*Big ideas/takeaways*
Challenge 1: Face Your Bad Hand
Write a list of current factors limiting your growth and success. What are the long odds you’re up against right now? What are things you were hurt by? What cause you pain? Write every detail.
This list will be used to fuel your ultimate success.
*Challenge 2: Set Up Your Accountability Mirror*
Write all your insecurities, dreams, and goals on Post-Its and tag up your mirror with them. Whether it’s a career goal, a lifestyle goal, or an athletic one, you need to be truthful with yourself about where you are and the necessary steps it will take to achieve those goals, day by day. Hold yourself accountable to your goals on a daily basis.
“If you look into the mirror and you see a fat person, don’t tell yourself that you need to lose a couple of pounds. Tell the truth. You’re fucking fat! It’s okay. Just say you’re fat if you’re fat. The dirty mirror that you see every day is going to tell you the truth every time, so why are you still lying to yourself? So you can feel better for a few minutes and stay the fucking same? If you’re fat you need to change the fact that you’re fat because it’s very fucking unhealthy.”
Call yourself out! Tell yourself the truth!
It’s okay to be cruel to yourself as long as you realize you’re doing it to become better.
Challenge 3: Get Used to Discomfort
The first step on the journey towards a calloused mind is stepping outside our comfort zone on a regular basis. Write down all the things that you don’t like to do or that make you uncomfortable. Especially those things that you know are good for you. Now go do one of them and do it again. Doing things – even small things – that make you uncomfortable will help make you strong. The more often you get uncomfortable the stronger you’ll become.
*Challenge 4: Taking Souls*
Choose any competitive situation that you’re in right now. Who is your opponent? Is it your teacher or coach, your boss, an unruly client? No matter how they’re treating you there is one way to not only earn their respect, but turn the tables: Excellence.
Whatever it is, I want you to work harder on that than you ever have before. Do everything exactly as they ask, and whatever standard they set as an ideal outcome, you should be aiming to surpass that.
Your goal is to make them watch you achieve what they could never have done themselves. You want them thinking how amazing you are. Take their negativity and use it to dominate their task with everything you’ve got.
Find your competitive advantage. Address your weaknesses (and your opponent’s weaknesses to your advantage).
Challenge 5: Armored Mind – Visualize Success
Rather than focusing on bullshit you cannot change, imagine visualizing the things you can. Choose any obstacle in your way, or set a new goal, and visualize overcoming or achieving it. Paint a picture of what success looks and feels like.
Make sure to visualize the challenges that are likely to arise and determine how you will attack those problems when they do. This also means being prepared to answer the simple questions. Why are you doing this? What is driving you towards this achievement? Where does the darkness you’re using for fuel come from? What has calloused your mind?
It takes relentless self-discipline to schedule suffering into your day, every day, but if you do, you’ll find that at the other end of that suffering is a whole other life just waiting for you.
*Challenge 6: The Cookie Jar*
Take inventory of your Cookie Jar. Write out all your achievements, including life obstacles you’ve overcome. Add in those minor tasks you failed earlier in life, but tried again a second or third time, and ultimately succeeded at. Feel what it was like to overcome those struggles, those opponents, and win. Then get to work.
Set ambitious goals before each workout and let those victories carry you to new personal bests. When the pain hits and tries to stop you short of your goal, dunk your fist in, pull out a cookie, and let it fuel you!
When you’re in the heat of battle, we need to draw inspiration to push through our own exhaustion, depression, and misery. Remembering what you’ve been through and how that has strengthened your mindset can help lift you out of a negative brain loop and help you bypass those weak, one-second impulses to give in so you can power through obstacles.
*Challenge 7: The 40% Rule*
We habitually settle for less than our best, at work, in school, in our relationships, and on the playing field or racecourse.
Sadly, most of us give up when we’ve only given around 40 percent of our maximum effort. Even when we feel like we’ve reached our absolute limit, we still have 60 percent more to give! This is the 40% Rule. The only way to move beyond your 40% is to callous your mind, day after day. Which means you’ll have to chase pain like it’s your damn job!
But nobody taps their reserve 60 percent right away or all at once. The first step is to remember that your initial blast of pain and fatigue is your governor talking. Once you do that, you are in control of the dialogue in your mind, and you can remind yourself that you are not as drained as you think.
That’s why the line “fatigue makes cowards of us all” is true as shit.
We have many more resources today than ever before and yet we are so much less capable than those who came before us.
Whether you are running on a treadmill or doing a set of pushups, get to the point where you are so tired and in pain that your mind is begging you to stop. Then push just 5 to 10 percent further.
It also resets your baseline, which is important because you’re going to increase your workload another 5 to 10 percent the following week, and the week after that.
The newfound mental strength and confidence you gain by continuing to push yourself physically will carry over to other aspects in your life.
The bottom line is that life is one big mind game. The only person you are playing against is yourself.
