Creating Your Own Destiny

How to Get Exactly What You Want Out of Life and Work

Patrick Snow

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780470582022
• eBook ISBN: 9780470595718
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Put your own fate exactly where it belongs-in your hands

It is one of the great questions of life. Its a simple question, really, but it seems impossible for many to answer: Do we control our own destinies? 90 percent of people think and act as if their destiny is foreordained, while only about 10 percent believe in the capacity to change and act on it.

Creating Your Own Destiny explains and demonstrates to the majority how to dream, plan, and execute a better future-despite the challenges of the economy and life circumstances.

• Based on time-honored principles, theories, and case studies
• Provides a Success Road Map for all those people who are seeking to achieve success but who aren't satisfied with their careers.
• Written in an easy and accessible tone by Patrick Snow, who has been dubbed "the Dean of Destiny"

With the powerful and practical tools featured in this essential guide, you'll find yourself newly empowered and energized to achieve extraordinary results.

SECTION ONE

DREAM

The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.

—Frank Lloyd Wright¹

CHAPTER 1

Visualizing Your Dreams

Tell everyone what you want to do and someone will want to help you do it.

—W. Clement Stone¹

People who are successful in all areas of life—in their faith, family, business, sports—share a common trait: the ability to look into the future and visualize exactly what they want to accomplish. Here’s what St. Augustine said about visualization:

“Faith is believing what you do not see.
The reward of faith is to see what we believe.”²

Why is vision so important? Being able to visualize what it is that you want to do or accomplish paints a mental picture in your mind. Ever heard of the phrase, “Seeing is believing”? I’m sure you have. When we can “see” something, even in our minds, we’re much more likely to make it happen. Another way to think of this is by what author Alex Morrison once said:

“You must clearly see a thing in
your mind before you can do it.”³

Let me tell you one way how visualization has changed my life: I grew up the fourth of five kids in Owosso, Michigan, 90 miles northwest of Detroit. My father was a teacher; my mother a nurse. I was blessed with a loving childhood. I also was encouraged to pursue any worthy goal that I wanted.

Well, at an early age I decided I wanted to play professional football! I can remember as a young child watching the Pittsburgh Steelers win multiple Super Bowls. I used to put my number-32 Franco Harris jersey on my black lab, Bear, and then practice my tackling techniques—although mostly what I did was chase Bear around our backyard in the snow!

I was always small for my age but that didn’t stop me. I quickly began to live by former Alabama football coach Bear Bryant’s words (which I still believe to this day):

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight
but the size of the fight in the dog.”⁴

I went out for the football team in the fourth grade and was very lucky to receive some great coaching all the way through high school. Even though most of the time our high school had very average teams, my senior year I led the team in tackles, interceptions, and fumble recoveries; was named Most Valuable Player; and also was selected as first-team all-league linebacker.

Looking back on this time, I must say that this was no honorable feat since my senior year we sucked and finished 0-9. To make matters worse, on Halloween night in 1986, both our team and the opposing team had the same dismal record: winless at 0-8. Well, not only did we lose this game (named the “toilet bowl” by our few loyal fans), we lost in double overtime. Talk about a humbling experience. I learned that night that life is not fair and it never has been. I am sure that you can think of times in your life when you worked really hard for something and still fell short of your goal. The point is that we need to learn from our disappointments and move on by developing a “next” philosophy. In sales, I refer to it as, “Some will, some won’t, so what, next.”

My high school football earned me financial assistance to Albion College, a small Division III school in Southern Michigan, between Detroit and Chicago. It wasn’t the University of Michigan or Notre Dame, but I was convinced that I could continue to develop my football abilities and eventually make it to the pros. I could see it in my mind, so I knew that it could happen. But something happened during my freshman year at Albion, something that would change the course of my life forever.

Before training camp, I was so eager to make a good impression on the coaches that I over-trained. Several of my rib heads would “slip out,” that is, become dislocated from my spine. A trainer would easily pop them back in, so I continued to practice with the team for almost ten days. But things got worse as training camp progressed. We were practicing four times a day. At times I thought I couldn’t breathe, the pain was so bad. Also, I couldn’t raise my arms above my head. But I kept on, because football was my life.

And then, just like that, my football career was over. I finally listened to the team doctors who said that no amount of rehabilitation could prevent the injury from recurring. At first I was devastated. My dream since the fourth grade was gone, dissolved in an injury that couldn’t be stopped from happening again and again.

Fortunately, I was taking a philosophy class. One of the assigned books in particular fascinated me: Man’s Search for Himself, by Rollo May. The plot of this book, in a nutshell, is very similar to the William Wallace quote in this introduction: “We are all born free.” However, if we don’t act upon this freedom by cutting the psychological umbilical cord to our parents early in life, we will only go so far. To think of this another way, we’ll be tied like a dog on a chain in the front yard, only being able to go as far as the length of the chain allows us.

