Anyone who has accomplished anything great is still human–just like you. If they can do it, you can do it. Anything is possible. Think about all of the adversity people have fought through over the years. The challenges, the triumphs, the setbacks, the failures, the victories, the high achievements. You are just like the people who overcame and accomplished those things. If they can do it, why not you?
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Extreme Ownership
Develop the mindset of extreme ownership, that you own everything in your world. You are ultimately responsible for what happens in your world. If your relationship isn’t working out, what did you or can you do to fix it? If you aren’t making progress towards your goals, how can you fix it? Have you done everything you can to improve it?
When you have this mindset, you become unstoppable because you are constantly searching for how you can become better or improve your world. It also means you have to become ultimately accountable because there is no one else to blame.
But perhaps more importantly, you also become happier. By taking extreme ownership, you preclude the possibility of becoming a victim of circumstance. Nothing escapes your control because one way or another you own it and therefore can work to improve it. As a result, extreme ownership can be a key to happiness and fulfillment.
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Relationships Take Work
Even the deepest love takes a lot of work. Don’t expect you’ll fall in love and it’s “happily ever after.” It is an ongoing, ever-present challenge to make sure your relationship engine is fully oiled and hitting on all cylinders. Go into any relationship–business, friendship, or significant other–with this expectation.
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Life is About Balance
If you become a disciplined person, your discipline can dominate your mindset. In turn, this will lead you to feel guilty any time you deviate from your own standards or expectations. If you decide to get super fit and live a healthy life, any indulgence can riddle you with guilt. This guilt has the tendency to completely override any satisfaction that you might take from eating a piece of cholate cake (or whatever your guilty pleasure is). The same with finances. If you choose to save and live a frugal life, then spending money can bring a lot of feelings of guilt.
But life isn’t about scrimping and saving every penny, or ensuring every calorie you eat is as nutritious as possible. Life is about being satisfied, fulfilled and happy. I have observed that the best path to this is to be disciplined and hold yourself to a high standard, but to also be able to suspend this discipline so you can indulge in the finer things in life also.
Don’t be too disciplined. Don’t indulge too much. The right answer is a healthy balance between the two.
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Assume the Best
Give people the benefit of the doubt and assume the best. Fundamental attribution error – we are usually quick to assume the person is the problem, not their situation. But it is usually their situation or circumstance that causes people to act badly. Maybe they’re having a bad day, maybe they lost someone or maybe they aren’t happy for some reason. Chances are, something is going wrong in their life and they are just taking it out on you. So it’s not about you and nothing to take personally or let drag you down.
But don’t be naïve. There are bad people out there. In general, however, most people are good and there are many more good people than bad people. After all, how can we have a society like this if most people aren’t good??
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Power of Mentors
Power of mentors, getting help from others, learning from others experiences
Look at all of the people who springboard with the help of others.
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10,000 Hour Rule
10,000 hours rule. Your intelligence is flexible. You can improve and change. Show examples of people who didn’t start great. You can get better with deliberate effort.
There’s a lot of controversy around this rule but the lesson is important nonetheless.
“The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly 4 hours a day for 10 years.” -Malcolm Gladwell
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Failure
Anyone who is trying to do anything of significance will fail. It’s inevitable. How you cope to and react to failure is the whole key to success. It’s ironic-failure, and how you fail, is the key to success.
In reality, there is no failure. Only learning. Every failure is an opportunity to start again smarter. You are either succeeding or growing. Each failure is another growth opportunity.
Failure is an event, it is not a person. You will fail many times in your life, especially if you are pushing. Don’t let it define you.
You’re not a failure until you quit trying.
You only grow through stress. If you do something you already know how to do, you do not grow. It is only when you force your body and brain to do new and bigger things – new stresses – that you grow.
Suggested reading:
- Mindset book
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Stay Humble
When you inevitably experience triumph and success in your life, it’s so tempting for it to go to your head. This can manifest in very obvious ways, or it can also be very subtle. You have to protect against confidence from past successes spilling over into cockiness. There’s always someone out there who is better than you so stay humble and realize that, more often than not, you aren’t as good as you think you are. Supreme confidence is great. Cockiness is a big turnoff to everyone around you.
Virtue: Humility
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Power of Habit
People often think setting the big hairy audacious goal is the key to success. It isn’t. The key to success is what you do year to year, month to month, and day to day that gets the results you need to achieve your goals. Habits are the foundation of success because they are literally how you carry yourself minute to minute. What’s incredible is once you form a habit it becomes unconscious and you don’t need to think about it or force yourself to do something–it happens automatically.
The power of habit is undeniable. Constructive habits, like exercising or eating vegetables, carried out over many years can have tremendous impact. It’s kind of like water dripping on a stone. Over the course of a day or even a month, you will not see any change to the rock. But leave it there for long enough and the water will literally wear away the stone. How do you think the grand canyon was formed?
What’s funny is the the habits you form not only determine your success… they also determine the kind of person you are. You literally are your habits. If you have habits of discipline, you will be known as a disciplined person. If you have habits of late night binge eating, you will be known as a fat person. This can also work in the other direction. A great question to ask yourself as you try to form habits and become the kind of person you want to be is “What would XYZ person do?” If you want to be fit, ask yourself, “What would a fit person do?” Eventually, as you repeat these actions/behaviors enough, you will become that person. You can also think of yourself as that fit person, which makes you all the more likely to carry the action forward. If you are debating whether or not to go to the gym, you can remind yourself that you are a fit person and it will propel you towards the gym.
Suggested reading:
- Power of Habit
- Atomic Habits