Kai Greene and Evan Carmichael discuss how extraordinary achievement requires rigorous self-management: setting exceptionally high personal standards, aligning thoughts with actions, and maintaining relentless focus on improvement. Entrepreneurs especially must cultivate internal discipline since they lack external pressure from bosses.
Good morning, Believe Nation. Today's message is Manage Yourself. Over to you, Kai Greene.
I wake up every morning with espresso to keep me going. The achievement of great things though comes from, you know, um, the ability to manage yourself very, very, very well, you know, or at least well enough where you almost become impulsive about getting certain things done, you know. You have to set a standard for yourself that is very, very, very high, you know, and you have to manage yourself to keep your thoughts where they need to be in order to allow you to be successful at what you're trying to do. One way you can say, "Absolutely I can," is not with your mouth but with your actions, and actions are the product of thought. So if you're continuing to think, like I was saying when we were training, am I doing this as good as I can? Can I command more from myself? Am I connecting with this muscle as intensely as I can connect? Am I training hard enough? You know, can I train harder?
This is a really important message for entrepreneurs especially, because as an entrepreneur, you don't have anybody pushing you to do better, right? If you're working in a typical job, you have a boss. If you don't show up on time, if you don't get the project done on time, if you're slacking off, you're gonna hear it. You're gonna hear from it, right? You're gonna have somebody breathing fire down your neck to say, "Get this thing done or you're gonna be fired." And so because you have that external pressure, you're much more likely to go out and achieve the goals. Whereas entrepreneurs, yes, we are ultimately responsible to our customers and if we commit to them to do something, we're probably gonna do it. But at the end of the day, a lot of times we're not responsible to anybody else. Right? Nobody's really tracking what time you get up, how many hours you work, how late it goes, if you're really putting your all into that project or just kind of mailing it in. Nobody's really on you to get better. Nobody's really pushing you to get better. And the people who have the most success as entrepreneurs are the ones who can manage themselves and push themselves and have higher standards of excellence for themselves than anybody puts on them. That you want this product to be amazing more than your customer wants the product to be amazing. That you care more about solving the customer's problem than they care about solving the problem. You have to have that level of pride and expectation on yourself to push yourself, otherwise you won't follow through. I think back to when I was in school and my parents always expected me to get A's. My sisters always got A's and I was always getting B's and C's and I always had to have that conversation every report card time. To talk about why I wasn't getting A's, and it was always in a very positive, encouraging way. I always left with them telling me that I was Evan Carmichael, Evan Castrilli Carmichael, I could do anything that I wanted, and that they believed that I could go out and do it. And something happened in my last year of high school where in the year before that I was getting my B's and C's, and in my last year of high school something tweaked, and I don't know what it was, and I might have to go into like some deep dive psychoanalytics to figure it out, but my own expectations suddenly surpassed what my parents expected of me. And so in my last year of high school, I got straight 90s. I didn't just get A's, which is what all they were asking for, I got straight 90s. I had a higher standard than anybody else put on me, and it's still the same today. No matter what you guys think of the videos, however critical you may be, however much you might like them, My own standards for the videos are higher than what you guys have for me. I want them to be better more than you want them to be better. Everything that I'm working on, I have insane high standards for, much more than anybody else's expectations on me. And I think you need to develop that in your life, in your business, to go out and accomplish those big dreams. Because if you're always waiting for somebody else to push you to get something done, If you need to be micromanaged constantly by somebody else before you're gonna take action, then you're always gonna be subject to other people's expectations instead of you going out and building the business and the life that you want. So the question of the day today is, how effective are you at managing yourself and what gets in the way? Super curious to find out. Please leave in the comments below. I'm gonna join in the discussion. Thank you guys so much 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 again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso.
