Benjamin P. Hardy's Blog, page 19

The Most Important Skill For Interacting With People

Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash“When you meet someone, treat them as if they were in serious trouble:

… and you will be right more than half the time.”—Henry Eyring

Every person you meet, no matter how happy they appear on the outside, is dealing with serious challenges in their life.

Life is freaking hard.

Some of the people you meet are going through bitter and bone-chilling challenges. And for the most part, you have no clue. You just pass them at work, in the grocery store, or even at family gatherings.

In the book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Stephen Covey tells the story of being on a train one day. While on the train, there were two very noisy kids causing a disturbance to everyone around them. Covey noticed that the father was doing nothing about it, and after a period of restraint he approached the father. Here’s Covey’s account of the situation:

“Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?”

The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly,

“Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”

Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted. Suddenly I saw things differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn’t have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior; my heart was filled with the man’s pain. Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely. Everything changed in an instant.

Living More Compassionately

If you treat every person you meet like they are dealing with a serious challenge, you’ll be right more than half the time. If you entreat people with love, kindness, empathy, and discernment, they will appreciate you so much.

Sharing a few kind words to our loved ones make refreshes them like cool water in the middle of the desert. Small gestures can bring hope and motivation.

Even better, ask people how they are really doing in their life. Tell them that you know they are going through a lot right now, and that it’s probably really tough.

How do you think they’ll respond?

You might just see some tears.

Very few people are compassionate and considerate. For instance, my mom works like an absolute workhorse in her job. She is one of the most caring and loving and hardworking people I know. Yet, day in-and-out, she takes constantly crap from people who don’t appreciate what she does.

It’s crazy how a small and thoughtful compliment can put her in tears. She works so hard.

There are people in your life that haven’t been thanked for all of efforts in far too long.

Conclusion

Harriet Beecher Stowe once said, “The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”

You have no idea what the people in your world are currently dealing with. If you treat them like they are going through a crises, you’ll be right more often than not. But even more importantly, you can be a balm of peace and understanding for them.

A few words can be a release-valve for pent-up pain and sadness.

You could change someone’s life today. You could potentially save someone’s life today. You could also indirectly change countless other lives through the ripple effects of making just one person felt heard and seen.

Send the text to a friend.

Make that call to a loved one.

Apologize to a co-worker or employee.

Send a loving note of appreciation to your spouse/lover.

Say “I love you” more.

Wrote William Shakespeare, “They do not love that do not show their love.

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 Most Important Skill For Interacting With People was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How To Know If You’ll Be Successful

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Life is complex and messy. It can be extremely difficult to get traction, let alone find motivation.

But motivation is something you can learn to create at will. Becoming deeply passionate is also within your creative control. As a result, you can completely predict your own success. You can choose to become as successful as you want. You can blow past all competition.

Here’s how:

1. Turn Success Into A Game, Not A Grind

“Life is a game, play it.” — Mother Theresa

We hear a lot about people “grinding” these days. That sounds awful! Grinding day in and out is a path to burnout and misery.

The best performers in the world don’t grind, they game! For example, Warren Buffett became good at selling because as a child he would go door-to-door selling chewing gum. But he wasn’t focused on making money. Instead, he was fascinated trying to figure out which flavors sold best. Even back then, he was trying to make predictions. He’s still playing the same games.

According to author, Daniel Coyle, “If it can be counted, you can turn it into a game.” Rather than “practicing” in a tedious and boring way, you’re far better-off turning your practice into a game. This is why CrossFit is so successful. There are objectives — where you start and complete new challenges.

I recently had this experience learning Spanish on the app, Duolingo. I started seeing how many objectives I could complete in a single day, and how many days I could compete challenges in a row.

2. Know That You Can Succeed

“Ignition (n): The motivational process that occurs when your identity becomes linked to a long-term vision of your future. Triggers significant amounts of unconscious energy; usually marked by the realization: That is who I want to be.” — Daniel Coyle

There’s a moment when you see what you want and a voice organically speaks within you — “I could be that.”

This experience is pivotal!

How could you ever become an Olympic Athlete if you didn’t at some point see it and believe it in your mind?

Put simply, you need to have an identity shift. No “wannabe” ever made it big. At some point, they either gave up on their dream or stopped being a wannabe.

During my research as a graduate student, I studied the difference between wannabe entrepreneurs and successful entrepreneurs. None of the wannabes actually saw themselves as entrepreneurs. They hadn’t had the shift where they fully identified themselves as entrepreneurs. Conversely, successful entrepreneurs saw being an entrepreneur as who they were.

That identity shift happened as they began investing money into their entrepreneurial goals, and as they made the conscious decision — this is WHO I AM. Your identity follows your behavior. Therefore, this shift won’t happen until after you begin acting into the new role you plan to play. You don’t start with faith. You choose to have it. It’s a conscious choice, followed by behavior. Then identity and motivation follow.

3. Stop Hiding It

What other people think of you is none of your business.

If you want to remain mediocre at something forever, keep it to yourself. If you want to become extremely successful, then openly share your dreams with your loved ones.

Harmonious passion is about living an integrated, rather than a compartmentalized, life. The more aligned you become on who you are — the more congruent all areas of your life will be. Moreover, the more honest you are with the person you intend to be, the more support and love you’ll get from friends and family. They’ll also hold you accountable to your dreams and goals if they see you not making progress.

How can you involve key people into this quest?

How can you connect this passion with other areas in your life?

4. Create A Vision That Works

“It doesn’t matter what your vision is. It matters what your vision does.” — Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Disciple

What’s your vision?

More interestingly, what does your vision cause you to do?

Rather than worrying so much about what your vision is, you should be thinking about what your vision is doing. What is it doing to you? What is it doing to your environment? Your behavior? Your relationships? Your aspirations? Your income? Your impact?

Are you and your external world transforming in powerful and inspired ways Then your vision is working. That’s the most important consideration —is your vision working?

5. Practice Privately 5–10X Than You Perform Publicly

“Private victory always precedes public victory.” — Stephen Covey

Kobe Bryant was always the first person in the gym and the last to leave. He worked harder than anyone else. He had more coaches and trainers. He was always pushing his own limits and perfecting even the smallest facets of his skillsets.

When practice becomes the game for you, that’s when you’re about to explode in your progress.

Why?

Because practice is all about perfecting skills. True practice and learning force you to deeply examine the chinks in your armor. You are only as strong as your weakest link. In a world that tells you to ignore your weaknesses, true practitioners do the opposite.

6. Carry A Notepad Everywhere

“I take notes like some people take drugs. There is an eight-foot stretch of shelves in my house containing nothing but full notebooks. I trust the weakest pen more than the strongest memory, and note taking is — in my experience — one of the most important skills for converting excessive information into precise action and follow-up.” — Tim Ferriss, in the blogpost, How to Take Notes Like an Alpha-Geek

Your mind can be like a well. It takes pumping the well for a while to get the ideas and creativity flowing. However, if you get the well pumping, then all of you have to do is keep it going. You can get to the point where the ideas and insights keep coming coming coming.

Your responsibility at that point is to take notes. If you ignore those subconscious promptings, they will stop coming. Taking note, adjusting your mindset, and shifting your behavior is HOW you pump the well. It’s how you keep the ideas flowing. You must continually be shifting the connections and model.

7. Quickly Address Mistakes, Or You’ll Stop Learning

“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.’” — Peter M. Senge

Lessons are repeated until learned.

According to Brain-scan studies, if you do not address a problem in 0.25 seconds after a mistake is made, then you probably won’t do anything about it. You’ll shrug your shoulders and keep going. This is really bad for learning. You’re just more deeply engraining the negative behavioral cycle into your brain.

Performance experts have found that if you address your mistakes immediately, you can learn more in 5 minutes than most people do in 30 days. If you simply address your problems and the spot, correct them, and learn better ways, then you don’t have to continuously repeat the problem.

8. Face Your Pain, Or It Will Be Buried And Stunt Your Growth

“If you don’t know how to control your emotional reactions and there’s a refractory period, and you let that emotional reaction linger for hours or days, it turns into a mood. So you say to someone, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ The person says, ‘I’m in a mood.’ Then you say, ‘Why are you in a mood?’ They say, ‘Well, this thing happened to me five days ago and I’m having one long emotional reaction.’ If you keep that refractory period going for weeks and months, you’ve developed a temperament. If you keep that same refractory period going on for years, it’s called a personality trait.” — Dr. Joe Dispenza

Learning and growing are emotional and often painful experiences. Sometimes, things happen in life that you didn’t plan for nor were you responsible for — traumatic experiences.

Whether caused by you or someone else, when you go through a painful experience, that experience can only become one of two things to you. It’s either going to become a long-term problem, or it’s going to become a core strength.

When you experience a powerfully emotional experience, you experience what is known as a “refractory period” — which is your physiological response to an experience. That period should ideally be short, but often people don’t cope well with experiences. Sometimes. the refractory period of a certain experience can last years.

For example, you have a really intense experience and that experience changes you. Until you directly face and walk-through that issue, it will always be a part of you. In fact, you will remain the same person emotionally until you learn that lesson. I know people who had rough experiences as teenagers who are still subconsciously playing out the same emotional experiences from that episode. They haven’t learned or changed since that event.

This is a painful and ineffective way to live. This is not to diminish the pain and suffering that people have gone through, or the negative ripple effects that have since been created. It’s simply speaking to the truth of the matter — the only way out is through. You can’t avoid it. You must face your deepest fears or you’ll always be a slave to them.

In a recent interview, Josh Waitzkin described an experience where he almost died. He was doing underwater breathing techniques and accidentally passed-out. Rather than allowing a long refractory period to occur, he said that he was back in the water 2 days later.

He didn’t want that traumatic experience to become a lifelong weakness. He didn’t want to train his body to live in the trauma. He walked straight into the trauma and pain and fear and quickly re-established his relationship and control over the situation. Therefore, that experience became an incredible blessing and learning and experience.

9. Have Fun Milestones

“Celebrate small victories often. Mourn failures quickly. Do what’s necessary without fanfare.” — Chris Brogan

A key component of mastering anything is creating fun, engaging, and relevant milestones throughout the learning process.

For example, if you’re trying to learn a new language, buy a plane ticket for 3 months in advance so you can test your new language skills in an immersive way. Plan to eat at fun restaurants and to see interesting things. Reward yourself in a way that links directly to what you’re trying to master.

10. Invest Big On Yourself

“Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.” — Franz Kafka

Dreamers invest their money and time into distractions while doers invest their time and money into their dreams.

The financial investment will make it real to you. This is a huge part of “ignition” (see #2 above). When you start acting in ways that excite you, and in ways that reflect the future identity you’re trying to create — then you begin identifying with that future self here-and-now. You signal to yourself who you are by the actions you take. Your behavior shapes your personality and identity.

This is one of the most important moments you can have. That moment where you say, “Whoa, I’m actually doing this!”

That moment is deeply connected with the moment where you say inside of yourself, “I can be one of those.”

11. Ignore Everyone

“For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.” — Ira Glass

Keep your eyes only on the people who inspire you. You have good taste.

The worst thing you could do is worry about what your peers think. When people begin worrying about what their peers think, their motivation becomes clouded and confused. They stop doing their work for the internal reasons that got them excited and they begin trying to fit in, or to be impressive to the wrong people.

12. Focus On Challenges And Quests, Not Time

“Deep practice is not measured in minutes or hours, but in the number of high-quality reaches and repetitions you make — basically, how many new connections you form in your brain.” — Daniel Coyle

In his book, Living with a SEAL, Jesse Itzler tells the story of being inspired by a certain Navy SEAL and consequently inviting him to live at Itzler’s home for a month. Itzler admitted being in a personal rut and wanted to shake himself out of his routine.

Day 1: “SEAL” asked Itzler, “How many pull-ups can you do?” Itzler squeaked out eight shaky pull-ups.

“Take 30 seconds and do it again,” SEAL said. 30 seconds later, Itzler got on the bar and did six, struggling.

“Take 30 seconds and do it one more time,” SEAL said. 30 seconds later, Itzler got on the bar and did three, at which point his arms were exhausted.

“Alright, we’re not leaving here until you do 100 more,” SEAL stated. Itzler was puzzled. “Alright, we’re gonna be here a long-time. Cause there’s no way I could do 100.” However, Itzler ended-up completing the challenge, doing one pull-up at a time. Thus, SEAL convinced Itzler that he could do way more than he thought he could.

Like Itzler who shattered a mental barrier by completing 100 pull-ups, you too can get out of your rut by pursuing tangible objectives.

The concept is: Do something and don’t stop until it’s complete, no matter how long it takes.

If it doesn’t suck, we don’t do it.

You can apply this principle to anything. You can do a homework assignment and just do it until it’s complete. You can write an article and stick-to-it until it’s published. You can do 100 pull-ups, or run 5 miles, and go until you’re done. Who cares how long it takes?

The best practice is objective-based. Not time based. In fact, you want to eliminate your sense of time as much as you possibly can.

Living in the dimensions of time is a 9–5 mindset. Living in FLOW is about dissolving into timelessness. It’s about enjoying what you’re doing for the sake of it. One of the fastest ways into flow is by pushing yourself to achieve certain things, daily. If you’re weightlifting, your “reps” or “objectives” could be to do a certain lift perfectly a number of times. If you’re a musician, it could be playing a certain song or part of a song 5–10 times perfectly in a row.

Make it a game. But more than anything, focus it on successfully completing a certain objective. Don’t build your practice around time and effort. We live in the results economy — where results are what matter more than anything now.

13. See How Much You Can Do In A Single Day

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” — T. S. Eliot

Ezra Taft Benson was a religious leader who simultaneously served as the 15th United States Secretary of Agriculture during both presidential terms of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Benson grew up on a farm in Whitney, Idaho. One day in 1915 at the age of 16, he was hired by a neighboring farmer to thin a field of sugar beets. He took his short-handled hoe in hand and looked out over the sugar beet field. Here was the thought that came into his mind:

“If I work as hard as I can, I wonder how much I can do in a day?”

He started just as the sun came up and worked almost without stopping until sun down. Then he realized how much he could do. He had thinned a full acre of beets in just one day! Which was an insane amount for one person. When the farmer saw what Benson had done, he was shocked. He dropped two silver dollars and two five-dollar gold coins into Benson’s hand. Benson could hardly believe his eyes! 12 dollars at that time, and for a 16 year old farm boy, was a small fortune.

As he walked home he was walking on air and he felt like the richest man in town.

The question Benson asked himself is a question YOU need to ask yourself.

How much can you get done in a single day?

How much can you get done today?

This isn’t about being busy, but rather, about being productive. It’s also about pushing your own limits, and seeing how far you can actually go. Most people are trying to see how little they can do. If you’re one of those people who can see how much you can do, yeah…

14. See How Much You Can Give In Your Relationships

“You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.” — Zig Ziglar

When you’re driven to give and to serve, you become more empathetic and relevant. Because it’s about them and not you, you can actually listen and discern what they need. You’re not calculating your next move. You’re not thinking about what you’re going to say next. Instead, you’re actually listening. You’re actually discovering what other people need.

15. Deep Focus, Then Deep Reflection

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

Success is not a marathon. Instead, success is a series of sprints. You push yourself beyond your limits and then you rest/recover.

Some sprints may be a week. Other sprints may be a few years. Whatever the case, you need periods where you surface from the intensity and reflect on what the heck just happened. You get feedback. You open yourself up to trusted friends and mentors. You re-adjust your path if you need to based on what you’ve learned and based on the post-reflection process.

Recovery, resting, and reflection are essential to becoming brilliant at what you do. If you’re not prioritizing these, then you’re on a path to burnout. Moreover, if you’re not taking time to reflect and recover, there’s a good chance you’re going the wrong direction without even knowing it.

16. Never Stop Learning

“Don’t believe your own press.” — Joe Polish

Wayne Gretzky is considered the greatest hockey player to ever live. Yet, he was known by his teammates to continually look like a fool. He was always trying new things in practice and falling all over the ice. He failed a lot more than his teammates.

