October 28, 2024 • 10 mins
A few weeks ago, a friend confided in me about feeling stuck and unhappy with her level of success. She sought my advice, and it inspired me to create this episode. In this video, I'll share the essential questions you need to ask yourself to define what success means for you and how to take the first steps toward achieving it.
First, it's crucial to understand your personal definition of success. Many of us chase promotions, money, or business ventures without knowing why. By asking yourself, "What am I motivated by?" and "What do I love doing?", you can gain clarity and align your goals with your true desires.
Next, I emphasize the importance of taking immediate action and making the most of your available time. Often, we waste hours daily on trivial activities. By redirecting that time towards your goals, you can make significant progress. Fear is another major obstacle, but remember, failure is just a step towards learning and growth.
Finally, I address the misconception that you need to be the best to succeed. Success doesn't mean being the top performer; it means achieving what works for you. By redefining success and setting realistic goals, you can find fulfillment and continuously aim higher.
Join me in this journey of self-discovery and take the first step towards unlocking your true potential. If you need further guidance, feel free to reach out, and let's make your dreams a reality.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
So a few weeks ago, a friend of mine came to me and she was telling me about how she felt stuck.
She felt like she just wasn't achieving the type of success that she wanted,
that she wasn't happy with her level of success.
And she wanted me to tell her what she should do. And I get that question a lot.
And the truth is that there actually isn't a step-by-step guide that's gonna
make them successful. There's no silver bullet.
The reality is you need to define what success means for you.
(00:23):
You have to ask yourself a couple of hard questions and you have to be honest when you answer them.
And once you do that, the steps to actually become successful become so crystal clear in your mind.
So I figured I'd make a video about it. I'm going to share with you the questions that I asked her.
And I know that if you do it, if you're honest, and if you go through this process,
you'll figure out what success means for you and you'll be willing to take the
(00:44):
steps to actually achieve it.
The first thing you need to do is you have to ask yourself, do you actually
know what success means for you?
Because I bet you, you don't. A lot of us just grab for the next rung on the
ladder, or we go for the promotion because we want more money,
or we want to start a business, whatever it may be.
But we don't actually know why we're doing it. It may look good on paper,
(01:05):
it may look good to your parents, but it's not necessarily what you ultimately want.
So you have to get real about it, and you have to ask yourself two simple questions.
You have to ask, what am I motivated by?
And what am I great at doing? What do I love doing?
What would I be willing to do even if the results never came or took a long time to come?
And I went through this about a year ago. If you've seen any of my other videos,
you've probably heard me talk about being a founder.
(01:27):
I talk about it a lot. But when I asked myself those questions,
when I said, what am I motivated by?
And what do I love doing? I quickly realized that there was absolutely no reason
for me to start a software company again.
So I'll tell you my answers. The first one is, what am I motivated by?
I realized that I'm motivated by the freedom that money gives me.
And I'm motivated to work harder when I know that my hard work equals more return for me.
(01:51):
I like to work for myself, not for other people. And so clearly that means that
being an entrepreneur is a good path for me.
And maybe being a software company founder is a good path.
But I had to ask myself also, what do I love to do?
And that's where I realized that I should absolutely not make another company.
Because nowhere on that list were things like hiring people,
firing them, one-on-ones, performance reviews, team meetings,
(02:14):
waiting on other people to deliver on my vision.
None of those things were the things that I love to do. So why would I put myself
in a position where that's exactly what I have to do?
So what is it that I love doing? Well, at the end of the day,
when I thought about my past career, when I thought about my time as a founder,
the only answer that I could come up with was that I love to talk about it.
(02:35):
And I know that that's probably the most obvious answer that anyone has ever
said in the history of time, because you're watching me now and you know that,
yes, I love to talk. I love the sound of my own voice.
But it was true. I always am the most energized when I'm talking,
when I'm sharing ideas, when I'm on stage or in front of a camera.
So I then realized, okay, I need to find a way where I can talk for a living.
(02:56):
And the better I do, maybe the more I talk, the more chance I have of living
a life of financial freedom. And that's what you need to figure out.
You need to ask yourself, why do you want that promotion?
Why do you want to start a business? What type of a business do you want to
start? Are you aiming to become the next billionaire and be on Fortune Magazine?
Or are you just looking to work for yourself? Because those are very different businesses.
