First Law of Extraordinary Success-People who achieve ordinary outcomes do so by using conventional approaches and methods taught in schools and used by the masses.  People who achieve extraordinary to near impossible outcomes do so by using a different set of master strategies that are universally and consistently used by superachievers and are virtually unknown to the masses.

Second Law of Extraordinary Success-Superachievers learn these master strategies from mentors (the fast way), or through the agonizing process of trial and error (the slow way).

Four Types of People-Which Type are you?  DRIFTERS-Go with the flow of the river and go wherever it takes them-50 percent of the adult population.  PURSUERS-Set their own course and pursue dreams achieve some and fail to achieve most-25 percent of adult population.  ACHIEVERS-Set their own course and power their way through various destinations regardless of the flow-24.99 percent of adult population.  SUPERACHIEVERS-Those who get out of the river altogether, pursue and achieve extraordinary outcomes and impossible dreams.  One tenth of the adult population.  Our greatest and most desirable dreams are usually the most distant destinations.  Once we become adults and realize how distant they are, we don’t even begin the journey, much less complete it.

Critical Distinctions-TEACHER; Someone who imparts information but relies on the learner to determine the importance, validity, and correct way to use that information.  MENTOR:  Someone who coaches the learner into a correct understanding of important information that is critical to achieving a specific goal, and coaches that person through the process of effectively applying that information.  IDEAL MENTOR:  A mentor who has achieved extraordinary success in an applicable or similar endeavor by using the information and processes in which he or she is coaching the learner.  EXPERTS:  Tend to teach what they think will work rather than what they have personally experienced and proven to work.  One Simple Life-Changing Truth-The most powerful computer ever created isn’t a mainframe, it’s a micro and it’s housed within a few cubic inches of your head.

Third Law of Extraordinary Success–Regardless of past programming for mediocrity, anyone can reprogram their brain for extraordinary outcomes.  All they need is the right software and the commitment to use it.  As adults, a few of the false standards by which we judge ourselves are job titles, paychecks, material possessions, and a forever young and thin appearance.

Three step process of reprogramming your brain and attitude:  Realization-Success is not limited by your know-how or resources (time, talent, or money).  Not limited by your lack of achievement in the past or your past failures.  Personal Commitment- Believe it and act on it.  Financial stress would be relieved, and hopefully you could bless the lives of countless others in need.  Strategy-Strategy in itself is the single most powerful way to reprogram yourself for extraordinary success.  When our strengths aren’t balanced by learned behavior, they too can create stress and other difficulties in our work and our relationships.  As you learn the personality types of your spouse, children, coworkers, employees, and supervisors, you will have a much greater understanding and appreciation of their strengths.  Knowing your personality type and the personality of others can make your daily life a lot less stressful, a lot more enjoyable, and infinitely more productive.  Anger turned inward is a primary cause of frustration and depression.  “What you don’t know can make you!” In fact what you don’t know can be a springboard to levels of success you haven’t even imagined.

Fourth Law of Extraordinary Success– Lack of know-how only appears to be an insurmountable obstacle.  For superachievers, it serves as a springboard to extraordinary achievement.

We don’t have to be geniuses to achieve extraordinary outcomes and impossible dreams.  We all know a little, and don’t know a lot.  We all have a few skills, and don’t have most skills.  We don’t even have to know how to do those things that are critical to the success of a project or the fulfillment of a dream.  We have a few natural talents and abilities, and don’t have most.  Your lack of talent and abilities need never prevent you from achieving your impossible dreams.

You must gain an accurate assessment of your own strengths and weaknesses in general and then in particular as those strengths and weaknesses relate to your pursuit of a specific project, opportunity, or dream.  Gaining an accurate and thorough assessment of your strengths and weaknesses will provide you with a personal profile that will serve as the foundation on which the elements critical to your success and happiness will be built.  You must identify, recruit, and effectively utilize the right partners whose strengths will more than compensate for your weaknesses.  Effective partnering is the single most powerful strategy in these mentoring sessions.  Without this strategy, no impossible dream would have ever been realized and no extraordinary outcomes would have ever been achieved…by anyone!

