How To Be Successful: Cultivating The Growth Mindset

1. Intro: Welcome to my course, how to think and be successful, cultivating a growth mindset. My name is Colin Stuker. I'm an entrepreneur, CEO, father podcaster content creator, and I'm obsessed with the first principles of just about everything, especially of success and the mindset, how you think and how that translates to abundance in the real world. There goes my It's fascinating how everything in your life starts in your mind. Every action you take, every failure, every success, everything you do say is first a thought, is an electrical signal in your brain that comes from who knows where? It just shows up, and then we get something in real life, and then we think about it later, how that was good, bad, whatever, and then we adjust and we learn, and we adapt. That's a very fascinating process to me. And there are some first principles that we can learn from people that have done this for hundreds, potentially thousands of years as humans throughout our history. Have been able to use their mental energy, their thoughts and translate that into real tangible results. We're going to cover how to think, how to not think as well. A lot of times what you need is you need to improve by removing. So we're going to focus on removing negative thought patterns and limiting beliefs and replacing that, creating space for thoughts that are going to help you get what you want. I hope you get a lot out of this course, but more importantly, I hope you take action. I hope you start thinking differently. And I hope you manifest the abundance in your life that you want and that you deserve. 2. The Growth Mindset: The growth mindset. It is the foundational mindset of everything. If you want to be successful, I would even say if you want to be happy, healthy, and stress free, you kind of have to have a growth mindset because a fixed mindset leads to negativity and to, I would say, destruction of your mental well being. The growth mindset is the most important thing for creating success and happiness in your life. I do truly believe that. Hree quotes here, and then I'm going to get into talking about what the verse fixed mindset is. So you can start thinking about it and start recognizing it in your own life. You're not going to watch this video and then wake up tomorrow with the growth mindset. It doesn't work that way. But you can start recognizing your thought patterns, and you can start culling the fixed mindset and the limiting beliefs and the things that you might be doing and not even aware of it. You have to first shine a spotlight on it, become aware of it. And then you can start changing it, it's going to be a process, okay? So we've got the first quote here. There's no such thing as failure only results. Now, this is a little bit more specific into the action realm and thinking about doing things and what failure success is. But it's very succinct and very powerful. If you actually think about this. And if you understand this concept, if you understand the principles of taking action and failing, succeeding, just doing anything, it will help you remove a lot of the limiting fixed mindset beliefs because you have a healthy understanding of what success actually is and what taking action actually is, okay? There's no such thing as failure. Like, there's no such thing as failure because every single thing that you do that didn't succeed or that you call failure actually gave you data, Edison said, I figured out 1,000 ways, a light bulb doesn't work, and that's how I figured out the one way it did, it does. When you fail, you know, even that words kind of bad. It should be just learning when you tried something and it didn't work out. You have information that you can use about what doesn't work. And what does is that leads you to better action. This is the success loop. The feedback from action leads to better action, and then on and on on till eventually you succeed the way you want to succeed. Without taking action, You cannot be successful. You cannot get result. And without learning what the wrong actions are, you can't figure out what the right actions are. I think a lot of people think this idea of success should be just planning a bunch, doing the thing, and then everything works out perfect. Doesn't work that way. No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking. This quote speaks to the importance of consistency, sticking to it. And the reality that if you actually keep going and you keep trying and you doggedly pursue something, you will figure it out. You will either figure out that your whole approach is wrong, you need to try something else. You will figure out that it's not worth the time and effort, so you do something else, so you quit, saving your time and energy and stress or you'll figure out that the first five ideas you had about this thing are the first five methods. They were wrong. But then method six works, or method 1409 was wrong or not really the right key to this lock and 50. Try 50 got it done. It's not that I'm so smart. It's just that I stay with problems longer. Albert Einstein. Einstein Daly, daydreamed and was living in his head, to eventually figure out E equals MC squared and the speed of light and relativity and all things that he figured out that was revolutionary. He just thought about it for years and years and years. And most of what he did in his mind were just like thought experiments. He would just in his mind, like, if this then that, or what if this was true? What would that mean? And he just followed these logic patterns in his mind, and he stayed with that problem that most physicists and scientists just weren't trying to really think about or solve, and he stayed with it for years until he figured it out. What things in your life have you stayed with for years? All right, let's get into the growth first fixed mindset. We got this cool chart here that we can go through real quick. And it's from this website mindset health.com. There's a link