Building Yourself: Putting Your Success Together

Building Yourself
Putting Your Success Together One Piece at a Time

These pages contain the complete 2005 revised text of Building Yourself, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's guide to living the successful life.

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Building Yourself Table of Contents
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Introduction

Experience is an expensive school, but fools will learn in no other. Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)

This book was written for those who love and value achievement. As you'll learn, the world out there is as wide as you want it to be. Nothing stands still. You make your world.

This book was written for the mind that never ceases to question, that never ceases to learn. The mind that remains open, probing, flexible.

This book was written for the person with the integrity to break through every personal barrier. Despite setbacks. Despite failures. Despite the attitudes and scorn of others.

This book was written to promote reflection, but also to act as the base for dynamic personal action. Yes, this book contains theory, but it is theory designed to generate action.

This book asks you to take total responsibility for your own self and actions. Is that frightening? Maybe. But the alternative—sitting and waiting for life to grind you down into little bits—is much more frightening.

This is all very serious business. But it's fun to get down to serious business, isn't it? So move on now into Building Yourself and make your mark on life.

You've Got To Do It Yourself

Man can do nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself. Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980)

It's a big world out there, and you—a person with talent, energy and vision—cannot count on other people to lead the way. Only you can lead your own life. This is an inescapable fact of existence. That big wide world out there may not knock you down with poverty or physical handicaps, but it will fill you with images that can damage you. It may tell you what you should or should not do, what you can or cannot accomplish. It may give you false and inappropriate ideas of how the real world works.

The great key to success, especially to early success, is in thinking for yourself. Well, you ask, isn't that fairly easy? Yes it is, theoretically. Even if they put me in chains and torture us, my thoughts are still free. In reality though, today, here, now, you're about as free to think as a heavy smoker is free to say no to a cigarette. Possible, yes; likely, no.

Few people can sift through the barrage of ideas and images in the media jungle. Assuming you're one of these people, this book is designed to accelerate your process of learning to think for yourself, with the goal of maximizing your personal success in every area of your life. There is no sense in your repeating mistakes others have made—mistakes that could set you back and cost you plenty.

What This Book Is All About

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

Building Yourself will not tell you to go into this career, or that business. Opportunities change all the time. What the book will try to do is give you the perspective to make sound judgments. No book can make you a success—that's your job—but this book will give you the tools.

Building Yourself is divided into ten chapters, each following a keyword that begins with the letter “S”. Each chapter is further divided into ten short, stand‑alone numbered sections. Weave each of these 100 sections together to create the tapestry of your own success.

We first cover SAVVY—thinking skills, decision making, personal attitudes and goal setting. Learn the critical role autonomy plays in a successful life. Recognize the obstacles to free thinking; many of them are quite subtle. Manage the goal‑setting process. Appreciate the value of risk. Maximize your entire life with SAVVY.

Next: SWEAT. Every aspect of success, we find, in every corner of life, involves some form of work. Your attitude toward your own sweat, and what you expect in return, will affect what you actually get.

SKILLS are always important. Here you'll learn to learn, learn what to learn, learn to reject what others think you ought to learn in favor of those skills and disciplines that will best enrich your life—everything from business math to listening skills. SKILLS is an eye‑opener. It will change your ideas about how you educate yourself.

SOURCES is our next key word; how you acquire money. How to ask for and get top value for your efforts. How to set your earnings and value strategies early in life. How to perpetuate quality cash flow to assure your financial success.

SAVE is a natural follower to SOURCES; it covers handling your money to make it grow, running your personal financial life like a business, common misconceptions about money management, good fiscal habits to get into early.

It's a tough subject, but we cannot ignore SPOUSE—the person you choose to spend your life with. Mistakes in this area are very costly.

SOCIETY, and its expectations, is also an important area most other books don't cover. You'll learn how to work with society even if you don't agree with everything it represents. You'll also learn how to be truly moral, and enhance your success powers at the same time.

STRANGE does sound strange for a chapter title. But what appears to be strange and frightening in life may hold the key to your best personal growth. You'll learn to expect, welcome and manage change. You'll open yourself up to new people, concepts and ways of living.

We devote an entire chapter to STRENGTH—emotional, physical and spiritual. How to maximize your strength consistently through life. How to make stress work to your advantage. How to become a more powerful person through managed emotional and physical releases.

We end Building Yourself with the critical word SELECT. You'll learn how to recognize people with integrity, how to form strategic alliances, how to avoid the drainers and parasites in life.

Use This Book for You

So is a word better than a gift. Ecclesiastes 18:16

Since I cherish freedom of thought and freedom of choice, I would be horrified to hear that you were following the suggestions of Building Yourself blindly or automatically. That's not why I wrote this book. I did write it to excite people of high integrity into maximizing their potential in a world full of conflicting forces. If my book gets your mental juices flowing, if it helps you break through barriers you might not have recognized before, I will have done my job.

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