In this chapter you define your life purpose. If you are familiar with the self-help genre of books, tapes or seminars then you will probably be familiar with this exercise. This is a deceptively simple exercise and each time that I do it, I have a different answer, and each time I answer I feel that my response is stronger than the last time.

So, without further adieu… here is the most recent incarnation of my life purpose….

My purpose is to use my creativity and willingness to explore the unknown to inspire others to do the same, and live the lives that they dream of.

This may sound a little canned, and I do admit that there must be a better way to state this, however from all of my thinking on this subject, this is what I want to do. I want to have an amazing life so that hopefully you can catch even just 1% of what I’ve done and use it to inspire yourself towards your own ambitions.

When I was small my parents told me that when I grew up I could be anything. At 13 during a family dinner I was asked what I wanted to do when I grow up. I told them confidently that I wanted to be in the NBA. My family likes to be sarcastic and nearly all of them laughed at my dream of being in the NBA… perhaps the NBA was a little too ambitious, and sadly I gave up that dream on that day. I still regret that decision, but perhaps as a white kid just shy of 6 feet it was for the best. Previous dream jobs included fighter jet pilot, comic book artist, video game designer, jewel thief, rock star and millionaire – I realize now that being a millionaire isn’t necessarily a career path, but at 6 years old it seemed more than possible.

So how does this rant relate to my life purpose? I really believed, and still believe that I can do and achieve anything that I want to be. The problem is that there aren’t that many people who think like this. The childhood dreams are dead and gone for many, and to me, that’s really a shame. The world at times seems like a really boring place when I talk to my friends. They fell backward into a job that pays ok, and had health benefits and they pretty much resigned those childhood dreams and are now just serving time for the next thirty to forty years until they can collect a pension. This doesn’t really seem like living to me… this really seems like dying, and dying a slow, drawn out, painful death….

I hope that by going against the grain and my willingness to explore alternative paths that I can inspire at least some people to look into a life that has some semblance of what they dreamed about when they were a kid, or at least something a little more imaginative than falling backward into a somewhat stable job.

Don’t get me wrong… there’s nothing wrong with taking the job path, it’s just that I wish that more people would tap into their creative side a little more and have faith in themselves enough to at least try for a little more. Ok… rant over, let’s keep moving.

Of all the principles in this book… this is the one that I feel that I am closest to mastering. Having started reading the book several times over the past few years I’ve really come to realize that it is me who is in control of things and that it is my responsibility to have the life I want. No one else is going to give me what I want, I must take it for myself. This applies not only to financial goals but also to relationship, health and every goal that I’ll ever dream up for myself.

I let go of the blame and instead of placing it on circumstance or another person, I look inward and point the finger of blame at myself and ask what I could have done different or better to achieve the desired outcome from a situation. Looking at life from this point of view is interesting in that you are ultimately in control of everything that happens to you. Sure, you may not have the tools at this exact moment to successfully handle many of the problems that come to you, but by looking inward you will be starting the process of learning and improving from every situation that you encounter.

Off to a flying start. What’s next?

If you’re feeling like your career, relationships and social life are spiraling out of your control it’s time to get back into the driver’s seat and set things back on course. It’s not as difficult as it seems, and starting is the hardest part. Once you have some momentum you’ll start to find the peace of mind that you’ve been longing for.
Here are some tips to help you get started:

1. Improve your Health
Get back to the gym and start making headway towards improving your body. Eat healthy and make sure that you’re getting enough water and rest each day. Make this one of your highest priorities as you will immediately start to feel better and have the increased energy and motivation to tackle some of the bigger obstacles ahead.

2. Be Consciously Grateful for what you Have
In the morning take a few minutes to remind yourself of everything that you have. There are people out there with far less who would give almost anything to have what you have and take for granted every day. Appreciating what you have today will help set your mind at east to realize that your situation likely isn’t as bad as you may think it is. Once you’ve freed your mind of these negative thoughts, you’ll be able to harness that brain power towards more positive and productive goals.

3. Speak Up!
If something is bothering you, it’s time to stop thinking about it and take action. Speak up and ask questions to those around you. Getting up the courage to speak is the biggest challenge – rarely will there be a situation that comes from your assertiveness that is scarier than first asking the question in the first place. Like tip #2, once you do this it will free your mind from worrying about invented fears and let you get back to being focused on the things that really matter.

4. Remember Few Things are ‘Always or Never’
Ever had a thought like any of the following: ‘ He’s always late,’ ‘It’s never fast enough,’ or ‘Why does this always happen to me?’ The truth of the matter is that few things in life are ‘Always or Never,’ but when you repeatedly think this way, the world reflects your belief and it may really seem like things are ‘Always or Never’. When you find yourself thinking like this remember that it’s not the case and you should look forward to the situation surprising you with a more positive outcome.

