Ep. #194: Motivation Monday: The Simplest “Secret” of Success That I Know

[00:00:00] There will be unforeseen twists and turns, there will be unanticipated storms, there will be sometimes inexplicable reverses of fortune, and you gotta have enough forward motion. You gotta have enough momentum on your side to just keep going despite it all.

Hey, this is Mike from Muscle for Life, and welcome to another episode of my podcast. This episode is part of a weekly series that I have dubbed Motivation Monday. Yes, I know so creative of me. What can I say? I’m just a genius Seriously though, the idea here is simple. Every Monday morning, I am going to post a short and punchy episode that I hope gets you fired up to tackle the workouts, work, and everything else that you have planned for the week ahead.

Because it’s fun. It’s one thing to know what you want to do, [00:01:00] but it’s something else altogether to actually make yourself do it. And I hope that this series gives you a jolt of energy and encouragement to go ahead and do all of those things that you want to do. So if you like what you hear, then make sure to check back every Monday morning for the latest and greatest installment.

Okay. So let’s start with this week’s quote, which comes from the infamous, the inimitable. John D. Rockefeller. And he said that I’ve always been contented, but I’ve never been satisfied. And as a quick side note, if you want to read one of the best biographies that I’ve ever read, check out Titan, which is of course about John D.

Rockefeller written by Ron Chernow. Amazing book, amazing story, just wild. Check it out. All right. So when you have great desires, when you have, Big ambitions, when you are intoxicated by the vastness of them, [00:02:00] it can be hard to come back down to earth and then really focus on the many little kind of comparatively mundane steps that it takes to actually make your dreams a reality.

Instead, we tend to think in large definitive leaps toward our goals and it makes it easy to fall prey to our natural impatience when instead of soaring toward these milestones day by day, we feel like we’re just treading water, like we’re stuck in place and going nowhere. And then impatience becomes frustration and then frustration becomes despair and despair becomes Netflix.

Facebook, Instagram, and that’s usually the end of the journey. Now I myself have avoided this catastrophe many times with some disciplined thinking and action. So when I myself start considering doing [00:03:00] something. Of any importance. I actually spend very little time on the big picture thinking on the dreaming, the fantasizing.

And what I do instead is I first take stock of what I have available in terms of my abilities, in terms of my skills, my knowledge, my tools. The material, the resources that I have access to including time, money, and people. And I try to look at all those things and consider how well can I muster all of those for use?

What do I have that I can bring to bear on this project? How creatively can I employ all this toward this goal that I’m considering? I then use that assessment to inform and give Shape to my goals, as opposed to the other way around, as opposed to trying to force goals into my life that objectively speaking probably won’t fit.

And what I’ve found is that by doing that, I’m able to set goals that are [00:04:00] much more realistic and much more attainable than those that I might just pluck from my imagination willy nilly, and with no Real consideration as to how the hell I’m actually going to make them happen. For example, if I rewind back to 2012, I guess it’s really 2011.

When I was writing my first book, bigger, leaner, stronger, I had a goal to become a bestselling author, but I wasn’t sure if I could do it. Was I a good enough writer? Was I a good enough marketer? Was I going after the right opportunity? Was the timing right? And so on. And what I did is, I.

Spent my nights and my weekends writing bigger, leaner, stronger, writing that first edition of bigger, leaner, stronger, which was a kind of a minimum viable product. It was 130 pages maybe. And my goal with it was simply to put something out there and see, do I have the resources to achieve this goal? And that was my first Trial balloon and it sold [00:05:00] maybe 20 copies in the first month, which I thought was cool.

I just thought, Hey, that’s great. Somebody bought my book. But again, that, that wasn’t, evidence that I should go all in just yet. And so I waited and by the end of 2012, so I published it. In January of 2012, by the end of 2012, it was selling several thousand copies per month. And at that point, then again, doing my little assessment, I looked at it and I was, I thought, Hey, I actually, I think I do have what it takes to achieve this bigger goal of becoming.

