"Move Toward Your IDEALS!" - Simon Sinek (@simonsinek) - #Entspresso

Good morning, Believe Nation! It's Evan. My one word is believe. I believe in you, and I want to see that awesome thing that you have inside you explode out into the universe to have a major impact. So to help you on your journey, today's message is know your destination. Over to you, Simon Sinek.

Imagine we're standing in a big empty room, right? And we're standing in one corner, and I give you a simple instruction: I want you to go to that corner in a straight line.

Right?

Off you go. No big deal, right? Without telling you, I slip a chair in front of you. What do you do? You go around the chair. Now you just disobeyed what I told you to do. I told you to go to that corner in a straight line. But this is the amazing thing about human beings: which is when we're given a clear destination, we use our own creativity and our own sense of innovation and our own problem-solving abilities to overcome obstacles to get to the destination. In other words, the destination is more important than the route, right? We are flexible about the route, we are obsessed with the destination. Reset. We're standing in the corner together and I give you a simple instruction: go somewhere in this room in a straight line. And you say to me, "Well, where do you want me to go?" I'm like, "I don't know. You're smart, figure it out." Go in a straight line. And so you pick a point and you start walking, and without telling you, I put a chair in front of you. And what do you do? You come to a grinding halt. And I say, "What'd you stop for?" You go, "Well, you put a chair in front of me." Or you'll make a sudden turn and go in another direction, right? And this is the problem. It's the same obstacle. The difference is when you have a clear destination, the obstacles become easy to overcome. When you don't have a clear destination, you keep coming to a grinding halt. And what we do in our companies is we're counting the steps we're taking along the route, but we're never looking at the destination, right? So company says, "Made $1 million this year, we were only planning on making $800,000." Like, we took 10 steps, we were only planning on taking 8. Where you going? No clue, right? We count the steps. And so the point is, is that people want to feel that the effort that they're exerting actually are moving somewhere. And so successful measurement, successful recognition is not just for the steps you take, it's not just for the effort, it's that the effort you exerted moved us closer to where we're trying to get to. and that get-to should be some crazy ideal. My ideal is to live in a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning, you know, inspired to go to work and fulfilled by the work that they do. And the couple of measurements that I use are if the book is selling, and I, by the way, people ask me, how many have you sold? I have no clue. I've never asked the publisher because I don't care. I really don't care how many I've sold. What I care about is the Amazon rankings and that those are going steady or up and not plummeting, because that means other people, right, 'cause I don't have a publicist, I don't have a marketing strategy on purpose. I didn't hire one of those companies to sell the book for me, and the reason is, is because I'm not interested in book sales. I'm interested in the spreading of an idea, and so I just use that as a metric to help me understand, am I sort of marching in the, because the more I preach, is it resonating, you know? And so you have a couple of these imperfect measurements that help you understand, are you going along the way? So it's not just great effort, look what you achieved, because that's what we're doing now, right? Our goal is to increase top-line revenues by $50 million. For what reason, right? Which is, we have to know the destination, and then we say, amazing, you took us that much closer. And if we go to the right, it's because we were overcoming an obstacle. If we hadn't gone to the right, we would've been stuck forever. Thank you. You know, it's not always straight lines. It's not always straight lines, but it's, it's in one direction. She's pulling the cane out.

