Day 84 - Every Struggle Reminds Us of a Question: How Bad Do You Want It?

 Success… Everyone has a different definition of this word, but today I want to talk about success as a mindset and not as some sort of a destination that most believe it is… “Someday I am going to be a success…” is the carrot and the stick philosophy that actually holds us back because “someday” usually means “never” because we consider success coming on the other side of the work we will never begin… So we see success as something that could happen for us but usually only happens to others… Success is an Instagram blurb with a happy person in a beach house or some guy climbing out of a Ferrari 812 GTs smiling at us explaining that we too could get the lifestyle he supposedly lives…

No… Bullshit…

What if success was a daily mindset? What if you could feel like you succeeded every day of your life? The psychology of motivation teaches us that little victories lead to growing self esteem and self confidence. Take for instance playing a guitar… You learn a few chords, you get good at them and you learn a few more. Now you’re not playing a rock anthem after two weeks but you are playing six chords… Isn’t that a success? A burgeoning chef isn’t perfecting their Baked Alaska in their first months but they are learning and growing their menu within days of starting. Little successes make us feel like we can go on and become that person we are working to be… 

Losing a little weight should make us feel like we could lose a little more, instead, we see someone on Instagram holding up a gigantic pair of pants telling us that “someday”, if we buy their program or their book, we could be a success… Let me tell you, if you lost two pounds last week, you’re a fucking success… You don’t need to lose 100 pounds to succeed…  You need to start and you need to stick with it, that’s the triumph…  

Changing your mind, getting off the couch, making a plan and getting to work is the greatest success that there is… Picking up the guitar, finding a program to begin lessons is a success… 

Let me be very clear here… Let’s make it really simple… If I want to visit the beach, standing there by my truck and  looking off into the distance and thinking that someday I will make it to beach isn’t going to get me there…  Thinking about success isn’t success… Starting the process is the first part of succeeding…  Starting is the success… 

Get started…

The height of your success probably won’t be a Ferrari, or being able to do impossible variations of pull-ups, having a perfectly chiseled body or a six figure salary with a seven figure bank account… So why hold ourselves to these impossible standards and never start our own journey? I think that is what held me back for so long with my guitar playing… I knew I would never be Eddie van Halen and somehow, that held me back from starting my journey… I lamented at how I asked for a guitar when I was 12 and my parents pretty much ignored me… I was constantly telling myself that “if I had started sooner, I would be so good at guitar…” Are you seeing this? I couldn’t get started because I didn’t get started when I thought I should have and just continued to delay…

Well… A couple of nights ago, I learned a B chord so I could start learning to play a Four Non-Blondes song  and after I learned it, I had to laugh at myself… As of that chord, I now know 15 chords and am learning to play different variations of chords, strum patterns and snippets of recognizable songs as well as just playing shit that I make up as it comes to me… I am building on my skills daily and guess what? I will never be Eddie van Halen and that’s perfectly okay, I’m much better looking anyway… I don’t want to be, play like or even resemble him… I am a wild success when you compare me to me from last year… Did you hear that? Should I say it again so that you can catch the subtle hint that lies within that statement?

I am a wild success when you compare me to me from last year…

How did it happen? I succeeded the second I picked that guitar up with a commitment in my heart. I found a mentor in a co-worker… I purchased an app to help me further my skills… The point is, I stopped my rationalizations and excuses and began my journey… Guess what? I AM A SUCCESS… I’m not an expert, and in fact I will never be an expert… I just wanted to play and now, at any time, I can pick up a guitar and play it… That’s success…

Most of it is the slow speed at which we meet our own expectations of what we consider success… We can lie down on the couch and watch an entire Netflix series and hate the first few episodes or even the entire first season with the promise from those who have watched it before us and told us that “even though it starts slow, it gets SO MUCH BETTER!!!” So we suffer through it with the belief that it will get better…  Now why can’t we accept that yes, starting off with improving yourself sucks major ass… It hurts to adjust; it’s tedious when we don’t see as much progress as we would like to see but we can lie on the couch and suffer through shitty television for nothing more than to be entertained but we can’t stand it when give self improvement a half assed try and we don’t look like a super model in two weeks… Yes, I am admonishing you for being lazy… No worries, you can hate me all you want, just use that negative energy to get up off the couch and prove me wrong… I will not mind at all…