right there. Growth mindset believes that intelligence and talent can be improved, and it's not just intelligent and talent. Growth mindset believes that anything can be improved, and that if you don't have a result that you want, it's because you haven't figured out how to get it or you haven't put in the work necessary to get it. So this leads to embracing flaws and mistakes as opportunities for growth, accepting setbacks as part of the learning process, and feeling empowered to reach goals, right? Empowerment is very important because you have to believe that you have the agency to accomplish what you want to accomplish or try to accomplish. If you feel like someone else has the agency or that you're just the victim or just going to get lucky or not lucky, then how can you actually control the outcome? You can't. And what it does is it removes all motivation to do anything. Fixed mindset believes that talent and intelligence are fixed. You say things like, I'm just not good at math. That's what I used to say. I said that all throughout high school and middle school, and I never did good at math. Imagine that. And then I got into business and started working with spreadsheets and formulas, and I'm like, Damn. I'm actually pretty good at math. Fixed mindset leads to hiding flaws and mistakes, feeling ashamed about failures, which is literally opposite of how you should think about it. You should embrace failures because that's learning and because you took action, you should be happy about that, giving up easily, and being unmotivated to strive for or achieve goals. Developed IQ, seize intelligence as something you can develop over time. So this is the growth mindset. Fixed is seize intelligence and talent as fixed. If you think it's fixed, you don't try. Obvious. Motivation. Growth mindset willingly embraces challenges and risks possible failure. That's part of the course. But with the growth mindset, you actually embrace it. Fixed mindset avoids challenges to prevent the possibility of failure because it wrongly assumes that failure is bad. Growth mindset is beliefs effort and practice can lead to mastery. And that's the process. That's why they say it's about the journey out destination. It's part of the fun. Fixed mindset believes that talent is innate, so effort and practice aren't important, right? It's very much about all I'm either good at it or I'm not or I'll get it or I don't and whatever. Growth mindset acceptance, Cease failure as temporary setbacks and persist in the achievement of goals because growth mindset knows that it's about the effort you put in. Fixed mindset gives up easily and views temporary setbacks as permanent failures. Inspiration. Growth mindset sees other people's success as source of inspiration. Now, personally I've always felt this way. I've never been jealous of people. I've always been Wow, that's amazing. I want to do that. I want to learn from you or tell me what's your secret, right? That's amazing. See other people's success as a threat of a source or gels. As a threat of a source successes as a threat of a source or gels. I don't know if that's written the right way. Finally, feedback. Growth mindset views feedback as an opportunity to grow and applies constructive criticism, fix mindset, view feedback as a personal attack, and ignores constructive criticism because again, it's about the ego. Okay. So this is the foundational mindset for success. I'm going to spend a little bit time here on this and talk about it a lot. And I already do talk about it a lot. I've done multiple podcasts on this, multiple videos. It's so freaking important. It's one of those things that's hard to just teach or understand. You really need to in my opinion, I believe that you need to first focus on getting rid of limiting beliefs, getting rid of fixed mindset and stop all that toxic internal dialogue that's holding you back and replace it with positive affirmation based dialogue, or at least go neutral. Right? If you can get rid of the negative nancy in your mind, you at least have the opportunity to do things and you're not really spending a bunch of time trying to analyze it, you just get out there and do it. And then to take it to the next step further, you start building growth mindset based affirmations, and you start training your internal mind that if you put the work in and you embrace the work and the struggle and hard things, you're going to get result. And the more you do that, the better you get at it. And then, over time, after a year or two of doing this, you're a completely different person. You manufacture success in your life. If you want something, the only question in your mind is, is it worth the effort, time, and expense to get it. And then if you decide it is, then you go get it. And you don't have any delusions about it being easy or whatever. And in fact, in a lot of cases, the growth mindset has a very healthy rationality to success and to what it takes. Like, for me, now later in my life, 36, I've been doing this entrepreneur thinging for years. I You know, I used to when I was younger, just jump into things. Now I'm very, very careful about what I take on because I know how hard things are, how expensive they are, how long they take. I used to just, you know, wrongfully assume that I could get it fast or I could do this or do whatever. And you know, it was good to have that kind of young ignorance bliss mentality for a while. It definitely got me into some things. I definitely costs a lot of money though, and a lot of pain and suffering, and I've learned a lot. And so now I'm way more way more measured. But that's a result of experience, and it all still falls within the realm of the growth mindset. So like I said, you're not going to wake up tomorrow with this. But if you start on a daily basis catching yourself when you're telling yourself these bad ideas about you not being good enough or worthy or they're just this and you're not or their privilege, and you're not or you're a victim or whatever. When