p.56-57 When you become goal directed, this expertise spills over into all other compartments of your life,
drawing out your full potential in each area... Goals provide you with clarity of outcome, which is the prerequisite for becoming
an outstanding decision maker... Learning to set goals and crafting plans for their accomplishment will have more of a positive
impact on your life than anything else you could possibly do.
p.60 The overwhelming majority of Americans... [have] confused activity with accomplishment. Without
goals, one does not live; one simply exists, drifting.
p.72 The more you are focused on your goal, the more you'll be aware of the people, ideas, and resources
around you that can help you reach your goal.
p.85-86 Now that you've written down all the potential resources, take a moment to think about what
could prevent you from reaching your goals... List all the possible obstacles you may encounter... Any major or worthwhile
goal has barriers. If it doesn't, it's not even really a goal - it's simply busywork and won't bring many rewards.... The
next step is to list some solutions to help you overcome the obstacles you just wrote down. Look at each obstacle
as a problem waiting to be solved... we are goal-striving organisms. We're engineered to solve problems, and we function
best and are happiest when we're moving toward a goal.
p.136,138 It is important to remember that what we perceive as reality is not necessarily true at
all, but only our personal version of reality. We get only an edited look at the world around us. This is because
our beliefs, for better or worse, act as filters, screening out any evidence that doesn't support
them. We screen reality through our senses... and especially through generalizations we make relative to our personal
experiences.
p.138 For every single effect in your life, there is a cause or group of causes. If you want to produce
a specific result in your life, you must trace back from that result and identify the cause.
p.139 Successful men and women train their minds to think only about what they want to happen in
their lives.
p.140,142 Improvement in your circumstances is always preceded by improvement in your mental pictures, by
improvement in the dominant images that occupy your mind. This means that you must develop a vivid mental picture
of any goal you hope to achieve in advance of its actual accomplishment... The principle of concentration states
that whatever you focus on grows and expands. You will be effective to the degree that you can concentrate single-mindedly
on only one thing and stick with it until it's complete.
p.163 At this very moment, you are changing! Nobody stays the same for any length of time.
You are continually changing in the specific direction that your thoughts and goals lead you. You are what
you are and where you are because of the dominating thoughts you have allowed to occupy your mind. Your
surroundings are nothing more than the outworking of your thoughts.
p.169 I visualized where I wanted to be, what kind of player I wanted to become. I knew exactly where I
wanted to go, and I focused on getting there. - Michael Jordan
