Something that is central to my life is living with purpose, so for today’s positivity quote I want to elaborate on a famous Dolly Parton quote - “Find out who you are and do it on purpose”.

When we think of purpose we usually see it through the lens of our life’s mission, the difference you want to make in the world, and what you want to be remembered for. It’s really powerful to have that overarching ‘why’ that you angle toward throughout your life, but this quote comments more on the second form of purpose.

Purpose isn’t just a directional north-star, it’s also a moment by moment intention. It causes you to really reflect on your daily choices and the quality you bring to what you do. Everything has a reason and connects to a goal, strategy, or tactic that you’ve decided is on your path. That’s what it means to infuse more purpose in your life -it’s to live with more intentionality. 

Now as it relates to Dolly Parton’s suggestion, “find out who you are and do it on purpose”... The north-star that you get to orient your actions around, and keep in mind as you make daily choices, is your most authentic self. It’s the fully expressed, self-aware version of ourselves. 

When we’re aware of our strengths and weaknesses, limitations and roadblocks, needs, wants, and interests (which is essentially who we are), and we live in alignment wit that, a whole world unlocks for us.

And trust me I know, it’s easier said than done. It takes courage to be yourself. But I’ve found that even if it’s a little uncomfortable, or inconvenient, or scary to lean into who you are and to stand up for that person through your daily actions, it fills you with self-confidence and self-belief. 

So if there were to be a takeaway, let it be this - Keep an open mind to explore who you are and don’t rule anything out. Try not to let judgment and conditioning keep you in a box that you don’t fit in. When you’re being your most authentic you, you’re at your very best, and that’s what the world needs and you deserve.

The highest caliber of growth-oriented people are constantly asking themselves how they can make things better. That’s not to say that things always need to get better, there’s a healthy balance between accepting things that are good enough and finding room for improvement... 

But isn’t it worth asking the question to have an idea of what you might be missing? 

When we approach our lives with curiosity and a desire to generate more awareness, we give ourselves more context to make better decisions without the bias of our own judgment. Then if you discover something you feel compelled to try out, run a test without attachment to a certain outcome and see how it goes.

In the pursuit of better, my friend Case Kenny offers to interesting approaches to consider. He says look for ways to making things simpler or do things differently.

Our natural inclination is to add more on top of what we’ve already got. But complexity and volume don’t guarantee better results. In fact, as Case suggests it’s often the opposite that is more effective.

To talk more about this balance, just because things can get better does not mean that your current results are good enough. ‘Enough’ is a loaded word. One side of the coin of enough is complacency, meeting minimum requirements.

What I’m talking about is the other side, which is sufficiency and satisfaction. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, we don’t need to create problems where they don’t exist.

But again, isn’t it worth thinking about what’s possible? Is there a better way? Awareness never hurts.

Getting in the habit of thinking this way serves you in more than the immediate. Ed Mylett says that our thinking is simply the process of asking and answering questions to ourselves. So when we ask good, creative, challenging questions like this, we train our brain to think more creatively. 

This applies to anything. It could be as mundane as your current grocery shopping process - Is there a better way? Something that’s simpler or different than what you’re already doing, or more efficient? Or it could be as tactical as evaluating a core strategy in your business. What would simpler or different even look like?

Give it a try and let me know how it goes!

You know how people can get superstitious? It all comes from drawing arbitrary connections between things. Like tapping dice a certain way thinking it’ll improve your chances of having a good roll, or wearing a certain outfit on days when you have a big presentation at work.

There’s actually some truth to this. While the superstition seems to literally do nothing, in certain circumstances it could cause some shifts that make you feel more confident or prepared to get a good result.

The other side of superstition is worrying about “jinxing it”. You know, when you jinx it that means that you caused a negative outcome to happen, or prevented a positive outcome from happening, simply because you brought awareness to it.

Let’s highlight the underlying concept here. You believe that one random thing influenced another random thing. This is the power of perspective. Our minds are meaning making machines. We constantly want to close the loop and make sense of what’s happening around us. Sometimes we fabricate a meaning, like a superstition or a jinx, to fill in the gaps.

