It was in keeping with that annual January tradition, where a plethora of bloggers flood the Internet with their predictions about online trends, emerging technologies, Internet flops, growing industries, rumored takeovers, ad nauseum.

But I’m no futurist by any stretch. I’m a copywriter by trade.

But I’ve seen some tremendous changes, mostly “behind the scenes,” and I wanted to join in the tradition. Particularly, I wanted to share not only something I was passionate about, but also something I knew was going to affect online copy in significant ways.

Now that several years have passed, I’m astounded by how true my predictions were…

At the time, I saw where online salesletters were heading. I’ve witnessed some dramatic shifts and upcoming trends, which I predicted would change the way we sell online.

It was something I truly believed in and still do, and something I had a lot to say about. But what started out as a blog post turned into a 50-page document! (Well, 52, to be exact.) It became more like a manifesto, which I entitled: “The Death of The Salesletter.”

I knew it would be controversial, due to the fact that I’m a copywriter and my career depends on salesletters. That’s why I said at the time, “It’s going to blow some minds, turn some heads, cause some yawns, provoke some fits, or waste some bandwidth.”

Up until now, you could easily download my manifesto. But now, and for the first time ever, I’ve also decided to republish the document, in its entirety, on this blog, without the need to download anything. The linked table of contents is listed below.

I encourage you to pass this report around. Download it and give it away, or just point people to this blog post. Either way, it doesn’t matter. And there’s nothing “covert,” here, too. There are no sales pitches or hidden agendas. I just wanted to get this off my chest.

If you’ve read it before, go back and read it again. See how many of my predictions came true or are about to. Rants or raves? Post them below. I’d love to hear from you.

The Death of The Salesletter originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

It contains 21 chapters of timeless strategies you don't want to ignore in your advertising and marketing efforts.

In fact, David Ogilvy once said: "Nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times."

I highly recommend that your read this book, which is brought to you free, before you spend any money on other copywriting books.

Some chapters are separated into several pages for easier reading and navigation. At the bottom of each page, you will find on the left links to other pages. On the right are links to the next chapter.

Happy reading!

"The time has come when advertising in some hands has reached the status of a science."
– Claude C. Hopkins

Scientific Advertising originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

But it's a practical, step-by-step guide whose thought-provoking principles and strategies, though they were written in 1910, are still very much applicable to this day. And probably more so.

I'm a firm believer in the idiom that you are what you think. And this book drives that point home. So I highly recommend that your read this book, which is brought to you free on this website.

Some chapters are separated into several pages for easier reading and navigation. At the bottom of each page, you will find on the left links to other pages. On the right are links to the next chapter.

Happy reading!

"The men and women who practice the foregoing instructions will certainly get rich, and the riches they receive will be in exact proportion to the definiteness of their vision, the fixity of their purpose, the steadiness of their faith, and the depth of their gratitude."
– Wallace D. Wattles

The Science Of Getting Rich originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

This version is the 3rd edition with over 140,000 copies distributed to date! This is includes third party distribution since people are invited to freely pass the ebook around. In fact, the estimate is in excess of 140,000 copies in all. (It’s probably closer to 300,000 copies if not more.)

Third edition. Copyright © 1997-2009 Michel Fortin. All rights reserved. The following page offers instructions on how to distribute, reprint or copy this ebook.

Remember, you can download and distribute this book! There’s the ebook version in PDF format. You can freely redistribute this book.

Some chapters are separated into several pages for easier reading and navigation. At the bottom of each page, you will find on the left links to other pages. On the right are links to the next chapter.

Happy reading!

“Don’t duplicate. Differentiate! Being the best in your field is not about being the best. It’s about being different. Be unique, and you’ll be perceived as the best as a byproduct.”
– Michel Fortin

The 10 Commandments of Power Positioning originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

But if you do prefer the printable version, you can download this book in digital PDF format by clicking here. Most browsers have the PDF plug-in already installed.

There are four worksheets in all:

1. My Values
2. My Guides
3. My Objectives For (Guide)
4. My Actions For (Objective)

My Values Worksheet

In the “values” worksheet, enter your values. Your priorities. The things that give you meaning. These are not goals but the feelings and end-result reaching any goal would give you.

My Guides Worksheet

Next is the “guides.” This is where you list your goals but align them with your guiding values. Remember, trying to reach a goal that’s misaligned with your personal priorities will set you up for frustration, stress, unhappiness, procrastination, even failure.

My Objectives Worksheet

Then, take one guide from your “guides” list, and use the “objectives” worksheet to list all the objectives you need to reach to achieve your goal. Break them down, step by step.

My Action Steps Worksheet

Then, with the “actions” worksheet, take one of the objectives above and list all the necessary actions you need to take to reach that objective. Finally, beside each action, add a liveline. That is, a date you want to start implementing the action.

A “liveline” is not a deadline. It is not a date by which you need to reach your objective but another guide, if you will, to let you know when you need to put your action into action.

One final note.

Print as many as you want. Pass them around, if you wish. Bookmark this page and come back often. If you wish, you may also download and freely distribute the ebook version here.

Here are the worksheets:

My Values

My Guides

My Objectives For: ________________________________

My Actions For: ________________________________

Worksheets originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

Remember that it’s not your goals that really count but how you live your life according to what’s important to you. If you feel you can not incorporate this system with your current job or other responsibilities, you should first try it out.

You might find out that your job is indeed part of your priorities or that it doesn’t mean anything at all to you. If the first is true, then you will have a greater zest and love for what you do. However, if the second is true, then start looking for something you love or would love to do.

One friend I know got involved in different functions with several local associations thinking that doing so was essential in her business. However, she felt stressed out because she couldn’t keep up with all of the demands on her life. She had pressing needs at home, less time at work, and more work than she can handle.

But when she went through the GOAL process she discovered that attending these meetings were not important at all because they were not in tune with her values. What was surprising to her was the fact that she had a wrong sense of what her real values were all along. This might happen to you!

The philosophies and strategies you have read in this book are not some sort of path-breaking dogma or the only road to success. But one thing is for sure in that it is the surest way to discover why one should (and not how one can) achieve one’s personal success.

Remember that if you live in a way consistent with your deepest values, your success is assured no matter how small or how grand the purpose is in your life. If you focus only on your goals and not on your priorities, you are placing a ceiling on your potential.

Remember that the essence of you, the “You” of you, is your successfulness. You don’t need anything outside of you to prove it. So dump your goals — more specifically, change the way you used to look at them. And instead, love what you do or do what you love.

Either way, work on your goals that revolve around a clear purpose in your life, and reaching them will be merely a byproduct of your love. As well, peace of mind, happiness, and absence of stress will equally become the result. When you realize this, you will grow in the right direction and enjoy a much greater quality of life.

Don’t just read this book once and forget about it. And don’t discount the power of clarifying your priorities. Try the techniques out. You will never fully understand the reasoning behind their use until you put what you have learned into practice. You will never really achieve the freedom you deserve.

