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by
Steve Kamb
We know something is missing in our lives, or we dream of something more, but aren’t quite able to identify what that is. And yet it seems like year after year goes by with nothing actually changing, and pretty soon we’re looking back and asking ourselves, “What the heck happened?” If
As Ben Franklin said, “Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.”
We lived 20 yards from the beach, I surfed when I could, I had a company car, a steady salary, and a job that kept me busy, and I was miserable. Every morning hit me like a sack of hammers, and I quickly counted down the minutes until my shift ended and I could go home.
As Winston Churchill declared, “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”
IT’S A DANGEROUS BUSINESS, FRODO, GOING OUT YOUR DOOR. YOU STEP ONTO THE ROAD, AND IF YOU DON’T KEEP YOUR FEET, THERE’S NO KNOWING WHERE YOU MIGHT BE SWEPT OFF TO.
In the book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, the #1 regret voiced by those on their deathbeds, having the crystal-clear ability to look back at what they had done or not done over the course of their lives, is that they wished they’d had the courage to live lives true to themselves, as opposed to the lives others expected of them.
Starting today, that voice in your head is no longer allowed to utter the words: “I don’t have time.” Instead, the voice must use the phrase, “It’s not a priority.” Watch how quickly your perspective shifts when looking at life’s challenges this way: “I’d love to exercise, but I just don’t have time” becomes “exercising isn’t a priority.” “I’d love to learn a new language, but I don’t have time to practice” becomes “learning a new language isn’t a priority.” “I don’t have time to find a new job” becomes “finding a new job isn’t a priority.”
Can I find a way to be happier and healthier today than I was yesterday? Can I find a way to make life more fulfilling today than it was at this time last year? It’s never too late to change, you’re never too old to learn, and you’re never too far down a path to change to a different one. As humans, we have the amazing ability to change and adapt code into our DNA.
No more excuses. Instead of coming up with reasons why we can’t do the stuff we talk about in this book, we instead must ask, “Okay, what do I need to do, and how do I need to do it in order to make these things a reality?” Now that we’ve quieted our inner voices and enemies, giving us a chance to get started on our adventure, we need to watch out for the external threats we’ll face as well. And to do that,
Most of us are trapped in it without our knowledge: we’ve all been programmed to follow a specific set of rules that govern how we exist. For the past 80-plus years, that’s gone something like this: get a job for the most money you can, buy the biggest house you can, the nicest car, the biggest television, and work your ass off for 40-plus years until you retire at 65 to finally enjoy the good life. This is the wool that has been pulled over our eyes to keep us complacent and subdued. We’re taught and told by everybody around us that this is just the way things are, and we’re supposed to
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Author Seth Godin put it plainly: “Be judged, or be ignored.” If you want to do extraordinary things, and you plan on standing out from the crowd, expect to be judged for it. Perhaps harshly. After
Haidt defines being productive and happy as “flow,” a concept coined by psychology professor Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. Haidt explains it as “the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.”
Okay, so now we have our basic framework for happiness: Time spent daily, hopefully in a job that challenges us, but also in our after-hours hobbies. An ability to show ourselves that we are making consistent progress and improvements toward a specified goal. Energy and attention dedicated each day to an activity that puts us in the zone.
the world in which you live is shaped by how you view it. It’s either a daring adventure or nothing at all. We
it’s a great day to be alive and adventure is out there for those who seek it. Oh,
LIFE IS EITHER A DARING ADVENTURE OR NOTHING AT ALL. —HELEN KELLER
When I started to play the violin, I struggled with getting myself to practice every day because the concept of practicing for an hour every day overwhelmed me. So, after failing for a while, I bought a violin stand. I did this so the violin would always be in tune, ready to be played, and in my line of sight when I walked in my apartment. Then I lowered my quest commitment to 15 minutes each day total. The result was that I started practicing daily, and often ended up putting in an hour or more of practice in 5-minute chunks spread throughout the day. In simplifying the quest, I made more
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cases, the allure of immediate gratification on our lizard brains is so strong that we sabotage our efforts to level up our lives in the long term in exchange for happiness in the short term. If given the choice:
How do we develop a new action into an automatic habit? By making sure the new action is both achievable and repeatable. That’s
If you don’t bite off more than you can chew, you won’t get overwhelmed, and your odds of success will increase.
