How to achieve

Q: So Mr. Successful, do you have any advice for young people who wish to follow in your footsteps?

A: Hmmm. Ya know, I was working very hard even at a young age. But, ah, see I don't like describing things as hard because everyone's definition of hard is vastly different. Ya know David Goggins' idea of hard is probably 100 times more difficult than the average person's. So... Hmmm...

When I was in college, people would always say, "Oh college is so hard." What they actually meant is that it takes a lot of time. In high school, schoolwork takes up very little of your free hours where in college––in a perfect world––the majority of the work gets done outside the confines of the classroom. Well––so young people won't gauge my real opinion of college difficulty wrongly, college isn't actually hard and doesn't take that much time to keep a high 3 GPA. But this example is meant to communicate that hardness is equal to time in most situations. Why is a 315 pound benchpress hard? Because it takes years of training to get there. So if you consider my success hard, what could you do as a young person to replicate it? Well, spend a lot of time on it.

I don't mean spend a lot of time on it today because that won't last. Simple arithmetic tells us doing something for a short period of time over the course of years is the optimal approach here. That has its nuances and pitfalls as well, ya know basic lessons in discipline and what not. There is also a lot of luck in anything, and I certainly got lucky. But at the same time, I would've been lucky eventually because this is what I do and love; I would be endlessly trying to do this until the day I croak over. Put another way, I'd be accumulating more and more time year after year doing this thing until I figured it out/got lucky. Starting young helps because you put more time in early.

So my advice, put a sustainable amount of effort and time in each day. Don't go all out. Be sustainable and don't fret that it won't be enough to achieve whatever. It won't make you happy anyways, so you should really fall in love the work. You are more likely to quit before you get wherever you wish to go, so that is the more pressing issue we are trying to account for. All you can do is all you can do, and I promise you'll feel good about trying your hardest and failing. Not your hardest that day, but your hardest with the long future in mind (aka being sustainable). Well, maybe do go as hard as you can. Like, take it deadly serious. Be a pro––but a sustainable pro. What happens over time is we get comfortable with a certain amount of output and increase it. Over many years our sustainable effort becomes something a beginner can't comprehend.

Striving for something is a really important pillar in my life. There are other things I need too, but this might be the biggest one. I strongly encourage young people to figure out what they want and really go after it. There seems to be no meaning in life other than what we give it. We only have the chance to play.