7 Secrets To Transform Yourself Right Now
Introduction
You have positive faith but don’t see the evidence to make you actually believe in that faith.
You set goals but your subconscious doesn’t believe what your self-talk says to it, so your conscious desires never happen.
You don’t know what success actually is for you, because you don’t know why you want it and what it looks like.
You don’t know what long term fulfillment even is, much less what it looks like for yourself, because you listen to your ego that’s never satisfied and always wants more.
The first secret is you can be fulfilled, now.
The second secret, the biggest in fact, is that you have and always will have everything you need, and can be whoever you need to be to possess whatever you want to have, now.
3. You Actually Don’t Own Anything
What does it actually mean to “have” or “own” something whether it’s achieving a goal or owning an object?
In this context, it usually means owning something by purchasing it with money. For this piece, let’s say it’s a big thing like a house or car. But when you finally do have that house or car. What changes about you? What construct in your mind get’s created?
- Your ego feels much bigger and satisfied (for a little while)
- Your self-worth (ego self) goes up.
- When you first buy it especially, you’ll have huge rushes of dopamine (reward chemicals) and you’ll increase seratonin for feeling important about it.
If you’re lucky and know how to appreciate things, each and every time you walk into that house, perhaps you can repeat those feelings every time you walk in.
Perhaps each and every time your child walks into that house, you get the seratonin hit of feeling important because you provided for your family.
Those things are all great when appreciated with self awareness and a knowledge for how happiness actually works.
Hopefully you can sustain those feelings but the natural tendency is that it get’s perceived as “old” pretty quickly and the day to day drive of the ego simply makes you want more which takes you back to the day to day pre-occupation of wanting.
What does this teach us?
Ultimately you’re buying feelings and chasing what you believe will make you feel satisfied.
The hard truth is if you have an ego as everyone does, and you identify with it (especially if you’re reading this and saying “yea but those things ARE what make me happy and you’re full of it”), that those feelings go away and that level of satisfaction fulfillment eventually becomes the norm.
But are you fulfilled? What’s the difference?
To get more of those feelings, you need more things. And I’m not saying that striving, growth (both tangible and intangible) and acquiring stuff is or isn’t good or doesn’t have it’s place (I love high-end fashion and want a nice living situation like everyone), what I am saying is to transform yourself right now, the first step is to recognize what having something actually means for your self and what it actually get’s you when you buy it.
Then you can make better decisions.
So then what?
Now we know what we’re actually buying, but why are we buying it?
You’re actually buying perceived fulfillment or worse yet value and perception in relationship.
“If I buy this, it will get me the feelings and self-worth of who I want to be perceived as”.
“I am what I think you think I am” is an immutable law.
Generally this is so you can earn your own respect and love, or the respect and love of your friends and family.
So what you’re often actually buying is self esteem, self-love and perception from others.
All these things can and need to be had now, and if you’re currently striving to get to any desired result, from A to B, or make a personal transformation, you need to have those things prior to manifesting the external tangible goals.
When this shift occurs:
- Wanting a “big house” to impress others or achieve becomes having a “happy home”, or sacred space for yourself and family.
- Owning a “nice car” turns into being able to value any car, and derive satisfaction from keeping it in great shape and deriving joy every time you drive, no matter what car it is.
- You won’t care whether it’s a Mercedes or Kia, and will end up with the Mercedes anyway and will just enjoy it that much more.
It’s the understanding and intention.
I’m not saying to suppress your ego. Ego is and always will be there to keep us wanting more. It’s being able to channel that with accuracy and grace, for both your own self-preservation and generating results.
As Dr. David Hawkins says in his legendary book, Letting Go:
“The mind has the idea that the way to get a thing is to want it. Actually, if we examine the issue, we will see that events are due to decisions, and choices are based on our intentions.”
This is why we often learn the hard lesson of when we’re driving the new car and as much as it’s nicer and provides a better experience (which of course has it’s own benefits and very well is worth investing in but again with the proper knowledge and understanding) often gives us the exact same feelings of fulfillment from deriving intrinsic value from it it (or not) or joy from driving it.
4. Most Faith Is Blind
Having positive faith is a must but having faith without efficacy is blind faith.
Efficacy means effectiveness.
In the context of faith, it means seeing evidence and receiving feedback that confirms the principles (faith) you’re following and the faith you have isn’t blind.
- Without deep self-awareness, you’re blindly faithful.
- Without an understanding of yourself, you’re blindly faithful.
- Without high conscious awareness, you’re blindly faithful.
