“Anything that does not bring me alive is too small for me” ~David Whyte
1. Personal Growth Requires Giving to the World
On your path to ultimate personal development, you will reach a place where you realize that you can no longer focus solely on yourself and you have to begin giving back to truly impact the world.
To grow into the best version of yourself, you have to give back to others, you have to be a servant to the world, and you have to be willing to occasionally put the needs of those less fortunate than you above your own.
2. You Need to Know What You Really Want
If you do not know where you want to go, then it doesn’t much matter what you are doing on a day to day basis.
You have to have a vision for your life and for who you want to be. You have to have goals and a plan to achieve them, based off of your desires and your dreams, not society’s, your parent’s or your friend’s desires and dreams.
3. You Have to Take Care of Yourself First
While we have already said that personal development requires that you give to the world, you cannot fully give to the world until you have given to yourself. Until you are taking care of yourself in mind, body, and spirit, until you are a little bit selfish and prioritize your needs, you will not have enough to truly give to the world.
4. Focus on What You Want, not What You Don’t
What you focus on expands.
If you want to achieve your dream you have to focus on the things that you want in your life, not the things that you don’t want. Instead of focusing on how you are out of shape and overweight, focus on how you can’t wait until you are a shredded, athletic beast.
Instead of focusing on how you are broke, focus on how you can’t wait until you have more than enough money to live life on your terms.
It’s just like riding a bike, look where you want to go, not at the tree nearby.
5.Your Language Creates Your Reality
If you are constantly telling yourself that you are a worthless piece of shit…. Odds are, that’s how you will feel.
If you are constantly telling yourself that you are not where you want to be however you are going to put in the work to achieve your dreams, that is what will start to happen.
What you tell yourself, you believe. Be sure you are telling yourself an empowering story.
Kim Coates is a Canadian-American actor who has worked in both Canadian and American films and television series. He has worked on Broadway portraying Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and in the lead role of Macbeth performed at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. He also starred as Alexander “Tig” Trager in the FX series Sons of Anarchy.
1. Follow Your Bliss
Life is too short to live every day doing things that you dislike. If you love something, do it, end of story.
If you want to be an actor, act. If you want to be a musician, play music. If you want to start a business, do it! Don’t let anyone or anything hold you back from pursuing what you love.
Follow your bliss, and the rest will fall into place.
2. Be Willing to Wait Until You Are Ready
Once you have committed to a path, whether it is business, acting, athletics etc. be willing to wait until you are ready to take the big leap.
For Kim, he continued to master his craft of acting on stage for 8 years before he took the leap into television.
For you, it may mean working an apprenticeship for a few years before you start your business, it may mean playing local gigs with your band for a few years before you quit your job and try touring.
Don’t rush things. Excellence takes time.
3. Failure is Not an Option
Success is simple, you simply have to remove the possibility of failure from your mind. When failure is no longer an option, success is inevitable. Once you have started following your bliss and prepared yourself for the leap, it is time to burn your boats and leave yourself no choice but to succeed.
Whether that is moving to a new city, quitting your job, or investing all of your dispensable cash into a business, when you give yourself no way out, you will succeed.
4. Keep Your Head on Straight
Once you start to see success, it is easy to let it go to your head. You have to be diligent in making sure that you keep your head on straight. Stay away from the masses living the rock star lifestyle who will end up ruining their career within a few short years.
If you want longevity in whatever path you select, you have to continually grow and avoid things that are detrimental to your public image and success.
5. A Real Man Listens More and Talks Less
You were given two ears and one mouth for a reason, use them in that proportion.
Charles Hanna is the Chairman, CEO, and founder of Brains II a third-party technology provider that he began in a basement in 1979 and built into Canada’s largest independent service consolidation company with offices in all of the major cities in the country.
A devoted father of three children, Hanna is involved with a range of charities including organizations that help with cancer treatment, artists, and displaced or handicapped people. He has a particularly soft spot for children and animals and contributes his personal time in various ways to the YMCA and animal shelter groups. He divides his time between Toronto and Los Angeles
“Happiness is a way of thinking”
1. Your Life is Not Yours
A mistake that many of us make when we think about our lives is to believe that our lives are truly ours. We did nothing to earn this life, we did not take out a loan that we are forced to repay, we were simply given the gift of life and the responsibility to make the most of it.
