If you try to change everything at once, you will fall overboard. So give strict attention to making one change at a time, and leave the rest of the river to ordinary chance.

Frank Bettger ends his book, How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Sales, with some of the best advice that I’ve ever read, and I can’t resist passing his wisdom on to you. His advice goes something like this.

You’ve finished my lessons. Maybe you’re feeling a little overwhelmed by all the information. Maybe you’re feeling uncertain about what to do next, where to start, or if you even want to start. Well, I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I do know that you have three choices. First, you could do nothing. In which case I hope you enjoyed the site and recommend to a friend. Second, you could try to do everything. You could say to yourself, “This site has a lot of useful ideas. I’m going to try all of them right now and turn my life around immediately. The sooner the better.”

However, if you choose either of those paths, failure is your forecast.

Third, you could take some advice from Benjamin Franklin who, in his autobiography, attributes his success and happiness to one practice. Franklin writes about his early years, and says that in his youth, he determined that if he could “acquire the essential principles of successful living,” then those principles should lead him to a successful life. But what method could he use to acquire them? A man cannot change his skin over night. He decided to choose thirteen ideals that he would attempt to master in his life, and he decided to give one week’s strict attention to each ideal, “leaving all others to their ordinary chance.”

In this way, he would cycle through all thirteen ideals over the course of thirteen weeks, and then repeat the process four times a year. Each time that an ideal would circle around, he would develop a new and deeper understanding of that ideal, and find new ways to integrate it into his life. Franklin’s ideals were temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility—which he defined as imitating both Jesus and Socrates.

For the past five years, I have cycled through my own rules. The fourteen rules that I have outlined on this web site: cause and effect, definition, reflection, focus, strategy, vacuum, process, responsibility, contribution, attraction, entropy, understanding, persuasion and indirect effort. The impact that these rules have had on my life has been well worth the effort.

No one can change everything in an instant. So, take one rule at a time, give it one week’s “strict attention,” and leave all of the others to “their ordinary chance.” Now that you have finished rule fourteen, return to rule one next week and begin the cycle again.