Mindset means your thinking mind is set in a certain way. I like the word “set” because it means you place something in a particular spot or way, like when you set a vase on a table. If you can set it, you can set it differently or in another place or direction.

Here’s how I’d re-word the definition of mind-set: a mental attitude inclined in a direction based on what you tell yourself that anything means, which means you can tell yourself anything, depending on how you decide to or prefer to set your mind about anything and everything.

You may believe events and others cause you to feel or think a certain way, but no one but you can set your mind about anything.

But . . . “some things are real,” you may say.

Many things are what they are—usually because of what leads up to them, but we often tell ourselves way more than what’s actually going on. And then we believe what we tell ourselves . . . and then, because misery loves company, we set out to convince others as well.

Here’s an example. A workshop presenter shared that she had to learn to “fix” her face. When she wore no expression, her mouth’s natural shape was turned down, which made her look as though she was frowning, when she wasn’t. You can imagine the chatter about her that likely included, “She’s always in a bad mood,” when she wasn’t. Once she realized this, she began to practice deliberately shifting the corners of her mouth up just a bit so people wouldn’t judge her as angry or unfriendly. You could say the corners of her mouth are fixed in a downward direction, but she chose to fix this—in order to have different experiences and results. And others had fixed in their minds an opinion of her that was inaccurate.

One of the daily emailed quotes I receive came from The Talmud: “If you add to the truth, you subtract from it.”

Looking at choices and actions

If you have a result or experience you don’t like or want, look at the choices or actions that led to it so you know what to shift, and don’t add to it with comments like, “I’m such a (whatever negative you might say about yourself)” or any other version of that about life or others. When you add such criticisms about yourself (or life or others) rather than look at what is and what can be done differently, you diminish the truth of yourself in your mind. You set your mind against your Self. What experiences and results might you expect if you do this?

You can choose to keep an attitude fixed, but that is a choice (remember that clever phrase “hardening of the attitudes”?). I’ve heard people say things like, “I’m too old to change” or “It’s too late to change it now,” and even “That’s how God made me.” What’s between the lines is, “This behavior (or mindset) meets an immediate need for me. It creates problems for me, but it’s a lot easier for me to repeatedly butt my head against this familiar wall than to risk facing what scares me or admit that my behaviors create some of my problems.”

How is your mind set about these?
● I have to be perfect, OR My significance is inherent and not dependent on being “perfect”.
● Who I am is not enough, OR I’m the only me there is so I enjoy and make the most of it, and expand who I am in the ongoing process of my life.
● Every day is difficult, OR Some things challenge me, but I’ve been meeting and going beyond challenges since God made dirt. If I allowed this to be easier, what would I do differently?
● Money worries are like a shadow I can’t shake, OR Every day I find a way to increase my contribution to others and feel great about the compensation that’s exchanged.
● People with money are to be belittled (and simultaneously envied), Or Having all the money (and even wealth) that supports my life feels right.
● I HAVE to be stressed, OR Sometimes I feel stressed about certain events, but I can decide if they are events I need to take action on, and take it, or whether it’s my thinking about events causing the stress, and shift this.
● I don’t have what it takes to be successful (work, relationships), OR I choose success and nothing less, and allow myself to have it.

When you get into bed to sleep, how is your mind set?
When you wake, how is your mind set?
When you do anything at all, how is your mind set?

You can meditate, affirm, and use all the techniques you know, but if your mind-set is not aligned with what you truly desire, and desire to be and experience, you’re butting your head (and life experience) against a too-familiar wall.

Specific mindsets create matching experiences and results. How is your mind set?

You are what you practice.

© Joyce Shafer
Joyce Shafer (jls1422@yahoo.com) is the You Are More! Empowerment Coach who helps women rediscover their authentic selves, and author of “I Don’t Want to be Your Guru, but I Have Something to Say”, as well as more life and small business empowerment books/ebooks, most easily found online at Lulu.com. Check out the terrific articles and Empowerment Extras, and learn about private coaching sessions, in her free weekly online newsletter at http://stateofappreciation.webs.com.

