What would you say is the most valuable piece of real estate in the world? Do you think we’d find it in Malibu? Manhattan? Monte Carlo? NO! I’ll give you a clue; it’s the most valuable, and also the smallest.

The most valuable piece of real estate in the world is the small space between your two ears. It is most valuable because that small plot houses your brain—your mind—which defines who you are as a human being. It’s where your life really takes place. It’s SO valuable it’s actually priceless.

Now, you may not own your company, your car, your dwelling, your computer, maybe even the clothes on your back, but you DO own that piece of property. It is ALL YOURS to develop as YOU want! Remember that only YOU can decide what will and will not be stored on YOUR property. Please, be vigilant!

Your mind is your most vital, most precious personal asset—take extremely good care of it!

Dr. Harvey B. Simon made this interesting observation in a recent issue of a prominent medical journal: "For most of us, health depends not on who we are, but on how we live. The body you have at 20 depends on your genes, but the body you have at 40, 60, 80 is the body you deserve, the body that reflects your behavior."

Hmmm... Well, I’m not a doctor, but my studies and my life experiences have taught me that we certainly could take these words and apply them quasi verbatim to the mind as well: "For most of us, our mind is a reflection not of who we are, but on how we live. The mind you have at 20 is in great part the result of environment, peers influence, education, family life, etc... but at 40, 60, 80 it’s the product of your own personal (and professional) development (or lack of)."

As a wise philosopher brilliantly observed, "Everybody is self-made...but only the successful will admit to it."

Speaking of successful people, my very smart sister Cristiane (who has two master’s degrees) told me recently that she takes courses every semester to feed the part of her mind that is not fed at work or at home. She needs that food for her mind. What about you?

People feed their car (gas), their furnace (wood), their plants, their pets, their bodies... What about the most important part of you, your mind? A human being is essentially a think-tank, a mind (95%) in a body (5%). So, if you don't feed the 95% of you...

"The mind grows by what it feeds on " once wrote J.G. Holland. Let’s hear what some other successful people had to say on this topic...

"Create a personal learning agenda. Identify important skills and areas of expertise for your success and ‘go to school’: get the best books, audios, videos, talk to the best people, and take the best courses and seminars available." Mark Sanborn

"You’re not automatically educated when you get out of college, education is a process, not a package. Its goal is not the acquisition of a specific set of skills or body of knowledge, but a maturity of mind and emotions that enables one to be a better person as well as a better engineer, lawyer or scientist." T.T. James

Are you going to treat education as a continuing and ongoing pursuit, or are you going to neglect the growth of your mental capacity? The world is changing at a rapid pace. What are you doing to keep up with advancements in technology and information? Knowledge creates value. Expanding your knowledge base expands and increases your value to your career, value to your family, and value to yourself. Education opens new doors. As you expand your thinking, you expand your possibilities. Do you have a consistent and ongoing plan for continuing education?

"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." Derek Bok

I’m not an experienced gardener, though I’ve successfully grown tomatoes and delphiniums in the past, but I do seem to remember that to grow properly, they need good soil, water, sun, and nutrients. And some TLC. They don’t do well if you plant them in rocks, keep them in the shade, feed them Styrofoam® pellets, and sprinkle them with turpentine. Tomatoes can’t grow in these conditions, and neither does the mind. It needs food, light, laughter, ideas, challenges, and TLC in the form of support, and encouragement. And books.

"Reading is to the mind what exercising is to the body." Sir Richard Steele

"A room without a book is a body without a soul." Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Books are not men and yet they are alive. They are man’s memory and his aspiration, the link between his present and his past, the tools he builds with." Stephen V. Benet

"The greatest of all avenues to learning—to wisdom, adventure, pleasure, insight, to understanding human nature, understanding ourselves and our world and our place in it—is in reading books. Read for life, all your life. Nothing ever invented provides such sustenance, such infinite reward for time spent, as a good book. Read to your heart’s content. Let one book lead to another. They nearly always do. Read about places you’ve never been. Read books that changed history. Read those books you know you’re supposed to have read and imagine as dreary. A classic may be defined as a book that stays long in print, and a book stays long in print only because it is exceptional. Why exclude the exceptional from your experience? And when you read a book you love—a book you feel has enlarged the experience of being alive—then spread the word." David McCullough, winner of two Pulitzer prizes

In a letter to John Adams in 1815, Thomas Jefferson wrote "I cannot live without books." Someone else said that a man without books is like a king without money.

"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, ‘lighthouses erected in the sea of time.’ They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print." Barbara Tuchman

"Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting." Aldous Huxley

"Read books, listen to tapes, attend seminars—they are decades of wisdom reduced to invaluable hours." Mark Victor Hansen

Friends and business colleagues, make the development of your mind a daily priority and a never-ending journey. Or like bestselling author and speaker-extraordinaire Vince Poscente puts it, "Work on yourself. Better yourself. Raise the bar personally and it will be raised professionally. " We’re challenging you to learn something new and useful EVERY day. The gauntlet has been thrown!

