The best way to make sure that no great ideas slip through your fingers is to make a tickler file. Tickler files can be pretty easy to set up. All you need is a card file and a bunch of index cards. I have a little black box that holds 3×5 cards. I also cut up a couple of index cards to make dividers with tabs to maintain some semblance of order to system that’s little more than a collection of random thoughts at this point. You can have as many or as few categories as you’d like and you can feel free to add or delete categories as needed.

Now that you have your tickler file set up, grab a stack of index cards and start writing! Write down every idea for every invention, book, or whatever you’ve been thinking about. When you’re done, go back to each card and write down the questions you have about that idea. Do you need to figure out how an invention could be put together? Do you need a more efficient system at work but haven’t quite figured out what it could be? Write these concerns on the card. Over time you’ll notice that so many questions and comments have accumulated that an action plan for your idea now seems clear. At that point you can take your idea out of your tickler file and turn in into a project. Your rock is now on it’s way to becoming a diamond!

Most people have ideas and think, “If only I could make it happen.” With this system, you have a way to make your ideas realities almost automatically! Make sure you review your tickler file every week. You’ll be surprised at all the new comments you can add!

There’s one more facet we’ve yet to cover: long term goals. What do you do with items like “renovate my home” or “buy a new car”? You can’t have a nebulous item like “get $25,000″ on an action plan. How do we organize these goals so that they can be achieved one day? Find out in Someday Lists for Fun and Profit.

After gathering all of your paperwork and tasks, you need to implement the four “D’s”. Every time you pick up a piece of paper or consider a task you need to decide if you’re going to Delete it, Delegate it, Defer it, or Deal with it. If the task is something that isn’t vital to your success or to achieving you goals, delete it. Toss it, trash it, whatever! Just get rid of the dang thing. These tasks are draining your psychic energy for no reason. If the task is something that’s important to your success but you don’t necessarily have to do it yourself, put it in a file to be delegated to someone you trust. We’ll make a file for these tasks later so we can check up on their progress. Should you decide that the task is too important to delegate and it can’t be completed within two minutes, then defer it. Put these tasks in a separate file so you can turn them into individual projects or put them on your perpetual task war board. Later we’ll organize these items and turn them into action plans. Finally if a task will take you less than two minutes to complete, deal with it now. Get it done and out of your way forever! You’ll be surprised how many of your tasks can be dealt with now.

You’ve probably accomplished a lot at the end of this exercise but we aren’t done yet! Right now you’ve got two folders staring you in the face with the generic titles of Defer and Delegate. Now it’s time to turn these folders into actionable projects. Ready yet? Then go on to the next article: Powerful Project Management.

1. Fear- This one emotion can stop someone before they ever get a chance to begin. Fear comes in many forms. There’s the fear of failure, the fear of rejection, the fear of change, the fear of success. The list goes on and on. Every time you step out of your comfort zone you’re going to feel fear. The problem is that the only way you can grow and improve is by stepping out of your comfort zone! A little fear can be a good thing. It lets you know you’re moving in the right direction.

2. Despair- This little bugger is often a side effect of failure. It’s that feeling that you’re no good, that you can’t do it, and that you were a fool for even trying. Whereas fear prevents people from ever trying, despair prevents people from ever trying again. In order to avoid despair, you need to embrace failure. When you try something new, you need to realize that you’re going to fail at first. In fact, you’ll probably fail a lot! Take these little failures as learning experiences that you can build into great successes! Don’t despair. Every time you fail brings you one step closer to your goal.

3. Fatalism- Fatalism is a way people rationalize despair. After a particularly hard failure you’ll hear people say thinks like, “I guess God just wants me to be a ditch digger.” Or, “This must be my lot in life.” These people see their destiny as fixed. The problem is, if you think your destiny is determined by someone or something else, you’ve lost all power in your life. You’ll never improve because you don’t think anything you do will help. This way of thinking can lead to depression in a hurry. Don’t think for a second that you deserve any less than the very best in life!

The best thing to combat fear, despair, and fatalism is knowledge. The more you analyze a fear, the more you realize how irrational it is. Then the fear loses power over you. The more you know about why you failed, the less likely you are to make the same mistake again. Failures become learning experiences. Finally, if you take time to learn about yourself and think about why you deserve to succeed, you become less and less likely to accept your “lot in life” and demand more.

First I’ll say this; you will not be bored on this blog! You could spend a day on it reading a wide variety of articles ranging from “How to Give Up Coffee” to “The Meaning of Life.” The articles are generally well written and are frequently backed with Steve’s experience on the subject.

One of the articles I found particularly interesting was “30 Days to Success.” It’s one of those things that you read and think, “It’s so simple! Why didn’t I think of that?” Basically Steve suggests that major changes in your life should have a 30 day trial period. Have you been thinking of starting a new diet? It can be a daunting task to change the way you eat forever, but if you just want to stick with the diet for 30 days, it becomes much less of a mental hurdle. The beauty of this principle is that new habits take about 30 days to form so if you find that you’re reaping health benefits from your new diet after the 30 day mark, you’re much more likely to continue. See what I mean? The principle presented is simple, yet powerful.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some things Steve writes about that I’d recommend a lot more research on before trying. One such idea is polyphasic sleep. Polyphasic sleep is taking many naps throughout the day rather than sleeping in one long span of time. Steve suggests that this is possible because you train yourself to enter REM sleep faster. That statement caused little alarms to go off in the part of my brain that holds a psychology degree. I remember reading that a person will go directly to REM sleep if they’re sleep deprived and exhausted. I don’t think people trying this sleeping method are really training themselves. I just think they reach a point where they’re so exhausted they go right into REM sleep. Polyphasic sleep also seems to ignore thermal fluctuations that your body goes through during wake/sleep cycles. For me, polyphasic sleep left too many questions.

