1. HAVE A CLEAR VISION

Vision is the most important thing. Vision is purpose and meaning. To have a clear vision is to have a picture of what you want your life to look like and a plan for how to get there. The people who feel most lost have neither of those. They don’t have the picture or the plan.

That is what a clear vision gives you: a way to decipher whether a decision is good or bad for you, based on whether it gets you closer or further away from where you want your life to go. Does the picture you have in your mind of your ideal future get blurrier or sharper because of this thing you’re about to do?

So how do we do that? How do we create a clear vision from scratch? I think there are two ways to do it. You can start small and build out until a big, clear picture reveals itself to you. Or you can start very broad and then, like the lens on a camera, zoom in until a clear picture snaps into focus. That’s how it was for me.

Only you can create the life you want for yourself—no one is going to do it for you. If you don’t know what that life looks like yet, for whatever reason, that’s fine. We’re here now. The choices you make from here on out are what matters. And right now, there are two things you should do. First, create little goals for yourself. Don’t worry about the big, broad stuff for now. Focus on making improvements and banking achievements one day at a time. They can be exercise goals, nutrition goals. They can be about networking or reading or getting your house organized. Start doing things you like to do or that make you proud of yourself for having completed them. Do those things every day with a little goal attached to them, and then notice how doing that changes what you pay attention to. All of a sudden you will find yourself looking at things differently. Once you’ve developed a rhythm with those little daily goals, create weekly and then monthly goals. Instead of zooming in from a broad place, build out your life from this small beginning and let your vision open up in front of you from there. As it does, and the sense of uselessness starts to loosen its grip, that’s when you take the second step: put the machines away and create space and time in your life, however small or short in the beginning, for inspiration to find its way in and for the discovery process to happen.

Going for a walk, going to the gym, reading, riding your bike, taking a Jacuzzi, I don’t care what you do. If you are stuck, if you are struggling to figure out a clear vision for the life you want, then all I care about is that you make little goals for yourself to start building momentum and that you create time and space every day to think, to daydream, to look around, to be present in the world, to let inspiration and ideas in. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, at least give it a chance to find you.

I’m not saying if you just visualize what you want, then it will come true. Hell no. You have to plan and work and learn and fail and then learn and work and fail some more. That’s just life. Those are the rules. What I am saying is that if you want your vision to stick, if you want to increase the chances of success looking exactly like you hoped it would when you first figured out what you wanted your life to look like, then you need to get crystal clear on that vision and tattoo it to the inside of your eyelids. You need to SEE IT.

As important as it is to know what success looks like, it’s equally important to know what it doesn’t look like. There are a lot of things you can end up settling for in this world that will get you a knockoff version of your goals, but that ultimately knock you off course, if the mental picture you have of your life is even a little bit blurry. Knowing what is and isn’t success brings crystal clarity to your vision. And with that clarity, I have found, comes a sense of calm, because almost every question becomes easier to answer.

As uncomfortable as it can be, you have to look at yourself in the mirror every day in order to know where you stand. You have to check in with yourself if you want to be sure that you’re moving in the right direction. You have to make sure that the person looking back at you is the same one you see when you close your eyes and visualize the person you are trying to become. You need to know whether or not your vision aligns with the reality of your choices. You have to do this to avoid becoming lost and useless, obviously. But you also have to do it to avoid becoming a bad person.

Life isn’t just the high points or the big moments. It’s not just the stuff that ends up seared into people’s memory banks or recorded in photos that are confined to scrapbooks. Life is also those stretches of time in between. Life happens as much in the transitions as it does in the poses. It’s all one long performance, and the greater the impact you want that performance to have, the more important each one of those little moments becomes.

2. NEVER THINK SMALL

This isn’t just how you should think about chasing your goals, it’s how you should craft them, too, no matter how big or small they are compared to other people’s. What I’m saying is, if you’re going to do it, do it. Not just because going all in might be the thing that guarantees your success, but because not going all in will absolutely guarantee that you fall short. And it’s not just you who will suffer as a result. It’s like that cheesy motivational saying: Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll end up among the stars! Setting aside that whoever came up with it never took an astronomy class, the point is that if you aim for a big goal and give it your all and you come up short, that’s OK because you’ve still probably done something pretty impressive: graduated college, become a police officer or a mechanic or a parent, and so on. But the flip side of that is also true, and perhaps more important. If you only aim for the smaller goal, the big goal is automatically out of reach, in part because you are no longer motivated to truly go all in and focus on all the little things that make the difference between greatness and good enough.

