CONTROL YOURSELF. YOU MUST BECOME MORE DISCIPLINED – The Key to Success
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This episode is brought to you by Amazon Business. How can you free up your team from time-consuming office tasks? Amazon Business empowers leaders to not only streamline purchasing, but better support their teams so they can focus on strategy and growth, free up your teams, and focus on your future. Learn more about the technology, insights, and support available at amazonbusiness.com. Look at all the things that you could do and ask yourself, do you want to win?

You see, to win is to know what's important now. The challenge is to just get started. Not now, but right now. Bring on the resistance, bring on the challenge and allow yourself to have the feeling of elation when you've got started and you've done something that you said that you were going to do. And the more you do this, the better you will feel.

the more adept and the stronger you will become at moving through the resistance that we all face. You see, how you do anything is how you do everything. And the fact is, it all comes down to one thing. That one thing is choice. And what's the easiest choice to make? Well, the easiest choice to make is to choose what you've chosen before

If you always do what you've always done, then you'll always get what you've always got. Ultimately, your attention is your superpower. Your attention to focus on now what needs to be done. And this is the difference between success and failure. We put ourselves in this great box. And in that box, there's no suffering in it.

So what we do is we show to ourselves from greatness. And on the other side is where you start to really start your journey. People think they start their journey because they're born. No, there's a lot of people in graves who have lived 100 years and have never started their real journey. Your real journey starts when you go outside that box.

and you start climbing mountains and it goes on and it goes on and it goes on and there you are you have to have a plan and you have to spend all your waking hours outside of whatever job you do planning your escape and you have to come to the realization very clearly that you've done you got yourself stuck so whatever you're doing you have to

Do it like your life depends on it. Pick something. Aim at it. As you move toward it, you'll get wiser. Then maybe your aim will change. That's okay. But at least it'll change in an informed way. It's like discipline yourself in one dimension. See what happens. That's exciting.

And I think that's something that's open for everyone. I think you can find yourself in a situation that's so dire that there's no escape from it. But that doesn't matter because the best we have might not always work, but it's still the best we have. And the fact that it might not work doesn't mean we should throw it away. It's still the best we have. I mean, everyone dies, and so we fail in some sense. The fact that the symphony ends doesn't mean that it wasn't worth listening to. So you must think negative when it's positive. You must think winter when it's summer.

Here's some of the best advice. Comes from classic tradition. A great story says: "Don't build your house on the sand in the summer." Why be given that advice? Because it's easy to get faked out in the summer. You must not be faked out when it's nice. You must think storm in the summer and not get faked out. And if you think storm, now you'll look for a rock on which to build your house. Now you're gonna be safe.

So you can't think nice when it's nice. You got to think storm when it's... The seasons are going to come and change. And if you're not educated to that degree, now you suffer a great loss. Now here's the next philosophy. The time to think positive is when it's negative. Why? Because the negative won't last long. How long is the winter? Isn't that long? Just hang on. It's not going to take that long. How long is the night? It's only a few hours. There's never been a double night.

Couldn't you make it a few more hours? And the story says yes, the night just can't last for sometimes it seems like it's gonna last forever. And when you have insomnia, right? It seems like the night will never pass, but I'm telling you sure enough, it will pass. So learn to think day when it's night and then you must learn to think night when it's day. So you have to get it going, get it in before the night came. Commitment shows up in your life

through action. You can tell people who are committed and those people who don't feel worthy. The people that are committed are busy doing it. The people that don't feel worthy are like a guy I talked to last night who told me, "Hey, I sure like to do what you're doing. However, I just don't want the responsibility." The company I work for, they're taking good care of me. I say, "Let me tell you something. Once you increase your sense of worthiness, you won't even be able to open your mouth saying that somebody is taking care of you."

You want to take care of yourself. You see, because he doesn't feel worthy. He's intelligent. 17 years for a major corporation. They've spent thousands of dollars training him. He knows he has the book knowledge, but his attitude is his vision of himself. His sense of deservingness says you can't have that. So he will fabricate all kinds of excuses on why he can't have it. You can only have two things in life.

Reasons or results? Notice, reasons don't count. We as individuals control, to an altogether unsuspected extent, our lives here on Earth. That each one of us is the architect of the structure fashioned by our years.

The failure of most people to live successfully is not caused by their lack of abilities, far from it but rather in their failure to decide what it is they want and understanding that our wants are governed by our talents and abilities. Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. That is, anyone who knows where he is going in life is a success. The Great Paradox

There is an interesting and important paradox in life that you need to be aware of.

It is that if you are an intelligent person, you do everything possible to organize your life in such a way that you minimize and avoid adversity and disappointment. This is a sensible and rational thing to do. All intelligent people following the path of least resistance to achieve their goals do everything possible to minimize the number of difficulties and obstacles that they will face in their day. Day activities.