The truth is you don’t have to agree with everything Steve Pavlina writes in order to benefit from his site. There are plenty of good ideas there and it’s definitely worth your time to check it out and play around for a couple of hours. Who knows? One of Steve’s ideas may change your life!

Covey’s book runs the gamut in terms of personal development. After the initial overview, Covey separates his book into three parts. Each part attacks a different facet of success. For example, the first part is focused exclusively on the individual. Here you’ll learn how to approach the projects that face you every day. Sound like your average self help book? It probably would be if Covey didn’t take an unconventional approach to task management. Einstein once said that, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” That quote pretty much sums up Covey’s philosophy when engaging your most challenging tasks. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People explains how you can elevate your thinking to solve issues that stand in the way of your success.

The next section of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People explains the principle of interdependence and the importance of seeking out win/win relationships with other successful people. No one is an army of one and everyone needs help to achieve their most ambitious goals. The next section of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People explains the principle of interdependence and the importance of seeking out win/win relationships with other successful people. Two heads truly are better than one and if you’re really serious about your success, you’ll need to help others with theirs’. In this section, Covey will teach you how synergy will help you reach your goals in short order!

Finally, Covey also understands that life can’t be all business all the time so the last section is dedicated to renewing yourself so you don’t miss out on the important things in life. Some people tend to get lost in the pursuit of their goals and forget about the important things in life. In the last section of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey reminds you to take a step back every now and then to enjoy life so you don’t forget why you’re working as hard as you are.

If you’re a nail biter or a speeder, then it’s time to get some better habits. With Stephen Covey’s help, you’ll reach your goals a lot faster, and without a speeding ticket.

In Unlimited Power, Robbins shows you how to identify disempowering beliefs that you hold such as, I have to do everything myself and teaches you to question them and break them down using neuro-linguistic programming. It’s truly amazing how many beliefs you develop that have little or no evidence to back them up! You see, the mind doesn’t like information gaps so when you lack enough information your mind will fill in these gaps to reach a conclusion. Some of these conclusions are preventing you from achieving your ultimate potential in life. Unlimited Power gives you step-by-step instructions to identify these disempowering beliefs, challenge them, and replace them with empowering beliefs so you can move forward in your life and achieve the success you deserve!

The book would be great even if it stopped there but Robbins takes in a step further and dedicates an entire section of the book to building a winning team. Most self help books focus solely on self improvement, but Robbins realizes that no one is an army of one. In order to put together a powerful team, Robbins teaches you a variety of techniques such as mirroring. When you mirror someone you mimic, to a degree, the mannerisms of the person you’re talking to. People like others that are like themselves. It’s true that birds of a feather flock together. If you are driven to be successful then you have to align yourself with other people who want the same thing. Unlimited Power is not only about bettering you; it’s about building a powerful alliance and growing together.

If you think you’re going to be an army of one, go ahead and try. But your chances of success are about as good as John Doe winning the war on terror by himself. When you have a group of like minded people working with you, there’s no limit to what you can achieve and Unlimited Power will teach you to do just that.

What do I mean by weaponizing your day exactly? Too many of us go into our days without a plan. We simply take whatever task presents itself, complete it, then move on to the next task. What you need to do is determine ahead of time what tasks are important? What tasks are going to be the most productive for you? Think about that for a minute. What tasks are hanging over your head right now? What tasks would advance you most financially, professionally, or personally if they were completed tomorrow? Now write those tasks down! Take a page from David Letterman’s playbook and make a top ten list. This list will be the backbone of your day. Come rain or shine, if nothing else gets accomplished, these 10 items will be done! Do this each and every day. I find that it works best if I make it part of my nightly routine. Before I brush my teeth for bed, I write my top 10 list down in my trusty notebook.

So what’s making a top ten list going to do for you? Well, first of all it will help you prioritize your day. You’ll no longer be a slave to those little projects that seem to pop up out of nowhere. When you prioritize your most important tasks it makes it infinitely easier to say no to the little things that crawl out of the woodworks to drain suck up your precious time. Every time someone asks you to do something you’ll immediately think, “Is this task really important enough to take time away from my top ten? Should I delegate this task or just say no all together?” By setting a goal for yourself ahead of time you’ve ensured that you don’t wander through your life just trying to keep up. You have a plan, a purpose, a direction; and nothing will derail you from that unless it’s of the utmost importance.

Failure is a tool to build success. Success is the good stuff. It’s the goal. But failure is what will lead you there. Failure is a learning experience. From success you get nothing in terms of development. When you fail you haven’t really made a mistake, you’ve simply found the wrong path to success. After a while you’ll get on the right track and success will be yours as long as you have the guts to keep on going.

Persistence is what separates the achievers from the naysayers. Too may people have it in their heads that you should never fail. If you’re one of those people then I can say with absolute certainty that true success will never be yours. You’ll have a lot more success and a lot more fun in life if you not only accept failure but seek it out! Why not? Make it one of your goals this year to have a spectacular failure. I mean a real bomb!

Why the heck would anyone tell you to fail? To get you to try! What is it that you’ve always wanted to do but have been too afraid to take on? Go ahead and do it! The fear of failure has prevented more people from achieving their dreams than any other force on this planet. A failure is not someone who fails; it’s someone who gives up trying before their goal is reached. Give yourself permission to fail and see what happens. At the worst you’ll get a great learning experience and who knows, you might just make your dreams come true.