you catch those really bad internal dialogues and you stop them, then you can create this empty space for positive dialogue, or at least for a empty space that will allow you to just do things, take action, get it done, right? Yeah, I want to go on on about this so important. But I guess we'll have to spend some more time on that in later episodes, courses, videos, wherever you happen to be hearing or seeing this. So make sure, though. I would say the single call to action is to make sure that you start catching those fixed beliefs. And they also might be coming from other people. Don't let anybody tell you you can't do something, you're not this or you're not that. In fact, before I let you go, it's actually kind of weird and ironic. It's like, if I asked you, how did you learn how to walk? You would say, Well, I was like a young child, and I was like, bumbling around, and I scraped my leg quite a few times, and I probably bopped my head a few times as two sons do. And you would almost think that that question is kind of stupid. So then, why do you or anyone ever assume that anything you've never done, you're supposed to just be good at. How does anybody achieve anything? Like, how do you become a billionaire from self made? Amazon, you know, Jeff Bezos, are they born out of the womb doing these things? Or do they go and they do and they try and they learn and they fail, and they make mistakes, and they have successes, and they go through the process? Think about that question. And how probably certain things in your life that you have fixed mindset around are completely dismantled by just a very simple logic statement of one plus one equals two. If I want to get something I've never done, I have to go after it, I have to learn, I have to grow, and I have to adapt. Just like if I want to play piano or whatever. I think we have this idea that you have these virtuosos that are born out of the womb, being able to play piano perfectly. Even those kids, those prodigies have to start hitting the keys and learning and listening to the sounds and experiencing cause and effect. 3. The Obstacle Is The Way: Book. Great book. Most of the books are pretty good. By Ryan Holday. He actually lives just outside Austin. I saw him in a coffee shop once. My buddy went up to him. I didn't. Okay. The obstacle is the way. Now, this is based on stoic philosophy, which has been which is huge for my life, for working through trauma and my life loss, but also for business and how to think about the invariable inevitable problems that come up and all the different things you have to deal with. And most of it is just you having to wrap your head around it, have to come to terms with it. This is true in everything. Every struggle in our life, it's about how we think about it. We can either make this thing ten times worse and obsess over it and feel bad for yourself and be the victim or we can use it as fuel to learn to grow and to adapt. All right. So there's no good or bad without us. There was only perception. I don't know if that's right without us. Is that the right quote? There is the event itself, and the story we tell ourselves about what it means. I guess that could be right. Within us? I don't know. There is no good or bad within us. No, that probably isn't right. There is no good or bad without us. There's only perception. So yeah, good or bad is just a opinion, an opinion. This is a better quote. Marcus Salus. Choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed and you haven't been. So simple Son so powerful. This is something that takes potentially years to really internalize and be able to think this way and be able to act this way as your gut response, right? We can intuitively understand that we shouldn't obsess over these things or feel bad for ourselves or whatever. But our primal brain takes over. And only through lots and lots and lots of effort and training and experience dealing with these things. Do you get to that point where you can just quickly maybe suppress those negative emotions or those primal responses and then move to a place of logic. And when you use logic, you can remove so much of the dangerous emotions that well up that causes problems and that generally throw fuel to the fire rather than try to dissipate or throw sand on the fire. We tend to fuel and grow problems, by the way we respond to them. And this beautiful quote here by Ryals is just saying that if you decide to not be harmed, then you're not. Nothing anybody says to you can harm you unless you allow them to. It's just your opinion of something they did or said to you, right? Okay. With growth minds that you start approaching problems differently. Maybe we should make a little bit bigger. When you start thinking of the things in your life, the obstacles, and you really almost develop this desire for them. Like they become a guidepost that you're going in the right direction or that you have this obvious next thing you need to do. Like, this is a big obstacle in my way. This is a big struggle. But if I get through this, I'm going to be better off. I'm going to be closer to where I want to be. Generally, the bigger the thing is in front of you, the bigger this struggle or the obstacle, The bigger the reward on the other side. It's kind of like risk to reward. The bigger the risk, usually the bigger the reward, they're exactly correlate. So the big thing in your life, whatever that big fear is or that big struggle or obscle thing that's in your way, right? The bigger it is, the more likely it is to be the key, the gate, the door to exactly where you want to go. Okay. So you start viewing the things in your life as the very things you should go towards and work through, right? So the growth mindset, you start approaching problems differently. You start viewing these big things as almost a magnet, you're attracted to them. You're like, Oh, wow, I need to deal with this. I need to resolve this. I need to work through this, rather than what most people do is they just try to