As people dedicated to becoming the best version of ourselves, we all want to be successful. And that’s not just in the way society has painted it to be with the wealth and influence, but in the ways that are unique to us and represent the lives we want to live.

In case you didn't know, the secret to success is defining it for yourself.

But regardless of what success looks like, author David Schwartz says there are 4 common excuses people make that’s holding them back from achieving the results they want in life:

Excuse #1 - Poor Health. People think that in order to excel in their career or have a fun and social lifestyle, they must compromise their personal health to accommodate. They view taking care of themselves as a tradeoff that takes time from other important things… 

But the truth of it is that good health is an investment that facilitates more quality in everything else. And for those who are in poor health, it becomes such a dominant focus that it takes away from being able to prioritize other desires.

Excuse #2 - Low Intelligence And Being Underqualified. As people reflect on the vision they’ve casted for themselves, who they can be, and the level that they can contribute at... Often they feel like an imposter. They reason that they’re not smart enough to excel, or don’t have the degrees or schooling they need to be taken seriously. 

But your goals don’t care how educated you are. All that matters is the extent of action you take toward what you care about, and if you’re not “good enough” to meet the required standard, the fastest way to bridge the gap is with hands-on experience.

Excuse #3 - Being Too Old Or Too Young. Some people think that their time has already passed. That they no longer have the drive, energy, or work ethic to keep up… And that new technologies and ways of doing things have passed them by, and they’re too far behind to catch up. Some think that they don’t have the experience yet to command the respect they need to be effective.

But anyone can learn anything. You can teach an old dog new tricks, and youngsters can catch up fast. That is, as long as the individual has the desire to invest the time required to learn. 

Excuse #4 - Being Unlucky. The most successful people in the world would admit that luck has played a major role in their success. Opportunities had to present themselves. And for those who haven’t had their stroke of luck, or where the timing just didn’t work out, it’s easier to explain away why certain things didn’t happen.

But we’re not just the recipients of good fortune, we’re also the creators of it. The old expression goes “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.” You can certainly prepare, and in some ways ‘knock on doors’ which will cause more to open. Richard Branson puts it perfectly - “Everyone’s lucky. I’ve just managed to do a lot with the good luck that’s come my way.” And golf legend Gary Player is known for saying “The more I practice, the luckier I get.”

These are the 4 most common excuses holding people back from success... But what’s an excuse anyway? It’s just an explanation for why something out of your control caused you to not get what you want, or do what you wanted to do. 

And every time you make an excuse, you give your power to everything else. It makes you powerless, and that’s not a recipe for achieving your goals.

One of the most iconic brands in fashion and retail, JCPenney, hasn’t been successful by accident... It’s a testament to a foundational culture built into the business, “Just do what’s right.”

When you build the habit of doing the right thing, things tends to work out.

“Just do what’s right” is the life mantra of the founder James Cash Penney. In practice it’s pretty simple: Act with integrity, treat people fairly, and act in good conscience. It’s an intention to do what’s in the best interest of everyone involved, and being willing to take on personal sacrifice to achieve it. Doing the right thing might have short-term costs, but as a law of the world, good karma always seems to come back around and provide in unexpected ways when you do what’s right. 

Interestingly, Mr. JC Penney learned this lesson from his first business partners, where he bought into becoming a partial owner of a new location associated with the “Golden Rule” stores. As you’ll probably remember, the Golden Rule is to “treat others the way you want to be treated.” Doing what’s right is doing exactly that.

It’s with that spirit that JC Penney turned a ⅓ stake in one store into 1400 stores less than 30 years later.

In our lives, we’re tempted to not ‘do what’s right’ in an effort to save some money, time, and our reputation. But when we go down that path, we know it’s out of integrity. There’s something about that choice that doesn’t sit well with us, and it’s a feeling we need to live with. Sure, in the short-term we took the path that was easier, more convenient, and came with more personal benefit… But it quietly eats away at our confidence and puts our character into question.

Doing what’s right often involves being the bigger person. Perhaps JC Penney is somewhat responsible for the expression “the customer is always right”... But doing what’s right involves a lot more than just conceding an argument. It’s also apologizing and acknowledging that you made a mistake, or that you did something that negatively affected someone else. It’s taking responsibility for something you played a part in, even if you can easily point the finger. It’s making things even when someone else doesn’t even know they’re being wronged, because it’s the right thing to do.

The right thing to do is always the right thing to do.

Not only are you rewarded for it in the long-term, but you also feel good about yourself, you can proudly look at yourself in the mirror because you’re a person of integrity, and you can’t put a price on that.

