Moments of Success

Most of us see success as the aftermath of an avalanche. We see the impact.

An avalanche is caused by different densities of snow building up, until the weight is too great causing a collapse and an avalanche.

Coming towards you an avalanche is a massive and powerful force that is made up of billions of snowflakes.

A snowflake by itself is nothing, it is harmless. Have you ever watched a snow flake fall the sky only to melt when it hits the ground? Snowflakes are the actions that we take. Some will melt on the ground while others will help us build an avalanche.

A snow flake is made up of ice crystals, something you cannot see without a microscope. Ice crystals are your thoughts and you beliefs. While you cannot see them unless you take a deep look inside yourself, they ultimately determine your actions that cause an avalanche.

Your old beliefs and actions and your new beliefs and actions are at odds with one another. 

You may have started with a weak base, as you start to build better habits, thoughts and actions, eventually they will overpower your weak base, just like the snow in an avalanche. So when it feels like the pressure is mounting, things are changing just remember you are about to take off.

I want to share with you two moments in my life that seemed insignificant at the time but ended up making a huge difference.

In college, I worked for the Union Marketing Department. One day I received a call from a parent that had sent her child a care package but he had yet to receive it. She had called numerous departments, had been bounced around and somehow she had ended up calling our office. Needless to say she was frustrated, upset and sad not just about the service but because her son never received her care package. I had two options. I could send her to another department and make them figure it out or I could work with her on it. I chose the latter. I cannot remember how long it took me to figure it all out but it was not long. I got her in contact with the right people, to make everything better. It was because of this one choice that her son was able to receive the care package that she had sent. The mother was so impressed with me going above and beyond (less than 30 minutes) that she wrote an email to my boss and told her how much she appreciated me helping her. In just 30 minutes I was able to make a women’s day become better, for one of the most important things in her life, her son.

A cup of coffee can change your life. One day, I told my friend that I wanted to help change the lives of youth which led to a cup of coffee that changed my life. He told me about a program he was in charge of called Rotary Youth Leadership Awards (RYLA). He told me about the impact and how it changes lives, not just of those that attend but those that interact with attendees after they attend RYLA. In that moment I agreed to take over the program, not having a clue about anything. RYLA is one of the most significant parts of my life, it has changed my life. I have met so many wonderful, amazing and inspiring people who are changing the world right now. I never would have been able to experience this if it were not for a cup of coffee.

These are just two example of what happens when you make the most of a moment. How small moments that seem insignificant at the time can change your life or the change the lives of your friends, family, or someone you do not even know. These stories are not meant to brag about what I have done. The truth is that you could be in these stories if you chose to be. It is all about your choice. Every moment you have a choice. Will you half ass it or will you use all your ass? This is the one time that it is not just ok but great to be a big, giant ass.

Doing what you love, will get you nothing

During lunch with a friend who is an entrepreneur we talked about the concept of “doing what you love”. As a successful entrepreneur he had a lot of insight of why this concept is flawed.

No entrepreneur starts their own business to deal with the book keeping, logistics and filing for taxes. They start a business because they are obsessed about something it can be a product, idea, service or making themselves better. Yet to get to where they want to be, to grow and to thrive, they need to do the shit that they hate for at least a little while. In fact they need at times they need to stop doing what they love, to do what they hate.

Entrepreneur or not, at some point in your life and hopefully many points in your life you will face this challenge.

How many times in your life have you had an amazing idea of what you want to do or who you want to become? It is exciting but then it hits you, all the work and pain that would come with getting there. Your dream becomes a nightmare. If you cannot love every minute of it then it must not be right.

This is a struggle I have with getting in better shape. I am at a healthy weight but I could be at a healthier weight. I know the steps that I need to take in order to become healthier, stop eating so much and eat better food and yet I still struggle with it because I simply am not willing to do the work. In fact I am choosing what I love to do, eat food (bad food specifically), over what will make me stronger and healthier. I am choosing the short-term reward over the long-term goal.

The solution is to be driven by what you love, be so driven that you are willing to do anything and everything that needs to be done.

Take this back to your life, what is something that you have always wanted to doubt getting there has stopped you before. Decide and commit to doing it now.

Focus on what you want, what it means to you and why it is important to you. Be driven by what you love and stop doing what you love.

No More Days Off

“Everybody is working for the weekend”- Loverboy

If you only work for the weekend or for vacation, you are not living.

Stop living a life that you need an escape from.

What if you lived a life where you did not need another day off?

