DO THIS to Unleash Your Potential | Lessons from George R.R. Martin

Good morning, Believe Nation! It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe that you have something special that when you unleash it, it will be able to change the world. So to help you on your journey, today's message is Aim High. Over to you, George R.R. Martin.

And I started actually writing a science fiction novel that had been an idea I'd been playing with a long time, a book called Avalon. And I was working on Avalon, and it was coming pretty well. Um, and suddenly the first chapter of Game of Thrones came to me, where they find the direwolf pups.

It's a freak.

It's a direwolf. I knew it wasn't part of the science fiction novel I was writing. This was clearly a fantasy, medieval, had these wolves and this large family. I'd been reading a lot of historical fiction, and it might have been in the back of my mind, but suddenly it all gelled, and I wrote that chapter in like 2, 3 days. It just came together. Came to pour out of me.

Lord Stark, there are 5 pups, one for each of the Stark children. The direwolf is the sigil of your house. They were meant to have them. You'll train them yourselves, you'll feed them yourselves, and if they die, you'll bury them yourselves.

When I did return to books, I said to myself, okay, I've had many things optioned, they never make them. I've done pilots and TV shows, tried to keep them within budget and producible, they never make that. I'm tired of playing that game. I'm gonna, you know, I have a big imagination, I have an epic story I wanna tell, I'm gonna make it as big as my imagination, I'm gonna have all the castles and battles I want, I'm gonna have hundreds of characters, 'cause the real world is complex, I want my fictional world to be complex too, not a kinda simplified thing. I wanna have giant battles, I wanna have incredible castles that each one is distinct from the other, that people remember for all time. I want to have dragons and direwolves and mammoths and a wall of ice that's 700 feet tall. I want something huge and epic that can stand up there with Tolkien.

A funny thing happens when you start setting bigger goals for yourself, where you start imagining a bigger future potential for yourself. You start to accomplish bigger things. Most people have really, really small goals for themselves, and when they hit it, they're happy they hit their goal, and then they set another really small goal for themselves, and they continue to live small, and they continue to play small because their thinking is small, because their ambitions are small. And as long as you're happy, that's great, that's fine, but I think if you have the ability to do more, then you have the responsibility to do more as well. And I encourage all of you to think, How can I do something bigger? How can I have a bigger goal for myself? How can I stretch myself to do a little bit more than what is comfortable for me? If I look at my overall goal, I want to help a billion entrepreneurs. I want to help a billion entrepreneurs in my lifetime. Like, how does that happen? A lot of people look at that goal and they say, well, that's impossible. It's never going to happen. A lot of people say, well, how do you track it? Are there even a billion entrepreneurs out there in the world? And the people who think like that, the people who come from that world of scarcity, they think small. They are not out doing amazing things. You need to avoid those people. Those people are like a disease. Their small thinking can be a disease to you. Their doubt, their negativity, their small thinking can seep into you to shrink yourself down. You want to go off and do this amazing thing, but then all the people around you are negative, and what they're doing is pulling on you, and they pull you right back down to where you were. 'cause you don't want to be judged by them, because you don't want to disappoint them, because you don't want to fail in front of them. That's toxic. And you may not be able to totally eliminate those people from your life. Like, maybe that's your mom, and maybe there's a lot of great things about your mom, but this piece you don't like. So you may not be able to completely brush aside these people, but you can supplement with a lot of greatness. You can supplement with videos and people and ideas and resources and thoughts and books. That make you want to play a bigger game. If you hung around George R.R. Martin more, you would aim higher. You would have bigger goals for yourself. It's why I have this channel. It's why I had the Mentor Me series and the Top 10, to hang around these people more. People you might never ever meet in your life. Some people who passed on, some people you may never get access to, to get more of their wisdom, their thought process, their mindset. Because if you hang around people and consuming content of people who are thinking big, you are going to want to think big too. And it doesn't mean you need to read a book on 7 ways to think big. That's one way to do it, you know, the how-to step-by-step approach. But just by osmosis, just by hanging around and watching people thinking big, it'll naturally seep into you to want to think bigger and do more as well. When I first started working with Lily and decided to take her on and mentor her and build her up into being an entrepreneur, Her big goal was to do a TEDx talk. That's what she wanted to do. Like, I want to be a TEDx speaker. I need to— my big goal as a speaker is I want to get on TEDx. I'm like, TEDx is nothing. TEDx is small. I mean, I have respect for TED and everything they're doing at TEDx conferences, but you're so much more talented than that. You have so much more of a ceiling than just doing a TEDx. And she saw that as being like a 1-year goal or 2-year goal or something off in the future. Like, no, we're gonna— you're gonna apply right now. You are going to start researching TED, you're going to look at all the different ones that are coming up, and you're going to start applying right now. And she got her first one, and she's leaving to go do her first TEDx talk, and she's applying to more. And a new goal that we created together is for her to be the most prolific TEDx talk speaker ever. I don't know how many people have done multiple TEDx talks, have done like 3 or 4, I don't know what the highest is, but The goal is for her to be the highest, to have the highest, the most number of TEDx Talks. And so taking that goal of something that's way down in the future and bringing it to today, taking that big thing that you think is impossible, that maybe one day will happen, and making it happen sooner, taking the recent goal that you had and you just hit, and that was a safe, easy, comfortable goal to hit, and make it bigger. It's like, I don't know how I'm going to get there, But I'm gonna try to figure it out. Like, when you set yourself a target and a goal, you're much more likely to have your brain then try to figure out, okay, how am I gonna accomplish it? When I set my goal this year to hit a million YouTube subscribers by the end of the year, I had nothing to justify that. You know, my growth rate wasn't on track. I would be way short. But having that as a goal then tweaks my mind. Okay, how do we do that? How do we up our production quality? How do we bring on better videos? How do we give more value to you guys watching so that you want to watch more, you want to share more, you want to tell your friends about it, you want to go out and more importantly go and do something in your life, in your business as a result of watching the videos? And now we're on track. We're on track for late December, but it's, it's on track, right? And hopefully we continue to climb and grow and we hit it. And what seemed like a crazy stretch goal at the beginning of the year is now, I Achievable. And so I want the same thing for you. Take whatever goal you have that you've been hitting consistently and stretch it more. Aim bigger. Believe in yourself more. Stop listening to the naysayers and the doubters and the haters and the small-thinking people around you. It's not that they're evil or bad. We're not judging them. Just stop listening to them. Believe in yourself more. Surround yourself with the resources that build you up and make you feel unstoppable and give you boldness and courage. And implement that into your daily routine so that you wake up every day and do the thing that makes you feel bold and courageous. If you did that every day for a year, just imagine where you would be compared to where you are right now. Aim higher. And so the question of the day today is, I'm curious, what is your big goal? What's the big thing that you're trying to accomplish? What's the big impact that you're trying to make? I'd love to hear from you. Leave it down in the comments below. I also wanna give a quick shout out to Rich. Rich, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. It really means a lot to me, your support, and I hope you enjoyed the read. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love, and I'll see you guys again tomorrow morning for another shot of en espresso.

