33 Brutal Truths To Stop Wasting Your Potential

You Have to Change to Change

You have to change to change. It's a cliché but the truth is that not everyone knows or accepts that if nothing has changed, nothing will change.

It's an unwritten rule of life — after every prolonged period of hardship and uncertainty there's going to be a period where you achieve quantum leaps across multiple areas of your life. The only requirement is that you don't give up on yourself.

Failure and success are on the same road. It's just that failure is an earlier exit.

Whatever you do, don't be the guy who gives up at the exact moment when you should be fighting with everything you have. You'll make it through either way, but there's only one way you'll look back and be proud of yourself.

You can't compare yourself with people who are in different chapters. You just have to believe you can change incrementally — one behavior at a time, over an extended period of time — and those changes will aggregate. Because we don't know what the next chapter looks like, we only know what the next page does, and we get to write that today.

No one is coming to save you. Everything is your fault. And you have to sacrifice who you are for who you want to become.

Be Yourself, Don't Dilute

It sucks to not be liked, but it sucks more to not be yourself. Everything around you will try and force you to dilute yourself. It will force you to try and merge in, fit in with your surroundings. This force is natural and inevitable and yet we have to fight it. The fact that it's hard does not make it less worth it.

The #1 Skill Everyone Should Learn

The single greatest skill you can develop is the ability to stay in a good mood in the absence of things to be in a good mood about.

Why do I have to have things to be grateful for in order to be in a good mood? Why is trying to find things a requirement of being in that mood? Could I not find things and still choose to be in a good mood? What if you can just be in a good mood without a reason?

It is a very unfortunate irony of the world that the skill set you often need to become successful in the business, is the one you need to get rid of to be happy in your life.

How to Not Let One Bad Day Spiral

How feeble, how small is your life that something so unimpressive is a source of gratitude to you, and yet your life is made of small days like this — that is what life is.

Suppose your expectation of life is that it is going to be well, until you achieve something very big (e.g., earn $1 million, receive an offer from Google, etc.). In that case, you're just holding your happiness hostage until something great happens.

What if something small could be something great?

If everyone is working smart, then the only thing left that you have to compete is working hard. "Work smart, not hard" only works when you compete against dumb people.

Hormozi's Flip to Discovering Happiness

One of the issues with asking anybody successful for advice is that they tell you what they do now, not what they did when they were in your position. You shouldn't ask somebody how they're maintaining their success right now. The question you need to ask is: "How did you achieve your success when you were at the stage I was at?"

Alex's embedded command to everyone:

• Use if useful.
• This is a documentary, not a sermon.
• Model the rise if you want the rise, model the plateau if you want the plateau.

The greatest skill is to discern what things to use and what things to cast out. If you cannot pull out what is useful for you, you will never win.

Alex's Blueprint for a Successful Life

We seek freedom, but it's really that we seek options. The idea of freedom is a blank calendar, but a blank calendar that never gets filled is not a fulfilling day. And we want everything we want during that day.

Perhaps the golden years could only happen in our memory. Nobody believes that we're living through a golden year right now. We never think we're in the good old days, but the good old days are always now.

Rewards stick, punishment fades.

If You're 22, You Don't Need Work-Life Balance

If you talk about work-life balance as a 22-year-old, you're hanging around with the wrong people. That knowing feeling when you realize you've outgrown your social circle isn't loneliness — it's your ambition, finally speaking instead of your need to belong.

The Story of Buddha and the Second Arrow

The Buddha was trying to teach a lesson, and he asked the student: "Does it hurt if I shoot you with an arrow?"
Student: "Yes, it would be hurtful."
Buddha: "If I shoot you with a second arrow in the same spot after the first arrow, would that hurt?"
Student: "Yes."
Buddha: "The first arrow is life; you can't avoid the first arrow. The second arrow is you — that one you can avoid."

Suffering is a constant, that's a fixed cost of life. We're going to have downsides. We're going to have bad seasons, bad moments, and bad days. But a great rule to live by is to only suffer once. Without reliving this moment or judging yourself for not behaving the way you would have liked to behave, do not judge the version of you that you should have been at this moment.

The True Meaning of Success

Success really just boils down to this: you've got to want it more than you hate what it takes to get it. If you're willing to suck at anything for 100 days in a row, you can beat most people at most things.

To release desire, just choose to want something else. Don't try to release the desire — try and justify or reason why wanting something different is better.

The Power of Trying Anything Even If You Suck

The bar for excellence has never been so low. Most of your competition quits after the first sign of difficulty because they've never known what hard feels like. If it's hard for you, it's hard for everyone. And most people avoid hard things, which is why you can beat most people by just trying.

There are two types of people: those who want to know more, and those who want to defend what they already know. So many people are afraid to change their minds when most of their beliefs aren't even theirs to begin with.

What are you so afraid of losing when nothing in this world really belongs to you? If you can't explain why you believe what you believe, then it isn't your belief — it's someone else's. What's weird is that people are willing to defend someone else's belief but they're not willing to accept someone else's belief.

Don't analyze or judge your pleasure. If this thing makes you feel good, don't question it — just let it be.

Why Pain Is Necessary for Real Progress

The fastest growth periods are often miserable. If you want progress, get used to pain.

The worst thing that has happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you. The hardest you have ever worked is the hardest you have ever worked. Every new challenge shows you a new territory you were scared of, but survived. Every time you break a new limit, you now know you have the capacity to handle more than you ever did before — it's inverse PTSD, like workload exposure therapy that teaches you: "Oh! I've been here before, and I didn't die. This is okay."

One of the strongest reframes for suffering is that it gives you the opportunity to create evidence of the person you want to be. You cannot say that you're the type of person who can withstand hard things without having gone through hard things. Reframing suffering as an opportunity to create more proof is really strong, because we are ultimately just the behaviors that we do.

The bigger the monster, the more epic the hero.

How to Find True Love

If it makes sense without emotion, then it will make sense when the emotions are gone.

You Don't Need Work-Life Balance If You're Obsessed

People who obsess about work-life balance are typically mediocre at both. Obsessive people apply their obsession to everything and just call it life.

Don't Be Surprised by Results You Didn't Work For

Lazy people don't know how to start, weak people don't know how to finish, successful people don't know how to stop. People demand success but refuse to work weekends, people want opportunity but won't talk to strangers, people claim ambition but sleep in every day. We are the result of our actions, not our aspirations.

Alex's Journey of Discovering Meditation

The single greatest skill that you can develop is being in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about.

It's important to realize that the thing you thought was going to fill the void wasn't the thing, but you can't realize it wasn't the thing that was going to fill the void until you got it. And then once you got it, you think: "Okay, sick. Take that one off. Now allow me to move on to the more subtle insight that I could have never achieved had I not gone there."