Over the next few months, here in Martial Arts Professional I will ne explaining to you the Seven Laws of Mental Mastery.
The United States spends more its gross national product on health care than any other nation, and the costs are increasing. More people are sick, overweight, unfit, and unhealthy than ever before. Today, we know that an enormous amount of illness and disease is caused by negative mental attitude and unhappiness of various kinds. People actually make themselves sick and poison their relationships with their own thinking.
America is a free society. All choices are open to the individual. People can do anything, go anywhere, change any part of their lives for the better, whenever they want. Why is it then that so many people persist in their negativity and pessimism when they are free to think anything they want? Why is it that so few people are living up to their potential?
The Search
When I was growing up, it never occurred to me that if you wanted to be good at something, you had to study it thoroughly and practice diligently. Health, happiness, peace, prosperity, and high achievement just occur if you happen to be in the right place at the right time.
Living with this idea, as the great majority do, puts a person under the Law of Accident. This law, is the governing principle for most people. In its simplest terms, it says that failing to plan is planning to fail.
If you want to be doctor, you study and practice medicine. If you want to be a good cook, you study cooking by getting cookbooks and using proven recipes. If you want to be a martial arts instructor, you study the ACMA manual and take the certification exam. If you want to live a life full of joy, happiness and self-fulfillment, you study the happiest and most successful people you can find and then do what they do until you get the same results in your own life.
This was an amazing thought to me. It seemed so simple! Surely it couldn’t be as easy as that. And of course, it’s not. Nothing really worthwhile is easy. It’s an erroneous belief that, if a thing is right, it should be easy, like a relationship. If you have to really work at it, some people say, then there’s probably something wrong with it. This kind of thinking is fatal to happiness. As I began my quest for the holy grail of the good life, I formulated three basic operating principles that helped me immeasurably.
First, life is hard. It always has been and it always will be. It’s never been any different for or me or anyone else. The good thing is if you accept this basic truth, live somehow becomes a little easier because you don’t suffer so much from feeling of frustration and injustice.
Second, everything you are or ever will be is up to you. You are where you are today because that is where you have chosen to be. You are always free to choose your actions, or inactions, and your life today is the sum total of your choices, good and bad. If you want your failure to be different, you have to make better choices.
Third, and perhaps most important, you can learn anything you need to learn to become anyone you want to become, to achieve anything you want to achieve. There are very few limitations and most of them are on the inside, not the outside.
If necessity is the mother of invention, then pain seems to be the father of learning. As the old martial arts adage goes, “Pain is part of the training.”
To move ahead, you have to both learn and unlearn a few things. You are locked in place at your current level of knowledge and skill. Your future largely depends on what you learn and practice from this moment onward.
I began to study success, happiness and achievement based on the preceding principles. They became the foundation upon which I built the superstructure of the system I’ll be sharing with you as we go along. Each month I will show you how this works, as a magnificent building goes up, piece by piece, until the structure is complete in all its glory.
Thought by thought, action by action, you will learn how to make you life a masterpiece. You will learn how to create something truly beautiful out of your efforts. You will learn how to take complete control of your destiny. You will learn how to accomplish more than you might have ever dreamed possible. Just don’t except it to be easy.