You have to realize that your life does not belong to you, it belongs to the world and to the people around you. It belongs to the people that you serve and the people you love.
2. You Must Take Care of Yourself Physically
Before you can truly serve anyone else, you have to take care of yourself, and this begins with your body.
Taking care of yourself physically is imperative, and rather straightforward. If you can get 8 hours of high-quality sleep a night, eat a diet of 80% whole foods, eliminate drugs, limit alcohol, get regular exercise, and swallow your pride when you are feeling sick and go see a doctor, then you are well on your way to the healthiest version of you ever.
3. Realize Your Insignificance in the Universe
Whenever people take something personally, they fail to understand one of the most important facts about life: You don’t matter that much.
You are one of 7 billion, on one of God knows how many planets. You are a tiny speck in the universe.
This is not to say that you are not important to the people around you, but rather to say that you truly hold little significance in this universe. Your flight was not late because the world is out to get you, that cute girl didn’t give you her number because the stars are aligning for you and you alone.
Life simply happens and you get to take part in it. Realize this, realize your insignificance, and learn to live with a sense of humility and gratitude for where you are.
4. Taking Care of Your Body and Spirit Will Create Success in the Rest of Your Life
Whenever you decide to become successful and start pursuing success at the expense of your health and spiritual well being, you are setting yourself up for failure.
You have to take care of yourself first before you can truly achieve success. If you are physically and spiritually healthy, your performance will sky rocket, your happiness will increase, and you will be able to accomplish more than you had ever dreamed.
5. Nothing is Good or Bad
All things in life are simply our perception of them. Nothing is inherently good or bad, it is just the story that we tell ourselves about things. With that knowledge, what would happen if you started to reframe everything in life as a blessing? To start to see the good in all things no matter how difficult they may be.
I dare you to try it for a week and see what happens. You might just be amazed.
David de las Morenas is a Boston-based personal trainer, strength coach, bestselling author, and the founder of www.HowToBeast.com – a popular fitness and self-improvement website for men.
“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.” ~Marcus Aurelius
1. Don’t Let Growth become a Drug
Whenever we embark on our personal growth journies, it is easy to allow growth to become a drug. It is easy to get addicted to the surges of growth without ever stopping to appreciate them or stopping to realize that they are becoming a crutch.
While constant and never ending growth is a wonderful thing, it can also become how we deal with issues in our lives.
Struggling at work? Just go to the gym!
Relationships suck? Just build your business and ignore it.
Growth is good, just make sure that you focus on making small changes overtime and don’t allow it to consume you.
2. Presence Destroys Anxiety
If you are suffering from anxiety, you are really suffering from lack of presence. Take a few deep breaths, pause, reflect, smile, you will be amazed at how much a little active meditation can change the way you feel about things.
3. Balance is Key
Life is a juggling act, and you have to learn to balance things out to succeed.
It doesn’t matter if you have millions if your health is in the shitter. It doesn’t matter if you are shredded as hell if you can’t get and keep a girlfriend, and it really doesn’t matter if you are sleeping with beautiful women if you have no money and no future outside of meaningless one night stands.
You need to learn to balance all areas of your life, starting with health and relationships. If you can master those two, the money will eventually come, and it’s a lot easier to be broke whenever you have good health and great people around you to help, then it is to be rich and have poor health and bad friends.
4. Share Your Struggles
You must learn to share the struggles you are facing. You have to confide in people that you trust who can asses things honestly for you, help you when you fall down, and admit that they have probably faced the same thing.
Burderns are easier to carry when they are shared, and learning to speak honestly with people you trust will take a huge weight off of your shoulders.
5. The Key to Success is Self-reliance
No matter what you are doing in life, you have to cultivate self realiance. If you cannot be happy with yourself whenever you have nothing, you will not be fulfilled when you have everything.
Learn to love being you, to pursue things yourself, and not to base your validation off of the number of 0’s in your bank account or the girlfriend you have, or the business you are runing.
All those things can be taken away from you, but short of a terrible disease, your identity cannot.
1. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
2. The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer
3. Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It by Kamal Ravikant
Next Steps
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Dean Niewolny spent 23 years in executive roles with three of Wall Street’s largest financial firms, finishing his career in the financial sector as the market manager for Wells Fargo Advisors in Chicago, where he oversaw a $100mm market.
