Dan Waldschmidt's Blog, page 18

The Humility To Dominate.

You’re not too good to get on your knees and work for success. 

That’s what it takes to achieve greatness. Humility. A deep sense of mission and purpose. 

You might feel like you’ve struggled too long to still be in this position right now. 

You might feel like you’re above the primacy of doing whatever it takes. 

In truth, you can never outgrow desire. 

You never stop needing to be humble and hopeful. That’s the secret to domination.

That’s the secret to taking your game to the next level. 

You need the humility to know that at any time life can break you and the hopefulness to believe that you’re strong enough to get back up.

That you are committed to continue fighting even when you feel like your effort is wasted. 

Doing whatever it takes isn’t about you puffing out your chest standing on the trophy podium with your hand raising showing that you are the best. 

It’s about all the sleepless nights you’ve had to endure to get there.

It’s about the pain of practicing with purpose. It’s about the loneliness of focused vision. 

You’re not smiling through the tedious effort and never-ending journey. 

It’s the grimace in the grind. But humility keeps you grounded. 

Never forget that every other person who has accomplished anything of note has had to do the exact same thing as you’re doing right now. 

Humility reminds you that what makes you great isn’t your inherent talent or birthright, but your ability to do what is hard and embarrassing and thankless. 

What makes you great is your unabashed dedication to accomplishing your goals.

That’s demands humility.

Get Up. Get Busy.

Get up and get busy. Get out of bed.

Stop telling yourself that you’re not a morning person. You’re just not a motivated person.

All the things that you want for yourself require you to get to work right now.

That fear you feel — it goes away when you begin to apply activity.

So get up and get busy.

Stop making excuses for staying in bed.

Stop pretending like you owe yourself more rest.

Life is hard. You’re going to be fatigued.

Stop crying and get busy. All you have is today.

You’re not even guaranteed to have the whole day.

All you have are these moments that you’re wasting lying in bed hoping that the universe magically bends in your direction.

But it won’t — and it could — because you’re not putting in enough effort.

You’re not even trying.

What if you got up an hour earlier each day, using that time to find your inner motivation or to begin experimenting on some of the new ideas you’ve been thinking about?

You would get more out of each day.

An hour earlier each day for just 5 days of the week every week for a year translates to 260 extra hours working on your big idea.

That’s more than a month and a half of 9-to-5 days.

How much more could you achieve with an extra 6 weeks of time?

How much more could you achieve if you traded sleeping in for getting things done?

You would actually get things done.

It’s hard to get started when you’re still tired from what you did the day before. That’s still not an excuse to stay in bed.

Nothing works if you don’t work — which is where everything you want for yourself begins.

With you working. With you trying.

Get out of bed and get busy. Your goals can’t wait any longer.

That’s Not Success. It’s Just A Sugar Rush.

The hard thing about success is that it demands you do hard things.

You can not achieve greatness by simply doing what is easy.

It doesn’t work.

Which is why all the quick fixes and “guaranteed home runs” you’re trying to find are just a waste of your time.

There is no plan that you can repeat that’s guaranteed to get you where you want to be.

What has worked for someone else probably won’t work for you at all. And vice versa. 

Plans are dependent on resources like time, money, and environment –which aren’t easily replicated. 

You won’t find success looking for easy answers. All you will find are easy excuses for not being awesome.

If you want to find success, look first for hard things.

Scary, painful things.

What are the complex and emotionally uncomfortable challenges that everyone else around you is afraid to confront? What are you afraid to get started working on? 

In truth, you probably already have the answers. 

It’s that thing you haven’t started yet, but you’ve been talking about. It’s that scary thing you’ve been thinking about that you haven’t even had the courage to talk about yet.

These hard things take time. And results come slowly. 

Which is why it can seem like the best option is the easy answer with the fast results and guaranteed results. 

That’s not success. It’s just a sugar rush. 

What you learn from doing the hard things is that the results are so much sweeter and they last quite a bit longer. 

You keep winning for a long time. Which is why you need to get started on that hard thing now.

The Problem With Not Failing.

The problem with not failing is that you never get any better.

Forward progress is a result of loss and suffering.

Whatever you call it – a try or an iteration, a pivot, a test, or a trial balloon – trying and failing is uncomfortable, no matter how you tried to rationalize the outcome.

But it’s also necessary. It’s the only way that you improve.

