Even if you overcome a tremendous challenge and feel the personal victory, it's simply not powerful enough. It may activate your left brain, which says, 'I have achieved,' but it will not activate your more social right brain, which desperately desires to say, 'Look, Ma, I did it!'
People think, 'If I could only get motivated, then I'll act.' Nope. In actuality, it's the opposite.
The top experts in the world are ardent students. The day you stop learning, you're definitely not an expert.
Sometimes entrepreneurs, successful people, need to put their blinders back on. They're losing their day to distraction, to faulty obligations.
Everything boils down to motivation.
Challenge is the pathway to engagement and progress in our lives. But not all challenges are created equal. Some challenges make us feel alive, engaged, connected, and fulfilled. Others simply overwhelm us. Knowing the difference as you set bigger and bolder challenges for yourself is critical to your sanity, success, and satisfaction.
Business coaching and the personal development and self-help industry is considered to be one of the booming industries today.
High performers obsessively research their dreams from a multitude of sources. To become world-class, you have to know who has already cracked the struggle you face ahead.
Have you ever played a video game that didn't have escalating levels of difficulty? Well, life can feel like play, too, when we purposefully engage in activities that demand we test and develop our skills.
Inexperienced personal development teachers always tell you to visualize, but often in a tragically limited way. They tell you to visualize nothing but victory. But high-achievers know that it's even more important to visualize themselves at the point where they want to quit, and then see themselves working through the struggle.
What makes us really, truly successful over the long term has a ton to do with our social interactions and the influence we do or don't have with other people.
We lost my dad in 2009 to leukemia. He taught me everything I know, and I love him very much.
We all have a life story and a message that can inspire others to live a better life or run a better business. Why not use that story and message to serve others and grow a real business doing it?
My dad lived a good life. He was a simple guy. His family had been poor, and he joined the Marines to be able to send money home to his mom and dad and brothers and sisters. He genuinely had the intention to live a good life and to respect other people.
I've seen that phenomenally successful people believe they can learn something from everybody. I call them 'mavericks with mentors.' Richard Branson, for instance, is a total maverick but he surrounds himself with incredibly successful, smart people and he listens to them.
My best mentor is a mechanic - and he never left the sixth grade. By any competency measure, he doesn't have it. But the perspective he brings to me and my life is, bar none, the most helpful.
Research the leaders in fields related to yours, synthesize their findings, and see how you can apply their hard-won wisdom to your work. Stand on their shoulders, and then make a leap into new territory that is distinctly yours.
Raise your ambition beyond where you're capable of now. There's nothing about my hometown that said I'd be working with Fortune 50 CEO's, Olympians, at the highest level.
I was in college for organizational communication and politics because I was just fascinated by influence. I wondered how people have influence, not because I wanted to inspire the world - yet.
People who label themselves as 'realists' are usually accurate - they see to the real edge of what they know, understand, or believe. At best, these folks tend to be caring worriers.
