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One of the biggest problems that most people face as they work towards a goal is the ability to put in consistent effort. Staying consistent in your activities and effort is one of the keys to success.

Consistency is even more important than simple mathematics may make it seem. By this I mean that consistently putting in 5 hours each week over the course of a month towards building business, growing a blog, or achieving a goal, is more valuable than putting in 30 hours one week and nothing for the next three weeks. Yes, the 5 hour a week plan only puts in 20 hours for the month while the other plan has 30 hours, the 5 hour a week plan is still more effective. The same applies on a month-by-month basis. You need to be consistent month after month, not work for a month, and then take a month off. Being consistent will help you reach your goals much more quickly than a sprint-and-stop plan.

You can see this idea really clearly when you think of exercising. Having a big long work out once a month is not nearly as effective as having a smaller workout every day, or even every second day. Similarly, working out every day for a week and then taking the rest of the month off is not as effective as working three times each week across the entire month. Being consistent is more effective. This same principle applies to other goals you are pursuing.

Consistency like this is important for a few reasons:

1. Inertia

The hardest part of any accomplishment is getting started. If you work in spurts you are spending a lot of energy getting started. You will work hard to get started and then before you know it you are stopped again. The law of inertia says that “a body at rest tends to stay at rest.” If you then take a significant amount of time off from pursuing your goal, things will have stopped completely and you will need to use all of that energy again. If instead, you do a little bit every day, you will be able to carry over some of that energy. Think of the exercise program again. The first workout is the hardest, because you have negative inertia. Your body doesn’t react the same, and you mentally aren’t as in to it. After a while your daily workout becomes routine and you carry forward from one day to the next. If you only exercise once a week, it feels like you are starting over each time. Both mentally and physically it requires more effort to get started again.

2. Momentum

Moving past the initial steps of negative inertia allows you to build momentum. Momentum is when the activities you do start to snowball in their effects. The work you are doing starts to build up speed because everything you are doing is building on itself. The efforts of today are building smoothly on the efforts of tomorrow. Momentum is positive inertia. The positive side of inertia is that “a body in motion tends to stay in motion.” Momentum is clearly seen in many areas of life. In politics, momentum is a powerful force for a candidate in an election campaign. In sports, many games are filled with momentum swings where one team has all the energy and everything seems to go just right. In business, momentum helps companies grow more quickly than they have before. As you work consistently towards your goal you will develop momentum that makes things happen more quickly and with less effort than before.

3. Power of Mental Focus

In life people consistently move towards the things that they focus their minds on. If you work in spurts, your mind will be focused on your goal for a short period of time. After that time you forget about it, or at least it is not part of your focus. By consistently focusing on your goal, even just a little bit each day or week, will keep your mind engaged in the process. If you mind is engaged and focused on your goal, you will notice when other things come along that might help you achieve your goal. For example, if you are growing a part time home business, you may find potential clients while doing other things. If you are consistently working on your business, you will make those connections. If you are not, you might miss out on that opportunity. Being consistent keeps your goal in your mind and helps you move towards it more quickly.

4. Keeping your life in balance

You need to allow all the areas of your life, family, work, business, spiritual etc. have some level of balance. That means you need to spend an appropriate amount of each aspect of your life. If you pursue your goals with quick spurts where you put in a huge amount of time in for one week, then during that week everything else in your life will be out of balance. Of course the opposite is also true. If you take three weeks off from pursing your goal, you will be out of balance in that area. Take exercise as an example. If you go overboard one week, then you will have taken time away from other things you should be doing; you will be out of balance. If you then stop working out for the next three weeks, you are equally out of balance, this time short on the physical activity side of life.

Consistency in life is vital. In almost every situation in my life where I haven’t achieved my goal, or where I am unsatisfied with my progress towards a goal it is because I have been inconsistent in my efforts. Being consistent allows you to use inertia instead of working against it, it allows you to build momentum, use the power of mental focus, and keep your life in balance. The next post will discuss HOW to improve your consistency.

