Jim Rohn - This Is The Secret Only A Few Know - Powerful Motivational Speech

thank you thank you very much I appreciate the welcome and it's nice to come by and have a chance to visit with you Claude And I do go back a few years and it's nice to be invited back I did three lectures here last year and it says something to be invited back maybe it doesn't say everything but it says something maybe it says let's give him one more chance see if he can uh pull it out this time it's nice to see all of you how many of you this is the first time you've

seen me can I see your hands okay most of you uh some of you I recognize have been back uh a few times the last uh few years that I've been coming to Phoenix but I appreciate being invited to uh come and spend some time with you I just got back from Australia my ninth lecture tour of Australia and uh got to see the America's Cup in Perth unfortunately it's in Perth but um in 1987 we're going to go back and get it right but uh life's been good to me and after being single 10

years uh last year at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove California I got married and got somebody now to share the rest of my life with so what a fascinating Journey for me and now to have the opportunity to be invited to come by and share some of my thoughts with you and see if I can't invest some of my ideas in in your better future and then if I meet you a year from now 10 years from now you might say uh the day you came by and talk to us was a a good

day for me it gave me some ideas to try and so that's what I'd like to do in the next few minutes in the time we've got is to give you what I think are some major things that can help in putting your life together some things at least to consider I don't have all the answers on how to do well but I've got some I'm using and I'm practicing and it's working well for me so let me just share with you my experience and then you can decide if it's valid for you give it

a try if it doesn't make sense just throw it at out right you don't have to buy everything any one person says here's the key be a student not a follower be a student not a follower somebody says I read this book should I follow and the answer is no read at least two books and make up your own mind right don't be a follower be a student be independent take advice but not orders only give yourself orders make sure what you finally do is the product of your own conclusion that's what university is for

to debate all the ideas not just to buy them all debate them all and then decide what's best for you where to go from there but University is a great place to hear an exchange of ideas on a wide variety of major life topics and that's what it's all about taking the time to go through it now what I'd like to give you is what I think are the five major pieces to the life puzzle five major pieces to the life puzzle if we can study each of the pieces and then put it all together

the chances of it running well are just a lot better Mr schof gave me a simple formula when I first met him and let me give it to you he said there's usually about a half dozen things makes 80% of the difference I thought that was a good formula I've applied that to a lot of things there's usually about a half dozen things makes 80% of the difference there's about a half dozen wealth things about a half dozen health things that can give you the 80% solution to the problem then Mr scha said be a

student of those half dozen basic things pretty good advice success is not doing extraordinary things success is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well so if you just learn to do it well key things well learn to speak well poor people can talk and rich people can talk looks like rich people talk better it's just learning a skill with a high degree of of precision uh learning to speak is called survival learning to speak well is called success so we can speak well enough to survive or we can speak the extra well enough to succeed so let

me give you what I think our fundamental pieces to life and um we'll take it from there here's the first one philosophy pretty well-known word on a University campus philosophy philosophy in very simple terms is simply what you know and what you know greatly affects how your life works out we might also add what you don't know greatly affects how your life works out the idea you miss could be the missing number in trying to put the numbers in the lock so what you don't know will hurt you to correct an old cliche and to

correct another one ignorance is not Bliss right it's important to know it's important to get the information now we do something very important with what we know we weigh it that's another good word we weigh in our leadership series we teach uh aspiring entrepreneurs weigh everything before you do it before you buy it before you try it make sure you weigh it every you get ready to do you got to decide whether it's a major or a minor and you don't want to give minor things major time you don't want to give something insignificant significant

amounts of your energy so we simply use the phrase way before you pay sophisticated people learn to weigh everything and what we all need is a good set of mental scales to weigh everything what if you got information and your mental scales were off and insignificant things to you were significant wouldn't that be a major handicap the rest of your life when you weighed something important things weighed unimportant we would call that a great handicap so it's very important to weigh everything properly and that's the reason for sermons and songs and lyrics and lectures and

