And if you really want to go to that next level,
then what you have to do, is you have
to start to think in a different way.
Successful people are extremely persistent.
They do not quit when it gets tough.
The more you study people who have been successful,
the more you see what it really takes.
(whooshing sound)
– What’s up Believe Nation, it’s Evan.
My One Word is ‘believe’, and I believe
that you have the ability to do
something special that can change the planet.
So to help you on your journey today,
we’re going to learn from YouTuber, entrepreneur,
and life coach Leo Gura and my take
on his Top Ten Rules for Success.
Rule number 10 is my personal favorite,
and I’d love to know which one you guys like the best.
(whooshing sound)
(slamming sound)
(inspirational music)
(beeping)
– Perhaps the most important thing is,
you need to find your life purpose as soon as possible.
Life purpose is,
what is going to be your field of mastery in life?
How do you want to impact the world?
What are you most passionate about?
How do you create a career out of your top passion in life?
If you can figure that out and become definite about it,
and be crystal clear about it,
then that’s going to focus all your energy into that,
and you’re going to become a master and an expert in that.
And from this will come a lot of your financial success.
From this also will come a lot of fulfillment,
and a lot of satisfaction.
Because, fulfillment comes from being good at something.
You’re not going to be fulfilled at life
by just dabbling in bunch of little stupid things,
or working a job that you’re not really excited about.
You need to position yourself as an artist in life.
What’s your art form?
You got to find what that is.
If you have some nascent passions,
some passions that are still just starting to bud,
go and,
nurture those, and just see where they take you.
If you’re interested in art, go do some art.
If you’re interested in music, go play some music.
If you’re interested in starting a business,
go try starting a business,
and just see where that takes you.
You might discover, oh, I really love this!
Or no, you know, I thought I loved it,
but I actually kind of hate it.
And those are very valuable insights for you to have.
But as you’re exploring around,
always keep your eye out for the choice.
You got to make a choice.
You got to make a commitment and a decision
as to what your life is going to be about.
What are you going to be mastering?
Next is, set big goals.
Successful people set big goals.
In fact, they set gargantuan goals.
And you have to do that, too.
There’s a tendency to say
that we want to set realistic goals.
You might say, well, I’m not going to set too ambitious
of a goal, because there’s a risk that I’m going to fail.
Well, instead what I’m going to do,
is I’m going to focus on a goal that’s realistic,
that I can attain.
The problem with that kind of thinking
is that, a lot of times, those realistic goals that we set
are undervaluing what we can actually do in our lives.
Right? You’re selling yourself short.
You don’t really know how much potential
you really have until you set a very ambitious goal.
I’m sure at one point in your life you have done that,
and you’ve actually been able to meet it or even exceed it,
and you felt the power of that.
Setting an ambitious goal, a big goal,
is a great way to super charge your motivation.
And successful people are very passionate and motivated.
That’s because they set big goals for themselves.
If you set a weak goal, a small goal,
a realistic goal, what’s going to happen,
is that you’re not going to get engaged with it.
You’re not going to get excited enough
to really go out there and take the action.
And, counter-intuitively, what might happen,
is that realist goal that you set
might actually be harder to accomplish
than the very, very ambitious goal,
because the ambitious goal has heart to it,
whereas your weak, piddly little goal, well,
who really cares if you accomplish it or not?
It’s not going to have a big impact on you.
It’s not going to have a big impact on the world.
So, have goals out there that are a big,
that are about not just you, but about other people too.
Your best strategy and chances of success in life,
chances at fulfillment, and chances
at the most people liking you, is to be yourself.
Because when you’re yourself, your authentic self,
your magnetic.
You’re attractive. People want to be near you.
Maybe not the same people that want to be
near your fake self right now, so, acknowledge that.
I’m not saying that you can maintain everything in your life
as it is and still be yourself.
You might need to make some sacrifices.
There might be some costs.
Because, chances are, right now, you’ve whored yourself out
and now you have some social debts, right?
They want to tell you to stop caring about other people
and start being authentic, well, you’re going to come up
with all sorts of reasons about why
that’s too costly for you.
You’re going to say, well, then my boss will say something bad.
My job might be in danger.
My relationship might be in danger.
Somebody else might be in danger.
Well, what’s more important to you?
Is it more important for you to be getting
those shallow things?
Or is it more important for you to be self expressive?
To really be yourself, to really be fulfilled inside,
and then to act on that, and to live your life from that,
and to create a business from that place,
to create a career from that place,
to create a nice relationship from that place?