Remove the limits of your Limited resources; Time is not only our most limited resource; it is also the least appreciated and most easily wasted of all our resources.

Fifth Law of Extraordinary Success– Superachievers remove the limits of limited resources by accurately assessing their resources, wisely allocating them, and expanding them by recruiting outside resources.  Accurately assess and correctly value your resources.  Recruiting the financial resources of others has long been the most preferred path of superachievers.

Your idea, project, or business must be a truly worthy idea, project or business.  You must create an accurate assessment of your resources and demonstrate your ability to wisely allocate those resources.  You should use the strategies and techniques that you will learn in our next session to identify, recruit, utilize, and motivate the right financial partners.  You should use the vision mapping process that you’ll learn in session 7 to create a well-defined and powerful vision of your idea, project, or business.  You should use the skills for effective and persuasive communication that you will learn in session 5 to communicate your vision to your would-be financial partners.  You should always keep foremost in your mind and presentation that your would-be financial partners (whether your boss, an investor, a company, or a bank) are only interested in what your opportunity will do for them, not what their participation will do for you.  The only reason a would-be financial partner would ever provide his or her resources to help fulfill your vision is because your vision presents a wonderful opportunity to further fulfill his or her vision for his or her resources-namely a great return on his investment and the highest and best of those assets.  The single greatest strategy for overcoming your lack of know-how and removing the limits of your limited resources is the strategy of effective partnering.

Sixth Law of Extraordinary Success– It is impossible to achieve extraordinary success in any area without effective partnering.  Every extraordinary or impossible dream ever achieved through partnering.  *The Unlimited power of strategic partnering can make your impossible dreams an unimaginable success story.

Seventh Law of Extraordinary Success– Effective partnering raises the level of success exponentially, accelerates success meteorically, and reduces risk enormously.

Incomparable Benefits of Effective Partnering: It’s the fastest and most beneficial way to overcome your lack of know-how.  It’s the fastest and most beneficial way to remove the limits of your limited resources.  It raises your chances of success geometrically.  It raises your level of success exponentially.  It accelerates your achievement of success meteorically.  It increases your knowledge and broadens your expertise.  It increases your offensive power against competitive forces and reduces your vulnerability to their attacks.  It reduces your risk of failure-Proverbs 11:14 “Without counsel, people fall: but in the multitude of counselors there is safety”.  It reduces the quantity and the degree of failures you will experience.  It reduces your personal workload.  It reduces your level of personal stress.  Offloading stress is critical, and effective partnering gives us a great way to do that.

Partners: Counselors, consultants, advisors, experts, authors, friends, key employees, financiers, investors, lenders, mentors, and literal or legal partners who are recruited to fulfill tasks that are necessary to the optimal achievement of a goal, project or dream.  Effective Partnering: Partnering that involves four essential components:  Identifying the right type of partner needed for a given situation.   Identifying the right person within that type.  You must gain a clear and precise vision, you must have an accurate assessment, you must determine the category of your partner, you must determine the role the partner(s) will play, and you must create a profile or description of the ideal partner.  Recruiting the right person with the right kind of offer.    Effectively utilizing the partner for optimal results.  It is easier to partner ineffectively than it is to partner effectively.  Sharing the wealth is one of the single most important elements in effective partnering.  Provide the opportunity and authority, provide the right environment: Environment where people are free to express their thoughts, ideas, and opinions without the fear of being inappropriately criticized or ignored.  Provide the right incentives; use the greatest long-term motivating strategy.

The most effective way to motivate another’s behavior for long-term success and a stronger relationship is with love (value and honor); the easiest and most often used way to motivate behavior is with fear.  Manipulating behavior with fear is always faster and easier, but is never more productive or beneficial to you, your endeavors, or your partners.  Strategies and tips for identifying and recruiting the right partners: Assess your own strengths and weaknesses; identify the talents, abilities, and strengths that you need in a partner to compensate for the areas of your weaknesses, inabilities, and lack of interest.  Look for a person who shares the same vision you have for your business venture or personal dream.  Look at the character and integrity of your would-be partner.  Look for a partner who is willing to be totally committed to your vision to achieve success.  Is your would-be partner a positive person or a negative person?  Look at your would-be partner’s natural drive and gifts rather than his or her resume.

