Anybody can do the sh*t they want to do
when they feel like doing it.
Anybody can go to the gym when
they feel like going to the gym,
Anybody could show up to work and give 100%
when they're in the mood to do so.
But what makes successful people successful
is what they do when they don't feel like it.
I see people writing on my page,
"Oh, Andy I'm motivated!
Oh I listen to your videos and I get hyped!"
That's great.
And I'm glad that I can get you hyped for five minutes.
But what do you do after the 5 minutes is over?
What do you do after you walk out of the seminar
that you just paid $1,000 to go to?
What do you do when you wake up the next day?
What do you do when you have to either do
what it is you know you're supposed to do
without somebody there to supervise you,
cause or you get to take the playoff
cause no one's gonna know the difference?
Those are the things that make up success.
That's discipline.
The practicing, the developing the discipline
that when applied consistently
can get you to the next level.
If you look at the true warriors of humanity,
you look at the true empire builders,
you look at the true titans who ara
constructing a better world,
they're less about pleasure seeking because they understand
that if you want to have a great life, a soaring life.
look at what most people do
and do the opposite.
Growth comes through discomfort.
Look at a great athlete,
It's the way they show up in the championship game
is simply
how they showed up
in the lonely light
of the early hours at practice.
To have the results
only 5% of the population have,
you've got to be willing to do the things
that only 5% of the population
are willing to do.
Stop f*cking going about the days as a servant,
become the master,
run your day and stop having it run you.
Believe in yourself.
Be that 1 of 100 that has a belief
instead of just f*cking jaw jab talk of intent.
Huge differential there.
The differential is somebody just breathing life,
and the other one taking the most of the opportunity
and time of life.
Remembrace,
otherwise forgotten.
You have no business being average,
but now you justified it.
You've come up with these great reasons
why you can't get up at 5.
You have these great reasons of
why you half do everything,
why you don't execute, why you don't finish,
why you don't follow through,
why you say you'll exercise,
and you do it for about 10 days and you quit.
You've got an excuse for why you're average.
I guarantee you if you were humble enough,
if you were hungry enough,
if you really wanted what you said,
you'd sit down and you'd study what you do,
and you would say, I can do this better.
That I have not exhausted all my time,
I have not exhausted all my resources,
there's something missing.
You're not where you're supposed to be,
it's not going to take a lot,
but it's a small gap.
And the gap is called execution.
If you want to execute just a little bit more
you'll be on a whole other level.
And I'm telling you,
you're not where you want to be financially.
you are not the person you want to be,
and you have not given yourself
enough credit to say,
I just need to get up a half hour earlier
and my whole life will change.
I just need to get up 1 hour earlier,
I just need to work 1 hour longer.
Doing things that matter take time,
doing things that are great take time,
doing things that are gonna get you f*cking paid
take time.
And you can't get around it,
you can't outwork time,
you can't change it,
you can't do anything about it.
It's just going to take time.
And if you could understand aggressive patience,
and you can put it into play in your life,
you can not only achieve everything you wanna achieve,
but you can do so
with a sense of calm,
with a sense of competence,
with a sense of certainty
that your life is gonna turn out the way
that you want it to.
thIt takes faith.
You have to trust that things are going to happen.
At the end of the day
if you go to bed at night
and sleep good knowing you have every f*cking day your all,
you can feel good that things are going to happen.
If you can understand
that it is going to take a long time,
and during that time,
you are going to have to do absolutely everything you can,
you
cannot be anything else but successful.
You need structure, you need predictability,
and you need more of it than you think.
Just to keep you sane.
Now, if you're lucky, and maybe a bit odd, you can deviate.
5% from the norm, or 10% from
the norm, or something like that.
Carefully and cautiously, as long as the rest of
you is all well ordered in a normative manner.
You might be able to get away with that, and you might
be able to sustain it across time, and people might be
able to tolerate you if you do it, or maybe you'll get
really lucky and you happen to be creative, but reasonably
well put together, and people will actually be happy that
there's something idiosyncratic and unique about you.
But even under those circumstances,
mostly what you want is to...
Have a routine.
It's disciplined.
It's predictable and bloody well stick to it.
You're going to be way healthier and happier and saner
if you do that and then the other thing that you need
Because this is one of the things the psychoanalysts
got wrong I think is that they overestimated the
degree to which sanity was a consequence of internal
Of being properly structured internally, you know?
Because from the psychoanalytic point of view,
you're sort of an ego, and that ego is inside you.
And of course it rests on an unconscious structure,
but the purpose of psychoanalysis is to sort out that
unconscious structure, and the ego on top of it, and to
make you a fully functioning and autonomous individual.
But there's a problem with that, because
The reason that you're sane as a fully functional
and autonomous human being isn't because you've
organized your psyche, even though that's important.
