Take Responsibility, Take Action and the "First Day Mentality"
I love it when something just ‘hits’ me, not literally of course, I’m no masochist, but when I have one of those ‘eureka’ moments, or as their sometimes known, a BFO – a Blinding Flash of the Obvious.
It’s when these moments happen to us that we wake up, I mean truly wake up to something that’s been trying to get us out of our slumber for quite a while.
I had one of those moments just a couple of weeks ago and that’s what I wanted to share with you today.
You see, as well as speaking I’m also a property investor, it’s not something I’ve done for long so I’m early on in my property investing career but I decided to invest in property to become financially free, speaking won’t do that for me, as much as I love it and love creating ‘lightbulb’ moments with people, that’s why my main focus has been more on property than speaking over the past few months.
I’ve recognized for quite a while now that we have to take responsibility for our own lives, for so many people there’s always something to blame for them not being happy / rich / in love / successful (delete as appropriate) – yet it’s simply just down to us.
I’ve been working with this to create my own financially free future (I’m nowhere near it yet by the way! But I am on the way!) and am shaping my future slowly. As part of this I joined a property mastermind program, a 12 month program with 50 members all learning from and helping each other in their property investing goals.
About the same time as this I changed my strategy on property investing and used some of the pre-program material to help me. I had a deal on the table that I was just waiting to drop in to my lap on the same day the program started.
I woke up that Friday with such an amazing sense of excitement because of what was happening, it was then I had my BFO.
I said to myself “Dave, today is the first day of the rest of your life” – this was going to be a pivotal day, a great investment deal and the start of the program to help me achieve what I need to. It almost sounds corny really to say ‘today is the first day of the rest of your life’ but it really got me thinking.
EVERY day is the first day of the rest of your life, and what’s more, when we accept responsibility for our lives, we then understand that the decisions and the resulting actions we take will shape that future. Tony Robbins talks about our destiny being made in the moment we make a decision, which I agree with but I feel we need to go further, it’s in the actions we take as a result of those decisions, that our future starts to evolve.
No doubt everyone reading this has at some point started a new job – how eager are we to impress? We work hard during that first day in an attempt to show how good we are, our keenness brimming over. I’ve now adopted this in my life, I’m calling it the ‘first day mentality’.
That day two weeks ago when I realized this, I was bouncing off the walls with energy, excitement and anticipation of what was in store for me, that was my ‘first day’ and I had the ‘first day mentality’ – just like any of us have in that new job. I was excited about the prospect of my decisions and actions taking me where I wanted to go.
I’ve now got stuck on my wall in my office a poster (I’ve created it as a PDF for you which you can download here by the way if you want it) which simply says:
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life, the decisions you make,
and the actions you take, will shape your future”
It serves to remind me of having that ‘first day mentality’. By maintaining that outlook and attitude I’ll achieve what I want in terms of my financial freedom and all my other life goals. Now it's time for you to think. What could you achieve in your life if you had that ‘first day mentality’ everyday? What could you achieve if you got juiced up thinking about where you were taking your life as a result of your decisions and actions? Kind of exciting isn’t it?
So remember, today IS the first day of the rest of your life, take responsibility and make some good decisions backed up by some great actions, because after all, the shape of your future depends upon it.
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