James Stockdale is a naval aviator who won the Medal of Honor for his bravery during the Vietnam War. In 1965 his plane was shot down and as he ejected from his plane, he only had a few minutes to prepare himself for what would become some of the most challenging years of his life as a Prisoner Of War. 

But James Stockdale wasn’t your average man, he was a practicing Stoic. As he descended to land he recognized that he was entering the world of Epictetus, a major Stoic figure who was a slave and physically disabled that coined many of the wise truths we know Stoicism to be today.

This means that Stockdale knew that he would be captured, tortured, and treated in the most terrible ways humans could ever treat each other. But he also knew all of that was out of his control, and he committed that his captors would never be able to take his inner resilience and freedom.

In order to survive these conditions, Stockdale had to embrace an unexpected paradox. On one hand, he needed to have undying belief that in the end, things would be okay. He needed to maintain hope that he would return to his family and the life he wanted, no matter the odds. 

But on the other hand, he had to be very practical. He knew that being a Prisoner of War would be challenging, and that he’d have to endure years of horrific treatment. He had to accept his current conditions and not deny them because that would do more harm than good.

It’s this unique combination of overly optimistic hope, paired with a practical and painful embrace of reality, that got him through 7 years of captivity. He never broke, defected, or complied with his captors demands to be used for political propaganda. He lived in the virtuous world of Epictetus.

I share this story because while the stakes in our lives aren’t so high, the same principles come out. Maybe you have some things in life that you realize are unlikely to happen. It’s by fully believing it will happen, and accepting the time, work, and sacrifice that comes with making it happen, that you’ll actually be able to achieve it. 

Like James Stockdale, we each have that best version of ourselves living inside of us. We just need to summon the courage to bring them out!

Something I hear a lot from people who are looking to make improvements to their life is “the time isn’t right”. They want to lose that extra weight and get serious about their health, but they’re going to wait until after the Holidays. They want to go on that dream trip but they need to wait for things at work to settle down before they can. 

I know for me, I was waiting for the right moment to write my book. In my mind the stars needed to align where I had extra time to write it, I was in a season of getting a lot of exposure, and felt confident that I had a complete message that was ready to be shared. And for many years it was an idea that kept getting pushed off.

The reality is, the time is never right. If it’s not ‘this’ reason today it’ll be ‘that’ reason tomorrow. Waiting for the time to be right is waiting for a day that will never come. And if you’re serious about making the most out of life, that’s unacceptable.

Do you know what makes the timing right? Choosing for it to be so. Making a commitment that you’re going to do something big and new is like shaking a snow globe. Everything gets displaced but it all settles back down in some orderly way. The idea is that it settles in a way that incorporates the new thing you want to prioritize. 

That’s what happened for me - I gave myself a deadline to write my book in 6 months and locked in the commitment by telling a mentor to hold me accountable to it. It shook up my snow globe and everything else settled back into its own rhythm with my book writing commitment a centerpiece to it.

It takes courage, but in a single moment you can change your life forever. It’s not easy, but you can make a decision today that changes your daily routine for good. 

How long have you been talking about getting consistent with good and healthy habits? How many times have you told yourself that you’re going to live inspired only to repeat the same unmotivated patterns? How often do you fail to do the things you said you were going to do, or the things that you know you should do, and it’s keeping you from being the person you know you’re capable of?

What if today was the day, and this was the moment that you actually changed your life trajectory? 

To kick off the New Year I’m leading a 21 Day Challenge to help people permanently and positively change their life. It’s for people who know that they’re destined for more and who are ready for their breakthrough. You can learn more about the 21 Day New Year Challenge here.

Stop waiting for the time to be right to achieve your goals… And make the timing right. The time is now! This is it, and your fullest potential is calling.

I’m not going to lie… I’m a sucker for vanilla ice cream. Add some fresh fruit with it, or put a scoop on top of a piece of pie, there are few things that makes my mouth water more. Yet, in the last year I’ve probably eaten vanilla ice cream less times than I can count on one hand.

I’m not sharing to tell you how ice-cream deprived I am, or asking you to express-ship me a carton overnight… It’s to highlight one very simple concept: While I want ice cream, I want something else more.

What’s more important to me than the sweet pleasures of vanilla ice cream is a long and healthy life where I stay in good shape and physically able to play with my kids and grandkids. What’s more important to me than the tasty delight of vanilla ice cream are my goals to impact the world, which require my very best and cannot be compromised by a sugar crash or a poor night of sleep.

In fact, sometimes in private settings (I’d do it more often if it didn’t sound so elitist!) when someone asks me if I want dessert I answer “Yes, I do… But I’m choosing not to have any because I want to achieve my goals more.” 