seminars and conversations and professors and teachers and it's one of the reasons why we confers we converse with each other and we debate and we think about and we Ponder and we perceive and we weigh and and we try to find out where the values are CU you don't want to proceed and give big chunks of your life to something that's insignificant okay so we get information we weigh it then we come to conclusions these are just some key words conclusions about values big question informing your life where are the values what is important what

should weigh heavy on my mind and I should give it significant time and significant energy energy and significant money okay so all of this stuff this is our thinking process sh said to me poor thinking habits keeps most people poor not poor working habits most people work hard but they don't think hard they don't use their mind to really try to perceive where the values are so that they don't waste any time it's easy to spend big chunks of your life on insignificant things unless you can weigh it better our mind so all of this

stuff is called major it's one of the major pieces of the life puzzle what you think about knowledge how you weigh it the conclusions you come to the values you've perceived thinking if you really want to help somebody change their life you have to start changing their mind change their philosophy change how they think somebody says well just motivation that'll do and the answer is no motivation won't do it if a guy's an idiot then you motivate him you got a motivated idiot right say no that that's not what it takes now it's very easy

to make errors in judgment errors in judgment I'm now the teaching people even out even after they're out of school University College they should read at least uh one or two books a week it's easy when you get out of school right and get a job to just sort of let that all slide and not keep up the learning process but if you don't keep up the learning process uh a lot of values become fuzzy if you don't keep trying to perceive what's important what's not important and then start spending major effort on minor things

so we have to keep learning what if a guy spent his book money on Donuts right we would call him greatly deprived mentally in 10 years the guy's bought two tons of donuts and only two books right mostly with pictures right and he wonders why his life isn't working well reason after he got out of school he didn't keep up the flow of ideas that can help to refine your business and help to refine your decisions and help you come to better conclusions you've got to keep up the learning Cur curve even after you're out

of school to make sure that you're not making errors in judgment the reason why most people wind up average at Agee 40 instead of rich is simply an error in judgment about what to do with your money what would you suggest a 15-year-old start as a plan to do with their money so that by 40 they're rich instead of average you got to have a good plan right if you start making errors early with your money those errors can uh can make your life mediocre instead of Rich you wind up with pennies instead of Fortune

and you w you wind up with crumbs instead of a feast simply because early you made errors on what to do with your money the guy says well it's only $10 so what does it matter what I do with it and the answer is it that's when it really matters is when you don't have much the guy says oh if I had a fortune I'd really take good care of it but I've only got a paycheck so I don't know where it goes we call those great errors in judgment it's so important to make sure

you've got a good plan when the amounts are small but it's easy to make errors it's easy not to know it's easy to miscalculate and if you miscalculate some things keep adding and adding and adding I got a good phrase for you life is accumulative good phrase to know life is accumulative our errors either accumulate into what we don't get or our wise decisions accumulate into what we do get now the key is to correct the errors as early as possible fortunately Mr scha caught me at age 25 started asking me major questions at age

25 he said Mr O how long have you been working and I said I've been working uh six years I started working when I was 19 right full-time job he said well six years how much money have you saved and invested in the last six years I said not any he said Who Sold you on that plan wow six years is is enough time now to check and see if you've got a good Financial philosophy and the time to catch the errors is early early so Mr cha started asking me those tough questions at age

25 how about your money how about your resources how about your Investments and you say well I I've got plenty of time to worry about that I'd be concerned about that later and the answer is probably not Now's the Time to fix it wherever you hear the good information that's the time to start fixing it so we're teaching kids now a good wealth philosophy starting at age 50 15 will make you Wealthy by age 40 45 at the latest if you're little slow start doing wise things with your resources when when would you suggest people

should do wise things with their resources answer as soon as they get the better information now you can't do what you don't know but the key is to keep learning so that good ideas keep occurring to you now you can do more wise things okay but philosophy is where it all begins what you know now to know Wise things you simply have to study as you're doing keep up the reading keep up the conversations keep up the listening to lectures keep going through the information keep stashing it away taking the notes right there's no better

