Let me give you an example.

When I first got into the rental real estate business, I had no knowledge of how it works. But I did have a basic understanding of real estate, having bought and sold properties before.

So I did two things.

First, I bought some “how-to” books and spent, maybe, 40 hours studying them.

I zipped through them pretty quickly, because most of what they taught were fundamentals. And that’s not what I was looking for. I knew I would pick up the basics on my own, just by buying my first few properties.

I was looking for secrets — inside information that could get me into profitability faster. So, more important than studying the books, I talked to knowledgeable people — lots of them — who had made millions in real estate. (I spoke to one guy at a party who had reportedly made billions.)

That’s what I do whenever I am interested in a new business. I search out pros in the field and ask as many questions as they will tolerate. I am always probing for the same things:

• What are the most common mistakes I’m likely to make?
• What is the fastest and safest way to get started?

It took about three months of this sort of research before I felt “ready” to buy.

I bought three small houses in my town. All three seemed good on paper. In reality, they were a mixed bag. I made several big mistakes in assessing their value that I won’t make again. I also quickly learned things I’ll never forget about how to write a contract and how to screen rental applications.

What I gleaned from the books and conversations was enough to get me started. It helped me avoid the worst mistakes. It put me on the right path.

But what I learned from the experience of doing it was the good stuff — the true inside information that helped me eventually establish a decamillion-dollar portfolio.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: The most important knowledge about any business is invisible to outsiders. You can pick it up only when you are actively involved in the business on a day-to-day basis. You can’t know it any other way.

That kind of knowledge will determine your ultimate success — whether you keep going and become rich or stop at the starting gate and do no more.

Where are you with your great moneymaking idea? Are you “ready” to take action on it?

If not, take a few months to acquire the knowledge you need. Spend some money to educate yourself. But buy how-to books and programs only from people with proven success in the field, not from those who make money only by selling advice.

Then “fire”! The sooner you get going, the sooner you’ll succeed.

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to creating wealth and success through inspiration and practical, proven advice. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.By Michael Masterson.

It seems that most people let thoughts connected with worries, fears, anger or unhappiness occupy their mind most of the time. They keep engaging their mind with inner conversation about negative situations and actions. This inner conversation eventually affects the subconscious mind, making it accept and take seriously the thoughts and ideas expressed in those inner conversations.

It is of vital importance to be careful of what goes into the subconscious mind. Words and thoughts that are repeated often get stronger by the repetitions, sink into the subconscious mind and affect the behavior, actions and reactions of the person involved.

The subconscious mind regards the words and thoughts that get lodged inside it as expressing and describing a real situation, and therefore endeavors to align the words and thoughts with reality. It works diligently to make these words and thoughts a reality in the life of the person saying or thinking them.

This means that if you often tell yourself that it is difficult or impossible to acquire money, the subconscious mind will accept your words and put obstacles in your way. If you keep telling yourself that you are rich, it will find ways to bring you opportunities to get rich, and push you towards taking advantage of these opportunities.

The thoughts that you express through your words shape your life. This is often done unconsciously, as few pay attention to their thoughts and the words they use while thinking, and let outside circumstances and situations determine what they think about. In this case there is no freedom. Here, the outside world affects the inner world.

If you consciously choose the thoughts, phrases and words that you repeat in your mind, your life will start to change. You will begin creating new situations and circumstances. You will be using the power of affirmations.

Affirmations are sentences that are repeated often during the day, and which sink into the subconscious mind, thereby releasing its enormous power to materialize the intention of the words and phrases in the outside world. This does not mean that every word you utter will bring results. In order to trigger the subconscious mind into action, the words have to be said with attention, intention and with feeling.

In order to obtain positive results, affirmations have to be phrased in positive words. Look at the following two sentences:

1. I am not weak anymore.

2. I am strong and powerful.

Though both sentences seem to express the same idea, but in different words, the first one is a negative sentence. It creates in the mind a mental image of weakness. This is wrong wording. The second sentence awakens in the mind a mental image of strength.

It is not enough to say an affirmation a few times, and then expect your life to change. More than this is necessary. It is important to affirm with attention, as well as with strong desire, faith and persistence. It is also important to choose the right affirmation for any specific situation. You need to feel comfortable with it; otherwise the affirmation may not work or may bring you something that you do not really want.

Affirmations can be used together with creative visualization, to strengthen it, and they can be used separately, on their own. They are of special importance for people who find it difficult to visualize. In this case they serve as a substitution to creative visualization.

Instead of repeating negative and useless words and phrases in the mind, you can choose positive words and phrases to help you build the life you want. By choosing your thoughts and words you exercise control over your life.

Here are a few affirmations:

- Day by day I am becoming happier and more satisfied.

- With every inhalation I am filling myself with happiness.

- Love is filling my life now.

- The power of the Cosmos is filling my life with love.

- A lot of money is flowing now into my life.

- The power of the Universal Mind is now filling my life with wealth.

- The powerful and vital energy of the Cosmos is flowing and filling my body and mind.

- Healing energy is constantly filling every cell of my body.

- I always stay calm and in control of myself, in every situation and in http://www.success-mantras.com/wp-admin/post-new.php#edit_timestampall circumstances.

- I am having a wonderful, happy and fascinating day.

© Copyright Remez Sasson
Remez Sasson teaches and writes on positive thinking, creative visualization, motivation, self-improvement, peace of mind, spiritual growth and meditation. He is the author of several books, among which are “Peace of mind in Daily Life”, “Will Power and Self Discipline”, “Visualize and Achieve” and “Affirmations – Words of Power”.
Website: http://www.SuccessConsciousness.com
Books: http://www.successconsciousness.com/ebooks_and_books.htm

It was, and remains, as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled.

