Free No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline by Brian Tracy

within three to five minutes.
     

Select One Goal
     
    Once you have written out your ten goals, imagine for the moment that you can achieve all of the goals on your list if you want them long enough and hard enough. Also imagine that you have a “magic wand” that you can wave that will enable you to achieve any one goal on your list within twenty-four hours.
     
    If you could achieve any one goal on your list within twenty-four hours, which one would have the greatest positive impact on your life right now? Which one goal would change or improve your life more than anything else? Which one goal, if you were to achieve it, would help you to achieve more of your other goals than anything else?
     
    Whatever your answer to this question, put a circle around this goal and then write it at the top of a clean sheet of paper. This goal then becomes your “Major Definite Purpose.” It becomes your focal point and the organizing principle of your future activities.
     

Make a Plan
     
    Once you have written out this goal, clearly and specifically, and made it measurable, set a deadline on your goal. Your subconscious mind needs a deadline so that it can focus and concentrate all your mental powers on goal attainment.
     
    Make a list of everything that you can think of that you could do to achieve your goal. Organize this list by sequence and priority.
     
    Select the most important or logical next step in your plan and take action on it immediately. Take the first step. Do something. Do anything.
     
    Resolve to work on this goal every single day until it is achieved. From this moment forward, as far as you are concerned, “Failure is not an option.” Once you have decided that this one goal can have the greatest positive impact on your life and you have set it as your major definite purpose, resolve that you will work toward this goal as hard as you can, as long as you can, and that you will never give up until it is achieved. This decision alone can change your life.
     

Use “Mindstorming” to Get Started
     
    Here is another technique you can use to dramatically increase the likelihood that you will achieve your most important goal. This is the most powerful creative thinking technique I have ever seen. More people have become wealthy using this method than any other way.
     
    Take another clean sheet of paper. Write out your Major Definite Purpose at the top of the page in the form of a question . Then discipline yourself to write a minimum of twenty answers to the question.
     
    For example, if your goal is to earn a certain amount of money by a certain date, you would write the question as, “How can I earn $XXX by this specific date?”
     
    You then discipline yourself to generate twenty answers to your question. This exercise of “mindstorming” will activate your mind, unleash your creativity, and give you ideas that you may never have thought of before.
     
    The first three to five answers will be easy. The next five will be difficult, and the last ten answers will be harder than you can imagine, at least the first time you do this exercise. Nonetheless, you must exert your discipline and willpower to persist until you have written down at least twenty answers.
     
    Once you have generated twenty answers, look over your list and select one of those answers to take action on immediately. It seems that when you take action on a single idea on your list, it triggers more ideas and motivates you to take action on even more of these answers.
     

The Great Law of Cause and Effect
     
    The most important application of the law of cause and effect is that “thoughts are causes, and conditions are effects.”
     
    Your thoughts create the conditions of your life. When you change your thinking, you change your life. Your outer world becomes a mirror-image reflection of your inner world.
     
    Perhaps the greatest discovery in the history of thought is that “you become what you think about most of the time.”