Naysayers are a fact of life. That doesn’t mean they get to have a say in your life. It’s not that they’re bad people. They’re just not very useful to someone like you. They’re scared of the unfamiliar and the unknown. They’re afraid of taking risks and putting themselves out there. They’ve never had the courage to do what you’re trying to do. They’ve never crafted a huge vision for the life they want and then put a plan together to make it a reality. They’ve never gone all in on anything. Do you know how I know this? Because if they had, they would never tell you to give up or that it can’t be done. No, they would have encouraged you, the way I am encouraging you now! When it comes to you and your dreams, the naysayers have no idea what they’re talking about. And if they haven’t done any of the things that you’re trying to do, the question you need to ask yourself is: Why should I ever listen to them? The answer is, you shouldn’t. You should ignore them. Or better yet, hear what they have to say and then use it as motivation.

Let me tell you something: Nothing good has ever come from having a plan B. Nothing important or life-changing, anyway. Plan B is dangerous to every big dream. It is a plan for failure. If plan A is the road less traveled, if it’s you carving your own path toward the vision you’ve created for your life, then plan B is the path of least resistance. And once you know that path is there, once you’ve accepted that it’s an option, it becomes so, so easy to take it whenever things get difficult. Fuck plan B! The second you create a backup plan, not only are you giving a voice to all the naysayers, but you are shrinking your own dream by acknowledging the validity of their doubts. Worse, you become your own naysayer. There are enough of them out there already; you don’t need to add to their ranks.

Fulfilling a dream gives you the power to see further and deeper—further out into the world toward what is possible, and deeper into yourself to what you are capable of. It’s why there are so few stories about people who have done something big then just packed their bags and moved to a private island never to be heard from again. People who think big and succeed almost always continue to push and to strive and to dream bigger. Think about the last time you did something difficult, that you were proud of. You didn’t stop doing stuff after that, did you? Of course not. That success gave you more confidence to do other things. New things. That’s how all the greats are. They may not succeed at the level of their greatest achievement. The music world is full of one-hit wonders. There are plenty of writers who had only one great book in them, or directors who had only one great film. But they never stop working or dreaming. They never say, “I made it, my work here is done.” As long as they are alive, they will be working to achieve the vision they have created for the life they want to live. Thinking big and succeeding does something to us. It certainly did something to me. It became addictive, because I learned that the only limits that truly exist are in our minds. I realized that our potential is limitless—mine and yours! What’s just as powerful, I believe, is that other people realize their potential is limitless, too, when they watch someone like you or me bust through barriers and blaze new trails. When we think big and make our own dreams a reality, those dreams become real to them too.

Why aim for the middle? Why settle for “good enough” before you’ve even done the work to see what you are capable of? What do you have to lose? It’s not like dreaming up a big vision takes more energy than dreaming up a small one. Try it. Grab a piece of paper and a pencil. Write down your vision. Now cross that out and write it again, only bigger. See, the same amount of energy. It’s no harder to think big than it is to think small. The only hard part is giving yourself permission to think that way. Well, I don’t just give you permission, I demand it of you, because when you’re thinking about your goals and crafting that vision for your life, you have to remember that it’s not just about you. You could have a huge impact on the people around you. While you are breaking new ground in your own life, you could be blazing trails for people you didn’t even know were watching. How big you dream, whether you give it your all, or whether you give in at the first sign of trouble—these things matter. They matter for your own happiness and success, obviously. But they also matter because it could make a real difference in the world, far beyond what you can directly impact yourself.

3. WORK YOUR ASS OFF

If there is one unavoidable truth in this world, it’s that there is no substitute for putting in the work. There is no shortcut or growth hack or magic pill that can get you around the hard work of doing your job well, of winning something you care about, or of making your dreams come true. People have tried to cut corners and skip steps in this process for as long as hard work has been hard. Eventually, those people either fall behind or get left in our dust, because working your ass off is the only thing that works 100 percent of the time for 100 percent of the things worth achieving.