Imagine how powerful it would be to shape our brains to find a positive meaning in everything we do. To flip failure into a learning lesson. To find gratitude for setbacks. To see the good in people rather than the bad.

It’s all an unconscious process that is happening regardless, might as well get it working in our favor? And just as arbitrary as what you might conclude from superstition or a jinx, you can choose to shape your perception of how you want to serve the life you want to live.

I hate to break it to you, there’s no such thing as an overnight success. Extraordinary results require consistent, dedicated, hard work. Although it might seem like success came quick, and others may perceive that it happened overnight, it's just a result of a lot of hard work that was incubating over time to make it so.

While it’s true that you can’t be a success overnight, changing your life is a different story. 

You can in fact close your eyes one evening and your life and lifestyle can be drastically different the next. Just ask someone who realized that their smoking or drinking habit didn’t serve them and in one moment made a decision, and they haven’t touched it since. Or someone who met the love of their life, that they later married, and they can’t get the excitement and butterflies out of their system.

Serious life change is much, much more possible than we’ve been led to believe. That’s not to say that quitting smoking or meeting your future spouse is an easy thing to do, or it happens every day, but when moments like this come along they permanently shift the trajectory of your life.

Ultimately, your life comes down to your choices. Darren Hardy says “You make your choices and then your choices make you.” We’re often unaware of the choices we’re making but we are constantly making them. This means that at any given moment you can choose to completely transform your life and it will actually happen.

Let me present you with one of these moments where you get to decide, right now, what you want your future to look like. It could be more of the same, or it could be the beginning of the best chapter of your life. On Monday we’re starting another cohort of the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge. 

This is a transformational process that, when you work it, will improve your daily productivity and consistency to levels that are unrecognizable compared to how you’re living today. And the process is simply 5 minutes a day for 21 days, and in this Challenge I walk you through every detail of it so that you’re fully set up for success.

If you want to prioritize your health more, you want to stop being so busy and find a better life balance, you want to stop being so distracted and wasteful of your time with social media or random things that come up, this is the moment that you decide that things will forever be different.

I spoke yesterday with someone who just completed the last version of the challenge and she said that “this challenge has completely shifted my perspective. Previously I thought that I had to just accept who I was, but now I believe I can actually change my life. And it’s exciting!”

If you feel the pull to give this a try and see for yourself how this one single, simple habit will permanently ignite your next level in every area of your life, register for the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge, especially before you can self-sabotage and talk your way out of it.

I wanted to share a perspective shifting quote that introduces a new approach to fulfillment. The quote is “What we most enjoy is what’s best for us, and what is best for us is what we most enjoy.”

In life we’re all chasing a richer, happier, more joyful, higher quality experience. We want to be present in the things around us and infuse a sense of purpose in everything we do. What this quote suggests is that we do not achieve that through pleasure and the senses. True, deep, authentic joy goes beyond that and into your being.

That’s exactly what this quote is telling us, but it does so in two parts:

Going a layer deeper into the first half of the quote, “What we most enjoy is what’s best for us”, this is really a statement of self-awareness. What’s best for you is different from everyone else, and knowing what you want is a requirement to finding joy because then you can go get it. It isn’t just about material things, this is lifestyle, quality of relationships, physical abilities, career and purpose, and other elements of your vision.

This takes us to the second part of the quote - “What is best for us is what we most enjoy.” While yes, we all have our own unique ways of finding joy, there are definitely recurring themes that apply for everyone. 

What’s best for us is taking care of our bodies and health so that we are physically capable of doing things and energetically ready to be a part of it.

What’s best for us is having full clarity on what we want in our career, in our relationships, and taking real action to make it so rather than just dream about it. 

What’s best for us is to see the positivity and possibility in the world around us, not the dread and despair that’s the reality of life.

