You start at zero. That’s okay, we all begin there. At zero, you are barely capable of taking care of yourself, let alone of building an empire.

At this stage of your development, nobody sees you. Nobody wants you. Nobody but a privileged few see your hidden potential. You don’t even know your own potential.

Right now, only one thing matters: Get your mind in the right place.

You have been taught by many people. You absorbed the bad lessons that they showed you and have long forgotten the good lessons they told you. Our visual sense overpowers our other senses, and we feel emotions about things before we form thoughts about them. As a result, you, like all of us, learned to feel certain feelings based mostly on the things that you saw. You are likely a slave to those emotions.

You may think that your feelings are based on logic or facts. That’s how many people feel. Like many people, you are probably wrong.

It was difficult for me to accept the truth, too. Emotions come before facts or logical thinking. You are emotional. How do I know? Because every healthy, functioning human being has emotions. When we are passionate about something, we often express those emotions. That’s part of the human experience.

Here is the scary thought: feeling emotions is the primary human experience. People mostly act based on their emotions. Those emotions are programmed into us by our DNA and environment. The majority of people don’t do the hard, painful work of understanding and controlling their emotions. As a result, they experience a lot of pain. They often spread that pain to the people around them.

The beginning of life success and happiness is to fix your mindset. It is absolutely essential. Your mindset is the foundation for your future happiness and success. Skipping mindset training is not an option.

There are a lot of books that will help you fix your mindset. Here is a small list of books available in English and Japanese.

• The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale
• How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
• Influence, Robert Cialdini

There are more books. My two favorites are Gorilla Mindset by Mike Cernovich and How to Win Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams. Launch is another important book about online marketing, but you can learn many mindset principles from it. Sapiens is an important history book that has a powerful message about mindset.

I’ll help you get started on your mindset training with some powerful thoughts to begin your reprogramming.

1. You were born with infinite potential. You are still filled with infinite potential. You are infinite.
2. Your current and future friends and family need you to be happy, successful, and healthy.
3. The stories you tell about your past, present, and future are more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
4. Tell yourself the most powerful, inspiring stories that you can imagine.
5. Whatever story you tell yourself, it will not be ambitious enough. It will only be the first chapter in your story.

You have lots of reading and thinking to do. However, you won’t be able to perfectly finish your mindset work reading books. You need to start doing something.