“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt.

Winners say, “Talk is cheap. Your past actions predict your future choices. Show me, don’t tell me.” I agree.

If you’re wondering why your efforts and endeavors usually result in frustration, failure, disappointment, and pain, while other people, working on the same things, make pots of money, this is for you.

If you feel like you’re accident prone, all alone, and your chances are blown, don’t moan and groan – I might just have the solution for you.

Does this sound familiar?

You might be as smart as others who get rich while you get into more debt, you might work even harder than they do, you might be more motivated, and yet your attempts seem to be doomed to perpetual failure. You feel like a loser.

Dumb people are making money and you’re floundering. It’s just not fair!

Same products and services, same market, same pricing, same opportunity, yet while they seem to attract success and wealth, you feel like you’re magnetizing perpetual flops. Why?

Well, it’s not as mysterious as it may seem.

There’s no magical, imaginary demon or devil undermining your success and jumping at every opportunity to pull the proverbial rug out from under your feet. It’s not your age, appearance, education, or parents. It is a lot more simple than that.

The good news is that when you know what has been contaminating your progress, undermining your success, causing you stress, and making this mess, you can remove and change it, and put yourself on the road to health, wealth, and happiness.

A Good, Workable “Success Recipe”

Usually, we earn money and succeed in our endeavors in direct proportion to our self worth or self esteem. Guilt, a poor self image, and mixing with the wrong people (losers) is what generally sabotages our efforts, in spite of our hard work and good intentions.

The solution, therefore, must be to improve one’s self esteem.

The way to do that is through rigorous, sustained self discipline, and a good, workable “success recipe”. This, in my opinion, will “oil the wheels” of your programs and activities, and add jet fuel to what you’re doing. Confidence, enthusiasm, and belief are signs of a strong self image, and they attract great results.

Three major areas need to be addressed:

Area #1 - Your Input

…The people you spend time with and the input you’re exposed to. Discipline yourself to cut the losers out of your life and read good books, like Atlas Shrugged. Do not wilt nor hesitate – remember, self discipline increases self worth, and that increases the old bank balance.

Area #2 - Your Appearance

Look your best at all times, buy good clothes and shoes, groom yourself well, look like a million bucks, act and walk and talk like a successful entrepreneur, “Fake it until you make it”, and don’t hang out in crummy places. Only the best for you, my friend.

Treat yourself as a successful person would treat herself. Look the part, and you’ll start to feel the part. Believe and achieve!

Consistent, persistent attention to doing your best in everything you do will make you feel great about yourself. And when you feel good about yourself, you will start attracting winners and money into your life.

Area #3 - Your Self-Talk

…What you tell yourself – your self talk, and the questions you ask yourself will determine how much success you achieve. Never put yourself down – be your own best friend and fan.

Here are some great questions and affirmations I strongly recommend you use at least ten times a day, every day, until they are a habit. Speak out load, with belief, sincerity, enthusiasm, and commitment:

• I am happy, healthy, and successful.
• I am a money magnet – I attract wealth and great people into my life every day.
• What is great about my life? What do I have to be grateful for?
• I am bulletproof, unstoppable, and strong.
• Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better, richer and richer.
• I am a guided missile on my way to my goals.
• People are fortunate to know me and work with me.
• I am a money machine, a dollarmaker, and a wonderful, generous, happy person.
• How can I double my net worth in one year?

Self discipline = self worth  = a self made millionaire.

When the WHY is sufficient, the HOW is automatic.

Slow? Sometimes agonizingly so.

Frustrating? Frequently.

Arduous? Assuredly.

Tiring? Indubitably.

…But inevitable.

Success is a forgone conclusion, a matter of time, when the WHY is in place; the travail is temporary,the discomfort fleeting, and easy to accommodate while bathed in the light of your magnificent obsession, your WHY.

The Promising Power of WHY

Your WHY in life is your Hot Button, your main objective, your raison d’etre, your glorious goal, your absolute ambition. It is what will get you to a meeting an hour early, dressed to the nines, wearing an infectious grin you find it hard to wipe off your scrubbed face.