(03:20):
One requires millions or billions of dollars of investment, teams of thousands
of people on a campus, and one you might be able to run out of your garage.
And if that's the one you want, why would you even go through any of the other steps of that other one?
So ask yourself that and be honest with the answer and challenge it.
When you come up with an answer, come back to it the next day and say,
is that really the thing that I want?
And one of the easiest ways to validate that, and it's the next question that
(03:42):
I asked my friend, is what's the first step you can take towards that goal?
If you want a promotion or you want to go back to school, you want to start
a business, what's the simplest thing you could do today, right now,
while we're here to put yourself on the path to actually achieving that.
If it was me and I wanted to make videos, well, then I would pull up my phone
right then and there and try making a video.
(04:03):
How does it feel to talk into a camera? How does it feel to share ideas?
Is it as fun and as exciting as you thought it would be? If so,
great. Not only have you taken a first step, but you validated that you're on the right path.
The other question that I asked her, and it's a question you should be asking
yourself is, do you have enough time?
And I'm going to give you the answer. You do. Every single person out there
probably has at least a couple of hours every day that they devote to something new.
(04:28):
And most of us have enough time that we waste every single day to basically
live an entirely new life.
I'm trying to go after something right now. But what does my day look,
I get up and I go for a bike ride or a walk. And when I come home,
I usually spend the next half hour on my phone playing Wordle or reading the
news. Well, that's a half hour right there.
Wasted. I watch TikTok while I'm having lunch. I usually am back on my phone in the afternoon.
(04:51):
I spend a good hour a day just refreshing stats to see if anybody's watched my videos.
All of those things add up. They're like calories. You know,
you think you're eating really well and then you go through the day and you're
like, well, I did snack on this and I had that and that.
But if you look at your time that same way, you realize that you have time to
do just about anything you want. If you want to learn a new language,
if you want to take some new courses, if you want to start a business,
(05:12):
you can do it. It's a matter then of your motivation.
Why aren't you motivated to use that time? And a lot of the time,
it's either because you don't know what you actually want. And if that's the
case, go back to step one.
Or it's because you're afraid.
Being afraid is probably the biggest blocker that most people have.
(05:33):
And I want to talk to you about that right now. It's what I talk to my friend about. Why?
What is it that you're so afraid of? What's the worst that could possibly happen if you try?
And I usually say to people when we're having this conversation that they're
probably making the mistake that they think their life is a TV show.
They think everybody's watching them in sequence. And if they do things in the
wrong order, if they have to go back to the start again, that everybody's going
(05:56):
to be disappointed. But honestly, nobody's watching.
Nobody cares as much as you do. I talk to people in their 20s who think it's
too late for them to go back to school. Oh my my God, it's never too late.
I talked to people in their thirties who think that they're too old to get into
social media or too old to start over again, but they're not.
Time is going to keep moving on. No matter what age you are right now,
(06:17):
you're going to be four years older in four years from now.
So would you rather be four years older and be doing the thing you love,
be more successful, have gone back to school, have started a business than just
to be four years older and still be wondering why you're not achieving things.
(06:37):
I know that sounds a little trivial. I know it sounds like I'm just saying to
pull yourselves up by your bootstraps.
I don't mean it like that. I just mean it to say that you've got to let go of
that version of failure.
And you've also got to let go of the version of failure that thinks that everyone's
going to be laughing at you, where that failure is actually a real finite thing because it's not.
Most of the time, failure is just a form of embarrassment or a form of learning.
(06:59):
The other thing I do all the time, and I hope that some of of you will take
this on as well is whenever I'm starting something new, whether it's a business
here on YouTube, whether it's a skill, I assume that I'm going to fail 50 times
before I'm any good at it.
By saying that to myself, by saying that I'm going to fail a whole lot,
I'm going to be bad at this, I'm not going to do it properly,
(07:19):
and eventually I'll get better at it, then I actually start seeking out that
failure. Because again, think about the timeline.
If it's going to take me 50 failures anyway, do I want that to play out over five years? No.
I would rather it happens today or in the next week or month than over the next
four years, so I actually seek it out.
That makes me willing to put things out there before I'm ready.
(07:40):
It makes me willing to put out videos on this channel before I had an editor,
before I knew what the heck I was doing.
Not that I do yet. I'm only at about 22, 23 videos.
It makes me willing to do that because I know that eventually I'll have failed
enough to actually know what works, to know what I'm good at,
to know what people care about.
