

CHAMPION MINDSET  
Tactics to Maximize Potential, Execute Effectively, & Perform at Your Peak

_KNOCKOUT MEDIOCRITY!_

By Patrick King

Social Interaction Specialist and Conversation Coach  
www.PatrickKingConsulting.com

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Disregard Convention

Chapter 2. Pinpoint Weaknesses

Chapter 3. Control Your Narrative

Chapter 4. Correct Company

Chapter 5. Travel Through Time

Chapter 6. Action and Emotion

Chapter 7. Science of Sleep

Chapter 8. Marginal Gains

Chapter 9. Feign Doubt

Chapter 10. Take Ownership

Chapter 11. Secondary Skills

Chapter 12. Fundamental Needs

Chapter 13. Long road

Chapter 14. Words

Chapter 15. Outside the Box

Chapter 16. Ignore Ego

Chapter 17. Manage Energy
Introduction

Success is wholly subjective.

My own version of success took a while to find. As it turned out, it wasn't as a practicing lawyer, so my transition from practicing law to writing and coaching was not a difficult decision for me.

In fact, it was one of the easiest choices of my life. Imagine you're presented with two paths: one you thoroughly dislike, and one that is more appealing in every way, _and_ shows sign of being viable and sustainable. It's a no-brainer.

I've always said that great change usually follows a critical mass of discontent and unhappiness, and that was certainly the case for me.

The difficult part wasn't the actual transition – the hardest part was the initial act of proactively searching for a career outside of law, the only world I had known for the past six years, including law school. In other words, it was a frightening period when I looked outside of law and couldn't imagine myself being qualified for any of the positions my friends seemed to be excelling at.

Project management? What was that?

Business development? So... you mean... sales?

Engineering and programming? Yikes.

Every obstacle outside of law I wanted to climb seemed like Mount Everest. My mindset wasn't in a place of possibility. Instead, I was adhering far too closely to the _narrative_ that my life had taken thus far, and counting myself out prematurely.

A _narrative_ is a story we tell ourselves that is chock-full of excuses that enable a particular path of behavior. As you can imagine, it heavily influences our mindset and how we approach the world.

Narratives can be empowering or disempowering, and mine was decidedly disempowering. My narrative was full of selective storytelling based on assumptions about how pigeon-holed I was in law and how few, if any, marketable skills I thought I had. My mindset was one of avoiding failure rather than seizing opportunity.

The power of the narrative is that it is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, if you think you can't... then you definitely can't. Every obstacle is seen as the _coup de grace_ that will prove your narrative true. Your narrative enables and actually encourages inaction.

Clearly I needed to break my narrative or just find a new one. There were multiple sources of inspiration, but one of my biggest breakthroughs came at a dinner party at a friend's crowded loft.

He was a former corporate consultant turned skydiving instructor. He took the leap (pun intended) and found that he had quite a bit more to offer people than he thought, and he used consulting skills just about every day in his business.

Just like that, I knew my narrative and mindset changed overnight.

They went from someone who was eminently unemployable to someone who just needed to catch up on a few principles. Nothing hard work and a bit of time couldn't solve. That was a challenge I could look forward to conquering.

Once I rewrote my narrative and could approach life with that mindset, lasting change was not far away.

As I mentioned, success is wholly subjective. But what's objective is the mindset that will carry you there. Let's find your personal success and blaze trails together.

Chapter 1. Disregard Convention

All too often we define success in terms of what _other_ people want, or by what's been socialized into us since birth.

This should come as no surprise because while we were growing up, we were always looking for role models (consciously or not).

You were looking for a path that had already been blazed; a safe route about which you could receive guidance. This is mostly driven by our subconscious, which is why so many people struggle to find their own version of success – one that strays from the conventional definitions they've seen models of.

You automatically pick up on patterns that have been set in front of you by your parents, teachers, and environment. And then you work toward those ideals without stopping to consider whether they actually suit you.

That's been your definition of success and achievement for so long that you don't even think about it anymore.

Doctor, lawyer, engineer, dentist, white-collar professional. Why do so many people go to graduate school and pursue lines of work that make them wish they were anywhere but there when they've finally reached it? Was there any consideration for how they might feel _after_ they finally reached that definition of success?

Success should not be a fixed, defined term unless you define it with being happy, content, and being able to provide for yourself. Unfortunately, most people focus on the last part and mistake success for financial security and other measures of stability. I would assert that a certain type of job is only success if it checks those boxes of happiness and contentment for you.

Therefore, success can be attained in many (countless) ways, and is not a specific milestone or achievement. For some, this can be alarming...but for most, this should be incredibly empowering. If you set your aim to achieve happiness and contentedness rather than some financial milestone, imagine the different decisions you would make.

Your path is yours to choose. If you aren't careful with the path you choose and are pulled to one side by your conventional programming you are setting yourself up to be mediocre at best and an abject failure at worst.

That's what happens when you try to jam a square peg into a round hole. Now just imagine being a square peg your whole life and being told you have to conform to a round hole. It doesn't make sense, it won't create success, and it's _very_ uncomfortable. It will actually handicap your probability of a successful journey and cause you unnecessary unhappiness.

People who sleepwalk through their life paths can end up at that point easily if they aren't conscious about the paths they pursue. They might not quite be able to put their finger on what is out of alignment or making them unhappy, but it's usually an attempt at success that exposes their weaknesses and doesn't capitalize on their strengths. It's like a child who is a gifted poet trying to become a professional athlete because that's all he saw around him. It won't resonate and it won't create happiness.

The simple truth is what works for others may not work for you, and relying on testimonials and the power of numbers ("we all took this path and we're doing just dandy") is a scary proposition.

Your grandparents and their parents had a certain way of doing things. It worked for them and they seemed fine with it. That doesn't mean they were happy with it, or that they even had a choice to make. Additionally, that doesn't automatically mean that same method should or will work for you just because you share the same surname – even if that one method has worked for generations.

A friend of mine went traveling in India a few years ago and relayed this illuminating story to me: There was a woman who, every time she cooked fish, cut it into eight pieces. When the woman's daughter learned to cook, she also cut fish into eight pieces before cooking it and she taught her own daughter to do the same. Generations of women continued this tradition of cutting fish into eight pieces every time they cooked it because they believed it was an important aspect of dining. When the older woman was finally asked why she cut the fish into eight pieces, she replied simply that her old pot was too small so she always cut a whole fish into eight pieces to make it fit.

And _that_ spawned at least two generations of doing the same action, no matter the size of their pots! Are these the types of paths you want to follow in your life?

Just because something has "always been done that way" doesn't mean it is right or that there is a good reason to continue doing it. In this case, it was originally done for convenience. In future generations, the practice was continued out of a sense of duty or obligation. Once the necessity for a particular course of action no longer exists (i.e., you got a bigger pot), why would you follow that path blindly?

Regardless of the position you are in, it's worth questioning whether you're taking full advantage of your bigger pot or still behaving as if you have one that is too small to hold a whole fish.

We owe it to ourselves to question the patterns and logic that have been presented as _conventional_ in our situation.

The bottom line: if you want to be truly happy and successful, ultimately you will have to pursue happiness and success based on _your_ definitions and terms. But you first have to know what you want and what you're aiming for. This is going to be the biggest missing puzzle piece for most of us. If we've only been sold one path, how do we know what the others even are?

It's a story I've told often, but it is doubly important here. I spent three years in law school, passed the notoriously difficult California Bar Exam (the longest with the lowest passing rate in the United States), and practiced corporate law for two years. That was not a choice that was made in my own head or heart; instead, I was pressured by external forces, including family and friends, far before considering if it was a fit for my strengths and personality.

It wasn't. I was the ultimate square peg trying to shove myself into the triangular hole of law, and I wasn't sure why I wasn't happy until I made that realization. Everything I valued in my daily life was ignored in law, while most things I abhorred were priorities in law. It was the ultimate recipe for discontent.

The idea that you've been chasing the wrong goal, or even a ghost, can be a little disconcerting, but it's a necessary realization to create the life you want. What do you do when you eventually accept this proposal?

You take the next steps to determine what your actual path is. If you're a square peg, how do you find square holes that fit your strengths, ignore your weaknesses, and ultimately make you the happiest?

I've outlined a five-part plan for examining your life and coming away with the path for success and happiness that fits you like a glove. Six steps if you count shedding all the preconceived notions for your life that were programmed into you since birth!

One: be completely honest with yourself about what you want.

What's important to you in life and what do you want? If you want money, power, and prestige, that's completely fine to prioritize. There's nothing wrong with that – just be honest with yourself that that's what you want and don't worry about being judged by others.

Not all of us are Mother Teresa, altruists, or even like donating to charity. That's a choice based on our values, and you shouldn't compromise your values.

The social ideal for many people may be completely repulsive to others, but that's fine because no one else is going to be living your life and walking in your shoes, so why would you abide by their standards?

What priorities do you place in life that others might judge? You have to separate the judgment placed by others from things that truly matter to you. It's perfectly okay to pursue things that make sense and appeal to _you_. This is another aspect of social and external pressures that shapes us despite of what we might actually aspire to. For the purposes of this step, just ask what you would do if you weren't afraid of what others would say.

Two: think about the role models you look up to.

Who are the people you look up to, and what do they have in common with each other as far as their lifestyles, impact, type of work, world view, how they deal with problems, or work-life balance? What are their defining characteristics you admire and how do those translate into their life and values?

It doesn't matter if they are celebrities, business moguls, teachers, parents, or even friends. What matters is not the type of model you have, but the reasons you look up to them. There's no right or wrong answer here.

Write these people and characteristics all down and try to itemize exactly what you admire about them. You will probably be surprised to find common themes. Admiring a life of travel, a life of solitude, or even a life of aggression and politics is fine. Again, honesty is the priority because you are designing life for only one person – you.

If you idolize Sir Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, that's fine. But you have to get more specific as to _what_ you idolize, want to emulate, and feel jealous over. Is it his freedom? His wealth? His personal island? His business success? His glorious, flowing locks of platinum hair? The fact that he was knighted into a Sir? The more specific the better, and going through this process with a few role models will paint a comprehensive picture of what you want.

This exercise will help you define exactly what success is for you by spotting it in others. We have only been exposed to certain paths, so the simple act of increased exposure to different mindsets can be revelatory. Once you have those elements in place, you can take action by seeking them directly.

Three: what feels good to you?

This involves dissecting your current status quo.

Which parts of your daily life activities do you enjoy and feel invigorated by? Which parts give you a sense of "flow" where things are easy even though you're being challenged? Which of your daily activities trigger your personal sense of curiosity and open your mind to tremendous possibilities? What do you look forward to each day, no matter how insignificant or miniscule? What do you do to unwind, or for a break, when you are stressed?

For example, does washing your car feel like the best part of your day, or does going surfing? What about organizing your calendar or making phone calls? These all speak to very different types of interests, engagement, and strengths.

Put simply, what are the activities that you do on any given day that make time fly by? Regardless of the type of work you do, there will always be at least one activity that puts you in a state of flow where you are performing at peak levels of curiosity, engagement, and productivity. Dissect your daily life to identify those activities. Again, listing these out will paint a picture of what you want and like.

In the same vein, isolate parts of your life that put you into a state of depression, anger, annoyance, or any other negative emotion. These are things you should be filtering for and avoiding.

Four: consider the bargains you would make.

You've got a lot going on in your life, not all of them negative. In fact, some of them very positive. For this step, ask yourself which of the positive aspects you would gladly and willingly sacrifice for increased happiness.

If a fairy dropped from the sky and offered you a chance to bargain a positive for more happiness, what would you trade? For example, this is where you might say something like, "I would gladly earn much less if I could spend more time with my children."

A good salary is obviously a positive, but if you would bargain it for something else, then it's clearly not a top priority for you. This step is about identifying what really matters beyond objective positives, which might not actually matter to you at all.

For example, "I would gladly live in a tiny apartment if I could be much loser to the beach."

There are many kinds of success, but not all of them will be things that you care about or even want in the first place. If, off the top of your head, you can name a few that you would sacrifice you'll know with even more accuracy what you should be searching and striving for.

Five: start with small action.

Don't just sit in your room quietly thinking about what success is to you. Now that you've broadly identified the kind of success and happiness you seek, you need to act on it. It won't miraculously come to you. In fact, you will have to go out and seize it proactively.

If success were simply something you thought about, there would be a lot more successful people walking on this planet. Unfortunately, the world doesn't care about what you're thinking. It can't read your mind and it doesn't hear your intentions and dreams. It cares only about what you _do_ and your action. It's crucial to take action on the path you have selected for yourself.

You want a life that allows you freedom in your schedule and involves working with flowers? You will not magically sprout (pun intended) a career involving flowers while still at your day job. For example:

Do you personally know anyone that works with flowers, or can your friends introduce you to anyone in the industry?

What local companies work with flowers in your area?

What will research turn up about local companies where you can help in your spare time?

What do you know about flowers, anyway? Can you take gardening classes or volunteer at a local greenhouse?

Is anyone aware that you like flowers? Can you start writing about it or submitting to websites and magazines?

Do you know where flower fiends spend their time online? Find out and immerse yourself.

Is there a flower critic you admire? Can you find their contact and leave them a positive note?

Be resourceful with your action. Success is a reality that needs to be acted on.

Chapter 2. Pinpoint Weaknesses to Find Strengths

Just as we all have winding paths to our own brand of success; we all have our own combination of strengths and weaknesses that only we possess.

When I was a lawyer, a document draft that would routinely take me three hours sometimes would take someone else just thirty minutes, but a business plan would be the opposite. I could write and analyze those in a fraction of the time that other lawyers could. It didn't mean I was better or worse than the other lawyers in my firm, it just meant that we had different strengths and weaknesses.

It also begs the question – why not avoid what inherently takes you three hours and focus on what inherently takes you thirty minutes?

Plainly put, the fastest path to success is to focus on what works for you. This also means carefully discovering your weaknesses. Not only that, it's the easiest path because it capitalizes on what comes naturally to you as a result of your core strengths and competencies.

This chapter presents a somewhat unusual proposal: discover what your weaknesses are as opposed to your strengths.

Everyone has strengths, and you already (mostly) know what they are. You can even be mild and categorize a strength as something you are above-average at, or simply better at than most of your friends. Another way I like to characterize this is: if you were to read the top three books and five articles on a topic and not learn anything you didn't already know, consider that a strength for you!

