Benjamin P. Hardy's Blog, page 18

8 Things Every Person Should Do Before 8AM

Photo by Emma Simpson on Unsplash

In the first 60–120 minutes of your day, you can change your entire life.

You can routinely get yourself into a “peak” or heightened state of mind and then operate from that state for the remainder of your day.

It’s strange, though, that most people won’t do this. Most people are content pulling themselves out of bed and then dragging themselves through their day. Most people begin with negative momentum and continue with negative momentum.

Most people’s days are highly reflective of their past. As people age, they become increasing past-oriented. Children are almost entirely future-oriented. If you ask them their age, they will say, “I’m almost 6!” or “I’m 5 and 3/4!”.

At some point or another, you probably became past-oriented. You may have goals you’re pursuing. But if you look at your actual daily behavior, does it mostly look like what happened yesterday?

If so, then you’re past-oriented.

If asked the question, “Why are you doing what you’re doing?” when speaking of your job and other activities, is your response based on experiences and events of the past, or desires for your future?

Most people are doing what they are doing because of an event in the past.

Most people’s lives are highly predictable — because they are living from the past. Their body and environment have become the controlling influences in their lives. Their body is the record of their past, which has become used to experiences the same emotions every day. Stepping out of those emotions — their comfort zone — isn’t fun and so it happens rarely. And their environment keeps them in check and holds their self-image together.

If you want to change your life, you can do it very quickly.

You can put yourself into a peak mental state every single morning and then operate from that state of mind throughout your day.

You can create a wildly imaginative future and strive for that future with joy. As Neville Goddard put it, “Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled.”

That’s what living in a peak-state is all about. It’s about having the imagination and possibility of a child and then creating the emotional experience of actualizing that future in the here-and-now.

Training Your Brain To Get What You Want

As you act from the future of your deepest desires, your behaviors change dramatically. You act with gusto, enthusiasm, and interest. You see potential where others see nothing.

As Dan Sullivan has said, “Our eyes only see and our ears only hear what our brain is looking for.” Similarly, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer said, “If something is presented as an accepted truth, alternative ways of thinking do not even come up for consideration.”

These two quotes encompass the psychological concept — “Selective Attention” — which means we only pay attention to things from our environment that are meaningful to us or that we are looking for. We selectively attend, and the rest of everything in the field outside of us goes unnoticed.

Every morning, you can put yourself into a zone where you see incredible opportunities and experiences. Your perspective comes from your emotional lens. How you feel about the world determines how you see it.

When you act from your desired future — you see things you couldn’t see before. You act far more powerfully. You also begin acting with the foreknowledge (i.e., pre-cognition) that when you act powerfully, positive emotions will ensue.

The following list is a simple way to put yourself into a peak-state every single day. This isn’t complicated stuff. It’s actually very basic and doable. But as Jim Rohn put it, “What is easy to do is easy not to do.”

Here’s how it works:

Set yourself up for success the night before (30–60 minutes)Sleep 7+ hoursWake up immediately when you said you wouldGet into a new environment (5–10 minutes)Meditation and prayer with emotion and writing (5–10 minutes)Listen to high-quality information while you exercise (20–40 minutes)Take a cold shower (3–5 minutes)Work on a creative project while in a peak-state (30–90 minutes)

This list may seem lame to you.

You may be one of those people who feel you are above something like this. And that’s fine if you are. But without fail, every time I purposefully create a solid morning routine, I feel better.

Dr. Jerome Bruner, a Harvard psychologist said, “You’re more likely to act yourself into feeling than feeling yourself into action.”

With this morning routine, you actually enhance your emotional-state from two angles. You act intentionally and powerfully, which immediately shifts your emotional state as Dr. Bruner says. But you also take the time to visualize and emotionally generate your desired future in the here as now, as Neville Goddard says.

You act your way into feeling powerful. And you also feel your way into action.

You then operate the rest of your day from your future, not your past.

Set yourself up for success the night before.

“Stressful activities have no place before bedtime. They can induce your body to secrete the stress hormone cortisol, which can make you feel more alert. Chill out and steer clear of anything non-chilled out.” — Kimberly Snyder

This is very simple.

Don’t look at screens 60+ minutes before bedPut your phone on airplane modeAllow yourself to “psychologically detach” from work — which means you stop thinking about itBe present with your loved ones“Wherever you are, make sure you are there.” — Dan SullivanOnly 16% of creative ideas happen while you’re working — most of them will come when your mind is in a relaxed stateCreate an environment where sleep can happenSleep 7+ hours.

“Treat yourself as well as you treat your smartphone, making sure to sleep until fully recharged.” — Arianna Huffington

According to research done by The National Sleep Foundation, getting a healthy amount of sleep is linked to:

increased memory;longer life;decreased inflammation;increased creativity;increased attention and focus;decreased fat and increased muscle mass with exercise;lower stress;decreased dependence on stimulants like caffeine;decreased risk of getting into accidents;decreased risk of depression

If you sleep well and treat your body right, you won’t need caffeine and other stimulants.

We live in an addiction culture. In the Ted Talk, “Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong,” Johann Hari explains that addiction is an “environmental adaptation.”

Research has shown that caffeine use is due, in large part, to the industrial model of working from 9–5. It’s also clearly due to people’s poor sleeping and technology habits.

Don’t start your day with caffeine. Instead, follow the advice of the people who consistently live the longest. In the book The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest, Dan Buettner explains that people who live to be over 100 usually start their day with a purpose.

They rarely rely on stimulants to get through their day. They are intentional. They are focused on longevity and purpose, not on quick-fixes like caffeine.

Wake up immediately when you said you would.

“Self-trust is the first secret of success.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Confidence is a byproduct of doing what you say you will do. If you don’t trust yourself, you can’t have confidence.

Confidence is something that has to be earned every single day. The first decision you make, the one to wake up, starts your momentum in either a positive or negative direction.

Get into a new environment.

“If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us.” — Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

Every environment has energy. In order to get yourself moving and going, get yourself into a fresh environment. Even if that’s just outside.

Shifting environments shifts your energy. When you get up and immediately change your environment, you actually boost your energy levels. Research done by Ellen Langer has found that by simply changing context, people’s energy levels increase because the brain loves novelty and newness.

Meditation and prayer with emotion and writing.

“Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled.” — Neville Goddard

Also, when you begin to meditate, visualize, and write about your goals, you want to be in an environment conducive to getting clarity and insights.

In order to live from your desired future, you want to think about it while your mind is creative first thing in the morning. A creative mind is essential to being a creator of your future and life.

Imagination is highly linked to learning, joy, and creativity. How imaginative are you?

How imaginative is the future you’re striving for?

Is it “realistic”?

Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Dr. Stephen Covey said, “Live out of your imagination, not your history.”

Here’s where you’re at so far:

You set yourself up for success the night beforeYou woke up when you said you would (which boosts confidence)You shifted your environment (which boosts energy and flow)You’re now imagining the future you want in a creative environment

As Neville Goddard explains, “Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled.”

As your visualizing and writing down your goals, do so with feeling. Assume the feeling of having achieved your dreams. Assume what it would be like to have what you want.

Realize that the moment you begin feeling different, then you can create a different future than you did your past.

Most people feel the same way today as they felt yesterday. And their body seeks desperately to recreate the same emotional state — which has become your homeostasis.

In order to become a new person and create a new future — you need to act in ways that produce new emotions, and strategically generate the emotions you seek to feel.