And that's the same for you. If you want to sing, go sing somewhere.
(08:01):
If you want to start a business, start talking to people about it.
See if anybody will pay you anything for it.
It's not going to be the end of the world when people say no.
No, it's just going to be the first failure that you needed to get where you need to go.
And the final thing that we talked about, because I think this is the other
thing that holds a lot of people back when they're unsure of themselves,
(08:23):
whether they should apply for the new job or the promotion, whether they should
change careers or anything else, is that it's not the most talented people that are going to succeed.
You don't have to be the best. If your goal is to be the best,
if you want to be the single greatest hockey player of all time,
I'm Canadian by the way, or you want to be the best singer or the best musician
or the number one YouTuber, then yeah, that's going to be hard to achieve.
(08:46):
But the majority of people that make it, make it in some form that isn't the pinnacle.
They're just succeeding in a way that works for them.
On a hockey team, there's a couple of stars, but the rest of the roster is made
up of people that are there. They're good.
And they also just stuck with it and tried. People on YouTube, it's the same thing.
So you don't have to be the best and don't let that hold you back from trying.
(09:09):
If you're willing to try, if you're willing to do it, then you can be in the game.
You may have to adjust what success means to you. Maybe instead of trying to
be the best, you'll be happy if you can make a little bit of extra money doing
it. Or if you're are able to support yourself.
Redefine what success means for you. There's no reason. Nobody else is telling you what it has to be.
You can define that. And if you do, you'll be successful.
(09:31):
And you can always reset your goals later on and set them higher and aim for something even bigger.
But remember that you don't have to be the best at anything to go for the job.
Nobody above you is better than you per se.
They're just there. They just tried. I went through this with her and I've gone
through it with myself and the outcome is always the same.
The person realizes, is, oh, that's what I want.
(09:53):
I want more time to spend with my kids and I want more freedom.
I want to start a business, but it doesn't have to be that complicated.
I can do it locally instead of globally. I can do it smaller.
I can do it easier. I can simplify what I'm trying to achieve because what I'm
trying to achieve isn't that big or it's not that difficult.
Now the risks don't seem as bad. I have the time. I'm willing to do that time
(10:14):
because I'm excited about it and
I'm excited to to fail. And that's what I want from all of you as well.
And if you want to talk about it, just let me know. Talk to your friends, but also talk to me.
Every single video I make, I put my link into the description.
I made a whole video about why I'm doing that. And I love talking to people
about their own ideas and encouraging them to just go for it.
So if you need a little kick in the right direction, just book some time with
(10:37):
me and we'll do this personally.
But until then, I'm excited to see what you accomplish. I'm excited for my friend.
And I just really encourage all of you you to be honest with yourself.
So a few weeks ago, a friend of mine came to me and she was telling me about how she felt stuck.
She felt like she just wasn't achieving the type of success that she wanted,
that she wasn't happy with her level of success.
And she wanted me to tell her what she should do. And I get that question a lot.
And the truth is that there actually isn't a step-by-step guide that's gonna
make them successful. There's no silver bullet.
The reality is you need to define what success means for you.
(00:23):
You have to ask yourself a couple of hard questions and you have to be honest when you answer them.
And once you do that, the steps to actually become successful become so crystal clear in your mind.
So I figured I'd make a video about it. I'm going to share with you the questions that I asked her.
And I know that if you do it, if you're honest, and if you go through this process,
you'll figure out what success means for you and you'll be willing to take the
(00:44):
steps to actually achieve it.
The first thing you need to do is you have to ask yourself, do you actually
know what success means for you?
Because I bet you, you don't. A lot of us just grab for the next rung on the
ladder, or we go for the promotion because we want more money,
or we want to start a business, whatever it may be.
But we don't actually know why we're doing it. It may look good on paper,
(01:05):
it may look good to your parents, but it's not necessarily what you ultimately want.
So you have to get real about it, and you have to ask yourself two simple questions.
You have to ask, what am I motivated by?
And what am I great at doing? What do I love doing?
What would I be willing to do even if the results never came or took a long time to come?
And I went through this about a year ago. If you've seen any of my other videos,
you've probably heard me talk about being a founder.
(01:27):
I talk about it a lot. But when I asked myself those questions,
when I said, what am I motivated by?
And what do I love doing? I quickly realized that there was absolutely no reason
for me to start a software company again.