Everyone has at least a couple of strengths, and they can be relatively apparent as the gateway to the success and happiness that you are looking for.

A broad way to look at your strengths is to look at what you currently have, what brought you there, and what makes you excel at it. It's the special sauce behind the current successes you already enjoy. These aren't a mystery to you, and you can, at worst, ask your friends what your strengths are because they can give positive feedback.

For example, my special sauce would probably be related to my social and conversational skills. I love people and at times have an insatiable curiosity, but I also identify more as an introvert so I love alone time to process and write. Your special sauce is a spotlight to the success path you should travel.

It's important to know your strengths, but even more important to know the weaknesses that are keeping you from the level of success you desire. You don't know what you don't know, and your weaknesses represent blind spots that represent the reasons you haven't been promoted, or dread going to work each morning.

It can be unpleasant to look at our weaknesses straight in the eye, but sometimes you just have to call a spade a spade – for your life's sake.

Properly managing our weaknesses keeps us from wasting our time engaging in activities we're not good at and don't make an impact in. It pays to know what you're bad at so you don't waste time continuing to do it, or trying to figure it out.

Knowing your weakness also provides an opportunity for others – people with the very strengths you are missing – to contribute to your life. You become aware of your need for allies, relationships, and information. You start looking at people based on whether they have your missing components and you team up with them. It pushes you to collaborate and create relationships that can be mutually beneficial.

Finally, you need to be aware of your weaknesses because knowing them will keep you from frustrating yourself and others. The more frustrated you get, the less effective you are. At some point that's going to affect the people around you on both a functional and emotional level.

In this chapter we've talked about the importance of knowing your weaknesses as opposed to knowing your strengths because they represent blind spots that keep you from ascending to where you want.

To make sure your strengths can be properly used, you need to identify the weak links in your chain. At the very least, you may be able to neutralize them so they don't create greater problems, and at best, you can completely offset them so you come out ahead.

How do you actually determine your weaknesses so you can deal with them proactively?

Don't try to articulate your weaknesses as if you are answering an interview question. That's ineffective because it is only your self-perception, which is by definition a blind spot. Instead, examine your daily actions to determine your weaknesses.

The first method of finding your weaknesses is to ask yourself what you avoid on a daily basis.

What do you procrastinate on, postpone, or attempt to delegate to others? What washes you with a feeling of dread when you see it on your calendar, and what are the things that take you twice as long as they should because you procrastinate so much? About what do often say, "I can do that...tomorrow."?

Isolating the tasks you avoid will allow you to think about the reasons you avoid them and articulate that into a weakness. If you find that you tend to avoid coordination or filling in the details on forms and mailing them, it could signal that you tend to enjoy big picture thinking and your weakness is execution.

If you hate it and avoid it, it might as well be a weakness even if you have an innate talent for it.

You can find the same kind of pattern when you look at what you avoid with your checkbook. If you spend a disproportionate amount of money on taking care of something, or making sure that you don't have to deal with it, there's your weakness. Your checkbook represents when you'd rather spend money than have to actually do something.

The second method of discovering your weaknesses is to look for patterns of feedback from other people.

Your friends and family might be tempted to sugarcoat any negative feedback they have for you, so it is especially helpful to seek feedback from people who don't hold back or who are paid to evaluate you in a work setting or something similar.

You should attempt to solicit negative feedback about the following three areas. 1) Traits – this concerns your perception of things. 2) Tendencies - this is how you react to things. 3) Habits – your natural inclination toward things. These mean different things to different people and will present you with a full range of your abilities or lack thereof.

The third method to determining weaknesses is to examine your past personal failures.

Failure is the best teacher you'll ever have because it will never lie to you. It will ruthlessly tell you that you were just not good enough or had the wrong approach. And often failure will tell you exactly why.

The problem with success is that there are so many parts to it that you don't know which of them actually contributed to things working out. But with failure, it's easier to do a postmortem and identify the particular weak link that led to the fiasco or outright disaster. Upon examining your past personal failures, are there common threads that might imply underlying weaknesses?

Instead of trying to bury past failure experiences in the quicksand of memory, actively fish them out. They might be mortifying, but they can teach you quite a bit about what you need to improve.

People typically fail in predictable ways because there's always at least one reason that stands head-and-shoulders above others and it's typically related to a trait. This reason contributed in a major way to the failure. So roll up your sleeves, emotionally speaking, and dig deep in your memory banks for past failures because they hold the key to your breaking free from the bondage of the past.

The final method in determining your weaknesses is to think about what you're bad at.

We often (almost always) like things that we are good at and despise the things we are poor at. Sort out what in your daily life, hobbies, or passions you are good at and enjoy. What remains are things you are bad or neutral at.

What pops out to you about the second group – what commonalities are there, and what information can you glean from it?

The way to get maximum value from this exercise is to be as thorough as possible. Don't leave anything out or feel embarrassed. Remember, nobody is looking over your shoulder. The more honest you are with yourself, the higher the likelihood that this exercise will point a spotlight to the weaknesses you need to proactively deal with.

Determining your weaknesses will put you firmly on a path toward success, or at the very least, a path not pointed toward failure.

The way to best capitalize on this knowledge is to place your strengths and weaknesses into the context of your goals. In other words, what is your overall goal and definition of success, and how do your strengths and weaknesses fit that goal?

For example, your goal is to be a great salesman – what traits of yours will be strengths or weaknesses in that context? How can you work on emphasizing your strengths and improving your weaknesses? Then ask yourself if your goal is actually a reachable goal given your strengths and weaknesses.

If I prefer to avoid phone calls and conflict, that's a huge weakness as a salesman. Is it possible to find a way around that if I want to be a successful salesman? What strengths do I have that might be able to neutralize those rather large weaknesses?

Knowing yourself inside and out and conducting periodic inventories will set you firmly onto the path to success.

Chapter 3. Control Your Narrative

Many of us live inside self-created narratives that excuse us of responsibility.

I'll give you an example that I come across often.

Many people hate having to interact with others and make small talk because it makes them feel as if greater goals are being shoved to the side while they engage in meaningless niceties. They get to a point where they doggedly avoid social obligations and just throw themselves into their work. They can't imagine how people who socialize all the time ever get anything done.

How does this narrative serve them? It gives them an excuse to be free of social responsibilities if they have difficulties connecting with others and engaging in small talk.

It lets them feel guilt-free and justified because they choose to focus on working; it gives them validation in not having to change their behavior.

Narratives

We create excuses and defense mechanisms, often subconsciously, to reduce our level of responsibility when things don't go our way. We entertain all sorts of stories and believe all sorts of narratives to exempt us from taking action or responsibility.

Ask yourself why some people succeed and others do not in the same circumstances.

A common thread among successful people is their ability to overcome the defense mechanisms and narratives that excused them from responsibility. Instead of guarding their sense of self and assiduously clinging to their protective narrative, they've managed to short-circuit their egos and face reality.

They are free to admit failure or inadequacy. This realization is necessary to getting to "What am I going to do about it now?" as opposed to "The system was rigged and there was nothing I could do about it."

It can be scary, but acknowledging responsibility is the first step in improving a situation.

Don't get me wrong, in many contexts these defense mechanisms need to be there. They exist because it would be emotionally devastating to assume responsibility for every little negative aspect of your life. They keep us sane and balanced. But you need to be mindful of how they can detract from your quest for success.

Our personal narratives dictate what we can and cannot do. We have narratives about why we do certain things and why we don't do others. These help provide order and boundaries in our lives.

The problem arises when we choose to interpret these narratives in such a way that they begin functioning as invisible prisons. Whether we can actually do something or not takes a back seat to what our narrative has convinced us we cannot do. Our narratives control our focus, perceptions, and the way in which we feel and act. They are self-limiting beliefs.

Narratives have power because they give us something to believe. If we pick the wrong ones, we might end up constantly undermining ourselves.

When a person succeeds, it's because they've chosen the correct or best strategy and execution. When they fail, it's because the strategy or execution was wrong. It's going to be very difficult for a person to know the difference if their narrative doesn't address the strategy and instead blames underlying circumstances.

When I was a personal trainer, it was always evident who was controlled by their self-limiting narrative and who was not. The ones who lost weight were not.

People lose weight when they have a strategy of exercise and diet; they fail to lose weight when their narrative excuses them from executing good strategy. You know the kind of personal narrative I'm talking about. "I'm big-boned and just carry weight more readily than others." Or, "It's my metabolism; no matter what I eat I can't lose weight."

The ones who lost weight and kept it off owned their responsibility and didn't use a narrative as an excuse not to get results. They actively changed their narratives to something like, "The right exercise and diet _will_ work. I just have to stick to it. I won't get to eat everything I want, and that will be difficult, but I'm going to lose twenty pounds this year. It's going to happen."

With a disempowering narrative as your core belief system, you're never going to find a strategy because it will allow you to feel okay without changing.

In fact, the right strategy will not even be a possibility because it doesn't fit your personal narrative. The question won't be about finding good strategies, it will be about constructing a convoluted narrative to protect your ego. Your story may be true, but that's not the reason you can't have the life you want.

Many of us have truly horrific experiences. For example, you might have had a bad breakup that emotionally damaged you many years ago. That may have affected you greatly, but you cannot use it forever as a reason not to find the passionate, loving, and fulfilling relationship you deserve.

If you do, you've just created a disempowering story that sucks your control out of a situation and places blame elsewhere. For many, these stories are a source of comfort, but they are ultimately limiting.

Limiting narratives are selective storytelling.

We don't even get to the point where we maximize our efforts and strategy because we're afraid we will fail. We just focus on the story that comforts us and excuses our failures. The problem is this kind of comfort prevents us from taking action because we are afraid of losing the security of having an excuse.

The first step to controlling your narrative is to stop telling it in a selective way. Look at the full range of elements in the story with objective and non-judgmental eyes.

Are you actually failing at losing weight because you are big-boned or have a poor metabolism? Or are you failing because you have impulse control problems and are not really doing what you need to do? And harder, are you unwilling to admit that because if you do, you'll be acknowledging that the failure is your own?

What details are you leaving out of the story that you tell yourself?

When you control your narrative, not only will you be telling the story in a non-selective way, you will also not run the facts through a filter that makes you look good. You can decide this process is too painful, or you can recognize how it will work to your advantage.

You can either create an empowering story that places you firmly in the driver's seat _despite_ failure, or a disempowering story that takes control (and blame) away from you and gives you an excuse for failure – or keeps you from even trying and therefore safeguards you from failure.

When you share your personal narratives with others, you will be faced with two types of people.

The first type of person cuts through your BS and tells you that your story is disempowering and a cover-up. On an intellectual, logical, and emotional level, what you are saying is invalid to them. They won't tell you what you want to hear. These people may seem unpleasant at first, and it may even seem as if they are intentionally discouraging you.

In reality, they're doing you a big favor. You might feel deep pain, but that's a sign that they've hit something that you are trying to hide. They are looking at your story with clear and non-emotional eyes and pushing you to make a breakthrough.

The other type of person will enable your disempowering story by agreeing with you. They'll agree that it's everybody else's problem but yours, you're a victim, and you caught an unlucky break. Sometimes we are so clever that we can convince people to believe us. That's soothing in the moment, but it is precisely what will hold you back from any kind of success or breakthrough in your life. The more excuses you give yourself, the more helpless you will feel in the world, and the harder it will be for you to make your mark.

It may be comforting when your best friend is telling you that it's your ex's fault, but it doesn't do you much good if it was indeed your fault. Be aware of well-intentioned enablers.

If you look at prior experiences and see only narratives and justifications that make you responsibility-free, you should be alarmed. Pay attention to how frequently you make certain excuses or think of certain narratives. They are red flags and wake up calls at the same time.

There are common stories that people constantly use to alleviate personal responsibility. You've probably used some of them yourself.

" _I failed because I didn't have time. I was too busy!"_

Translation: You didn't care enough.

This isn't a simple failure in time management. You're not prioritizing correctly. If you're constantly running out of time, then you're not operating with a sense of urgency to achieve real success in your life. You're not focused. You constantly reap the same mediocre results until you finally choose to care enough to prioritize. You can't claim 100% of the output if you only give 30% of the input.

" _I failed because I didn't try or care."_

Translation: You cared quite a bit, but intentionally didn't act because by not trying you avoided the possibility of failure.

" _I failed because I didn't know where to start."_

Translation: You're lazy. You don't want to do the actual work and would rather spin your wheels endlessly. You don't want to put in any work unless you have a 100% chance of success, which is essentially impossible. You want the easy way and don't want to work hard toward success. You want someone to hold your hand.

" _I'm too ____ for this."_

Translation: You don't think you can do it and you're afraid to try.

" _I have to wait until ___ happens."_

Translation: All accountability and responsibility now belongs to whatever you're waiting for. Until that necessary condition appears, you're not going to take action or even feel accountable. You present that you _would_ act, but you lack the prerequisites so you obviously won't act.

If you use this excuse, there will never be a point in in your life when all conditions are perfect enough for you to take action. The reason you keep relying on the excuse that the time isn't right or that things haven't aligned just so is you don't really want the responsibility of setting yourself up for possible failure. Is your fear of failure eclipsing all the rewards you could have if you tried and succeeded?

Visualize all the rewards you could possibly gain from a particular goal. I need you to see them with your mind's eye, hear them, taste them, smell them, touch them, _live_ them. Make them as palpable and tangible as possible. Is your fear of failure really worth sacrificing the chance at the rewards you're currently imagining?

The clearer you are with your imagined rewards, the more obvious it will become to you that you're just giving yourself excuses. And as you dig through these excuses, they become smaller and less important. Their hold on you becomes less and less powerful.

What insecurities are you trying to cover with your narrative?

Chapter 4. Keep the Correct Company

Birds of a feather flock together.

This isn't going to be a chapter on avian migration patterns.

It's commentary on how we instinctually find familiarity comforting, and how we are often stronger because of the people that surround us.

More than anything, the people around you will be the key to your success. They give context to your world and they can encourage and motivate you to great heights, or enable your negative thoughts and lead you down a tunnel of discouragement and despair. Just as you pick up the mannerisms or speech patterns of those you spend a lot of time with, you also pick up their mindsets towards life.

Beyond your immediate family, your external influences are completely your choice. It behooves you to keep the kind of company that can skyrocket you to success and achievement.