And whether I say it in my head or out loud, every time I do it’s a flex. It reinforces that I’m in control of my life, committed to what truly matters most, and able to overcome the temptations of instant gratification to invest in my long-term success. It fires me up and helps me compound results with other positive choices. 

Now I’m fully aware that one bowl of ice cream every once in a while isn’t going to ruin everything. I know that there are moments in life that are meant to be enjoyed. But there’s a tradeoff to it and the right amount is somewhere on the spectrum between ‘always’ and ‘never’.

Over time I’ve arrived at the balance to enjoy one bite of something sweet - and do I savor it! It’s the right amount for me to enjoy something special without negatively impacting other things that are important to me.

Our minds want us to feel good right now and do the things that are pleasurable in the moment. But these things are often in conflict with the things we want most that we’re working toward in the future. The more often you can bring that perspective to mind, the more intentional you can be about the choices you’re making today, and the more aligned you are toward living your best life!

Ready to make 2025 your best, most disciplined, most life-giving year to date? Check this out!

So many people are stretched too thin. We have commitments at work, intentions to prioritize our self-care, family and friends to spend time with and support, major life events and holidays to attend... and it all feels like so much. People have too much on their plate, they're already getting crushed by it, and they can’t take anything else on for fear that it will push them over the top.

I really empathize with that. It’s sad to be so busy that you can’t enjoy life as much as you want to. That you’re so worried about ‘doing all the things’ that you aren’t present when you’re doing them. And unfortunately many people accept this as their permanent reality and are unwilling or unable to disrupt the current pattern and create something more sustainable.

The reason life feels so full and overwhelming is because it literally is - the current demand of life is greater than your capacity to fulfill it. 

In order to fix that, there are only two things you can do. You can try to decrease the demands of life by saying “no” more often - Removing yourself from commitments you’ve made, and scaling back the size of your personal and professional goals. But I’ve found that’s either a bottomless pit (with more things that fill in the space you create) or it's a version of life you’d enjoy less.

The other thing you can do is expand your capacity. To become capable of taking on more in life so that you can rise to the occasion and exceed the demand. When you create more energy in your life you become more efficient with what you do. When you’re more efficient with what you do, you compress time and can fit more things more effortlessly into the time you have.

But counterintuitively, to expand capacity you first must add more demand. You need to invest time and energy into building the life-systems that create efficiencies, and building routines that improve your output. But the payoff is, once those systems and routines are in place they work for you and make everything else easier to do.

For the New Year I’m leading a 21 Day Challenge to help people implement a new life system, the same one I've used for a decade, called the Super Habits System. If you want 2025 to be the year 'doing everything better', and not another year of 'too much to do'... Then this is for you!

I have a quote on the wall in my office, attributed to John Assaraf, that says “The universe wouldn’t be so silly to give you a dream you couldn’t achieve.” I know talking about making your dreams come true in life can seem cliche and out of touch with reality, so let’s talk about it from another angle - let’s call them 'aspirations'.

Aspirations are what you want and desire in life. It’s the potential future that you’d trade your present for if you could. But just because you aspire for something to be better does not mean you’re ungrateful for what you have. Our aspirations drive our personal evolution.

You might have some pretty big dreams and crazy aspirations for yourself, and the very fact that you aspire for them means that you’re capable of it. Whether it’s to write a book, be an Olympian, retire in Europe, or whatever it might be for you… The fact that it has been planted in your consciousness as something that you want means that you can have it. Not everyone aspires to be an astronaut, but only those that do are the ones that become one.  “The universe wouldn’t be so silly to give you a dream you couldn’t achieve.” 

Branding and business expert Jasmine Star says it a little differently - “You wouldn’t have a dream if you didn’t have the capacity to achieve it.” But it follows the same sentiment. The reason you chose your aspirations is because they first chose you. Your mind wouldn’t be fooled into doing something that was actually impossible.

That’s not to say you’re going to achieve all your dreams or that success is guaranteed. It doesn’t even mean that it’s likely to happen. It simply means that it’s possible. In order to really give your dreams their fullest chance you might need to sacrifice, and other things might need to suffer in order for your one thing to rise. 

And that’s the beautiful part of the process. Once you’ve quantified the consequences of pursuing your dreams, you get to choose if it’s worth the cost. Is that dream actually what you want? With this new awareness you get to update your dream so that it represents the aspirations and future reality you actually want to live.

My life and progress transformed when I made this simple switch: To stop focusing on habits and start building new systems.

Don’t get me wrong, habits are incredibly important because they are the consistent actions that most influence your results. But when you place your time and attention on locking in a new habit, you’re fueling your growth from a source that runs out. To be consistent with a habit every day means you need to find the motivation and will to take action, and it can taxing to demand that of yourself day in and day out.