avoid their problems. And the more you avoid your problems, the more you develop the habit of avoiding your problems, that's not what you want to do. The more you move towards the things that are hard and that are big and that are in your way. The closer you're getting to your actual goals and fulfillment and happiness and wisdom and learning. This is one of those dualities of life that's just inescapable. The big problems in your life are the very things that are going to bring the big rewards results. The big aha moments epiphanies steps forward, the big leaps. And every day that you ignore them or try to go around them or try to somehow short change them. Anytime you try to shortchange doing the work that you know you need to do. Well, the bigger those problems swell, and actually, the more scary they become, and the further away from them and your goals behind them, you get. Think about this. Most people give up after one or two tries or something. They say one thing to one person, or they try one iteration, or they write one business plan, go to one investor or they ask one person their opinion, and they get shut down by, like, one thing, maybe two things. Get some of my coffee here cause early. Cold Bla of ice, dash a cream. That's it. What about 50 tries or 100? Like, When was the last time or the only time I'm not even suggesting I've even done this. Most of us live in a world where we don't actually have to try 50 times, we probably can try three to ten and get it done. But 50 times tried something, and maybe a sport or some kind of physical activity. We'll make more sense here with this because, you know, like, if you're surfing, you're literally going to get up 50 times and probably fall, you know? When you were walking when you were a toddler, as my newborn is Rowan, who's about nine months now, he literally gets up, stands up. He's not at the walking pace, but he falls over all the time. Sometimes he falls over backwards and rolls around. Usually, he doesn't hit his head, and he laughs, sometimes cries. Maybe the last time you actually tried something doggedly until you got it right was actually walking. Now, think about how our modern comfort world and our addiction to comfort in this world keeps us away from doing that necessary work, that hard work. That if you think about it, pretty scary. The older we get the more comfortable we become. When was the last time you tried something over and over and over again. And you were telling yourself that, I'm just going to get this done. I don't care how long it takes. I'm single mindedly focused on getting this done. The reality is there's nothing in your life right now that you couldn't figure out if you kept going until you did. Until you figured it out. There's nothing in your life right now. I promise you that that if you kept going, you wouldn't get there. Let me say that simply anything and everything in your life that you want. If you keep going, you will figure out a way to get there. But do you have the mental resilience in the fortitude and the mindset, the growth mindset that is needed to show up day and day out effort after effort after effort. That's the hard part. I recommend for this to get the obstacles away, read that. Some other books are really good, goes the enemy, things like that. I usually listen to these or read these on audible. Great stuff, and that's going to be it for this lesson. 4. The Success Loop: Action over knowledge. Most of us one way or another. Even some people that go to college, they do this because they don't want to get out there and they just want to avoid doing the work or asking for a job or whatever. We think one more course or podcast or video or one more bit of information or secret that we don't have is what we need to finally just start doing things and figuring it out. We want to feel like we know how to do something before we even do it, which is completely ridiculous if you actually think about it. How do you know how to do anything? If you haven't done it yet? How do you learn how to get good at something if you haven't done it yet? It's very strange kind of A fallacy. It's almost an apost syndrome that has infected our culture because we see people on TV that are well spoken that look like they have all these things going on. They have everything figured out. They say the right things, and we think we have to be like those people or that somehow they're born perfect, so we have to do all this work ahead of time to figure it out to look and be as perfect as possible. Cont be further from the truth. Analysis by paralysis or analysis by avoidance or analysis for avoidance. The idea that you need just one more book course or podcast to get the secret information. This is just avoidance of doing the work. Here's a good way to think about this. I'm going to get a sip of coffee If I told you exactly how I did what I did or how Steve Jobs did what he did, would you be able to follow those same paths and achieve success? Would you be able to do what Jobs did? If you knew every single thing he did. If you knew every habit, every routine, everything he said in a meeting. If you just replicated that verbatim, would you have the same success? Now, if you think about that, It may not be obvious, actually. Some people might actually think that they could do the same thing. Now, of course, if you were at the same place as him and literally lived his exact life, and you have the same opportunities, you know, like, yeah, I guess you would have been Steve Jobs if you did exactly what Steve Jobs did. But maybe you would have looked differently. Maybe your voice tone wouldn't have inspired as much or been as good at doing the apple presentations. Like there's just literally billions or trillions of happenstances and reasons and this and that of which that even if you did live at the same time and did every single thing that Jobs did, talk to every single same person, whatever, you would still not get the same results as him. So this idea that you're going