This is Part IV of Dilip Mukerjea's latest 60-page catalog of new books:

LEARNING FROM THE MASTERS: THE POWER OF DECISIONS & ACTIONS

"Once a decision is made, focus on supporting it, not second guessing it."

~ Dr Maxwell Maltz;

"Having a goal and understanding the situation are not enough. You must have the courage to act, for only by actions can goals, desires, and beliefs be translated into realities."

~ Dr Maxwell Maltz:

"Only you can decide to develop an unflinching will, to concentrate, to stay focused on your chosen objective until the task is completed."

~ Bob Proctor;

"Once you make the decision you will find all the people, resources, and ideas you need every time."

~ Bob Proctor;

"A real decision is measured by the fact that you've taken a new action. If there is no action, you haven't truly decided."

~ Tony Robbins;

"Stay committed to your decision, but stay flexible in your approach."

~ Tony Robbins;

"Successful people are decisive people. When opportunities come their way, they evaluate them carefully, make a decision and take appropriate action."

~ Napoleon Hill;

"Successful people don't ponder decision; they take action without fear of failure. Decisiveness is powerful. Just go, stop procrastinating and wishing for the right resources. You must be resourceful and take action quickly."

~ Napoleon Hill;

I am just recapping and reviewing (my notes of) what Dr Maxwell Maltz had talked extensively about the success-type personality, which then reminds of what I have had previously read about the late Bob Proctor's work in this area. He posed an interesting question:

WHY DON'T WE DO THE THINGS WE KNOW WE SHOULD TO CREATE SUCCESS?

Interestingly, Bob Proctor also had a CD product that goes under the label of 'Success Habits'. He had deliberately listed 12 'Success Habits'.

Although I have not reviewed his product, I would like to take the liberty of using those labels for success habits as an intellectual platform to tackle his pertinent question, with random bursts of insights, drawing learning experiences from my own long journey on the Highway of Life.

1) Success:

- most of us have a foggy idea about success, except for equating it with money and/or fame;

- it's never the end-result or destination; it's always the ride or journey, and as such, there are always road blocks and even unexpected accidents, e.g. storms, to deal with; sometimes, we may need to take detours to continue the journey;

- Earl Nightingale and Paul J Meyer defined it best:

"Success is the progressive realisation of predetermined, worthwhile and personal goals";

- it's also pertinent to point out that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which one has overcome while trying to succeed;

2) Decision:

- I once read that life is a sum of all our choices or decisions; unfortunately most of us like to sit on the fence;

- I am sure you can remember the jocularity of the proverbial 3 frogs sitting on a lily pod; two decided to jump into the pond; how many frogs are left on the pod?

- no wonder peak performance coach Anthony Robbins once said:

"It is in your moment of decision that your destiny is shaped";

What he is saying is that using the power of decision gives you the capacity to get past any excuse to change any and every part of your life in an instant;

- interestingly, good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions;

- hence, indecisiveness is a stumbling block to success;

3) Risk:

- Most of us are risk adverse, including myself;

- I remember vividly during the late seventies, while I was a deputy divisional manager, one of my young engineers who left to start his own business [he wanted to make S$1 million before his 30th birthday] had posed me a question to the effect as to why I was still working for somebody else while I had more than a decade of professional experience; to be frank, risk was my concern at that point as I was gainfully employed; [that young engineer made it!]

- Helen Keller said it best:

"Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing".

- I am always bemused when I read this quotation from an unknown author:

"Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic."

- So, in late 1991, I left the corporate world after almost a quarter of a century, and the rest was history!

4) Persistence:

- I believe it was my persistence and perseverance that kept me going when I started my own small ventures during the early nineties, as the first 3 years were hell of a ride;

- the following advice from Paul J Meyer still rings true:

"90% of those who failed are not actually defeated. They simply quit!"

