STOP Undervaluing Your Potential | Leo Gura's Success Secrets

What is going to be your field of mastery in life?

And if you really want to go to that next level, then what you have to do is you have to start to think in a different way. Successful people are extremely persistent. They do not quit when it gets tough. The more you study people who have been successful, the more you see what it really takes.

What's up, Believe Nation? It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe that you have the ability to do something special that can change the planet. So to help you on your journey, today we're going to learn from YouTuber, entrepreneur, and life coach Leo Gura and my take on his top 10 rules for success. Rule number 10 is my personal favorite, and I'd love to know which one you guys like the best.

Perhaps the most important thing is you need to find your life purpose as soon as possible. Life purpose is— what is gonna be your field of mastery in life? How do you wanna impact the world? What are you most passionate about? How do you create a career out of your top passion in life? If you can figure that out and become definite about it, and be crystal clear about it, Then that's gonna focus all of your energy into that, and you're gonna become a master and expert in that. And from this will come a lot of your financial success. From this also will come a lot of fulfillment and a lot of satisfaction, because fulfillment comes from being good at something. You're not gonna be fulfilled at life by just dabbling in a bunch of little stupid things or working a job that you're not really excited about. You need to position yourself as an artist in life. What's your art form? You gotta find what that is. If you have some nascent passions, you know, some passions that are still kinda like just starting to bud, go and nurture those and just see where they take you. If you're interested in art, go do some art. If you're interested in music, go play some music. If you're interested in starting a business, go maybe try starting a business and just see where that takes you. You might discover, like, "Oh, I really love this." Or, "No, you know, I thought I loved it, but I actually kind of hate it." And those are very valuable insights for you to have. But as you're exploring around, always keep your eye out for the choice. You gotta make a choice. You gotta make a commitment and a decision as to what your life is gonna be about. What are you gonna be mastering?

