When is the last time you gave everything you had to make something happen? By that I mean putting a ton of time into a goal with extreme focus and determination. It means becoming so passionate that you start to obsess.
If I had to pick one personality trait that helps me succeed, it would be the ability to become 100% dedicated to make a goal happen. It’s amazing how much immersing yourself completely into a goal can help you reach it.
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Show me the person who has never failed and you’ll be showing me a person who has never accomplished anything.
Failure is a natural part of life. We all have to go through it at one point or another. It can’t be helped.
You may not be able to change the fact that failures and setbacks will happen once in a while, but you can determine how you react to them. And it turns out that how you react to failure matters a lot.
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A few months ago I got back from Morocco where I had been living and traveling for two months. Rather than quitting my job, I took a leave of absence so I could go back to my position when I returned.
This is the fourth time I’ve had an employer let me take time off to travel for a month or so at a time. I wrote about my first two times in a previous post.
However in that post, I didn’t go into much detail about how I negotiated the time off.
Since then I’ve asked more employers for extended periods of time off to travel. I’ve gained a lot of experience in the best way to ask in order to get travel time off.
So I want to go into more detail about what I’ve learned about getting a month or more of travel off from work.
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Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both dropped out of Harvard. David Geffen went to college for only three semesters before leaving. Ralph Lauren, Ted Turner and Steve Jobs are others who dropped out before getting their bachelor’s degrees.
All are billionaires; all are college dropouts.
The actual list of billionaires has even more college dropouts. According to the Forbes 400 list of billionaires, 63 earned nothing past a high school diploma. And the bulk of these people earned their way onto the list rather than having inherited their wealth.
So what do these people do that allows them to build up such a vast empire with so little formal education? What kind of life lessons can we learn from their stories?
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That moment you decide to follow a dream is magical.
It’s so exciting. Not everyone finds a dream they truly believe in. Even less people take action to pursue them.
There’s no doubt it’s a risk, but what dreams come easy?
Besides you’d rather go for it and fail than let it pass you by without even trying.
You set your plans and goals to accomplish and head out on your way. Everything is going great.
That is, until you tell the people close to you.
Your friends and family aren’t as supportive as you’d thought they would be. You expected a few questions and concerns, but the feedback you get surprises you.
A few are doubtful, but many of them are outright unsupportive.
For some reason, they want you to give up on this dream. They might think it’s too risky or that the odds are completely against you. Whatever their concern is, the message is clear: they’re against it.
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A reporter once asked Muhammad Ali how many sit ups he could do. The great boxer said he didn’t know. He only started counting when it started hurting.
This is the story I like to think about when I think about reaching greatness. Muhammad Ali is generally considered one of the greatest boxers of all time. Just by looking at this quote I can see why.
What made Muhammad Ali great is this ability to push past his limits so he could grow and become better. That’s what it takes to reach greatness. It means ignoring what you think is impossible to be the best.
So what qualities do you need to bring out your own greatness?
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I know it’s a rather morbid idea, but every once in a while I like to imagine what the last day of my life will look like. It’s more a matter of intellectual curiosity than grim preoccupation.
I can actually trace back to the moment when I started doing this. It all started with a phone call I received a few years ago. A friend of mine called me up and said he had some bad news for me. It was more than bad news though; it was terrible news.
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