Hi Candidate,
"What does it take to be the best?"
I spent YEARS asking myself that question. Leaders enjoy 10x the rewards of their nearest competitor. How do they do that? What's the secret to becoming the leader in your field?
This week, I want to take you behind the scenes of how I found the unexpected answer to those questions. Then I'm going to show you how the lessons I learned along the way changed my life.
Let's begin…
* * * * *
First, let's look at that idea of being the best.
What does that even mean?
Does it mean more money? More friends? More free time? Being on the cover of a magazine?
I remember standing in line a while back for a famous sushi restaurant in SF and noticing how people would stand in line for over an hour to eat there...even though there were tons of other sushi restaurants within 3 blocks.
I loved it. For me, success was about creating something so good that the competition became irrelevant. In other words, I could take my skills and passions, and share them with the world.
And I would be the OBVIOUS and ONLY choice.
But how?
At the time I was an awkward, 5'11", 127lb college kid who never smiled and happened to have a blog.
I was willing to put in the work: I read and studied everything I could get my hands on, I worked tirelessly to improve my craft, I surrounded myself with people I wanted to be like. The more and more I grew, the more I began to recognize a whole other level existed. What made these people different? I had to find out.
I copied the habits of successful people I admired: I worked out, I read, I studied time management and productivity, I slept 7.5 hours every night...
But still, I knew I was missing something huge.
I'd read articles and posts about mindsets, and fears, and passion...and scoff. I'm too smart for that. This is "fluffy stuff." I wanted tactics.
But at the same time, it felt like pushing a boulder up a hill — I was trying all these different things, but nothing was really crystallizing.
For example, I wasn't seeing any results in the gym.
I couldn't really increase my rates because clients would laugh and say, "Why would I pay that?"
I realized I could do all the right things formulaically, but if I didn't master my own inner psychology, nothing mattered.
All this time, I'd been searching for an external "magic bullet" — the secret that would propel me to success. In truth, the answer was to look internally.
Think about the top performers in any field — sports, business, science, etc. If you ask any Olympic athlete what the secret to their success is, they'll never say "Acme gloves!" They've mastered more than their craft, more than productivity and health…they've become masters of their own mental frameworks.
Once I had this breakthrough, I went deep. I relentlessly hunted down the mental frameworks — or "Success Triggers" as I started calling them — from top performers across disciplines. I studied and tested them, keeping the ones that worked and discarding the ones that didn't.
The interesting thing I found was even though I wasn't some beginner starting from ground 0 with no confidence, these simple Success Triggers were extremely powerful. And the more advanced I got, the more powerful these frameworks became.
Over the next 3 days, I want to share some of these Success Triggers with you. Each one shows you how the trigger works and how you can implement it in your life today.
TUE: Master yourself. We'll look closely at guilt — why we feel it, what it does, and how to stop beating yourself up all the time.
WED: Handle things you can't control. What do we do when we're not in control? This one simple technique will eliminate 99% of your worries.
THU: Master the follow-through. I'll show you how I stay motivated over time so you don't have to rely on bursts of inspiration.
There'll be an opportunity to take these even further later in the week, but just these 3 Success Triggers, my gift to you, can provide massive results.
One note of warning: On the surface, these insights seem simple. I had to put aside my notions of being "too smart" or "too advanced." Once I did, I quickly saw massive changes in many areas of my life.
By the end of the week, you can do the same. These simple changes can have massive ramifications that ripple through your career, your business, your health, your relationships, and more.
Talk tomorrow.
