P11 since repetition is the mother of skill.

Therefore, I hope this will be a book you'll read

again and again, a book you'll come back to and
utilize as a tool to trigger yourself to find the
answers that already lie inside you. you don't have
to believe or use everything within it. Grab hold of
the things you think are useful; put them in action
immediately.
P12 For example, it might be hard for you to
believe that merely by changing one word that is
part of your habitual vocabulary, you could
immediately change your emotional patterns for
life. Or that by changing the consistent questions
that you consciously or unconsciously ask yourself,
you could instantly change what you focus on and
therefore what actions you take every day of your
life.
P14 Man is not the creature of circumstances;
circumstances are the creatures of men.
P24 deciding to feed your mind rather than
allowing the environment to control you
P25 As a society, we're so focused on
instantaneous gratification that our short-term
solutions often become long-term problems.
P29 What is this force that is controlling you even
now and will continue to do so for the rest of your
life? PAIN and PLEASURE! Everything you and I
do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or
our desire to gain pleasure.
P30 "The secret of success is learning how to use
pain and pleasure instead of having pain and
pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of

your life. If you don't, life controls you."

P31 Why is it that people can experience pain yet
fail to change? They haven't experienced enough
pain yet; they haven't hit what I call emotional
threshold.
P31 We've all experienced those times in our lives
when we've said, "I've had itnever againthis
must change now." This is the magical moment
when pain becomes our friend. It drives us to
take new action and produce new results.
P32 The most important lesson we learn in life is
what creates pain for us and what creates
pleasure. This lesson is different for each of us and,
therefore, so are our behaviors.
P33 Think of the limiting pain and pleasure
associations of John Belushi, Freddie Prinze, Jimi
Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, and Jim
Morrison. Their associations to drugs as an escape,
a quick fix, or a way out of pain and into temporary
pleasure created their downfalls.
P34 if we link massive pain to any behavior or
emotional pattern, we will avoid indulging in it at
all costs. We can use this understanding to harness
the force of pain and pleasure to change virtually
anything in our lives,
P35 They have converted the discomfort of
discipline into the satisfaction of personal
growth.
P35 But if we fail to direct our own associations to
pain and pleasure, we're living no better than

animals or machines
P36 "Men, as well as women, are much oftener led
by their hearts than by their understandings."
LORD CHESTERFIELD
P36 Remember, we will all do more to avoid pain
than we will to gain pleasure.
P36 In fact, they often link pleasure to pushing the
plate away with food still on it. It symbolizes to
them that they're in control of their lives.
The truth is that we can learn to condition our
minds, bodies, and emotions to link pain or
pleasure to whatever we choose. By changing what
we link pain and pleasure to, we will instantly
change our behaviors.
P37 IF YOU DON'T HAVE A PLAN FOR YOUR LIFE,
SOMEONE ELSE DOES.
P37 But for now, consider this: any time we're in an
intense emotional state, when we're feeling strong
sensations of pain or pleasure, anything unique
that occurs consistently will become neurologically
linked.
P39 Roger Ailes
P40 The problem is that most of us base our
decisions about what to do on what's going to
create pain or pleasure in the short term instead of
the long term. Yet, in order to succeed, most of the
things that we value require us to be able to break
through the wall of short-term pain in order to have
long-term
pleasure.

P40 You must put aside the passing moments of

terror and temptation, and focus on what's most
important in the long term: your values and
personal standards. Remember, too, that it's not
actual pain that drives us, but our fear that
something will lead to pain. And it's not actual
pleasure that drives us, but our beliefour sense
of certaintythat somehow taking a certain action
will lead to pleasure. We're not driven by the
reality, but by our perception of reality.

P40 Most people focus on how to avoid pain and

gain pleasure in the short term, and thereby create
long term pain for themselves.
P40 Remember, anything you want that's valuable
requires that you break through some short-term
pain in order to gain long-term pleasure.
P40 We can always decide to override the pain in
the moment, and better yet is to follow up by
conditioning ourselves, which is something we'll
cover in detail in Chapter 6.
P43 "Nature has placed mankind under the
government of two sovereign masters, pain and
pleasure . ..they govern us in all we do, in all we
say, in all we think: every effort we can make to
throw off our subjection, will serve but to
demonstrate and confirm it."-JEREMY BENTHAM
P44 You've got to remember that what drives us is
our emotions. So get associated and use pain as
your friend, one that can drive you to a new level
of success.