Written by:
Danny Gamache – The Success Professor
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Lou Holtz is known as one of the top college football coaches of all time.  Most recently he came out of retirement to coach South Carolina and before that had a successful run coaching at Notre Dame.  He is the only coach ever to have brought six different teams to bowl games and is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame.

Recently I was at a conference where Lou Holtz was the keynote speaker. Aside from being a great football coach, Holtz is a great LIFE coach.  His lessons are clear and powerful and delivered with a mix of inspiration and humor.  Here are his five keys to success.

1. Choose Your Attitude

In life you will face many difficulties and problems. It is guaranteed that life won’t be easy.  You choose how you respond to adversity or difficulties.  You choose how you respond to rejection.  You choose how you approach life.  Be self discipline and be enthusiastic about everything you do.

“You cannot let others people determine your attitude.”

“Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.”

“Show me someone who has done something worthwhile, and I’ll show you someone who has overcome adversity.”

2. Have a Passion to Win

You need to develop a deep passion to win. As you do, obstacles will slip away.  If your passion is strong then there will be no obstacle that will keep you from being a success.  You will pursue, persevere, and endure.  You will sacrifice and have no excuses.

“You can evaluate your passion to win by what you are willing to sacrifice.”

“Focus on why you can win; no on why you can’t.”

“You’re never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you’re never as bad as they say when you lose.”

3. Understand Your Purpose

Do you know your purpose?  Your purpose is your WHY: the reason WHY you are pursuing your goals.  You need to have clear objectives, and have a team ready to help you move towards your goals. Based on your purpose, ask yourself the WIN question: “What’s Important Now?”  Ask yourself this at least 25 times a day.  This will help you push back towards your purpose.

“If you’re bored with life – you don’t get up every morning with a burning desire to do things – you don’t have enough goals.”

“I can’t believe that God put us on this earth to be ordinary.”

4. Be a Dreamer

Your purpose should be connected to your dream. Have a dream, share your dream, and use your dream to identify your goals.  Develop a dreams list of all the things you dream to do.  Have something to do, something to hope for, something to love, and something to believe in.

“Don’t maintain where you are – everything is either growing or dying.”

“Don’t be a spectator. Don’t let life pass you by.”

5. Lift People Up

You need to develop and maintain meaningful relationships with others.  Do what is right to others.  Do everything to the very best of your ability. Show people you care. All the people you meet have their own struggles and are carrying some burden. They are just like you.

“Do right. Do your best. Treat others as you want to be treated.”

“If you burn your neighbor’s house down, it doesn’t make your house look any better.”

Read more of Lou Holtz’s wisdom by picking up his book “Winning Everyday”.

Written by:
Danny Gamache
Based on a presentation by Lou Holtz

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One of the things that holds most people back in business and in life is procrastination – putting off things that should be done today and leaving them to do ‘later’. Everybody procrastinates to some extent, so you are not alone.  It is those people who can put aside their procrastination and move towards action more quickly that will be the most successful in life and business.  A favorite quote of mine is that “life rewards action!” Action, at the proper time, is the opposite of procrastination.

Why does procrastination occur?  It occurs when your mind, consciously or sub-consciously, has a view of the ‘pain’ and ‘pleasures’ that can occur from doing, or not doing the task. Each task in life has its own costs (‘pain’) attached completing it, but it has rewards (‘pleasures’) as well.  What people often forget, but in truth drives you just as much, is that for every task there are also ‘pains’ of not completing the task, which drives you towards their completion.  It is the balance of these varied pains and pleasures that result in one of two things – action or procrastination.

For example, if you are procrastinating and not mowing the lawn that needs to be cut, you view the ‘pain’ of mowing the lawn as more important than the results (‘pleasure’) that would come from having it completed.  In other words, the time you give up to do the mowing, the effort you would need to put out and other ‘pains’ that would be involved cover up the satisfaction you would get for completing the task and from having a nicely cut lawn.