Write down your goals and a deadline in which they will be complete. Write down the price that needs to be paid in order to achieve the goal. Commit to acting and being such that you will pay the price. As the billionaire H.L. Hunt said:

“There are only three requirements for success. First, decide exactly what it is you want in life. Second, determine the price that you are going to have to pay to get the things you want. And third, and this is most important, resolve to pay that price.”

Listen to high-quality information while you exercise.

“Your input determines your outlook. Your outlook determines your output, and your output determines your future.” — Zig Ziglar

Workout in the morning, whether that means walking or going to the gym. Whatever you want. But grab yourself a pair of cordless headphones — you can find some for as little as $20.

Workout while you listen to audiobooks or podcasts or inspirational music. By moving and pushing your body, you’ll also be lighting-up your brain. In the book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, John Ratey and Eric Hagerman show that fitness charges your brain up and gets you into a learning and heightened state.

Take a cold shower.

“It is concluded that the evidence base for the different claims made for Cold Water Immersion (CWI) are varied, and although in most instances there seems to be a credible rationale for the benefits or otherwise of CWI, in some instances the supporting data remain at the level of anecdotal speculation.” — Experimental Psychology, 2017

The science is pretty wishy-washy when it comes to cold water immersion. A 2007 study found that routinely taking cold showers can help treat depression symptoms, often more effectively than medications. That’s because cold water triggers a wave of mood-boosting neurochemicals that make you feel happy.

This is one of those ones where you act before you think.

If you think too long about it, you probably won’t do it.

Turn the cold water on, immerse yourself. You’ll feel great and energized. Then be done.

Not a big deal.

Work on a creative project while in a peak state.

“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” — Mark Twain

Crush the day while everyone else is in a daze.

If you want to become successful, you must create success.

Wealth is not something you earn, it’s something you create. And you can create success every single day. You can get into a creative state and produce incredible works.

You can build companies. Write music. Come up with creative solutions.

You can be a highly creative, imaginative, and innovative person. But creativity is a verb. It’s like love. It’s something you do and embody.

So do it.

Get your most important stuff done first. Or else, as you’ve seen before, it likely won’t get done.

Conclusion

Want to live in a peak state? Then produce amazing mornings.

You make or break your life before 8AM.

Assume the feeling of your wish fulfilled.

Act and live from the future you want to create, not from your past.

Ready to Upgrade?

I’ve created a cheat sheet for putting yourself into a PEAK-STATE, immediately. You follow this daily, your life will change quickly.

Get the cheat sheet here!

8 Things Every Person Should Do Before 8AM was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The 3 Requirements For Huge Success (According to Science and Billionaires)

Photo by Jonas Verstuyft on Unsplash

According to the “Expectancy Theory of Motivation,” three things must occur for a person to be deeply and fully motivated toward their goals.

If you have these three things, you’ll be pulled toward something that truly excites you. You’ll have the confidence of a plan that you can execute. You’ll regularly create small wins that ripple into bigger wins.

3 Requirements To Unstoppable MotivationYou must believe the reward (the ‘WHY’) of a particular goal are important, meaningful, and compelling.You must believe that you know how (clear strategies/plans/people) to achieve your goal.You must believe that you can execute the plans, strategies, and pivoting involved in achieving the goal.

These are the big three which you must have to succeed at any level. Interestingly, long before Expectancy Theory existed, the billionaire H.L. Hunt said:

“There are only three requirements for success. First, decide exactly what it is you want in life. Second, determine the price that you are going to have to pay to get the things you want. And third, and this is most important, resolve to pay that price.”

Here’s how it works:

1. Decide Exactly What You Want And Why

“The bigger the ‘why’ the easier the ‘how’.” — Jim Rohn

Your goal or desired outcome needs to be truly desirable. You need to really want it and have compelling reasons for wanting it.

Jim Rohn once said, “Reasons come first, answers come second.” You need reasons for doing something. Those reasons are your WHY.

The more reasons you can give yourself for accomplishing something, the more motivated you will be. These reasons, when powerful, become NEEDS. For example, look at your life right now.

Most people look at their current income as a product of their situation or capability. In reality, your current income is based on how much you believe you need.

If you needed more, you’d make more. If you needed to make an extra $50,000 in the next 6 months because the situation or your dreams demanded it, you’d be surprised what you could come up with. Necessity is the mother of invention.

Your current level of income reflects the size of your reasons. Most people have this backward. They work so they can make money. When you have compelling reasons, you make money so you can do more work. The work is sweet because you have very specific and powerful reasons for doing it.

If you can make your reasons bigger, more exciting, and personally meaningful to you, then you’ll start to conceptualize clear goals.

The bigger your reasons, the bigger your needs. If you have big goals, you’ll need more resources, a team of people to help you, and probably lots more income.

According to marketing legend, Jay Abraham, there is zero correlation between being good at something and making money. There are a lot of very talented people who don’t have enough reasons to take their work and life to the next level.

Although there is zero correlation between being “good” and making money, there is a direct correlation between marketing and making money. The more compelling your reasons become for achieving a particular goal, the more willing you’ll be to get the word out and to succeed.

How big do you want to play?

How deep are your reasons to achieve your vision?

How compelling are the rewards?

How willing are you to learn and become?

You cannot be motivated without a clear vision and reasons for that vision. But clarifying that vision takes work and patience. It takes exploration and asking yourself some really hard questions.

Getting clear on a vision that matters to you requires spending lots of time by yourself and disconnecting from all of the noise around you. A deeply compelling WHY has to be more than just maintaining prior success or “beating” other people.

You need to have something that is intrinsic. You can increase the velocity and pace of your success through extrinsic motivators. But the driving force must be something that is very personal to you. Something that you feel is your mission and purpose in life. Once you can get there, and once you can see it, then it is your obligation to begin sprinting toward it.

It truly doesn’t matter how big it is. You need to get as many data-points as you can from people who have done something somewhat similar. If someone has done EXACTLY what you want to do, you should check yourself. You’re probably pursuing someone else’s goal. But similarity with others is to be expected. And you can use them as data points to plot your own course.

2. Determine The Price You Will Have To Pay

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” — Napoleon Hill

When you can conceive a goal and you have deep reasons for achieving that goal, your next step is to believe in the vision.

You cannot believe in your vision without a thoughtful and strategic plan. For example, if you have the goal of making $10 Million Dollars but have never made more than $50,000 per year, then it doesn’t matter how compelling your reasons are, you probably won’t believe you can.

You may talk a really good talk. But deep down, you’ll either be lying to yourself or naive to the reality of your situation.

Being naive isn’t a bad thing. But in order to truly believe you can do something big, you need to get educated. You need context into what will really be required. And you need to start succeeding even in small ways toward your goals.

2–3 years is a really powerful span of time to make enormous progress toward a vision. In 2–3 years, you can become a millionaire. As Dean Graziosi once said, “I got to 10 million by saying ‘Yes,’ and I got to 100 million by saying, ‘No.’”

The more clear you become on your target, the better equipped you’ll become to find solutions. Having a ‘WHY’ isn’t enough. You need ‘HOW’s’ and ‘WHO’s’ to help you achieve that vision.

If you don’t have strategies and people and resources — or ways to get resources — then you won’t be motivated and you won't achieve your goals.

If you have something you really want to do, it is your responsibility to get the gameplan in place. Robin Sharma has said, “The bigger the dream, the more important to the team.”

