“Success” isn’t just having lots of money. Many people with lots of money have horribly unhappy and radically imbalanced lives.
Success is continuously improving who you are, how you live, how you serve, and how you relate.
So why won’t most people be successful?
Why don’t most people evolve?
The more evolved you become, the more elevated becomes your thinking, expectations, and standards.
Becoming evolved means:
- You no longer major in minor things — As Jim Rohn said, “A lot of people don’t do well simply because they major in minor things.”
- You are intentional about every moment of every day — even when that means being fully unplugged and present with your loved ones
- You know that you become the product of what surrounds you
- You know that everything you put in your mind and body shapes the person you become — As Zig Ziglar said, “Your input determines your outlook. Your outlook determines your output, and your output determines your future.”
- You realize that your behaviors shape your personality and identity — therefore you recognize that EVERY CHOICE YOU MAKE signals to yourself the type of person you are
Balancing The Few Essentials
The more successful you become — which is balancing the few essential things (spiritual, relational, financial, physical) in your life and removing everything else — the less you can justify low quality.
Before you evolve as a person:
- You can reasonably spend time with just about anyone
- You can eat just about anything put in front of you
- You can justify having terrible evenings because you don’t have anything meaningful to wake-up for anyways
As Your Vision For Yourself Expands
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” — Wayne Dyer
As your vision for yourself expands, you realize you have to make certain adjustments. You need to cut back on spending all of your money and time on crap and entertainment. You have to save more, and invest more in your education and your future.
The more successful you become:
- The less you can justify low quality and the higher your standards become for yourself — As Tony Robbins said, “Remember in life we get what we tolerate! Where in your life is it time to draw the line in the sand and say no more! To yourself? To others?”
- The more you value your time — and how that time is spent. When you’re at work, you’re 100% at work. When you’re at home, you’re 100% at home. You begin living in the “results-economy,” where you’re less worried about how long something takes you, and you’re more concerned about achieving your desired results more effectively and efficiently.
- Thus, no longer are you willing to work on a time clock.
- Instead, you only work and get paid for what you results you produce.
- You have skin in the game. And because you get paid for your results, you create environments that force you to get your desired results faster.
- You apply the 80/20 rule. You only focus on those things that produce the best outcomes, and you ignore all else.
- You get the best mentoring.
- You work when your energy levels and brain-power are peaked, which for most people is during the first 3 hours of their day.
- You figure out how to get 2X the results you’re currently getting in half the time.
- You the re-invest that time you just saved into rest and recovery. You’re totally unplugged spending quality time with your friends and family.
- You’re investing more and more into your self-improvement. You get to the point where 20% of your time is spent working, and the other 80% is spent either learning or resting. You’re sharpening your saw so that during your work hours, your rested, fresh, and powerful.
- You’re continually upgraded your mindset, mentorships, skills, abilities, and income.
Your life and your identity are a product of your choices. Your personality doesn’t shape who you are. Your behaviors shape who you are.
The most powerful choices you can make is to put yourself into environments that force you to rise to new standards. Said historian Will Durant, “I think the ability of the average man could be doubled if it were demanded. If the situation demanded.”
You surround yourself with people who have higher standards than you do. Because you know that as a person, you are not a fixed and unchangeable entity.
Instead, you know that you are highly flexible and fluid. Your input shapes your mindset and worldview, which shapes your output. That output creates opportunities for the future.
As you continually improve your world around you — and as you consistently make better and better choices, your identity changes. Your environment changes. Your confidence and abilities change.
You begin taking on much bigger goals.
You begin recognizing and appreciating how far you’ve come.
You begin collaborating with brilliant people. You transform yourself over and over, all the while continually going deeper and deeper into your “why.”
How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything
If your daily behaviors are consistently low quality, what do you expect your life’s output to be?
Every area of your life affects every other area of your life. Hence the saying, How you do anything is how you do everything. This is very high-level thinking. It only makes sense for people who have removed everything from their lives they hate. To actually live this principle: your daily and normal life can only be filled with those things you highly value.
Your “new normal” needs to continually exceed your previous ideals and dreams.
When your days are filled with only those core essentials that mean the world to you — and you’re succeeding in those few areas — you absolutely will dominate in all areas of your life.
Because the only things in your life are the things you highly value. You’re intrinsically motivated by what you’re doing.
The stakes are very high for you. Because everything in your life matters. Your behavior is consequential in every area of your life. If you don’t show up, you get called out. Whether that’s at work with your partners or at home with your kids.
You’ve created an environment that expects you to be present. That expects you to show up. And you rise to that expectation. You rise to that expectation because your behavior is increasingly consistent with the person you intend to be.
Because your behavior is continually improving, your confidence continually improves. As your confidence improves, your expectation to continue to succeed continually improves. As your expectation to succeed improves, your ability to manifest your dreams and desires becomes powerful.
Even more powerfully though, you understand that you should expect everything yet attach to nothing. Regardless of the outcome, your security is internal. You expect the best, and that is generally what happens for you. When things start to fall apart, or when you fail, you let it go. You don’t over-attach to any outcomes, whether success or failure.
You are fluid and adaptive. You seek data through action, and then take that feedback and continually emerge into something new and better. Continually providing more value. Continually maintain the beginner’s mind. Continually seeking feedback and openness.
You have no ego in this game.
Your life is increasingly congruent.
You’re continuing to learn — which means you are becoming more effective at producing your desired results and then replicating those results. Learning, after all, is a making a permanent change in how you see and operate in the world. If you can’t consistently produce better results, you’re not learning.
Getting information in your head is not learning. There must be a change in behavior, or else there is no true understanding. The difference between knowledge and wisdom is that wisdom is the proper application of knowledge.
Knowledge isn’t power — it’s potential power. Knowledge only becomes powerful when it’s properly applied and becomes wisdom, experience, and understanding.
T.S. Elliot once asked, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
We now live in the information economy. Information is not scarce. Information has actually become one of the biggest distractions in our current environment.
Spending your time-consuming information won’t set you apart in today’s environment. Filtering through the vast sea of noise and finding the right information, then properly and immediately apply that information to produce better results is how you set yourself apart in today’s word.
And not applying that information in a vacuum or echo-chamber. But applying it in the form of collaborations with different types of people — where the whole becomes different from the sum of its parts.
Are You Living Intentionally?
Saying “No” to great but irrelevant opportunities is hard.
Giving up bad habits is hard.
Changing your belief system and expanding your vision takes courage. It’s so easy to revert back to small and mediocre thinking.
However, as you come closer to living on a daily basis with your values and ideals, amazing things start to happen. You’ll feel happier. You’ll be more present with those you love. You’ll spend your time better. You’ll pursue bigger dreams and ambitions. You’ll be more resilient during challenges. You’ll live at a higher frequency. And everything around you will reflect that.
But to repeat Jim Rohn, “A lot of people don’t do well simply because they major in minor things.” Said another way, most people are caught in the thick of thin things.
Hence, most people won’t be successful. Most people won’t evolve and progress.
But you will. You know it, and you can feel it. You’ve already begun. And every day, you’re taking one step closer.
Soon enough, you’ll fully commit to being who you know you can be. Once you pass that point of no return, nothing will stop you.
Originally published at Medium.com