- Without a lot of knowledge, you’re dangerously faithful.
- Believing you know everything and not wanting to know more, blindly faithful.
Knowing a lot because you yearn to learn every moment you can yet continuing to be in awe of just how much you don’t know, the beginning of faith with efficacy.
There’s nothing worse than being blindly faithful for the (uninformed) sake of it or worse yet not taking ownership and believing things will happen to you if you only continue to have faith.
Yes, you need positive faith and an optimistic attitude and those have their benefits a long with all the other benefits of positive thinking that very well have lot’s and lot’s of benefits, but if you don’t have the principles that provide positive feedback, that reinforce what you’re doing and the way you’re doing it are correct, your faith is blind.
There is a way to live in surrender, with efficacy.
There’s a way to pray or meditate, with efficacy.
There’s a way to “visualize a goal and allow it to manifest without force”, with efficacy.
Without the right principles and self awareness, your faith is blind.
Dig deep into yourself and understand.
Dig deep into yourself and learn a lot about everything.
Dig deep into yourself and want to know.
If you don’t want to dig deep, you’re faith is blind.
5. Know What Success Looks Like and Understand The Fulfillment You’ll Derive From It
I would bet 99% of the population’s action is taken without a proper understanding what they actually want, why they want it and what it looks like.
Why because it’s very hard. Ryan Holiday does a great job distilling this in a couple articles and points out how he publishes one book a year, and that that was a goal he worked toward when he first began planning to become a writer, not something he came up with on the fly.
Most of us think we want a “good job”, but realize the label of having that job isn’t worth the expense of doing work that’s not fulfilling, meaningful work and expansive to ourselves.
Most of us think we want to be a chef (or anything) because we like cooking, but find out we derive joy from the meditative effect of cooking, the exact opposite of what goes into starting and operating a restaurant (self awareness).
Most of us want to make a lot of money, not knowing the understanding of what money means to us, properly valuing the benefits it can bring us (after the basics it’s digits on a computer screen)
6. Ensure Your Subconscious Beliefs Don’t Block Your Conscious Desires
“Your subconscious mind needs to believe what your conscious mind says to it.” — Dr. Sam Qureshi
If you don’t believe you deserve what you want, you won’t get it.
If you don’t become the person who takes the right actions of the person who deserves what he wants, you won’t get it.
If you continually fail at hitting goals and don’t see evidence that you’re moving toward the fulfillment of your goal, you won’t build the confidence required to get what you want.
None of this is intended to be metaphysical or ‘woo woo’, though it applies metaphysical principles that have been proven by science.
To dominate a field, you need to master it, and that takes putting in the work.
To voraciously put in the work each day, you need to love the work itself.
To overcome doubts that every one of us is wired to have, you need to continually see evidence that alleviate your doubts.
You can’t magically eliminate doubt.
I used to constantly doubt my ability as a writer and fear not getting into the flow required to tap my genius, but it’s comments from people and notes saying my work was transformational for them or excellent. You need real feedback to actually eliminate the doubts because you’re definitely going to have them.
You’ll learn to manage and channel them when you begin to see positive feedback.
With 95% of our actions coming from the subconscious mind, it’s critical to have actual evidence to believe what your conscious mind says to it (what you want) and believe the right things (programs).
If you don’t believe the right things, you’re goals are doomed before you even set them.
If your goals are doomed before you set them, you’ll miss over and over and won’t build confidence, have the ability and conviction to share your voice and ultimately, achieve mastery.
7. Absolute Resourcefulness — The Secret To Ensuring Goal Achievement
“Burn your boats and take the fucking island.” — Tony Robbins
I just quit the company I started after having founded it two years ago, raised seven figures of capital, and helped put together a team of about 8.
I did it because reading, writing and sharing my work is the most expansive and additive existence I can have. The depth and personal growth that results from reading a book, the deep flow that comes from writing and the riveting excitement that comes from a creative breakthrough is priceless and worth burning my boats for.
These things happen every day when I read and write and they accelerate my evolution. Though I was happy working with my team and partners at my company, it was far from the level of expansiveness and personal growth required to keep me evolving at a fast rate.
- You always have to be growing.
- You always have to be pushing yourself.
- You always have to be evolving.
Faster and faster if growth is your purpose.
The secret to achieving every goal is to create the right context by making decisions that are optimized for growth (in this case, personal evolution). It’s that simple but profound to practice.