Disappointment is inevitable. Yet in spite of our best efforts, disappointments and adversity are normal and natural, unavoidable parts of life. Benjamin Franklin said that the only things that are inevitable are death and taxes, but every bit of experience shows that disappointment is also inevitable.

No matter how well you organize yourself and your activities, you will experience countless disappointments, setbacks, obstacles, and adversity over the course of your life. And the higher and more challenging the goals that you set for yourself,

the more disappointment and adversity you will experience. This is the paradox. It is impossible for us to evolve and grow and develop to our full potentials except to the degree to which we face adversity and learn from it. All of the great lessons of life come as the result of setbacks and temporary defeats which we have done our utmost to avoid. Adversity, therefore, comes unbidden in spite of our best efforts.

And yet without it, we cannot grow into the kind of people who are capable of scaling the heights and achieving great goals. Adversity is what tests us.

Throughout history, great thinkers have reflected on this paradox and have concluded that adversity is the test that you must pass on the path to accomplishing anything worthwhile. Herodotus, the Greek philosopher, said, "...adversity has the effect of drawing out strength and qualities of a man that would have lain dormant in its absence."

The very best qualities of strength, courage, character, and persistence are brought out in you when you face your greatest challenges and you respond to them positively and constructively.

Everyone faces difficulties every step of the way. The difference between the high achiever and the low achiever is simply that the high achiever utilizes adversity and struggles for growth, while the low achiever allows difficulties and adversity to overwhelm him or her and leave him or her discouraged and dejected.

We all have goals that we want to achieve in our lives. These goals may include learning a new language, eating healthier and losing weight, becoming a better parent, saving more money and so on. It can be easy to assume that the gap between where you are now and where you want to be in the future is caused by a lack of knowledge.

This is why we buy courses on how to start a business or how to lose weight fast or how to learn a new language in three months. We assume that if we knew about a better strategy, then we would get better results. We believe that a new result requires new knowledge.

What I'm starting to realize, however, is that new knowledge does not necessarily drive new results. In fact, learning something new can actually be a waste of time if your goal is to make progress and not simply gain additional knowledge. It all comes down to the difference between learning and practicing.

When we practice something, we are involved in the deliberate repetition of a process with the intention of reaching a specific goal. The words deliberate and intention are key here because they define the difference between actively practicing something and passively learning it.

Learning something new and practicing something new may seem very similar, but these two methods can have profoundly different results. Here are some additional ways to think about the difference. Let's say your goal is to get stronger and more fit. You can research the best instructions on bench press technique, but the only way to build strength is to practice lifting weights.

Let's say your goal is to grow your startup. You can learn about the best way to make a sales pitch, but the only way to actually land customers is to practice making sales calls. Let's say your goal is to write a book. You can talk to a best-selling author about writing, but the only way to become a better writer is to practice publishing consistently.

Passive learning creates knowledge. Active practice creates skill. Passive learning can be a crutch that supports inaction. In many cases, learning is actually a way to avoid taking action on the goals and interests that we say are important to us. For example, let's say you want to learn a foreign language.

Reading a book on how to learn a foreign language quickly allows you to feel like you're making progress. Hey, I'm figuring out the best way to do this. Of course, you're not actually practicing the action that would deliver your desired outcome, speaking the foreign language. In situations like this one, we often claim that we are preparing or researching the best method

But these rationalizations allow us to feel like we are moving forward when we are merely spinning our wheels. We make the mistake of being in motion rather than taking action. Learning is valuable until it becomes a form of procrastination. Practice is learning, but learning is not practice. Passive learning is not a form of practice because although you gain new knowledge, you are not discovering how to apply that knowledge. Active learning

Practice, meanwhile, is one of the greatest forms of learning because the mistakes you make while practicing reveal important insights. Even more important, practice is the only way to make a meaningful contribution with your knowledge. You can watch an online course about how to build a business or read an article about a terrible disaster in a developing nation.

but that knowledge is unproductive unless you actually launch your business or donate to those in need. Learning by itself can be valuable for you, but if you want to be valuable to others, then you have to express your knowledge in some way. Practice focuses your energy on the process. Progress is a natural result of staying focused on the process of doing anything.

The state of your life right now is a result of the habits and beliefs that you have been practicing each day. When you realize this and begin to direct your focus toward practicing better habits day in and day out, continual progress will be the logical outcome. It is not the things we learn nor the dreams we envision that determines our results, but rather the habits that we practice each day.

Fall in love with boredom and focus your energy on the process, not the product. The bottom line: Is passive learning useless? Of course not. In many cases, learning for the sake of learning can be a beautiful thing. Not to mention that soaking up new information can help you make more informed decisions when you do decide to take action.

That said, the main point of this article is that learning by itself does not lead to progress. We often hide behind information and use learning as an excuse to delay the more difficult and more important choice of actually doing something. Spend less time passively learning and more time actively practicing. Stop thinking and start doing something.

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