The problem with success is dull your motivational edge and drive. In order to keep yourself sharp, you need to never stop pushing your boundaries, not matter how good you become.

The moment you stop learning, testing, and trying is the moment you go backwards. If you don’t use it, you’ll quickly lose it.

17. Avoid Luxury Like The Plague

“We love comfort. We love state-of-the-art practice facilities, oak-paneled corner offices, spotless locker rooms, and fluffy towels. Which is a shame, because luxury is a motivational narcotic: It signals our unconscious minds to give less effort. It whispers, Relax, you’ve made it.

The talent hotbeds are not luxurious. In fact, they are so much the opposite that they are sometimes called chicken-wire Harvards. Top music camps — especially ones that can afford better — consist mainly of rundown cabins. The North Baltimore Aquatic Club, which produced Michael Phelps and four other Olympic medalists, could pass for an underfunded YMCA. The world’s highest-performing schools — those in Finland and South Korea, which perennially score at the top of the Program for International Student Assessment rankings — feature austere classrooms that look as if they haven’t changed since the 1950s.” — Daniel Coyle

For most people, “success” is not really about the work itself, but about the luxuries success can give you.

World-class performers keep things simple. They aren’t afraid to enjoy luxuries and make good money. However, when it comes to their work, they are simplistic. They maintain the scrappiness and drive as they had when they were first starting out.

Conclusion

What does success actually look like to you?

How much are you investing in your dreams?

Can you see yourself where you want to be?

Are you going to get there?

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!

How To Know If You’ll Be Successful was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here’s How Elite Performers Silence Negative Self-Talk

Goalcast“Don’t believe everything you think — or feel.” — Anna Chancellor

95% of the thoughts you have had today are the same thoughts you had yesterday.

How many of those thoughts are actually true?

Just because a thought enters your mind doesn’t make it true. Yet, we tend to believe our own thoughts because they are inside of us. Many, if not most, of the thoughts that you have should quickly be discarded.

Believing in something is not a passive act. It takes consent. It takes buying-into. You must choose not to believe in the negative and limiting thoughts that enter your mind.

Here’s the challenge — In order to do something to pursue big goals and achieve things you’ve never done, you must embrace uncertainty. The uncertainty of your goals and aspirations creates an easy target for your subconscious to send negative, limiting, and fear-based signals.

So, if you want to pursue big goals, expect an onslaught of negative thoughts. Here’s specifically what will happen:

Your Mind Will Try To Keep You In Your Past

Some of the most difficult negative thoughts will relate to your past. If you’ve been relatively successful in the past, your mind will always make you believe that you’re not as good as you used to be. Your mind will try to convince you that you’ve lost your touch. That you’ve gone off the rails. That you’ve taken a wrong turn and need to go back.

Don’t believe these lies.

You can’t go back. And you shouldn’t go back. You’re actually far better than you used to be. You’re more evolved and have more capability and insight to offer. But the uncertainty of the enormous goals you’re pursuing is exposing your subconscious emotional blocks.

Your subconscious mind is playing a hindsight bias game with you. It’s easy looking back and saying to yourself, “I must have known what I was doing. Because everything seemed to work out.”

You didn’t know what you were doing. Your memories about those experiences have changed based on your current circumstances. In the moment, when you were pursuing your previous goals, the future was just as uncertain as the future you’re pursuing now.

You weren’t better then. You just kept going. You fought the resistance. You choose to remain committed to something. According to Strategic Coach founder, Dan Sullivan, commitment is not doing something because you know the plan. Rather, commitment is not knowing the plan and having the courage to deal with uncertainty.

Take-Away #1: Don’t Believe Your Limiting Thoughts

The first step of silencing your mind is to not believe the negative and limiting thoughts that will relentlessly plague you if you’re growing and learning. See these thoughts for what they are — your subconscious wants certainty and predictability.

In order to actually grow and learn, you must experience what neuroscientists call, “Prediction Errors.” A prediction error is when you step out of your current sphere of experience and encounter feedback. Consider the child who touches the hot stove — prediction error. Such experiences imprint a deeply emotional memory into the subconscious mind and physical body.

If you’re not experiencing prediction errors, you’re not actually learning. If you’re not learning, you’re not growing. If you’re seeking a life of growth and expansion, then you will undoubtedly experience many prediction errors, which are painful in the moment but essential to permanently upgrading behavior and elevating mood.

Take-Away #2: Embrace The Unknown

Researchers have found that children generally have a higher tolerance for ambiguity than grownups do. They’re more willing to accept murky conditions — situations where the likelihood of winning or losing is unknown.

Having a high tolerance for ambiguity is required for learning and growth, because all learning and growth begins with ambiguity and uncertainty. You must work through this. You must become comfortable on the opposite side of your fear.

One of the reasons children are more comfortable with uncertainty is because they have less of a past to cling onto. Dan Sullivan has explained that the reason 5 year old children seem to have boundless energy is because for them, it’s ALL FUTURE.

Everything is in front of them; nothing is behind them. They are excitedly MOVING FORWARD. The more life experience you gain, the more likely you are to buy-into that experience, which will shift your focus from the excitement of learning and the future to the stability and certainty of the past.

In the book, It’s Now How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be, Paul Arden said:

“Knowledge comes from the past, so it’s safe. It is also out of date. It’s the opposite of originality. Experience is built from solutions to old situations and problems. This is lazy. Experience is the opposite of being creative. If you can prove you’re right you’re set in concrete. You cannot move with the times or with other people. Your mind is closed. You are not open to new ideas.”

Learn from your past. But never, ever, get stuck there. No matter how great it’s been. Never allow prior success to become an excuse for developed a fixed-mindset.

What You Focus On Expands

Your mind is like a stage, and thoughts are the actors. You get to choose which actor you will put the light of your attention on. The thoughts you give attention to begin to steal the show. What you focus on expands.

Psychologists have a term for focus — they call it selective attention, and it is your super power. Selective attention involves more than simply ignoring distracting or goal-conflicting stimuli. In order to remain focused on the goal at hand, you need a sufficient “load” of goal-oriented stimuli to keep yourself engaged.

Take-Away #3: Offense Is Your Best Defense

Put simply, you need to continually be approaching your goals and fueling the fire of your focus. You can’t just play defense when it comes to your mind. Intense offense is your best defense.

The More Successful You Become, The More Pressure You Will Experience

“Pressure can burst a pipe, or pressure can make a diamond.” — Robert Horry

Success is often an antecedent to failure. One of the primary reasons success is hard to maintain is that the internal and, most importantly, external pressure continues to go up.

When you’ve succeeded in the past, people will expect you to continue doing what you’ve done. However, what got you here won’t get you there. If you’re committed to growth, you’ll need to continually disrupt yourself and your own past. Therefore, you’ll need to continue evolving and experiencing prediction errors. You’ll need to continue failing.

Another reason the pressure will mount is that people will want you to fail. Your continual search for the next level exposes others to the fact that they haven’t pushed their own boundaries for a long time. They’ve stopped learning and have developed a fixed-mindset. Don’t listen to these people.

Theodore Roosevelt said it best:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Become

In a recent interview, learning expert Josh Waitzkin explained that it doesn’t matter all that much where a person currently is in their development. What actually matters is the slope of their growth curve.

How steep is your current growth curve?

Are your plateau’d?

Has your growth curve leveled-off?

Are your constantly pushing your own boundaries?

It’s not about where you currently are. It’s about where you’re going. If you have a steep growth curve, then you will fail often. Waitzkin calls this investing in failure. You invest in failure by pursuing new frontiers that are beyond your current experience and capability. You’re willing to keep learning, embrace the humility of loss, and face your suppressed emotions and subconscious mind head-on.

Take-Away #4: Evaluate Your Current Growth Curve

“Good timber does not grow with ease: The stronger wind, the stronger trees; The further sky, the greater length; The more the storm, the more the strength. By sun and cold, by rain and snow, In trees and men good timbers grow.” — Douglas Malloch

How steep is the growth curve you’re on?

This growth curve will be different in the multiple domains of your life. You want to be seeking steep curves in all domains of your life. That’s how you can predict if someone is going to go far. If they are taking on bigger and bigger challenges in the various areas of their life.

Extreme growth in one area of your life can transfer to growth in other areas. For example, when I became a foster parent of three kids, having never been a parent before in my life, I put myself on steep growth curve in one area of my life which directly transferred to other areas of my life — such as my writing career.

What are the key areas of your life?

How steep are the individual growth curves you’re on in each of those key areas?

If you’re lagging in one key area of your life, that will negatively transfer to the other key areas. You must maintain a growth mindset in all areas of your life, or the insidious fixed-mindset will set in.

Conclusion: Always Make Your Future Bigger Than Your Past

“Always make your future bigger than your past.” — Dan Sullivan

Don’t believe the thoughts your subconscious mind will send you as you’re exposed to the uncertainty of a bigger and better future.

What you focus on expands. Simply trying to avoid negative thoughts is not enough. You must load-up on goal-directed stimuli, which includes information, behaviors, environments, responsibilities, projects, creations, etc. Offense toward your goals is your best defense.

Steepen your growth curve. It’s not about where you are, but where you’re going. You may not be as successful or smart as other people out there. But are you currently failing more than they are? Are you pushing your boundaries more than they are?

A huge component of growth in internal. Therefore, you shouldn’t judge someone based purely on what is external. The most powerful and important growth is always internal. Therefore, someone may appear to be going backwards in their progression, when in reality, they are going to the next level within, which will shortly be manifest without.

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 Elite Performers Silence Negative Self-Talk was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This 10-Minute Routine Will Increase Your Confidence And Self-Esteem

Morning“All hell can break loose throughout the day, but because I control the bookends, I know I’m always going to start and finish strong.” ― Darren Hardy, The Compound Effect

The two most important times in your day are just before you go to bed, and just after you wake up. These are your “bookends.” If you learn to master the bookends of your day, you will quickly gain greater control over the rest of your life.

You are the most important human-being in your own life. While most people are trying to impress other people, it’s far more inspiring to live a life that impresses yourself. Rita Mae Brown said, “The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.”

Living in alignment and with intention is how you create inner confidence and peace. It does not matter how many times you’ve failed in the past. It doesn’t matter how messy or conflicted your life may be right now. You can quickly learn to develop confidence and a deep sense of self-love. George Eliot said, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

With this short routine, you can come to love and appreciate yourself far more. This love and appreciate will give you momentum and motivation to make increasingly better decisions throughout your days, so that overtime, your life gets exponentially better.

10 minutes before going to sleep:

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

Before going to bed at night, pull out your journal and simply report to yourself what you did that day. If you’re a fast typer, you’re better off using a computer than a handwritten notepad for this journaling session.

Report and account to yourself how the day went. Be completely honest and vulnerable with yourself.

Share both your wins and your losses. Think about the triggers that may have set you off on a wrong course. In the process of accounting what happened during your day, write down how things could have gone differently if you had been more intentional.

According to Dr. Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association, there are several differences between optimists and pessimists.

PessimistsPessimists explain negative events as a permanent fixture of their identity (something they can’t change). They view themselves (or life in general) as the problem, and there is nothing that can really be done.OptimistsOptimists explain negative events as situation and short-lived. When something goes wrong, they focus on situational factors that can be altered and improved.

During your evening journaling session, write down how you could have altered the situation. Have no negative judgement about yourself. Just report back what happened and what you learned.

While writing about what happened and what you learned, your mind will naturally begin projecting the future and what you could be doing differently. Ride this natural stream of thought and begin writing down how you plan to live tomorrow differently.

Write in an affirmative way how you want to see tomorrow happen. Be positive and optimistic. Thomas Edison said, “Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” As you write down how you intend to see tomorrow, feel and imagine yourself being excellent tomorrow. Make a mental commitment that you’re going to wake up at a certain time and that you’re going to crush the next day. Imagine yourself the following evening in the same place you are now reporting how the day went, and being able to report incredible success and progress.

Write down the potential barriers that could come up. In psychology, planning for obstacles is known as “implementation intentions.” Write about how you plan to face those obstacles or challenges when they come.

Avoiding problems is far more intelligent than trying to overcome them. Consequently, write down how you can avoid being triggered into negative traps in the first place.

Even if you had a bad day, this routine will make you feel better. You’ll have been honest with yourself about what happened. You’ll have been able to re-live your day. Just by virtue of that fact that you’re spending some time reflecting on how things went, you’ll begin to feel gratitude for the little things.

If you had a negative experience with a friend, child, or spouse, your love for them will deepen as you reflect on how things could have gone differently. You’ll commit to yourself that you will be better tomorrow. This commitment to yourself will also be a commitment to those you love — that tomorrow you will shift the pattern and help them feel more love than they ever have before.

Overtime, you’ll begin looking forward to these evening reporting and accountability journaling sessions. They will become one of the most treasured parts of your day. They will inspire you to live better each day so that you can honestly report to yourself how well you did.

Your love for yourself will increase because day-by-day, you’ll be living more intentionally and congruently. Mahatma Gandhi has said, “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”

The more harmonious your life becomes, the happier and more confident you’ll be. This evening writing session will help you develop incredible love and compassion for yourself. Jean Shinoda Bolen said, “When you recover or discover something that nourishes your soul and brings joy, care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life.”

10 minutes after you wake up:

Research confirms the brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex, is most active and readily creative immediately following sleep. Your subconscious mind has been loosely mind-wandering while you slept, making contextual and temporal connections. Creativity, after all, is making connections between different parts of the brain.

In an interview with Tim Ferriss, Josh Waitzkin, former chess prodigy and tai chi world champion, explains his morning routine to tap into the subconscious breakthroughs and connections experienced while he was sleeping.

Unlike 80 percent of people between the ages of 18–44 who check their smartphones within 15 minutes of waking up, Waitzkin goes to a quiet place, does some meditation and grabs his journal.

In his journal, he thought-dumps for several minutes. Thus, rather than focusing on input like most people who check their notifications, Waitzkin’s focus is on output. This is how he taps into his higher realms of clarity, learning, and creativity — what he calls, “crystallized intelligence.”

Writing in your journal first thing in the morning has a few key purposes:

To clear your mindTo trigger and remind yourself your goalsTo experience deep gratitude for the dayTo help you get creative insights about people you need to reach out to, or projects you’re working on

Your mind is beautifully attuned first thing in the morning. If you learn how to use your morning-mind, you’ll get the most important ideas of your life. You’ll get insights and inspiration that will help you live better throughout your day. This is the crystalized intelligence that Waitzkin is talking about.

Important ideas can change your life. Those ideas won’t come if you don’t give your mind the space to focus. That’s where this morning journaling comes in. This morning session is more meditation than anything else. You’re allowing your mind to loosely wander while you write down your goals, dreams, plans, and what you aim to accomplish that day.

As you remind yourself of your goals and dreams, you want to be highly affirmative about what you intend to do that very day.

Who do you want to be?

How do you want to show up?

What do you need to focus on first?

Who do you need to reach out to?

Affirm in writing that you’re going to succeed that day. Affirm in writing that you will accomplish all of your goals, both short and long-term. By affirming and deeply visualizing and experiencing yourself succeeding, you are creating an emotional climate of success. You are creating a powerful state from which to operate in the world. This is a peak-state.

The goal of the peak-state is to be completely in the moment, to clear your mind, and to avoid unhealthy subconscious loops. You want to be completely clear on how you’re feeling RIGHT NOW.

What are your current emotions?

Do these emotions match the goals you want to achieve?

Do these emotions match the future you are trying to create?

If your current emotions do not match the future you’d like to create, then your behavior will be low-level and your day will be a repeat of the past. In order to create a new future, you need to proactively create the energy and emotions that matches the future you intend to create. You do this at the beginning of your day so that you can live out your day from those emotions. If you start right, you’ll be far more likely to continue right throughout the day.

While writing in your morning journal, feel and know that you’re going to succeed today. Know that the goals you aspire toward are already yours. Allow yourself to experience deep gratitude while writing in your journal about the accomplishments you’re going to have that day.

Be as imaginative as possible. Albert Einstein has 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.”