While in Chicago, he and his wife, Lisa, traveled many times to Africa and, seeing the abject needs of widows and orphans, made life changes that enabled them to get involved, such as helping to complete an orphan home and a Hospice home in Durbin, South Africa.
In 2010, Dean traded his marketplace career for Halftime to help more people who, like him, wanted to expand their own “first half” success and skills into passion and purpose for meeting human needs and making a significant difference. Dean joined Halftime as managing director and in 2011 became chief executive officer. He speaks at events around the world, encouraging business leaders to channel
Dean joined Halftime as managing director and in 2011 became chief executive officer. He speaks at events around the world, encouraging business leaders to channel their first-half achievements into a second half defined by joy, impact, and balance.
“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works,which God prepared in advance for us to do.” ~Ephesians 2:1
1. The Pursuit of Money is Empty
So many of us as men tie our identity to the number of 0’s in our checking account. We think that out worth as a man is determined by how much money we earn and the number of toys that we have without ever realizing that the sole pursuit of money is empty.
Yes, money is important and allows us to have a bigger impact on the world, but pursuing money just for the sake of having more money and bigger and better things is a pursuit that will leave you empty and full of regret for a life lived in vain.
2. Life is About What You Can Give Not What You Get
The true joy of life is in giving back, it’s in making an impact and helping other people to become all that they can be. If you want to live a full life, a good life, and a life that has true meaning, then you must focus on what you are giving, not what you are getting.
3. You Don’t Need to Leave Your Job to Make an Impact
Many people seem to think that the only way to have true significance is to leave their job and start a nonprofit in the deep Sahara. But the truth of the matter is that you can start having a real impact by just focusing on your local community.
Start a local club for young boys who don’t have fathers and give them a strong male role model, build a park for the inner city, mentor someone who you believe has real potential.
You don’t have to be drastic to make an important difference, start small and you will be amazed where it takes you.
4. Aim for Success and Significance
Something that many millennials are realizing is that success and significance are not either-or situations, you can have both-and. They are realizing that they can have the 7-figure business, and use that business to enjoy the finer things in life while still changing communities and individuals on a global scale.
They are realizing that they can actually make a money from making a difference, solving real problems and training up the next generation of leaders and world changers while making a profit is something that is completely doable.
Do not settle for one or the other, pursue both.
5. You Have to Operate from Passion and Strength
If you want to make a real difference in the world, then you have to operate from passion and stregth. If you are doing something that you do not enjoy and you are no good at, you will never make a difference in your life or the life of anybody else.
You have to find thigs that make you come alive, and then find a niche where you can become one of the best. This is the only way that you will be able to make a lasting impact on the world.
Jerod Zavistoski is the international bestselling author of “Methodology of The Modern Male: A Modern Man’s Guide to Personal Excellence”, a motivational speaker and LA’s premiere dating coach.
“There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.” ~Søren Kierkegaard
“This won’t kill you, just do it”
1. The Only Person Who Can Fix Anything is You
One of the most common themes in the Knowledge for Men interviews is personal responsibility, and this should come as little surprise.
When you are in a victim mode, there is very little that you can do to change your life. If you are constantly blaming other people for your lack of success, you will never take the action necessary to achieve the success you are after.
The only person who can fix your life is you. Take 100% responsibility for everything in your life and start making moves to get your life to the level you want to be.
2. Be Careful You Build the Right Package
All men are trying to build themselves into a “package.” They are trying to become a certain type of person, and typically the motivation for this is their desire for more beautiful women.
While there is nothing wrong with this, men need to take care to make sure they are fully educated and building the right package, one that will not only lead to success with women, but success in your health, in your business, and most importantly fulfillment with life.
3. Men Are Emotional Creatures
Something many men fail to realize in their pursuit of becoming the “Alpha” is that men are inherently emotional creatures, we are just different emotional creatures then women are.
It is learning how to harness and share these emotions where men often fail.
Expressing your emotions, your fears, your desires, and your pain is not unmanly. Vulnerability is an inherently manly thing to do as it opens you up to pain and ridicule and shows that you have true strength of character and confidence in yourself.