Once I understood this concept, I knew that my career-ending football injury wasn’t an ending at all—it was a beginning. I was free to go anywhere, to create a new vision for my life, to do new things. With the help of Rollo May, I learned that there were bigger things in life for me than the game of football.

My back injury gave me a chance to start over again; to pursue a new set of goals. Two of those goals were to become an inspirational speaker and published author while pursuing a career in the field of personal growth and development to help others succeed.

EXERCISE

Can you think of a time in your life that seemed to be an “ending”? What were your thoughts, feelings, and emotions at that time?

Did this “ending” lead to a new beginning? What happened?

Of the current challenges you face, are any of them disguised as an opportunity?

A NEW BEGINNING

I knew that I had only decided on Albion College because of my dream to one day play professional football. Now that my college football career had ended, staying at Albion didn’t make sense. I hadn’t yet had time to think much about my future and what I wanted to do, but I knew that I loved the mountains and I wanted to explore the western part of the United States. So I sent an application to the University of Montana and was accepted.

On January 1, 1988, as an 18-year-old college freshman who didn’t know a soul west of the Mississippi River, I jumped on a Greyhound bus with a $69 ticket to Montana. I didn’t know exactly where I was going with my life, but I was confident that I was moving in the right direction.

And do you know what? Transferring to the University of Montana was the best thing that ever happened to me. I not only graduated with a degree in political science, but, more importantly, I met a wonderful woman named Cheryl Monaghan—who later, I’m lucky to say, became my wife!

We now have two boys, Samuel and Jacob, and established careers: Cheryl as a prosecuting attorney for King County in Seattle, and myself with my speaking, coaching, writing pursuits, and a life dedicated to helping others succeed.

Let me say this: regardless of how exciting it would have been to play professional football and maybe even win a Super Bowl ring, it could never equal the love I have for my family. My experience also has led me to be a firm believer that people must never set their sights on only one goal. It’s too limiting. Instead, each of us should create a destiny that we’re moving toward, a series of people and places as well as milestones that we want to accomplish in our lives.

Since I can’t play in the NFL, I have a new goal: to own my own NFL franchise by age 50. How is that for visualizing a dream? I will have to raise close to $2 billion to achieve this vision, but I have roughly ten years to do so. I will be awarded an NFL expansion team. My team will be called the Hawaii Tiger Sharks and will play its home games in Honolulu starting by the fall of 2018. If I can’t get a fan base in Hawaii, then my other plan is to purchase the Seattle Seahawks or start an expansion NFL team in Los Angeles. If you are interested in being a part of this NFL franchise and ownership group, I am currently accepting investment capital at the address listed on my web site. Depending on your thought process, you are either roaring with laughter, or buying into my vision. Either way, these are the kinds of visions that you must develop in your life. Your visions are invisible and possibly unrealistic to others, but they must become visible in your mind and heart so that you can transform the impossible into the probable.

I also have a goal to sell one million copies of this book. I don’t know exactly how I am going to accomplish these goals, but I will write about the how later in this chapter.

After reading these last few paragraphs, you may be thinking that I have an ego the size of Texas. I can assure you that this is not the case. I believe there is a big difference between having a big ego and being self-confident! My parents raised me to believe that I can accomplish anything in life, if I work hard enough at it. My attitude of eternal optimism can be blamed on them. As a result of being raised this way, I do not believe I have a large ego, but I may have the highest level of self-confidence of anyone you have ever known! There is a big difference between these two character traits.

If you further developed your level of self-confidence and stretched your mind to believe in the power of your visions, what could you achieve in life? Your vision may not include becoming a best-selling author or owning an NFL team, but your vision is uniquely important to you and that is why you are such a special person. Focus on your uniqueness instead of allowing societal pressures to have you conform to becoming like everyone else. To set yourself free, you must develop faith in yourself and believe in your visions like never before.

The point about my new beginning is that if I did not have the ability to dream big and envision what my future could be, then I never would have had the courage to board that bus to Montana. Because I was able to see the invisible, I achieved the impossible—a wonderful family, a successful career, and an exciting future.

I challenge you to develop your own visualization skills and see your biggest dreams in your mind’s eye. Later in this chapter, I will show you how to turn your dreams ...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• SECTION ONE - DREAM
• SECTION TWO - PLAN
• SECTION THREE - EXECUTE
• SECTION FOUR - SOAR
• A FINAL NOTE
• NOTES
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• ABOUT THE SNOW GROUP
• BEST-SELLER PUBLISHING COACHING
• BOOK PATRICK SNOW TO SPEAK AT YOUR NEXT EVENT
• INDEX