What’s the secret? How can I get ahead in life?
There isn’t a magic button or a genie that is going to come down and bless us and make all our problems go away
What’s the “secret”? There isn’t a secret
A secret isn’t meant to be known by others .
What separates those that make it in life and those that don’t is their philosophy – how they think, view, and interpret different situations, circumstances, and events throughout their life.
If we change the way we think, then our lives will change and everything will follow suit.
And even deeper, someone who thinks differently, acts differently.
The “acts”
Maybe they don’t look like they matter and I guess they don’t if they’re only done for a day or a week, but a year?
Or ten years?
That’s when the little things lead to big differences, big results. Things start to add up, and in that way, all the little things do matter.
Learning and applying the little things create success throughout the lives of the greats. Filling life with hundreds and thousands and millions of small, ‘insignificant’ actions that lead to a ‘crazy’ life.
That overnight success we see only took 15 years. Was it really overnight? Or do other people seem to notice overnight?
That’s what these successful people do, simple things that are easy to do (and easy not to do) That’s the kicker, the easy not to do part, because if we don’t do something, our life won’t change that week, month, or even year. We won’t suffer or fail today…
But what about in ten years? People overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade. That slight error in judgment, over the course of ten years can completely ruin our chances of success, especially if those ten years turn into 20 or 30…
Time changes everything, it exposes us or promotes us – overnight success takes YEARS to come through.
And how we think – it lets us position ourselves to have time work for us instead of against us
DRILL THIS INTO YOUR MIND: Time is what we need to let play out – this is what determines our success or failure, just stay on the path long enough and things are going to eventually work out.
And that’s the kicker because people don’t want to wait. They wanted things yesterday, but they’ll take them now.
Life is like a garden: planting, cultivating, then harvesting. You can’t do it any other way, people want to go from planting right to harvesting and it just doesn’t work like that, leaving them miserable.
Because it seems like we’re never going to get what we want. To go from A – Z it can be overwhelming, it may seem impossible.
And it is impossible to go from A – Z. But it’s not impossible to go from A to B, then B to C, and eventually we’ll end up at Z.
Eventually. It’s about starting small. Things like:
- drinking a gallon of water per day
- changing that after dinner desert from a pint of ice cream to yogurt
- sending out 10 emails
- texting 5 friends
- putting 10% of all your income away
whatever area you want to grow in, pick something small and do it consistently, for months – years.
The best day to plant a tree was yesterday, the second best time is right now. If we feel behind in life, use that as fuel to focus on the little things that are going to bring us towards where we want to go.
Whether it’s for our health, knowledge, skills, diet, finances, relationships – what could we do to tick the needle just a little bit closer to where we want to go?
And this is the point that needs to be driven home, the small daily actions is what takes us to where we want to go in life, we can’t rush the process so we might as well trust the process and do what we can now. One day we’ll look back and think “holy shit, I’ve come a long way”
And it will come a lot sooner than we think. The journey of a thousand miles begins with that first step.
After all, we can’t stay the same in life – life isn’t stagnant, it’s dynamic and we’re either growing or dying. We’re either slowly improving or slowly diminishing, and the best part is that the choice is ours.
A quick riff on goals:
- Write each goal down
- Develop a plan for achieving that goal*
- Understand what it’s going to take to achieve the goal, and be willing to pay that price
- Read and visualize the goal twice per day
*What’s one simple, easy to do activity that you can do each day that will have the greatest influence on reaching the goal you set for yourself?
Here are a few things we can think about to get started, maybe you can apply a few of them right now?
- Give your best all the time with a positive attitude
- Know what you want in life
- Have faith and belief in yourself
- Be willing to do the work, especially when no one is looking.
- Invest in your personal development (reading 10 pages a day is a great place to start)
- Momentum- getting going is the hardest part, and it gets easier the longer we keep things in motion
- Completion – we learned to walk, and we can learn anything else that we need to
- Habit – these are what brings us up or pulls us down
- Reflections – busy and productive are different, it’s all about doing the right things.
- Celebrate – even the smallest of wins, celebrate it and keep going.
Joe DiAndrea 