Failure forces you to adapt and evolve.

You can’t stay the same and improve.

You have to get better.

Failure is nature’s way of pruning back good ideas so that you can create greater work.

Make no mistake, failure isn’t going to feel fun. Even knowing that it is the core of what propels you mightily toward your goal isn’t going to be enough to take the sting away.

It’s going to hurt. You’re going to feel uncomfortable. Miserable. Upset and angry.

When you put it all on the line and fail to succeed, it feels like you have left a part of yourself behind.

In truth, you have.

You have left a piece of yourself behind. But if you are willing to learn something new, that piece you lost will grow back even stronger.

You will be better because of your failure.

When you first feel the sting of failure, conversations like this are meaningless. What you feel overrides any logical discussion you could have with yourself.

But it’s important to remember the truth for when your emotions level out and it’s time to get back to work.

Failure can’t kill you.

And the problem with never failing is that you will never get any better.

You’ll stay stuck. And miserable. Always wanting something more but not sure how to go get it.

Learn from your failures. Let that drive you to be the person you’ve always wanted to become. To get to where you want to be.

After all, success is the best revenge.

If It Doesn’t Suck You’re Not Doing It Right.

Like so many other 10-year-old boys, Kieran Behan went into surgery for a small tumor discovered on his leg.

It was a routine surgery, performed thousands of times across the United Kingdom. Cut out the growth. Stitch up the wound. Today, of course, was to be no different.

Except it was.

As the surgeon cut around the edge of the tumor with a sharp scalpel to remove it, his hand slipped — slicing through the nerves in his leg, causing catastrophic damage. He was left wheelchair bound. The agony from his damaged nerves caused him overwhelming waves of pain.

The doctors told him he would never walk again. His psychiatrist told him to accept the worst.

His young days of gymnastics were over.

His friends and family tried to level with him by telling him  “he could kiss his dream of competing goodbye.”

“But that just drove me on; I wanted to prove them wrong. They were saying it was over but I wasn’t having it.”

After 15 months of relentless effort to re-train his leg, Kieran finally returned to Tolworth Gymnastics Club, his home gym in southwest London to get back in shape for the run of his life.

His promising career was back on track. Kieran knew how this story would go. He had suffered a traumatic injury, recovered against all odds, and was now destined for world-class gymnastics feats, possibly even the Olympics.

It was an impossibly inspiring story.

A story Kieran was ready to write and prove everyone else wrong.

But it wasn’t meant to be.

One training day, as he was working through his usual high bar routine like he had thousands of times before, he made one wrong move.

His hand slipped. He smashed the back of his skull on the bar and crumpled to the ground. Unconscious. And unresponsive.

His dad raced him into the emergency room where the doctors discovered extensive damage to his brain and his inner ear.

He was back in the wheelchair.

And faced with new problems.

In an instant, he went from spinning impossibly fast off the vault, powerfully holding positions midair on the rings, and tumbling gracefully through the air in his floor routine–his best event– to relearning how to sit up straight.

For three years, he would work on human skills most take for granted — trying to just re-learn the basics. Like walking.

For three years, his parents would encourage him, telling him “he could do it”, then run out of the room to sob over the state of their son.

For three years, he struggled to remain conscious, passing out thousands of times from the brain damage caused by his fall.

After a year, he returned to school.

Only to face relentless teasing over his disabilities as he struggled to get around with a cane.

He spent countless hours in his gymnastics training center trying to catch a ball rebounding off the wall to relearn hand-eye coordination, while his teammates tumbled, twisted, and flew through the air around him.

Painfully slowly but surely, he began to relearn the sport he had fallen in love with so many years before.

By 2009, he was back in full-swing, gunning after the 2010 European Championships.

And again tragedy would strike. He blew his right ACL in a training exercise. And then 6 weeks before his biggest competition, he ruptured his other ACL. All of his work to come back to the sport he loved was wasted.

Nothing had worked in his favor. He wanted to quit.

He even contemplated suicide.

Instead, he did what he always had done in other situations like this. He pushed through.

And in 2011, he pushed hard enough to compete in the Challenge World Cup Series.

In September, he won bronze in Slovenia for his floor routine.

In October, he took silver in Croatia. Same event.

In November, he won gold–Ireland’s first–in the Czech Republic. Same event.

But those medals were not without a cost.