- in fact, I have learned that when defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not working, so rebuild those plans, and set sail once again toward your preferred outcome;

5) Responsibility;

- I am sure most readers can recall Stephen Covey's elaborate definition of "responsibility" in his debut classic, '7 Habits of Highly Effective People';

- For me, "responsibility" is taking charge of and taking action on one's own life;

- I just can't help thinking about what Spiderman's dying uncle had taught our young hero, as his parting advice:

"Great power comes with great responsibility!";

6) Confidence:

- I believe quite a lot of people, for one reason or another, suffer from low self-esteem; as a result, they have a poor image of themselves, and this always boils down to the lack of confidence in oneself;

- most of the time, this has also to do with one's own self-talk, especially the negative aspect;

- One problem I reckon has also to do with one's incessant need to compare with others - follow the Jones, so to speak; I always believe that we don't have to out beat anybody; we just have to be better our self everyday, and that's the first small step towards building self-confidence;

7) Action:

- action always follows decision, but the problem is that we often don't want to act on what we have decided; that's stupidity!

- from another perspective, famed scientist Marie Curie shared her thoughts this way:

"The common conception is that motivation leads to action, but the reverse is true - action precedes motivation. You have to 'prime the pump' and get the juice flowing, which motivates you to work on your goals. Getting momentum going is the most difficult part of the job, and often taking the first step is enough to prompt you to make the best of your day."

- remember, I have talked about "inertia" in an earlier post; also about "action-mindedness";

- Bruce Lee, whose fists shook the world, once said this:

"Knowing is not enough, you must apply. Willing is not enough, you must do.";

- Interestingly, futurist Joel Arthur Barker has this great perspective:

"Vision without action is daydreaming; action without vision is random activity; vision with action changes the world."

How about that?;

- Interestingly, as a counterpoint, action has consequences, but action also creates feedback for learning and opportunity;

8) Money:

- Most people like to hold the view that only after we have the money, we can then do something;

- I like what the cash flow guy Robert Kiyosaki has once taught me:

"Money is only an idea; if you want to have money in your hands, change your thinking!"

- it's also important to note that money isn't everything: I have some friends who are loaded, but surprisingly, they are still unhappy with their own lives.

9) Goals:

- many people fail in life, not for lack of ability or even courage, but simply because they have never organised their lives around a goal;

- undoubtedly, in any success or prosperity literature, old or new, goal setting & goal achieving always form one of the critical approaches to personal success;

- once your goals are set, life takes on a meaningful purpose, & everything else just falls into place - that's what I have found;

- in retrospect, you simply can't hit anything unless you have a target;

- successful companies, successful individuals & successful students have one thing in common: they have specific goals! Best of all, they know where they are going!

- I was so glad that I had learned about goal setting during my early professional years - many thanks to Paul J Meyer, Dr Maxwell Maltz and Napoleon Hill!

- Aristotle was right to day. and so was Dr Maxwell Maltz:

"Man is a goal-seeking animal. His life only has meaning if he is reaching out and striving for his goals."

10) Attitude:

- Attitude is everything - it's very true!

- A positive mental attitude can really make the difference;

- There is a wise saying from Zig Ziglar:

"It's your attitude, not your aptitude that determines your altitude!";

- put it in another way, aptitude may get you to the top, but it takes attitude to keep you there!;

- I remember in my employment days that knowledge and skills often help one to get a job, but poor attitude and bad habits can get one fired from the job!

11) Creativity:

- we are able to enjoy many modern technological conveniences today primarily because of the creativity and imagination of our forefathers;

- No wonder, Napoleon Hill once said:

"Ideas are the beginnings of all riches . . ."

- I don't know who said to this effect, but it makes sense:

"Ideas make money. Everything else is housekeeping."

- not only coming up with good ideas, but we must also have the will power to put them to work;

- it's also pertinent to point out that the problem is never how to get new ideas into your mind, but how to get old ideas out of the system;

12) Communications:

- well, just follow the intellectual cues of productivity strategist Stephen R Covey: Seek first to understand, then to be understood!

