NOTHING TO LOSE
Go For It!
I had a friend who started a gluten-free diet with his wife to try and isolate some health issues. In the end, the diet did not do anything special for him but it did help his wife. Going on the diet did not yield great benefits for him, but my friend had nothing to lose and much to gain.
In the same way, I want to encourage you to try the things I have been sharing with you the past few weeks. You have nothing to lose, but everything to gain. Put into action the things you have learned from these principles and I know you will see results and benefits. Try them! You have nothing to lose. Commit to work in your everyday life so you can experience firsthand just how powerful your own thought processes can be and how strongly your thinking can affect every aspect of your life.
To further assist you on your journey, I encourage you to search your heart, be completely honest with yourself, and identify the one thing that you want more than anything else in life. Identify this primary driving motivation – that one thing that floats your boat and quivers your liver more than anything else – and write it down in one phrase or one sentence so you can use it as a launching pad for a short-term trial of these principles. If you could achieve one thing before you die, what is it that you would achieve? Focus on this phrase or sentence for four weeks. Read it a few times in the morning and the evening and all the in-between moments when you have time to focus for a minute or two. Say it out loud during the course of your day. Do this every day for at least four weeks. (If you haven’t read my book Make That, Break That on habits, you can buy it today at davemartin.org!)
I am not the author of this concept. In Deuteronomy 6:7-9, after God had given the Israelites His law, He gave them this piece of wisdom, “Impress (these laws and truths) on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” God designed and created the human mind and knows how He designed it to work. He set us up for success! We just have to do what He told us to do.
Without even realizing it, a person becomes what they think. They drift toward those things. My four-week challenge will help you take the initial steps toward a mindset shift. It will get your focus off the negative and onto those real desires of your heart, what I believe is most probably your actual purpose in life or a contributing goal to that purpose. You will begin to see ways that you can make it a reality as you dwell on this phrase or sentence. You will begin to understand your own capacity to create success for yourself and see your own potential for sharing in the world’s abundance that God has provided and set before us. I believe if you commit to this challenge daily for the next 28 days, that you will have a new habit that will completely revolutionize you as a person and set you on a course that can alter the outcome of your life.
The goal of this exercise is to help you stop thinking like everyone around you – narrowly and for the short-term. Catch yourself every time you start drowning in the mundane and repetitive problems of day-to-day life that deplete all of your thinking time, leaving no time to consider nobler things. What I want for you is that you learn to formulate a mental picture of your strongest personal goal so it can begin to dominate your thinking, impact your planning, alter your actions, and change your life. It will take time to unlearn old patterns but do not give up! Take control of your mind. Let it only think about the things that you teach it to think about and only consider the data that you program into it.
I go into more detail regarding this process in Chapter 7 of my book Mindset Matters. It’s one of the best ways to invest in yourself, and in your future. Do this for yourself today. It is truly Success Made Simple.