What’s more important?
I mean, you can still keep whoring yourself
out if you want to, but in the end,
being a whore is not a good way to go through life.
So my suggestion is to bite the bullet on this one,
and be yourself despite the costs.
Our next thing is, I would say,
the hard work.
Hard work is really, really important
to be successful, and to be at the top ten percent
of the population in terms of success.
All those people worked their ass off.
You’re not going to be successful without hard work.
And the reason, mostly, is not even they have
to go out there and build a giant empire,
or you have to amass a lot of money, or work long hours.
It’s not even so much about that,
it’s that you need to develop yourself.
Because success is not so much an outer world state
as an inner world state, and that might sound
kind of hokey or New Age, but it’s very, very true.
Success is grounded within you.
You’re not going to be able to maintain
any sort of level of success if you do not have
the psychology to really follow principles,
to know how to maintain success,
to think strategically, to think long term,
to delay gratification, to resist addictions.
All of these factors come into play.
So really, for me, success is grounded in self mastery.
It’s understanding yourself and building on that.
Building disciplines, building successful habits,
which then move you towards where you want to be going.
There’s something to this idea
that there can be no problem that is not an opportunity
in your life.
And I think this is what the core of positive thinking is.
It’s understanding that every problem, every challenge
that you have, is ultimately an opportunity.
And this is not just wishful thinking.
This is not said lightly.
This is something that takes some study.
This takes some study and some contemplation to understand.
It takes wisdom to really understand this.
You have to have some life experience to start to see
the truth of this, the depth of it.
‘Cause there’s like a surface level understanding,
and then a much deeper layer of understanding.
That’s why you have to kind of go back and look
at your own history, to try to prove it to yourself.
To prove yourself that this is true.
Because right now, I tell you this,
but you’re probably saying, yes, this sounds nice.
And sure, it could probably work
for many problems in my life.
I can see that somehow I’m catastrophizing them,
exaggerating them, a lot of times they don’t come true,
but, you know, there’s just this one problem
I’ve got right now, I’ve got this one problem
that’s just pure hell.
It’s pure hell. It’s pure evil.
There’s no possible way that this problem
I’ve got right here, there’s no possible way that this
could have any opportunity in it.
There’s no opportunity here.
There’s no lesson to be learned here.
There’s nothing positive, this is just pure negative.
If I could remove it from my life, my life would be happy.
I would be better, I just know it.
Well that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you,
is that, that’s not positive thinking.
And I understand where you’re coming from.
A lot of times, I get triggered like that too.
And I was especially like that a lot in the past.
And I’m still a bit like that today.
But you’ve got to understand that this is the mode
of thinking that you’ve been coming from
for most of your life, and that mode of thinking
has gotten you to where you are right now in your life.
So that’s gotten you to where you are,
but, that’s only gotten you to where you are.
And I’m willing to bet that you can do better
than where you are right now.
And if you really want to go to that next level,
then what you have to do, is you have to start to think
in a different way.
Sometimes you have to start thinking
in a radically different way.
A way that seems uncomfortable.
A way that seems wishful thinking at first.
A way that seems unrealistic, that seems idealistic,
that seems fantastical.
Yet,
there’s something to this idea.
That nothing can happen to you that is not positive.
I guarantee you that, if you really look at it,
if I really sat down with you to really look
at that challenge that you have right now
that’s totally unsolvable, that’s ruining your life,
if we looked at it, we can pick out,
I guarantee we can pick out something positive.
Something that you can learn from it.
Of course this doesn’t mean that all of a sudden
your problems will be fixed.
It doesn’t mean that your problem is not a real problem.
It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t work to fix your problem.
It doesn’t mean that you don’t feel the pains
of your problem.
I’m not denying you any of that.
But I am saying that, once you adopt this mindset,
and you become a positive thinker,
then you’re going to be able to Akido a lot of your problems.
If you don’t like yourself, then,
ask yourself the following question.
Do you really not like yourself?
Or do you not like an aspect of yourself?
Big difference, right?
Is it all of you that you don’t like, or just an aspect?
I bet it’s just an aspect.
So, if that’s the case, first of all,
realize how much you’re focusing on it.
Right?
And I want you take that camera that you have right now,
and you’re totally zoomed in on that one imperfection
that you had, you’re totally zoomed in on it,
I want you to zoom out and see yourself
and your whole life, and the whole history that you’ve had
of your life, and where you’re going.
See all of that, and put that imperfection into context.
Right?