to read some book or course or listen to somebody, and they're going to kind of show you the path so that you never have to fumble. You never have to learn. You never have to try. You never have to be afraid. You never have to do any of those hard things is a fundamental lack of understanding of what actually success is, what life is. Life is learning. Success is learning. Failure is learning. The only way you actually lose the game is if you stop playing, as long as you keep going, and as long as you learn and try and learn and try, you follow the success loop, which I'm going to get to in the next slide, then you can create your own success. And you don't need information from someone else. And in a lot of instances, information can actually hold you back. You're going to develop bad ideas about how maybe you should talk to people the way jobs did. But guess what? Jobs was jobs at a time and had the certain power and cache he did to get away with that? If you just start going out into the let's say the business world and start berating people and wearing turtle necks and doing things that jobs did because you think you want to be like jobs, you're probably gonna feel dismally. People are going to kind of laugh at you. There's so much context, like I said, so many of these billions of interactions and circumstances to which you know, jobs maybe could have been a jerk at times. He was also very charismatic and motivating and got out of the way a lot of times, too, if he actually read his biography. So the answer to this question is, absolutely not. You could not do what I've done. I cannot do what you have done or going to do and vice versa. Okay. So even if you take the biggest ideas of humanity, you'd have to go out into the wild and get feedback from the universe, because maybe those ideas, the way you're implementing them are not the right time, not the right place, not the right people. There are these subtle differences. Like I said, trillions of circumstances that you have to go into different environments, different people, different timings, different dollar amounts. Everything is different. You have to go into that environment. And you could try things, like you can experiment with things and see what works and what doesn't. And then more you do that, the better you get, right? This is fundamentally why though no amount of information can prepare you for success. It can actually it can prepare you for how to become successful. Like if you take certain actions, you focus on the basics and you learn how to deal with people in psychology and the basics of marketing or whatever, and then you get into the trenches and then you do things and you act and you learn and you grow. That's why I spent so much time focusing on the first principles, like growth, mindset, how you think about things like just the first principles of everything, even health, life, whatever. But it still doesn't shield you from doing hard things and learning, which is hard, which is painful, which can hurt the ego. I call it the success loop. The only way to be successful is the success loop. Action leads to learning, which leads to better action, which eventually over time, the more you do that leads to success. I say that again. You do something, you try something, you perform an experiment, and that's really what success is. You're being a scientist, you're experimenting until you figure out what works. And then you get some feedback from people, things, the market, whatever, customers. And then you take that information and you take more actions now that you have more information to take better actions on, and then that better action leads to more information. Maybe it's information that makes your stuff better, so you move up a little bit. Maybe it makes you have to move laterally this way or that way, and then you take actions, right? And you're just kind of doing this like zigzagging, sometimes you're going this way. Maybe sometimes you're coming backwards, if you're just not paying attention to what the data is telling you, or you're being too stubborn or you're being too afraid, and you're avoiding things. And then over time, you're just kind of zigzagging, going around like that, and then over time, you have that upward traject, just like the stock market. If you look at any stock ticker over 30 years, the companies are going like this. They're going up, down, up, down, and the better ones are generally over a long enough time period going like this, right? What you don't want to do is kind of like going like this or worse, like this. The success sloop is action, learning, action, learning, action, learning action learning forever. And then you have success. Okay. 5. The 1% Rule and Compounding: We've got a very important concept here, the 1% rule. You can find this article over on james clear.com. Highly recommend it's book, it's website, everything. So the winner take all effects, the 1% rule. Talk about this real quick. Now, I'm not going to go into the whole Pareto principle right now. You can read up on that. Again, Google this article and find the link. But he was basically Italian economist that found that most of the peas in his garden were produced by a small majority of the pea pods. And he thought that was interesting. That's nature. I'm not doing anything. It's just doing its own thing. So where else might this be the case? And he was actually studying the wealth of nations at the time. He was an economist. And he found that there was this similar power law of the 80 20. Or sometimes even as much as 9055 or 9091. It's a power law distribution. And he started noticing it, I believe it was about 20% of the rich in Italy owned 80% of the land, and then it kind of found its way into other ideas. So this 1% rule, though, let's find it in here. It's about small differences in performance can lead to very unequal distributions repeated over time. When you get things like compound interest, where Einsteint is the most amazing thing in the universe, and it's