Everything You Need To Succeed is Hidden in Plain Sight
You’ve told your brain it’s not important
You don’t need more discipline.
You don’t need more information.
You don’t need more focus.
Everything you need to start making progress TODAY is right in front of you!
The only reason you can’t see those resources is that you’re not looking for them.
You’ve told your brain they’re not important.
You’ve reinforced your lack enough times.
You’ve become fixated on your desired outcome.
These things have blinded you to the immediate issues you must tackle to start advancing and it hinder your development.
If you wanna turn your fortunes around, you must raise your level of self-awareness.
You’ve got to zoom in on what the immediate problem blocking you is and tackle that first.
Available doesn’t mean accessible
Resources are only accessible once the vessel is prepared.
This doesn’t mean resources weren’t available prior…
They were just inaccessible.
For example, in the UK, anyone who wants to buy alcohol from a licensed premises must be over the age of 18.
Alcohol is still available to those under 18, but it’s not accessible from licensed premises.
The government states this is enforced to protect the health of young people.
According to the National Health Service (NHS), The UK’s health service provider, alcohol during teenage years is related to a wide range of health and social problems.
Nature follows a similar principle…
“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”
This is a popular saying that’s been around for ages, but nobody knows who said it— it’s often credited to the likes of Buddha, the religious leader, and Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher.
The main gist is a teacher only appears when the student is prepared.
It’s not that the teacher wasn’t there before; the student just couldn’t see him or her.
Robin Sharma puts it down to focus…
He said, “What you focus on grows.”
Science backs up this claim with a phenomenon known as experience-dependent neuroplasticity. It’s the notion your brain has the capacity to alter itself in response to experience, repeated stimuli, environmental cues, and learning.
Basically, what I’m getting at is this…
If you feel like you don’t have the resources to start making progress today, it’s cos you’re focusing on the wrong thing.
The resources are available. They are right in front of you.
… But they’re inaccessible cos you’re focused on the wrong thing.
Chances are you’ve fixated your mind on the desired outcome you want, which reinforces to yourself the lack of it.
As you repeatedly focus on the end goal, you simultaneously blind yourself to the resources you already have available, which pushes the attainment of your ideal future further away.
The funny thing about what I’ve said is you probably already know this…
You know your brain can change and adapt — otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this story.
The problem is most people lack the self-awareness to identify they’re the ones obstructing themselves.
Not only do they lack self-awareness, they’re delusional about it…
In a study by organizational psychologist and executive coach Tasha Eurich, the researchers found that despite most people believing they’re self-aware, self-awareness is truly a rare quality.
“We estimate that only 10%–15% of the people we studied actually fit the criteria.” — Tasha Eurich
The researchers proposed two primary reasons for why this is the case…
Although their study focuses on executive leaders, the results can be related to ordinary folks like you and me.
For example, the first reason is by virtue of level — “senior leaders simply have fewer people above them who can provide candid feedback.” As you get older, you take more charge of your life; there’s fewer people who can give you candid feedback since you’re the leader of your life.
The second reason was, “The more power a leader wields, the less comfortable people will be to give them constructive feedback, for fear it will hurt their careers.” This is somewhat self-explanatory.
Ultimately, your lack of self-awareness is obstructing you.
The resources you need to progress are available to you, but they’re inaccessible cos you’re not paying attention to them, and you’re not noticing your lack of attention to them cos you lack self-awareness.
It’s a vicious cycle.
Positive fantasies
Fixating yourself on the attainment of a desired outcome is referred to by social psychologists as a positive fantasy.
According to the research on the phenomenon, positive fantasies allow individuals to indulge in a desired future mentally, which leads to them having less energy to pursue the desired future.
Since all of the sensations associated with the attainment of the desired outcome are being lived in the present as you indulge, you lack the energy you need to go after what you want.
This is often serenaded with excuses about the lack of certain resources.
What’s truly happening behind the scenes is as you’ve fixated yourself on the result, you’re not alert to the obstacles you encounter along the way.
It’s like walking up the stairs while looking at the ceiling…
If an obstacle blocked the way, you wouldn’t be able to proceed since your energy is being directed toward the desired outcome.
In other words, in your attempt to tackle future problems that haven’t yet occurred, you’re draining your energy.
