How To Habit

            This week I had the opportunity to read a summary of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. He lists out the seven habits: 1, Be Proactive; 2, Begin with the end in mind; 3, Put first things first; 4, Think win/win; 5, Seek first to understand … then to be understood; 6, Synergize; and 7, Sharpen the saw.

               My favorite of these seven habits is the first one; Be Proactive.  Any other one of the steps starts with taking action and stepping forward to accomplish something. Covey juxtaposes proactivity with reactivity. We as humans have the ability to act preemptively and anticipate

In George Leonard’s book Mastery which I mentioned last week, chapter ten is titled “Why Resolutions Fail – And What to Do About It”.  This chapter talks about equilibrium.  Our bodies naturally adapt to return our core to its proper temperature, and in the same way our minds are always striving to maintain a psychological equilibrium.  Leonard uses the example of someone who hasn’t worked out for a long time.  If they decide to get in shape and suddenly go running, their body interprets that as a threat and becomes busy and short of breath as part of the attempt to get them to stop and return to equilibrium, or a state of not working out.

               Combining these two points, I understand that we can’t just maintain the status quo.  Our minds and our bodies want to remain stagnant.  They want to do what they’ve always done the way they’ve always done it.  Combining our ability to be proactive and understand ourselves with our understanding of how our bodies stay at equilibrium, we can beat the cycle and be proactive in creating new habits for ourselves, and that’s how to habit.

Self-Mastery: Making Ours and Using Others’

               This week I learned a lot about the path to being a successful entrepreneur.  First of all, growing off of last week, mastering myself is just as much a path to spiritual and financial success. N. Eldon Tanner, an LDS apostle taught in this talk that true to religious beliefs and classic philosophers, the key to true success starts with self-mastery.  We can never master anything without mastering ourselves first.  The long road to mastery involves self-discipline and focus, which come from the first and most important mastery; self-mastery.

               After mastering ourselves we can work harder than we ever have before, but we need more than that to have success. According to the Harvard Business Review, 71% of entrepreneurs’ ideas are “replicated or modified [from] and idea encountered through previous employment”. When I was deciding to start with dōTerra, I read the book ‘Go Pro: 7 Steps to Becoming a Network Marketing Professional’ by Eric Worre, and he lays out some steps that he followed to become successful in MLM.  In dōTerra, we all have up lines and other resources that are willing to provide us resources and ideas to advance our own organizations.  If we follow-up with leaders in our field, we can glean gems of knowledge from their experiences that we can apply in our own businesses to be successful.  We don’t have to reinvent the wheel; we just have to ask the inventor how he did it.

The Way to Mastery

             This week I started reading a book called “Mastery” by George Leonard.  Leonard introduces a few graphs that teach us how to become masters.  He says that the way to become a master is to follow the graph that has little waves of learning with long plateaus between them in order to eventually become a master. 

https://www.google.com/search?q=mastery+charts+leonard&espv=2&biw=1920&bih=940&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjqnb-4uuLPAhVHxWMKHVP3A-AQ_AUIBigB#imgrc=TxkJMASL_LG_EM%3A

                    Along with that idea of a long slow progress towards mastery, I watched this video that explains how most entrepreneurs are not rock stars.  If we want to make it big in any business, it’s long hard effort that makes it work.  We’re not going to find one idea that we can make a business out of then sell for billions.  We’re not going to ‘make it bit’ overnight.  The path to mastery requires work; the path to riches requires effort.

               We reap what we sow and get back what we put in. I want to start something for myself, but I need to know going into it what that means.  I am only going to be as successful as I want to or am willing to be.  Whatever I decide that I want to do for my business, it may take me seven years to become a master, but I have to be willing to do that.  When I finally decide to start my business, I have to love it enough to put in the time, and I have to be dedicated enough to put in the time when I’m on the ‘plateau’ and don’t want to put in the effort.  That’s the key to mastery.

Who am I? Who Will I Be?

After last week’s bucket list planning, this week I got thinking about who I wanted to be through all of these adventures.  Seven Hitz and James Ritchie co-authored a book called ‘The Ministry of Business’ that outlines some tips to business success. I was reading a part this week that he spoke about making a personal constitution.  He said to start out by listing our values out one by one.  The next step was to number them all in order of priority. The point is to make sure we know what we want to base our decisions on before we’re at a critical decision moment.

               As I was wondering what my constitution should be, I realized that I am not the man I want to be in the future; I am barely the man I want to be right now!  Let’s think about the United States though. The United States of America was founded on the constitutional belief that ‘all men are created equal’ and that every man is bestowed by God with ‘certain unalienable rights’ which include ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. But wait, didn’t some of the founding fathers own slaves? Didn’t women and African-Americans have to fight for their right to vote, and aren’t civil rights a hot topic of debate in this country to this day?  How could those be core beliefs if they aren’t even in practice?

