This is the saddest thing about being a human being. Well, maybe not the saddest, but it’s pretty damn sad.
You’re in the way of your own success. If you used one hundred percent of your potential, you could accomplish basically anything outside of becoming a professional athlete or movie star. If you just believed in yourself, the world would open up to you and give you exactly what you want.
We all come from different circumstances, yes, but even so, the power of the mind is powerful enough to overcome most circumstances. Your mind is powerful enough to do that. But, you don’t do it.
That’s the thing that kills you, isn’t it? You know you could live a better life. Forget about the money, status, materials, fame, none of that BS.
You know that you could simply get more out of yourself.
But you don’t. Or maybe you try, but you don’t get all the way there. Maybe you’ve been trying for a long time and you’re still hitting a wall.
What gives?
This eats at you because you see people who are no better than you intrinsically, but they seem to get the outcomes you want. Not only that, but it also seems easy for them, while pulling off the dreams seems improbable.
I get the angst in our society. We have a mass of men and women who can’t exert their will over their reality. No wonder they feel envy at those who can.
The question you’re probably asking yourself right now is the question you ask yourself often:
Is there still hope?
Can you find some way to muster up the motivation to get what you want, or is it all for naught?
The Annoying Thing About Success
In reality, you don’t need to work hard to be successful. You don’t need to do any work to feel confident. If you simply adopted a certain attitude, you’d get pretty much anything you wanted.
What attitude? An attitude of entitlement. The results you get in your life are a product of what you think you deserve. As soon as you change that, you change your results.
Take money for example. I’ve often told people it takes five years to build a successful business. Maybe that’s true. But I’ve seen people do it in shorter time frames. I use five years because it’s the sort of timeline you can use to build up a sense of entitlement, that’s all.
There is a route where you could put our head down and build a business of my level in as little as 6 months if you felt entitled to it. We use work as a means to give ourselves permission to be successful. So theoretically, you could build a six-figure business in 6 months, but it’s unlikely because you’re not just going to conjure up those feelings from thin air.
I’ll talk about creating that feeling through doing the work in a bit, but I want you to understand this simple truth — most of the limits in your life are self-imposed. If you make $60,000 a year, it’s because you feel entitled to $60k. If you work at McDonald’s, at some level, you feel like you deserve to work there and can’t do any better.
Some of your sense of entitlement is rooted in your circumstances. If you have little to no education and your environment helps shape your belief systems, of course, you won’t feel entitled to much.
I can’t solve society’s issues, eradicate poverty, or instill ambition into every single person on planet earth. I can just tell you what I know to be true. Even if you have the most justifiable reasons in the world, still, you get what you think you deserve.
How do you feel entitled to more? Allow me to explain.
Enhance Your ‘Winner Effect’
Since you usually can’t conjure up feelings of massive confidence from thin air, it’s best to gradually build your confidence over time. The more confidence you have, the more entitled you feel to get what you want.
When I first started making money writing, I’d write freelance blog posts for $15 an hour. Now? I’d take an offer like that as an insult. There was a point in my writing career where I didn’t feel entitled to any money. I was just happy to have places to publish my work. Now? A level of income that would currently disappoint me would blow the mind of my former self.
Why am I telling you this? Again, to hammer in the point about the way your mind works. Once you reach a certain level in life, all of a sudden it becomes the norm and you don’t want to go back. You grow your sense of entitlement by creating “new normals” for yourself.
But before you get to those new normals, you’re going to have a hard time imagining your current self achieving those future goals. So, what do you do?
You put in the work at the skill you’re trying to master then you also constantly visualize your future and try to delude yourself into feeling that sense of entitlement before you actually have it.
The combination of the two will help produce a ‘winner effect.’ Each little win you gain on a new life path reinforces your self-confidence.
Getting the momentum in the first place is the tricky part, which is why I’m trying to convince you how much of your limits are purely psychological.
Find enough entitlement to start, build over time, and in the future, you’ll feel like you deserve to achieve more. A good way to find that sense of entitlement to start? Just look at your life and ask yourself, “Is this all you deserve?”
Take those examples earlier, from the person making $60k to the McDonald’s worker. It’s like they have a devil and an angel on their shoulders. The devil tells them they’re only entitled to what they have right now. But the angel whispers and hints that they could have more.
This is where that angst comes from — the tension between the two voices in your head. You have a negative narrative that’s holding you back and you know it’s BS.
When trying to convince yourself to take real steps toward improving your life, you have to kind of just question your current situation to death, asking yourself iterations of the same question.
Is this all you deserve?
You have to contemplate your self-worth at a deep level. What does the way you’re living your life say about the way you truly see yourself? Is this the best you can do, really?
Are you content to just coast through your life without ever attempting to reach a major goal? Are you going to die the same person you are now?
I remember that feeling when I was dead broke living in my ratty apartment. I didn’t feel entitled to millions, but I looked at my situation and thought “What the hell am I doing? I’m better than this.”
The Simple Yet Complex Path to Success
So that’s it.
There’s no magical fancy secret to all of this.
You have different talents and strengths you could utilize to build a better life, a better career, a better business, so on, and so forth. You kind of already know what you want to do, but you’re afraid and you don’t feel like you deserve to be successful.
Deep down, you know you could do better. Self-improvement is the process of riding that feeling until you build habits and discipline to carry through with the steps without having to will yourself to ultimate motivation to do so.
Then, one day, you’ll reach the point I’m at.
Where am I? I don’t live a perfect life, but having gone through the process of achieving goals I once thought improbable, I realize the extent of my own limiting beliefs. I’m used to a life I used to dream about.
So when I have a new goal in mind, I genuinely know my doubts are BS.
Your doubts are BS.
Corniness aside, you already have everything you need to do anything you want. Maybe some of you can just understand that right now and conjure up those feelings.
For those who can’t, you’ll just have to do the work until it becomes obvious that you deserve more.
You do deserve more. Again, it’s not about having millions in the bank. It’s about avoiding the sad yet common fate of wasted potential. You owe it to yourself to see this process through.
If you do, you’ll see how right I am, and you’ll kick yourself for waiting so damn long.