Next is set big goals. Successful people set big goals. In fact, they set gargantuan goals. And you have to do that too. There's a tendency to say that we want to set realistic goals. You might say, well, I'm not gonna set too ambitious of a goal because there's a risk that I'm gonna fail. Instead, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna focus on a goal that's realistic, that I can attain. The problem with that kind of thinking is that a lot of times those realistic goals that we set are Undervaluing what we can actually do in our lives, right? You're selling yourself short. You don't really know how much potential you really have until you set a very ambitious goal. I'm sure at one point in your life you have done that and you've actually been able to meet it or even exceed it, and you felt the power of that. Setting an ambitious goal, a big goal, is a great way to supercharge your motivation. And successful people are very passionate and motivated. That's because they set big goals for themselves. If you set a weak goal, a small goal, a realistic goal, what's gonna happen is that you're not gonna get engaged with it, you're not gonna get excited enough to really go out there and take the action. And counterintuitively, what might happen is that realistic goal that you set might actually be harder to accomplish than the very, very ambitious goal, because the ambitious goal has heart to it, whereas your weak, piddly little goal, well, Who really cares if you accomplish it or not? It's not gonna have a big impact on you. It's not gonna have a big impact on the world. So have goals out there that are big, that are about not just you, but about other people too. Your best strategy and success— chances of success in life, chances at fulfillment, and chances at most— the most people liking you is to be yourself. Because when you're yourself, your authentic self, you're magnetic. You're attractive. People want to be near you. Maybe not the same people that want to be near your fake self right now. So, acknowledge that. I'm not saying that you can maintain everything in your life as it is and still be yourself. You might need to make some sacrifices. There might be some costs. Because chances are, right now, you've whored yourself out and now you have some social debts, right? And when I tell you to stop caring about other people and start being authentic, well, you're gonna come up with all sorts of reasons about why that's too costly for you. You're gonna say, "Well, then my boss will say something bad." "My job might be in danger." "My relationship might be in danger." Something else might be in danger. Well, what's more important to you? Is it more important to you— for you to be getting those shallow things? Or is it more important for you to be self-expressive? To really be yourself, to really be fulfilled inside. And then to act from that, and to live your life from that, and to create a business from that place, to create a career from that place, to create a nice relationship from that place. What's more important? I mean, you can still keep whoring yourself out if you want to, but in the end, being a whore is not a good way to go through life. So my suggestion is to, to bite the bullet on this one and be yourself despite the costs. The next thing is, I would say, the hard work. Hard work is really, really important to be successful. And to be at the top, like 10% of the population in terms of success, all those people worked their ass off. You're not gonna be successful without hard work. And the reason mostly is not even that you have to go out there and build a giant empire, or you have to amass amount of money, or work long hours. It's not even so much about that. It's that you need to develop yourself. Because success is not so much an outer world state as an inner world state. And that might sound kind of hokey and new age, but it's very, very true. Success is grounded within you. You're not going to be able to maintain any sort of level of success if you do not have the psychology to really follow principles, to know how to maintain success, to think strategically, to think long-term, to delay gratification, to resist addictions. All these factors come into play. So really, for me, success is grounded in self-mastery. It's understanding yourself and then building on that, building disciplines, building successful habits which then move you towards where you want to be going. There's something to this idea that there can be no problem that is not an opportunity in your life. And I think this is what the core of positive thinking is, is understanding that every problem, every challenge that you have is ultimately an opportunity. And this is not just some wishful thinking. This is not said lightly. This is something that takes some study. This takes some study and some contemplation to understand. It takes wisdom to really understand this. You have to have some life experience to start to see the truth of this. The depth of it. Because there's like a surface-level understanding and then a much deeper layer of understanding. That's why you have to kind of go back and look at your own history, just try to prove it to yourself, to prove to yourself that this is true. Because right now I tell you this, but you're probably saying, yes, this sounds nice, and sure, it can probably work for many problems in my life. I can see that somehow I'm catastrophizing them, exaggerating them. A lot of times they don't come true. 'But you know, there's just this one problem I've got right now. I've got this one problem that's just pure hell. It's pure hell. It's pure evil. There's no possible way that this problem I've got right here— there's no possible way that this could have any opportunity in it. There's no opportunity here. There's no lesson to be learned here. There's nothing possible. This is just pure negative. If I could remove it from my life, my life would be happy. I would be better, I just know it. Well, that's exactly what I'm trying to tell you, is that that's not positive thinking. And I mean, I understand where you're coming from. A lot of times I get triggered like that too, and I was especially like that a lot in the past. I'm still a bit like that today. But you gotta understand that this is the mode of thinking that you've been coming from for most of your life. And that, that mode of thinking has gotten you to where you are right now in your life. So that's gotten you to where you are, but that's only gotten you to where you are. And I'm willing to bet that you can do better than where you are right now. And if you really want to go to that next level, then what you have to do is you have to start to think in a different way. Sometimes you have to start I'm thinking in a radically different way. A way that seems uncomfortable. A way that seems wishful thinking at first. A way that seems unrealistic. That seems idealistic. That seems fantastical. Yet, there is something to this idea. That nothing can happen to you that is not positive. I guarantee you that if you really look at it, If I really sat down with you and we really looked at that challenge that you have right now that's totally insolvable, that's ruining your life, if we looked at it, we can pick out— I guarantee we can pick out something positive, something you could learn from it. Of course, this doesn't mean that all of a sudden your problem's gonna be fixed. It doesn't mean that your problem is not a real problem. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't work to fix your problem. It doesn't mean that you don't feel the pains of your problem. I'm not denying you any of that. But I am saying that once you adopt this mindset and you become a positive thinker, then you're going to be able to Aikido a lot of your problems. If you don't like yourself, then ask yourself the following question: do you really not like yourself, or do you not like an aspect of yourself? Big difference, right? Is it you Is it all of you that you don't like, or just an aspect? I bet it's just an aspect. So if that's the case, first of all, realize how much you're focusing on it, right? And I want you to take that camera that you have right now, and you're totally zoomed in on this one imperfection that you have. You're totally zoomed in on it. I want you to zoom out and see yourself and your whole life and the whole history that you have of your life and where you're going. See all of that. And put that imperfection, that one imperfection, into context. Right? It's still there. I'm not denying it.