It is what will obliterate every obstacle, remove every roadblock, and eradicate anything between you an your goal. Nobody and nothing can stop someone whose WHY is large enough. To a man with a grand WHY, reversals are transient, mere bumps along the yellow brick road.

Succumbing to Mediocrity

Most people have succumbed to the prevailing mediocrity that dulls our senses, robs us of ambition, and waters down our expectations with the pervasive and crippling cynicism that the rulers encourage to blind us from the alternatives to mere survival as we plod through the smelly swamp of somnambulism, compromise and dead dreams.

You MUST Find Your Why

Deep down inside you, your WHY is waiting, glittering, and pulsing.

When you pick it up with hands shaking with excited anticipation, wipe off the pessimism and disappointment, and polish it with optimism, hope, and belief, you will discover the genie that grants any and every wish. That Genie loves you more than anyone else has ever loved you, understands you better than anyone, cares deeply about your success, an believes in you. YOU are the Genie you seek.

Your fuel is your WHY. Find your WHY, and you have broken free.

You Attitude Determines Your Altitude

It’s not the techniques or the teaching - it’s the WHY. It’s not your tools or your skills, but your attitude that determines what you will accomplish in life.

If you want something badly enough, NOTHING will prevent your victory. These are the people I seek - people with a WHY that will not be denied.

The following questions, when seriously considered and answered on an individual basis, will reveal some of your deep motivations and beliefs, interpretations and needs, objectives, fears, and dreams, as well as some of the perceived barriers and pain in your life.

I challenge you to take some quiet, uninterrupted time to sincerely and honestly ask yourself these questions and answer them.

1. If I won five million dollars tomorrow and I had to allocate it within five days, what, specifically would I do with it, and why?
2. If I was given five million dollars and I had to distribute that between five people, not including myself or my spouse, who would those people be, and why?
3. If I had to spend three weeks on a desert island with ten people, dead or alive, who would they be, and why?
4. What would be a good reason for me to commit suicide?
5. Why would I not commit suicide?
6. Why do I hold my present religious beliefs? Do they help me or hurt me?
7. If I had to double my income in three months or be shot to death in public, what would I do differently in those three months?
8. If I had only six months to live, what would I do in those six months?
9. If I had ten million dollars in the bank, how would my life change specifically? What would I start doing, what would I stop doing, and whom would I spend time with?
10. If the world was going to be destroyed and I had to pick fifteen people to escape with me in a rocket ship, who would they be, and why?
11. Repeat the same question for FIVE people plus yourself.
12. Repeat the same question for TWO people plus yourself.
13. If I moved, alone, to a new city, far away, where nobody knew me, and I didn’t have to work (enough money to live comfortably) and I had to live there for a year, what would change in my life and my activities? What new things would I do, and what would I stop doing?
14. If there were no consequences or punishment, and nobody would find out, what would I do?
15. What two things do I fear most, and why? What can I do about it?
16. If I could change two things in my life, what would they be?
17. Which five people do I love the most, and why?
18. Which three people do I hate the most, and why? How would I benefit from forgiving and forgetting them?
19. What stops me from succeeding to a greater degree? What excuses am I making for not reaching my full potential?
20. If I could change the way I think about my life and the things I tell myself about my life and my options, I could break free and be happier. How badly do I want my dreams to come true, on a scale of one to ten?

Everything in your life is a trigger of some sort – the things you see, hear, feel, taste, read, and touch, the people you mix with, the places you go, the things you wear, what you eat and drink, your car, your home - everything is affecting you, whether you know it or not.

Peak performers carefully monitor their input, associations, diet, and environment. They control their self-talk, and set high standards for themselves.

Making the Right Adjustments

• You know how you feel if you wear dirty or creased clothes, if you don’t groom yourself well, if you spend time with losers, or if you don’t get enough exercise or sleep.
• And you know how you feel if you associate with winners, wear smart clothes, look your best, and go to top restaurants.

When you feel good about yourself, it’s because you have systematically created that situation, and you will achieve a lot more. Simply making the right adjustments in your life will go a long way to improving your self-esteem, and we earn money in direct proportion to our level of self-esteem.

How We Learn:

• Taste 1%
• Touch 1.5%
• Smell 3.5% (yet it is the most emotional sense)
• Hearing 11%
• SIGHT 85%!

