When It Comes To Setting Goals, Get Real by Bob Bly

Napoleon Hill famously wrote: "Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve."

Earl Nightingale similarly said, "We become what we think about."

This is the biggest load of horse hooey since the Law of Attraction.

Just because you want something doesn't mean you can have or do it.

For instance, today I will start conceiving and believing that I will replace Jeter as the next Yankees captain.

I'll let you know how that goes.

I think NYU professor Tamsin Shaw sees things much more clearly than Hill or Nightingale.

In the New York Review of Books (10/9/14, p. 4), she writes that what we do and become is largely guided by "our internal dispositions and talents, our inborn nature."

In other words, we achieve in areas we are good at, like, and have a natural aptitude and talent for.

The people I know who are successful all pursued activities that they were naturally inclined to do and enjoyed.

Instead of just wishing, believing, and conceiving, ask yourself: what do you like? What are you good at? What do other people say you do well?

And most important of all, what do you absolutely love to do more than anything else?

Next to my family, the greatest plus in my life is that I have a job—writing—that I absolutely love.

I am not the best writer in the world. Far from it. But every day, I work to be the best writer I can be. And it pleases enough people that I make a very handsome living from my writing.

My poor dad lived in the purgatory of having a job he hated. I designed my life so I would not have to do that, though I admired the sacrifice he made to provide for his family.

Fortunately, dad got pleasure not from work but elsewhere: his family, friends, and many hobbies, including bowling, poker, tennis, fishing, and collecting coins and stamps.

Loving work as I do, I do put my family first, but friends are peripheral (my most active friendships are with peers in my profession; personal friends I rarely see) and I never developed any hobbies, because I agree with Noel Coward who said: "Work is more fun than fun."


Bob Bly is the author of "World's Best Copywriting Secrets" and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him "America's top copywriter".

Brendon's invite

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It's about the 8 reasons people fail, and how to accelerate faster in achieving your goals and potential.

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Brendon Burchard's 5 steps to gaining greater confidence

1. Decide to have it. Make it an intention. You don't need to achieve anything more, you simply need to decide to feel and generate confidence on a more consistent and conscious basis.

2. Live with integrity for who you are and what you believe. When you are being fully alive and authentic and true to yourself, you feel confident.

3. Get more competent. Go gather more knowledge, skill, and abilities in the areas that you are passionate about and need to perform well in. More competence = more confidence.

4. Get momentum. Take more action. Life isn't about perfection it's about progress. The more action you take the more progress you'll sense and the more confident you'll feel that you are on path.

5. Surround yourself with positive, supportive people. If you don't have a supportive community, go create one. No excuses. A positive peer set will help you feel more confident.

The most important success secret in the world

The most important success secret in the world is that you can make a great living and live a happy life by doing something you are good at and passionate about.

Says psychologist Dr. Richard Reichel: "No one is good at everything, but everyone is good at something. In order to get what you want in life, you simply need to do what you're good at."

The secret to winning arguments: stop arguing!

There's an old saying that's very true: if you win the argument you lose the sale. Yes, you feel passionately about your product or service, and your potential customer has said something completely ridiculous.

But, warns superstar entrepreneur Gurbaksh Chahal, it doesn't serve any useful purpose to get into an argument about it. "Sometimes, I have to bite my tongue," he says. "But, I never lose my cool. I try to educate, I remain calm and never argue or become controversial. Keep it light. Another approach is to move on to discuss an area where you can agree on something."

Source, Early to Rise, 4/17/14

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Can anyone learn to be a genius?

This awesome question was asked in Quora and I think more people deserve to read about it, so I reprint here: What patterns can be observed in the way geniuses think and behave?

Satvik Beri:

Here are a few patterns I've seen among the smartest people I've met (primarily professors or graduate students). Not saying that these are replicable, or that doing so will make you a genius, just that these patterns seem to exist:

1. They're extremely talented at going up and down levels of abstraction. Geniuses tend to be able to fit seemingly unrelated facts into the big picture almost instantly, and drill down to any level of detail. On a related note, when learning they tend to learn at every level of abstraction at once, rather than simply building from the bottom up or top down like most people.

2. They make a lot of assumptions. This may seem counterintuitive-we've often heard that creative thinking requires breaking existing assumptions. And this may be true, but it seems like geniuses tend to make a lot of assumptions very quickly, test their hypotheses, and then change their assumptions very slowly if it's necessary.

3. They come up with unique ways to compress information. A smart person might see a difficult Mathematical theorem as a connection of ten steps, whereas a genius might visualize it and see it all as one picture.

4. They separate emotion or external thoughts from their thinking. At least in science, geniuses tend to never attach any external meaning to their thoughts-as an example, they could think about how to efficiently invade a country or release a horrible weapon without feeling phased by the image of the devastation that would involve. Similarly, they can often focus on their work no matter what they're going through-whether it's loud noises or personal trauma.

5. They connect seemingly unrelated things. A genius will frequently follow a T-shaped model of learning: be an expert on one things and dabble in a lot. They will frequently get inspired by or make connections between things that are unrelated to their main research.