So I remember finding out about personal development, and I thought it was just the greatest thing. I basically sucked at everything, but I realized, hey, I can improve whatever I suck at and that’s pretty cool. But I ran into a problem that almost everyone going through the same journey runs into, which is basically starting to want to improve everything.
So it goes something like this. This is awesome. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to wake up early, meditate for an hour, go to the gym for two hours, go to work. And as soon as that’s done, go to a martial arts class, come home and learn how to play the guitar, because I’ve always wanted to play it. And once I’m done with that, I know it’s really late, but I’m going to work on my five different business ideas. And that sounds so good because all of a sudden you’re excited about life again.
But here are the two most likely outcomes of that dream. The first and the most likely one is that you won’t be able to actually do it. I don’t care how great you think your willpower is because willpower is like a battery.
It gets drained.
So when you start your day off trying to be the Dalai Lama and then Ronnie Coleman and then Anderson Silva and then Jimmy Hendrix, and finally at midnight, you want to be Mark Zuckerberg, you won’t be able to get to the Silver Hendrix and Zuckerberg point if you even make it that far because the battery is empty by then. The other option and this is very unlikely, is let’s assume a hypothetical situation where you somehow can manage and consistently get through all those things. In this unlikely scenario, the best outcome is that you’ll still end up being average at everything. That’s it.
Just average.
So we’re talking about success here in terms of how it’s usually defined. We think of the Dalai Lama as a successor, what he does. We think of Ronnie Coleman as a success at what he does. It’s the same thing with Anderson Silva and Jimmy Hendrix and Mark Zuckerberg. Now, if you look at all those people, what do they have in common? You don’t see Mark Zuckerberg busting through his shirt. Why? Because if he dedicated his daily hours and focus to his workouts, he just wouldn’t be Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s the same thing with Ronnie Coleman. If he’s going to be up on the stage in six months, he’s focusing on one thing and that’s his physique. He’s not playing the violin while building awesome business websites. And all of that leads us to this idea of the one thing every person who we view as successful has, the one thing that they focus on. If it’s Mozart, it’s the piano, it’s not the piano. Plus hitting the gym and shooting a basketball for hours.
If it’s LeBron James, it’s basketball, it’s not basketball. Plus playing the piano and trying to compose for hours. Now, let me make this clear that I’m not here to define success for you. Your definition of success might be different than what’s commonly accepted. Maybe for you. Mozart and LeBron James aren’t successful. Maybe you like the idea of being OK at everything and having a more balanced lifestyle, and that’s fine.
I’m not here to tell you what you should do or how you should think, but if you’re asking about how to be successful and success is defined for you by someone like Mozart in Music or LeBron James in basketball, you do have to realize that there’s almost no balance with that kind of success. There just isn’t.
So if you’ve been reading my blogs, I took a month off from making these blogs, and this is one of the biggest things I have to think about. What do I want? And it wasn’t an easy choice. On one hand, I could pick a very balanced lifestyle, wake up and dedicate my time to whatever I want, like the gym every day, the piano every day, cooking awesome meals, every day, thinking about and exploring all the different business ideas that come to my head every day and a hundred other things that I’m slightly interested in or just focus on the one thing which is really as much as I can, and then share those ideas.
And that’s what I ended up picking. So my one thing literally consists of just reading and researching all day. And my one thing at night is spending quality time with my girlfriend. That’s it. The only other thing I really do is go to the gym and I’ve had to cut that down to full body workouts as well.
And if you’ve noticed, my posting pattern has been a lot more different than it used to be. I mean, there’s no way I could be posting at this pace if I decided to have balance and not focus on this one thing.
There’s no way I can be hitting the gym for two hours every day, getting better at playing the piano, cooking gourmet meals all day, focusing on five different other business ideas, and then consistently be putting out blogs and focusing on my reading so I can turn this into something great because my willpower battery is going to be completely empty by the time I get to it.
So ask yourself, what is your one thing? Are you a Zukerberg who’s trying to also look like a bodybuilder and also ask yourself, what are you? Want what do you want that is the most important question here, when I’m trying to explain a book, I like to use real-life examples of how something would be done. But I think I make it come across like I accept and fully implement 100 percent of every book I read, which I guarantee you have never happened with any book, no matter how great.
And I also sometimes phrase things in a way that implies that you should do something which isn’t my intention either. I genuinely don’t care about what you do.
I don’t go to sleep at night worrying about whether people are unconscious in front of the TV at home or doing something proactive. So if you want to have a balanced life, I’m not here to tell you that you need to be a success at something. And I’m not here to tell you how you should think of success either. But if you want to know how to be a success and you define success like it’s usually defined, then I’m here to explain it.
The only way you’re going to get there is by understanding what you’re one thing is and then completely focusing on that. I wish there was a way to have a perfectly balanced, harmonious life and also do extraordinary things. But there isn’t. I’ve tried it so many times and have failed so many times. Mozart didn’t achieve extraordinary success in music because he had a balanced life.
He didn’t meditate for two hours every morning, followed by two hours at the gym and a two-hour session of reading philosophy books before he finally started playing the piano.
