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Why It Is Impossible to Fail
with the shortcuts of Winners and Role Models
When you were young, you conquered more obstacles than you can easily count. If you think that learning to walk was a piece of cake, you might want to reach back in your memory to rethink that. Hundreds and hundreds of failures... yet never once did you stop trying... from the smells in the kitchen to sounds outside, you had plenty of reason to learn to walk. You learned how to speak. Now that is really something: I'm not aware of any other creature on this planet that can do so. You learned hundreds and hundreds of complicated tasks, from tying shoelaces, to addressing men as "Mister" and ladies as "Ma'am," to running, climbing, using a pair of scissors. You know, my dog is smart, but I've never seen him lick a stamp and stick it on an envelope, or ride a bicycle, or make change of a ten. The more you conquered, the more you believed you could conquer, and by the time you were four or five, your brain was absorbing new facts and faces and figures and colors and sentence structures at a rate it would only keep up for a couple of more years. Some recent info sheds a bit of light on why we stop believing. Graduate psychology students at the University of Iowa individually followed hundreds of young children, carrying little click-counters. For every instance of the child hearing encouraging words and comments, there were just over fourteen negative comments! In a typical day, the child would hear an average of 32 positive comments, and an average of, get this, four hundred and twenty negative comments!! "NO!" "DON'T GO IN THERE!" "WHAT ARE YOU, STUPID?!" "DON'T DO THAT... DO YOU WANT TO GROW UP AN IDIOT LIKE YOUR FATHER?" What a shocker! No wonder we stop believing. Hey, an eight-year old boy receives about one-seventh the number of hugs that an eight-year old girl receives. Do you think it's a coincidence that an eight-year old boy is seven times more likely to have behavioral "problems?" Hey, I don't make up these numbers, I just observe & report them. It's not as simple as the "rah-rah-you-can-do-it" rationale. Shortcuts are easy, and belief is just one step of the way.
The next step is, of course, action. Knowing dozens, or even hundreds of powerful shortcuts does no one any good, least of all you, until the moments that count; the moments that lead to change... is a clear preview of how you are spending your life. Whether you are wasting your precious minutes or investing them wisely into your own future, your reputation will not be based on what you are "going to do." Your reputation is based on what you have done with all the moments of your life up until today, and your reputation tomorrow will be based on what you've done with the moments of your life up to and including today. It continues like this... ... until you speak the final goodbye, which means that this very day contains ingredients that determine just how poorly or excellently you "bake" your life. One unassailable fact remains: using the high-powered, very magical shortcuts that are identical to the steps used by Winners and Leaders, Role Models and Champions, it is impossible to fail. It is only possible to stop trying. You did not stop because you failed;
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