The reason that you're sane if you're...
If you have a well organized unconscious, an ego is because
other people can tolerate having you around for reasonably
extensive periods of time and will cuff you across the
back of the head every time you do something so stupid
that people will dislike you permanently if you continue.
And so what people are doing to each other
all the time, just non stop, is broadcasting
sanity, signals back and forth, right?
It's like you smile at people if they're, well, if they're
not, not only behaving properly, but behaving in a way
that you would like to see them continue to behave.
You frown at them if they're not,
you ignore them if they're not,
you shun them.
You, you roll your eyes at them.
You manifest a disgust face.
You don't listen to them.
You interrupt them.
You won't cooperate with them.
You won't compete with them.
It's like you're blasting signals at other
people about how to regulate their behavior.
So frequently, well, it just makes
up all of your social interaction.
That's why we face each other, and we have emotional
displays on our face, and we're looking at each other's
eyes, and we know exactly, we know as much as we can about
what's going on with each other, given that we don't have
immediate access to the contents of their consciousness.
And so, partly what you're doing with your routine
is establishing yourself as a credible, reliable,
trustworthy, potentially interesting human being.
Who isn't going to do anything too erratic at any moment.
And everyone else is around there, tapping you into
shape, making sure that that's exactly what you are.
And that's how you stay sane.
And so what happens to people too, if they don't have a
routine, and they get isolated, is they start to drift.
And they drift badly, because the world is too
complicated for you to keep it organized all by yourself.
You just cannot do it.
So a lot of our, so we outsource the problem of sanity.
And it's very intelligent that we outsource the problem
of sanity because
sanity is an impossibly complex problem.
And so the way that we manage the incredibly complex
problem is we have a very large number of brains
working simultaneously on the problem all the time.
It's like a stock market for sanity.
And it's partly, and I use that,
I use that definition with purpose.
Because the stock market does the
same kind of impossible thing, right?
Because it tries to price things, which is impossible.
There's so, how many things are there?
Like a billion.
How in the world do you decide what the price is?
You can't decide what the price is.
That's why you have a stock market.
Well, and a free market, I mean, for consumer goods.
Everyone's voting on what the price
of everything is all the time.
And that's the way we figure it out, because
it's actually, it's technically impossible.
Understand:
your mind is weaker than your emotions.
But you become aware of this weakness only in moments of adversity-
-precisely the time when you need strength.
What best equips you to cope with the heat of battle is neither more knowledge nor more intellect.
What makes your mind stronger, and more able to control your emotions,
is internal discipline and toughness.
No one can teach you this skill;
you cannot learn it by reading about it.
Like any discipline, it can come only through practice, experience, even a little suffering.
An active life
serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work,
while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment
in experiencing beauty, art, or nature.
But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment
and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior:
namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces.
A creative life and a life of enjoyment are banned to him.
But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful.
If there is a meaning in life at all,
then there must be a meaning in suffering.
Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.
Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
As his mind becomes purer and his emotions come under control,
his thoughts become clearer and his instincts truer.
As he learns to live more and more in harmony with his higher Self,
his body's natural intuition becomes active of itself.
The result is that false desires and unnatural instincts
which have been imposed upon it by others or by himself will become weaker and weaker
and fall away entirely in time.
This may happen without any attempt to undergo an elaborate system of self-discipline on his part:
yet it will affect his way of living, his diet, his habits.
False cravings like the craving for smoking tobacco will vanish of their own accord;
false appetites like the appetite for alcoholic liquor or flesh food will likewise vanish;
but the more deep-seated the desire, the longer it will take to uproot it
--except in the case of some who will hear and
answer a heroic call for an abrupt change.
Persistence and variety.
These are the two primary ways to develop great ideas or to solve important problems.
Keep leaning your head against a topic for a long time.
Certainly for weeks, possibly for years.
And along the way, try many lines of attack.
Continue to generate options, explore paths, and propose silly ideas.
Copy and paste concepts from widely different disciplines and see if it gets you anywhere.
All the while, continue to refine the best solution you’ve found thus far.
What looks like genius
may simply be the byproduct of persistence and variety.
The tendency to avoid challenges is so omnipresent in human beings
that it can properly be considered a characteristic of human nature.
But calling it natural does not mean it is essential or beneficial,
or unchangeable behavior.
It is also natural to defecate in our pants and never brush our teeth.
Yet we teach ourselves to do the unnatural
until the unnatural becomes itself second nature.
Indeed, all self-discipline might be defined as teaching ourselves to do the unnatural.
Another characteristic of human nature -
perhaps the one that makes us most human
- is our capacity to do the unnatural,
to transcend and hence transform our own nature.