The goal wasn’t necessarily just become a best selling author, but to become the number one best selling health and fitness author, at least the number one best selling self published health and fitness author. And so by the end of 2012, when I looked at what I had done with Bigger Than You’re Stronger, I concluded that I do have what it takes to become a best selling health and fitness author.

And that also means that I can build popular blogs, which of course can be used to not only sell books, but to sell other products and services. So I can parlay the [00:06:00] resources that I had at the time into other things. And so I wrote more books and launched most for life and Legion and so forth.

Now, once I’ve worked out a goal and I’ve done my assessment and I have determined that I think there is a good fit and I do think it’s worth pursuing, I then dive into my favorite part, which is really just the process. Then I’m looking at, okay, so what sequence of actions Will it really take to pull this off?

And this is more from a broad strokes, almost strategic planning level of analysis. So I’m looking at what are the big milestones that need to happen for this thing to happen? How can I break this down into a series of smaller bites that still may be large ish, but smaller, more specific steps that will lead me to the prize.

And then once I have that, I look at what do I need to start doing right now? What’s the first thing that I have to [00:07:00] produce to get me in motion. And I think that this approach has several big advantages. First, it gets you out of thinking and into action. And that’s very important because the first and one of the biggest obstacles to overcome in Just doing things is inertia, which means that the longer we remain at rest, the more likely we are to remain.

And that’s why one of the worst things that you can do in any endeavor is to add unnecessary amounts of time. And here we’re talking about adding time right in the beginning before you even get started. That’s bad, but really adding unnecessary amounts of time anywhere in the process is bad because the more time that something takes, the more ways it can go wrong.

And that can range from personal things going wrong, like losing motivation or losing interest or having life getting in the way to more internal or logistical or process related things going wrong, like losing key [00:08:00] players, whether it’s in an organization or like in your business, or it could be contractors you’re working with to supply chain problems and so forth.

And it also can include external factors like market conditions, economic factors, and so forth. So the point is when it comes down to execution, you want to go as quickly as possible. It doesn’t mean that all things that you might want to do are going to be fast. Some things might actually take quite a bit of time, but You want them to take as little time as possible.

And that means that in the beginning of anything, you just need to get going. You need to get into action. You need to have your first win. That’s your biggest goal in the beginning. Something that will show you proof of concept and will inspire you to do better. To steal yourself for what is to come, because if your goal is even remotely ambitious, just know it’s going to take a lot more time, energy, and effort than you think going in.

It’s going to be a much bigger [00:09:00] pain in the ass than you think going in and you need to be ready for that. Which brings me to my next point, which is that there will be unforeseen twists and turns. There will be unanticipated storms. There will be sometimes inexplicable reverses of fortune, and you got to have enough forward motion.

You got to have enough momentum on your side to just keep going despite it all. And I’ve found that the best way To maintain that forward motion, the best way to build and maintain momentum is to set yourself up for a lot of small successes. So when you look off into the distance to that mountain that you’re trying to reach or that you’re trying to climb, and it appears to be impossibly far and enshrouded by lightning and gloom, there’s a lot of value in being able to just turn your gaze downward and look to the next steps that you need to take on the road.

And to focus on just that. Continuing moving toward those big [00:10:00] milestones that you laid out in the beginning. Now, in the end, are you going to be able to reach the mountain? Are you able to reach the summit? Who knows? But can you navigate that boulder that is in your way? Absolutely. You can figure that out.

And then can you figure out how to have another small success after that? Can you figure out how to make it to the next leg of the journey? Yes, you probably can. And then can you figure out how to make it to the. So next leg, you probably can. That’s just how it goes. And eventually you come to the end and you look back and you go, Oh wow, I guess I did that.

Another reason I’ve found this mindset and this approach to achieving goals useful is it sets you up for small failures. So Seth Godin, the famous marketer author, he said that creativity is better described as failing repeatedly until you get something right. And I think he’s right. And I think that applies actually to any.

Thing that we want to do, not just creative things. I [00:11:00] think that failures are just as instructive as successes. So long as we are willing to analyze them and find out why we failed and what we need to do to not repeat that failure. And I’d say in some cases, actually the failures are more instructive than the successes because many times successes come about.