It might not be there.

Maybe you have some crooked teeth, or you have a big nose, or you have a fat ass, or whatever. Or maybe you have some, you know, character flaws in you. Not physical problems, but character flaws. And you don't like yourself for those reasons. Okay, let's admit that that's there. Let's say that it's true, it's there. Well, that's, that's one aspect of a much bigger picture. So first of all, realize that that's the case. And if that is the case, then also realize this point is that you have a choice of what you focus on. You've got this, you've got this like laser beam in your mind, which is your focus, right? Your awareness. And this laser beam, it's consciously guided by you. Not all the time, but you can guide it. And so if you're always hating on yourself, then what you're doing is you're taking your imperfections and you're always like shining a magnifying glass over it. So that's what's happening. You're shining this magnifying glass on your imperfections. Sometimes all you do is you just stare at them all day, right? And that's why you feel so bad about yourself sometimes, because you stare at those imperfections ceaselessly. Well, if you've got an imperfection, there's— you only got two choices. Either you're gonna fix it, either you can change it, or you can't. Now Go out there and try to change it if you can. I mean, that's what I'm all about. I'm giving you a lot of advice and stuff with all my videos about, you know, how to put your life into place, actually make it really good, objectively good. But if you can't change it, maybe like your physical appearance, you can't— you feel like you can't change it, or you don't really want to go that far, then that's fine. You can then learn to accept it in the sense that you're going to shift your focus away. You're going to kind of accept it and not look at it anymore. Stop looking at it. Because it's the constant looking at it and the re-looking and the re-looking and the re-looking that is— that's really killing you. You're going to start to focus on other areas of your life that are great. And what you're going to realize when you make that shift is you're going to realize that, well, that little imperfection, it's not that important anymore. And then maybe a couple years down the road, you will actually laugh. You will laugh because you'll laugh and say, how could I have possibly been so concerned about that? It's so insignificant now because I've got all this other awesome stuff flourishing in my life. Next point: do not quit. Successful people are extremely persistent. They do not quit when it gets tough, and it will get tough. I don't care how passionate you are about what you're doing. I don't care how much you love it. Whether you love it or you don't, there's gonna be ups and downs in life. And whatever you're pursuing, whatever kind of big goal you set for yourself, especially if you set those big goals, They're gonna be challenging. They're gonna require you to grow. They're gonna require you to step outside your comfort zone, and that means emotional labor will be involved. That's okay, but to make sure that you get through that and to get to your ultimate objective of success, you're gonna have to have persistence, and you can't quit when the going gets tough. So, you know, maybe you're working on a project and something's not working out the way you want. Something slips, something fails, and you're really tempted to quit and throw in the towel. Or maybe there's a relationship and you're trying to work it out, but it's not working, and you're tempted to drop it, you're tempted to quit there. You know, whatever part of your life you really wanna quit or drop right now, if you're in that kind of point, you gotta push through it if it's really aligned with your values and aligned with your purpose. If it's not aligned, you can, you can drop it. In fact, you should. But otherwise, you have to be very, very persistent. If you read biographies of the most successful people throughout human history—business leaders, social leaders, politicians, celebrities, actors—you know that just the underlying theme of all those biographies and all their histories is that they were very, very persistent. And they were okay with failure. In fact, most of these people, they were so successful because they failed so much that they just couldn't— their success was inevitable. Because after you fail thousands of times, you start to learn your lessons and you start to get good. And the human brain is really, really, really stubborn, and it doesn't tend to learn from success as much as it does from failure. So when you're failing a lot, don't get discouraged. Push on, persevere. Go through your hardest moments, because those hardest moments that you go through, that's when you learn your biggest lessons, and those are what grow you to be able to handle bigger and bigger challenges, to accomplish more and more, and get that kind of success that you want. And these are also, coincidentally, the proudest moments of your life, the moments of your life that you will never ever regret. So never quit when you're doing something that's important to you. Being able to focus is critical to getting you the results that you want. Focus is all about eliminating distractions. So what are the distractions right now that are keeping you from being focused? Go ahead and sit down, pause this video, and jot down 5 things. What are 5 things that are keeping you distracted in whatever area of life you want more focus in? So are you not focused at work? What is distracting you? Is it hunger because you're not eating in the morning? Is it your boss who comes in and disturbs you every 15 minutes? Is it emails? Is it the Twitter feed that's pinging you? Is it your cell phone that's vibrating from texts that you're getting hit up with? You know, what is distracting you? What about at school? What's distracting you there? What about in your relationship? What's distracting you there? Sit down and identify those factors, because once you've got those identified, and I think what you'll find is actually that one of the biggest factors that you'll find is multitasking. You trying to do multiple things at one time, and that of course is the antithesis of focus. When you're doing multiple things, you are not focused by definition. You're splitting your focus, and when you split your focus, it's like, you know what it's like? It's like, imagine if We had the sun, and it was a bright sunny day, and I gave you a magnifying glass, and I said, "Here, you can take this magnifying glass, and if you hold it up at the right angle and you hold it steady, then you can burn that ant right there on the ground, or you can set that leaf on fire." And at first thought, you'd say, like, "Wow, that's—" If you didn't know that, you'd say, "Wow, that's amazing. I can't believe that's true. Let me try it." Then you'd take that magnifying glass, and you'd run over and You tried to burn an ant or burn a piece of leaf. And, but of course, if you didn't listen to the fact that I told you that you have to keep it steady and you have to focus the rays, then what's going to happen is you're going to just kind of move, move it around, move it around, move it around, and you're going to come back to me and you're going to say, "What the hell? Nothing worked. This, this, you're lying to me. This doesn't work. It's not possible to take the sun's rays and burn anything with them. They're, they're too weak." And of course the problem is that you didn't focus the rays first. That's exactly what it's like in your life. If you're trying to get some success in your career, in your business, at school, what you need to do is you need to put your full attention on it, right? You need to bring all those rays to a point. You need to bring your thoughts to a point. Your mind has to be focused on whatever it is that you're doing.

