“Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.“
– Richard Bach

“This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst then be false to any man.“
– William Shakespeare

I believe that the path to true personal greatness can be found through the use of a personal journal. Remember that you will never be as successful as you will be to your own self, and the journal can enlighten you in more ways in this area than you would have ever thought possible. Many great successful men and women have kept personal journals.

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“There are many who are living far below their possibilities because they are continually handing over their individualities to others. Do you want to be a power in the world? Then be yourself. Be true to the highest within your soul and allow yourself to be governed by no customs or conventionalities or arbitrary man-​​made rules that are not founded on principle.“
– Ralph Waldo Trine

“Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.“
– Miguel de Cervantes

In everything you do or want to do in life, you are always governed by law and not by chance. Natural laws are principles or explanations of why things are the way they are. Principles defined by Webster are “fundamental laws or facts of nature.” Out of the many you have read or will read about in this book, there is one, however, that is the foundational principle to all success.

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“In addition to self-​​awareness, imagination and conscience, it is the fourth human endowment, independent will, that really makes effective self-​​management possible. It is the ability to make decisions and choices and to act in accordance with them. It is the ability to act rather than to be acted upon, to proactively carry out the program we have developed through the other three endowments. Empowerment comes from learning how to use this great endowment in the decisions we make every day.“
– Stephen Covey

“Motivation,” the author of The Psychology Of Winning Dr. Dennis Waitley wrote, “comes from within and not from without; all motivation is self-​​motivation.” You can not find motivation outside of you but can develop motivation inside of you. Oftentimes, it is sleeping within you. People can get pepped up, enthused, encouraged, or even inspired by others, but they can never get motivated by them.

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“Try not to become a man of success, but to become a man of value.“
– Albert Einstein (1879–1955)

“When your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier.“
– Roy Disney

People say “change your attitudes” or “have a positive attitude,” but I don’t agree since attitudes can not be changed. They are results and not causes. They are byproducts of your innermost convictions. They are reflections of your deepest values. You can’t just change them on a whim because your outside is but a mirror reflection of your inside.

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“Do not measure your life by your goals but what you are actually doing to achieve them.“
– Peter Drucker

“The ultimate goal of life is death — the experience of life is where the value is, not the results we achieve.“
– Anonymous

When people refer to productiveness, they usually refer to “busy-​​ness.” Positive productivity, on the other hand, is the result of doing what’s important and will hinge greatly on how well you adhere to this process of alignment. Alignment can also help you to discover not only what you need to do but also provide you with shortcuts as well.

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“Strong lives are motivated by dynamic purposes.“
– Kenneth Hildebrand

While statistics prove that 90% of heart attacks happen on Monday mornings, it goes to show that motivation doesn’t come from work. In reality, most people find themselves working in jobs they hate.

Some wake up in the morning feeling lethargic and hit the snooze button one too many times. Some work only “for the weekend” and take more time to prepare their vacations than they do their own lives. And some who become “workaholics” end up working themselves either out of a job or into a grave. In short, getting motivated by one’s work is impossible. In fact, getting motivated by anything outside of oneself is impossible.

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“Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one’s better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk — and to act.“
– Maxwell Maltz

Realize that whatever you choose to focus on affects your quality of life, or what Zig Ziglar calls your “standard of life,” and not just your standard of living. For instance, if you focus on the future by setting goals, you may be forcing yourself to remain in your comfort-​​zone and probably without ever knowing how far you can really go.

Jim Rohn said, “To know how far we can go is to risk going too far.” To reach your potential therefore, you will unquestionably need to confront risks. They are inevitable. They are unavoidable. You simply have to take them if you want your successfulness to manifest, and there’s no way of tiptoeing around it.

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