Do the Best You Can — Jim Rohn on Daily Discipline

In today's episode, Jim breaks down a powerful truth. You may not control everything, but you can control how well you show up. If you're working on becoming your best, check out our audience-loved, self-discipline hacks e-book, the perfect next step after this talk. Link in the description. If you'd like to be invited back, I did three lectures here last year, and it says something to be invited back. Maybe it doesn't say everything, but it says something. Maybe it says, let's give you one more chance to see if you can pull it out this time. It's nice to see all of you. How many of you, this is the first time you've seen me, can I see your hands? Okay, most of you. Some of you, I recognize, have been back a few times the last few years that I've been coming to Phoenix. But I appreciate being invited to come and spend some time with you. I just got back from Australia, my ninth lecture tour of Australia, and I got to see the Americas Cup in Perth. Unfortunately, it's in Perth. But in 1987, we're going to go back and get it, right? But life's been good to me, and after being single 10 years, last year at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, I got married. Got somebody now to share the rest of my life with. So, what a fascinating journey for me. And now to have the opportunity to be invited to come by and share some of my thoughts with you. And see if I can't invest some of my ideas in your better future. And then if I meet you a year from now, 10 years from now, you might say, the day you came by and talked to us was a good day for me. It gave me some ideas to try. And so that's what I'd like to do in the next few minutes in the time we've got, is to give you what I think are some major things that can help in putting your life together. Some things at least to consider. I don't have all the answers on how to do well, but I've got some I'm using, and I'm practicing, and it's working well for me, so let me just share with you my experience. And then you can decide if it's valid for you to give it a try. If it doesn't make sense, just throw it out, right? You don't have to buy everything anyone person says. Here's the key, be a student, not a follower. Be a student, not a follower. Somebody says, I read this book, should I follow? And the answer is no, read at least two books and make up your own mind. I don't be a follower, be a student, be independent. Take advice, but not orders. Only give yourself orders. Make sure what you finally do is the product of your own conclusion. That's what universities for it to debate all the ideas, not just to buy them all, debate them all, and then decide what's best for you, where to go from there. But universities are a great place to hear an exchange of ideas on a wide variety of major life topics, and that's what it's all about, taking the time to go through it. Now, what I'd like to give you is what I think are the five major pieces to the life puzzle, five major pieces to the life puzzle. If we can study each of the pieces and then put it all together, the chances of it running well are just a lot better. Mr. Shelf gave me a simple formula. When I first met him, let me give it to you. He said, there's usually about a half dozen things makes 80% of the difference. I thought that was a good formula. I've applied that to a lot of things. There's usually about a half dozen things makes 80% of the difference. There's about a half dozen wealth things, about a half dozen health things that can give you the 80% solution to the problem. Then Mr. Shelf said, be a student of those half dozen basic things. Pretty good advice. Success is not doing extraordinary things. Success is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. So if you just learn to do it well, key things well, learn to speak well, poor people can talk and rich people can talk. Looks like rich people talk better. It's just learning a skill with a high degree of precision. Learning to speak is called survival. Learning to speak well is called success. So we can speak well enough to survive or we can speak the extra well enough to succeed. So let me give you what I think are fundamental pieces to life and we'll take it from there. Here's the first one. Philosophy. Pretty well known word on the university campus, philosophy, philosophy in very simple terms is simply what you know and what you know greatly affects how your life works out. We might also add what you don't know greatly affects how your life works out. The idea you miss could be the missing number in trying to put the numbers in the lock. So what you don't know will hurt you to correct an old cliche and to correct another one ignorance is not bliss, it's important to know, it's important to get the information. Now we do something very important with what we know. We weigh it. That's another good word we weigh. In our leadership series we teach aspiring entrepreneurs way everything before you do it before you buy it, before you try it, make sure you weigh it. Everything you get ready to do you get to decide whether it's a major or a minor and you don't want to give minor things major time. You don't want to give something insignificant, significant amounts of your energy. So we simply use the phrase way before you pay. Sophisticated people learn to weigh everything. And what we all need is a good set of mental scales to weigh everything. But if you got information and your mental scales were off and insignificant things to you were significant, wouldn't that be a major handicap the rest of your life? When you weighed something important things weighed unimportant, we would call that a great handicap. So it's very important to weigh everything properly and that's the reason for sermons and songs and lyrics and lectures and seminars and conversations and professors and teachers. But one of the reasons why we converse with each