- To use empathic listening, listen patiently to what the other person has to say, even if you do not agree with it. It is important to show acceptance, though not necessarily agreement, by simply nodding or injecting phrases such as "I understand" or "I see."

Enjoy your reading, exploration and asssimilation!

This beautiful picture of nature's amazing animals suddenly reminds me of something important I have learned back in the early nineties.

It's the 'Whac-A-Mole-Theory' postulated by innovation expert Lindsay Collier. In fact, back in the early nineties, actually he wrote a book on it, which bore the same title, in addition to 'Get Out of Your Thinking Box'.

For those of you who have been to the circus or carnival, it's a very simple game, whereby little plastic critters (moles), pop up out of holes, and you must whack them with a padded mallet to knock them back in the holes.

Unfortunately, to one's chagrin, they keep popping out.

This amusement game play seems to be fun and even therapeutic for people of all ages.

Transposing the game to the real corporate world, cubicle folks play the same game, but it has a different name for it, to which I like to call ''fire-fighting''.

Does it sound familiar?

This is exactly what Prof Don Sull of the London Business School has meant when he terms it as ''active inertia''.

To solve this seemingly dilemma, at least from a personal level, one must embrace the first three habits of Stephen R Covey's '7 Habits or Highly Effective People'... ''Be Proactive'', ''Having the End in Mind'', and ''First Things First''!

This has been my own personal as well as professional experience.

Interestingly, I have found this fascinating ''Ah Beng'' version of Stephen R Covey's '7 Habits of Highly Effective People'.

For the uninitiated:

'Ah Beng' signifies an unsophisticated Singaporean Chinese boy, usually Hokkien.

Stereotypically, he speaks the gutter Hokkien dialect and likes neon-coloured clothes, spiky, moussed hair and accessories such as handphones or pagers, all of which are conspicuously displayed.

He also likes to squat, even when a seat is available.

"Wah lao eh, why you so chao ah beng one?" (Goodness, why are you such an obnoxious Ah Beng?)

[Source of Definition: The Coxford Singlish Dictionary]

Just sharing some vital lessons I have had learned from one of my favourite senseis, productivity strategist Stephen R Covey back in the early nineties.

Covey wrote his magnum opus, ''7 Habits of Highly Effective People', during the early nineties.

In reality, I have had gotten a lot of mileage from reading his above book, which I believe is the distillation from 200 years of the success literature in USA.

Henceforth, I always hold the explicit view that '7 Habits' is more or less a condensation of Napolean Hill's 'Law of Success' to suit contemporary times.

Here's a few of my valuable takeaways from my sensei, other than the '7 Habits':

"Remember, to learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know."

As I have maintained so far, the propensity or bias for action is fundamental to personal and organisational success, because only action produces results.

In the corporate world, it's called 'disciplined execution'.

Another one:

"The way you see the problem is the problem."

In terms of problem solving as well as potential problem solving, what Covey had so eloquently advocated holds the vital key to personal as well as organisational success.

To put it bluntly, change your perspective and you will find that it is easy for you to change your world.

In fact, the father of lateral thinking Dr Edward de bono has earlier termed it as "enhancing your perceptual sensitivity" to the environment, and he has even added that one should also embrace fluidity and multiplicity of our perception about the world.

In a nut shell, what he had been saying is this: get as many viewpoints as you can as you see a problem, so as to expand your mental horizon.

Achieving this mental flexibility is not going to be easy, as there are numerous mental blocks in our heads (perceptual, emotional, cultural, environmental, intellectual, and expressive) that prevent us from realizing the full potential of our fertile minds.

[I recommend reading James Adams' 'Conceptual Blockbusting'].

One last one: The 90/10 Principle:

According to Covey, 10% of our life is made up of what happens to us and 90% is decided by how we react and respond to life's problems.

