It was the worst advice.
When someone is in a bad place last thing they want to hear is “Keep having fun.”
But it’s also a most important thing you can share with someone.
Like one of my teachers said.
A place with no problems?
He says there’s one place in the world where nobody has any problems.
Everyone is just there time passing by.
Never a care in the world.
Nothing to worry about.
Where?
A client is making leaps.
But he’s got a loooooong way to go.
He’s on a world-changing mission that has legs because so much is possible with technology.
Just he’s got a hard leap to make.
Here’s 5 things we’re doing.
The thing with making leaps in business and life is you’ve reaaalllly gotta want it.
Because it’s not just about where you’re leaping but making leaps in your performance.
You must know why this matters to you because making a leap is hard and you’ll back down.
When you’re feeling the strain you’ll find it easier to hang back or look for reasons to slow.
Or you push yourself to a comfortable limit vs. where a drill sergeant would get you.
I learned a lot this week.
It’s stuff I’m pretty bad at so it was good to be here.
Here was a senior leader offsite with a client I’ve advised for many years.
I learned a lot about the business and a lot of people who I only knew by name.
But most I learned about obsession.
Customers have an obsession with my client’s company and the games they make.
I knew this.
I’ve known they have millions and millions of people obsessively playing their games.
Been to esport world events seeing all these fans going crazy faces painted for the game.
So I thought I got this obsession but this week I got it deeper.
Every day is a chase.
I bounce out of bed and go after it.
All day I’m going after it and often through the night.
What exactly I’m going after is still in some ways elusive to me!
That’s why I’m going after it.
Why do what you do?
You wake up every day, do your thing, go to bed, wake up to do another day.
In many ways this life is quite routine isn’t it and you can find yourself just ticking through the days.
That’s how it was for me back when I had a job.
They were great jobs but I wanted more.
At dinner with best friends in Manhattan this week she asked me what books to read.
She saw this article I wrote 11 years ago and wanted to know what books are most valuable for her to be reading.
I told her to be wary.
Is it worth your time?
You’ve gotta be careful reading.
I read little.
About 15 years ago I cut out reading media and over recent years even cut out checking headlines.
You are what you eat and you’ve gotta be careful what you feed your brain.
It’s not just negative and often untrue, but it’s intended to consume you.
Ask yourself what is best for you to consume?
If you want to achieve at the highest levels you must first achieve this.
In thousands of self-help books I rarely saw this and never clearly.
Psychology and their therapy completely miss this.
Even the best schools mostly overlook it.
But achieve this, achieve all.
This game of life is a game of high energy.
We all know this in concept just what exactly is high energy and how exactly do you achieve it?
High vibrating energy you see in the woo-woo books like Think And Grow Rich is powerful but they never accurately define nor give you a path to achieving it.
High physical energy is your most crucial starting point but that’s a mess of advice too.
You’re told to get 8 hours sleep when world leaders sleep way less.
Exercise. Nutrition. Supplements. All true.
A mess of advice too.
How good are you?
Out of 10 how good would you say you are?
How much of your potential have you unleashed?
Here I’m thinking in terms of your main focus in life or maybe all your life.
In your career or business or life or mind or as a parent or otherwise out of 10 how good are you?
I’d say many people never care.
They don’t have enough reason to care.
It doesn’t matter in their career or business or life they’re operating at a fraction of their potential.
Or even if they feel way less than 10 out of 10.
They’re not like us.
Hi there,
How are you?
What’s happening with you?
I miss you 🙂 I haven’t written much recently and love coming back to it.
Tell me something…
How are you doing?
I’m doing awesome. Lots of good stuff going.
Just loving getting it done and you look up and see half the year has flown by!
Does it feel the same way for you? How is your year? How are things with you?
I’m curious if you’d like to share coz I’d love to hear what’s going on with you?
Because I haven’t written recently I’m out of touch and would love to learn more about you.
“If I’ve learned anything from you it’s that New Year’s Resolutions are stupid!” my good mate Terry wrote me.
I agree with me 🙂 they can be stupid and also can be stupidly powerful when you’re setting “real” goals.
The difference comes back to this word “Resolution” and your level of resolve.
80% of Resolutions are quit by February 15 when you achieve everything with limitless resolve.