The key is, they have to be good reps. Not lazy, distracted, arched-back, noodle-arm, bullshit reps. You have to use proper form. You have to complete the entire exercise. You have to give maximum effort. Remember, wenn schon, denn schon! It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a dead lift, a press conference, or a run-through of an entire speech. You need to be all there, all in, every time. Trust me, I’m speaking from experience here. It only takes one slipup, one wrong move, one wrong word, to derail your progress and set you back. The whole point of doing lots of reps is to give you a base that makes you stronger and more resistant to silly, unfortunate mistakes, whatever that means for you. The goal is to increase the load you’re able to handle so that when it’s time to do the work that matters—the stuff that people see and remember—you don’t have to think about whether you can do it. You just do it. That all falls apart if you don’t take the time to do things the right way. If you half-ass your reps and fail to pay attention to the details, the base you’re building will be unstable and unreliable. It’s why in firearms training they say “slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” It’s why first responder types, like paramedics and firefighters, train obsessively and practice the fundamentals of their jobs over and over again until it becomes second nature for them. It’s so that when the shit hits the fan and the unexpected happens—which it always does—they don’t have to think about the run-of-the-mill, life-saving parts of their work, and they can use that little bit of extra mental space to deal with the situations they’ve never seen before without wasting precious seconds. And while the stakes are much lower in most other areas of life, that principle applies equally across most of them.

This is where we need to get to. This is what we have to do. We have to embrace the boring stuff. We have to nail the fundamentals. We have to do them right and we have to do them often. This is the only way we can build that strong base and all that muscle memory, so that performing when it counts isn’t a question. It’s the easy part.

To do great things that last, sacrifices are necessary. That’s the beauty of pain. Not only is it temporary, which means you don’t have to deal with it forever, it tells you whether you’ve begun to give enough of yourself in pursuit of your dreams. If the work of being great or achieving something special hasn’t hurt or cost you anything, or at least made you uncomfortable, then I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but you’re not working hard enough. You’re not sacrificing all that could be sacrificed in order to be all that you could become.

You probably already know that this is true. I’m sure you’ve heard some of those popular sayings that get at this message. Get out of your comfort zone. Embrace the suck. Lean into the pain. Do something every day that scares you. These are just different ways of trying to tell you that if you want to grow, or you want to be great, it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to hurt a little bit. Or a lot.

You can’t just expect that other people are going to do what you think they’re going to do or what they say they’re going to do. Especially at the moment of truth, whether that’s the cusp of success or the brink of disaster. (Making your dream come true often requires the same effort as preventing a nightmare scenario from occurring.) Shit happens. Signals get crossed. People are lazy. Some people are just plain stupid. If you have a job to do or a goal you’re trying to achieve, or you’ve made a commitment to protect something or someone, and it’s important to you that everything happens the way it’s supposed to, it’s up to you to follow through all the way.

This is how you follow up. This is how you follow through. It’s about leaving no stone unturned. It’s about dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s. It’s about closing the loop and circling back.

And yet so many people are content to depend entirely on plans and systems, or to do the bare minimum asked of them, and then think to themselves, This is all set, I took care of it. No. Don’t be a lazy fuck. Do the work. The only time you are allowed to use the phrase “I took care of it” is when it is done. Completely.

It seems like a small thing in isolation, but a lack of follow-through at any moment can cause you to lose a match or lose potential gains, just like it can cause you to lose out in life. It’s an indication that you’re not committing fully, that you’re not going all out, that you’re just going through the motions. This is a much bigger problem than you think it is, because if you accept a poorly executed shot attempt or a half-assed lat workout from yourself as good enough, then you’re more likely to accept half-assed versions of other, more important things from yourself. Things like your output at work. Or how you show up in your relationship. Or even how you take care of your baby.

