hard work | The Caleb Barney Collection

The key to greatness

To be great, you have to be consistent. You have to be disciplined. You may have natural talent/ability, but without nurturing it and growing it through consistent effort, you will never achieve true greatness.

Do you think LeBron James or Michael Jordan were born with gifts that you and I don’t have? Yes. That’s how the world works. Everyone is different. But they also worked tirelessly for years on end, spent millions of dollars investing in their bodies to help strengthen them, honed their craft with hours in the gym, etc. They had natural ability, but so do a lot of other guys in the NBA. It was their consistent, focused effort over many years that helped them become the greatest of all time.

While it is easy to think of sports as the best analogy here, it applies to everything we do in life. Want to be better at your job? What actions are you taking daily to train to become the best? Do you role play scenarios with other team members? Do you take continuing education classes? Do you read about specific subjects to help you or watch “how to” videos?

You don’t improve the most by going to a weeklong seminar once per year and then not doing anything else until next year’s seminar. You improve the most by taking small, focused actions every single day, always building upon the previous day.

What actions are you willing to take to achieve greatness – not today, and not tomorrow, but five, ten, or twenty years from now? Are you able to look at the big picture and base your decisions on that instead of what feels good today? Do you have the discipline to repeat the monotonous actions (slightly/slowly improving over time)? If you want to be mediocre, that’s fine. You can live a good life coasting through it. But if you want to achieve greatness, you have to endure many unheroic days to reach some heroic decades in the future…

Your house and the White House

“What happens in your house is more important than what happens in the White House.” – Barbara Bush

Whether you feel happy, sad, neutral, or mad with the election results of the 2020 Presidential race, remember one thing. What happens in your house is more important than what happens in the White House.

The President, no matter which party he/she is affiliated with, will not save you, nor will he/she ruin you. You control your own fate. The decisions you make will have the greatest influence on how your life turns out. Why would you give that power to anyone else? Take ownership of what happens for you – good or bad.

If you like the results you’re getting, then continue doing what you’ve been doing. If you don’t like the results you’ve seen so far, change what you’re doing. And if you’re really unhappy? Just know that you’re going to have to work your tail off to get to where you want to go. Nothing matters as much as determination, grit, perseverance, and having a positive attitude. All of those things won’t always be easy, but if they were, everyone would do it.

Making an honest attempt

If I try, I have a chance. If I don’t try, I have no chance. There is no harm in trying and failing. At least you’re still setting yourself up to possibly succeed. But if you don’t try for fear of failing, you guarantee that you will not achieve your goal.

Be ok with taking chances and always strive to do your best. You should give your greatest effort in everything you do. If you are taking the time to do something, you might as well do it properly. Not only that, but how you do anything is how you do everything. Don’t fall into the habit of going through the motions and not giving it your all, otherwise that will become your new norm.

If you take chances and give 100% of your effort, you can rest easy at night. You can go to bed knowing that you gave it your all and not have any regrets. Again, the only you can control is your effort. If things don’t work out as planned, let it be because of forces outside of your control, not because you didn’t do something.

Protecting your time

Be intentional with your time. Protect it…not just from others asking you to do things, but also from yourself. It’s easy to binge watch a show. Be careful so that the 30 minute show doesn’t become a two hour watch session. It’s easy to consume social media. If you keep a social media account, make sure that you’re not mindlessly surfing through their carefully crafted content specifically targeted at delivering the most compelling stories to keep you on their website.

How can you be intentional with your time where you’re doing something to improve your knowledge AND what would make you feel better (long term)? Instead of consuming shallow, surface level content (including tv shows, social media posts, and even many magazine articles), try reading something with more depth.

Start small. Try reading 10 pages per day (from a book). Over the course of the year, this will equate to 3,650 pages per year. If an average book is 250 pages, you will have read between 14-15 books for the year! If you do this for ten years, you will have read 140-150 books.

So many people quit reading or only occasionally read after graduating high school or college. Be different. Set yourself apart from the collective average. Use your time intentionally. And then use your newly acquired knowledge to further yourself in your career or change your life for the better.

Short term sacrifices for long term gains

Everybody has their own “thing” that they want right now – something that makes them feel good or gives them joy in some way. And while we should always work at being happy, we should also prioritize our future selves over our current selves more often than not. If you always live for optimum happiness/pleasure and are not willing to make any short term sacrifices, understand that you’re doing so at the expense of your future.

This can be the case for anything from your financial health, to mental, physical, and beyond. For example, if you want to buy a new expensive product instead of buying a used one (or better yet, not buying anything at all), you have less money to save or invest. If you want to sit around and watch mindless tv, you are sacrificing time which you could be reading or working on a project. And if you want to eat fast food five days per week, you are sacrificing your wasteline and clogging you arteries with trans fats and saturated fats.

Each decision you make today affects you in the future. If you can somehow manage to align what you like doing and what is healthiest for your future self, that’s where you can really make big wins because it won’t feel like you’re sacrificing anything. It all starts with changing your habits for the better. Talk a 5-10 minute walk after every meal. Exercise for 60 minutes per day (it can be cumulative). Eat non-processed foods that consist of a variety of vegetables, lean meats, nuts, seeds, some fruits, little starch, and no extra/added sugars. Meditate, pray, or write down what you’re grateful for when you wake up. Read at least 10 minutes per day. Try to make it a game to see how little you can spend each week. Other than investing and paying for your mortgage/rent, utilities, cell phone, car/car maintenance, and groceries, do you need to spend on anything else or can you wait? The longer you can hold off or sacrifice on doing things that don’t promote long term benefits, the better off you’ll be.