Dan Waldschmidt's Blog, page 8

The Big Lesson I’ve Learned After Working 94,487 Hours Over The Past 21 Years.

I started out selling air conditioning systems to homeowners at 19. That was my first “professional” job. Over the last 21 years, I’ve worked over 94,487 hours. Maybe more. At some point, the numbers get blurry.

So I know a little something about work.

Most jobs require 40 hours of work per week. If you work hard you might put in 50-60 hours that week. I’ve consistently worked “doubles” for more than 2 decades.

I’m not saying that to brag. I just want you to know that I’ve spent a lifetime maximizing how much I work — at the expense of being effective.

That’s right. I have finally come to the realization that it’s not about how much you do in a day. It’s about how much you do that matters.

Here’s the thing, you won’t know what matters until you’ve tried and failed.

By the way, that’s another thing I’ve spent a lifetime trying to avoid. I don’t like failing or the thought of failure. Heck, I don’t even like thinking about failure.

But you can’t be effective until you realize what being ineffective looks like.

You can’t win big until you have failed big.

That’s the hard truth that you won’t find it a lot of success books.

Your path to greatness isn’t about you mimicking the activities of other successful people so perfectly that you wind up automatically creating a magical future for yourself. It’s about being effective.

It’s really that simple. The concept at least.

Being effective is painful. It means you have to learn and grow continually.

See — learning is what comes “after” failure.

It’s okay to read what others have done and work to replicate their success. But if it’s not working for you, it makes no sense to mimic blindly. You’re just going to multiply your failure.

At some point it just becomes insanity. And you burn out.

It also makes no sense to let your ego blind you to opportunities that you hadn’t considered previously.

Most of the time, success happens in all the ways you least expect it.

When you allow your pride stop you from changing your actions, you lock yourself into a cycle of underperformance that will cripple everything you do.

About a year ago one of my close friends Bill Cortright, who is a master of personal effectiveness, called me one day with a simple idea: “Have you read Michael Singers book, The Surrender Experiment?” he asked me.

I had not read it so I grabbed the audiobook from Google Play to listen to while I ran. The story Michael told had a profound impact on framing my mindset around effectiveness.

Reading the book wasn’t the end of my journey, it was my beginning.

Michaels simple thesis for his book — and his life as a whole — is that success requires that you surrender yourself to whatever life brings you.

You should take it as a sign that what is happening is supposed to happen.

That you are, right now, exactly where you should be. That nothing is out of order. That you are meant to learn something from what is going on.

I won’t tell you how his story ends. But I will share that his premise is one for which I have seen evidence in my own life.

Looking back I can see a clear pattern. When I learn and grow, I spiral upward mightily.

When I try to force success to happen, on my timeline and with my requirements, I find myself burning out, with more failure soon to follow.

When I let life teach me, I learn, grow, and evolve into the person that success wants to reward.

Sometimes the best way to be effective is to just stop trying to be efficient.

Stop trying to use every moment you have to get one more thing done. Stop being so bullish that you aren’t willing to adapt and evolve. Stop being so stubborn but you failed to notice unexpected opportunities.



Surrender to your greatness.

Make no mistake, you still have to do the work. You can’t avoid putting in the effort.

Progress always requires massive amounts of activity.

Being effective starts as a mindset. You have to make the decision to be a better you a little bit more each day.

The things you’re already good at, you make them better. The times you fail, you shrug it off and do it better the next time around.

There’s no limit to how good you can be, because there’s no limit on how long you can keep growing.

It’s up to you to make that decision. You control how effective you are.

Don’t let it take you 94,487 hours to figure this out for yourself.

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Keeping On Living

” You can give up and die or you can try and live and become the hero of your life from this day forward.” Dan Waldschmidt

This episode of the podcast will talk about how we can keep on living despite all the struggle in life. You can live or you can die. Pick one. If you choose to live, it is all a matter of HOW you choose to live.

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You Don’t Get To Choose When You’re Successful.

Success isn’t automatic; but it is guaranteed.

