If You Change, Everything Will Change

By Josh Racioppo

I make a promise to you on this day. If you will change, everything will change for you. The next five years of your life will be totally different from the previous five years, if you change. If you will get better, everything will get better for you. If you don't change then nothing will change. Allow me to help you make the needed changes so you can have a truly happy and fulfilled life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781925846898

Book preview

Conclusion

Introduction

You might think me crazy, but I think I can predict your future. I would say that in the future you will truly be a happy person. You will be carefree and living a life without drama, successful in everything you do. You will be able to deal with failure and let it be a learning experience. You will be kind to everybody and you will wake up every day with a smile on your face. You will look forward to discovering new cultures from all around the world and enjoying their beautiful food. You will be someone with great friends who lift you up rather than tear you down. You will live a life of joy and you will want to continue to grow and learn more every day.

Is this you now? If not, then I think I can help you on your way. Maybe you already have a good life. Let’s just say you have 80 percent of your life down. In this book, I will give you the other 20 percent. Or maybe you have only 20 percent down, so I will give you the 80 percent that you need. I am not a writer, I am an entrepreneur, but I have tried to put into words all that I have been taught.

You will find priceless gems in this book. Gems that can make great changes to your life. But if something doesn’t sound right to you, please discard it and if something sounds good, please use it and instil its principles into your life. You don’t have to believe everything I say, but please give me a chance. I don’t know you, but I do care about you and I want you to be the best you can be. I could have written a much longer book and told story after story and just rambled on and on, but I wanted to be as precise as possible. I didn’t want you to lose all the gems amongst the straw, because if you put too much fuel on the fire, you will burn your house down. I want to give you just the right amount of fuel to set your life ablaze and make you unstoppable. I want all this to be easily understood and easily defined so that you can start making changes to your life now. Many years ago, I made the changes to my life that I outline in this book and now I love everything about my life. You can be the same way.

One

It was 11 pm and the cold of the road was penetrating my body, the lights of multiple cars shining all around me. A man was looming over me and with a soft but firm voice he said, Hey mate, you’ve just been hit by a car, I have to get you off the road. I was riding my motorbike home and I accidentally picked a fight with a monster-size vehicle.

That night changed my life forever. I will discuss the outcome of my accident shortly, but for now I’ll just say that when you nearly die, life takes on a new meaning.

I know you’re thinking, Poor little motorbike boy, got hit by a car and he’s telling his sob story in a book.

Well if that’s what you’re thinking, I’m here to tell you that it’s not the case at all.

Before this event, I led a normal life. I grew up in a small town of about 6,000 people. It was a good place to grow up, far away from the big cities. I had good friends and a great family. Life in the country was good. Life was slow and I seemed to have forever to do the things I needed to do.

I ventured out into the wild when I was 19. I left a town of 6,000 to go to a city of millions, Melbourne Australia. What a big shock to my system! Driving down the streets of St Kilda and seeing prostitutes and drug addicts was a massive surprise. I had never seen those things in the country. I had never heard the words ‘metrosexual’ and ‘alternative lifestyle’ before. Despite all of these things, I pushed through at full steam ahead and was very excited to be in Melbourne.

I started my own business and played a lot of sport, but I was nowhere close to achieving my full potential. Before the motorbike crash, my life wasn’t going the way I wanted it to go. Yes, there were some good things. I was raised with a belief in God, which was a constant joy in my life, but I wasn’t where I thought I should be in other areas of my life.

I was very quick to blame. I would blame everything and everyone. How could anything that wasn’t going right ever be my fault? I was the last of my mother’s three boys. Surely I was not to blame, not me, the special child!

If I wasn’t making the money that I wanted to make, I would blame the economy, I would blame people for not giving me the opportunities that I thought I needed to get ahead. I would blame taxes. Taxes are just too high! How could the government take so much away from me? I worked so hard and then the government would put its hand in my pocket and rob me blind.

Every week there was a new bill in the mail. What, I had to pay to drink water? Are you serious? Water is a human right, it comes from the sky. I often wondered why I was getting charged a lot for someone to take the water from the ground, clean it up, and bring it to my house. Also, the cost of living was high. I would go to the grocery store with a $50 note and come home with only one bag of groceries.

Oftentimes my car decided to play up, and always when I didn’t have any money to fix it, thanks a lot Murphy. My car had so many problems that I considered driving like Fred Flintstone and using my feet to drive my car to work.

I couldn’t escape the rat race, not even for an overseas holiday. I couldn’t even go to Sydney for a holiday, and it was only one hour away by plane! I would blame the airlines and hotels for the high prices and I just had to admit to myself that I would never be able to travel the world.

As a single man I would blame the girls for not going out with me, they were just too picky. Why would they not want a handsome man like me? I’m sure it had nothing to do with my charming personality. I was from the country and what city girl wouldn’t want to date a country boy?

Basically, I blamed everything and everyone. There was one person whom I never blamed or ever realised could be the reason for my current state. That was me. Then one day, I heard one sentence that changed my life forever, by a man from the US named Jim Rohn. His mentor Earl Schoaff told him something that changed his life and once I heard it, it changed my life too – ‘If you will change, then everything will change for you’. If you don’t change, then the next five years will be like the last five years.

I then realised that if I didn’t change, I still wouldn’t have any money, my business still wouldn’t be doing well, my social life would be non-existent, and I would never be a traveller.

Wow, could this be the key to my future success? Was I the reason that my life was not heading in the direction I wanted it to go? On that day, when I heard those words, ‘If you will change then everything will change for you’, I was forever changed.

I stopped looking at things around me and started to look inside myself. It was me, I was the problem and I finally admitted to myself that I would need to change myself in every aspect. Change the way I think, change the way I act, change the way I handle money, change the way I speak to people, and change the way I speak to myself. I mean, make a complete turnaround.

So, I started a change process. I will tell you this, it did not happen straight away, it did take time, and I must admit that I am constantly working on myself to this day, but little changes started happening soon after I made the decision to never again blame anyone else for what was happening in my life. I have made changes in my life to the point where I now love every aspect of my life. I get up