How to get things done! (and enjoy it)

Do you ever feel confused by all the different conflicting information about hard work? There's this huge notion about your success should be easy. It should almost be like effortless in a sense. And I've heard that from so many different people. And I've also heard the other side, which is like, no, you have to bust your ass. You have to work ridiculous hours. And it can be kind of overwhelming at times. So in this video, I just want to break down my experience with hard work and the truth that I have found behind it. If you look at any top-level performer, whether it's a salesperson, a Major League Baseball, football, basketball player, any human being who has achieved a great level of success, majority has put in so much hard work and effort and energy into something. They've shown up, they've done the extra hours, they're there before everybody else is. There's a story about Jerry Rice, how he would show up before Bo Eason and be training, and he was there, and Bo would show up and be like, How is this dude here? I'm always the first guy. And Jerry Rice would be there before him every time. Think about Tom Brady. Tom Brady would show up before everybody else. He would put in that extra time, do the extra reps, put in the extra work, and that's why he became so good and so successful, because he put in the hard work. So that's one side of the spectrum. The other side of the spectrum is when you think about someone like Mark Allen. If you don't know who Mark Allen is, he's the man who started New World Library, which is the publishing company that put out The Power of Now. Mark was a guy that was so lazy. He would sleep in later than everybody else growing up. He was just always this like total bum. And I like to refer to him as like kind of like a sloth, almost just like the way he talks is very slow and relaxed and very chill demeanor. And growing up, he had no success. He had no money for 30 years of his life. He didn't grow up in a wealthy family or anything. He was in the slums of Oakland is where he lived. And on his 30th birthday, he just kind of like, it just hit him. And he's like, I can't do this anymore. I have to do something different with my life because now I'm 30, it's my birthday, and I'm literally just sitting in this tiny apartment in Oakland. And he wrote out a dream sheet for himself, and he pretty much just said all the different things that he would love to do with his life, just ideas that were naturally coming up inside of him. And he would just put aside his doubts and fears and write out these ideas. So he wrote up like having a publishing company. And he'd never had a publishing company. He wrote having music that he would sell and he would play music. He was in bands and stuff, but he had never really sold albums like that. And the biggest thing that he wanted was he wanted to do it with ease. That was his big thing. So here's this guy who is super lazy, wants to sleep in, wants to just have a successful business and literally just sleep pretty much all day and not set an alarm, not wake up at 5 in the morning or 4 in the morning like most of these hardworking entrepreneurs, Type A people do. Mark refers to himself as Type Z. He's just a total outcast, basically. So what he did is he wrote out this dream sheet, this idea of something that he would love for himself, and he just started working towards it, always with the intention behind it of, I don't want to work so hard like these people do, like these Type A business people do. They're all rah-rah and crazy. To him, it's not what he wanted. Long story short, Mark Allen now releases beautiful piano music. He has this insanely successful publishing company that released The Power of Now. Like, That is one of the biggest personal development, like self-help books out there. And the dude makes millions and millions of dollars and he's still the lazy guy that sleeps in as late as he wants to since the beginning. And his mantra that he always would say in an easy and relaxed manner and a healthy and positive way with every action he took and every decision that he made, everything that he aimed to go do, he would put that phrase right behind it. I want to go start the successful business, release this music, whatever it is that he wanted to do. He would always say in an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way. And that was his mantra. That was his life mantra. And that's what happened with his life. You see, the biggest challenge nowadays is people get instant gratification and people want things to be easy. We live in a world now where we can just go down to a grocery store for most people and just buy whatever groceries we need. And it's easy. It's just quick, easy. Easy. We have a phone that can give us information quick and easy. Mark Allen, you think about that, or the Tom Brady, like two very different people. One being more Type A, more wake up, grind, do the grind, and the other one being I'm gonna sleep in all day, I'm still gonna work towards this, and I want it to happen that way. And they're both multi-multi-millionaires. There's so many people that just want it to be easy. The thing is that they still had to work, they still had to put energy towards something. Tom Brady was physically putting in so much work, so much energy into being there. Mark Allen would live by this mantra of in a healthy and positive way, in an easy and relaxed manner. So one's putting in mental energy for sure, emotional energy, and way more physical energy to train, put in the work. And the other one's putting a lot more mental energy and not as much physical energy, and they still both got similar results. What blows me away about Mark Allen is the fact that he such a lazy dude. There's actually— if you have Audible, there's— and you type in The Millionaire Course, that's his, uh, one of his books that he's written— there's an audio version of the seminar that he does about that book and kind of his life story and everything, his experiences. And you get to hear it, and I love it because it's so intimate, and you get to really hear about how he went from the slums of Oakland to living in Marin in this huge white house. It's like ridiculous square footage, and it's like 30,000 square feet or something ridiculous. Maybe not that much, I don't know. The point is that you get to hear his success. Whether you're typing A or you're totally a Type Z person, you can still have massive success. There's a saying that I'm sure you've heard before, and it's, if you can conceive it and you can believe it, you can achieve it. And it's so, so true. Mark Allen believed because every single day he would just ingrain this easy, relaxed, healthy, and positive into his brain while working towards a destination. And he wanted to be lazy, wanted to sleep in as late as he could, and he made that happen because he started it in his mind. Everything begins in thought, and if you want to have it be easy and relaxed, then your brain will literally find ways to have it be easy and relaxed while still maintaining the success. Now, personally, I don't know how long it took for Mark Allen to really make all of his success happen. It took years, but it also took years for Tom Brady and Jerry Rice. All of them, every single one of them, put energy into the idea of the thing that they really wanted. Hard work is dictated by a perception. It really comes down to perception, whether work that you do is either hard or easy. For me, making videos like this, serving you, speaking on stages, coaching people, I don't think it's hard work. Editing the video, it's a little challenging for me. I mean, it's fun, I definitely get some, a