Confucius once said, “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” Remember that this is not a “how-to” book but a “why-for” book. Try the GOAL method before you judge it. It might reveal many things about you, about your life, and about your deepest convictions. The result of trying the system may grant you a whole new perspective on life.

Jim Rohn said this, which has been hanging on my wall, above my desk, for years: “There are some things you don’t have to know how it works. The main thing is that it works. While some people are analyzing the roots, others are picking the fruit. It just depends which end of this you want to get in on.”

Oprah Winfrey once said, “The hardest things in life to learn are which bridges to cross and which ones to burn.” This is what the techniques in this book will help you to do, which is to learn more about your own personal bridges. To paraphrase Stephen Covey, “Seek to understand yourself before being understood.”

If you translate what is important in your life into what is urgent, then what is important will seldom if ever be placed on the back burner of your life. All in all, you will be happy and not just successful. You will find peace of mind as well as peace of time. You will improve the quality of your life during the passage of time. You can not control time, therefore enjoy it while you can. If you don’t, one day you might just be too late…

Good luck to you. Be kind to yourself.

May you be blessed with many opportunities, the wisdom to recognize them, the courage to seize them, and the ability to live them. But most importantly, may you be prepared to grow from them!

Namasté,
Michel Fortin

Conclusion originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

“We can no more afford to spend major time on minor things than we can to spend minor time on major things.”
– Jim Rohn

Now is the time to set your GOALs. Your “guides” are goals that will most likely stem from your personal values because, having gone through the process so far, you will have a pretty good idea of what kind of goals you truly want. Take a new sheet of paper and write at the top the words “My Guides.” Then, write down what you want to be, do, or have.

By taking your values you have listed and prioritized, associate a goal to each value and prioritize your goals according to the order your values have taken. Place a goal to which a value corresponds best. In other words, don’t look at the goal in itself but at its meaning. Some goals will end up with no value at all, which means exactly what it says — they have no real value whatsoever.

You should write them off completely and forget about them immediately. These goals can cause you to feel unsatisfied, unfulfilled, and unhappy. If not, just having them around can take your focus away from other goals that are more valuable and stop you from reaching them.

After you’re all done, re-prioritize your goals according to the specific order you have given them through their alignment. They may not necessarily respond to the exact value number. They simply follow suit according to the level of importance you have placed on them by harmonizing your goals with your personal set of prioritized values.

Now, take a new sheet of paper and re-list your newly prioritized goals. After that, you can start working on your goals with greater peace of mind and assurance. As Carl Trumbell Hayden once wrote, “Success is getting what you want while happiness is wanting what you get.”

The next step in the GOAL method is “O,” which stands for objectives. Objectives are mini-goals or milestone goals. Objectives come as a result of breaking a larger goal down into bite-sized chunks that are easier to achieve.

They are like checkpoints where you will be able to track your goals and easily detect and correct any deviations. They help to ensure that you’re on the right track since, after you’ve reached an objective, you can make appropriate corrections, focus on what’s important, change your objective, or change your goal altogether.

So, take a new sheet of paper again for each and every goal, and write at the top the words “My Objectives For (the goal you are working on).” Divide the goal up into as many parts as possible.

Instead of working on a goal with a deadline and probably feeling frustrated because you procrastinated until the last minute, you are achieving smaller goals within smaller time frames. You will become more productive and know where you’re going rather than be distracted by unproductive and oftentimes urgent activities.

We now get to “A” of the GOAL method for defining your actions. These are activities that will lead to the accomplishment of each objective. Ask, “What are the ’causes’ I need to produce the ‘effects’ I want?” “What steps must I take in order to reach my objectives?”

By breaking your goals down, you will likely discover what activities are truly important rather than urgent. In fact, some activities you never thought of will come to you almost automatically.

However, blindly taking massive amounts of action hoping someday it will produce the results you want can be very time consuming and frustrating. As Alec MacKenzie once wrote, “If you’re flying a plane and you’re lost, you may be accomplishing a lot just as the plane is going 600 miles an hour… But the bottom-line is that the plane is still lost.” Jim Rohn also wrote, “If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn’t need motivation to speed him up; what he needs is education to turn him around.”

So what you do now is take a sheet of paper for each and every objective and write at the top the words “My Actions For (objective).” For each individual objective, write down all of the activities that are required for reaching your objective. You’re preparing an action plan, so to speak, and by developing action plans you will be able to tell how well you’re on track towards your goals (i.e., how well you are sticking to your priorities). If objectives are milestone goals, then actions are like stepping stones towards your objectives.

At this point, you need not concern yourself with deadlines. You need only concern yourself with the knowledge of what you must be doing, and how important it is, at any given time. To do this, you must put “livelines” on your activities, which is the “L” portion of the GOAL method.

Livelines are dates by which your activities are to be initiated. They help to streamline and concentrate your focus on what’s important at any given time, and make sure that you’re sticking to your priorities at all times. In other words, livelines are meant to guide you and not force you into action.

With each action plan, put a start-date on each activity. Remember that livelines are guides that will tell you what’s important and when they are important, rather than what’s urgent or when they are to be finished by. You do not need to prioritize them because, in reality, they have already been prioritized.

But in order to put realistic livelines on each activity so that you don’t end up with a mountain of them, ask yourself this powerful question: “Does it matter? Does it matter right now? And if so, how much?”

Tackling or hoarding lists of unimportant activities can deter you from following your priorities. They will cause unwanted grief by causing you to not reach your goals and, worse yet, to step over other goals let alone other values.

The G.O.A.L. Method originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
– Bertrand Russell

“Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want to they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, to have what you want.”
– Margaret Young

First, take a sheet of paper and write at the top “My Values.” Start by listing your top ten values. Ask yourself what kind of feeling, value, or personal meaning you would like in your life right now. What are your innermost convictions? What do your really value in life? What are you truly passionate about? What are your core desires?

They can be health, wealth, excitement, career, spirituality, integrity, happiness, peace of mind, love, appreciation, financial independence, prestige, etc. Most important, your values can and should also be the important people in your life. They can include your mother, your father, your spouse, your lover, your children, your friends, etc. Don’t look at what you want but at what’s important to you. Consider the ultimate benefit in the accomplishment of any goal.

Then, prioritize your values from one to 10 (or more), where one is the most important value you cherish and 10 is the least. Write beside each of your values the reasons why you’ve chosen this value as well as why you’ve prioritized it in its respective order.

For example, you can say, “I’ve chosen financial independence as a value number one because I do not want to ever go bankrupt again,” or, “I’ve chosen health as my number two value because I want to live my life to the fullest and, since heart-related problems run in my family, I refuse to be stricken with this kind of disease.”