Allow your mind to go places. Don’t squelch inspiration. Allow bold, big, and incredible thoughts to flow to you as you meditate and write in your journal. Be completely optimistic and affirmative about the goals and plans you set.

Know in your mind that you can do it. As Napoleon Hill famously wrote, “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.”

This whole process will allow you to not only get clear, but also to get inspired. Every morning, you should be elevating your way of thinking and living. Your goals should continually be expanding because each day you’re gaining confidence and learning.

The clarity, affirmation, gratitude, and inspiration from this routine put you into a deep level of presence, creating a peak-experience. According to Abraham Maslow, “Peak experiences as rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect upon the experimenter.”

These peak experiences are rare because very few intentionally create them. You can and should be having peak experiences daily. As you have peak experiences every morning, and then act from those experiences, you live an intention and present life. You reshape your subconscious and become a super-learner, allowing all of life to come in.

Peak experiences are rare for most people because they have deep emotional blocks, which cloud their minds. Due to the lack of clarity and lack of routines to get clarity, people live reactively to their environment and their body. They seek dopamine and distraction and sugar and carbs and the downward cycle continues — as does their confidence, self-love, and imagination. Overtime, they become pessimistic about themselves and about life.

Conclusion

“A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.” — Mark Twain

“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection” — Buddha

“Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it. ” — M. Scott Peck

“To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance” — Oscar Wilde

These journaling sessions can absolutely change your life. In the evening, you develop greater love, appreciation, insight, and compassion for yourself. You notice things you may not have seen in the busyness of your day. You report your learning so that it becomes more engrained. You make better plans for the future and positively affirm to yourself that you’ll succeed.

As you write in the evening, you’ll shift your subconscious patterns while you sleep. When you wake up, you’ll have new memories, new emotions, and new neural connections to work with.

As a result, it’s very important not to immediately get sucked BACK into the old reality of yesterday. Don’t pull out your smartphone. Instead, seize access to those new neural connections through meditation and journaling. Go to a quiet place and pull out your journal. Begin writing down the things you plan to achieve and the person you intend to become.

During your writing session, you’ll come to expect flashes of insight during the writing process itself. Psychologists call this epiphany ability and self-help gurus call this auto suggestion. They are both a way of saying that you’ll get inspired insights and clarity if you give yourself the space, and if you come to truly believe and feel what you’re seeking to have in your life.

When you do these two routines, your behavior DURING YOUR DAY will improve. You’ll stop being so reactive to environments, emotions, and other people. You’ll avoid terrible situations that were once your norm.

Your days will get better and more intentional. Your life will transform. You’ll begin living your dreams. Soon, those dreams will expand through the inspiration you get and the experiences you create. Your confidence will soar because you’ll be living in greater alignment with yourself.

You’ll love yourself.

You’ll have greater confidence.

You’ll appreciate those you love more.

You’ll be happier.

Your emotions will translate to those around you and they’ll love and appreciate you more.

You’ll be far more present and powerful.

You’ll end the cycle of addiction. You’ll be clear.

Ready to Upgrade?

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

Get the cheat sheet here!

This 10-Minute Routine Will Increase Your Confidence And Self-Esteem was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This Morning Routine Will Make You Unstoppable

Greatist“Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.” — Richard Whately

Life is busy. It can feel impossible to move toward your dreams. If you have a full-time job and kids, it’s even harder.

How do you move forward?

If you don’t purposefully carve time out every day to progress and improve — without question, your time will get lost in the vacuum of our increasingly crowded lives. Before you know it, you’ll be old and withered — wondering where all that time went.

As Professor Harold Hill has said — “You pile up enough tomorrows, and you’ll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays.”

Getting Out Of Survival Mode

It does not matter how successful or unsuccessful you’ve been in the past. Confidence, clarity, and a sense of purpose are all things that need to be established, and re-established, daily.

Each and every day, you have the power to shift who you are, and who you’ve been.

For most people, their morning begins the same way it usually does, by being triggered almost immediately into a subconscious cycle. They pull out their phone, go through their apps, get out of bed on the same side, and then go about their day.

Their physical body has become their mind — and due to the repetition it has experienced, the body can go through the day in an automatic and subconscious way. You eat the same unhealthy foods, distract yourself at work in the same ways.

Your body is a chemical system — and the chemicals your body releases produce emotions. Those emotions are tied to memories. So, when you pull out your smartphone out of habit, your body has taken over your mind, and it is seeking the dopamine chemicals that it has become habituated to. Your body becomes your mind because your physical body quite literally is your subconscious mind. And your subconscious mind makes up around 95% of your behavior.

This is why change can be so difficult. Change is always emotional. You have to decide, very intentionally, who you are going to be every single day. If you don’t make the decision who you will be and how you will act, then your body will go through it’s cycle seeking the same chemicals and emotional states that it has become accustomed to.

In order to become someone different, you must do something different, today. You must act in ways that are more reflective of the emotions you want to experience in your future, rather than living out the emotions of your past. The only way to do that is to wake up and intentionally decide who you will be and how you will act.

If you don’t start your day with intention, you are living in survival mode. Your time is, without question, moving faster than you want it to. You’re stuck in the past. You’re stuck living out the same experiences and emotions and patterns, over and over and over.

This is not a fun way to live life. Yet this is how most people are living in today’s heavily stimulated and addicting world. We are spending more and more time in subconscious and distracting cycles. More of our time is being taken from us because we’ve allowed our bodies and the external world to govern our lives.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can make the decision right here and now to create a new pattern. Rather than living in the past, you can create a new future. But there’s a catch. The past is known. The emotions you’ve become used to experiencing are known and predictable.

One of the primary reasons people stay in even life-threatening addictions is because they know the outcomes of their behavior. The human brain really likes being able to predict the future. Thus, people want their lives to be predictable even if what is predictable is absolutely painful and horrible and regretful.

If you want to become someone new, you have to do something where you cannot entirely predict the outcome. You have to do something different and new, and this will freak you out. When you do something new, your body will experience new emotions, and it will quickly seek its homeostasis. As Napoleon Hill said, “A good shock often helps the brain that has been atrophied by habit.”

If you’re willing to live with intention, and to make new decisions, there is a cost. That cost is emotional. Are you willing to deal with difficult emotions? Are you willing to move forward into your future without being able to fully predict the outcome?

According to some psychologists, fear of the unknown is the basis of all other fears. The unknown is what freaks us out, because we hate not being able to predict exactly how something will happen. Emotionally, this rocks our world. Based on loads of research in psychology, one of the primary attributes of successful people is having a high tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty.

Are you willing to make new decisions and live a less predictable life?

Are you willing to operate with faith and vision, rather than regret and being stuck in the past?

Are you ready to become a new person; one who lives their life based on what they are striving to create in their future?

If so, then this morning routine will transform your life. You will quickly learn that you can actually change your entire personality. Personality is not something that is or should remain permanent. Rather, your personality is based on the memories you have and the behaviors you repeatedly perform. Your personality is the decisions you make. If you make new decisions and thus experience new emotions and create new memories, then you will change your personality.

Who you are and who you become is up to you. But only if you get out of your emotional and subconscious pattern.

Optimizing Your Brain In The Evening And Morning

According to Benjamin Franklin, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” A life-changing morning routine doesn’t just happen. It must be designed and planned for.

According to Stanford Psychologist, BJ Fogg, design trumps willpower. If you simply take a few minutes to set up the environment, then the decision has already been made for you. For example, you can lay your clothes out the night before so you don’t have to think about what you’re going to wear. You can pull some dental floss out and lay it on the counter so you don’t have to make the decision whether to floss or not.

Your evening routine is about taking the decisions out of your morning. You want to wake up already knowing exactly what you’re going to do. You want to wake up with the confidence of a plan so you don’t have to exhaust willpower to get yourself going.

This Evening Routine Guarantees Success The Next Day

This is one of the most pivotal things you can learn — to set yourself up the night before. Your brain is generally more analytical at night and more creative in the morning. Your evening is the perfect time to take 5 or so minutes planning out your next day.

Your evening is also a really good time to reflect, relax, and recover. Here are the keys to a perfect evening routine to set your next day up for you success.

1. Write In Your Journal About What Happened That Day

There are several reasons and ways to use a journal. Your journal can be place to record and account the experiences you’ve had and the things you’ve learned. The evening is a solid time to take 5–15 minutes writing down the events of your day. By doing this, you have a record and accounting of what you’ve done. This is an easy way to track key behaviors and spot themes in your life. Also during this evening journaling session, you can begin detailing your plans for the next day.

This type of journaling is best done on a computer using something like Google Docs or Word. The reason you want to use a computer for this type of journaling is that you probably type 5 times faster than you write by hand. Also, this type of journaling isn’t inherently creative, but more reflective, factual, and analytical.

Taking 5–15 minutes every night to go over all of the details of your day is very enlightening, and it is actually a profound way to also get your mind thinking and planning for the next day. While reviewing your day, you can relive and re-experience your whole day. This will create enormous feelings of gratitude. Also, while you’re reflecting on how your day went, you can immediately begin thinking about what could be done better.

It is during my evening journaling session, usually while documenting what I learned that day, that I get all of my best ideas for what I’ll be writing about the next day. Again, this is essential for someone who is creative, because waking up with a plan and an idea almost ensures you’ll be successful the next morning. Conversely, if you don’t have a plan or an idea, but have to start with a blank slate, this is heavily taxing to your willpower. Design trumps willpower everyday of the week.

Another use of your journal is to write your goals and dreams and ambitions in vivid detail. Doing this in the evening is powerful because it triggers your subconscious mind to ruminate and think about it all night while you sleep. However, the morning is most likely the best time to be thinking and writing in terms of your big picture dreams, because by mentally and emotionally envisioning those dreams, you trigger the emotions and experiences you intend to create in the future. Doing this first thing every morning is how you trigger yourself into the state of being you plan to become. This is how you live with purpose and intention. This is how you get out of the trap of the past. This is how you consciously design your subconscious, rather than having your subconscious control you.

More on this type of journaling in the morning routine section.

2. Make Brief Plans For What You’ll Do The Next Morning

“If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.” — Jim Collins

If you have a big to-do list the following day, you probably aren’t using your time in the best ways. In the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Stephen Covey explains the difference between activities that are urgent and those which are important. He actually created a useful matrix to explain how the most effective people use their time vs. how most people use their time.

The 4 categories of activities include:

Important activities that are urgent (they must be done now or soon)Important activities that are not urgentUnimportant activities that are urgentUnimportant activities that are not urgent

Below is a simplified matrix of how this work:

Matrix 1

Here is another matrix of how you should handle all of these activities:

Matrix 2

As you begin living your days better and better, you’ll become clearer on what matters to you. In the important book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Greg McKeown says, “You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.”

Almost everything is a waste of time. The better you get with your time, the less you tolerate things that are not making an impact on your goals, values, and priorities. You get in life what you’re willing to tolerate. Most people tolerate spending huge amounts of their time on things that don’t inspire them because they aren’t clear on what they want. They aren’t clear on what they want because they haven’t begun acting right. Clarity and inspiration follow positive action.

The clearer you get on your goals and values, the more narrow and focused you become on your priorities. You begin to embrace Derek Sivers’ mantra: “No ‘yes.’ Either ‘HELL YEAH!’ or ‘no.’”

Here’s exactly what Sivers’ said:

“If you’re not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, say “no”.

When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” — then say “no.”

When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say “HELL YEAH!”

Every event you get invited to. Every request to start a new project. If you’re not saying “HELL YEAH!” about it, say “no.”

We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.”

This is how you need to view your time. This is how you need to view your relationships. HELL YES or no is how you view your planning the evening before.

What are the few things that are absolutely essential to making tomorrow a truly amazing day worth living?

What creative work do you want to do?

What experiences do you want to have?

Who do you want to connect to?

Don’t place any limitations on what you’re willing to do. Remember, you’re no longer living the predictable life you have in the past. You’re no longer going to be enslaved to the emotions that your body is currently addicted to.

Not anymore. Instead, you’re going to live life on your own terms. You’re going to create the future you want. You’re going to operate out of the emotions that inspire you. Therefore, you’re willing to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity. You’re willing to feel the fear and do it anyways. You’re willing to act in bold and powerful ways, knowing that the more bold and emotional the action, the more memorable and transformational the outcome.

Hell yes or no. That’s how you live your life. That’s how you prioritize your time. And therefore, that is your benchmark when you’re creating your plans for the next day.

During your evening journal session where you record what happened to you during your day, give yourself a score for the day on a 1–10 scale. Was your day a 6? 7? 3? 9? 10?

When planning your day, decide what would make the next day a 10.

It shouldn’t be a lot of things. Instead, it should involve the few essential things that mean the absolute most to you.

What creative outlet do you need to engage in to fill your soul and move your dreams forward?

What spiritual experiences do you need to engage in to deepen your connection to yourself and God?

What conversations do you need to have to move mountains in your career and self-improvement?

What experiences do you want to create with your loved ones to deepen those relationships and ensure they are your greatest asset and joy?

3. Put Your Phone On Airplane Mode

“Wherever you are, make sure you’re there.” — Dan Sullivan

An hour or so before you go to bed, put your phone on airplane mode. You don’t want to be alerted of anything just before going to bed. You want your evening time to be completely present, reflective, and imaginative.

You don’t want your mind to be bounced around like a ping-pong ball with notifications, disruptions, and distractions. You want your mind to relax and recover. You want to be completely mindful of the people around you; and you also want to give your mind room to begin creating ideas for your next morning.

If you give your mind space at night, you’ll get more inspiration and ideas than you know what to do with. Your evening can become the most spiritual and deep part of your day. While the morning has an intense energy of doing and creating, your evening can have a serene energy where deep gratitude, beautiful experiences, and exquisite inspiration flow.

When you wake up the next morning, keep your phone on airplane mode. In order to become a better person than you were the day before, you need to spend your morning visualizing — mentally and emotionally — the future you want to have. This is how you create the emotions you want to experience in the future here-and-now so you can then operate from higher-level emotions than you have in the past.

Be → Do → Have

Your state of being is the emotional state you are operating from. This emotional state influences the powerful and decisiveness of your decision making. Your decisions determine your destiny.

Zig Ziglar said, “You have to ‘Be’ the right kind of person first, then you must ‘Do’ the right things before you can expect to ‘Have’ the things in life that really matter. Be, Do, Have.

If you check your smartphone first thing in the morning, then your body has become your mind. You’ve immediately reverted to your subconscious cycle and you’ve granted complete control to your physical body and its addiction to various emotion-inducing chemicals. As a result, most people’s lives are quite predictable. All you need to do is look at a person’s past to predict their future. Indeed, personality is predictable.

But again, personality should never become permanent, and your life should never be predictable from your past. Instead, you should continually be learning new things everyday. And true learning means you’ve reshaped your memories and have learned new and better ways to operate in the future. If you don’t see and operate differently in the world, then you didn’t truly learn something.

This Morning Routine Will Make You A Millionaire

If you’ve set yourself up the evening before, then your chances of winning the next day are optimal.

Design is far more powerful than willpower. You must be intentional. You need to set yourself up for successful. If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail. Willpower is for people who are still uncertain what they want to do with their lives. Willpower reflects internal conflict, indecisiveness, and a lack of intentional design.

The following are essential ingredients to a morning routine that allows you to live every day of your life in a peak and heightened state. If you do these things every single day, your life will quickly and continuously evolve. You’ll continue to grow and transform at rocket-speed. While most of the world is living repetitive and predictable lives, you’ll be experiences new galaxies of growth regularly.

Here are the ingredients you want to start your day with. You’ll notice that these are mostly principle-based, rather than direct applications. The exact behaviors and choices are up to you based on the specific goals you’re pursuing. But the principles remain the same.

