THE FIVE MAJOR PIECES OF THE LIFE PUZZLE BY JIM ROHN

Quick Summary

In this book, Rohn discusses the 5 core areas around life: Philosophy, Attitude, Activity, Results, and Lifestyle.

Life changing!

Key Insights

Philosophy

• Desperation and Inspiration are what drive change.
• Think of your brain like computer – what you put in stays forever.
• You may only see the trees, but your friends see the forest.
• For a better life, you must first become a better person.
• Battle against neglect.

Attitude

• Today brings to each of us 1,440 minutes; 86,400 ticks of the clock. Both the poor and the wealthy have the same 24 hours of opportunity. Time favors no one.
• Just as the body instinctively knows how to the miracle of health, the mind instinctively knows how to perform the miracle of wealth.
• Don’t underestimate the power of influence.
• No other person on earth has dominion over our attitude.
• If we care at all about ourselves, then we must accept full responsibility for our own feelings.

Activity

• Parable of Talents – get what you deserve – not need.
• The Bible offers this philosophy about the ratio of labor to rest: six days of labor and one day of rest.
• The punishment for excessive rest is mediocrity.

Results

• Results are the harvest that comes from our past efforts.
• Opportunity approaches, arrives, and then quickly passes.
• Our future happiness is seldom the product of any one harvest.
• The answer to the good life lies in becoming more than we currently are so that we can attract more than we currently have.
• Our objective must be to work harder on ourselves than we work on anything else.
• Results do not respond to need. Results respond to effort… to labor… to activity.
• Doing less than our best has a disastrous effect. It erodes self-confidence and diminishes our self-worth.
• It seems that every life form on this planet strives toward its maximum potential… except human beings.

Lifestyle

• Many have learned to earn well, but they have not yet learned to live well.
• We don’t have to be rich to live richly.
• The word “tip” is an abbreviation of the phrase “To Insure Promptness,” which implies that the gratuity should be given before we receive the service, not after.
• Lifestyle is really nothing more than the art of doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
• Lifestyle is where we go, what we do, and how we feel once we are there. Lifestyle is how we dress, what we drive, and the type of entertainment we choose to enjoy.
• Lifestyle means designing ways to live uniquely.
• Lifestyle is not a reward for all of our hard effort; it is a way of making our hard effort more rewarding, more meaningful and ultimately more productive.
• Happiness is as much a cause of success as it is a result of success, and we can begin to experience happiness whenever we wish, regardless of our current circumstances.
• Lifestyle is learning to be wherever you are.

Personal Application

1. Be like the painter. Know your colors.
2. Develop a “magnificent obsession”

Meaningful Quotes (Optional)

• “Small disciplines lead to great accomplishments.”
• “What we think determines what we believe; what we believe influences what we choose; what we choose defines what we are; and what we are attracts what we have.”
• “Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. We do not fail overnight. Failure is the inevitable result of an accumulation of poor thinking and poor choices. To put it more simply, failure is nothing more than a few errors in judgment repeated every day.”
• “A goal that is casually pursued is not a goal; at best it is a wish, and wishes are little more than self-delusion. Wishes are an anesthetic to be used by the unambitious, a narcotic that dulls their awareness of their own desperate condition.”
• “It is better to aim the spear at the moon and strike the than to aim at the eagle and strike only a rock.”
• “Today is yesterday’s tomorrow. The question is what did we do with its opportunity? All too often we will waste tomorrow as we wasted yesterday, and as we are wasting today.”
• “We are now full participants in the game of life and our opponent is human mediocrity.”
• “The final result of your life will be determined by whether you made too many errors in judgment, repeated every day, or whether you dedicated your life to a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.”