Of all the things I regret the most is I regret that I didn't start meditating when I was 6 or 7 years old. If I started that habit, man, I would be at such a different place in my life right now. I'd be so much happier, so much more fulfilled. Meditation is the key to mastering happiness, and happiness is different than success. You could read all the self-help books in the world and become very successful, but you still will not be fulfilled and happy, and that's because you haven't practiced meditation. So start tomorrow, 20 minutes a day at the very least. Make that commitment for the rest of your life. You're gonna meditate for 20 minutes every day for the rest of your life, no matter what. No sick days, no days off. You're never gonna miss a day starting tomorrow. That's your mission. And then after a year or two, I recommend you bump that up to 1 hour per day if you really want to supercharge your fulfillment levels in life.

And then the last point, and this is one of my favorites, this is one that people really miss out on, is study success. Successful people study success. Success is not what we naively think, just something that happens naturally to some people and doesn't happen to other people. Success is a very deliberate, conscious endeavor that you undertake. Success is built over months and years, and it's done consciously. And the more you understand the principles of success, the concepts of success, the more you study people who have been successful, the more you see what it really takes. And that process of success, the principles, are not always what they seem. And to me, this is something that I really committed my life to, is studying these principles. I really love it. It's exciting for me. And I really encourage you to get involved with that. So that means maybe attending some seminars, Reading some books, watching these videos, learning about it, maybe joining a group of friends that are successful, joining a mastermind group, right? Be around successful people, learn how the success process works, and learn the psychology of success. Not the externals of success, but the psychology. That's what we're talking about.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video because 70013 AD, asked me to. If there's someone you'd like to vote on for the next top 10, check out the link in the description and go and have your say. Finally, I want to give a quick shout out to Steph Reveron. Thank you so much, Steph, for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word, and for all the support doing the unboxing video, all the posts you've been putting on social media. I really appreciate the support and I'm so glad you enjoyed the book.