In the incredible book, Scale or Fail, Allison Maslan provides the following 5 Stage framework:

Stage 1 — THE SEEKER: You rule and run the domain. In fact, you are the domain. You create, sell, implement, do and are responsible for everything.Stage 2 — THE PIONEER: You have one to a small handful of employees. You begin to delegate but are still approving everything that comes in and out of your company.Stage 3 — THE RINGLEADER: It can feel like a circus at times! You begin building small teams (e.g., admin, custom service, marketing). At this stage, you are really getting clear on your vision. You are leading team meetings and developing systems and processes. You’re spread way too thin. People are still not clear on what their roles are.Stage 4 — THE CO-CREATOR: You begin to recruit or promote team leaders to co-create the solutions and brainstorm the new ideas and opportunities. Your people become just as committed as you to your vision and begin asking: How can we delight our customers? How can we innovate? How can we increase revenue?Stage 5 — THE VISIONARY: At this stage of the game, they don’t need you. You have great people in place who are devoted and committed to the vision. You step back from meetings and stop providing your two cents. You let go of the day-to-day and focus exclusively on the big picture.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an entrepreneur or not. This 5-stage framework is very instructive.

At each stage, you need a new gameplan. If you don’t have the gameplan of going from Stage 1 to Stage 2, then you won’t get there.

Lots of people imagine themselves at Stage 5 when they don’t even know how to get out of Stage 1 or 2.

Whatever your goal is, you need to develop a plan. You need strategies to get from where you are to where you want to go. Once you ascend to a certain level, you’ll need to re-define the WHY — your reasons for what you’re doing. They should get bigger and bigger along the way because if it continues to grow, it will involve increasing numbers of people. It will also impact increasing numbers of people through the work you do.

Without plans and people, you can’t be motivated. You can’t achieve big goals. Having a WHY is not enough. You need HOW’s and WHO’s. Or as Dan Sullivan puts it, you need WHO’s to take care of the HOW’s.

3. Resolve To Pay The Price

According to psychology’s Hope Theory, hope reflects your perceptions regarding your capacity to:

Clearly conceptualize goalsDevelop the specific strategies to reach those goals (i.e., pathways thinking)Initiate and sustain the motivation for executing those strategies

This theory is very similar to Expectancy Theory, which this entire article is based upon.

The idea is simple, you need to have a clearly defined goal that is meaningful to you. You then need clear plans and strategies for reaching that goal. You need to truly believe the strategies (and people) will actually get the job done.

Which brings us to this final point — you need to believe YOU can execute this.

It doesn’t matter if the WHY is powerful. It doesn’t matter if you have all of the best strategies. If you don’t believe you can execute, then you will self-sabotage.

You need to believe you can execute the plans and strategies you’ve developed. You need to believe you can lead the mission — if leadership is required for what you seek to do.

You need to be completely committed to becoming whatever it takes to achieve your dreams. If your dreams are big, you will be required to change. As Albert Einstein put it, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”

You’ll need to expand and grow into your vision. And actually, that’s one of the primary reasons to have a huge vision — to transform you into the type of person who can make it happen.

Yes, you can expand and grow. You can develop capacities and skills. You can adapt to challenging circumstances and do stuff you’ve never done before.

You can become comfortable in new and unknown territories.

You can become a person of confidence and faith who is willing to put their stake in their ground.

You get to this level of conviction by investing fulling into what you believe in. You need to get clear on what matters to you.

You need to care enough about your dreams to grow beyond your petty fears and self-image. You’ll need to get good at marketing and leadership. You’ll need to care enough about your vision to learn what works and how to spread the message— rather than solely remaining a starving artist filled with good ideas about how other people are doing things wrong.

You can do all of this.

Conclusion

Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve. You can become more imaginative than children.

You can develop incredibly creative and thoughtful and fun ideas and solutions and dreams. You can grow and expand into a legendary and beautiful person as you evolve through these dreams. As you painstakingly BECOME, learn, grow, lead, and share.

Do you have these 3 things?

A clear goal with compelling REASONSClear and specific plans you believe will lead to the completion of your goalThe belief that you can execute on those plans

At every stage of your growth, you will have to revisit these big 3. You’ll need to continually hone and improve them.

As your WHY gets bigger, the HOW will get easier. It will get easier because increasingly, your vision will be pulling you forward. You’ll be so committed and in flow that the HOW will begin taking care of itself.

This is a beautiful way to live, and you can apply it to all levels of achievement.

You gain confidence in yourself through action. You must take steps forward now. You must begin learning what you don’t know and unlearning what’s holding you back. You need to transform and become more than you currently are.

Ready to Upgrade?

I’ve created a cheat sheet for putting yourself into a PEAK-STATE, immediately. You follow this daily, your life will change quickly.

Get the cheat sheet here!

The 3 Requirements For Achieving Huge Goals (According to Psychology)

Photo by Jonas Verstuyft on Unsplash

According to the “Expectancy Theory of Motivation,” three things must occur for a person to be deeply and fully motivated toward their goals.

If you have these three things, you’ll be pulled toward something that truly excites you. You’ll have the confidence of a plan that you can execute. You’ll regularly create small wins that ripple into bigger wins.

3 Requirements To Unstoppable MotivationYou must believe the reward (the ‘WHY’) of a particular goal are important, meaningful, and compelling.You must believe that you know how (clear strategies/plans/people) to achieve your goal.You must believe that you can execute the plans, strategies, and pivoting involved in achieving the goal.1. The Rewards For “Success” Are Deeply Meaningful

“The bigger the ‘why’ the easier the ‘how’.” — Jim Rohn

Your goal or desired outcome needs to be truly desirable. You need to really want it and have compelling reasons for wanting it.

Jim Rohn once said, “Reasons come first, answers come second.” You need reasons for doing something. Those reasons are your WHY.

The more reasons you can give yourself for accomplishing something, the more motivated you will be. These reasons, when powerful, become NEEDS. For example, look at your life right now.

How much money do you currently make?

Most people look at their current income as a product of their situation or capability. In reality, your current income is based on how much you believe you need.

If you needed more, you’d make more. If you needed to make an extra $250,000 in the next 6 months because the situation or your dreams demanded it, you’d be surprised what you could come up with.

Your current level of income reflects the size of your reasons. Most people have this backward. They work so they can make money. When you have compelling reasons, you make money so you can do more work. The work is sweet because you have very specific and powerful reasons for doing it.

If you can make your reasons bigger, more exciting, and personally meaningful to you, then you’ll start to conceptualize clear goals.

The bigger your reasons, the bigger your needs. If you have big goals, you’ll need more resources, a team of people to help you, and probably lots more income.

According to marketing legend, Jay Abraham, there is zero correlation between being good at something and making money. There are a lot of very talented people who don’t have enough reasons to take their work and life to the next level.

Although there is zero correlation between being “good” and making money, there is a direct correlation between marketing and making money. The more compelling your reasons become for achieving a particular goal, the more willing you’ll be to get the word out and to succeed.

How big do you want to play?

How deep are your reasons to achieve your vision?

How compelling are the rewards?

How willing are you to learn and become?

You cannot be motivated without a clear vision and reasons for that vision. But clarifying that vision takes work and patience. It takes exploration and asking yourself some really hard questions.

Getting clear on a vision that matters to you requires spending lots of time by yourself and disconnecting from all of the noise around you. A deeply compelling WHY has to be more than just maintaining prior success or “beating” other people.

