What One Great Thing?

What One Great Thing?

It is a question that Bryan Tracy asks on his audio program, "The Psychology of Success."  Here is the complete question:  "What one great thing would you accomplish if you knew you could not fail?  It's not an easy question and requires thought, for someone like I am.  Maybe others, even many, have a quick and ready answer but I wanted to think mine out.  I began working from goals many years ago, in 1987 in fact.  I had set some goals before, and accomplished a number of them.

For example, when I was seventeen and in love and had a terribly crashed romance with my girlfriend, after I struggled with so many things, I quit school and enlisted in the United States Navy.  I was barely seventeen having my birthday in February and enlisting in March.  I went through Boot Camp in San Diego, then Radar "A" School in San Francisco and then boarded my ship, the USS Point Defiance (LSD-31) in December of 1961.  After I left the navy, I had a goal of finishing high school, which I did, in 1967, five years after my graduating class of 1962.  I was married, had a new son and a low paying, hard working job as a truck driver and cylinder gas delivery person.  Then I got a job with Phillips Petroleum Company (after my diploma) and I worked there for 33 1/2 years.  I started college when I was 29 and working for Phillips and as I went along in my career, I acquired college hours, got a better job, more hours, better job, etc.  So I had goals but I never grasped the power of goals until I began to study under Zig Ziglar.  What were my goals?  Well, too many to list here but let me highlight a few.  I set a goal to personally meet Zig, and did.  In fact, I am listed in his book, "Over theTop" on page 106, as Stephen Payne from Bartlesville, Oklahoma.  I set a goal to meet Stephen Covey, author of "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" and met him.  Then it was to meet Tom Hopkins; did: Meet Bryan Tracy; did.  I set a goal to learn Spanish.  I later became a Spanish interpreter and translator, worked in two jobs as an interpreter, taught Spanish, then I learned French, Italian, German, Russian, Mandarin Chinese and now I am busily learning Polish and I can speak, read and write Polish.  So, you can see why I had to think, "What one great thing?"

Years ago, I wrote out my personal mission statement, which is long, but the nutshell version is this: My mission is to learn, teach and give.  I do that.  I love learning and I've even been called The Learning Machine; I can't help teaching as it's in my nature and I give.  I give books.  I have given over 200 copies of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, around one hundred copies of Joyce Hifler's book, "The Cherokee Feast of Days," a number of "The Magic of Thinking Big" and many other books.  Then I began to give the Marine's Bible to marines I could meet and find.  I began to give the Soldier's Bible, and as of this week, we have given 640 of the Holman Military Bibles.

Could I reach 1,000?  Yes, of course, as we are not so far from that.  We will reach 700 Bibles by the end of 2013 and then next year, more, so 1,000 is hardly a challenge then.  What one great thing?  I decided to set my goal as 10,000 Bibles to give and then some of the things Bryan said came back to me.  What one great thing would you accomplish if you KNEW you could not fail?  

My goal is to give 100,000 Holman Christian Standard Bibles to the men and women of our armed services.  That has now become my one great thing.  As some athletes have said, you miss all of the shots you don't take; as Jelly Bean Jones said, "The girl you don't ask out ain't going with you anyway."  So, I set a high goal, one so high I can not yet see it, but it's there now, carved in ink, and I'm on my way to it.

The photograph I chose?  Yes, that is I, in the tandem jump from 10,000 feet with Andy Beck, my jump master and I had a wonderful time.  I am 69 years of age now and made my first jump.  I did it to deal with my fear of height and it has worked pretty well so far.  It's part of my processes, to learn, to teach, and to give.  

We did a free fall for 38 seconds and it didn't feel like we were moving.  We hung in the air as we talked and I looked all around me, down, sideways, up, and I loved the feeling of sailing through the air, even downward.  Once the parachute opened, Andy taught me how to drive and let me go left, right, even spin us, and then we were down, landing softly, and I feel different today, a week and days since I went out of the airplane.  Jumping was a goal but not my one great thing.  But I know now what my one great thing is, to give 100,000 Bibles, and I cannot fail.