There is an old saying, "You are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with."

What exactly does this mean?

It's a process of inevitable osmosis. The more time you spend with somebody, the more their negativity or positivity will seep into your consciousness. You will gain their knowledge, mindset, ingenuity, and sense of gratitude. You will also gain their sense of entitlement, poor work ethic, negative narrative, and defense mechanisms. It goes both ways.

When you can surround yourself with the right people, they will push you to new heights and encourage you to achieve more.

You will draw on their views and habits. You will adopt their stances and approaches toward achievement and success. You might have questions about your potential, but that might be a foregone conclusion to the people around you. These behaviors will become so normal to you that you will truly believe that positivity is limitless and achievement and reaching your potential are inevitable.

It can be as simple as being told "You can do it!" or seeing an example of success that makes you feel that you can indeed do it. These are people who tell you to push forward. These are people who tell you that you can achieve success and that you have what it takes. At the very least, make sure to avoid those who don't have the same ambitions as you, don't inspire you, or have a tendency to discourage and naysay you.

You have to be very careful about who you hang out with because their level of success is contagious.

Of course, the right people around you can be much more than a source of encouragement and inspiration. They can also serve as sources for skill acquisition and knowledge so that you get better at developing the tools and skills you need for whatever your goal is.

Imagine that you are attempting to be a professional soccer player. Obviously, you will need to hone your skills to compete against better and better players. What if you only played soccer with your family? You might be the best in your family, but the five family members that surround you in a backyard soccer game won't be that helpful or teach you anything.

Ideally you should surround yourself with five professional soccer players, but more realistically, you just have to find players that are better than you are so you can keep improving. As you play with them, you will learn their skills, pick up their tricks, and learn exactly what it takes to be a successful soccer player. Their success and skills will rub off on you. If you can eventually surround yourself with five professional players, your skill level should rise considerably!

And of course, you should avoid those who don't prioritize soccer and would pressure you to skip practice to go play video games.

Keeping the correct company also has an unpleasant necessity.

You need to know when to _make the cut_. If somebody is a constant drain on you, or is a negative person, you need to cut him or her out of your life, or at least put them into quarantine. If you are looking to become more successful, you need to manage the negative forces in your life. These people can take the form of any friendship, co-worker, and even your significant other.

A significant part of surrounding yourself with the correct company is finding people who you look up to that you can consider a mentor. There might be more than one person; think of them as your personal board of directors, there to guide and advise you when you need.

A mentor is someone who is farther along your path than you are, and who can give you constructive feedback and honest praise.

They can be like personal lighthouses. Your path can appear very dark and impossible to navigate, so having someone who knows the way can be invaluable. This goes for all aspects in life – business, love, and life.

The idea of deliberately seeking mentors for specific aspects of life might be foreign, even though seeking someone more knowledgeable to ask for guidance is completely natural. They can even be friends of yours that have had a wealth more experience than you. Why attempt to reinvent the wheel when you can receive highly specialized advice and strategies from someone who is already rolling along on four wheels?

For example, if you are primarily looking for business networking success, find a networking mentor instead of a general business mentor who might walk you through accounting processes and other topics that may not be as relevant to you.

Potential mentors are all around you.

You only need to look at people who are only a few steps ahead of you in the game. They will be the best at teaching because they are not that far removed from the struggles you're currently facing. And, you can envision their level as reachable instead of putting them on a pedestal that you can't climb. One of the most common mistakes people make when seeking a mentor is selecting someone who is at the very top of their industry.

For example, if you're looking for a management mentor, it doesn't make much sense to have Jack Welch, ex-CEO of General Electric, be your mentor. His advice to you just wouldn't be useful or relatable because, let's face it, you aren't there (yet). Initially, most of us need advice that is a combination of execution, encouragement, and the nitty-gritty day-to-day operations rather than overarching business principles for massive wealth.

It's inevitable that you will exhaust your immediate circle for mentors quickly, so the question is how do you find a mentor, and how do you create that relationship with someone that you don't already know?

The number one thing you _shouldn't_ do is approach them and ask them to be your mentor. That is an approach that is 100% selfish on your part; you are asking them to take on the burden of helping you for essentially nothing in return other than your gratitude.

High-value people get asked for things every single day, so separate yourself from the pack by providing value to them and not asking for anything in return.

Your approach must be that of an interested admirer who wants to learn more about them and the subject of the expertise. Aim to start a friendship first and everything else will flow naturally on the strength of that relationship.

It's a far bigger turn off to ask for something right off the bat, or appear to cloak yourself in altruism under an ulterior motive. Undoubtedly the biggest hurdle for most people is how to reach out to potential mentors effectively.

As I mentioned before, the best approach is to compliment them in a personal way and then start a conversation by asking a question about their expertise. Get get a reply and get on their radar. Make it as easy as possible for them to reply.

Don't overload them with information or requests – they have limited time. Don't put them on the spot. Don't try to call them to action or some sort of commitment. You also have to remember that their inboxes are probably flooded; so you need to keep things short and sweet. Keep it light at first. They'll respond well to flattery and a question that's easy for them to answer.

Hey Todd,

I just wanted to drop a note and say that I thought your stance in your latest Businessweek article was intriguing. I'm pretty researched in the topic and hadn't taken that train of thought before.

Do you find that such positions are indicative of a western upbringing?

Keep up the great work,

Patrick

The above email contains all the elements that you need, no more, no less. If they don't respond, simply send another email two weeks later based on something else they did relatively recently.

The secret is the process of following up. If they reply to you, it's important to reply with increased excitement and curiosity about the subject matter. Ask questions, provide sources and articles, and eventually offer them insight they haven't thought of before. It's also extremely important to make it clear that you don't want anything from them, that you're not trying to sell them on something, and that you're not trying to be a time vampire.

At that point, you should feel comfortable asking them for advice pertaining to your personal situation, or even to connect more intimately over the phone or Skype.

Finding superstar mentors can be a longer process, but it's one that will pay dividends for years to come. You probably won't ever have to cement a formal mentor-mentee relationship if all goes well.

Chapter 5. Travel Through Time

As much as we want, success never happens overnight.

Success isn't like a bag of popcorn that you can easily buy, take home, and pop to perfection in the microwave. Success in the real world resembles an Eastern European stew you need to simmer overnight, incrementally adding ingredients, and then correct after constant taste testing.

If you are trying to learn a new skill or make headway to a goal, it may seem that the days blur together without any progress, but that's the beauty of traveling through time and taking a long view of success.

Measuring your success and progress on a short-term scale does no one any favors and is ultimately damaging and discouraging. If you wanted to lose weight, would you celebrate and mourn every morning and night when you stood on the scale? No, because your weight will fluctuate every day depending on the day's successes and failures. You are looking at too small a scale to account for very natural fluctuations.

When you look at your weight over the course of every week or months, that's when you begin to see real trends and progress. You have to think long-term with your goals. Understand that they take time and require patience. But it's that patience and ability to delay gratification that is key to success.

The secret to making this manageable and not being overwhelmed is to _travel through time_. First arrive at your big picture goals far in the future, then work backward and articulate smaller milestones that will be necessary to accomplish your big picture goal.

Then, what needs to happen for you to achieve those smaller milestones? Take those sub goals and plug them into your timeline. You can continue to break down the milestones and achievements you need to a weekly and even daily level. You will be able to determine what is necessary to achieve that big picture goal, when all you did was travel into the future and work backwards.

It also makes larger goals easier to tackle because it's a matter of small milestones that will eventually contribute to the overall mountain of a goal.

The second way to travel through time is to abide by the 10/10/10 Rule.

The 10/10/10 Rule is very straightforward. When you are at a fork in the road, ask yourself how will you feel about the choice you make: 10 minutes from now, 10 days from now, and 10 months from now? Devote some time to explore the consequences in each scenario.

The 10/10/10 Rule begs you to travel forward in time and ask your future self about the decisions and approaches you are making today. How do they play out and what ripple effects will they have? The Rule lays out consequences and aftereffects in a very real and tangible manner, and forces you to step back from your immediate emotion or impulse about a course of action or decision. It creates a mindset in which you articulate your short and long-term goals and actively move toward them.

The 10/10/10 Rule impacts your range of choices because things that may seem important or easy to do now might not lead to the small or big goals you want for the future. They might actually lead nowhere and they might just be wasting your time.

When you apply the 10/10/10 Rule, you train your mind to look at long-term implications. And just as important, you train your mind to look at your options and see whether they will advance you toward achieving your big goals. At the very least, you get a feel for the overall impact of the choice in front of you and whether it furthers your ultimate success or not.

The good news is that the 10/10/10 Rule can be applied to almost any option in front of you. It can impact the things you eat, the clothes you buy, the jobs you apply for, the people you spend time with, and obviously the business opportunities you wish to take advantage of.

This exercise highlights what is truly important and what is not so consequential. Remove impulse and temptation from your life and let discipline propel you forward.

The 10/10/10 Rule also teaches delayed gratification. You might feel great about a decision in 10 minutes, but you might feel terrible about it in 10 days.

Most people don't believe in delayed gratification – they don't feel as if they are promised anything beyond what is present, so they take what is offered immediately. It comes from a scarcity mindset and not being sure about the future. But there is a strong connection between your ability to delay gratification and achieve great success and happiness in life.

The things worth doing and that bring tremendous rewards require a lot of sacrifice, work, and effort _right now_. They don't yield overnight results, or in some cases, any results. In many cases, you have to keep at something for several years before you attain a reward on your investment of time and effort.

The ability to delay gratification is another way of sticking to long-term planning and thinking big. You need to delay gratification and resist temptation in every form that threatens to detract you from your overarching goals. This might be for weeks or even years, but you delay it because you are focused on the overall end goal.

It might seem like a contradiction in terms, but you need to balance planning for the future while staying squarely in the present.

Being too narrowly focused on the big picture can lead to ignoring all the doors and alternative paths you have available that you should take advantage of. Developing tunnel vision and staying in the present can be dangerous if you ignore things that are massively beneficial in the long run but not at the moment, or that might have unintended massive benefits.

In many cases, there will be doors that will lead to even better rewards than the success you initially set your mind to. That's the beauty of embarking on a journey – the end point may change, but the journey will have taught you greatly.

The answer is to stay in the present and remain flexible, and constantly check with your long-term goals to see if you have better options on the table or if circumstances have changed.

Thinking long-term also prepares you for uncertainty and allows you to plan thoroughly through multiple scenarios. You can have the best laid plan possible but if you don't make room for contingencies, chances are you're just planning to fail because certain things might pop out that make your plan unattainable or that drag out the timeline when there are much better alternatives available to you.

If all else fails, try to remove all temptation from your path in the manner of a Ulysses contract. This is traveling through time at its best.

In the book _Ulysses_ by James Joyce, a re-imagining of Homer's _Odyssey_ , Ulysses' ship sailed close to an island that seemed to be populated by beautiful women singing songs. These women were known as sirens.

Ulysses had the foresight to determine that the beautiful women were singing songs to seduce the men into sailing straight toward them, which would cause their ships to crash on the sharp rocks. It was all a trap.

What Ulysses did was plug his crew's ears with cotton and tie them to the mast and rails of the ship to resist the inevitable temptation.

A so-called Ulysses contract is planning and accounting for short-term temptations and safeguarding against them before their melody actually reaches you. This keeps you firmly on the path to your long-term goals.

For some, this will mean simply not buying junk food when they are trying to diet. For others, this means automatically moving a large part of your paycheck into a savings account you can't easily get to. And yet for others, this means only carrying around enough cash for a certain amount of food during the day.

What about blocking websites on your computer during work hours to keep productivity high, or deleting phone numbers of particularly negative people in your life? You can proactively combat what you know to be detrimental in your life so you don't even have to grapple with willpower.

Never ever let short-term goals disrupt your attempts at working towards your long-term goals.

Chapter 6. Become Action and Emotion-Oriented

By now you've probably figured out that success values action over almost all else.

Some people are planners, but for several reasons I like to err on the side of action. Planning is positive, but can also lead to analysis paralysis and the need for perfectionism, which ultimately creates an excuse for things to remain just the way they are.

It was too complicated, you didn't know where to start, and you were just overwhelmed, so you called it a night.

Sometimes that's how it feels to write a book. When I first started writing longer pieces, and eventually books, I outlined heavily. I knew what each paragraph would include, and what each subsequent point was and how it would be proved.

I wrote slowly, mechanically, and predictably. It was as if the outline stole my creativity, and I felt stifled having to follow it. Not to mention, I would spend weeks outlining vague thoughts instead of actually fleshing them out.

Now I barely outline. I may not know exactly where I want to go with a chapter or principle, but as soon as I start typing, everything falls into place and all my instincts and thoughts take over. It just takes a little bit of actual writing and getting into the groove to figure out what I want to say.

Getting into the nitty-gritty will often make your next steps obvious. Most of the time, you only know where you're headed after you start, and all that planning goes out the window.

So while smart planning is an essential aspect of any path to success, I want to call it slightly overrated in place of simple action. If people spent less time on theory and calculating every contingency and just took that first step, they would break their inertia and fear of the unknown and get something accomplished.

The best way to manage this dichotomy is simple: become action-oriented in your planning. When you break your plans down into their simplest terms, you only need two things: an outcome you are aiming for and the specific actions needed to get you there. If you don't have a clear view of these two components, you're essentially winging it. It won't work for most people most of the time.

The first part is not a challenge. You can easily name the outcome you want, especially if you try the exercises from earlier in the book. Large house, constant travels, big promotion, new car. The second part is where the vast majority of people fail. How can you make your planning more action-oriented?

I'm going to borrow from Tony Robbins's Rapid Planning Method (RPM) which will help you establish a clear path for making your goals into reality. It provides a framework to start tackling any goal or problem. It's simple but will rapidly take you to clear and pointed action. There are three stages.

First, figure out the exact specific results you want. Be as specific as possible. What does success look like? Try to paint as complete a mental picture as you can, down to what you own and where you are.

Second, determine the purpose those goals achieve, and the emotions that you associate them with. If you want to live in a mansion, what emotions does that evoke? What goes through the mind of someone who enjoys the success you are aiming for? Conversely, what goals make you feel secure, accomplished, happy, and successful?

Third, what do you need to do to get from point A (your current point) to point B (whatever you articulated in step one)? What is each tiny step that needs to occur to achieve that ultimate result?