Rise Early — ideally at or before 5AM.Super-hydrate — 20+ ounces of water immediately upon waking up.Connection — through prayer and meditation, you want to seek connection to yourself and God.Visualization and emotion — you want to imagine your ideal future and you want to generate the emotions you will experience in that future. You also want to generate and fully experience gratitude for future events before they happen in order to trigger your brain and body to anticipate these future events. You attract what you are.Novelty and nutrition — the two things your brain needs to be optimal and remain young.Creativity — you need to put first things first, which means you do your most creative and important work first thing in the morning. If you don’t, you’ll never know what true productivity means.Courage — every day, you need to do something different and outside your current comfort zone. Courage is the starting point of all growth and evolution. It takes courage to embrace the uncertainties of unpredictable outcomes and new behaviors.Rise Early (Ideally At Or Before 5AM)

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”— Friedrich Nietzsche

Waking up early is not difficult for people who are driven by a mission and purpose in life. If you have something important to wake up for, you won’t want to hit the snooze button.

When you become a time-hacker, and begin to realize that you can expand your time 10X, 100X, and 1,000X, you take your mornings extremely seriously. Your mornings are where the magic happens. In fact, you’ll come to love your mornings so much that you’ll be tempted to wake up earlier and earlier and earlier — so that you can get more and more done.

People who know how to use their mornings get more done by noon than most people get done all week. If you learn how to use your morning, it won’t surprise you if you move the needle on an important project, exercise, and read an entire book before 10AM.

Waking up early is also easy if your evening before was truly restful and sweet. A recovered mind translates to a recovered body. Your evening is the easiest time to self-sabotage. If you begin falling apart in the evening and reverting to your subconscious and bodily addictions, then you won’t have powerful mornings.

Your evening routine really matters. It needs to be restful and rejuvenating. Your evenings must become more inspiring and serene. You will never master your mornings until you take control over your nights. When you learn to behave accordingly at night — and not fall into addictions — you will sleep well. When you sleep well, waking up early will not be hard. It will be a joy. You’ll jump right out of bed and immediately begin moving because you’re so exciting about the future you’re creating and you’re so exciting about the new and positive experiences you’ll be creating.

You’ll be acting as a agent rather than operating as an object. Most people are objects that are being acted upon by either the external world or their own body. When you become an agent, you act with intention and definiteness of purpose.

Super-Hydrate (Drink 20+ Ounces Of Water Immediately Upon Waking Up)

If you use an alarm clock, put the alarm or your phone on the opposite side of the room so you’re forced to get out of bed in order to stop the beeping. Setting up this type of alarm is a forcing function.

Forcing functions are all about designing the right environment so that desired behavior is the automatic and willpower becomes irrelevant. Design trumps willpower.

As soon as you get out of bed, walk to another room in your house and get a giant glass of water. You want to super-hydrate your body first thing in the morning to re-energize your brain and body.

Hydration is essential to a fully functioning brain. Also, the water will wake you up quickly and make you alert and ready to get moving.

BONUS: Take A 60 Second Ice-Cold Shower

The first thing Tony Robbins does when he wakes up is he jumps into a 57-degree Fahrenheit swimming pool.

Why would he do such a thing?

Cold water immersion radically facilitates physical and mental wellness.When practiced regularly, it provides long-lasting changes to your body’s immune, lymphatic, circulatory and digestive systems that improve the quality of your life. It can also increase weight-loss because it boosts your metabolism.

A 2007 research study found that taking cold showers routinely can help treat depression symptoms often more effectively than prescription medications. That’s because cold water triggers a wave of mood-boosting neurochemicals which make you feel happy.

In less than five minutes upon waking up:you could hear your alarmget out of bed, walk to the bathroomdrink a cup or two of waterstep into the shower for 60 secondsand dry-off

Have the cup right next to the sink so it’s easy to fill up. Design trumps willpower. It’s all in the set-up.

It’s now 5:05AM and your body is hydrated and activated. Your brain is flooded with dopamine and other happy-chemicals. You’ve already done one thing today that took intention and choice. You’re creating immediate momentum for having the best day of your life. You’re getting yourself deeper into a flow state. You’re putting yourself in the right frame of mind so you can meditate and pray with purpose, and then visualize your future with energy and enthusiasm.

You can top all of this off by putting on some clothing that triggers you into a state of being awesome. Immediately upon getting out of the shower, I get into dress clothes — a white shirt and tie. This puts me into a great frame of mind for all of the other activities in my morning routine. I don’t spend much time getting my hair ready. I just throw these clothes on so I’m feeling good and ready to have a masterful morning. It’s 5:10 and I’m feeling like a million bucks. And these emotions are the very reason I will be doing work worth more than a million bucks. Be, Do, Have.

If you’re freaked-out by the idea of a cold shower, remember that your fear is emotional, not physical. It’s not physically dangerous or harmful or even hurtful to have cold water splash on your body for 60 seconds. In fact, it’s highly refreshing physically. Your concern is emotional, and it is by stepping into those emotions you want to avoid that you evolve beyond subconscious and unhealthy patterns.

Connection — With Yourself And God

“I have so much to do today that I’m going to need to spend three hours in prayer in order to be able to get it all done.” — Martin Luther

It doesn’t matter how fast you think you’re moving, if you’re going in the wrong direction you might as well not be moving at all.

There is a huge emphasis these days on HUSTLING! However, productivity is not about doing a lot of things, but rather, about making tangible progress. Progress is made by making the right moves at the right times. It’s about learning from your mistakes and making better decisions.

Ryan Holiday once wrote in a blog post, “This is a fundamental irony of most people’s lives. They don’t quite know what they want to do with their lives. Yet they are very active.”

This happens way too often. We get caught in the thick of thin things. Far too late do we realize that in our mad rush, we were pursuing someone else’s goals instead of our own.

Spending even a few minutes of time in prayer and/or meditation does more than provide clarity to what you’re doing. These things open your mind up to possibilities you can’t get while busy.

While in meditation or prayer, you will get flashes on insight that allow you to make better decisions. Psychologists call this epiphany ability. The ability to generate epiphanies is something you can absolutely master in your life. Your goal is to begin connecting with the highest and best version of yourself that you can presently imagine.

Albert Einstein has 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.”

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

Your goal is to get into a highly creative, imaginative, and faith-based state. By faith, I’m taking about the conviction and resolve to bring into existence something you want to see happen. Don’t let what you currently see stop you from creating in your mind and heart something far more powerful. Prayer and meditation is how you begin tapping into your creative and imaginative powers.

Visualization And Emotion (And Experience Gratitude For Achieving Those Future Goals)

“According to research on mental rehearsal, once we immerse ourselves in that scene, changes begin to take place in our brain. Therefore each time we do this, we’re laying down new neurological tracks (in the present moment) that literally change our brain to look like the brain of our future. In other words, the brain starts to look like the future we want to create has already happened.

If we are truly engaged in this process with passion, we might begin to emotionally experience our future through thought alone. In fact, when we are feeling the emotions of our future — whether that’s gratitude, joy, freedom, abundance, enthusiasm, love, and so on — the creative thoughts in your mind can become the experience. As the body receives the chemical signals of these emotions, essentially the body is receiving the signal that the event has already occurred.” — Dr. Joe Dispenza

Research on visualization has found that mentally rehearsing something is not enough to reliably create that experience in the future. You need mental imagination and emotional stimulation in order for visualization to be reliable and predictable.

One of the most powerful emotional experiences is gratitude. It is the mother of all virtues. Research shows that gratitude enhances a person’s life in all areas — physical, emotional, relational, spiritual.

While you are envisioning the future you want to create, make that an emotional experience. Truly imagine what it would feel like to have the life you want. Imagine and experience the emotions of achieving certain goals, or having certain experiences. Express deep gratitude for having those experiences. Truly believe the experiences have already happened.

When you express and feel gratitude for the future experiences you are seeking to have, you are folding your future into your present. You are activating your brain and body to experience the chemical and emotional experiences of your future in the here-and-now.

Remember, memories are highly emotional. Moreover, your body and brain and chemically-producing organisms. Neurons that fire together, wire together. When you regularly experience the ideal emotions of your future, you rewire your brain and retrain your biology. Quite literally, you can shift your identity and biology through emotional visualization. Thus, you’re state of being changes. You then want to act and operate FROM THAT PLACE. Be, Do, Have.

When you operate from the most powerful and anticipated emotions of your future, you act with far more power and intention. This is why you don’t want to check your smartphone in the morning. Instead, you want to put yourself in a place so that you are designing and living out your future, rather than re-creating the past.

A very powerful tool for visualizing is your journal. Unlike the journal you used the night before, hand-writing your morning journal with a pen and pad is beneficial to the brain. Writing with pen and pad activates your brain in different ways from typing. Additionally, writing by hand takes much longer than typing, which allows your mind to loosely wander as you write. This mind-wandering is important for creativity, because as your mind wanders, it will make connections in various parts of your brain. Thus, as you’re writing in your morning journal, you’ll become accustomed to getting many ideas through the writing process itself. Again, this is you developing your epiphany ability.

You can get to the point where you learn more through your own journal writing than you do reading books. Learning is all about making new connections in your brain. This is how your memory and worldview is reshaped. This form of journal writing is a potent tool for reshaping memory. You’ll be in a highly creative and spiritual place while writing in your journal, because you took a few minutes to pray and meditate before you started journaling and visualizing.

Novelty And Nutrition (Two Things Your Brain Needs To Be Optimal and Remain Young)

According to brain and learning expert, Jim Kwik, the two things your brain needs first thing in the morning are novelty and nutrition.

Novelty

Novelty is all about newness. Your brain does not do well doing the same thing over and over and over. Instead, your brain loves making new connections and expanding. In order for you to make new connections, you need to do things that are new, every single day.

One way that Jim fires his brain in new ways is by brushing his teeth in the morning with his left hand. This fires different neurons on the right side of his brain which aren’t normally fired.

Novelty and newness are essential to growth and success in life. If you’re not doing new things, then you’re stuck in subconscious and unhealthy patterns. You’re not evolving. Interestingly, according to research in psychology, the older people get, the less open they become to having new experiences. Instead, they seek the same things, the same people, and the same types of information that confirms their present biases and ways of life.

As will be discussed in the next point on creativity, in order to transform your identity, you need to continually be trying things you’ve never done before. This is how you also gain confidence. Thus, you should be continually working on projects that push you beyond your current abilities. Personality is predictable. If you want to change your identity and personality, you must act in new ways. Behavior is what shapes personality.

Nutrition

Regarding nutrition, Zig Ziglar has said, “Your input determines your outlook. Your outlook determines your output, and your output determines your future.” Your nutrition is the quality of your environment — food, places, people, information, experiences.

Your brain and soul need increasingly higher quality nutrition if you want to operate at higher levels. You can’t develop a six-pack if you continue to drink a six-pack and eat pizza every day. If you want a different you, you need better nutrition. Your brain will thank you, and then you’ll thank you brain for the amazing insights, decisions, and creations that you’re able to do with a better brain.

Your brain is plastic and flexible. You can transform your brain, and therefore, you can transform yourself. You simply need to make better decisions. You need to raise your standards and get better inputs and nutrition. You can develop a genius brain that allows you to make amazing money, create universe-denting innovations, and connect deeply with anyone in the world you choose.

You must design your brain intentionally.

Create Something (Eat The Frog!)

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” — Sir Ken Robinson

You’re not rewarded in life for what you know. Instead, you’re rewarded in life for what you create. You must take your knowledge and experiences and do something with them. You need to find an creative outlet that allows you to build a body of work.

In order to do truly creative work, you must embrace the unknown. As Seth Godin said, “If you’re willing to do something that might not work, you’re closer to becoming an artist.” Creativity is highly personal and emotional. Good art is honest. And art can be anything — it can be a business, it can be writing, it can be coding. It needs to be something that is personal to you.

You have to be willing to try something beyond what you’ve ever done before. If you wake up every day and begin doing highly creative work toward your biggest dreams and ambitions, you’ll begin living a rare and incredible life.

In order to make millions of dollars and stop living the 9–5, you must become a creator. You need to become a master at what you do. The morning time is the best time to creatively work, since your brain is most creative first thing in morning and your mind isn’t muddled by all the happenings of the day.

Mark Twain once wrote, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” That quote has become a principle that many successful people apply. The idea is simple: put first things first. Do the hardest and most creative thing first thing in the morning. If you don’t do your most important work first thing in the morning, you probably will never get it done. The day will begin to take on whatever form it does, and you’ll be left with another day stuck in the same place you were before.

If, however, you do eat that frog every single day, you’ll begin to see something truly magical happen in your life. You’ll begin living a creative and harmoniously passionate life. You’ll begin to create things that other people want. You’ll begin to feel more zest and passion for life. You’ll begin to dream bigger and imagine how you can turn your art into business, such that you can make money by creating value for people in the most personal way you possibly can.

Ideally, you should try to spend at least 90 minutes per morning working on a creative project that directly translates to your ideal future and the dreams you’re trying to live. If you can give yourself more time, all the better. But shoot for 90 focused minutes of creation. Again, your phone should still be on airplane mode. You should not have checked email or social media.

So far, here’s your morning:

wake updrink watercold shower (optional)get dressedmeditate/prayvisualize/write down goalscreate/work (eat the frog)

Now that you’ve done all of these things, there’s just one more thing you need to do. This last one may come later in the day. But why not do it first thing in the morning when you have all of this momentum?

Do Something Courageous!

“A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.” — Tim Ferriss

Courage is the starting point of all growth and evolution. It takes courage to embrace the uncertainties of unpredictable outcomes and new behaviors. According to Darren Hardy, you can be a coward 99.9305556% of the time (to be exact). You only need to be courageous for 20 seconds at a time.

Twenty seconds of awkwardness or fear is all you need. If you courageously confront fear for 20 seconds every single day, before you know it, you’ll be in a different socio-economic and social situation.

Make that call.

Ask that question.

Pitch that idea.

Post that video.

Jack Canfield once said, “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” And he’s right. But I’m going to take it one step further. Pain, discomfort, shock, boredom, impostor syndrome, awkwardness, fear, being wrong, failing, ignorance, looking stupid: your avoidance of these feelings is stopping you from a life beyond your wildest imagination.

Wealth, optimal health, incredible relationships, deep spiritual maturity are all available to you. But you have to pay the price to have these things. The primary obstacle in your way is how you feel about what you need to do to have these things.

If you do something courageous every single day, you will fail a lot. But failure is not the opposite of successful. Failure is essential to successful. Failure is learning. Failure is evolving. Failure is stepping outside of the predictability of your subconscious conditioning and creating a life of passion and purpose.

Wayne Gretzky famously said, “You miss every shot you don’t take.” If you act courageously and simply try something new, every single day, life becomes a numbers game. Yes, you will miss a lot of shots. But you’ll also make a lot of shots. For example, I’m always surprised which of the articles I write that end up going viral. Many of the articles I just whipped-out and didn’t think much of went on to be read by millions of people. If I hadn’t written those, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

You need to take a lot of shots. It’s better to be prolific than perfect. Take shots. Fail. Try.

Conclusion

“Watch your thoughts; for they become words. Watch your words; for they become actions. Watch your actions; for they become habits. Watch your habits; for they become character. Watch your character for it will become your destiny.” — Frank Outlaw

It does not matter where you are in your life right now. You can make a change. However, you must begin acting as an agent rather than operating as an object.

You must make the decision. You must do something that is unpredictable to the past you’ve been living. You must face the emotional void of uncertainty.

You need to begin living your evenings better. You’ve got to unplug yourself from the matrix of social media and information. When you begin having serene and incredible evenings, you’ll be living more presently and happily than you ever have you before.

You’ll begin living better days, and recording the happenings of those days every night on your computer. Over a year or so, you’ll have thousands of typed pages of history typed up. Your grandkids will thank you.

You can transform your identity. You can become a new person. You can live at a much higher state. You can create and be and do at a much higher state. You can attract the most incredible people and experiences to you. Quite literally, you can attract any person into your sphere that you want to. You can develop mentorships and collaborations with your heroes. I’ve done this myself, many times. It’s truly incredible. But in order to do so, you must live by design rather than by default.

You need to begin using your time to create things that transform other people’s lives for the better. You need to becoming increasingly focused on how you use your time. It’s either HELL YES! or no.

