What I Don’t Want – Part 2

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Think about what you did yesterday. Think about the whole day, from start to finish, or think about today as you live it. That’s always a good thing to do, and remember that you’re actually living you’re not just sitting on a shelf, you’re not freeze-dried, your life doesn’t need to be microwaved to get it going. You remember the old joke “This can’t be my real life, because if it were, there would be a user’s manual”? Well, we’re making up that user’s manual as we go along.

WarholSo think about your day, yesterday or even today. Write down the things that happened that you didn’t like. It could be something you did, or somewhere you went, or even just something you felt. Maybe you didn’t call that friend you said you’d call back. Maybe you got mad at your neighbor because she lets her cats use your yard as their litter box. Maybe you were bored at your job. Maybe you didn’t spend time with your kids because you were tired. Maybe you ate too much or drank too much. Maybe you didn’t write down the things you didn’t like.

Which one, or which ones, of them have bugged you for a long time? Are there any of them that you can change? Can you go over and talk to that neighbor? Can you eat one less Twinkie or have one less drink? Can you take your lunch hour and get out of your office to do something fun and different? Maybe just for one day. When I say change, I just mean change–I don’t mean transform or erase or obliterate. Just give it a little twist, open up a window, crank it up or down a notch. See what happens.

What I’m saying is that I want you to look for ways you can take control of your life. I want you to begin to see and feel and taste that you can be in control of your life. You can start with small things and see how it goes, because you’re going to get there – you’re going to get to a place where you can control your destiny. You can change the places, spaces, and faces that are in your life. And if they’re in your way, if they are keeping you from living a full life, then you need to.

Now we’ll do something that may be even more important. For the things in your life that you can’t change, write down why you can’t. The reasons may be outside you, or they may be inside you. Or maybe you can’t tell exactly why you can’t change something; you just think or know or fear that you can’t. We’ll get back to those. In fact, nothing you do for this book, which is really for yourself, is wasted.

Now, I’ve tried this, and I know that it can get a little depressing just to think about all the things you don’t like about your life, even when they’re not your fault. More important, saying what you don’t want with your life doesn’t get you any further along the road to what you do want. So while you were writing down the things you didn’t like about your day, you might have thought of some things you really did like. That’s great. Write those down as well, and put a box around them and add a little star or two. As you write down the things you don’t want, the things you do want will become ever more clear to you. Try reversing the previous list to see if your core desires are now more obvious to you. Your list may now read:

I want to look good.

I want to work at a job that satisfies me.

I want to have time to see friends and learn new things.

I want to be financially secure so that I can provide what my family and I need and like.

I want to exercise more.

I want to buy a boat.

I want to be able to tell my wife what I think.

Now pick one of those wants-maybe not the most important one-to begin with. Ask yourself if you’re willing to change your life in order to make it come true. When you answer yes to one of them, circle it. We’ll come back to that too.

The more you think about your life, about what makes you content or satisfied or gratified, the more you will think about the larger purpose and meaning of your life. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these things and helping other people to think about them. I’ve found that I want to live by design to my God-given purpose; I want to fulfill my purpose for being on earth.

 

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What I Don’t Want – Part 1

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When you sit down to order a meal, you first decide – probably without even thinking about it – what you don’t want to eat. If you’re there at 9:00 A.M., you probably skip the roast beef dinner. If it’s dinnertime, you probably won’t be satisfied with tea and toast. But that decision has to be what you want, and what will give you the energy you need. If you’ve been working hard since four in the morning, you’ll want something hearty. Just don’t be like Jack, who didn’t even really order. If you keep doing things as you’ve always done them, what you’ll get is what you’ve already got.

Just stop for five minutes and dream with me. We’re going to have a wonderful dream together, and it’s going to be about you. Dream about feeling that you have an abundance of life all around you and in you. You are doing work that satisfies you, stretches you, and fulfills you. You wake up in the morning with an excitement in you – you’re already planning how you are going to spend the day, because it’s just a joy to think about.

You have a glide in your stride and a skip in your step all day because you have satisfaction, you have rewards, you have work that is good for you. Maybe it’s because of money, or maybe it’s because of love, but more likely those things are what happens after you have started living your utmost life.

I don’t know about you, but I am convinced that you can have that dream-if you are willing to do the work. Attracting the life you want by thinking the right thoughts might sound easy, but it won’t happen unless you make it happen. And I believe that you will start to see a difference almost immediately – if you are willing to do the work. Some of it will be hard, but most of it will be absorbing. After all, it’s all about you.