So let them make flakey Resolutions while you live limitless goals.
If you are certain that you will achieve your goal then it’s never a goal.
That’s where many people are stuck in life avoiding any fear of failure never stretching for any goals.
Goals don’t have to be of the BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) variety but it is a lot more fun this way!
It’s good to be realistic about what’s possible and also good to ask yourself just how good can it get?
Like Jeff Bezos in 1994 watching the internet growing at 2,300% a year he wasn’t certain where it was headed but was convinced to make a bold bet.
Certainly it would have been a stretch goal just to get Amazon started and build a dominant online bookstore but Jeff Bezos had his sights set on a grander vision.
I don’t know what “this” is for you.
But I do know that you’ve got this.
You know how I know?
Because you’ve gotta know that you’ve got this.
You’ve just gotta know.
You’ve just gotta know.
I don’t know how to say it any more directly than you’ve just gotta know that you’ve got this.
Whatever it is that you’re focused on doing.
Whatever it is that you’re looking to achieve.
Whoever it is that you’re dreaming to be.
You’ve just gotta know you are this.
He missed.
One shot to make history and he missed his shot.
Now in all fairness he didn’t entirely miss as the supersonic 556 round tore through the top of president Trump’s ear and he’ll still go down in history as a terrible murderer.
But all that training and planning and borrowing Dad’s gun and buying the ladder and ammo and walking to the rally and taking his range finder through security and standing around measuring the shot and oh so cunningly outwitting the secret service and climbing up on the roof and crawling across in broad daylight rifle swinging around for everyone to see, all that to miss his shot.
As they say you miss 100% of the shots that you never take and you also miss plenty that you do.
Even Trump has had many misses, this perhaps his gravest.
In business. In life. In his influence. In losing the last election.
But one thing that you always see from this man is he gets back up and takes his shot over and over again.
Some missed shots you never stand back up like the terrible shooter knew the snipers wouldn’t miss.
Yet outside of worst cases nearly always you have the chance to stand again.
Hold onto your hat!
We’re already on a wild ride, aren’t we?
How are you doing with all these things going on in the world?
None of us can know where it’s headed but you do know one thing.
The world keeps moving forward and so must you.
You do this best when you back yourself in.
People spend their lives backing others but how many of us are backing ourselves?
It’s like all those people who spend hours a day and decades of their precious life backing a sports and political team but never back themselves in anything.
At the end of our lives we all know the cliche that you regret the things that you never did and you never need wait till the end to begin regretting.
That’s like so many of my friends who have blindly backed president Biden now trying to figure out who exactly they’re backing.
Biden has played an A+ game outwitting them all by backing himself in.
Hello there,
How are you doing?
I hope that you are doing as good as you can be.
Of course this hasn’t been the best of years in plenty of ways but I hope that this has been the best year it can be for you!?
At the start of this year I wrote about making this your best year ever and I can happily share with you that this has been the best year ever for me 🙂
It’s unfortunately been my second worst year on mission for humanity looking out at this world I love so much that [fill in your best description of what is going on!]
Jacking my back and living in quite some pain with limited mobility for the first half of this year wasn’t the best either.
Yet like from a caterpillar the chrysalis creates something beautifully new the worse can also bring out your best too.
No matter what’s going on, running your own brain you can make the best of every day, every year, if you choose.
Happy new best year ever
I cracked the code.
It was by far the most important evolution of my life.
But cracking the secret code to how you live your best life isn’t enough.
Just like any type of achieving, knowing the solution is as useless as knowing how to lose weight.
You must be living it.
What would you say creates your best life?
Would you say that you are living your best life now?
I don’t necessarily mean right now, although as you keep reading you’ll see this is exactly what I mean, but for now more generally, would you say that you are living the life that you truly want?
Many people I know are because we are all into these topics we’re all doing our best every day for living our best lives.
But, I also know that’s not the norm in our society.
Especially now many people feel stuck in their jobs or businesses or lives or marriages or financial situation or addictions or habits or lack or media or unhappiness or just about every other thing that can trap you in life.
And you know what they all come back to?
“Stay the course,” I said to her.
“But which one?” she desperately responded.
“Do I stay in my current job or make a move?”
“YES, exactly,” I replied.