But there is another ‘pain’ involved too.  Except this ‘pain’ pushes you towards to completing the task.  In this case, it would be the pain you feel from looking at your uncut lawn. The pain you perceive from the harm to your reputation you might face amongst your neighbors.  The longer your grass gets, the more this ‘pain’ becomes prevalent.  The ‘pain’ that prevents you from doing the task is a NEGATIVE ‘pain’.  The ‘pain’ pushing you towards doing the task is a POSITIVE ‘pain’.

“The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you’re in control of your life. If you don’t, life controls you.” – Tony Robbins

These ‘pains’ and ‘pleasures’ from a given task can change as time goes on, which is why you might suddenly do the task at hand.  I see this all the time with my students.  If you are a student who has a paper due in a month, there is not as much ‘pleasure’ from doing the task, and there is no positive ‘pain’ pushing you towards doing it – you only have the negative ‘pain’ keeping you from doing it.  If however, you now have only one day before the paper is due, there is a new positive ‘pain’ that pushes you towards doing the task.  That positive ‘pain’ is of course the risk of getting a failing grade.

If you are in sales you might procrastinate about making a call to a prospect.  In this case you view the ‘pain’ of getting out of your comfort zone and facing possibly rejection as being stronger than the pleasure from the results you could get from making the call.  The thing about this fact is that usually your mind has it completely wrong.  The tendency is to inflate the costs and to lower the true rewards you will receive.   That is why FEAR stands for False Expectations Appearing Real – most of them will simply never come true.

So based on this view of ‘pain’ and ‘pleasure’ and their effects of procrastination, how can you force yourself to take action more – to get past procrastination and create results?  There are three ways that naturally come out of this understanding:

1. Decrease the perceived negative ‘pain’.

This means using your mind to view the task at hand as having less negative costs.  In other words, take a realistic look at the possible outcomes.  Chances are you are making it much harder than it really is.  You are likely emphasizing negative results that in reality are never going to happen. Take a more realistic look and understand that in most cases what you fear will never happen, that the task is much easier than you are making it out to be, and will take much less time than you are figuring.

2. Increase the ‘pleasure’ from completing the task.

To do this, spend more time focusing on what you will get out of completing the task.  Think through all the benefits of completing the task at hand.  The better feeling you will gain, the removal of stress, the extra income you will earn, the easier it will make your life etc… That is why goal setting is so important.  You need to clearly be able to know why you are pursing the goals you are pursing. What are the results you will get, and why are they important?  If you are building a side business, blog, or website, you need to think through the benefits that success will bring to you and your family. Emphasize these positives in your mind.  Focus on this, rather than on the ‘negative’ pain.

3. Increase the positive ‘pain’.

In other words, emphasize all the negatives that will occur if you DO NOT do the task at hand. Think through all the potential costs with not doing it.  These could include the loss of reputation, the giving up on your goals, and the missing of deadlines.  Make these ‘pains’ as large and as important as possible.  If you are the salesperson needing to make a prospecting call focus on all the things that could happen if you DON’T make the call.  Perhaps the prospect goes with a different product, or goes with the same product but purchases it from someone else. Realize in your mind that your business will not grow if you don’t make the call – you’ll be giving up on your dreams and your goals.  Repeat to yourself the saying,  “If I don’t act, I lose!” This increased positive ‘pain’ can drive you towards completing the task at hand.

Procrastination is all in the mind. It is how you perceive the ‘pains’ and ‘pleasures’ associated with either doing, or not doing the task at hand.  Because the mind is what causes procrastination, you can also use the mind to defeat it.  Use the mind to increase the ‘pain’ of not doing tasks, increase the ‘pleasures’ of completing the tasks, and decrease the ‘pain’ associated with doing the task.  Do these three things strongly enough and you will be able to get yourself to take action on whatever you need to do.