You want to get more consistent at having days that you score as a 9 or a 10. This becomes a lot easier when you have great mornings. Elbert Hubbard once said, “Be pleasant until ten o’clock in the morning, and the rest of the day will take care of itself.”

Confidence is the byproduct of prior performance. Success is what creates confidence. Therefore, if you act powerfully in the morning, you’ll have confidence which will allow you to make better decisions in your evening. However, in order to have confidence the next morning, you need to actually live well the evening before. You can’t fall into subconscious self-sabotage. Make better choices during the morning so you can make better choices at night, and then make better choices at night so you can make better choices the next morning.

Ready to Upgrade?

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

Get the cheat sheet here!

This Morning Routine Will Make You Unstoppable was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This Morning Routine Will Make You A Millionaire

Greatist“Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.” — Richard Whately

Life is busy. It can feel impossible to move toward your dreams. If you have a full-time job and kids, it’s even harder.

How do you move forward?

If you don’t purposefully carve time out every day to progress and improve — without question, your time will get lost in the vacuum of our increasingly crowded lives. Before you know it, you’ll be old and withered — wondering where all that time went.

As Professor Harold Hill has said — “You pile up enough tomorrows, and you’ll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays.”

Getting Out Of Survival Mode

It does not matter how successful or unsuccessful you’ve been in the past. Confidence, clarity, and a sense of purpose are all things that need to be established, and re-established, daily.

Each and every day, you have the power to shift who you are, and who you’ve been.

For most people, their morning begins the same way it usually does, by being triggered almost immediately into a subconscious cycle. They pull out their phone, go through their apps, get out of bed on the same side, and then go about their day.

Their physical body has become their mind — and due to the repetition it has experienced, the body can go through the day in an automatic and subconscious way. You eat the same unhealthy foods, distract yourself at work in the same ways.

Your body is a chemical system — and the chemicals your body releases produce emotions. Those emotions are tied to memories. So, when you pull out your smartphone out of habit, your body has taken over your mind, and it is seeking the dopamine chemicals that it has become habituated to. Your body becomes your mind because your physical body quite literally is your subconscious mind. And your subconscious mind makes up around 95% of your behavior.

This is why change can be so difficult. Change is always emotional. You have to decide, very intentionally, who you are going to be every single day. If you don’t make the decision who you will be and how you will act, then your body will go through it’s cycle seeking the same chemicals and emotional states that it has become accustomed to.

In order to become someone different, you must do something different, today. You must act in ways that are more reflective of the emotions you want to experience in your future, rather than living out the emotions of your past. The only way to do that is to wake up and intentionally decide who you will be and how you will act.

If you don’t start your day with intention, you are living in survival mode. Your time is, without question, moving faster than you want it to. You’re stuck in the past. You’re stuck living out the same experiences and emotions and patterns, over and over and over.

This is not a fun way to live life. Yet this is how most people are living in today’s heavily stimulated and addicting world. We are spending more and more time in subconscious and distracting cycles. More of our time is being taken from us because we’ve allowed our bodies and the external world to govern our lives.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can make the decision right here and now to create a new pattern. Rather than living in the past, you can create a new future. But there’s a catch. The past is known. The emotions you’ve become used to experiencing are known and predictable.

One of the primary reasons people stay in even life-threatening addictions is because they know the outcomes of their behavior. The human brain really likes being able to predict the future. Thus, people want their lives to be predictable even if what is predictable is absolutely painful and horrible and regretful.

If you want to become someone new, you have to do something where you cannot entirely predict the outcome. You have to do something different and new, and this will freak you out. When you do something new, your body will experience new emotions, and it will quickly seek its homeostasis. As Napoleon Hill said, “A good shock often helps the brain that has been atrophied by habit.”

If you’re willing to live with intention, and to make new decisions, there is a cost. That cost is emotional. Are you willing to deal with difficult emotions? Are you willing to move forward into your future without being able to fully predict the outcome?

According to some psychologists, fear of the unknown is the basis of all other fears. The unknown is what freaks us out, because we hate not being able to predict exactly how something will happen. Emotionally, this rocks our world. Based on loads of research in psychology, one of the primary attributes of successful people is having a high tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty.

Are you willing to make new decisions and live a less predictable life?

Are you willing to operate with faith and vision, rather than regret and being stuck in the past?

Are you ready to become a new person; one who lives their life based on what they are striving to create in their future?

If so, then this morning routine will transform your life. You will quickly learn that you can actually change your entire personality. Personality is not something that is or should remain permanent. Rather, your personality is based on the memories you have and the behaviors you repeatedly perform. Your personality is the decisions you make. If you make new decisions and thus experience new emotions and create new memories, then you will change your personality.

Who you are and who you become is up to you. But only if you get out of your emotional and subconscious pattern.

Optimizing Your Brain In The Evening And Morning

According to Benjamin Franklin, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” A life-changing morning routine doesn’t just happen. It must be designed and planned for.

According to Stanford Psychologist, BJ Fogg, design trumps willpower. If you simply take a few minutes to set up the environment, then the decision has already been made for you. For example, you can lay your clothes out the night before so you don’t have to think about what you’re going to wear. You can pull some dental floss out and lay it on the counter so you don’t have to make the decision whether to floss or not.

Your evening routine is about taking the decisions out of your morning. You want to wake up already knowing exactly what you’re going to do. You want to wake up with the confidence of a plan so you don’t have to exhaust willpower to get yourself going.

This Evening Routine Guarantees Success The Next Day

This is one of the most pivotal things you can learn — to set yourself up the night before. Your brain is generally more analytical at night and more creative in the morning. Your evening is the perfect time to take 5 or so minutes planning out your next day.

Your evening is also a really good time to reflect, relax, and recover. Here are the keys to a perfect evening routine to set your next day up for you success.

1. Write In Your Journal About What Happened That Day

There are several reasons and ways to use a journal. Your journal can be place to record and account the experiences you’ve had and the things you’ve learned. The evening is a solid time to take 5–15 minutes writing down the events of your day. By doing this, you have a record and accounting of what you’ve done. This is an easy way to track key behaviors and spot themes in your life. Also during this evening journaling session, you can begin detailing your plans for the next day.

This type of journaling is best done on a computer using something like Google Docs or Word. The reason you want to use a computer for this type of journaling is that you probably type 5 times faster than you write by hand. Also, this type of journaling isn’t inherently creative, but more reflective, factual, and analytical.

Taking 5–15 minutes every night to go over all of the details of your day is very enlightening, and it is actually a profound way to also get your mind thinking and planning for the next day. While reviewing your day, you can relive and re-experience your whole day. This will create enormous feelings of gratitude. Also, while you’re reflecting on how your day went, you can immediately begin thinking about what could be done better.

It is during my evening journaling session, usually while documenting what I learned that day, that I get all of my best ideas for what I’ll be writing about the next day. Again, this is essential for someone who is creative, because waking up with a plan and an idea almost ensures you’ll be successful the next morning. Conversely, if you don’t have a plan or an idea, but have to start with a blank slate, this is heavily taxing to your willpower. Design trumps willpower everyday of the week.

Another use of your journal is to write your goals and dreams and ambitions in vivid detail. Doing this in the evening is powerful because it triggers your subconscious mind to ruminate and think about it all night while you sleep. However, the morning is most likely the best time to be thinking and writing in terms of your big picture dreams, because by mentally and emotionally envisioning those dreams, you trigger the emotions and experiences you intend to create in the future. Doing this first thing every morning is how you trigger yourself into the state of being you plan to become. This is how you live with purpose and intention. This is how you get out of the trap of the past. This is how you consciously design your subconscious, rather than having your subconscious control you.

More on this type of journaling in the morning routine section.

2. Make Brief Plans For What You’ll Do The Next Morning

“If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.” — Jim Collins

If you have a big to-do list the following day, you probably aren’t using your time in the best ways. In the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Stephen Covey explains the difference between activities that are urgent and those which are important. He actually created a useful matrix to explain how the most effective people use their time vs. how most people use their time.

The 4 categories of activities include:

Important activities that are urgent (they must be done now or soon)Important activities that are not urgentUnimportant activities that are urgentUnimportant activities that are not urgent

Below is a simplified matrix of how this work:

Matrix 1

Here is another matrix of how you should handle all of these activities:

Matrix 2

As you begin living your days better and better, you’ll become clearer on what matters to you. In the important book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Greg McKeown says, “You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.”

Almost everything is a waste of time. The better you get with your time, the less you tolerate things that are not making an impact on your goals, values, and priorities. You get in life what you’re willing to tolerate. Most people tolerate spending huge amounts of their time on things that don’t inspire them because they aren’t clear on what they want. They aren’t clear on what they want because they haven’t begun acting right. Clarity and inspiration follow positive action.

The clearer you get on your goals and values, the more narrow and focused you become on your priorities. You begin to embrace Derek Sivers’ mantra: “No ‘yes.’ Either ‘HELL YEAH!’ or ‘no.’”

Here’s exactly what Sivers’ said:

“If you’re not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, say “no”.

When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” — then say “no.”

When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say “HELL YEAH!”

Every event you get invited to. Every request to start a new project. If you’re not saying “HELL YEAH!” about it, say “no.”

We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.”

This is how you need to view your time. This is how you need to view your relationships. HELL YES or no is how you view your planning the evening before.

What are the few things that are absolutely essential to making tomorrow a truly amazing day worth living?

What creative work do you want to do?

What experiences do you want to have?

Who do you want to connect to?

Don’t place any limitations on what you’re willing to do. Remember, you’re no longer living the predictable life you have in the past. You’re no longer going to be enslaved to the emotions that your body is currently addicted to.

Not anymore. Instead, you’re going to live life on your own terms. You’re going to create the future you want. You’re going to operate out of the emotions that inspire you. Therefore, you’re willing to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity. You’re willing to feel the fear and do it anyways. You’re willing to act in bold and powerful ways, knowing that the more bold and emotional the action, the more memorable and transformational the outcome.

Hell yes or no. That’s how you live your life. That’s how you prioritize your time. And therefore, that is your benchmark when you’re creating your plans for the next day.

During your evening journal session where you record what happened to you during your day, give yourself a score for the day on a 1–10 scale. Was your day a 6? 7? 3? 9? 10?

When planning your day, decide what would make the next day a 10.

It shouldn’t be a lot of things. Instead, it should involve the few essential things that mean the absolute most to you.

What creative outlet do you need to engage in to fill your soul and move your dreams forward?

What spiritual experiences do you need to engage in to deepen your connection to yourself and God?

What conversations do you need to have to move mountains in your career and self-improvement?

What experiences do you want to create with your loved ones to deepen those relationships and ensure they are your greatest asset and joy?

3. Put Your Phone On Airplane Mode

“Wherever you are, make sure you’re there.” — Dan Sullivan

An hour or so before you go to bed, put your phone on airplane mode. You don’t want to be alerted of anything just before going to bed. You want your evening time to be completely present, reflective, and imaginative.

You don’t want your mind to be bounced around like a ping-pong ball with notifications, disruptions, and distractions. You want your mind to relax and recover. You want to be completely mindful of the people around you; and you also want to give your mind room to begin creating ideas for your next morning.

If you give your mind space at night, you’ll get more inspiration and ideas than you know what to do with. Your evening can become the most spiritual and deep part of your day. While the morning has an intense energy of doing and creating, your evening can have a serene energy where deep gratitude, beautiful experiences, and exquisite inspiration flow.

When you wake up the next morning, keep your phone on airplane mode. In order to become a better person than you were the day before, you need to spend your morning visualizing — mentally and emotionally — the future you want to have. This is how you create the emotions you want to experience in the future here-and-now so you can then operate from higher-level emotions than you have in the past.

Be → Do → Have

Your state of being is the emotional state you are operating from. This emotional state influences the powerful and decisiveness of your decision making. Your decisions determine your destiny.

Zig Ziglar said, “You have to ‘Be’ the right kind of person first, then you must ‘Do’ the right things before you can expect to ‘Have’ the things in life that really matter. Be, Do, Have.

If you check your smartphone first thing in the morning, then your body has become your mind. You’ve immediately reverted to your subconscious cycle and you’ve granted complete control to your physical body and its addiction to various emotion-inducing chemicals. As a result, most people’s lives are quite predictable. All you need to do is look at a person’s past to predict their future. Indeed, personality is predictable.

But again, personality should never become permanent, and your life should never be predictable from your past. Instead, you should continually be learning new things everyday. And true learning means you’ve reshaped your memories and have learned new and better ways to operate in the future. If you don’t see and operate differently in the world, then you didn’t truly learn something.

This Morning Routine Will Make You A Millionaire

If you’ve set yourself up the evening before, then your chances of winning the next day are optimal.

Design is far more powerful than willpower. You must be intentional. You need to set yourself up for successful. If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail. Willpower is for people who are still uncertain what they want to do with their lives. Willpower reflects internal conflict, indecisiveness, and a lack of intentional design.

The following are essential ingredients to a morning routine that allows you to live every day of your life in a peak and heightened state. If you do these things every single day, your life will quickly and continuously evolve. You’ll continue to grow and transform at rocket-speed. While most of the world is living repetitive and predictable lives, you’ll be experiences new galaxies of growth regularly.

Here are the ingredients you want to start your day with. You’ll notice that these are mostly principle-based, rather than direct applications. The exact behaviors and choices are up to you based on the specific goals you’re pursuing. But the principles remain the same.

Rise Early — ideally at or before 5AM.Super-hydrate — 20+ ounces of water immediately upon waking up.Connection — through prayer and meditation, you want to seek connection to yourself and God.Visualization and emotion — you want to imagine your ideal future and you want to generate the emotions you will experience in that future. You also want to generate and fully experience gratitude for future events before they happen in order to trigger your brain and body to anticipate these future events. You attract what you are.Novelty and nutrition — the two things your brain needs to be optimal and remain young.Creativity — you need to put first things first, which means you do your most creative and important work first thing in the morning. If you don’t, you’ll never know what true productivity means.Courage — every day, you need to do something different and outside your current comfort zone. Courage is the starting point of all growth and evolution. It takes courage to embrace the uncertainties of unpredictable outcomes and new behaviors.Rise Early (Ideally At Or Before 5AM)

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”— Friedrich Nietzsche

Waking up early is not difficult for people who are driven by a mission and purpose in life. If you have something important to wake up for, you won’t want to hit the snooze button.

When you become a time-hacker, and begin to realize that you can expand your time 10X, 100X, and 1,000X, you take your mornings extremely seriously. Your mornings are where the magic happens. In fact, you’ll come to love your mornings so much that you’ll be tempted to wake up earlier and earlier and earlier — so that you can get more and more done.

People who know how to use their mornings get more done by noon than most people get done all week. If you learn how to use your morning, it won’t surprise you if you move the needle on an important project, exercise, and read an entire book before 10AM.

Waking up early is also easy if your evening before was truly restful and sweet. A recovered mind translates to a recovered body. Your evening is the easiest time to self-sabotage. If you begin falling apart in the evening and reverting to your subconscious and bodily addictions, then you won’t have powerful mornings.

Your evening routine really matters. It needs to be restful and rejuvenating. Your evenings must become more inspiring and serene. You will never master your mornings until you take control over your nights. When you learn to behave accordingly at night — and not fall into addictions — you will sleep well. When you sleep well, waking up early will not be hard. It will be a joy. You’ll jump right out of bed and immediately begin moving because you’re so exciting about the future you’re creating and you’re so exciting about the new and positive experiences you’ll be creating.

You’ll be acting as a agent rather than operating as an object. Most people are objects that are being acted upon by either the external world or their own body. When you become an agent, you act with intention and definiteness of purpose.

Super-Hydrate (Drink 20+ Ounces Of Water Immediately Upon Waking Up)

If you use an alarm clock, put the alarm or your phone on the opposite side of the room so you’re forced to get out of bed in order to stop the beeping. Setting up this type of alarm is a forcing function.

Forcing functions are all about designing the right environment so that desired behavior is the automatic and willpower becomes irrelevant. Design trumps willpower.

