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Title: LifetoSuccess.com Ezine

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Table of Contents Article - The Seasons of Life by Jim Rohn, Part 3 of 5 - Jim Rohn Article - Capitalizing on Your Strengths - Brian Tracy Article - Winning the War Against Weaknesses  - Chris Widener

Date: November 21, 2004 From: John Clark - Subscriber, This Week Brian Tracy talks about Capitalizing on Your Strengths. This is a great subject that is worth plenty of detailed study. Another area of Study, that is well worth the effort, is in Personality types. There is a great book called the Platinum Rule by Tony Alessandra and Michael J. O'Connor that goes into different personality types and the strengths and weakness in the different personality types. What's even more fascinating about this subject is that to attain any level of success you need to deal with people. And it's important to know how to deal with these different personality types. This subject is also important when you start to build your organization or your business. You need to have a balance within your organization to make it run smoothly. Brian Tracy has a wonderful tool that you can use to see what personality type you are. To access this tool simply go to: http://www.performfirst.net/u/bta/t.asp?id=1862 You'll be amazed and liberated by the results. It's amazing the insights you get when you know your personality type. Until the next Ezine, Here's to your LifetoSuccess

The Seasons of Life by Jim Rohn, Part 3 of 5 - Jim Rohn This week is part three of our five part series on The Season's of Life. In Part One of the series, I stated: a) That life is about constant, predictable patterns of change. b) For all of us, the only constant factor is our feelings and attitudes toward life. c) We as human beings have the power of attitude and that attitude determines choice, and choice determines results. In Part Two of our series, I stated: a) Life and business are like the changing seasons. b) You cannot change the seasons, but you can change yourself. c) A major lesson in life to learn is how to handle the winters. d) Winter time allows you to get stronger, wiser, better. The winters won't change, but you can. This week we talk about spring. Fortunately, following the turbulence of winter comes the season of activity and opportunity called springtime. It is the season for entering the fertile fields of life with seed, knowledge, commitment, and a determined effort. However, the mere arrival of spring is no sign that things are going to look good in the fall. You must do something with the spring. In fact, everyone has to get good at one of two things: planting in the spring or begging in the fall. Take advantage of the day and the opportunities that spring can bring. It is the promise of spring that as we sow, so shall we also reap. Faith further provides to us an irrevocable law decreed in heaven which assures that for every disciplined human effort we will receive a multiple reward. For each cup planted, a bushel reaped, for every good idea given to another, many shall be given to us in return. For every demonstrated act of faith, a multiplicity of the rewards, and for every act of love given, a life of love in return. Just remember it is a natural characteristic of springtime to present itself ever so briefly, or to lull us into inactivity with its bounteous beauty. Do not pause too long to soak in the aroma of the blossoming flowers, lest you awaken to find springtime gone with your seed still in your sack. With the intelligence, wisdom, and freedom of choice given to us as humans exercise the discipline to plant in spite of the rocks, weeds, or other obstacles before us. The rocks, weeds, and thorns of the world cannot destroy all your seeds if you plant massively enough and intelligently enough. My suggestion is to choose action, not rest. Choose truth, not fantasy. Choose a smile, not a frown. Choose love, not animosity. Choose the good in life in all things, and choose the opportunity as well as the chance to work when springtime smiles on your life. Spring shows us that life is truly a constant beginning, a constant opportunity, a constant springtime. We need only to learn to look once again at life as we did as children, letting fascination and curiosity give us welcome cause to look for the miraculous hidden among the common. Get busy quickly on your springs, your opportunities. There are just a handful of springs that have been handed to each of us. Life is brief, even at its longest. Whatever you are going to do with your life, get at it. Don't just let the seasons pass by. (Next week we will talk about Summer, the time of testing.) To Your Success, Jim Rohn Great Health, Wealth, Relationships and Overall Success! Become part of a group that has committed to a plan, a process, a blueprint and a commitment to inspect and improve their lives. The Jim Rohn One-Year Success Plan (including experts Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy) will help you do just that and become the person you desire to become. Visit: www.jimrohn.com today! To read previous articles, quotes, and Q and A from the Jim Rohn Weekly E-zine Archives, or to get a complete listing of Jim Rohn's books, audios, videos and seminar schedule, or to place an order; please go to: www.jimrohn.com or call 800-929-0434 M-F 8:30-5:30 CST.

