The top experts in the world are ardent students. The day you stop learning, you're definitely not an expert.
Brendon Burchard
Remember: when you knock on the door of Opportunity, it is Work who answers!
At the end of our lives we all ask, 'Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter?'
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?
To inspire a singularity of focus, a challenge must be important to you and it must be something you feel you should do now in this moment. If it's trivial or not time-bound, you won't engage. So in selecting your next challenge in life, choose one that is meaningful and will demand your complete concentration.
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.
The first thing successful people do is view failure as a positive signal to success.
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.
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.
Everybody says, 'I want to change,' but they're not willing to pay the price of it. That was the metaphor of 'Life's Golden Ticket'... Life is some kind of a ride, and if you want that ride to be exhilarating and amazing, you've got to pay to get in. And the price is a willingness to change above and beyond what most people will do.
People are remarkably bad at remembering long lists of goals. I learned this at a professional level when trying to get my high-performance coaching clients to stay on track; the longer their lists of to-dos and goals, the more overwhelmed and off-track they got. Clarity comes with simplicity.
If you create incredible value and information for others that can change their lives - and you always stay focused on that service - the financial success will follow.
At 19, you're not really thinking about the habits you have. I wasn't. Maybe your study habits? But not your life habits.
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.
In your life, where are you not making mistakes? Sometimes if there's no mess, there's no change happening.
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.
We lost my dad in 2009 to leukemia. He taught me everything I know, and I love him very much.
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.
Figure out what questions you'd ask to see if you were happy with your life. Then wake up every day and live intentionally, so you're happy with the answers at the end.
Meditation is a lifelong process. Give it a try. As you get deeper and more disciplined into the process, you'll get deeper and more disciplined in your mind and life.
People think, 'If I could only get motivated, then I'll act.' Nope. In actuality, it's the opposite.
For an entrepreneur, motivation is the core of all things.
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.
Your ambitions - don't limit them. Where do you want to go, and what would be required of you to grow into that? Put yourself together a plan, and develop the skills to get there.
To me, meditation is simply silencing or focusing the mind.
I have to laugh when I receive newsletters from major personalities and when you hit reply, you get a 'do-not-reply' address. It's ridiculous! Don't you want your customers to reply to you?
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.
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.
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!'
Those things that you just do, if you put that together in a DVD program, let's say, for $97, to teach people how to do that. Well, if you sold 100 of those a month, that's $9,700 of income a month just teaching what you already do and know to people who want to learn how to do the same.
Business coaching and the personal development and self-help industry is considered to be one of the booming industries today.
Everything boils down to motivation.
Our challenge isn't that we can't be motivated. It's not that we aren't smart, excitable, or that we lack passion - what we don't have is the ability to sustain motivation over time.
Sometimes entrepreneurs, successful people, need to put their blinders back on. They're losing their day to distraction, to faulty obligations.
I have incredible respect for customers and peers - my curriculum is very strong because I was taught by my clients' reactions to my work.
The secret of my success is that I deeply respect and learn from my peers and customers.
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.
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.
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.
We should not seek to tune out the realists' whines or taunts, as they may provide good instruction.
Let us not alter our course simply because it leads into a dark thicket of work.