My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep — so the family moved from place to place without any trouble, and my mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal (now Bangladesh), she was a matriculate when she married my father.

My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system, which makes me what I am today and largely, defines what success means to me today.

As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government — he reiterated to us that it was not ‘his jeep’ but the government’s.

Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep — we could sit in it only when it was stationary.

That was our early childhood lesson in governance — a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.

The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my father’s office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix ‘dada’ whenever we were to refer to him in public or private.

When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed — I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, ‘Raju Uncle’ – very different from many of their friends who refer to their family driver, as ‘my driver’. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe.

To me, the lesson was significant — you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my mother’s chulha — an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was neither gas, nor electrical stoves.

The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman’s ‘muffosil’ edition — delivered one day late.

We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine.

After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson.

He used to say, “You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it.” That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.

Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios — we did not have one.

We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask father when we could get one. Each time, my father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios — alluding to his five sons.

We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, “We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses.” His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant.

Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.

Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding.

We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed.

At that time, my father’s transfer order came. A few neighbours told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant.

My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, “I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited.”

That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination.

So it was decided that my mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too.

For the first time in my life I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script.

So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper — end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe.

In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness. Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then prime minster, coined the term ‘Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan’ and galvanised the nation in to patriotic fervour.

Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the university’s water tank, which served the community.

I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper.

Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination.

Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.

Over the next few years, my mother’s eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too.

As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished.

She said, “Oh, my God! I did not know you were so fair.” I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date.

Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once.

Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, “No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed.” Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes.

To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life’s own journey.

I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a management trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life’s calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981.

Life took me places — I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and travelled all over the world.

In 1992, while I was posted in the United States, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him — he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe.

The Safdarjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst.

One morning, while attending to my father, I realised that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it.

She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theatre of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, “Why have you not gone home yet?”

Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self.

There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what the limit of inclusion is you can create.

My father died the next day. He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion.

Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state.

You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts — the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned.

His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of a ill-paid, unrecognised government servant’s world.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-Independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event.

My mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords.

Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions.

In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking.

Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar.

I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on.

Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, “Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world.”

Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rs 300, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity was telling me to go and kiss the world!

Success to me is about vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extraordinary success with ordinary lives.

Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and God’s speed. Go, kiss the world!

- Subroto Bagchi
Co-Founder, Vice Chairman & Gardener, MindTree Ltd

Subroto Bagchi is one of the co-founders of MindTree Ltd, a fast-growing IT services and solutions company in India, also noted as one of the most admired companies to work for in the country. A prolific writer, whose columns in several Indian newspapers and magazines are eagerly awaited, Bagchi’s three books till date have been extremely well received by critics and readers alike. His first book, The High Performance Entrepreneur gives the “Golden rules for success in today’s world” on entrepreneurship to take an idea to creating a hugely successful enterprise. It is a book written to ‘tap the entrepreneurial energy’ in aspiring entrepreneurs. His second book’s title is drawn from this particular speech (which in turn were his blind mother’s last words to him) – ‘Go kiss the world’, and gives some great nuggets of wisdom for young professionals and in “working and living and energizing ordinary people to live extraordinary lives”. His third book, The Professional was released in September 2009.

This speech was delivered to the class of 2006 at the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.

Imagination is the creative ability of your mind that helps you form an image of an object or an experience before you bring it to physical reality. The Power of imagination helps you visualize things that cannot be seen. Simply put, imagination is seeing through mental images. This power is inherent in all of us and can be developed to a very high level.

If you study the lives of great entrepreneurs, scientists and inventors, you will find that by using creative visualization they developed a strong mental picture of what they wanted to achieve. They used the Power of Imagination to give a tangible shape to their ‘inside picture’.

You too have the Power of Imagination. It is a myth that only a few people possess the Power of Imagination. Every human has it; you too have this power within you. It is just that you might not have developed it as much as an Einstein or an Edison. But with perseverance and practice, you can enlarge your Power of Imagination to achieve amazing things.

Think for a moment: you are what you are today because somewhere in the cycle of time in the past you imagined yourself to be what you should be.

And here you are. By the same logic, if today you imagine yourself to be somewhere in the future, that is where you will reach. Isn’t it amazing?

You have the Power of Imagination to change your existing reality. All you need to do is imagine a new set of exceptional images about yourself and keep reminding yourself that you have to achieve your goals.

By reorienting your mental images, you change your belief system. By reorienting your beliefs, you change your expectations about yourself. By reorienting your expectations, you change your attitude. By reorienting your attitude, you change your behavioural patterns. By reorienting your behavioural patterns, you change your performance level. And by reorienting your performance level, you change your life.

Two Action Steps:

Step 1: Create a mental screen. Find a quiet place and sit in a relaxed manner. Look at your surroundings and then close your eyes. Think of your mind as a film screen that helps you recreate the things you saw just moments earlier. To begin with, repeat this process four or five times a day.

Step 2: Prepare the mental screen to visualize thoughts as pictures. As your mental screen becomes strong, you can visualize things with ease. You can prepare it to play films of past and future events. As you train your mind, you will gradually develop the ability to visualize things even while your eyes are open.

Success Mantra: Visualize what you want to achieve and create a strong mental image of your goals. Hold these images till you make them come true.

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