Dan Vega's

The main reason people either thrive or find it hard to survive is the patterns we learn to follow. When you study successful people, you will find many commonalities in their daily routine. I have found at least fifty attributes that all successful people share. I have also found that unsuccessful people share many commonalities in their day-to-day routines.

Everyone stumbles onto a pattern--most of which are learned by observation. Let’s say you wake up around 6:00 am. You have your cornflakes around 7. Then you get ready in order to start work at 8. You perform certain duties at work, and then at noon you head to one of your three favorite eateries. Upon returning back to work, you resume your duties and look forward to the end of the work day.  You arrive home between 6 or 7 pm and enjoy a nice meal around 7:30. The kids are off to bed by 9, and you relax and enjoy a little television before retiring at 11. Everyone has a pattern. Regardless of what your pattern looks like, once we establish one, we love to follow it.

The problem that is every day, week, month, and year we follow this pattern, we leave a very fine filament, just as a spider leaves on a web.  After just several weeks or months on this pattern, we have built something that is as strong as a steel-binding cable. So now we pick up a book or go to a seminar and meet this “out of the box thinker.” We are motivated and inspired to change our lives forever in a positive way!  We are so pumped that we might even say, “That’s it! I am done with this old life! Starting tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life!”

With good intentions we jump ship, abandon the old life, and with high hopes look forward to a new way of living--enriched with success and full of happiness. Sadly, within a week or two, our trusty steel cable jerks us off the new pattern and binds us to the old way of life--the life where the results were not enough, nor were they the ones we wanted. I know this because I spent years on that cable--bound to a pattern I did not want. This wasn’t a lack of being motivated or having a good work ethic, either. I have always been a good worker, and I read numerous motivational books that kept me motivated. My efforts were not enough, however, to break the cable and allow me to achieve long-term success. Eventually, I found a way to break free. You can too.

Every problem that people deal with, every problem that I am dealing with, every problem that you have right now--every problem that people experience (besides a few sicknesses and death) can all be traced back to one of two problems. Here they are: it is either a lack of trust or a lack of discipline. Everything can be stemmed back to one or the other: a lack of trust or a lack of discipline. That's it! That's the problem, and everything else is symptomatic. Your "problems" are just symptoms. The reason people are in a tough financial situation, where they don’t want to be--is that they have either a lack of trust or a lack of discipline. Trust me; money is never the problem.