Capitalizing on Your Strengths - Brian Tracy One of the qualities of superior men and women is that they are extremely self-reliant. They accept complete responsibility for themselves and everything that happens to them. They look to themselves as the source of their successes and as the main cause of their problems and difficulties. High achievers say, �If it's to be, it's up to me.� When things aren't moving along as fast as they want, they ask themselves, �What is it in me that is causing this problem?� They refuse to make excuses or to blame people. Instead, they look for ways to overcome obstacles and to make progress. Totally self-responsible people look upon themselves as self-employed. They see themselves as the president of their own personal services corporation. They realize that no matter who signs their paycheck, in the final analysis they work for themselves. Because they have this attitude of self-employment, they take a strategic approach to their work. The essential element in strategic planning for a corporation or a business entity is the concept of �return on equity.� All business planning is aimed at organizing and reorganizing the resources of the business in such a way as to increase the financial returns to the business owners. It is to increase the quantity of output relative to the quantity of input. It is to focus on areas of high profitability and return and, simultaneously, to withdraw resources from areas of low profitability and return. Companies that do this effectively in a rapidly changing environment are the ones that survive and prosper. Companies that fail to do this form of strategic analysis are those that fall behind and often disappear. To achieve everything you are capable of achieving as a person, you also must become a skilled strategic planner with regard to your life and work. But instead of aiming to increase your return on equity, your goal is to increase your return on energy. Most people in America start off with little more than their ability to work. More than 80 percent of the millionaires in America started with nothing. Most people have been broke, or nearly broke, several times during their young-adult years. But the ones who eventually get ahead are those who do certain things in certain ways, and those actions set them apart from the masses. Perhaps the most important thing they do, consciously or unconsciously, is to look at themselves strategically, thinking about how they can better use themselves in the marketplace, how they can best capitalize on their strengths and abilities to increase their returns to themselves and their families. Your most valuable financial asset is your earning ability, your ability to earn money. Properly applied to the marketplace, it's like a pump. By exploiting your earning ability, you can pump tens of thousands of dollars a year into your pocket. All your knowledge, education, skills and experience contribute toward your earning ability, your ability to get results for which someone will pay good money. And your earning ability is like farmland. If you don't take excellent care of it, if you don't fertilize it and cultivate it and water it on a regular basis, it soon loses its ability to produce the kind of harvest that you desire. Successful men and women are those who are extremely aware of the importance and value of their earning ability, and they work every day to keep it growing and current with the demands of the marketplace. One of the greatest responsibilities in life is to identify, develop and maintain an important marketable skill. It is to become very good at doing something for which there is a strong market demand. In corporate strategy, we call this the development of a �competitive advantage.� For a company, a competitive advantage is defined as an area of excellence in producing a product or service that gives the company a distinct edge over its competition. In capitalizing on your strengths, as the president of your own personal services corporation, you also must have a clear competitive advantage. You also must have an area of excellence. You must do something that makes you different from and better than your competitors. Your ability to identify and develop this competitive advantage is the most important thing you do in the world of work. It's the key to maintaining your earning ability. It's the foundation of your financial success. Without it, you're simply a pawn in a rapidly changing environment. But with a distinct competitive advantage, based on your strengths and abilities, you can write your own ticket. You can take charge of your own life. You can always get a job. And the more distinct your competitive advantage, the more money you can earn and the more places in which you can earn it. There are four keys to the strategic marketing of yourself and your services. These are applicable to huge companies such as General Motors, to candidates running for election and to individuals who want to accomplish the very most in the very shortest time. The first of these four keys is specialization. No one can be all things to all people. A �jack-of-all-trades� also is a �master of none.� That career path usually leads to a dead end. Specialization is the key. Men and women who are successful have a series of general skills, but they also have one or two areas where they have developed the ability to perform in an outstanding manner. Your decision about how, where, when and why you are going to specialize in a particular area of endeavor is perhaps the most important decision you will ever make in your career. It was well said that if you don't think about the future, you can't have one. The major reason why so many people are finding their jobs eliminated and finding themselves unemployed for long periods of time is because they didn't look down the road of life far enough and prepare themselves well enough for the time when their current jobs would expire. They suddenly found themselves out of gas on a lonely road, facing a long walk back to regular and well-paying employment. Don't let this happen to you. In determining your area of specialization, put your current job aside for the moment, and take the time to look deeply into yourself. Analyze yourself from every point of view. Rise above yourself, and look at your lifetime of activities and accomplishments in determining what your area of specialization could be or should be. And by the way, you might be doing exactly the right job for you at this moment. You already might be capitalizing on all your strengths, and