Written by:
Danny Gamache

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So what’s holding you back from moving forward more quickly towards your goals? Likely you are reading this article because you want to learn something. You want to learn something that you can apply to your life or business, so that you can grow and move forward more quickly. You likely have goals that you have not achieved. One of the keys to moving forward will be to find out what is holding you back.

This is a question I ask myself from time to time. While I am making exciting progress towards many of my goals, there are some that I am not moving forward on as quickly as I would like. Self examination helps me look at these areas and ask: “What’s holding me back?”

While everyone will have unique factors that hold them back, there are a few things that many people have in common. Here are the things that most likely are holding you back.

1. No Clear Picture of the Destination

If you don’t have clarity about what you are trying to accomplish and where you are trying to go, you will not make significant progress. This is more than simply writing down a goal. It is having a crystal clear picture for what achieving this goal will be like. The difference is like the difference between a black and white photograph and a high definition video. Most people have goals that are like the black and white photograph. You know what you want, but you don’t have a vivid picture of it. Dream a little. Use your imagination. Turn that black and white photograph into a color photograph. Then dream some more and turn it into a movie. Then dream some more and turn your movie into vivid high definition. Your dream will have increased clarity and you will have more passion to move towards it.

2. You Don’t Know WHY

Another thing that might be holding you back is that you don’t know your WHY. Your WHY is the motivating reason behind the goals. It is the reason why you will spend extra time and effort working towards the dream. The WHY is not the dream itself, but all the reasons WHY you want to achieve the dream. The WHY is usually outwards focused – on the difference you can make for others, or the difference it will make for your family. Make sure you know your WHY clearly.

3. Self-doubt

This is a big one. It was the big one in the past for me, is still the biggest one today. While with success comes more and more self-confidence the self-doubt is still there, it is just in different forms. Self-doubt is the voice in your mind that limits you – that says you can’t achieve it, that suggests you won’t make it, that you don’t have the skills and that it won’t work. Self-doubt causes you to focus on your weaknesses rather than your strengths. Self-doubt is a deadly poison for people working towards a big goal. If you let this limiting belief take over you will slow down and stop pursuing your dreams. You need to recognize self-doubt as an attitude that you can control. Focus on your strengths, and remind yourself that you can achieve your goals. Have a support system around you and train them to give you positive reinforcement about your abilities and strengths.
Bonus article: Six Steps to Defeating Self-doubt

4. Lack of consistency

Pursuit of a goal requires consistent effort. While there are times when a focused spurt can be valuable, in general it is much more effective to work at something continuously over time.  Consistency helps you to maintain steady growth. The best way to improve your consistency is to have clear goals that you break down and pursue on a weekly basis and that you break down into daily activities. (For one example, see my weekly planning and goal setting system).

5. Procrastination

Everyone struggles with procrastination. Anytime you put off doing what you know you should be doing you are procrastinating. It is something that controls many of us more than we even realize. The more you are able to move past procrastination the more quickly you will reach your goals in every area of your life. Often people procrastinate on what they view as the little things; however these little things soon add up to become very big things. Procrastination occurs when you take your focus off the importance and benefit of doing the task at hand. When you do this, the negative aspects of the task appear larger than the benefits, and then you won’t do it. You need to focus back on the benefits of what you are doing. Often it helps to just get started, even doing a little. Once you are in the state of action, more action will easily follow.

So what’s holding you back? Is it one of these five things? Is it all of them? Is it something else? Take this opportunity to do a proper self-examination. Understand what is holding back, and work towards eliminating these.

Written by:
The Success Professor – Danny Gamache

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Have you ever gone through a period where you just don’t feel like you are accomplishing anything?

Have you ever had a time where you suddenly are not doing the things that you know you need to do to reach your goals?

Have you ever gone from a period of high achievement to suddenly doing nothing at all?

Have you ever had a time when you seem to have lost your motivation?

Have you ever just felt drained and have been not sure how to get back into life?

It is easy to get into a slump in life. All of these situations are symptoms of a slump. In a slump you are not making progress towards your goals.  In a slump you get out of the habits that help you accomplish important things.  In a slump you feel like you are just treading water, not moving through the water.