Stephen Joe "Red Boots" Payne

The New Challenge

The New Challenge

The Last Ten Pounds

I have done well this year, since I began my program back in January and I weighed 204.0 lbs, then actually had a weight gain to 207.0 lbs. as I progressed, but not discouraged by the gain.  I then began a progressive and steady decrease in my weight with a goal of losing at least two ounces each day.  I achieved an average weight loss of over four ounces per day and I continued that through May.  June has been a more difficult month for me as I have been steady between 162 and 165 lbs.  My tracking program in Microsoft Excel has a conditional setting that if I exceed 164.8 lbs, the entry turns red and in bold print so that I notice it and can't deny it.  That is what I call my red flag weight and it means I have failed and it's time for new, desperate means.  That means going right back to work on a low carbohydrate diet and other desperate measures.

The main thing then is to watch my addiction to carbohydrates and make serious corrections in my program. First thing is, I weigh every day.  I have a good scale that I bought last year and then I quit weighing.  I believe that I did not need to weigh, as long as I stayed on my program but then, the truth was that I was getting off of my program.  I probably started by eating ice cream and I've always told myself that it was high in fat but low in carbohydrates so I could allow myself some.  Some turned into too much and then I was not weighing daily so I drifted into bad patterns.

I have a friend who told me that he had fallen off of the wagon, meaning he had erred and eaten too many carbohydrate heavy meals and had gained weight.  He is in the early and critical stages, meaning that he has not allowed enough time to enter ketogenic status.  My comment (to myself as much as to anyone) is that we don't fall off of the wagon; we sort of slowly and gently step down.  A fall will wake us up and scare us, stepping down softly and gently allows us to go into a half stupor.  Weighing every day so that we know our patterns is critical.  Something can't be critical without being important by definition so, yes, weighing daily is important.  My pattern is that Saturdays are always my lowest weight of the week and then I'll go up slightly by Monday.  The remainder of the week is a slow decrease until I get back into my average weight decrease again.  The graphic that I have loaded for June shows how my weight rose, then fell and rose again.  The high of 165 lbs. happened the morning after we had journeyed to eastern Oklahoma on business and having missed lunch, we stopped in a store and got water, coffee and a snack.  I got pig skins, which have zero grams of carbohydrates.  Why did my weight jump the next morning?  I have to conclude that it was likely the higher content of sodium, sitting most of the day in a car, and perhaps something else that I just don't understand.  For the time being,, I'm watching eating pig skins just in case they somehow contributed.  And, I'm still watching carbohydrate intake and keeping them low.

Once in a while, I have a yearning for yogurt and I'll add some nuts to it, cashews, Macadamia nuts, pecans, because I like the addition of a crunch to the yogurt.  I've had a couple of these yogurt treats during June.  I'm at a stable weight now and I can probably maintain that with ease; but I still want to reach my goal of 155 lbs. and I have not yet given up. I will reach it.  In fact, when I write out my goals and affirmations, I write "I weigh 155 lbs. as my permanent, healthy weight."  I was writing that when I weighed 204 lbs.  Notice that it is personal, using "I", positive (as in fait accompli), present tense.  I have reduced each of my measurements of chest, waist, hips, thigh and calf and I am now wearing a 30" waist jean with 29" length.

It has cost me a lot because I have had to replace all of my jeans and other trousers and I've given away those larger sizes that I took off.  People ask why I didn't put them in the closet.  Several reasons: I don't want to make it easy to gain weight, I don't need them, someone else does, and last and most important, it's a mind set.  My removal of all of them means I am committed to my program to weigh 155 lbs. or less in a healthy fashion; in a determined, healthy fashion.

I expect to weigh 160 lbs. by the end of July and to reach 155 lbs. by the anniversary of the date of the death of my son, September 6.  My son died ten years ago, at age 36 on that day.  He was a victim of juvenile diabetes which slowly took his life.  It is an important date to me and so I chose that date to reach my ideal weight.  

One thing I did recently, June 30, was to jump from an airplane at an altitude of 10,000 feet.  It was my first jump and I enjoyed it immensely.  I would not have jumped at a heavier weight so it was part of my reward system I set up within me for reaching one of my weight goals.

Stephen Joe Payne

Body by Payne