It’s still there, I’m not denying it might not be there.
Maybe you have some crooked teeth, or you have a big nose,
or you have a fat ass, or whatever.
Or maybe you have some character flaws in you.
Not physical problems, but character flaws,
and you don’t like yourself for those reasons.
Okay, let’s admit that that’s there.
Let’s say that it’s true, it’s there.
Well, that’s one aspect of a much bigger picture.
So, first of all, realize that that’s the case.
And if that is the case, then also realize this point.
You have a choice of what you focus on.
You’ve got this laser beam in your mind,
which is your focus, right, your awareness.
And this laser beam, it’s consciously guided by you.
Not all the time, but you can guide it.
And so, if you’re always hating on yourself,
then what you’re doing is you’re taking your imperfections
and you’re always shining a magnifying glass over it.
So that’s what’s happening.
You’re shining this magnifying glass on your imperfections.
Sometimes, all you do is you just stare at them all day.
Right?
And that’s why you feel so bad about yourself sometimes,
because you stare at those imperfections ceaselessly.
Well, if you’ve got an imperfection,
you only got two choices.
Either you’re going to fix it, you can change it,
or you can’t.
Now, go out there and try to change it if you can.
I mean, that’s what I’m all about.
I’m giving you a lot of advice and stuff in all my videos
about how to put your life into place,
and actually make it really good.
Objectively good.
But if you can’t change it,
maybe like your physical appearance,
you feel like you can’t change
or you don’t really want to go that far,
then that’s fine.
You can learn to accept it, in the sense
that you’re going to shift your focus away.
You’re going to kind of accept it, and not look at it anymore.
Stop looking at it, because it’s the constant looking
at it and the re-looking and the re-looking
and the re-looking that is really killing you.
You’re going to start to focus on other areas of your life
that are great, and what you’re going to realize,
when you make that shift, is you’re going to realize that,
well, that little imperfection,
it’s not that important anymore.
And then maybe a couple years down the road
you will actually laugh.
You will laugh, because you’ll laugh and say,
how could I have possibly been so concerned about that?
It’s so insignificant now because I’ve got all this other
awesome stuff flourishing in my life.
Next point: do not quit.
Successful people are extremely persistent.
We do not quit when it gets tough.
And it will get tough.
I don’t care how passionate you are about what you’re doing.
I don’t care how much you love it,
or you love it or you don’t.
There’s going to be ups and downs in life,
and whatever you’re pursuing, whatever kind of big goal
you set for yourself, especially if you set those big goals,
they’re going to be challenging.
They’re going to require you to grow.
They’re going to require you to step
outside your comfort zone, and that means emotional labor
will be involved.
That’s okay, but, to make sure that you get through that,
and to get to your ultimate objective of success,
you’re going to have to have persistent,
and you can’t quit when the going gets tough.
So, maybe you’re working on a project
and something’s not working out the way you want.
Something slips, something fails,
and you’re really tempted to quit and throw in the towel.
Or maybe there’s a relationship,
and you’re trying to work it out,
but it’s not working, and you’re tempted to drop it.
You’re tempted to quit there.
Whatever part of your life you really want to quit,
or drop right now, if you’re in that kind of point,
you got to push through it
if it’s really aligned with your values
and aligned with your purpose.
If it’s not aligned, you can drop it.
In fact, you should.
But otherwise, you have to be very, very persistent.
If you read biographies of the most successful people
throughout human history, business leaders,
social leaders, politicians, celebrities, actors,
you know that just the underlying theme
of all those biographies and all the histories
is that they were very, very persistent.
They were okay with failure.
In fact, most of these people, they were so successful
because they failed so much, that they just couldn’t,
their success was inevitable, because after you fail
thousands of times, you start to learn your lessons,
and you start to get good,
and the human brain is really, really, really stubborn,
and it doesn’t tend to learn from success
as much as it does from failure.
So, when you’re failing a lot, don’t get discouraged.
Push on. Persevere.
Go through your hardest moments,
because those hardest moments that you go through,
that’s when you learn your biggest lessons,
and those are what grow you to be able to handle
bigger and bigger challenges.
To accomplish more and more, and get the kind of success
that you want.
And these are also, coincidentally,
the proudest moments of your life.
The moments of your life that you will never, ever regret.
So never quit when you’re doing something
that’s important to you.
Being able to focus is critical to getting the results
that you want.
Focus is all about eliminating distractions.
So, what are the distractions right now
that are keeping you from being focused?