There are several things that might move you into a slump.  You may get into a slump because:

• you overwork yourself
• you have gone through a major change in life and you have not adjusted your habits around this life change
• you failed to reach an important goal
• you are exhausted
• you had something interrupt your regular life pattern for a period of time
• you got distracted and started pursing things that are not important
• you set goals that were too high and unreasonable and you don’t move towards them because you believe you can’t achieve them anyways

The good news is that once you recognize that you are in a slump there are some concrete steps you can take to move on and back into progressing towards your goals.

1. Understand how you got into a slump

Moving out of a slump starts with an understanding of how you got into the slump in the first place.  Take some time to reflect on what got you into the state you are in.  Perhaps it was one of the things listed above, or perhaps it is something else.  You need to grasp the cause of your slump if you want to move out of it. Recognizing the cause will help you put in safe guards to protect it from happening again.

2. Pick a start date

Look a couple of days ahead on your schedule and pick a day where you don’t have anything major planned.  You don’t necessarily need an open schedule, just some free time.  Perhaps it is a day with fewer meetings and obligations, or a free evening.  Choose this as your REstart date. Don’t give yourself too much time ahead of your start date, two to three days is ideal.

3. Revisit your goals

Spend some time rereading your goals.  Look over your long term goals as well as the goals for the current quarter of the year.  If you don’t have goals now is a great time to write them down. If your goals are no longer appropriate, use this time to set new goals. Make sure that you have goals that you want to achieve, believe you can achieve and are committed to achieving.

4. Spend some time dreaming

After revisiting your goals spend some time dreaming about achieving those goals. Imagine you are living your perfect day, what would be like? What would life be like if you achieve the major goals you are working towards?  How would life be better?  To dream like this you need to get away from distractions. You may want to go for a walk, or go and lie down in a park.  You may want to talk a hot bath.  Find some way of doing nothing except dreaming.  Allow your imagination to take over. Get a clear picture in your mind about what achieving your goal will be like.

5. Get rid of life clutter

Before your REstart day you need to make sure you get rid of the clutter in your life. This involves getting your work environment and home environment to a place where you can function.  This might mean cleaning your house, doing those errands that you have been procrastinating on or cleaning your desk. You need to get rid of anything that is going to stop you or distract you from restarting towards your goals. Remember this must happen BEFORE your start date.  This is one of the reasons you should choose a start date a day or two out is that you need to make sure you get your life free of clutter.  Once your start date comes you don’t want to be worrying about the little things.

6. Set some basic starter goals

These should be small goals that will help you get moving, things that you can complete quickly and that do not rely on outsiders for your success or failure; in other words things that you can do yourself.  These are important because they help you start getting some successes under your belt, to get feeling good about yourself and start gathering momentum. These can be easy goals.  The point is not to make them too challenging, but to get you started on something.

7. Get started

Next you need to get started. You might not feel like doing anything, but you need to just start doing them.  Often action causes feeling – the more you do something the more you feel like doing something. The first step is often the hardest, the one that takes the most energy.  Take that first step and get started.

8. Build back into your daily habits

Once you start moving again you need to work on bringing back your daily habits that help you be successful. Start getting up at your optimal wake up time.  Develop your morning routine.  Set your daily to do list, and your weekly goals.  Get back into your work out habit.  Do whatever it takes to reestablish the key habits that help you move towards your goals.

By following these eight steps you will be able to break out of your slump.  You can get back on track towards your goals, and you can achieve success.

Written by:

The Success Professor – Danny Gamache
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Ok, so now Danny must really be going crazy you think. Isn’t gravity what holds us to the earth? Isn’t that a good thing? Well yes, and no.  Yes it is good that we have gravity to keep us from floating off into outer space, but don’t you ever have times that you wish you could just defy the law of gravity and fly. I mean really fly! Fly above the beautiful earth we live on; fly through the valleys and over the amazing mountains. You would marvel at the beauty of creation and you would be away from all the struggles of life!

