One thing you notice about mentally strong folks is they carry a booklet of sayings, phrases, and facts with them as a way to make sense of life. Mantras inscribed in their mind as cheat codes to take them to the next level.
Aubrey Marcus, “Go hero Go!”
Tai Lopez, “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.”
Tom Bilyeu, “Don’t ask what is the least I can do, ask what is the most I can endure.”
Seth Godin, “Always be shipping.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger, “Break the rules.”
Elliott Hulse, “I don’t finish when I am tired, I finish when I am done.”
Dave Goggins, “When your mind is telling you you’re done, you’re really only 40% done.
Justin Timberlake, “And we’re all going to hell, and we are all going to have the best stories to tell.”
Carlos Castaneda, “The warrior sees only challenges, the normal person sees either a blessing or a curse.
Greg Plitt, “Normality is what weak people call living. I call it death.”
Tai Lopez changed the direction of my life. He got me hooked on books, meditation and education all with his “Here in my garage” ad.
I was a sophomore in college. I was dumb, scared, lonely and I needed answers. Tai Lopez provided me with a strategy that I could use to live my life.
I bought his program The 67 Steps and it helped break down how I saw the world, provided me with the mindset on which the top performers run (MJ, Picasso, Steve Jobs) and showed me the habits to adopt that all happy people do every day (take care of their mind, body, and relationships.)
I would wake up at 4:30 in the morning to go to the gym, come back to my dorm and eat, meditate for 30 minutes and then watch a lesson from his 67 steps.
I was motivated to change and these lessons pumped me up. Every lesson would shock me with some statistic like most people live lives of quiet desperation, or that regret comes from “not” doing the things we want instead of doing it and failing.
Every lesson I felt as if my brain was changing, like the sound of ice cracking from being exposed to heat.
I look at my college days and I see an explosion of growth. I look back at that time with this tearful gratefulness. Because I see this lost soul but help learns to swim towards something even though he is still covered in darkness.
The 67 Steps helped me lose this childish naiveness of being dependent and helpless and provided me an education to fend for myself.
Tai Lopez taught me that happiness is growing and learning every day. If we stop we become irrelevant.
Better to live on the lessons of others that came before us, than learn these lessons the hard way.
I am always asking myself questions. Am I good looking, am I happy, do other people like me. These questions were the loudest in High School and dictated how I felt.
I was asking myself all of these questions about life, but I was giving myself the wrong answers. One question that I was botching up was “How much are you willing to give.” My answer in High School was “what’s the least I can do.”
That answer manifested itself in my soccer training, in my day job, and in the weight room. I thought the final goal was being comfortable and pain-free. I thought if I could do something with the least effort to finish something, the faster I could reach the comfort I wanted.
I suffered from that answer because it made me weak. It made me want to quit. I was unhappy because my mind, body, soul doesn’t like comfort. I get bored like a caged up parrot pulling off its own feathers because it has no where to put it boundless energy.
The answer that finally made me change course and excited to live was “What’s the most that I can give.” I stole that answer from Quest founder Tom Bilyeu’s Youtube videos.
I’m the happiest when I am in pain. When I am hungry for answers. I am reading, pushing myself at the gym, constantly meditating. When I am comfortable my day just goes by, it’s dull, I have no dragons to train for or hunt down.
I’m happy in pain because I am required to be strong. And to be strong is what I always want to be.
My strength is determined by the strength of my answers to the questions I ask myself. That is why I steal from strong people.
There is the saying “How you do anything is how you do everything.” Greg Plitt uses this phrase and puts it like this, “If you finish washing your car and you see that you missed a spot, you have to take out the soap and the water and finish it.” If you don’t have the intensity to finish something easy, what is going to give you the strength to persevere when it gets hard.
How we do things everyday wires us to persevere through things and get the job done, or get bored, scared, and run away. Eric Thomas says “A true hunter is wired differently.” A lion is wired to hunt and a gazelle wired to run. The intensity by how we do things may not reveal itself while we are folding clothes, but it is revealed in duress.
A Clark Kent character will never be able to turn into Superman because he practices timidity and spinelessness. I used to get mad at myself when I first started my restaurant job because I would lose my cool when I got overwhelmed with guests. I would become introverted and fumble with my words, be short with others and look dumb for not knowing what to do next. This would happen because before work I would be closed off inside my head, listening to depressing music and scared to step out of my room.
