Tag: taking action

Failure, limitations, and the future

If you can embrace failure, you can accomplish amazing things. If you aren’t afraid to fail, to look stupid, to look weak or lesser in the eyes of others, as long as you can keep getting up and trying again, you will continue to improve and eventually reach heights you never thought possible before.

Failures or setbacks happen. Plan and prepare as much as possible so that winning is the expected outcome, not failure. But if/when you do fail, don’t be too down on yourself. Everyone fails if they’re pushing their current limits…the key is to have a good understanding of what your current limitations are, how much risk you can afford to take so that your failure is not catastrophic, and then to continually push forward. By doing this, eventually your current limitations will be easy for you.

Playing the victim card vs taking control of your life

Don’t play the victim card. It may be true that you have been victimized. But until recent times, not many people cared and even less people offered to help.

It’s up to you to make your life better – not your family, not your friends, and not the government. If, by some chance, you are fortunate enough to have somebody care and help you out, that’s icing on the cake. But don’t expect that to happen. Nobody owes you anything, especially if they are not the ones who directly harmed you.

If you feel bad about something that has happened, that’s ok. I’m not saying you should be a robot. But I am saying that what’s done is done and you need to move on. Wasting time, energy, and thought on feeling bad for yourself isn’t going to help you moving forward. How can you make your life better starting today?

Embracing your fear to make you better and live with less anxiety

Embrace your fear. Everybody fears something. Don’t be ashamed of it and don’t recoil from it. If you fear making mistakes and you don’t embrace it, you will do everything in your power to not make a mistake. Eventually that will lead you to stop taking any chances at all just so you don’t look bad…

But the thing is, it’s all in your head. Most people won’t judge you for making mistake. And if they do, it’s pretty hypocritical. Everyone makes mistakes. The best learn from their mistakes and from the mistakes they’ve observed others make. They not only learn from that isolated incident, but they also can apply their new found knowledge in other areas of life. They figure out where the carryover is and become better predictors for future events. Then they test the hypothesis and keep pushing.

The more you push your limits, the more you grow. But if you don’t want to push your limits and always want to stay within your comfort zone, you might grow slowly, or you might not grow at all. And in a worst-case scenario, you’ll actually end up getting worse.

Embrace your fears. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, to look weak, to look dumb… If you don’t understand something, ask a question. If you think you can lift the weight, but you aren’t sure, try it anyways. Ask for a spotter. People like to help if you let them.

Getting started

You don’t have to know it all to get started, you just need to know what the next step is. If you wait until you have all of the information or until you know exactly how things will play out, you will be waiting forever. There is risk and uncertainty in everything we do in life. There is even risk and not taking action.

Determine where you are currently and where you think you want to be in the future. Once you have an end result in mind, then reverse engineer the next steps to get there. You don’t have to have everything planned out to a “T” to get started. Have a general guideline or a framework on how do you think it should look and what you need to do to get started. I guarantee that how do you think it looks and how it will eventually end up working is going to be at least a little different. But if you don’t do anything, if you wait for all the answers to come to you, if you wait for certainty, you’re going to miss your opportunity.

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.