The hard part is of course is day to day reality — being able to last and pay the bills and everything else required to give you the time to make decisions that allow you to work on yourself, set big goals and allow the growth to happen.
But that’s what makes being human so great, we can plan and calculate and control our realities and channel things like uncertainty and even use it to accelerate our success.
Both learning that lesson and figuring out how to apply those principles to win are the real life skills that matter most.
So case in point, I left college to join as the first employee as a start up, my decision process at the time was “they’re a very smart team I can learn from”.
Growth, yes.
After six years and earning a high income which I mostly poured back and invested in myself, I chose to evolve and gave up a $300k guaranteed salary to start my own company. I did this without a lot of money in the bank but knew I could raise money.
It was my first idea and a crazy one and it failed miserably.
However it was that that experience that created the context for gigantic goal setting, innovation and therefore learning and growth at a fast rate.
“If an idea at first doesn’t sound stupid, it isn’t innovative.” — Reid Hoffman, Founder of Paypal and Linkedin
So first try. Crazy idea. Moved as fast as I could.
The recipe for growth.
Only three years later (though it felt like 30), after getting a desk at a world renown start up lab that includes investors like Tim Ferriss and others.
I made it kicking off my third company.
After two years in, I feel I’ve mastered entrepreneurship and have gotten through making every major forseable mistakes and compounded a ton of small wins and became the person who had the experience and deep understanding to start a company with anyone I wanted which is where I’m at now.
However two years into that, as I write this, as a result of that fast growth, I’ve evolved into a writer and teacher. So naturally, I chose to follow my deepest inclination I’ve always had and write full time.
I have not even “made big money” yet and compared to many of my peers, I’m not as what most people (not growth minded) would consider “successful” because I don’t “have stability in my career”.
Though growth and uncertainty is what keeps me stable.
Those ideas are only symbolic constructs, in our heads, and are based on fear.
The fear construct defined in your parents head of “get a steady job”.
Or the “fear construct” of your peers who say “he jumps around a lot”.
They just don’t understand the framework of fast growth and the experimentation required.
As Peter Thiel brilliantly told Eric Schmidt when saying Google doesn’t innovate because it “acts like a bank”, and to look at Amazon as a true innovator (they just barely started making a profit recently after hitting about $100 billion in annual revenue) because they give up every dollar they have and continually re-invest it in the entity for growth.
They do everything for growth.
To think a company can produce over $100 billion a year in revenue and not earn a dollar of profit because they choose growth is astonishing an admirable.
Jeff Bezos is driven by innovation.
Innovation for you is personal growth and investing in yourself.
And you wonder why Amazon’s taking over the world.
I choose to be Amazon, not the bank.
I choose to “innovate” (evolve) not profit.
It’s choosing to evolve that big goals happen without knowing it.
I achieved all I have in the process of taking moonshots and having high standards, and that’s the only way your subconscious can believe big goals to be achievable.
By making them feel smaller than they actually are and thus achievable.
Make the choice to evolve and you’ll achieve everything you want.
Soon you’ll begin to do it faster and faster and bigger and bigger goals become easy to target and the results just become the details.
But the point is you continue growing.
Remaining the student and remaining hungry.
Steve Jobs didn’t create Apple to make money. He achieved Apple because he “stayed hungry and stayed foolish” (what Apple’s culture stands for).
What happens to the growth obsessed person is eventually mastery.
So for the entrepreneur / writer or any artist really, the thinking becomes:
“If we went after this problem in this market, if we won and scaled up for three years, we’d get to a $1billion valuation. Maybe we’d sell or take it public.”
Let’s start the paper work and begin testing. Lo and behold it begins to happen.
There are others who don’t because they believe it’s so hard.
It’s hard until you learn to make it easy when you achieve mastery.
When you achieve mastery, you look forward to the struggle and challenge.
With mastery, you look forward to the journey. It becomes fun.
Mastery begins when you learn the principles.
Conclusion
Choosing to evolve forces the absolute resourcefulness required to achieve a goal. The hard part is being able to last through it all and having the resilience to overcome the fear that exists in your consciousness.
I had a deep seated fear of speaking in public and leading meetings of smart people, doing it forced me to purge and overcome that.
That is the only way you’ll purge what you fear most and accomplish every goal you set your mind to.
Choose to evolve.
I’ve done everything I’ve wanted to do, and am continuing to accomplish everything I’ve wanted to accomplish.
Though I struggle daily, I overcome.
I still act it. I still am it.
You can act it and be it too.
Choose to evolve every time and decide to transform yourself right now.
