Tag: hard work

Are you justifying your fears?

Stop justifying your fears just so you can stay in your comfort zone. If you do so, you are deliberately holding yourself back, even if it is subconsciously. You give yourself an excuse or you say things like, “well I didn’t really want that anyways,” or, “I have to give up too much to get that,” just to make yourself feel better about not getting what you really want.

In reality, all of the best things in life take work to get. Sometimes, it takes a lot of work. Because if it was easy, everyone would do it.

If you’re OK with taking it easy and not living life to the fullest, that’s OK too. That’s part of the trade-off. But at least be honest with yourself… It’s not because you didn’t really want it, it’s because you didn’t want to have to do what it takes to get it.

Consistency, intensity, and reaching your full potential

Consistency trumps intensity, but you will never achieve your full potential without both.

If you do something once, you can’t reasonably expect results to come from it immediately. If you cold call one person, don’t expect one sale. If you work out one time, don’t expect six pack abs. If you make a one-time stock purchase, don’t expect to be able to retire tomorrow…

Consistency is about continually doing the bare minimum that you need to do in order to improve 1% that day. You have to consistently do the right things to achieve great results.

Intensity is another tool we should utilize to achieve the best results though…Sometimes it’s OK to stay up late and cram in a study session, but it’s not sustainable. If you do that every night, eventually you’ll crash. If you push it hard in the gym that’s great, but if you’re so sore that you can’t workout for a week afterwards, how much good did it really do? So many people follow diet programs or participate in 30-day challenges, which again, can be great, but when you stop following that, are you keeping the majority of the good behaviors or falling back into bad habits?

Intensity can help you achieve amazing results, but you need to have a stopping point. If you’re always doing things in an unsustainable manner, you’re going to burn out. It’s almost like redlining an engine for a car…you can ramp up to RPMs to pass somebody, but if you’re only driving in the redline, you’ll burn up you engine and do more harm than good.

When you decrease the intensity, you need to think of it like turning down the dimmer on a light switch. You’re not flicking a light switch on and off, just like you are not turning your intensity on and off. Because what usually happens there is you become an all-or-nothing person. You either work out really hard or you don’t work out at all. You eat extremely clean for 30 days, then you fall off the wagon. You invest a couple of times, then you don’t touch or even look at your retirement account for a year…you will yo-yo with manic highs and lows, and you’ll never reach your full potential.

Consistency needs to be the foundation of your success. That needs to be your number one goal – find something you know you should be doing everyday and do it. Don’t break the streak, but if you do, get back up and start it over immediately. Once you’ve found something that you can consistently do, focus on turning up the intensity more frequently. The more often you can do this, the better results you’ll get in a shorter timeframe.

The answer isn’t having more information, it’s acting on the information we “know to be true”

It doesn’t matter how much information you acquire if you don’t use it. “We would all be rockstar millionaires with six-pack abs” if information was the answer to all of our problems (paraphrased from Derek Sievers).

We all kind of know what we should be doing financially, physically, mentally, etc, but what are we doing with that information? How are we putting it into practice? Many of us know we should save and invest, but instead we indulge. We know we should eat clean, drink plenty of water, and exercise daily, but instead we eat too much fried food, drink too much alcohol, and skip our workouts. We know we should continue to read and expand our mind, but instead we waste time on social media or binge watching tv.

We all have an idea of what we should be doing. More information isn’t the answer – acting on the information we know to be true is.

Be so good they can’t ignore you (and prepare for haters along the way)

Haters are a good problem to have. Nobody hates the good ones. They hate the great ones.
“Haters are a good problem to have. Nobody hates the good ones. They hate the great ones.” – Kobe Bryant

Be so good that they can’t ignore you. And know that along the way, you will have detractors. You’ll have people making negative comments or disparaging remarks to try to bring you down to their level. Ignore the critics. Pay no attention to the haters. They are obstacles in your way to greatness.

If you dream big and act on your dreams, people will inevitably say things to you to make you question your decisions.

“Why do you work so hard?”

“I would never want to _____.”

“That sounds miserable.”

Don’t worry about what they say. Live your life and let them worry about living theirs. You’re striving for greatness, not mediocrity. As Tywin Lannister says in Game of Thrones, “A lion doesn’t concern himself with the opinions of sheep.”

Do you have a warrior’s mindset?

Do you have a Warrior’s mindset? When things get tough, will you fight or will you lay down? Can you adapt and overcome? Will you persist through failure, getting up after you’ve been knocked down?

Make no excuses. Do not complain. Embrace the “suck.”

Things will get better if you consistently take the right actions – making logical “bets” with asymmetric risk/rewards (that is, finding actions that do not carry much risk, but have outsized rewards). The more you string together good days the more success you set yourself up for. It’s like a flywheel…at first it can be hard to get started, but once you get momentum going, it’s hard to stop. Work hard to build momentum and then it’s much easier to keep it going.