So in order to put ourselves in a position to truly enjoy life, we must not neglect to do the fundamental things that are best for us. It requires action, discipline, commitment, and follow through.

Now if you feel like you’re not taking action as consistently as you’d like to, and you feel like your self-confidence, self-belief, and overall happiness is negatively affected by it, let me propose an idea of something you could do about it.

The Best Self Breakthrough Challenge helps you to install the core life-system and infrastructure that makes elite consistency permanent, even when you don’t feel like it, so that at the end of every day you feel proud of how you showed up. Imagine how much more enthusiasm and excitement you’d have for life when you start making undeniable progress and allow yourself to pursue your dreams with more confidence and conviction.

That’s what this Challenge will unlock for you. Click here to learn all about it and register for yourself - It’s a live challenge and it starts on Monday!

** And FYI if you already tried signing up but had website issues, I’ve got that all fixed now! **

So I know more about you than you think I do. The fact that you’re listening to this podcast / reading this right now means that you’re growth-oriented, you have a desire to live life to the fullest and to maximize your potential and see what you’re capable of in your life-time. It’s an incredibly noble worthwhile pursuit, but there’s just one problem.

Maybe it’s not going as well as you want it to.

Maybe you’re having a hard time striking the right balance in your life, you don’t feel as motivated or inspired as you used to, you aren’t as consistent with the habits and routines that you know put you in a position to be at your very best. Or no matter how hard you try you keep getting stuck and fail to make meaningful progress in your health or finances.

I think about all of this all day and I’ve found that all of this comes back to the one core problem that so many people are experiencing, that they don’t even realize is a problem, and it’s holding them back.

The problem is - Many people spend so much time trying to improve their lives but they’ve reached the capacity of their current systems.

This means that people are piling things on in their self-improvement - New habits, new intentions, new routines - But it doesn't get incorporated to the extent they’d like it to. It’s because all of these new changes are being supported by old systems, and the effectiveness of the changes are limited.

It’s like having a kink in the hose of your self-improvement. Once you undo the kink you find that the hose flows so much better than it used to. But again, people don’t even know that they have a kink in the first and wonder why things aren’t flowing for them.

The fastest way to reach the next level of your self-improvement, productivity, and daily processes is to focus on upgrading the core systems that enable it. Whether you realize it or not, you’ve been operating informally on certain self-improvement systems.

Let’s do a quick check in to see the state of your current systems...

Do you have a way to keep track of your daily habits and commitments?

Do you reflect on a daily basis on the limiting factors that keep you from being disciplined or consistent?

Do you have accountability in place to support you in following through on things that are challenging but good for you?

Have you established standards for yourself that you evaluate your choices against?

Do you have a process to understand what things contribute to you having an energized, productive day versus a lazy, distracted day? 

If your answer to most of those things is no, that’s GREAT news. It means that you are ripe for a massive breakthrough in your self-growth where all of the hard work you’ve been putting is about to come to fruition. 

Should you choose to update your self-improvement systems...

If you’re ready for that, I host a challenge called the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge where over the course of 21 days we install a new self-improvement system into your life that includes all of the things I just described, and more, at a whole new level. 

The Challenge kicks off with a live session on Monday August 7th, if you want to seize this opportunity to level up your life, in just 5 minutes a day for 21 days, click here to register for the Challenge so I can take you step-by-step and show you how!

You’ve probably heard the expression “work smarter not harder” before. At its core, the advice in the expression is that there are higher leverage ways to pursue things to get the same results with less. In other words it is always possible to do things better while making them easier to do.

In our personal development we’re constantly looking for better in the form of ‘life hacks’ and ‘time-savers’. While there’s no single thing that will cause you to live a wildly fulfilling life, there are certainly things you can do to make your life much better when you implement them.

These are the little hinges that swing big doors.

If you want to make massive moves in your life, sometimes it’s as simple as focusing on the little hinge that controls the door and has the power to make it move.

