Articles - Page 19 of 36

Take This To The Next Level

What’s more human than progress?

No matter how far we’ve come, there’s something inside that keeps us striving to the next level.

What is this for you?

What does it take for you reach it?

What do you need when you get there?

A Hard Thing…

About reaching the next level is that, by definition, it requires something beyond this level.

Whether it’s taking your career/business to another level, getting in better shape, getting more skilled, or any other goal requires something beyond where we are now.

In gaming, leveling up requires navigating your current level, collecting keys, earning points, overcoming an ordeal, whatever it is demands you collect what you need before ascending.

This test determines if you’re qualified to pass, and also ensures you have what you need to succeed at a higher level.

When a hike turns into technical climb it’s too late to turn around and go get your rope.

To pass to the next level you must be ready when you arrive.

Acting As-If, We Fail

In our careers it’s natural to think we get promoted when we’re successful, but in fact we get promoted to test if we can succeed at a higher level.

An NFL player doesn’t succeed by playing college ball.

We can be fooled into chicken and egg thinking that when we make it to the next level we’ll step up our game, but by definition we step up to be here.

This isn’t only having the capabilities we need to succeed, but also the self-image.

As was perhaps best put by Maxwell Maltz some 70 years ago, we only achieve goals that are consistent with who we perceive ourselves to be.

And to reach the next level we must not only become this person, we must be them now.

Acting as if, we fail.

Daniel Craig does a nice job acting as a cold killer, but you’d hardly want him covering your six in a gunfight.

To reach that next level, we can’t fake it till we make it, we must make it now to take it there.

Continue

Popeye Worry Muscles

Popeye is a weakling relative to most of us.

He has to pop a can of spinach to grow his muscles, but we have our worry muscles pumped ready to go.

The best feedback I’ve received this year from anything I’ve written was in response to Winning Like A Loser.

Wake up stressed. Fill your mind with overwhelm. Worry about everything. Go to bed at night feeling like you failed to get it done and looking forward to losing another day…

Plenty of people told me that they were ROFL reading it, before going on to tell me how much it resembled their days…

No Laughing Matter

Writing about the insane way we’ve been conditioned to live I was laughing all the way to the publish, but I was also shining a light on something serious.

Because I’ve spent decades ridding my head of the human condition I can never go back to “not-living” that way, but for plenty of years I did.

Back then I didn’t see a problem with it.

It was “normal” to wake up whining about my job (just talk to many people, even at Goldman Sachs), confused what my life was about, terrified it wouldn’t work out as I dreamed, worried about the utter lunacy of the world.

If you’d asked me I would have told you I was completely justified living that way, “it’s just how it is,” I would have said I was “happy,” but now I’d rather be the walking dead.

As I wrote about here, for most of my life I believed that when I was doing what I want I would feel amazing, but now I know we only feel as amazing as we train ourselves to feel.

Creatures of Habit

You have a standard routine for dressing in the morning. Maybe underwear first—not you, P—then socks, perhaps your pants or skirt before.

No matter your “process,” I know every time it’s the same.

You shower and brush in the same sequence too, because just about everything we do is habit.

And while this serves us in many ways—e.g. you don’t have to figure out whether your socks go on before your shoes—our habits of thinking tend to punish us the other way.

The data is astounding—each day we have somewhere around 60,000 thoughts, of which some 90% are redundant and 80% are negative.

It’s sad, but when you consider the nature of the human predicament, it’s obvious why it’s true.

We’re not built for happiness, but survival. Our brains aren’t set up to wander through predator-infested territory smelling the roses but to fixate on what might eat us.

Biologically we’re built with a negativity bias, and we live in a predatory society that feeds on our fears, which ensures many of us are world-class worriers.

To A Man With A Hammer…

His hands are often beaten.

And to a mind that has been feeding on worry, and developed a Popeye-sized worry muscle, there’s always something more to worry about.

See, the problem with muscles is that once you’ve built them you’ve gotta feed them, and indeed mental muscles do a nice job of feeding themselves.

And this means even if there’s nothing “real” in our life to fear—e.g. unlike our ancestors, no Neanderthals are predating us—the brain will find plenty of fake fear to binge on.

