When my daughter was younger, she was an avid collector of “The Babysitter Club” books, in fact some of the covers fell off because they had been read so often, so when we made our regular trips to the USA or Canada to her delight we were able to find new copies and one off editions of “The Babysitters Club” books that would never have graced the bookshelves in the UK, and therefore never have brought such moments of joy into her life.
On most of those trips, my daughter managed to accomplish two things, one was she now knew adventures, characters and stories about her “Babysitter Club” friends that most of the other UK based fans never would (giving her the slight edge )and secondly she was also able to position herself as an authority or an expert having amassed a huge collection of knowledge about “her niche” in the process.
On those same trips, I picked up my first personal development book, “The Magic of Thinking Big” by David Schwartz and started writing my first “journal” in a Mickey Mouse Notebook (literally a picture of Mickey Mouse sitting in a Director’s Chair from Walt Disney World) which is still a great source of inspiration today.
I can see from page one of that journal everybody’s “starting point” because of the entries I have made, picking out choice quotations, snippets of paragraphs so that I would always have reference to them forever. These were my “diamonds”, choice pieces of wisdom that I never knew existed until I opened those pages for the first time.
Page one of my journal reads, what three qualities millionaires possess:-
1. A Passion To Succeed
2. Almost Obsessive Attention To Detail
3. Their Minds Are Always Alert
The note underneath that opening statement way back in 1999 was “Losing belief in yourself leaves doubts, you’re not born that way.”
In those days (pre-broadband) the ability to just type on a keypad the name of a book, be able to buy it within minutes and have it shipped to your door the next day did not exist and I am so thankful that I began my journey of personal development a decade ago, what if it had never begun?
I cannot convey how enriching and rewarding it is to be a life long student of personal development, constantly and continually dipping in to the magnificence of resources we have to share knowledge with today. Yet in the days where so much is now available we seem to be less inclined to seek it out. Perhaps it has been replaced by the need to be able to get to “The Hidden Level of Platform 3″ in the latest Computer Game?
I cannot bear to think what my life would be like today if we had not stumbled across those Acres of Diamonds called Bookstores that are literally at your fingertips online if you wish to take your first step, or do yourself an enormous favour if your first step has already been taken but you haven’t “exercised properly” in a little while, re-visit the “Wells of Wisdom” if you have them gathering dust on your bookshelf – and understand one of the Laws that Andy Andrews writes about in his book “The Traveller’s Gift” is “I will seek wisdom.”
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