You need to have something that is intrinsic. You can increase the velocity and pace of your success through extrinsic motivators. But the driving force must be something that is very personal to you. Something that you feel is your mission and purpose in life. Once you can get there, and once you can see it, then it is your obligation to begin sprinting toward it.

It truly doesn’t matter how big it is. You need to get as many data-points as you can from people who have done something somewhat similar. If someone has done EXACTLY what you want to do, you should check yourself. You’re probably pursuing someone else’s goal. But similarity with others is to be expected. And you can use them as data points to plot your own course.

2. You Have A Specific, Intelligent, And Flexible Game-Plan

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” — Napoleon Hill

When you can conceive a goal and you have deep reasons for achieving that goal, your next step is to believe in the vision.

You cannot believe in your vision without a thoughtful and strategic plan. For example, if you have the goal of making $10 Million Dollars but have never made more than $50,000 per year, then it doesn’t matter how compelling your reasons are, you probably won’t believe you can.

You may talk a really good talk. But deep down, you’ll either be lying to yourself or naive to the reality of your situation.

Being naive isn’t a bad thing. But in order to truly believe you can do something big, you need to get educated. You need context into what will really be required. And you need to start succeeding even in small ways toward your goals.

2–3 years is a really powerful span of time to make enormous progress toward a vision. In 2–3 years, you can become a millionaire. As Dean Graziosi once said, “I got to 10 million by saying ‘Yes,’ and I got to 100 million by saying, ‘No.’”

The more clear you become on your target, the better equipped you’ll become to find solutions. Having a ‘WHY’ isn’t enough. You need ‘HOW’s’ and ‘WHO’s’ to help you achieve that vision.

If you don’t have strategies and people and resources — or ways to get resources — then you won’t be motivated and you won't achieve your goals.

If you have something you really want to do, it is your responsibility to get the gameplan in place. Robin Sharma has said, “The bigger the dream, the more important to the team.”

In the incredible book, Scale or Fail, Allison Maslan provides the following 5 Stage framework:

Stage 1 — THE SEEKER: You rule and run the domain. In fact, you are the domain. You create, sell, implement, do and are responsible for everything.Stage 2 — THE PIONEER: You have one to a small handful of employees. You begin to delegate but are still approving everything that comes in and out of your company.Stage 3 — THE RINGLEADER: It can feel like a circus at times! You begin building small teams (e.g., admin, custom service, marketing). At this stage, you are really getting clear on your vision. You are leading team meetings and developing systems and processes. You’re spread way too thin. People are still not clear on what their roles are.Stage 4 — THE CO-CREATOR: You begin to recruit or promote team leaders to co-create the solutions and brainstorm the new ideas and opportunities. Your people become just as committed as you to your vision and begin asking: How can we delight our customers? How can we innovate? How can we increase revenue?Stage 5 — THE VISIONARY: At this stage of the game, they don’t need you. You have great people in place who are devoted and committed to the vision. You step back from meetings and stop providing your two cents. You let go of the day-to-day and focus exclusively on the big picture.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an entrepreneur or not. This 5-stage framework is very instructive.

At each stage, you need a new gameplan. If you don’t have the gameplan of going from Stage 1 to Stage 2, then you won’t get there.

Lots of people imagine themselves at Stage 5 when they don’t even know how to get out of Stage 1 or 2.

Whatever your goal is, you need to develop a plan. You need strategies to get from where you are to where you want to go. Once you ascend to a certain level, you’ll need to re-define the WHY — your reasons for what you’re doing. They should get bigger and bigger along the way because if it continues to grow, it will involve increasing numbers of people. It will also impact increasing numbers of people through the work you do.

Without plans and people, you can’t be motivated. You can’t achieve big goals. Having a WHY is not enough. You need HOW’s and WHO’s. Or as Dan Sullivan puts it, you need WHO’s to take care of the HOW’s.

3. You Know That You Can Execute The Plan

According to psychology’s Hope Theory, hope reflects your perceptions regarding your capacity to:

Clearly conceptualize goalsDevelop the specific strategies to reach those goals (i.e., pathways thinking)Initiate and sustain the motivation for executing those strategies

This theory is very similar to Expectancy Theory, which this entire article is based upon.

The idea is simple, you need to have a clearly defined goal that is meaningful to you. You then need clear plans and strategies for reaching that goal. You need to truly believe the strategies (and people) will actually get the job done.

Which brings us to this final point — you need to believe YOU can execute this.

It doesn’t matter if the WHY is powerful. It doesn’t matter if you have all of the best strategies. If you don’t believe you can execute, then you will self-sabotage.

You need to believe you can execute the plans and strategies you’ve developed. You need to believe you can lead the mission — if leadership is required for what you seek to do.

You need to be completely committed to becoming whatever it takes to achieve your dreams. If your dreams are big, you will be required to change. As Albert Einstein put it, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”

You’ll need to expand and grow into your vision. And actually, that’s one of the primary reasons to have a huge vision — to transform you into the type of person who can make it happen.

Yes, you can expand and grow. You can develop capacities and skills. You can adapt to challenging circumstances and do stuff you’ve never done before.

You can become comfortable in new and unknown territories.

You can become a person of confidence and faith who is willing to put their stake in their ground.

You get to this level of conviction by investing fulling into what you believe in. You need to get clear on what matters to you.

You need to care enough about your dreams to grow beyond your petty fears and self-image. You’ll need to get good at marketing and leadership. You’ll need to care enough about your vision to learn what works and how to spread the message— rather than solely remaining a starving artist filled with good ideas about how other people are doing things wrong.

You can do all of this.

Conclusion

Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve. You can become more imaginative than children.

You can develop incredibly creative and thoughtful and fun ideas and solutions and dreams. You can grow and expand into a legendary and beautiful person as you evolve through these dreams. As you painstakingly BECOME, learn, grow, lead, and share.

Do you have these 3 things?

A clear goal with compelling REASONSClear and specific plans you believe will lead to the completion of your goalThe belief that you can execute on those plans

At every stage of your growth, you will have to revisit these big 3. You’ll need to continually hone and improve them.

As your WHY gets bigger, the HOW will get easier. It will get easier because increasingly, your vision will be pulling you forward. You’ll be so committed and in flow that the HOW will begin taking care of itself.

This is a beautiful way to live, and you can apply it to all levels of achievement.

You gain confidence in yourself through action. You must take steps forward now. You must begin learning what you don’t know and unlearning what’s holding you back. You need to transform and become more than you currently are.

Ready to Upgrade?

I’ve created a cheat sheet for putting yourself into a PEAK-STATE, immediately. You follow this daily, your life will change quickly.

Get the cheat sheet here!

Responsibility: Not Apologizing When You Succeed Or Complaining When You Fail

mUnsplash“The greatest form of maturity is at harvest time. This is when we must learn how to reap without complaint if the amounts are small and how to reap without apology if the amounts are big.” — Jim Rohn

Don’t apologize when you succeed.

Don’t complain or blame when you fail.

Completely own and take responsibility for what you’ve attracted into your life. Said Dr. Stephen R. Covey, “We control our actions, but the consequences that flow from those actions are controlled by principles.”

You cannot change your situation until you own that you’ve contributed to your situation.

When you take responsibility for what is happening in your life, you’re no longer the victim of circumstances. You no longer have to be a reactive object being acted upon by your environment. Instead, you can proactively act as an agent who impacts and changes your circumstances.

