B.E.T.T.E.R.

As someone who is constantly looking to ways to improve, grow and learn, one word that describes all of that, is better. In life we have a choice I every situation, we can choose to become better or we can choose to shrink. Running is the perfect example. When you run you have a many options on the distance you would want to race, some people stick to a certain distance and improve upon that distance, others focus on going a further distance. The benefits of both could be argued as well as the cons but the point of it all is that you constantly get better.

Here are some tips to become BETTER everyday

Begin: The most important step to become better. Begin, start and keep going. Stop worrying about what you are doing wrong, what you do not know and how far you have to go, act, begin and create. This is a step that stops most of us because we believe that we need to be at a certain level to start but it is only by our action, that we will grow.

Education: Now that you started, learn even more. What can you improve upon, everything. You are enough but you can always be better.. Learn more to help you go further and be more impactful.

Think: Do not believe anything you are told. Do not question to prove someone else wrong, because that is not the point. Question what you are told to grow, to become better. Create your own beliefs that will drive you.

Train: Do not remain stagnant keep training and practicing. Be trained by others as it will give you new ideas to think about and train others because it will help you create a clear and concise message and process. This is the difference between starting to run, and getting ready for a marathon. You need to train.

Evaluate: Take time to see how you are doing, how far you have come and all that you have accomplished. Is it still the direction that you want to head in? What do you want to change? What went right and what went wrong. Do not just set your life on auto-pilot and cruise, take control of the wheel.

Readjust: Once you know what you want to change, how you want to improve, start doing it, continue the cycle and become BETTER 

Fishing for Success

It is impossible to catch anything, without having your line in the water. If you walked by someone that was on the side of a dock. They had their tackle box, bait and a rod but they just stood there. If they said they were fishing, you would call them crazy but that is the way we treat our success at times. We stand and we wait for success to come to us. We worry that we do not have the right talents, skills and drive when all we need to do is cast a line.

The more times you cast your line, the better your chances are at catching a fish. The more times you try the better the chances you are at “finding” success. Success is a process, there are many times that you will do your best and fail. It can wear on you, do n stop. If you stop, you will never get anything.

Fishing requires skills and talents just like success. Build up your “tackle box”, with skills and hard work so that you can be successful in any situation. Stop just trying to catch something, focus on what you really want. Different environments require different skills to be successful.

What you fish for determines how you fish and where you fish. You can spend your entire life on Lake Michigan and never catch a Tuna, no matter how hard you tried. Understand and commit to what success means to you and then build your environment around this. Many times we just get on the boat and cast our line, because that is what everyone else is doing. We can catch more than anyone but we continue to wonder why we are not happy or successful, it is because we are fishing for the wrong things.

How long would you wait for a fish to bite before you moved? Success is much like fishing in the fact that while you may change locations, tactics and what you are looking for, you never stop fishing. So while your outcomes may change and tactics may change, never give up on creating success.

Passion and Skills

Passion and Skills are not on opposite sides of the equation, they are multipliers of one another.

When you are truly passionate about something you will stop at nothing to do more about it, to grow with it and to learn more about it. Your hunger for your passion fuels the need to develop more skills/do more work.

The more you work at something, the better you become, the more you will like it and your passion will grow.

As an example, I hated swimming but I love triathlons, I have a passion for the full-distance triathlon.  The more I worked on swimming the more I actually liked it because I could see improvement in my swimming, my passion for triathlons grew even more. Looking at the bigger picture I have a passion for how much both swimming and triathlons taught me, how much it made me grow as a person and how it changed my outlook on life.

We get passion wrong, we focus too much on things or ideas. We want to be passionate about leadership, education, poverty or fill in the blank and we end up spending our whole lives trying to find our passion as if it has to be limited to one idea.

When was the last time you had passion for yourself; a passion to see yourself grow, to challenge yourself to become a better version of yourself today than you were yesterday? Have you ever had a passion to improve your process, to learn more, just to improve? This passion is what will get you further than anything else. If you have passion to be the best, you can excel at anything.

