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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. As it does, and the sense of uselessness starts to loosen its grip, that’s when you take the second step: put the machines away and create space and time in your life, however small or short in the beginning, for inspiration to find its way in and for the discovery process to happen.
Plan B is dangerous to every big dream. It is a plan for failure.
And if I can do what I did, why can’t you? Granted, I am a lunatic. I don’t do anything like a normal person. I don’t have normal dreams. My risk tolerance for big goals and new challenges is sky high. Everything I do, I do big.
The key is, they have to be good reps. Not lazy, distracted, arched-back, noodle-arm, bullshit reps.
And yet so many people are content to depend entirely on plans and systems, or to do the bare minimum asked of them, and then think to themselves, This is all set, I took care of it. No. Don’t be a lazy fuck. Do the work. The only time you are allowed to use the phrase “I took care of it” is when it is done. Completely.
I chose to do bricklaying because it was like an extra workout. I got to work on my tan and practice my English on people, and I got to enjoy the sense of pride that comes with building things. You have to remember, my goal wasn’t just to come to America, it was to become part of America.
Do you know how many times people tell me they don’t have time to work out, and then I ask them to take out their phones and show me their screen time stats and it says they spent three and a half hours on social media? It’s not hours in the day you lack, it’s a vision for your life that makes time irrelevant.
After all this stuff in a typical daily life is accounted for, there are still two hours left in the day to make progress toward your vision. I can already hear the question coming from a bunch of you: What about time for rest and relaxation? First of all, rest is for babies and relaxation is for retired people.
Fredi was younger than all our fathers, and he’d been on the right side of the war, which I think made it easier to keep an open mind about things as he got older, because he wasn’t consumed by regret or shame like many of our fathers were. When you’ve fought for something you believe in and you’ve triumphed—when you’ve helped to literally save the world—I imagine it’s easier to see the joy and possibility in new and beautiful things.
