For years, I wondered why some people … who have so much going for them … accomplish so little in life, love, and work.
And I wondered why other people … who had so little going for them … or who had so many problems and obstacles to overcome … accomplished so much in life, love, and work.
After years of research, a little bit of luck, and an awful lot of help from above, I believe I found the answers to both of those questions. It all came down to a few laws.
The unquestionable laws of happiness and success. If you know them, if you follow them, you’re going to do extraordinarily well in your life, work, and relationships. That’s why I named my two-day experience The Journey to the Extraordinary, because it’s a program where you actually experience, learn, and master those laws.
Let’s look at three of those laws.
► 1. The Law of Continual Education
It’s a simple fact. If your competitors keep on learning and you don’t, guess who has the upper hand when the two of you meet? It won’t be you.
And despite this simple fact, most people are intellectually lazy and surprisingly sedentary in their acquisition of new knowledge and information. They naively think they already know it all … or at least enough to get by.
Other folks boastfully say they’d rather learn through experience.
Oh you can learn from experience all right, but the tuition is awfully high. As baseball player Vernon Law put it, “Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.”
You see … there’s no need to lose your job or be stuck in a dead-end job, BEFORE you learn what you should have done differently. And there’s no need to lose your relationship BEFORE you learn how to be in a successful relationship.
That’s why I attend at least ten days of training every year. I subscribe to the Law of Continual Education, because I don’t want to learn the hard way, through trial and error and pain and suffering. And it’s worked wonders in my life.
It also worked wonders for Doris Dean when she attended my Journey-to-the-Extraordinary program. Doris says: “I’m so thankful that the FBI has made your Journey program available to so many people. Your 12 Unquestionable Laws of Happiness and Success are so powerful that I’m sharing them with my co-workers as well as my friends in business, education, and medicine – as well as the youngsters throughout my county. And I’m pleased to report that even the teens (a tough audience) are using your positive techniques!”
So I urge you to take advantage of every training opportunity you get.
(My next offsite Journey program will be on October 25-26, 2018 in the Chicago area. Those who register now can take advantage of the Super Early-Early Bird Pricing. For more information, go to www.attendthejourney.com.)
When you’re about to attend a training program, make sure you get the most out of it by doing some of the following:
- Prepare yourself ahead of time.
- List at least five specific questions you want answered at the program.
- Use break time to network.
- Talk to your peers. Find out what have been the most important things they’ve learned in the seminar. And make lunch and dinner plans with as many different people as you can.
- Exchange business cards.
- When you receive a card, put a note on the card that says something distinctive about the person who gave it to you.
- Read your notes.
- Review them on your way home and prepare a summary of what you experienced and what you learned.
- Back at work, conduct a mini-seminar.
- Tell your coworkers what you learned.
- Keep in touch with the speaker.
- Write to them … asking any additional questions you might have.
Once you’ve got the Law of Continual Education working for you, you need to follow…
► 2. The Law of Intentional Application
It’s not good enough to keep on learning. You have to have every intention of applying what you learned.
After all, there’s nothing more pathetic than a knowledgeable, educated person, sitting on his butt, refusing to use the knowledge he has gained.
And there’s not much difference between an Ivy League university graduate filled with knowledge who does nothing with her education and the ignoramus who does nothing because she knows nothing.
Whenever you learn anything, in a class or through an experience, set up your intentions. Tell yourself, “I will use this learning and I will use this learning in the next 48 hours.”
When you verbalize your intention, you dramatically increase your chances of using what you learned. And you close the biggest gap in the world … the gap between knowing what you should do and actually doing it.
► 3. The Law of Action
You’ve heard people say that “knowledge is power.” But they’re lying to you. Knowledge isn’t power; the application of knowledge is power.
Goethe talked about that hundreds of years ago. He said, “Knowledge is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”
So I recommend three ways you can apply the Law of Action to your life.
- Just do it … if you know it’s the right thing to do.
- Don’t wait for the perfect set of conditions before you do something. Too many great ideas fall by the wayside because people wait for “perfect.”
- Just do it … no matter how old you are.
- No age or time of life, no position or circumstance, has a monopoly on success. Any age is the right age to start doing!
- Take my lifetime friend , for example. He’s 99 ½ years of age and decided to bring Habitat for Humanity to his community and has built 20 homes since he turned 80.
- Just do it … without getting stuck in the past or future.
- As famed psychologist Abraham Maslow discovered, “I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.”
As I continue to speak around the world, as I lecture on the unquestionable laws of happiness and success, I keep on telling people, “Do not confuse activity with accomplishment.” Follow the Law of Continual Education, adopt the Law of Intentional Application, and use the Law of Action, and you’ll be delightfully amazed at the results you get.
Dr. Zimmerman’s Tuesday Tip, Issue 941 – How to get the “3 Unquestionable Laws of Happiness and Success” working for you