There are many people
who have
the limitations in their minds
who have lost that fire
in their eyes
Most people, ladies and gentlemen
go to their graves
living a life
far below their potential.
And the question is
if you die today
what ideas
what dreams
what talents
what gifts
will die with you?
You have the ability to do more
than you can ever begin to imagine.
It's what you create.
It's the habit of what you put in your head.
See, someone will tell you your whole life
you're a piece of crap and part of you can go,
you're full of it.
I'm gonna show you.
Lots of people have done that.
They never bought it.
Or someone tell you're beautiful your whole life.
You go, I'm not really beautiful.
So what people tell you doesn't matter at all.
It's what you stack.
It's what you assemble.
You need to believe and know
that you're one decision, one relationship, one meeting,
one book, one thought,
one something away from a completely different life.
It's an effort play.
If you don't have self confidence, you've
never kept the promises you make to yourself.
Check that box.
If you have self confidence, you've started
to keep the promises you make to yourself.
So if I'm going to get up and I'm going to work out
and I'm going to do 10 reps in the gym, I do one more.
If I'm going to do 45 minutes on the treadmill,
I do one more.
If I'm going to make 10 contacts in a day,
I do that and one more.
There's a lot of times where I don't know how
I'm going to move forward.
But I asked myself one question
can you take another step?
And that answer is always yes.
You're passing through that, that keyhole.
But if you pass through it, then something
massive opens up on the other side.
And it is definitely the case that
disciplinary institutions, universities are exactly that,
is their places of guidance and their places
to encourage people to develop the discipline
that's necessary to see beyond the discipline.
I mean, that's why we have disciplines, right?
I mean, the words aren't there by accident.
And once that discipline was established
then the disciplined mind could explode in every direction,
which is precisely what happened.
And so, and that's the thing about growing up is
that when you're a teenager and a young adult,
you have to sacrifice everything you could have been as
a child to be the one thing that you're aiming at.
But then that opens up and the universities
are part and parcel of that process.
Change is automatic, but progress is not.
Start today.
Right now.
What do I really want, in depth?
What are the rituals that will get me there?
And then get yourself to
start a few of those actions
and lock them in place.
If you make the changes in yourself,
you're going to be proud.
And no amount of money or accolades
from other people can
mirror the feeling of being proud of knowing
you've taken back control of your life.
Everything in life is always changing
we don't have to work on change.
The major key to the good life
every day in a thousand different ways.
We are trying to improve ourselves
by learning how to do things.
We spend a lifetime gathering knowledge in
classrooms, in textbooks, in experiences.
Now, if knowledge is power, if knowledge is the forerunner to success,
then why do we fall short of our objectives?
Why in spite of all our knowledge and
in spite of our collective experiences,
do we find ourselves aimlessly wandering
Settling for a life of existence
rather than a life of substance?
There may be many answers to this question.
Your answers may be different than your
associate, or your spouses, or your friends.
The fundamental answer is the absence of discipline.
Applying all that we know.
Discipline.
Self discipline.
We might add one more word here, consistent.
Consistent self discipline.
It doesn't really matter how smart you are
or how much you know, if you don't use it.
And once you're disciplined, like you're, you're like
a sharpened sword, man, like a well tempered blade,
and then you can go out there and operate in the world.
The reason that, Discipline is necessary is because
you're a mass of competing short term interests.
And so the question is then, well, which
short term interests should win out?
And the answer to that is none of them.
They need to be organized into a hierarchy that makes
them functional across time and across individuals.
Get really simple things you can
do right now to change your life.
You can go to experience it that day.
And then you get momentum, day one, day two,
day three, day four, and all of a sudden now
what used to be hard to do is easy to do.
And I think for anyone, you gotta
understand, anyone can learn anything.
And I'm just not willing to settle for
a life without passion and aliveness.
That's just like, there's so much
to learn, there's so much to grow.
And then my view is, what's next is always better.
If I make it so, it's my job to make it so.
