If you’re Not Reaching your Goals: These 8 Things Will Attract Success
“Success is what you attract by the person you become.” — Jim Rohn
1. EMBRACE THE TRUTH
“…The truth shall make you free.” — John 8:32
David Goggins today is a world-class author, ultramarathon runner, and retired highly successful Navy SEAL.
He wasn’t always that way.
In his book Can’t Hurt Me, he shares how he went through a painful, traumatizing, and abusive childhood.
At one particular low point he was failing every class in school, and he was miserable and depressed about his life.
He says:
“[One] night, after taking a shower, I wiped the steam away from our corroded bathroom mirror and took a good look. I didn’t like who I saw staring back. I was a low-budget thug with no purpose and no future. I felt so disgusted I wanted to punch that idiot in the face and shatter glass.”
But rather than doing that, he decided to embrace the truth.
“Instead, I lectured him. It was time to get real.”
What did “getting real” look like?
Every day, Goggins would do three things:
- Stare in the mirror
- Be completely honest with himself
- Make post-it notes of all of his goals and put them on the mirror.
He calls this practice his “accountability mirror.”
The mirror of truth.
What does your “getting real” look like?
When you look in the mirror, who do you see?
Do you see your future self?
Do you have a future self?
What are you justifying because of outside obstacles rather than taking complete ownership?
Look in the mirror and be honest.
If you’re massively overweight, be honest.
If your finances are out of order, be honest.
If you’re putting the dream on hold, be honest.
If you aren’t prioritizing key relationships, be honest.
Honesty is the starting point of all change. When you’re honest, there’s nothing to hide. There’s only things you can work with.
What are you saying “no” to receiving because you’re too attached to things that aren’t honest?
David Goggins could have created hundreds of excuses for his failures in school, but he didn’t. Instead, he made his post-it notes and acted on them.
Eventually, he passed the rigorous intellectual test required to become a Navy SEAL and is now a multiple bestselling author and renowned keynote speaker.
He was honest with himself, and then he gave himself permission to change. To believe and understand that his personality wasn’t permanent.
The sticky-notes are your passport to personal change.
To become who you want to be, you need constant reminders everywhere you go reminding you of that person.
This is my own culture wall, designed by Gaping Void:
This wall is filled with many of my favorite beliefs and values, and it’s how I’ve engineered my environment so that I can have the life I want. Every day, these pictures trigger reminders of the values and goals I have.
Likewise, you need an environment that triggers imagination of your future self in a tangible and real way.
Most people have an environment that reminds them of their former self.
They’re around old traumas, failures, addictions, people, and mindsets, and so they’re thrown back into their former self when they go throughout their day.
No.
The only way to change your trajectory, like Goggins, is to cut off the trigger and to create a new one — a transformational trigger that reminds you of your future self.
2. BE STRATEGICALLY IGNORANT
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.” — Steve Jobs
You don’t need to be aware of everything that’s going on in the world. Or as author Barry Schwartz shares in the book The Paradox of Choice, oftentimes increased options actually lead to lower-quality decisions.
If you have too much media flowing in, you’re sending your brain in a thousand different directions at once. You’re limiting your ability to be in a flow state, heightening your stress, and washing your energy. You’re also putting your view of the future into the hands of somebody else.
Most media is intended to make you feel that the future is going to be worse than the present — it’s created at a low-level out of fear, pessimism, scarcity, and victimhood.
In psychology, prospection states that your view of the future shapes your attitudes and behaviors in the present. If you believe the future is worse than the present, your chances of acting powerfully in the present are slim to none.
High achievers aren’t aware of most things out there.
They don’t consume the mainstream news or media.
As former NFL player Bo Eason has said, pro athletes don’t watch sports on TV. They’re focused on playing the game, not entertaining themselves.
This doesn’t mean you should be randomly ignorant or uninformed. It simply means you’re strategically ignorant of things that aren’t helpful.
Instead, high achievers consume media that relates to their goals. For example, if they’re trying to build financial wealth, they focus only on media and information that helps them build their wealth.
High achievers consume media that makes them realize their future is bigger than their past.
They study information that helps them think better, focus better, and tangibly know how to achieve their goals.