CHALLENGE: You may find it easier to make a list of what you don’t want before you can clearly see your heart’s desires. To help bring your core desires into focus, make a list of what you don’t want to swallow anymore. Finish the sentence: I don’t want …

I don’t want to be fat.

I don’t want to wake up feeling like I don’t want to get out of bed.

I don’t want to feel the rest of the world is enjoying what I don’t have.

I don’t want to work at this job I don’t care about.

I don’t want to always be. Denying myself things and experiences just because I don’t have the time.

I don’t want to be too out of shape to enjoy playing ball with my kids.

I don’t want to meet men only in bars.

I don’t want to argue with my wife every time we talk about money.

 

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Faith in the Possibility

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FaithFaith is the bedrock that makes all the other things not just possible but inevitable. Acknowledging that God has created you in order for you to succeed brings contentment. Accepting that he has made you a promise, given you a promise, allows you to trust that even the time of your life that you spend on the left has a purpose and a meaning. You may bend, but you will not break. It is easier to have confidence in ourselves when we have confidence in God’s power and love for us.

The story of Noah tells us how faith can take us beyond our five senses. Noah was nearing the end of his life when the Lord called him.

He didn’t want to start an immense new project; he wanted to collect himself and tie things up for the next life. He couldn’t imagine that it would rain so much that the earth would be drowned. He didn’t know how to build an ark. But by committing himself, by entrusting himself to God, he saved himself, his family, and all the creatures of the earth.

This story is telling us a couple of things. One is that if you commit to your God idea, things will happen to you that will astonish you. No matter what you can imagine, God will put you in charge of a project that you couldn’t have ever imagined before. It will be so big that it seems ridiculous. Can you imagine Noah going into the Home Depot of his day and asking for thousands of board feet of lumber? And he was building this boat in the middle of dry land. Not only that, he didn’t really feel like doing it, and nobody was there to help him. But despite all the evidence of his eyes and ears, he trusted in the Lord and committed himself to the project. He worked at it every day, and he kept working because he had a cause that was bigger than himself, even bigger than his family. There must be success beyond ourselves or we will be no more than ourselves. I’ve said that if you don’t change, you’ll never be more than you are now. It’s also true that if you don’t get beyond yourself, you’ll never be more than who you are.

Noah didn’t stop and worry about whether he was doing the right thing, he didn’t doubt that his project was a worthy one, he didn’t wonder if he was just wasting his time. Understanding that God has made a plan for you-for your own good-makes it easier to get off your own back. What you think of as a weakness may be a special kind of strength that He has given you. Your job is to find a use for it. You may disappoint yourself, but if you accept that even the disappointment is part of God’s purpose, you see that it is a challenge that he has given you to overcome.

CHALLENGE: Take a minute and think about whether or not you believe in the possibility of something more…something bigger than you…something bigger than where you are at today. Sometimes we don’t see the possibility and have to remind ourselves that is there. “I believe in the possibility that things will get better. I believe in the possibility that I am a called to do more than what I’ve done so far. I believe in the possibility that I can begin today.” Faith in the possibility is of utmost importance. It’s not faith in what you know you are sure of (that’s not faith), its faith in the possibility there could be more…more that you can see right now.

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You’re a Wonder

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I probably have my mother to thank for making me take responsibility for finding that better reality. She wouldn’t let me make excuses for myself. She tried to teach me there was more to life than sports and dancing. She made me scrub the floors at Winchell’s after her late shift. She said to me, “Don’t do half a job.” I learned the discipline of doing things all the way, no matter what challenges presented themselves.

Whatever we want to do, there are almost always obstacles we have to overcome. They may be external, such as a lack of money or physically being in the wrong place. You can’t train horses in Antarctica. If you’re seven-foot two, you’re not going to be a jockey. You may have family responsibilities that you can’t shirk. You may need to learn a new skill, reach out to new people, or otherwise change the way you live your life. The obstacles may be internal-old habits, old rules that have been passed down, a lack of self-confidence, fear.

Whatever they are, they’re not adding to your life, they are adding to your drag. You’re dragging around all this extra weight. You’re not who you really are, you’re that person plus all that other weight. In the years after my father died, I carried around a lot of weight. I wasn’t doing well in school, my father was gone, and my family was searching for a center. It was a long time before things started to get better.

I had difficulty with reading and writing, so I was labeled a “troubled student.” That was the label they put on me, even when they didn’t say those words to my face. That label determined how I was looked at, how people treated me, and even how I felt about mysel£ That label became my image. The dictionary defines image as “the opinion or concept of something that is held by the public,” or “the character projected to the public.” I picked up that label, put it on my forehead, and wore it all over that school. I was the class clown, I didn’t pay attention in school, I didn’t make any efforts with my schoolwork.

