Change is Hard Without Leverage
“Change is hard at first, messy in the middle, and gorgeous at the end.” ― Robin S. Sharma
Making changes in life so that you can reap the rewards you want is hard. I’ll be honest. Driving the right kind of change takes focus, it takes discipline, it takes commitment. And in this chapter I’m going to give you a tool that you can use as leverage to drive this change. But let’s first talk about why you need to make a change and why it is important to commit up front to it.
Congratulations. You’ve just hit a critical inflection point in this book. Over the past few chapters, we talked through what separates the DREAMERS from the DABBLERS. We talked about our deep-rooted fears and the limiting beliefs holding us back. And, most importantly, we took a moment to pause and imagine what life would be like for you if you maintained the STATUS QUO in an ever-changing world.
If you’re continuing to read my book, it means one thing: You’re intent on committing to Belief x Discipline and changing the trajectory of your life. I’m pumped for you.
When I was sitting there at age 25, thinking about the trajectory of my life, I knew I had a lot of things to figure out, and I knew I had some changes to make. From age 25 to age 35, I used the same tools that I am going to present to you over the next few chapters of this book. I used these tools to take stock of everything I had accomplished in my life, to craft a vision for my life true to my own definition of greatness, and to then start to navigate toward that vision, one Sunday at a time.
Why Sunday? Because we as human beings love “fresh starts.” That is why we love New Year’s Resolutions. It is a new beginning and a new opportunity. Similarly, our bodies recognize the fresh start and tighten up on a Sunday. It’s a new beginning, and our body is subtly asking us: “What’s the plan?”
The subsequent chapters of this book are going to introduce you to actionable ideas that you can adopt in order to bring change to your life. These practices will help you go from just reacting to life to taking control and becoming more proactive in life.
Those changes that I made in my life unlocked nearly a decade of success and productivity for me. The methods, tools, and ideas I used to make those changes came from hundreds of hours of reading, researching, going to conferences, and talking to mentors. Ironically, none of the things that I learned were taught in schools; they weren’t taught by my teachers; they weren’t taught by my parents; they weren’t even taught in the world-class corporations like GE and Bridgewater Associates where I worked. And yet, it is all knowledge that has been available for us to access for thousands of years.
Part of my motivation to write this book was exactly that. I thought it was silly that I wasn’t handed a basic, actionable, and simple handbook on how to plan out what I want from life right at the sixth grade. While I was proud of what I had accomplished at age 25, can you imagine just how much farther along I would’ve been had I learned how to set a vision for my life and how to set goals and how to manage my time and prioritize --- instead of learning how to compute derivatives in Calculus class?!
Before you can start to take action and adopt the mindset that the subsequent chapters of this book will present to you, you’ll have to make a decision and make a commitment to change your status quo and the current trajectory of your life, so that you can become Unstoppable.
There are certain changes in life that are easy to adopt. It just so happens that they’re often not good for us, but we adopt them anyway -- because those easily-adoptable types of changes tend to give us an immediate reward.
On one hand, if you have a drink of Scotch or eat an amazing steak, you almost immediately get the reward and gratification from it, even though in the long term it may be bad for you. Convincing yourself to have steak and Scotch every day is very easy!
On the other hand, if you work out at the gym just once, you feel okay, but it may take 45 days straight of workouts before your body starts to tighten up and you start to feel amazing both physically and mentally. Convincing yourself to go to the gym three times a week in order to reap the long-term rewards can be very hard!
The going-to-the-gym reward is delayed, even though the net positive impact on your life is far greater than is the impact of the Scotch-and-steak meal. But in order to get to that reward, you’ll have to make the change in your life to work out for 45 days to reap the long-term, positive rewards of that change. Therein lies the conundrum.
We optimize our lives and build habits that give us immediate gratification, and yet we yearn for the results and success that come from things that require discipline and delayed gratification. In life, whether we realize it or not, we’re constantly faced with the choice between discipline now versus regret later.
So the question becomes… How do you start doing the things that provide delayed gratification (thus avoiding that later regret) when doing so means that you are giving up rewards RIGHT NOW? The greatest treasures in life come from delayed gratification and focused and purposeful work through discipline. How do you build Discipline? How do you get unstuck and start taking action on the things that you know are good for you long-term?
You need to start by building momentum. Once you are done working through this book, and once you create the habits to drive change in your life, you will become an Unstoppable freight train.
However, much like any locomotive, you first have to get the momentum going. Which brings me to the key focus of this chapter. How do you get that initial change going? How do you take that first sustainable change? How do you create that Discipline? Especially when you might not feel the rewards right away?
First, the key to getting started is to actually start. This is why I’ve structured the steps you need to take in this book by prioritizing the things that give you shorter-term rewards. We’ll start with practicing Unstoppable Sundays, where you can start to take stock of just the immediate seven days of your life and where you are now, just so you can positively impact the next seven days in your life. Simple, right? Then, as you start to get that momentum, you’ll start to think about the next 365 days. And then we’ll get to the deeper and meatier aspects of your life plan by starting to look at the next five years of your life, looking at your circles of influence, and looking at taking on bigger challenges that shift the direction of your life.
Second, I’ve learned over the past decade that there is a distinct art to bringing change into your life. If you start too fast, try to get too big, and move too fast, then you’ll fall apart before you even get going. You’ll give up. That’s why I hate 50% of the lose-weight-fast, change-your-life fast, and become-a-millionaire-easily-tomorrow books. They cause more disillusionment than success because they set expectations too high and people give up before they can reap any rewards; thus, the readers of those books only go back to their old habits. “I tried it… It didn’t work. I must not be meant for more.” Incorrect. You didn’t approach it with a long-term-enough view.
I’ve learned that in order to bring long-term and sustained success to life, you have to approach change in multiple phases and with a long-term view. You also have to approach it with commitment, discipline, and purposeful and focused action. If what I just said sounds contradictory, well, it might be -- but that is why long-term sustained change is art and not science. It’s two opposing and seemingly diverging forces coming together as one.
This is why, as you set out to bring about change, you have to start in the right way. This means that you’re not going to feel THAT different tomorrow as you start. Nor will you feel THAT different a week from now. But as you sustain your actions and work at change for a specific period of time, you’ll start to build momentum and you’ll start to see small rewards. As you work at it for a year, your following year will be even better. Much like the locomotive that starts out slow and sluggish at the station and then picks up speed and becomes unstoppable, as you continue on your journey toward Unstoppability, you will become Unstoppable, like that locomotive.
So the question is, how do you start? How do you start the RIGHT way? It took me years to master all the core principles around how to do this right. But there is one tool that I now use regularly and that makes it easy for even beginners to start the right way. It’s what I call the 45-day Unstoppable Beast Mode Challenge. Let me explain.