The School of Hard Knocks has no physical location but it has millions of students and just as many teachers, but most aren’t even humans. There are no books and there are countless tests. It’s the toughest and best education you can get. Sometimes it costs you money, but other times it’s free.

People often find it difficult to graduate with a good grade, let alone a 4.0. However, in this article I will help you gain the best education and graduate the School of Hard Knocks with flying colors.

Recognize your teachers

First, you need to figure out who or what your teachers are. It can be a person, object, or event. They all can teach you valuable lessons that cannot be acquired anywhere else. Recognizing your teachers will help you stop and think so that you can get the most out of each lesson. Even the littlest of events can teach you the biggest lessons. The same goes for negative events. They may seem difficult to endure but there’s so much to be learned. Practice pausing and assessing a situation when it arises, then ask yourself these two questions: What is the reason for this? And what can I learn from it?

Study & do your homework

You also have to be your own teacher as well. Not all the information you need is going to present itself. You are going to have to seek it out, wherever it may lie. Sometimes it’s book, on the internet, or even within yourself. Do some extra studying and homework to get one step ahead of the rest.

Fail

In the school of hard knocks, it is good to fail. It is encouraged and necessary to achieve success. More often than not, failure provides you with new knowledge that success wouldn’t have provided. In the school of hard knocks you have to take chances, make mistakes, and fail, if you don’t you’ll be left behind.

Skip the parties and other time wasters

Don’t get caught up in negative things like drugs and alcohol. They don’t do anything for you but waste your time, energy, and money. There’s millions of other positive ways to have good time. Also don’t get caught up in “drama” that won’t even matter in 20 years, 2 years, or even in 2 weeks. Your time is precious.

Get a tutor

You are going to need help to graduate from the school of hard knocks. Create some contacts online with successful people, ask them questions and get advice. Even if you can’t actually contact the successful person you want, read as much about them as you can. Study their style and road to success, and replicate parts of it.

Keep notes

This is something you should literally do. Get a notebook to write down all your successes and failures so that you can better learn from them. In this notebook you can also jot down ideas and dreams. Getting things on paper is one step closer to manifesting them.

Make friends

Again, you’re going to need help to achieve success. Make some contacts with positive and successful people. It is quite easy to do so online. And also don’t be afraid to use your contacts to benefit you.

Always be ready for a pop quiz

Life is a tough teacher, it can give you a pop quiz when you least expect it. A lot of the times you’ll be tested before you have even learned anything. Always try to be ready for it. Stay sharp and don’t get complacent.

Work hard

You need to work hard to get yourself to a better place. The harder you work, the more satisfying the reward will be.

If you follow these rules, you’ll be graduating from the School of Hard Knocks at the top of your class.

Photo by justintosh

Kurek Ashley doesn’t really consider himself a motivational speaker or a life coach, he considers himself a success coach. Kurek helps people and companies in harnessing their full potential for peak performance in all areas of their life. From their finances to their spirituality. He believes success can be achieved everywhere.

Like all of us, Kurek has experienced very difficult events that would break most people. And in the beginning such circumstances were breaking Kurek, emotionally, physically, and financially.

Before Mr. Ashley assisted others in achieving success, he was achieving it for himself in Hollywood. Kurek worked on over 38 film and television projects, alongside actors such as John Travolta, Sylvester Stallone, and Chuck Norris.

While filming a movie with Chuck Norris, tragedy struck Kurek’s life. A helicopter used for the movie crashed killing five people. All were his friends. This event lead Kurek down a path of depression and self-destruction. He resorted to drugs to relieve his pain and was very close to committing suicide on more than a few occasions.

After two years of this reckless behavior Kurek started to transform his life. He discovered that through love and passion you can not only change your life but you can also change the world. From this moment of discovery, Mr. Ashley has been unstoppable. He wanted to demonstrate to people that they can do anything as long as they take action and have focus. To do so, Kurek walked 266 feet across 600 degree coals to break the world record for the longest firewalk.

Besides achieving records and success for himself, Kurek has helped celebrities and athletes such as volleyball player Kerri Ann Pottharst. Kerri was part of the Australia Women’s Olympic beach volleyball team. With Kurek’s help the team took home a gold medal in the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Today, Kurek resides in Queensland, Australia and is the CEO of Kurek Ashley Success International Pty Ltd. Through this company, he is able to touch the lives of over 10,000 people each year through his seminars and teachings.

But Mr. Ashley isn’t stopping there. He has just released his book “How Would Love Respond?” and hopes to touch the lives of millions more around the world. “How Would Love Respond?” helps readers achieve greater happiness, success, and love. It was released on April 1st and has already hit numerous best-seller lists, including:

- Number 1 on Amazon’s Mover and Shaker list
- Number 4 on Barnes & Noble Self Improvement list
- Number 7 on Bestseller Barnes and Noble list
- Number 8 on Amazon’s Hot New Release list

I highly recommend you purchase Kurek’s book. It’ll not only change your life, but can help you change to world around you. “How Would Love Respond?” can be purchased from Amazon as well as from Barnes & Noble.

I also recommend you visit the “How Would Love Respond?” website here and Kurek’s main site here to learn more.

Who do you think is the best person to get you motivated? Think about it for a moment… The answer’s is quite simple. It’s YOU. Getting yourself to stop dreaming and start achieving ultimately comes down to you. Other people can give you advice, encouragement, and motivation but none of that will matter until you change yourself and take that first step towards a goal.

There are many ways you can get yourself fired up to accomplish a goal. Most are very simple and easy things that you can do every day. Each will feed your desire until it grows into a monster that can’t be tamed.