Go ahead and sit down, pause this video,
and jot down five things.
What are five things that are keeping you distracted
in whatever area of life you want more focus in.
So, are you not focused at work?
What is distracting you?
Is it hunger?
Because you’re not eating in the morning?
Is it your boss who comes in,
and disturbs you every 15 minutes?
Is it emails?
Is it the Twitter feed that’s pinging you?
Is it your cellphone that’s vibrating from texts
that you’re getting hit up with?
What is distracting you?
What about at school, what’s distracting you there?
What about your relationship, what’s distracting you there?
Sit down and identify those factors.
‘Cause once you’ve got those identified,
I think what you’ll find is actually that,
one of the biggest factors that you’ll find,
is multi-tasking.
You trying to do multiple things at one time.
And that, of course, is the antithesis of focus.
When you’re doing multiple things,
you’re not focused by definition.
You’re splitting your focus, and when you split your focus,
it’s like, you know what it’s like,
imagine if we had the sun.
It was a bright sunny day, and I gave you a magnifying glass
and I said, here, you can take this magnifying glass,
and if you hold it up at the right angle
and you hold it steady,
then you can burn that ant right there on the ground.
Or you can set that leaf on fire.
And, first thought, you’d say, wow, if you didn’t know that,
you’d say, wow, that’s amazing, I can’t believe that’s true.
Let me try it.
Then you take that magnifying glass and you’d run over,
and you try to burn an ant or burn a piece of leaf.
But of course, if you didn’t listen to the fact
that I told you, that you have to keep it steady,
and you have to focus the rays,
then what’s going to happen, is,
you’re going to just kind of move it around, move it around,
move it around, and you’re going to come back to me,
and you’re going to say, what the hell?
Nothing worked. You’re lying to me.
This doesn’t work.
It’s not possible to take the sun’s rays
and burn anything with them.
They’re too weak.
And of course, the problem is that you didn’t
focus the rays first.
That’s exactly what it’s like in your life.
If you’re trying to get some success
in your career, in your business,
at school, what you need to do,
is you need to put your full attention on it.
You need to bring all those rays to a point.
You need to bring your thoughts to a point.
Your mind has to be focused on whatever it is
that you’re doing.
Of all the things that I regret the most,
is I regret that I didn’t start meditating
when I was six or seven years old.
If I started that habit, man,
I would be at such a different place in my life right now.
I’d be so much happier. So much more fulfilled.
Meditation is the key to mastering happiness.
And happiness is different than success.
You could read all the self help books in the world
and become very successful, but you still will not be
fulfilled and happy.
And that’s because you haven’t practiced meditation.
So, start tomorrow.
20 minutes a day at the very least.
Make that commitment for the rest of your life.
You’re going to meditate for 20 minutes every day
for the rest of your life, no matter what.
No sick days, no days off, you’re never going to miss a day.
Starting tomorrow, that’s your mission.
And then, after a year or two,
I recommend that you bump that up to one hour per day,
if you really want to supercharge
your fulfillment levels in life
And then the last point, and this is one of my favorites,
and this is one that people really miss out on,
is study success.
Successful people study success.
Success is not what we naively think,
just something that happens naturally to some people,
and doesn’t happen to other people.
Success is a very deliberate, conscious endeavor
that you undertake.
Success is built over months and years,
and it’s done consciously.
And the more you understand the principles of success,
the concepts of success,
the more you study people who have been successful,
the more you see what it really takes.
And that process of success, those principles,
are not always what they seem.
And to me, this is something that I’ve really committed
my life to, is studying these principles.
I really love it. It’s exciting for me.
I really encourage you to get involved with that.
So that means, maybe, attending some seminars.
Reading some books, watching these videos,
learning about it, maybe joining a group of friends
that are successful, joining a mastermind group.
Be around successful people,
learn how the success process works,
and learn the psychology of success.
Not the externals of success, but the psychology.
That’s what we’re talking about.
(whooshing sound)
– Thank you guys so much for watching.
I made this video because 7oo13ad asked me to.
If there’s someone you’d like to vote on
for the next top ten, check out the link in the description,
and go and have your say.
Finally, wanted to give a quick shout out to Steph Reveron.
Thank you so much, Steph, for picking up a copy of my book,
‘Your One Word’, and for all the support,
doing the unboxing video, all the posts you’ve been putting
on social media.
I really appreciate the support,
and I’m so glad you enjoyed the book.
– Thank you Evan!
And let’s vlog my One Word.
– So thank you guys again for watching.