Sadly this means, once you’ve built these muscles, it’s near impossible to be happy, other than pretending to be happily-worried all the time.

Continue

Why We’re So Fat—Ashley Graham Vs. Elsa Hosk

Us humans are facing an ever-growing health crisis.

All the time you see headlines like World Faces Staggering Obesity Challenge, yet where does this get us?

People are getting fatter and fatter. They are dying of preventable illness.

Their quality of life is significantly diminished by the way they look and feel and as a society what do we do for them?

We Shame Fat

It’s only in recent years that companies like Dove, with its Real Beauty campaign. And plus-size models like Ashley Graham and Tess Holliday have made it socially acceptable to not look like Kate Moss.

Yet even recently, when Cosmo put Tess on its cover, she was forced to defend herself from shamers… Beautifully telling them “Not to worry about my fat ass…”

Of course our definition of beauty is skewed towards tall, strong, chiseled, handsome men, and thin women, yet we all know that’s not what we are.

We are “normal.” Some of us are taller, fatter, skinnier, smarter, dumber, sexier, geekier than others…

And that’s all good. Our society measures us using the same stick, yet that ugly stick beats many of us down.

Einstein wrote, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

We all come from a different mold, and what matters most is that we are good with who we are.

Continue

Losers Keep Doing What You’re Doing

The next best feedback you can ever give someone is, Keep doing what you’re doing.

Even if they’re doing a terrible job, you’ll avoid conflict and also ensure they won’t get so good that they outshine you.

Although some people pretend to want honest feedback, you know nobody wants to hear the truth, let alone improve, so just get their tail wagging with a pat on the head and keep doing what you’re doing.

Just like in school, a couple check marks and not getting held back each year is all any human ever wants, why encourage anyone to get better?

Improving Leads To Failure

Improving is for people who can’t work hard enough to keep doing what they’re doing.

Like Rafael Nadal, of course it’s true that people who keep getting better tend to win more, but they also only keep getting promoted to the point where other people fail.

The Peter Principle demands that you must be good enough to keep getting promoted, but not so good that you actually excel.

As one of my favorite book titles states, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, and keep doing what you’re doing is the surest way to avoid succeeding to ultimately fail.

Head Down Hit It Hard

It’s scary to drive and you’re much better off just keeping your head down.

Maybe you could avoid that wall you’ll eventually hit, but with your head down driving hard you might even punch through concrete.

Some people say, pick your head up, set goals.

What the hell do they know? Once you’ve set goals, now you’re on the hook, you likely have to get better, and that will only lead you to fail more successfully anyways.

As I wrote here, no good loser wins that way. Who cares where you’re headed…

Continue

Message From a Dead Man

I’m starting a podcast interviewing entrepreneurs, VCs, PEs, and others who have built winning businesses.

Doing so we blasted a big list, which included serial entrepreneur and angel investor, Ted Rheingold.

I didn’t know Ted and didn’t know he died a year ago, but his auto-response still deeply touched me more than many humans who claim to still be alive.

His message asks us to “keep these very important messages in place,” so I’m passing it on.

It’ unlikely I’ll able to get back to you

Was the subject line. He went on to write:

My cancer (ccRCC, metastic) has gotten the upper hand and I’ll be putting all my resources into managing it.

In my stread, please keep these very important messages in place:

* be good to each other

* enjoy evert day

* wanting is suffering

* The journey is still the destination, now more than every

* the trend of purpose is coming like a tidal wave, get out a heard of
it. enjoy the ride. die fulfilled.

* Reframe your thinking of “what your career can do for you,” into
“what can your career do for others,” and wonderful, meaningful work
awaits you.

Continue

Winning Like A LOSER

The best way to win is through brute force.

Everyone knows that hustle is the secret to winning, and that demands that you never have a minute you’re not ferreting away.

Most people are far too lazy for this approach.

Some people are just too stupid to run themselves ragged chasing success, but those who are truly ambitious know exactly how to win.

Wake Up Stressed

As soon as you wake up you must get yourself fired up.

And we all know that the absolute best way to motivate yourself is with fear.