For example, if your plan is to live in a mansion, you obviously need the money to pay for it. Walk backward from there. How do you come up with the money? How many years do you give yourself to come up with the money for that down payment? What are the possible options you have in front of you to get that amount of money together?

Do you need to get another job? Do you need to get several promotions? Do you need to invest? Do you need to start side businesses? What might you sacrifice for your overarching goal? And just as important, what options do you completely ignore and shut out so you can focus on that goal?

In the RPM, you start with the end result and work backward. You create positive associations and emotional urgency when you think clearly about what you want to achieve. It's an additional layer of motivation that most of us never tap, and yet ironically it's the most powerful of all – hence the name of the chapter, emotion-oriented.

If your goal is a new car, it's not just a new car. It's a feeling of security, safety, accomplishment, and fulfillment. By going through this simple exercise, you gain clarity on what will become multiple motivators for yourself – you realize what you're really seeking may not even be a new car; it's actually the feeling of security and fulfillment. Knowing the end goal and associating it with emotions is crucial.

Thinking about success is mostly a cerebral process, and the RPM aligns your emotional state with your mental state and gives you a compelling _why_ for your goals.

If you are so emotionally engaged that your mind is open to picking apart the details to get to where you need to go, the chances of your succeeding are much higher because all the details are accounted for.

For example, you want to lose weight. Here's how RPM plays out. First, you focus on the result: you want lose a certain number of pounds. Specifically, you want to lose twenty pounds in the next four months.

Second, you get into the purpose. What is the purpose? You want to do it to raise your self-esteem and get more dates with the opposite sex. You want to look better when you're naked and feel less insecure about your looks. You want to be healthier. Do you see how this works? You get into a certain emotional state and realize your current deficiencies and how much happier you would be if you reached this goal.

Third, the action plan then becomes clear. Since you're working to get over your insecurity, you are operating under a tremendous amount of emotional intensity. Now you can decide to eat more vegetables, skip the donuts, workout twice a week, go on walks three times a week, and cut down on your carbs.

The final step is to write all this down on a piece of paper and tape it in a location that you'll see every morning so you can have a daily reminder of where you are and how you're getting somewhere else.

RPM works in conjunction with another success framework called SMART goals.

Following the fashion of this chapter, SMART is of course an acronym. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound.

S – Specific. Instead of saying, "I want to lose weight," be as specific as possible. Say, "I want to lose 15 pounds and look good in my favorite jeans." This makes your goal real because you've placed a number on it and a specific benefit; it's no longer a vague concept.

M – Measurable. You have to have means for determining whether you're achieving incremental success or not. With weight loss, this is pretty straightforward. You only need to step on a scale to see whether you're losing weight or not. For other goals, you need to have an objective way of measuring your progress and progress beyond the percentage that you are currently at.

You can't rely on subjective judgment here or else you will default to the path of least resistance.

A – Attainable. When you're setting your goals, it must be clear that at some point in time they can happen. A smart goal is not something that _might possibly_ happen in the future if many other factors arrive. No, there has to be a high likelihood that if you control the things you can control, the results are attainable. This keeps you accountable because you won't be able to blame anything external – you will have sole responsibility for whether you attain your goal.

R – Relevance. This speaks to the relevance of your overarching goals. What is the point of losing 15 pounds? Is it tied to a greater goal? Is it tied to higher self-esteem? Is it tied to improving your looks? There has to be some sort of "hook" to a larger overarching goal because that will keep you utterly motivated and on target. If you lack an overarching goal or emotional reason, it's incredibly easy to veer off the path to your goal because there's no backlash.

T – Time-bound. You must be able to impose a deadline for reaching your goal. A goal without a deadline is just a dream or, at best, a statement of intent. If you don't have a deadline for your goal, you won't have any urgency or reason to take action _today_ instead of tomorrow or next week. This is key to actually carrying through.

Planning is well and good, but being a superb planner is often just another justification for not acting.

Chapter 7. The Science of Sleep

It sounds overly-simplistic to say, but your mother was right. Your performance in every aspect of your life will improve if you just get more sleep.

Stop reading under the sheets with a flashlight and just go to sleep.

Sleep is what's known as a _force multiplier_. This means sleep makes it possible for you to perform at your optimal levels, and lack of sleep means you have a high probability of performing at your lowest levels. Were you aware that lack of sleep can make people drive as if they are under the influence?

If you think you don't need that much sleep to function, you're probably right. We can _function_ adequately on just a handful of hours of sleep a day, but functioning is not the same as being ready for instant action or acing that speech and impressing your superiors.

It's true that everyone's body functions differently, so you might be in the tiny .05% of the population that can truly ascend by being powered by caffeine or other stimulants. But just imagine if you were an elite athlete in preparation for a big competition. They need to prime their bodies for peak performance with stretching and a proper diet, and you need to do the same with your brain – it's your workhorse and you will only go as far as it will take you.

[P.S. Beyond being more mentally alert and sharp when you're well-rested, there are also massive physical benefits such as better cellular repair and decreased cortisol, which results in decreased fat storage.]

Your brain does WORK while you sleep!

According to the research reported in an article in the _Scientific American Mind Journal_ , "Sleep on It: How Snoozing Makes You Smarter," when we're sleeping our brain is busily processing our past day's information. Your brain is frantically sifting through all that data and analyzing it. It actively looks for relationships and links between things we choose to remember and comes up with solutions to problems that we were working on while we were awake.

Sleep even weeds out irrelevant details so only the important pieces of our day remain. It's all just to consider an issue with a clearer mind in the morning. Have you ever noticed that you are able to solve problems better, or you're more inspired, after you've had a full night's sleep?

All this recent research gives support to the old saying, "Sleep on it," when trying to make hard decisions. When you have an important decision to make and you're unsure about how to proceed, think about delaying the decision until the next morning. Sleep on it and you will likely wake up with new perspectives and angles – _if you've gotten a full night's sleep._

Chances are, when you wake up the next day, you will be able to see things more clearly. You may be able to see relationships among the different parts of the problem. This can lead to a more truly informed decision and better decisions overall.

Another reason sleep is important to better decision making is that your brain turns recently acquired memories into long-term memories during sleep. When you're sleeping, you are able to learn more fully. Sleep helps lock in whatever you learned during the day.

According to Mathew P. Walker, the author of "The Role of Slow Wave Sleep and Memory Processing," long-term memory sorting, and locking and learning, are the main biological functions of sleep.

Finally, if you sleep long enough, you have enough mental energy to be able to fight these mental battles and win. One concrete manifestation of this is the simple fact that you have more willpower if you have slept a full eight hours compared to sleeping only four hours a night.

Now that you have a clear idea of the science behind sleep and how it leads to better learning, better data analysis, and overall better mental processes, how can you benefit from all this? How you can capitalize on the power of sleep?

Generally, you need to utilize as many hours of sleep as possible, over longer periods of time. The more sleep periods to lock in your learning, the better.

For example, review things over more days instead of doing it all in one day.

They can be shorter sessions, but over a greater amount of time. Plan slightly ahead and start playing with ideas over a set of days instead of depending on a one-day burst. Give yourself time to decide on a particularly difficult decision. The more nights this information is processed, the more connections will be made, the more insightful your perspective will be on the subjects, and the better you will remember them.

Next, get adequate sleep before making big decisions. Try to always wait until the morning to make decisions. This means that you at least slept on a particular issue before you made a judgment call. Make sure all your mental faculties have a say in the matter.

Third, take naps to improve your memory. As sleep locks in new information and helps convert short-term information to long-term memories, creating a strategic schedule of studying interspersed with napping can be spectacularly effective if you can manage it. This is especially true if you're dealing with a lot of new information.

Finally, review the tasks you did before you go to sleep. They'll be swimming around your noodle all night long and you will be able to synthesize and perform better on them the next day.

Many people grapple with sleeping issues and insomnia. There is also scientifically-proven advice to garner you better and deeper sleep. You can gain tremendous improvements in your sleep by simply sticking to this regimen.

Stay consistent.

Make sure you go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day. Even if you're tired, wake up at the same time every single morning. Don't take naps during the day or try to compensate otherwise. Eventually, your body's clock will lock into this pattern and you will guarantee yourself a fixed amount of sleeping time every night. This is a matter of staying disciplined and thinking about the long-term effects of your circadian rhythm – not the momentary relief of sleeping an extra hour here or there. Think on a weekly basis as opposed to a daily basis here.

Use your bed only for sex and sleep.

Make sure you don't do anything else on your bed except have sex or sleep. It's important to develop the association of sleep with your bed. Because you're not always having sex with your partner on the bed, at the very least when you get in bed, the sleep association kicks in and it makes it all that much easier for you to fall to sleep.

Avoid the temptation to read, play video games, or tool around on your smartphone or tablet. The fewer activities you do on your bed, the easier it is for your mind to associate being in bed with sleep. This is essentially a toned-down version of Pavlov's dogs salivating when they heard the bell ring. Associations create action.

Be aware of your light exposure.

Different types of light impact you differently. Blue light (light from the blue part of the light spectrum and wavelength) keeps you awake. It's like the light from the sun. It's important to block blue light as much as possible because it signals that it's daytime and not yet time to rest. If you're using devices close to your bedtime, you can find apps and settings to lower or block the amount of blue light you are receiving. Better yet, don't look at those devices after a certain hour.

As much as possible, do not expose yourself to light at a certain time so your body can start to wind down and you can go to sleep.

Keep temperatures relatively low.

As much as you can, lower your room temperature so it works more closely with your body's natural biorhythm. Everyone's body temperature naturally dips during deeper sleep, so take extra effort to ensure that the temperature of your bedroom is relatively low. If you're able to do this, you'll sleep more easily and soundly.

Adopt a sleep ritual.

Create a routine to get ready for bed. For example, brushing your teeth, showering, then putting your pajamas on is a perfectly adequate routine. If this is your routine, you can even add a few things such as turning off all the lights in your home, powering your devices off, and doing some stretching.

Whatever is convenient or comfortable for you, adopt a routine that tells your body that you're about to wind down. The more natural the association, the higher the likelihood it will become a habit. Your body will then automatically start getting tired the moment you begin your sleep routine.

Sleep is a severely underrated super weapon. Don't disregard it; you will be disregarding the machine that you rely on every day and that keeps you moving.

Chapter 8. Find Marginal Gains

In this chapter I discuss two powerful principles that can be integral to your success. Interestingly, they appear to be oxymoronic in nature.

The first principle is the Pareto Principle. This is a concept that seeks to minimize wasted effort and diminishing returns.

The Pareto Principle states that 80% of all your results come from only 20% of your activities.

Put another way, you make 80% of your money from only 20% of your work. This means you should focus on the 20% that produces the vast majority of your results, not the 80% of your other activities.

The amount of work you'd have to put in to squeeze the last 20% of profit out is something that is probably not worth it to most people. This encourages people to focus on the activities with the biggest impact and not get caught up in those that have diminishing returns. Perfection is the enemy here.

Whenever you're doing something, there is always a point you reach – regardless of how much work you put in – when you start getting fewer results. You have gone past the point of optimal return on effort. It's really important to know where this point is because you don't want to waste your time, resources, and physical effort.

Put another way, once you're at a certain point of completion and competency, does it really matter how good something is? Does something need to be perfect, or is completion completely fine? Usually it doesn't matter at all.

So the Pareto Principle discourages extra effort spent and going the extra mile because the likelihood it impacts your bottom line is fairly low.

But that's not always true. Sometimes, you can afford to go the extra mile and you need things to be perfect and optimized to the best of your abilities. Sometimes you need that 100% perfection without a margin for error. It might not be often that this applies, but how can you reach that level of perfection even in the face of diminishing returns?

That's where the Pareto Principle must step the side and the principle of marginal gains comes into play. Marginal gains are about improving each aspect involved in your performance incrementally and marginally until their sum is greater than their individual improvements.

The concept of marginal improvements was brought into the mainstream by Dave Brailsford, the head of the British Cycling team. When he joined the team in 2002, the team had zero past success. No medals, no big race wins, and no apparent chance to join the world's best. It was not a respected cycling team.

Just six years later at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the British cycling team won gold in seven out of the ten cycling events. He attributed this sudden jump in success to his focus on creating marginal gains.

He focused on increasing every aspect related to cycling racing by 1% to make an overall increased effect – except the actual cycling itself. His belief was that if you improved every area related to cycling by just 1%, those small gains would add up to remarkable overall improvement. They worked under the assumption that their main activities of physical training and nutrition were 99% optimized – so where else could they seek to create improvement?

He started by optimizing things you might expect like the nutrition of the riders, the weekly training programs, the ergonomics of the bike seats, and the weight of the tires. But Brailsford and his team did not stop there.

They searched for 1% improvements in all areas that were overlooked as non-factors or unimportant by their competitors and most other people.

They discovered that the pillows they were using could be improved for better sleep. They experimented with different types of massage gel for better muscle relaxation. They famously taught their riders the best way to wash their hands so they could better avoid infection and getting sick. They were constantly looking for those 1% gains and were able to generate them in ingenious and unconventional ways.

In the beginning, making a choice that was a marginal 1% more optimal was almost exactly the same as making a choice that was 1% worse, especially on a daily basis.

But as time went on, these small improvements or declines compounded enormously and Brailsford's team found itself on the medal stand because they understood the huge gap between people who make slightly better decisions on a daily basis and those who don't.

Many small choices don't make an impact when you look at them on a short-term scale, but the cumulative effects can be staggering over a longer-term scale. That's why people gain weight despite their best efforts, and can't seem to save money even though they budget well "most of the time."

The principle of marginal gains is an important mindset because it encourages continual improvement and growth. It causes you to question your status quo and disregard the notion that some things don't need to be investigated and changed. It challenges your long-held beliefs and assumptions and puts them under intense scrutiny. It encourages looking outside of the main growth activities and at the range of activities that actually impact performance.

What you think is set in stone usually is not.

Let's apply the principle of marginal gains to a common goal of losing weight. You already know that you need to engage in the main activities of going to the gym and counting your calories more strictly. What are the tiny, marginal gains you can make every day that will compound to make a big difference by the end of the month?

You can take the stairs instead of the elevator, walk around the office every time before you use the restroom, purposely park far away in the parking lot, use one less slice of meat in your sandwiches, use no condiments for your hamburger, or take your coffee black with no sugar or cream.