Because visual triggers are so important (ask any advertiser), I designed a few triggers you might want to take advantage of.

Carefully Design Your Environment

My office is very carefully designed to visually trigger motivation, work, belief, optimism, feelings of well being and success, joy, and peace of mind.

I remove anything that has a negative trigger for me. Photographs of people who hurt me get removed and replaced.

Everywhere I look, I see multiple triggers.  I surround myself with:

• Gifts from people I like, respect, and love.
• Reminders of past victories.
• Reminders of future promises.
• Symbols of success and strength.

Our entire home is like that. Rika and I are careful about our triggers, and we’re highly disciplined. Cleanliness, orderliness, and high quality are important to us.

Do Some Spring-Cleaning

Take a good look at the triggers in your life, from people to things, and do some spring-cleaning. After all, it is spring, and every day is the first day of the rest of your life. Create an environment that makes you happy, healthy, and successful.

Think of a specific amount of money that would make a dramatic and exciting difference in your life.

Now imagine that you knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that you and your entire family would be tortured to death in a horrible manner (think of the movie, “Saw”) if you didn’t achieve that specific, exciting financial goal within exactly three months.

What would you do?

Could you achieve that goal?

Imagine your beloved kids having their podgy little paws severed, and you’ll quickly start making new choices. (Did that get your attention?)

More importantly:

• What would you do differently?
• What would you change?
• What would you stop doing?
• What would you start doing?
• Who would you call?
• What would you suddenly be prepared to do under those circumstances that you refuse to do now?

Most of us are too lazy, content, comfortable, and timid to do things outside of our comfort zone, and we allow our low self-esteem and fear of embarrassment to keep us from the wonderful achievements that we could accomplish.

It’s About Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone

Instead of sending you to a shrink (who is usually even more screwed up than we are), putting you through a motivational seminar every morning of your life, or chasing you around with a large, spiky stick, I suggest the easier route is to take the time to imagine the terrible consequences of remaining in your comfortable little molehill of mellow, yellow mediocrity.

When you play this game, you start to see all sorts of real options you might not previously have had the guts to confront.

Is It You Can’t or You Won’t?

You see, our biggest barrier isn’t the fact that we can’t accomplish something, but rather the fact that we won’t, because of our fear of other people’s opinions. Scary, I know, but true. We don’t fear failure per se; we fear the reactions of others if we were to fail. “What would they say? I would feel so embarrassed!”

How much more embarrassed would you feel if you learned that you had six months to live (watch “Breaking Bad”), and you had been too bashful, self-absorbed, and apathetic to provide adequately for your family when you had the opportunity?

Try this one: Imagine you get hit by a heavy truck while meandering across a busy street in the rain, so you’re confined to a wheelchair and can’t speak, and your fifty-something, arthritic wife has to work as a shelf packer at Safeway in the day and a cleaner at MacDonald’s at night to support your pathetic asset? (Problem is, there are so many useless men already living off their wives…)

Consider Your Real Alternatives

Playing head games frees us up to consider our real alternatives, to weigh up our present use of time and resources, and to think outside the box. We need to mentally exceed our pain threshold in order to imagine the unimaginable.

Playing this “torturous consequences” game allows us to peek out from under our moldy old security blanket and realize that we’re using around 4% of our potential, and that the lies we’ve been telling ourselves about what we can’t do are really just self delusion.

Think of Ricky Bobby in “Talladega Nights”, when he convinced himself he was paralyzed – a hilarious hospital scene that has a serious ring of truth to it. We all suffer from self-deception. When he stuck a real knife into his thigh to prove his point to his friends, he had a painful awakening.

Make Your Excuse Irrelevant

Yes, you can achieve magnificent goals, and all the barriers are just in your head. DollarMakers teaches how you can achieve any financial goals with no cost or risk, so all those weak excuses are no longer relevant. If only you can believe it to be so. Hence the dramatic imagination game.

If you have a vivid imagination and take the time to really get yourself into this head game, you might be amazed at what you could accomplish. Suddenly, you would do things that you currently avoid like the proverbial plague, not because you can’t do them, but because you fear the opinions of people who really don’t give a damn, don’t care, don’t notice, and don’t matter.