It’s been said that it’s twice as tough to break a bad habit than it is to build a new habit,
If you want to run or exercise every morning, sleep in your running clothes! Place your alarm clock across the room from your bed, with your shoes right next to it and a glass of water. Make the alarm sound as annoying as possible, hop out of bed, quickly put your running shoes on, and get it done. If you want to exercise after work, pack your gym bag the night before and leave it by your front door so you never forget it on your way out in the morning. Don’t even give yourself the option of coming home before
quests. If you’re serious about leveling up your life, start by furiously eliminating the unimportant parts of your life to free you up for what truly is important.
For us in real life, it’s our bad habits, obligations, and struggles with focus and discipline that we need to overcome.
happiness, we are at our most happy when we can get in the zone while performing a challenging or engaging activity. In nerd speak: you are having so much fun and are so immersed in the activity at hand that you lose track of time. Although I often find myself in the zone while playing specific video games, I try to target most of my flow on beneficial activities that improve
“Happiness is only real when shared.”
In laymen’s terms: the more time you spend with people who are better, more successful, healthier, and happier than you, the types of decisions you make and the things you choose to do will be constantly influenced by those people. Just as more adventures present themselves to us when we begin to see life itself as an adventure, more group adventures pop up when we surround ourselves with people who feel that same way.
We have a finite amount of time—the most valuable resource on this planet—and you have 100 percent control over how that time gets spent. Surround yourself with people who want you to be better, and you will see yourself start to level up faster than ever before.
As the late, legendary boxing trainer Cus D’Amato said: “The hero and the coward both feel the same thing: fear; it’s what they do with that fear that separates them.”
Bruce decided to leave all his luxury comforts behind and immersed himself in a difficult life because he knew it was the only way growth would happen.
your experiences in how you choose to deal with your fear will forge you into the superhero version of yourself.
Want to know the best way to challenge yourself both physically and mentally? Do the very things that scare you! Fear and anxiety have the power to paralyze us, but they also give us a chance to acknowledge them without submitting to them. If you’ve ever been in a situation in which you watched somebody else do something that you wanted to do but chickened out and spent the rest of the day saying, “I should have done that,” then you know what kind of power fear wields.
If you are lazy or complacent, you can lie to yourself and lie to others by saying you’re trying, but failure will teach you that slacking off and coasting won’t lead to success. Failure teaches you exactly what went right and what went wrong and how to improve your chances for success the next time around.
Although the failure still stings, it’s far worse looking back knowing that you could have done more. This reaction allows you to move on without regret.
Without taking risks, there can be no innovation. Without failure, there can be no growth. And without failure, we might never get to where we need to go.
“sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it.”
“20 seconds of courage,” why can’t we have our own Berserker/Beast Mode? Rather than using your 20 seconds of courage or Beast Mode to go into battle, why not use those 20 seconds as a limited window of time in which you’re invincible and you can accomplish anything? You can be terrified before, and you can be terrified after, but during those 20 seconds in the middle you need to do what you need to do.
See that cute girl/guy at the coffee shop? Normally you’d say NOTHING to him/her and then go home and kick yourself for the rest of the afternoon thinking about what you should have said. Instead, give yourself 20 seconds of courage! Be scared before and scared after, but give yourself those 20 seconds to say: “Hey, I need to get back to my friend/work, but I saw you from across the room and think you’re really cute. Can I buy you a cup of coffee sometime?” Or, if that’s too forward, give them a drive-by compliment: “I just wanted to let you know that you have a great smile. ” You’ll never
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I want you to think of where the scarecrow is in your own life right now. Is it a mountain hike that you’ve told yourself you would finish but haven’t attempted yet? Is it traveling outside the country and testing your preconceived notions of other cultures? Is it trying to learn a new instrument, or making a new friend, or attending an event that scares you?
They tell us to avoid discomfort, to do the bare minimum. To stay at the comfy job or in the “comfortable” relationship that has already run its course. They keep us in our hobbit-holes, and within the Shire, rather than encouraging us to step beyond the scarecrow.
You need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable if you’re going to grow.
