Continually Improve Your Life
Author: Charles Gueli

Northrop Frye, a Canadian literary critic, has said that "the mind best fitted for survival in any world is the mind that has discovered how knowledge can be joyful, leading to a friendship with wisdom that is pure delight. That mind is ready to tackle any kind of knowledge with intentness of will."

Mr. Frye is distinguishing between a trained mind and a dedicated mind. He is suggesting that the trained mind has acquired techniques that, in our world, will probably be out of date in ten or fifteen years. Training is not the important thing; it's the readiness to take on the training. Open-mindedness is the key element of a dedicated mind.

Our nature is to want to improve our private world. We are all living in a world that falls short of the world we want. We each have a vision of what paradise is, a better place where we're trying to reach, for ourselves as well as our families. I suggest to you that the best way to reach this better world is to become a more effective person.

Occasional self-improvement is fairly common and easily achievable. Continuous self-improvement is virtually unachievable, but striving for it is the single most effective way to approach your personal paradise.

How can we go about this self-improvement? First, write on the back of a three-by-five card, in large letters:



IMPROVE
TODAY


Put the card in a prominent corner of the mirror you use when you comb your hair in the morning. Look at it every day (including weekends). Before you leave the mirror, think about what you will do that day to improve yourself. If it's already on your weekly schedule, great! This thinking process still reinforces that you are making time for yourself and prevents your forgetting what you intended.

There are hundreds of ways for you to improve yourself. The general categories are to do something new, to do something better, and to increase your awareness.

Examples include: extending your exercise time, thereby improving your fitness; reading a nonfiction book; improving your time management; learning how to make something using tools, or how to paint, or how to cook; shining your shoes; starting to sort and recycle your garbage; changing your diet so that you eat healthful foods; participating in a community service project; offering advice; listening to advice; caring for someone; revising your itinerary to make it more productive; and so on.

Particularly useful things to learn (if you haven't already) are how to improve your memory, speed reading, typing, and word processing. These will help you make better use of your time. Also, learning a foreign language can be beneficial and fun.

The list is endless. Choosing ways to improve yourself is the easy part. What's difficult is maintaining the enthusiasm for the rest of your life and having the self-discipline to make continuous improvement a part of your daily schedule. The Japenese have become very good at it. They work at improvement in the quality of their products, the efficiency of their service, and their daily living habits.

The most important ingredient is your interest level--your attitude. I know a family where a sixth-grader came home with a report card that was all D's and C's. His father asked why. "I can never remember anything" was the answer. If you ask this same child about baseball, he can give you the earned run averages and win-loss records of every pitcher on his home team, as well as the batting average of each player. Memory obviously isn't the problem--it's a lack of interest in the subject matter."

Most of the effective people I know are concerned with the issue of self-improvement. Those who are already good want to get better. They recognize that the things you do to sharpen skills in one dimension have a positive impact in other dimensions because they are all interrelated. Your physical health affects your mental health; your spiritual strength affects your social/emotional strength.

As you improve in one area, you increase your ability in other areas as well. As you become more involved in continuing education, you increase your knowledge base and you increase your options. Despite what you might think, economic security does not lie in your job; it lies in your own power to produce--to think, to learn, to create, to adapt. That's true financial independence. It's not having wealth; it's having the power to produce wealth. It's intrinsic.

In spite of all the good things that come from self-improvement, it is extremely difficult to achieve results on a daily basis. It's hard. It's work. But it's also fun. It gives a wonderful sense of satisfaction--a feeling of accomplishment.

Somehow you have to give yourself daily reminders of the points brought up to you in this lesson. Find ways to maintain the realization that self-improvement results in many benefits. Keep reminding yourself what those benefits are and how they will enhance your life. If you succeed in keeping this awareness high, you will maintain your enthusiasm more easily, and you will be more likely to sustain the positive spiral that comes from continuous self-improvement.

And remember, no matter how good you become, there will always be room for improvement.







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This article is taken from the 9-part email course entitled "The Path to Success" written by Charles Gueli. You can sign up for FREE at http://www.HammondeResources.com.

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