Immediately, as soon as you wake up, you want to start thinking about EVERYTHING that you need to get done today.

The best “hack” for getting your anxiety started is to keep your phone by your bed so that within 30 seconds of waking you can check your email.

Of course if you’re serious about winning, you never want to let that anxiety get away from you while lazy people are sleeping, so keep your phone dinging all night.

The most insightful question we should all ask ourselves is, “What keeps you awake at night?”

And then every night before going to bed you want to fill your mind with those things so your brain will keep waking you up to hustle.

It might seem small but just waking up a few times through the night to check your email can make a massive difference. People will know how much you hustle, you’ll feel like you’re all over it, and with just a few thousand sleepless nights you’ll be crushing it.

Now you’ve got your nights sorted and are waking up with the right terror, you want to drive your day the same way.

Start Your Day With Overwhelm

If you’re serious about success, after you check your email, you want to start filling your mind with all the ways that you might fail, and especially, all the things that might go wrong today.

Instead of paying attention to your spouse, kids, pets, or others you love, you want to be fully in your head thinking about all those things that are happening elsewhere.

A great way to keep building up your fear and overwhelm is to tune into the news, and of course start scrolling through social media, paying careful attention to all the bad things that are going on that have zero impact on you, and you have zero control.

By far Twitter is the best.

It’s only soundbites, so you can easily scroll through thousands of brain farts and overwhelm yourself with noise in just a few minutes.

Once again, if you’re truly ambitious, you’ve been doing this throughout the night, but for those of you who aren’t as committed, there’s still plenty of time to build enough overwhelm to start your day.

Continue

Life, Solved—2 Answers

I’m Done.

When I sat back and read last week’s newsletter I felt this feeling wash over me.

Most my life I’ve been baffled by what we are and how we live, and I’ve solved it, at least to satisfactory answers for me.

I know it sounds lofty or arrogant or nutso to say “I’ve figured out life” and of course I hope there’s plenty left to learn…

But, truth is, I found the three (one redacted…) SIMPLE answers that I’ve spent my entire adult life obsessively seeking.

1. How Do You Create The Life You Truly Want?

This is the most fundamental mystery of our lives…

When it should be the most basic, obvious, and teachable skill of being human.

Left to figure it out on our own few of us do. 5+ billion of us live in abject poverty, at best most of us live and die a life that was good enough, with few of us truly living our dream.

How on earth could we when nobody teaches us how?

With our heads stuffed full of information masquerading as learning, none of us are given even the slightest hint on how to make our way through this world.

Bombarded by a world of noise most of us struggle just to make it through our days, let alone chart our ideal course.

I bleed for humanity. Since I was a child I’ve felt an unshakable sadness and unwavering fight that so many of us are forced to settle for so little.

From about age 11 this has been my focus, and since 2000, more or less, my sole focus.

I ONLY ever wanted to live the most amazing life I can imagine, and I spent a good 20 years obsessed with how you do it.

Here I give away the answer for a fraction of the cost of wasting your life watching Netflix, but I’m done with trying too hard getting people to read…

Continue

Feel Amazing At Will (Pt 2.)

A buddy told me that in writing about my most amazing discovery on feeling how you want, I alluded to an uber secret to happiness and then dropped the mic and walked off stage.

It’s somewhat true…

In some ways my work is done. I’ve spent the better part of 20 years obsessively seeking answers to 3 life questions and this was the final piece.

The answer to feeling amazing at will, The Ultimate Solution, is so SUPER SIMPLE, and laughably ludicrous, yet it’s not easy to unpack, even with my clients who are deep on these topics.

That’s because it requires you to “out evolve” our most fundamental biological and social conditioning.

This Doesn’t Cause That

Poor baby is crying because she’s got a dirty diaper.

Notice what the “because” does to that sentence…

It rationalizes feeling crap. It makes sense to kick and scream because of a dirty diaper, right?

Wrong. That’s the problem.

At our most basic level we’re conditioned to believe that not getting/doing what we want is cause for us to “feel worse,” and satisfying our wants is cause for us to feel better.

Of course I’m not suggesting that we should leave baby in a soiled diaper to teach it to feel good irrespective of conditions, I’m merely highlighting how this pattern gets conditioned throughout our lives.