So I'll tell you my answers. The first one is, what am I motivated by?
I realized that I'm motivated by the freedom that money gives me.
And I'm motivated to work harder when I know that my hard work equals more return for me.
(01:51):
I like to work for myself, not for other people. And so clearly that means that
being an entrepreneur is a good path for me.
And maybe being a software company founder is a good path.
But I had to ask myself also, what do I love to do?
And that's where I realized that I should absolutely not make another company.
Because nowhere on that list were things like hiring people,
firing them, one-on-ones, performance reviews, team meetings,
(02:14):
waiting on other people to deliver on my vision.
None of those things were the things that I love to do. So why would I put myself
in a position where that's exactly what I have to do?
So what is it that I love doing? Well, at the end of the day,
when I thought about my past career, when I thought about my time as a founder,
the only answer that I could come up with was that I love to talk about it.
(02:35):
And I know that that's probably the most obvious answer that anyone has ever
said in the history of time, because you're watching me now and you know that,
yes, I love to talk. I love the sound of my own voice.
But it was true. I always am the most energized when I'm talking,
when I'm sharing ideas, when I'm on stage or in front of a camera.
So I then realized, okay, I need to find a way where I can talk for a living.
(02:56):
And the better I do, maybe the more I talk, the more chance I have of living
a life of financial freedom. And that's what you need to figure out.
You need to ask yourself, why do you want that promotion?
Why do you want to start a business? What type of a business do you want to
start? Are you aiming to become the next billionaire and be on Fortune Magazine?
Or are you just looking to work for yourself? Because those are very different businesses.
(03:20):
One requires millions or billions of dollars of investment, teams of thousands
of people on a campus, and one you might be able to run out of your garage.
And if that's the one you want, why would you even go through any of the other steps of that other one?
So ask yourself that and be honest with the answer and challenge it.
When you come up with an answer, come back to it the next day and say,
is that really the thing that I want?
And one of the easiest ways to validate that, and it's the next question that
(03:42):
I asked my friend, is what's the first step you can take towards that goal?
If you want a promotion or you want to go back to school, you want to start
a business, what's the simplest thing you could do today, right now,
while we're here to put yourself on the path to actually achieving that.
If it was me and I wanted to make videos, well, then I would pull up my phone
right then and there and try making a video.
(04:03):
How does it feel to talk into a camera? How does it feel to share ideas?
Is it as fun and as exciting as you thought it would be? If so,
great. Not only have you taken a first step, but you validated that you're on the right path.
The other question that I asked her, and it's a question you should be asking
yourself is, do you have enough time?
And I'm going to give you the answer. You do. Every single person out there
probably has at least a couple of hours every day that they devote to something new.
(04:28):
And most of us have enough time that we waste every single day to basically
live an entirely new life.
I'm trying to go after something right now. But what does my day look,
I get up and I go for a bike ride or a walk. And when I come home,
I usually spend the next half hour on my phone playing Wordle or reading the
news. Well, that's a half hour right there.
Wasted. I watch TikTok while I'm having lunch. I usually am back on my phone in the afternoon.
(04:51):
I spend a good hour a day just refreshing stats to see if anybody's watched my videos.
All of those things add up. They're like calories. You know,
you think you're eating really well and then you go through the day and you're
like, well, I did snack on this and I had that and that.
But if you look at your time that same way, you realize that you have time to
do just about anything you want. If you want to learn a new language,
if you want to take some new courses, if you want to start a business,
(05:12):
you can do it. It's a matter then of your motivation.
Why aren't you motivated to use that time? And a lot of the time,
it's either because you don't know what you actually want. And if that's the
case, go back to step one.
Or it's because you're afraid.
Being afraid is probably the biggest blocker that most people have.
(05:33):
And I want to talk to you about that right now. It's what I talk to my friend about. Why?
What is it that you're so afraid of? What's the worst that could possibly happen if you try?
And I usually say to people when we're having this conversation that they're
probably making the mistake that they think their life is a TV show.
They think everybody's watching them in sequence. And if they do things in the
wrong order, if they have to go back to the start again, that everybody's going
(05:56):
to be disappointed. But honestly, nobody's watching.
Nobody cares as much as you do. I talk to people in their 20s who think it's
too late for them to go back to school. Oh my my God, it's never too late.
I talked to people in their thirties who think that they're too old to get into
social media or too old to start over again, but they're not.
