Brian Tracy - Master Your Time, Master Your Life: The Groundbreaking Program for Discovering How To Put Time on Your Side

Do ye value life? Then waste not time, for that is the stuff out of which life is made.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

T his is a great time to be alive. There have never been more opportunities to do more things and to achieve more of your goals in all of human history than there are today.

You can live longer and better today than any other generation before you. Modern advances in medicine and healthcare are enabling more people to live to age eighty or ninetyor even one hundredthan ever imagined possible.

But with all these great opportunities for success, prosperity, long life, and happiness, you are probably feeling like most people: too much to do and too little time.

Because of the explosive growth of information, technology, and competition, the rate of change has accelerated almost beyond your capacity to keep up with it.

Today we need a new way to think about time, especially the different times of your life.

We find that each activity and responsibility in your life requires you to take a different approach to time if you want to get the best results from everything you do.

You need one kind of time for setting goals and deciding what you really want in life and another type of time for setting priorities, focusing on high-value tasks, and getting things done.

You need one type of time for interacting, communicating, negotiating, and administrating and another type of time at home with your family and your most important relationships.

The different types of time are often like oil and water; they dont mix very well together.

Any attempt to use the wrong type of time in the wrong area for it will lead to frustration, failure, and ineffectiveness.

The quality of your life is largely determined by the quality of your time management. But time management is really personal management, life management. It is management of yourself. If you dont control your time properly, it is difficult for you to control anything else.

Fortunately, the richest, most successful person in the world has the same twenty-four hours per day that you have. The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people, sometimes with less potential and fewer opportunities, often accomplish vastly more than others because they use their time in a better and more effective way.

Your highest paid, most important skill is your ability to think, both before you act and while you are acting. It is your ability to choose what is more important and what is less important.

Psychologists tell us that your level of self-esteemhow much you like and respect yourselfis the key measure of how happy you are in any area of your life. The key to high self-esteem is a feeling of self-efficacythe confidence that you can master your life, achieve your goals, perform your tasks, and get the results that are expected of you and that you expect from yourself.

Your most valuable financial asset is your earning ability. This is your ability to get results that people will pay you for. This again is largely determined by how you use your time when you are working and before and after your work.

Thomas Edison once wrote, Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is why most people would rather die than think.

The way you think about time and the various possible ways you can use your time largely determine your effectiveness and the quality of every part of your life.

Most people live in a reactive-responsive mode. When something happens around them, they react and respond immediately, automatically, unthinkingly, becoming slaves to the moment or to the latest ring on their smartphone or computer.

The key to taking full control over your time and your life is for you to stop and think before you react and respond. It is for you to identify the kind of time and behavior that is required of you at each moment, and then for you to respond appropriately to that situation.

British historian Arnold Toynbee won the Nobel Prize for his masterful twelve-volume work, A Study of History. This series of books traces the rise and fall of twenty-three great civilizations or empires over twenty-five hundred years. Toynbee found that there was a predictable cycle that an empire would go through, from its early beginnings through to its collapse.

Toynbee proposed the idea of the challenge and response theory of history. He showed that each great civilization started small, sometimes as a single tribe or village, and by repeatedly responding effectively to external challenges, usually from warring tribes and other human enemies, the group continued to grow and expand until it dominated large land masses.

The Mongol Empire, for example, the largest land empire in history, started with three peopleTemjin; his mother, Hoelun; and his young brotherafter another Mongol tribe had wiped out their village. From that humble beginning, Temjin, who later became known as Genghis Khan, The Perfect Warrior, spread the Mongol Empire from the Sea of Japan across China, India, much of Russia, and the Middle East, all the way to the Mediterranean and the Danube.

It is the same with you and your life. As long as you respond effectively to the continuous challenges of daily life and work, you continue to grow smarter and more capable and move toward the fulfillment of your full potential.

More than anything, your success in both the short and the long term is largely determined by the way you respond to the inevitable and unavoidable difficulties and challenges of daily life. This is called your