If you’ve read my about me page, you’ll know that my whole ‘self improvement’ journey began when I “stole” a book from a public library many years ago 😳. (Well, I just never returned it…more on that later)

That book was, ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People‘ by Stephen Covey. Little did I know at the time the difference it was going to make in my life.

I still have the book. Here is a pic of it with the library card. I have blacked out the library stamp for obvious reasons. I imagine the late fees on this would be eye-watering at this point! (Note: I would never intentionally steal anything. I wouldn’t even dream of it).

Here’s What Happened

I was 19 years old living in the US (I live in Ireland now). I lived alone in a 1-bedroom apartment. No TV. No car. Very little money. So sometimes in my spare time I’d go to the local library to use the computers there to send some emails home and browse the net (I had no other internet access and certainly couldn’t afford a cell phone).

So I go there one day and…all the computers are taken. Bummer. I figured I’d walk around and take a look at those dusty old books until one of the computers was available (I had ZERO interest in reading when I was 19).

About 10 minutes into my aimless wandering, I spot a book called, ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People‘ (UK link). Now apart from being a weird title, I thought, “That’s almost exactly the same title as a rock album I used to listen to as a younger teenager”. That album was called ‘How to Make Friends and Influence People’ by Terrorvision. It looked like this…

So I was curious. “What the heck is that?!”. So I put my hand on the book to pull it off the shelf and as I did, the book beside it fell onto the floor. I picked it up; it was called, ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’. As a 19 year-old, I had no idea books like this existed. “What sort of weirdo reads stuff like this?”, I remember thinking.

But I had just enough curiosity to check this book out and see what made effective people so darn effective. Hey, maybe I could be “effective”, too 😂.

I started reading it that same day and got hooked. “This is kinda powerful, actually.”

I read that thing cover to cover (350 pages) in 2 days. Then I re-read it and highlighted my favourite passages. I was due to go back to Ireland the following week and well…basically…I forgot all about returning it until I was about to go to the airport and had no time to do so. So it went in my “carry on” bag for the flight home.

The Bottom Line

So here’s the deal: The big message I took away from the book was this…

We become what we think about. And I am a product of my choices, not my past, nor my environment.

Wow. What a difference from how I had been living my life up to that point. I had always thought that life was something that happened to me. Now I was being told that my life was truly in my own hands.

Life didn’t happen to me. Life responded to me.

My life was up to me and I always…always…in every case…had the ability to choose my response to a given situation. If I didn’t, and simply reacted automatically, I was behaving no better than an animal (who are ‘stimulus-response’ creatures with no conscious ability to choose differently). Covey calls this the ‘Reactive Model‘.

In contrast, there is the ‘Proactive Model‘. There is a gap between stimulus and response where we take conscious responsibility for our lives. “Response-ability” –  the ability to choose our response.

I talk about all of this in step 1 of my book, ‘The Happy Book’ – click here to download. It’s aimed at improving your levels of well-being in 7 days. I think you’ll like it. You can download it now by clicking here.

Going from the reactive mindset to the proactive mindset is just the first habit of Covey’s 7 Habits. Covering all 7 is beyond the scope of this article. But this first step was the trigger to changing my mentality.

As I often say, “The way you change your life is by taking control of your mind. Everything follows from that”.

Overnight Change?

So did I change overnight? Certainly not. Hey, I was 19. I came home to Ireland and soon forgot anything I had learned. I drank, partied, and did dumb stuff for a few years until my daughter came along when I was just 22.

My little girl is the love of my life. No-one else comes close. So I stopped drinking (except special occasions) and by 25 I started reading Personal Development material again and set some pretty outrageous goals for myself.

Messing around with my little girl

So what were these outrageous goals that I set?

• I wanted to “retire” before I was 30
• I wanted a body like you’d see on the cover of Men’s Health magazine
• I wanted to have good relationships with the people in my life
• I wanted to be happy. Real, inner happiness

I’m very pleased and thankful to say that I achieved all my goals (I actually “retired” from my desk job at 28 years old and have been a professional blogger and online coach at my MuscleHack.com fitness site since then).

NOTE: I am now offering awesome Weight Loss Coaching via this site here. I’m an expert at this and have been getting men and women lean for over 10 years now. See all the details here and let me take your body to the next level.

How goals are achieved and how real happiness is cultivated will be the subject of my future posts. This is only the first article here. You can subscribe to my list for future updates by clicking here.

But in short, I want to tell you that you will astound yourself the minute you make a definite decision about what you want and absolutely commit to making it happen.

“There is tremendous power in a ‘made-up’ mind” ~ Mark McManus

So that’s where it all started for me. A random book falling on the floor all because the book next to it had an weird title.

Life changing.

Strange but true.

Mark McManus

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