4. Move Towards Discomfort
A comfortable life is the killer of all great dreams.
If you are living in comfort, you have no reason to pursue greatness. I mean think about it, why risk pain and suffering whenever what you are doing right now has earned you the big ass TV, the house, the car, and a cute girlfriend?
Why push to become more than you are?
You have to move towards discomfort, because the simple fact is, if you don’t move towards it, it will move towards you. The more open and prepared you are to face discomfort, the more at ease you will be when adversity strikes (and it will strike). If you are constantly living a life of ease, even the smallest of setbacks can make you feel as if your life is crashing in around you.
5. Open Up Your Mind
You can never be a truly complete man until you are willing to let go of your prejudices and open up your mind, until you are willing to examine news ideas, new ways of thinking and new lifestyles without judgement.
If you want to life a truly happy and fulfilled life, you need to spend time exploring new things and new ways of being, only then will you truly know the path that you want to pursue and who you want to be.
Jay Samit has been described by Wired magazine as “having the coolest job in the industry.”
He is a leading technology innovator who has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for startups; sold companies to Fortune 500 firms; taken companies public; and partnered with some of the world’s biggest brands, including Coca Cola, McDonald’s, General Motors, United Airlines, Microsoft, Apple, Verizon, and Facebook. Samit is CEO of SeaChange International, a leading global multi-screen video software company.
A technology innovator and entrepreneur, he was a senior advisor to LinkedIn and was appointed to the White House initiative for education and technology by President Bill Clinton. An adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering, Samit is the host of the Wall Street Journal Startup of the Year series and author of the book “Disrupt You”
“Are you living life or just paying bills until you die?”
“The purpose of life is to live a life of purpose”
1. All that is Required for Success is Drive and Insight
If you want to be successful, you need two things, drive and insight.
Forget talent, forget high levels of academic intelligence, if you are someone who is driven to succeed, and you have the insight to see needs within the marketplace, to see the problems and offer appropriate solutions, then you can become massively wealthy.
Think about characters like Richard Branson who were told they were stupid in school and that they would amount to nothing, who had next to no understanding of industries, yet still saw a problem and were able to hire the expertise that they needed to create the businesses of their dreams.
2. Failing is Part of the Process
There is a HUGE difference between failing and failure.
Failure is when you give up, when you resign to defeat. When you hang you head, throw in the towel and give up.
Failing is part of the path to success.
No great person has ever been without failures. Failures are what teach you, they show you what works and what doesn’t, and more often than not, when you fail at a small project, you will be able to use the knowledge you learned later to save or earn millions upon millions of dollars in a bigger business or idea.
3. You Have Everything You Need to Succeed
In the 21st century, you have everything you need to succeed.
You have the intelligence, the access to money and any other asset that you can imagine that is required for success.
If you do not know how to do something, you can simple Google it or hire someone who does.
If you don’t have access to high level investors for capital, crowd fund.
No matter what problem you are facing you have the tools to solve it and become wildly successful.
4. Write Down 3 Problems in Your Life Everyday
If you want to come up with your million or billion dollar idea in the next 30 days, then simply commit to writing down three problems you have in your life everyday.
In the beginning, most of the problems will be fairly obvious, but as you progress, you will be able to pick out issues that could be the next big thing, make you rich, and help millions of people in the process.
5. The Illusion of Security Robs Ambition
The only true security lies in self reliance.
If you are dependent on a job for your income, although there is nothing inherently wrong with working a 9-5 if you enjoy it and it provides the lifestyle that you want, do not be fooled into thinking that you have any security.
Government regulations, new technology, and shifts in the marketplace are all responsible for putting hundreds of companies out of business each year including dozens of Fortune 500 companies.
You have no security working for someone else, the only security is in developing, and disrupting yourself enough to create the self reliance and skill necessary to thrive in the modern world.
Tucker Max received his BA from the University of Chicago in 1998, and his JD from Duke Law School in 2001. He even attended Duke Law School on an academic scholarship, where he neglected to buy any of his textbooks for his final two years and spent part of one semester–while still enrolled in classes–living in Cancun.
His first book, I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, is a #1 New York Times Best Seller, spent five years on the list, and has over 2 million copies in print. His second book, Assholes Finish First, and his third book,Hilarity Ensues, are also NY Times Best Sellers.