5. Release Your Negative Thoughts
If you find yourself with a negative thought, do your best to release it or plant an opposing positive thought in its place. An example of this would be to think ‘I’m so fat’ when you look in the mirror; as you’re thinking this, your mouth will likely form into a frown to mirror your inner thinking with your outward appearance which compounds the problem. Instead of this negative thought, when you look at the mirror say to yourself ‘I’m healthy and vibrant’ and smile at yourself as you think this thought.

Remember to smile at yourself, even if you have to fake it in the beginning. It won’t be long before you naturally feel good looking in the mirror, even if you do have a few pounds that you haven’t yet worked off, and the more you keep this thought the sooner your inner thoughts of healthy and vibrant will match your outward physical appearance.

6. Not Everything is About You!
When you hear a group of people laughing, don’t automatically assume that they’re laughing about you. You’re not so special! Most people are too busy worrying about themselves the same way that you worry about yourself to spend any time thinking about you.

When you notice yourself projecting your negative thoughts of fear and rejection into the minds of other people realize that it’s your own imagination that’s creating this anxiety and then release those thoughts so you can get back to thinking about more positive and important things.

7. Reach out and Touch Someone
Improve the relationships with those around you with a little old fashioned human contact. Shake hands when greeting or leaving friends and give a hug to those close to you. If your relationship is on the rocks you will be amazed at the responsiveness that some additional and unexpected human contact will have. Try it out today!

8. Join a Special Interest Group
Take a hobby or new skill that you are interested in learning and then find a group of likeminded people to join and share ideas with. There are so many benefits to doing this, but I think the biggest one is that you will enrich your life by adding more people into it who will expose you to many different and amazing possibilities that you would never have been possible on your own.

9. Offer your Experience and Time to Others.
The term ‘volunteer’ must have some negative connotation as I know very few people who do traditional ‘volunteer work,’ however the amount of people that I know who help people is enormous.

If you’ve been keeping your personal experience and expertise to yourself it’s time to give back to those around you – and this doesn’t mean spending time in a soup kitchen if that’s not your style. Host an information night, help someone advance in their career, or start a blog to share your ideas and insights to those who do not yet possess the knowledge that you do. These are just a few examples, but helping other will help you to feel good about yourself as well as expose you to new people who will in turn help and enrich your life.

10. Change your Location to Break Through Mental Blocks.
It’s possible to focus so much on a problem that it really is possible to make a mountain out of a mole hill. A good way to combat this is to suddenly and unexpectedly change your routine or environment. Let’s say you have some piece of writing like an essay or report that you need to finish, but have been struggling with. Instead of staring at your computer and watching the clock tick down to the deadline, grab your notes and head out to a coffee shop or park.

After several days of struggling with an article, I took my laptop to a coffee shop and was able to write not only one article, but three in about an hour and a half. The coffee shop environment got me away from my house and all the mini-distractions that come with working from home and allowed me to focus like a laser beam on the task at hand.

That’s it for now. I sincerely hope that this helps you get back on track as much as it did me.

You’ve read enough books, listened to enough audio tapes and watched enough training videos. Pick a system… any system. They almost all work if you take the massive action that is required.

Before you give up on whatever it is that you’re currently engaged in, take a second and ask yourself if you’re a change junkie. If you are, then you might want to give what you’re working on a second chance and see if you can’t push through the rough times to creating your own success story.

We’ve all heard stories of dot com millionaires, but how realistic is it to think that you or I would be the one to develop the next FaceBook or Youtube? Pretty unlikely I imagine. But what if I told you there are thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people just like you and me earning a living online. I’m not just talking about chump change here, some of these people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars each month — it’s really amazing. But before I get ahead of myself and change my name to Rockefeller let me tell you how I got started with my simple little hobby website and how you can do the same yourself.

The Search For Internet Cash

I searched all over the Internet looking for a realistic way to make money online. It’s no big secret that there are tons of scam artists on the Internet. I was really cautious of anything that promised too much or seemed too easy. Easy money may sound nice, but in my experience there’s usually catch and I was interested in building a real business for myself and real businesses take real effort. After several months of searching I found a lot of sites recommending one single service called SiteSell.

I really started to scratch my head and wonder if SiteSell could be the thing I had been looking for. With so many people recommending them it was at least worth looking into. Sitesell is a small Canadian company with a real mom-and-pop feel who specialize in helping people like you and I, my grandma or my coworkers start their own real Internet businesses without costing an arm and a leg. They give you all the tools and instruction that you need to go from a complete beginner to having a successful business that puts cash in your pocket each and every month. Not too shabby eh?