A person to whom I taught this technique chose security as one of her values because of an experience she had after being robbed and losing everything she owned. She chose wealth as another value because, after losing everything she owned and lacking proper insurance, she was homeless for several months. She was repulsed by this kind of living and rebuilding her life was a priority. As you can see, values as well as their order of importance are strictly personal.

So let’s start the entire process by first listing your prioritized set of innermost values. You can take a new sheet of paper and rewrite them in proper order. These are your rock-solid values that live in every single cell and fiber of your being. They are what make you unique. They are your purposes in life. They are your priorities. They are the fuel that will propel you along your journey. They will help you determine your “guides” rather than your “goals.”

As time goes on, you may need to review and reset your values. We all change with time and growth is a normal and expected part of life. While some if not all goals may never change, your values or their new order of priority can, and this will conflict with your goals or cloud your perception of their importance.

For example, you are probably single and value career as a number one value and family as a number two value. Years from now, you may meet that special someone and start a family. More than likely, you will start to value your family first rather than your career.

If your goals are not reevaluated or realigned properly with your priorities, this will cause some distortion in your perception of the importance of your career goals. In addition, it can create some challenges along the road of achieving both career and family goals.

To remain consistent, you must therefore continually ensure your activities respect your personal set of priorities. Reviewing your values from time to time will cause you to reassess your goals, re-prioritize them, or realign them with your values. Don’t worry if this happens to you.

Remember that your values are your guides along the voyage of life. Nobody can change them but you. They govern your actions and will grant you the necessary determination, courage, and motivation you will need to be successful. In fact, as you break your goals down into smaller easier-to-digest activities, you will add value to what you do. Ultimately, why should you earn a living when you can design a life worth earning?

Your Values originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

“The secret to success and happiness is to translate your values into everyday life.”
– Hyrum Smith

Everybody has a set of deep core values that governs a person’s actions and a person can never ignore his core values. When confronted with emergencies, pressure, important decisions, or challenging situations, the actions he invariably takes will directly stem from his personal set of values.

Wayne Dyer said, “If you cut an orange and squeeze it, all you will get is orange juice, not apple juice.” When a person is under pressure, what will come out will be without exception consistent with his deepest values; and this, no matter what a person wants or how that person acts under normal circumstances.

Therefore, working on goals that do not answer to your values or their specific order is like “going against the grain.” It’s like trying to maneuver your car when your wheels are out of alignment or pointing you in a different direction. In the end, you will lose control of your car and become prone to accidents along the way.

In the same sense, if you’re aligned with your values, you will have greater control over your life. As the Law of Control says, “People are happiest to the degree to which they are (or feel they are) in control of their lives.”

Ed Bernd, co-author of The Silva Method, once wrote: “When you know where you’re going, you can take shortcuts. Or at the very least, you can stay on the right path and not be distracted by unproductive activities.” This is what the system I will teach you will do. It is called the GOAL method, which is an acronym that stands for Guides, Objectives, Actions, and Livelines.

The first step in the GOAL system is to set your values and develop goals from them. (That’s why I prefer to call them your priorities. They are your “guides” rather than your “goals.” They guide you along your journey rather than become targets to reach.)

If you already have goals, then it would be to align your goals with your priorities. If your goals are not aligned with your prioritized values (or, worst yet, if they are improperly aligned), you will end up reaching a destination you might have never wanted or none at all.

As well, stress, procrastination, hard work, poor relationships, and unhappiness often results from the lack of proper alignment. Always remember that your values are more important than your goals because they are helping you to understand the value behind your goals.

To understand the importance of alignment, let’s illustrate with the example Brian Tracy uses in his seminars. Let’s say you meet persons “A” and “B.” They both have the same three core values, which are family, health, and career.

However, person “A’s” values are in the following order of priority: Career first, family second, and health last. Person “B’s” priorities, however, are: Family first, health second, and then career. Now tell me, even if both have the same three values, would you notice a difference between the two? The answer is invariably yes.

While one places career above all else, the other values his family first and he would sacrifice his career for his family if the need ever rose. While the other’s career is more important to him, even if family values are important, urgencies at work will take precedence. One’s higher value-oriented activities inherently dominate over all others. If goals do not correspond to one’s uppermost values, it can threaten the entire process.

Misalignment can be dangerous. Very dangerous. For example, person “A” has goals in the following specific order: 1) To spend more time with spouse, 2) get promoted, and 3) to improve cardiovascular condition. His number one goal, according to the preceding order, is a family goal when his number one priority, if you recall, is career. By placing career as a secondary priority, this will cause challenges along the way and he will feel that something’s wrong, which may indirectly cause distress on his family and thus defeat the purpose.

Another scenario is that he will probably have a tendency to procrastinate in the process and not feel as motivated as he should be. He will be unhappy, frustrated, neglect his family or deviate from any of his family goals when confronted with urgencies in his career. His wheels are pointing his car in a totally different direction and he is trying to maneuver against it. He must unnecessarily work harder to reach his goal. He might even abandon his family goals altogether without ever knowing why. Frustration, unhappiness, and guilt often ensue.

So, to manage your life effectively, you must start by setting your values, prioritize them, and then set your goals. This will prompt you to create goals that have more meaning, sometimes goals you may have never realized you wanted to achieve. Oftentimes, it will also create an entirely new vision for your life.

However, it may not be as easy as you think. Setting and prioritizing your values may take a while. It may take some time to think them over and it may require serious reflection. And, as you go along the road of life, you may have reshaped your thinking and need to reset your values altogether. Don’t fret if this happens to you. It’s all part of the process of growing that I mentioned earlier.

As well, this new vision created by your personal values may cause you to eliminate some of your goals or misconceptions. In reality, these goals were never meant to be accomplished in the first place. Either you would have never reached them in the first place or they would have deviated you from the accomplishment of other, more important goals.

Your True Priorities originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

“When you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
– Jim Rohn

A question people often ask me in my seminars is, “Why are there so many people who succeed, have everything a person can ever wish for, yet still feel unhappy, unsatisfied, or unfulfilled?” Why, in other words, do so many people successfully fail? You might wonder what this question has to do with self-esteem. To explain, let me draw on an analogy.

You see, life is like a building. And whatever we need, want, or do in our lives, there is one thing in this world that we will absolutely need and can never ignore, no matter what kind of “house” we dream of building for ourselves. Obviously, it is the foundation.

A foundation needs to be solid, reliable, and consistent with the size and type of building you want to build. In other words, a foundation must be “true” to your building. The bigger and greater the building, the more solid the foundation should be. Therefore, if you want a life that is richly rewarding, it is commonsensical that you will need a stronger foundation to work from.

For instance, did you know that towers have foundations as deep as the height of the tower itself in order to prevent it from shifting or vacillating? Likewise, being true to yourself means working from a foundation that is as strong as the life you are capable of building. But if you vacillate from your values, your life will have a tendency to vacillate as well.