way to adjust your philosophy than to have a continual flow of ideas but that's the first piece of the life puzzle philosophy now here's number two philosophy deter determines attitude attitude is simply how you feel first what you know sets the sail of your life now how you feel starts taking you there attitude now there's all kinds of ways to feel right you can feel good or you can feel bad here's one attitude if this is all they pay I'm not coming early and I'm not staying late on the job that's an attitude right if

this is all they pay I don't come early and I don't stay late now do you suppose that that attitude if you carried it through the rest of your life do you suppose that attitude would greatly affect your life as the years unfold the answer is overwhelmingly of course here's another attitude no matter what they pay I always come early and I always stay late to invest in my own future isn't that fascinating attitude is by choice you can either choose to come early or you can choose to come late you can either choose to

leave early or you can choose to stay late attitude's a matter of choice now to make wise choice we need educated attitudes emotions must go to school to learn where the values are okay good phrase emot must go to school when kids are young right a three-year-old you know falls on the floor and kicks his feet and screams we say well that's okay when you're three but it isn't okay when you're 30 right as a little kid right you can retaliate and punch somebody out but when you're 23 we say no no you got to

learn now to take that emotion and send it to school and find find out where the values are it's okay to feel strong but you've got to learn to restrain yourself in a society if you want life to go well for you so attitudes now become a matter of educated Choice educated choice but how we feel is going to greatly determine how our life works out now it's how you feel about a variety of things let me give you that list number one it's how you feel about the past now when you're young you haven't

got that much past to feel about but I'm sure you've had some upss and downs you've had some wins and losses right you wouldn't have arrived here if you hadn't done fairly well and I'm sure everybody has also arrived here with some uh already pretty tough things you've had to face and decisions you've had to make who knows what a variety of stories there are here I'm sure if we knew some of the stories we'd you know shut mine down listen to yours there's probably some fascinating stories here already some things you've been through so

part of our attitude is based on how we feel about the past some people are still carrying the burdens of the past they're affected by some difficulties and some losses whatever and they're carrying it around like a burden instead of using the past as a school uh they're using it as a threat to their life so part of it is solving the attitude about the past how you feel about it number two it's how you feel about the future facing the future very important key part of our life now there's two ways to face the

future here they are one anticipation that's one way to face the future anticipation here's the other way apprehension now most people face the future with that apprehension primarily because they bought somebody else's view they don't have their own future welld designed so in the absence of having your own future well-designed you have a tendency to be persuaded to buy somebody else's future here's what's going to happen here's what's going to happen boy it's easy to let your days be clouded by all of that so somay somewhere along the line you've got to start settling for

sure how you feel about the future and how you feel about it greatly determines what you do if you don't feel good about the future by having goals set you take what we call uncertain steps it's difficult to be confident about the day if you don't have your future well-designed so here's one of the keys to do about your future set goals write them down design the future where do you want to go what do you want to do what do you want to be what do you want to see what do you want to

have what do you want to share even if it all changes 12 months from now the key is to start making a list now the cities you want to visit the people people you'd like to meet your health goals your investment goals all that stuff start writing it putting it in a journal somewhere and let it all change as time unfolds something that you think's very important right now two years from now you'll say that was kind of foolish how come I thought that was so important right because you'll grow beyond that but right now

it's important to get as clear a picture of you can as you can of the future set your dreams set your goals because it's important how the day goes is greatly determined by your confidence about the future now here's another attitude it's how you feel about each other it's how you feel about Society in the community in the country it's very important it's not that difficult to be a cynic and cynicism greatly influences how your life works out but it's also important to understand that if you want to do well it takes all of us

to help each of us good phrase it it takes all of us to help each of us do well you can't succeed by yourself it's hard to find a rich hermit you can't succeed by yourself you need a market you need a society we need each other's ideas we need each other's Collective ideas Collective participation in the marketplace Society okay so how we feel about each other very important now here's the big one it's how you feel about yourself how you feel about yourself selfesteem understanding your own value boy if new discovery starts to unfold

