Hi Candidate,
I think there's a lot in common with the way society talks about love and success.
LOVE: You see the love of your life from across the room, time stops, and you instantly know you're going to fall in love.
SUCCESS: You see an opportunity, Whitney Houston's "One Moment in Time" swells in the background, and you do it (write the winning essay, make the winning shot, close the winning deal). Go live happily ever after.
The only problem is … that's NOT HOW LIFE WORKS!
I call this the "Magazine Version of Reality." Media editors want a cover story — some tidy example that shows one person coming up with a magical answer right in the nick of time. With harps playing in the background.
But real success is a lot more complicated. It's slow, it involves a lot of failure and missteps, and it almost always includes help from other people.
I don't care about cover stories. I want to know how the world really works. In money, in relationships, in business, in fitness … in everything.
TELL ME THE TRUTH! Not the cover story.
It's almost as if we would rather see tricks, hacks, and gimmicks instead of the messy reality of success.
The "Magazine Version of Reality":
- You can't just lose weight. You have to be "The Biggest Loser"
- Which Silicon Valley giant is going to buy your startup for $100,000,000? Actually, anything less than a "unicorn" is failure
- Look at this amazing dish we cooked in 18 min (not including commercial breaks)
The hidden message behind all of this is that if you're not hitting home runs, you're wasting your time. This makes their recipe for success: fail → fail → fail → fail → home run.
And that message is nonsense.
Real success is a series of small steps, not a TNT drama. Each one of them may look small — so small it's easy to miss — but when they add up they can totally change your life and happiness.
I'm writing this email to you, Candidate, and hundreds of thousands of other people. But I started back in 2004 by writing for ONE person! (That was me, BTW. Nobody read my stuff back then.)
Little steps matter.
This is an important piece of Mental Mastery. It's a critical ingredient in the deep inner skills of winners.