http://youtu.be/5xAwwQ_d0Ck

Jesus gave us a commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself.

Love is also a choice.

Everyday we can choose to look at others in our life with love.

Today you can make that choice.

Make it a great day.

Jake

I recently received the email below and thought it was worth sharing with everyone as the daily attitude email.

Make it a great day.

Jake

A young person I know was explaining to me the changes that he wanted to make in his life. At one point in the conversation he got excited and said, "I am going to make a 360 degree change in my life." I appreciated the sentiment, and I struggled not to laugh. I didn’t want to interrupt his excitement to point out that turning 360 degrees would point him right back in the direction he was already heading.

You might be laughing to yourself, believing that what this young person meant to say was, "I am going make a 180 degree change in my life." But that’s not correct either. Turning 180 degrees means that you completely change directions. If you were heading north, changing 180 degrees means you are heading south. That kind of serious correction may be necessary from time to time. But most of the time the corrections you need to make are something less than that.

Let’s use the metaphor "179 degrees" to describe these changes. It’s less than 180 degrees. Reaching your goals in business, in sales, and life requires that you trim you sails and make adjustments. But it’s likely you are not off course by so much that you have to change directions completely. Changing that much is what causes people to go from failed effort to failed effort, always seeking the magic bullet answer.

Here’s a personal example. Last year I lost 25 pounds. For years I had a healthy smoothie for breakfast (one cup of frozen mixed berries, one cup of frozen spinach, two scoops of carb-free Iso-Pure protein powder, aloe vera, ground flax seed, and water in a blender). I almost always had a salad with chicken for lunch. But it was dinners and snacking with my three kids on the weekends that kept the weight on. To lose the weight, I stopped eating bad carbs for dinner and snacking with the kids and the pounds fell off. I didn’t exercise once during the time I lost the weight. I wasn’t that far off, and I changed something far less than 180 degrees.

Whether your goals are around your physical health, your financial health, your results in business, or your results in sales, reaching those goals requires that you make changes. You arrived at your present state by holding certain beliefs and taking certain actions as a result of those beliefs. To reach your desired future state you need new beliefs and new actions. But everything you believe and everything you’re doing isn’t wrong. You might not be that far off.

Have you ever tried to make 180 degree turn only to find out that it was too much change and that it was impossibly difficult to sustain? It might not have even been necessary.

Tim Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Work Week, The 4-Hour Body, and The 4-Hour Chef has made his career by studying how get massive changes with a little effort as possible. He searches for the "minimum effective dosage," the least amount of work that you can do to produce outstanding results. He looks for "effectiveness" instead of changes that require massive effort.

Think of some area of your life where you want better results. What are the 179-degree (less than 180) changes that you can make to produce those results?

When something isn’t working, we often want to scrap the whole idea, believing that the idea was bad or that we failed. But that isn’t always true. Sometimes you’re mostly right, but you need to trim the sails to produce the results you’re after. Think of some project that you’ve abandoned (or that you are about to abandon). What are the 179-degree changes you might make to produce better results instead of abandoning your project?

What are the one or two little actions you can take (or stop taking) that would change your results and correct your course?

Make this week rock and I’ll see you back here next week.

Anthony Iannarino

"The most influential persuasion tool you have in your entire arsenal is your integrity." -Zig Ziglar

As I thought about this quote it made me think back on some important moments of persuasion in my life.

Most of them involved long term relationships where I had proved personal integrity and was allowed to influence and/or lead someone else because of this.

I have heard it called a “trust bank” or an “emotional bank account”. Whatever you call it, personal integrity and trustworthiness is the foundation for long standing relationships.

And long standing relationships are the ones that bear the most fruit.

Is there a relationship in your life that could use a little more personal integrity?

A boss/employer you are not doing your best for?

A spouse who doesn’t know that “one little secret”?

A friend who didn’t get a straight answer to his/her invitation to a birthday party?

As with a lot of others areas in life, I believe that when it comes to integrity, little things do matter. A lot.

Maybe take a minute today to draw a new line in the sand when it comes to integrity.

Make it a great day.

Jake

A lot of people quit looking for work as soon as they find a job. – Zig Ziglar

Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all.- Sam Ewing

One of my favorite scenes from Bruce Almighty is when God and Bruce mop the floor together.

Bruce has finally gotten to the end of his rope and goes seeking help, and God gives him a mop and then they mop the floor together. The sheer simplicity of doing some hard, good work together produces clarity of thought and purpose for Bruce.

There is something almost cathartic about doing some plain old fashioned hard work.

Hard work is also one of the keys to creating and transferring value to others (which in turn determines our rewards). Applying hard work to solving the problems of others can be our unique way of delivering value.

Is there something in your life that just needs some good old fashioned hard work?

When can you start?

Make it a great day.

Jake

Yesterday was Oliver’s baptism.

Baptism are always such happy moments for me, they always remind me of new beginnings.

As you look at your day, your week, your year ahead, are you excited for some new beginnings?

Is there something you would like to get started on but haven’t yet?

Do it. Start now.

Make it a time of new beginnings in your life. Celebrate the opportunities and possibilities and then get started.

Make it a great day.

Jake

JM – I am and always will be, your friend. – Spock

JW – Bones, get that thing off my face. – James T. Kirk

EB – Yes, you can….you can do anything that you want to do, as long as you make up your mind….you can do it. – Dick Hoyt

JD – You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

–Plato

Make it a great weekend.

Jake

http://youtu.be/6FOUqQt3Kg0

Funny thing about getting respect. You have to be respectable.

So often we expect respect, honor and trust without first becoming respectable, honorable and trustworthy.

Part of getting the results you want in life is becoming the kind of person who gets those results.

And respect is a great example.

Make it a great day.

Jake

Organization removes obstacles.

Listening to the podcast about the lady who lost her sight and this point from her really struck me.

She explained how she realized this after being blind. Everything having (and being in) its place becomes very important when you can’t see while you are walking around the house.

If it wasn’t, you would spend all your time carefully bumping into things and adjusting back to where you were trying to go.

I think this is how our brains work with all the clutter, stuff and to dos that are unorganized in our lives.

Without a place for everything and everything in its place we stumble from thing to thing, never picking up the head of steam we need to break through those barriers in our lives.

Is there an area of your life where more organization could make the difference?

All the stuff of life getting in the way of your life?

Email running your day for you?

Is today the day you are going to start the change that gets you over the hump?

Make it a great day.

Jake

Dr. Seuss’ The Sneetches is a favorite of ours.

The story is about two different kinds of Sneetches. One with stars on their bellies and sneetches with none upon thars.

They are bamboozled (don’t get to break that one out much) into getting stars added and removed from their stomachs in a race to see which kind of Sneetches are the best.

Like all my favorite Dr. Seuss books, this story illustrates an important life lesson while being silly and whimsical (bamboozled and whimsical in the same email, wow).

At first blush, I thought the lesson was about not looking down on others because they are different than you.

And while I think that lesson can be gathered from this story, there is a potentially more important one.

Don’t let someone else tell you that because you don’t have a “star” that you are anything less.

The really sad part of the story was that each group in turn accepted the other group’s labeling of them as “less than” or some version of that.

When we accept those thoughts and labels that others place on us we actually do become “less than” we are capable of being.

I think Thomas Jefferson said it best:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Remember today to not accept the limitations any else places on you.

Make it a great day.

Jake

For those of you fellow Dr. Seuss lovers, here is the full Sneetches video from YouTuber:

http://youtu.be/v3yJomUhs0g

Below is a short article I came across about intake and output.

I thought it was very insightful and wanted to share with the group.

Make it a great day.

Jake