Life! By Design_ 6 Steps to an Extraordinary You - Laura Morton [12]
I created my six-step plan to help you not only discover what’s not working in your life, but also how you can shift from living by default to By Design by creating purpose and passion in your life. Each of these steps will require you to dig deep and face your weaknesses, fears, and flaws. Let me be perfectly candid. We all have these. I will say this again. We all suffer from emotional damage from our past and the negative things we tell ourselves about our weaknesses, fears, and flaws. We all get caught up in daily dramas and suffer extensively from our attachment to the opinions of others. The good news is we don’t have to. If we can adapt, learn, and grow by letting go of these attachments, living By Design will become a much less daunting and more achievable task. So, how do you learn to do this?
Read on.
My company motto is Strategy Matters and Passion Rules!
Why?
In today’s world, it takes the right strategies to live By Design. These strategies are the six steps outlined in this book.
Passion is the power source that drives us and makes us persist over time and in the face of adversity. And to have passion you have to love what you do. Passion is a necessary component of success, but alone it is not enough. Vision without action deteriorates into daydreaming. Without persistence, passion fades.
I’m not a guru. I am a regular guy whose life’s mission is to make a difference in other people’s lives. I have been exposed to more, and perhaps different, models of excellence than you have. These models have helped me develop and brand my own model of excellence, a model you can now benefit from and experience for yourself.
I am one of the fortunate guys in this world who wakes up every day eager, excited, fired up, and ready to get to work. I love my wife and two sons. Against many obstacles, I have created an extraordinary life. Am I somehow luckier than you?
No.
I simply choose to live my life By Design—not by default.
Are you ready to get started?
Then let’s go!
Congratulations … You have made it through Chapter 1. Now go to my website www.TomFerry.com/resources to view “Life by Design,” a video from me to you!
—Tom
Have you ever played the lottery? Who hasn’t bought a ticket with the hope that those six numbers will hit, and bam! your life will instantly change? All of your troubles would go away if you had millions of dollars in the bank, right? Wrong! You’d still have the same issues, only with a much bigger balance in your checkbook.
Everybody already knows, of course, that money doesn’t buy happiness. Despite the enormous financial success that several of my clients had achieved, their lives were a mess before we began working together. You see, happiness and success aren’t about how much money you have in the bank but how well you are living your life. I don’t mean how grandly or extravagantly you’re living but rather the quality of life you’re living.
To fully understand what holds us back from living to our fullest potential, we have to do two important things. First, we have to recognize that most people live life by default. What I mean by this is they fail to decide, or stop deciding, how they want their lives to be, or they are unwilling to do whatever it takes to live to their fullest potential. Or worse, they simply accept things as they are and believe they have no say in the result. But the bottom line about living by default, in my view, is that it represents choosing to be a victim!
Let me say that again: If we’re not leading our fullest life, if we feel ourselves constrained or victimized by outside circumstances, it is because, in essence, we have accepted that this is our lot, and we have made the choice to live a life of diminished expectations, to accept our lives and circumstances as they are. We sit around saying things like:
“It’s the economy.”
“When will the government [or my boss, my spouse, my kids] do something about this?”
“I don’t have enough money to live