We have something else in common besides our willingness to work. We each have the same twenty-four hours in the day to do that work. Everything else about our lives might be totally different—age, money, where we live, what we’re good at—but we have the same drive and the same amount of time. That’s fantastic! It means there’s nothing we can’t accomplish if we put in the time and effort. The questions you need to ask yourself are: How much of that time am I wasting? How much of it do I spend thinking about how I’m going to get started... instead of starting? How much of it do I flush down the toilet of social media? How much of it do I spend watching television, playing video games, drinking, and partying? My hope for you is that you don’t waste much of your time at all. Sadly, a lot of people waste a lot of time. The worst offenders are the ones with big, ambitious dreams who desperately want to change their lives, but when I ask them what they’re doing to achieve their dreams, they spend twenty minutes explaining how busy they are. Not surprisingly, the people who complain the most about not having enough time do the least amount of work. Let me put it another way: busyness is bullshit. We’re all “busy.” We all have things to do every day. Obligations and responsibilities. We all have to eat, sleep, pay the bills. What does that have to do with putting in the work to reach your vision? If it matters to you, make the time.

Whether it’s a matter of getting into flow state or not, what every person who gets shit done has in common is that they either find the time, make the time, or turn the time they do have into what it needs to be for them to accomplish the task in front of them. When you hear stories like these, if you’re still worried about eating or energy or sleep or fun, maybe your problem isn’t time at all. Maybe it’s what you’re spending your time on. Do you know how many times people tell me they don’t have time to work out, and then I ask them to take out their phones and show me their screen time stats and it says they spent three and a half hours on social media? It’s not hours in the day you lack, it’s a vision for your life that makes time irrelevant.

4. SELL, SELL, SELL

When entrepreneurs and athletes and artists ask me for advice nowadays—it doesn’t matter if they’re talking about their newest product, their latest piece, or how to get representation—the one thing I tell them that they should be doing more of is promoting. Communicating. Selling. Sell, sell, sell! You can have the most amazing idea, the most fantastic plan, the best in class of virtually anything, but if nobody knows that it exists or knows what it is, then it’s a waste of time and effort. It might as well not exist at all. When it comes to realizing your dreams, you cannot allow that to happen. In fact, it should never happen, because no one is better equipped or motivated than you to sell your vision to the world.

Selling your vision means being open about what you’re trying to achieve and telling your story in such a way that it is perceived in the most positive light possible by the people you need or want to get a yes from. Your customers, in other words.

You can never take for granted that you know who your customer is. It’s not always obvious who you need to move toward a yes and who you need to move away from a no. Unless you pay attention to who is paying attention to you, it’s impossible to know for sure who your vision is attracting positively or who it might be impacting negatively. A big part of selling your vision is seeing how the world around you reacts to what you’re trying to do. It’s how you figure out who wants to say yes and who you need to say yes. If you can do that, you will know who all your customers are before they even know that you’re selling to them.

You are your first customer, when you really think about it. The purpose of getting crystal clear on your vision and thinking about how it’s going to happen is to sell yourself on the possibility of your own dream. But eventually you need to sell the world on it too. One of the easiest, most authentic ways to start selling it is to speak your inner voice out loud so others can hear it. All those things you tell yourself about what you’re going to achieve, you should start saying to other people. For some, publicly committing to their vision is essential, because they get caught up in planning instead of executing. Dreaming is always easier than doing. Publicly committing to a big goal is a great way to get moving. It is also a critical step for the many of us who need people to know about our dreams in order for those dreams to reach their full potential.

And if you really want to supercharge your dream’s exposure to the world, don’t just tell them about it, act like it’s already come true. You do that by talking openly about what you’re working toward but removing the phrase “will be“ from your vocabulary. Saying things this way is very powerful for two reasons: First, it presents your vision to the world as if it were real, which puts you in the position of having to work hard right now to make it true. Second, in cases where you need other people to believe in your vision for it to reach the highest heights, making it sound like it’s already gotten there is the ultimate marketing. To the people who want to be part of your company, or your movement, or whatever it is, giving them the sense that the dream has come true is like a call to arms.

A good salesman knows that the key to making a sale and creating a customer for life is to give the customer more than they expected and leave them feeling like they’re always getting the better end of the deal. When it’s you that you’re selling, the best way to exceed expectations every time is to keep those expectations low for as long as possible. Or maybe a better way to put it is that you shouldn’t be afraid to let your customer hold on to their low expectations, because then it’s that much easier for you to blow them away and sell them on what you have to offer.

