"If you would enjoy real freedom, you must be the slave of Philosophy."

The primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man's ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company. You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere.

Our motto,1 as you know, is "Live according to Nature"; but it is quite contrary to nature to torture the body, to hate unlaboured elegance, to be dirty on purpose, to eat food that is not only plain, but disgusting and forbidding. 5. Just as it is a sign of luxury to seek out dainties, so it is madness to avoid that which is customary and can be purchased at no great price.

Philosophy calls for plain living, but not for penance; and we may perfectly well be plain and neat at the same time. This is the mean of which I approve; our life should observe a happy medium between the ways of a sage and the ways of the world at large; all men should admire it, but they should understand it also.

Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach.

Seneca: Letters from a Stoic (and Biography) [Annotated]

A goal is some desirable objective—typically something yet to be achieved—that a person or company needs in order to move forward. Successful people are highly goal-oriented and always pay more attention to the target than the problem. They are seemingly able to bend bullets because of their commitment and focus on the goal.

If you don't stay focused on your goals, you will spend your life achieving the objectives of other people—particularly those who are goal-oriented. Goals are incredibly important to me. I begin and finish each day by writing them down and reviewing them. Any time I encounter failure or a challenge, I take out a legal pad and write my goals down again. This helps keep my attention on where I desire to go and the goals I want to achieve—instead of letting me dwell on the difficulty of the moment. The ability to remain focused on the goal and keep your orientation on that goal's achievement is vital to success. Although I try to stay focused on the present, I want to keep most of my attention on the bigger picture of my goals rather than on just the task I'm accomplishing at that moment.

The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure

Derek Sivers, coach and author: “Abraham Maslow had a great quote that he said something like, ‘Life presents us constantly with a choice between safety and risk’ and he said, ‘Make the growth choice a thousand times a day.’ Reading something like that when I was 17 and just knowing him and his pyramid of self-actualization I kind of went all right. “Again, that’s like a rule of thumb or recipe for what to do and how to make your decisions in life. Make the growth choice a thousand times a day, okay, got it. I guess I kind of just run all of my daily decisions through that kind of filter.

Frank McKinney, who does ultramarathons, talks about exercising risk like a muscle. It’s something that can be strengthened. Your comfort zone can grow. You start to build up a tolerance and then it starts to become comfortable. I see this over and over again. That’s why it’s easier for serial entrepreneurs, even if there is big risk involved in the new companies. They have done it before. They have more confidence and more skill managing risks. That doesn’t mean there isn’t fear, but they mitigate that as well.

The key difference between them and others though is just like I said earlier: They don’t let that stop them! They continue to grow and get better. You need to make sure you can rely on yourself and your own powers. The way to do that is to keep relying on yourself over and over again so you start to trust yourself. Once that trust builds, your confidence builds.

It takes practice. The more practice you get in, the more times you step up to the plate, the more times you’ll have to look back on to show yourself that you did it. That also means that practicing that sales call or practicing that presentation makes a difference, too. Another piece that tends to play a part in confidence is how much you value the opinions of others. If you take others’ opinions of you to heart, then either you will be too worried about what they think to even try, or you will be so focused on what others think that you can’t be confident in what you think. If this seems to resonate with you, then this is a piece that needs to be worked on!

An opinion is not fact. Everyone has his or her own perception of reality. Just like asking eye witnesses to recount an accident, there will be differences based on their feelings toward the event. You will never be able to please everyone! Don’t let the opinion of others get in the way of you creating the business you want. As you grow as a business owner you’ll rely more and more on yourself and care less about the opinions of others.

Whatever scares you, go do it, because then it won’t scare you anymore. With almost anything, once you do it, it’s not as scary as you thought it was. —Derek Sivers

The Eventual Millionaire: How Anyone Can Be an Entrepreneur and Successfully Grow Their Startup

Fear isn't bad or something to avoid; conversely, it's something you want to seek and embrace. Fear is actually a sign that you are doing what's needed to move in the right direction.