Your plan for achieving success is gonna fail. No matter how great a plan that you come up with at the beginning, it's going to fail. And what you need to do is just launch it and adjust and fail and launch it and adjust and fail, and you continually go through that process, eventually getting to the point of success. There's this great picture that I saw of what people think success looks like versus what success actually looks like. And that's the path. And so understanding that going in makes a huge difference as an entrepreneur because too often we quit too soon because our first thing, our first idea, our first plan doesn't work out. Where that's okay, that's normal, that is going to happen and you need to just continue to adjust. I think what's really, really, really, really, really important is that you have a mission, you have a big goal, you have something that you're aiming towards, and you're really stubborn about hitting that. Like, that's the thing that has to happen, that North Star that you're gearing towards. But the how of reaching that goal, what will change, will adjust, will be flexible on. And so stubborn about the mission and flexible about the path. And so for me, as an example, I want to help a billion entrepreneurs, right? I've said that a number of my videos. It's the goal that drives me on a regular basis. I want to have a big impact. I want these videos to have a big impact. I want everything that I do, the the books, the videos, my website, the newsletter, to have a big impact, to have a big reach, because I think if I can help a billion entrepreneurs, those entrepreneurs are off having a massive ripple effect on the planet. That's inspiring. But how I go about helping those billion entrepreneurs will change. You know, if you ask me where am I going to be in 5 years, I don't know. I don't know, I don't have a 5-year goal. I don't have a 5-year plan. As soon as I come up with a 5-year plan, I figure out how do I make that happen in 5 weeks. I always crunch it down and start taking immediate action. If you asked me 5 years ago, I would have never said most of the things that I'm doing right now. I would have never said I'd be an author and now have my second book coming out. I would have never said I'd be going big time on YouTube and have close to 1 million subscribers. I would have said something totally different. And if you ask me now, where am I going to be in 5 years? Whatever I come up with is not actually going to be what I'm doing, apart from it's going to be helping a billion entrepreneurs. And so as much as I love YouTube, I love YouTube, right now it's the window for me, it combines everything that I love and my ability to have a big impact and meet you guys in a way that I couldn't do on other platforms. So everything's coming together perfectly for me right now, and so I love YouTube. But if YouTube is not the thing, and it won't always be the thing, like you guys won't always be on YouTube, in 10 years there's gonna be something else. And so the danger is when entrepreneurs stick to one path and they get stuck with this is the only way that I'm gonna have success, because it worked before, so it's always gonna work. It's not how it works. You're gonna have to adjust, and you're gonna have to change. And so being stubborn about the goal, like your lifetime goal, the big thing that you wanna accomplish, but flexible in how you go and approach it on a day-to-day basis, which may mean doing one project and stopping and going another, and remembering that success is not that straight line, but it starts off and then gets into this squiggly mess, you keep adjusting, and eventually you hit it. So the question of the day today is, I'm curious, what is the big goal that you have that you are stubborn about, that you are passionate about, your mission? Leave it down in the comments below. I'm really curious to find out. I also wanna give a quick shout out to James Niagu. James, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. I really, really, really appreciate the support, and I hope you're enjoying the read. Thank you guys again for watching. I hope you have an amazing day. 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 enespresso.

I said to myself, okay, Arnold, here's the goal, and whatever it takes to get there, I will do. So I was doing my daily work, cleaning the guns and going to the shooting range, marching running many miles a day and crawling around up hills with weapons. Running at 5 in the morning with heavy combat boots and all of this stuff. And when everyone just almost drops dead at night, is totally exhausted. I worked out 3 hours and got up early in the morning again to do my sit-ups and my push-ups and my chin-ups. There was a clear conflict, a dilemma, because the lifting was not a traditional sport for them. They didn't like the idea. They didn't even have the equipment. I had to go and figure out every way possible to do dips between chairs or to the bar across two chairs into upside-down rowing. Everyone would say this is the wrong direction that I'm going, or I'm in a dream world, I'm useless. Whatever it was, I said, I'm gonna break through that no matter what it takes. I needed to reach that goal, that vision that I had of being a world champion.

We always had this goal in sports. And I give the credit to my coaches for instilling that in me. It's like always creating this goal, this part of time to achieve something. And during that time, nothing else mattered. It didn't matter what was happening in school for me. It didn't happen, relationships didn't matter. It was just like achieving that goal. And maybe it comes back to childhood or something where I just wanted to be a great athlete. But when I get in that mind frame, I guess, I don't know. I just want to achieve the goal more than anything else, and that's what I like to do.

I used to be kind of quiet about this dream because it seemed kind of like a crazy thing maybe. Even last year, it would have seemed crazy for me to say what I'm about to say, but now I think there's a potential for— Right now, online learning, no one takes it seriously. They take it seriously. They think it has value, but they don't— Online learning is here and your prestigious universities are over here. They're not in the same conversation. I'm hoping Khan Academy can turn into an institution that, I don't want to say rivals, but it's talked in the same conversation as some of these things that have been around for hundreds of years.

In the places where you can learn.

In the places where you can learn at a very high level. You can start at arithmetic, but you can go deep and it's a real learning experience. It's not something superficial.

Let me give you the one word secret to happiness.

One word.

This is all you need to be happy. It's the most important word ever.

If you had to think of one word that's most important to you or that sums you up or that would be kind of like a little beacon.

Hey, Believe Nation, if you want to know what the most important one word is for Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah Winfrey, will.i.am, and Howard Schultz, I have a very special secret video for you. Check the description for details.