2 insanely powerful questions to ask yourself daily to get motivation on steroids and feel great no matter what.
Expectations: The mother of sadness. Certainty: The father of motivation. – Truth Cake.
Staying off the emotional roller coaster of taking risks in life is much easier when you know the 2 players that are responsible for nearly everything.
Expectations govern what you feel. Certainty governs what you do.
Tony Robbins often mentions that if when you have Certainty that something will work is the point when you’ll usually get off the fence and actually pursue something. If you’re certain of something though, you inherently have expectations.
If you are given $1 million dollars this moment, you might be happy. If you played the lottery with a friend and split the cost of a ticket (and therefore the expected winnings), and he took $849 Million of the $850 total prize money and gave you only $1 million, now you’re furious.
Your expectations are dictating what you’re feeling.
If I tell you to market a product door to door and you don’t make a dollar for weeks on end, you’ll give up as you probably should; door to door selling sucks. But if you were Certain, and therefore Expecting to make millions by the end of the year you’d likely not give up. However, if you don’t have certainty that you’re going to get paid for working, you’re pretty unlikely to show up to work.
Your levels of certainty are dictating what you’re doing.
There’s a delicate balance of not being emotionally wrapped up in every success, since if that success event doesn’t occur, it’s responded to with sadness. You expect someone to call you for your birthday, and when they don’t, you’re saddened. If you’re depressed about something, it’s usually a matter of just finding where your expectations didn’t match with reality.
Alexander Pope, the famous 18th Century poet says – “Those who expect nothing, will never be disappointed.” This is a pretty melancholy existence. And to follow it up, those who expect nothing often won’t be motivated to try to do anything either.
The good news is that both expectations and your feelings of certainty are both under your mental control 100%. A lot of people starting off in personal development start to feel certain they’ll achieve their goals in record time, then when they don’t hit those expectations, they’re depressed and conclude it’s a bunch of BS.
“Expectation” can be solved by expecting the worse and convincing yourself that you’re fine with it – this allows for upside potential only. But then you lose a lot of motivation in life. Therefore, the secret trick to mastering Certainty is to generally go vague.
Instead of being certain that “Starting this new business will make me rich!” you can restate it to, “Continuing to try multiple things and trying my best will make me rich!”
Now your expectations are that you’ll get rich eventually and your certainty is tied to your general efforts, and not the results of one specific business.
Therefore, each day ask yourself 2 easy questions to feel wonderful and accomplish what you want:
Where can you lower your expectations in life and still be content/happy like a Stoic so you can feel good about your day to day life?
Where can you generalize your certainty a bit and then amplify it up to feel absolute certainty for things you’re striving for?
The master key to decoding Amazon reviews like a boss: Disdain
“Look at what the majority of people are doing, and do the exact opposite, and you’ll probably never go wrong for as long as you live” – Earl Nightingale
People read concepts like this but fail to execute many of the ideas because they fail at embedding the ideas into their mindset foundation. For example, if you’re looking at getting a product and looking at reviews to help you make a decision, you tread down a dangerous path.
Most people are failures. Do you really care about their opinions?
Stop reading reviews in the way you have in the past. Listening to negative reviews is usually the same as listening to advice that feels good. I recently saw multiple videos talking about how it’s okay to be scatterbrained, totally unfocused, and have multiple passions you pursue simultaneously. These ideas are comforting, because it’s where most of us are. Some guru finally just “GETS IT” – of course we can’t be bothered with focusing when we’re busy chasing every new shiny object. This is great advice to feel good temporarily. Bad advice if you’re looking to accomplish much.
Are you skeptical about a course / event, but want to check the reviews first? Beware of your conclusion after you find the negative reviews for that new Tony Robbin’s seminar you were considering. Because after reading reviews…
Of course you knew it was a scam! Thank god read that review so you never went to see for yourself!
Reading reviews on a new type of car wax is valuable. However, reading reviews about a business development program usually not valuable. Did the scathing negative reviewer (foolishly) think that there was too much talk about a growth mindset and it was a waste of time because they just wanted to hear the secret recipe for success? Who knows…more importantly, who cares.
Franchise forums will tell you nearly every franchise is a “scam” or “nearly bankrupted me.” A healthy dose of disdain for the opinions of random people goes a long way.
Consider that winning the lottery makes people go broke.
