Notes From The Tiger’s Cave

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Greetings, and a Happy New Year from The Land of the Rising Sun! Or, as they say around here,

akemashite omedeto gozaimasu, kotoshi mo aikawarazu, … or something!

This greeting is best said in the early hours of New Years Day after hauling your booze-addled carcass up to the top of Mount Misen on the Holy Island of Miyajima in good time to greet Dawn’s first crack of the year. A few rousing choruses of “BANZAI!” to wake up the monkeys are also customary practice - but please, no fixed bayonets!

New Year’s Day, 2009, Miyajima, Japan New Year’s resolutions are quite popular in Japan. At the beginning of each year many of my students resolve to “lose weight” and “study English harder”… but nothing changes!

This year, my resolution is to help Japanese students learn how to make better goals and “succeed in English” by introducing Success University to Japan. I will be updating my rather neglected Succeed-in-English.com website and offering students both in Japan and all over the world a nice low-priced package in which they can study “the secrets of success” in “English” using all the materials provided by Success University, plus free online tuition and coaching with the materials by myself, via the website, email and skype.

Students living in the Hiroshima area of Japan will also have an option of personal, face-to-face tuition.

Keep your eyes peeled for further information!

Look out for more details in upcoming blog posts!

There is a street close to the centre of Hiroshima where there are two competing takurakuji booths that sell Japanese state lottery tickets with prizes amounting to several oku yen (ichi oku, or 1 oku = 100,000,000).

On weekends when the prize money has been racheted up you often see long queues of folk lining up to by tickets, while old geezers in blue uniforms bellow through megaphones to bring in more losers.

Losers! 

Harsh, but true, don’t you think? Would you spend a good part of a precious Saturday morning lining up to buy a few state lottery tickets? The odds on your winning the big prize are so poor, the likelihood so remote, that you really ought to be doing something better with your life.

But just suppose you did win… :mrgreen: What would you do?

Would you give up whatever it is you do for a living?

Why?

Probably because you are not following your passion… Here’s a quote from a fine blog post I just read, by Alister Cameron:

“If Bill Cosby won the state lottery, would he retire from show business? Would Barbra Streisand quit singing? Would Shaq O’Neil quit playing basketball? Not even if he won the biggest lottery in the world. And almost nothing could have kept George Forman out of the boxing ring.”

The blog is actually about goal setting, and why people who are following their passion don’t need to place so much emphasis on setting goals because their passion leads them on to achieve great things almost, as it were, on autopilot…

They certainly don’t need to spend their Saturday mornings lining up to buy lottery tickets - and neither do you, if you follow your passion!

Read the rest of Alister Cameron’s blog post.

David Hurley

http://grasp-the-nettle.com

Sir Edward Gibbon, the English Enlightenment historian who wrote The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, observed that,

 ”All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.”    

Our quest therefore should be to seek constant improvement and progress in everything we do. The problem, however, is that we often seem to have too many things to do at any one time and end up leaving many things half done, half baked or not done at all.Unable to see the woods for the trees we leave many a project or good intention to whither on the vine. That is especially true of the aspiring Internet marketer who is trying to set up a home business while maintaining a day job and running a home and family.

Sound familiar?

Earlier this week I received my monthly DVD and CD package from Success University. The CD presentation by Albert Mensah was called The Secrets To Effective Goal Setting. Success University students can also hear the talk online as part of SU’s life-enhancing streaming video and audio courses. During his talk Albert said the key is to prioritize, and the way to do that is to remember that,

 The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. 

Pretty neat, eh?

It reminds me that a few months ago I was reading Steven Covey’s bestselling “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and how he advises that you plan your whole week and use a four-part prioritizing system,

1. Important/Urgent
2. Important/Not Urgent
3. Not Important/Urgent
4. Not Important/Not Urgent

In terms of “keeping the main thing the main thing,” the main thing is actually number 2, Important/Not Urgent - those things are all your big projects, you know the great ambitions you have that always get put off by number 1, 3 and 4.

I was impressed with Covey’s ideas at the time. But at the end of last year I bought a day-diary, thinking that I could plan my day in great detail. That was a non-starter. Instead, I ended up with lists that were half completed and then forgotten once the day ended and the page was turned…

I went out on Monday and bought a week planner - and from next week I’ll try to put Covey’s suggestions into practice in order to restore focus to my “main thing”!

Interestingly, Covey’s books and his son’s spin-off products, a series of up-market designer schedules and filofaxes with diaries designed to accomodate Covey’s system and with a quotation from one of his books on each page, have become popular in Japan. Tokyu Hands, the famous Japanese gadget-packed hobby, home improvement and lifestyle department store started stocking them towards the end of last year, and one of my students asked me to accompany him to the store to help him choose a suitable one for his needs. Apparently it has proved very effective in helping him focus on his “main thing” and get the rest of his act together too!

Well, I hope that my new week planner will arrest my retrogradation and help me to get back into “advance mode” with my “main thing(s)” …

 

One of Success University’s top success instructors and business builders, Johnny Wimbrey, teaches that,


“Every moment of your life you’re in a character-building process. You cannot stop the process of character-building but you can control what you allow to build your character. The very nature of who you are.”   

It takes discipline and for that you need to keep your vision of where you are going ever before you.

Elsewhere Johnny Wimbrey teaches that you must not let another person’s negativity define YOUR reality. Again, if you can keep your vision of what you aspire to be in your minds eye, and if you can make it plain to yourself every day by writing it down and reading it out loud, that will serve as a buckler and a sword in your fight against the prevailing negativity of the circumstances you may find yourself in.

If you haven’t seen or heard of JW before, check out the video:

 

Just recently here in Japan, Kendo Jidai, or “Age of Kendo”, magazine has decided to take the fight against negativity onto the blogosphere by launching a widget that launches a kendo warrior into an assault against negativity and crappy thinking or expressions of extreme pissed-offishness, boredom, and general shittiness or bad attitude. The slogan is apt: “attack negativity through the discipline of kendo” - taking up a martial art is certainly one way of strengthening and training the mind no less than the body.

 

 

David HurleyGrasp-The-Nettle.com