1) There are 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week and 8,760 hours in a year. That is a lot of time to accomplish whatever goals you have for yourself. At the start of each year, I budget the 8,760 million "time dollars" I've been blessed with and figure out how I am going to make my life better. You'd be amazed at how much you can change your entire life in just one year of consistent focus. Most of us have so much BS around us that we lose our center and disconnect from our true purpose in life. Find your purpose right now, write it down and read that note every day. 2) No matter what your age, your life should ALWAYS be moving forward. You should always aim to get educated, pick up a new skill, overcome another weakness, etc. When a living thing stops growing, that is when the thing starts dying. The velocity and direction of an object means far more than its current position. In other words, where you are doesn't mean much of anything: it is where you are going that determines where you end up. We are all becoming SOMETHING, and it is our day to day actions that determine what that thing is. For example, someone who plays basketball every day is becoming a good basketball player, even if they are not very good right now. Someone who eats cupcakes all day is becoming overweight. Someone who studies every day is becoming a good student. Ask yourself honestly, "Based on my day to day actions, what am I becoming? Are my words in line with my activities or am I lying to myself?" 3) Remove the toxins from your life. Wasteful activities, negative people, bad relationships and ugly habits have no place in your existence. Start the process of extracting the negatives today to remove the weight that keeps you from being where you want to be. Either kill or redefine the relationships that stand as barriers between you and your destiny. It's scary and people might get angry, but you must do it right now. When people see that you are serious, they will move the hell out of your way. 4) Mistakes of our past can be the cancer that causes us to destroy our future. A young man at 28 years old told me that he was down on himself for never going to college. 10 years later, I saw the man and told him that if he'd started going to school the minute we'd had that conversation 10 years earlier, he would be a doctor by now. Mistakes of our past can be like a cancer in our foot. Rather than cutting off the foot and being healthy, we let that cancer spread to the rest of our body, killing us slowly. Sometimes, we are so angry at ourselves about the past that we throw away our future by remaining determined to drown in the depths of self-pity, laziness and low self-esteem. Learn to forgive yourself for mistakes and keep moving forward. Life is too short to waste time. 5) Only crazy people become Great Black Achievers. I say this because you must see the vision before anyone else does, and only crazy people see things that are not there. There was a time when a "nobody" named Barack Obama saw himself as President of the United States and people thought he was simply delusional. But had he not been able to see the vision clearly for himself, he would never have been able to paint the vision for the rest of the world and his confidence would have been swayed by those who truly felt that a Black man could not be President of the United States. See your vision, believe in that vision, craft that vision, have a strategy to live that vision. Then bust your butt to fulfill that vision with deliberate actions and daily activities that inch you closer to your objective. The bed called "Your Life" is made by your day to day actions and choices. Most of our existence is nothing more than a product of what we choose to do on a daily basis. Success DOES NOT happen by accident.