for you that you've got the brains you've got the talent all you need is instruction all you need is some coaching all you need is some help all you need is some advice some experience if you're head it down the wrong road hopefully somebody's already been down that road where the bridge is out and they come back saying don't go this way anymore the bridge is out so we take somebody else's advice and we say wow I'm glad you came along I'm heading down this road so learning from other people's experiences picking up all the

ideas so that we can feel good about ourselves you've got the talent you've got the skill that's what university is for school is for is to help guide all this available potential and there isn't anybody here that hasn't got the potential to become wealthy and powerful and sophisticated and influential and live uniquely that's all within all of your reach uh some people live unfortunate lives of tragedy and despair but that's not here you've become those few percentage points that have the unusual gift of Association and awareness and exposure to the best that the country has

to offer and here you are at a well-known University with all the chances and all of the opportunities within your reach and with your brains and with your potential and your power and and your drive and your incentives no telling what Miracles you can go do and what unique things you can accomplish you'll look back on these days saying those were good days that exposed me to ideas and philosophies and people and gave me chances and opportunities to come become somebody unique but everybody here's got the potential but you've got to feel that you've got

to think well about yourself now self-esteem primarily becomes from comes from engaging in the disciplines that lead to value self-esteem comes from engaging in the disciplines that lead to Value we don't lack potential but to bring value from potential we need the disciplines now one of the major things that makes us not feel good about ourselves is not engaging in the disciplines if you keep letting yourself off the hook or just ho humming it and letting it all slide then you don't feel good about yourself best is the ant philosophy right to feel good about

yourself do your best gather all you can during the summer we call that the ant philosophy ants don't settle for half they go for all all you possibly can do the best you can it's the greatest lift of self-esteem is doing the best you can okay so attitude plays such an important part in the five pieces of the life puzzle now what's next number three first is philosophy second is attitude philosophy and attitude determines [Applause] activity activity is what you do key phrase success is a doing you actually now have to do it it seems

as though God has designed that the major part of the value of our life is L to is left to our own mental genius you've got to decide what you want to become then you simply have to go do it engaging in the disciplines now the Activity part is so important how hard should you work when you get ready to labor when you get ready to try to be successful in the marketplace how many days should you spend how hard should you work well let me give you an Old Testament phrase to consider it says

6 days activity one day rest now that's called a philosophy on activity right what should be the ratio of rest activity Old Testament suggests 61 now I know that goes back a long ways some people said no 6 61's oldfashioned 52 is better well you got to take a look at 52 and see if it's okay you don't just want to buy somebody's philosophy without seeing if it if it leads to Fortune and if it leads to unique things wonderful it's probably good but you have to check out if 5-2 is okay would uh 43

be better I don't know you got to check everything I do know this good phrase don't rest too long and the reason you can't rest too long is because we live in a push of world key phrase It's a push shove world we live in a in a world of conflict and the conflict at the higher levels it's called the conflict between good and evil that's one way to describe it it's the conflict between health and sickness health is simply Conquering the territory and defending it against the encroachment of illness guess where illness always seems

to be testing the outer edges of your health plan it's push shove world so you can't relax too much and you can't rest too long if you rest too long the weeds take the garden and if you don't think so we call you naive I got a good point for you make rest un necessity not an objective the objective of of life is not to rest the objective of life is to accomplish to growth full growth full accomplishment test the outer limits of your abilities that's what life is all about see what all you can

do that's what life is all about see what you can do with the seasons and the soil and the seed see what you can do with your brain see what you can do with your talent and your gifts and your skills that's what life's all about see what you can do now we need rest but you must make rest a necessity not an objective if you make it an objective you start falling into what we call the average syndrome right people who live mediocre lives are always looking forward to getting off successful people are always

looking looking forward to getting on successful people don't want off they want on they want to get on with the job they rest only enough to gather strength so consider that in your argument in your debate on how hard should you work let me give you another Bible philosophy I'm my parents made sure I was a pretty good scholar by the time I was 18 and I'm an amateur on the Bible but here's another good philosophy whatever your hands currently find to do do it with all your might whatever you're doing do it with all

