One of Murphy‘s Laws is that, —Before you do anything, you have to do something else first.“ Because success is so rare, there are many principles you must learn if you want to achieve it and keep it, but the one thing you have to do first is to take complete control of yourself and your life.
Becoming a money magnet requires the development of self-mastery, self-control, and self-discipline. Taking charge of yourself, your appetites and behaviors, is essential for anyone who wants to achieve greatly. And control over your thoughts is the hardest exercise in self-mastery that you will ever engage in.
Here is an exercise for you. Answer the question, —What are your three most important goals in life, right now?“ You should be able to write the answers to this —quick list“ in about thirty seconds.
Here is the test: Resolve to think and talk about only these three goals, and how you might attain them, for the next twenty-four hours. Refuse to think or talk about things you don‘t want. Keep bringing your mind back to your goals whenever it starts to drift.
This exercise will be very revealing. Far from keeping your mind on what you want, and off of what you don‘t want, for 24 hours, you will not be able to do it for 24 minutes. This exercise will demonstrate to you how hard it is to control your thinking, and keep it focused. It will show you what you are really made of. It will make it clear to you why so few people succeed or fulfill their potential at anything. You will find, at least initially, that keeping your mind on what you want is like trying to control a car on a winding road with no steering wheel.
The good news is that focus and concentration are learnable skills. They are habits you can develop with willpower and practice, and they enable you to develop even greater willpower in the future. Self-mastery is hard at first, but with practice, you can reach the point where you can keep your thinking on your goals and desires most of the time.
Once you have taken control of your thinking, you can then take control of your actions. If you can master yourself and discipline yourself to pay the price of success in advance, you must eventually succeed. As Zig Ziglar says, —If you are hard on yourself, life will be easy on you. But if you insist on being easy on yourself, life is going to be very hard on you.“ Everything counts. You must resolve, here and now, to fill your mind only with thoughts consistent with your desires, and simultaneously keep your mind off your doubts and fears