Tuning into an event Toby Robbin’s hosted last week, he introduced a new framework that I found to be really compelling. As most of us look to find ways to improve in our lives, we’re trying to uncover new strategies that will boost our chances of success.

Successful strategies can be found all over the place - books, podcasts, courses, videos - and they come from a place of credibility because often they’re being shared by people who’ve used them to achieve their goals. The strategy is meant to guide our actions, which ultimately materialize into our results.

But going a layer deeper, we each have a personal relationship with the strategy we choose.

We have our own perception of how likely it is to work, and how much it is actually working. This is the ‘story’ we assign to the strategy. The 'story' basically provides an explanation for the result we achieved and shapes the way we view it.

The 'story' is unconsciously written by a few different things… One of the primary factors being our belief system. Based on past experiences, a life-time of lessons, and social conditioning we formulate our understanding for how the world works. And it becomes our lens into reality.

Something that plays into that, contributing to our ‘story’ is our energetic state. How we feel predisposes our minds to think a certain way. If we feel good, confident, safe, and in control, we’re more likely to relate with a situation positively. If we feel tired, scared, and stressed, we’re more likely to respond to that same situation much more negatively.

The reason Tony chose to bring this all up is because we spend so much time working on our strategy to improve performance... When in reality the most impactful thing we could do is manage our personal state.

Our energetic state influences the story we create, which is responsible for the way we show up to executing a tactic. A more positive state leads to more convicted, ambitious, consistent, empowered action… Which leads to better results.

When we feel on fire we bring more resilience, discipline, and confidence to everything we do. And we can control that… It simply involves being more intentional about taking care of our bodies, disrupting lazy patterns, introducing movement throughout the day, and creating a more energized and aroused state.

So join me in giving that a try for a week! When you feel tired, lazy, burned out, or unmotivated, change your start with some pushups, breathing, dancing, or something to get your blood flowing. Having focused a lot on my state management in the past, it feels really good, and it works!

In trying to improve anything in life, we’re doing it in order to achieve one thing: better results.

We workout to get a positive result in our daily energy levels and body type. We put our phone down at dinner to get the result of having more connected and informed relationships. We read books, invest in courses, and seek perspective not just to fill our time, but to use what we learn to positively change the realities we experience.

And there’s only one thing in the world that influences the results we get, which are 'actions'. Our actions, and the actions taken around us, are the only things that have the power to shift how reality exists.

Knowing that action is the key to changing anything about your life, let’s oversimplify what goes into taking positive, empowering action.

First is knowing what to do. This is a process of getting clarity. Clarity on what you want to change and what you can do to create that change. Often times people stay stuck in inaction because they don’t know what action is most likely to produce the desired result, so they overthink it. Ultimately this means they lack the clarity they need to believe that doing the thing is going to be worth the time and effort. 

Second is knowing how to do it. This is a process of becoming more skilled or knowledgeable about the action. There are better, higher quality ways to do things, and the more you know how to take a certain action, the more leverage you create in the result you get out from it. The results produced from an action aren’t fixed… They exist on a spectrum. Becoming more effective and efficient in your action-taking helps you to get more from less.

And last is actually following through on doing it. This is a matter of discipline, doing what you most serves you, consistently, despite the circumstances around it. Even when you don’t feel like it or you’re afraid to do it. To overcome the internal resistance we feel to taking action, it’s helpful to put a system of execution behind it so that there’s a plan, commitment, accountability, and streamlined process that makes taking action easier. 

It’s no more complicated than that. To take action you need to know what to do, know how to do it, and to follow through on doing it. And there’s an unbelievable amount of opportunity for improvement within each of those areas.

But if all this serves to improve your life, which means to quantifiably improve the quality of your personal and professional results, then you need to be obsessed with taking the right actions.

I call this living intentionally, and being thoughtful about every choice you make and action you take. Every day I reflect on my choices, actions, and results to fine-tune my approach to creating my best life in my Self Improvement Scorecard. It’s my personal intentionality system, and if you want to see what it takes to get consistent in doing the things that achieve your goals, watch this video where I show you my Self Improvement Scorecard in action!

Two times last week I noticed myself getting frustrated over the same thing. I was taking calls with people offering my support with the intention to be helpful. These were calls I didn’t need to accommodate... And was doing it as a favor and benefit for the other person. In both cases, two different people showed up to the call with poor cell service while taking the call on-the-go in their car.

Initially I felt like my time was being disrespected. I dedicated a portion of my day to support them and they didn’t have the decency to plan well enough to make the most of the time on their end. 

