When you are arguing with a fool, make sure he isn't doing the same thing. —Unknown

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment. --Dorothy Nevill

Great minds talk about ideas, Average minds talk about things, Small minds talk about other people. --Unknown

Kind words do not cost much. They never blister the tongue or lips. They make other people good-natured. They also produce their own image on men's souls, and a beautiful image it is. --Blaise Pascal

The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking. ~Albert Einstein

What luck for rulers, that men do not think. ~Adolph Hitler


For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while. ~Luther Burbank