Now before I go into my story in detail, I just want to tell you how great it is to be earning passive income on the Internet. Now that my website is setup it continues to attract people and those people continue to generate cash for me. The more I work, the more I get paid; it’s as simple as that.

So what did I do for my own website?
Here’s my story…

I combined my passion for helping people with my interest in drawing to create a site that helps new artists get started learning how to draw. It was a simple enough idea and it’s now earning me a decent amount of money each month. Last month alone I had over 80,000 different people come to read my lessons on how to draw. What’s even cooler is that a lot of these people actually e-mail me thanking me for helping them learn how to draw which makes me feel pretty fantastic to tell the truth.

The amazing thing about all of this is that I did most of it while still working as an art director in the videogame industry. If you’re unfamiliar with the videogame or entertainment industry, it’s really competitive and often requires you to work hours that most people would consider quite insane. What I am trying to say here is that even though I was working 50 to 60 hour weeks at my day job, there was still enough time to put up a few pages and continue to grow my website. I’ll safely say that no matter how busy you currently are there still enough time to slowly and steadily build up a solid stream of passive income for yourself.

Saying Buh-Bye To My Day Job

The success of my site has given me the confidence in myself to leave the insanity that is the entertainment industry and focus on building real Internet based businesses around hobbies and topics that I enjoy and am interested in. It doesn’t really matter what you’re interested in because the Internet is so huge that there are other people who are also interested in the same topic and because you have your own website powered by SiteSell and ranking highly in Google, those people will find your content.

Slowly and steadily as I continued to build up my site more and more people came and the money I was earning grew and grew. Within a year’s time I was making about $500 a month and now that I’ve started working full time on this I’m almost making $1000 a month. What makes this whole thing even sweeter is that I’m free to step away from this business whenever I want. I’m my own boss and I can take a vacation or day off whenever I want and the money will still keep coming in. I’m also not limited to just one site, so there’s nothing from stopping me from adding two or three more sites that over time will grow and add even more passive income to my bank account.

It’s really that simple and SiteSell gives you all the tools and training that you need to start from scratch and build your own Internet based business. It doesn’t matter what you’re interested in, there is a market out there that you can begin to start making money from.

When I think back on the past three years and how hard I worked at running my previous business I’m amazed at how convenient and comfortable my lifestyle has become because I earn passive income from the web. As I said above it just gets better and better. Next year I’ll add a few more sites and make even more money, all from the comfort of my own home, while being in complete control of my life.

If you’re interested in more information you can go and check out the SiteSell website. If you click here it will take you to a brief video introduction to everything that Sitesell is and how it can help you start making money online. This is not a scam, it is real business using the power of the Internet that anyone can do no matter what your current knowledge of the net may be.

Personally I think you’re a little crazy if you don’t at least take a look at the Sitesell video and see what they’re all about. This company changes lives as it has mine and they can do the same for you!

PS – if you’re still wondering what my how to draw website looks like, search ‘drawing realistic ears’ on Google and click on the 1st search result

Let me tell you what I did to give myself permission to take full control of my life. A control card is the device that you can use to give yourself permission to do more of the things that you want to do and less of the things that you don’t want to do. It works much the same way as a doctor’s note would. When the doctor says you can drink alcohol or eat cheeseburgers and you use that as your reason for not going out with your friends for dinner, your ability to say no is easy and no one will question you the importance of your doctor’s note.

However when you simply say that you’ll are trying to lose weight or avoid alcohol’s negative effects your rubber arm will be twisted into submission and before you know it you’ll have a mouthful of cheeseburger and be reaching for your alcoholic beverage of choice to wash it all down with. My control card is nothing more than a small business card sized piece of cardboard paper that reads: I am in total control of my life. I alone have the power to choose to live a better life.

I kept a small card in my wallet at all times. I made sure to place it in the front of my wallet where I would be able to read its message every time I opened it. The wallet is a really great place for messages like this. It’s often the spending or misspending of money that leads us down that road of temptation that we know we should avoid. Though this card merely looks like pen scribbled on paper the power that it holds has allowed me to take back control of my life.

You can use control cards in your own life with messages that ring true to you. I have some specific suggestions for creating a message that is both personal and powerful. 1. Choose the area of your life that you need the most help in controlling. This can be stopping addiction, spending less money, taking more free time etc.2. don’t worry about trying to do too much with your message. Each problem is another mountain to climb and by trying to climb too many mountains at once you will certainly become overwhelmed and end up doing nothing.3. Create a short one or two sentence message that gives you permission to choose that path that will lead to your desired outcome. The key here is that it gives you permission to be unreasonable and put what you want to achieve ahead of everyone else’s needs.3. Use only positive words. As a general rule it’s always better to ask for what you want than that in trying to explain exactly what it is that you don’t want. Once you’re finished place the card in the front of your wallet. Replace or remove one of your existing credit or membership cards if needed so that your personalized control card will be easily seen and read each and every time you open your wallet. When you’re faced with a difficult decision or you feel that you’re about to lapse into your old undesired way of acting, just open the wallet and take a look at the control card. Let it decide for you what the best way to act is. Once you feel that you have gained control of the area of your life that the control card is targeting feel free to add a new control card to wallet but do not remove the old one. Keeping your old control cards with you in your wallet will give you additional power if and when you need them again in the future.