These little incremental changes can scale up, pun intended, to sizable differences given enough time. They may not feel like anything, and they might feel like you're just going through the motions, but that's only if you evaluate the effects on a daily basis. Fortunately, your life does not reset at midnight each night.

Whatever your goal is: where can you create additional streams of marginal gains that are outside of the main actions? If you want to get a better job, where can you look to create marginal opportunities outside the main actions of applying, interviewing, and revising your resume?

Keep in mind that these two opposing principles, the Pareto Principle and the principle of marginal gains, have a time and place for each.

When you're overwhelmed and just need to get things done, the Pareto Principle will be important to seizing your most important tasks and tuning everything else out. If you have the luxury of time and being a perfectionist, you need to look into the principle of marginal gains to squeeze every drop of results out that you can.

Of course, you can also focus on the Pareto Principle at first and then find marginal gains with the time you have left over. Overall, you need to examine which model of achievement and success best fits your current situation. Most people match them poorly, and as a result, over or under-deliver.
Chapter 9. Feign Doubt

It's one of the age-old maxims when you're trying to improve yourself.

Confidence is the key. Just be confident. If you're confident, everything else will follow.

I'm not in a place to disagree. I've even written books on the topic. I strongly believe in its power as more than a simple placebo or mindset.

It's important to have self-confidence and believe that you have the ability to achieve what you want. It's a key to success because without it, you will never attempt anything because what would be the point of attempting certain failure?

We're constantly grappling with inertia, and confidence gives you momentum because you believe you will be rewarded for it. Confidence enables us to override the initial fear we experience before we try anything new and unfamiliar. When you have confidence, you will try, fail, learn, and then keep returning because of the belief that you will make the situation acceptable.

This is what separates successful people from people who try, fail, and give up. The confident don't let one-off events affect their self-perception of their abilities.

My acquaintance John Smith represents the problem with that.

He goes into every situation at work or in love with the utmost confidence. He believes he can, even in the direst of situations. And despite any negative feedback that would cause others to re-evaluate and re-group, he pushes forward like a lab rat pushing a lever only to be electrocuted time after time.

He approaches everything in a way that, for his self-esteem, eliminates doubt or the possibility of failure. That's a double-edged sword because it creates a feeling of invincibility and a very different mindset than someone who is cautiously confident. He never looks outside of his own actions when things go wrong – they are always due to external factors outside of his control.

The lesson of this chapter is to occasionally feign doubt.

Do you remember the uncomfortable feeling of insecurity back when you weren't as confident in your abilities?

How would you act, react, and double-check if you weren't completely sure of yourself? How did you act when you doubted yourself and your abilities, and how did you ensure that your actions would be correct or well-received?

That's what feigning doubt does for us. We act in a way to all but guarantee success through sheer hard work and diligence. John Smith desperately needs to learn how to feign doubt.

The bright side is you can separate the discomfort of insecurity from the actions it made you perform. In other words, you can harness the positives of doubt while avoiding the negative emotional impact. You need to occasionally modulate your confidence to make sure you aren't getting too far removed from reality and still understand the primary issues you're facing.

Feigning doubt is about remembering how you _used_ to feel, and using that feeling to drive your actions to make success more likely.

Your confidence must straddle a thin line.

If you have too little confidence, you will constantly second guess yourself and be insecure, and not get things done. You won't want to try anything outside of your immediate comfort zone. On the other hand, if you have too much confidence, you will get cocky and assume you know everything without the proper research. Eventually, this will get the better of you and it will start undermining your confidence or drive you into further and deeper delusion.

Feigning doubt allows you to pay attention to critical feedback, question yourself, and be thoroughly self-critical when it is required.

With greater confidence, you might feel as if you're above certain actions or basics, and skip over actions with an air of "I know what I'm doing, I don't need it!" and that could be your downfall.

For example, if you are convinced you are the best skier you know, you probably won't be receptive to feedback, nor will you be able to criticize yourself honestly and effectively. You'll skip warming up and stretching because you're overly-confident in your skiing abilities, and never learn some of the fundamentals because you think you're already above that level.

Why would you listen to anyone else if you think you're at a world-class level already?

That's exactly what successful people do, and often how they've gotten there. They listen to feedback from nearly anyone so they can constantly improve their methods.

Lower confidence and assuming doubt in this context can make you work harder and prepare more. You don't assume that things will pan out automatically. You put in a little bit more work to make sure that you cross your t's and dot your i's.

If you're not convinced you're going to nail your presentation next Monday, you're likely to spend more time practicing and going over your numbers. These are great habits to have. Being able to feign doubt also makes you more relatable and easier to commiserate with. No one likes relaying their own doubts to someone who is unflappable and doesn't appear to understand why doubt it exists.

True confidence is knowing your strengths and being even more aware of your weaknesses and limitations. True confidence is knowing your limits, while at the same time being comfortable with your strengths.

The last thing you want to do is to overcompensate for your weaknesses or simply turn a blind eye to them. At the very least, you need to stay grounded and keep perspective. Remember all the questions you had when you were a beginner and don't forget the worries inside them.

Every question you asked was powered by some sort of worry or some sort of concern, always remember those. This way, you can stay grounded and make the right decisions.

Additionally, you need to err on the side of more confidence because that will create more action and opportunities for you. If you're given two choices between being over confident or under confident, go with being over confident, but there is one key thing that you need to do to make sure that this stance leads to success. Check in very frequently about whether you're trying to get too clever or too cute.

Confidence is wonderful – but remember the doubt that got you there.

Chapter 10. Take Ownership

I talk about ownership frequently when I coach social skills and conversation skills.

I implore clients to take ownership of the awkward silences and conversation lulls that can sometimes happen.

This means I want them to explicitly assume it's their responsibility to take care of them and make them disappear. When they view it as their responsibility, they immediately start preparing for it and reacting to them with a completely different energy. Suddenly they start doing work beforehand and brainstorming tactics they can use for these expected bumps in the road.

It's a relatively small mindset shift that can pay huge dividends in how smoothly a conversation with anyone goes.

Taking ownership over not only the conversations in your life, but the sequence of events that occur in your life itself, is a massive key to success.

The way to take ownership is to realize that everything that happens is a consequence of your free will. Yours only, and not anyone else's. This includes the good and especially the bad. It's perfectly acceptable to blame yourself. In fact, it's a good sign if you blame yourself because it means you have taken ownership.

Taking responsibility for all the good and bad that happens in your life forces you to approach your day differently than you would if you didn't think it was up to you.

No one else in the world cares that much about your success. You are the only person whose top priority is you. No one can hold your hand and no one can take care of you. That's why you need to take ownership over everything that comes in your life. You must learn to depend on yourself and take proactive action to get what you want.

When you take ownership, you create a different mindset. Think about the difference in mentality when you live alone and know that you have to do all the dishes in your sink because no one else will versus when you are forced to by your parents.

There's a feeling of acceptance when you know you have to put in the work, but when you didn't expect it, there's a feeling of turmoil and annoyance. You'd probably make sure you have soap, adequate sponges, and a system of drying and racking because you know it's up to you to maintain order in your kitchen.

That's the level of care and attention that taking ownership creates.

Being mentally prepared and accepting of a particular course of action ensures that you have the energy ready to take care of business. It also activates your Reticular Activation System (RAS) wherein, because you are fixated on a certain goal, all the paths to that goal suddenly open up because you spend so much time thinking about it.

As the old saying goes, "Where your focus goes, energy flows." All sorts of paths and new angles will open up as a result of going down the road of ownership.

Another example of how taking ownership creates a proactive mindset involves traveling.

Let say you're traveling with a friend, but your friend is hopeless with planning maps and navigation. Knowing this, you would take responsibility over all the navigation and planning. You'd know you'd needed to do it otherwise it simply wouldn't get done.

You would go into the trip with the knowledge and acceptance of taking on that burden. You would take ownership of the trip and carry through in many ways.

Compare that to having a travel companion who takes care of everything, or entrusting all the planning to a guide whom you could just follow around. You would turn your brain off and follow along like a drone. You would be completely reliant on this person to take you from one spot to the next.

If you planned everything out yourself, it would be a more fulfilling trip because you would be able to do exactly what you wanted, and none of what you didn't want. And because you knew you'd have to take ownership, you would be willing to work for it.

What areas of life could you take greater ownership over?

Nothing kills success more than thinking your life is automatic, that as long as you take action it automatically leads to a certain conclusion.

When you actively choose to own actions and understand how they affect your life, you are in a better position to make better decisions that lead to more positive results.

A final perspective on taking ownership is the concept of a locus of control. A locus of control is whether you feel you can influence your outcomes, or they are influenced externally.

You have to maintain an internal locus of control. This is when you feel the control in your life occurs as a result of your actions. This is a simple way of saying that you need to always be in the driver's seat of your life. The way you think about your life has to involve your pushing the action forward. It's you calling the shots. It's you making the decisions. It's you making the choices. You didn't get the job because you bombed the interview.

An external locus of control is where external factors like other people, situations, and circumstances control your life. Since you can't control these external factors, your life is out of control. Framed this way, it's easy to understand how an internal locus of control gives you more power. It is positive and proactive. An external locus of control, on the other hand, is negative and puts you in the position of having to constantly come up with excuses for why things don't pan out. You didn't get the job because the interviewer hated you.

If I have an internal locus of control, I'm going to do everything I can do to lose weight. On the other hand, if I have an external locus of control, I say to myself, "I can't lose weight because the gym is too far and the food at work is unhealthy or there are just not enough good restaurants for healthy food around."

Most successful people have an internal locus of control and a sense of extreme ownership over their lives.

Chapter 11. Cultivate Secondary Skills

Scott Adams is the mind behind one of my favorite cartoons of all time, Dilbert.

Dilbert is a comic strip that parodies the mundanity and bureaucracy that comes with cubicle and corporate life. But don't mistake Scott Adams as just another pretty-faced cartoonist like Charles Schultz or Jim Davis.

He never intended on becoming a cartoonist until late in his life, and because of that, he has been able to impart nuggets of wisdom that only huge twists and turns can provide. The story of Scott Adams and how he came to be one of the country's most famous cartoonists is a study on the importance of secondary skills and diversification.

Adams graduated from college and first worked as an engineer in a cubicle farm that likely provided the inspiration for countless editions of Dilbert. He then decided to get an MBA, and after he graduated from business school, worked again in an engineering position while he drew his comic strip on the side. It took a few years until he was able to focus on Dilbert full-time and quit his day job.

He's the first to admit his success relied on a synthesis of skills rather than being the absolute best cartoonist in the world. He focused on what he was skilled at, and cultivated secondary skills that would enhance his primary skills and strengths.

For example, you might suppose that a cartoonist's primary skill is being a good artist. Yet it is plain to see that Dilbert isn't drawn with much aesthetic sense, at least for what is considered a top cartoon. Adams isn't the best artist in the world.

You might also suppose that cartoonists need to be as funny as standup comedians. But Dilbert isn't going to make you laugh out loud. In addition to his proficiency in drawing, he possessed a secondary skill of having a sharp wit and sarcastic sense of humor, which is something that pairs well with his subject matter.

Finally, he had the business acumen of someone who has graduated from business school and been trained to dissect a market and figure out how to appeal to it. Still, he's no Henry Ford or Steve Jobs.

Even so, and by his own account, he was a better artist than most people, and funnier than most, the combination of which is exceedingly rare in this world, especially for someone who went to business school. Without any of those three pieces, it's unlikely the world would have heard of Dilbert, Dogbert, Wally, and the infamous Pointy-haired Boss. But when you have a combination of secondary skills, you can easily set yourself apart from others.

Scott Adams went on to lay out two very basic paths to success.

The first path is simply to be one of the best at what you do – in the top percentile, somewhere around the top 1% of your industry. Be so excellent and remarkable that it doesn't matter what you are deficient in. Your rare talents alone make you an asset to the right people.

This path is nearly impossible for – you guessed it – 99% of the people that want to be in the industry. And out of those 1%, they might not even want to work in that industry \- so it ends up being a tiny percentage of people that can actually accomplish this.

If you want to be Leonardo da Vinci, it's going to take a huge amount of work and a huge amount of time, and the chances of that happening are still infinitesimal.

If you love basketball, only so many of us can play professional basketball in the National Basketball Association (NBA). That's a fact. Even extremely gifted and talented people with the right height and physical power often get cut from the NBA. That's how competitive it is. There are only 450 players in the NBA at any given time. There are roughly 6,000 men who play college basketball any given year. Even at those high levels, the percentages are discouraging, to say the least.

Basing your success on being in the top percentile skill-wise in the world is a risky proposition. Unfortunately, it's the path that most people attempt to travel because they (1) believe in themselves to a fault, or (2) are unaware of what encompasses the success that most truly successful people have. Relying on one skill as your worth in the market is risky, unrealistic, and usually followed by failure.

The second path Adams outlined is far more realistic and attainable.

The path to success that the majority of people follow, often unintentionally, is to simply get very, very good (in the top 20%) at two or more skills, as opposed to remarkable (in the top 1%) in one skill.

This is far more achievable for most of us simply because that level of expertise and skill isn't mind-blowingly difficult to achieve. Being in the top 20% of a skill can represent a few years of education or practice, and that's something that happens naturally through our lives. If we're lucky, these two to three areas of expertise can converge and create a synergy within our lives, as it did with Scott Adams.

This is extremely representative of most people who succeed in life – and the extreme over-achievers, they just have multiple skills in the top 20%, and perhaps one skill in the top 5%.

According to research studies of millionaires and other successful people, they are often multi-talented in a way that gives them abilities and perspective other people will never have. They were able to do it all before they hit it big, which means they were able to conquer any initial obstacle that might have vanquished less-skilled people.

Suppose you're a talented writer, but you're no good at marketing or selling yourself. Unless everyone who reads your material is brought to tears, there's probably no chance you can make a living as a writer. The same is true with the converse – if you're great at marketing and selling yourself as an author but your writing is rubbish, your writing career won't be long-lived.

However, if you're a good writer, great at marketing, and also great at public speaking – you have an exponentially higher chance of success as a writer. You will be able to get your works read by many, many people.