Without support or a proper one for that matter, then regardless of how great the goal you want to reach your building just won’t stand up. Likewise, your achievements won’t stand up to your expectations when they’re built on a poor foundation. In addition, you can not add to your building with a foundation that was meant for a smaller or a different kind of building.

Therefore, doing as much as possible is like building too hastily, using poor materials and shoddy construction work. And reaching goals that are not consistent with your uppermost values is like a life that is built a foundation of sand; it may stand up but it won’t stay up — at least, not for long.

That is why you must ensure that you are building upon a reliable foundation that is consistent with the life you dream of building. The only thing that will keep your building standing through the challenges of time and the storms of life that come sweeping by is to start from a foundation that is made of solid concrete.

Your foundation is thus made up of your personal set of innermost values. Brian Tracy, author of The Science Of Self-confidence, says that the foundation of a fulfilling life is “to recognize, respect, and reach that which we are capable of in consistency with our uppermost values.” Therefore, the size and the strength of your foundation must be consistent with the size and the weight of your success.

Remember that clearly defining your values is the foundation of success. How can you stick to your priorities when you don’t know what they are or what they mean?

Our lives are, more often than not, cluttered with pressing needs and urgencies, other people’s needs as well as their priorities, or goals that do not correspond to any of our values. In order to manage your life effectively, you must first define your values. Then, when you align yourself with your values, you will have greater peace of mind.

Remember that if the foundation upon which you live your life is the wrong one, or in this case a weak one, you will either fall short of your expectations or never feel fulfilled. Your success, in other words, won’t stand up. You must be organized from the onset by clarifying exactly where you stand before deciding where you want to go. How can you reach any goal if you don’t know why for? In other words, how do you get to where you want to go when you don’t know where we are to start with?

So before you start reaching any goal, you must first manage your life. In other words, you must begin by clearly defining your deepest values. If not, you might produce some results and reach some goals, but ignoring your true priorities will cause you to never be able to reach that which you are truly capable of.

The key to effective personal management is absolute clarity. Clarity increases self-esteem while clutter decreases it. If your mind is cluttered, your life will be cluttered as well.

If you do not have a clear sense of your personal values, that is if you don’t know what’s important to you and your life right now, then regardless of how great the goal, how productive the day, or how effective the system, you will never be truly happy let alone successful.

If your deepest values are not clearly defined, you are probably following someone else’s values instead. Think about it. Have you ever worked on some of your goals but saw your successes as part of someone else’s plan? Have you ever reached some of your goals but somehow got deviated along the way? Have you ever worked so hard but felt you were going nowhere?

When I was in school, I remember my 6th grade teacher who once said, “Looking inside your lockers will tell me a great deal about who you are.” This applies to every dimension of life, as it is true that a person will become a high achiever to the degree to which he is organized.

In this context, how one is organized on the inside will determine how well one will do on the outside. To paraphrase my teacher, “If I could look inside your mind, it will tell me great deal about who you are.” In essence, you first need to put your life in order before you attempt to make something of it.

Your Life’s Foundation originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

“This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst then be false to any man.”
– William Shakespeare

I believe that the path to true personal greatness can be found through the use of a personal journal. Remember that you will never be as successful as you will be to your own self, and the journal can enlighten you in more ways in this area than you would have ever thought possible. Many great successful men and women have kept personal journals.

As a young salesman, the one thing that kept me hanging on was through writing and reviewing entries in my personal journal. In essence, knowing how far I’ve grown was the fuel that helped me grow further. My journals contain thoughts, feelings, inspirational messages, and all sorts of information about myself as well as about the people around me.

This book, for instance, is the result of years of journal-keeping. You can use your journal to reflect on, develop, and prioritize your personal set of values. Better still, you should use one to develop and integrate the GOAL system you will learn later in this book.

You can use your journal to help associate feelings to thoughts and thoughts to feelings. And most important, a journal can help you to discover the motives that motivate you.

Never underestimate the power of keeping a journal. In fact, look at it as your personal bible; it contains the commandments and the prophecies you want your life to take, respect, and adhere to. Make your journal your personal gospel.

Use it to capture ideas, flashes of inspiration, new skills, different strategies, situations you are facing, questions about yourself, and answers you come up with. You may think you know yourself well but this is rarely if ever true. You only know yourself to the degree that you learn about yourself. And the journal can positively and profoundly impact this important learning process.

Moreover, the journal can help you in developing your intuition. Recently, psychologists have discovered that we do not operate at a single level but at three. In other words, we don’t have just one mind but three distinct minds.

For example, beyond the conscious and subconscious minds, we also have an all-powerful, all-knowing super-conscious mind. Some people call it the “infinite intelligence.” Some people call it “soul” or “spirit.” But if you remember, I prefer to call it the conscience. Your intuition. It is the place from which all flows.

In other words, your mind is like a computer. For example, the random-access memory (RAM) is your conscious mind in which you sort, calculate, and process data. The subconscious mind is the read-only memory or hard drive (ROM) where information is stored, coded, and retrieved. However, the super-conscious mind is the programmer on which the other two depend, since the computer can not operate without it being programmed in the first place.

Thus, your super-conscious mind, being perfect and all-knowing, can help you along your journey and maybe more than you think. As such, your personal journal can become a great tool for tapping into the source that lies within you.

Additionally, it is of paramount importance for you to be able to keep records and refer back to them. References can help you to become more resilient and flexible in times of challenges. In other words, if you had a bad experience and overcame it in the past, the journal can help to remind you of your successes or of the learning experiences when another confronts you.

The best way to do this is to use the “best-better” technique. Look at what is the best thing you can pull from or liked about a given situation, and then look at how you would do better next time or how you can better yourself from the experience. Don’t write what you hate about an event or how terrible you were in dealing with it. And don’t justify it by saying, “I have to know what I did wrong so I won’t do it again.”

Finding out what’s wrong about any situation is in fact emphasizing it as well as reinforcing it. Instead of what you did wrong, write down what is the best thing you can pull from what happened or what you liked best about your experience. And look at what will make things better or how you would handle the situation better next time.

Understand that you must first work on your strong points instead of your weak points. Often, people work on their deficiencies and, as a result, unconsciously lower their self-esteem. However, if they had focused on their strengths, many of their weaknesses would have been self-corrected in the process.

Nevertheless, building your strengths will increase your self-esteem, which is the key to understanding your weaknesses and how to correct them. And the journal can be a wonderful tool for helping you do exactly that.

Be True to Yourself originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

“First, all relationships are with yourself — and sometimes they involve other people. Second, the most important relationship in your life — the one you have, like it or not, until the day you die — is with yourself.”
– Peter McWilliams

Remember that your inner self is your greatest source of all that feeds you along the road of life. It’s what builds you as a person. It’s your values, your priorities, your mind, and especially your peace of mind. Most important, it’s your self-image. Since your image is a mere reflection of your self-image, then what goes on outside of you is an indication of what goes on inside.