your current work might be ideally suited to your likes and dislikes, to your temperament and your personality. Nevertheless, you owe it to yourself to be continually expanding the scope of your vision and looking toward the future to see where you might want to be going in the months and years ahead. Remember, the best way to predict the future is to create it. You possess special talents and abilities that make you unique, different from anyone else who has ever lived. The odds of there being another person just like you are more than 50 billion to one. Your remarkable and unusual combination of education, experience, knowledge, problems, successes, difficulties and challenges, and your way of looking at and reacting to life, make you extraordinary. You have within you potential competencies and attributes that can enable you to accomplish virtually anything you want in life. Even if you lived for another 100 years, it would not be enough time for you to plumb the depths of your potential. You will never be able to use more than a small part of your inborn abilities. Your main job is to decide which of your talents you're going to exploit and develop to their highest and best possible use right now. So, what is your area of excellence? What are you especially good at right now? If things continue as they are, what are you likely to be good at in the future-say one or two or even five years from now? Is this a marketable skill with a growing demand, or is your field changing in such a way that you are going to have to change as well if you want to keep up with it? Looking into the future, what could be your area of excellence if you were to go to work on yourself and your abilities? What should be your area of excellence if you want to rise to the top of your field, make an excellent living and take complete control of your financial future? When I was 22, I answered an advertisement for a copywriter for an advertising agency. As it happened, I had failed high-school English, and I really had no idea what a copywriter did. I remember the executive who interviewed me and how nice he was at pointing out that I wasn't at all qualified for the job. But something happened to me in the course of the interview process. The more I thought about it, the more I thought how much I would like to write advertising. Having been turned down flat during my first interview, I decided to learn more about the field. I went to the city library and began to check out and read books on advertising and copywriting. Over the next six months, while I worked in a department store, I spent many hours devouring them. At the same time, I applied for copywriting jobs to advertising agencies in the city. I started with the small agencies first. When they turned me down, I asked them why they did so. What was wrong with my application? What did I need to learn more about? What books would they recommend? And to this day, I remember that virtually everyone I spoke with was helpful to me. By the end of six months, I had read every book on advertising and copywriting in the library and applied to every agency in the city, working up from the smallest agency to the very largest in the country. And by the time I had reached that level, I was ready. I was offered jobs as a junior copywriter by both the number-one and number-two agencies in the country. I took the job with the number-one agency and was very successful in a short period of time. The point of this story is that you can become almost anything you need to become, in order to accomplish almost anything you want to accomplish, if you simply decide what it is and then learn what you need to learn. This is such an obvious fact that most people miss it completely. Some years later, I decided that I wanted to get into real-estate development. Again, I went to the library and began checking out and reading all the books on real-estate development. At the time, I had no money, no contacts and no knowledge of the industry. But I knew the great secret: I could learn what I needed to learn so that I could do what I wanted to do. Within 12 months, I had tied up a piece of property with a $100 deposit and a 30-day option. I put together a proposal for a shopping center, and I tentatively arranged for major anchor tenants and several minor tenants that together took up 85 percent of the square footage I had proposed. Then I sold 75 percent of the entire package to a major development company in exchange for the company's putting up all the cash and providing me with the resources and people I needed to manage the construction of the shopping center and the completion of the leasing. Virtually everything that I did I had learned from books written by real-estate experts, books on the shelves of the local library. As you might have noticed, the fields of advertising and copywriting and real-estate development are very different. But these incidents, and every business situation I have been in over the years, had one element in common. Success in each area was based on the decision, first, to specialize in that area and, second, to be extremely knowledgeable in that area so that I could do a good job. In looking at your current and past experiences for an area of specialization, one of the most important questions to ask yourself is, �What activities have been most responsible for my success in life to date?� How did you get from where you were to where you are today? What talents and abilities seemed to come easily to you? What things do you do well that seem to be difficult for most other people? What things do you most enjoy doing? What things do you find most intrinsically motivating? What things make you happy when you are doing them? In capitalizing on your strengths, your level of interest, excitement and enthusiasm about the particular job or activity is a key factor. You'll always do best and make the most money in a field that you really enjoy. It will be an area that you like to think about and talk about and read about and learn about. Successful people love what they do, and they can hardly wait to get to it each day. Doing their work makes them happy, and the happier they are, the more enthusiastically they do it, and the better they do it as well. In capitalizing on your strengths, the second key is differentiation. You must decide what you're going to do to be not only different but also better than your competitors in the field. Remember, you have to be good in only one specific area to move ahead of the pack. And you must decide what that area should be. The third strategic principle in capitalizing on your strengths is segmentation. You have to look at the marketplace and determine where you can best apply yourself, with your unique talents and abilities, to give yourself the highest possible return on energy expended. What customers, companies, markets, can best utilize your special talents and offer you the most in terms of financial rewards and future opportunities? The final key to personal strategic planning is concentration. Once you have decided the area in which you are going to specialize, how you are going to differentiate yourself, and where in the marketplace you can best apply your strengths, your final job is to concentrate all of your energy on becoming excellent there. The marketplace pays extraordinary rewards only for extraordinary performance.   