An Indisputable Formula for Success
It is a very simple formula. Anyone can execute it. Few will.
Hard Work Wins
Short cuts
Make long delays.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Do the work.
Put in the time.
Learn.
Apply.
And eventually, you will achieve your goals.
If you haven’t yet achieved your goals, work harder, put in more time, be smarter, and apply better.
Become wiser and more efficient with each passing day.
In “The Divine Comedy,” Dante wrote,
“The path to paradise begins in hell.”
Whenever you find yourself in a position of reflection of why you haven’t yet met your goals, the corrective action to take will be simple.
Get back to work.
Work harder.
Work smarter.
Put in more time.
Learn from your mistakes and failures.
Apply what you learned.
And then it won’t be if, but only a matter of time before you succeed.
You Will Not Always Get Paid for Your Work, Work Hard Anyway
No effort that we make
To attain the beautiful
Is ever lost.
Helen Keller
There will be times when you will do the work, and you won’t get paid.
There will be times when you will do everything right, and things will still go wrong.
There will be times when you will work hard and produce great work and the payoff never happens.
What should you do when this happens?
Well, the best advice comes from Shakespeare when he wrote in Othello,
“The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief.”
You see, some events are designed to discourage you.
To break you.
To make you quit.
Don’t let them.
Detach from negative emotions.
Flip the script and turn turmoil into fuel.
Be unable to be discouraged.
Believe you always get paid.
Even when you don’t, you do.
Your payment will not always come in the customarily expected fashion.
But hard work and a full effort always get paid.
Often your reward is not being unjustifiably held from you. It is being deferred for you, stored up, to be given to you in a lump sum, rather than in incremental pieces.
Nobody Outworks You
There may be people that have more talent than you,
But there is no excuse
For anyone to work harder than you do.
Derek Jeter
It is a great feeling knowing you the hardest worker in the room.
It is a characteristic most sought after by many employers.
I’ve worked for companies that only hired athletes, especially wrestlers because they knew their work ethic would be supreme.
Many things are out of your control.
Your ability to be the hardest worker in the room is not one of them.
Take pride in the fact that nobody will ever outwork you.
Your Confidence Will Be In Direct Proportion to Your Preparedness
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
Abraham Lincoln
Confidence is best defined as a belief in oneself.
Having a belief in oneself is attributed to knowing.
Knowing comes from being prepared.
Preparation comes from putting in the work, making the sacrifices, and experiencing the pain.
Confidence is vital to achievement.
Confidence is binary.
There is no middle ground.
Either you have it, or you don’t.
There is no such thing as being “a little bit confident.”
Confidence cannot be faked.
It can only be earned.
Confidence is earned through hard work, extreme sacrifice, and enduring struggle.
Then, and only then will you be prepared, and then and only then will you have confidence.
Every test you face where you do the work, make the sacrifice, and absorb the pain of struggle, is recorded by your mind.
The results are stored deep in your subconscious.
When your confidence is called upon, immediately, your subconscious mind will become the judge and jury and will determine if you deserve its delivery based on those prior test results.
There is an old saying that you can’t fool yourself.
When earned, confidence will be at your beckoning call.
When you convince your subconscious mind that you have properly prepared, sacrificed, and have handled the pain of suffering positively, confidence will automatically appear.
And you will be rewarded by its presence.
Trust Yourself
Intuition is
Seeing with the soul.
Dean Koontz
Your intuition is a key component in figuring it out.
People get similar results because they act and respond similarly.
Trust your instincts when they scream out to you to act differently.
Sometimes it takes making a wrong turn that requires you to make another wrong turn that somehow puts you back on course.
You can never see the two wrong turns turning into the right path ahead of time.
But your intuition can.
It can see around corners and over mountains.
It can see two wrong turns ahead.
Be still and listen to your soul.
It will whisper to you.
Trust it.
Trust it even when it is telling you to do something that is not completely conventional.
As it may be working a few steps ahead.
99% Effort is Not Enough
If you give 99% you will make your competitions job very easy.
Imagine that you are shopping for life insurance to protect your family, who are the most important thing in the world to you.
There is a one-million-dollar policy that costs $1,000 a year and covers your family every day of the year.
There is another one-million-dollar policy that only costs $500 a year but doesn’t cover your family on Fridays; if you were to die on a Friday, the policy wouldn’t payout to your family.
Which one would you choose?
Sounds silly, right?