The reason this works is because a hinge creates leverage. The definition of leverage is “to use something to its maximum advantage”. It’s to be intentional about how you take action in your life so that you are working smarter and not harder, maximizing the amount of output for the amount of input. 

There are ways to create leverage in your life, which are ways to create more little hinges that swing big doors. The first is by structuring your environment. When you change your environment around you it changes the influence you feel on a moment by moment basis. This is why accountability, goals, gamification, and clarity are so influential in your behavior. These are high-leverage things you can do to make action-taking easier to do.

Then the second way to create leverage is to build systems. A system is a reproducible process you can use to achieve a certain result. The great part is, once you’ve invested in building the system, it works for you and you begin to achieve the desired result on autopilot.

Now if you’re looking for the one little hinge that swings the biggest door in your personal development, read this closely.

I call it your Keystone Habit. It's the one small thing you can do that impacts your success in every area of your life. This one habit becomes your new Self Improvement Operating System, which includes everything I just described - Helping you craft a fully-intentional environment that supports your goals and a gives you a step-by-step system to improve anything about your life.

The only reason you don’t have this in place yet is because you haven’t put in the work to install it. But that can very easily change! 

On Monday we’re beginning another round of the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge where it takes just 5 minutes a day for 21 days to implement your one Keystone Habit. This is the little hinge that leads to you getting in the best shape of your life, multiplying your productivity and focus, building a stronger mindset, filling your days with more purpose, and so much more. And I walk you through every detail of it so that you can actually change your life in all the ways you’ve wanted to for so long.

If there’s anything I could recommend to quickly and permanently take your daily energy, productivity, and success to the next level - this is it!

If you’re anything like me, I can imagine there are a ton of things you want to do in life. To travel more, make time to be with friends and family, complete a milestone fitness competition like a marathon or ironman or Spartan Race, try new hobbies, attend more events… the list goes on.

And I also imagine that a lot of these things have been on your list for a while now already. The question I want to ask you is ‘Are you happy with a long list of almosts?’

I almost signed up for that race. I almost booked that trip. I almost pursued that new opportunity at work. This idea is very personal to me because of my mission statement, which is to turn human intention into action. When you almost do something it means that you really thought about it, you wanted to, but for whatever reason you didn’t pull the trigger. You had a strong intention but you didn’t take action.

I want you to reflect on how prevalent this is in your life. Have you made promises or pacts with yourself to get in better shape, have a better attitude, be a better and more present family member, or stop procrastinating so much?

If so, do you expect that things will change if you keep on doing the same things, or might it serve you to give something else a try and see if it gets you a better result?

A life of 'almost' is a life of regret. It’s a life of missed experiences and opportunities, lost excitement, and unfulfilled potential. But fortunately at any moment you can choose do something different and shift your trajectory to turn the vision you have for your life into a reality. Seriously you can do it.

The two missing ingredients that I find people are missing when they have high intention but little action are discipline and awareness. Discipline is the ability to take action consistently in alignment with who you want to be. Many people know what they need to do but don’t have the follow through to actually do it. 

Then there’s awareness. Oftentimes people aren’t aware of the things they’re tolerating in life, the standards that they’re not enforcing, and the conditions that cause them to feel more tired, lazy, or unmotivated than they’d like to be.

These two characteristics are at the base of what I call is your Self Improvement Operating System. Without discipline and awareness you can’t get into the habits, routines, and mindsets that represent the best version of yourself because you’re missing the essential raw materials.

Once a month I host a 21 day challenge where I help you to build elite levels of discipline and awareness so that you stop feeling so bad for yourself that you’re not making the most out of life. Your future is in your control, and in this Challenge, I teach you how to claim it so that you can have a lifetime of rich experiences and fulfillment. 

The process takes only 5 minutes a day for 21 days to complete and at the end of it, you’ll be on fire and ready to take on anything that life throws at you! This is a live Challenge and the next one starts on Monday August 7th. Click here to learn more about the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge and register! Either that, or keep tolerating ‘almost’ being the person you want to be and convincing yourself that you’re okay with it.