your might we call that philosophy on activity how hard should you work as hard as you can in the time allotted to labor in leadership management lectures we teach when you work work when you play play don't play at work and don't work at Play right make best use of your time when you're working pour it on and when you're playing have a good time but don't play at work okay so activity very important piece in this whole life puzzle in working so you've got to test how hard you can work part of it is

physical your own physical limitation some people can take 14 hours no problem some people 10 stretches pretty much their physical limitation so everybody has to sort of decide how hard you can work how much time you can put in when you come to University right you got to sort of find out how much workload you can handle how many classes can you go through how much can you unravel how many study hours do you need how much effort have you got when are you're going to run out of gas right and you need to replenish

the supply so we all have to study our own activity habits but let me give you what I think is the best philosophy it is simply do the best you can in activity we call it doing your best that's all we ask simply your best if you want to put together a championship team one simple requirement for all those who participate just do your best if everybody does their best whatever that brings us to number one number two wherever we arrive when the final count is made is okay if we all know when it's over

we did our best a man asked me one time he said I'm making about $50,000 a year isn't that enough what would you tell somebody a businessman said to me he said my kids aren't starving and he said I got my bills paid and he said we're doing pretty good and I'm making about $50,000 a year isn't that enough he asked me what do you suppose I told him I said yes it's enough if it's the best you can do we don't call an amount enough we call your best enough I said if you're capable

of making a half million dollars a year and you make $50,000 a year we call you loser and we don't call you loser because of the difference between 50,000 and a half million we call you loser because you're not doing your best if you do your best and you make 10,000 a year that's enough if you do your best and you make a million dollars a year that's enough enough is not the difference between 10,000 and a million enough is simply doing the best you can so that's the key to the good life when the

day is finished if you say did I do my best and if I'm not doing my best why not do I have I got some errors in My Philosophy that says hey half efforts okay just slide by ho hum it cross your fingers and everything will work out hopefully say no I don't want to take those kind of chances I don't want to drift okay so activity just put a big question mark on activity and say Here's a major piece of life to keep checking make sure I'm doing my best that's all I require my

best a group of psychiatrists asked me to come and lecture for them in Los Angeles one time which I thought was interesting since I only went to one year of college and then in the middle of my lecture I had the audacity to say ladies and gentlemen let me tell you what I think most messes with the mind [Music] they said what do you think most messes with the mind I said I think what most messes with the mind is simply doing less than you can it sets up all kinds of psychic problems doing less

than you can guess when you really feel good about yourself when you've done the best you can you don't even have to win the full prize if you do the best you can we call that the ultimate winning doing the best you can wow there's no nothing like the soaring self-confidence that comes from putting out what we call full effort in whatever you do it's called full effort okay so activity Now activity leads to what number four philosophy activity attitude leads to number four results and that's what life is all about putting the first three

together good philosophy y attitude High activity to get the ultimate called results I got a good phrase for you results is the name of the game productivity now the challenge of life is a very simple phrase Let me give it to you I think you'll find it interesting to at least Ponder the challenge of life is to make measurable progress in reasonable time measurable progress in reasonable time first we don't want to be unreasonable with time if you and I agree to do something 5 minutes later I'm asking you how are you doing you say

I haven't left the building yet you can't ask in 5 minutes 5 minutes is too soon that's unreasonable now if I don't ask you for 5 years years we call that too late you can't wait 5 years and you can't go 5 minutes right you we all have to learn what is reasonable time to expect somebody to make progress to grow to change to develop so all of us have to learn especially if you're going to become leaders entrepreneurs if you're going to have management responsibilities and work with people you got to understand what is

reasonable time we don't want to be unreasonable with time but here's what else we expect measurable progress in reasonable time how many years should the child spend in fourth grade approximately about one you say well if they're nice kids would you give them three or four you say no you can't spend four years in fourth grade it's unacceptable we put on the family pressure we put on peer pressure right we put on all kinds of pressure you can't spend four years in fourth grade now wouldn't that be interesting if we applied the same kind of