Since Kieran wasn’t officially sponsored, he had to figure out his own way to get to these events. He, his family, and his friends did whatever they could: bake sales, personal donations, anything to get him around the globe.

His hard work didn’t go unnoticed. The Irish Sports Council gave him a €20,000 grant to fund his quest for Olympic gold at the 2012 London games.

But that money couldn’t stop him from twice slipping during his floor routine, the event he thought was rock solid. He had disqualified himself from the finals.

“I was in no man’s land, and I was lonely not knowing where my career was going,” Kieran Behan would remark, looking back at the event.

His meager support forced him to work construction with his dad.

And since that wasn’t enough, he coached the younger kids and cleaned the gym each morning so he could spend another 35 hours a week in the gym perfecting his dream.

All that sweat paid off in 2016 when he made it to the Rio Olympics.

This was his moment. It had slipped away in 2012 when he fell twice on the mat — and he wasn’t about to let it slip away again this time.

Halfway through the qualifying round to make it to the finals, he was in good position. His dream was finally starting to become a reality.

But it all came down to the floor routine, his strongest discipline.

If he could nail this, he’d be in the finals and one step closer to Olympic gold. He’d need to score higher on this than in any previous round.

He started the routine the same as he had a thousand other times in practice. Hands raised, outstretched in a “Y” like every other gymnast. He stepped with the left leg that had given him so much trouble, then started racing diagonally across the floor before bounding into the air, rotating at an inhuman speed, quickly landing, somersaulting again, leaping once more into the air, rotating and sticking the landing. It was flawless.

Except for his left knee. This time, he blew his meniscus, the soft lubricant between the shin and thigh bones.

But there was one problem.

He still had the rest of his floor routine to complete. He had busted his knee on the first move of his strongest routine.

“As soon as my feet touched the ground on that first tumble and the knee went, I just knew that it was about survival and just getting through the rest of the routine,” Kieran thought.

He twisted, tumbled, and flipped his way through the routine, adrenaline helping him the rest of the way through.

But his coach had to help him off the mat.

He was disqualified. Again.

Sent home without a medal or even a spot in the finals.

When asked about his future after Rio, he opined, “I don’t know anyone that’s had the journey I’ve had.”

His story is still being written. Why?

Because Kieran refuses to quit.

That same spirit pulled him back into the gym where he smashed his head earlier. That same tenacity pulled him back from the edge of suicide. That same raw grit carried him through his final routine and continues to push him onward today.

He simply refuses to quit.

Gritting through the pain because he knows the long-term pain of quitting is far worse than the short-term pain of pushing through his recovery.

His “workaholism” and “perfectionism” — traits most people write-off as faults, flaws, and failure — drove him through the pain and agony to the Olympics. Twice.

There’s a saying among elite runners: “If it doesn’t suck, you’re not doing it right.”

Just because it’s hurting doesn’t mean it’s the wrong move.

It’s easy to make the easy choices. But easy choices just leave you fat, broke, and lonely.

Life will kick you down mercilessly if you let it.

You don’t have to enjoy the pain to enjoy the rewards–but you do have to endure it.

You might have to cry, bleed, and fight your way through the darkness, but your mission is worth it.

It might not be Olympic glory, but it’s just as valuable.

Suffering leads to success. Fight on.

First You Move.

Progress comes in stages.

First, you have to make movement. Then you learn the motions and moves of success.

You go through those motions until you learn why you’re doing them.

Progress, and more importantly success, is the result of turning moves and movement into momentum.

You aren’t just doing things because someone else told you to do them.

You know what you want and what you can do and are deliberate about executing in a way that uniquely gets you to where you want to be.

First, you move.

Then you learn the moves. Then you make your own moves.

It’s the difference between an amateur and a professional. One studies the craft. The other perfects it.

Here is why that matters:

You won’t win your game playing with someone else’s moves.

It’s important to know the strategies and tactics that are out there. But putting your faith in them blindly is guaranteed to disappoint you.

You don’t need to have the perfect plan before you get started.

Just get moving.

You can learn new moves while you’re already busy making progress. Soon enough though, you’re going to need to make your own moves.

You’re going to need to perfect the strategies you’ve been using in a way that makes you especially powerful.

This is all about what works for you. Your special skills. Your life experience. Your intuition and insight.

First, you move. Then you learn the moves. Then you make your own moves.

If you’re not there yet, keep working towards it.

How To Know If It’s Working.