Thank you, Evan, and let's rock my one word.

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. As always, much love. I'll see you soon.

So, confidence. Let's understand why you're not confident. So where exactly are you feeling unconfident? On a date? In your work situation? Where are you feeling unconfident there? How exactly is that being manifest? When you're sitting at a meeting, in a group meeting, and people are standing up and voicing their opinions, and you're sitting there and you're kind of being quiet and meek, Make a note of that if that's you. Or maybe it's when you see an opportunity in your job, maybe to step up and maybe put yourself in line for a promotion position, and your mind tells you, "No, no, no, no, don't do that. Stay safe. Stay in your current place." And maybe you're lacking confidence in that way, right? Or maybe you're lacking confidence in voicing your thoughts and you can't get those out. Or you're finding that you're having to hold back your thoughts. So make a list of all these different ways that you are not being confident. Then what I want you to do is I want you to analyze each one of those situations that you're facing and say, what is an alternative set of actions that you could be taking? So what would a confident person be doing? So let's say in that, on that date situation, what would the most confident person who's extremely confident with the opposite sex. What would he or she do? How would he or she think? And jot down some specific points. How would he talk about his stories? How would she be thinking about the situation? How would he or she be carrying himself? What would the body language be like? What would the thought process be? Same thing with the situation at work or anywhere else. Make a list of alternative actions that you could be taking that would feel confident to you if you took them. So that is going to be kind of your game plan. Once you identify the situations and you identify the alternative actions, you kind of know what you need to do. Basically, what you need to do is you need to start changing your behaviors, and you need to start now living in and practicing those alternative actions. You have to have a deep understanding of who you really are in life to have long-term sustainable success and both happiness and then fulfillment, right? And for me, success is shallow if it doesn't come with the happiness and fulfillment component. So for me, I wanna get all of it, both the external success and then the fulfillment, the lasting fulfillment and happiness that you can get with that. I don't want just shallow external success. And to do that, you need to really understand and discover who you are. And you might be thinking, well, I know who I am. No, you don't. Most people out there, I would say 99% of people, do not really know who they are because they have not gone on the journey that it takes to discover that. And what I'm really talking about here, this is not some abstract notion, is you really need to discover what your top 10 values are. You need to discover what your top 5 feelings are in life. You need to discover what it is that you really want out of life, what is meaningful to you. And you got to also discover what you don't want. And you might say, well, I know what I don't want. I know the things I don't like. Well, there might not be as much clarity there as you think there is. So this is all about a matter of clarity and articulation. It's one thing to know it vaguely. It's a totally different thing to actually articulate it. Write it down and know it very, very consciously. It's going to clear a lot of things up for you. And you're going to— if you sit down and do this process, you're going to quickly realize that you don't know know as much about yourself as you think you do. And you probably have had moments in your life that have been like epiphanies where you had deep self-discovery. Maybe it was when you were traveling, maybe it was after a breakup in a relationship, maybe it was when you were struggling at work. You discover things about yourself, and by going through these, these challenging experiences, you really discover what it is that we want out of life. And that's the foundation. Successful people know what they want.

I want you to read one self-help book every single month. It's not a lot, just one per month. That's not a lot, you can handle that. Most self-help books are pretty short. So all you need to do is just have a list, and in fact I have a list of some of my favorite, most powerful self-help books on my website. You can go check that out at actualized.org. But this is, this is a huge habit. Here's why. Because self-help books have basically distilled all the principles of success and happiness that human beings have discovered in the last 2,000 years. And especially in the last 100 years, there's been so much research done on how to be successful in business, how to be successful in relationships, how to be successful with your happiness levels, how to meditate properly, the scientific benefits of meditation, and so on and so forth. And self-help books are not just abstract, you know, very pedantic type of books that you might read in college. These are very practical. These are written to get you results. These self-help books have exercises in them. They have techniques. Read those. Start practicing those. If you just read one book per month for the next, let's say, 8 years, That would be close to 100 books. That would give you the entire theoretical foundation that you need to master life.