               Therein lies the secret. According to the fount of all wisdom, google, a constitution is, “a body of fundamental principles or established precedents according to which a state or other organization is acknowledged to be governed” (italics added).  That word acknowledged is the key.  When we acknowledge to be governed by something, we accept it as fact and rely on it. If it were simply written, “is to be governed”, then it MUST be true without exception.  In our personal constitution, we write what we acknowledge to be our governing principles.  We are human and we are weak, so sometimes we may get distracted or confused and we will fail.  Like the United States of America, we may not live up to our personal constitution immediately.  It may take us years and years of hard work, but we’ll grow closer to abiding by our constitution with each ounce of effort we put towards it. 

               With that in mind, we have to write out our constitution as soon as we can in order to strive to live by it.  We don’t need it to be full of things that we already do perfectly, but we need it to be what we hope to one day become.  Jefferson, Washington and Franklin knew that the USA wasn’t a world power by any means, but they hoped that one day it would become a bastion of freedom.  In the same way, we can hope to one day live up to the full potential of our own personal constitution if we choose to write down today what we will be throughout our lives’ adventures.

Living the Dream

Carnegie Melon university put on a series where professors have a chance to say what their last words would be if they had to give some last words of advice at some point, and this week I read the last speech of Randy Pausch.¹  The catch is that he was actually dying when he gave it.  He had ten tumors in his liver and had been given only a few more months to live.  In what may have been literally his last speech, Randy delivered a message full of hope and laughter despite his grim future.  He taught that we should chase our dreams.  He said that “the brick walls are the to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.  They’re there to stop the other people.”  That leads us to reason, ‘are we the other people?’  That’s our choice.  We can want it bad enough, or we can let it slide by.

Right now I’m living my dream.  I’m going to college so I can make something of myself and my life.  I’m married to the woman of my dreams.  I’m working my butt off and doing whatever I can to make ends meet for my tiny little family in our tiny one bedroom apartment, and that’s exactly where I wanted to be when I was 22. It’s hard but it’s my dream for this part of my life.  Here in five, ten, fifteen or fifty years though, my dreams are different.

During this last week I had a chance to develop a bucket list of 50 things I wanted to do at the recommendation of this article from The Washington Post. It was hard people!  I breezed through twenty or so and then I had to ask my wife and start thinking about things that I didn’t think I would be able to do but would love to do.  Here’s a link to my list, and I would love to see all of yours in a message or comments or anything.  At my50.com you can make your list, keep track of it and share it with others.  My list includes going to space and seeing a million dollars in my bank account.  I put hunting on my list and I don’t even like guns, but that’s not what it’s about.  It’s about stretching and pushing myself and going on adventures so I can say at the end of the day that I lived my life.

As I was making this list, I realized that I didn’t care if it was impossible! I have things I want to do, and I’m not going to stop.  If I have to work my butt off for fifteen years so I can take a whole year off and do the things I need to do while I’m still young enough to do them then I will!  I have the choice in the end, and so do you. Will we go through our daily grind and live our lives merely surviving day by day, or will we really truly live?  

The Journey to Essential-Me

I wanted to start a blog about my learning process during my adventure into the dōTerra world as I learn about business and essential oils. I wanted people to see how I went from disliking essential oils and referring to them as ‘witchcraft’ to signing up as a wellness advocate with dōTerra. I didn’t and still don’t know much about essential oils, but I’m learning about them, and I’m just now starting my first class as an entrepreneur. That’s the journey.

What I didn’t know is that my intro to entrepreneurship class at BYU-I would require me to start a blog and give me that kick in the pants that I needed to get up and act. My teacher referred us to an article by Jeff Sandefer¹ where he told us entrepreneurs to keep an ‘Entrepreneur’s Journal’.  The idea is to record our successes and failures. I have yet to attend an essential oil class, and like I said I’m in my first entrepreneurship class so I’m sure I’ll have plenty of failures to record and lessons to learn.  Lucky for me, in another article² Sandefer also encourages us to learn to live with, learn from, and expect small setbacks.

In a seminar by Tiffany Peterson,³  the first principle of entrepreneurship that really struck me was to not be afraid to take imperfect action. It’s not easy and I’m still struggling with taking imperfect action, but even leaders of my faith have taught us how we must take one small step into the dark or press forward amid uncertainty to be able to see farther ahead.⁴

This blog is one of those steps. I’m adventuring into entrepreneurship, essential oils, and blogging all in one fell swoop. Welcome to my journey.