Earl Nightingale once said that if a person does not prepare for his success, when his opportunity comes, it will only make him look foolish. You've probably heard it said repeatedly that luck is what happens when preparedness meets opportunity. Only when you've paid the price to be ready for your success are you in a position to take advantage of your opportunities when they arise. And the most remarkable thing is this: The very act of preparation attracts to you, like iron filings to a magnet, opportunities to use that preparation to advance in your life. You'll seldom learn anything of value, or prepare yourself in any area, without soon having a chance to use your new knowledge and your new skills to move ahead more rapidly.

There is a series of things that you can do to become ready for success. All of these activities require self-discipline and a good deal of faith. They require self-discipline because the most normal and natural thing for people to do is to try to get by without preparation. Instead of taking the time and making the effort to be ready for their chance when it comes, they fool around, listen to the radio, watch television, and then they try to wing it and dupe others into thinking that they are more prepared than they really are. And since we're all transparent, since just about everyone can see through just about everyone else, the unprepared person simply looks incompetent and foolish.

Preparation also requires a lot of faith because you have no proof in advance to demonstrate that the preparation will pay off. You simply have to believe, deep within yourself, that everything you do of a constructive nature will come back to you in some way. You have to know that no good effort is ever wasted. You have to be willing to sow for a long time before you reap, knowing that if you do sow in quality and quantity, the reaping will come about inevitably with the force of a law of nature.

Look at your work. Be honest and objective about your strengths and weaknesses. What are you good at? What are you poor at? What is your major area of weakness? What must you absolutely, positively be excellent at in order to move to the top of your field? What one skill do you have that, because of its weakness, may be holding you back from using all your other skills?

Norman Augustine, CEO of Martin Marietta Corporation, recently said that the most important thing he learned in the last 10 years of business was that your weakest important skill determines the extent to which you can use all of your other talents and abilities. In looking at the hundreds of people who worked below him in his corporation, he had found that people's careers were largely determined not only by their strengths but also by their weaknesses. The very act of overcoming a particular weakness, through preparation and practice, was enough to propel a person into the front ranks in his or her career.

In preparing for success, one of the very best questions that you can ask yourself, continually, is: "What can I and only I do that, if done well, will make a real difference in my career?" Usually, there is only one or perhaps two answers to that question. Your ability to honestly appraise yourself and to identify the particular skill area that may be holding you back is critical.

Remember when I said that preparation requires both self-discipline and faith. It requires self-discipline because your natural tendency is to do more and more of those things that come most easily to you, and to avoid those areas that you don't enjoy because you're not particularly good at them yet. It requires faith and character for you to admit your weaknesses in a particular area and then resolve to go to work to develop yourself so those weaknesses don't hold you back.

The greatest change that has taken place in our society in the last 20 years is that it's become an information-based society. More than 50 percent of the working population is in the business of processing information in some way. This means that we now have a knowledge-based society and that you're a knowledge worker. You work with your mind, your brain, your mental talents and abilities. You no longer "load that bale and tote that hay." You work by thinking, and the more effectively you think and the better prepared you are mentally, the more productive and positive you'll be.

One thing that has helped me enormously over the years is the habit of getting up early in the morning and spending the first 30 to 60 minutes reading something uplifting. You can read material that is educational or motivational or even inspirational. Many people read spiritual literature. Henry Ward Beecher once said, "The first hour is the rudder of the day." This is often called the "golden hour." It's the hour during which you program your mind and set your emotional tone for the rest of the day. If you get up in the morning at least two hours before you have to be at work, or before your first appointment, and spend the first hour investing in your mind, taking in "mental protein" rather than "mental candy," reading good books rather than the newspaper or magazines, your whole day will flow more smoothly. You'll be more positive and optimistic. You'll be calmer, more confident and relaxed. You'll have a greater sense of control and well-being by the very act of reading healthy material for the first hour of each day.

After just three days of reading for 30 to 60 minutes in the morning, you'll notice a profound difference. you'll begin to develop what Dr. William Glasser called a "positive addiction." As a result of your early-morning reading, you'll feel so good about yourself and your life that you'll develop a desire and motivation to get up earlier, even though your tendency in the past was to sleep in later. Try it and see. it's a wonderful experience, and it can have a profound impact on the rest of your life.

In the period of time before work, another thing that highly successful people do is plan and prepare for their entire day. They review all of the tasks and responsibilities that they have for the coming hours. They carefully make a list of all their activities, and they set clear priorities on the activities. They decide which things are most important to do, which are secondary in importance, and which things should not be done at all unless all the other things are finished. They then discipline themselves to start working on their most important tasks and stay with them during the day until they're complete.

Again, the natural tendency of the low performer is to do what is fun and easy before he does what is hard and necessary. Underachievers always like to do the little things first. They are drawn to the tasks that contribute very little to their careers or future possibilities. But high achievers are not like that! High achievers discipline themselves to start at the top of their list and to work on the activities in order of importance, without diversion or distraction.

If you're in sales, you should spend fully 80 percent of your time prospecting until you're so busy with presentations and proposals that you've no time left to prospect at all. In fact, whenever you have money problems of any kind, you should look upon them as a signal telling you that you need to reorder your priorities and to prepare more thoroughly to accomplish more of the things that contribute the greatest value to your life.

Another way to prepare for success is to eat right. Energy and dynamism are essential to your success, and they're possible only when you're sharp and alert. There are foods that are highly nutritious and that give you high energy and vitality on through the day. Also, there are foods, which you eat usually by habit, that are hard for your system to digest and that tire you out and make you slow and drowsy in the morning and the afternoon.