Get over yourself, get over your mental barriers, and get down to the bank to cash in on your grossly underutilized potential. Some once said. “THINK and grow rich…”

Antoine de Saint-Exupery said:

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”

The more exciting your goals and objectives, the more specific, the easier it is to handle the price you pay along the way.

Losers look at what they’re going THROUGH, while Champions look at what they’re going TO.

Part of the reason why people quit so easily is that they don’t believe in their own goals.

Here’s how to get very excited about your goals - it will fuel your enthusiasm and determination and make your journey infinitely easier by getting you to WANT to do what you have to do to get where you want to be.

Make an EMOTIONAL Commitment

Think of a goal. For example, let’s say your goal is to participate in the exciting DollarMakers International Convention in Cancun. Now it can be something that you rationally and intellectually commit to, and you might make a few random, lukewarm efforts to reach that goal.

Alternatively, you can make an emotional commitment, and that’s where you get the rocket fuel. Walt Disney said:

“If your heart is in your dreams, no request is too extreme, for when you wish upon a star, it makes no difference who you are!”

What would happen?

What would happen if you put up posters of Cancun around your home, visit websites about Cancun, ask Lynnette Peter, our DollarMakers Director for Travel and Conventions, about all the fun activities that will be available, discuss it with your family and friends, invite them to join you, visualize yourself riding a white horse on the beach, snorkeling among the multicolored fish, meeting the DollarMakers cream of the crop from all over the world, and having fun in the sun?

• Would you work harder to make it happen?
• Would you go out on a limb to spend time in paradise with the best of the best?
• What would the return on your investment be?

You don’t notice the shadows when you’re looking at the sun. Focus on what you want, not on what you don’t want.

4 Tips to Fuel Your Enthusiasm

1. Fill your mind with motivation and inspiration.
2. Associate with people who believe in you and in your dreams.
3. Work on your own personal development more than anything else.
4. Get excited about the details of your goals - the more specific, the more terrific. Smell them, taste them, visualize them, listen to them.

If your goal is a new red Cadillac STS, go and test drive one every single weekend… or at least sit in one. Smell it. Feel it. Imagine yourself driving it. Touch it. Put up pictures of it.

“Whatever the mind of man can believe and conceive, it can achieve”

- Napoleon Hill.

The rocky road will turn into silk and feathers when your objective is sufficiently brilliant and believable. Make it so.

Have you ever joined a health club or started a diet or exercise program, and given up after a short while? I have.

Muscle, Mind, and Motivation

I was once approached by a publisher friend to co-write a book with another friend, Lionel who was the country’s number one bodybuilder. The book was to be called, Muscle, Mind, and Motivation.

Lionel would write about health, exercise, and nutrition, and I would write about motivation and self improvement.

We would market the book through the eighteen health clubs that Lionel owned at the time and through my database and my talks and seminars – a lovely Joint Venture.

“I won’t start writing until you get into shape.”

We set up a lunch to agree on the terms. Lionel hadn’t seen me for a while, and when he did, he said, “Robin, I won’t start writing until you get into shape. You’re fat and unfit. Here is a Gold Membership Card to my Club. Come train with me, lose some fat, add some muscle, and then we’ll write the book.”

You Get Results Quicker When You Work with the Best.

I had been going to gym before in my life, but this was a new experience. When you train with the best in the country, it’s a whole new ball of wax, I assure you. I worked really hard and found out what makes a champion bodybuilder! I was in a bodybuilding Joint Venture with Lionel! I lost weight and fat, put on muscle faster than ever before, looked great, and we wrote the book, which was a roaring success.

The Best Laid Plans

The best kind of plans have three components:

1. You team up with champions, winners, and successful people only, not with undisciplined losers.
2. You both commit to a measurable, time-related, specific action plan that makes you both accountable for exact results.
3. You diligently and regularly monitor your progress and make adjustments as you go. And because you’re working with a champion, quitting is never even a consideration.

To this day, I remember the power of teaming up with champions, and I am privileged to know some real business champions with whom I Joint Venture.