My Biggest Keys to Success

I used to think that you had to struggle to be successful. I thought that it had to be hard that I would have to white knuckle my way through my life in order to have any form of success. Today I'm going to talk to you about what I believe are my two biggest keys to success. And you know, for me, I'll be honest with you, I have, at 39 years old, almost, I have built a life that I am proud of. I have been able to check off most of the boxes that I wanted to check off in my life. When I look back and look through my goals and my journals 10, 12, 15 years ago, the majority of the things that are in there I actually checked off. And it's an amazing thing to see. So I feel like I can consider myself qualified to give advice on this. I think in the past, if I would have said, hey, here's two keys to be successful, 20 years ago, I'd be like, here's kind of what I'm seeing in other people. But I'm not really noticing in my own life now that I'm, you know, as old as I am and I've been in business for 19 years, you know, since I was 19 years old, I can really start to say, I think that these are my two biggest keys to success. These are, for me, this is what I've noticed in my life. This is what I've noticed in friends that are successful as well. So it doesn't mean this is absolutely the two biggest, but I think they're going to hit home with you. So the first key, which I think is extremely, extremely important and extremely underrated and not talked about, is alignment. When I was young, I used to think that you had to struggle to be successful. I thought that it had to be hard that I would have to white knuckle my way through my life in order to have any form of success. Whatever success means to you, that's what I thought. Whether it's in business or money or relationships or happiness or whatever it might be, I thought that success had to be hard. And I think many people listening to me right now think that success has to be hard, that you have to struggle to get there. And a lot of people are holding themselves back from creating the life that they want or the business that they want because they're like, yeah, struggle doesn't sound fun. Now I will say this. Success does require hard work. You know, if you're trying to have business success, it will take work. If you're trying to have a Great relationship, it will take work. If you want to have great health and fitness and body, it will take work. If you want to be a great parent, it's going to take work. But the biggest mistake that I see when people are trying to build a business or make money in some sort of way is that they chase the money. And that is really the most interesting thing, is that the, the money is the end goal. In my first year of college, I went for a degree simply because I knew that it paid well. And then I was like, I don't want to do this for the rest of my life. This looks like it sucks, like it will require hard work in your life, but it doesn't mean that your life has to be hard while you're doing it. It will require hard work, but you can work hard doing something that you don't like and you don't enjoy and eventually make a lot of money. You can, if you have enough willpower, you can force yourself to do something that you hate simply because you want to get to the end result of making a million dollars. But once you hit that end goal of whatever it is that you wanted, you've now basically got to keep doing that thing because you're like, well, I've spent the last 15 years building my life to build this business. And even though I hate this business, I'm kind of a slave to my business and I have to stay here because this is. Yep, this is the ladder that I built up this wall. And so you could do something that you hate and have financial success if you want, or you can work hard doing something that you love, that feels fully aligned with who you are, with your heart and with your soul, and who you are as a person and your traits and your characteristics that you want to have in this world, you could find something that is in full alignment and you can still get to financial success. The interesting thing that I have found is that money almost never comes right away, but in the long term, you usually make way more than you could have possibly expected. And that's the interesting thing about it, is that if you're doing something because you just want to make money, you can get there. I promise you, you can. I've seen many people succeed and then hate their lives. But you can also do something that you love, and you can succeed doing that in long term, you can turn into something that could be very financially successful. And so the money almost never comes right away. But over the long term, it usually comes because when you do something for 5, 10, 15, years, you start to become an expert at that thing. And when you become an expert at anything, people are also interested in whatever that thing is that you do, and they want to pay you in order to learn from you. So success, the way I like to see success, whatever success means to you, it's different for every single person, is a marathon. If you, if you love what you do, if you're interested in it, you can outlast anybody. But if you don't love what you do, you're going to burn out eventually, whether it's three years or five years or seven years or 15 years, but 20, 30 years down the road, no way you're burning out, that's for sure. So you might as well pick and do something that you love. It's like there's a quote that Oprah said a long time ago that I heard, and she says, money comes second, passion comes first. And I really do think that that is the biggest piece of it, is when I see people who are passionate about something. Like, I'm very passionate about mindset in psychology and neurology and early childhood development. Like, I just, I'm obsessed. I think it's the coolest thing in the world to look at another human and be like, why are you the way that you are? Like, that's interesting to me. I like real estate, but I'm not passionate about real estate. But I have a friend who is so frickin passionate about real estate, and he loves it and he is incredibly successful at it because he followed his passion and he has had massive amounts of monetary success because of it. And so, you know, this is what it really comes down to is like, can you find something that you can fall in love with? Can you find something that seems fun? Like, can you find something. And this