Choose Yourself!

So I did the only thing I could do: I woke up early one morning in early March and bought a bag of chocolates. Small Hershey’s chocolates, like you hand out on Halloween. At around 8 a.m., I stood outside the entrance of the New York Stock Exchange and started handing out chocolates to everyone walking inside.

Studies show that it’s better to be around positive people than negative people. Positive people uplift you, negative people bring you down

Success comes from continually expanding your frontiers in every direction—creatively, financially, spiritually, and physically. Always ask yourself, what can I improve? Who else can I talk to? Where else can I look?

Three things I do when struggling for idea topics:

1. Twitter Search

I’ll search phrases like:

“I wish I had”

“I just paid someone to”

“is the worst product”

“is a horrible company”

“has a terrible website”

“is my favorite website”

“does anyone know how”

With all of those terms, I’ll think of ideas on how I could fulfill their wants or how that terrible website or company could be a little less terrible.

Write down ten ideas. About anything. It doesn’t matter if they are business ideas, book ideas,

Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or you can’t—either way you are right.”

Note the important thing: the day he came up with the idea, he also called Boeing and got a plane from them. Not only did he identify the next step, but he took it.

Someone asked me, “How do you know when an idea is too big?” I answered that an idea is too big if you can’t think of the next step.

When you’re negotiating you have to say no a lot. When you are selling, you are always trying to find the “yes.”

Everyone has a “yes” buried inside of them. A good salesman knows how to find where that “yes” is buried and then how to tease it out. Great salesmen know it instinctively.

If you want to be successful, you need to study success, not hate it or be envious of it. If you are envious, then you will distance yourself from success and make it that much harder to get there. Never be jealous. Never think someone is “lucky.”