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ThINK it...

Here are three very important points I made in my book Milk & Cookies For Success :

1-The most valuable piece of real estate in the world (also the tiniest) is the small space between your two ears—that small plot that houses your brain (your mind) which defines who you are as a human being.

2-YOU (and only you) own that piece of property—it is ALL YOURS to develop as YOU want!

3-The mind is only as strong as its weakest think (like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link).

I also made these two recommendations:

1-Your mind is your most vital, most precious personal asset—take extremely good care of it!

2-Your mind is your most important, yet most underutilized personal asset—WORK IT TO THE MAX! And how do you work your great mind? Easy: thinkthinkthinkthinkthinkthinkthinkthinkthinkthink...

"Thinking is the hardest work there is—which is probably the reason why so few engage in it."
Henry Ford

"Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV,
it’s a shame more people don’t switch over to it."
Robert M. Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

It is true that thinking is hard work, but it is equally true that good, prolonged, intense, creative thinking can be interesting, invigorating, and very productive. Especially for business people.

Never lose sight of the facts that, as business philosopher Brian Tracy likes to point out,

"Tomorrow’s achievements are determined by today’s thoughts. Your ability to generate constructive ideas is, to all intents and purposes, infinite. Every advance in human life begins with an IDEA in the mind of ONE person."

Here’s more from Mr. Tracy (from Universal Laws of Success and Achievement)

"It’s ideas that YOU generate that enable you to solve your problems, overcome your obstacles and achieve your goals. Ideas ARE the keys to your future. It’s hardly possible for you to achieve anything of note except to the degree to which you think and do something new and different from what has been done before. All it takes is a small innovation to lay the foundation for a fortune and great success in life.

Ideas are a mode of transportation, a vehicle that you can use to take you from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. There’s virtually no obstacle in life that you cannot overcome with the power of thought, with the power of creative concentration, with the power of ideas! Your job is simply to generate as many ideas as possible, to evaluate them carefully against your current goals and then to take action on them.

Napoleon Hill said that, ‘Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.’ Your mind is structured in such a way that you cannot at the same time have an idea and not also have the ability to bring that idea to reality. The very existence of an idea in your conscious mind means that you have within you the capacity to achieve it.

Virtually every important turning point in your life will be marked by an idea that you’ve had at that time and that moment. ALL great changes in human life and human destiny begin with an idea that causes you to see things differently and take actions you would not have taken in the absence of that idea. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, whatever your situation, you have the creative capacity in the form of an infinite ability to generate ideas to solve any problem and achieve any goal."

Brilliant man, that Mr. Tracy. Speaking of brilliant, here’s an apropos observation from Mark Victor Hansen, the co-creator of the Chicken Soup For The Soul phenomenon and one of the most creative minds in the business world today:

"An idea is the one thing that takes nothing and turns it into something and it’s THE ONE THING that’s everything."

"Human history is in essence a history of ideas."
H. G. Wells

It ALL starts in the mind... as Mae West once observed "Everything starts in the mind. Knowing what you want is the first step in getting it." Ideas, ideas, ideas... lots of ideas! Because as Emile Chartier wisely pointed out "Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it’s the only one you have." Don’t let that happen to you. Follow Linus Pauling’s (two-time Nobel Prize winner) recipe for (business) success: "The best way to get a good idea is to get LOTS of ideas!"

So use your mind 24/7 to produce ideas, and more ideas, and even more ideas! The more ideas... the more BUSINESS SUCCESS!

...INK it...

And when you get an idea, or an INKling to do something, don’t just thINK it, INK it!

Always, always, always be ready to capture an idea that’ll pop into your head. They always show up unexpectedly. Some inventions—Velcro® for example—are the results of a single observation that was recorded on the spot and studied later. Never, never, never be caught without Pen & Paper (P&P) or your portable recorder or personal digital assistant, whatever works for you.

I’m always "ready." I carry P&P when I go jogging, biking, shopping. I have P&P by the bedside so I’m ready, whether I’m in bed to sleep (and dream), or to… you know … (my exes could tell you funny stories about that … well, funny now, a bit frustrating at the time).

But great ideas and a-ha! moments don’t care what else you’re ‘busy’ doing. They just show up! Be ready. You never know when the sky will open up and a beam of wisdom will descend upon you.

"Why is it I get my best ideas in the morning while I’m shaving?"
Albert Einstein

I have P&P when I watch TV or movies—you can find diamonds there (yes, even on TV…). That’s how I was able to capture many of the quotations people find in my books and articles (and possibly nowhere else), including this one by mathematician John Nash (Russell Crowe) in the movie A Beautiful Mind:

"Perhaps it is good to have a beautiful mind,
but an even greater gift is to discover a beautiful thought."