A few years later a bigger baby doesn’t get the ice cream it wants and throws a tantrum. Or is begging for a new toy that will absolutely satisfy it… until it’s crying for the next.

20 years later the even bigger baby is upset because they didn’t get the new sweater in mauve or is so desperately seeking that partner to feel complete.

It’s true that biologically we move away from what we don’t want and towards what we do, but that’s different to growing up believing this is the cause of how we feel.

Why Are You So Happy?

Hidden inside that seemingly innocent question is the cause of much misery in our world.

Why do we need a “because” to feel happy? Why do we need a cause, instead of being happy for no reason? (because many people are unhappy blaming some reason)

I recently saw a quote from a double amputee that said something like, “People ask me how I can be so positive without my legs, I ask them how they can be so negative with theirs.”

Do you see what’s implied? That having legs “should” cause you to be happy, and having them removed should cause misery.

Now, I’m not suggesting that we should be indifferent to having our legs cut off but I am pointing out that if legs were the cause of happiness we wouldn’t live in a Prozac world.

Because it relies on this flawed cause and effect thinking, nearly all of the research on happiness is wrong.

Continue

My Most Amazing Discovery—Feel How You Want

In the last couple of decades, the focus of my work has been through three major evolutions:

In the old days it was about getting what you want because I believed that would make my life everything I imagined.

Coming from a place of lack the brain seeks those things it thinks will make it feel full (full-filled) but we all know this feeling is fleeting.

And after many years of getting and still not feeling “complete,” I came to see doing is where it’s at.

“It’s not about getting somewhere,” I would have said, “It’s about being immersed in doing what you want…”

Nice try… It’s true, but still incomplete.

Feeling is where it’s at.

Getting Demands More Getting

Growing up working poor I figured that when I got what I wanted I would feel how I wanted.

I was right, then, quickly, wrong…

How often do we get what we want, only to then set our sights on the next thing that we “think” we want?

All the time!

We’re no happier than we were after WWII because we quickly adapt to what we have.

We live inside a half-empty brain that no matter what it gets seeks more things to fill it up.

But that brain can never feel full. Enough is never enough.

Like a yin that at its deepest level is missing yang, it’s incomplete wiring leads the brain to constantly seek that next thing it needs to feel good.

A reason is that our thinking and feeling faculties are separated like a car and driver. The thinking mind can’t feel anything and projects lack onto the feeling body, which means no amount of getting is satiating.

Seeing through this lie of thinking, I saw beyond getting, to doing.

Continue

What I Fortunately Learned Before My Massive Goals Crushed Me

Getting stuck in my massive goals shredded my mind.

In the past I chased down goals like a cheetah, but when I left Wall Street to do this, I was shot in my tracks.

What I called the chest feeling. The inability to sit down and work, let alone write. The painful thinking on thinking that dominated my head in those early days.

I had a dream to do something big, but I couldn’t even get myself to do it small.

It’s for this reason that I build highly systematic approaches for myself and my clients to wake up and crush our days, and I can’t emphasize enough the power of daily systems like this.

Yet it was from years of stuck thinking on massive goals that I discovered the secret is…

Stop Making It So Massive!

Our brain is the most powerful time machine we know that can imagine anything and everything at all times in every future.

One moment we’re thinking about what happened as a kid. The next we’re thinking about 30 years from now. Five seconds later that brain has jumped to what happened last weekend or what might happen next.

Forever stuck in this time machine we can become too overwhelmed by all the things we might do, and focus too little on doing what matter most now.

Instead of living in the world of the actionable, we get stuck in the world of the possible…

“But, I Don’t Know What I Want…”

If I had written a book for every time I said that, I would have written a library of books on not knowing what you want…

But I knew how to do that well enough, so instead I wrote the one book that helped me solve it!

It’s a big book. There’s plenty of stuff in there, but there’s also a very simple process that drives from front to back.

For many years I was stuck in my own head, confused, worried, frustrated, thinking all the time, What Do I Want?

But after grinding my gears on the same question for a decade, I could see it was false.