Eighth Law of Extraordinary Success– Achievement is accelerated by effective and persuasive communication skills and is retarded by the lack of those skills.  Proverbs 16:23 “The heart of the wise teaches his mouth, and adds persuasiveness to his lips.” Proverbs 15:2 “The tongue of the wise makes knowledge acceptable.”

The difference between persuasion and manipulation- Manipulation is using any means necessary to motivate or force someone to do something that fulfills your desire or need.  Persuasion is communication that guides people’s minds and emotions past all obstacles, enables them to understand what you are saying and feel what you are feeling, and ultimately motivates them to take the course of action that you believe is in their best interest or for the common good.  Potential Barriers preventing your listeners from receiving and responding to your communication-Listener’s frame of mind, ego, gender differences, personality types, semantics (different definitions), they’d rather be speaking than listening, opposing opinions, time, YOU.  When you dishonor your listener-whether it’s your spouse, your child, your boss, your peers, or your friends- you and you alone are defeating the goal of your communication.  Emotional word pictures: grabbing the listener’s undivided attention, holding their attention level high throughout the communication, imparting and implanting understanding and feeling, influencing their will to make the right choice for the right reason.  FACT:  if your listener doesn’t focus on what you are saying, doesn’t clearly understand what you are saying, and doesn’t feel what you are feeling, it’s your fault!

Ninth Law of Extraordinary Success– It’s the speaker’s sole responsibility to grab a listener’s undivided attention, hold his or her attention, impart a clear understanding of what’s being said, and implant what is felt into his or her emotions.  Hooking a person’s undivided attention:  Three types of hooks that always grab a person’s undivided attention-  A Strong captivating statement:  Be sure to tailor the statement to the specific interests, concerns, needs, or desires of that specific person or group.  A Personal reference: Using the name, image, credibility, or words of someone whom your listener knows, appreciates, respects, or has an interest in.  A Specific question:  Not general questions like “How are you doing? How was your day?  Placing hooks throughout a conversation will help you keep their attention focused:  However the best technique for meeting this challenge is called SALTING.  How do you salt a conversation?  Simply stated, you create curiosity about what you are going to say before you say it.  Using Emotional Word Pictures to implant understanding in the listener’s mind and feeling in the listener’s emotions.  Your brain is divided into two parts:  Left hemisphere, which is the analytical side and right hemisphere which is the feeling and visual side.  Emotional word pictures are so effective because they stimulate the right side of your brain.  Emotional word pictures go one step further.  They relate to you in a more personal way therefore impact your feelings.  Using emotional word pictures is the only way to stimulate the right side of the brain of a left brain-dominant male.  An emotional word picture can instantly enable a woman to feel what you are feeling and consequently can move her from one opinion to another.  This is the one and only communication technique that builds a bridge from the mind of a typically left brain-dominant male to the mind of a typically right brain-dominant female.

Six steps to creating effective emotional word pictures:  Set a specific time to create the word picture, think about the other person’s interests, create your word picture from one of the following inexhaustible resources-passions, hobbies, or interests, memorable events, everyday objects that the person is familiar with, nature, and imaginary stories.  Practice using a word picture before you actually share it with the person.  Pick a convenient time with minimal distractions to communicate your word picture. Without overusing them, be persistent and soft in using emotional word pictures.  Three major factors that motivate people to act: Desire for gain-Fear of Loss-Need to love and be loved.  When preparing for an important conversation or presentation, review your points and determine if you have clearly and adequately appealed to any of the three motivational factors.  If so, should the appeal be strengthened or softened?  Are you using persuasive appeal or a manipulative one?  These questions should be answered before you engage in the conversation or deliver a presentation.  The more important the issue that you want to communicate, the more preparation you need to do beforehand.  HOOK: A strong captivating statement, personal reference, or a specific question that instantly grabs a listener’s undivided attention.  SALT: A statement, question, or story that creates curiosity about what you are going to say before you say it.  Emotional Word Picture: A word, statement, or story that creates an instant picture in listener’s minds that clarifies what you are trying to say and implants a feeling into their emotions.

