CHAPTER 1

You Must AlwaysAcknowledge Your Reality

If you think that you can't have what you want out of lifebecause you lack a fancy diploma or something else is missing, youare wrong! I never believed that I couldn't have success, and youshouldn't believe that either. If you're reading this book, that's proof ofyour desire to improve your life, and that's everything you need. If youdon't succeed, it's your own fault.

I want to start this chapter by telling you that, while this chapter isabout your metal state, it's not about holding crystals to your foreheadand burning incense. Don't fight the concepts that I'm going toexplain—it will make sense.

As a newly married young adult, I felt that I was experiencing fartoo many disappointments, misunderstandings, and frustrations in mylife. With very few exceptions, every one of those struggles came as atotally unanticipated surprise. Regardless of the nature of my struggles,I thought I had too many of them to deal with. Yes, the definitionof "too many" is different for everyone, but for me, each of thosefrustrating situations was unpleasant, and dealing with them weekly oreven monthly was far too often.

My wife and I hated those setbacks and difficult situations becausethey were unpleasant and often resulted in bickering and blaming.Bickering and blaming does little to solve problems, and doesn't preventthe problems from happening again. Mostly, we both disliked arguingwith anyone—regardless of who eventually won the argument. Wepreferred calm, pleasant, and productive relationships with each otherand with other people. We also had too many financial struggles.We really wanted to be able to pay all of our bills on time and havelots of money left to do whatever we wanted to do. I became verymotivated to figure out how we could permanently eliminate most ofthese frustrating situations that caused life to be so difficult. Even tome, those goals sounded like they were very difficult to reach. But I wasdetermined to get as close to it as possible because struggling, arguing,being disappointed, and going without sucked. I knew that I didn't wantto live my whole life like that.

I figured it out and I achieved my goals, and looking back, it nowall makes sense, and that's why I decided to write it out for my familyand friends.

Understand Your Problems

When people are faced with seemingly insurmountable problems,it's common for them to blame other people that are involved in theproblems and then part ways. That happens with friends, employmentsituations, business associations, and all other types of relationships.Regardless of the relationship, separation without resolution usuallymeans that the people either continue to struggle with life alone orfind someone new with whom they'll share their struggles. They don'tbother to understand the causes of the problems, so they eventuallyencounter most of the same problems again. Thankfully, my wife andI acknowledged that, except for a few rare situations, divorce doesn'tresolve most of the problems. Divorce just gives people separate addressesand more expenses while they continue to fight about the same money,the same children, and all of the other unresolved problems they stillhave. My wife and I knew that our marriage was not the cause of ourproblems, so common sense told us that ending our marriage wouldn'tsolve our problems. There had to be a real solution.

Eventually, I figured out the first step: Don't try to deal with yourproblems. It's stupid and futile and doesn't improve your life.

Don't try to deal with your problems? Well, I don't mean that youshould ignore your problems. I mean that spending your entire lifetrying to deal with problems is like signing up for a lifetime of playingWhac-a-Mole. No thanks! Don't stand there beating the moles as fastas you can for your entire life. The easiest way to end that struggle isto reach behind the machine and unplug it. The cord is the source ofthe problem, and that mallet is a crappy solution. The first step youmust take to improve your life is to stop dealing with the same typesof problems over and over. Dealing with problems is reactionary—that'snot what you want to do.

Reactive solutions to an existing problem are only slightly helpful;they don't change what happened or explain why things aren't alreadyhow you want them to be.

The first step to developing a viable and permanent method tosolving your problems is to first figure out why the undesirable situationsexist and why better situations don't. A reactive solution is like moppingup a puddle of water that keeps appearing on the floor in front of thesink. Wiping up the water every once in a while does deal with theproblem of water on the floor, but you're going to keep wiping uppuddles until you find out where the water is coming from and fix that.Obviously, that's a situation that we'd normally handle properly, but youneed to understand that successful people don't deal with problems—theyidentify the sources of their problems and then eliminate thosesources. You need to, find the causes of the problems, and deal withthose causes to prevent the problems.

How do you find the causes for all of your problems? Sometimes it'seasy to find the cause of a problem and sometimes it takes some effort. Themost important thing is for you to believe is that the only way to improveyour life is to understand that you need to stop dealing with repeatingproblems, and to do that you must look at the problems honestly so thatyou...