The 3 Factors of Greatness That Everyone Can Master
Everybody in this life has a unique talent, a special combination of features and characteristics that all mesh to make you the miracle that is you. Some people choose to push away and ignore their talents, rejecting opportunities to realize their dreams and cultivate their talents because of some deeply ingrained fear inside of us that we all have to face eventually. Yet everyone has a unique gift and vast wells of untapped potential inside them. What separates the greats, the heroes, the legends of our times who have attained their dreams from common people who may have just as much talent as these pioneers of our planet? It has to do with a few important abilities that must be mastered before we can explore the depths of our power and live out our dreams. The 3 Factors of Greatness That Everyone Can Master Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. -- Napoleon Hill 1. Self-awareness Time and time again, visionaries and business executives, actors and artists alike have constantly reinforced that self-awareness is one of the most critical aspects to master on the road to fully realizing your talent. What is self-awareness? It’s a commonly used buzzword that is tossed around at business conferences and self-help seminars, yet so few truly grasp the enormous capabilities that self-awareness can unlock. Self-awareness is the ability to understand who you truly are and what your strengths and weaknesses are, comprehending and controlling your emotions by studying why they occur, and constantly learning from your mistakes and thoughts to advance yourself. It's the most important part of emotional intelligence. READ: Know Thyself: Why Self-Awareness Is the Starting Point for Your Goals Being self-aware is like a running on a never-ending improvement treadmill. But in this case, the treadmill is actually fun after you realize that you’re building on being a better person each day. You’re investing in yourself and compounding on your learning again and again and advancing forward constantly. The perfect case study is actors or musicians. Successful actors and musicians are often viciously, unapologetically self-aware. It’s the only way they could rise to the top in a massively overcrowded field -- by staying true to their distinctive skill set and understanding all of the features that make them unique. Why do you think so many actors seem insane? They’ve harnessed every characteristic that makes them special and doubled down on it day after day. They’re larger than life, and I think most of us admire the authentic nature of their personalities. 2. Hard work Hard work is vital. There are truly no shortcuts to getting to the place you want to be. If you take a shortcut, you miss out on the lessons and sacrifices that are necessary to forge you into what you want to become. It’s going to be hard. People are often scared of committing to something because they think it will be too much work, or that it will be wasted time if they end up short of where they want to be. But there’s a huge secret that anyone who has achieved their dream will tell you: it’s all a mind game. It’s actually exhilarating to dig into the process of growth and learning while constructing the skill set that will take you where you’re meant to go. You’ll learn exponentially more about yourself through struggles, challenges, and roadblocks than if you stayed exactly where you are. All this time you’ll be watering your talent garden and learning new things about yourself that you never would have if you didn’t start down the path. READ: How Moments of Adversity Are Your Greatest Opportunities If you pursue something you want wholeheartedly, the lessons and knowledge you gain on your journey about yourself and your place in the world will pay you back enormously in every area of your life. The Universe will move out of your way and guide you along. Maybe you’ll find out that you want something different than what you first thought. But none of this can happen if you don’t take the first step down that path. Keep walking and you’ll experience the excitement and momentum of working extraordinarily hard on your talents and dreams. Hard work becomes intensely gratifying. 3. Persistence You’ve read all of the classic examples before. Michael Jordan getting cut from his high school basketball team. Steve Jobs being fired from his own company. J.K. Rowling being turned down by countless publishers. But it’s not just this type of persistence of character that is essential to making the most of your life. It’s the persistence to keep learning and expanding your mind. It’s the persistence to be self-aware and grow a little bit each and every day. You must innovate and learn all the time. You have the miracle of your life, and the endless opportunities that it provides. Combining the persistence to deal with rejection from other people with the tenacity to continue learning and working hard forms you into an unstoppable engine of self-improvement. READ: 3 Secrets to Persevering (When All You Want to Do Is Give Up) Keep persisting and growing a little bit every day and see what you turn into in a month. A year. Five years. You’ll be shocked. I promise. Find out what makes you special, what you’re truly talented at. Incorporate these traits into your life immediately and work at them. Start to notice the beautiful changes and the positivity that comes with them. Enjoy every moment of the process. You deserve the life you envision. You’re a miracle. Discover yourself. Work hard. Be persistent. Your dreams won’t be dreams for long if you stay the course. Go out there and change everything.
