Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement

CONTINUALLY THINK AHEAD
You probably recall the famous comment by hockey star Wayne
Gretzky. When he was asked by a reporter for the secret of his suc-
cess on the ice, he replied by saying,
“Most players are pretty good, but
they go to where the puck is. I go to where the puck is going to be.”
This observation is directly relevant to you. Where is 
your
puck
going to be three to five years from now? Where is your puck going
to be 10 years from now? Taking a long-term perspective on your
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CHANGE YOUR THINKING, CHANGE YOUR LIFE
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work life enables you to make better decisions in the short term. As
strategic planner Michael Kami says,
“Those who do not think about
the future cannot have one.”
Look into your future and begin to imagine and anticipate some
of the twists and turns that might occur. If you lost your job today,
how would you react? What would be your first thought? The great
majority of people, when they think about losing their jobs, go into
a form of panic. They have no idea what they would do.
However, in my work with many thousands of 
successful
people,
I have found that they have one particular attitude in common.
They all know with complete assurance that if they lost their jobs
they could walk across the street and get another job tomorrow.
They are so good at what they do, and so confident in their abilities,
that job loss to them would be merely an inconvenience. They have
lots of options.
As I mentioned in Chapter 6, there is a way to determine how
good you are in your field. What is the number of job offers you get
on a regular basis? Just as a store or restaurant can measure its suc-
cess by the number of customers or patrons it attracts, you can
measure how valued and respected you are for what you do by
counting the number of people who want to hire you and use your
services. How are you doing?
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