Berating myself because I didn’t know what I wanted kept me confused, but I got lucky that every day I was taking the small steps that eventually would lead me to clarity.

The brain can keep questioning forever, and, in fact, being stuck is desirous for the brain craves certainty, even if that certainty is not knowing what you want!

Yet, by continuing to take steps, as I wrote about here, even without knowing what you want, you are navigating your way there.

Continue

Make Big Hard Decisions Easily, or At Least Easier

His problem wasn’t unique.

Each of my Do What You Want books I open by telling a story about two business leaders, Gary Cohn and Jeff Bezos, at similar crossroads.

Bezos was at DE Shaw, wondering do I leave this great job to build the everything store. Cohn had been sitting as president of Goldman Sachs with his eye on the CEO seat, thinking about how to ascend or make a move.

The executive sitting next to me on the plane was in the same bind.

From the ground level he’s climbed his way to the near top of a towering company, where he sits an arms-length from the corner office.

Unclear of how long it will be before the CEO retires, and facing plenty of internal competition for the top job, constantly he’s asking himself…

Do I Stay Or Do I Go?

For most of the flight we were busy being anti-social on a plane, but as the flight attendants began preparing the cabin to land at Newark, we started talking.

“So, what do you do?” he asked.

“I do what I want” is my playful answer, but wanting to avoid all that I dodged his question, “I’m a consultant. How about you?”

Like most top executives, unsatisfied with my evasive answer he went deeper, “What type of consulting?”

“Our consulting firm is focused on systematic winning in your business, but my work is far more personal, working with leaders in getting what they want.”

“I’m a leader, I want to get what I want,” he half-joked, “I wonder if you’ve had any experience with this type of problem I’m facing…”

Game On…

Often when people present problems to me they’ve spent so much time wrapping themselves around the axle that they think their problem is super complicated and unique.

Vista Equity Partners crushes it because they figured out that the types of companies they buy can be optimized the same way, and our problems are much the same.

Sitting back and taking a big sigh, he told me how much he loved his job, how his career had been a rocket ship, but, now, he found himself stuck at a crossroad…

Like an actor taking a gulp of air before delivering his big line, slowing his voice and looking me deep in the eyes, he said, “I just don’t know if I should stay in my job or leave to start this new venture…”

Within 15 seconds I could see exactly where he was stuck.

Continue

Happy Fake Facebook Birthday!

Last weekend was my fake Facebook birthday so I took a trip to celebrate.

Each year I forget my fake birthday until a couple days before I start receiving texts, and then I feel a little guilty.

For obvious reasons I gave a fake ID to Facebook, not knowing that for years to come I’d be stealing fake birthday wishes from the community.

I used to tell people “no, no, it’s only my fake Facebook birthday,” but I saw it robbed them of birthday joy so I learned to just say thank you.

This year I took it a step further and celebrated too 🙂

Fake, Real, Reality…

One of my Level 4 Tools is called the Present Dashboard.

Part of the tool is looking out through your eyes at your life like you’re looking through the windshield of a car.

This helps you be in the driver’s seat of your brain, giving you more choice on what you pay attention to, and how it makes you think and feel.

You can imagine looking out through the windshield at a traffic-filled overcast day, or you can see the sun shining brightly on a road of your dreams.

Your “real” day might seem hard, but looking through your windshield you might choose to experience it more joyfully.

A challenging workout you might see like fun play. A tough meeting you might imagine going smoothly, and choose to brighten up and feel cheery no matter how it goes.

The Present Dashboard teaches your brain the difference between reality and what we make “real.”

Continue

In Pursuit Of Magic

As I go deeper in the mind I find it increasingly hard to talk about.

For instance, writing about remote viewing is odd enough, let alone what it actually implies for our reality.

It’s easy to dismiss what we don’t understand, and just allowing yourself to think there might be something to remote viewing opens the door to how on earth it could be possible. If we are able to access information from the so-called future and pass it back to ourselves today, then what does this say about our reality?

That’s the problem on topics of the mind.

When you open the door, the whole damn tide floods in.

Meditation Is A Gentle Ride

When you get into meditation you learn that our awareness extends beyond the meat and two veg.

