If I’m going to fail and be broke anyway, I may as well be changing the world and helping a lot of people in the process.
Have you ever wondered how the greatest achievers and household names of success get started? Rockefeller, Jobs, Bezos, Musk, Buffet are all names that you know and are synonymous with amazing success. If you haven’t thought about this, it’s probably because you’ve made the assumption that they got lucky or had a predisposed advantage that gave them the courage to get started. After all, changing the world is really hard, that’s why most people don’t do it! Or maybe you do acknowledge the effort and work people like this put in but think it’s just easier for them.
I have been studying people of success for a long time now and I have found some very fascinating things about the minds of great achievers. I’m not saying these people are always exciting, in fact some can be downright boring but they are very diverse. But the one thing they all have in common is this; they all possess an incredible imperviousness to painful stress and the unrelenting pressure to produce results.
If you think about your own life for just a minute, ask yourself why you have not done better or became more successful like these people? I understand a lot of people do not want high levels of success and are completely happy with a quintessential average life. Please, understand, there’s nothing wrong with that! But others strive for the highest level of the American dream only to fall short or experience complete failure. If you are one of the strivers and you seem to keep coming up short, keep reading and maybe you will see something you are missing.
Here are 11 mindset principles to put into action that will drastically change the outcomes of your efforts. While studying these principles, keep in mind that the highest level of achievers are not doing it for the glory, wealth, or fame. They are doing it for the impact, results, and for the game. They think, “If I’m going to fail and go broke anyway, I may as well be changing the world and helping a lot of people in the process.”
1. Work and family are the only way I spend my time. No friends, no social, no events outside work until I have achieve my desired results.
2. I need a reason to have a resolute perseverance in the face of failure
3. I need a pathway for intentional practice. Intentionally practicing and pushing the work to the failure point each day
4. I need to be driven by an idea that makes me work very hard and long hours with little gain and still keep going
5. To have the failure and financial stress of the business not be nearly as scary or risky as not doing the business at all. The feeling that not acting on high risk ventures is actually riskier.
6. To care far more about the vision of the business than paying rent on the building or being criticized by others
7. To be completely carefree of competition and/or seeking Blue Ocean aspects
8. Completely be insulated from the idea of natural talent and inborn giftedness of employees. Meaning, anyone can be taught
9. I need employees whose work skills go beyond showing up on time, working hard, or learning fast. Those three things are not work skills! Anyone can show up, work hard and learn fast. I’m looking for employees with a purposeful work ethic.
10. Have absolutely no “B plan” for this vision. I will succeed at this or die trying. If I’m going to go broke, it may as well be purposeful, world changing, and while helping a lot of people along the way and… be spectacular!
11. I will be accepting and fully comfortable of mistakes and miscalculations as part of the success process.
You do not have to love the work
You do not have to love the work, you just have to be insatiable about the results. That is something most people miss in the success process. We have been lead to believe we should, “Love what you do and you will never work a day in your life” or “Follow your passion” and so on. These kinds of incantations have disappointed more than a lot of people. Tom Brady, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan all only cared about winning rings. They may have liked the game but they did not love what it took to be the best ever.
Keep this in mind as you develop your great achievement
Another paramount insight to reaching the greatest success you possibly can is separating yourself from the achievement and give the world more value and the people something to aspire to. The achiever got the ring, the money, and the success but the world got the benefit. It eventually becomes not about them anymore but about the world. These really high achievers not only focus on the end results but also how will those results pave the way for the future and give more people a pathway to climb up as well. Once someone does it, more people believe they could do it too.
Make it about other people when you are strategizing
We often conceptualize that high achievers want it all to themselves. That is an easy mistake to make especially during our modern age of businesses and superstars now taking a political stance and our population’s awful cancel culture. But truly high achieving strivers will want others to achieve greatly as well no matter who they are! As Michael Jordan once very sternly told Nike, “Republicans buy shoes too!” Elon Musk wants all car companies to follow his lead, Warren Buffett wants more people to follow his investments advice, Apple teaches other businesses the 30% rule, and Amazon allows average people to have Amazon Stores to access their vast customer base. Climbing the ivory tower and kicking the ladder off is not how these people think!
You cannot be afraid to do hard shit!
Do not forget that the world needs you to fail at something great. Things are hard, and most people are not going to attempt them. The world needs you to go do it, fail at it, and rebuild it to success. The greatest achievers of all time approached their work actually wanting to fail at it. I know that sounds crazy because we have been so conditioned to be successes that we completely forget the how invaluable failure is. We have been taught that failure is a bad thing so we go into new ventures thinking only about the success of it. Even in starting a new business, experts want you to do a risk mitigation analysis. When failure inevitably happens, we get incredibly frustrated and even quit! Screw risk mitigation! Get in the game and do some hard shit! Don’t just try, do! Because if you are only trying, failure and quitting is still an option. Trust yourself and your instincts!
Try changing your security and scarcity thinking into the thinking that I only have one life and the people in the world now and the ones who have not been born yet are depending on me to achieve something great. Make this your achievement motto as you get started:
“If I’m going to fail and be broke anyway, I may as well be changing the world, touching a lot of lives, and helping a lot of people in the process.”
I think you can see the irony in that statement. If you do change the world, touch a lot of lives and help a lot of people, you will likely not be a failure and most likely won’t be broke. You are going to fail anyway so why not fail at something great! You do not want to be the person that couldn’t make it in something mediocre. Be someone that went where eagles dare. When you fail or lose, people will be critical and laugh at you but you can always say, “What I lose, you never had! How can that be a loss or a failure?”
Your failure at something great and amazing will also get you back in the game. You had what it took to get there before, what’s stopping you from doing it again with a new fresh look how to succeed this time!
I hope this information you can really use. Email me or text me and let me know your thoughts
danbockman@bockmangroup.com or text 307-751-6714
Daniel J Bockman
