Success and happiness go hand in hand. Success is getting what you want and happiness is wanting what you get!

Existence alone is not success! It is a lot more!

Do more than exist -- live Do more than touch -- feel Do more than look -- observe Do more than read -- absorb Do more than hear -- listen Do more than listen -- understand

John H. Rhodes

SOME OBSTACLES TO SUCCESS (REAL OR IMAGINED).

Ego Fear of failure success ; lack of self esteem No plan 33*?

Lack of formalized goals Life changes Procrastination Family responsibility Financial security issues Lack of focus, being muddled Giving up vision for promise of money Doing too much alone Over-commitment Lack of commitment Lack of training Lack of persistence Lack of priorities

THE WINNING EDGE.

In order to get the winning edge , we need to strive for excellence, not perfection. Striving for perfection is neurotic; striving for excellence is progress, because there is nothing that can't be done better or improved.

All that we need is a little edge. The winning horse in the races wins 5-to-1 or 10-to-1. Do you think he is five or ten times faster than the other horses? Of course not. He may only be faster by a fraction, by a nose, but the rewards are five or ten times greater.

Is it fair? Who cares? It doesn't matter. Those are the rules of the game. That is the way the game is played. The same is true in our lives. Successful people are not ten times smarter than the people who fail. They may be better by a nose, but the rewards are ten times bigger.

We don't need to improve 1,000% in any one area. All we need is to improve 1% in 1,000 different areas, which is a lot easier. That is the winning edge!

STRUGGLE.

Trials in life can be tragedies or triumphs, depending on how we handle them. Triumphs don't come without effort.

A biology teacher was teaching his students how a caterpillar turns into a b.u.t.terfly. He told the students that in the next couple of hours, the b.u.t.terfly would struggle to come out of the coc.o.o.n. But no one should help the b.u.t.terfly. Then he left.

The students were waiting and it happened. The b.u.t.terfly struggled to get out of the coc.o.o.n, and one of the students took pity on it and decided to help the b.u.t.terfly out of the coc.o.o.n against the advice of his teacher. He broke the coc.o.o.n to help the b.u.t.terfly so it didn't have to struggle anymore. But shortly afterwards the b.u.t.terfly died.

When the teacher returned, he was told what happened. He explained to this student that by helping the b.u.t.terfly, he had actually killed it because it is a law of nature that the struggle to come out of the coc.o.o.n actually helps develop and strengthen its wings. The boy had deprived the b.u.t.terfly of its struggle and the b.u.t.terfly died.

Apply this same principle to our lives. Nothing worthwhile in life comes without a struggle.

As parents we tend to hurt the ones we love most because we don't allow them to struggle to gain strength.

34*OVERCOMING OBSTACLES

People who have overcome obstacles are more secure than those who have never faced them . We all have problems and we feel discouraged some time. Most people get disappointed; but winners don't get disheartened. The answer is perseverance.

An English proverb says, "A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner." Everything is difficult before it becomes easy. We cannot run away from our problems. Only losers quit and give up.

Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

--Abigail Van Buren

HOW DO WE MEASURE SUCCESS?.

True success is measured by the feeling of knowing you have done a job well and have achieved your objective.

Success is not measured by our position in life but by the obstacles we overcame to get there.

Success in life is not determined by how we are doing compared with others, but by how we are doing compared with what we are capable of doing. Successful people compete against themselves. They better their own record and keep improving constantly.

Success is not measured by how high we go up in life but by how many times we bounce back when we fall down. It is this bounce back ability that determines success.

EVERY SUCCESS STORY IS ALSO A STORY OF GREAT FAILURE.

Failure is the highway to success. Tom Watson Sr. said, "If you want to succeed, double your failure rate."

If you study history, you will find that all stories of success are also stories of great failures. But people don't see the failures. They only see one side of the picture and they say that person got lucky: "He must have been at the right place at the right time."

Let me share someone's life history with you. This was a man who failed in business at the age of 21 ; was defeated in a legislative race at age 22; failed again in business at age 24; overcame the death of his sweetheart at age 26; had a nervous breakdown at age 27; lost a congressional race at age 34; lost a senatorial race at age 45; failed in an effort to become vice-president at age 47; lost a senatorial race at age 49; and was elected president of the United States at age 52.

This man was Abraham Lincoln.

Would you call him a failure? He could have quit. But to Lincoln, defeat was a detour and not a dead end.

In 1913, Lee De Forest, inventor of the triodes tube, was charged by the district attorney for using fraudulent means to mislead the public into buying stocks of his company by claiming that he could transmit the human voice across the Atlantic. He was publicly humiliated. Can you imagine where we would be without his invention?

A New York Times editorial on December 10, 1903, questioned the wisdom of the Wright Brothers who were trying to invent a machine, heavier than air, that would fly. One week later, at Kitty Hawk, the Wright Brothers took their famous flight.

35*

Colonel Sanders, at age 65, with a beat-up car and a $100 check from Social Security, realized he had to do something. He remembered his mother's recipe and went out selling. How many doors did he have to knock on before he got his first order? It is estimated that he had knocked on more than a thousand doors before he got his first order. How many of us quit after three tries, ten tries, a hundred tries, and then we say we tried as hard as we could?

As a young cartoonist, Walt Disney faced many rejections from newspaper editors, who said he had no talent. One day a minister at a church hired him to draw some cartoons.

Disney was working out of a small mouse infested shed near the church. After seeing a small mouse, he was inspired. That was the start of Mickey Mouse.

Successful people don't do great things, they only do small things in a great way.

One day a partially deaf four year old kid came home with a note in his pocket from his teacher, "Your Tommy is too stupid to learn, get him out of the school." His mother read the note and answered, "My Tommy is not stupid to learn, I will teach him myself." And that Tommy grew up to be the great Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison had only three months of formal schooling and he was partially deaf.

Henry Ford forgot to put the reverse gear in the first car he made.

Do you consider these people failures? They succeeded in spite of problems, not in the absence of them. But to the outside world, it appears as though they just got lucky.

All success stories are stories of great failures. The only difference is that every time they failed, they bounced back. This is called failing forward, rather than backward. You learn and move forward. Learn from your failure and keep moving.

In 1914, Thomas Edison, at age 67, lost his factory, which was worth a few million dollars, to fire. It had very little insurance. No longer a young man, Edison watched his lifetime effort go up in smoke and said, "There is great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burnt up. Thank G.o.d we can start anew." In spite of disaster, three weeks later, he invented the phonograph. What an att.i.tude!

Below are more examples of the failures of successful people:

1. Thomas Edison failed approximately 10,000 times while he was working on the light bulb.

2. Henry Ford was broke at the age of 40.

3. Lee Iacocca was fired by Henry Ford II at the age of 54.

4. Young Beethoven was told that he had no talent for music, but he gave some of the best music to the world.

Setbacks are inevitable in life. A setback can act as a driving force and also teach us humility. In grief you will find courage and faith to overcome the setback. We need to learn to become victors, not victims. Fear and doubt short-circuit the mind.

Ask yourself after every setback: What did I learn from this experience? Only then will you be able to turn a stumbling block into a stepping stone.

IF YOU THINK.

If you think you are beaten, you are.

36*If you think you dare not, you don't!

If you like to win, but think you can't, It's almost a cinch you won't.