No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline by Brian Tracy Read Free Book Online
Authors: Brian Tracy
you are in a situation today in which you are not living up to your highest values, make a decision, this very minute, to confront the situation and straighten it out. The minute you do, you will once again feel happy and back in control.
There is an old Indian story: “On my shoulders are two wolves. One is a black wolf, evil, who continually tempts me to do and say the wrong things. On my other shoulder is a white wolf that continually encourages me to live up to my very best.”
A listener asked the old man, “Which of these wolves has the greatest power over you?”
The old man replied, “The one I feed.”
By the Law of Concentration, whatever you dwell on grows and increases in your life. When you think and talk about the virtues and values that you most admire and respect, you therefore program those values deeper and deeper into your subconscious until they begin to operate automatically in every situation.
Whenever you exercise your self-discipline and willpower to live your life consistently with those values that you most aspire to be known for, you begin to move rapidly along the path to becoming an excellent person.
Action Exercises:
Take out a sheet of paper and write out your answers to these questions.
1. Name three people, living or dead, who you most admire and describe one quality of each of them that you respect.
2. Determine the most important virtue or quality in your life that you strive the most to practice or emulate.
3. Identify those situations in which you feel the most confident, in which you feel like the very best person you could possibly be.
4. What situations give you your greatest feelings of self-esteem and personal worth?
5. If you were already an excellent person in every respect, how would you behave differently from today onward?
6. What one quality would you like people to think of when your name is mentioned, and what could you do to ensure this happens?
7. In what one area do you need to be more truthful and practice higher levels of integrity than you do today?
Chapter 3
Self-Discipline and Responsibility
“The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might and force of habit. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him-and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires.”
—J. PAUL GETTY
Y our ability and willingness to discipline yourself to accept personal responsibility for your life are essential to happiness, health, success, achievement, and personal leadership. Accepting responsibility is one of the hardest of all disciplines, but without it, no success is possible.
The failure to accept responsibility and the attempt to foist responsibility for things in your life that make you unhappy onto other people, institutions, and situations completely distort cause and effect, undermine your character, weaken your resolve, and diminish your humanity. They lead to making endless excuses.
MY GREAT REVELATION
When I was twenty-one, I was living in a tiny apartment and working as a construction laborer. I had to get up at 5:00 A.M. so that I could take three buses to work in order to be there by 8:00 A.M. I didn’t get home until 7:00 P.M., tired out from carrying construction materials all day. I was making just enough money to get by, and I had no car, almost no savings, and just enough clothes for my needs. I had no radio or television.
It was the middle of a cold winter, with the temperature at minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit, so I seldom went out in the evening. Instead, if I had enough energy, I sat in my small apartment at my little table in my kitchen nook and read.
One evening, late at night, as I was sitting there by myself at the table, it suddenly dawned on me that “this is my life.” This life was not a rehearsal for something else. The game was on, and I
There is an old Indian story: “On my shoulders are two wolves. One is a black wolf, evil, who continually tempts me to do and say the wrong things. On my other shoulder is a white wolf that continually encourages me to live up to my very best.”
A listener asked the old man, “Which of these wolves has the greatest power over you?”
The old man replied, “The one I feed.”
By the Law of Concentration, whatever you dwell on grows and increases in your life. When you think and talk about the virtues and values that you most admire and respect, you therefore program those values deeper and deeper into your subconscious until they begin to operate automatically in every situation.
Whenever you exercise your self-discipline and willpower to live your life consistently with those values that you most aspire to be known for, you begin to move rapidly along the path to becoming an excellent person.
Action Exercises:
Take out a sheet of paper and write out your answers to these questions.
1. Name three people, living or dead, who you most admire and describe one quality of each of them that you respect.
2. Determine the most important virtue or quality in your life that you strive the most to practice or emulate.
3. Identify those situations in which you feel the most confident, in which you feel like the very best person you could possibly be.
4. What situations give you your greatest feelings of self-esteem and personal worth?
5. If you were already an excellent person in every respect, how would you behave differently from today onward?
6. What one quality would you like people to think of when your name is mentioned, and what could you do to ensure this happens?
7. In what one area do you need to be more truthful and practice higher levels of integrity than you do today?
Chapter 3
Self-Discipline and Responsibility
“The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might and force of habit. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him-and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires.”
—J. PAUL GETTY
Y our ability and willingness to discipline yourself to accept personal responsibility for your life are essential to happiness, health, success, achievement, and personal leadership. Accepting responsibility is one of the hardest of all disciplines, but without it, no success is possible.
The failure to accept responsibility and the attempt to foist responsibility for things in your life that make you unhappy onto other people, institutions, and situations completely distort cause and effect, undermine your character, weaken your resolve, and diminish your humanity. They lead to making endless excuses.
MY GREAT REVELATION
When I was twenty-one, I was living in a tiny apartment and working as a construction laborer. I had to get up at 5:00 A.M. so that I could take three buses to work in order to be there by 8:00 A.M. I didn’t get home until 7:00 P.M., tired out from carrying construction materials all day. I was making just enough money to get by, and I had no car, almost no savings, and just enough clothes for my needs. I had no radio or television.
It was the middle of a cold winter, with the temperature at minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit, so I seldom went out in the evening. Instead, if I had enough energy, I sat in my small apartment at my little table in my kitchen nook and read.
One evening, late at night, as I was sitting there by myself at the table, it suddenly dawned on me that “this is my life.” This life was not a rehearsal for something else. The game was on, and I
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