Changing your life's mind isn't that difficult, afterall

(photocredit: linh ngan)

Mental Reprogramming Made Easy - 30 days to whatever new you that you could want...

Here's today's inputs:

• "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell;
• his quoted concept that it takes 10,000 hours (about 10 years) to master a new skill;
• another concept that it takes 28 days to change any habit;
• Google Reader as a method for changing your inputs.

One review of Gladwell's book (in a farming magazine, no less) says that a person's success (or failure) has been building up for a long time, that anyone suddenly hitting the popular wave as an expert in their field - well, they've been studying for this moment their whole life. Or at least devoting the last 10 years to it seriously.

Which explains the concept Napoleon Hill (and others) have said, that most life successes show up when the person is mid-life.

I've started taking my own advice and beginning to read my Google Reader daily. (One tip is to set it up to just read the headlines as a quick filter.) What I ran into is exactly what I thought - I didn't want to read a lot of this stuff, and so will have to continue to weed and prune my "garden". And there is a lot of other stuff I want to surround myself with.

The trick is to do what you really like to do in life. Things that bring you pleasure, that get you excited. And then do these in a flat-out fashion that really helps other people improve theirs.

After 30 days, you'll get an inkling of how to do it. And if you switch fields away from anything you really are already expert at - well, it's going to take ten years before you're really good at it. (So keep a part-time day job, or move in with family if you can stand it.)

But if you take stock of what you have always been successful at, and all your skills, you can probably figure out where you've been headed all this time - at least the general direction. Ray Kroc started McDonald's after a lifetime as a salesman. He was 40-something at the time, and stumbled onto a pair of brothers who really knew how to make french fries... Died rich and happy. Stories of Microsoft's founder's success show that he played a lot of poker - which enabled him to sell IBM an operating system for their new PC when he didn't even have one.

Anyway, you've been tooling around for quite a while and now you can do something about it. All this self-re-programming stuff is just installing a hopped-up carburetor on your factory-built engine - supercharge it.

1. Surround your self with stuff you are really interested in -
   
2. and look up your back-trail to see what you are already good at.
3. Then, find your "unique selling proposition" and go out to conquer the world! (Or at least a sizeably remunerative part of it...)