As Denis Waitley in The Psychology Of Winning once wrote, “What is impressed on the inside is expressed on the outside.” That is why, throughout this book, I often refer to self-esteem as the key determinant in your success. Inextricably, it affects who you are, what you do, and the people around you. You can never do what you love or love what you do if you don’t love yourself firsthand. Rumi once wrote, “Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.”

In addition, you will love others to the exact same degree you love yourself. Relationships are a mirror reflection of the relationship you have with yourself. Therefore, the more aligned you are, the better your relationships will be.

Stephen Covey once wrote, “People who are constantly repressing, not transcending feelings toward a higher meaning find that it affects the quality of their relationships with others.”

The way you treat others is directly proportional to the way you treat yourself, and the relationships you maintain reflect the quality of the relationship you maintain with yourself. If your relationships are less than desirable, then the problem lies within you — not outside.

In essence, if you ignore others, you ignore the fact that people contribute to your quality of life. As the cliché goes, “Nobody on their deathbed wished they spent more time at the office.” The level of success you achieve in your life is wholly dependent on the relationship you have with the people you know, serve, and love. And that, my friend, all starts with you.

For instance, if wealth is one of your values, remember that you can not buy happiness let alone friendship. Stuart Wilde once said, “People are the custodians of the world’s wealth. If you want to be wealthy, you’ve got to be nice to people.”

Money is but an energy, and it is not and should never be a goal in itself. Therefore, if you neglect others in the process of reaching your income goals, it is because you are neglecting yourself. You may become rich but you can also become poor in other ways.

If you don’t believe me, you should take a quick trip to your library. You will find that there are many rich men and women who, although being successful in a material sense, have failed in many other ways. They’ve failed in their businesses, in their partnerships, in their marriages, with their peers, with their kids, and even with themselves through suicide.

Bob Proctor, in the introduction of his book Born to be Rich, provides some very interesting statistics. To make a long story short, he listed the names of many of the world’s greatest self-made millionaires who have committed suicide, became mentally insane or incompetent, were killed, or died due to an over-consumption of drugs or alcohol.

Jim Rohn said, “Don’t become wealthy at the expense of others but rather at the service of others.” Wealth, therefore, is but a byproduct of love. If you seek to accumulate wealth, do so through doing what you love and not by setting it as a goal in itself.

In other words, wealth is a value and not a goal. Love yourself and you will love what you do as well as other people. In the end, success, happiness, wealth, and many other wonderful things will come to you in unexpected ways.

From the Inside Out originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

What is a problem? There’s a saying, which says that obstacles are what happens when you take your eyes off your goals. I don’t agree because problems can occur even when you are focusing on your goals. However, I would certainly agree that obstacles are what happens when you take your eyes off your priorities. In fact, to the congruent person, problems are not problems but considered as growing pains.

You are always growing no matter what. Change is, in essence, the result of growing. A “Help Wanted” ad caught my eye when it said: “We embrace change by hiring people who create it.” We do create our own changes. We are always growing, always evolving, always changing. Therefore, since we can not stop that growth, the key to living a fulfilling life is to choose how to grow and to grow in the right direction.

Like a plant that must first be tied to a stake in order for it to grow straight, you must learn to accept life’s garden stakes. Stakes are your teachers; people who have taught you or who are teaching you the things you need to learn. They can hold you back, make it tough for you, hurt you, say nasty things to you, or push you, but what they are really doing is teaching you.

Ultimately, they are making you stronger. They include your parents, spouses, bosses, mentors, teachers, government agencies, partners, customers, bankers, lawyers, competitors, friends, etc. They are like garden stakes that hold you as you set out to reach your goals, because they have something to teach you first and do so whether they intended it or not.

Now, failure and loss are also a part of life. You may lose money, time, people you love, even confidence in yourself. You may fail in business ventures, in reaching goals, in relationships, or in the course of your life. You may even lose sight of your values at some point in time, especially when you have to start all over (as most successful people have).

As life’s pruning processes help you to lose that which will make you grow stronger, you must translate those failures and losses as part of the pruning process of life that will help you grow healthier.

In addition to life’s garden stakes and pruning processes, you probably have to deal with negativity thrown at you from time to time. You must deal with challenges, setbacks, difficulties, and problems. Now, you know what fertilizer is made of, right? It takes that kind of negativity from which can grow into a beautiful tree. Therefore, you must accept getting fertilizer occasionally thrown at you so as to grow stronger.

Life is indeed like a garden. If you want to grow in the right direction and especially in the direction of your own choosing, you must learn to recognize life’s stakes, fertilizers, and pruning processes. You not only have the ability to grow, because we all do no matter what, but also you have the ability to choose how to grow. That’s what really important.

To grow either in age or in wisdom, in wealth or in poverty, in health or in sickness, in love or in fear, or in knowledge or in ignorance is all but a matter of choice. You have the ability to choose how you want to grow and to create the results you want. Benjamin Disraeli once said, “Men are not creatures of circumstances, circumstances are creatures of men.”

Growing in the Right Direction originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

“Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.”
– Miguel de Cervantes

In everything you do or want to do in life, you are always governed by law and not by chance. Natural laws are principles or explanations of why things are the way they are. Principles defined by Webster are “fundamental laws or facts of nature.” Out of the many you have read or will read about in this book, there is one, however, that is the foundational principle to all success.

It’s the Law of Cause and Effect, the Socratic Law of Causality enunciated by Socrates in 410 BCE. It is the one I want you to focus on most. It says that every event has a root cause as well as every event is also a cause set in motion, and so on. Everything happens for a reason. Everything is a matter of choice, and how you turn chance into choice depends on how well you recognize this law.

True success is not reaching a worthy ideal but in living it. It is to evolve. It is to become and not to have. As one sage put it, “Success is measured by who we are and not what we have.” Success is a label you put on a person who has achieved something that in your eyes is of significant value.

For instance, should you consider a person who meets a certain criteria to be successful? If so, all you are doing is looking at the end-result, one based on your perception of success. Do you know, for instance, if that person is living his worthy ideal? Do you know if that person is happy? Or should you, when you look at others who do not seem to lead affluent lifestyles, consider them failures?

The answer to all of these questions is no. You are only labeling them and doing so by merely scratching the surface. Literally.

Remember that the path to true success is an inward one. We will never be successful when feel that we have to measure it against something outside of ourselves, including and more importantly the perceptions of others.

In fact, many have achieved success but are often not considered successful. This is why I consider success and achievement as two separate entities. All successful people are achievers but not all achievers are considered successful. One is measured by its end-result while the other by its process.

Let me illustrate. One person has reached an annual income of $120,000 while another has reached only $25,000. Which one do you think is the more successful person? Most of you will have a tendency to say the $120,000 income earner is more successful because you are comparing end-results (or goals). You are not considering the process.

