More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It’s the struggle that makes success, when you achieve it, taste so sweet.
They involve knowing where you want to go and how you’re going to get there, as well as having the willingness to do the work and the ability to communicate to the people you care about that the journey you want to bring them on is worth the effort. They include the capacity to shift gears when the journey hits a roadblock, and the ability to keep an open mind and learn from your surroundings to find new ways through. And most important of all, once you get where you’re trying to go, they demand that you acknowledge all the help you had along the way and that you give back accordingly.
Vision is the most important thing. Vision is purpose and meaning. To have a clear vision is to have a picture of what you want your life to look like and a plan for how to get there.
That is what a clear vision gives you: a way to decipher whether a decision is good or bad for you, based on whether it gets you closer or further away from where you want your life to go. Does the picture you have in your mind of your ideal future get blurrier or sharper because of this thing you’re about to do?
The only difference between them and us, between me and you, between any two people, is the clarity of the picture we have for our future, the strength of our plan to get there, and whether or not we have accepted that the choice to make that vision a reality is ours and ours alone.
“go back to when you were three, figure out what you loved doing, figure out how to make that your life, then make the road map and follow it.”
Bodybuilding is all about zooming in. Not just on the specifics of what you want to achieve as a bodybuilder, but also on the steps you need to take in the gym to get there.
First, create little goals for yourself. Don’t worry about the big, broad stuff for now. Focus on making improvements and banking achievements one day at a time.
Once you’ve developed a rhythm with those little daily goals, create weekly and then monthly goals. Instead of zooming in from a broad place, build out your life from this small beginning and let your vision open up in front of you from there.
“What you can ‘see’ you can ‘ be,’ ” as the sports psychologist Don Macpherson has famously said. You need to be able to see what you want to achieve before you do it, not as you do it. That’s the difference.
You can’t get better unless you judge your effort against what you know it should look like, in your heart and in your mind.
If your greatest wish in life is to be a parent, don’t just pay for things or think that providing is your only job. Be a great role model who raises healthy, loving kids who go out into the world and do great things themselves.
“No man is more unhappy,” the Stoic philosopher Seneca said, “than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.”
If there is one unavoidable truth in this world, it’s that there is no substitute for putting in the work.
There are a lot of reasons this is the case, but a big one is the fact that new-money lotto winners and old-money rich people never got any of the benefits that come from working toward a big goal.
You need to know who is the customer, who is the boss, and who is making the decisions.”
When you’re different, when you’re unique, and nobody has ever dealt with someone like you before, they are going to drastically underestimate what you’re capable of.
Embrace who you are! Own your story! Even if you don’t like it.
I have a rule: no complaining about a situation unless you’re prepared to do something to make it better. If you see a problem and you don’t come to the table with a potential solution, I don’t want to hear your whining about how bad it is. It couldn’t be that bad if it hasn’t motivated you to try to fix it.
The worst thing that can happen when you do the work to overcome adversity instead of quit in the face of it is that you fail again
and learn one more way that doesn’t work.
He made us understand that the way to become the kind of sponge that absorbs only the most useful knowledge was to always be curious.
To listen and look more than we talked.
This is the missing piece of the equation. Purpose. Vision.
Important, interesting, powerful people are drawn to those who ask good questions and listen well.
These are all just different ways of saying that you don’t know as much as you think you do, so shut your mouth and open your mind.