With meditation you can easily explore consciousness by getting your feet a little wet, but sometimes you’re forced to dive all the way in.

That’s what happened to Harvard neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor when the left hemisphere of her brain blew out and she got flushed through the other door.

I write about her all the time because in her TED Talk she provides a rapid glimpse into what enlightened humans describe as the true nature of reality.

To the left hemisphere of the brain the world is solid and rational, yet to the right it’s an energy soup.

Do We Live In A Simulation?

Elon Musk apparently thinks the chances are 1 in billions that we aren’t in a simulation.

I like where he’s coming from, but I’m not so confident that us humans can even comprehend let alone describe what this reality is.

Like trying to explain to my cat where I’m going for lunch, or even what is outside our home in New York, some things aren’t possible for us animals to understand.

We are barely a rung below the monkeys swinging from the trees, our conscious faculties are built to operate in a linear, time-based reality, and you literally must be out of “that mind” to experience reality differently.

Buddhists. Catholics. Muslims. Jews. Greeks. Egyptians. Indians. Conspiracy. Ancients. Hermetics. Philosophers. Trippers. Transcendentalists. Most lately, Science.

Like the Catholic Heaven and Soul, they all describe some form of reality beyond WYSIWYG.

Continue

Rapidly Learn Anything This Summer

People often talk about learning being an advantage in the future, yet when hasn’t this been true?

The caveman that first learned to avoid the lion survived longer, and still today rapidly adapting is the key to thriving.

The faster we learn in school, the better grades we get, the better opportunities that are available to us.

In the workplace those who quickly learn the rules of the game and keep learning the fastest are most likely to accelerate.

It’s also true in our hobbies and sports. The faster we learn, the more fun we have, the more likely we are to keep playing.

Do You Know Why Reading Is So Boring?

Because nobody ever teaches us to read fast enough, our brains get bored.

It’s a Ferrari designed to suck in a massive amount of information, yet because we’ve never been trained to read beyond a fifth-grade level most of us read like driving Miss Daisy.

When you understand why, it’s no surprise that on average we read at the same rate we speak, some 250 words a minute.

The cause is subvocalizing, which means instead of taking in information with our eyes as you do in say reading a traffic sign, we repeat the words eveeeeerrr soooo sloooowly in our heads.

If I had trained Evelyn Wood in high school, I would have bought myself thousands of hours of wasted study and repetition, and the first secret to learning fast is to train yourself to more rapidly input information.

But, that’s just for starters, because we learn little from reading.

Reading Isn’t Learning

Sadly, even few smart highly successful people are continuously learning, and even many who pretend to be are merely listening to podcasts or reading books.

Often when I suggest to people great books like How To Win Friends and Influence People, they tell me something like, “Yep, I read that.”

I then ask questions like: How specifically are you using it? What is your process for reviewing what you learned? If you were tested on it, would you get a passing grade?

When I first began this journey, how we learn seemed pretty obvious.

Of course we know how we learn. We’re learning all of our lives, but I soon realized that us adults are conditioned to be terrible learners.

Continue

Shocking Video Of De Niro Supporting Trump

At the recent Tony Awards Robert De Niro used his star power to promote Trump.

While he did it by giving a big fuck you to the president, he might as well have recorded a Superbowl commercial for Trump.

De Niro got himself an extra 15 hours of fame, but like so many of us on the left he’s helping buy the guy another four years.

Propaganda Everywhere…

But few people get how it really works.

The most basic ingredient of Trump’s winning campaign was…

ATTENTION

Negative attention is still attention, and what Trump most needed to win.

The TWO BILLION dollars in free promotion that the mostly left-selling media handed Trump got him elected, and even top promoters like De Niro still fail to see it.

While many on the left of course believe that the liberal media is “on their side” and trying to stop Trump, they fail to understand that the media is on their own side.

Continue

I Feel So Sorry For Warren Buffett

“So, what, I buy another car, or house, or plane, then what?” He asked me.

“That’s exactly my point,” I responded.

“It’s lame isn’t it…”

Boooooring…

Still too often I hear seemingly ambitious types talking like rap stars about the G650 that they so desperately wish to own.

