What was the highlight or lowlight of my day?
What did I learn from today?
Did I achieve my goals or tasks for the day? Why or why not?
Which areas of my life require the most immediate attention? Finances? Temper control? Relationship with my boss?
Did I overeat, drink to excess, or knowingly poison my body or mind? What triggered the excess(es)?
How can I gain greater balance when faced with the same challenge in the future?
What one activity could I do tomorrow to take me a step closer to success, as I define it?
What are five things which I can be grateful for today, as I am about to fall into a restful sleep for the night?
My first domain is focused on fostering creativity. Believe or not, we are born with brains that function well. If, over the years, our brains have withered and rotted, likely that deterioration was self-inflicted.
With absolute certainty, however, you can switch on the mental lights at any stage of your personal development and achieve remarkable greatness through this shift in thinking. From any wheelchair, from any park bench, from any easy chair in front of the boob tube – it’s up to you to make the most of affairs from this point forward.
We must make a habit of stretching the brain muscle, from lobe to lobe, in order to remain resilient and resourceful throughout life. Frankly speaking, to settle for a brainless, rote, rigid lifestyle based on knee-jerk actions and reactions is much more than a travesty and personal shame… it’s a crime against humanity.
I have studied those who I feel lead successful lives in most of the essential ways, and to a person they are thinkers and doers. Both elements, thinking and doing, are built into their stealthy souls and are side by side in every activity they undertake.
They don’t idly think and remain inert; that is called mental masturbation, a deadly disease of the information age. You see such deadbeats everyday: their thoughts are cogent, well-packaged and oftentimes romantically beautiful to the ear or the eye. But nothing ever gets done because the music of their words and their pinpoint logic lulls them into a sleeping narcissism.
A carpenter may see the world as a nail to be hammered down or a screw to be fastened firm. A banker may see the world as divided into assets and liabilities. A doctor may see the world as a disease with a cure or a possible treatment. But a person of success must remain extremely flexible and never locked into one metaphorical box to fit all.
Flexibility in thought and in action are essentials, if we we wish to influence people to give us what we want in our lives.
The online marketer has two or perhaps three choices, if he or she hopes to touch their target audience and reach their purse strings. The first choice is to become flexible and discard metaphors which are too rigid or too incongruent with the mindset of the target audience. The second choice is to build a niche business around your inflexibility and intolerance, always luring like-minded people to join you in your intolerant crusade. The third choice is to broaden your thinking and learn to feel comfortable with and talk the language of a great number of people you presently have no connection with in life or ideology.
Thinking, learning and doing are the ingredients for success. Everyday you should challenge yourself to become a bigger person. To become a bigger person, you must shuffle the cards of life everyday. Never rest on laurels, smarminess or lethal arrogance. None of the three is a viable alternative to thinking and broadening one’s perspective.
What follows is a simple daily mind/body exercise that can put your brain back on the throne. I recommend that for a fifteen- to thirty-minute interval each morning you throw yourself into these exercises. No psycho-babble here, folks.
The Mind Flexor
Search for something/anything! in your physical world. For example a ruler. Try to first imagine and then write down how many unorthodox uses the ruler could have. Jot down a minimum of ten. Then, as a follow up go online to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit and a great source for niche businesses and keywords, and type in a search for “ruler“. Fascinating how the simple and commonplace have stories and histories which can keep one spellbound and thinking.
Immerse yourself every morning in such a manner.
And, I almost forgot one thing. Mind aerobics are not a fraction as effective as they could be if you are not keeping your physical body in shape. The first fifteen minutes should be spent on thinking and the next fifteen spent increasing the blood flow to the brain through a fast walk or some muscle stretching activities.
Indulge yourself every single day in activities which foster thinking and action. You are born to think and become more until the casket is lowered. There is no better day to commence than today.