Will power is your inner strength to make decisions and act on them regardless of internal resistances. The Power of Will exists to help you cope with life’s challenges. It drives you to attain goals or apply your talents irrespective of your emotional state. It gives you the strength to overcome inertia and build momentum, and empowers you to achieve what you want by sticking to the job till it is done. Your Power of Will is strengthened whenever you reject instant gratification and instead choose to concentrate on something worthwhile.

The Power of Will helps you to gather your energies and focus them in a positive direction. Let’s say laziness prevents you from going on a planned morning walk. This is where you need to apply your Power of Will. This power can help you to overcome bad habits such as overeating, laziness,
procrastination and indiscipline.

The Power of Will prospers when you develop the ability to control unnecessary and harmful impulses. It improves the ability to arrive at a decision and follow it through with perseverance until its successful completion. When you decide upon a list of things and behaviour that you will no longer accept from yourself, your decision-making ability grows and so does your will power.

The three important factors that affect the development of your Power of Will are:
1) Self-discipline
2) Self-control
3) Self-determination

1) Self-discipline helps you do the right things in the right way at the right time, whether you like doing them or not. It involves setting standards that you always adhere to.

You are blessed with a free will; it is through self-discipline that you can train your will to overcome obstacles. Self-discipline may be used to lose weight, take up exercise or form a daily routine. It helps you persevere and rise above procrastination, laziness and indecisiveness. Self-discipline helps you respond to all tasks with the appropriate behaviour.

2) Self-control keeps a check over your internal universe—your thoughts and emotions—to gain control over your will and actions, which create the universe outside you.

According to an ancient Indian proverb, ‘Before conquering the world, the king has to first conquer himself.’ This holds true even today. To become successful, you must increase your Power of Will and exercise control over your thoughts, emotions, will and reactions. The more you can do this, the more successful you will become.

Self-control helps you to focus on your job. You are a treasure trove of energy and power. These can be best utilized when you stop succumbing to your cravings and whims. Once you start controlling unprofitable thoughts and become aware of the choices you make every day—even every hour—you start becoming more powerful from within.

3) Self-determination is your decision-making ability. Self-determination helps you to stick to your resolutions. Maybe you have tried to change your eating habits but failed to do so because of a lack of inner strength and persistence. Most people have had such an experience. Once you have determined to shun laziness and take control over your emotions, you will develop the ability to stick to your resolutions. You are born to be rich, famous, successful, happy and healthy. If you have fallen short on any of these counts, it only means that you need to examine the state of your spiritual orientation. Your inner voice will guide you towards the right path. You must listen to your feelings, notice what is working and what is not. Resolve to change your life. Self-determination is the vital first step.

Two Action Steps:

Step 1: Keep a check over your negative emotions: Negative energies will try to pull you down like gravity. They may draw your attention to minor things and distract you from your real goals. So, beware of them and remain focused on your larger goals.

Step 2: Reject instant gratification: If you see an ice-cream parlour while walking down a street and are tempted to have your favourite flavour, do not give in to temptation. This way you will learn how to postpone gratification.

Success Mantra: Develop your willpower by using self-determination and self-discipline to keep a check over your negative emotions, and do what is necessary.

©Shishir Srivsatava, Motivational Speaker and Author ‘The Eight Powers within You’
www.shishirsrivastava.org and www.eightpowers.com

At that age, I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage — figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”

I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.” That’s not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

Differences between gifts and choices

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

This is a group with many gifts. I’m sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. I’m confident that’s the case because admission is competitive and if there weren’t some signs that you’re clever, the dean of admission wouldn’t have let you in.

Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans — plodding as we are — will astonish ourselves. We’ll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we’ll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we’ve synthesized life. In the coming years, we’ll not only synthesize it, but we’ll engineer it to specifications. I believe you’ll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton — all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.

How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?

Following your passion
I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles — something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world — was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I’d been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I’d been a garage inventor. I’d invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn’t work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I’d always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.

I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, “That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn’t already have a good job.” That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice.

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins.

> How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

> Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

> Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

> Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

> Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

> Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?

> Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

> Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

> When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

> Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

> Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck!

- Jeff Bezos, Founder, Amazon.com

This is the transcript of the commencement address by Jeff Bezos, an inventor and founder of Amazon.com, to the class of 2010 at Princeton delivered on May 30, 2010. Bezos is an alumnus of Princeton.