Motivation
Our Vialchemy team transformed their motivation by instilling key insights from these 3 life-changing books!
Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds
Author: David Goggins
Key Learnings:
In order to accomplish big things in life you need to first find yourself. You need to first realize that the only person that is capable of turning your situation around is yourself. When you put yourself through incredibly hard situations, whether that is physical or mental you will find yourself on the other side. Success is an inside job!
Have you ever noticed what happens to your hands when you first start to go to the gym, or your fingers when you first start to play the guitar? At first your hands will hurt, you may get blisters or sores. But over time your skin thickens and these tasks that once caused you pain no longer do. As our skin gets stronger we call this building calluses. But what we learn from our hands can also be applied to our brain! We can build calluses on our brain when we work hard. You have to suffer to grow. If you take the easy route in life you may live your whole life without starting your true journey. If you do things you are uncomfortable with every day of your life before you know it you will build the strongest mindset and become comfortable with being uncomfortable.
We all have the ability to go into a space where we can accomplish anything when we figure out how to connect our mind with our body. Motivation can come and go but when you are driven to accomplish something you will figure out a way! Your mind may tell you to stop, often far before your body is at 100%. The next time things are getting tough ask yourself? Is this just my mind trying to trick me into taking the easy route? Will taking the easy route lead to success and greatness? Instead of giving up, figure out how to break the task down into small steps and focus on one at a time. This will give you the drive to power through!
At times of hell and suffering we may forget how tough we really are. When times get tough we need to look back and remind ourselves what we have overcome in life. Write down all your accomplishments in life, big and small. Imagine putting all of these in a cookie jar and then during our hardest times put your hand into the cookie jar and use these accomplishments to drive yourself forward in the hardest times.
We will all face difficult and challenging times in our life. We need to equip ourselves with different tools to help us through these times. We have a darkside deep down somewhere that we can strategically tap into. Goggins calls this “taking someone's soul”. Take the hurt and negative comments you have heard from others and transform it into the fuel that will power you to greatness! Think back to all the naysayers and prove them wrong.
Most people quit as soon as things get though. This makes it easy to be successful in today's age. If you train yourself to have a “I’ll do it anyways” mentality you are already leaps ahead of most of your peers. Never forget that on the other side of these tough obstacles you will find greatness.
Be a warrior in life. To be a warrior is about “doing whatever it takes” even if that means you need to suffer. But don't just do it for yourself. It needs to be bigger than yourself. Do it for the people beside you, do it for the ones you love in your life. If you choose to be a warrior you have two options, choose to go in hard and attack it, or to go in soft and quit when it gets difficult. It’s not about being better than anyone else. We grow by being better than how we were yesterday.
The 10x Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure
Author: Grant Cardone
Key Learnings:
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.”
If you don't consider it your duty to live up to your potential, then you simply won't. If it doesn't become an ethical issue for you, then you won't feel obligated and driven to fulfill your capacity. Treating success as an option is one of the major reasons why more people don't create it for themselves—and why most people don't even get close to living up to their full potential. Good parents will do whatever it takes to take care of their children. They will get up in the middle of the night to feed their baby, work as hard as they have to in order to clothe and feed their children, fight for them, even put their lives at risk to protect them. This is the same way you must envision success.
Although you can train to increase your skills and your confidence, courage is only attained by doing—especially the things that you fear. Do things that scare you more frequently, and they will slowly begin to scare you a bit less—until they become so habitual that you wonder why you ever feared them in the first place!
The highly successful people take unbelievable amounts of action. They assume that their future achievements rely on investing in actions that may not pay dividends today but that when taken consistently and persistently over time will sooner or later bear fruit.
“Nothing happens to you; it happens because of you.” Excuses are never the reason for why you did or didn't do something. They're just a revision of the facts that you make up in order to help yourself feel better about what happened (or didn't). Excuses are for people who refuse to take responsibility for their life and how it turns out. If you keep telling yourself that long enough, you'll start to expect it—thereby ensuring that things will continue to not go your way.
FEAR stands for False Events Appearing Real, which implies that most of what you're afraid of doesn't ever come to pass. Fear is one of the most disabling emotions a human being can experience. It immobilizes people, and often, it ultimately prevents them from going for their goals and dreams. 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.
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Author: Carol Dweck
Key Learnings:
People are born with a love of learning, but the fixed mindset can undo it. Think of a time you were enjoying something. Then it became hard and you wanted out. Next time when this happens, don't fool yourself. It’s the fixed mindset. Put yourself in a growth mindset. Picture your brain forming new connections as you meet the challenge and learn. Keep on going.
Mindset of champions:
Those with the growth mindset found success in doing their best, in learning and improving. They found setbacks motivating, informative. They see them as a wake-up call. People with a growth mindset take charge of the processes that bring success and that maintain it.
Research by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson show that negative labels harm our limited brain power. When stereotypes are evoked, they fill people’s mind with distracting thoughts - with secret worries about confirming the stereotype. People usually aren’t even aware of it, but they don’t have enough mental power left to do their best at a given task.
Mindset change is not about picking up a few pointers here and there. It’s about seeing things in a new way. Changing to a growth mindset is changing from judge-and-be-judged framework to a learn-and-help-learn framework. Their commitment is to growth, and growth takes plenty of time, effort, and mutual support.
The Growth Mindset is about believing your basic qualities are things that you can cultivate through your efforts.
Everyone can grow through application and experience despite differences in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments. True potential is unknown
Why waste time proving over and over how great you are when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them?
“When it’s really hard and I try really hard, and I can do something I couldn’t before.”
“When I work on something for a long time and I start to figure it out.”
The fixed mindset limits achievement. It fills people’s minds with interfering thoughts, it makes effort disagreeable, and it leads to inferior learning strategies. What’s more, it makes other people into judges instead of allies. Early performance does not tell you all you need to know about their talent and their future. Just because some people can do something with little or no training, it doesn’t mean that others can’t do it (and sometimes do it even better) with training.
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