Don’t Apologize For Success

You should only apologize if you’ve done something wrong. Apologies only make sense if you plan to never do something again.

When you’ve succeeded, you have no reason to apologize. Of course, you don’t need to flaunt your rewards or “harvest.”

But you absolutely can and should own how you’ve been living and own what you’re learning.

All the while, remain humble to the fact that “self-made” is an illusion. You have taken responsibility, and you will continue to take 100% responsibility. Yet, at the same time, you know you are nothing without the help and grace of others. Therefore, you remain deeply grateful and humble.

This humility and gratitude is your strength. But it certainly doesn’t cause you to act smaller than you really are. That is a strange form of hypocrisy that is just as bad as pretending to be better than you really are.

Don’t lower yourself, your standards, or your results to make other people feel comfortable for their lack of progress. Instead, have candid conversations where all can learn from each other. Dan Sullivan, the founder of Strategic Coach, has said, “It’s better to be an example of someone living a powerful life than to live small in order to make other people feel comfortable around you.”

Don’t attach your identity to outcomes. Instead, attach your identity to your WHY, and to your behaviors — those things you can control. Principles govern outcomes. You govern your behaviors and you define your WHY.

Said Jim Rohn, “When you know what you want, and want it bad enough, you will find a way to get it.”

You start with Reasons, and from those Reasons you select specific Results you seek to achieve. From those results you develop Processes or Methods.

The Methods are the means to the end and should never become the end in themselves. That’s the problem with modern psychology — the emphasis has shifted from people to process.

Process matters, but only in the context of specific results you seek to achieve.

You absolutely should seek outcomes. The more specific the outcomes you seek, the more clear will be your goals. Having clear and timely goals is essential to success. If someone tells you not to seek or focus on outcomes, they are lying to you. Said performance coach, Tim Grover, “When you crave the end result, the hard work becomes irrelevant.” The more clear and compelling the desired outcome, the more inspired, relevant, and bold must become your process.

Seeking outcomes is not the problem. Attaching your identity to outcomes is the problem. Because no matter how good or bad your outcomes have been in the past, you can’t stay there. Getting stuck in the past is how you throw away your future. Hence, Dan Sullivan has said, “Always make your future bigger than your past.”

Don’t Complain For Failure

Lessons are repeated until they are learned.

When you fail, don’t complain. There’s nothing good that will come out of it. When you complain or blame, you immediately shut yourself off to learning. You halt your own progress and will inevitably repeat the same blunder in the future.

Failure is feedback. Failure is what neuroscientists call “prediction error,” which is essential to learning.

You made a mistake. So learn from it. Be happy about it. You just stepped outside your small realm of understanding and now you have the opportunity to expand your worldview.

If you allow this learning to sink-in, you’ll be empowered to create better outcomes in the future.

In the book, The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge said:

“It is tempting to think that just because one understands certain principles one has “learned” about the discipline. This is the familiar trap of confusing intellectual understanding with learning. Learning always involves new understandings and new behaviors, ‘thinking’ and ‘doing.’”

If your behavior isn’t changing, then you’re not learning. True learning means you can produce a desired outcome. If you can’t consistently produce the outcome you want, then you haven’t learned.

According to Brain-scan studies, if you do not address a problem in 0.25 seconds after a mistake is made, you probably won’t do anything about it. You’ll brush-off the mistake and continue forward in the same manner you’ve been going. You won’t be learning from your experience, and thus you’ll continue moving into your future by recreating your past.

If instead, you would simply stop, address what just happened, and continue forward from a higher plane, you could then produce better outcomes in the future. You don’t have to live in your past.

This can only happen when you truly own when you’ve made a mistake. Rather than complaining for failures — or blaming the bad weather or something else — you learn from what is happening and adapt.

Charles Darwin has said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” To adapt is to learn. The quicker you adapt, the better you’ll live. It doesn’t matter what happens to you, it matters how you respond.

Without question, environment influence matters. But what matters more is what you do about it. You can either continue living reactively as an object, or you can adapt as an agent in new and better ways to change your environment.

Conclusion

You can learn your lessons.

Success is yours for the taking.

You can success bigger than you can presently imagine. Success begets success. When you begin making huge leaps — you open yourself to different worlds of possibility. When you have momentum, confidence, and inspiration, you begin taking on bigger and more powerful goals.

Don’ t apologize when you succeed.

Don’t complain when you fail.

Don’t attach your identity to outcomes. But without question, seek very specific outcomes. Set S.M.A.R.T. goals. Then get increasingly better at applying principles and honing your process so that you can consistently yield desired outcomes.

Ready to Upgrade?

I’ve created a cheat sheet for putting yourself into a PEAK-STATE, immediately. You follow this daily, your life will change quickly.

Get the cheat sheet here!

Responsibility: Not Apologizing When You Succeed Or Complaining When You Fail was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mature People Don’t Apologize For Success Or Complain For Failure

mUnsplash“The greatest form of maturity is at harvest time. This is when we must learn how to reap without complaint if the amounts are small and how to reap without apology if the amounts are big.” — Jim Rohn

Don’t apologize when you succeed.

Don’t complain or blame when you fail.

Completely own and take responsibility for what you’ve attracted into your life. Said Dr. Stephen R. Covey, “We control our actions, but the consequences that flow from those actions are controlled by principles.”

You cannot change your situation until you own that you’ve contributed to your situation.

When you take responsibility for what is happening in your life, you’re no longer the victim of circumstances. You no longer have to be a reactive object being acted upon by your environment. Instead, you can proactively act as an agent who impacts and changes your circumstances.

Don’t Apologize For Success

You should only apologize if you’ve done something wrong. Apologies only make sense if you plan to never do something again.

When you’ve succeeded, you have no reason to apologize. Of course, you don’t need to flaunt your rewards or “harvest.”

But you absolutely can and should own how you’ve been living and own what you’re learning.

All the while, remain humble to the fact that “self-made” is an illusion. You have taken responsibility, and you will continue to take 100% responsibility. Yet, at the same time, you know you are nothing without the help and grace of others. Therefore, you remain deeply grateful and humble.

This humility and gratitude is your strength. But it certainly doesn’t cause you to act smaller than you really are. That is a strange form of hypocrisy that is just as bad as pretending to be better than you really are.

Don’t lower yourself, your standards, or your results to make other people feel comfortable for their lack of progress. Instead, have candid conversations where all can learn from each other. Dan Sullivan, the founder of Strategic Coach, has said, “It’s better to be an example of someone living a powerful life than to live small in order to make other people feel comfortable around you.”

Be an example. Don’t lower your standards for yourself. And don’t apologize for where you’re going.

But also don’t over-attach to what you’ve done. Next year’s harvest doesn’t care about what you did last year. If you don’t continue to consistently plant in the Spring and work through the Summer, then you won’t reap in the Fall.

Don’t attach your identity to outcomes. Instead, attach your identity to your WHY, and to your behaviors — those things you can control. Principles govern outcomes. You govern your behaviors and you define your WHY.

You absolutely should seek outcomes. The more specific the outcomes you seek, the more clear will be your goals. Having clear and timely goals is essential to success. If someone tells you not to seek or focus on outcomes, they are lying to you. Said performance coach, Tim Grover, “When you crave the end result, the hard work becomes irrelevant.” The more clear and compelling the desired outcome, the more homes and bold must become your process.