As soon as you get out of bed, walk to another room in your house and get a giant glass of water. You want to super-hydrate your body first thing in the morning to re-energize your brain and body.

Hydration is essential to a fully functioning brain. Also, the water will wake you up quickly and make you alert and ready to get moving.

BONUS: Take A 60 Second Ice-Cold Shower

The first thing Tony Robbins does when he wakes up is he jumps into a 57-degree Fahrenheit swimming pool.

Why would he do such a thing?

Cold water immersion radically facilitates physical and mental wellness.When practiced regularly, it provides long-lasting changes to your body’s immune, lymphatic, circulatory and digestive systems that improve the quality of your life. It can also increase weight-loss because it boosts your metabolism.

A 2007 research study found that taking cold showers routinely can help treat depression symptoms often more effectively than prescription medications. That’s because cold water triggers a wave of mood-boosting neurochemicals which make you feel happy.

In less than five minutes upon waking up:you could hear your alarmget out of bed, walk to the bathroomdrink a cup or two of waterstep into the shower for 60 secondsand dry-off

Have the cup right next to the sink so it’s easy to fill up. Design trumps willpower. It’s all in the set-up.

It’s now 5:05AM and your body is hydrated and activated. Your brain is flooded with dopamine and other happy-chemicals. You’ve already done one thing today that took intention and choice. You’re creating immediate momentum for having the best day of your life. You’re getting yourself deeper into a flow state. You’re putting yourself in the right frame of mind so you can meditate and pray with purpose, and then visualize your future with energy and enthusiasm.

You can top all of this off by putting on some clothing that triggers you into a state of being awesome. Immediately upon getting out of the shower, I get into dress clothes — a white shirt and tie. This puts me into a great frame of mind for all of the other activities in my morning routine. I don’t spend much time getting my hair ready. I just throw these clothes on so I’m feeling good and ready to have a masterful morning. It’s 5:10 and I’m feeling like a million bucks. And these emotions are the very reason I will be doing work worth more than a million bucks. Be, Do, Have.

If you’re freaked-out by the idea of a cold shower, remember that your fear is emotional, not physical. It’s not physically dangerous or harmful or even hurtful to have cold water splash on your body for 60 seconds. In fact, it’s highly refreshing physically. Your concern is emotional, and it is by stepping into those emotions you want to avoid that you evolve beyond subconscious and unhealthy patterns.

Connection — With Yourself And God

“I have so much to do today that I’m going to need to spend three hours in prayer in order to be able to get it all done.” — Martin Luther

It doesn’t matter how fast you think you’re moving, if you’re going in the wrong direction you might as well not be moving at all.

There is a huge emphasis these days on HUSTLING! However, productivity is not about doing a lot of things, but rather, about making tangible progress. Progress is made by making the right moves at the right times. It’s about learning from your mistakes and making better decisions.

Ryan Holiday once wrote in a blog post, “This is a fundamental irony of most people’s lives. They don’t quite know what they want to do with their lives. Yet they are very active.”

This happens way too often. We get caught in the thick of thin things. Far too late do we realize that in our mad rush, we were pursuing someone else’s goals instead of our own.

Spending even a few minutes of time in prayer and/or meditation does more than provide clarity to what you’re doing. These things open your mind up to possibilities you can’t get while busy.

While in meditation or prayer, you will get flashes on insight that allow you to make better decisions. Psychologists call this epiphany ability. The ability to generate epiphanies is something you can absolutely master in your life. Your goal is to begin connecting with the highest and best version of yourself that you can presently imagine.

Albert Einstein has 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.”

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

Your goal is to get into a highly creative, imaginative, and faith-based state. By faith, I’m taking about the conviction and resolve to bring into existence something you want to see happen. Don’t let what you currently see stop you from creating in your mind and heart something far more powerful. Prayer and meditation is how you begin tapping into your creative and imaginative powers.

Visualization And Emotion (And Experience Gratitude For Achieving Those Future Goals)

“According to research on mental rehearsal, once we immerse ourselves in that scene, changes begin to take place in our brain. Therefore each time we do this, we’re laying down new neurological tracks (in the present moment) that literally change our brain to look like the brain of our future. In other words, the brain starts to look like the future we want to create has already happened.

If we are truly engaged in this process with passion, we might begin to emotionally experience our future through thought alone. In fact, when we are feeling the emotions of our future — whether that’s gratitude, joy, freedom, abundance, enthusiasm, love, and so on — the creative thoughts in your mind can become the experience. As the body receives the chemical signals of these emotions, essentially the body is receiving the signal that the event has already occurred.” — Dr. Joe Dispenza

Research on visualization has found that mentally rehearsing something is not enough to reliably create that experience in the future. You need mental imagination and emotional stimulation in order for visualization to be reliable and predictable.

One of the most powerful emotional experiences is gratitude. It is the mother of all virtues. Research shows that gratitude enhances a person’s life in all areas — physical, emotional, relational, spiritual.

While you are envisioning the future you want to create, make that an emotional experience. Truly imagine what it would feel like to have the life you want. Imagine and experience the emotions of achieving certain goals, or having certain experiences. Express deep gratitude for having those experiences. Truly believe the experiences have already happened.

When you express and feel gratitude for the future experiences you are seeking to have, you are folding your future into your present. You are activating your brain and body to experience the chemical and emotional experiences of your future in the here-and-now.

Remember, memories are highly emotional. Moreover, your body and brain and chemically-producing organisms. Neurons that fire together, wire together. When you regularly experience the ideal emotions of your future, you rewire your brain and retrain your biology. Quite literally, you can shift your identity and biology through emotional visualization. Thus, you’re state of being changes. You then want to act and operate FROM THAT PLACE. Be, Do, Have.

When you operate from the most powerful and anticipated emotions of your future, you act with far more power and intention. This is why you don’t want to check your smartphone in the morning. Instead, you want to put yourself in a place so that you are designing and living out your future, rather than re-creating the past.

A very powerful tool for visualizing is your journal. Unlike the journal you used the night before, hand-writing your morning journal with a pen and pad is beneficial to the brain. Writing with pen and pad activates your brain in different ways from typing. Additionally, writing by hand takes much longer than typing, which allows your mind to loosely wander as you write. This mind-wandering is important for creativity, because as your mind wanders, it will make connections in various parts of your brain. Thus, as you’re writing in your morning journal, you’ll become accustomed to getting many ideas through the writing process itself. Again, this is you developing your epiphany ability.

You can get to the point where you learn more through your own journal writing than you do reading books. Learning is all about making new connections in your brain. This is how your memory and worldview is reshaped. This form of journal writing is a potent tool for reshaping memory. You’ll be in a highly creative and spiritual place while writing in your journal, because you took a few minutes to pray and meditate before you started journaling and visualizing.

Novelty And Nutrition (Two Things Your Brain Needs To Be Optimal and Remain Young)

According to brain and learning expert, Jim Kwik, the two things your brain needs first thing in the morning are novelty and nutrition.

Novelty

Novelty is all about newness. Your brain does not do well doing the same thing over and over and over. Instead, your brain loves making new connections and expanding. In order for you to make new connections, you need to do things that are new, every single day.

One way that Jim fires his brain in new ways is by brushing his teeth in the morning with his left hand. This fires different neurons on the right side of his brain which aren’t normally fired.

Novelty and newness are essential to growth and success in life. If you’re not doing new things, then you’re stuck in subconscious and unhealthy patterns. You’re not evolving. Interestingly, according to research in psychology, the older people get, the less open they become to having new experiences. Instead, they seek the same things, the same people, and the same types of information that confirms their present biases and ways of life.

As will be discussed in the next point on creativity, in order to transform your identity, you need to continually be trying things you’ve never done before. This is how you also gain confidence. Thus, you should be continually working on projects that push you beyond your current abilities. Personality is predictable. If you want to change your identity and personality, you must act in new ways. Behavior is what shapes personality.

Nutrition

Regarding nutrition, Zig Ziglar has said, “Your input determines your outlook. Your outlook determines your output, and your output determines your future.” Your nutrition is the quality of your environment — food, places, people, information, experiences.

Your brain and soul need increasingly higher quality nutrition if you want to operate at higher levels. You can’t develop a six-pack if you continue to drink a six-pack and eat pizza every day. If you want a different you, you need better nutrition. Your brain will thank you, and then you’ll thank you brain for the amazing insights, decisions, and creations that you’re able to do with a better brain.

Your brain is plastic and flexible. You can transform your brain, and therefore, you can transform yourself. You simply need to make better decisions. You need to raise your standards and get better inputs and nutrition. You can develop a genius brain that allows you to make amazing money, create universe-denting innovations, and connect deeply with anyone in the world you choose.

You must design your brain intentionally.

Create Something (Eat The Frog!)

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” — Sir Ken Robinson

You’re not rewarded in life for what you know. Instead, you’re rewarded in life for what you create. You must take your knowledge and experiences and do something with them. You need to find an creative outlet that allows you to build a body of work.

In order to do truly creative work, you must embrace the unknown. As Seth Godin said, “If you’re willing to do something that might not work, you’re closer to becoming an artist.” Creativity is highly personal and emotional. Good art is honest. And art can be anything — it can be a business, it can be writing, it can be coding. It needs to be something that is personal to you.

You have to be willing to try something beyond what you’ve ever done before. If you wake up every day and begin doing highly creative work toward your biggest dreams and ambitions, you’ll begin living a rare and incredible life.

In order to make millions of dollars and stop living the 9–5, you must become a creator. You need to become a master at what you do. The morning time is the best time to creatively work, since your brain is most creative first thing in morning and your mind isn’t muddled by all the happenings of the day.

Mark Twain once wrote, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” That quote has become a principle that many successful people apply. The idea is simple: put first things first. Do the hardest and most creative thing first thing in the morning. If you don’t do your most important work first thing in the morning, you probably will never get it done. The day will begin to take on whatever form it does, and you’ll be left with another day stuck in the same place you were before.

If, however, you do eat that frog every single day, you’ll begin to see something truly magical happen in your life. You’ll begin living a creative and harmoniously passionate life. You’ll begin to create things that other people want. You’ll begin to feel more zest and passion for life. You’ll begin to dream bigger and imagine how you can turn your art into business, such that you can make money by creating value for people in the most personal way you possibly can.

Ideally, you should try to spend at least 90 minutes per morning working on a creative project that directly translates to your ideal future and the dreams you’re trying to live. If you can give yourself more time, all the better. But shoot for 90 focused minutes of creation. Again, your phone should still be on airplane mode. You should not have checked email or social media.

So far, here’s your morning:

wake updrink watercold shower (optional)get dressedmeditate/prayvisualize/write down goalscreate/work (eat the frog)

Now that you’ve done all of these things, there’s just one more thing you need to do. This last one may come later in the day. But why not do it first thing in the morning when you have all of this momentum?

Do Something Courageous!

“A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.” — Tim Ferriss

Courage is the starting point of all growth and evolution. It takes courage to embrace the uncertainties of unpredictable outcomes and new behaviors. According to Darren Hardy, you can be a coward 99.9305556% of the time (to be exact). You only need to be courageous for 20 seconds at a time.

Twenty seconds of awkwardness or fear is all you need. If you courageously confront fear for 20 seconds every single day, before you know it, you’ll be in a different socio-economic and social situation.

Make that call.

Ask that question.

Pitch that idea.

Post that video.

Jack Canfield once said, “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” And he’s right. But I’m going to take it one step further. Pain, discomfort, shock, boredom, impostor syndrome, awkwardness, fear, being wrong, failing, ignorance, looking stupid: your avoidance of these feelings is stopping you from a life beyond your wildest imagination.

Wealth, optimal health, incredible relationships, deep spiritual maturity are all available to you. But you have to pay the price to have these things. The primary obstacle in your way is how you feel about what you need to do to have these things.

If you do something courageous every single day, you will fail a lot. But failure is not the opposite of successful. Failure is essential to successful. Failure is learning. Failure is evolving. Failure is stepping outside of the predictability of your subconscious conditioning and creating a life of passion and purpose.

Wayne Gretzky famously said, “You miss every shot you don’t take.” If you act courageously and simply try something new, every single day, life becomes a numbers game. Yes, you will miss a lot of shots. But you’ll also make a lot of shots. For example, I’m always surprised which of the articles I write that end up going viral. Many of the articles I just whipped-out and didn’t think much of went on to be read by millions of people. If I hadn’t written those, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

You need to take a lot of shots. It’s better to be prolific than perfect. Take shots. Fail. Try.

Conclusion

“Watch your thoughts; for they become words. Watch your words; for they become actions. Watch your actions; for they become habits. Watch your habits; for they become character. Watch your character for it will become your destiny.” — Frank Outlaw

It does not matter where you are in your life right now. You can make a change. However, you must begin acting as an agent rather than operating as an object.

You must make the decision. You must do something that is unpredictable to the past you’ve been living. You must face the emotional void of uncertainty.

You need to begin living your evenings better. You’ve got to unplug yourself from the matrix of social media and information. When you begin having serene and incredible evenings, you’ll be living more presently and happily than you ever have you before.

You’ll begin living better days, and recording the happenings of those days every night on your computer. Over a year or so, you’ll have thousands of typed pages of history typed up. Your grandkids will thank you.

You can transform your identity. You can become a new person. You can live at a much higher state. You can create and be and do at a much higher state. You can attract the most incredible people and experiences to you. Quite literally, you can attract any person into your sphere that you want to. You can develop mentorships and collaborations with your heroes. I’ve done this myself, many times. It’s truly incredible. But in order to do so, you must live by design rather than by default.

You need to begin using your time to create things that transform other people’s lives for the better. You need to becoming increasingly focused on how you use your time. It’s either HELL YES! or no.

You want to get more consistent at having days that you score as a 9 or a 10. This becomes a lot easier when you have great mornings. Elbert Hubbard once said, “Be pleasant until ten o’clock in the morning, and the rest of the day will take care of itself.”

Confidence is the byproduct of prior performance. Success is what creates confidence. Therefore, if you act powerfully in the morning, you’ll have confidence which will allow you to make better decisions in your evening. However, in order to have confidence the next morning, you need to actually live well the evening before. You can’t fall into subconscious self-sabotage. Make better choices during the morning so you can make better choices at night, and then make better choices at night so you can make better choices the next morning.

Ready to Upgrade?

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

Get the cheat sheet here!

This Morning Routine Will Make You A Millionaire was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is amazing

This is amazing

10 Ways To Determine If You Have Healthy Or Destructive Passion

https://unsplash.com/photos/T7K4aEPoGGk

“Passion” gets a lot of bad press these days. There seems to be much written about why having passion is bad.

The problem for most people is that they believe passion is the moving cause, when in reality, passion is an effect. In the book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, Cal Newport debunks the myth that passion is something we should be looking for. Instead, he argues that developing rare and valuable skills is what leads to a life of passion.

When you’re focused solely on “finding” your passion, you’re only thinking about yourself. If you shifted your focus on developing skills and abilities for the purpose of helping others, you’d begin to have a very passionate and purposeful life.

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

And this brings up a very important point about passion that is rarely discussed. There are actually two types of passion — one you should seek and one you should avoid. The type of passion that most people want is actually the type of passion that would ruin their lives.

The two types of passion are obsessive and harmonious.

Obsessive passion is about being completely fueled and driven by emotion. It’s highly impulsive. This is the type of passion where you’re not clear on your “WHY.” Instead, you’re seeking dopamine, self-esteem, social acceptance, or something else. It may look and feel good in the moment, but obsessive passion always leads to a messed-up life. By definition, obsessive passion is an activity that conflicts with other areas of your life and often leads to addiction.

With obsessive passion, the emotions control you — which is another way of saying your body has taken over your mind and is seeking it’s dopamine addiction.

Conversely, harmonious passion is intuitive and intrinsically motivated, and thus controlled by you. It is the byproduct of intentional purpose and goal-directed behavior. Harmonious passion enhances all other areas of your life, making you a better person. According to research, harmonious passion is far more correlated with being in a flow state than obsessive passion.

