Never Stop Using Your Imagination

It is amazing what people are able to do with the power of their imagination.

• Steve Jobs has become incredibly famous by taking things that already existed and imagining and creating new uses for them. These changes he makes by using his imagination have made him one of the most famous men in the world.
• Walt Disney imagined entirely new ways to entertain the world and his vision led to a global multi platform entertainment empire.
• The imagination of inventors brought us television, the light bulb, satellites, the telephone, and other incredible devices. Imagination can truly change the world.

There is almost nothing more powerful than our imaginations. If you have a well-developed faculty of imagination, you can bring positive (or negative) change to every single person on the earth. You need to use your imagination every single day, and you need to think about who you want to become. Two people presented with the same circumstances and same information will become different people based on the power of their imagination. I recently listened to part of a book called The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. While I did not get a lot out of this book from a business standpoint, what I was amazed at was Ferris’s power of imagination. He was able to become a Chinese cage-fighting champion by using his imagination. In this sport, there are various weight classes, and the weigh-ins occur 24 hours before the fight. Ferris was able to fight in a much lighter weight class by learning how to lose, and then gain, 25 pounds in [Read more]

The Importance of Planting Seeds: My Experience With the Scientologists

“And when much people were gathered together, and were come to him out of every city, he spake by a parable: a sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bore fruit a hundredfold. And when he had said these things, he cried, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”—Luke 8:4-8.

For several years I underwent a ritual throughout various suburbs of Detroit that year after year resulted in my dramatically increasing my income and customer base in the asphalt business. This ritual became effective year after year due to the power of “planting seeds” in my prospects’ minds. I have continued to use the power of “planting seeds” throughout my career to start businesses and expand various businesses year after year. When you plant seeds in prospects’ minds, they are far more likely to think of you when a need comes up in the future than if you [Read more]

Setting Goals is Their Attainment

Every year in January, I do all sorts of goal setting. I set goals for what I am going to do over the next year. I do this in a lot of ways, but sometimes I dig out old tapes and CD programs I have accumulated throughout the years and listen to them to get fired up. I have been setting goals since the first of January and it is unlikely I’ll be done before the end of January, and these goals are just covering the year 2010. I figure I am going to spend at least 10% of 2010 [Read more]

Your Perceptions Will Control Your Outcome and Life

When I was in middle school, my girlfriend announced to me she was going to be trying out for the cheerleading squad. Our relationship consisted mainly of us riding our bikes to school together each day. Occasionally, I might call her after school. The cheerleading squad in our school cheered for the basketball team. I attended a public high school in middle school and the basketball team was the most important one in the school. The entire gym filled up with students, parents, and teachers every Friday night. Everyone was very enthusiastic about it. “You should try out [Read more]

How You Deal With Problems Will Determine Quality of Your Life

One of the things I have learned over the years is anyone can be up when things are going well. However, the real challenge is when things are not going well. All businesses and all relationships go through problems, and how you deal with problems will determine the quality of your life. Far too few people know how to effectively deal with problems, and they end up having their lives sidetracked by them. The more you delay dealing with problems the more they build up. The more problems are allowed to build up the more difficult your life ends up [Read more]

Anything that is Not Managed Will Deteriorate

Managing your life is like managing a business. When you look at a typical business there are an incredible number of procedures in place to keep the business running. Take a McDonald’s, for example: Each day the restaurant will open at a certain time and people will arrive before opening to make sure the coffee is made, the ovens and grills are heated, the lights are turned on and other procedures are followed. The restaurant will have been cleaned top to bottom the night before. Outside, the parking lot will have been maintained a certain way. The [Read more]

Increasing Efficiency is Your Best Route to Employment Security

The cheapening of any article in common use almost immediately results in a largely increased demand for that article. Take the case of shoes, for instance. The introduction of machinery for doing every element of the work which was formerly done by hand has resulted in making shoes at a fraction of their former labor cost. Now almost every man, woman, and child in the working classes buys one or two pairs of shoes per year, and they wear shoes all the time. Formerly, each workman bought perhaps one pair of shoes every five years, and went barefoot most of the time, wearing shoes only as a luxury or as a matter of the sternest necessity. In spite of the enormously increased output of shoes per workman, which has come with shoe machinery, the demand for shoes has so increased that there are relatively more men working in the shoe industry now than ever before. The workmen in almost every trade have before them an object lesson of this kind, and yet, because they are ignorant of the history of their own trade, they still firmly believe, as their fathers did before them, that it is against their best interests for each man to turn out each day as much work as possible. Under this fallacious idea, a large proportion of workmen deliberately work slowly so as to curtail their output. Almost every labor union has made, or is contemplating making, rules which have for their object curtailing the output of their members. Those men who have the greatest influence with the working people, the labor leaders, as well as many people with philanthropic feelings who are helping them, are daily spreading this fallacy and at the same time telling them that they are overworked. -Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) From the time I was 18 until I was about 27, I spent most of my summers working as an asphalt sealant and maintenance contractor around Detroit, Michigan. One of the main jobs I did involved putting an asphalt sealant on parking lots and driveways. At the beginning of my first summer doing this work, I used to purchase the sealant in five-gallon pails. Then I starting purchasing the sealant in 55-gallon drums and installing a pipe on the drums to drain [Read more]

The Importance of Disconnecting from Your Work

Some of the happiest, most well adjusted, and most effective people I know are also people who have a profound ability to disconnect from their work. They can disconnect rapidly and put themselves in another state of mind which does not involve work. People who come to mind include Richard Branson, who set records in balloons, captains of industry who leisurely golf their days away, men in bars who slap each others’ backs while drinking martinis and making deals, or CEO‘s of companies in their early 60s who run marathons. One of the most important things you can do for yourself is learn to disconnect from your work. Many people never do this, or don’t know how. You see these people walking around with telephones in their ears wherever they go, getting up from dinner to talk on the phone, screwing around with their Blackberries at any given moment, and, in general, working every second of the day. I have a secret for you: The most important and successful people never behave like this. The most important people simply do not work when they are not working. If you are working all the time, you are not being nearly as productive [Read more]

Create Rules that Make You Feel Successful, Not Unsuccessful

I attended a private high school named Cranbrook-Kingswood. There was a lot of competition to get accepted. A couple of years before I started there, the founder of Little Caesar’s Pizza, Mike Ilitch, made a large donation to the school with instructions to build an indoor hockey rink. Mike loved hockey, and his son had also been very good at the sport. I believe he may have also “required” the school, as part of his gift, to have an exceptional hockey team. The school went out and recruited the best hockey players from all over the [Read more]

The Art and Science of Personal Magnetism

With the need to offer his teachings on the secrets of mental fascination to an American audience, Theron Dumont put together this popular book, The Art and Science of Personal Magnetism. The author instructs us how to exert a powerful irresistible influence upon the reason or will of another person. A truly absorbing self-improvement book, it gives us the key to improve ourselves by changing our personal magnetism from the negative to the positive.

–Harrison

The Art and Science of Personal Magnetism

By Theron Dumont

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preliminary Greeting Chapter 1. Personal Magnetism Chapter 2. Mental and Physical Poles [Read more]

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