It's been said that FEAR stands for False Events Appearing Real, which aptly implies that most of what you're afraid of doesn't ever come to pass. Fear, for the most part, is provoked by emotions, not rational thinking. You must reframe your understanding of fear and use it as a reason to move forward rather than as an excuse to stop or retreat.

If you're afraid to call on a client, then it's a sign that you should call that client. Fear of speaking with the boss is an indication that you should march into his office and ask for a moment of his time. Fear of requesting the client's business means that you must ask for the business—and then keep asking. The 10X Rule compels you to separate yourself from everyone else in the market. And you do that by—as I emphasized earlier—doing what others refuse to do. Only in this way will you distinguish yourself and dominate your sector. Everyone experiences fear on some level, and because the marketplace is composed of people interacting with both products and one another, the market will face fear in the same way that you and your peers do. But rather than seeing fear as a sign to run—as most other people in the market will do—it must become your indicator to go.

I handle this dilemma myself by omitting time from the equation—since time is what drives fear. The more time you devote to the object of your apprehension, the stronger it becomes. So starve the fear of its favorite food by removing time from its menu.

Fear doesn't just tell you what to do; it also tells you when to do it. Ask yourself what time it is at any point in the day, and the answer is always the same: now. The time is always now—and when you experience fear, it's a sign that the best time to take action is at that very moment. Most people will not follow through with their goals when enough time has passed from the inception of their idea to actually doing something about it; however, if you remove time from your process, you'll be ready to go. There's simply no other choice than to act. There's no need to prepare. It's too late for that once you've gotten this far.

All the excuses in the world won't change one simple fact: that fear is a sign to do whatever it is you fear—and do it quickly.

Eat your fears; don't feed them by backing off or giving them time to grow. Learn to look for and use fear so that you know exactly what you need to do to overcome it and advance your life. Every successful person I know of has used fear as an indicator to determine which actions will provide the greatest return.

The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure

I’ve outlined a step-by-step process to help you move past your fear, along with specific tools you can use to help harness it. The first step is to recognize the fear. Goal number one of your new plan about getting uncomfortable every day, recognize the fear. Number two is harness that fear. Number three is step out with active actions and number four is assess and expand your comfort zone. Let’s step into those. 

Step 1: Recognize the Fear We tend to avoid things that we don’t like and procrastinate whatever it is. If, every time you think of public speaking or deciding on a business decision, you start to feel anxiety or that queasy stomach or worry “What if?”, then you are starting to deal with fear. Nobody thinks the feeling of fear is fun. We need to know though that it’s there and we need to give it a name because then it can start to get smaller. Fear is an idea in your head.

Step 2: Harness the Fear We have nothing to fear but fear itself. —Theodore Roosevelt There is a benefit to fear. Millionaires talk about harnessing it. Just like harnessing the wind or water for electricity, we channel fear into something greater. Fear is an indicator as to whether there might be a threat or risk. So use fear as your guidepost. You probably don’t look at that picture because that’s probably not a good guidepost right now. It looks like it’s going to fall apart. But that’s where fear is the asset. Just like Chris said, “It might be your gut telling you to stop moving forward because there’s potential disaster ahead. You do that  check in, and then you do your due diligence. You use it for what it is and then ignore, if it’s not true.” The other way that you can harness the fear is to use fear to get over stuff, to move things faster. Use it like you would caffeine. Pretend fear is like your morning coffee getting you buzzed and ready to go for action. The more situations you are in that are fear-inducing (not paralyzing fear where you can’t move, but regulated fear) the more you are stepping out of your comfort zone and the more you are going to be able to create the life you want. It’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

The Eventual Millionaire: How Anyone Can Be an Entrepreneur and Successfully Grow Their Startup

“Whatever excites you, go do it. Whatever drains you, stop doing it.” —Derek Sivers

There’s a funny story in John Richardson’s biography, A Life of Picasso. Pablo Picasso was notorious for sucking all the energy out of the people he met. His granddaughter Marina claimed that he squeezed people like one of his tubes of oil paints. You’d have a great time hanging out all day with Picasso, and then you’d go home nervous and exhausted, and Picasso would go back to his studio and paint all night, using the energy he’d sucked out of you.