When you’re different, when you’re unique, and nobody has ever dealt with someone like you before, they are going to drastically underestimate what you’re capable of. Do not let your ego win. Don’t correct them. If you can stay focused on winning and on achieving your goals, you can use their doubts and underestimation against them to effortlessly bridge the conversation, or the interview, or the negotiation to whatever you want to talk about.

This is something you should think about. What is the value of trying to be someone you’re not? Of hiding from your true story and letting someone else tell it? Where do you think that gets you in the end? I promise you, it’s nowhere good. Embrace who you are! Own your story! Even if you don’t like it. Even if it’s bad, and you’re ashamed. If you run away and hide from your past, if you deny your story and try to sell a different one, even if you mean well, it just makes you seem like a con artist. Or worse, a politician.

5. SHIFT GEARS

I have a rule: no complaining about a situation unless you’re prepared to do something to make it better. If you see a problem and you don’t come to the table with a potential solution, I don’t want to hear your whining about how bad it is. It couldn’t be that bad if it hasn’t motivated you to try to fix it. And when exactly has complaining ever gotten someone closer to achieving their goals? You work to make a dream come true, you don’t whine it into existence. Plus, problems and adversity are a normal part of every person’s journey. Whatever your vision is, there is going to be struggle. Tough times. Things that bug the shit out of you. You have to learn how to manage those moments. You have to get good at shifting gears and finding the positive in things. You have to know how to reframe the failure you experience and understand the risks you’re undertaking. Confronting problems instead of complaining about them gives you the chance to practice all these skills.

I owe a lot to my upbringing. I was made for it and made by it. I wouldn’t be who I am today without each one of those experiences. The Stoics have a term for this: amor fati. Love of fate. “Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to,” the great Stoic philosopher and former slave Epictetus said. “Rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens. Then you will be happy.” Nietzsche talks about this too. He says, “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary... but love it.” To get to this place takes some work. It’s not intuitive to stare adversity or unpleasantness in the face and think, “Yes, this is what I needed. This is what I wanted. I love this.” Ironically, our natural negativity bias draws us toward all the bad stuff happening out in the world, but it makes us want to run away, to deny, to turn a blind eye to difficulty when it finds its way to our doorstep. And if that doesn’t work, then we just complain about it. It happens to the best of us. We’re all guilty of it, all the time, with big things just as often as with little things. Anytime I find myself in a shitty situation and I feel that urge to bitch and moan rising up within me, I stop, take a breath, and tell myself that it’s time to switch gears. I will actually talk to myself out loud and remind myself to look for the positive in my situation.

You can turn a negative situation into a positive experience. It all starts by catching yourself any time you start to complain, then talking yourself into switching gears and looking for the good in things. If you can choose joy over jealousy, happiness over hate, love over resentment, positivity over negativity, then you have the tools to make the best of any situation, even one that feels like failure.

If anything, when you look at it with the right perspective, failure is actually the beginning of measurable success, because failure is only possible in situations where you’ve tried to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. You can’t fail when you don’t try. In that sense, failure is kind of like a progress report on your path to purpose. It shows you how far you’ve come, and it reminds you how far you still have to go and what you have to work on to get there. It’s an opportunity to learn from your mistakes, to evolve your approach, and to come back better than ever.

6. SHUT YOUR MOUTH, OPEN YOUR MIND

Curiosity has been a superpower for me. It’s magnetic. Simply by opening my mind to the wonders of the world around me, my curiosity has attracted many amazing opportunities to me. It has also attracted countless good, smart people into my life. The kind who like to teach and support and lift up others.

You don’t know as much as you think you do, so shut your mouth and open your mind.

Being curious and being a good listener are a big part of how to effectively utilize your relationships with other people in pursuit of your goals. I don’t mean that in a manipulative way, only practically. When it comes down to it, people are resources. But it’s only when you learn to soak up what those people tell you—not just let it go in one ear, out the other—that you truly begin to make yourself useful to others and become a resource yourself.