Of course few will ever make “yacht money,” and some who do will end up just as unfulfilled as the others.

I’m never surprised when I hear about another billionaire who’s all messed up, with their drink or trophies or insecurities or stupid money being thrown around on this or that.

When you can buy whatever you want, where’s the excitement in getting that new thing?

In the dripping in oil rich Arab countries where you’re “bored” into money you see the extreme desperation of the rich.

Prominent license plates cost more than the custom Ferraris and Lambos they’re pasted on—this sad man paid $14.3mm for his #1 license plate—because bored people “spend” their lives playing status games.

Continue

To Become Your Greatest, Get An Anvil

For years I sought better ways to characterize the pursuit of success.

I could see that, ultimately, success is the pursuit of development, that it’s not only (or perhaps at all) about what we “achieve” but much more about who we become.

A real goal is one that is bigger than us and requires growing if we are to succeed.

If you’re not strong enough to pick up a heavy load, then you either leave the heavy lifting to someone else, or you choose to get stronger.

We fail to grow if we’re not stretched, and to forge ourselves into our greatest, we need a goal that forces growth.

I call this an anvil.

Forging Steel

To forge steel you heat it up with a flame, and bash it against an anvil.

Of course nobody asks the steel if this is a pleasant experience, but one would like to believe that it’s worth it to be forged into what you’re destined to be.

Success can feel much the same.

Our society likes to celebrate those who have achieved, but we seldom like to go too deep into what it took for that hero to become this way.

Watching Elon Musk in the world, does anyone think it looks like a laugh a minute?

Sure, plenty of people would love to be a billionaire, but how many would step into the heat and beat themselves against the anvils of SpaceX, Tesla, Boring, SolarCity, and all else that man does?

(I don’t know how he does it without Geoff Blades yet on his side… struggling is how :). Let’s take it to another level, Elon!)

Many of us dream of achieving great things. We dream of becoming great men and women. But we shy away from the anvil because we want an easier way.

Continue

Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It

Celebrity suicides tell us a lot.

Life is hard for many of us.

Irrespective of fame, fortune, and everything else, many of us struggle to make it through our days.

When you get inside people’s heads it’s shocking to learn how many of us are hurting deep down.

Don’t Wanna Be Alive

Famously, in his song about suicide prevention, 1800-273-8255, Logic sang:

I’ve been on the low
I been taking my time
I feel like I’m out of my mind
It feel like my life ain’t mine
(Who can relate? Woo!)

A lot of us can. His song made him famous because a lot of us can relate, and when celebrities suicide a lot more of us call the hotline.

Continue

Pence. Trump. Water Bottle. Covert Influence

A buddy sent me this video of Trump and Pence.

He’s a liberal, and I despise politics, so hopefully I’ll avoid getting myself in trouble this time talking about Trump’s influence…

Sitting at a FEMA event, after Trump takes his water bottle off the table and puts it on the floor, Pence immediately follows.

The video went viral because the behavior seems strange, but at a deeper level there’s something very powerful to learn from it.

Most People Are Blind To Influence

In some ways I made a bad decision to write the book on how Trump was winning, but I also wanted to talk about a crucial topic that few others observed.

Just like nearly every single economist who failed to predict the most devastating recession in modern history, nearly every commentator who watched Trump win failed to see how.

Continue

NLP’s Mind Reading Influence

All the time we wish we could get more insight into what people are thinking, and here a little knowledge can go a long way.

An example from NLP is how to decode other people’s non-verbal cues.

Think of it this way, right before you say yes or no, you do something with your body. Maybe your face scrunches on no, or on yes you’re already nodding.

With a little bit of practice, you can easily read minds by reading these cues!

Become Fake Psychic

You don’t need to be an expert at this like the FBI’s Joe Navarro who can interpret a micro gesture on someone’s cheek, but it can be easy and helpful to know if people are agreeing with what you’re saying.

Imagine sitting in a negotiation, and before they say anything, just by reading their cues, you know whether they’re in agreement with you.

Top negotiators I know do this unconsciously in “reading the room,” and others do this more deliberately.

This is how some of the fake psychics work.

It’s an art and a science called cold reading where you do something like…