And I think that's how we have to navigate.
But most of us, most of us have
been conditioned not to take a risk.
It was you.
Peel that crust, you know,
peel that crust away and see who you really are.
You open your mind to a whole nother world.
So I've opened my mind up to a whole nother world
that most people can't even fathom
because they haven't dug deep.
So they think, people think I'm crazy
because I found a whole nother way of living.
I think they're crazy for never even trying to get
to the other side of whatever's in front of them.
So what drives me every day is finding more of myself.
And be my best is a never ending journey.
It is said that the master swordsman Nakayama Hakudo would practice drawing his sword
some two thousand times a day.
At the Hayashizaki temple, in one marathon of endurance training,
he was recorded drawing his sword ten thousand times in a single twenty-four-hour period.
We can imagine the sheer speed required to do this . . .
and also the deliberateness to do so many reps in so little time.
But why would he do such a thing at all?
Because, as Octavian’s teacher Arius Didymus said,
“Practice over a long time turns into second nature.”
We don’t rise to the occasion, we fall to the level of our training.
The samurai Musashi was once challenged by a warrior named Miyake Gunbei,
a man who thought himself one of the best in the world.
On his third attack, frustrated by his lack of success,
Gunbei charged at Musashi in an aggressive lunge.
Musashi, having prepared for this exact scenario countless times, replied,
“That is not what you should do,”
then parried the blow with one sword
and watched as the man gashed his own cheek against Musashi’s other sword.
How had he known? Practice.
Cho tan seki ren was Musashi’s phrase.
Training from morning to night. Oh, you’ve done that? Okay.
Do it some more. And after that? More. More. More.
“A thousand days of training to develop,” Musashi would write,
“ten thousand days of training to polish.”
For a samurai, there was no such thing as pretty good.
If a pretty good swordsman met a better fighter . . . he would die.
It’s like the basketball Hall of Famer Bill Bradley’s observation:
When you are not practicing, refining, working
—somewhere, someone else is . . .
and when you meet them, they will beat you. Or kill you.
Gunbei was lucky enough to learn this lesson and live to tell about it.
In fact, after Musashi treated the man’s wound,
Gunbei accepted that he was outmatched and became Musashi’s student,
training and practicing under him
until he was no longer prone to the mistakes that come from such rashness.
Look, this is not a drill. There is no greatness without practice.
Lots of practice. Repetitive practice.
Exhausting, bone-crunching, soul-crushing practice. And yet
what emerges from this practice is the opposite of those three feelings.
Energy. Strength. Confidence.
You deserve that. Yes, your body will burn, but that’s the evidence.
From that burning comes real heat, heat you can apply to your craft, to your work, to your life.
The cellist Pablo Casals practiced continually late into his life, even long after he was widely considered a master,
because he believed he was still making progress.
In fact, we might say that progress and practice are synonyms.
You can’t have the former without the latter.
And the latter is worthless without the former.
Drawing the sword from the scabbard. Thrusting. Blocking.
To build up your stamina for those skills, you lift weights, you do conditioning.
To put it all together, you spar. It’s the same with music.
You can jam with other talented musicians, you can put all those sessions together to learn new songs.
But before all that, as Casals did, you can simply practice your scales
in your bedroom for hours upon hours.
What are those scales for you?
You better know and you better be doing them.
No matter what you do, practice will make you better.
Florence Nightingale wanted young nurses to understand that
nursing was an art that required “as hard a preparation as any painter or sculptor’s work.”
Churchill spent many evenings practicing his “impromptu” performances.
Only you know what it will look like to train in your art like a samurai,
an Olympic athlete, a master in pursuit of excellence.
Only you will know what you need to practice from morning until night,
what to repeat ten thousand times.
It won’t be easy, but in that burden is also freedom and confidence.
The pleasure of the flow state. The rhythm of second nature.
The quiet calmness of knowing that, from the practice,
you’ll know exactly what to do when it counts . . .
the pride and the dependability of doing it too.