Seeking outcomes is not the problem. Attaching your identity to outcomes is the problem. Because no matter how good or bad your outcomes have been in the past, you can’t stay there. Getting stuck in the past is how you throw away your future. Hence, Dan Sullivan has said, “Always make your future bigger than your past.”

You cannot be happy if you’re attached to outcomes. You need to be attached to principles, values, and meanings. You need to be attached to processes and continually doing your absolute best work — living with integrity and continually raising your standards for what you can do and be.

Don’t Complain For Failure

Lessons are repeated until they are learned.

When you fail, don’t complain. There’s nothing good that will come out of it. When you complain or blame, you immediately shut yourself off to learning. You halt your own progress and will inevitably repeat the same blunder in the future.

Failure is feedback. Failure is what neuroscientists call “prediction error,” which is essential to learning.

You made a mistake. So learn from it. Be happy about it. You just stepped outside your small realm of understanding and now you have the opportunity to expand your worldview.

If you allow this learning to sink-in, you’ll be empowered to create better outcomes in the future.

In the book, The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge said:

“It is tempting to think that just because one understands certain principles one has “learned” about the discipline. This is the familiar trap of confusing intellectual understanding with learning. Learning always involves new understandings and new behaviors, ‘thinking’ and ‘doing.’”

If your behavior isn’t changing, then you’re not learning. True learning means you can produce a desired outcome. If you can’t consistently produce the outcome you want, then you haven’t learned.

According to Brain-scan studies, if you do not address a problem in 0.25 seconds after a mistake is made, you probably won’t do anything about it. You’ll brush-off the mistake and continue forward in the same manner you’ve been going. You won’t be learning from your experience, and thus you’ll continue moving into your future by recreating your past.

If instead, you would simply stop, address what just happened, and continue forward from a higher plane, you could then produce better outcomes in the future. You don’t have to live in your past.

This can only happen when you truly own when you’ve made a mistake. Rather than complaining for failures — or blaming the bad weather or something else — you learn from what is happening and adapt.

Charles Darwin has said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” To adapt is to learn. The quicker you adapt, the better you’ll live. It doesn’t matter what happens to you, it matters how you respond.

Without question, environment influence matters. But what matters more is what you do about it. You can either continue living reactively as an object, or you can adapt as an agent in new and better ways to change your environment.

Conclusion

You can learn your lessons.

Success is yours for the taking.

You can success bigger than you can presently imagine. Success begets success. When you begin making huge leaps — you open yourself to different worlds of possibility. When you have momentum, confidence, and inspiration, you begin taking on bigger and more powerful goals.

Don’ t apologize when you succeed.

Don’t complain when you fail.

Don’t attach your identity to outcomes. But without question, seek very specific outcomes. Set S.M.A.R.T. goals. Then get increasingly better at applying principles and honing your process so that you can consistently yield desired outcomes.

Ready to Upgrade?

I’ve created a cheat sheet for putting yourself into a PEAK-STATE, immediately. You follow this daily, your life will change quickly.

Get the cheat sheet here!

Mature People Don’t Apologize For Success Or Complain For Failure was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Great article!

Great article!

I’ll read it!

I’ll read it!

Here’s How Successful People Avoid Information Overwhelm

Steve Jobs

There are seemingly infinite options in the world today. With increasing options comes increased choices.

This may seem like a good thing. But at a certain point, having more options and choices becomes negative. In the book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, psychologist Barry Schwartz explains:

We assume that more choice means better options and greater satisfactionHowever, choice overload can make you question the decisions you make before you even make themChoice overload leaves you in a perpetual state of FOMO — always looking over your shoulder and questioning the decisions you’ve madeThis puts you in a constant state of stress, ever feeling like you’re falling short, always questioning the decisions you’ve made, always wondering

Having options is a good thing. Without options, you can’t make choices. However, the best decision-makers in the world purposefully avoid almost ALL of the options available. They know that most of the information and choices out there are not only bad but harmful and destructive.

Hence these powerful and important words from Basecamp founder, Jason Fried, “I’m pretty oblivious to a lot of things intentionally. I don’t want to be influenced that much.”

The Latin of the word decision means, “to cut off.” Making a decision is about “cutting off” choices — cutting you off from some other course of action.

Removing options is not limiting, it’s liberating. It allows you actually to have a path, a plan, and to get some traction. Most people are tossed to and fro with every new idea. They have no stable footing upon which to stand, and consequently, they are wholly aimless and confused by the complexity of everything going on around them.

You have to choose what you consume consciously. As Zig Ziglar has said, “Your input determines your outlook. Your outlook determines your output, and your output determines your future.”

The information you allow yourself to process affects you greatly. You can become confused quickly with all of the conflicting voices, opinions, and options in the world today.

It’s easy to be seduced by the negative and the new. For instance, although the amount of warfare and deaths by human hands are reducing globally, you will not get that message watching the televised news or reading the newspaper.

It’s important to realize that everyone has a different agenda. Most people’s agendas are self-serving. In the case of the news, their focus is on inflating the negative because if they didn’t do so, their viewership would plummet. Which is why Peter Diamandis, one of the world’s experts on entrepreneurship and the future of innovation has said, “I’ve stopped watching TV news. They couldn’t pay me enough money.”

Regarding the news, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, said nearly 2,000 years ago, “Are you distracted by breaking news? Then take some leisure time to learn something well, and stop bouncing around.”

Are You Bouncing Around?

The world can be a pretty confusing place. Which is why it’s more important now than ever to have a moral footing. You need to have something you believe in. Something you can stand on. This doesn’t mean you put your blinders on. It merely means you recognize that more information is not better.

Hence the words of T.S. Elliot: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Wisdom requires making hard choices and firm commitments. It means drawing a line in the sand and standing firm. It involves removing negative options from your life because you only have so much time — and you have important work to do.

Viktor Frankl wisely stated, “For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

To experience happiness and success in your life, you need to have something bigger than yourself. You need to have a cause you believe in and other people whom you love and are willing to sacrifice for. It can’t be all about you.

Self-absorption brings confusion. Sitting around thinking in circles brings complexity. Wisdom is discernible and straightforward. As Leonardo da Vinci stated, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Steve Jobs similarly stated, “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

You cannot move mountains in your life until you remove the complexity. It takes wisdom to live simple. It takes simplicity to have a clear and compelling vision you are working toward.

Being simple has its drawbacks. Academic-types and “air chair philosophasters” will point the negative finger at you. They’ll call you ignorant and wrong.

And they won’t entirely be wrong in their assessments. But they indeed aren’t entirely right either. You can’t expect everyone to agree with you. Seth Godin has said, “If someone doesn’t like what you’ve made, ignore them. You didn’t make it for them anyways.”

You can’t let the voices of people who disagree with you dissuade you from doing great work. You have to ignore them.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t get advice. Actually, you’re learning all the time. Your worldview is constantly being updated, refined, and improved through transformative experiences and education. You are just highly conscious of who you accept advice from. You don’t take advice from people who don’t inspire you.

Purposefully Avoiding Information That Limits You

Only seek information that enables and empowers you to achieve your goals and to live your highest standards in life.

The best learners in the world proactively seek information and knowledge they can use in the here-and-now to move forward. They are practical learners. They are implementers and movers. They are actually out in the world doing great things. They are helping other people. They aren’t overly academic and stuck in complexity.

They are striving to remove complexity for themselves and others by solving problems. They have too much work to do to get caught up in the confusion of negative and unclear information. They need solutions. Therefore, they’ve developed a powerful filter for eliminating negative and low-level information that doesn’t support their mission.