I had to find out how to get beyond this world of setbacks, to tear off those labels. And I did, but I didn’t do it alone. It happened because of some things I chose, and it happened because of some things that chose me. One of the things that chose me was Mr. Probert.

Mr. Probert was one of my teachers, and a funny guy. He looked and acted a little like Mr. Rogers. Even down to the sweaters. He’d come into class, take his sweater off, fold it up, and put it in a plastic bag, like he was working at Brooks Brothers. But he wouldn’t accept my label. He told me I should work harder, because I was better than I thought. He saw the best in me, not the label on me. He argued with me a lot, and in the end he won. He convinced me that I had value. Mr. Probert saved my soul.

I realize now that Mr. Probert saw me from a God’s-eye view. I don’t know if he would say it that way, and you don’t have to say it that way, but you can see it that way no matter how you say it. I didn’t have to show Mr. Probert anything. I didn’t have to turn somersaults, do math problems, or show him my Superman suit. He just knew it was there.

And I’ve learned that it’s there in everyone. Some of you may think that doing something wonderful is beyond you. You’re too young, you’re too poor, you’re too dumb, you’re too shy. And all those may be true all at once. That doesn’t mean you aren’t a wonder.

 

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Focus on the Real Problem

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The first step in getting over your setback is to regain your focus. Get out of that setback mentality. Tune back into the Anything Is Possible Network and think about where you want to go and why you want to get there. Remember what you were aiming for and why. Look at what happened, accept it, and evaluate it. Don’t pass sentence on yoursel£ Pass sentence on what happened. Figure out what you could have done better or how you could have avoided the problem.

DinerMaybe you needed to learn something more about your goal or about the company or the people around you. Maybe you needed to talk to someone else, to find a mentor who can help you. Ask him or her if your problem has ever happened to anyone else, and if so, how that person fixed it. Maybe it was just bad luck or bad timing. If so, vow that you will keep trying until you have good luck or until you make your luck good. You’ll keep trying until the timing is good or until your timing is good.

Be honest with yourself, or ask others to be honest with you. Nobody gets it right the first time or even the second time. No, it’s not fair. But it’s life-learning.

The second arrow in your quiver is our old friend, imagination. Take some time to get your feet back under you and feel the excitement of your dream. One thing that failure does is to teach you new ways to use your imagination. When you were setting goals for yourself, preparing yourself for success, you took the time to envision what it would be like when you succeeded. You imagined what it would look like, what it would feel like, what it would taste like. Now you have to do the same thing with opposition. Facing opposition, expecting opposition, and dealing with opposition are key steps to achieving success. You have to replace your setback mentality with a step-back mentality.

When you’ve experienced a setback, you have been given a new ingredient for your success. Once you change what went wrong, once you adjust either your behavior or your attitude, then you’ve firmed up the ground you stand on.

When things were going right, you didn’t want to think about what it would feel like if they went left. You didn’t want to get back to that place where things weren’t going your way. But one of the things to learn on our path to success is never to avoid thinking about the hard times, about failure, about making mistakes, about being alone. Psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers says, “The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top.” An inevitable part. Readjust your vision of the fut~re to include failure. Just don’t let your subconscious hear that. Say to yourself, “Life will teach me lessons, sometimes in disguise. It’s up to me to discover their real shape.” It takes courage to face that fact, but once you do, you’ll be better off.

Next, take another helping of persistence. Did you imagine that everything would go your way the first time? Were you reading the Cliff’s Notes version of your life? Thomas Edison said that he tried more than a thousand different experiments before he made the lightbulb work. But he didn’t describe them as a thousand failures-he said simply, “I took a thousand steps.” If Edison had stopped after 999 experiments and just given up, he wouldn’t have changed the world.

You will make mistakes as you’re trying to accomplish your goal. You’ll slip a Twinkie into your diet or sneak a cigarette. You’ll make a proposal that is dismissed with a sneer. But as long as you learn from whatever happens, you’ve taken a step forward. You might have to learn 999 new things to reach your goal, the way Edison did, but each new idea, each new approach brought him one step closer to his goal. The important thing is not to stop. I couldn’t get into the Peace Corps, but I didn’t stop there. I investigated and navigated until I found the place I needed to be.

CHALLENGE: Make a plan to refocus today. Think about where you want to be. Write down these three words and put them somewhere you will see them all day…FOCUS, IMAGINE, PERSISTENCE.

 

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