Real Leaders Have the Guts to Have HARD Conversations

Deconstruct the need of your marketplace for belonging and how you can fill that need at every level of the value chain. Your peers in your marketplace aren't even thinking like this. You will be undefeatable if you do this exercise, and then more importantly, execute on it, because ideation without execution is utter delusion. But ideas alone are worthless. What made Facebook? Facebook, Amazon. Amazon. What makes a great company great is not the idea, but it's the daily execution and implementation and iteration and relentless optimization around the idea until the company is seen as a world-class company.

It's the people who operate in different ways that get the greatest things done. So to have the results only 5% of the population has, you've got to be willing to think and do and operate as 95% of people are not willing to think, do and operate. So I would say own your freakish nature. And if people say you're crazy or strange or weird because of your daily routines or your SOPs, your standard operating procedures, or your philosophies, smile at them, send them the best and continue on your path. Be a daily hero. And that sounds very simple, and it is simple, yet it speaks to the idea that we must release our victim nature in order to own our heroism. There are too many good people on the planet today that are card-carrying members of the cult of mediocrity. It's not because they're bad people, it's because they've fallen into the trap of believing the programming of the world around them. When we are little kids, we are born into genius, but too often we resign ourselves to mediocrity. When we're little kids. We want to do amazing things with our lives. We are quite intimate with our gifts and our talents. We are okay and comfortable in our own skin. We walk our own walk, we talk our own talk, we trust our instincts. But then as we advance through life, we get hurt, and the people around us tell us how to think, and they suggest to us if we live this way, we will live soaring lives. And over time we experience a brainwashing of sorts and a heart-washing, and we close ourselves down, and we start to steadily and incrementally we contract, we play small, and we restrict ourselves, and it becomes the great forgetting. We forget who we truly are, and we wonder why we don't feel joyful, and there's a lack of soulfulness in our lives, and we don't feel alive. And it's because we have betrayed ourselves. Stop giving away your power to external things because that's what victims do. And every single time you refuse to make an excuse or offer a complaint and you take your power back from a fear or something maybe you've been procrastinating on, you become more powerful. And if every single day you practice micro bravery and you do uncomfortable things and you vote for difficult projects, you steadily become the hero that you're meant to be. We get from life not what we want, but who we are. So build your warrior character, because life is a mirror, and we from life, not the things we hope for, we get from life who we are. And so I'm going to encourage you to focus on building what I call the four interior empires of Mindset, which is your psychology, Heartset, which is your emotionality, Healthset, which is your physicality, and Soulset, which is your spirituality. All external empires of prosperity or fame and fortune or applause or lifestyle, all exterior empires come from and flow from the four interior empires of Mindset, Heartset, Healthset and Soulset. If you want a world-class life, then develop a world-class interior core, because everything you do and everything you touch reflects who you are.