This is what Jason Fried was talking about. He doesn’t want to be influenced by all of the confusion and noise in the world. Fried understand the words of Viktor Frankl — that you need a cause that drives you to get out of bed in the morning. As Darren Hardy said, “Your life can be measured by the size of the problems you seek to solve.”

Are you out trying to solve significant problems?

Do you see needs in the world that are worth your time and attention to attack?

How well is your day spent?

Are you doing stuff, or just sitting around confused in your head?

Will L. Thompson (1847–1909) wrote a beautiful poem: “Have I done any good in the world today? Have I helped anyone in need? Have I cheered up the sad and made someone feel glad? If not, I have failed indeed.”

You Are Responsible For How You See And Act In The World

What you focus on expands. What you pay attention to becomes your reality — psychologists call this selective attention. Of this, Dr. Stephen Covey said, “We see the world, not as it is, but as we are──or, as we are conditioned to see it.”

Your worldview is under your control. You have to train the garden of your mind. You need to develop a low tolerance for negative and low-level information that is limiting and limited in its scope.

In the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Greg McKeown states, “You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.” Almost all choices, options, and information in the world is noise.

Almost all decisions are bad decisions. And you will quickly experience decision-fatigue if you don’t proactively shield yourself from most of that noise. You shield yourself by creating an environment that fosters the type of inputs you desires. Your input shapes your outlook and conditions .you to see and act in the world in a certain way. If you do not proactively shape your environment, then you will become the reactive product of whatever environment finds you.

If you want to live powerfully and move the world forward, you need a filtering system to eliminate the harmful noise from your life. You need to keep things simple, discernible, actionable, and helpful.

The clearer you become on what your life is about, and the problems you seek to solve in the world, the less you will tolerate even “good” information and “good” options. As Jim Collins said, “Good is the enemy of great.” Similarly, Dallin Oaks said, “We should be careful not to exhaust our available time on things that are merely good and leave little time for that which is better or best.”

Australian author, Robyn Davidson, said, “The two important things I learned were that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be and that the most difficult part of any endeavor is taking the first step, making the first decision.”

You have to make a decision. And once you make that decision, you simultaneously eliminate 99.99% of other options. This is the smartest thing you can do. As Michael Jordan said, “Once I made a decision, I never thought about it again.” Similarly, Ralph Waldo Emerson has said, “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.”

You must pass your point of no return.

You must embrace the opportunity cost of making powerfully committed decisions. As Napoleon Hill said, “Definiteness of Purpose is that starting point of all achievement.” Until you become definite about what you’re doing, you will continually be tossed to and fro. Life will become increasingly complex. Skepticism and doubt will become your emotional reality. And in that reality, your only goal will be to tear things down, rather than build something new.

Are you building something powerful?

Do you have a filtering system for eliminating irrelevant decisions and information that is more noise than signal?

Do you have a purpose in life that is bigger than yourself?

Have you made a real decision lately, and stuck to that decision?

Are you like most people, who have a fragile relationship with commitment?

Most people lie to themselves every day. They haven’t stuck to a real commitment and haven’t made a firm decision in a long time. They then seek information and opinions that justify their lack of progress.

Make a decision.

Own that decision.

Become better.

Go out into the world and do good of your own accord, not because someone told you to.

Ready to Upgrade?

I’ve created a cheat sheet for putting yourself into a PEAK-STATE, immediately. You follow this daily, your life will change very quickly.

Get the cheat sheet here!

Here’s How Successful People Avoid Information Overwhelm was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Love this. Decision is the starting point. Otherwise it’s futile and exhausting.

Love this. Decision is the starting point. Otherwise it’s futile and exhausting.

5 Steps To Escape The “I’ll Start Tomorrow” Trap

UnsplashYou’ve probably heard something similar to the following phrase:

It’s better to spend 5 minutes per day learning a new language than 5 hours once per month.

It’s better to do anything daily than sporadically. If you do something daily, your chances of mastering it are very high.

The challenge (and the hidden benefit) is that there are only 24 hours in a single day. This 24-hour constraint will force you to decide what really matters to you.

What are you serious about?

What are you working on?

When it comes to your own goals or dreams:

Are you like the person who studies a new language 5–10 minutes per day?Or are you like the person who “studies” a new language for an hour or two here and there?

If you’re like most people, you’re the latter. And if you’re like most people, that means you’re not making very much progress.

Life is extremely busy. It can be tough strategically fitting other things into your daily schedule when you have a job, family, and other responsibilities. However, if you don’t fit your big dreams into your daily schedule, you probably won’t achieve them. Or in the least, you won’t achieve them in a timely fashion.

This article is not for people who are fine achieving big things once or twice in their lifetimes. Instead, this article is for people who want to achieve several big things every single year.

If you learn to prioritize your life and your time, then you can do several big things on an annual basis. When you develop consistency, you also develop momentum. With momentum comes confidence and increased motivation. With confidence and increased motivation comes inspiration and bold ideas. If you’re not consistent, then you’re missing out on all of the psychological benefits that ripple into a life of success.

Your daily routine is the clearest indicator of where you’re going.

The Trap Of Believing You Need Big Chunks Of Time

When it comes to big goals or projects — such as starting a business, writing a book, cleaning the garage, etc. — it’s easy falling into the trap of only working on it when you have a 3+ hour chunk of time.

I myself fell into this trap. I’m nearing the completion of my PhD in Organizational Psychology and only have my dissertation to complete. But a dissertation is a really big, complex, and challenging project. It felt so big that I didn’t feel I could work on it for just 10–20 minutes at a time. I felt like it took an hour just to “get into” it.

That premise resulted in me regularly going weeks (sometimes months!) without touching it. It’s taken far longer than it has needed to complete. I have learned from sad experience the truth of Meredith Willson’s words, “You pile up enough tomorrows, and you’ll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays.”

Once I made working on my dissertation a part of my daily schedule, and worked on it like I was learning a new language — just 15–30 minutes per day — I started making huge progress. I began caring about it more. I got more motivated and excited to do well. I went from push motivation, where it took willpower to work on it, to pull motivation, where I intrinsically wanted to do it. I began finding more pockets of time to squeeze it in.

Here’s the 5-step process and how it works:Establish clear priorities of what you truly want to do (it must fit into your daily schedule, or it’s probably not a huge priority)Design your daily routine to ensure you get it done optimallyUse the Pomodoro Technique  — where you work for a set period of time without any distractionsReport your progress immediately after you’ve completed your sessionHave a weekly reflection where you assess your progress and make future plansEstablish Clear Priorities

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” — Bruce Lee

What do you really care about?

What do you really want to do?

If you cannot fit something into your daily schedule, it’s probably not that important to you. Because just like learning a new language, you don’t need more than 15–30 minutes per day.

If you can’t find 15–30 minutes per day, then you’re not serious.

If you do something consistently, even for a few minutes every day, it will start to become a bigger part of your life. In the book, The Compound Effect, Darren Hardy explains that small habits done repeatedly over a long enough period of time experience exponential results.

If you do something repeatedly, eventually it starts to get momentum. It’s like pumping a water-well. It takes some time to get going. But once you get going, you start getting pulled forward.

You can get momentum doing something 15 minutes per day.

Overtime, you’ll start to develop competence at what you’re doing. When you increase in your competence and consistency, you’ll develop fare more confidence.

