Here is what I know, from personal experience, if you want to change your life. These are the boring, accurate, and productive lessons that I have learned.
If you want to make a change in your life:
- Don’t think. Use someone else’s ideas for a while. Your most brilliant ideas and insights, coupled with all of the energy and willpower you could muster, applied over and over again, put you to the jackpot you’re in right now. And trust me—you poured a lot of energy and willpower into this adventure you call your life, and look at the payoff. Kinda pathetic, no? It’s because of your ideas.
- Aim low. Extremely modest goals. Embarrassingly small. It took me forever to hear it. Now I hear and see it everywhere. Jordan Peterson says “aim low.” The 75 Hard program is working for me because I aimed low. “Follow a diet” is one of the 75 Hard tasks. My “diet” is no frozen yogurt, no ice cream. Silly, small, but this has an immense impact.
- Start doing. I use the word “doing” because action is the key. Your brain will get smarter as it watches you achieve tiny increments based on someone else’s thoughts and ideas. Your brain is not going to get smarter based on implementing your own ideas. Action. Action. Action. Action. Extremely modest action is better than ambitious action. Personally I think that —at this stage—ambitious action is worse than no action. Ambition coupled with failure (because you set your goal too high) is a mindkiller.
- Don’t stop doing. That’s the key to the 75 Hard challenge for me. There is no finish line in life. Every day I show up and report for duty and do my modest 75 Hard things. It’s the same as the “90 in 90” advice I got early on. Even after the 90 I kept going.
This sounds like Grindset instead of Mindset, but it isn’t. This isn’t a grind, it’s freedom.
“Discipline equals freedom” according to Jocko Willink. He is right. The part everyone misunderstands is the discipline part. Everyone wants to start a new life the way I started my Economics major in college: by enrolling in Intermediate Macroeconomics. No. You start at the beginning. And sometimes you start even lower than that. It might be necessary to relearn high school algebra, for instance. Find bedrock and start there.
I think everyone gets discouraged looking at a Jocko Willink or a David Goggins. How can I possibly measure up to those examples?
I can’t. But I can measure up to myself, my yesterday self.
Those two started small, according to their definitions of small. (Their definitions of small look like mountains to me, but my perspective is not their problem.)
But they started. And they didn’t stop. Take that inspiration away from their examples with your own life. Start doing and don’t stop doing. Don’t focus on what they did. Just that they did something and kept doing it.
Start small, and be willing to stay small for a long, long, long time.
If you stay on The Path, you will someday realize that small is your lot in life, forever.
Every morning is Day 1. The horizon is always far away, whether you are crawling, walking, or running towards it.