To Help People Do What They Do
To Do It Better!
By Jim “Gymbeaux” Brown, August 10, 2017
Do
you have a Life Mission Statement? If
not why not? What do you do? Why do you do it? If you can’t answer these basic questions, do
you really know what you are doing and what your future holds; or not? If
you don’t know where you are going, without a plan you can get to a whole of
places you may not want to go!
Several
years ago I created a Life Mission Statement for me. It is “To
Help People Do What They Do, To Do It Better!” It is that simple. I felt my calling was to first learn things
and then to take the things I have learned and offer that knowledge to others
to help them “do what they do, to do it better.” This Mission Statement has served me well
over the years.
One
of the “things” I discovered came from Joe
Tye, my friend, teacher and mentor.
He calls it the Direction-Deflection-Questin
or DDQ. I have talked about it in several of the
Nuggets for the Noggin I have written. It is so simple to use but is one of the most
effective tools you could ever have to achieve whatever it is you want to
achieve. You ask AND answer yourself a question.
In my case, it works like this:
Is
what I am about to say, do or write
consistent
with my desire to help people
to
do what they do to do it better?
Then
is becomes a matter of YES or NO. If
YES, I say, do or write it. If NO, I don’t!
Look
at another example - losing weight. What
would happen if your desire was to weigh 150 pounds but you currently weigh 180
pounds. Meaning you have to lose 30
pounds to hit your goal. What are you
doing now to make that happen? Is it
working? Try this question:
Is
what I am about to eat or drink taking me to my ideal weight of 150 pounds?
If
YES, eat or drink it. If NO, don’t. You will know if it is in your best
interest. If you want to lose 30 pounds,
would you consider drinking a sugar infested soft drink as being in your best
interest to hit your goal? You know it
is not so why drink it? The trick is to
keep the DDQ in front of you at all times so as not to forget when it matters
most.
With
that in mind, I write Nuggets for the Noggin.
For the most part they are one to three typed pages of information that
people could use or at least think about.
Initially they were almost all related to sales and motivation. After I retired in 2012, some of the Nuggets
were more about whatever I was thinking at the time.
What
am I think about today? I am almost
finished reading Orison Swett Marden’s
book, Prosperity: How to Attract It.
What is so special about this book?
Thought you would never ask.
I
have read a lot of books, well over 1000.
I do not tell you that to impress you but to emphasize that out of all
the books I have read, Marden’s books are very special and therefore I want to
tell you about them. I have to keep
reminding myself that Marden wrote his books back in the late 1890s through
1911. What is so shocking to me is that
as I read them, I can see the exact same subject matter in other books I have
read over the years. Occasionally these
later books would make reference to Orison Swett Marden but not that much. I looked him up by searching on Amazon and
was shocked at the number of books he wrote.
I
don’t recall which of the many books I read first but I can tell you that I was
so impressed with one overriding thought that appeared in all of his
books. He wrote about events throughout
history and how they related to the life and times of the 1890 – 1911. I was shocked to discover that what he wrote
about then, what he tried to teach was no different in his time than they are
today. All of his books talk about men
and women becoming a success and just how that happens and more importantly how
it affects the world for the good when people become self-sufficient and successful. He also describes how the opposite of that is
also true, how it adversely affects the lives and futures of those people who
lie in wait of something better to happen to them and it rarely if ever does.
How
is reading Marden’s books in keeping with my Mission Statement of helping
people to do what they do, to do it better?
I can assure you that IF you
or your children or their children want to be successful in life, they need to
read what I have read – Orison Swett Marden’s books. If you read one, you should be caught up in
his writings and want to read more. You
can open any one of his many books to any page and you will see a paragraph,
paragraphs, sentences or simple phrases that could be used as a quote that
people would want to hear and remember.
If
you take nothing else away from this Nugget, I want you to take away the
thought of encouraging your children and by extension their children to read
Marden but not only just read it, actually study it. What are they doing right now in their early
years that would set them up for a successful future and ultimately retirement in
their later years. I can honestly say
that growing up in the 1950s no one ever talked to me about becoming a
success. About finding my passion. About finding my vocation. About setting out a course of action, a plan,
to achieve whatever it was that I wanted to achieve. Then in the 1960s as I graduated from High
School and attended College, still no one came forth with suggestions or
recommendations on a career path or planning for my future or how whatever I
did could eventually change the world.
