The Self-Improvement Superpower You Can Give to Yourself
It’s yours for the taking (because too many others have abdicated their responsibility to be GREAT)
“Think about it: Most people don’t even show up. Of the people who do, most don’t really push themselves. So to show up and be disciplined about daily improvement? You are the rarest of the rare.”
-Ryan Holiday, Discipline is Destiny
It’s so easy to set yourself apart from the crowd today.
As they say, it’s never crowded along the extra mile, and most people just won’t do the work that you’re willing to do in order to get ahead.
Not even to get ahead — simply to give yourself the mental freedom to do what’s best for you and to take your life back.
A life spent comparing yourself to others isn’t much of a life, but competition can be good for you.
For example, it’s fun and exciting to match your best against others’ bests and see how far you can go, and how much you can achieve.
Measuring yourself against others who are at least slightly ahead of you, in the context of pushing yourself to be as great as you can be, is something I’d recommend to pretty much everyone. You need that measuring stick in front of you to see what’s possible.
But the reality?
The reality is that most people are barely even trying, least of all trying to become Great.
And therein lies your opportunity. Your chance to give yourself superpowers — the powers of consistency, commitment, and DRIVE.
The fact of the matter is that most people won’t read past the first chapter of a book — if they even read at all.
They won’t stick to a workout plan when it gets hard, and they won’t take any extra classes to give themselves the skills that could enhance their value in the marketplace.
They just won’t do it.
That’s your competition. That is the average that you’re competing against. There is so much low-hanging fruit just waiting for you to step up and take it. There is so much potential out there just waiting to be seized.
When most people are complacent and content with just skating by, it only takes a tiny bit of effort to stand out as someone committed and capable.
The Craziness of Compounding
Is it going to be slow in the beginning? Of course it will. There’s a compounding effect at work here, where the biggest returns lie on the other side of a sustained commitment.
But virtually everyone who says yes to that commitment will tell you that it’s the greatest decision they’ve ever made.
A lot of growth is exponential — damn near invisible in the beginning — and only becomes readily apparent with time.
For example, you’ll gain 2 new YouTube subscribers a week for 3 months, and then you’ll start to gain 10. After a year, you’ll be adding dozens of new subscribers a day, and when you’ve been at it for years and years, you’ll gain 10,000 subscribers from a single video and people will call you an overnight success.
Back in the real world, you can plainly see that going to the gym once, for 10 hours, isn’t going to do it. One workout won’t get you into shape. But 20 minutes a day, for 6 weeks?
Now we’re working! Now the results are showing up!
Start today, and in 2 weeks, you’ll start to feel it. In 4 weeks, you’ll start to see it. And in 6 weeks, people will ask you how.
What’s most important to remember here is that people tend to overestimate what they can do in a day, but greatly underestimate what they can accomplish in a year.
What the most disciplined people in the world have realized is that you need to get to a point mentally where you are willing to keep going through the process, knowing that it’s working, without necessarily seeing the results of your actions.
The Rule of 100
The $100,000,000 CEO, Alex Hormozi, has what he calls the Rule of 100, which is basically when you commit to taking action 100 times, every single day, on the key activity that’s going to move the needle for you.
The idea is that you’re committing to doing something important, and doing it enough times, for long enough, such that it then becomes unreasonable to believe that you won’t be successful.
If you make 100 more sales calls every day, and you do this for the next 365 days, don’t you think that you’d make a lot more money?
What about writing online? Don’t you think that, if you committed to writing just 3 articles per day on Medium, that you would be much further along in your career by the end of the 365 days?
Of course you would!
Is it hard to do? It can be! Certainly! It’s certainly a time commitment to pick up the phone 100 times a day and work to advance your business.
Are barbell squats painful and uncomfortable and frankly, downright boring once you’ve done thousands of them? Absolutely!
But a year of squatting — even once a week — will give you powerful legs and a completely different physique. People know this, but then they don’t do it!
Herein lies your competitive advantage.
Last word now to Ryan Holiday again, from his phenomenal book, Discipline is Destiny:
“The good news is that because it’s hard, most people don’t do it. They don’t show up. They can’t even do one tiny thing a day. So yes, you’re alone, out there on the track in the rain. You’re the only one responding on Christmas. But having the lead is, by definition, a little lonely. This is also why it’s quiet in the morning. You have the opportunities all to yourself.”
All the best,
Matt Karamazov