Fortunately, the frustration didn’t last long. Instead of carrying this negative energy into the conversation, I accepted the conditions and chose to be of service and generously share whatever I could. And I’m so glad I did. In both cases, these individuals gave deeply personal, vulnerable updates on their life situations that more than explained why they had to take the call from their car.

It was a reminder to hold back your initial judgment. Our engrained response-system acts virtually instantaneously. Daniel Kahneman calls it “fast-thinking” where we immediately process any stimulus we’re faced with, seek to understand what it means, and produce a response to it. It’s hardwired into our evolution because In threatening situations, the difference between life and death is our ability to act fast.

One of the main factors that goes into our “fast thinking” is our ego. It’s part of what’s ingrained in us to achieve self-preservation. But our ego often influences us to respond in ways we don’t want to because it gets easily agitated by the actions of other people. In an effort to maintain our own self-image, it finds fault in others to make us feel better about ourselves.

That’s exactly what my ego did in this situation. It immediately caused me to feel offended by their choices, attacked by their rudeness, and wanting to belittle their character. It all happened unconsciously, and I’m grateful that I’ve done enough inner work to quickly identify what happened and consciously choose a different response that aligns with the person I want to be.

It’s easier said than done, but try to hold back your initial judgment because it’s often being fueled by your ego. Give yourself time to process what’s happening and determine how you want to show up versus how your mind is telling you to. I’ve found that meditation has been a really helpful tool for quieting the impulses of the ego so that you can select a more thoughtful response. That, and reflecting on moments where you feel triggered to create an awareness of the conditions around it, so that you’re more likely to recognize those conditions the next time you’re in them.

Author of “The 5 Types of Wealth”, Sahil Bloom introduced a really helpful framework related to being consistent. When we think of building good habits, we naturally believe that we need to be really consistent with doing a specific thing. But sometimes and under some conditions, it’s really difficult to take action to the extent that would keep you consistent with a commitment. 

We all encounter days where we don’t have the time, energy, capacity, or ability to follow through with our intentions. And when that happens, the alternative choice is that we break our streak and lose our consistency.

But that doesn’t represent our options fairly. Sure, it’s ideal to follow through fully, but on the days when you can’t take full action, you can still do something. Something is better than nothing, right? And Sahil argues that executing a Plan B, or Plan C, is extremely meaningful in maintaining momentum.

So for any habit you want to implement, Sahil recommends that you build out three variations of it: A, B, and C. He calls them ABC Goals and Habits. Here’s what they are, and some examples.

‘A’ is the version that is ideal and you strive to do on a daily basis. That’s spending an hour a day marketing and prospecting for your business.

‘B’ is a managed approach where you still take a significant amount of action, but it’s not the full amount. This is following up with all the leads who have gotten back to you and are awaiting a response, which might take 10 or 20 minutes.

‘C’ is just enough to get the smallest rep in, that’s a meaningful amount in reinforcing the original intention. This is sending one message out in whatever capacity that is relevant to your marketing activity, and it could happen in 30 seconds.

In the name of consistency: Plan A is what you’re building toward, Plan B is meaningful action, and Plan C is enough to not completely break your rhythm.

Sahil argues you can do the same for the goals that you set: One best case achievement, one middle-ground indicator of progress, and one that minimally completes the commitment.

The real insight embedded in all of this is that we need to accept partial action as significant, and we can’t let ourselves off the hook on the days when we can’t take action in full. In fact, it’s on these off days that your character gets to shine through, and real momentum gets built. 

Today’s thought was inspired by a comment Darren Hardy makes at the end of his book “The Compound Effect”.

“Whatever I want in life, I found the best way to get it is to focus my energy on giving it to others. The ‘ripple effect’ of giving generously of your time and energy is that you become the biggest beneficiary of your personal philanthropy.”

It’s not that you “give to get”, but you give knowing that you get a lot in return, in unexpected ways, when you do. And that serves to provide you with more influence, resources, capacity, and experience that will help you in giving generously again and again.

One of the most abundant and generous people I know is my mentor David Meltzer, and he considers himself to be a conduit that value flows through. He has a spiritual approach to the goodness in his life, and feels as though the universe trusts him to facilitate the flow that needs to touch others. It’s an energy I do my best to embody myself.

And the beautiful part is, we have so much to give, no matter who you are. Standardly we default to thinking that the most valuable things to give are your money and time, but there are so many more nuanced things that we have to offer:

We can give our attention to help someone feel seen, heard, appreciated, and valued.

We can give people our networks and connections, helping them forge collaborations that are valuable to them.