Due to factors that you haven’t really understood or that you have misinterpreted. So you can experience wins that actually set you up for bigger failures later because of your misunderstanding of what was actually going on. And this is why Oftentimes you have to first figure out what doesn’t work before you can ever figure out what does work.

And that knowing what doesn’t work is very valuable. I would say equally as valuable as knowing what does work, because if you know what does work, that you can keep on pulling through. Those levers and keep on producing results. But if you don’t know what doesn’t [00:12:00] work, you are inevitably going to stumble into those pitfalls and depending on where you’re at that time, those mistakes, those missteps might hurt a lot more than they would have hurt.

If you would have figured that out a long time ago.

Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. If you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say, Thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. Another thing to [00:13:00] consider is that if you’re not failing a lot, then you’re probably not putting yourself in situations where you can get really lucky.

You’re probably not having enough at bats. You’re probably not spinning the roulette wheel enough to Put yourself in a position where you actually can win big. And, if you embrace this philosophy of just getting busy and being willing to make mistakes, not trying to make mistakes, do your best to avoid mistakes, but just knowing that they’re going to come.

If you do that, then I think you can immediately gain a big advantage over everyone else in your field. All your competitors, all your opponents, while those people are lost in their unable to even see the paths that they’re going to have to travel. You’re already on the way. You are at the coal face.

You are knee deep in the mud, in the trenches, inspecting the terrain and working out how to travel it one crucial footstep at a time. It just reminds me of a Thomas Edison quote where he said, opportunity is missed by most people because [00:14:00] it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. I really liked that quote because it is very true.

Yeah. A personal and kind of silly example of all this is golf. So a few years ago I took up golf and I set a goal at the time, tentatively, I wasn’t sure if it’s possible. I wanted to break 80 shoot below 80 by the end of the year. So I started the beginning of the year. So I wanted to give myself a year.

Now I had played some golf previously. Which actually worked against me because all it really did was ingrain bad habits. So I knew I was going to have to first kind of deconstruct and fix my swing, which had some serious flaws and then get better at the game itself. And that first step of building a proper golf swing is no easy task.

Let me tell you it’s a very complex movement. It requires really about every muscle in your body to work in perfect coordination. So first you got to wind up. And then you’ve got to release a little [00:15:00] hunk of metal at speeds of, depending on the club, it can be upward of, a hundred, 110 miles an hour with a driver into that little ball on a very exact elliptical path.

And you have to strike the ball at an exact angle of descent. And there needs to be an exact angle of rotation in the club face. And if you get all that then you hit a good shot. If you’re off though, by an inch, maybe on your swing path, or maybe a couple of degrees in your clubface rotation as you hit the ball that’s a terrible shot.

That’s just how precise golf is. And that’s of course, why pro golfers make millions of dollars, mainly because they can just repeat one movement pattern over and over with precision. It’s really just that hard to learn. So when I got into it, the question was. How do I best go about learning this?

So if I were to try to approach it as a whole integrated movement, if I just try to practice the whole swing, it becomes overwhelming because there’s just [00:16:00] too much. There are too many things that need to happen simultaneously. And so what I did is I broke it down into small bite sized movements first, and then I learned those one at a time.

So That first small success is getting just the first piece of the takeaway. And you just do that over and over until it’s automatic. And also I worked on camera, which anyone interested in golf or wanting to learn golf, you have to work on camera. If you want to build. A real golf swing, which you should, if you want to get good at the game, because ultimately if you want to be good, if you want to be able to shoot in the seventies regularly, you have to have a long game.

You have to be able to hit the ball far and distance actually matters more than accuracy. That’s at this point, that’s actually like a scientific statement. If you want to learn more about that, read the book, every shot counts by Mark Brody, super. Interesting book. Anyways. So that first piece, I give myself the first little win, the takeaway until it’s automatic.