Why would someone care enough to take out life insurance but leave themselves vulnerable on Fridays?
It may not be as important as life insurance for your family, but only giving 99% effort towards your goal is the same thing.
Why would you care enough to do 99% only to leave yourself vulnerable by the 1% left undone?
Always give your all.
100% of it.
No holding back.
Be all in.
All the time.
No matter what.
Have no vulnerabilities in your effort.
I am always best able to give 100% effort by concentrating on what I can control.
To not be distracted by the constant noise of life.
Always being on an ongoing journey towards my vision.
When I do that, I am able to live with any outcome; because I know I did everything I could; there wasn’t one more thing I possibly could have done.
And, then and only then, can I live with any, and all, results.
With no regret.
One of the greatest lessons I have learned from life is that the outcome isn’t the goal.
Your output is.
You can’t control the outcome.
You can control your output.
The goal is to give 100% of what you have.
And then you can live with any outcome.
100% effort kills regret.
If you give 99%, your peace of mind will be vulnerable for life.
For every 1% that you hold back, is an additional 1% chink in your armor.
For every 1% that you hold back is 1% that goes in your opponent’s opportunity column.
So, don’t hold back.
Don’t pace yourself.
Don’t save some for later.
Why in the world would you be willing to do 99% and then not be willing to do 1% more?
Most people leave the remaining 1% undone because the last 1% is tolling.
The truth is it requires much more effort than it numerically suggests.
There are very few people willing to do significantly more work than 1% only to get 1% in return.
It seems like an unfair trade.
I’m telling you to pay significantly more for the final 1% gladly.
Because what people fail to realize is that the last 1% returns to you so much more.
It takes you to a new level.
If you have been fastidious enough to give to 99% effort, one, give yourself credit, and then two, go back to work to give the other 1%.
All you can give is all that you have.
Give it all.
And you will always be at peace with yourself.
You Can’t Fool Yourself
Your brain will not sow lies,
And then reap the truth.
There is a saying in life, “You can’t run from yourself.”
You are the only person with yourself 100% of the time.
Only you know if you deserve the special force stored in your soul when you are reaching down for more.
Most people don’t have confidence because they feel that they don’t deserve it.
Why?
They know everything about themselves, and they know what they did, what they didn’t do, and their subconscious mind made an evaluation that they didn’t deserve success.
Other people know they have done all that was asked of them, and when they reached down to get more, it is delivered because their subconscious made an evaluation and determined that they earned it.
Be in harmony with success by doing the work.
Convince the judge and jury, your subconscious mind, that you deserve success.
And success will appear.
Give Everything or Get Nothing
You find that you have peace of mind
And can enjoy yourself,
Get more sleep, and rest,
When you know
That it was a one hundred percent effort
That you gave,
Win or lose.
Geordie Howe
Most people have what it takes, but they are not willing to give everything they got.
When you give everything you got, there will be a time where you will have nothing left, and you are left vulnerable.
I attest it is in this state of vulnerability that desperation arises.
The feeling of desperation is vital to ignite one into the relentless action needed to overcome all obstacles.
The feeling of having nothing left creates a desire to get everything back.
And more.
So, don’t hold back.
Not even a little.
Give everything.
Without giving everything,
You get to keep the little you didn’t give.
And in the scheme of things, that is nothing.
You need to have a gear that others don’t have.
The desperation gear.
If at this moment that gear eludes you, then there is nothing more important than obtaining it.
Right now.
Above all else.
For it is in that unpopulated gear where the jewels are stored.
The desperation gear originates in desire.
Only you, and you alone can desire an outcome you are willing to fight for.
To sacrifice for.
To bleed for.
To give all you have for.
To reach your zone of vulnerability and un-comfortability for.
Without the guarantee of success.
It takes a feeling of desperation to know all you want is just outside of your reach and that an extra effort is needed, one even above the already insane output of energy you have already exalted.
It’s the same feeling of funneled focused desperation as when you are rope training, giving 100% output, but somehow “you will” the rope faster.
It isn’t your physical fitness which makes the rope go faster; it’s your desperate desire to create a new maximum output that does.
With vulnerability comes desperation.
With desperation comes relentlessness.
And with relentlessness comes achievement.
Get 1% Better Every Day
Little by little, one travels far.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Most people feel there isn’t enough time in the day.
Not having enough time isn’t the issue.
The issue is utilizing the time you do have more efficiently.
No one gets to increase the amount of time they have.