As I have understood him, we really have no control over 10% of what happens to us.

The other 90% is different. We have control over it. How?

It boils down to how we interpret our reaction and choose to respond to the problem.

Wow! what an epiphany when I first understood him.

During the heydays of my own strategy consulting and training development business (after leaving the corporate world for good), I have often shared with folks in business as well as in schools, how best one can survive and thrive in the 21st Century by learning and applying these critical learning points during their journey on the Highway of Life.

These are excerpts, pertaining to Creating Success in a VUCA World, from one of Dilip Mukerjea's latest books, where he touches on leadership and statesmanship, entitled MeghaLIONS: 

What I have had truly learned from the Father of Quality Management Dr W Edwards Deming back in the early nineties:

Point #1 of his 'Fourteen Points of High Performance Management':

Create Constancy of Purpose for Continous Improvement

- Plan for quality for the long term;

- Don't just do the same thing; find better things to do;

Transposed to the personal setting:

To truly succeed in any endeavour on the Highway of Life, you must fully embrace continuous and never-ending improvement as a living element in whatever you do, making it the basis of your habitual domain.

By the way, his Point #1 resonates readily with the First Principle of Personal Success Achievement as postulated by Napoleon Hill, in the 'Law of Success', written in the 1930's.

To me, the acronym of S.U.C.C.E.S.S. to denote success traits as created by Dr Maxwell Maltz, writing in his Psycho-Cybernetics classic is indeed a marvelous piece of work, attesting to the intellectual horsepower and mental bandwidth of the author.

The first letter stands for Sense of Direction.

It resonates pretty well with the intellectual cues of Napoleon Hill (Definiteness of Purpose), Dr Edwards Deming (Constancy of Purpose), Tony Robbins (beginning part of his Ultimate Success Formula) and Joel Arthur Barker (Power of Vision, with corroborating research findings from Dutch social scientist Fred Polak, management consultant Jim Collins, psychologist Martin Seligman, Canadian educational psychologist Dr Benjamin Singer, and not forgetting, Austrian psychologist/psychiatrist Dr Viktor Frankl).

In a nut shell, and putting it in layman terms, it's all about the fact that goals set direction, in tune with Dr Maltz's concept of goal striving.

Other than the myriad aspects of Imagination, Opportunity Sensing, and Theatre of the Mind, this Goal Striving perspective of Dr Maltz actually fascinated me the most, ever since having read his classic for the first time in the late seventies.

It has had also benefitted me the most as a professional working in the corporate world during the ensuing years from the late seventies.

Interestingly, Dr Maltz added in his Prescription for establishing a Sense of Direction:

• Get yourself a goal worth working for. Better still, get yourself a project;
• Decide what you want out of any situation. That means, you must know your principal objective;
• Always have something ahead of you to look forward to - to work for and hope for;
• Always look forward, for the Nostalgia for the Future can keep you youthful;
• When you're not striving, not looking forward, you are really not living;
• Get interested in some projects to help others, not out of a sense of duty, but because you want to;

Bravissimo!

One of the most productive lessons I have had picked up during the late eighties or early nineties is the following inspiring quote from quality guru Dr Edwards Deming:

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”

As I have understood, in order to change for the better and smarter in whatever we do, we just have to take a proactive stance in our personal change process.

Vision, goals and values are important things, and so is a personal strategy formulation, but more importantly, are self-motivation, diligence, discipline and tenacity.

That's to say, we have to force change into our life, consistently and massively, to paraphrase internationally acclaimed peak performance strategist Anthony Robbins.

If we don't force the change upon our own life, we will always remain in status quo.

Naturally, change comes with discomforts and uncertainties, but that's part of life's journey. We are all born to tackle problems and challenges in one way or another.

I have had the opportunity to go through this tough learning curve myself, because had I stayed back in the corporate world during the early nineties, and even if I had won the rat race, I would still be a rat.

That thought wasn't comforting.