Tell me how you use your time and how you spend your money, and I will tell you where and what you will be ten years from now.
Time and money are precious resources, and few people striving for success ever believe they possess either one in excess. Understanding how you use them is an important part of evaluating your progress toward success and analyzing what may be holding you back.
We’ll begin this chapter by taking an inventory of your progress toward success with a special emphasis on the role of time. Once you’ve seen how to improve your use of time, you’ll be able to devote more of it to managing your money. And any review of the overall path you are following is always valuable.
A Personal Inventory
Ask the following questions of yourself, and answer them honestly; you want to identify areas needing improvement, not win a prize for a high ranking. Feeding your ego by lying to yourself about the truth will only waste the time you spend on the inventory and undermine your self-confidence.
1. Do you have a major definite purpose? What plans do you have for attaining it? How much time are you devoting to those plans on a persistent, daily basis? How often do you work on your plans; only when the notion strikes you or when you can snatch a few minutes during commercials?
2. Is your definite major purpose a burning obsession? When and how often do you fan its flames?
3. What have you planned to give in return for realizing your definite major purpose? Are you doing it yet? When will you start?
4. What steps have you taken to build your mastermind alliance? How often are you in contact with the members? How many of them do you speak to monthly, weekly, and daily?
5. Have you made a habit of accepting temporary defeat as a challenge to greater. effort? (Let’s hope your temporary defeats are few, but they are inevitable.) How quickly do you seek out the seed of equivalent benefit when adversity strikes?
6. How do you spend more of your time: carrying out your plans or brooding over the obstacles you face?
7. How often do you forgo personal pleasure in order to have more time to work bn your plan? How often is it the other way around?
8. Do you seize every moment of time as if it were the only one you were sure you had?
9. Have you looked at your life as the result of the way you spent time in the past? Are you happy with your life to date? Do you wish you had spent it some other way? Do you regard each second that passes as the opportunity to change the course of your life for the better?
10. Is your mental attitude always positive? Is it positive most of the time? Some of the time? Is it positive now? Can you make it positive in the next second? How about the one after that?
11. How often do you display personal initiative by backing your positive thoughts with action?
12. Do you believe that you will succeed by luck or a windfall? When are these things going to happen? Do you believe that you will succeed as the result of your own efforts? When are you going to make those efforts?
13. Do you know anyone who inspires you with his or her personal initiative? How often do you seek that person out? How often do you actually model your behavior on him or her?
14. When do you go the extra mile? Does it happen every day or just when you think someone is paying attention? Is your attitude good when you do it, or do you begrudge the additional work?
15. How attractive is your personality? Do you look at yourself in the mirror every morning and work to improve your smile, your facial expressions? Or do you just brush up before an important meeting?
16. How are you applying your faith? When do you act on the inspiration from Infinite Intelligence? How often do you ignore it?
17. Are you building your self-discipline? How often do uncontrolled emotions cause you to do something you quickly regret?
18. Have you mastered your fears? How often do you display their symptoms? When do you replace them with your ambitions?
19. How often do you accept other people’s opinions as fact? Do you question those opinions every time you encounter them? How often do you call on accurate thinking as the solution to your problems?
20. How often do you inspire cooperation by giving it? Are you doing it at home? At the office? In your mastermind alliance?
21. What opportunities do you allow your imagination? When do you apply yourself to problems with creative vision? What dilemmas do you have that need to be solved this way?
22. Are you relaxing, exercising, and paying attention to your health? Were you planning to start at the new year? Why can’t you start right now?
This inventory is designed to get you thinking. Your use of your time reflects the degree to which you have made the principles of personal achievement a part of your life. Don’t be discouraged if your answers to these questions are not yet what you’d like them to be. I have sold books to millions of people and lectured to thousands more. Many of them gained great success afterward, but none of them did it overnight. Although the benefits from success can accrue very quickly, most truly successful people need much of a lifetime to get everything they want. Those are lifetimes well spent.
Source: Keys to Success by Napoleon Hill