kick out of it, but there's some things that I find a lot more enjoyable, which are the things that I should be doing. Even in my own life, when I was doing construction work, I was envisioning some job or life that I could be working on myself, being the best version of me, and helping other people do the same thing for themselves. And I never put together that that would be considered life coaching or coaching. So it wasn't until the day that I had a conversation with a coach and I realized like, this guy gets paid to do that. I could do that and get paid to do that. I want that guy's job. And the thing was, I started looking into coaching and everything and finding different schools and things like that, and they're always saying, oh, you need to pick one thing that you really want to help people with, one niche, whether it's health or career or relationships or something like that. And I was thinking to myself like, why can't it Why can't it be all of it? Because even looking at my tripod with my camera, there's 3 legs and each leg supports the camera. So think about you as the camera and each leg is there. And one leg is your health, one's relationships, one's career. And with health, it's mental, physical, spiritual, emotional. The relationships, it's your intimate, your non-intimate relationships, and the relationship with yourself. And the career, I also want to throw in time and money freedom in there. So it's all this makes a wonderful life. And I always had this vision inside my mind with this tripod analogy. And you think about it, if your relationships are totally toxic, you kick that leg out, now it just spilled into every other area, and you're going to have so much stress that's going to affect your health and your work life. And I would explain this to people, and they're like, now you still got to find a niche. And I was thinking, there's got to be some kind of niche where I can do that, and I couldn't find it. It was taking me forever. So what happened was I was putting in this energy towards it because it lit me up. See, the thing is that when we have energy that we want to put into something like hard work to create something, it's going to take energy, massive energy. The bigger it is, the more energy it's going to take. You can't just sit on your ass and wait for things to happen. You have to put in work. You have to put in energy. So I'm looking around at this. I see a different coach. I tell her about my tripod analogy. And I saw multiple coaches and they kept saying I had to find a niche. And I kept looking around and then I finally found the Life Mastery Institute, which is an awesome school that I totally recommend if you do want to become a coach like I did. This is a school that I went through, Life Mastery Institute. Say hi for me if you do go there. James Allen, I'm your man. Biggest thing that I learned and why I teach self-leadership is because we have to work on ourselves if we want to be better leaders. We want to have more confidence, we never want to settle in our lives, we have to be able to listen to our SELF. When I say SELF, I mean in all caps. Life Mastery Institute simplified this whole process for me by making me realize that all these different areas in our life— our health, relationships, career, money, whatever it is— is all governed by the same thing, and it's our thoughts. It's what's going on up in here and what's going on in here. So with hard work, again, it's a perception. It's this idea, because if you love what you do, you have so much energy and passion behind whatever it is, whether you're an artist or you maybe you do construction or you're a salesperson or a parent, whatever it is that just fills you with life and energy and joy to where it doesn't feel like it's hard work, but you still have to put in effort. You still have to put in energy towards that. I just spit on my camera. Get passionate. So what I'm getting at is I put this idea out there of the thing that I wanted, and then it finally manifested into my life, and that's what I I love to do and building my business. I've realized that I've had to put in a lot of energy because I've kind of, I mean really I've got sucked into that part that I've heard from other people of like, you don't have to work super hard to make it happen. And what I've learned is that if you imagine it to be that way, like Mark Allen did where he wanted that, he, that was his burning desire was he wanted it to be easy and he found easy ways to get those things done. You see, so it's all about the perception that we hold and the energy that we generate inside. Because when you generate energy, then using that energy towards creating whatever it is that you want to create doesn't really necessarily make it feel like it's so hard. Hard work absolutely pays off. Yeah, you got to put in work because when I left construction to be my own boss, basically I had to learn how to do this stuff. I had to put in work. I had to build biographies and make YouTube videos and do all this different stuff that I do now. And at first it was really challenging because it was so new. New to me. And as soon as I started getting used to it, getting better at it, I was putting energy into it because what was on the other side is what was more important to me. But the biggest thing for you is that whatever you choose to create in your life, whether it is a business, whether it is writing a book, a piece of art, being the best version, the best parent, the best spouse you can be, whatever it is, you have to put energy into that. The more energy that you put towards that thing, the faster you're going to be able to create that result. And the key is to really be able to generate that energy by making sure it's the thing that you would actually love. So you have to ask your question, is this what I really love? Because if you want to be a coach and you start doing the work but you keep falling off and doing other things, then it's not that big of a desire for you. I keep making these videos every week because it's something that I want to do. I have energy to do it and I'm willing to go put in the work to actually make, like, write out my video like I do on my computer. To sit here and create the video, to edit it, to publish it, all these different things that go into it. And because there's that passion, that desire behind it, it doesn't feel like it's really hard work. It's just what I do. So whether work is easy or hard to you is totally based on your perception of it. The bottom line is you need to be crystal clear as to what it is that you do want to create, and you're going to have to put as much mental, physical, emotional energy into that. And energy is generated by desire because, you know, what's hard is staying in a job that you can't stand, staying in a relationship that's toxic and destructive, settling with poor health so that you can't spend that time with your friends and family doing active things, picking them up and throwing them around in the pool or whatever it is for you. That's freaking hard. Putting in the necessary work to get the necessary things done that light you up, that shouldn't be so hard. It should be exciting and fun. And yes, you have to put the energy into it. That's what makes it hard work. It's putting in that effort, but the juice has got to be worth the squeeze. I hope this video does help you in realizing that you do have to put in the energy to create the things that you would love for your life, and you just have to make sure that you really love it. If you like the video, give me a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, check out the other videos to get more clarity, and have an awesome day.