We can only more efficiently utilize the time that we have.
Work with a purpose.
Slow and steady wins the race.
Consistency wins.
Take the approach life is not a sprint;
it is a marathon.
Small gains over long periods.
Life has many 100-day periods, more than three per year.
Get 1% better each day in every area of your life and you can triple your effectiveness in less than a year.
Be productive.
Make small gains every day over long periods.
The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca said it best,
“It is not that we have so little time.
The life we receive is not short, but we make it so;
We are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.”
Be jealous of your time.
Use it effectively.
Seek to get 1% better every day.
Push Beyond Your Limits Daily
Push me past my limit all you want.
It’s territory I know all too well.
Ben Greenhalgh
The average human uses only 10% of their brain.
That means we have 10x more mind functions to tap into.
Imagine if your brain was 10x smarter, 10x more productive, 10x more efficient than it was at your most significant moment?
The possibilities of achievement are limitless.
The typical person, though, stays within the 10% that he has always used, never going beyond the misconstrued boundaries of their mind, in essence, creating a self-imposed fence around future achievement.
Go beyond the boundaries.
Unleash the 10x force.
Push beyond your limits daily.
Working up to yesterday’s limits is not the goal.
Pushing past those limits, making daily breakthroughs, is the goal.
Set out to make yesterday’s maximum today’s minimum.
And do the same thing tomorrow.
And see how your life expands.
Always Choose the Harder Option
Once you get past the point of expecting life to be easy, It becomes much less difficult.
Most people in life will choose the option that requires the least amount of effort for a smaller short-term result.
Choosing the harder option, which sacrifices obtaining a small short-term result for a more enduring long term reward, will require more time and effort.
Hard work works.
Prioritize or Agonize
Many of us never realize our greatness
Because we get sidetracked
By secondary activity.
Og Mandino
There is not enough time, nor do you have enough energy to accomplish everything every day.
There will be days you will have to sacrifice something you value.
When you live in order with your priorities and then run out of time or energy in your day, the choice of least value to you will get sacrificed.
When you live out of order of your priorities, what gets sacrificed is of the choice of most value to you.
To achieve the life you envision, you must live each day in order and harmony with your priorities.
Impose Your Will
If you haven’t the strength
To impose your own terms upon life,
Then you must accept the terms it offers you.
T.S. Eliot
Good things do not just happen in life.
You need to make them happen.
Taking massive, immediate action makes good things happen.
Even after taking massive, immediate action, your efforts will run into resistance.
To overcome resistance requires grit.
To do what you set out to do will require more attempts than you had planned.
During these multiple attempts, doubt will start to creep in.
Having a clear purpose will allow you to persevere through doubt.
As purpose trumps doubt.
To persevere with purpose requires will.
Will is the process of converting what you want into reality for your unique reasons.
That is where mental toughness comes in.
Ralph Waldo Emerson eloquently said,
“What lies behind us, and what lies before us, are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
Your will is what lies within you.
It is your why.
Use your why to impose your will.
Delay Gratification
For everything you have missed,
You have gained something else,
And for everything you gain,
You lose something else.
We live in a microwave society.
Everyone wants instant gratification, instant success.
The problem is that success doesn’t come in an instant formula.
Success requires years of hard work, sacrifice, and perseverance.
Understand, for every gratification you delay,
You will receive an even bigger reward tomorrow.
Be strong enough to resist the temptation of an immediate reward to put yourself in a position to receive a greater, more enduring reward in the future.
No seed planted today is ever harvested today.
Every hour invested in delaying gratification nurtures a seed which will be more bountifully sown tomorrow.
Don’t Make the Same Mistake Twice
Once is a mistake.
Twice is a choice
There are too many mistakes in this world to make once.
Don’t exponentially increase the number of mistakes there are available to make by repeating one.
Mistakes can be beneficial.
When you make a mistake and learn from it,
that mistake is not as a waste.
When you make a mistake, and you do not learn from it, well, that is a waste of time and energy, which are both in limited supply in life.
Don’t waste either by not applying a lesson that you have already paid the price to learn.
You Achieve, or You Learn
If we shall be quiet
And ready enough,
We will find compensation
In every disappointment.
Henry David Thoreau
You achieve, or you learn.
When you adjust your thinking that a failed attempt is not a failure, but rather it is a learn, then both the achievement and the failed attempt will prove to be beneficial to your success.