The
lesson I learned late in life was that your children and their children “may”
find that special person that will help them identify their passion and future
career path but I am both afraid and certain that those mentors are few and far
between. If your children happen upon
one they are indeed fortunate provided they learn to value what they have
happened upon. It has been my experience
that most parents and their children fail to look upon people who have already
done what they want to do as a source of tremendous value and expertise. In fact that is one thing in my life that
concerns me deeply. It is impossible to
read as much as I have read without acquiring a great deal of knowledge. When I die, that knowledge dies with me
except for the over 400 Nuggets for the Noggin like this one that will live on
forever. The Nuggets and the 3 books I
have drafted will become my legacy but a legacy unto itself is useless unless
people discover what I will be leaving behind and find some use for the
Nuggets/Books.
The
Lesson of THIS Nugget is to read Marden’s books and then get your children and
their children to also read them. They
contain a tremendous amount of information on becoming a success where others
have failed. Time apparently has shown
us nothing as his books have been around for over 100 years and his lessons are
more true today than in his time. It makes
me ask the question, exactly what are our schools teaching our children if they
are not teaching them how to become successful?
The
following is a list of Marden’s book I have read. I will continue to read the remainder of his
books because they are hard to put down.
My biggest regret? Finding them
as I turned 70 years old. They could
have and most likely would have opened my mind and my future had I read them
when I was 12 to 18 years old. They are
like a GPS system showing you where the next turn in your life is and that will
eventually lead you to the destination you have chosen. What more could you possibly ask for? The list is in no specific order except for
the first two. Pushing to the Front is
truly exceptional but long; as such unless you create a plan for your children
to tackle the book just one chapter at a time, they may not want to read it
all. The second book may be the best
book on which to start – Self Investment.
This is the book the emphasizes that everyone should create their own
educational plan for success or in other words, Self-Help. No one is going to do it for them, they MUST
learn to create a plan for themselves.
First identify a long-range target for your life and then create a plan
on just how you intend to get there. It
is no different than taking a trip where you plug in your final destination
into your GPS system – your goal. Then
you fill up your gasoline tank (education) that will take you to your
goal. But just like the tank of gas in
your car, you have to continually replenish the gas (education) otherwise you
will stop dead in your tracks and your destination will never be achieved. So here is the list of books available on the
Amazon.com site where they can be found.
But wait…here is the best part.
Several of his books are FREE as a Kindle read and you can download
Kindle to your smart phone, tablet, notebook, desktop or Kindle Reader for FREE
as well. The remainder of Marden’s books
as Kindle reads are just 99 cents each. They are worth far more than FREE or 99
cents but at that price there is no excuse for not looking into them – NONE!
Pushing to the Front
Self Investment
Cheerfulness
as a Life Power
Eclectic
School Readings; Stories from Life
Every
Man a King
He
Can Who Thinks He Can; How To Succeed
Hints
for Young Writers
How
They Succeeded; Life Stories of Successful Men Told by Themselves
How
to Succeed, or Stepping Stones to Fame and Fortune
An
Iron Will
The
Joys of Living
The
Miracle of Right Thought
Out
of the Ashes; The Story of Orison Swett Marden
Selling
Things
Prosperity;
How to Attract It
The
Victorious Attitude
The
Wisdom of Orison Swett Marden
MARDEN BOOKS I INTEND TO
READ
Wisdom
and Empowerment
Be
Good to Yourself
Masterful
Personality
Character;
the Greatest Thing in the World
How
to Speak in Public
Thrift;
How to Cultivate Self-Control and Achieve Strength of Character
Keeping
Fit
Peace,
Power and Plenty
The
Secret of Achievement
Why
Grow Old (I need this one!)
Not
the Salary but the Opportunity
Making
of a Man (Woman)
How
To Get What You Want
The
Crime of Silence
The
Young Man Entering Business
Success
Nuggets
The
Hour of Opportunity
Making
Life a Masterpiece
Rising
in the World; or Architects of Faith
Ambition
of Success
(There
are even more)
SPECIAL NOTE: Given the time in which these books were
written, it was commonplace for speakers and writers to use the terms “man”, “men”,
“boys” but they were used to reflect both men and women, boys and girls. For
example, Making of a Man also refers to Making of a Woman.
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