He co-wrote and produced the movie based on his life/book, also titled “I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell.” He has also been credited with being the originator and leader of a new literary genre, “fratire,” is only the third writer (after Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis) to ever have three books on the NY Times Nonfiction Best Seller List at one time, and was nominated to the Time Magazine 100 Most Influential List in 2009. He currently lives in Austin, Texas.
“Every day write down one example of you working your process and one example of how you are making your life about other people”
1. Life is Not Complicated but it is Difficult
Many people like to make life seem more complicated than it really is. In reality, life is simple, but it is hard as hell and it boils down to two things:
-The relationships you have with the people that you love
-The work you do
If you can master the relationships in your life and you can do work every day that you find personally fulfilling, allows you to have freedom, and adds value to others, than you are about as successful as they come.
2. The Best Way to Make Money is to Help People
If you want to be rich, then you have to help a lot of people. Making money is all about the art of problem solving and helping others improve their lives in a way that they cannot wait to pay you.
Everyone is in pain and everyone is struggling with something in their lives, no matter how rich, good looking, or successful they are, and if you can find that thing and offer them a solution that genuinely works, you will be able to make more money than you ever imagined.
3. Achieving External Success Alone is Unfulfilling
In the interview Tucker talked about how he had all of the external trappings of success. Millions of dollars in income, meet and sleeping with countless beautiful women, a healthy body, and a great career, but still found it ultimately unfulfilling, because he had not done the work on himself.
No matter how much you achieve in your life, if you do not work on yourself and if you do not take care of your emotions and inner world, no amount of outward success will leave you fulfilled.
4. Knowing Is Not Enough
If everyone in the world acted on what they knew, we would live in a society where everyone was happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Think about it…
Everyone knows that to be healthy you should move more and eat less. Everyone knows to be wealthy you should work hard and smart, and spend less than you make. Everyone knows to be wise you should read more and be around smarter people.
So why the hell don’t people do this?
They have an action problem, not a knowledge problem. If you want to succeed in life, you have to take the action, knowing is not half of the battle, it’s about 10% and massive effing action is the other 90%.
5. You Make Your Own Purpose
Many people have been sold a lie that they have to go on this mystical journey to find their purpose. That if they go and meditate in a dark cave a ball of light will come down from the heavens to reveal to them what they need to do.
This is pure bullshit.
If you are struggling to find a purpose it is because you don’t find a purpose you make one!
Pick something that you enjoy and are good at that will allow you to maximize your relationships with the people you love and serve the world, and you have successfully found a purpose worth living for.
Like we said earlier, this is quite simple, but not easy.
But it is also worth it.
Babette Hughes, did not start writing until her 80’s and has now become a prolific author of books like The Red Scar, The Hat and Lost and Found, and co-author of Why College Students Fail.
Now 93, she writes every day with a fluidity and grace of a woman half her age; her most recent novel is Searching For Vivian. Her earned wisdom has enriched her contributions to the Huffington Post.
“When you accept the events that happen to you, you accept life, and when you accept life, life accepts you”
1. Stop Worrying About the Pressures of Society
As a man, society places tremendous pressure on you to live up to the standards it has unrealistically set.
If you don’t drive the fastest car, own the biggest house, have the biggest paycheck, lift the most weight, be the most masculine and classically manly man yet also be the most sensitive and kind-hearted lover that you can be then you have failed tremendously.
Men, just stop!
Live your life, love your life and be there for the people who really matter. You will not be on your death bed wishing you had made more money or owned a bigger house, you will wish that you had spent more time doing things you love with people you love.
Life is too darn short to be unhappy.
2. Don’t Fear Failure, Embrace It
Mistakes are often looked at as a failure, something that you cannot recover from and something that will permanently tarnish your name.
This isn’t true.
Mistakes and failures are how you learn and how you grow into the man you need to be. They teach you valuable lessons about what is truly important and about the kind of person you should aspire to be.
Use failures, don’t regret them.
3. Life Takes Time
When you are young, you always want to move faster than necessary and try and get to the next checkpoint in life.
You want to become the man you dream of overnight. But life takes time.
And that’s the way that it should be. Enjoy the journey and don’t rush it.