Most people put up with this because they got to hang out with Picasso all day, but not Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian-born sculptor. Brancusi hailed from the Carpathian Mountains, and he knew a vampire when he saw one. He was not going to have his energy or the fruits of his energy juiced by Picasso, so he refused to have anything to do with him.

Brancusi practiced what I call The Vampire Test. It’s a simple way to know who you should let in and out of your life. If, after hanging out with someone you feel worn out and depleted, that person is a vampire. If, after hanging out with someone you still feel full of energy, that person is not a vampire. Of course, The Vampire Test works on many things in our lives, not just people—you can apply it to jobs, hobbies, places, etc. Vampires cannot be cured. Should you find yourself in the presence of a vampire, be like Brancusi, and banish it from your life forever.

“Part of the act of creating is in discovering your own kind. They are everywhere. But don’t look for them in the wrong places.” —Henry Miller

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

It’s hard to interrupt these autopilot cycles because, well, that’s the whole point of autopilot. We don’t think about what we’re doing. We drift along in life, floating on the wake of past choices, and it’s easy to forget that we have the ability to change direction.

One solution to this is to bundle our decisions with “tripwires,” signals that would snap us awake at exactly the right moment, compelling us to reconsider a decision or to make a new one.

Chances are you know someone who has been stuck on autopilot too long. Sometimes autopilot causes people to neglect opportunities; maybe you have a friend who has talked about writing a novel for years but never seems to make any progress. Other times, autopilot leads people to persist at efforts that seem doomed, like a couple whose relationship makes them both miserable, or a relative with a naive dream of making a living as a landscape painter, or an executive who refuses to recognize that her pet project has failed. At some point, the virtue of being persistent turns into the vice of denying reality. When that transformation happens, how can you snap someone out of it?

One option is to set a deadline, the most familiar form of a tripwire.

Some deadlines are natural, such as the deadline for filing stories at a daily newspaper—the printing press has to roll at a certain time, whether the story is ready or not. But it’s easy to forget that most of the deadlines we encounter in life are simply made up. They are artificially created tripwires to force an action or a decision.

Deadlines focus our mental spotlight on a choice. They grab us by the collar and say, If you’re gonna do this, you have to do it now.

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

To get where you want to go in life, you must adopt the view that whatever is going on in your world—good, bad, or nothing—is something caused by you. I assume control over everything that happens to me, even for those things that I appear to have no control over. Whether I am in control or not, I still elect to claim responsibility and control so that I can do something to improve my situation going forward.

When I assume and increase my responsibility for this situation, I will probably come up with a solution going forward.

Assume control and increase responsibility by adopting the position that you make all things happen, even those things you have previously considered to not be under your control. Never take the position that things just happen to you; rather, they happen because of something you did or did not do. If you are willing to take credit when you win, you have to take credit when you don't! Increasing your responsibility level will inherently enhance your ability to find solutions and create more success for yourself.

Assuming control will cause you to start to look at what you can do to make sure negative events don't take place so that you can improve the quality of your life and reduce the occurrence of seemingly random unfortunate events.

Once you start to approach every situation as someone who is acting—not being acted upon—you will start to have more control over your life. Having (or failing to have) success, I believe, is a direct result of everything you are doing and thinking yourself. You are the source, the generator, the origin, and the reason for everything—both positive and negative. This is not meant to simplify the concept of success, of course, but until you decide you are responsible for everything, you likely will not take the action necessary to get you above the game. However, if you want to have it all, then of course you have to assume responsibility for everything.

It was only until I truly started to believe that nothing happens to me; it happens because of me that I was able to start operating at 10X levels. Someone once said, “No matter where I go, there I am.” This little saying suggested to me that I am both the problem and the solution.