However, let’s say that the $25,000 earner went through a bankruptcy, suffered an illness, or had a series of accidents. Who’s more successful now? Not convinced yet? How about if I added that the latter also has greater peace of mind, feels a deeper sense of joy, loves his work, and finds a profound feeling of satisfaction with only $25,000. In other words, his $25,000 means more to him than $120,000 means to the other.

Now, who is the more successful person? You see, the $25,000 means more to the latter. The taste of success is sweeter to him. The value behind the achievement is greater. And that’s the key.

Essentially, success is not and should never be measured by the end-result or by how others feel about it, because the level of one’s success is deeply personal and based on how one feels in achieving it. It comes from neither the size of the goal nor its value to others. Ultimately, the level of your success is measured by how you personally value its achievement. Period.

“Mike,” some interviewer once asked me, “if you had to live your life over, what would you have changed?” I responded that I wouldn’t change anything. If I had to choose my parents or the way I wanted to live, I wouldn’t be where I am if I did, and I would certainly have to experience what I did in order to think that way in the first place.

Some of you may categorize that as having a positive attitude, but a positive mental attitude is more than simply being optimistic. It is based on the understanding and the application of natural laws. Stephen Covey illustrates this point extremely well. He says, “Some may be lost in their lives. If they have a positive mental attitude, they may be able to carry that loss. But they are still lost.”

In essence, positive thinking is the result of alignment and not the other way around. If you accept your setbacks as things that have happened to you for a reason and use them as propelling forces to reach that which you seek, you will become much more effective and, of course, successful.

Natural Laws originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

“Motivation,” the author of The Psychology Of Winning Dr. Dennis Waitley wrote, “comes from within and not from without; all motivation is self-motivation.” You can not find motivation outside of you but can develop motivation inside of you. Oftentimes, it is sleeping within you. People can get pepped up, enthused, encouraged, or even inspired by others, but they can never get motivated by them.

Effective personal managers are efficient, satisfied, motivated, and happier. They have higher self-esteem, are more likely to get promoted, and find more and better opportunities in life.

All great achieving men and women are effective self-managers. They master their lives instead of manage their time. In fact, they do so almost instinctively without it being a goal in itself. On the flip side, however, ineffective personal management leads to procrastination and under-achievement.

It’s like the typical workaholic who manages to accomplish many tasks in an expedient fashion but must work long hours in order to do so or falls “sick” more days in the year than the average. Usually, an ineffective personal manager is moody, restless, sleepless, stressed, irritated, or sick. These are some of the natural side-effects of working without a sense of purpose.

For instance, if a salesperson is excellent in selling, he can close on a larger number of presentations than the norm. But if he is a poor self-manager, he only finds poor quality prospects or sells using unethical tactics.

Therefore, he will have to work harder in order to find more people in order to meet his sales goals. Additionally, he will compromise his peace of mind that will ultimately affect his presentations and the relationships with his clients.

If he works very hard, meets a lot of potential customers, manages his time well, and accomplishes many tasks efficiently, but works on lower priority activities or on low priority values, it will cost him precious selling opportunities.

He is limiting himself as a result.

Truly successful people live in a way consistent with their personal values. They also know how to reach their goals without having to work themselves into the ground. Remember that what is urgent is seldom important and what is important is seldom urgent. Having goals that are aligned with one’s priorities will cause a person to do what is important and not necessarily urgent.

However, the beauty of following such a process is that it will help to create a sense of urgency with what is important. It may not necessarily be urgent, but it is to that person. That person will positively procrastinate.

In other words, he will delay that which is not important to him and urgently attend to that which is. He will focus on quality of life rather than quantity of time. He will drop his goals and manage his life.

Jim Rohn once said, “Without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value.” In essence, activities that follow one’s uppermost values become priorities as well. The things that are really important in one’s life are given a sense of urgency rather than left on the back burner.

Nevertheless, if you say “I wish someone would come by and motivate me,” what happens if he doesn’t show up? As Jim Rohn said, “You’ve got to have a better plan for your life.” You have to become an effective self-manager. You have to manage your life and not your time.

Self Management originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

Goals properly aligned will give you an impelling momentum that, like a snowball rolling down a snow covered hill, increases in size and speed along the way. The more you work on your priorities, the more motivated you will become and the more timely the results you will produce. They will increase and keep on increasing.

Pam Lontos once wrote, “Momentum creates more momentum as motivation actually feeds on itself.” Each little success achieved will increase your self-esteem, your effectiveness, and of course, your efficiency.

Alignment will also grant you the ability to discover hidden opportunities and resources; opportunities and resources you thought you never had. An aligned person somehow has more of everything.

Through the Law of Attraction, working with a sense of purpose ignites this inner magnetic force that positively attracts the right kinds of people, situations, experiences, ideas, and opportunities you will need along your journey. Ultimately, serendipity is the result of alignment.

You might think that this is a whole bunch of “mumbo-jumbo.” But in fact, when people are aligned, they are often considered “lucky.” Is it because of some metaphysical magic? Is it the result of some supernatural event? Is it really luck? Or is it because opportunities pass them by every single day and that such an alignment creates a heightened sense of awareness that causes them to discover what has been there all along? Of course, the latter is the right answer.

Alignment is opening yourself up to a whole new dimension, one that is and has always been there ready for you to enter when you are truly prepared for it. As Earl Nightingale once said, “Luck is when opportunity meets preparation.”

Management guru Peter Drucker once said, “Efficiency is doing things right while effectiveness is doing the right thing.” I say that luck is the result of both. It’s doing the right things in the right way.

By aligning your goals with to your values, you are doing things right. Then, when you work on your goals (i.e., follow your values), you are in fact doing the right things because they reflect your priorities. In the end, what you choose to do at any time will respond to your uppermost values at all times.

This is where luck often comes in. You will have more desire, energy, and courage, and you will get a greater feeling of fulfillment both while you’re working on your goals and once they’re achieved. And you will attract all the necessary resources, events and people you need at that point.

Contrary to the traditional way people set goals, the process discussed in this book is in fact showing you how to do so in reverse. You are breaking your core values down into smaller, more digestible goals.

These are called “pipeline goals” or “point-to-point goals” (or what BrianTracy calls “benchmark goals”). If you just set goals, for instance, you will seldom if never be effective and, as often is the case, you will lower your self-esteem.

Therefore, you must first find out what your priorities are and then you use them to back up your goals. Together and properly aligned, you will be able to develop your goals into the right tools, skills, relationships, attitudes, and activities that you will require in order to achieve your goals. Thus, when working on your goals in reverse, you will become lucky.

Luck and Motivation originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

“When your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier.”
– Roy Disney

People say “change your attitudes” or “have a positive attitude,” but I don’t agree since attitudes can not be changed. They are results and not causes. They are byproducts of your innermost convictions. They are reflections of your deepest values. You can’t just change them on a whim because your outside is but a mirror reflection of your inside.