What I did was close myself off and cause my instinct to become one of hiding. Now I don’t play music, I smile when things get hectic and laugh when a wave of panic is heading over me and my coworkers. Because I know I can’t become Superman at night if I play Clark Kent in the daytime, I always have to keep my smile intact and my breathe deep. I have to practice my intensity at the gym when washing the dishes or writing blogs because I don’t want my intensity to be one of stress and laziness.
I was exploring Jocko Willink’s podcast and he said that his happiest times where in times of war. When there are tasks to complete, people to beat and things to get better at.
Some people need the stress to make their dopamine rise. I’m like that. Stressful situations make me feel accomplished. It shows that I’m doing things. Without stress I get bored and I fall into a rut, even a little depressed. The stress wakes me up. If something scares me it means that there is something to overcome. I have to keep getting stronger, become more disciplined because the stress reveals your weakness. And like a stain on a nice shirt, I move to make my weaknesses stronger.
I go after stress like a dog after rabbits. When I see that I am weak in one area I get happy because I found something where I can train and get stronger. Right now that stress is revealing that I need to work on my assertiveness and my aggression. For men, knowing how to get the job done gets respect. Assertiveness gets respect. And yes people will talk behind you, but they are behind you. You lead the pack because you know how to lead them to victory. You are strong to carry the criticism others have about you.
But this relationship with stress took me some time to get to. I used to be overwhelmed by it. Because I thought stress meant that I was a coward, insufficient and weak. Stress would stifle me into inaction instead of moving forward. I associated stress with humiliation and freezing up.
Just like there are people who have everything and still feel like they don’t have enough, our perception with stress can turn negative by how we see it.
John Wooden says, “I’m positive doers make mistakes. If you don’t make mistakes you are not doing anything.” Director Ron Howard says if you are a director you are going to look stupid sometimes. For happy people stress is getting stronger every day. If there is no stress, then I am dead, a coward for not trusting in myself to succeed.
The pain of stress is the weak version of me dying. The pain of now will make me stronger for tomorrow.
Tom Brady is constantly practicing the fundamentals, doing every day what we think should come easy to him. Practicing catching with the other players and working on player positioning. Even Michael Jordan, the best of the best at basketball spent the first parts of practice doing bounce passes with the other players. Those who practice greatness know that there is still so much to know, there is no ceiling on their skill level and it begins with relearning the basics every practice and every game.
For myself and for many others, we fall into the trap that the basics of a game, a hobby, or a job should be easy. We think that when it is easy there is not that much more to understand and should be done with perfection each time. This leads to a sinister way of thinking that our skills are finite, a mindset that says “I should know how to do this already.”
Photo from Starz News. I got a little famous.
When this phrase pops up in my head it tells me that I need to be perfect and do with no effort simple things I have done a thousand times. In my case as a soccer goalie, this phrase would pop up when I was having difficulty positioning myself in the goalie box to make a stop, or when a corner kick happened and I needed to decide if I should go out for the ball or stay on my line.
The phrase is cunning because it boosts your ego up. It makes you rationalize that because you don’t need to look at the small things that you must be really good. But what happens when you mess up at the things you see as simple? You begin to question if you are good or not.
“If I am not good at the little things then I must be dumb, worthless, incapable of growth, “I should know how to do this already, why did I mess up then.”
Even the greats mess up. MJ and Tom Brady have thrown bad passes but their mentality does not tell them, “Hey you messed up on the easiest thing you must suck then.” No, their mentality tells them I just messed up, good there is something new I can learn from this mistake.
Your mentality should not keep you on the floor, a strong mentality should bounce you back up to play with a looseness and freeness so you are not scared to mess up again. Because there is no cap on your growth, if I mess up it means there are new things I can learn to overcome.
We fall into these hindering mindsets because we think our ego is trying to help, but our vulnerabilities come to light when we read and examine the lives and mentalities of other great humans. The article I was reading was about how goalies are evolving to be at a professional level. In the article it went in to explore that even the goalies at the very top are always learning new ways to position themselves when an opponent is attacking with the ball, practicing their footwork to go out and retrieve the ball, and even just passing the ball with other players. Where one player sees things as simple and easy, another player sees them as fundamentals to keep practicing and improving.
Someone with a great mentality does not lock himself up with thinking that things should be easy and perfect. But he makes it a habit at seeing everything with the possibility of learning new things. It’s easy to see the simple things such as a job or a competitive sport as not meaning that much, but it’s only when we treat the small things with curiosity and an eagerness to keep learning that we can tackle the big things and be mentally ready for the pressure they will bring on us.