Disciplined, consistent, and persistent actions are more of a determining factor in the creation of success than any other combination of things.  Understanding how to calculate and then take the right amount of action is more important than your concept, idea, invention, or business plan.

Most people fail only because they are operating at the wrong degree of action. To simplify action, we are going to break down your choices into four simple categories or degrees of action. Your four choices are: 

1. Do nothing. 
2. Retreat. 
3. Take normal levels of action. 
4. Take massive action.

You have to approach each day as though your life and your future depend on your ability to take massive action.

The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure

Personal problems drive the evolution of the individual. Without my insecurity around my friend Steve, I never would’ve achieved the confidence I feel today. Without a crippling illness, Phil never would’ve taken the inner journey that yielded the tools. These are illustrations of the third pillar of the new spirituality: the driving force of spiritual evolution is personal problems

Think of a particularly difficult problem you have in your life right now and then try this: First, think of the problem as a random hardship, occurring in an unthinking universe that doesn’t care about you or your evolution. How does that feel? 

Now, think of the same problem as a challenge posed by a universe that wants you to evolve and knows that you can. How does that feel?

Most people feel more motivated when they envision themselves as part of an intelligent system whose goal is their advancement.

This ongoing sense that problems are meaningful is a fundamental difference between a consumer and a creator. A consumer feels that life is only meaningful when his needs are being gratified. Problems, because they are un-gratifying, inevitably destroy the consumer’s sense of purpose. In contrast, a creator has a sense of meaning that can’t be destroyed—he insists on seeing problems as driving him toward something better, something higher in himself. Far from destroying his sense of meaning, problems actually reinforce it.

They want to respond to their problems as creators. All they need are the right tools. A healthy spirit has the confidence that it can meet the future. Although it’s impossible to know exactly what the future will bring, it will definitely contain some type of pain.

When an individual stops moving forward in life, he stagnates.

The only way to rebuild the spirit is to be true to its nature. The spirit always moves toward wholeness—it wants to embrace everyone. We feed the spirit every time we accept those who are most different from us. Doing this is a matter of self-interest. It’s impossible for anyone to feel secure in a society at odds with itself. 

The Tools: 5 Tools to Help You Find Courage, Creativity, and Willpower--and Inspire You to Live Life in Forward Motion

The 10X Rule is about pure domination mentality. You never do what others do. You must be willing to do what they won't do—and even take actions that you might deem “unreasonable.”

Any goal you set is going to be difficult to achieve, and you will inevitably be disappointed at some points along the way. So why not set these goals much higher than you deem worthy from the beginning? If they are going to require work, effort, energy, and persistence, then why not exert 10 times as much of each? What if you are underestimating your capabilities?

Remember: A person who limits his or her potential success will limit what he or she will do to create it and keep it. As long as you are alive, you will either live to accomplish your own goals and dreams or be used as a resource to accomplish someone else's.

When you have underestimated the time, energy, and effort necessary to do something, you will have “quit” in your mind, voice, posture, face, and presentation. You won't develop the persistence necessary to get your mission accomplished. However, when you correctly estimate the effort necessary, you will assume the appropriate posture. The marketplace will sense by your actions that you are a force to be reckoned with and are not going away—and it will begin to respond accordingly.

Never reduce a target. Instead, increase actions. When you start rethinking your targets, making up excuses, and letting yourself off the hook, you are giving up on your dreams!

The 10X Rule assumes the target is never the problem. Any target attacked with the right actions in the right amounts with persistence is attainable.

I know you've probably heard this before, but success does not merely “happen.” It is the result of relentless, proper actions taken over time. Only those who operate with the appropriate view and corresponding actions will have success. Luck clearly has something to do with it, but anyone who is “getting lucky” will tell you that their “luck” is directly proportional to what they've done. The more actions you take, the better your chances are of getting “lucky.”

The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure