Life Lesson
About this time, around the end of 2016, my personal life started to unravel. I was watching and helping others build their fortunes but I was still struggling in the financial department. Financial stress and my basic immaturity led to my demise. I’d been in a relationship spanning better than four years, but it was simply taking too long for me to find myself. When my significant other left, with our new born daughter so did a large source of continuity. The endless string of business failures, the stress of living paycheck-to-paycheck, losing my new family, it was all too much, and I went crashing to the bottom emotionally. Not like the breakdown I had experienced from over working. That was a different breakdown. This breakdown had to do with confidence. I was beginning to doubt myself—with conviction.
In an effort to fight my depressed state, I picked up a stupid little book written by some nerd named Robert Kiyosaki. The book was titled Rich Dad Poor Dad. I learned in a few minutes of reading about the possibility of being successful could actually make me rise above it all for a moment. I recognized the healing power of this diversion called reading. I didn’t read much before that in my life. I never liked reading. But now its effect on me was undeniable.
Rich Dad Poor Dad was absolutely life altering for me. It gave me hope and a direction at a time when I was having trouble figuring myself out. I knew I didn’t want to be a carpenter making 40,000 a year, peeling out of bed every morning at 5 a.m., busting my ass off day in and day out, all for what? to stuff the pockets of the boss man with no real future. It helped to hear that many of the successful people documented in that book had failed many, many times before their ships came in. It showed me that many of the most successful people in the world didn’t have a college education. Instead the book seemed to prove that success could come from anywhere and everywhere and that there was no right or wrong way. It suggested that success was something that you learned over a long period of time and that if you set certain priorities in your life that your chances for success would be immensely increased if not predestined. The real trick was to make those priorities part of the fabric of your life and not just a garment to wear for a while. I studied those priorities, I agreed with them, and then I wove those new fibers into the fabric of my own life. I’d heard about such things before but apparently I wasn’t ready to learn it then. I learned it when I picked up the right book at the right time in my life. I learned because I was ready to learn it. Someone once said, “The teacher will appear when the student is ready.” I know this to be true in my life.
We’d all be better off if we paid more attention to what our minds hear, see, and think. More importantly, we need to listen to how we talk to ourselves. The greatest life lesson I’ve ever learned has been to listen to my inner voice. I listen to what it is saying to ME, and if it’s not positive, I start immediately to change that. In a perfect world my inner voice would never say anything bad to me or about me. The worst thing my inner voice should ever say to me is, “You’ll do much better next time, Drew, and you will get there because you have or will be presented with everything you’ll need to do it.”
There is no doubt about it. We become what we feed our minds. May I suggest, the most important thing you’ll ever do in your life, will be to recognize your inner voice when it speaks, monitor that voice, and control the message you’re sending yourself millions of times a year. The thing we hear more than anything in our entire life is our inner voice. What are you saying to yourself? Are you telling yourself that you can, or are you telling yourself you can’t? Let me tell you a little secret: If we are limited in any way it’s because the message we are sending ourselves is wrong. Change your self-talk and you will change your life! It’s incredible how many people never take control of their inner voice. What I have learned through out my short life is that Success Comes From The Inside Out.