Something I just read that I wanted to share.....

10 To-Do's For Making Your 2008 Comeback
by Guest Author
Successful weight loss and physical transformation requires a major mental effort.

John A. Sarkett (author of the book "Extraordinary Comebacks") offers these succinct tips for making your New Year's resolution stick.

PERSIST. Don’t quit. “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.” Sir Winston Churchill
MAKE THE EFFORT. Work hard. Great comebackers use all the hours in the day: Wayne Huizenga collected trash at night, sold new accounts in the day. George Foreman out-trained younger fighters to become champ. You can find your comeback right in the effort you make.
UNDERSTAND TRANSIENCE. Don’t extrapolate temporary setbacks into permanent defeat. “This, too, shall pass.” Lance Armstrong was given a 2% chance to survive cancer, he went on to win seven, consecutive Tour de Frances. Churchill again: “When you’re going through hell, keep going.”
CHANGE DIRECTION. Sylvester Stallone was stymied as an actor, so he wrote Rocky after seeing the Wepner-Ali fight. Billy Beane was a so-so baseball player, he quit and became a top GM. Quincy Jones was a talented trumpeter, but after a stroke, he had to quit, and then became a legendary music producer.
EMPLOY SUPPORT. Stay away from the nay-sayers, even if they’re famous or going to be (Martin Scorsese once told Billy Crystal he had “no talent.”) Pack your corner with friends who won’t let you quit. Muhammed Ali did that: he wanted to quit during his first heavyweight championship, his manager wouldn’t let him.
REPEAT. It took Sir Edmund Hillary two attempts to climb Everest, Peary eight times to reach the North Pole, and various authors scores and sometimes hundreds of tries to get their works published. Go again, and again, and ………
DREAM BIG. Your effort and ideas are worth many times what you may imagine. Fred Smith wrote a college paper that got a “C,” as the story goes, then turned it into $40 billion FedEx. Dean Karnazes ran a 226 mile ultramarathon and 350 mile run, plus 50 marathons in 50 days (2006). J.K. Rowling wrote her ideas about one “Harry Potter” during a train ride. It sold 100 million copies, and $4 billion movie box office, and counting. You can do much more than you imagine. Dream big.
STAY HUMBLE. Attitude -- is everything. When tennis master Andre Agassi fell from No. 1 to No. 141 (1997), he started over, went back to the minor leagues, upped his training, including weightlifting. It set the stage for greater things than ever before. Attitude – not image – is everything.
SELF-PROGRAM. Get a mantra. A psychiatrist-hypnotist provided Rachmaninoff the composer, who had a writing block, with a positive self-talk mantra: “You will begin your concerto. You will work with great facility. The concerto will be excellent.” It worked. He wrote his Piano Concerto No. 2.
PERSIST. It’s not over until you say so. Don’t say so.
Sarkett's book is Comebacks: 201 Inspiring Stories of Courage, Triumph, and Success. It is available at Amazon and other bookstores.