Tenth Law of Extraordinary Success–Extraordinary achievement is impossible to attain without a clear and precise vision and detailed plan to achieve that vision.  In Proverbs Solomon wrote “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Its converse is equally true; where there is vision, the people live!

Eleventh Law of Extraordinary Success– Vision infuses life into any project or endeavor, and the lack of vision infuses the dying process.  Solomon’s vision:  A clearly defined dream, idea, goal, or objective and a plan detailing the specific steps that must be taken to achieve it.

Twelfth Law of Extraordinary Success– Dreams without clearly defined goals, and goals without clearly defined steps, will never be achieved expeditiously or efficiently, and will rarely be achieved at all.  Well intentioned experts tell us that we should only set reasonable and timely achievable goals.  Shooting for the moon is the secret strategy of the world’s most successful people.

Thirteenth Law of Extraordinary Success–No one has ever achieved extraordinary success without shooting for the moon.  Everyone who has ever achieved their “impossible dreams” has done so by shooting for the moon.  Shooting for the moon-The process of defining dreams and setting goals that are extraordinary to impossible for a person to achieve on his or her own.  This process is powerless without utilizing the other master strategies, but it is fully empowered when used in conjunction with the other master strategies.  Start with a choice, now as basic as this is the sad truth is that most people come up to the plate in life just trying to get on base.  They truly believe that a walk is as good as a hit.  They just don’t want to strike out.  If they set any goals at all, they only set ones that are so easily achieved that there is almost no chance of failing.  What persistence is not:  When failure is contemplated, persistence is not simply a matter of staying the course no matter what.  When failure is experienced, persistence is not simply refusing to give up and then trying the same thing over and over again, but with more effort, intensity, or frequency.  What true persistence is: When failure is contemplated, true persistence makes the necessary midcourse corrections to reduce risk and increase the possibility of success.  When failure is experienced, true persistence analyzes various elements or factors that may have caused or contributed to that failure and then designs and tries creative alternatives that might result in significant improvement and ultimate success.

Fourteenth Law of Extraordinary Success– Extraordinary success can never be achieved without encountering extraordinary roadblocks, setbacks, and failures.  These can only be overcome through creative persistence.  Edison wrote, “The three things that are essential to achievement are common sense, hard work, and stick-to-itiveness…”  Edison had six techniques for developing and implementing the skill of creative persistence.  Define the idea or dream in writing, enumerate the broad ramifications of achieving the dream, infuse your dream into the hearts and minds of others, expect criticism, problems, and failures and predetermine the right way to deal with them, use roadblocks, obstacles, and failures as springboards to develop effective creative alternatives, recognize a three-legged horse, and take it out of the race (know when you have a dud).   Every project, goal, and dream should have a realistic deadline and a budget for being achieved.  It’s usually not a good idea to go significantly beyond a reasonable deadline or over a budget.   *Each failure is only one sentence or paragraph in the book of your life (SW).  In the pursuit of success in any endeavor, there is a blinding snow that prevents people from clearly seeing the roads of opportunity that they need to take to achieve extraordinary success.  Blinding snow is your conscious and subconscious fear of failure.

Fifteenth Law of Extraordinary Success– Fears of failure blinds one’s vision to opportunity.  Extraordinary success cannot be achieved until those fears are effectively dealt with and vision is restored.  John Keats wrote “Failure is in a sense the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true.”  Henry Ford said, “One who fears failure limits his activities.”  If we set any goals at all, we set them so low that we have virtually no chance of failing those goals.  Fear is the greatest enemy of progress (SW).   Four steps for overcoming fears of failure in any endeavor. Define what you really want in each endeavor, project, or dream you are pursuing.  List the potential obstacles that could stand in the way of getting what you really want.  List your reasons for not confronting each obstacle.  Create a risk-reward analysis chart for each of your fears.  *Discovering that every failure contains real-life lessons that are more valuable than any theory you could ever learn from a textbook (SW).