The same applies to you as you pursue your goals. If you want to FLY you need to break the law of gravity. The law of gravity I’m talking about here is the gravity that comes from negative people and things that are trying to hold you where you are at. They are trying to keep your feet on the ground and keep you were you are now– they are your gravity! There are several types of gravity to avoid: the negative family member or friend; the gravity of negative self image; and the gravity of life’s distractions.

The first type of gravity often comes from a negative friend or family member. This person is likely very well meaning, in fact the likely want the best for you. The problem is they usually want their best for you – not what you might know as best.  They are likely trained in the 40/40/40 mindset. That is the 40 hours a week, 40 weeks a year for 40 years – and boom you get to retire! They don’t mind the idea of spending 60000 hours of your life working for someone else! They don’t really mind having to leave the kids at home while you go to work!

Often the best way to handle this type of gravity is to prove them wrong – as Nike says, “Just Do It!” When they see you start to have the success you’ve dreamed about often this person will come around. If it is your spouse sometimes you will have to be a little more patient. It might be worth asking him or her for permission to give the your goal one-year, or at least six solid months of effort. There will be sacrifices in working towards your dream, and getting permission to make those sacrifices for a one-year period can often give you the time you will need to prove that the goal is worthwhile.

The next form of gravity that can prevent you from seeing success in life is a negative self-image. Not believing in yourself can actually be the biggest form of gravity you will face. I believe the first important step here is to realize that your negative beliefs in yourself are irrational and are going to hinder you from success. Choose NOT to believe those negative thoughts. Make a DECISION to move past it.

There are a few practical steps that can help you: First off, listen to positive motivation and self-improvement tapes and read similar books (see my top books choice here and my top podcasts choice here). These can really make a difference. Secondly, don’t compare yourself with the top performers. A golfer who is used to shooting in the 80’s does not compare himself with Tiger Woods – that would only be more discouraging. Instead he or she tries to beat their personal best. They can still make it all the way around the course (which is a success in itself), and they can still try to do better and better. If that same golfer shoots a 78, they have an even bigger success. A lot of times when I am coaching people towards a goal they get disappointed if they don’t immediately see success.  You should look for continuous improvement towards your goal, not necessarily getting there day one.

A third form of gravity that can hold you down and keep you from really soaring are the distractions of life. Everyone has them. The number of things we have to keep us busy naturally expand to the amount of time we have. There is no such thing as spare time – in my experiences it doesn’t exist. So the key is as Stephen Covey says, put “First Things First”. First things naturally need to include your faith, your family and perhaps you job. Immediately following those things, I suggest that you give your primary goal a high priority. Finally the idea of ‘First Things First’, can also be applied WITHIN the goal you are focused on. Know what activities are critical in moving you forward, and then focus on those activities. Do not focus on things that will not provide you with results.

What is the gravity that is holding you down? What is keeping you from soaring to new heights and reaching your goals? Is it one of the examples listed here? Is it something else? Whatever it is, the key is to realize what is holding you down and break past it. Make a decision today that nothing will hold you down from reaching your goals and do whatever it takes to move past the Gravity, and soar!

Written by:
The Success Professor – Danny Gamache

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Here on Success Professor, every second Sunday I share some of the best recent articles that I have come across on other blogs.  My hope is that you too can benefit from these articles.

Here are this week’s choices:

1. Ken Kurosawa of WasabiBurger shares about the value of getting up early in “5 Reasons that Kept me from Becoming an Early Riser.”

2. Learn about “One of the Greatest Factors of Your Success” on RSSDS.com.

3. Duct Tape Marketing shares “5 Tips For Getting More From Twitter.“  (Bonus, from the archives: 10 Easy Steps to get Started With Twitter)

4. Leo Babauta’s new blog Mnmlist has a post on “How to be Less Busy in a Busy Busy World“.

5. Finally, learn “17 Ways Search Engines Judge the Value of a Link” on SEOmoz.

Danny Gamache – The Success Professor

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The tag line of “The Think Big Manifesto” is “Think you can’t change your life (and the world)? Think again.” That is a pretty good summary about what the book is all about, although the focus is more about changing the world than your life. The book focuses on challenging you to think big about life and what you can achieve. It challenges you to think about ways you can make a difference in the world.