social pressure all of our Lives what would be acceptable to Society for wise Investments to have been made by age 30 so that you can really properly take care of yourself and your family somehow we've missed those standards right shouldn't it be popular to be Wealthy by age 40 and shouldn't we look at somebody who by age 45 is not at least financially independent saying where have you been Tibet or Bangladesh you probably have spent you mean you've been here all this time right shouldn't we make it a bit unacceptable not to be well off

in what we call reasonable time but what if a guy spent his potential fortune on non-essentials from age 15 to age 45 shouldn't we call that unacceptable shouldn't teenagers ask their parents how come we're not rich we live in a rich country this is America aren't those good questions how about the wisdom of a good plan versus a poor plan what if a man was a farmer and he ate his Seed corn instead of planting it he ate it wouldn't we make arrangements to go get his children and say the kids aren't safe the man's

insane he eats his Seed corn he doesn't plant it wow I just offer that as kind of an interesting question if we make such pressure demands for fourth grade why shouldn't we make those same pressure demands for the rest of Life interesting question right good debatable question now part of it is we simply Society eases back on us as far as ongoing demand of results but here's what I'd ask you to do make the demands on yourself I'm asking you not to let yourself off the hook Society will let you get by with far less

than you want to be when you get out of University how many books will the community demand that you read every month approximately about none so if you're going to do the extra reading guess what you got to develop that philosophy and put that pressure on yourself but what I'm asking you to do is take a good look at results now another reason why we look at results results at age 25 results at age 30 on a wide variety of things health and wealth and culture and and sophistication and lifestyle and uniqueness we keep checking

all those results here's why to see if there's any errors in activity guess how easy it is to make errors in activity it's easy we teach in our leadership series don't mistake movement for achievement boy sometimes it's easy to be faked out by being busy guy's busy 10 hours a day but he's going in figure eights the guy's not making progress he's stalled but he's busy and he thinks being busy is going to do it say no you got to be busy doing the right things so maybe you need activity fixed maybe you need attitude

fixed who knows the guy who says since they don't pay well I come late and leave early we say John that's going to affect you all your life and you've probably got the results to show it or maybe we need a correction of philosophy that's why we check results now here's the last piece in the Life puzzle it's called lifestyle lifestyle is simply how you choose to live we call lifestyle The Genius of living well now here's what's exciting about lifestyle as a subject of one of the major pieces of the life puzzle all of

us can choose especially in this country all of us can choose how we wish to live guess what you can get from your money Joy or animosity however you wish to live a father takes a $10 bill and wads it up and throws it at his son and says if you need the darn stuff that bad take it we call it money without style the father's got the money but he doesn't have the style he studied economics but he didn't study happiness so let me give you the phrase happiness is an art not an accident

some people have figured out things economically but they haven't figured out lifestyle to live [Music] well culture is a study it's not an amount somebody says if you have an amount of money you'll be cultured the answerers no cultured is a study culture culture is a refinement of the mind to be cultured you must study culture and practice culture money doesn't solve the culture challenge money doesn't solve the happiness challenge to be happy you got to study and practice happiness and Mr sh taught me all the simple ways to get joy from substance a sophisticated

gentleman knows that a rose on time is more valuable than a $1,000 gift too late it's not the amount that counts it's the genius that counts it's the ideas that count so here's what I'm challenging you to do how to be happy with what you've got while you pursue what you want and I'll give you time to make a note of that phrase because I think it's so important to wrap it up how to be happy with what you've got while you pursue what you want so I would challenge you in the last piece of

the life puzzle find ways to live uniquely now if you look at your life on all these five pieces this is why I'm asking you to just go back through and review these notes how am I doing on philosophy are there some things I don't know am I making some errors in judgment that's going to bring me to no good end right 3 years from now 5 years from now key for ra 10 years from now you will arrive the question is where good question where and the followup is Now's the Time to fix the

next 10 years Now's the Time to fix the next 10 years and hopefully with the discussion of the these five subjects we've given you some uh viewpoints at least from my experience and uh hopefully I've done a little coaching here today and you can take these subjects and debate them and talk about them and think about them and they'll help you with life in the future thank you for your attention I appreciate you inviting me to come by