Read your list of goals

You probably have written a list of goals that you want to accomplish or perhaps a bucket list. You should go through it every morning and each night, or at least once a week. As you do so, visualize what it’ll be like when you achieve each goal. If one of your goals is to vacation on a tropical island, imagine yourself sitting in the sand with the turquoise water splashing in front of you and the sun warming your face.

View pictures and watch videos

If your imagination isn’t that good, look through old photos from your favorite vacations or search online for images of the things you desire. You can also go to YouTube or other video sites and look up videos that relate to your dreams. Use these images to create slide shows or to use the images as your computer background.

Think of what you dislike about yourself

Perhaps you don’t like how you’re shy or always stressed out. Each of us has something about ourselves that we want to change. Think of what yours is and turn it into something you want to tackle.

Get jealous

This may seem strange but a great way to motivate yourself is to be jealous. Look to successful people that you know or don’t personally know. Then ask yourself, “why not me?” Jealousy can force people to perform terrible actions but it can also lead people to great accomplishments.

Think of the naysayers

Think back to your past and perhaps think about your present. Remember the naysayers and what they said about your aspirations. Morph those words into motivation for yourself to achieve and prove them wrong.

Remember why

Think of why you want to accomplish your goals. Is it because you can’t afford a car or a house or is it because you can’t stand another day at your workplace.

All these simple strategies will keep you from getting comfortable with mediocrity. If we get too comfortable with where we currently are, there will seem to be no reason to change.

All right, so it’s the beginning of a new month. Maybe in March you didn’t accomplish everything you wanted to. I know I didn’t. Since we can’t go back in time let’s look to this month and make it our most productive month so far. Here are the steps you can take to do so.

Reflect

“Look” to March or to the past few months and recall what you didn’t accomplish. Try to remember everything from the biggest tasks to the smallest.

Plan

Get yourself a piece of paper or open up a document on your computer. List numbers 2 through 30. Since April 1st has passed, we’ll skip that day. You can start at any day as long it’s somewhat early in the month. Make sure you give yourself plenty of room between each number.

Now, for each day write a goal that you want to accomplish on that day. Start small and then every 5 or ten days list a large goal to accomplish. You can write several goals for each day if you truly wish to. But it’s better to stay with one task and stay focused on it.

Okay, so after you have all your days filled up (even the weekends) it’s time to plan on how you are going to get each of these goals done. Under each goal, add baby steps that you’ll need to walk to reach your goals.

Act

This is the most important factor to being more productive. Take Action! Get things done. Don’t hesitate. Jump right in and get things going. Once you get one goal done you’ll be quickly moving onto the next ones on your list.

Review

After a few days go back to your plan and see how you’re doing. Cross off what you’ve accomplished and adjust your plans if need be.

Get back to work

Get back to getting things accomplished. Don’t stop, at least not yet.

Stop

Okay it’s time to take a break. Every time you accomplish a task reward yourself. Make sure your rewards are proportionate to your accomplishments.

Repeat

Next month repeat all these steps. Maybe even increase the stakes, make the goals even bigger than this month’s.

“The great question is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with failure.”
-Chinese Proverb

Before you can succeed, you need to fail. You should expect it and accept it. Failure can breed new opportunities and new knowledge for you. So why wouldn’t you want to fail? You can either let failure prevent you from moving forward or you can utilize it to propel you to more success than you ever imagined. Which would you rather do? If you’re on this site, I would hope it’s the latter.

To help you turn failure into success, here are some things I’ve found that have worked.

Learn

Knowledge is the most valuable thing you can acquire from failure. What you learn cannot be taught in any school or by anyone. You must experience it yourself. Too many times, people shut out their failures when they should be examining them and keeping their failures in mind.

Here are some ways to maximize your learning potential:

~ Keep a timeline – Write down when you failed along with your successes.

~ Discover why you failed – Was your failure because of a lack of resources or because a lack of motivation?

~ What could you’ve done – Figure out what you could’ve done better or maybe didn’t need to do.

~ Get someone else’s opinion – Ask a friend or someone else, why they think you failed or what they saw wrong with your project and/or effort.

Get motivated

Failure is one of the greatest motivators. When you taste failure, you never want to taste it again. You also want to show yourself and others that you can succeed.

Here are a few ways to use failure to get motivated:

~ Think of even larger goals to achieve. Maybe your failed goals were too small and you failed for a reason.

~ Refresh your memory as to why you want to succeed. What do you desire and need to live the life you want?

~ Remember that other great achievers have failed as well. Failure was a key step to their success.

Adapt

After you have learned some priceless lessons from your failures it’s time to modify and adapt your plans and goals. Sometimes failures destroy your whole plans and require you to restart from scratch. Other times all you need to do is rethink your plans.

Here are some things you can do to adapt from failure:

~ Change time frames – Perhaps reaching your goals will take longer or less time than you first expected.

~ Move your plans around – You may want to move around items listed on your plans to tackle something first or later on.

~ Change approaches – Maybe you failed at an effort because your approach was wrong. Modify your approach and try again.

Spot opportunities

Failure can bring a whole new realm of opportunities to you. If you succeeded, you could have missed even bigger chances and opportunities.

Here are a few ways you can spot opportunities after failing:

~ If a business endeavor failed perhaps there wasn’t a demand for your product or service. Find out why people passed on your business and see what they really wanted. A whole new market could lie within those findings.

~ Capitalize on your failure by teaching others. Maybe you can help other people by preventing them from making the same mistakes you did. You can do so by writing a book, blogging, and maybe even by giving seminars.

~ Even in a failed endeavor, there’s a way you can make great contacts and friends. Use those contacts to move onto another project.

Those were just a few ways to turn failure into success. Never, ever, consider failing as the end, it’s only the beginning and a necessary step before you can reach the top. Once you’ve felt failure, you’ll appreciate success a 100 times more.