Your current momentum is the most powerful predictor of future success.

The hardest part of getting to where you want to be is building momentum in that direction — building momentum and then keeping that momentum. Despite all the romantic stories you’ve heard about overnight success, that’s just not how it works.

You feel success long before you realize that it has already happened.

You can’t prove it with results. You can’t see it in the numbers.  You can’t hear it, taste it, smell it, or logically explain it. But you know it’s there.

You can sense the rumbling of your moment.

So it might feel like overnight success to everyone else around you, but you know all the sleepless nights that it’s taken you to get to this moment.

That’s why momentum is what you want to measure on a daily basis.

To do that, you have to ask yourself tough questions:

Are you doing things that get you closer to where you want to be?
Are you improving your skills and working on your weaknesses?
Are there things that you are still not willing to do in order to achieve a breakthrough?

Momentum begins with this brutal honesty with yourself. And why not? It makes no sense to play games. This is your life. Your destiny. Your goals.

But that’s not all.

To measure your momentum, you have to look back at from where you have come.

Are you still growing as quickly and passionately as when you first started out?
Are you as excited and careful about the details as when you first began?
Are you open and willing to change if it gets you closer to where you want to be?

These aren’t easy questions. But they are necessary.

You either choose to grow or ignore your situation while you slow.

Look back. Look forward. Look inside you.

Do you want this as badly as you once did? Are you doing everything you can to move towards your goals?

That’s how you know if it’s going to work.

Your Best Is Yet To Come. Or Not.

Your thoughts and fears shape your perspective. Your perspective determines what you find in your future.

What you want to see, you see. What you want to find, you find.

If you believe that your best is yet to come then that is what you will find.

In her autobiography, Oprah Winfrey wrote: “There is one irrefutable law of the universe: We are each responsible for our own life.”

That starts with what you think about.

You will work to make that thought a reality.

Everywhere you look, you will see opportunities to make that a possibility.

The opposite is also true. If you believe that something bad is just around the corner, waiting to ruin your dream, that’s what you will find.

Your outlook impacts your outcomes. What you want to see, you find.

Stephen Hawking, perhaps the world’s most intelligent theoretical physicist, lectured that: “One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn’t exist. Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.”

He makes the case that perfection is just a matter of perspective. And that’s alright.

The truth about results is that you’ll never achieve more than you think you should.

Your perspective can sink you.

You’ll ruin every opportunity at growth because you’ll see every obstacle as life being especially unfair to you.

You’ll imagine disaster and let fear drive you to avoid people and challenges that could elevate your game to the next level.

It seems ridiculously simplistic to think that what you believe impacts the world around you. But it’s true.

As William Shakespeare penned in Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Your best is yet to come. Or not. It just depends on what you want.

And what you are thinking about right now.

Success is Primal.

To this day, a small white box sits tucked away in the archives of a nondescript building in downtown Copenhagen stuffed next to other artifacts from a time when “frozen” meant death. The back of that seemingly insignificant box reads, “Grandfather’s beard, from the days of exile.”

Inside that box lies the bushy, reddish-orange beard of a man whose life seems more fitting for Norse mythology than Danish fairy tales.

In 1926, Peter Freuchen found himself weathering a -65°F blizzard imprisoned between a boulder and his dog sledge. It was a tomb of his own making–a space so small that his beard had frozen to the ice on his sledge.

He had nowhere to turn. Literally.

He couldn’t turn his head without ripping the beard from his exposed face. His 6’7” frame was stuffed into an area the size of a large suitcase.

If he was going to make it back alive, he had little time to do something about it.

Except he didn’t have a way out. He was trapped. Destined to die in the Arctic he fell in love with as a boy. He furiously tried to scratch, claw, and punch his way out, throwing the force of his 6’7” bulky frame behind every punch.

But it wasn’t working. He was still trapped.

His frantic breath added a layer of ice to his frantic struggle.

And when it seemed like he was going to die there, buried alive in the vast, unforgiving expanse of the Arctic, that’s when he had an idea.

A bearskin in his sledge had frozen solid while he was busy trying to punch his way out. Using the bearskin as padding against his hands, he punched and pulled and pushed against the sledge.

Punch. Push. Pull. Push. Punch. Pull. Minute after minute after minute.

It took him 30 hours to escape.

But then he faced a new challenge. There was no one close. No one to rescue him. He would have to walk for hours to get back to safety.