how Warren Buffet build his wealth, it's a little bit stacked at a time over and over and over again, that then builds on top of itself, and it grows exponentially. And then the growth you get grows exponentially, right? So if you actually ever look at a compounding calculator, it's very fascinating what happens after ten to 20 years where the little bit you save starts snowballing, and then what you save on top of what you save on top of B you save on Top Bot builds bills bills bills exponentially until you get this explosive growth. Buffett, for example, made most of his wealth after you, I think it was 65. Okay. So he was a millionaire, you know, as young as 20 where he might have had a few million bucks, and then he maybe had tens of millions or hundreds. I think he might have had something around 100 million or more by the time he was like 65, but then past 65 is when he accumulated billions. So the 1% rule states that the majority over the time, the majority of the results in a given field will accumulate to the people teams and organizations that maintain a 1% advantage over the alternatives. You don't need to be twice as good. You just need to be slightly better. And even if you're not thinking about this from a competitive perspective and just about improving yourself and where you were and where you want to go, if you're improving on a daily basis, 1% of time a little bit at a time. Over the course of a year, you know, that's 365 days of small incremental improvements, and then over two years and three years and five years, right? And then you compound and compound a compound. And then when you get better from getting better, your 1% improvements actually get bigger. It's actually pretty fascinating. Early on, you might make small improvements here and there and they are 1% of a small hole. Then as you get better, more advanced, more intelligent, more effective, your 1% improvements actually end up becoming bigger in proportion to your old improvements. By getting 1% better than before, even in the future, after you've been getting 1% better for a year, your 1% improvements on date 399, 1% is actually way bigger than the 1% you had on day ten or day 20 or day 50, et cetera, right? It's a very, very fascinating concept. And when you really dive into understanding exponential growth in numbers and things like compound interest and compound effort, it's actually pretty hard for a human brain to comprehend because they're just outside of our ability to really comprehend and the scales are just so beyond what humans have evolved to understand. But the key principle is every single day, 1% improvement, a small tiny micro improvement, do one little 80 bitty extra thing to become wiser, healthier, better, smarter. And over the course of one, two, five, ten years, and then your whole life, where you are now and where you will end up will be you know, light years away. 6. Consistency is the thing: We're coming to the end. Let's talk about consistency. You've heard it 1,000 times. You've you know, people talk about it, there's quotes about it. All the self help guru preach it. But what is consistency and how do you build it if you're struggling with it, you know? Like, this is not an easy thing. I can read you all these quotes here and I'm going to read you some of these quotes. And I'm going to talk about it to the best of my ability. But I struggle with this because I don't really know what the answer is. Like, everybody has to figure out it for themselves. You have to figure out what works for you. How can you become consistent? And they say things like find your passion and find your purpose, and those are basically, wellsprings of motivation, which then lead to consistency. But what if you struggle with finding that? I mean, this is not an easy thing. This is going to be the hardest thing you're going to have to do in your entire life. The hardest thing to do it as adult is to figure out How do you want to spend your time, which is very much about how much of the work you're going to do in your life, which is the bulk of your life. What is that going to be? What are you going to be working towards? Is it going to just be for a paycheck so you can then spend that money on something else? Or is your work going to be your passion? Are you going to be fortunate enough to figure that out some combination of the spectrum, like, where are you going to fall? And this is not an easy thing. I'm going to read a few quotes here, and the more I talk about this, the more I realize like I literally have no idea what to offer you. Maybe that itself is the best thing I can do, other than you got to figure it out. You got to try a lot of things. You have to figure out what you're trying to accomplish in life. For me, personally, losing my father, having struggle in my life, having loss and pain and a lot of the different things I've gone through has always created in me this drive and an appreciation for time and how little of it there is. And so I'm always thinking about how am I spending my time? How am I spending my time? I've always been willing to give up pursuing opportunities or money if I thought that time wasn't you know, being used well, or if I was working for somebody else, I'm basically allergic to working for someone else. I have to work for myself. So everything I do has to be for me when it comes to work. And I figured that out long ago. So that is an example of my life where I at least have an internal dialogue of how I think about time, and it does motivate me inspire me. And it's a double edged sword because some days where I should be relaxing, spending time with the family. I'm next thing. I'm thinking about what I should be doing. I'm feeling anxious if I'm not working. I definitely battle with all those type entrepreneurial side effects that come with you know, they're the other side of the coin. Like one side of the coin is you get stuff done, and, you know, you seemingly have never ending spring of motivation and energy and whatever. But