In Conclusion, and Continuing Your Journey to Become Unstoppable
I learned (almost too late) in my life that developing a PROACTIVE approach to my days led to a calmer me. A less frantic me.
I spent a significant part of my youth as a person who constantly wanted to do “what’s right.” I wanted to please others, especially my elders and my parents. I grew up inclined to think about optics and how things look, and I prioritized things that I thought would bring me happiness -- but that ultimately failed to do so. I became incredibly great at setting and crushing goals, but they consistently turned out to be the wrong goals.
Through my 20s, I constantly did things based on what I thought society expected of me -- or what I thought you were supposed to do. This desire to please others led to me marrying a wonderful person at the young age of 25 -- which led to a divorce. It led me to pursue a job in finance that produced career success, but left me wholly unfulfilled. Ultimately, I discovered that I had created a life that was careening along at 90 mph on curvy roads, but at the end of the day, I found myself asking: Is this it?
Through this experience, I learned that while you can have anything you want, you can’t have everything. So you better get proactive and pick what you want.
And so I made a change. I decided to become more proactive about my life. I decided to focus more on what was important to me and on my dreams, and I focused on substance instead of optics. Most importantly, instead of letting others or society as a whole set the agenda for my life, I started to be more proactive about my life. I made the changes necessary to follow a life path that was true to myself, one Unstoppable Sunday at a time.
As I crushed goals, moved the goalpost to bigger challenges, in my late 20s, and as I entered my 30s, I started to come to terms with a few realizations:
If you set a goal and define a purpose, you can achieve anything that you want.
You will never be perfect, you’ll never nail the goal perfectly, but even allowing for the speed bumps along the way, with resilience you can accomplish anything and be Unstoppable.
Not everyone will believe in you in the beginning, but you will never have to explain your success in the end; they’ll come around.
No matter your circumstances, socioeconomic status, level of wealth… Ultimately knowledge is power and with enough knowledge and grit you can accomplish anything. Fortunately for us, knowledge is widely accessible today.
Given the above, you can indeed be Unstoppable in life, but you have to pay careful attention to what it is you choose to be Unstoppable in.
Through my 20s and 30s, I’ve worked at the world’s largest hedge fund; I started a company from scratch and built it into a multi-million-dollar business while partnering with one of the world’s best venture capital firms; and I then sold that company (twice over) while working with the world’s best enterprise software private equity firm. I finally started to unlock levels of success that felt right and true to my own path -- all because I decided to become more proactive about life.
During this journey, and through my trials and tribulations, I picked up a specific set of skills and insights into what it takes to pick the right goals in your life, go after them, and win. I learned that it’s not enough to know how to crush goals; it’s equally important to pick the right goals -- those that are true to yourself and your purpose on this planet. Most importantly, I learned that with anything worthwhile, there will always be bumps in the road, and that those who can build resilience and persevere will become Unstoppable in this life.
All of this wraps around the simple idea of being more PROACTIVE in your life through Belief and Discipline. Shockingly, none of this knowledge needed to be learned from experience. None of this knowledge is taught at schools. And yet it was plainly available in age-old books that were readily available -- sadly, it isn’t in plain sight to the average person.
Unstoppable is the movement I created to share everything that I’ve learned. It’s the idea that with Belief x Discipline, you can be more proactive in life and achieve your wildest dreams. It’s the idea that if we can take this common knowledge around designing and living a more proactive life, and if we persuade even 1,000 people to be ten percent more proactive, we will forever tilt the axis of the planet.
This life planning book is our first real educational system covering some of our most basic principles on how to design and live a proactive life -- and we expect to do more. Thank you for being part of our movement, and I hope the core ideas we present in this book help you go on to practice Belief and Discipline every day, and go on to do incredible things for our planet.
If there is one core concept I want you to walk away with from this book, it is this: You can either let life happen to you, or you can take control of your life. Somewhere in the middle of that is a beautiful equilibrium where universal forces collude with your innermost desires to help you manifest the beautiful life you deserve. This equilibrium point is the perfect balance of being proactive and refusing what is not right for you, while opening up to what the universe is guiding you to.
In the beginning of this book, I made a simple promise to you: I’d teach you the tools I utilize regularly to live a more proactive life. These tools and processes unlocked over a decade of productivity and success for me, my career, and my family:
- In Chapter 5, I introduced you to the idea of practicing Unstoppable Sundays, where we taught you to reflect on and plan for your next seven days.
- In Chapter 6, I helped you zoom out and start to think about your one-year plan by answering a set of very pointed questions that help you practice gratitude, assess where you are today, and then start to lay out a plan for the next 365 days.
- In Chapter 7, I introduced a new tool that you can use to become proactive about the 365 days you’re given every year, so that you can be proactive about how you spend your days and months in a given year, and make tough trade-offs on what you spend your time on versus not.
- In Chapter 8, I helped you really zoom out, take a long-term unconstrained view, and think about the next five years of your life and the vision you want to set for yourself.
- In Chapter 9, I walked you through the most significant impediment in your life relative to achieving your goals (the five people you spend the most time with).
Through every exercise, through every chapter, I stressed one thing: It doesn’t have to be perfect.
The majority of the people on planet Earth do not bother to sit down to pause and reflect, and even fewer set goals and check in on them on a regular basis.
Even by starting to do this and by developing the discipline of practicing Kaizen on your personal life strategy, even by tethering yourself to a strategy and plan -- you’re putting yourself into the top of the planet’s population.
So, it doesn’t have to be perfect. What you DO have to do is the following:
Stop DABBLING and switch to becoming a DO-er.
Keep practicing Unstoppable Sundays and pause and reflect on your next seven days.
Check in on your 365-day goals every month and course-correct as necessary.
Keep honing in on your five-year vision for yourself and navigate toward that North Star.
I kept rinsing and repeating on these four key steps over and over and over for nearly a decade and accomplished and achieved the life that I always wanted. I want you to live that way, too.