To level-up, cut off most of the options.
Don’t watch mainstream news.
Don’t watch mainstream media.
Focus on and consume information and media that ultimately helps you.
3. CREATE FORCING FUNCTIONS
“I think the ability of the average man could be doubled if it were demanded, if the situation demanded.” — Will Durant
You’re always either rising or falling to the demands of your situation. If your situation isn’t demanding you to rise up, then you probably won’t.
Your situation will rarely exact lasting and radical changes out of you on its own. It’s likely to be a continuation of your present circumstance without active intervention.
You can make that intervention through a forcing function. A forcing function is any situational factor that forces you to produce an outcome.
You can engineer situations that force you to change.
When you create a situation that forces you to rise up, you’ll rise up.
If you’re publicly committed, people know it’s coming.
You’ve outsourced your motivation to a situation, which is far more powerful than leaving it up to chance.
Apple runs a famous keynote every year. Aside from being a great PR and marketing opportunity, this is really a forcing function for the business more than anything.
Every year, every employee knows when the next keynote is. It’s on the calendar. It’s public. It’s committed. It can’t be changed, altered, or moved.
The products must be finished by the keynote.
Procrastination is not an option when deadlines are made public.
You can do this, too. Outsource your willpower to a situation. Let your forcing functions guide you to action. Don’t rely on your own energy, which will always eventually burn out.
You create your own “Apple keynote” in 3 ways:
A. Time Function
Short deadlines really do work.
If you give yourself a month to do something, it will take a month.
If you give yourself a week, it will take a week.
If you give yourself three days, it will take three days.
Try fully blocking-out 3 days for you to do the thing you wanted to do for the entirety of next month. You’ll surprise yourself with what you can do.
B. Social Function
Said Johann Hari said in his famous Ted talk, “the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is human connection.”
Human connection is the opposite of failure. You need social support to succeed.
If you have a workout partner waiting for you at the gym, you are FAR more likely to go than if you simply go to the gym alone. You’ll almost always let yourself down before letting others down.
Build relationships where you’re expected to be more. This is called the Pygmalion effect, which states that we’re either rising or falling to the demands or expectations of those around us.
When you have someone who can hear you and help you reconstruct the meaning of your experiences, you’ll fly.
Create social accountability and forcing functions by involving other people in your goals.
When you have someone who can…
- hear you
- empathize with you
- understand you
- be there for you
Everything changes.
This is what trauma expert Peter Levine calls an “empathetic witness.” With a witness, you’re limitless.
C. Increased Load
When David Goggins had a daughter, he realized his performance not only affected him; it actually impacted his family. That gave him more incentive to get down to work.
“Now it wasn’t just about me and my dreams of becoming a SEAL. I had a family to think about, which raised the stakes that much higher. If I failed this time, it wouldn’t mean that I was just going back to ground zero, emotionally and financially, but I would be bringing my new family there with me.”
When things get more difficult, you’ll actually progress quicker.
In a TED Talk I gave years ago, I shared a story from David Bednar of a truck that got stuck on a snowy road. It was only until the load was added to the truck that it received enough traction to move forward.
Our lives are the same way.
I needed to rise up. I needed to get things done.
Find coaches. Mentorships. Accountability partners. People who are so involved in your goals that your performance not only affects your outcomes but also impacts their outcomes.
There’s a lot of research that shows that the more invested you are, the more committed you become.
When you invest money, time, and relationships into a goal, you’re going to be a lot more committed to your future self.
When you hire someone, it gets real.
When you put money down, it gets real.
When you block out the time, it gets real.
You start to identify with the goal more and more.
Whatever your goal is, invest heavily into it.
4. LEARN QUICKLY
High achievers have high accountability. They’re constantly studying information that helps them achieve, and avoid (or are strategically ignorant) of information that tries to destroy their hope and confidence in the future.
Low achievers don’t want to learn new methods or ways of achieving their goals.
Deep down, they want to be stuck.
They want to keep trying the same things over and over while expecting a different result.
They’re unwilling to learn new methods and means. They’re stuck in one way.
You need a clear vision; you need the belief that you can achieve it, but you also need to find a deliberate and tactical pathway to getting there.
