Finally! the Stuff You Really Need to Improve Your Life

© 2013 Paul Skornik. All rights reserved.

Preliminary editing: Sarah Barbour, Aeroplane Media, Oregon

Content editing & consulting: Misty Stiles, Aurora, Colorado

Illustrations & cover art (except optical illusion in chapter 16):

Mike Ferrin, Kansas City, Missouri

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/08/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-1821-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-1820-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-1822-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013916786

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 You Must Always Acknowledge Your Reality

2 To Really Change Your Life, Change Your Thinking

3 Start by Understanding and Believing the Ten Truisms

4 Truism #1: People Often Corrupt Their Own Thinking

5 Truism #2: Believing Murphy’s Laws Causes Needless Problems

6 Truism #3: People Need to Accept the Consequences of Their Decisions

7 Truism #4: Childhood Left Uncorrected Causes People to Fail

8 Truism #5: Sometimes, the Path of Least Resistance Just Isn’t

9 Truism #6: Every Relationship Needs to Be Mutually Beneficial

10 Truism #7: Some People Achieve, but Most People Just Get By

11 Truism #8: One Single Factor Determines Every Person’s Income

12 Truism #9: If You Hurt Someone, They’ll Probably Hurt You Back

13 Truism #10: Our Values Are Not Everyone’s Values—and That’s Okay

14 The Single Common Trait in All of the Truisms

15 How to Deal with Your Expectations

16 How to Deal with Other People’s Expectations

Postscript

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife, Johanna. She was my friend, my confidant, and my motivation for thirty-eight years. She changed my life more profoundly than I could ever put into words. She was everything to me.

Without a doubt, it was the darkest time in my life when I held her in my arms as she took her last breaths.

Our amazing relationship ended quietly at 11:38 p.m. on June 18, 2012, when she was finally granted the peace and rest that she so dearly earned. But her departure left an indescribable emptiness in my life. I was chosen to stay behind, but the anguish is unimaginably cruel.

My memories of her and the love and values that we shared will stay with me until we’re together again.

I might be wrong, but I believe:

The longer we believe something to be true, the less likely we are to question whether that belief is actually true and whether we should continue to believe it.

Not everything we’ve come to believe to be true is actually true, and no matter our age, we should question our own beliefs and convictions as often as we question other people’s beliefs and convictions.

Just as it’s not true that working longer and harder will get us more free time, it’s also not true that we’re always smarter than most of the people around us (even when we’re pretty sure that’s true).

I might be wrong, but I believe:

Most people are not satisfied with mediocrity from others, but those same people try to defend it when it’s a result of their own actions.

Learn to recognize mediocrity when it comes from you just as you recognize it when it comes to you from other people.

Left unchecked, mediocrity infects our lives and becomes the fundamental measurement that defines us and our character.

When you see your own mediocrity,

don’t defend it. Learn to hate it.

Apologize for it, and then go back and fix it whenever possible.

You’ll be a much better person for doing so.

I might be wrong, but I believe:

Respect is not gained as a result of being in a position of authority or from physical dominance or intellectual superiority or any other outward advantage.

You can no more gain a person’s respect by demanding that they respect you than you can gain their love by demanding that they love you.

Genuine respect, like genuine love, comes over time as a result of relentlessly being more concerned for someone else than you are concerned for yourself.

You earn respect by way of unending care and compassion. There is no other way to have someone respect you or love you.

Acknowledgments

It’s important that I don’t take full credit for this book. I need to recognize and thank the people who helped make it possible.

For two years, my son, Mike, helped me take care of my wife, his mother. By giving up his personal time to help me with my responsibilities, he gave me the time to work on this book.

Lenn Pritchard has been a friend who I’ve looked to for advice for the past thirty-five years. He gave me the first little piece of undeniable truth that became my first truism, which ultimately evolved into this book.

Steve Weber is a very calm and rational friend who listens intently and speaks when he has something insightful to offer. He gave me another of the pieces of wisdom that further motivated me to write.

Pastor Paul Gregory was part of the Cornerstone Hospice organization that assisted me during the last months of my wife’s life. I truly benefited from every one of his visits. He’s an extraordinary man who gave me guidance during a very defining time in my life.

Troy Nyquist and Tom Maffuccio are two good friends who relentlessly motivated me by making me feel like I’d be letting them down if I didn’t finish this book.