the other side is it's hard to turn that off, and it's hard to enjoy life. It's hard to embrace the journey rather than the destination. Like I'm saying, This isn't easy, okay? I can barely even think or talk about it. This is hard stuff. It's hard stuff. And I'd be doing disservice to you if I didn't give you straight honest real role. This is the hardest thing. It is figuring out what purpose is, what your mission is, how to connect that to what you're doing daily. I also have always been afraid of basically being a slave to a job. Early on, I recognized that. So I've always been in this, I need to build my own thing. I need to make a lot of money to pay for my lifestyle. That's always been a goal I've had. And, you know, it's financial freedom. It's having a certain amount of money and income and assets so that I can live on my own terms, and I'm getting closer and closer to that on a daily basis. And then I got to figure out what I actually do with my time. I create a t time for myself, and I got to do something with it. So again, that's a whole another problem you have to figure out, but it's definitely a better problem to have than not even knowing where you want to go or whatever in the first place, right? That's definitely the problem you want to work through and get to better, bigger problems. Okay? So success isn't always about greatness. It's about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success, greatness will come. Trust is built with consistency. Let's see any good ones in here. Consistency of performance is essential, you don't have to be exceptional every week, but as a minimum, you need to be at a level that even on a bad day, you get points on the board, and that very much echoes the 1% rule. If you're getting better, just at least a little bit every single day, you're at least getting points on the board. You're at least moving forward. Luis, I've learned from experience that if you work harder at it and apply more energy and time to it and more consistency, you get a better result comes from the work. With consistency and reps and routine, you're going to achieve your goals and get where you want to be. When you look at people who are successful, you'll find that they aren't the people who are motivated but have consistency in their motivation. Okay. Yeah. So the quotes here are all over the place. Consistency is a tough one. You have to figure it out. And when you can figure out what that purpose is that mission, that motivation, what are you working towards? You write those goals down daily, you recite them in the mirror, you positively visualize and use positive affirmations to yourself. You talk to yourself positive self talking, and do all these things, and over time, it becomes your identity, who you are. And then of what I think Phase two, you'll struggle with is figuring out how to spend that time, that energy, that focus. Because you'll have so many opportunities and so many things you could do, so many distractions. And the hardest thing is deciding, which is Latin for cut off. That's the word decide. It means the cut off. So when you actually decide on some thing or some things, few things, you are cutting off others. So that's a level two problem that you have to work through. And then when you get that done and you create financial freedom, then you have to figure out what you do with your time, how are you going to spend it? Are you going to read every single day. You're going to play video games? Are you going to send a beach somewhere? All that can get very boring and very fast. Trust me. You got to figure that out. But that's a good problem you want to have. That's really the goal you should get to is I have all the time. I don't have to really work for money if I don't want to. Maybe I want to do a little bit. Maybe I don't. That's a good problem to have. Okay. 7. Big Goals, Tiny Goals: Mm. Finally, we have the importance of tiny goals, tiny steps, micro habits. You have big goals, hopefully. You have a very clear vision of those goals, right? That's goal setting one one, be very, very hyper specific about the number about where you're going to be what you're going to achieve, who's going to be around you? Who's the person you're going to be. Be crystal clear about that. Write that down. Now, most of us can do that. It's a fun thought experiment. And in ten years, we're going to have a pretty clear vision of who we want to become and what we want to have. But what about Tomorrow. What are you going to do when you wake up tomorrow? What are you actually going to do to get you one step closer to that ten year goal? What are you going to do in five years? What's every year from now to ten years from now going to look like? How much money you're going to have? What do you have accomplished? What are the obvious stepping stones to get there? I ask some examples here. Imagine you had a goal of making ten, $10 million after ten years, you can break that down into a daily number. So it comes to about $273 a day for ten years that you need to reach. That's about $8,200 a month. Now, the way these things work is, you're not going to start today with that kind of money. It's more likely going to come after a few years, and then it's going to grow and grow and grow, and then some days you'll probably be making $500,000 a day get even more so, and you get a lot of that compound growth that early on is nothing, and then later on really is mushrooming into a short period of time, right? But you would still be averaging over ten years, $273 a day. Now, if you're to do that through business, right? That's one way. If you do that through a salary, that's one way. If you're going to do it through whatever I don't know, whatever other possible ways there are to make $1 million. You got to map out to the best of your ability, brain dump, things you can do linear steps, right? Let's just say you're going to do it for a job. You want to get a job that's making 100 year, and you want to stow away as much of that as