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“Now, here’s what I would like you to do. Make up your mind you are going to go back to school. Let that one thought dominate your thinking. Then think, really think, about how you can do it and still support your family. Come back in a couple of weeks and let me know what ideas you’ve come up with.”
Eliminate the word impossible from your thinking and speaking vocabularies. Impossible is a failure word. The thought “It’s impossible” sets off a chain reaction of other thoughts to prove you’re right.
95 percent will laugh at it) chances are he suffers from tradition paralysis. But the one in twenty who says, “That’s an interesting idea; tell me more about it,” has a mind that’s turned to creativity.
“How can I improve the quality of my performance? How can I do better?”
don’t simply wish more customers would shop in my store. Instead I ask myself, ‘What can I do to attract more customers?’ ‘How can I develop regular, loyal customers?’”
isn’t so much what you know when you start that matters. It’s what you learn and put to use after you open your doors that counts most.”
Big success calls for persons who continually set higher standards for themselves and others, persons who are searching for ways to increase efficiency, to get more output at lower cost, do more with less effort. Top success is reserved for the I-can-do-it-better kind of person.
Eagerly accept the opportunity to do more.
Next, concentrate on “How can I do more?”
Big people monopolize the listening. Small people monopolize the talking.
Top-level leaders in all walks of life spend much more time requesting advice than they do in giving it. Before a top man makes a decision, he asks, “How do you feel about it?” “What do you recommend?” “What would you do under these circumstances?” “How does this sound to you?”
The procedure for developing successful products is to get as much opinion as you can, listen to the people who will buy the product, and then design the product and its promotion to please these people.
Concentrate on what the other person says. Evaluate it.
Don’t let ideas escape. Write them down. Every day lots of good ideas are born only to die quickly because they aren’t nailed to paper.
An idea written or in some sort of picture or diagram form has many times more selling power than the idea presented only in oral form.
Others see in us what we see in ourselves. We receive the kind of treatment we think we deserve.
To be important, we must think we are important, really think so; then others will think so too.
Pay twice as much and buy half as many.
But think instead, I am important. I do have what it takes. I am a first-class performer. My work is important. Think this way, and you’re headed straight to success.
A person who thinks his job is important Receives mental signals on how to do his job better; And a better job means More promotions, more money, more prestige, more happiness.
how does one develop enthusiasm? The basic step is simple: Think enthusiastically. Build in yourself an optimistic, progressive glow, a feeling that “this is great and I’m 100 percent for it.”
You are what you think you are. Think more of yourself and there is more of you.
Cement in your mind the question “Is this the way an important person does it?” Use this question to make you a bigger, more successful person.
The mind reflects what its environment feeds it just as surely as the body reflects the food you feed it.
People who tell you it cannot be done almost always are unsuccessful people, are strictly average or mediocre at best in terms of accomplishment. The opinions of these people can be poison.
don’t let negative-thinking people—“negators”—destroy your plan to think yourself to success. Negators are everywhere, and they seem to delight in sabotaging the positive progress of others.
one evening after a long discussion with W. W. I grabbed hold of myself. It dawned on me that I was listening to the voice of failure. It seemed to me W. W. was talking more to convince himself than he was to convert me to his way of thinking. From then on I regarded W. W. as an object lesson, a sort of experimental guinea pig. Rather than buy what he said,
Be sure you’re in the flock that thinks right.
Ignore such negative thinkers in your midst. For often the remarks made in your direction aren’t so personal as you might at first think. They are merely a projection of the speaker’s own feeling of failure and discouragement.
Cling to people who think progressively. Move upward with them.
Do circulate in new groups.
Do select friends who stand above petty, unimportant things.
using verbal axes and grenades on another person doesn’t do one thing to make you a better you or me a better me.
it’s better to have fewer things and have quality than to have many things and have junk.
Get your advice from successful people.
Go first class in everything you do. You can’t afford to go any other way.
Grow the attitude of I’m activated. 2. Grow the attitude of You are important. 3. Grow the attitude of Service first.
To activate others, to get them to be enthusiastic, you must first be enthusiastic yourself.
To get enthusiastic, learn more about the thing you are not enthusiastic about.
Use the dig-into-it-deeper technique to develop enthusiasm toward other people.
To get enthusiasm about anything—people, places, things—dig into it deeper.
Broadcast good news about how you feel. Be an “I-feel-great” person. Just say “I feel great” at every possible opportunity, and you will feel better.
Whenever you leave a person, ask yourself, “Does that person honestly feel better because he has talked with me?” This self-training device works. Apply it when talking with employees, associates, your family, customers, even with casual acquaintances.
people do more for you when you make them feel important.
It pays to make “little” people feel like big people.
When you help others feel important, you help yourself feel important too.
Always give people more than they expect to get.
Excellent ideas are not enough. An only fair idea acted upon, and developed, is 100 percent better than a terrific idea that dies because it isn’t followed up.
But nothing man-made or man-designed is, or can be, absolutely perfect. So to wait for the perfect set of conditions is to wait forever.
The test of a successful person is not the ability to eliminate all problems before he takes action, but rather the ability to find solutions to difficulties when he encounters them.