This, I believe, is one of the reasons so many people feel stuck in their lives. They live in a world they don’t understand. The world is what it is, and they are who they are, and it’s just something they have to accept and deal with. It’s their lot in life. Maybe they were born into a life in which others were rich and they were poor, or others were tall or smart or physically gifted and they were the opposite of those things—and no one explained to them that while there are some circumstances you can’t change, there are others that you can change by being curious and by being a sponge and then using the knowledge you gain to craft a vision for yourself.

Use it or lose it is the rule with ripe fruit, political goodwill, media attention, coupons, economic opportunity, space to pass on the highway, all sorts of things. But most importantly, it’s true of the knowledge you soak up over your lifetime. If you don’t regularly flex your mind like a muscle and put your knowledge to work, it will eventually lose its power.

7. BREAK YOUR MIRRORS

None of us has ever done anything on our own when you really think about it. We have always had help or guidance. Others have paved or pointed the way for us in some form or another, whether we were aware of it beforehand or not. And now that you know this, it’s important for you to recognize that you have a responsibility to give back. To help others. To send the ladder back down and lift the next group up. To pay it forward. To be useful. And let me tell you something: when you fully embrace that responsibility, it will change your life and improve the lives of countless others. You will wonder why you hadn’t realized this much earlier. What began as a responsibility will quickly become a duty, which will eventually feel like a privilege that you will never want to let go of and will never take for granted.

It can feel like there’s no time in your schedule for giving back. And when you do find time, your head has been down for so long trying to grind, or to provide, or to make your vision a reality, that it can be overwhelming to figure out how best to use that time, or whether your time is even valuable to somebody else. You end up saying to yourself things like, “Who am I? I’m just a nobody trying to get by.” Or “What can I do? I don’t have any special skills.” Or “What do I have to offer? I’m not rich and famous like these other people.” The first thing to realize is that at the simplest, most basic level, you don’t have to rearrange your life to help other people. You just have to keep your eyes and ears open and be engaged with the world around you. When you see someone struggling—with a bag of groceries or a difficult emotion—stop and give them a hand or a hug. If a friend you haven’t talked to for years calls in the middle of the night, answer the phone. If there is someone who looks like they might need help, answer the call, whether they asked for help or not. Lighten their burden, even if it’s only for five minutes or fifty feet. Helping others is a simple practice that requires nothing more than awareness, willingness, and a little bit of effort. Without actively seeking it out, just by being connected to your environment, you will have opportunities every day to help someone else. And trust me when I tell you, it will make you feel great when you do. The second thing to realize is that you have more to offer than you know. For instance, I know you have the time. If we looked at the full twenty-four-hour breakdown of your day, I guarantee you have an hour to spare at least once or twice a week.

If you’re still struggling to think up ways you can give back, don’t focus on what you have or what you know, take a personal inventory of what others have done for you in your life and try to pay it forward by doing those same things for others who might be in a similar situation.

I am not sharing these stories with you as a way to tell you to do what I did, or to do what firefighters and commandos and first responders do. I am also not asking you to be Robin Hood or Mother Teresa, or to abandon your personal ambition or your personal possessions. I am only asking you to break your mirrors and do for others what you are able to do. I am asking you to give back. To pay it forward. To be useful as often as you can. And I am asking you to do that for the same reason that any of us have chosen to give back. Because we owe a debt of gratitude to the people who got us where we are today. Because we can do for the next generation exactly what the previous generation did for us. Because it will make the world a better place. Because it will make you happier in ways you could never have anticipated. One thing you learn when you’ve lived long enough and worked hard enough to see your wildest dreams come true, is that we’re all connected. We’re all in this thing called life together. It’s not a zero-sum game. It’s one that can have multiple winners. An unending amount of winners, really... as long as you make giving back part of the rules of the game. When we make giving back a part of life, when we break our mirrors so we can see all the people behind the glass who could use our help, that’s when we all benefit. It doesn’t matter how young or old you are, how much or how little you have, how much you’ve done or how much you have left to do. In every case, giving more will get you more. Want to help yourself? Help others. Learn to start from that place, and that is how you will become the most useful version of yourself—to your family, to your friends, to your community, to your nation... and to the world.