What I Didn’t Like

I picked up this book expecting to read a book focused on, well, thinking big. While the book talks about that, it seems to be more focused on the idea of changing the world, rather than the act of thinking big. In other words the advice on thinking big is very focused on changing the world, not on how to think big. For example, Port writes,

“Small thoughts are not reality…. You are more than you think. You can do more with your own life and you can have an impact on the larger world outside you – your family, your community, your country, our global village.”

Great advice, and very true, but not what I was expecting from the title. Instead it seems to focus more on the fact that you should think big (which I knew), rather than on HOW to think big (which I want to get better at).

Another thing I do not like is the constant “I” focus. Perhaps the purpose of a manifesto is to share more from an “I” focus, however I found it difficult at times because the “I” focus seems to take away from helping the reader.

One more thing that I don’t like is that the book seems to be a little fluffy. For example, Port writes,

“Failure is nothing. It will happen. We will transcend it.”

While I think it is great to say that failure will happen, the idea of simply “transcending it” is a little whimsical. I would have preferred a more detailed look at how we can learn from failure, how to THINK BIG in spite of failure, and HOW to move beyond failure.

What I Did Like

There are, however, many things that I liked about the book. First of all, I really like the fact that Port focuses on making a difference in the world. The book focuses on changing the world, and the fact that every person can make a difference in the world. I like that he addresses how the thing that holds most people back from changing the world is how they think. We think small and therefore we act small.
Secondly, I like that the book moves beyond the common definitions of success: a better job, more money, and more things. Instead it looks at contribution and making the difference as being the true measure of success. Port writes,

“If you’re not happy now, you’re not going to be happy when you have more money, purchase your dream home, or whatever goal you may have.”

Another thing I like is that Port shares many examples of other people who are thinking big. While some of the examples are surprising and may seem out of place, they serve to demonstrate the power to make a difference even in what others might consider the “mundane” things of life.

The second part of the book really makes up for some of the short comings in the first half. One of my favorite sections of the book is his section on collaboration. I tend to be the type of person who just gets things done myself. I have not collaborated very often. Learning from this section means I need to be open to more forms of collaboration. Port writes,

“True collaboration is a give-and-take. True partnerships are founded in equality. Equality does not equal sameness. We don’t all bring the same skills or resources to the table, but we all bring something and we all need something….. . This kind of collaboration is possible only when we are very secure, win-win, without measuring who won more. Can we allow ourselves to be happy if we get what we want, even though others get more of what they want? It’s not at our expense.”

Conclusions

So is “The Think Big Manifesto” worth reading? Yes it is. Certainly there are many things that could be improved, and I don’t think it lives up to its title; however, there is a lot of good that you can get from reading the book. I learned things and was inspired – both things that I really appreciate in a book. If you pick up this book realize you are getting a book about changing the world more than you are about thinking big. Thinking big is just the method that allows for the world to be changed.

To give you a deeper flavor for the book I’ll leave with some of the quotes that I found inspiring:

“Inspiring others to think big is perhaps the single most important act of any one individual thinking big.”

“Know that we reach only what we aim for, so there is no choice but to aim high if we are to succeed.”

“Think: ‘Why not me?’ instead of ‘Why me?’”

“The truth is that big thinking is always, always [always, always, always] worth the expenditure of energy.”

“People will be excited about what you do only if you are excited about it. People will believe in you and what you do only if you believe.”

“The more uncomfortable you are, the more challenged you are.”

“Small thinking has the power to suck in everything around it. To influence and sway small thoughts, big thinking must first exert twice the strength to achieve a fraction of the same force.”

Review by:
Danny Gamache

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