If you configure your life so that what you are genuinely doing is aiming at the highest possible good, then the things that you need to, to survive and to thrive on a day-to-day basis will deliver themselves to you. That's a hypothesis, and it's not some simple hypothesis, right? Because it— what it basically says is, if you dare to do the most difficult thing that you can conceptualize, your life will work out better than it will if you do anything else. Well, how are you going to find out if that's true? Well, It's a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. There's no way you're going to find out whether or not that's true unless you do it. So no one can tell you either, because just because it works for someone else— I mean, that's interesting and all that, but it's no proof that it'll work for you. You have to be all in in this game. There is no more effective way of operating in the world than to conceptualize the highest good that you can and then strive to attain it. There's no more practical pathway to the kind of success that you could have if you actually knew what success was. The world shifts itself around your aim. Because you're a creature that has an aim. You have to have an aim in order to do something. You're an aiming creature. You look at a point and you move towards it. It's built right into you. And so you have an aim. Well, let's say your aim is the highest possible aim. Well, then so that sets up the world around you. It organizes all of your perceptions. It organizes what you see and you don't see. It organizes your emotions and your motivations. So you organize yourself around that aim, and then what happens is the day manifests itself as a set of challenges and problems. And if you solve them properly, then you stay on the pathway towards that aim, and you can concentrate on the day. And so that way you get to have your cake and eat it too, because you can You can point into the distance, the far distance, and you can live in the day. And it seems to me that that's— that makes every moment of the day supercharged with meaning. That's how— because if everything that you're doing every day is related to the highest possible aim that you can conceptualize, well, that's the very definition of the meaning that would sustain you in your life.

Thinking completely different is the key. If everyone is competing on one level, you gotta think at another. Like, for instance, like, I'd always wanted to get in television, but TV is so— it was always so crowded. Everyone's trying to get in on Friday night on NBC. So what do you do when everyone— I've always heard this advice, and it made sense only recently— everyone is doing the same thing and everyone's competing in the same realm. You have to think much bigger. There's a lot less competition up there. There's nobody up there, actually. So find the hole to fill it instead of trying to— like, I can't get my show on TV. I know. I'll own a network that I can put on any show that I want. And how many other people are going up for a network? You know how many other people applied for that network? How many? It was a lot, and then it wasn't a lot. 100 people in the whole country. In the whole country, 100 people threw in an idea for a network and showed a presentation. It's not a lot of people.

That isn't a lot of people.

It's a lot less people than in this room. So when you think about that, think about How can I show somebody, how can I get someone's attention? Everyone else is at the festival. Don't go to the festival. Go some— think of something better. I mean, go to the festival, but think also something else beyond that. Don't rely on the festival, 'cause then you're just crossing your fingers. You gotta hit it from other ways. And that promotes much bigger thinking. I always say aim high, 'cause if you aim just at the festival, you might hit it and you might just hit lower. But if you aim really high, you might still just hit the festival, but at least now you got a chance. You'll hit there, there, or like—

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others too.