avatarKeir Wotherspoon

Summarize

Here’s The Secret To Achieving Your Goals — Stop Following The 10X & Hustle Culture

The truth about how your brain works for success

Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash

The 10X culture is setting you up for FAILURE!

The trouble is we live in a culture where we’re told…

10X your goals… If you think X go for Z

Hustle until you make it…

Go big or go home.

Although I couldn’t comment on these people’s happiness, mental health, and wellness this approach works for the minority of ‘influencers’.

But unless your ambitions are to be a high-flying tycoon, my guess is you got into entrepreneurship to any or all of the below

a) Create your own way in the world by serving and helping others

b) Provide yourself and your family with a better way of living on your own terms

c) Do work you enjoy that makes an impact in the world

So why set yourself up for failure by following the advice of the hustlers?

Let’s be clear, we are all at different stages in life. We all have different experiences, levels of confidence, and strength of mental resilience.

So let me tell you why this 10Xing hustle culture is WRONG!

There’s a part of your brain that handles fear and anxiety called the amygdala (1). The amygdala plays a crucial role in goal setting. The reason it plays a crucial role is that fear and anxiety are essential for goal setting and achieving these goals.

Few people know this, but visualizing failure is a more significant motivator than visualizing success. Fear and anxiety are your secret weapon (shh! Don’t tell anyone)

So let’s scrap those vision boards and instead have failure boards.

Be careful though because it can also backfire and work against you by setting goals that are too big. Goals that deep down you don’t believe you can achieve (yet).

I say yet because it’s not that you can’t achieve it, you just don’t believe it yet. And that’s okay. Building self-belief is a necessary part of growth.

Elon Musk didn’t start thinking he’d become the first trillionaire. He saw problems in the market and figured out how to solve them. The rest they say is history.

Always be yourself and have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a succesful personality and try to duplicate it — Bruce Lee

Start where you’re at:

Earlier I mentioned we are all at different stages of confidence, experience, and mental resilience. Please remember this because this is the number one reason people FAIL!

Here’s why…

Think of the fear and anxiety response as a scale. On one end of the scale, there’s belief, grit, and hope. This will elicit the fight response. On the other lies debilitating doubt, worry and hopelessness. The part that forces you to flee. How you set your goals and targets will determine at what side of the scale you sit and whether you fight or flight.

The truth about achievement

The sweet spot is to identify targets that scare you enough to excite. But does not debilitate you enough into overwhelm and excessive procrastination. Believe me, there’s a difference.

Targets need to be realistic to where you are now. Because what you believe is achievable now will be different in 12-months.

“But Keir, what about dreaming big?”

Don’t worry, I’ve got you.

There’s a difference between ambitions and targets.

Ambitions are your long-term vision and how you envisage your future five, ten and twenty years down the road. Your vision is important. In fact, your vision is essential. Think of this as your navigation system to where you want to go.

Targets are different. Targets are your steppingstones to reaching your vision. If the steppingstones are too far apart, and you’re not yet confident with your jumping abilities, you will miss your stones and fall. This will kill your confidence.

Photo by Lisa Baker on Unsplash

Yet, if the steppingstones are too close together it’s too easy. There’s no drive or determination to challenge your jumping abilities. You’re not forced to learn and improve. Then when you’re faced with your ultimate jump, you crumble under the pressure.

The sweet spot is to place the stones just far enough apart to create the fear of failing. But close enough to inject a belief that you can do it. If you put the work in.

With each jump you make your confidence grows. Eventually, you have total belief in your jumping abilities and begin striving towards bigger leaps.

Remember this…

You have the ability to make the jump. You just don’t believe it yet. Every day work to develop your confidence, experience and strengthen your resilience.

Thank you for reading : )

Keir Spoon

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References

1:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2882379/pdf/nihms204504.pdf

2:https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/hubermanlab/id1545953110?i=1000548697097

Entrepreneurship
Goal Setting
Personal Development
Self Improvement
Hustle Culture
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