Let me give you an example of negative manifestation that I know very clearly for my personal life. Once I realized that this person’s life was haunted by this particular negative manifestation I became instantly fascinated. So, what exactly does this person believe? “Everything that I buy will have a defect or flaw in it.” This may sound like a joke but I assure you that it is not. Read on.

Think about this particular manifestation for second. Do you think that it’s actually possible that with all of the technology and tools that we have today to quality control the things that we buy that it would be possible for everything to be defective? Think about this for a second longer and ask yourself “When was the last time you bought something that had to be returned to a store because it was broken?” I’m not talking about something that you do to break the item, it was just broken when you brought it home. Insane right? Well it’s true. I’ve watched her buy water coolers, MP3 players, toaster ovens, and even pasta that was defective. How can pasta be defective? Good question; let me tell you. The bag had a small hole in it and it was full of small black bugs. Disgusting, but technically defective.

Now let’s examine the most recent example from last week. She’d wanted a Mac book for quite a while, saved her money and finally bought one. When the Mac book finally arrived at her house she was delighted and immediately started to use it, but there was a problem. The touchpad that you use to control the mouse had a bump in the middle of it making it very uncomfortable to use. She thought that maybe there was a screw that had not been tightened properly under the trackpad. She was very annoyed, but I was not surprised in the least that even Macintosh could not deliver a product that could overcome the power of her negative manifestation of buying defective products. She sent the Mac book back to get fixed.

When the computer finally arrived back in her hands there was a note from Macintosh apologizing for the inconvenience which also stated that the certain defect her computer had, which was an air bubble in the trackpad, was one that they had previously never before seen. Can you imagine that? She essentially manifested a new kind of defect in a Mac book. Insane. How does this relate and apply to your life? Think about any negative manifestations or intentions that you may hold true in your personal life and resolve to change them. Take them from negatives and turn them into positives as quickly as you can.

When you really start to think about it you probably will have a lot of negative hangups that have been with you since childhood. These thoughts certainly have power and could be forcing you to live your life as though you’ve had the emergency brake on for as long as you can remember. I urge you to release the break and make life easier on yourself, unless you actually enjoy the pain-and-suffering that comes along with their negative intention. On the lighter note, you could use such a negative power to your advantage. Think if you’re the Dell manufacturer, or Macintosh manufacturer for that matter how great would it be to have someone on your staff who could pinpoint and pick out any and all defective products. I’m sure that would be a godsend! However, it may be even easier to hold true the manifestation that all products you ship from your factory are free from defects; that sounds a lot easier to me, but hey, to each his own right?

Each week of inaction that passes brings new and better ideas, but are they really better ideas? I’m sure that the ideas seem better because they are new, but the thought of coming up with a better idea each week than the previous is a little unsettling. With this kind of thinking it’s impossible to take action because you know that what you think of next week will be far better than what you thought of this week.

In the theme of taking action I decided to do a quick bit of research and find out what the most successful product categories are, choose one of them this week, research it next week, and take action on the following week after that unless the idea proved to be completely unfeasible.

Here’s a small list of topics that I thought of for which someone could successfully market a product or service to help get you started.

Nutrition
Relationships
Home Decoration
Entertainment
Computers
Investments
Business
Personal Development
Organization and Time Management
Weight loss
Martial Arts
Public Speaking
The Internet
Hobbies and Collections
Sports
Home Repair
Cars and Trucks
Religion and Spirituality
Travel
Emotional Issues (Fear, Depression)
Parenting
Education
Career Counseling
Gadgets
Addiction
Languages

This is only a partial list and I imagine that if you start to think about it that you can think of many more possible categories. If this list does not have something on it that personally interests you I strongly suggest that you keep looking. Start by looking at the room around you and seeing what kind of products you have personally bought and surrounded yourself with. Go from room to room and continue making a list until you find something that seriously interests you. If you don’t find anything in your house or apartment start looking outside in the area around your yard or apartment complex. You’ll find something that you’re interested in, just keep looking.

Because your new product will probably be most successful in niche market within one of these larger broader category it is a good idea to select the one that looks the most promising to you and start breaking that down into the possible niches.