What's The TRUTH About Winning & Making Fast Progress?

Figuring out what the current "problem" you need to solve is. Winning in business, competition, and life is all about problem solving. If you’re trying to make money, the first problem is “what do I sell?”. Then it’s “how do I deliver this?”. Then it’s “how do I get people to know this exists?”. And on & on. It’s a series of difficult problems. The faster you solve one, the faster you can move on to the next, the the more progress you make in less time. If you see someone achieving extreme success in an unnatural time frame it almost always means they found a way to solve difficult problems faster. You need to internalise this because it’s so f***** important. The amount of time it takes you to achieve your goal is dictated by how fast you identify and solve the problems standing in the way of that goal. If there’s 100 problems, that could take you 100 days, or 5 years, depending on the speed at which you identify & solve them. So the primary habit you need to adopt in your daily life to make REAL and consistent progress is identifying the biggest problem holding you back, then attacking it.

Actively thinking about solutions to that problem, and coming up with your "best guess" to move forward with. Chung Ju-yung, the founder of Hyundai, once said, “If you search for a method, it will come to you. If you can’t come up with a method, it’s because you didn’t think hard enough.” The key = METHOD. He didn’t say “if you search for the perfect solution”, he said “if you search for a METHOD”. Why? Because winners understand that if you wait for a perfect solution before taking action, you’ll be waiting a lifetime. All you need to get started on solving a problem is a METHOD that has a chance of working, and the balls to take action on it, knowing that it might not work. Once you take the pressure off like this, solving problems becomes easy. All you have to is earnestly search for a method that COULD work, then take action on it. Through action and the feedback you receive, the real solution will reveal itself. Remember; action creates information. No action = no information.

Aggressively taking action on your "best guess”, knowing that you might be wrong but the only way to find out is by implementing it. This is honestly one of the “great separators” between winners and losers. Losers are afraid to fail. If there’s a chance of something not working, they default to inaction. Winners understand that certainty doesn’t exist, and that there’s ALWAYS some probability of failure. They also understand that failure is one of the only ways to acquire the information & experience they need to succeed, so they run towards it. Rockefeller put it best when he said, “failure isn’t a tombstone, it’s a stepping stone.” A stepping stone is something you have to go over to reach your destination. Failure is the same. You can’t win without it. So why would you ever avoid it?

Measuring progress daily. All winners are trackers. They know that without hard data, they’ll deceive themselves into thinking they’re doing better than they are, which is a death sentence. At all times, you should know your key numbers. Money, weight, followers, sales, practice hours, etc. You don’t need to track everything, just the KEY indicators of performance. I have a spreadsheet titled ‘I LOVE DATA’, and the first thing I do every morning is fill it out. I’ve deceived myself TOO MANY TIMES in the past and i REFUSE to let it happen again. I do not want to live in a comforting daydream where it FEELS like i’m making progress but the numbers are stagnant. I want the real thing. And this is the best way I’ve found to keep myself accountable and get it.

Removing ALL sources of low quality information and content. Your success is largely dictated by the quality of your thinking, and the quality of your thinking is largely determined by the content you allow into your mind. Once you realise just how powerful this is, you also realise that social media algorithms where you have ZERO CONTROL over what comes up next are evil and destructive. You can’t maintain a high level of thinking if you allow yourself to scroll through garbage for even an hour a day. There’s too much bullshit, and it’s so stimulating that it captures more than it’s fair share of your mindspace. Don’t take my word for this, run your own experiment. For 2 weeks, remove ALL social media scrolling and replace it with reading books that fire you up, working, or spending time in silence. I guarantee that once you’ve experienced it, you’ll never go back. You’ll be full of ideas. You’ll feel more bullish and excited about the future. Your DESIRE to work will be through the roof. The quality of work you produce will 3x. Your overall enjoyment and satisfaction with life will skyrocket. Everything gets better. It’s an order of magnitude improvement on your life and results. The hard part is going through the initial “withdrawal” phase where you’re feeling worse and suffering constant impulses to open social media for a “quick scroll”. But if you can get through that period, a whole new world will open up to you. It’s beautiful. And you should experience it at least once, just so you know what life can be like, and how much progress you COULD be making.