P48 The good news about this is that making one

change in a limiting global belief you currently hold
can change virtually every aspect of your life in a
moment! Remember: Once accepted, our beliefs
become unquestioned commands to our nervous
systems, and they have the power to expand or
destroy the possibilities of our present and future.
P51 "The belief that becomes truth for me ... is that
which allows me the best use of my strength, the
best means of putting my virtues into action."-ANDRE GIDE

P51 People so often develop limiting beliefs about

who they are and what they're capable of. Because
they haven't succeeded in the past, they believe
they won't be able to succeed in the future. As a
result, out of their fear of pain, they begin to
constantly focus on being "realistic." Most people
who constantly say, "Let's be realistic," are really
just living in fear, deathly afraid of being
disappointed again. Out of that fear, they develop
beliefs that cause them to hesitate, to not give
their allconsequently they get limited results.
Great leaders are rarely "realistic." They are
intelligent, and they are accurate, but they are not
realistic by other people's standards. What is realistic
for one person, though, is
totally different from what is realistic for another
person, based upon their references. Gandhi
believed he could gain autonomy for India without
violently opposing Great Britainsomething that
had never been done before. He wasn't being
realistic, but he certainly proved to be accurate. By

the same token,

it certainly wasn't realistic for a man to believe he
could give the world happiness by building a theme
park in the middle of an orange grove and charging
people not only for the rides, but even to get in! At
the time, there was no such park in the world. Yet
Walt Disney had a sense of certainty like few
people who have ever lived, and his optimism
transformed his circumstances.
P51 The reason success eludes20 most people is
that they have insufficient references of
succeeding in the past. But an optimist operates
with beliefs such as, "The past doesn't equal the
future." All great leaders, all people who have
achieved success in any area of life, know the
power of continuously, pursuing their vision, even
if all the details of how to achieve it aren't yet;
available. If you develop the absolute sense of
certainty that powerful beliefs provide, then you
can get yourself to accomplish virtually anything,
including those things that other people are certain
are impossible.
P51 "Only in men's imagination does every truth
find an effective and undeniable existence.
Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master
of art, as of life."
--JOSEPH CONRAD
P52 We need to remember that how we deal with
adversity and challenges will shape our lives more
than almost anything else.
P52 Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of
Pennsylvania has done intensive research on what
creates learned helplessness. In his book Learned
Optimism he reports on three specific patterns of

beliefs that cause us to feel helpless and can

destroy virtually every aspect of our lives. He calls
these three categories permanence,
pervasiveness, and personal.
P52 Once you adopt the belief that there's nothing
you can do to change something, simply because
nothing you've done up until now has changed it,
you start to take a pernicious poison into your
system. Eight years ago, when I had hit rock
bottom and despaired of ever turning things
around, I thought my problems were permanent.
That was the closest thing to emotional death I've
ever experienced. I learned to link so much pain to
holding that belief that I was able to destroy it, and
I've never indulged in it again. You must do the
same. If you ever hear yourself or anyone you care
about starting to express the belief that a problem
is permanent, it's time to immediately shake that
person loose. No matter what happens in your life,
you've got to be able to believe, "This, too, shall
pass," and that if you keep persisting, you'll find a
way.
P53 The final category of belief, which Seligman
calls personal, I refer to as the problem being
personal. If we don't see a failure as a challenge to
modify our approach, but rather as a problem with
ourselves, as a personality defect, we will
immediately feel overwhelmed. After all, how do
you change your entire life? Isn't that more difficult
than just changing your actions in a particular
area? Be wary of adopting the belief of the problem
being personal. How inspired can you get by
beating yourself up?
P53 "It is the mind that maketh good of ill, that

maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor."--EDMUND

SPENSER
P53 All personal breakthroughs begin with a
change in beliefs. So how do we change? The most
effective way is to get your brain to associate
massive pain to the old belief. You must feel deep
in your gut that not only has this belief cost you
pain in the past, but it's costing you in the present
and, ultimately, can only bring you pain in the
future. Then you must associate tremendous
pleasure to the idea of adopting a new,
empowering belief. This is the basic pattern that
we'll review again and again in creating change in
our lives. Remember, we can never forget that
everything we do, we do either out of our need to
avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure, and if we
associate enough pain to anything, we'll change.
The only reason we have a belief about something
is that we've linked massive pain to not believing it
or massive pleasure to keeping it alive.
P54 New experiences trigger change only if they
cause us to question our beliefs. Remember,
whenever we believe something, we no longer
question it in any way.
P54 But questions can obviously be tremendously
empowering if we use them to examine the validity
of beliefs we may have just blindly accepted. In
fact, many of our beliefs are supported by
information we've received from others that we
failed to question at the time. If we scrutinize
them, we may find that what we've unconsciously
believed for years may be based on a false set of
presuppositions.

P55 If you question anything enough, eventually

you'll begin to doubt it.
P55 Our beliefs have different levels of emotional
certainty and intensity, and it's important to know
just how intense they really are. In fact, I've
classified beliefs into three categories: opinions,
beliefs, and convictions.