Many other people shared their wisdom with me and kept pushing me when I needed it. To all of them, as well as to the very special people I mentioned above, thank you!

Introduction

Literary experts tell authors that a typical person reads the first few pages of a book to decide if it interests them, so the first few pages need to have the hook that gets people to buy it. However, I didn’t write this book with the hope that it would be part of Oprah’s Book Club. In fact, I didn’t start out writing a book at all. I was writing out information that I had used to improve my life with the idea that I could share it with family, friends, and anyone else who might want to use it to improve his or her own life. Family and friends encouraged me to give complete explanations with examples, and all of that became this book.

So you might be thinking, That’s it? You have no formal education or qualifications to write this book? Then your next thought might be, How can you tell people how to improve their lives when you don’t even know them and everyone needs different things to improve their lives?

To answer the first question, no, I’m not an elite person with pretentious claims to being an authority on the subject of self-improvement. I simply took the time to identify why I really and truly wasn’t reaching my goals. I figured it out, I made some serious changes so that I could reach my goals, and my life improved dramatically. I’m simply passing those learned lessons on to help others make their lives infinitely more enjoyable. Nobody needs special qualifications or a seven-year degree to help other people.

As for the second question regarding the differing needs of people, although I’m offering to help you improve your life, I don’t need to know exactly what will make you happy. This book is about how to achieve whatever you want rather than about telling you what you want. Besides, right now, you’re probably not certain what it would take to make you happy anyway, and that’s okay. What’s important is that you want to improve your life.

However, if someone asked you what it would take to make you happy, maybe you’d say, Ten million dollars, but, really? Are you going to be unhappy until you have ten million dollars in the bank? Of course not. That isn’t really what it would take to make you happy. You might be very happy with as little as having a six-figure income and a net worth of a million or two dollars, time to pursue personal interests, fewer problems and more really good friends, and a great relationship with someone special. Regardless of what you require to be happy; if you haven’t been able to reach those goals, you’re not alone. This book will help you understand why, despite your efforts, you aren’t able to get what you want, and it will help you understand what you really need to do so that you will have what you want.

Personally, my needs were simple. I wanted more money and fewer problems, and I’m sure most people would at least start with those same things. Well, it took a while for me to figure out what was causing so many problems in my life and eliminate those causes. But once I got things corrected—I ended up owning a successful business and having a net worth of over a million dollars, a lot fewer problems, a bunch of really good friends, and a great 38-year marriage. I also noticed that many people continue to make the same mistakes that I had made, and I could see that what I did to improve my life would improve their lives, too.

Average people like me can have peaceful and rewarding lives. You can dramatically improve your life with or without a college degree. In fact, a college degree doesn’t guarantee anything. We’ve all witnessed well-educated people achieving great success and well-educated people failing to achieve the quality of life they want. A higher education doesn’t prevent anyone from making mistakes that cause them to struggle through life.

The solutions to improving our lives have always been right in front of us—I didn’t invent them. I didn’t win the lottery or win millions of dollars in a lawsuit, I don’t have an impressive diploma, and I didn’t patent the paper clip or some other unusual thing that you can’t replicate. I just figured stuff out, and then sorted all the information so that it makes sense. Then I wrote it all in one place so that you can see how it all ties together and how it will work for you, too. When you read this book and understand the concepts and solutions, you’ll easily see just how truly effective these solutions will be in improving your life. Dramatic changes can begin before you’ve even finished reading it.

Life is short, and you deserve to enjoy it as much as possible. I figured out how to live a very enjoyable, comfortable life, and the same methods can help you enjoy a rewarding life, too.

The fact is; I worked harder to improve my life than you’ll have to work to improve yours. Why? Because I didn’t have a book to explain it all to me—I had to figure things out. For you, it’s all written out in this book, and it’s the stuff you really need to improve your life.

1

You Must Always Acknowledge Your Reality

If you think that you can’t have what you want out of life because you lack a fancy diploma or something else is missing, you are wrong! I never believed that I couldn’t have success, and you shouldn’t believe that either. If you’re reading this book, that’s proof of your desire to improve your life, and that’s everything you need. If you don’t succeed, it’s your own fault.

I want to start this chapter by telling you that, while this chapter is about your metal state, it’s not about holding crystals to your forehead and burning incense. Don’t fight the concepts that I’m going to explain—it will make sense.