Obsessive passion is where the subconscious takes over the conscious mind, leading you to feeling powerless and a victim. Suppressed emotions and unresolved internal conflict are the driver.

Harmonious passion is where you consciously redirect and shape your subconscious. Your behaviors and goals are the driver and you continually experience healthier and higher-level emotional outcomes.

Why People Are So Confused About Passion

The world and the media portray obsessive passion as the thing we should want. It’s sexy and extreme and artistic and completely fueled by emotion. It’s reckless and willing to burn all bridges — including the most important ones — to have what it wants. It’s disorganized and rarely has a happy ending. And even more, this type of passion is something you must discover, rather than something you design and create.

Harmonious passion is different. Without question, bridges need to be burned, commitments to excellence need to be made, and risks need to be taken in order to live out this type of passion. But not every bridge. Rather than operating out of impulse, harmonious passion is driven by faith, vision, and confidence.

Confidence is another word for self-trust. And with obsessive passion, you come to trust yourself less and less because your behavior is entirely based upon the emotions of the moment. These emotions, although exciting, are actually the body in an addictive and self-defeating state (more on this in a second).

Both types of passion ride highs and lows. But the lows of obsessive passion come from regret and neglect, whereas the lows from harmonious passion come from questioning if what you’re doing is still the right thing, and in the difficulties of failure and growth.

10 Questions To Determine If You Have Harmonious PassionWhen you have any free time, do you distract yourself or are you focusing on your passion/purpose?How do you feel if you haven’t worked on “it” that day?What lesser things have you recently given up to more fully embrace this?When was the last time you failed?In what ways have you positively changed in the past 12 months to more fully live out this purpose?To what extent does your external world match your inner thoughts, feelings, and dreams?Are you more worried about what your peers think, or what your family and friends think?Are your relationships with key people in your life getting better or worse?Can you sleep well at night, or do you ruminate over what you should be doing differently?Is your life getting better or worse?When you have any free time, do you distract yourself or are you focusing on your passion/purpose?

“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.” — Dallin Oaks

It’s shocking to see how most people spend their time — desperately seeking distraction from reality.

Most people’s lives reflect a physical addiction to certain emotional states. All emotions are chemical reactions that occur in the brain and throughout the body. And the body can quickly become habituated to these chemicals.

For example, if you check your phone regularly throughout the day without conscious thought or choice, then your body is controlling your mind. Your body is seeking a dopamine release, which chemically fuels your body’s addiction. Your hand grabs for your phone and goes through its memorized and ritualized behavior, and your mind needs to catch up.

After a certain period of time, you consciously “wake-up” to what you’re doing and go back to consciously directing your behavior, until the next subconscious self-sabotage occurs.

However, when you have a healthy passion and powerful purpose, you spend your free time thinking about what your want. You don’t distract yourself from reality. You embrace reality. You’re far more mindful of everything around you — especially the people and their emotional states. Thus, you become increasingly emotionally intelligent as your harmonious passion grows, because at the highest level, harmonious passion is about connecting with and helping other people.

When you have 5 spare minutes, what do you do?

You are who you are when no one else is looking.

A clear reflection of your inner compass is reflected in how you spend your time. If your time is spent on low-level distractions and is constantly bombarded by subconscious dopamine-seeking loops, then you aren’t clear on what you want.

The more you embrace a life of true learning and change, the better you’ll get with your time.

The better you are at planning your day based on the future you want to create — and then living in accordance with that plan — the more motivation and passion you’ll experience in your life. And also more confidence.

How do you feel if you haven’t worked on “it” that day?

If you have harmonious passion, you only feel regret if you allowed distractions to take you from what you know you’d rather be doing.

You didn’t plan accordingly and you didn’t put first things first. And as a result, you let life happen and you didn’t work on your craft.

With harmonious passion, you never feel regret spending quality time with family and embracing other hobbies or interests. You know that your “passion” is only enhanced when the other areas of your life are solid. For example, in the book, Creative Quest, Questlove explains the importance of embracing other outlets outside of your core passion.

On the other hand, if you have obsessive passion, you’re willing to waste huge amounts of time on distraction, and then in a frenzied and impulsive state, you dive into your passion. Because your life is a mess, you’re fine dropping important priorities and relationships. The only thing that matters to you now is getting that dopamine boost. Obsessive passion is all about you. It’s completely selfish, and in the long-run it leads to a short creative life due to increasing conflicts both internally and externally.

What lesser things have you recently given up to more fully embrace this?

“What is the ultimate quantification of success? For me, it’s not how much time you spend doing what you love. It’s how little time you spend doing what you hate.” — Casey Neistat

If you’re not increasingly using your time on better activities, then you haven’t truly developed your passion.When you find something that you truly care about, you’ll give up less important things in order to spend more time doing what you love.

In the seminal book, Good To Great, Jim Collins says, “If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.”

As you continually improve the quality of your daily behaviors, you become clearer and clearer on what matters most to you. Quality behavior is what creates clarity. Clarity and harmonious passion go hand-in-hand.

You already know what to do. You know the next step. You know where you’re currently operating at uninspiring levels. You know there are behaviors in your life that are sub-optimal.

Start today by removing something negative and focusing more clearly on the things you already know are your core priorities.

Focus on what excites you. Focus on what resonates with you. It’s alright if you don’t know all the answers right now. Take steps in the general area and your vision will clarify, your motivation and confidence will increase, and your passion will brew. Removing things that are clearly taking you in the wrong direction is how you increase your harmonious passion.

When was the last time you failed?

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” — Sir Ken Robinson

You don’t have passion if you’re not learning. You’re not learning if you’re not failing. Failure is feedback. Feedback brings clarity. Clarity brings confidence. Confidence comes from trusting yourself. Trusting yourself allows you to try things way out of your current reach. Trying things out of your current reach is how you evolve out of suppressed and subconscious patterns.

In what ways have you positively changed in the past 12 months to more fully live out this purpose?

“Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.” — Alain de Botton

If you’re not changing, then you’re not committed to something important. Commitment requires transformation. If you’re not being required to change for something greater than yourself, then you don’t know what loves means. You’re still too focused on yourself.

People who are obsessed with themselves don’t believe they need to change. They think the world should form itself around them.

People who are committed and passionate are intense learners. They serve those who are most important to them, and they use their gifts to transform a specific group of people. They don’t need willpower to get to work. They are being pulled forward and can’t be stopped. They are self-actualized because they have transcended themselves. Their life is so rich with purpose they are often humbled to speechlessness.

If you’re not growing, you’re not living. Humans were designed to evolve and grow. Being stuck in a suppressed cycle of addiction to unhealthy emotions is not what you were designed for. You were designed to expand beyond your pain, to be healed of it, and then to use what you’ve learned to help others.

To what extent does your external world match your inner thoughts, feelings, and dreams?

“What is impressed in the subconscious is expressed.” — William James

Mind and matter are inextricably connected. When you change one, you change the other. Your environment is a reflection of your self-esteem.

How powerful is your current environment?

To what extent does your environment and outer world inspire you?

Does your situation demand that you rise up to new heights?

Have you put yourself in a situation that humbles and excites you?

Did you know that you can change your environment immediately through powerful behavior and decision?

Did you know you could create an environment that continually triggers you to be at your best?

Did you know that you can change from the inside-out, and from the outside-in?

In order to change, you have two choices. You can either act above your current environment and emotions, or you can create an environment far above your current self that forces you to rise up.

Both are necessary.

Continually, you need to be acting, thinking, and living above your current circumstances. Also continually, you need to be proactively surrounding yourself with people, projects, and responsibilities that humble you — forcing you to find something within you that you didn’t know was there.

Are you more worried about what your peers think, or what your family and friends think?

“We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.” — Fight Club

Who are you trying to impress?

It does not matter how successful you become, or think you’ve become, you should be relatable to all people. You can and should remain down-to-earth. This is actually how you make yourself attractive to even the most successful people in the world.

Joe Polish, the founder of Genius Network, often judges people based on how they treat people “beneath them.” Joe runs a high-level entrepreneurial mastermind filled with very successful people. Joe watches as the people in his mastermind interact with the members of his team. Often, he sees these “successful” people ignoring and disrespecting the members of his team.

If you only treat people with respect when you think they can get you somewhere, you won’t have many friends for long. Dan Sullivan, the founder of Strategic Coach, says that it takes him less than 10 minutes to know if someone’s core motive is growth or greed. It’s obvious. You can’t fake being genuine. You can’t fake the fact that you’re not really listening, only wanting to speak.

No matter how successful you become, you should always strive to love and serve the people who need you. The people you call family and friends.

Are your relationships with key people in your life getting better or worse?

“Wherever you are, make sure you’re there.” — Dan Sullivan

If the key relationships in your life are becoming increasingly strained and complex, you likely have obsessive passion. You’re not putting first things first. You’ve gotten way out of alignment.

If you have harmonious passion, your relationships with the key people in your life will be getter better, because you as a person are getting better.

As you expand as a person through your passion and through holistic growth, you will care more about your family and friends. You’ll be more giving and considerate. You’ll be more confident and powerful, and inspire and help them. You’ll listen better. You’ll be far more engaged. You’ll be where you are, because you’ll be learning to live in a flow state. The more harmonious and congruent you are in your daily behaviors, the more in the moment you will live.

Can you sleep well at night, or do you ruminate over what you should be doing differently?

“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” — Thomas Edison

Quality sleep is a reflection of a clear conscious. When you are living your life in a conscious way, you will rest well. Your sleep will be sweet and nourishing. Your dreams will be vivid and memorable. Your subconscious mind will continually be stretching and expanding because you’ll have learned to direct it while you sleep.

Sleep is potentially the most productive time of a person’s day. It’s when the brain does some of it’s best creative work and learning. But if you can’t get into deep sleep, and if you aren’t leveraging your sleep for healing and learning, then your days won’t be what they could be. You won’t be learning and growing at the rate of children — which should never stop.

Is your life getting better or worse?

“Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.” — Jim Rohn

Put most simply, is your life getting better or worse? If it’s getting worse with time, then you either have obsessive passion or your behavior is out-of-whack.

When you have a harmonious passion, your life continually gets better. You become better. Your health becomes better. Your relationships become better. Your finances become better. Your environment becomes better.

Your life continually becomes more focused on the things which matter most. You realize that most things don’t matter at all, and you have high enough standards to avoid most of what the world has to offer.

Dr. Barry Schwartz wrote an amazing book called The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Based on decades of research on decision-making, Dr. Schwartz concluded that the best decision-makers proactively remove almost all choices from their life.

The best choices you can make are the ones that remove most options. In the important book, The One Thing, Gary Keller encourages us to ask, “What is the ONE thing that needs to happen today and will make everything else easier or irrelevant?”

Most decisions are bad options. Having too many options creates decision-fatigue, or willpower depletion. Willpower doesn’t work. Instead of relying on willpower, be intentional. Make powerful decisions that remove options that are merely distractions. Be confident enough to burn your boats. Make true commitments. Invest in yourself. Be bold.

This is how you make your life better. You act with purpose. You act. Your behavior is what makes you. Are you what you repeatedly do. You must make the choice.

The world is increasingly challenging you to give up your agency to emotional addictions such as dopamine dependence.

Own your emotions.

Own your life.

Make it better every single day.

Live a harmonious and powerful life.

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!

10 Ways To Determine If You Have Healthy Or Destructive Passion was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

10 Questions To Know If You’ve Really Found Your Passion And Purpose

https://unsplash.com/photos/T7K4aEPoGGk

“Passion” gets a lot of bad press these days. There seems to be much written about why having passion is bad.

The problem for most people is that they believe passion is the moving cause, when in reality, passion is an effect. In the book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, Cal Newport debunks the myth that passion is something we should be looking for. Instead, he argues that developing rare and valuable skills is what leads to a life of passion.

When you’re focused solely on “finding” your passion, you’re only thinking about yourself. If you shifted your focus on developing skills and abilities for the purpose of helping others, you’d begin to have a very passionate and purposeful life.

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

And this brings up a very important point about passion that is rarely discussed. There are actually two types of passion — one you should seek and one you should avoid. The type of passion that most people want is actually the type of passion that would ruin their lives.

The two types of passion are obsessive and harmonious.

Obsessive passion is about being completely fueled and driven by emotion. It’s highly impulsive. This is the type of passion where you’re not clear on your “WHY.” Instead, you’re seeking dopamine, self-esteem, social acceptance, or something else. It may look and feel good in the moment, but obsessive passion always leads to a messed-up life. By definition, obsessive passion is an activity that conflicts with other areas of your life and often leads to addiction.

With obsessive passion, the emotions control you — which is another way of saying your body has taken over your mind and is seeking it’s dopamine addiction.

Conversely, harmonious passion is intuitive and intrinsically motivated, and thus controlled by you. It is the byproduct of intentional purpose and goal-directed behavior. Harmonious passion enhances all other areas of your life, making you a better person. According to research, harmonious passion is far more correlated with being in a flow state than obsessive passion.

Obsessive passion is where the subconscious takes over the conscious mind, leading you to feeling powerless and a victim. Suppressed emotions and unresolved internal conflict are the driver.

Harmonious passion is where you consciously redirect and shape your subconscious. Your behaviors and goals are the driver and you continually experience healthier and higher-level emotional outcomes.

Why People Are So Confused About Passion

The world and the media portray obsessive passion as the thing we should want. It’s sexy and extreme and artistic and completely fueled by emotion. It’s reckless and willing to burn all bridges — including the most important ones — to have what it wants. It’s disorganized and rarely has a happy ending. And even more, this type of passion is something you must discover, rather than something you design and create.

Harmonious passion is different. Without question, bridges need to be burned, commitments to excellence need to be made, and risks need to be taken in order to live out this type of passion. But not every bridge. Rather than operating out of impulse, harmonious passion is driven by faith, vision, and confidence.

Confidence is another word for self-trust. And with obsessive passion, you come to trust yourself less and less because your behavior is entirely based upon the emotions of the moment. These emotions, although exciting, are actually the body in an addictive and self-defeating state (more on this in a second).

Both types of passion ride highs and lows. But the lows of obsessive passion come from regret and neglect, whereas the lows from harmonious passion come from questioning if what you’re doing is still the right thing, and in the difficulties of failure and growth.

10 Questions To Determine If You Have Harmonious PassionWhen you have any free time, do you distract yourself or are you focusing on your passion/purpose?How do you feel if you haven’t worked on “it” that day?What lesser things have you recently given up to more fully embrace this?When was the last time you failed?In what ways have you positively changed in the past 12 months to more fully live out this purpose?To what extent does your external world match your inner thoughts, feelings, and dreams?Are you more worried about what your peers think, or what your family and friends think?Are your relationships with key people in your life getting better or worse?Can you sleep well at night, or do you ruminate over what you should be doing differently?Is your life getting better or worse?When you have any free time, do you distract yourself or are you focusing on your passion/purpose?

“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.” — Dallin Oaks

It’s shocking to see how most people spend their time — desperately seeking distraction from reality.

Most people’s lives reflect a physical addiction to certain emotional states. All emotions are chemical reactions that occur in the brain and throughout the body. And the body can quickly become habituated to these chemicals.

For example, if you check your phone regularly throughout the day without conscious thought or choice, then your body is controlling your mind. Your body is seeking a dopamine release, which chemically fuels your body’s addiction. Your hand grabs for your phone and goes through its memorized and ritualized behavior, and your mind needs to catch up.

After a certain period of time, you consciously “wake-up” to what you’re doing and go back to consciously directing your behavior, until the next subconscious self-sabotage occurs.

However, when you have a healthy passion and powerful purpose, you spend your free time thinking about what your want. You don’t distract yourself from reality. You embrace reality. You’re far more mindful of everything around you — especially the people and their emotional states. Thus, you become increasingly emotionally intelligent as your harmonious passion grows, because at the highest level, harmonious passion is about connecting with and helping other people.

When you have 5 spare minutes, what do you do?

You are who you are when no one else is looking.