The chief culprits in diets are foods containing fats of any kind. More and more nutritional research suggests that fatty foods, which require the greatest effort on the part of the body to break down and digest, are the real enemies of human performance. Fats are becoming closely linked to many illnesses and ailments. One reason why people drink so much coffee is to counteract the drowsiness that occurs naturally in the morning because their stomachs are so loaded down with fatty foods.

You see, the process of digestion is the activity of your body that consumes the most energy. When you eat foods that are hard to digest, your body rushes blood from everywhere to the digestive system to work to break them down. In this process, the digestive system draws away blood from the brain and the muscles. The reason you feel drowsy after a large meal is because the blood has gone from your brain to your stomach. The reason you get cramps when you engage in vigorous physical exercise immediately after eating is because a substantial amount of blood has been drawn from your muscles to aid in the process of digestion.

The key is to eat lightly and healthily. Eat more fruits and vegetables. Eat more whole-grain products. In his book Eat to Win, Robert Haas says that your diet should be comprised of 75 percent carbohydrates, 15 percent fats and only 10 percent proteins. Since the average diet in America contains as much as 50 percent fats and proteins, there is ample room to improve. And every move that you make toward a high-carbohydrate diet will give you more energy and make you sharper in everything you do.

In preparing for success throughout the day, you should also talk to yourself in a positive way. The work by Dr. Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania has demonstrated that the way you talk to yourself largely determines your emotions, how you feel about yourself on a minute-to-minute basis.

If you don't deliberately and consciously think about what you want, and talk to yourself in a positive way, your mind will tend to slip toward your worries and your concerns. And negative thinking takes the edge off your personality and your enthusiasm, which is so important to your success with people.

A few years ago, Dr. Abraham Zaleznik of Harvard University did an interesting study on disappointment. He found that successful people bounce back from disappointments far faster than unsuccessful people do.

And what I've learned is that the key to your keeping yourself positive and optimistic is preparation in advance of the ups and downs that you'll experience each day. For example, if You're in sales, change the way you talk to yourself by viewing yourself as a "rejection specialist" rather than a "sales specialist." If you define yourself as a sales specialist, you'll be setting yourself up for failure, disappointment and lowered self-esteem with every rejection you get. But, on the other hand, if you look upon yourself as a rejection specialist, you'll be setting yourself up to feel like a winner every time someone turns you down for any reason. You can look upon every rejection as a percentage of a sale. If it takes you 20 calls to make a sale, you can look upon a rejection as 5 percent of the Commission that you receive for making that sale. In this way, every person you speak to actually pays you money. You simply collect it when you make the sale that is inevitable when you speak to enough people. Every time someone turns you down, you're a winner. You're just that much farther ahead. You're just a little bit closer to the sale that must come if you keep on keeping on.

Use every setback or disappointment as a spur to greater effort. Decide that nothing will ever get you down. Decide that you will bounce back instead of break. Develop a resilient or hardy personality. Become the kind of person who is always cheerful, no matter what happens on the outside. Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation. In this way, you become a far more resourceful and effective person. Preparing mentally, you become almost unstoppable.

If You're making sales calls, resist the "parking-lot mentality" of the average salesperson. The average salesperson doesn't think about the client until he drives onto the parking lot, and he stops thinking about the client when he drives off. Instead, prepare thoroughly for each call. Review your file of notes on the customer, and establish a clear set of call objectives before you go in. Know what you're doing and why. Be very clear on what you want to accomplish with this call. If a person were to ask you how you would judge whether or not this upcoming call was successful, you should be able to tell that person exactly what you want to accomplish, and after the call, you should be able to tell that person exactly what you achieved. Most salespeople never do this. When you ask them if a call was successful, they don't know how to answer you or how to base it. But this is not for you.

In everything you do, preparation is the key. If you want to be ready for success, you have to plant the seeds well in advance of the harvest that you expect. Do what the winners do: Think on paper. Memorize the winner's creed: "Everything counts." Everything you do is either moving you toward your goals or moving you away. Everything is either helping you or hurting you. Nothing is neutral. Everything counts.

A successful businessman was once asked for advice by a young person on how he could be more successful faster. The businessman told him that the key to his success had been to "get good" at his job.

The young man said, "I'm already good at what I do."

The businessman then said, "Well, get better!"

The young man, somewhat self-satisfied, said, "Well, I'm already better than most people."

To that, the businessman replied, "Then be the best."

Those are three of the best pieces of advice I've ever heard: Get good. Get better. Be the best!

Remember, we live in a knowledge-based society, and knowledge in every field is doubling approximately every seven years. This means that you must double your knowledge in your field every seven years just to stay even. You're already "maxxed out" at your current level of knowledge and skill. You've reached the ceiling in your career with your current talents and abilities. If you want to go faster and farther, you must get back to work and begin to prepare yourself for greater heights. You must put aside the newspaper, turn off the television, politely excuse yourself from aimless socializing and get back to working on yourself.

A quotation by Abraham Lincoln had a great influence on my life when I was 15. It was a statement he made when he was a young lawyer in Springfield, Illinois. He said, "I will study and prepare myself, and someday my chance will come."

If you study and prepare yourself, your chance will come as well. There is nothing that you cannot accomplish if you'll invest the effort to get yourself ready for the success that you desire. And there is nothing that can stop you but your own lack of preparation. Let me end with this beautiful poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "Those heights by great men won and kept; / Were not achieved by sudden flight; / But they, while their companions slept, / Were toiling upward in the night"

Your possibilities are endless, your potential is unlimited, and your future opens up before you when you prepare yourself for the success that must inevitably be yours.

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