possible so you can then have $1 million. In fact, maybe 100 K is not the best example. Well, I guess we have one 20. Now, because you have taxes and you might net like 80, then you have the living expenses, which could be like 30 to 50,000 a year, and then you might only have 20 to 30,000 left over every year. And then after ten years, it's really only one quarter million dollars. That's actually the sad part about having a salary is it's really, really hard to get wealthy with a salary. But if you're buying assets along the way and they're appreciating, there's definitely ways to do it. So maybe that's not a good example. But let's just say your goal is to make $100,000 a year. Like, you just want to make that, you want a job that does that, and you want to do a remote job. Like, map out what that is. Then figure out what a timeline is. Within six months, you want to have that job, okay? So what's some action step? Like, what can you do on a daily basis? Well, step one is, like, build a really solid CV or something or I don't know, like a video, do something creative, CVs are kind of boring, to be honest. Do something that's going to get the attention of an employer of a prospective company you want to work for. Maybe reach out to that person, send them a book, send them a letter, create a short video and make it creative and engaging and whatever, you know, offer to interview somebody and interview them. But really, it's a way for you to showcase your skills, offer to work for free as an intern for 30 days, and then just make them promise that they'll sit down with you for an hour a week to teach you something or whatever. There's just so many creative things you can do if you think outside the box and you do things that other people aren't doing. Take that kind of creative energy. Map it out into a plausible step by step, build the things, test the things. The things that work and get result. You know, do more of that. Things that don't work or you get straight nose, maybe file a way to try on someone else or at another time, doesn't necessarily mean that it's a Dud proud effort, but at least means that it's not working right now for whoever's working on, maybe try on ten people instead of one, or ten businesses instead of one. So you want to map out the theme here is, you want to map out as many of these tiny steps as possible that then lead to a larger goal. And you're not going to know the exact path, obviously, but there's going to be definitely some milestones, either in dollar amounts or in job secured or in funding secured or whatever to which you could then get to $1 million. And if you were going to do a business, for example, you know, one milestone is hitting $10,000 a month in profit, right? That's $120,000 a year in profit. And then it's very likely your business is growing. So, let's say you build in five to 8% growth. That's actually the low end. So maybe like 10% to 20%, actually. And then you can kind of map that on a spreadsheet what a plausible step by step day by day month by month action plan is to go from starting your business, getting your first customer, getting your first $10,000 a month profit to getting your first potentially $100,000 a month profit, and then finally making your first million. And then finally having $1 million in extra cash in the bank, right? Each one of these can be mapped out. Spreadsheet, and you can build in realistic percentages and models and use it as a guide post. You're not going to follow that plan and execute perfectly. It's just not the way reality works. But at least you have a map, like a vague idea of where you're going. And then you can adjust along the way and you can move things up and down, move them ahead, move them back, et cetera, right? So you have to figure out what you want to achieve, then map out as many realistic micro steps and many goals as possible that'll get you there. And then you constantly adjust these goals as you go and you update timelines. The more time you spend thinking about it, tracking and writing down your goals, the more likely you will actually get there, right? That's super massive. You may not get to exactly what you planned. You probably won't, but you'll least end up somewhere else that's going to be pretty awesome too. The reality is most people don't clarify or write down their goals at all. That's the sad truth. And that's why most people don't reach them. Most people don't actually get there. As Seneca said, if you don't know the port, no wind is favorable, he's using the ship analogy, if you get in a ship, you have a destination, you sail to that destination. If you get in a ship and you don't know where you're going, and the wind just bounces around. Well, you never have a good wind because you're never going in any direction. You're going in every direction and no direction at the same time. If you don't have a goal, you're not going to end up at that goal. And if you don't have a goal, you don't even know where you're going to end up. You might end up somewhere completely you didn't have in mind or that you don't want to be or that someone else had plan that is not really what you want, and that's just not that's not where you want to be. You don't want to go through life with regrets and you don't want to go through life looking back and been like, Wow, if I would have just had an idea, I could have maybe steered the ship in a different direction, and instead I'm here now and I've wasted time and money, and I'm never getting it back, hopefully that would be a wake up call to then move forward because it's never too late if you're alive, right? But avoid that at all costs by creating a plan, creating some goals, creating some micro goals. And then every single day, I mean, every single day, looking at that list, iterating, jotting down ideas, like, whatever. I use notion. I keep my stuff in here, I love this app, every single day, review your goals, add to them, maybe subtract them, maybe just timelines, and just get them into your brain.