This is why high achievers consume less but BETTER media. So they can learn better strategies, mindsets, and behaviors that allow them new and unique ways of achieving their goals.
Your chances of success at a given goal can usually be traced back to how flexible you are in learning how to get there.
5. RAISE THE STAKES
“Pressure can burst a pipe, or pressure can make a diamond.” — Attributed to Robert Horry
I started blogging online around the exact same time that my wife and I got 3 foster kids in 2015.
Writing is something I had literally procrastinated doing for years.
It wasn’t until I had that new responsibility heaved upon me that I finally had the courage to act.
Things get very real when there are mouths to feed.
“With great power comes great responsibility,” from Spider-Man’s uncle Ben is famous and well-known, but is actually the reverse order of the truth:
With great responsibility comes great power.
With great responsibility for the outcomes you create, great power flows into your life. Or as Jocko Willink and Leif Babin would say, you’ve got to take on extreme ownership.
Extreme ownership means you’ve implemented the forcing functions in your life — short deadlines, social accountability, high investment.
It means you have high consequences for failure.
Researchers on “flow” have discovered that when the consequences for failure are HIGH, it’s actually easier to tap into flow state.
For example, extreme athletes like snowboarders hitting huge jumps— could face injury or even death as a consequence for failing.
So they ensure success.
So they lock into an extreme flow state and channel their deepest performance.
That’s what you want to do too.
When you engineer situations that force your deepest commitment, you generate healthy stress, or “eustress.” This is otherwise known as the “zone of proximal development,” or the zone where you become stronger and more deeply committed.
Healthy pressure is eustress. It’s the kind of stress that makes you stronger.
Here’s why most people don’t succeed: they are too afraid to create an environment that would force them to.
6. SHARE YOUR GOALS OFTEN
“The only way to make your present better is by making your future bigger.” — Dan Sullivan
Most people are too afraid to say out loud who their future self is.
They’re too afraid to admit what they want.
They’re scared of what they want.
They’re too complacent to remove the negative inputs from their life.
They’re scared to design an environment that keeps them strategically and constantly aware of their future self.
They’re scared to look in the mirror.
They’re scared to put up the post-it notes.
They’re scared to apply forcing functions.
When people ask what your goals are, do you tell them what you really want?
Or do you tell them the watered-down version of what you really want?
Do you know what you really want?
Do you tell them?
7. CONTROL YOUR ENVIRONMENT
“If you do not create and control your environment, your environment creates and controls you.” — Dr. Marshall Goldsmith
“Your input determines your outlook, your outlook determines your output, your output determines your future.” — Zig Ziglar
Research has found that your peer group determines:
- Your income level
- Your religious or spiritual inclinations
- Whether or not you’re an alcoholic
- Whether or not you’re an entrepreneur
- Whether or not you succeed in school
And much more.
Your environment is king. Your inputs are king. The inputs you get from other people affect nearly everything in your life.
Anything that comes in — information, food, experiences, or knowledge — literally becomes part of you, both in your physical body and your mental body.
Whatever you let in is who you become.
“I find that almost every thought I have is downstream from what I consume. If you have better inputs, you naturally get better outputs.” –James Clear
If you are letting in garbage, then your mind is becoming a garden filled with weeds and garbage.
If you are letting in powerful things, your mind is becoming a beautiful landscape.
Either way, your environment shapes you. Your environment shapes your thoughts, goals, and even identity.
To change your life, change your environment.
8. Conclusion: Your New Standard
“Change before you have to.” — Jack Welch
You are so much more adaptive than you think.
You are so much more powerful than you think.
You are so much more creative than you think.
You have to make the leap and trust in your ability to adapt.
When you surround yourself with new people, you’re going to have new thoughts.
When you have forcing functions, you’ll find yourself in a new environment.
Success is like jumping into a cold swimming pool.
It’s cold and uncomfortable at first.
It’s stressful.
The anticipation of doing it is far more scary than the act itself.
And then, you find out that it’s not so bad.
You quickly adapt.
You see new things.
You shift your situation.
Your goals, identity, and character will all match the new environment you create.
Go create it.
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