When you incorporate
“You win, or you learn,”
You will always win because, in both cases, you come out ahead.
Make Adjustments Not Excuses
There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us.
They will be stumbling blocks or stepping-stones.
It all depends on how you use them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Excuses provide a reason why something didn’t happen in the past without an adjustment to correct the reason to why it won’t happen again in the future.
It is the adjustment that is key, so that same thing will not happen again in the future.
Adjustments take the reason and add an action that solves the problem.
Always go further than looking for the reason why something didn’t work out as you had liked.
Invest the time to look for the adjustment you need to make to ensure it won’t happen again in the future.
You win, or you learn.
Apply what you learned when you didn’t win, and then that non-win can never be deemed a loss.
Take Complete and Absolute Ownership
I am the master of my fate.
I am the captain of my soul.
William Ernest Henley
Invictus
If you don’t like what happened, don’t blame, adjust.
When you adjust, you correct the mistake.
When you blame, you keep yourself trapped in the mistake.
Losers stay trapped.
Winners escape the mistake by adjusting.
Remember when you point the finger at someone else, three will be pointing back at you.
Take complete responsibility for your actions and ownership for their results.
Placing blame or making excuses is a futile endeavor.
It wastes time and energy.
I have never seen a person who, after placing blame or making an excuse, ever achieve a better outcome.
Blame and excuses lead to a downward spiral because subconsciously, you are telling yourself that they were out of your control; thus, it cannot be fixed.
Downward spirals are not conducive to high achievement.
By taking complete and absolute ownership of all circumstances, you are telling your subconscious mind that you are in control and can fix what needs to be fixed to have a better outcome next time.
This action leads to improved performance.
Improved performance leads to hitting your goals.
In life, there will be many opportunities to blame others for poor performance.
There will be many opportunities to make an excuse as to why something terrible occurred.
Don’t.
Always remember that your objective is for better future performance.
Take complete and absolute ownership instead.
Doing so will give you the most significant opportunity for future success.
Remember, you are the master of your fate; you are the captain of your soul.
Find Your Why
A voice calls from within to go on.
And so, he goes on.
When asked why he did not quit
John Steven Aquari responded,
My country didn’t send me 5,000, miles to start a race.
They sent me 5,000 miles to finish the race.
John Stephan Ahkwari
Last Place Finisher
Marathon Runner from Tanzania
1968 Mexico City Olympics
During your journey to greatness, you will be tested.
You will be required to do things that seem out of whack, unfair, and without payoff.
And there will come a time when you will question whether all the work, sacrifice, and discipline are worth it.
Each of us has a special reason, a why, a driving force as to why we are willing to endure so much un-comfortability for so little pleasure.
Where does ones why come from?
It comes from within.
When you feel that you are part of something bigger,
when you are doing this for more than yourself,
then your why will be greater than any obstacle, and you will endure.
This is what separates good from great, great from elite and elite from astronomical.
Find your why, and you will find a way.
No matter what.
Whatever it takes.
Somehow.
Anyhow.
You will figure it out.
If your why is strong enough, you will endure.
It is Simple, But Not Easy
What I believe is not believed by everyone,
And is not practiced by everyone who believes it.
Pat Schneider
Never confuse simple and easy.
Simple is easy to understand but hard to execute.
Figuring out the path to success is simple.
Walking the path is hard.
The execution is always the hard part.
The execution requires sacrifice and discipline.
The execution requires precision planning and prioritizing.
The execution requires extensive work, insane boredom, and extreme loneliness.
The execution requires you to feel the acute pain of failure and requires you to grapple a few rounds with self-doubt and discouragement.
Everyone wants to be successful.
What they don’t want is to live the lifestyle and endure the pain that is necessary to become successful.
Have you ever witnessed a person come up with a goal?
Most execute their plan while their mood is still right, but once the mystique of having a big goal has worn off and the actual grueling work is required, they fall to the wayside.
Others, the most successful, continue to execute their plan well past the point of when it’s still in vogue to do so.
They do things others are not willing to do.
That is why they get what others are not able to get.
Never confuse simple and easy.
The difference between simple and easy is the work.
And work is hard.
Ever since becoming an involuntary member of the “Life-Changing Events Club” when my daughter lost oxygen to her brain for 6 minutes, I have viewed life with a new perspective. That new perspective has been the greatest gift of my life. I write about that unique perspective, life, and The Universe in my memoirs which can be found on my Amazon Author Page.
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