I use the gym as a metaphor on how I attack and live my life. It is my laboratory, if you will, where I break down the bad and create the good habits necessary to self-generate success. When you’re in the gym and you want to quit, when physical pain signals you to mentally checkout, it is in that moment you either develop a positive or a negative habit. Your instinctive decision creates a conditioned response. Every time you mentally shutdown, checkout or quit, the stronger that pathway becomes. Every time you’re faced with pain, stress, discomfort and you buckle down, you endure and you prove to yourself that you didn’t die when you pushed beyond your limits, you create a positive habit, a conditioned response to mentally check-in, when most want to mentally checkout.
The difference between success and failure lies in the answer to this question: When life throws you challenges, do you create negative or positive habits? How did you set yourself up to be in that position? I tell people you can strengthen character by overcoming difficulties, and that starts to give you a conditioned response. When you have armed yourself with all these conditioned responses, when you do have challenges, you’re better equipped, you don’t just go in with wishes and dreams. You attack endeavors with a tool belt, an arsenal of mental strength and indomitable will to succeed… Success isn’t an end state, it’s not a trophy or an award. Success is waking up each morning and trying to best yesterday’s effort. It is forgetting the accomplishments already passed and focusing on the success of tomorrow.
I am fortunate to have a highly educated and fantastically successful mentor in my older brother. Being a West Point grad/Army Ranger and now Wall Street executive he explained to me the importance of motivation versus intrinsic motivation. (e.g. people are motivated to have an expensive car.) He explained that people in the military are mostly intrinsically motivated for they put their lives on the line in service of the greater good of our nation. Celebrity status, fame and finance do not motive them. If you truly want to be the best at what it is you do, it’s not enough just to be motivated to make money, have the biggest house or date the prettiest girl, because what happens when you achieve those things? What happens when those materialistic and shallow goals are subsequently achieved? The answer—and we have seen it all too often—is that motivation fades away, the fire begins to fizzle. People view success as an end state. It is not an end state – it is a daily mindset. Every day you have to earn success. When you’re a parent you don’t stop and say, “As parent my job is done when my kid has passed 1st grade.” It is no different as a person, as an entrepreneur or business owner. Every day you try to self-improve.
Every day you have to earn success for the day… you can’t just “work hard at your job.” Success is in the little things you do when the mind or body tries to tell you otherwise. Success happens when you start forcing yourself beyond your cocoon of comfort, i.e. your comfort zone. It is forcing yourself to push beyond your comfy boundaries of mental and physical complacency. To attack the fears that once paralyzed us, and kept us from living the life of our dreams. That’s truly the way to feel successful and fulfilled in ones life.
Many think success and achievement are synonymous. Achievement is the trophy, the award, the end state. Success is not final but rather a process during which achievements fall along the journey. Every day I’m going to get up and work my day with a relentless desire to succeed from end to end. No matter what – I am going to find a way to win every day. When you do that repeatedly you put yourself in a position to self-generate self-success. Quest Nutrition President Tom Bilyeu and I made career choices. Tom and I went in completely different directions in life; both of us have never been more fulfilled. Yet neither one of us has taken the foot off the gas even for a second. Sure it’s nice to have financial security, but if Quest was 10% of its size he would still wake up and still enjoy his life. I stopped looking at my financial bottom line 3 years ago. I enjoy the process of putting projects together, the challenge of bringing an idea to fruition. If it generates revenue then great, but some things don’t and are not meant to work out. This is the nature of the business and there is no better on-the-job training than success by brutal lessons of failure. Battles are won, some are lost. In the end you want to look back on life in its entirety and have won the war, that is the game of life….
Watch Joe Donnelly’s interview on Inside Quest for more insights on beating fear at its own game and turning obstacles into advantages.