If you’re going to change your outside, you must stick to your values. If you remain consistent with them, you remain true to yourself and will become genuinely motivated. You will naturally have a positive attitude because you are connected with your higher self.

Like I said earlier, many people achieve their goals only to ask themselves in the end, “Is this it?” “Is this what I really wanted?” “I worked hard for this?” “Why am I not happy?” or, “Where do I go from here?” Obviously, goals alone can create a great deal of frustration even after they have been reached.

If you plan activities that revolve inexorably around your core priorities, your sense of purpose will therefore guide you in creating better goals and activities with which you will be much more productive in executing. How do you do that? First, you set your values and prioritize them — these are your priorities. Then and only then, you set your goals and align them with your priorities.

So, before you climb the ladder of success, you must ensure that it is leaning against the right wall by aligning your goals with your true priorities. Ultimately, goals and values should become one and the same. We, as individuals, are different not only by our core values but by the hierarchy of those values.

Let me give you an example. Hyrum Smith, author of The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management, uses an imaginary “I-beam” exercise in his seminars. An I-beam is a steel beam used in the construction of building frames.

While they can be as long as several hundred feet or even more, they’re only about a foot and a half wide. In fact, they are called “I-beams” because a cross section of the steel beam would look like the letter “I.” (If you put the beam on its side, it would look like an “H.”)

Mr. Smith tells his audiences, “Let’s say we have an imaginary I-beam stretching across the conference room floor. You’re at one end of the beam and I’m at the other.” Mr. Smith then asks, “Can you walk across the beam without falling off?” “Sure,” the audience replies.

Mr. Smith then changes the scenario. He says, “What would make a difference in your thinking is if I took the beam and hung it between the two World Trade Center towers in New York city, dangling several thousands of feet above the ground and braced at both ends.” At this point, he asks, “Would you cross the beam now?” The audience shouts, “Of course not!”

“Would you do it for a hundred dollars?” adds Mr. Smith. “Would you do it for a thousand or even a million dollars?” Now, the last figure does cause some people in the audience to hesitate a little bit. But even then, most people refuse the offer. They value their own life far more than they do the money. “They would far rather be alive than be rich,” as Hyrum would say.

Nevertheless, what Mr. Smith tried to do in this particular situation is to have people reveal their true priorities, especially to themselves. In an instant, money, which was long thought to be a priority, became secondary when their own lives are placed in the scenario.

However, it didn’t end there.

Some people value other things even greater than their own lives. For instance, after asking the parent of young child to participate, he conducted his exercise and then said, “What would you say if I kidnapped your child, held a gun to your child’s head, and asked you to cross the beam or else the child suffers the consequences? Would you cross it then?” Many parents would cross the beam, obviously with a great deal of fear and trepidation, but without question. They value their children’s lives before their own.

Mr. Smith, who had been doing this exercise flawlessly many times in the past, encountered a snag one day. He did his I-beam test with a mother of a two year old and asked her to cross the beam. To the amazement of both Mr. Smith and the audience, she refused to cross. When asked why, the mother answered, “If I die, I have nobody to take care of my seven other children.”

As you might imagine, there was a tremendous sigh of relief that could be felt across the entire room. Nevertheless, the point is that every single person has not only a different set of values but also a different prioritization of those values. In this case, the mother didn’t want to deprive her seven children of a mother.

While each person’s set of values may resemble one another, the order of importance in which they are placed is clearly an individual process based on many different factors. One’s experiences, education, philosophies, upbringing, culture, sex, race, religion, and of course, conditioning play very dynamic roles.

This is why there is a third element to this disparity between us humans.

In addition to personal values and their prioritization, a person’s uniqueness is also defined by the manner in which he is aligned with his distinct hierarchy of values. This is the reason why some people are genuinely motivated and love what they do, while others need constant reinforcement or a “carrot-and-stick” support system. It’s also why some people can deal with their challenges very easily while others quit or cut corners when they feel challenged or overwhelmed.

The Power of Alignment originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

“The ultimate goal of life is death — the experience of life is where the value is, not the results we achieve.”
– Anonymous

When people refer to productiveness, they usually refer to “busy-ness.” Positive productivity, on the other hand, is the result of doing what’s important and will hinge greatly on how well you adhere to this process of alignment. Alignment can also help you to discover not only what you need to do but also provide you with shortcuts as well.

Recognizing your intrinsic values will most likely aid you in finding better ways to reach your goals and greater results that you can produce along the way. When you translate your values into actions, many alternatives and opportunities will naturally jump out at you. While they were always there to begin with, alignment merely makes them more visible to you.

The difference between the production of results and the completion of tasks is in most cases a very subtle one. When I ignored my core values, I eventually became stressed out, less productive, disorganized, busier, and irritated.

Lacking motivation, I tried to find and felt compelled to use encouragement or inspiration from other sources. However, the most important downfall was that I had generated a great deal of distress on the people around me, especially those who were central to my life.

I certainly made myself busier and more efficient, but I wasn’t truly productive. Sometimes, I procrastinated doing what was important and even ignored some of my priorities because I was not internally driven. I said to myself, “I have to do this?” or “I have to do that?” I was frustrated even at the onset.

However, when I found out what was important in my life and worked in reverse, I was naturally enthusiastic, produced better results, had greater satisfaction with the littlest of results, and had a deeper understanding of what was required from me. I also faced challenges with greater ease and patience. Solutions came to me in an instant. My quality of life soared. And the people in my life encouraged and supported me.

Working in reverse in indeed the key to effectiveness and success. As one of Dr. Stephen Covey’s habits, in his truly exceptional book The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, the idea is to “begin with the end in mind” or to plan your way on backwards, from the final result to where you are now.

You see, the dynamics of success are not a matter of talents, skills, or attitudes but a matter of priorities. Arm yourself with the knowledge of yours in all you do and you will, directly or indirectly, make the best choices for your life and do so with greater inner peace. Making the right choices is the active outcome of consistently focusing on your true priorities.

The Law of Correspondence says that your outer self corresponds to your inner self, or that the outside is but a mirror reflection of the inside. Therefore, when you work in correspondence with your true priorities, it will produce enough self-motivation to empower you to act on those desires. Simply, your actions will be — as it should be — a mirror reflection of how you feel deep inside. As a result, you will be congruent and lead a balanced life.

When people look for outside stimulation or encouragement, whether it’s from pep rallies or drugs, it’s because they do not appreciate what they must do in order to reach their goals. This is the misalignment I discussed earlier. It happens when there is the lack of a clear purpose.

For instance, if people get pumped up on the outside, their inner selves will eventually find ways to downplay that external motivation. It’s really a fake sense of enthusiasm. They may appear excited and enthusiastic, but some say that people who appear too happy or excited are phonies. I’m not saying this is true all the time but it is certainly true when the motivation or the reason for their excitement does not come from deep within.