You ignore the immediate problems that are directly in your face, which makes you blind to the resources you already have at your disposal and prevents you from making progress.
Since the actions you’re trying to take to advance aren’t necessary for where you are currently, they lack meaning.
Since they lack meaning, you need willpower to execute them…
But willpower is a finite resource.
As your willpower depletes, your ability to focus on difficult tasks goes out the window.
People in this cycle often get hung up on the notion that they lack discipline or focus, but that’s not the real problem.
The problem is that they’re indulging themselves in a fantasy.
Psychologists have found this is the number one way your brain can unintentionally deter you from realizing your goals.
According to the researchers, “Positive expectations (judging a desired future as likely) predicted high effort and successful performance, but the reverse was true for positive fantasies (experiencing one’s thoughts and mental images about a desired future positively).”
What doesn’t help is that when you’ve indulged in a positive fantasy, feedback from others that doesn’t align with your fantasized view of the future is often seen as offensive.
This happened to me in my early days as a footballer.
I always wanted to be seen as the creative type of player like Lionel Messi, but I was often associated with the workhorse archetype that lacked technique and creative prowess.
Major offense!
Instead of working to change the narrative I just sulked.
I wasn’t aware of the immediate problem I had to tackle to change the narrative – improving my positional play so I get more of the ball without having to hunt people down for it.
How to set yourself up for victory
As alluded to above, one of the main reasons people don’t acknowledge the resources they have available to them is due to one simple fact…
They don’t have a clear objective they’re in pursuit of.
When you know where you’re going it’s much easier to identify what’s blocking you from getting there.
If you can see what’s immediately blocking, you’re much more likely to use your immediate resources to tackle the problem.
For example, if you know your goal is to hit 10% body fat but you notice it’s increasing, it’s unlikely you’re gonna enroll in a three-year course to tackle the problem — you’d probably do something more immediate.
Without a clear idea of your goal, you’d struggle to identify the immediate obstacles blocking your path.
If you can’t see the immediate obstacles, you’ll ignore the immediate resources you have at your disposal.
They’ll still be available but they’ll be inaccessible until you’re prepared – meaning you’ve surrendered to the situation and accepted you need help.
If you see yourself trapped in this cycle, there’s three things you must do:
Step 1: Get clear and honest about what you wanna achieve
You can’t identify a problem if the objective isn’t clear.
Problems are only problems cos they get in the way of an ideal scenario.
To define a clear goal, you must meet the following criteria:
- Honesty
- Specificity
Honesty means it must be what YOU genuinely want, without factoring in any current incapabilities or other people’s opinions.
If you wanna go to the moon, that’s cool.
You have enough resources to at least start making progress toward that end.
The second standard is specificity.
Jim Rohn once said, “In 5 years’ time, you will arrive… The question is where?”
No matter what happens, you’ll become someone in the future.
The more specific you are about it, the narrower the path to get you there.
This means you can cut out a bunch of distractions and focus.
Step 2: Identify the thing blocking you right now
Why aren’t you where you wanna be right now?
It’s not the lack of anything, it’s your unawareness of something.
Psychologist Nathaniel Branden said, “The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance” – we’ll get to the second step in the next section.
If you can’t see what’s obstructing you, you can’t change.
If you can’t change, you can’t make progress.
The secret to becoming aware through introspection is to plod yourself…
Ask yourself why you’re not where you wanna be.
Use the five why method I spoke about in Don’t Just Set Goals, Build Systems.
Step 3: Accept and act
Once you’ve discovered the problem, you must accept it.
“The second step [toward change] is acceptance.”
Slowly but surely you’ll start to see the resources available to you slowly begin to reveal themselves.
For example, when I realized I had to tell as many people as possible about my services, the first thing I remembered was that I’ve got a LinkedIn following I built to over 14k followers, so I started hitting up people in the DMs there.
Once you accept the problem infront of you, you’ll start to realize the resources you need to progress are there too.
What’s always been available will gradually become accessible.
This will help get to where you wanna go faster.
Final thoughts
You don’t need more; you need a different perspective.
The resources to start making progress are available to you but will remain inaccessible until you’re ready.
Being ready merely means acknowledging you have a problem, and accepting you can’t solve it on your own.
When you do this, the resources that were always available to you will reveal themselves.
Thanks for reading!
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