Take Prince or Michael Jackson – they weren't merely talented singers. They were amazing songwriters, performers, dancers, fashion icons, and cultural figures. It's unlikely they would have reached the level of fame they did if they'd only had two of those skills. Above all else, they were both amazing creators and amazing business managers.

There's a reason the brightest stars are called triple threats.

Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 20% with some effort – and not as much effort as you think. No matter how passionately you feel about your _one_ skill, the odds are against you if you only focus on that. You need to focus on one or two secondary skills that are related to your primary skill and overarching goal.

For example, if you're an excellent fiction writer, it would be smart to also learn copywriting (writing for commercial publications and marketing material) and develop your teaching skills so you can conduct writer's workshops and consult with beginning writers. These are related to your main skill and will help you along your path to success. They have a natural synergy and make you far more versatile, and being good at all three will naturally allow you to bring attention to your fiction work more easily.

Developing all three skills will set you apart from fiction writers who are starving artists while waiting for someone to recognize their breakout bestseller (a rare occurrence).

If you're a great accountant, it would be smart to learn how to put together presentations and do public speaking. They go hand in hand and each of these skills enhances the other skill's value. You would be able to become a featured speaker for many associations and clubs that require tax advising, and the exposure could land you a slew of new business.

Public speaking, in general, is a great skill to accompany any skill that you already possess because, as Adams puts it, you can now speak for others that don't know how to represent themselves. It enables an easy transition to any kind of leadership role and imparts a sense of status and power.

Another skill set to gain or grow would be what it takes to create a business from the ground up. That way, you can build a business off the one skill that you are incredibly proficient at and leverage that.

Rarely is anyone successful on the basis of one skill. You might know someone who is such a savant, but they are the extreme exception to the rule, and you might only know one or two of them out of all of your hundreds of acquaintances. They might also just be lucky, but you can't depend on lightning to strike for you.

Depending on one skill is not going to make you successful. It often takes an assimilation of other skills to make that one skill shine brightly and produce maximum value. What skills can you add to your toolbox that (1) you can realistically reach a top percentile in, and (2) are relevant to your existing skills and future goals?

A final tip from Scott Adams's improbable life is that people never have linear paths to where they end up. It's almost always a series of decisions that become visible by virtue of their skills and expertise. Do, learn, and repeat!

Chapter 12: Six Fundamental Human Needs

No matter where you're from or what you're trying to accomplish, we are driven by six fundamental human needs.

Life can be very complex and yet not at all at the same time. This is another Tony Robbins framework that I found especially helpful in my research on success.

These six needs drive our lives in ways that we can articulate, and others that we would never have thought. We generally value two out of the six needs the most at any given time. These two primary needs play a tremendous role in the kind of life choices and decisions we make, as well as the habits we develop on a daily basis.

If you can understand your subconscious desires and actions, you can short-circuit your negative impulses and emphasize your positive ones. What this means in human terms is that if you can isolate what your needs are, you can replace your negative habits with positive ones.

Keep in mind that you might possess them in much greater or much smaller quantities than other people, so it would make sense if only a few of the following needs resonate with you.

#1: The Need for Certainty

The need for certainty is about the assurance that you can avoid pain and gain pleasure.

The more certain and secure we can feel in the predictability of our wellbeing, the more comfortable we can feel engaging in other activities. This is why we crave a certain level of safety or predictability and assurance in our lives. These are very important because they ensure one extremely important goal: Survival.

The more certain we are that there is no danger, the more we can relax to focus on other needs.

Certainty forms the bedrock of our hierarchy of needs. Certainty ensures survival and then once this is taken care of, then we can look towards other needs.

This is one end of the certainty spectrum that explains how we why if we're uncertain. However, the other side of the spectrum is when you feel certainty has been established. Think about it, would you want to watch a basketball game if you already knew the score and everything that's going to happen in that game? Probably not. That would be extremely boring and predictable.

Everyone requires different levels of certainty in their lives. For example, my own need for certainty is very low compared to others. I travel constantly and don't have much of a five-year place to speak of. So if things become too routine, I get bored very easily. I need to constantly challenge myself with the next need, which is in direct conflict with the need for certainty.

Are you bored more often than not with routine and always seeking new hobbies in your free time? What is your level of need for certainty, and is it being fulfilled?

#2: The Need for Uncertainty and Variety

The apparent mirror opposite of the need for certainty is the need for the unknown and variety. This is the need for change and new stimuli.

We all need a change of scenery every now and then. The idea of novelty is attractive for a reason, and it's simply to experience something new and be surprised at an outcome rather than know it before you begin.

Do you want to watch the same type of movie over and over? Most people don't, but if you do, you might gather that you have a low need for uncertainty and variety. Too much uncertainty will bring us fear, but not enough uncertainty will bring us a lack of fulfillment.

It's why most people enjoy traveling and eating new foods. We don't want to do the exact same thing over and over again. This is what makes life exciting because we don't know what to expect. We have a need for the adrenaline that only novel stimulation can bring us. Routine is death.

What makes this need different is the uncertainty level is still tolerable enough that we know in the end that the variety will bring pleasure. Compare this with the first need where we're uncertain because there is a tremendous amount of danger if our safety is not certain.

#3: The Need for Significance and Uniqueness

Deep down we all need to feel that we are important, unique, and special. We don't want to feel insignificant and like no one cares about us.

We want to be the special snowflakes that we like to imagine we are. We all want to stand out in a positive way somehow and be known for something.

This is manifested in many different ways. Some will go out of their way to achieve in an academic sense, deriving their sense of worth in that realm. Everyone creates an identity of themselves based on their self-perception of how they're special.

If you've noticed someone that appears to be dressing solely for attention, they're taking pride in their unique appearance. They feel significant because they stand apart from everybody else.

No one would state their goal to be indistinguishable from their neighbor, so this is a very natural inclination. However, taking things to far to the extreme can turn off most people. You can imagine this in the form of people who dress very obnoxiously, or who constantly feel the need to discuss how different they are.

Additionally, if you strive for too much significance, you will relate to others less and less, which makes the next human need difficult.

It comes down to the question: how much do you value being distinguished from others?

#4: The Need for Connection

We all have an instinctual need to bond and connect with others. We strive for interpersonal relationships because they make us feel validated, important, and social. We want to feel like we belong and are part of a tribe.

Some people are extremely family-oriented and travel in packs, where others are lone wolves that enjoy their own company. Some of us like to play team sports, while others like to run alone along the beach. There's a happy medium somewhere for everyone.

The basis of most of these connections is similarity and familiarity. You might call that convenience or opportunity, but the truth is most relationships start there and evolve from that point.

It's easier to like somebody who is somewhat similar to you because you can relate better to them and it feels more natural. This is why I mentioned earlier in our need for significance that we can't overdo things to such an extent that we destroy all similarity. We can be different, but not too different otherwise you're only going to connect with other outliers.

The need for significance versus connection is like trying to feed Goldilocks stew. If our need for connection is not being met, we feel alone and disjointed from people. But if it's met entirely, we no longer feel different or unique and we end up lacking a sense of significance.

#5: The Need for Growth

Everybody is looking to expand and increase capacity and capabilities.

Everybody is looking to achieve their goals and move onto the next. Very few people are content just watching television every day and starting the process over the next day. Most of us need a sense of progress, and enjoy working towards something.

Everything on earth either growing or dying – that's not a false dichotomy. Human beings are no exception to this. We must feel we're constantly growing in our lives and moving forward.

The real litmus test occurs when you achieve a goal you set for yourself. Maybe it was a certain financial target or lifestyle, or just that new computer.

Are you satisfied and no longer feel the need to keep reaching, or do you just move the goal posts and start to plan how to exceed your original goal?

Those with a strong need for growth will be unhappy until they set a new goal because they're not growing anymore.

They reached a plateau and there are no more mountains to climb, but all need something to strive for, something that will challenge us to grow and take our lives to the next level. We have a need for pursuit and for pushing ourselves. That can indicate how strong your need for growth is. Are you just trying to hit a specific goal, or are you on the path to continual growth and improvement?

Otherwise, to many of us, living life from day to day without an overarching goal and theme becomes an exercise in futility.

#6: The Need for Contribution

Finally, we all have the need for a sense of contribution to society.

It might be a service to society, or giving money to a cause, but deep down, we all want to feel that we make an impact and won't pass from this earth without anyone caring. We want to make a mark on the world in our time and be memorable by contributing to society as a whole.

How many people will attend our funerals, and how much will they care?

This explains the popularity of volunteering and philanthropy. It's a universal need that exists in varying degrees in people. We want to give and contribute to a greater good above ourselves – simply because it feels good and fulfills our sense of contribution to the world.

When you see a homeless person, do you feel compelled to give, or do you ignore them?

Now that we've recapped the six fundamental human needs that drive most of our everyday decisions, what does this mean for you? What are you supposed to do with this knowledge besides see how it manifests in your life?

First, this framework shows that we are driven by subconscious needs, and despite how they manifest outwardly, it's relatively unlikely that your particular needs mirror someone else's.

For example, your friend might be exercising fanatically because they have a need for certainty in their physical appearance and significance, but you might view exercise as fulfilling the need for personal growth. Same outward manifestation but entirely different needs satisfied.

On the other hand, you might have the same needs as someone else, but they are manifested in completely different ways. For example, if you and your friend both have strong needs for uncertainty and variety, and you fulfill it through constant traveling and they fulfill it through constant changes of romantic partners.

You need to evaluate which of the six needs resonate with you, and then try to identify how they manifest in your daily life. Are your most important needs being met on a regular basis? If not, how can you increase your daily fulfillment?

Second, understanding your needs can help you understand why you partake in toxic actions and habits. It can also isolate the needs that those toxic actions were satisfying so you can replace them with more positive and productive actions.

A common example of this is when smokers start chewing gum voraciously to satisfy their oral fixation. Once you know the cause, you can address it in another way.

Knowing how your mind works when dealing with certain situations will enable you to identify alternative solutions or activities that meet the same needs, but deliver results that take you closer to success.

Simply replace less positive actions with more helpful actions that also satisfy certain needs. Rid yourself of your toxic behaviors and make sure your needs are met with more uplifting ones.

Self-understanding is paramount to success because otherwise, you're just winging it.
Chapter 13. Assume the Long Road

A friend of mine makes his living as a concert pianist. He has played with the most famous classical musicians of our day, and has even played at Carnegie Hall a few times.

A saying among musicians asks, "How does one get to Carnegie Hall?" expecting a pithy answer and a set of directions. The answer is actually "Years of dedication, hard work, and forsaking all other priorities."

I met my friend in college, and by that time, he had already put in his proverbial 10,000 hours of work and by the age of eighteen had an international reputation.

I was probably one of the first few people to see him let loose and really relax, because, in his words, his childhood was "living in front of the piano and sleeping with my sheet music and metronome." But that was the expectation his teacher had put into him, and he was comfortable doing that because he accepted that was the path to Carnegie Hall.

It was worth the sacrifice to him because he was fully prepared and expecting to grind it out – there was no expectation of overnight success even though he was a child prodigy and essentially had it. He knew just how long the path he was on was.

Whatever your goal and whatever path you are traveling, you have to assume that it is the long road. You can't assume there will be any lucky breaks along the way, or that you will travel along anything but a linear direction of growth. You can _hope_ for it, but planning for it can be one of your biggest downfalls (and disappointments). You just can't anticipate that any shortcuts will magically cut the amount of time you put in and the work you do in half. And relying on them would be an even bigger mistake.

To quote Zig Ziglar, "The elevator to success is out of order, but the stairs are always available."

Expect to do the work and expect to reach success after a process. If you have the proper expectations, then it's more likely that you will put in the kind of work that you need to put in and endure the process until you achieve success.

The worst thing that you can do is to feel that you're entitled to success. Nobody is entitled to success.

What if my concert pianist friend had expected to be famous and one of the best pianists in the nation after just one year of starting to play piano? That's clearly an expectation of avoiding the long road because of what – exceptional talent?

That expectation might create some hard work for about six months, until the realization sets in that the goal can't be accomplished. And have you ever been around someone who realizes their lofty hopes won't come to fruition? They're not the most pleasant. Having that expectation frames happiness in a black-or-white spectrum. If you reach it, you are happy, but if you don't, you're a mess – there's no in-between.

That's unrepresentative of real life and the massive areas of grey that you are bound to operate within.

Refusing to accept the long road also forces you to plan and prepare in a sustainable, progress-driven way. It makes you act in a way that will actually set you with a solid foundation for success, not just what you initially think it might take.

Let's say that you are about to embark on a 15-mile hike.

In the first scenario, you think it'll be a breeze and that you're in great shape already. You don't bother wearing proper socks or shoes, and you only bring one bottle of water. You don't expect to hit any bumps in the road, so to speak, and you don't account for the fact that it looks like there might be a storm on its way.

The temperature drops, it pours for hours, you get soaked, come down with hypothermia, and perish.

In the second scenario, you know that you're in good shape, but a 15-mile hike is far different from an hour in the gym three times a week. You take a couple of practice 7-mile hikes with your boots and a large backpack. You make sure that you have wool socks and broken-in hiking boots, and you bring as much water as your pack allows. You note the weather report and bring a rain jacket and hand warmers.

Which scenario do you think represents better planning by accepting that there's a long road ahead?

Assuming the long road is also another way of saying you must get comfortable with the grind and breaking a sweat. Are you?

Are you operating on an implicit unwillingness to spend hours on something that will lead you to a greater chance of success?

If you jump into a car for a 15-minute ride to the grocery store, you might not buckle your seat belt, adjust the mirrors, or take care of your semi-flat tire. You would assume that you can ignore the shortcomings.

But you'd act far differently if you were to embark on an eight-hour car ride across the state because those small actions (or lack thereof) have an annoying habit of compounding.

Everyone in any position of success and glory has expended the requisite amount of sweat, even those that appear to have been born with silver spoons in their mouths. They were fortunate to catch a break, but that doesn't account for their continued success.

The best part about the long road is that is imbues you with a sense of unshakeable confidence. You know you've put in the requisite number of hours, and you can fall back on that training and preparation in the event of any unexpected obstacles.

Let's take a look at the difference in mindset between people who consistently go to the gym and eat right over a series of months, and the people who try crash diet after crash diet.

The first group settles in for the long haul, and as a result, gets pretty much permanent results. They've built the habit of a healthy lifestyle and adjusted their lives in a way that their success is inevitable and eventual.