is a phrase that I've heard before. Can you find something that looks like work to everybody else but feels like play to you? What might that thing be? What would look like work to everybody else, but will feel like play to you? And if. And I would recommend that you don't make money. And I've made this mistake, okay, don't make money. The goal or the end result that you're going for? Because I believe that money is a byproduct of the value that you give the world. And so how can you find something that you're very passionate about, that you're super interested in, that you want to learn about, that you want to get better at, whatever it might be, and then try to become one of the best in the world at that thing, whatever it is. And this is why you see people, I think, that become like, crazy wealthy. And people look at them and they're like, they're so rich. Why don't they just retire? And it's like it was never about the money for them. It was usually about some sort of passion or some sort of interest or something that they're like, that's kind of fun. I want to try this thing out. And it's fun. So they just keep doing it and it's fun. So they put in a ton of hard work. But because it's fun to them, it doesn't feel like hard work. And they outlast everybody else. It's like the phrase, the man who loves walking will go further than the man who's running for a goal. So, like, if you're just trying to run a marathon, yeah, you'll run a little bit and you'll get there and you'll get, you know, in a couple months, a couple hundred miles under your belt. But if someone just loves walking, they're going to walk all the time, multiple times a day, and at least once a day for their entire life. And over the course of their entire life, the guy who's walking, he's going to go much further just because of the fact that he loves to go for a walk. And so how can you find that thing that you want to do that feels in alignment with you? And I will tell you this, it's not always the easiest thing to find because it goes back to the phrase, which is your fears will scream at you, your inspiration will whisper. A lot of times people are keeping themselves so busy in their emails, in their fears and their limiting beliefs, in doom scrolling on Instagram and TikTok, they're so watching Netflix and watching Hulu and watch. There's they're so damn busy that they don't give themselves enough time to listen to that quiet whisper that's deep down inside. Because your fears will always scream at you, your inspirational whisper. So it's like, can you get quiet enough to hear that whisper? And so the first thing is, what is it that feels fully in alignment with who you are, with your heart and with your soul? The second key to success that I have, and it's not that sexy and I don't really hear it very often in reality, it might surprise you a little bit for some people, but here it is. The second key to success, in my opinion, is patience. And I'll explain to you why that is. And I'LL explain to you a few other other things around it, but we live in a world where everything is basically immediate. Food. If I want, if I get hungry right now, I can go on door dash and by the time I finish this episode, the food that I just ordered is at my front door. Knowledge, it's immediate. I can just go in and I can ask Siri whatever question I have and she's going to give it to me and tell me everything that's ever, any piece of knowledge has ever existed in the entire world. Everything is so immediate in this world. But success, it's not immediate. It ain't. It takes time. And I think a lot of people, because everything's becoming so immediate, are becoming less and less patient. So if you want to completely set yourself apart from everyone else, be patient. I was talking to, I was live earlier this week on in my course Business Breakthrough, where I teach people how to grow their coaching businesses online. And one of the questions I was asked was like, hey, how do we succeed faster? And I was like, well, like, I'll give you all of the tips and the entire course teaches you how to succeed faster. But if you want to continue to make it go faster than that, sometimes it's just about doing the thing over again long term, and eventually you'll succeed at the level that you want to. And it goes back to like, when I think about success, I always think about the Chinese bamboo example, because I think that it's the perfect example of it, where, you know, you look at it and you say, all right, the Chinese bamboo, if you've never heard it, you take a Chinese bamboo seed and you put it in the ground and you water it. Give it the water that it needs, give it the sun that it needs. Everything. The first year, the seed doesn't break out of the ground. Second year, seed doesn't break out of the ground. Third year, seed doesn't break out the ground. Fourth year, seed doesn't break out of the ground. Fifth year, it will break out of the ground and, and it will grow 80ft in six weeks, sometimes up to 2ft a day. Like, you can literally watch it grow sometimes. And that's how success is, is that it requires patience, it requires long term patience. Like I always tell people, and I gave the example when I was live and this question was asked to me is that when I started the podcast Back in 2015, I hit a certain amount of downloads per month and I stayed there for five years. I made $0 off the podcast for the first five years there were no ads, none of that. And so for five years, I just put out three to four episodes every single week. And the podcast did not grow at all. It just stayed the same. And then some events in the world happened and it was like the synchronicities happened. And within about three months it went from being exactly the same amount of downloads every single month for five years, and then within three months, it's 70x, like 70 times more downloads and they become one that became one of the top downloaded podcasts in the entire world. And it was only because, and I saw it as like the Chinese bamboo. It took five years for the Chinese bamboo to grow, took five years for the podcast to finally explode. And so most people don't put in effort for five years without getting more and more and more and more results. And that's why, going back to the very first tip, I think that it's so important is that it didn't. The results didn't necessarily matter to me because I felt so in alignment. And success is not immediate. So you want to be aligned with something. And