Giving your subconscious time to work it's magic. Intense focus on solving the current "problem" to reach the next level + consistent action + removal of brain rot inputs = making your ONE goal the dominant thought in your mind. When the dominant thought in your mind = your one goal, your subconscious works on it 24/7. At this point, walking, time spent in silence, and the critical periods when you fall asleep and wake up become insanely high ROI as they create space for your subconscious to "airdrop" solutions into your brain. You have to carve out time for this. It doesn’t feel productive, but many of my greatest insights and ideas have come to me on a walk. For example, the idea for my Instagram page @historyofwinning came to me on a walk on the 1st January. I started it on the 3rd, and in the 59 days since, it’s grown to 261k followers. All because I gave my subconscious time to do it’s thing.

Always prioritising the hardest thing. At any given time, the thing you least want to do is the biggest opportunity for growth. Developing the habit of consistently choosing to attack the HARDEST problem and FINISH it = accelerating your progress. With every difficult task you complete, you pull your future into the present.

Reading biographies. Filling your mind with stories of REAL people who've achieved extreme success, seeing what it looks like to go from underdog to champion, seeing how these people think, how they take action, their work ethic, the things they tried that didn't work, the opportunities they seized, how they make decisions, etc—it fills you with ideas, and gives you a clear picture of how the best of the best operate. By reading biographies, you're able to master the best of what other people have already figured out. You can download multiple lifetimes of experience & lessons in a single month. They inspire you to go harder, fill your brain with ideas, and give you unlimited energy to attack your mission. They also humble you. Success breeds arrogance, arrogance breeds complacency, complacency breeds failure. If you want to PROTECT yourself from the arrogance that comes with success, read biographies daily. They remind you how far you still have left to go and how many levels there are to the game, which acts as a defence mechanism against thinking you're the shit & have it all "figured out". This is also something the majority of people won't do, which makes it an easy place to gain an edge.

Maintaining a positive attitude at all times. Having a positive attitude isn’t about being happy and full of joy 24/7, it’s about being bullish and optimistic about yourself and your actions. E.g. If you're about to attack a hard problem and the dominating thought in your mind is "I can't do this, I'm not good enough, this is too hard," then you've already failed. If you're launching a new business and the dominating thought in your mind is "this will never work, it'll probably fail, I doubt I can stick with this," you’ve already failed. Thoughts are largely self-fulfilling prophecies. This is the reality of manifestation. It's not about thinking "I'm going to be a millionaire" then waiting for the universe to deliver your cash. It's about how your thoughts dictate your actions. “This will probably fail" manifests in reality because it results in WEAK action. “I am going to make this work no matter how difficult it is or how long it takes” manifests in reality because it results in STRONG action. This is 100% under your control, and all it takes is reminding yourself. You are a human being, which makes you the most powerful creature on earth. You have a supercomputer lodged in your skull that can solve problems, and a pair of hands to execute solutions. You have access to more power & abundance sitting in your bedroom than kings did just a few hundred years ago. There are infinite reasons to be bullish and optimistic. But there are also infinite reasons to be pessimistic and defeated. It all depends on what you CHOOSE to focus on. Maintaining a positive attitude means constantly retraining your focus on the unlimited potential and power you wield. It’s a habit, and like any habit it gets easier the more you train it.

Developing impulse control. Self sabotage is very real and very destructive. But how you see it and choose to deal with it dictates how much power it holds over you. I think most people get this wrong. They start digging into their mind, wondering WHY they self sabotage, believing that the key to eliminating it is obsessively going over their past and problems until they “strike gold” and find the one thing they’ve been missing. In my experience, doing this only made things worse. It tanked my attitude and didn’t solve any of my problems. Everything changed once I let go of the past and focused exclusively on the present. I realised that what I was labelling “self sabotage” was really just a lack of impulse control. I’d have urges—eating some bullshit food, getting distracted on social media, watching Netflix instead of working, etc—and i’d immediately act on them. Why? Because I believed all my thoughts were true. I identified with my impulses, so i acted on them. Once I started meditating regularly, I became aware of my automatic thoughts and realised just how insane and irrational 98% of them were. Once I realised this, I stopped thinking of them as “me” and started seeing them as “something that happens inside my brain”. Once this switch flipped, I could recognise my impulsive thoughts the moment they came up, and simply looking at them objectively meant I could let them pass without action. The meditation practice was simple. I’d sit down first thing in the morning, close my eyes, and focus on my breath. Whenever I caught my mind wandering, I’d retrain my focus on my breath. I’d do that over & over again for as long as possible (I never set a timer, I set a stopwatch—the goal was always “go as long as possible”).