It’s worth repeating – an effortless, guaranteed, and high income event in someone’s life OFTEN MAKES THEM GO BROKE. What if the lotto was a business opportunity? Consider the review of the average lotto winner could very well be, “Got the money as promised, and went bankrupt a couple years afterwards. What a scam! Avoid winning the lotto!! We want to sue!” Dangerous garbage filling your mind.
Wait…maybe the reviews are biased since people with bad experiences are 2-3x as likely to talk about it than happy customers. That strategy still implies you don’t have enough disdain and are still interested in other random people’s opinions / results. Regardless, say you manage to go out and find out everyone that: 1) Had the intention of getting leaner and 2) Found the best scientifically proven tool to fix solve it (no fads / pills / etc), and 3) Actually purchased the product.
It’s called an exercise bike – and nearly everyone achieved NO RESULTS. It’s not about the saw – it’s about the carpenter. – TruthCake
I talk about not reinventing the wheel here by taking the easy road like a champ and we must use the platforms and knowledge of others to stand on to grow ourselves. However…
Consider deeply the source (often unknown) of the opinion / review you’re using at your platform for your own growth.
Stop pursuing your dreams.
Many years ago, I had a friend that loved going out in hopes to pursue his soul mate. It’s a good idea to get moving towards trying to pursue what you want. But it would have been easier if he just instead spent time thinking about how to become an attractive man.
They call it the Law of the Attraction. Not the Law of Pursuit.
Pursuing something implies it’s running away from you. It’s inherently harder to pursue something than it is to attract it. If he had become a highly attractive man (ie. rock star, celebrity, home town hero, etc), women would chase him – they would pursue him, and he would attract them.
You can go about getting what you want in either 2 ways:
1) Pursue it, which implies it’s harder and moving away from you without effort. This strategy works – it’s how most of nature works (eg. tigers vs gazelle).
2) Attract it, which implies it’s easier and moving towards you without effort. This strategy works much better and revolves around working on yourself (become an attractive person – letting girls hit on you), which changing yourself is easier to alter than the other way around.
What are you chasing that would instead come to you if you changed something about yourself?
Jan-2019 Update – Dammit if Tai Lopez didn’t say it better, he said, “Never chase what you want. Elevate your game until what you want chases you.” Nicely said. I said it first, Tai said it better.
Why your intention matters more than your actual results.
“It’s the thought that counts!” This terrible excuse (usually for failing at something) may have more truth in it than it seems.
Recall, this is a similar concept on premises and book summaries that states that the “why” matters more than the “what.” For example:
The ‘what’ is – “He’s successful.”
The ‘why’ is – “Because he’s a great father and husband.”
But that “why” may be awful to you if he was trying to give you advice on making a pile of cash.
There’s a gas station own that updated his price to be $2.986 – 6/10ths, instead of the typical 9/10ths that 99% of stations use for their price. If his intention is to update your pricing and he screwed up and intended for it to be 9/10ths, then he’s just an absent minded mistake prone business owner. However, if he intended to make it 6/10ths to get people to talk about it and stand out from the crowd, now he’s a genius marketer.
The “what” is – Gas is $2.986
The “why” is – He made a mistake. Which leads to, “He’s a moron!”
or
The “why” is – He was executing a brilliant marketing tactic. Which leads to, “He’s a genius!”
The resultant reality of “the price is X” is the same regardless of the intention, but the intention is what matters most to people. While “intention” is important and creates a foundation for something to be repeated, we need to see the reality of things as well.
If intention is more important than reality for people, and intention is a mental construct, you can start to see where “reality” can be easily manipulated for many people.
Revealed: The complete secret formula to find your passion.
You don’t. That’s the secret.
Very few thought leaders will admit this idea of finding a passion is a terrible idea. It’s because it’s highly lucrative to sell people an easily believable model:
1) Find your passion
2) Then you’ll love what you do
3) Then you’ll get rich
Give people some anecdotal stories about people finding what they love to do, get better at it, and get rich and happy.
“All you need to do is find your passion!” This meat of this statement has truth but is wrapped in a thick BS tortilla.
Seth Godin said it best when he said in an interview with Tom Bilyeu the following:
Passion is created – NOT found.
You pick what you want it to be. Creating your passion is done by getting some good feedback around something and changing your neurochemistry of your brain (just like Tony Robbins talks about) to anchor in positive states around that event.
They want you to think it’s in your DNA, and you just need to meditate more to find it!