so you've got to have some patience. A lot of times we think that because somebody just pops out up out of nowhere, it seems like they, you know, they build this massive company and they become a unicorn company and they're worth a billion dollars in their first year. You think, oh my God, it's just this massive overnight success. But you don't see the 10, 15, 20 years of hard work, of accumulating knowledge, of accumulating skills that they had to have in order to get there. And so, to everyone looking from the outside who had never heard of this person, it seems like a meteoric rise, but in reality, it was a really, really slow burn for a long time. Which is why being in alignment is really important, is because you will last long term. But then, number two, you have to have the patience. You know, as I get older, I can start to see that all of the little micro decisions that I made in my life paid off because I was just simply persistent and patient. And I was like, I have this feeling that it's going to work. I have this feeling that something's going to take off and I feel fully in alignment. So what else am I going to do in my life? Something that feels out of alignment, Something. Screw that. I'd rather make less money doing something that I love than making more money doing something that I hate. And then what's crazy about it is then it exploded and I was like, oh, I'm making More money than I ever did doing something that I love versus when I was doing something that I hated when I was younger. And so you can be patient, but you first have to decide what it is that you want. And that's really important for people. Like, before you can be patient, you have to figure out what it is that you want. Like, that's the very first step. Before I start driving my car, I have to decide where I'm going. I'm not just going to jump in my car and be like, well, let me take a left turn here, let me go right and let me just see if I can end up at the place that I don't know what I'm going to like. You can't just, otherwise you're just wandering around. Too many people are just wandering around in their lives. So once you've decided what it is that you want, what I recommend doing is if, like, if, okay, I decide this is what I want, this feels the most aligned for me in my life, my heart and soul. Feels like this could be the thing that I want to do. Like, I could be passionate about this thing. Once you figure that out and you're like, yeah, I think this is it. Get rid of all other options. You have to make up your mind. You have to burn the ships. You should not have a plan B because it distracts from plan A. You know, as the, the great philosopher Marshall Mathers once said, success is my only motherfucking option. Failure's not. So it's got to be this, this mindset of like, hey, I'm either going to succeed at this or I'm going to die trying. And this is where a lot of people stop. It doesn't work out after three months. Boo hoo. And then they give up. If you want to succeed, simple tip, just stop stopping. So that's the first thing, what it is, what is it that you want? Figure it out. Get very clear on it. Have no plan B. Second step, next step is to get moving. It doesn't matter how fast you go. It just matters that you're heading in the right direction. I always say if I decide to go to Dallas, I live in Austin, I just have to go north. I can take a car, I can take a plane, I can walk, I can take a bike. But as long as I'm heading in the right direction, I will eventually end up in Dallas. And the direction that you're heading in your life is way more important than the speed that you're going to. And one of the only things that you can control in your life is effort. There's very few things that you can control in your life. Most things in life we can't control. But you can 100% control the effort that you put into something. And the more effort you put into something, the more likely you are to succeed. And everything in this world takes a certain amount of time. You know, like, imagine if. Imagine if I had walked up to my wife Lauren, when she was pregnant with our son and, like, tapped her on the shoulder and been like, hey, listen, like, you know, I know you're supposed to know you're supposed to have the baby in nine months. Is there a way you could get it done in, like, six months? Because I really want to take a vacation. She'd look at me and be like, are you an idiot? Like, everybody knows it takes about nine months for a baby to be born. The universe has decided that. Well, the universe has decided how long it's going to take for you to get the success that you want. The effort and the time they're going to work themselves out. The effort is the thing that you could control. The time is not something that you could control. You can control. So as long as I'm controlling the direction that I'm heading and the effort that I'm going in, eventually I will get to where I want to go. The only thing that you control in that situation is the effort. So for me, it's like, why don't I put as much effort as I possibly can, and then maybe I'll get to my destination sooner than. It's like taking a car to Dallas versus walking there. Well, if I can take the car version of success to my destination, of wherever it is I want to go, it'd be a lot faster than me crawling on my way to Dallas. And so the effort is the thing that we can't control, the time we can't control. And so what I would recommend is figure out what it is that you want, what feels in full alignment with you, and then you can control the effort. So put the effort in that you possibly can, make sure you're heading in the right direction. And then you've just got to be patient. The time will eventually work its way out. The same way that it takes nine months for a baby to be born, it takes a certain amount of time that you don't know and I don't know. But the universe has decided in order for you to get the life that you want, as long as you just don't give up, you'll eventually get there. Might take one year, might take five, might take 10, might take 15. But eventually you will be there. And when you get there, you realize, damn, I'm so glad that I started on this journey. I'm so glad I didn't stop. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. If you love this video, YouTube thinks you're really going to enjoy watching this one right here. And if you want to see more of these, make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss any more episodes.