Why Having Less Leads to a Better Life
Everybody on Earth wants to be happier. We wake up every day and go out into the world striving to maintain a consistent level of happiness, or hopefully, to improve on the happiness we've already achieved in our lives. Yet happiness used to be about having rich relationships, giving back to others, and investing in yourself to ensure you’re always improving as a person. Somewhere along the way, our culture redefined happiness as having the nicest and newest things and spending your money on objects to impress others without any real gain to yourself. We’ve handed our happiness over to the possessions we have and the possessions we want to have. Because at the end of the day, it's always about having more. Why Having Less Leads to a Better Life When I let go of what I have, I receive what I need. – Lao Tzu Your time is the most valuable and finite thing you have on this earth. Think about this. When you go to work, you’re exchanging your precious time for the money you make. Then you go and buy something material with the time you spent. If your only goal is to keep buying the newest and greatest thing, your life will end up being an endless cycle of spending your time on objects. But you can’t get time back. Is that a fulfilling way to spend the one life you were given? Our possessions that possess us Current credit card debt in America alone sits at $750 billion. If our first impulse was to save instead of buy, think about how much better off we could be. Instead of buying, why don't we save? Why don't we aim to save and invest so that eventually we can be financially free and able to spend our time however we choose? Better yet, let us try to be simply grateful for what we already have. In no other point in human history have we had so much, and yet been so unhappy. If you wake up every day grateful for all that you do have, your desire for new things will diminish. Waking up to happiness I believe that we’re at a turning point in our history. New research is emerging that shows how being more materialistic correlates with lower emotional well-being. The millennial generation that increasingly makes up the world seems to understand that experiences, friendships, and memories are the cornerstone of a truly rewarding and extraordinary life. You’re fully equipped with everything you need for maximum happiness right now. Try it out for yourself. Wake up grateful for all that you have, and resist the urge to buy useless things that you know you don’t need. Focus more on yourself and others, and not the things they have. Free yourself from your possessions and you’ll experience life through a different lens. Free yourself from the burden of belongings that aren’t important to who we really are. Go out there and live.
How Moments of Adversity Are Your Greatest Opportunities
What if I told you that your most challenging moments in life were actually your greatest opportunities to learn and grow as a person? And what if I said that these hard times steeped in pain and adversity in fact held the greatest potential to transform your life for the better, and to bring you closer to your dreams and ambitions? We all face both positive and negative experiences in our lives in diverse ways. We have no problem cherishing the positive moments that have directly brought us happiness or success. But what about the moments when we're struggling? These moments of adversity can either catapult us to new heights or beat us down continually, depending strictly on how we choose to interpret them and respond. How Moments of Adversity Are Your Greatest Opportunities I never lose. I either win or learn. - Nelson Mandela I view life as a continuous celebration of growth, and I intend this as a message to help us open our eyes and become aware of why things happen to us. It's essential that we learn to convert hard times into reflective moments, so we can find the lessons in every moment of adversity. When negative moments occur, the feelings of pain, sadness or anger can contaminate the way we feel about everything in our lives. These emotions are perfectly natural and human, and it's both unavoidable and necessary that we all experience unhappy moments in our lives. But that doesn’t mean we have to linger on our sadness, and even less that we shouldn't learn from the inevitable adversity. We should be grateful for these “dreadful” moments, because they provide us with clarity. Think about it. Our lives are journeys, and every single day we have the opportunity to learn and improve ourselves on the road to achieving our goals. That’s the power within each and every one of us. But if we allow those hard times to alter our course, we will never reach our full potential. The following three steps can help you develop the constructive mindset to help you confront moments of adversity with a more positive outlook. Analyze The first step is to take a look back to see what caused the negative experience, and to analyze what occurred at that moment to make you feel how you did. Keep asking why, and be realistic with yourself. Think about all of the various factors at play: How were you feeling? What could or couldn't you control in that situation? You don't want to over-analyze every little misfortune in life that happens to you, but you should analyze and learn from those negative