“But, which one?” she repeated.
“Yes, you’ve got it now,” laughingly I said.
Can you see what I was doing with her?
We were having a little fun playing with the binary answer that she thought she needed.
Like many of us at different points in our lives she felt at a crossroad.
At these seeming forks in the road we’re often pushed to make a binary, “exclusive or” choice of one thing vs. another, aren’t we?
A problem at these junctures is that it can be very hard to decide between this vs. that, can’t it?
That’s what I was playfully leading her brain through making this transition more fun.
You know the quote that 90% of success is just showing up?
A client jokes that among successful people the number is closer to 100% 🙂
As he sees it, most successful people landed a successful job and then just kept showing up.
It’s a reason why it’s hard for him to find leaders.
“How many are TRULY focused on winning?” he asks.
He’s like this bold Aussie football coach who has been offending the locals.
In Australia, contrary to what people can think is the culture, you just don’t speak this way.
Even in the winningest world of sports you just kind of show up and play your game and see how you do at the end of the day.
Then you be real humble about the other team and how you gave it your best, and so on.
That’s how this coach has gotten offside with the yahoos.
He keeps talking about winning.
Are you awake or asleep?
On the surface it’s a pretty straightforward question, isn’t it?
That’s because by the traditional definition of these words, it is straightforward.
Being asleep you’re unconscious, generally in bed.
Awake you’re consciously aware.
That’s different to the deeper definitions we’re talking about here.
You may know that there’s a deep rabbit hole here?
In fact, perhaps this is the deepest rabbit hole that you can ever explore.
If you are on this path of evolving yourself and particularly have explored new-age or Eastern or spiritual or deeper esoteric teachings you might be using this word as we do.
Often you hear people on this path use this in a negative, judgmental way.
Because they are accumulating knowledge and are now more awake to how the human being is truly functioning (e.g. automatically), they label themselves in a more flattering way as having woke or being awake.
Others are labelled often pejoratively as being asleep, or called say “Sheeple.”
I suggest that you never want to judge anyone, especially when you know how easy it is to keep falling asleep.
I stuck this image on my wall and thought I’d share it with you.
It’s a powerful quote from Jeff Bezos that we used in the program on Rocketing To The Top Like Musk and Bezos.
You’ll see what I mean by every ever—
Every interesting thing I’ve ever done, every important thing I’ve ever done, every beneficial thing I’ve ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures.
Every?
Ever?
Of course you never want to take these things entirely literally.
But there’s most certainly a powerful signal here, isn’t there?
What might this signal mean to you?
I have little clue how to achieve my Grandest Vision.
By all rational accounts there’s no way it can be done.
Unlikely I can achieve even a fraction of what I’d like to see in our world.
It’s all good.
I never let that belief stop me.
The best you can do is your best to keep bringing your dream to life.
How are you doing on your goals?
I don’t know if you use my System For Doing What You Want and have established your Grandest Vision?
You might know this “Grandest Vision” is the term that I use in my books and some of my programs, such as this on Rocketing To The Top Like Musk and Bezos.
It’s the best way that I’ve come to define your biggest, most lofty, grandest, but still achievable goal for your life that you are constantly moving towards.
It’s like Elon Musk colonizing Mars.
Or Jeff Bezos once setting out to build The Everything Store.
Lofty, for sure, but obviously doable.
How grand are you dreaming?
So, how was it?
How was your 2022?
Out of 100, how would you say your year has been?
Of course not everything is perfect in our world and in any of our years, but how would you rate it among your best years?
Whether it’s among your best or not, how would it be to have a method to get the best from your year?
And use it to best set yourself up for next year?
There’s lots of ways that you can best review your year and best prepare yourself for next year.
Over the years we’ve experimented with many methods, and this is the best that we keep returning to.
Ideally, every day you’re already focused on the details of what you’re doing to keep making things the best they can be.
And here we’re focused on doing something simple, fun, and incredibly effective for looking back on the best of your year.
Now, this isn’t to say that you never reflect on things that didn’t go best.
But if you do, you never want to dwell on that stuff, and ideally you want to see how you solved it, or otherwise powered through.
Because the point here isn’t watching every twist and turn.
You’re showing your brain the best of this year and giving it a map for making 2023 your best too.