The second group keeps trying to find the magic bullet, which is a shortcut of time and effort. This group, as you might know, never loses weight. They might lose weight here and there, but all that weight eventually comes back with a vengeance.

At the very least, these approaches aren't mutually exclusive. Start preparing yourself for the long haul, while simultaneously looking for shortcuts in the context of that long haul. You shouldn't search for a magic bullet or a shortcut to replace what you actually need to do, but you can do them at the same time.

So what's the primary motivator for those who hate thinking about the long-term? They aren't just impatient or refuse to delay gratification – they don't care enough and aren't willing to work hard enough. They might even be intimidated by hard work, because it all might amount to nothing at all.

Bad news. The real world isn't some high school term paper for which you can pull an all-nighter and end up with a decent grade.

The good news is that the value of a goal is tied to the journey you need to take to that goal. Have you ever noticed that things that cost you a lot of time to achieve tend to be more valuable to you, and things that don't cost much effort are often after thoughts to you?

We tend to value things more when we feel we actually had to sacrifice and work to get them. Even when you don't meet the goal, you learn a lot along the way. Unfortunately, if you're focused on shortcuts and getting lucky you won't learn much of anything at all. In many cases, you'll end up right back where you started.

People often procrastinate from starting the long road because they are intimidated by it. Are you looking for magic shortcuts because you're scared of truly trying for once?

It's your journey that enables you to view what you achieve as success. Otherwise, it's too easy to fixate on how long or how rough the road to success is, instead of understanding that it's the process that is actually of more value than the success. It's the person you become that is more valuable than the goal you attain at the end of the process.

Chapter 14. In Their Own Words

Instead of hearing more from me, I'm going to highlight the words of those far better qualified to speak about success.

I've handpicked a few quotes in this chapter from experts on achievement, creating the life you want, and overcoming obstacles, because they pack tremendous value for those struggling to reach happiness.

It helps to come to the table with different approaches in mind, especially ones that you won't be familiar with. Each notable figure from whom I've drawn a quote has a particular way of approaching the world that has brought them great success. There may be overlap with others, and there may not.

What's important is for you to find something that resonates with your life, circumstance, and values. Much like the discussion of the six fundamental human needs in Chapter 12, you have to find an approach that satisfies your particular needs, desires, and ultimate goals.

Tony Robbins: "The path to success is to take massive determined action."

Of course, Tony Robbins had to make an appearance here. He has, after all, influenced me quite a bit.

Like many quotes I'll be using, they seem rather simplistic, but contain nuggets of wisdom if you dig deeper.

There are two main parts to this quote: "massive determined" and "action." Is the path to success really that simple? Yes and no.

One of the main reasons people are not successful is they don't dream big enough. You can take small actions all you want but if your goals are too small to matter, they won't amount to much at all. Dare to dream big, but also make sure you leave room to execute.

That's where the second part comes in. All this dreaming and planning is nothing without action to make it come to life.

Action is better than inaction 99% of the time, so it's unfortunate that many of us are too scared to take action for fear of failure.

Massive action is crucial because it allows you to escape your comfort zone and challenge yourself to become more resourceful, more efficient, more effective, more creative, more imaginative, simply better.

Determined action, on the other hand, is all about consistency. Many people can take massive action here and there, but the problem is massive action taken every once in a while has less of a chance of producing success than determined big action.

This is a quote that essentially tells you to dream big, and then get off your ass immediately to work toward that dream.

Jim Rohn: "Success is a few simple disciplines practiced every day while failure is simply a few errors and judgment repeated every day."

Jim Rohn's quote speaks to the importance of consistency, and how small choices you make every day accumulate into life-changing events. It's similar to the phrase "the straw that breaks the camel's back" – little things here or there can either break the camel's back or support you greatly.

The difference between success and failure is a much finer line than you might imagine. You could look at your less successful, bumbling co-worker and imagine that you're a 50% better work than they are. But in reality, you might only be 2% better in a couple of areas that lead you to make fewer errors in judgment every day. That's the only difference.

Each day is a tiny trial in which you have the opportunity to improve yourself, or act detrimentally, and you might not even realize when it happens.

By examining your daily choices and how you can incrementally improve each aspect of your life, you can build the kind of consistency that will make success an easy objective.

Remember, failure is only a few questionable choices away. This should be frightening and make you think twice about your habits, feelings, and decisions.

You also don't have to achieve success all at once. You can achieve very real success through a series of small wins. Think of changing a flat tire during a NASCAR race. Too many people who are running after success think of success in terms of something that happens all at once. Success is often a series of small wins, and just as importantly it's a series of lessons that you learn by going through a process.

Rockefeller: "I've always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity."

Rockefeller's quote is worth a ton of gold because successful people are always successful, while unsuccessful people are always unsuccessful.

What I mean is that an unsuccessful mindset will always look for the disaster in every opportunity or success. It will search for reasons not to succeed, not to work, and not to try. If that's what some people see in success, then imagine how they deal with disaster.

Successful people, on the other hand, understand that even the worst disasters contain opportunities. They either directly create a backdoor to explore, or an opportunity for learning and correction. Whatever the case, you have something you can convert into value immediately or you have a stepping stone to greater value in the future.

It all boils down to your mindset and how you choose to view a situation. We can't choose what happens around us. But we can always choose how we respond to our greater reality. This is at the heart of Rockefeller's quote.

If you always choose to come out a winner, chances are you will come out a winner. On the other hand, if you always choose to look at things in the worst light possible, that is precisely what's going to happen. You will get the worst of any situation.

Lily Tomlin: "The road to success is always under construction."

Lily Tomlin accurately comments on how some people view success and achieving goals. Many feel they need to wait for ideal conditions, or that their action is contingent upon something external occurring.

There will always be thousands of reasons not to act. The simple truth is the road to success is always under construction, never perfect, and predictably bumpy.

Waiting and attempting to analyze the best path with the least construction will more often than not lead to nothing. It will lead to no action, analysis paralysis, and using the construction and bumps along the way as an excuse.

This quote is meant to motivate you to proceed despite the apparent odds against you at the outset of your path. There will never be a perfect time because one year in the future you'll wish you had started a year earlier. The obstacles don't matter because they'll always be there. All that matters is your willing ness to push through and push on.

You must be always ready to identify opportunities, connect the dots, and take leaps of faith forward.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery: "A goal without a plan is just a wish."

This might just be my daily mantra.

Anybody can come up with a goal. It's easy to ask people what they want to achieve, and you'll usually get some lofty and unrealistic aspirations.

But without a concrete plan to get there, what people have actually given you is just a wish.

Similarly, anyone can fantasize, but only a few people turn their fantasies into realities that they can see, touch, hear, feel, taste, and smell.

What do they have in common? Generally speaking, a plan. A plan with milestones, progress, timelines, and accountability.

Wishes are unrealistic, and they aren't expected to come to fruition. They are granted by genies that pop out of bottles and involve sparkling magic.

Many people confuse their goals with wishes because of a lack of planning, or simple unwillingness to plan. In other words, it's the ultimate case of being all talk and no action.

Finally, here's a quote from the inventor of the light bulb, Thomas Edison.

Thomas Edison: "I haven't failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that don't work."

This quote talks about a relentless pursuit of success and the refusal to give up and admit defeat. Thomas Edison refuses to frame his results as failure, and instead sees them as slight road bumps on his way to success.

He found 10,000 ways that his light bulb didn't work, but eventually figured it out.

This framing is extremely important because if we frame certain things that happen in our lives in a negative way, they sap us of our motivation and confidence. If we keep doing this, we program ourselves for greater and greater failure. On the other hand, if we choose to look at setbacks in the most positive light possible, we lay the foundation for ultimate success.

Finally, Edison frames it in such a way that the action itself, the invention of the light bulb, is not a question. It's just a question of finding the right method and combination of factors which he viewed as inevitable.

What do all these quotes have in common?

They all focus on perseverance, never quitting, and defining success in an achievable and palatable way. They all encourage seekers of success to consistently take action. But what makes things difficult is that we constantly think of ways to rob ourselves of the mental and emotional energy needed to keep on taking action.

As I mentioned, Antoine De Saint-Exupery's quote resonates with me the most. Admittedly, I act sometimes with too much abandon and impatience, but I find that even after correcting my course, I'm miles ahead of where I would have been with careful analysis and too much caution. I value action.

What drives you?

Chapter 15. Think Outside the Box

For whatever goal you have, even if it doesn't seem like it, there are countless ways to get there.

You might be aware of the linear path and the slightly nonconventional path, but that completely ignores the alternative paths that aren't created every day.

For example, I characterize myself mostly as a writer and coach. Let's take each of those components and break down the possible paths that could lead to each.

For a writer, the conventional path would lead me to study English literature in college, and then take an internship at a major publishing house. After honing my skill by being an editor, I would eventually be able to get my own projects seen by important people and thus published.

A slightly less conventional path would have me make my name in an industry that a publisher decides is interesting to the public, and then capitalize on the brand that I've built.

And finally, we come to my actual path, which is more similar to standing on a sidewalk and shouting as I try to help as many people as I can.

For a coach, the conventional path would begin and end with getting qualifications and degrees that give the necessary validation in that field. I would then begin interning with some private practice counselor or therapist, then branch out to my own practice.

Again, my path doesn't resemble anything like that, or the slightly less conventional path of finding a second career after obtaining a life coach certification after a three-day workshop.

There may be a linear path to what you want, but that doesn't mean it's the smart or even effective way to get there. Just because a path already exists from point A to point B doesn't mean you shouldn't explore and think outside the box to find your own best way.

It might sound counterintuitive, but if you're looking to be successful in as little time as possible, you need to master the art of thinking outside the box and questioning the conventional paths set before you. The straight line from point A to point B is not always the best or quickest.

One of the most common reasons people fail to achieve success is that they keep attacking a problem from the same angle. Again, this all involves looking at the resources at your disposal in a different way so you can utilize them differently and get better results.

So how can you cultivate your ability to think outside the box and generally become more creative toward whatever your goal?

Thinking outside the box can be framed in many different ways. It mostly boils down to developing a knack for connecting the dots in a different path than you normally would and making the familiar novel and new. You are utilizing the resources you currently have in new ways that are probably not their primary functions. For example, using a pair of jeans as a creative flowerpot (I didn't just make this up).

The first step is to leave your comfort zone. When you let go of the familiar in favor of the unfamiliar, things will seem uncomfortable and dangerous. You have to overcome your need for certainty by focusing on what you stand to gain.

A pair of jeans isn't just an article of clothing. It can (apparently) also be a container, a canvas for a painting, a future pair of shorts, or a hanging wall shelf using the back pockets. Leaving your comfort zone and seeing things through a lens of basic components will be key to investigating new paths.

Second, you need to challenge your concept of causation.

Many people think that they clearly understand the causation involved in a situation. What they really have is mere belief and assumption.

From a purely logical perspective, and in most cases, there is no such thing as causation – there are only beliefs that X causes Y.

This can help you think outside the box because when you accept a path not set in concrete and challenge it, you increase the likelihood of coming up with an alternate or better explanation.

For example, astronomers and laypeople alike used to believe that an imbalance of bodily fluids caused sickness. What was this belief based on? A smattering of evidence and an inability to examine bacteria under a microscope.

All it took was a few scientists to begin doubting the imbalance theory for germ theory to quickly take hold, notably when Louis Pasteur proved in a series of experiments that infection doesn't come out of thin air but is caused by germs and bacteria.

This revolutionized the world of medicine. The assumption of causation went through a change and we're all healthier as a result.

If you're trying to think outside the box, focus your firepower first on the question of why you think certain things are the way they are. Causation is always a good place to start because that's the building block of a path.

Third, aim for quantity when brainstorming.

When trying to think outside the box, you're going to fling a lot of spaghetti at the wall.

Fling with abandon. Don't worry how well it sticks. Just focus on spitting out as many different ideas as possible and trying to solve a problem.

The key here is to get as many ideas as you can on a page and then filter. Think of ideas you (think you) "know" would never work and use them as stepping stones. Don't discount a seemingly random idea because it can be "the thing that leads to the thing."

Take bits and pieces from all the ideas and fuse them together in a Frankenstein solution. Often, you don't know what will work until you see all the options before you, good and bad.

Fourth, use the alphabet.

When trying to think of new ideas and approaches, try using the alphabet to establish a mechanism for new ideas. You start out with the letter A and generate solutions that begin with the letter A. Do this all the way to the letter Z. At the very least, you will be able to generate 26 new ideas simply by using the alphabet to guide you when coming up with ideas.

They don't have to be extremely useful or even completely relevant. It forces you to just list as many solutions as possible.

Fifth, work backward.

A good approach to thinking outside the box is to start with the goal first, and then work backwards from the problem. Stick yourself in the middle of the problem and ask yourself, "OK, this is the end point. How do I get from end point to where I am now?"

Another approach is to stick yourself in the middle and work to the front, and then to the back.

Whatever you choose to decide, using these approaches enables you to get a new perspective on an issue. It forces you to adopt a different perspective that may lead to the identification of different factors that may be interconnected and that you were otherwise overlooking.

It's similar to the feeling you get when you are studying materials for a test. If you're like most people, you'll review the beginning pages of your notes a disproportionate number of times, so it's a good strategy to start your reviewing at random pages in the middle.

Sixth, wear other shoes.

Another way to think outside of the box is to identify a person that you know has a high likelihood of solving this problem.

For example, if you are crime investigator and you are stuck trying to solve a murder, you would ask yourself, "How would Sherlock Holmes approach this issue?" This is looking at the problem through the eyes of a specialist geared toward fixing your problem or issue.

A variation of this approach is to ask, "How would somebody from an entirely different line of business approach my problem?" For example, if you are dealing with an accounting problem you would ask yourself, "How would a musician deal with this problem?" or, "How would a carpenter deal with this problem?"

The reason you're trying to get behind their eyeballs is because their training affords them a different perspective. By assuming a varying approach, you increase the likelihood that you may look at your problem from a completely novel perspective. It starts as a way of role playing, but can quickly yield results.

Seventh, summon the default mode network.

Scientifically, there is a state of mind that appears to be highly correlated (note: not causing) with creativity and thinking outside of the box. It's called the default mode network.

You might be familiar with it.