Goal Achieving Super Series (Sixty-minute video, two seven-hour audio programs, 200-page hard-cover book and an 80-page workbook) Get the most complete goal-achievement series ever assembled in one package! Learn how to achieve more goals faster than you ever thought possible. Decide exactly what you want in every area; Make detailed, fool-proof plans of accomplishment; Set clear priorities and focus single-mindedly; Overcome all obstacles to goal attainment; Make 2003 the most successful year of your life. This package includes the following programs: 1. The Power of Clarity (7-hour audio program) 2. How To Master Your Time (7-hour audio program) 3. The 10 Keys to Personal Power (60-minute video) 4. Personal Goal Planner (Ninety-page workbook) 5. Focal Point (200-page hard-cover book) Click Product Image for More Information For More Information About Brian Tracy Brian Tracy is a leading authority on personal and business success. As Chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International, he is the best-selling author of 17 books and over 300 audio and video learning programs. Join Brian's Free Email Newsletters. . Copyright � 2001 Brian Tracy International. All Rights Reserved. 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Winning the War Against Weaknesses  - Chris Widener Wouldn't it be great if we lived in a perfect world? Wouldn't it be great if we never failed? Wouldn't life be grand if we had no weaknesses, only strengths, and we achieved victory upon victory? Yes it would - but wake up - it isn't so! We DO have weaknesses, and no matter how much self-improvement we go through, we will have weaknesses until the day we pass from this life. So what to make of weaknesses? Should we just throw in the towel and give up? NO WAY! We can win the war against weaknesses. We can have weaknesses and still live our lives in such a way that we significantly reduce the effect that our weaknesses have on us and the way they undermine us. So let's get busy and take a look at the ways we can win the war on weaknesses: Recognize your weaknesses. A weakness that isn't known is a dangerous thing! Take some time of reflection to know your weaknesses. If you are really gutsy, do what I did recently and invite some of your closest associates to tell you what they are! I sat with four people and gave them one hour wherein I did not respond to what they said. I only wrote what they were saying for my own further reflection. This can be humbling but can be very empowering when you come to know what your weaknesses are and how to overcome them. Those who I asked were blown away that I would invite what they perceived as criticism, but I knew the deeper benefit would be that I would now know my �enemy� - my weaknesses! Play to your strengths. Remember playing sports growing up when you would always try to utilize your best move or best shot? Well, the same is true in life. We need to play to our strengths in life. We ought to find careers where we can spend most of our times using our strengths rather than fighting our weaknesses. The more we can perfect our strengths, they more we can downplay our weaknesses. Hire or delegate to your weaknesses. If you have this option, by all means take advantage of it! If you can hire someone who is strong in areas where you are weak, then you should certainly do so. This will enable you to avoid the weakness trap, it allows them to experience working from their strengths, and it will move the organization ahead faster than ever. Realize that your strengths, carried to their extremes, become your weaknesses. One thing that most people don't realize it that often the most fatal weakness we have is actually our greatest strength taken to the extreme. For example, if you speak well, chances are that your mouth will sometimes get you into trouble (take it from me - I know!) If you are very detail oriented, then your detail orientation can be a weakness when you get the paralysis of analysis! Think of your great strengths and then think how, when taken to the extreme, they can actually be weaknesses. Then keep them in balance! Learn from your failures when your weaknesses get the best of you. Ultimately, even if we act on our weaknesses and we do something that causes us to be less than successful, we can still learn from the event and grow for the future. In the long run, learning from our mistakes made in weakness turns our weaknesses into our very own �success school� - and that is a positive thing! We all have weaknesses. That is a given. But we do not have to lose in life because of them. The above are just a few ways that you can begin to win the war against weaknesses. Take some time to give it some thought and action and you will experience more victories than you even have before! Chris Widener is a popular speaker and writer as well as the President of Made for Success and Extraordinary Leaders, two companies helping individuals and organizations turn their potential into performance, succeed in every area of their lives and achieve their dreams. Join subscribers in over 100 countries around the world! Get Chris' FREE weekly Made for Success Ezine by sending a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]. Get his FREE daily SuccessQuote� with action point by sending a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]. Get his FREE monthly Extraordinary Leaders Ezine, one of the world's most widely distributed leadership newsletters, by sending a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit his websites at http://www.madeforsuccess.com and http://www.madeforsuccess.com. Copyright 2002 Made for Success. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

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