As your confidence, motivation, and momentum increase, you’ll become more passionate and excited about what you’re doing. You’ll make more time for it. You’ll become more successful at it.

Design Your Daily Routine

“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” — Mark Twain

The “bookends” of your day are your evening and morning. These are the times that you need to learn to optimize. Most people waste their evenings in a state of subconscious self-sabotage — usually distracting themselves with unhealthy food and mind-numbing technology.

According to eMarketer’s latest report, US adults’ spend more than 12 hours daily consuming information on the internet.

That’s more than half the day!

emarketer

You probably have WAY more time than you think. The problem for most people is that they have no clue how much time they actually waste.

Here’s the thing about time — if something becomes important to you, you’ll find the time. A few years ago, my friend Benny and his wife, Nicole, were trying to convince Nicole’s mom that she should watch the show, 24, with them. She told them she had no time to “fit it in.” They convinced her to watch just one episode with them. She got hooked and started watching hours of 24 every single day. For the next few weeks, whenever Benny and Nicole would go to Nicole’s parents house, they would find her mom glued to 24.

I guess she figured out how to “fit it in.” Who knows what other “priorities” in her life disappeared as a result. But life went on.

Even if you are legitimately extremely busy, which we all feel that we are, you can find 15–30 minutes daily to work on your goal. Your evening and morning routine are your best bet.

The first thing you do in the morning is reflective of how the rest of your day will go. If you start right, your chances of continuing to have a solid day are very high.

One of the 7 habits of “Highly Effective” people (that one book that sold over 25 million copies), is to put first things first.

Does this mean you may have to wake up 30–60 minutes earlier than you’re used to for a while? Does it mean it’s sometimes going to suck pulling yourself out of bed? Does it mean you’ll want to jump right back in bed?

Absolutely.

But it also means you’re going to experience an incredible amount of satisfaction that you didn’t used to have in your life.

I often wake up at 5 AM to work on my goals before my three kids wake up at 6. Until about 5:07, I’m really tempted to get back in bed. Many times, I have gotten back in bed.

However, by 5:11 or so, I’m starting to feel pretty good. By 5:59, I’m really glad I got up. I have far more energy than I had when I woke up. I may not have made a huge dent in my goals. But I took a few steps forward. I put first things first. And now I’m ready to see my kids. And you know what? They are going to interface with a parent who has self-esteem and confidence.

Use the Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s.

The technique uses a timer to break down work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks.

These intervals are named pomodoros, the plural in English of the Italian word pomodoro (tomato), after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that Cirillo used as a university student.

You don’t have to do 25-minute focus sessions. You can do 10-minute sessions. Or you can do 90-minute sessions!

The point is, you give yourself a timer and you work in complete focus until that timer is done. Once the timer goes off, you can take a break.

Most people will immediately jump into their digital addiction, such as Facebook, for their break. That’s completely fine. Give yourself a small victory for being focused.

However, as you become better and more serious about what you’re doing, you’ll realize just how important recovery is for your performance. As such, you’ll want your recovery to actually be restful and rejuvenating. Social media is mind-numbing, for sure, but it certainly isn’t rejuvenating.

Commit to a certain amount of time that you’ll focus on your goal each day. If it’s 10 minutes, then give yourself a 10-minute timer. Once that timer goes off, be done.

It’s very important that you stop when you say you were going to stop. Chances are, you’ll feel very excited for having done even 10 minutes of focused work on something you’ve been procrastinating for a long-time. In your excitement, you may be tempted to do another 20 or 30 minutes. If you do, then you’ll create an unsustainable expectation for yourself the next day.

Just do your pomodoro — whatever timeframe you give yourself. Once you finish, be done.

Then do it tomorrow.

And the next day.

And the next.

Get consistent and if you find time to squeeze another pomodoro into your day, then do another. But stick with your initial “morning” pomodoro.

Do it every day and eventually you’ll start to experience “the compound effect.” Eventually, you’ll start to develop competence and thus confidence. You’ll get momentum and motivation.

Your priorities will begin to shift. Like Nicole’s mom, you’ll find more time. You’ll delete more of the non-essential distractions from your day. Your day will become increasingly filled with things that truly are priorities that reflect the future you want to embody.

Because your days will become increasingly high quality and congruent, your life will become better and more successful. You’ll begin looking and living different from the norm. Indeed, to be normal or average is to not have clear priorities. Being average means you haven’t put first things first. “Normal” means you don’t have momentum or confidence or clarity.

Overtime, you’ll get far more effective during your pomodoro-time. You’ll develop routines and strategies for getting as much done in 30–60 minutes as used to take several hours. You’ll have a pre-performance routine for immediately putting you into a flow-state, so that you’re doing deeper and deeper work.

Report Your Progress Immediately

“When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates.” — Thomas Monson

If you don’t have someone you’re reporting your progress to, then you haven’t designed your life for optimal productivity. Accountability is essential for success.

You want to have someone meaningful who you report your progress to. This could be a friend or accountability partner or mentor or coach.

Every morning after you complete your pomodoro — you send a text message or email saying: “Done.” Or, if you want to add a little more detail, you could provide a few sentences, paragraphs, or bullets explaining how it went.

In any case, you not only want to track your progress, but you want to report it. If you track and report your progress, it will improve.

Have A Weekly Reflection

“I think of the learning process of an undulation of deep learning and periods of surfacing and reflection.” —  Josh Waitzkin

At the end of each week, it is powerful to have a reflection period. Take 10–20 minutes and reflect on your week. How did it go?

Did you actually work toward your goal every single day?

What came up during your week that you hadn’t anticipated?

Do you need to get up a few minutes earlier?

Are there things in your daily schedule you need to shuffle around to become more effective?

Are there activities or behaviors you could delete from your life to make more room for this growing priority?

What goals should you set for yourself this week, based on your experience last week, for this goal?

Should you work at it an extra 10–15 minutes daily?

How can you ensure your time is most effective during your daily pomodoro?

Those questions were simply prompts to get your mind going. Every week, you should be taking a few minutes to reflect on where you’re at. That’s a huge part of the learning process. You take a step back and examine how things are going so you can correct and perfect your process.

Each week, you should be getting better and more effective at what you’re doing.

Each week, you should be getting more momentum and motivation — more competence and more confidence.

Each week, you should be clearer on your priorities, and deleting the distractions from your life that are simply that, distractions.

Conclusion

“You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.” — Greg McKeown, in Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Success isn’t as hard as it appears. It’s not that far away. Success simply requires:

PrioritizationPlanningExecutionAccountabilityReflection and improvement

If you’ve been stuck in the past and haven’t made much progress on your dreams or goals, you need to make it a part of your daily life.

When it becomes something you do daily, you can be sure that you’ll begin making progress. Eventually, your progress will turn into enormous momentum. Eventually, your whole life will change as you become clearer on your priorities.

As you become clearer on your priorities, your standards for yourself will improve. You’ll stop justifying low-level distractions to take up huge portions of your time. As a result, your time will be invested far better. And as your time gets invest rather than spent, you’ll become more successful and happier.

Moreover, as you get better with time, you won’t be content having moments of quality mixed with moments of self-defeat. You’ll begin “stacking” quality habits together — such as exercising and journaling in addition to focusing on your goals. When you begin stacking quality habits, your results will compound even more. You’ll get more bang for your buck from each solid habit you cultivate.

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5 Steps To Escape The “I’ll Start Tomorrow” Trap was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.