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How to do Whatever

by Neil O'Brien

104 pages; Black coil; catalogue #00-0036; ISBN 1-55212-372-3; US$16.00, C$18.50, EUR13.50, £9.50

This how-to-book sets forth in clear, easy-to-follow language a proven system for everyone to achieve their goals.

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about the book      about the author      Table of Contents and Excerpt      catalogue info

About the Book This book is for ordinary people with realistic goals, but it works as well for specialists or single-minded people with only one goal. It sets forth simple, easy-to-follow procedures applicable to any endeavor - actually to all endeavors. The system is realistic. It does not require extraordinary efforts or performance. Quite the contrary, it insists upon modest efforts, but it guarantees huge results. It is loaded with practical, every day useful hints and advice - and sprinkled with a good bit of humor.

About the Author

The author is a graduate in English from Rice University, and in law from Southern Methodist University School of Law and Georgetown Law Center. He is married with four married children and 15 grandchildren. He is a senior partner in the law firm of Gardere & Wynne, L.L.P., Dallas, Texas.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Goals
• Chapter 2 - Time
• Chapter 3 - Money
• Chapter 4 - Image
• Chapter 5 - Your Mind
• Chapter 6 - The Big Issues
• Chapter 7 - Family
• Chapter 8 - Others
• Chapter 9 - Celebration
• Chapter 10 - Retirement

Excerpt

Introduction

This book is for everybody of every age, every height, every shape, color and disposition, both sexes, athletes and the effete, literate and bozo, atheist and religious, abstemious and gluttonous -- and if none of the foregoing covers you, whatever your category, you too. This book is not for the devotee. It is not for a person so dedicated to a particular goal that he or she has stepped out of the cone of life into the elsewhere. This book is not for zealots. It is not for anyone disposed to invest an inordinate amount of effort to achieve a particular goal to the exclusion of all else. It is not for Jimmy Johnson.

This is a self-achievement book. If you do what the book recommends and follow it tolerably well, you are guaranteed success and self-satisfaction, more than you realize from any other self-achievement book, but with the expenditure of less time, less devotion, and less commitment.

Why does this book promise more? Because it covers more, first by establishing a system that applies to everything you do, then by demonstrating how to apply the system to the most important things you do. The book treats a person as a three-dimensional human being. It deals with all aspects of a person, not just a single trait. It applies a general principle to all activities, so that an individual can, by following the Rule (the Rule comes soon and early, don't get in a hurry.), enjoy satisfaction and success in every aspect of his or her life -- every aspect, body, mind, soul (atheists can skip that chapter). Anyone can skip any chapter that does not interest him or her. Look back at the table of contents and scratch through anything that does not interest you. You are not required to be successful in everything you do, but if you want full satisfaction in what you do, this book will show you how to get it. If what interests you is not in the table of contents or buried somewhere lese in the book, don't despair. By the time you have finished reading this book, you will be able to write any missing chapter yourself.

How can the book cover more and still demand less time? Ah, that's part of the plan -- the better use of time. You only have so much time. The key (but not the Rule) is to use your time in the best way for your satisfaction, or put a little differently, to make better use of your time.

"Ugh," you say. You can see it coming. "The book is going to turn me into an over-scheduled, regimentally-disciplined automaton. That means giving up leisure, television, and socializing. Right?" Wrong! All of those activities are built into the Rule. You not only will not give them up, you are going to have much more fun doing them. Remember, the Rule applies to everything you do. It enhances every aspect of your life. And it is fun. That's part of the enhancement -- making everything you do fun.

One of the things you will like about the Rule is that it does not involve comparing yourself to other people or to a set of independent objective standards. All references are to you, yourself. You don't have to eat like Twiggy or pitch like Nolan Ryan to be satisfied with how you look or how you throw. The Rule contemplates your eating pie, if that is what you want, and throwing pennies, if that's your idea of a sporting event.

The Rule

So what is the magic Rule? First, the Rule is not magic, but it is simple. Simplicity is important, because that means you will never have any difficulty remembering the Rule and applying the Rule to what you are doing, nor will you have an excuse for not applying the Rule to what you are doing. Second, the Rule is not new. The Rule has been around for years. What is new is applying the Rule outside of its historical field of operation, outside of mathematics. Implementation of the Rule is important. That's what most of the book is about. But first you need to know what the Rule is and understand how it operates.

In mathematics the Rule is a formula, expressed as follows:
X = 1(P + I)n The formula is used to determine how much principle (P) compounds at a certain interest rate (I) over a given number of years (n). If your principle is $1,000 at an interest rate of 5%, over a 10-year period your principle compounds to $1,628.89. That's pretty good, but not remarkable. But, if you're 25 and putting money away for retirement at 65, and you use a more realistic long-term rate of return of 10%, by the time you are 65 you $1,000 will have turned into $45,259.25, and if you put $1,000 away every year, at 65 you will have $442,592.55. That's remarkable, and realistically achievable!

The idea of this book is to get the same kind of return in all of your activities, not just investing. The question is: How do you apply the arithmetical rule to, say, cooking?

First you have to convert the Rule to English. In English, the Rule is:
In everything you seek to achieve, exert a 5% greater effort That's the 5% solution. You will find it produces staggering results and immense satisfaction.

A corollary to the Rule is that for everything you want to stop doing, reduce your input by 5%. If you want to eliminate smoking entirely, like smoking, or biting your fingernails, or robbing banks, you should just stop, because slowing down is harder to do than just plain stopping. But, if you just want to cut back on the amount of what you are doing, not discontinue it altogether -- like watching television, talking on the phone, surfing the net, or eating -- cut back at 5% at a time, like 5% fewer calories per week, until you get down from 4,000 a day to 1800 a day, or whatever your goal.

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Catalogue Information

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