Cool. Got it. Then I moved on to the second piece of the swing, which again, you just repeat [00:17:00] God knows how many times until it also is automatic. Then combine them. Cool. So now you have two pieces that you can do. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Have little wins. And of course, along the way, find out what doesn’t work.

And that’s where the camera comes in. You think you’re doing one thing, you go on camera and look at it. Nah, you’re actually doing something else. Fix fix, fix until you can do it. And then now cool. You have to learn the downswing. So once you’ve learned that first windup, now it’s time to learn the rest of the swing, which then you break down into two or three pieces and you learn those separately.

And then of course, last is the follow through. And then once you’ve learned all those little pieces and you’ve had all those small successes, you’re You are ready to link them all together into a fluid motion, which of course is now a new challenge. And it’s a pain in the ass, but you have that momentum.

You’re motivated because, Hey, you’ve made it this far. So why not? I’m sure you can make it to the end, right? So I approach that in small bites too. I first practiced the full takeaway now as a fluid motion did it over and over [00:18:00] until it was. Solid on camera and felt automatic. I didn’t have to think very much about it and then the full downswing.

So I would start at the top of the swing and then just do a downswing over and over and over until again, it looked good on camera and then follow through. So I would start an impact and then just follow through over and over until it looked good until it was automatic. And then finally put it all together into a golf swing.

And in the end. What that got me was for about, let’s say 500 hours of work on my swing. I went from having a pretty atrociously bad golf swing that would have never been able to break 80 to a golf swing that allowed me to hit the ball better than Guys that had been playing golf for 10, 15, and even 20 plus years.

And in terms of score, the best score I put up in that first year was an 83. That was a no bullshit 83. That’s no mulligans, no fixing lies, like really playing the game. And I actually, I, if I remember [00:19:00] correctly, I shot a 39 on the front nine. So I, that was, I was close to breaking 80 in that first year. And what.

Is remarkable about that for anybody that knows golf is again, that was a year of work. It was, my standard schedule was, I would play from about, I’d play Sunday afternoons from at least one to six. Sometimes I’d be able to get there earlier and 80 percent of my time though, went into two.

The long game went into building a golf swing. So I shot an 83 with very little practice in terms of short game. I was pretty weak. I was okay, but I was pretty weak on my short game and really no practice actually playing the game. Because once you have a good swing, once you have good short game, then you have to actually learn how to play the game and learn how to make good decisions.

And so without any of that, really just on being able to hit long, straight Shots with all of my clubs. I was able to put up a really respectable score, a score that most golfers [00:20:00] will never see regardless of how much golf they play. Okay. So enough boring you to death with golf talk. My point here is that I have just found that this is the best way to approach anything that I’ve wanted to do.

So if we’re going to talk fitness now, let’s take like building a lean muscular physique. Really. You can break that down into just a long series of very small, easily. Digested bites involving the daily repetition of proper training, proper eating, proper resting, and supplementation. If you want, I’d say that building a successful business also can be broken down into a very long series of just small bites that involve developing skills or developing products or services that people want, and then learning how to get other people interested in them.

So learning how to sell. Learning marketing and then just delivering what you promise and keeping people happy. And at the core of it all is that simple process of just seeing where you want to go, breaking it down into a [00:21:00] bunch of smaller bites, ingesting them one at a time and seeing what happens and learning from both the good and the bad and figuring out how to get more of the good and less of the bad using momentum.

To push through the rough spots, hopefully catching some lucky breaks along the way and not allowing yourself to be demotivated by the unlucky breaks because they will come and you do enough of that and you do it for long enough and eventually you arrive at the goal. Hey there it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful and if you did and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick.

review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be [00:22:00] notified when the next episode goes live, then just podcast and you won’t miss out on any of the new goodies.

Lastly, if didn’t like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscle for life. com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. All right, that’s it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.

And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously, though, I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in. So instead, I’m going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my fitness book for women, thinner, leaner, stronger. Now this book has sold over 150, 000 copies in the last several years, and it has helped thousands of women build their best bodies ever, which is why it currently has over 1, 200 reviews on Amazon with a [00:23:00] four and a half star average.

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