Positive Productivity originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

While statistics prove that 90% of heart attacks happen on Monday mornings, it goes to show that motivation doesn’t come from work. In reality, most people find themselves working in jobs they hate.

Some wake up in the morning feeling lethargic and hit the snooze button one too many times. Some work only “for the weekend” and take more time to prepare their vacations than they do their own lives. And some who become “workaholics” end up working themselves either out of a job or into a grave. In short, getting motivated by one’s work is impossible. In fact, getting motivated by anything outside of oneself is impossible.

If people are not first internally driven to reach their goals, then other goals as well as other priorities will go by the wayside. People who focus strictly on goals usually compromise other more important things, such as health, family, relationships, job security, and so on. They procrastinate that which is more important in their lives and place quantity of time above quality of life. They generally get stressed out, burned out, or left out as a result.

Is this really motivation? Isn’t motivation supposed to be positive, joyful, and rewarding? Therefore, goals are not the motivators we think they are. For instance, if you think that having goals will jump-start you, you will be very disappointed if you haven’t been already.

The key to becoming more efficient, productive, as well as effective is to have and work on an intensely burning desire. Motivation comes from within and not from without. It comes from a sense of purpose. Your values are the real motivators and not your goals. If you fail to recognize this simple axiom and focus only on your goals, then rather than motivate you your goals will hurt you.

How much more motivated will you be if what you do has a meaning and a purpose? How can you procrastinate when you do what you love or have a clear understanding of how important are the things you do?

Confucius once said, “Do what you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Marsha Sinetar, author of True Wealth, said, “Do what you love and the money will follow.” And Peter McWilliams, author of Life 101, said, “Do what you love and the necessary resources will follow.”

Essentially, they are all true since goals do not bring us motivation; we must bring motivation to them. We must be self-motivated from the beginning.

You see, you may not necessarily love some of the things you do or need to do. But if they are relevant to your priorities and if you had a clearer understanding of how truly important they are, you will begin to look at what you consider as perfunctory or drudgery from a whole new perspective.

In his seminars, for instance, motivational speaker Roger Dawson talks about those famous bumper stickers that say “I’d rather be skiing” or “I’d rather be fishing.” Roger asks, “If they really wanted to ski, fish, or whatever else they’d rather be doing, why aren’t they doing it at that moment?”

You might say: “Yes, but the consequences are great. That person might lose his job, his spouse, his credit, or this, or that.” Of course, you’re absolutely right. But in reality, if a person really wanted to ski, fish, or whatever, and if that person is not doing it at that moment, then it is because he has made a choice on doing what he is currently doing.

Circumstances are never the culprits. What that person has chosen to do reflects what he inherently values, which is preserving his credit, marriage, job, and so on (and not skiing or fishing).

Some of you might say, “Yeah, but I must go to work everyday and slug it out just to keep up with my bills. Clearly, survival is not a choice.” Not so. If you value your standard of living, then the choices you are making reflect that specific value. If you are not doing what you love or if your bills are too high, you are purely living out the choices you’ve made up to that point.

I agree that some of the alternatives you are left with may not be as appealing. But when you focus on your values, you will be able to look at what you’re doing from a different perspective and understand that whatever you must do is really what you are choosing to do.

The fundamental, underlying truth in success is that you alone are responsible for the choices you make, and that you always have the ability to either change or accept what you have chosen. Invariably, your actions and your decisions reflect your innermost values. Often, if you’d rather be doing something else, it is because you are not conscious. In life, you are always making choices at every given moment. Even reactions are choices, albeit unconscious ones.

Don’t blame your circumstances for where you are. You alone are responsible for your life and in finding this motivation that so fuels it. If you don’t like what you have to do, then don’t blame “it” because it’s not “its” fault.

John Randolph Price once analogized, “If you are drowning, don’t blame the water but blame yourself for not having learned how to swim.” In other words, don’t blame the outside when the fault comes from ignoring the inside. Jim Rohn once said, “If you’re not happy where you are, then change it! You’re not a tree.”

True Motivation originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

“Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”
– Anonymous

You may have heard of Thoreau’s advice, “Do what you fear and the death of that fear is certain.” I figured that becoming a salesperson was the best way to fight my fear since rejection is commonplace in sales. In the beginning, though, I certainly was no sales superstar. Working solely on commission and with no income to show for, I filed for bankruptcy (one of two, if you recall). You might say that I became what my father programmed me to believe.

Slowly but surely, however, I manage to overcome my setbacks and eventually became the number one salesperson in Canada for a large, multinational insurance company. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Now, the point I’m trying to make is that becoming purposeful won’t make you an overnight success let alone guarantee it. It takes time. Jim Rohn said, “Part of success is preparation on purpose.” Alec MacKenzie said, “A bad decision is usually the result of a hasty one.” Ideally, you must take the time to learn why you should reach your goals and not how you can reach them.

Once you’ve defined your uppermost values, you will know which goals are important and why they are. This is what being conscious is all about and it’s not something you achieve at some point in the future. You will never be satisfied with your goals or with yourself after their achievement if you haven’t properly mastered your life right now.

Like it or not, the gratification you will receive out of any goal is directly proportional to the quality of your life, for how you focus on your priorities will affect your results as well as your appreciation of those results.

So, take the time to know or at least discover your values. In other words, your goals should not speed you up but slow you down. At first, it may seem hard to take the time you need to create a better plan for your life. Otherwise, the lack of planning will cause you unnecessary stress, frustration, and the possible abandonment of your goals.

You may also cut corners and get what you want, but as the Law of Balance says, “What goes around, comes around.” If you take a “bite” out of what’s important in your life, it will always come back and “bite” you somehow. Poet Nancye Sims, in The World Needs More Dreamers, wrote: “Dreamers are patient for they know a goal is only as worthy as the effort that’s required to achieve it.”

Don’t confuse eagerness with impatience because they are entirely different. It’s OK to be eager, but don’t get so impatient that you don’t take the time to prepare your goals let alone for your goals. Unsure, you might end up doing what may seem relevant when very often your actions will only be smoke-screens.

Abraham Lincoln once said, “If I have to chop down a tree and only had six hours to do it, I would take four hours to sharpen my ax.” If you are impatient, it might take you more time if not more effort to get what you want. Being prepared may seem like a lot of work, but it really isn’t if you are genuinely eager.

In The Power of Desire, one of Jack Zufelt’s students wanted to get a black belt in Karate as did his mentor. The student asked what he must do and Jack replied that, although he can do it, he would need to practice an hour each day for four years. Disappointed, the student abandoned his goal, saying, “I just don’t have the patience.”

To this person, although it may seem as an important goal to him, getting the black belt was not a genuine core value. If it really were, no matter how much time or effort it would have taken he would have achieved his black belt by now. Additionally, he would have enjoyed the process.

Taking the Time originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.