Just like the laws of nature and science, success is an exact and very consistent outcome.

What you do becomes what you get. That much is guaranteed. What’s not easily known is when that’s going to happen.

It’s been said by many philosophers that as humans we dramatically overestimate what we can do in a given day but underestimate our ability to achieve seamingly impossible things over a lifetime.

That is all too true. You’re not wired to be good at predicting when your awesome actions are going to lead to epic results.

Your brain is accidentally way smarter than you think it is.

It’s ready with excuses and plausible explanations about why the laws of success aren’t meant for you. Why you’re different. Why you should give up and quit because nothing is working.

Here is the tough-love truth that you might not want to hear — success isn’t measured on your timeline.

You don’t get to determine when the boomerang you’ve thrown reaches your hand again.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot you can do to influence success. You can try harder or work longer. You can leverage the influence of others, borrow money to move faster, and enroll mentors to help you avoid costly mistakes.

What you do and who you are have a direct impact on your success. But you don’t get to decide the exact day and time for your success.

You don’t even get to decide what your success exactly looks like.

What you want and what you get always end up being a little bit different. And usually in ways that are more magical than you can imagine.

Take wealth for example. It is wildly appealing to dream about building the next Facebook app, where as a 20-something-year-old you can put together a platform that turns you into one of the world’s richest people.

That sounds awesome. It’s just not realistic. It’s not logical. And it is directly in contrast with how success works.

You’re not going to be a millionaire in your 20’s. Or your 30’s. Or for most of your 40’s. Did you know that the average age of a millionaire in the developed world right now is almost 50 years old?

Why? In short, it takes time to get the experience you need and to find the purpose you have to have in order to achieve epic results.

And more importantly, the timing of success is something that you don’t get to control. And the more you try to control it, the less successful you will become.

When you try to force success you chase scams and shortcuts and activities that might have worked for somebody else but are completely ridiculous for you to pursue.

Success is guaranteed. Remember that.

Doing the right thing matters. Just be patient while it’s happening.

Make your mental health a priority. You’ll never be happy if you can’t stay inspired, despite the obstacles they come your way.

Plan your life for a long journey. Not a short one. Keep your finances lean-and-mean so that you can be flexible as you weather the storms that come your way.

There isn’t anything you can’t do if you persist. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking you get to choose when success happens.

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You Don’t Really Want To Be Successful Or Happy

Before you could be happy or rich or in love you must know your purpose and your mission, what it is that you enjoy, and the rules by which you are willing to play the game of life.

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5 Why’s Will Show You The Truth About How To Accomplish Your Goals.

Changing your outcomes requires some tweaks to your daily manufacturing process. Those changes start with tiny details. Those details turn into habits. Those habits create outcomes that push you closer to where you want to be.

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Stop Dabbling

Somewhere in life, you got to have to pick what you want and then focused on it.” – Dan Waldschmidt This episode will talk on how you stay focused. Dan shares that without focused we will not achieve our dreams. As you listen to this episode, try to ponder on this question, “How do you …

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EFFORT IS THE GREAT EQUALIZER .

Make no mistake, there is no achievement without effort. There is no forward progress without activity. Where is no championship without work. You get to decide how important that achievement or progress is to you. You get to decide if you're willing to sacrifice for what you want or if you're willing to let what you want become that sacrifice.

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Championship-Grade Forgiveness

The biggest part of this episode is forgiving yourself. We all don't realize how good we are in forgiving ourselves. We might don't even know that we like ourselves.

As you listen to this episode, try to look deeply at yourself.

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YOU CAN’T DREAM BIG UNTIL YOU FORGIVE.

You can’t dream big when your vision is clouded by personal frustration and negative emotions. Jealousy, envy, and rage blind you to living your best possible life. You can’t see straight. You can’t think straight. You can’t dream big, act big, level up, or improve. It’s just not possible to achieve awesome when what you …

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Red Ants

How can something so awful, something that causes pain to others be so helpful?

Like other complicated things in life, pain may not have any specific cause at all. It can have many underlying causes but pain can also be clearly beneficial.

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