However, when you invest in building a new system, you make the consistent action more doable on a daily basis because you’ve created efficiencies. You design your environment in such a way that you’ve set yourself up to succeed sustainably. It’s the gift that keeps on giving because the effort that you put into building the system works for you every time thereafter.

For example, I have a daily system to plan the when, what, and where of my workout for the next day. This commitment then gets in my schedule, which supports me in doing it consistently. Then every evening I have a system for reviewing my performance and understanding the factors that caused me to not workout at the times I intended to. As you can imagine, this is a powerful force that drives me toward achieving my fitness goals.

But as it goes with systems, they're only as strong as the weakest point. Let’s say that I often fail to make a schedule for the day. That compromises my ability to follow through on my workout, no matter how thoughtful I am about the details of it, because I don’t have a plan to integrate personal and work responsibilities alongside my self-care. It’s much more likely to be deprioritized, and for excuses to be made, when you’re trying to figure it all out in real-time. When we build a system we become dependent on it, and if it starts to become unreliable or ineffective, our results suffer with it.

That’s why the output of a system should always be evaluated. When you can see the consistency, quality, and results a system produces, you can be aware of when behaviors are starting to fade off. And you can more quickly recognize the bottleneck, giving you an opportunity to make positive adjustments so that the system flows smoother. 

I call my life-operating system the Super Habits System and if you want to install it in your life for yourself, and start living at the higher standard you know you’re capable of, you can check it out here.

Even though society paints a certain picture of what it looks like to be successful - to be wealthy, have influence, and get the things you want in life - you’ve probably heard that there’s no one definition of success. In order for us to be successful we each need to know what success looks like for ourselves, and measure ourselves up against that.

Easier said than done, especially with all the conditioning you’ve experienced over the course of your lifetime, but it becomes more doable when you realize the part of it we all share and make unique to ourselves. This is where I want to bring in the most successful basketball coach in history, John Wooden, and his definition of success because it’s the best I’ve heard:

"Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.”

First, “Success is peace of mind”. It’s not something that you achieve externally, it’s a way that you relate with your life internally. When you have peace of mind it means that you have no regrets, that you can accept the results with a state of contentment. 

How do you arrive at that peace of mind? That’s the rest of the definition - “Knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.” When you fully apply yourself, and give yourself credit for doing the best with what you have to work with, then you tap into this ultimate contentment. 

Even with this fair and achievable definition of success, many people are falling short of meeting it. Many people recognize that they haven’t done their best, and a lack of discipline, or motivation, or execution is getting in the way. Perfect! Today’s another opportunity to make new choices that get you closer to the fulfilled, inspired, successful path that you know you’re capable of.

If that’s you, then click here to fast-track your self-improvement!

Michael Jordan, who’s known to be one of the most competitive people to have ever played sports, has his own ways of cultivating personal high-performance. Being self-aware of what he responds well to, he uses games and competitions to pull him to be at his best. Because of that, he’s known for playing games within games.

For example, he’s on the basketball court playing against the Utah Jazz. The game is obvious, two teams, 4 quarters, the team who scores more points wins. But with 2 minutes left in the 3rd quarter, Jordan would make up a side game - To extend the lead from 4 points to 10 points. And he’d take over to win that mini-game, which of course puts him in a better position to win the real game.

There are a few things just about everyone responds positively to, among those are urgency and a clearly defined task. That’s the environment playing a game creates. Long-term high-performance is made up of many moments of high-performance done consistently. A way to get yourself to step up in the short-term, so that you can stack instances of high-performance, is by creating short-term games that demand more of you.

Here’s my favorite way of doing that. I find fulfillment and joy in holding myself to a high standard so that I can live an extraordinary life and make an extraordinary impact. To achieve that, I need to show up at my best every day. So I play a game called the Win The Day Game. The criteria for winning involves meeting outlined expectations for myself in my exercise, diet, sleep, work output, time on social media, and other things. Each one of those focus areas is its own game within the game. I’m committed to winning each, and motivated to make good choices in each so that I don’t ‘lose the day’.  It’s by creating a game like this that I stay consistent in doing the fundamentals that support my health and career goals.

It’s easy to do and it really works. Play a game to not press the Snooze button in the morning, and to not check social media until after your workout is done. This will help you to make the most of your mornings. Or a game to see how many days in a row you can hit your #1 goal for the day.

There are mechanics we can use to support us in being the best version of ourselves. These mechanics aren’t crutches, or only needed for people who don’t have discipline, they’re the environmental design pieces that help high-performers achieve at the level they do. And if you incorporate them, you will too!