Challenge 8: Become Productive
Our culture has become hooked on the quick fix, the life hack, efficiency. Everyone is on the hunt for that simple action algorithm that nets maximum profit with the least amount of effort. There’s no denying this attitude may get you some of the trappings of success, if you’re lucky, but it will not lead to a calloused mind or self-mastery. If you want to master the mind and remove your governor, you’ll have to become addicted to hard work. Because passion and obsession, even talent, are only useful tools if you have the work ethic to back them up.
My work ethic is the single most important factor in all of my accomplishments. Everything else is secondary, and when it comes to hard work, whether in the gym or on the job, The 40% Rule applies. To me, a forty-hour work week is a 40 percent effort.
There are 168 hours in a week! That means you have the hours to put in that extra time at work without skimping on your exercise. It means streamlining your nutrition, spending quality time with your wife and kids. It means scheduling your life like you’re on a twenty-four-hour mission every single day.
Avoid the excuse of not having enough time. Win the morning.
Minimize wasted hours and focus 100% of your attention on that task.
Analyze your schedule, kill your empty habits, burn out the bullshit, and see what’s left. Is it one hour per day? Three? Now maximize that shit. That means listing your prioritized tasks every hour of the day.
Three-week challenge.
- In week one, go about your normal schedule, but take notes. When do you work? Are you working nonstop or checking your phone (use Moment app)? How long are your meal breaks? When do you exercise, watch TV, or chat to friends? How long is your commute? Are you driving? Get super detailed and document it all with timestamps. This will be your baseline.
- Most people waste four to five hours in a given day, and if you can learn to identify and utilize it, you’ll be on your way toward increased productivity.
- In week two, build an optimal schedule. Lock everything into place in 15- to 30-minute blocks. Some tasks will take multiple blocks or entire days. Fine. When you work, only work on one thing at a time, think about the task in front of your and pursue it relentlessly. When it comes time for the next task on your schedule, place that first one aside, and apply the same focus.
- Make sure your meal breaks are adequate but not open-ended, and schedule in exercise and rest too.
- By week three, you should have a working schedule that maximizes your effort without sacrificing sleep.
Challenge #9: Uncommon Amongst Uncommon
If you truly want to become uncommon amongst the uncommon, it will require sustaining greatness for a long period of time. It requires staying in constant pursuit and putting out unending effort.
That’s what it takes to become a true overachiever, and if you are already surrounded by people who are at the top of their game, what are you going to do differently to stand out?
Torch the complacency you feel gathering around you, your coworkers, and teammates in that rare air. Continue to put obstacles in front of yourself, because that’s where you’ll find the friction that will help you grow even stronger. Before you know it, you will stand alone.
Uncommon people think about everyone else before yourself and developing your own code of ethics to set yourself apart from others (turning every negative into a positive and when it gets hard, be prepared to lead from the front).
A true leader stays exhausted, abhors arrogance, and never looks down on the weakest link. He finds for his men and leads by example. It meant being one of the best and helping your men find their best too. Instead of getting angry that your colleagues can’t keep up, help pick your colleagues up and bring them with you!
Most people in the world if they ever push themselves at all, are willing to push themselves only so far. Once they reach a cushy plateau, they relax and get soft.
Challenge #10: Empowerment off failure
Think about your most recent and your most heart-wrenching failures. Break out the journal. You’re going to write your own belated After-Action Report (AAR).
First off, write out all the good things, everything that went well, from your failures. Be detailed and generous with yourself. A lot of good things will have happened. It’s rarely all bad. Then note how you handled your failure. Did it affect your life and relationships? How so?
How did you think throughout the preparation for and during the execution stage of your failure? You have to know how you were thinking at each step because it’s all about mindset, and that’s where most people fall short.
- You can’t prepare for unknown factors, but if you have a better pre-game focus, you will likely only have to deal with one or two rather than ten.
Now go back through and make a list of things you can fix. This isn’t time to be soft or generous. Be brutally honest, write them all out. Study them.
Then look at your calendar and schedule another attempt as soon as possible.
As you prepare, keep that AAR handy, consult your Accountability Mirror, and make all necessary adjustments. When it comes time to execute, keep everything we’ve learned about the power of a calloused mind, the Cookie Jar, and the 40% Rule in the forefront of your mind. Control your mindset. Dominate your thought process. This life is all a fucking mind game. Realize that. Own it!
And if you fail again, so the fuck be it. Take the pain. Repeat these steps and keep fighting. That’s what it’s all about.
Whenever I failed in life, my mom was always asking me when and where I would go after it again. She never said “Well, maybe it isn’t meant to be.”
Challenge 11: What if
The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself. You wake up with them, you walk around with them, you go to bed with them, and eventually you act on them. Whether they be good or bad. We are all our own worst haters and doubters because self-doubt is a natural reaction to any bold attempt to change your life for the better. You can’t stop it from blooming in your brain, but you can neutralize it, and all the other external chatter by asking, What if?
What if you pushed past your comfort zone next time you feel like giving up?