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

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CHANGE YOUR THINKING, CHANGE YOUR LIFE
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Jack Welch, the past president and CEO of General Electric,
once said, “If the rate of change outside your organization is greater
than the rate of change inside your organization, the end is in sight.”
This principle applies to you as a person as well. If you are not con-
tinually learning and upgrading your skills, you are in danger of be-
coming obsolete.
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WHAT ARE YOU WORTH?
All over the country today, people are being laid off or fired by the
thousands, and even hundreds of thousands, each year. In many
cases, these people have allowed their levels of knowledge and skill
to decline to the point where their companies could no longer af-
ford to keep them on the payroll.
Many of them were not completely honest with themselves.
They did not continually upgrade their knowledge and skills so they
could continue to add more and more value to their companies.
They hoped that the dramatic changes taking place in the national
and international economies would not affect them. And as a result,
they got caught in the layoffs when the market for their products or
services slowed down.
It takes the average white-collar professional two to seven
months to find another job, usually taking a pay cut of 14 to 40 per-
cent. Some people get laid off from highly paid jobs and never make
that kind of money again. And if they don’t get busy upgrading their
knowledge and skills, it can happen again.
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FOCUS ON ADDING VALUE
Honesty means that you accept that your income is totally deter-
mined by your ability to contribute value to your company and,
through your company, to your customers. An individual must gen-
erate three dollars of bottom-line profit for every dollar of salary or
income that the person earns from the company. If you are not cur-
rently generating three dollars of profit or cost savings to the bot-
tom line for your company, your job is a prime candidate for
outsourcing, downsizing, or eliminating. Honesty means that you
Live A Great Life
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accept this as a fact and then do everything in your power to main-
tain and increase your value.
True honesty means that you never expect to get out more than
you put in.You never expect to get something for nothing.You don’t
gamble or buy lottery tickets, which in a way is an act of dishonesty.
It is an attempt to get something that you have not earned. The
truly honest person never attempts to get rewards without working,
or to get rich quick or easy.
In the United States today, millions of people are attracted to the
quick fix
. If they are employees or executives, they want new and bet-
ter jobs, and they want them immediately. They are always looking
for shortcuts, and as a result they are always frustrated and unhappy.
They hope that problems that have taken many months and
years to develop can be solved with a 
silver bullet
of some kind. They
are impatient and they want immediate results. But being an honest
person requires that you resist the temptation of the quick fix in any