Sixteenth Law of Extraordinary Success–Failure when revisited will rarely be relived.  Failure when analyzed will provide the building blocks for future successes that will be far greater than the failure itself.  If you want failure to push you into success, then you have to revisit it and you have to analyze it.  Criticism is a lot like a loud horn.  Even though it can irritate us to a degree that nothing else can, when we know how to receive it, it can produce benefits beyond measure.

Seventeenth Law of Extraordinary Success–Conscious or subconscious avoidance of criticism will short-circuit the ability to achieve extraordinary success and happiness.  Why is criticism such a formidable roadblock to extraordinary success? It affects our self-image and our self-esteem, it stifles our initiative, it suppresses our creativity, it discourages risk-taking, and it encourages and fosters dishonesty, it wreaks havoc on our emotional health and it impairs relationships.  You can’t end it, you can’t avoid it, and you can’t fight it.  But you can turn it into one of your most valuable and productive allies.  Sir Winston Churchill said, “Criticism is often useful, and praise is often deceitful.”  Consider the source of criticism-how qualified is the person giving it?  What is the basis of the criticism? What is the motive for making the criticism?  The only one who knows the future is GOD.  Factors to determine criticism-emotions, past experience (yours and the person criticizing).  Critic’s failures, past failures, lack of understanding, logic and wisdom.  Consider the accuracy of the criticism-You will find a few criticisms are extremely accurate, some partially accurate and many are totally inaccurate.  The less accurate they are, the more easily their sting is removed.  Take responsibility for your response to the criticism and mine it for gold-You can yield to your natural inclinations and react to the criticism or you can choose to restrain your inclinations and respond to the criticism.  When you respond to criticism, you are taking control away from your nature and choosing to utilize the criticism correctly.  You will analyze the criticism and then mine it for gold.  By choosing to respond, you will not only gain benefit from the criticism, you will increase your chances of achieving extraordinary success.  Superachievers convert their dreams into goals, their goals into steps, and their steps into tasks.

Eighteenth Law of Extraordinary Success– If you can’t control your time, you won’t achieve extraordinary success.  To take and maintain control of the most important areas of your life requires three key elements: Priority planning, sustained focus, and personal accountability.  Time is truly the most precious and limited commodity we possess.  Create and plan for the day, execute the plan according to your priorities.  No matter how important an activity or a task may be, if we are not comfortable performing it, we will put it off as long as possible.

Nineteenth Law of Extraordinary Success–No matter how much success a person achieves, if he or she becomes a positive person, he or she will achieve more and enjoy the journey a lot more.  It’s easy to be positive when everything is going great.  It’s quite another thing to be positive when things are going badly.  A negative situation takes charge of your focus and directs it toward the negative.  Just as a negative situation grabs our focus and resets it on the negative, we can choose to grab it right back and redirect it to the positive.  Proverbs 15:1 “A soft answer turns away wrath, but grievous words stir up anger.”  When we react rather than respond, we are letting negative situations or negative people take control of our happiness for the entire time we are reacting.  Helen Keller warned that not resetting our focus can cause us to miss the opportunity to remain happy or regain it if we lost it.  She said, “When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has opened before us.”   People who are genuinely grateful are also extremely positive.  If gratefulness were truly dependent on all of the circumstances in one’s life being good, then no one would be grateful.  No matter what we don’t have, we have more to be thankful for than we may ever imagine.   Gratefulness starts with an awareness of all of the good things you have in life, and an awareness that those good things have been provided not by your efforts alone, but through the efforts and contributions of others.  Give genuine praise, not flattery.  The Sandwich method of criticism, place a slice of criticism between two slices of praise.

Twentieth Law of Extraordinary Success–Without developing a controlled passion for a vision, extraordinary success is impossible.  Thomas Hobbs wrote, “Passions unguided, for the most part are mere madness.” When a passion takes control of us, it’s like madness.”  Passion is made up of a vision, hope, and fulfillment.   Each time you complete a task, step, or a goal, you get that much closer to achieving your dream and your expectation becomes more well founded and confident, producing even more hope.