By Reg Scheepers
If you haven’t yet, read part 1.
“I challenge you to make your life a masterpiece. I challenge
you to join the ranks of those people who live
what they teach, who walk their talk.”
— Tony Robbins
I’ve listened to a lot of people talk about what they want to do but never doing it. Just yesterday I was speaking to my Brothers in Beat partner Harry. He was saying how you only live once and he wants to go work on an island or on a cruise ship.
After discussing the pro’s and con’s, I began to be convinced. For some reason the phrase “you only live once” hit hard. “…Plus we don’t have a family or anything that would keep us in South Africa”, Harry added.
I noticed he kept on talking about why he wants to do it, being quite repetitive, “The crime in South Africa, the cherries are full of it, the rat race of it all!”, for 20 minutes on and on.
Eventually I stopped him and said, “you keep talking about why you want to do it; Let’s talk about how we are going to do it”, essentially I was saying, “Let’s figure out what the action goals would be toward achieving our dream.” Read more »
By Reg Scheepers
I was reading a piece about Rupert Murdoch complaining about Google indexing their news articles and the newspaper companies losing out on revenue. Apart from saying that fighting against Google is committing suicide, I don’t want to talk about that issue; but Mr. Murdoch did say something that made me think.
He said he “couldn’t promise to meet his own deadline” – but did say it remained a work in progress and “we are all working very hard” on delivering the pay solution.
It made me think, does he know what a deadline is? What’s the point of a deadline if you’re already preparing to miss it?
The problem with deadlines is that they are essentially results goals, not action goals. You’re aiming to achieve something that you don’t necessarily have 100% control over.
I understand there’s a need for deadlines because a project cannot just continue indefinitely, but when I was working for a boss, I saw too many deadlines come and go and there was nothing I could do about it. Read more »
By Reg Scheepers
When I was 14, my grandmother bought a program off an ‘As Seen On TV’ advert called Passion, Profit and Power. I loved it. I devoured it. I listened to it over and over.
Then when I was 17, my grandmother bought another ‘As Seen On TV’ program by Tony Robbins called Personal Power 2.
Personal Power 2 was about 20 hours worth of listening but I managed to do it in about a day an a half – and I wasn’t forcing it on myself, I just couldn’t get enough. I had such a momentum, drive and ambition to be the best me that I could be.
In both those programs and most books I’ve read and tapes I’ve listened to since, the authors make it sound as if “setting goals and writing them down” has some sort of magical power – that by doing this, the ether or mother nature or God or the universe is mobilised to give you the results you want.
I set goals and to my great surprise they never happened, not even close. I would set goals like “by March I will be earning R10 000 per month. By August I’ll be earning R15 000 per month. By December I’ll be driving a Mercedes.” Read more »
By Reg Scheepers
I recently read something with which I didn’t quite agree.
“Fear is nothing more than F-alse E-vidence A-ppearing R-eal. A movie director once trained his actors to walk across a six inch beam supported by two bricks on the ground. When the beam was raised 30 meters off the ground the actors had difficulty crossing the beam. They found it impossible to cross when placed across a canyon. The beam hadn’t changed. The only change that took place was in the minds of the actors attempting to cross the beam. They lost their focus and allowed fear of falling to block their obvious ability to cross the beam.”
No, what happened is that they lost their frame of reference (the ground) and their rational fear of falling saved their lives. (Rational fear is vital to our survival. Irrational fear is a problem) Read more »