other and we debate and we think about and we ponder and we perceive and we weigh and we try to find out where the values are. Because you don't want to proceed and give big chunks of your life to something that's insignificant. So we get information, we weigh it, then we come to conclusions, these are just some key words, conclusions about values, big question informing your life, where are the values? What is important? What should weigh heavy on my mind and I should give it significant time and significant energy and significant money? So all of this stuff, this is our thinking process. Self said to me, poor thinking habits keeps most people poor. Not poor working habits, most people work hard but they don't think hard. They don't use their mind to really try to perceive where the values are so that they don't waste any time. It's easy to spend big chunks of your life on insignificant things, unless you can weigh it better. Our mind, so all of this stuff is called major, it's one of the major pieces of the life puzzle, what you think about, knowledge, how you weigh it, the conclusions you come to, the values you've perceived, thinking. If you really want to help somebody change their life, you have to start changing their mind, change their philosophy, change how they think. Somebody said, well just motivation that'll do and the answer is no, motivation will do it. If a guy's an idiot and you're motivating, you've got a motivated idiot. Say no, that's not what it takes. Now it's very easy to make errors in judgment. Errors in judgment. I'm now the teaching people, even after they're out of school, University College, they should read at least one or two books a week. It's easy when you get out of school right and get a job to just sort of let that all slide, not keep up the learning process. But if you don't keep up the learning process, a lot of values become fuzzy if you don't keep trying to perceive what's important, what's not important. And then start spending major effort on minor things. So we have to keep learning. What if a guy spent his book money on donuts? We would call him greatly deprived mentally. In ten years, the guy's bought two tons of donuts and only two books, mostly with pictures. And he wonders why his life isn't working well, reason. After he got out of school, he didn't keep up the flow of ideas that can help to refine your business and help to refine your decisions and help you come to better conclusions. You've got to keep up the learning curve, even after you're out of school, to make sure that you're not making errors in judgment. The reason why most people wind up average at age 40 instead of rich is simply an error in judgment about what to do with your money. What would you suggest a fifteen-year-old start as a plan to do with their money so that by 40 they're rich instead of average? You've got to have a good plan, right? If you start making errors early with your money, those errors can make your life mediocre instead of rich. You wind up with pennies instead of fortune and you wind up with crumbs instead of a feast simply because early you made errors on what to do with your money. The guy says, "Well, it's only ten dollars." So what does it matter what I do with it and the answer is that's when it really matters is when you don't have much. The guy says, "Oh, if I had a fortune, I'd really take good care of it, but I've only got a paycheck so I don't know where it goes." We call those great errors in judgment. It's so important to make sure you've got a good plan when the amounts are small. But it's easy to make errors. It's easy not to know. It's easy to miscalculate and if you miscalculate, some things keep adding and adding and adding. I got a good phrase for you. Life is accumulative. Good phrase to know. Life is accumulative. Our errors either accumulate into what we don't get or our wise decisions accumulate into what we do get. Now the key is to correct the errors as early as possible. Fortunately, Mr. Shove caught me at age 25. Started asking me major questions. At age 25, he said, "Mr. Own, how long have you been working and I said I've been working six years." I started working when I was 19. Right full-time job. He said, "Well, six years, how much money have you saved and invested in the last six years?" I said, "Not any." He said, "Who sold you on that plan?" "Wow, six years is enough time now to check and see if you've got a good financial philosophy." And the time to catch the errors is early, early. So Mr. Shove started asking me those tough questions at age 25. How about your money? How about your resources? How about your investments? You say, "Well, I've got plenty of time to worry about that, to be concerned about that later and the answer is probably not." Now's the time to fix it. Wherever you hear the good information, that's the time to start fixing it. So we're teaching kids now a good wealth philosophy, starting at age 50, 15 will make you wealthy by age 40, 45 at the latest if you're little slow. Start doing wise things with your resources. When would you suggest people should do wise things with their resources? Sir, as soon as they get the better information. Now you can't do what you don't know, but the key is to keep learning so that good ideas keep occurring to you. Now you can do more wise things. But philosophy is where it all begins, what you know. Now to know wise things, you simply have to study as you're doing. Keep up the reading, keep up the conversations, keep up the listening to lectures, keep going through the information, keep stashing it away, taking the notes, right? There's no better way to adjust your philosophy than to have a continual flow of ideas. But that's the first piece of the life puzzle, philosophy. If this spoke to you, don't just listen, act. The self-discipline hacks ebook is your daily guide to doing the best you can. Start that journey today. (gentle music)