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I just finished the first phase of a period of reading that I know I will look back to as a turning point, and my biggest takeaway from my recent reading is that who I am becoming matters.
And it doesn’t just matter, it is the preeminent factor, the primary guiding goal. As I’ve been reading about success these authors argue that you must focus on becoming the kind of person who has the kind of success you want to have.
I found this challenging yet slightly comforting. Somehow the focus on becoming the person I need to be feels incredibly actionable, understandable, and therefore attainable. Perhaps because it is a factor I can control. I can decide who I will become. I can decide to establish habits to make me the kind of person I want to be.
I’m trying to nail down in my memory who said what. I just read The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod, and The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone. In both of these books the authors talk quite a bit about success and about specific actions you can take to make significant and constant daily progress toward the success you want to see in your life.
I was especially intrigued by Grant’s emphatic assertion that success is a duty. He argues that we should consider ourselves ethically obliged to pursue the highest degree of success to which we are personally capable of achieving. Hal talks about how the daily practice of reading personal affirmations can enable us to focus on our best self. In his example affirmation statement he includes this:
“The only thing that separates me from the most extraordinary life I can imagine is my level of commitment to becoming the person I need to be to achieve everything I want…I commit now to schedule and follow through TODAY with the necessary actions that will ensure that I create the extraordinary life I deserve to live. From this moment on, I give up being perfect for being authentic.”
Hal Elrod convinced me to work toward establishing my own ‘miracle morning’ of strategic morning habits, starting with writing my own affirmations and then reading them daily. But it was Jen Sincero who wrote prompts within her books that helped me to get in a good mindset to write my own.
And I’ve already noticed an incredible difference in my attitude throughout the day, especially while doing mundane activities. I also have energy all day long for a variety of tasks. This among other related steps I’ve taken to change my mindset has completely changed my day to day experience.
Soon I’ll be sharing an example version that is very close to my personal affirmations I read every day. If you want to watch me talk about this, earlier this week I recorded a short video about how to get started with reading daily affirmations.
So back to the point, which was that I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this idea of “becoming the person I need to be to achieve everything I want”, and the idea of success as a duty. And I’m really made a positive shift in how I think about success and how I approach the path to it.
Grant Cardone has a really great chapter in The 10X Rule about ownership. He basically makes an interesting case that from a certain perspective everything is under your control – or at least close enough that you should act like it is, and that your resulting mindset should be one that leads you to never make excuses for anything.
I’m starting to come around to this new mindset. I’ve set aside of stack of books and designated them as ones that I will frequently re-read as a group, alongside new reading, to ensure I continue to develop the mindset that has so transformed how I think in the last 6 months.
Along the same lines, I have to mention the connection in Brendon Burchard’s book, High Performance Habits. The first practice he mentions under the first habit is to envision the future four. For more the other practices in habit 1 read my recent post, How to Seek Clarity and Find Your Best Self. But what I want to highlight here is that after a ton of research and interviews with successful people, he says that one habit they cultivate is that they consistently stop to take time and set their intention regarding who they want to be in the future, and then they keep that goal in mind and set actions and projects accordingly – based on who they want to be in the future.
So as I plot out the main categories of life, and do some schedule setting and goal planning for the school year, I’m thinking really seriously about who I want to be, and how to make my life an environment that will help me grow into that person.
The main thought I want to leave with you today is that who you are becoming matters.
Who you are becoming. Matters.
A lot.
It is the single biggest factor in your ability to accomplish the goals you’ve set or that you aspire to set for yourself and your family.
Take time to think, and journal, about who you want to be. For some great exercises on this check out the first habit in High Performance Habits.
Resources mentioned in this post:
The Miracle Morning, by Hal Elrod
The 10X Rule, by Grant Cardone
You are a Badass, and You are a Badass at Making Money, by Jen Sincero
High Performance Habits, by Brendon Burchard
Alicia Eichmann