Time is going to keep moving on. No matter what age you are right now,
(06:17):
you're going to be four years older in four years from now.
So would you rather be four years older and be doing the thing you love,
be more successful, have gone back to school, have started a business than just
to be four years older and still be wondering why you're not achieving things.
(06:37):
I know that sounds a little trivial. I know it sounds like I'm just saying to
pull yourselves up by your bootstraps.
I don't mean it like that. I just mean it to say that you've got to let go of
that version of failure.
And you've also got to let go of the version of failure that thinks that everyone's
going to be laughing at you, where that failure is actually a real finite thing because it's not.
Most of the time, failure is just a form of embarrassment or a form of learning.
(06:59):
The other thing I do all the time, and I hope that some of of you will take
this on as well is whenever I'm starting something new, whether it's a business
here on YouTube, whether it's a skill, I assume that I'm going to fail 50 times
before I'm any good at it.
By saying that to myself, by saying that I'm going to fail a whole lot,
I'm going to be bad at this, I'm not going to do it properly,
(07:19):
and eventually I'll get better at it, then I actually start seeking out that
failure. Because again, think about the timeline.
If it's going to take me 50 failures anyway, do I want that to play out over five years? No.
I would rather it happens today or in the next week or month than over the next
four years, so I actually seek it out.
That makes me willing to put things out there before I'm ready.
(07:40):
It makes me willing to put out videos on this channel before I had an editor,
before I knew what the heck I was doing.
Not that I do yet. I'm only at about 22, 23 videos.
It makes me willing to do that because I know that eventually I'll have failed
enough to actually know what works, to know what I'm good at,
to know what people care about.
And that's the same for you. If you want to sing, go sing somewhere.
(08:01):
If you want to start a business, start talking to people about it.
See if anybody will pay you anything for it.
It's not going to be the end of the world when people say no.
No, it's just going to be the first failure that you needed to get where you need to go.
And the final thing that we talked about, because I think this is the other
thing that holds a lot of people back when they're unsure of themselves,
(08:23):
whether they should apply for the new job or the promotion, whether they should
change careers or anything else, is that it's not the most talented people that are going to succeed.
You don't have to be the best. If your goal is to be the best,
if you want to be the single greatest hockey player of all time,
I'm Canadian by the way, or you want to be the best singer or the best musician
or the number one YouTuber, then yeah, that's going to be hard to achieve.
(08:46):
But the majority of people that make it, make it in some form that isn't the pinnacle.
They're just succeeding in a way that works for them.
On a hockey team, there's a couple of stars, but the rest of the roster is made
up of people that are there. They're good.
And they also just stuck with it and tried. People on YouTube, it's the same thing.
So you don't have to be the best and don't let that hold you back from trying.
(09:09):
If you're willing to try, if you're willing to do it, then you can be in the game.
You may have to adjust what success means to you. Maybe instead of trying to
be the best, you'll be happy if you can make a little bit of extra money doing
it. Or if you're are able to support yourself.
Redefine what success means for you. There's no reason. Nobody else is telling you what it has to be.
You can define that. And if you do, you'll be successful.
(09:31):
And you can always reset your goals later on and set them higher and aim for something even bigger.
But remember that you don't have to be the best at anything to go for the job.
Nobody above you is better than you per se.
They're just there. They just tried. I went through this with her and I've gone
through it with myself and the outcome is always the same.
The person realizes, is, oh, that's what I want.
(09:53):
I want more time to spend with my kids and I want more freedom.
I want to start a business, but it doesn't have to be that complicated.
I can do it locally instead of globally. I can do it smaller.
I can do it easier. I can simplify what I'm trying to achieve because what I'm
trying to achieve isn't that big or it's not that difficult.
Now the risks don't seem as bad. I have the time. I'm willing to do that time
(10:14):
because I'm excited about it and
I'm excited to to fail. And that's what I want from all of you as well.
And if you want to talk about it, just let me know. Talk to your friends, but also talk to me.
Every single video I make, I put my link into the description.
I made a whole video about why I'm doing that. And I love talking to people
about their own ideas and encouraging them to just go for it.
So if you need a little kick in the right direction, just book some time with
(10:37):
me and we'll do this personally.
But until then, I'm excited to see what you accomplish. I'm excited for my friend.
And I just really encourage all of you you to be honest with yourself.
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