Now listen, this just isn’t about you… I want you to get a mentor for a reason… A mentor is a symbiotic relationship when you are a student who truly wants to learn… Here is why…  

An apprentice actually motivates the mentor to excel… The person who adopts you to help you puts themselves in a situation that they have to be a teacher… As my mentor says “Teaching always makes the best learning…” 

This is a relationship between a student and the teacher where we feed off of one another and both push themselves harder and become better than we were yesterday… Last night, my mentor texted me that he had been practicing for three hours and his fingers were aching… He said that he was pushing himself beyond his boundaries and playing like never before… Do you think that fucking motivated me? I was up this morning and practiced for an hour before I did anything else…  This isn’t a competition and it certainly is not a race, because as a novice up against someone playing for decades, there is no contest… What this is is a pursuit of personal excellence…  A beautiful symbiotic dance with two people helping one another to excel… All this time, you thought that your being a novice was going to be a burden… Now, doesn’t that sound like a reason for you to start your journey?   

Listen, I know it’s hard to get started and even harder to stay on track… Often we come out of the gate like a racehorse and overextend ourselves and immediately burn out, get discouraged and find ourselves back on the couch with yet another reason why whatever we wanted “just isn’t for us…” I mean, we tried again, failed and why keep trying… Right? No… We all know the story of the Edison and the light bulb… 1,000 experiments to find the filament that would work… When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn't fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps." "Great success is built on failure, frustration, even catastrophe." I have to agree here because every practice is an experiment for me and some of those experiments are absolute failures… Gotta love it and I gotta laugh sometimes… The journey is so fucking wonderful, and it started out with such trepidation…  Remember, this was my last attempt, it was a do or die proposition… I committed because I had thought about it for 20 years, and never progressed beyond my first year. I wanted it, but I didn’t try… At all… I started probably 30 times in that span of time and quit within two weeks every time… 

Which brings me to my final point today…

Just how bad do you want it?

We all have these dreams of excelling at something… the list is incomprehensibly long… From everything from music, to  making films, art, fitness, language proficiency, and anything a human can dream of, someone wants to be an expert, if not strive to be the best… 

You can you know… all you have to do is want it… I say that because if we think about it philosophically, if you simplify it, it is as easy as wanting it… If we make it straightforward to understand, let’s say  you are on the couch and want to go to the bathroom, you get up and go to the bathroom and usually get a bonus drink or something to eat… what you don’t do is piss your pants on the couch…Simple, right?

So do yourself a favor, don’t piss yourself on the couch… Get up and get to work…

Yeah I know, you can argue that my example doesn’t quite fit… But listen, is failing to live up to your potential with almost unlimited opportunities at your disposal the same as pissing your pants on the couch with the bathroom ten feet away? Yeah…

So again, get the fuck up…

Stop saying “I wish I could…” There is no magic genie in a bottle; there is only the hard work to make it happen… So make your dream happen…

The90 Day Life Change Challenge update… Yesterday I broke my 1/2 Murph record again… 100 burpees, 150 squats, 100 push-ups and 50 pull-ups in 14 minutes and 22 seconds… That is a full 27 seconds faster than my previous record but can I be honest here? Last week has hellish… My body is starting to reject the level of brutality that I am putting it through… That makes me want to finish this all the more… After today, there are 6 days left in this cycle and I am going to finish it in pain, sprinting towards the end giving it everything I have left… Then I will rest for a few days and make a plan for round two… No stop, no quit… I demand the best from myself and nothing less will suffice… 

For me life isn’t about easing into it, cheat days and time off… It’s about going as hard as I can, as much as I can, and cheating is for those who don’t want it as bad as I do… What do I want? I want to let people see that anything they want to achieve is possible, you just have to make it happen… Nobody else is going to do it for you…

See you tomorrow… The last week of the first 90 day challenge… I’m kind of excited about it… I want to watch that last progress data sheet get thrown away… 

I would like to take a second here and thank everyone who texts me, emails, me, makes comments on the blog, and stops me in the hallway to tell me that I inspire them... You have no idea what that means to me... I have made off hand comments that impact people's lives in major ways... That is the greatest thing to get your feedback... You're awesome... This is another example of a symbiotic, give and take relationship that could make the world a much better place... 

Love you… I really mean it… Go be the best person you can be…