Being a few years removed from school now, I’ve noticed a lot of people really hate what they’re doing, but stick with it because of the money. I get it, you’ve gotten accustomed to a certain lifestyle. You can buy nice clothes, you can go to the bars and take vacations whenever you’d like to. None of that replaces the sinking feeling in your stomach that you’re sort of wasting your life doing something you just don’t want to do for 60 hours a week.
Good news though, it doesn’t need to be that way. I love my job, and I often get asked what I’ve done to find a job I love. I live my life with a simple mantra, which is “Go Get It” and I apply that to everything I do, whether it’s my career or the gym. The only thing that is stopping you from getting what you want is yourself. I know that may seem like I’m oversimplifying things, but if you follow the 3 steps below, you’ll always get what you want.
1. GET OUT OF YOUR BOX
- The greatest innovators constantly live in a world of discomfort. Reason being, pushing new boundaries and exploring new things isn’t easy. There’s naysayers at every corner who are going to tell you to just stick with your doing and that change is a bad idea. This can come from family, your boss or most often, yourself. Don’t fall in the trap of being your own worst enemy, take action and get outside of your comfort zone.
“I’m continually trying to make choices that put me against my own comfort zone. As long as you’re uncomfortable, it means you’re growing”. – Ashton Kutcher
2. WORK YOUR ASS OFF
- Once you get out of your box, now you need to start working harder than you ever have. You’re going to fail. That’s a fact. But every failure gets one step closer to where you want to be. Anybody who is successful will tell you that it took a lot of failure, rejection and hard work to get to where they are today.
“Failure is also a necessary experience for growth in our own lives, for if we’re never tested to our limits, how will we know how strong we really are? How will we ever grow?” – Arnold Schwarzenegger
3. DON’T STOP
- Once you’ve gotten out of your comfort zone and worked your ass off to get to where you want to be, you’ve successfully gotten into a mind-set that will keep propelling you. What you’ll learn once you get to where you want to be is that you don’t want to stay there, you want to keep moving forward. Life is no fun when you’re in a rut. What is fun is seeing how far you can push the envelope.
“The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities” – Benjamin Mays
To be honest, the 3 things I’ve described above are not that hard to do. It takes a lot of time and effort, but everybody has the capacity to do it. It’s not about intelligence or status, it’s about work ethic. At the end of the day, if there’s a will, there’s a way. Or as Shia Labeouf would say, JUST DO IT.