You're running, showering, or otherwise performing some non-stimulating physical task, and your mind starts to tackle the problems of your day with absurd yet helpful thoughts. Drexel University psychologist John Kounios says, "You become less aware of your environment and more aware of your internal thoughts" when you engage in those activities, and dubbed this the default mode network.

The activities need to be "familiar or comfortable enough that you stay engaged but not bored, and last long enough to have an uninterrupted stream of thought."

Another Professor involved in the study goes on to state, "...[W]hen our minds are at ease [...] we're more likely to direct the spotlight of attention inward, toward that stream of remote associations emanating from the right hemisphere.

In contrast, when we are diligently focused, our attention tends to be directed outward, toward the details of the problems we're trying to solve. While this pattern of attention is necessary when solving problems analytically, it actually prevents us from detecting the connections that lead to insights. [...] It's not until we're being massaged by warm water, unable to check our e-mail, that we're finally able to hear the quiet voices in the backs of our heads telling us about the insight. The answers have been there [sic] all along–we just weren't listening."

In other words, when you occupy yourself physically to a limited extent and are mostly relaxed, you can trigger a mode of thought where your mind runs free and starts looking at problems in novel ways.

Chapter 16. Ignore Pride and Ego

I recall one particular Friday night when I was a younger lad.

I was out at a local bar with some friends and we were at a shared table. A stranger came up and struck up a conversation. Normally I would have no problem with this and engage, but this guy possessed the most infuriating trait you can find in a human being – he knew everything about everything. He was also the best in everything, only he was lazy and never fulfilled his potential.

At one point, the topic of soccer came up. I had played throughout high school and on club teams in college. I pushed the conversation to where he claimed he could juggle a soccer ball over 100 times. I had seen him trip while walking over to the table, so I doubted his claim the way I doubted all his other ones.

I couldn't take it anymore and finally challenged him to a soccer ball juggling competition. We couldn't find one, so I ventured outside to find anything ball-shaped and came back with two muddy, crumpled plastic bottles.

We started juggling. This happened to be the night that I wore my brand new white suede shoes. I beat the braggart handily, but ruined my shoes forever – suede is extremely unforgiving.

Why did I do this? Because I acted based on my ego and pride. I was reactive to the situation instead of taking a step back and not doing what I actually wanted to do.

More often than we'd like to admit, we're not doing things we actively want to do. We're just reacting to others to maintain a perception about ourselves, or feel better about ourselves and prevent damage to our fragile egos.

Acting out of pride: challenging the braggart because I needed to feel superior to him in the moment and prove to others that I was.

Acting out of ego: challenging the braggart because he was making me doubt my own abilities and subtly belittling me, so I could prove my worth to myself.

Ultimately, you're acting not because you want to, but because you feel compelled to or obligated to. Excellence never comes out of obligation or feeling like your back is against the wall. While fear can be a great motivator, fear can also stifle innovation and the power to break through limits.

If you're acting out of pride or ego, you're acting out of fear. You're acting in a certain way to protect something, and the sad truth is that can consume many people's lives. Where does that leave room for them to pursue what they want as opposed to preserve their perception and make themselves feel secure?

You're not acting out of what you need to see happen or purposefully toward a goal or objective. You're not acting out of your sense of possibility and your sense of purpose. You're acting out of what you feel other people are saying and its negative impact on yourself. In short, you're acting out of an addiction to external validation. This is a very debilitating state of mind to be in.

You've acted out of pride or ego:

If you've ever wanted to tell someone off whom you've been dating.

If you've ever bought something you shouldn't have because you thought it might make others view you a certain way.

If you've ever made an objectively poor choice because you don't want to let others know you were wrong.

If you've ever suffered unnecessarily by your own choice.

Instead of doing what you wanted, you were trying to catch up with other people's expectations or trying to cover things up. Whatever the case, you enabled yourself to remain sheltered, protected, and unafraid inside your safe comfort zone.

Unfortunately, those unchallenged comfort zone walls will inevitably cave in and eventually you'll find yourself in an invisible prison.

It's a matter of asking yourself before acting if you are merely reacting to something that will potentially make you feel worse about yourself, or make others view you in a negative way. It's a difficult question to answer honestly.

When you're operating out of fear and pride, you're letting other people's considerations get the better of you. You're letting them push you around and exert power over your life.

To achieve greater success and ensure your efforts are pure, directed, and efficient, you need to be truly honest in defining your motivation and the "why" of your actions. If pride, ego, or fear is part of the equation, you need to move on to something closer to success.

The solution is simple.

Decide to free your life decisions from outside influences. These are counterproductive to what you truly want. Make sure your choices are informed by internal factors, not based on what your parents want you to do and not based on what society expects you to do. Focus more on what makes you happy regardless of outside opinions because the only one that truly cares about whether you succeed is you.

My friend Eric, who was born in the Philippines, used to run a company there. Eric went to the right schools, got the right degrees, and worked for the right companies. Eventually, he got tired of working for other people and decided to work for himself. At its height his company had 50 employees, meaning it was no small operation

The problem with Eric, and the main reason I'm talking about his company in the past tense, is that all the achievements in his life were motivated on pleasing his parents and their friends. As he told me, Filipino culture is very materialistic and the top 1% is highly concerned with making sure everyone else knows who they were.

Eric's family was in that 1%, but they were always in danger of sinking into the 9% range. Therefore, the way he selected his friends, the schools he applied to, and what kind of major he chose were all informed by this insecurity regarding class status.

When he started his own company, he rented an office in the ritziest district in the Philippines. He had a fabulous first two years, but by the end of the third year, Eric's company had reverted back to being a one-man operation.

Eric couldn't let go of his fixation on class identity. He acted completely out of pride and ego and felt he had to put on a show for his employees. He thought his employees would only respect him if they thought he was truly rich. The problem was his income couldn't support his Mercedes, BMW, fancy wardrobe of suits, and expensive office space; his initial capital could only sustain a middle class lifestyle.

This is a dramatic example of letting the need for external validation push you to making the wrong decisions.

Eric easily could have dressed down, driven a Honda, and gotten a modest office in downtown. The problem was that "stepping down" (with respect to class) got in the way of his pride. He saw it as a huge fall from grace, even though from a purely practical and business standpoint, there was no question about it.

Don't let your pride and ego get in the way of success. Those are indicators of outside opinion – since when does that influence your actions to your goals?
Chapter 17. Manage Energy Not Time

Most people are worried about the amount of time they spend on their tasks and allotting enough time to finish everything they need to.

Time is finite, but you know what's even more finite? Our energy levels. We can have all the time in the world, but if we're fatigued or just unable to get "in the zone," you can consider that free time as good as wasted.

That's why it makes complete sense to be just as, if not more, aware of your energy levels and what drives them as opposed to simple time management.

We only have a finite amount of energy each day during which we can produce great work, so we must not let it go to waste.

The goal with managing your energy is to (1) identify when it is naturally high, (2) keep it as high as possible for as long as possible, and (3) take advantage of those times and avoid low-energy lulls.

How do you identify when your energy is at your highest and you are thus at your most alert and productive? Ignore all conventional advice about this topic because while many people have powerful morning routines, you might not fully wake up until 2:00PM, or later.

That's okay – what works for others won't necessarily work for you. Don't try to be someone you're not when your intuition tells you that mornings aren't for you.

The easiest and most effective way to identify your peak energy hours is to keep a short journal over a period of a few weeks (two to three weeks should be sufficient). In the journal, note the times during the day when you feel tired or lethargic and when you feel energetic or alert. When are you struggling to read the same page, and when does work just seem to flow out of your brain?

The common time periods are (1) early morning, (2) mid-morning, (3) post-lunch, (4) early evening, (5) post dinner, (6) pre-bedtime, and (7) night owl. Chances are you probably already have a clue of where you fit in, so there's no need for me to assign times to each period. Which of those seven periods suit you or fight you?

Finally, take note of how long these peak hours typically last. How long can you realistically maintain your focus in normal, everyday situations? How long will you need before you take a break to recharge your batteries, or simply call it a day?

Soon a clear pattern will emerge. You'll see with clarity when you have high energy levels and for how long. For example, my peak energy hours are nowhere close to the mornings. My peak time begins around 7:00PM and essentially extends until I get tired in anticipation for sleep. It lasts, with some variance, about five hours.

Now that we've identified our peak energy hours, how can we extend those hours and make the most of them?

The first step is to leave that space open in your daily schedule so you can utilize it to the fullest. Prioritize focus and productivity for your peak energy hours.

Second, eliminate your distractions and save all of your most taxing or brain-intensive tasks for that period of time.

If your peak hours are at night, spend the day taking care of simpler and less urgent tasks, as well as acts that you would use to procrastinate (like household chores or errands).

The activities you should save for your peak hours are the ones that are most draining to you. For example, if you are an introvert, then multiple conference calls will be draining. However, an extrovert might choose to take conference calls outside of their peak hours because speaking with others increases their energy and doesn't require their full concentration.

You may also want to make sure you only engage in low energy tasks prior to your peak hours, and if you aren't able to do that, recharge your energy throughout the day to keep it high by relaxing or playing.

Your peak hours are your game time. How does an athlete treat his or her body on game day, or how does a public speaker act differently on speech day?

An athlete stays off his or her feet as much as possible, rests, and clears his or her mind to make sure that they are in the moment when their time comes. A speaker does the same thing, except they rest their voice and try to speak as little as possible.

These performance-based people rest what they depend on; for the athlete it is the body, and for the speaker, the voice. In the same way, you need to rest your mind and utilize it as little as possible outside of your peak hours.

Third and finally, make sure that you can't make excuses not to work during your peak hours. Take care of all your distractions before your peak hours and make sure your friends know to leave you alone unless an emergency arises.

Planning your schedule around your energy levels is far more logical than planning around tasks. Your daily energy level is a constantly-running meter. Everything makes it run down and, accordingly, it is sometimes squandered. You have to keep your energy in reserve for when you need it, and not squander it on mind-numbing spreadsheets or emails you can answer in your sleep.

It's similar to willpower. The amount of willpower we have on a daily basis is finite, which is why it's easy to refuse a piece of chocolate once, but not for the seventh time.

And if you use all of your willpower and discipline to refuse chocolate, then you might not have enough left over for completing work or tasks that really matter.

A major theme in this chapter is that more hours worked does not equal better productivity or more output. Often when we spend hours upon hours on a task, we're not working on the task itself. We are fooling ourselves with busy work and procrastination.

Identifying and utilizing your peak hours to the fullest will allow you to do far more in far less time.
Conclusion

The power of the narrative is transformative.

But that's not the only thing that can empower you on your way to finding your path through life.

I mentioned before that there needs to a exist a critical mass of discontent before massive action takes place. I may have misspoke intentionally – by the time the discontent hits a critical mass, it's too late. You'll be forced into a situation where you simply need change, and may or may not have a plan in place for it.

You'll have to sink or swim.

Finding your true path through life and to success might be easier than you think if you're able to synthesize some of the lessons in this book. They all culminate in looking at the world as if you have nothing to lose, no sunk costs, and no external pressures pushing you.

Is that realistic? Yes and no. Not immediately, but eventually.

What would your childhood self think about your path?

Sincerely,

Patrick King

Social Interaction Specialist

www.PatrickKingConsulting.com

P.S. If you've enjoyed this book, please don't be shy. Drop me a line, leave a review, or both! I love reading feedback, and reviews are the lifeblood of Kindle books, so they are always welcome and greatly appreciated.
Cheat Sheet

Chapter 1. Disregard Convention

Just because things have been done a certain way for a certain amount of time doesn't mean there is a reason for it. Actively question conventional thinking and ask internal questions to evaluate actions and paths for yourself.

Chapter 2. Pinpoint Weaknesses to Find Strengths

Finding your strengths is important, but that's a relatively easy task. Not knowing your weaknesses is really what will keep you from where you want to be. You can discover your weaknesses through your actions and focus.

Chapter 3. Control Your Narrative

A narrative is a self-told story that allows you to forsake responsibility or accountability in a certain situation. Some of us use these to keep us from doing anything at all. Creating an empowering narrative will allow you to aim higher.

Chapter 4. Keep the Correct Company

You are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with. Make sure you are surrounded with great influences, because you will learn subconsciously and through osmosis.

Chapter 5. Travel Through Time

Putting yourself in the shoes of a future you can help create focus, orientation towards goals, and resist temptation.

Chapter 6. Become Action and Emotion-Oriented

Follow an action-oriented framework after defining your overarching goals. Then tie them to the emotions associated with the goals instead of the goals themselves for maximum commitment and motivation.

Chapter 7. The Science of Sleep

Our brains do an incredible amount of work when we sleep. They make connections that improve performance, so optimizing sleep is imperative to massive success.

Chapter 8. Find Marginal Gains

There are times for the Pareto Principle, but there are also times for marginal gains, which you create by focusing on the 1% improvements in every aspect of a plan or project. They will compound.

Chapter 9. Feign Doubt

With a certain amount of confidence, it's important to not forget the insecure actions that got us to where we are. Separate the emotion from the actions and you'll perform better.

Chapter 10. Take Ownership

You hold all the responsibility in your hands, and that creates a very different kind of drive and motivation than you would have otherwise.

Chapter 11. Cultivate Secondary Skills

Very few of us are going to succeed on the basis of one singular skill. Therefore, seek to cultivate at least two secondary skills that can enhance your primary skill. This follows the pattern of how most successful people are in real life.

Chapter 12: Six Fundamental Human Needs

There are six fundamental human needs, two of which we emphasize at any given time: certainty, uncertainty, significance, connection, growth, and contribution.

Chapter 13. Assume the Long Road

In other words, truly prepare for the worst, but hope for the best. Do not depend or rely on the best-case scenario.

Chapter 14. In Their Own Words

Based on quotations from six high-achievers, perseverance and imposing your will on a situation are key tenets to success.

Chapter 15. Think Outside the Box

There are conventional linear paths, slightly less conventional paths, and paths which you arrive to through necessity and thinking outside the box. People most often fail because they lack the ability to approach problems from alternative angles.

Chapter 16. Ignore Pride and Ego

If you're acting out of pride or ego, you're being reactionary and protecting your self-perception. You're not acting freely in a way that you would otherwise.

Chapter 17. Manage Energy Not Time

Time is limited, but energy is even more limited. Manage your energy levels and zones of productivity during the day to make sure you take advantage of them.

 August 2008, Robert Stickgold & Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen
