Harvey, Jason - Achieve Anything In Just One Year - Be Inspired Daily to Live Your Dreams and Accomplish Your Goals

It was lonely at the top for Anita. She had riches and power, but she had no friends. People judged her motives and decided they wanted no part of her. She was wealthy on the outside but bankrupt on the inside. Anita sat in a house filled with every luxury, but it wasn’t a home. She couldn’t even buy friends, because they were afraid she would unleash her ruthless behavior on them eventually. She learned too late that the most precious treasures are human relationships.

What are your motives? You will be judged by them.

DAY

174

“Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.”

— Eric Hoffer

Yesterday you viewed the downside of having impure motives. Today you will have a chance to look at what might happen if your motives tend toward the positive side. You don’t have to be like Gandhi, but you can practice having good motives, and it could change your life.

According to Eric Hoffer, kindness can become its own motive. If you are kind to others, you will become a kind person by default. That makes sense when you think about it. It would be impossible to consistently offer kindness to others and remain an ugly person on the inside. You cannot put your life in compartments like that. Eventually, the real motives shine through, ugly or beautiful. You are the sum of your actions and your motives, and it’s very difficult to separate them and only show one or the other to the world.

Think about the intuitive feelings you get when you are around a genuinely nice person. You immediately feel at ease and happy and important in their life. On the other hand, you probably can spot a faker a mile away. How do you feel when you deal with someone who is outwardly nice to you, but you can tell it’s only because they want something?

Practice having good motives today. You might be a selfish person most of the time, but you can change that. Practice acts of kindness and you will become kind. There is no way around it.

DAY

175

“Had it been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed? Or the desire for a new sensation? . . . Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves?”

— Oscar Wilde

What happens if you just don’t feel like a “good” person? Do you wish people thought you were? Well, that’s a good start. If you would like to have pure motives and do good things in the world, but you are still drawn to the dark side, you have to practice changing your motives. That starts with actions.

Let’s say you are a liar, a cheat, and a thief. You can change. The first step is to pretend. No kidding. You can act as if you are full of good motives. Do things that you think a nice person might do and try to stop thinking about what you will get out of it. That’s all you have to do. You don’t have to suddenly change your stripes. Just act like the person you want to be, and eventually your actions will change who you are.

Are you skeptical? Give it a try. You don’t have to believe. Get proof. Give yourself a month and start practicing. This doesn’t work if you do one good deed and then forget about it the rest of the month. You have to continue to act the part. Perform as many good acts as you can for thirty days and then take a look at your results. Are people nicer to you in return? How do you feel on the inside? Has your self-image improved at all?

By the way, this works if you are basically a good person, too. You can be even better just by pretending for awhile. Let your actions dictate who you are for a period of time, and then evaluate the changes you see in yourself.

DAY

176

“It’s choice—not chance—that determines your destiny.”

— Jean Nidetch

Your destiny is not in any way related to chance. People who fulfill their destinies are not merely lucky. They choose success. They go after what they want, and they achieved it. It has nothing to do with chance. You’re not playing a card game here or rolling the dice to find out the outcome. This is real life. You determine what happens next.

You create your destiny every day through the choices you make. It’s not necessarily just the big choices, either, like what you decide to major in if you go to college, where you plan to live, or if you want to get married or remain single. Your destiny is determined by all of the millions of little choices you make, too. They may seem insignificant when you make them, but they add up like change in your pocket, and pretty soon you’re looking at substantial life choices.

If you choose to go to the gym today, you are shaping your destiny of becoming a healthy and strong individual. If you choose to help a friend in need, you are also fulfilling your destiny. You are creating a perception in their mind that you are a caring and loving friend they can count on. Let’s say you choose to go to a one-day job fair just to check out your options. It may only be a couple of hours out of your entire life, but it could change your destiny.

Refuse to let chance rule your destiny. Be aware of your choices today and remember that the small decisions have just as much power to shape your destiny as the big ones.

DAY

177

“Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.”

— John Wayne

What will you do with the gift of a brand new day? Think about the way John Wayne describes it in the quote above. It is brand new when it arrives, and it is placed right in the palms of your hands. You can do whatever you want with a new day. What’s it going to be?

The pristine nature of a perfect new day is exciting. It is brimming with potential. When you wake in the morning, absolutely anything can happen to shape your destiny. You might discover something you never knew about yourself, or you could get the satisfaction of conquering a big problem at work or at home. Maybe you will spend some quality time with your family and remember how important those people are in your life and how much they add color and vibrancy to your days.

Your assignment today is to write down some of the things you learned from yesterday. It’s so important not to waste the gift of a new day by repeating old mistakes. Life is too short to play reruns of the less-than-perfect parts of your life. Write down the lessons you’ve learned, and apply them to this new day.

The universe wants you to learn from life and take each new morning in your hands like the precious gift that it is and mold it into your destiny. Be prepared to shape today into a beautiful day, no matter what outside forces blow through your life. Today is perfect, and tomorrow will be, too. They are in your hands. Have you learned from yesterday?

DAY

178

“What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.”

— Leo Buscaglia

Dawn was miserable 99 percent of the time. She was a beautiful, smart woman brimming with potential, but she refused to step up and try something new or change the way she had always lived her life. She sat over coffee with her friends and complained about her weight, her job, and her relationships at least once a week. They offered ideas and advice from their own life experiences, but she looked at them skeptically as if to say, “well, you’re lucky. I’m not. This is just the way my life is.”