experiences that affect your mindset in a deeper way. If you can harness the power of self-awareness and self-analysis, you’re well on your way to conquering crummy circumstances and converting them to constructive life lessons. A & A: Acknowledge and alter your attitude and thoughts Acknowledge those negative emotions that you harbored in that moment. Sure, maybe a situation didn’t go as planned, you didn’t get that promotion you’ve been waiting for, a girlfriend/boyfriend dumped you, etc. But do not dwell. After analyzing what led up to that specific occurrence, gain strength and encouragement in the fact that you have learned something from it. Be energized from it. You’re smarter, more experienced, and wiser as a result of what happened. Life goes on, always. Keep thinking about the fact that you’ve emerged better as a result of having traversed the hard times, identified the opportunity for growth, and come out the other side. You’ve learned something about yourself that you wouldn’t have known otherwise, and you'll be more resilient the next time adversity comes knocking. Our attitude and mindset define how our lives unfold, whether we realize it or not. It shapes how others interact with us, the energy we give off, and most importantly how we see and respond to events and experiences in our lives. I promise that with time and attention, developing a positive mindset focused on continuous learning and growth will pay dividends. The only person that can enhance your mindset is you, but once you do, you will be an unstoppable force. Within every defeat you will find the opportunity for a greater victory down the line, and nobody will be able to shake you from your upward path. Reinforce To gain real lasting mental strength, we must continue to reinforce what we’ve learned. I see so many people that make great gains, only to let setbacks drag them backward and wipe out everything they’ve accomplished. Constantly reinforce what you’ve learned and how far your mind has come, and continue improving and growing every day. You’ll soon fall in love with the process of becoming the best version of yourself.
How Can You Push Yourself to the Next Level?
How many of us are at a plateau in our lives? A point in which we’re comfortable, but know there’s a better version of us waiting right around the corner? I know many people reading this have those fleeting thoughts or feelings about when they know they should take action or work on areas that will improve them tremendously as a person. The hardest part is doing it. How Can You Push Yourself to the Next Level? Getting past plateaus in our lives isn’t always about making those massive life changes like a job change, relocation, or changing your relationship status. Many people are happy with all of these aspects of their lives yet still, know they need to improve personally. I’m writing about pushing your character to the next level. Only you know those weak spots and the actions you need to take to propel yourself forward. It may be being more sympathetic to people, it may be giving to others, it could be voicing your opinion in front of a crowd. Deep down each one of us knows our weaknesses and aspects of our life where we can improve. The first step is being honest with yourself. It’s extremely easy to keep covering over our flaws instead of changing, to keep rationalizing instead of taking action. But take a second and think about where that’ll get you. “If you always do what you've always done, you will always get what you've always got.” Once you’re aware of what you need to work on, start working right away. It takes conscious, sustained effort to stay focused on those areas of weakness. Write down your goals and constantly keep refreshing them in your mind to stay on track. As soon as you realize you’ve tackled those weaknesses, move onto other areas where you can improve. You’ll start to realize that working on yourself and improving every day becomes addicting. Self-improvement becomes a part of you and the whole process will energize you like nothing else can. You’re becoming a better version of yourself each day. How could you not want that? Other people will start to notice something different about you, an aura of constant positivity and momentum. Think about negative, pessimistic people for a moment. Do you think staying stagnant and not improving makes them happy people? Do others consider them leaders? Most importantly, what character traits and ideas are you picking up from spending time with pessimistic people? You’ll notice that the most energized and positive people are always the ones that are the happiest, and are almost always leading the way for others. Study the most successful people of our time. It doesn’t matter if your definition of success is in the business world, the spiritual world, or anywhere in between. The highest achievers are ALWAYS improving. It’s never too late to start the process of self-improvement. No matter what your age is, no matter what your circumstances are, we all have the chance to be better. Every day on this earth is a gift, and the greatest gift we can give ourselves is constantly living up to who we can really be as people. So start today. Focus, work hard, and enjoy the process of becoming the greatest you can possibly be. Hint: You can always be greater. Live to your full potential.