In 2012, according to the World Bank the average human life for an American was 78 or 28,489 days. When you live for the weekend, you only live 8,138 days, the other 20,351 days you are not alive. Let that sink in for a minute, for over two-thirds of your life you have made the choice to not truly live

You don’t need to love your job or boss. These are lies that we have been told, do they help, of course. Somewhere along the line, we were told we should have this perfect life. We will love our job, we will have all these friends, have a lot of money and our lives will be perfect. Stop buying in. You need to love your life.

Here are some tips on how to live an amazing life for the rest of your life.

Stop seeing work as a bad thing. It is an opportunity to learn, grow and become better. It is a channel to get you where you want to go.

Do at least one thing that is significant to you each day. Some days at work, no matter what job you have will seem pointless and that you never had chance to do anything significant. You have time before and after your work day to make an impact. Take a look at Bo Johnson, a boy who did not have a job, never held an official leadership position but he changed and continues to change the lives with his story. He did not wait until a job was there for him; he went out and did it.

Forgiveness: This is one that I have the most trouble with, not because I do not believe in it but because it is hard for me to do. When we hold on to hate, hold on to the ways we were mistreated, do not forgive those that have wronged us and more importantly the times that we have let ourselves down, we are holding back out lives. Forgiveness cuts the weights so we can come up for air.

Stop trying to get even and focus on getting better. When we try to get even with someone that wronged us, we do not become better, we just become even. We become on the same level that pissed us off. Why do we want to become even? What is that going to prove to the person that wronged us? If you are just living to prove that person wrong, you are living for them, you are putting all your effort on them and you are far too valuable to do that. You were made for so much more.

Stop complaining and be grateful: Life is not fair and sometimes it sucks. Not everything will go as you planned, it happens to everyone, it is not hate it is not God punishing you, it is life.  There are so many stories that I could tell you about individuals who had the cards stacked against them but they had a grateful attitude and they thrived. While we are at it, if you have done this in the past, stop letting it hold you down. It is in the past and there is nothing you can do about it. Focus on your future.

Help others: The best way to experience this one is to go out and do it but here is a caveat, if you only help people for the reward or karma, do not expect to feel anything. Give freely.

Remember how awesome you are. In an age where celebrity gossip, selfies and the number Twitter followers are the ways that we measure our life, it is easy to forget how great you are. You are full of so much potential, more than you can even fathom. We do not need to tell everyone how great we are, we need to believe it ourselves. Stop trying to impress people and start doing things that fulfill your life. We truly live when we do not need anyone’s praise to prove how great we are. It is a scary concept but until we get there, we are living for other people and we are not living. Go out there and kick some ass.

Never Again

At the age of 18 Tony Robbins promised himself that he would never have another bad day.

It may sound like a stupid idea annoying positive people but it’s not.

It is a belief that will change your life, if you truly believe in it and most importantly if you truly live it. It is about taking control of your life.

When you commit to never have another bad day, it does not mean you do not believe bad things will happen, or that you will not face adversity. What it means is that you will choose to be in control of how you view your life, how you act and what you see. Commit to never having another bad day and start to take accountability for yourself. Take accountability for your happiness, your beliefs and your success. Stop waiting on others.

I made the decision to no longer have any more bad days in my life. I made this decision on Monday, April 4, 2016. The morning of April 6, 2016, I slept past my alarm, got up late, had to deal with traffic and was in a bad mode for many of reasons, all of which do not matter. When you choose to no longer have another bad day, it does not mean it will be perfect or that you will be perfect. What it means is that you will always look to the bright side, pull yourself back up and make the most of your day. It means not giving up and giving in when it starts to hurt.

When I made the decision to never have another bad day, I surprisingly did not feel trapped by the burden of having to find the best in every day. I felt free and I felt in control. We believe that the more we take accountability for our lives, the more we are chained and the more of a burden we have. In reality, when we decide to take control, while it may be harder it is breaking the chains away. It is giving you unlimited potential.

Being pissed off gets you nowhere. Going back to April 6, I got pissed off at traffic on my way to work. Surprisingly all my anger and my frustration did nothing to improve the traffic situation, in fact it made it worse for me. While getting mad and being pissed off may be a spark to set you on your path to glory, the impact occurs when you decide to take action, when you decide to be in control of your life.

Some of you are telling yourselves right now “That is Tony Robbins that is not me, I can never do that” do not believe the lies. Tell that voice in your head to take a hike because you can be as amazing as you want to be, if you choose to be. It may not be easy but it is worth it.

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.