And when you DO discover one, WRITE IT DOWN!

"Creativity is more than painting, music, poetry; it is the ability to solve problems, develop unique strategies and contribute to relationships." said the late Sam Walton, founder and driving force behind Wal-Mart, who had a simple strategy: get out, look around, carry a notepad.

"I'm a great believer in writing things down. I know that if I don't write them down I'll never remember them all. That has nothing to do with age —I've been good at forgetting things since kindergarten."
Peter Urs Bender

I could not agree more with Sam & Peter (above) and Roger (below). Don’t trust your memory! And, don’t use your mind, that wonderful computer-that-never-crashes, to store information. Think of your fantasterrific mind as pots and pans. You use pots and pans to cook food (boil, fry, sauté). You use storage containers (like Tupperware®) to keep your spices, rice, flour, etc. Imagine if you were to try and prepare a meal and all your pots and pans were full of stuff. Not practical. Same thing for the thinking process. Keep your ideas and facts stored on paper (in binders or journals), or in your computer. Keep your mind free of clutter—tabula rasa—so it can think unencumbered, process ideas, create plans, and develop strategies.

"A new discovery, a new idea, a new piece of information can come at any time. When it does, be ready to record it. Before I started this practice, I’d get these incredible thoughts —they’d light up my mind—and I’d say to myself, "I’ll write these down later when I have a pen and paper." Two hours later, when I had the appropriate tools, I had forgotten the idea. Now I write all of my ideas down, and at the end of the day or week, I comb through them to see what I’ve written. Even if 80% of them were trivial or repetitive, at least I’ve saved the gems." Roger von Oech

Don’t just think it, INK it! Because as the Chinese proverb teaches, "The palest ink is stronger than the most powerful memory."

...and INKubate it!

Ok, so you just generated some great ideas for your current business, a new business, or project, or for your personal life. And you wrote them all down. Bravo! Now what?

"INK it, then let it INKubate for a while." That’s the advice Nancy Morris gave her participants in one of her thought-provoking teleclasses. "It’s like when you make bread," she said. "You have to leave it alone for a while and give it a chance to rise on its own. If you poke at it before it’s time … POUF! It goes flat. But if you go away and come back later, you can turn that dough into just about any shape you want. Be patient."

Creative thinker Ed Bernacki once remarked that, "Not all ideas are the same. Some are seeds of great ideas while others are already fully developed. Recognize the stage of development rather than passing judgment too early."

You gotta give it time... or as Doug King wisely advised: "Learn to pause ... or nothing worthwhile will catch up to you."

"Send your inner judge on a holiday. Give your ideas time to percolate before assessing them."
Jim Canterucci

Instead of trying to solve a problem by trying to solve it, sometimes letting go and turning the problem over to your subconscious can be the best strategy of all. By putting the idea on your mental back burner, you allow three beneficial things to happen.

First, you put your problem in perspective. Spend all the time you need to gather the relevant information, then go fishing for a couple of days, and let the ideas percolate their way to the top. Focusing on the problem could be compared to having your nose on the TV screen and seeing only one ‘dot’. But if you can back away from the situation, you’ll see the big picture that results when all the dots—the ideas—come together.

Second, when you work on a problem, you plant a seed in your mind. When you pause, this seed continues to grow. It sends its roots out in your gray matter and makes new connections. Third, when you return to a problem after INKubating, you’ll probably approach it with somewhat different assumptions. Sometimes delaying action—INKubation—will bring you more information. This is food for thought...

I will let prolific writer and renowned speaker Sam Silverstein have the last words on INKubating:

"Have you tapped your mental creativity, or do you choose to allow sameness to limit your opportunities? Creativity is the ability to generate new and innovative answers to questions or solutions to problems that, when implemented, will move you closer to realizing your vision of the future. Creativity is an ability that ALL of us share. The difference between individuals who display creativity and those who don’t is the ability to encourage creative impulses and then take action on creative thoughts. Creative thoughts are only beneficial when evaluated and implemented. By asking questions, exposing yourself to a continuous flow of thoughts and ideas, and allowing this input to incubate, you will find yourself generating your own creative ideas and solutions."

You know, someone said, "A day without laughter is a wasted day." I agree. I also feel that, "A day without a new idea or improvement on an existing one IS a wasted day." Fortunately for me, such a day is rare. And I certainly wish that for you too: days filled with laughter, creativity, and ideas galore—they are the keys to your BUSINESS SUCCESS!

Daniel St-Jean

NOTE: This text was originally published in a book I wrote that was released in September 2004 and that soon after became a Canadian bestseller. It’s entitled

A First Serving of Milk & Cookies for Success

You can purchase a copy on our other web site at
www.your-marketing-tools-for-success.com/product/FSMC-1

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