I believe in you.
I hope you continue to believe in yourself
and whatever Your One Word is.
Much love. I’ll see you soon.
(whooshing sound)
(slamming sound)
– So, confidence.
Let’s understand why you’re not confident.
So, where exactly are you feeling un-confident?
On a date? In your work situation?
Where are you feeling un-confident there?
How exactly is that being manifested?
When you’re sitting at a meeting, in a group meeting,
and people are standing up and voicing their opinions,
and you’re sitting there and you’re being quiet and meek.
Make a note of that, if that’s you.
Or, maybe, it’s when you see an opportunity
in your job, maybe to step up, and put yourself in line
for a promotion position, and your mind tells you,
no, no, no, no, don’t do that.
Stay safe, stay in your current place.
And maybe you’re lacking confidence in that way.
Or maybe you’re lacking confidence in voicing your thoughts,
and you can’t get those out, or you find that you’re having
to hold back your thoughts.
So make a list of all these different ways
that you are not being confident.
Then what I want you to do, is I want you
to analyze each one of those situations that you’re facing
and say, what is an alternative set of actions
that you could be taking?
So, what would a confident person be doing?
So, let’s say, in that date situation,
what would the most confident person,
who’s extremely confident with the opposite sex,
what would he or she do?
How would he or she think?
And jot down some specific points.
How would he talk about his stories?
How would she be thinking about the situation?
How would he or she be carrying themselves,
what would the body language be like,
what would the thought process be?
Same thing with the situation at work or anywhere else.
Make a list of alternative actions that you could be taking
that would feel confident to you if you took them.
So, that is going to be your game plan.
Once you identify the situations,
and you identify the alternative actions,
you kind of know what you need to do.
Basically, what you need to do,
is you need to start changing your behaviors,
and you need to start now living in,
and practicing, those alternative actions.
You have to have a deep understanding of who you really are
in life to have long term sustainable success,
and both happiness and then fulfillment, right?
And for me, success is shallow if it doesn’t come
with the happiness and fulfillment component.
So for me, I want to get all of it.
Both the external success and then the fulfillment,
the lasting fulfillment and happiness that you can get
with that.
I don’t want just shallow external success.
And to do that, you need to really understand
and discover who you are.
And you might be thinking, well, I know who I am.
No. You don’t.
Most people out there, I’d say 99% of people
do not really know who they are,
because they have not gone on the journey that it takes
to discover that.
And what I’m really talking about here,
this is not some abstract notion,
is you’re going to discover what your top ten values are.
You need to discover what your top five feelings
are in life.
You need to discover what it is that you really want
out of life, what is meaningful to you.
And you’ve got to also discover what you don’t want.
And you might say, well, I know what I don’t want.
I know the things I don’t like.
Well, there might not be as much clarity there
as you think there is.
So this is all about the matter
of clarity and articulation.
It’s one thing to know vaguely.
It’s a totally different thing to actually articulate it.
Write it down, and note very, very consciously.
It’s going to clear a lot of things up for you,
and if you sit down and do this process,
you’re going to quickly realize that you don’t know as much
about yourself as you think you do.
And you probably have had moments in your life
that have been like epiphanies,
where you had deep self-discovery,
whether it was when you were traveling, maybe it was
after a break up in a relationship.
Maybe it was when you were struggling at work.
You discovered things about yourself,
and by going through these challenging experiences,
we really discover what it is that we want out of life.
And that’s the foundation.
Successful people know what they want.
I want you to read one self-help book every single month.
It’s not a lot, just one per month,
that’s not a lot, you can handle that.
Most self-help books are pretty short.
So, all you need to do is just have a list,
and in fact I have a list of some of my favorite,
most powerful self-help books on my website,
you can go check that out at Actualized.org.
But this is a huge habit. Here’s why.
Because self-help books have basically distilled
all the principles of success and happiness
that human beings have discovered in the last,
2,000 years.
And especially the last hundred years,
there’s been so much research done
on how to be successful in business,
how to be successful in relationships,
how to be successful with your happiness levels,
how to meditate properly, the scientific benefits
of meditation, and so on and so forth.
And self-help books are not just abstract,
very pedantic types of books that you might read in college.
These are very practical.
These are written to get you results.
These self-books have exercises in them.
They have techniques.
Read those, start practicing those.
If you just read one book per month,
for the next, let’s say eight years,
that would be close to a hundred books.
That would give you the entire theoretical foundation
that you need to master life.
(whooshing sound)
”
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