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What They Didn’t Tell You About Success

Every second that you watch the ocean shiver as it foams against the shore, your bank account is growing. The sound of the soft blue water rocks you to sleep at night and gently wakes you up in the morning. You arise without an alarm clock, hop in the Lambo and drive to your other mansion, just because you can.

If we plucked anyone off the street and gave them the above package, they’d surely be happy.

Right?

Except all wealthy people know something about that situation that you don’t. Having money isn’t the problem. More money will never solve money problems.

Success is a Process

According to the millionaire MJ DeMarco, we like to see success as an event. We see when someone sells their software company for $13 million and call them lucky. When a basketball player’s salary makes us green with envy we call him a bastard.

We forget the 2 years of the software developer’s life that he spent working 80 hours a week eating Ramen Noodles. We forget the hours of practice, injuries, and surgeries behind the ring on the basketball player’s finger.

What makes someone successful is the actual road itself.

If someone wants to get better at mountain biking, they don’t improve simply by reaching the end of the trail. Its the ruts, mind-numbing close calls, and the skin they left behind on a few rocks on the trail itself that turns them into a better rider. Getting to Point B doesn’t make you successful. Its going to Point B that makes you successful.

Success is a mindset. You don’t get stronger in weight-lifting by the weight being above your head. The contractions of your muscles while you are on your way there is what ignites the growth. It is the process of lifting the weights that makes you stronger.

If you want to invent a product and make millions, people are going to hear that and instantly dismiss it and call you a dumb ass. This might seem like a hindrance to your success.

This is exactly what you want. Resisting social pressure is an opportunity to harden the inner determination that is crucial to your development. If the road was easy, everyone would be doing it and everyone would be wealthy (which in turn would cause nobody to be wealthy).

The comments by other people don’t hurt your ability to become successful, they train you to be successful. See the common theme? In ignoring these thoughts and learning to use them for motivation, you learn to think for yourself and move forward regardless of doubt.

You need to focus on the process. Instead of focusing on becoming healthy, focus on the activities that increase health. Instead of “becoming healthy,” focus on “eating well, sleeping enough, and exercise.” Fall in love with the process, be ruthless with which processes you need to focus on, then do them.

Happiness

It’s not reaching the end of the trail or the big bank account that makes someone happy. It’s who they have to become in order to get to the end of the trail or have an endless amount of money.

It is about losing everything and being the person who can build back your assets in a few years.

Having great stuff never makes someone happy. But being great does.

Think about the kids when you were younger who were born filthy rich. If your experience is anything like mine, the majority of those kids are far more unhappy than the kids who had to work for what they wanted. Most of them lack a certain drive and appreciation for life.

It’s one thing to be born at the top of the mountain and know nothing but the view from the top. It’s another to be born haphazardly on a jagged rock near the side of a muddy yeast infected river at the bottom of the mountain, climb your ass to the top while everyone at the bottom insults your efforts, then soak in the view you’ve never seen while you catch your breath and wipe the sweat and blood from your forehead.

Do you realize there is a guy somewhere in Africa who owns absolutely nothing, who is dancing around a fire like a badass enjoying his life more than you?

Creating a great deal of money won’t magically make you happy. However, becoming the type of person who gives extreme amounts of value to others in order to make that flow of income happen, will.

Your Secret Weapon

“If you want to live like no one else, you have to live like no one else.” – Dave Ramsey

Whenever you have doubt creep in, when social pressure builds, remind yourself that in order to be extraordinary you have to do extraordinary things. You have to live like no one else.

When you’re eating veggies and your friends call you crazy for not getting a Big Mac from McDeath, you’re on the right track. When you fail for the sixth time, get depressed, then realize that this is yet again another opportunity to learn from, you’re on the right track.

The next time someone calls you crazy, smile. This is your chance to overcome social pressure and keep going.

It’s nice and enjoyable to ride down an easy smooth mountain bike trail, but it doesn’t change you. Those big ear-to-ear smiles are reserved for those trails where you are forced to avoid jagged rocks, slide out on impossible turns, yet still survive to the end.

Lifting an easy weight above your head gets the job done, but it isn’t until you lift that weight you didn’t know that was possible that your muscles are forced to break down and repair themselves.

You can be successful right now. You can hop on the the trail that’s going to challenge and push you. You can make the decision to choose what you want and make it happen no matter what. You can choose those processes you know lead to success and do them everyday and watch yourself slowly transform into the person you want to be.

Leverage (How Bad Do You Really Want It)

Okay, so you’re ready to focus on the processes of what you need to do to become what you want to become. Want a fail-proof way to f0cus on those processes? A technique that if you use it, you will accomplish anything?

Let’s say you want to start a website. Send a trustworthy friend a check for $1,000. Tell him that you are going to work on your website one hour a day and you will send him an email every night for 3 months with details on what you did. Tell him the day that he doesn’t receive an email from you he gets to spend every cent of it as fast as he can.

In 3 months, you will have a website.

Actually, that’s how I started this website.

Overcoming Depression Is The Same

Don’t expect to take a random antidepressant and be cured of everything.  That is not the way things work.  Not only that, but over the long term you are hindering your chances of life-long success if you do that.

Overcoming depression means learning about your body, solving it at the root causes, and really buckling down to see what the real reasons are for why you are depressed.

Have you checked out your Vitamin D levels? Have you stopped eating sugar? Are you exercising 3 times a week?