Good news – it’s not in your DNA somewhere. If it was, no one would have ever “found their passion” prior to the internet since most people’s passion these days is coding, YouTube content creation, Photoshopping pictures, animating in Adobe Flash, etc. Even outside of tech, did every person that’s had “passion” in their DNA for piano playing all live a dispassionate life prior to the invention of the piano by Bartolomeo Cristofori? No.
Passion is picked and cultivated by you.
Perhaps we should examine our other goals that are similar to “finding your passion” are actually impossible and ludicrous. If you’re not making progress (even a SMALL amount) at all on the goal, it’s time to:
1) Change the strategy (eg. Stop meditating thinking about what you might like, and instead just actually try a lot of different things)
2) Give up, (eg. How can I get the results of passion without being passionate?)
3) Examine is that goal is even possible or legit and tweak it (eg. Don’t find your passion, create it instead).
Beware of the book summary.
There’s an art to doing a book summary, which I can assure you very few people do well at. Many book summaries have 2 fatal flaws:
1) They tell you the conclusion,
2) They boil it down.
Sounds great right? It’s terrible. Because conclusions don’t matter nearly as much as the premises to have reached the conclusion. Outside of math, when you have good premises, you can make many (not just one) good conclusions.
Premise: He’s been in jail 9 times for theft.
Conclusion: He would be a poor candidate to work the register.
Conclusion: He’s probably not the best person to date your daughter.
Etc
Versus if you had the right conclusion of “He’s not a good guy for my daughter to date,” but your conclusion was based on the premise that, “He doesn’t make $100k a year.” Now you’re making the right conclusion currently, but your premises / beliefs are so wrong, you’ll likely make many other stupid conclusions in the future.
If your conclusion is good but the premises aren’t, you’ll only be able to make that 1 good conclusion.
The problem with book summaries is everything can be summarized up to sound stupid or worthless, and also the conclusion is given, which blows over the most important part many times – the premise.
Consider how worthless the following accurate, great summary type statements are:
“I read that book on persuasion, it basically says to try to make your idea seem like their own.”
“I listened to Gary Vee’s recent podcast, he basically says to work hard.”
“I read about the guy that called Gary Vee’s message ‘Struggle Porn’, he basically says ‘struggling is overrated.'”
If you keep it up with this sloppy and “efficient” way of summarizing everything, it becomes highly detrimental. Because everything seems trivial, obvious, or even just dumb, when you summarize it too much.
This is because understanding the premises are more important than the conclusions many times. People feel like you disagree with them if you don’t agree with the premise, even if you agree with the resultant conclusion. Conclusions are too easy to boil down to meaningless ideas and also blows over a lot of the premises to focus on the conclusion too much.
Beware of the book summary – they give you the conclusion, which keeps you from what matters – how the book concludes something, and the low level details of the conclusion.
The 3,253 step process to getting what you want.
Everyone wants a simple process…or a fast process. Generally they want both, at the same time.
The “The 5 step process you need to do to make $10k a month in your business!” The problem with the desire for a simple process is the harder it becomes. Interestingly enough, when you have more steps though, things get easier NOT harder, BUT it becomes evident it’s going to take longer.
Regular people wrestle with whether they want something effortlessly or instantly – both of which they’re not getting. But they wrestle with wanting a formula to have something fast, but incredibly difficult. Or a formula to attain something very slowly, but very easily.
As stated in the post I made on the long hard way being the shortcut, the more steps you know, the easier it becomes, the more momentum you can get, the faster you can move forward. If you’re stuck, you likely just need to think of what the next step is to move toward in a tiny bit.
Everything becomes easier with more steps.
The 3 step process to become a rock star: 1) Get a guitar, 2) Practice like crazy, 3) Charge to let people hear you play. As opposed to the 3,000 step process, 1) Get a Fender Stratocaster from Guitar Center, 2) Get an amp, 3) Get a teacher… And so on. This is far easier and you’re likely to succeed with the 3,000 step process much more so than the 3 step process I gave you.
Start training yourself to break things down into smaller steps you can always be taking and looking for the process that’s more detailed than the appealing shortcut of a “3 step process.”
What is this site?
Self improvement for smart people.
I follow business leaders, gurus, and philosophers and note things others missed that I’ve found valuable.
This site is my precious treasure chest of ideas on business, philosophy and life. And hopefully during your pillaging here, you get your mind blown.
My life’s goals are to help summarize the human knowledge base, dispel self improvement myths, and achieve a resultant and unrelenting state of 24/7 euphoria. I’m kidding, but we’ll still try!
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