As a newly married young adult, I felt that I was experiencing far too many disappointments, misunderstandings, and frustrations in my life. With very few exceptions, every one of those struggles came as a totally unanticipated surprise. Regardless of the nature of my struggles, I thought I had too many of them to deal with. Yes, the definition of too many is different for everyone, but for me, each of those frustrating situations was unpleasant, and dealing with them weekly or even monthly was far too often.

My wife and I hated those setbacks and difficult situations because they were unpleasant and often resulted in bickering and blaming. Bickering and blaming does little to solve problems, and doesn’t prevent the problems from happening again. Mostly, we both disliked arguing with anyone—regardless of who eventually won the argument. We preferred calm, pleasant, and productive relationships with each other and with other people. We also had too many financial struggles. We really wanted to be able to pay all of our bills on time and have lots of money left to do whatever we wanted to do. I became very motivated to figure out how we could permanently eliminate most of these frustrating situations that caused life to be so difficult. Even to me, those goals sounded like they were very difficult to reach. But I was determined to get as close to it as possible because struggling, arguing, being disappointed, and going without sucked. I knew that I didn’t want to live my whole life like that.

I figured it out and I achieved my goals, and looking back, it now all makes sense, and that’s why I decided to write it out for my family and friends.

Understand Your Problems

When people are faced with seemingly insurmountable problems, it’s common for them to blame other people that are involved in the problems and then part ways. That happens with friends, employment situations, business associations, and all other types of relationships. Regardless of the relationship, separation without resolution usually means that the people either continue to struggle with life alone or find someone new with whom they’ll share their struggles. They don’t bother to understand the causes of the problems, so they eventually encounter most of the same problems again. Thankfully, my wife and I acknowledged that, except for a few rare situations, divorce doesn’t resolve most of the problems. Divorce just gives people separate addresses and more expenses while they continue to fight about the same money, the same children, and all of the other unresolved problems they still have. My wife and I knew that our marriage was not the cause of our problems, so common sense told us that ending our marriage wouldn’t solve our problems. There had to be a real solution.

Eventually, I figured out the first step: Don’t try to deal with your problems. It’s stupid and futile and doesn’t improve your life.

Don’t try to deal with your problems? Well, I don’t mean that you should ignore your problems. I mean that spending your entire life trying to deal with problems is like signing up for a lifetime of playing Whac-a-Mole. No thanks! Don’t stand there beating the moles as fast as you can for your entire life. The easiest way to end that struggle is to reach behind the machine and unplug it. The cord is the source of the problem, and that mallet is a crappy solution. The first step you must take to improve your life is to stop dealing with the same types of problems over and over. Dealing with problems is reactionary—that’s not what you want to do.

Reactive solutions to an existing problem are only slightly helpful; they don’t change what happened or explain why things aren’t already how you want them to be.

The first step to developing a viable and permanent method to solving your problems is to first figure out why the undesirable situations exist and why better situations don’t. A reactive solution is like mopping up a puddle of water that keeps appearing on the floor in front of the sink. Wiping up the water every once in a while does deal with the problem of water on the floor, but you’re going to keep wiping up puddles until you find out where the water is coming from and fix that. Obviously, that’s a situation that we’d normally handle properly, but you need to understand that successful people don’t deal with problems—they identify the sources of their problems and then eliminate those sources. You need to, find the causes of the problems, and deal with those causes to prevent the problems.

How do you find the causes for all of your problems? Sometimes it’s easy to find the cause of a problem and sometimes it takes some effort. The most important thing is for you to believe is that the only way to improve your life is to understand that you need to stop dealing with repeating problems, and to do that you must look at the problems honestly so that you can identify their causes. Remember; blaming other people doesn’t prevent the problem from returning—and neither does ignoring problems. We all know that if we ignore problems, they rarely solve themselves; they usually get worse, and we see them continually until we do something differently. Sometimes, problems can’t be anticipated—they come into people’s lives and all we can do is deal with the consequences. My wife and I were no different. We found no obvious or easy way to deal with those situations either, but we knew that we were going to experience the same problems until we did something different. In those situations, all we can do is make sure we prepare for the unexpected. That might mean having some money in reserve, or buying better insurance instead of a better vacation. It’s amazing how much smaller big problems are when we have the resources to deal with the problem. Big problems and unexpected problems are usually only problems