Except he couldn’t walk. His left foot was dead. Wouldn’t work. Damaged by the extreme cold.

And at -35°F, his core body temperature would drop by 1° every half hour. This was almost twice as cold.

Undeterred, he began to crawl.

Three hours later he made his way back to base. Limping. Crawling. Dragging himself.

By that time, gangrene had set into his seriously damaged foot.

It would kill him if he could stop it soon enough.

The moment called for extreme action.

Slaughtering an arctic rat and mixing it with some other herbal wildlife to make a traditional Inuit medicine, he spread the gross, smelly ointment on his frozen toes and foot. Which worked.

The ointment pulled the flesh and muscle from his toes, leaving behind only the bones — which could easily become reinfected and end up killing him later.

He took a pair of pincers and a hammer and broke them off. One. By one. By one. Without anesthesia.

That would be the last expedition Freuchen would ever take.

It was not a decision he took lightly.

He had spent his entire life in this frozen landscape.

At 24, he had established the northernmost trading outpost in Greenland at the time.  He named it “Thule” from the medieval term “ultima thule”–the land beyond the known boundary. The average daily temperature was -12°F.

Two years later he trekked 1,000 miles further into the Arctic circle — driven by a bet with a friend.

He was a tough guy in an even tougher place.

The stories told about Peter were legendary. He killed an arctic wolf with his bare hands. Stuck in a blizzard, he made a knife out of his frozen feces to dig himself out. When his dogs were too tired to pull the sledge, he made a sail out of polar bear skins to harness the wind and help them do the work.

He was unstoppable in every way.

Now, many years later, he was forced to hang up the hiking boots and return to Denmark. But he wasn’t done living an adventurous life.

When he hung up his boots, he picked up his pen to relive and share his adventures on the tundra. He wrote one book. And it was a best seller. So he wrote another.  And then another one.

Thirty novels later, he decided to turn his stories into a movie. Which he ended up starring in — and winning an Academy Award.

When the Germans invaded Denmark during World War II, Freuchen risked his own life to hide refugees and foil Nazi plans with the Danish Resistance.

He annoyed the Germans so much that Hitler ordered him killed.

And eventually, he was captured by the Nazis – and sentenced to immediate death by firing squad.  Little did the Third Reich know who they were messing with.

If extreme hypothermia, polar bears, and disease couldn’t kill him, he wasn’t about to let the Nazis take that honor.

The night before his execution, Freuchen scaled the prison fence – with one good foot and a peg leg – and fled to Sweden, escaping death once more.

Lorenc Peter Elfred Freuchen would spend all 71 of his years living life to the fullest.

No apologies. No excuses. No special circumstances. Nothing handed to him.

He just made it work. No fancy dream journal. No guru mindsets or self-help seminars.

Just ambition, creativity, and a burning desire to achieve something awesome.

It was primal and personal. And that made him powerful. 

There’s something to be said for the simplicity of achievement.

Success isn’t complicated. If you want something bad enough, you have to put in the work to achieve it. It’s that simple.

You’re going to have setbacks along the way.

You’re going to experience extreme hardship at times.

Anything is possible if you’re willing to do whatever it takes.

It doesn’t matter that no one else has done it before. It doesn’t matter that you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere with no help and fewer resources than you need.

It doesn’t matter that you’re tired and sore and beaten down by all that you’ve been through. 

It’s time to make success primal again. No more excuses. No more distractions. 

Just raw, honest ambition–your willingness to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes you to get to where you want to be.

Where To Find Inspiration.

Inspiration is the one thing you lose just after you stop looking for it.

That’s why your hustle matters so much.

It matters that you get out of bed and go do something productive today. Even though you might not feel like doing that.

It matters that you try to repair that fractured relationship. Even though the other person might not believe that you’re sincere.

It matters that you keep working on that weird idea that you want to turn into a business. Even though you can’t imagine how it’s all going to work out.
It matters that you get busy.

Along the way, you will find the answers you are looking for.

Finding inspiration is an “in the middle of the struggle” event not a “haven’t even started yet” event.

You’re not going to feel like trying one more time.

You have tried before and that hasn’t worked, so why would you doing the exact same thing another time earn you any different results?

That is beside the point.

You’re not looking for perfection. You are in pursuit of inspiration.

What you do matters. Stop waiting. And start working.