We can give love, energy, enthusiasm, and hope to help inspire others who are feeling down, and infuse belief in those who are short of it.

We can give patience and presence for those who are too caught up in their lives to see the big picture.

For a lot of the things that we have to offer, there’s no cost to sharing it. We just need to be willing to show up with that spirit, and to embody the courage required to be a positive influence in the world. That’s what our self-improvement work helps us to do, and that’s what helps us contribute more to the flow that circles back around and returns to us.

Seek to be more helpful. Seek to be more useful. And seek to give more generously, because it’s the currency that helps us all have more than enough. 

A methodology I’ve found to be really effective and applicable in creating improvement is ‘constraint theory’. It’s the idea that everything expands, flows, and produces without restriction until it meets its first limitation. That limitation is the constraint.

Think of it like a hose where the water valve is turned all the way on. Under normal conditions, the water will naturally flow with full water pressure. But if there are kinks or blockages in the hose, it will impact the water pressure that comes out the end, so much so that it might not flow any water at all.

It’s more abstract, but when something isn’t working in your life how you want it to, it’s often because you’ve run up against a constraint.

Good intentions to eat healthy, exercise consistently, get focused work done, follow through on marketing tactics, and spend quality time with your family perform to their first constraint. When you analyze things and identify what’s keeping you from achieving a desired result or taking a specific action, you can trace it back to the obstacle that’s getting in the way. The kink in the hose.

It’s wanting to eat healthy, but you didn’t have a healthy option at home. The constraint is the food that’s available. 

It’s having the intention to make sales calls, but you ran out of time. The constraint is that you didn’t carve out the hour to do it, or that you got distracted during that hour and deprioritized doing it.

Just about everything is vulnerable to constraints because everything operates off of the simple, universal principle of ‘cause and effect’. Things don’t just happen at random, they’re the byproduct of the conditions and design around it. When you change the design and undo a constraint, you unlock the next tier of result, which produces to the extent of the next constraint which then serves as the limiting factor.

Knowing that my own self-growth is limited by my own personal constraints, I am constantly seeking to understand what’s getting in the way of the abundance and flow I want. One of the things I want most right now is more business partnerships, and the constraint is creating more time to do more outreach and connect on calls. So I’m being really intentional about auditing what’s taking up my time, understanding the commitments on my plate, and taking action to free myself up to better prioritize partnerships.

In today’s world, there are 3 constraints that I see come up over and over again: Time (not having the capacity to do more), clarity (not knowing exactly what to do or what will work), and discipline (not bringing yourself to do the thing you’ve committed to).

If you want to chat with me to uncover the biggest constraints in your life, which are keeping you from the results you know you’re capable of and deserve, then book a time here, I'd love to connect!

The gift and curse about personal development is that the work is never done. There’s always more to explore within yourself, things to be more intentional about, areas for improvement, and opportunities for growth. 

And since there’s no specific endpoint to achieve, it can often be overwhelming to figure out what to focus on next. There are unlimited options... So the task is to narrow it down to just the things that you think will be most impactful for your personally and professionally.

Trying to figure that out for myself, I asked myself a question that I found was really helpful in knowing what to focus on in my self-growth next:

What do I see other people do exceptionally well that I’d pay $10,000 to do well myself?

If there’s something you respect or admire about someone else, it’s likely because you value that thing. And if you’d put money down to be more like that, it means that you know there’s a gap between where you are and where you want to be.

I'll put more thought and time into it soon, but this is the main thing came up for me as I sought to answer that question for myself:

I want to have more clarity on what I want to create in the world. I have big ambitions to do something massively impactful, and lots of ideas around what that could look like, but ultimately I want to sharpen my vision so that I can be laser-focused on what everything is building toward, and what steps I need to take systematically to get there. 

As a layer of complexity, I don’t want to pursue that vision at all costs. I want to build the roadmap with a healthy, connected, joyful lifestyle being taken into consideration. A life that includes, trips, family visits, a social life, fitness competitions, and other things that I enjoy. It’s something I’m watching Rob Dyrdek accomplish, and while I’m not prepared to do it at his level, it’s something I want to make progress toward. 

The interesting thing about answering this question is it can go in two directions. It can highlight goals and results you want to prioritize over others, or bring forward the skills and habits you want to develop. Either way, it takes the sea of everything and begins to narrow it into what you see as most impactful for you.

Here it is again: What do I see other people do exceptionally well that I’d pay $10,000 to do well myself?

Take some time to answer it for yourself!

And when it's time to figure out what to do about it, this is your first step.