Jim Bouchard

From Think Like a Black Belt by Jim Bouchard

“A winner never quits and a quitter never wins.” This may be a cliché but it’s true!

I’m passionately and deeply committed to sharing the values of Black Belt Mindset, largely because we’ve lost or abandoned many of these values in contemporary culture. We’ve become lazy, fat and complacent. In the developed world we’ve become a people waiting for salvation from government or worse, someone else’s government. The rustic Americans of Benjamin Franklin’s stories are now an endangered species; every day we’re in greater danger of forever losing our ideal of the rugged individualist. We’re losing our capacity for creativity and innovation, while surrendering our legacy of exploration and adventure.

We’re getting soft.

Why? Is it our culture of abundance and entitlement? That certainly has something to do with it. There is a direct correlation between the effort expended to earn one’s necessities and comforts, as to one’s dissatisfaction for them. We’ve got the highest standard of living human beings have ever created and yet our appreciation for this wealth is practically non-existent.

The good news is there are still plenty of ambitious, creative people in the world who feel entitled to nothing but an opportunity and are willing to work hard to make the most of it. You’re one of them. Seriously, if you haven’t thrown this book out the window yet, you must agree that discipline, focus and hard work are the necessary ingredients for a happy and successful life. You may already be well developed in these areas or you may want to improve, but either way you recognize that the best rewards in life are those that are earned.

The Black Belt way is not usually the easy way. We train ourselves to recognize the natural flow of life and work with our inner nature as well as the natural cycles and conditions around us; at the same time, we recognize that a life of discipline and self-perfection is not always easy.