I saw this in the current issue of the Jim Rohn newsletter. It’s one of my favorite teachings of Jim:

To attract attractive people, you must be attractive. To attract powerful people, you must be powerful. To attract committed people, you must be committed. Instead of going to work on them, you go to work on yourself. If you become, you can attract.

We can have more than we’ve got because we can become more than we are.

The big challenge is to become all that you have the possibility of becoming. You cannot believe what it does to the human spirit to maximize your human potential and stretch yourself to the limit.

Pity the man who inherits a million dollars and who isn’t a millionaire. Here’s what would be pitiful: If your income grew and you didn’t.

The most important question to ask on the job is not “What am I getting?” The most important question to ask on the job is “What am I becoming?”

It is hard to keep that which has not been obtained through personal development.

After you become a millionaire, you can give all of your money away because what’s important is not the million dollars; what’s important is the person you have become in the process of becoming a millionaire.

Income seldom exceeds personal development.

What you become directly influences what you get.

I don’t know about you, but self-help and personal development literally saved my life. Having been evicted from my home and losing my last automobile among other things, I shudder to think where I could have turned if it hadn’t been for self-help.

Now along comes some hungry author (who didn’t have any problem when he himself was making money in self-help) and writes a book called “SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America helpless.” Fortunately, when CNN’s Anderson Cooper interviewed him, he got another opinion from Mark Victor Hansen, co-creator of the famed Chicken Soup series. And Mark did an incredible job in the interview demonstrating how self help/personal development is serving the greater good of humanity.

The book should be re-titled SHAME, and it’s all on Steve Salerno, who helps no one but himself.

You can watch part of the interview here… (scroll down the page to the CNN logo).

I recently saw Lyle Lovett perform on Austin City Limits and one of his songs captured me so much I went to Amazon and ordered the entire CD.

The title of the song is “In My Own Mind” and some of the lyrics are:

“I live in my own mind
Ain’t nothing but a good time
No rain, just sunshine
Out here in my own mind.”

While the song has some traditional country music themes and lyrics (Randy and Danny Ray are hooked on fishing and hunting 🙂 ), I was most struck by the chorus above. Very few things have I ever seen or heard that reflect the truth more than those words.

When we fully realize that the only way we ever really know the world is through our own thoughts and feelings — “in my own mind” — we determine the quality of life we live. If there’s “no rain, just sunshine” in our mind, that’s exactly how we see the world and the circumstances we encounter. Just as one person sees failure and another person sees opportunity in the exact same circumstance.

Of course, James Allen turned the Proverb writer’s words into a book — “as a man thinketh in his heart so is he,” and Earl Nightingale taught us that “you become what you think about.” But I kinda like the way the rural poet Lovett reminds me: “I live in my own mind, ain’t nothing but a good time.”

(Listen to a short clip here)

Most New Year’s Resolutions have gone by the wayside before January is over and most won’t even be remembered six months later. And the reason is pretty simple.

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This is a story of a remarkable young tennis player. He is one of the best in the country, one of the best in the world, and he got there despite a series of catastrophes that almost killed him. It is also a classic improbable story about the power of positive thinking. – CBS 60 Minutes

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