1. Discover your nature. To know more, notice more. Explore your talents, skills, habit patterns, preferences and values. Continually ask, "Why is that so?

2. Grow your ability to deliver value. Refine your skills, increase your resources, specialize in your strengths, grow your technology, knowledge, reputation and relationships.

3. Define your future. Describe the life you'd like to live. The future you'd like to see defines the person you'll need to be. Identify the traits and qualities you'd like to acquire.

4. Become the person who would achieve your goals. As you develop the skills, knowledge, relationships and demeanor of the "future you," your goals will be the natural by-product of your growth.

5. Give more than you must. Nothing advances until somebody does more than they are paid to do. Always deliver more value than others expect. Don't require others to acknowledge your generosity. Give with "class."

6. Make time for what you love. What you love reveals the value you bring to the world. If you don't live fully, you deny the rest of us your potential contributions. Your "play" sometimes contributes as much as your "work."

7. Refine your inner circle. We define ourselves through our key relationships. Explore the mix and depth of those with whom you spend most of your time. Release those who limit you and connect with those who help you live more fully.

8. Resolve your unfinished business. Either deal with it or discard it. Say your apologies, face your fears, pay your debts, express your gratitude and get on with living.

9. Seek more alignment. Fine tune your relationships, lifestyle, work habits, leisure activities and responsibilities to tap your nature. Continually adjust your world to allow yourself to live more fully.

10. Rethink existing habits and routines. Describe your typical day and then reconsider every aspect of it. Explore new patterns. Change or expand the places you go, people you see, things you do and times you devote to each.

11. Embrace other points of view. Everything you know has come from within the limits of your life up to now. You might be wrong about how things work. Explore and experiment with other ways of looking at things.

12. Lighten up. Stop stressing over things that only matter to you emotionally. When life isn't fair to you, get over it. Take your misfortune as "course corrections" rather than "catastrophes." Let go so you can grow.

13. Tighten up. Sloppiness in life allows more variables to creep in and spoil your plans. Stay on target, increase your self discipline, master the art of self-motivation. Sometimes details matter a lot.

14. Profile yourself. Keep a journal of your goals, concerns, fears and dreams. Review it at least once a year. Look for patterns that reveal your core values, recurring situations, natural velocity and intelligence. Realize how life ebbs and flows for you. Notice the natural cycles of life.

15. Find more outlets. Seek connections through which you can reach more people and be of greater service. Multiply yourself through others. Nobody is as good as they can be until they are connected with others.

16. Increase your future possibilities. Serve your industry and grow your own future customers. Cultivate more ways to be of service through increasing your own knowledge and skills. Connect with people and resources you may need at some time in the future. Send part of today ahead to the person you'll be in the future.

17. Think bigger than yourself. An acorn that only thinks as an acorn will never become a mighty oak. Stretch yourself. You are undoubtedly capable of more than you ever dreamed is possible for you.

18. Build a composite role model. Emulate various qualities from a variety of people you admire, not just one person. Look for the traits, attitudes, skills and behaviors in others that you would like to cultivate in you. List these qualities and develop a plan for acquiring them.

19. Try new things. Break out of the limited world of your past and start to experiment. Learn a new language, go someplace different, do some things you'd typically pass by. Find out what your possibilities really are.

20. Invest in yourself. Set aside a portion of each year's income to acquire new tools and teachers to increase your potential. Refine your systems, get expert coaching, attend special conferences, cultivate a study group, appoint a board of advisors. You are your only true asset. Let the principle of compound interest and reinvested dividends pay off in your personal growth as it does in financial growth.

Quoted from The Acorn Principle: Know Yourself, Grow Yourself by Jim Cathcart with permission of the publisher, St. Martin's Press.

Jim Cathcart is a professional speaker and workshop leader who delivers nearly one hundred seminars to more than fifty thousand people a year. He is CEO of Cathcart Institute, whose psychological research and business consultations have resulted in 12 books and scores of recorded programs.

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