When we try to find passion we become lost and discouraged. We have a nagging voice in the back of our head, asking us if this is really the right thing for us. What if we started to we decided to be passionate about everything that we did. If instead of looking for passion we were open to passion coming to us, when we worked our ass off. Attract your passion, do not try and find it. I know some of you think you cannot be passionate about everything you do, you are wrong, you can. The problem real problem is you have too many things going on in your life.

The problem with the way we work, is how we view work. We separate the work that directly relates to our passion to all the other work that we have to do. Everything that you do, every act that you preform, can help you become better at what you are passionate about, especially when you focus on become passionate about yourself. When you have passion, it rarely feels like work, not because it is not work but because you focus on the passion. If we are passionate about getting better, work will no longer seem like work.

Passion and work are like building a log cabin. You build on top of one another not against them. Start Building.

Happiness

There is a story about a man waiting on the top of the roof during a flood and he is praying to God to save him. Two boats and a helicopter come by and offer to rescue him but he refuses because he knows that God will save him. The water continues to rise and in the end he drowns. When he dies he is upset. He asks God “I prayed, why did you not save me?” and God responds “I tried, who do you think sent the boats and helicopter”

We put ourselves in the position of the man waiting to be saved. Every day there are opportunities for us to be happy but we pass them up because we are waiting for something greater and in the end, we kill ourselves and kill our happiness.

We do not take joy in our everyday life. We focus on everything that goes wrong, what we did wrong and the reasons that we cannot be happy and it ruins us. We spend our lives on the rooftop, waiting for something to save us, when we are the ones that can save ourselves.

Dreams are a powerful thing. Dreams can ruin your life if you do not put action behind them to make them a reality.

It is easy to fall in love with your dreams and I think you should fall in love with your dreams but what you need to fall in love with more is the process of getting there. The hard work, every day activities and the struggles that you face getting there. When we do this, we shift our mindset from waiting to being engaged and we truly start living.

When was the last time you fell in love with your life, exactly as you are? The same person that has failed, that is not where you want to be and still can improve? When was the last time you fell in love with your job, everything that is wrong with, everything that frustrates you and all the things that you wish you did not have to do.

We spend our whole lives waiting for happiness, expecting it to come to us once we reach a certain level in our life but in reality we need to find happiness at every level of our life.

Find joy in the life you have and you will find more.

How to Win

I have completed two Ironman distance triathlons, Wisconsin in 15:39 and Boulder in 12:35. At the surface it would be easy to say that Boulder is the one I should be the most proud of.

Ironman Wisconsin means more to me, than any other race I have done this far, it changed my life. I raced with two amazing individuals, Aaron Hunnel and Katie Neuman. Aaron and I had the amazing privilege of racing with Katie who has cerebral palsy.

Ironman Wisconsin changed my mindset on what it truly means to win.

Winning versus the want to win. I used to play video games against myself just so I could win. It never required me to be better. Everyone loves to win, not as many love, wanting to win. What I mean by that is, the people that truly have the desire to win, practice as much as they can, they put in the work, the long hours and have the drive to be the best because they know that winning is an outcome. This is where we as a society have it wrong. We want an absolute, did you win or did you lose because this is hard data, that lets us judge where you stand. We do not spend enough time focusing on the path that was taken to get there and this goes beyond athletics and into your personally and professional life as well. Stop measuring the wins you have and start to build up your want to win, you will get further faster.

Trophies, medals and titles are all meant to tell the world how great you are and beg for others to give you their approval. Why is it important to win, why is it important to prove that you are the best and better than everyone else? Stop competing against the world and start competing against yourself. When you let the world determine your value, you have no value.

Winning is typically a single quantitative outcome. We focus on getting the trophy so much that we forget what else we can learn on race day. The pain that we experience and the attitude we must embrace to overcome it, will get you further in life than a trophy ever will. Having the opportunity to compete and being a part of the race is an incredible feeling. When we just focus on the win, we miss all of the other lessons that life has to teach us both during a race and in life. I have no argument against wanting to be the best and dominate but do not forget to learn along the way.