A clear reflection of your inner compass is reflected in how you spend your time. If your time is spent on low-level distractions and is constantly bombarded by subconscious dopamine-seeking loops, then you aren’t clear on what you want.

The more you embrace a life of true learning and change, the better you’ll get with your time.

The better you are at planning your day based on the future you want to create — and then living in accordance with that plan — the more motivation and passion you’ll experience in your life. And also more confidence.

How do you feel if you haven’t worked on “it” that day?

If you have harmonious passion, you only feel regret if you allowed distractions to take you from what you know you’d rather be doing.

You didn’t plan accordingly and you didn’t put first things first. And as a result, you let life happen and you didn’t work on your craft.

With harmonious passion, you never feel regret spending quality time with family and embracing other hobbies or interests. You know that your “passion” is only enhanced when the other areas of your life are solid. For example, in the book, Creative Quest, Questlove explains the importance of embracing other outlets outside of your core passion.

On the other hand, if you have obsessive passion, you’re willing to waste huge amounts of time on distraction, and then in a frenzied and impulsive state, you dive into your passion. Because your life is a mess, you’re fine dropping important priorities and relationships. The only thing that matters to you now is getting that dopamine boost. Obsessive passion is all about you. It’s completely selfish, and in the long-run it leads to a short creative life due to increasing conflicts both internally and externally.

What lesser things have you recently given up to more fully embrace this?

“What is the ultimate quantification of success? For me, it’s not how much time you spend doing what you love. It’s how little time you spend doing what you hate.” — Casey Neistat

If you’re not increasingly using your time on better activities, then you haven’t truly developed your passion.When you find something that you truly care about, you’ll give up less important things in order to spend more time doing what you love.

In the seminal book, Good To Great, Jim Collins says, “If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.”

As you continually improve the quality of your daily behaviors, you become clearer and clearer on what matters most to you. Quality behavior is what creates clarity. Clarity and harmonious passion go hand-in-hand.

You already know what to do. You know the next step. You know where you’re currently operating at uninspiring levels. You know there are behaviors in your life that are sub-optimal.

Start today by removing something negative and focusing more clearly on the things you already know are your core priorities.

Focus on what excites you. Focus on what resonates with you. It’s alright if you don’t know all the answers right now. Take steps in the general area and your vision will clarify, your motivation and confidence will increase, and your passion will brew. Removing things that are clearly taking you in the wrong direction is how you increase your harmonious passion.

When was the last time you failed?

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” — Sir Ken Robinson

You don’t have passion if you’re not learning. You’re not learning if you’re not failing. Failure is feedback. Feedback brings clarity. Clarity brings confidence. Confidence comes from trusting yourself. Trusting yourself allows you to try things way out of your current reach. Trying things out of your current reach is how you evolve out of suppressed and subconscious patterns.

In what ways have you positively changed in the past 12 months to more fully live out this purpose?

“Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.” — Alain de Botton

If you’re not changing, then you’re not committed to something important. Commitment requires transformation. If you’re not being required to change for something greater than yourself, then you don’t know what loves means. You’re still too focused on yourself.

People who are obsessed with themselves don’t believe they need to change. They think the world should form itself around them.

People who are committed and passionate are intense learners. They serve those who are most important to them, and they use their gifts to transform a specific group of people. They don’t need willpower to get to work. They are being pulled forward and can’t be stopped. They are self-actualized because they have transcended themselves. Their life is so rich with purpose they are often humbled to speechlessness.

If you’re not growing, you’re not living. Humans were designed to evolve and grow. Being stuck in a suppressed cycle of addiction to unhealthy emotions is not what you were designed for. You were designed to expand beyond your pain, to be healed of it, and then to use what you’ve learned to help others.

To what extent does your external world match your inner thoughts, feelings, and dreams?

“What is impressed in the subconscious is expressed.” — William James

Mind and matter are inextricably connected. When you change one, you change the other. Your environment is a reflection of your self-esteem.

How powerful is your current environment?

To what extent does your environment and outer world inspire you?

Does your situation demand that you rise up to new heights?

Have you put yourself in a situation that humbles and excites you?

Did you know that you can change your environment immediately through powerful behavior and decision?

Did you know you could create an environment that continually triggers you to be at your best?

Did you know that you can change from the inside-out, and from the outside-in?

In order to change, you have two choices. You can either act above your current environment and emotions, or you can create an environment far above your current self that forces you to rise up.

Both are necessary.

Continually, you need to be acting, thinking, and living above your current circumstances. Also continually, you need to be proactively surrounding yourself with people, projects, and responsibilities that humble you — forcing you to find something within you that you didn’t know was there.

Are you more worried about what your peers think, or what your family and friends think?

“We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.” — Fight Club

Who are you trying to impress?

It does not matter how successful you become, or think you’ve become, you should be relatable to all people. You can and should remain down-to-earth. This is actually how you make yourself attractive to even the most successful people in the world.

Joe Polish, the founder of Genius Network, often judges people based on how they treat people “beneath them.” Joe runs a high-level entrepreneurial mastermind filled with very successful people. Joe watches as the people in his mastermind interact with the members of his team. Often, he sees these “successful” people ignoring and disrespecting the members of his team.

If you only treat people with respect when you think they can get you somewhere, you won’t have many friends for long. Dan Sullivan, the founder of Strategic Coach, says that it takes him less than 10 minutes to know if someone’s core motive is growth or greed. It’s obvious. You can’t fake being genuine. You can’t fake the fact that you’re not really listening, only wanting to speak.

No matter how successful you become, you should always strive to love and serve the people who need you. The people you call family and friends.

Are your relationships with key people in your life getting better or worse?

“Wherever you are, make sure you’re there.” — Dan Sullivan

If the key relationships in your life are becoming increasingly strained and complex, you likely have obsessive passion. You’re not putting first things first. You’ve gotten way out of alignment.

If you have harmonious passion, your relationships with the key people in your life will be getter better, because you as a person are getting better.

As you expand as a person through your passion and through holistic growth, you will care more about your family and friends. You’ll be more giving and considerate. You’ll be more confident and powerful, and inspire and help them. You’ll listen better. You’ll be far more engaged. You’ll be where you are, because you’ll be learning to live in a flow state. The more harmonious and congruent you are in your daily behaviors, the more in the moment you will live.

Can you sleep well at night, or do you ruminate over what you should be doing differently?

“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” — Thomas Edison

Quality sleep is a reflection of a clear conscious. When you are living your life in a conscious way, you will rest well. Your sleep will be sweet and nourishing. Your dreams will be vivid and memorable. Your subconscious mind will continually be stretching and expanding because you’ll have learned to direct it while you sleep.

Sleep is potentially the most productive time of a person’s day. It’s when the brain does some of it’s best creative work and learning. But if you can’t get into deep sleep, and if you aren’t leveraging your sleep for healing and learning, then your days won’t be what they could be. You won’t be learning and growing at the rate of children — which should never stop.

Is your life getting better or worse?

“Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.” — Jim Rohn

Put most simply, is your life getting better or worse? If it’s getting worse with time, then you either have obsessive passion or your behavior is out-of-whack.

When you have a harmonious passion, your life continually gets better. You become better. Your health becomes better. Your relationships become better. Your finances become better. Your environment becomes better.

Your life continually becomes more focused on the things which matter most. You realize that most things don’t matter at all, and you have high enough standards to avoid most of what the world has to offer.

Dr. Barry Schwartz wrote an amazing book called The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Based on decades of research on decision-making, Dr. Schwartz concluded that the best decision-makers proactively remove almost all choices from their life.

The best choices you can make are the ones that remove most options. In the important book, The One Thing, Gary Keller encourages us to ask, “What is the ONE thing that needs to happen today and will make everything else easier or irrelevant?”

Most decisions are bad options. Having too many options creates decision-fatigue, or willpower depletion. Willpower doesn’t work. Instead of relying on willpower, be intentional. Make powerful decisions that remove options that are merely distractions. Be confident enough to burn your boats. Make true commitments. Invest in yourself. Be bold.

This is how you make your life better. You act with purpose. You act. Your behavior is what makes you. Are you what you repeatedly do. You must make the choice.

The world is increasingly challenging you to give up your agency to emotional addictions such as dopamine dependence.

Own your emotions.

Own your life.

Make it better every single day.

Live a harmonious and powerful live.

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!

If You Don’t Use It, You’ll Lose It

Tire Flip

Russell Ballard tells the story of a seven year old girl who started a tomato plant for a second grade project.

She was taught that one tiny seed had the potential to become a tomato, which contained many seeds that could make many tomatoes.

In the seven year old’s words, “And if all of those seeds were planted and grew more tomatoes, and you planted all of those seeds, in a few seasons you would have millions of tomatoes.”

Unfortunately, she almost killed her starter tomato plant. In her youthful immaturity, she left the plant in a dark room for a few days and totally forgot about it.

“When I remembered the plant, it was all wilted and dead looking. I cried because I thought of all of those millions of tomatoes that would never grow.”

She was devastated, and likely nervous to tell her teacher that she had killed her plant. Her mom told her that the plant might not be dead yet, and that with some proper nourishment — sunlight and water — the plant might revive.

The girl put the plant right by the window where it could get tons of sunlight. She regularly gave the plant water. And a “miracle” occurred, the plant almost immediately began thriving and growing tomatoes.

Nothing Is Permanent

Everything is in a state of movement. Nothing remains in a state of isolation without being changed.

Either you’re growing or you’re going backwards.

If you don’t continually hone your mind and body, you will become foggy and flabby.

Human beings, like tomato plants, are organic structures that need constant nourishment. Without a nourishing environment, it doesn’t matter how much potential you have. If you are in a dark room for long, you will wilt, and potentially die.

No amount of willpower in a dark room will save your life. You need healthy nourishment from the outside world. Gritting your teeth and trying to do it on your own won’t work. You need the right environment and you need the right behavior.

In order to even develop powerful characteristics and internal strength in the first place, you need amazing inputs from your environment. As Zig Ziglar said, “Your input determines your outlook. Your outlook determines your output, and your output determines your future.”

However, there is never a point at which you’ve arrived, and no longer need constant nourishment. Even after you’ve developed incredible internal clarity, motivation, education, and strength, if you don’t create an environment that supports the growth you’ve made, you will lose the growth you’ve made.

If you’re not continually being challenged to rise to new heights, you will become stagnant and stale as a person. If you’re not growing, you’re going backwards.

Alain de Botton once said, “Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.”

If you’re still the same person you were 12 months ago, what the heck have you been doing?

When was the last time you pushed yourself to exhaustion in a workout?

When was the last time you really learned something? And true learning is far different from acquiring information — learning involves a permanent change in how you see and act in the world. If you didn’t change, you didn’t learn. As Albert Einstein said, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”

Rest and recovery are absolutely essential. But you won’t get the benefits from rest and recovery if you’re not truly pushing and expanding yourself regularly. Your rest will truly be sweet if you’re earning it through a life worth living.

Emotions Are The Key To Growth

If you’re not having regular transformational experiences, then you’re not stepping out of your comfort zone enough. Human beings are transformed through emotions, not logic and reason.

Emotions are heavily tied to memory, and memory is your record of the past. However, your memory is not fixed and unchanging. Actually, your memory is constantly being changed and reshaped as you 1) face the emotions that will keep you stuck, and 2) as you experience new emotions that create new memories. The more intense the emotional experience, the deeper the memory and learning.

If you want to experience an insane amount of growth, do something that is emotionally challenging. Do something that is awkward. And most importantly, do something in which you cannot predict the outcome.

Tim Ferriss has said, “A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.”

Confidence is being fine taking on challenges and situations in which you cannot predict the outcome. The reason people stay stuck is because they really like to predict how things will go.

Not being sure of outcomes freaks people out. Therefore, people live very predictable lives. They don’t go too far outside of their comfort zone. They veer far from awkwardness and potential embarrassment. They are caged by their emotions.

Want to make powerful change?

Do something that requires courage and commitment, today. Do something that might fail. This is how you develop and demonstrate confidence.

Confidence is organic, like a tomato plant. If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. Confidence is like a muscle you must exercise and use, daily, to make stronger. Yet, the nourishment for confidence is both trying and succeeding. Just by trying, even if you fail, you’ll have gained confidence because you’ll have attempted something in which the outcome was not predictable.

Just as confidence is organic and ever-changing, so is your identity.

Identity Follows Choice

Your identity is not fixed. You don’t have some personality you were born with that remains the same. Like a garden, your identity is either becoming more polished and refined, or more entangled, confused, and distracted.

Your identity does not produce your behavior. Your behavior shapes your identity. You are responsible for who you become. You are the designer of your personality.

In the brilliant book, The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves, author Annie Murphy Paul explains, using plenty of hard evidence, how personality tests — our Western obsession — are dooming us to failure.

Western thinkers are obsessed with isolated variables and fixed traits. We fail to realize the continually altering context that shapes and re-shapes those traits and variables. There are no permanent traits, but continually changing STATES.

Then why do we see such regularity in our behaviors and attitudes? According to Stanford psychologist, Lee Ross, “We see consistency in everyday life because of the power of the situation.”

Ross further posits that ultimately, it’s the situation and not the person, that determines things. “People are predictable, that’s true… But they’re predictable because we see them in situations where their behavior is constrained by that situation and the roles they’re occupying and the relationships they have with us.”

Supply Follows Demand

“I think the ability of the average man could be doubled if it were demanded, if the situation demanded.” — William Durant

Most people believe they have a fixed and permanent identity and personality. They overvalue and rely on such things as personality tests.

They don’t put themselves into situations of high demand that force them to become something fundamentally more and different than they currently are.

You can put yourself into a situation — mentally and physically — where the demands are high. This is a very potent cocktail for forward movement.

You need both: the internal and external to pull you forward. The internal and external are two indistinguishable parts of the same whole — not separate.

Internally, you need a white-hot WHY. As Friedrich Nietzsche wisely said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Thus, the advice to “live within your means” is actually quite terrible advice when taken to its logical conclusion. Rather than living within your means, you need to DECIDE what you need, then let the means come to you. They will come once you’ve fully decided what you seek. To quote Rumi, “What you seek is seeking you.” Once resolved and committed, “the universe conspires to make it happen” as Emerson put it.

Externally, you need a situation that has enormous demand. So much demand that the supply comes, both from you and from external factors.When you’re clear on what you want and why, magic happens. Dreams become realities. Faith becomes sure knowledge.

Inspiration Follows Action

But where does this clarity and purpose come from?

Again, here Western culture generally has it backwards. The common belief is that inspiration creates action, when the opposite is more true.

Action creates inspiration.

Forward progress creates motivation.

Bold action reshapes your conscious and subconsious patterns.

Action generates the best thinking, because positive action creates inner confidence — which is the soil for positive thought.

Paralysis comes from analysis. As author and performance coach, Tim Grover, said, “Don’t think. You already know what you have to do, and you know how to do it. What’s stopping you?”

You know enough. The reason you’re mentally blocked, demotivated, and confused is because you’re not acting.

Behavior shapes identity.

Behavior shapes ideas and motivation.

Begin acting well.

Create situations that FORCE you to act well. Situations of such extreme DEMAND that trigger both an internal and external SUPPLY to match the demand. When the why is strong, the how develops organically. The most clever and bold strategies come when the demand is high. Necessity is the mother of invention.

The WHY becomes strong as you act. You must act. That is where your freedom lies. When you act, the ideas will come. As you continue to act, more ideas will come. The bolder the action, the greater the shattering of subconscious patterns — opening the window for better and clearer thinking.

Creativity Follows Creation

As you act, you’ll get an inflow of thoughts and ideas. You’ll then need to turn those ideas into tangible creations for the use and benefit of other people.

Inspiration doesn’t lead to creativity. Creating things leads to inspiration,which then generates a greater desire to create. The quality of your ideas come from the quality of your choices. Every choice generates like offspring of thinking and ideas. Hence, success begets success. Creativity begets even greater creativity.

Behavior shapes identity.

Behavior shapes ideas.

Put yourself in a situation that demands your greatest behavior. Then watch as a seemingly endless supply of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic help aids you.

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.

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