How to Succeed If You’re Ambitious but Lazy

If you’re ambitious but lazy, please watch this… – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnKyg3K1O1g

Transcript:
(00:00) If you’re ambitious but lazy, this video is for you. Because at 24 years old, I was broke, lost, and labeled as lazy. Today, I fly around on my own jet, mentor thousands of business owners, and love the work I do every day. But it wouldn’t have happened without following these eight steps.
(00:16) So, if you’re ready to cut off the old version of you, this is how to get unstuck. The first step of getting unstuck is realizing you’re not stuck, you’re just unclear. Laziness is a lack of clarity. Long time ago, I was talking to one of my mentors and he said to me, “A confused mind can’t make progress.
(00:32) If I don’t know what I got to go attack, how am I going to feel clear about attacking something?” So, here’s how we get really clear about our progress. Number one, dump everything in your mind onto a piece of paper. You got to get everything on your plate in front of you so you can look at it. Number two, you got to batch similar things together so you don’t go from running an errand to then trying to do copywriting to then making a phone call to a sales lead.
(00:54) All of those things want to be batched together. Phone calls should be batched together. Creating stuff should be batched together. Running errands should be batched together. Number three is sequence. Once you have everything out of your mind on a piece of paper and put together, you want to figure out what’s priority 1 2 3 and four.
(01:09) Step four is to delete. If there’s things on there that isn’t a hell yes, it’s got to be a hard no. But now that you’ve got a clear plan, you need to become the person capable of reaching it. Which brings us to step number two of getting unstuck, which is upgrade your identity. When your habits become your identity, you forget you do them.
(01:27) See, most people worry about like going to the gym. Once you go to the gym every day, it’s kind of like as weird as leaving the house not wearing pants because it feels awkward. For years, I used to write down I am an iron man. It forced me to go to CrossFit, so I started training to be an athlete.
(01:43) It forced me to hang out with other people that were into running and biking and eventually swimming. And two years later, my buddy Nick and I ended up doing our first Iron Man. What I learned is that the identity is more important than just the habits. Most people think that once I have something, then I’ll do the thing to keep it and then I’ll be better, more productive, successful.
(02:02) What you got to do is you got to reverse it. You got to first be that. Be the iron man. Be the athlete. Be somebody that gets up and is disciplined. Do the work because if that’s who you are, and then you’ll have the thing you want, which is your fitness, which is money, which is relationships. Most people sit back hoping that other people are going to do things for them.
(02:19) You need to be the example first. And the key for me though is to do it daily. And then speak your identity out loud. So my buddy Nick, he was so into the identity of becoming an Iron Man that he got a dog and he named it Kona. Now, if you don’t know this, Kona is the World Championships for Iron Man in Hawaii.
(02:36) This was 6 years before he ever did an Iron Man. It’s wild that he was able to speak that into existence. You become your conversations. But identity will fall apart if you don’t protect it. Which brings us to step number three of getting unstuck. Change your environment. Imagine you’re standing in a commercial grade freezer and you’re freezing to death and you’re telling yourself, “Feel warmer. Feel warmer.
(02:57) ” It doesn’t matter how much meditation, how much mantras, how much screaming you do in that commercial grade freezer to feel warm, you are going to freeze. If you take yourself out of that freezer, put yourself in a warm room, you will warm up. See, there’s no amount of positive thinking that will get you ready.
(03:11) The end of the day, sometimes your environment is what needs to change. My environment will help me to move forward. If I’m feeling stuck, I just look around me and go, what is it about the way I’m living or who I’m spending time with that’s keeping me feeling stuck? So, a few things you need to consider.
(03:25) I call these the three environments to master. The first environment is your physical environment. It’s the environment around you. I’m talking about your kitchen, your pantry. Maybe you’ve got to clear out your pantry and get rid of all the junk so you can lose that weight. Or maybe you got to put some kind of timer on your desk to force you to work.
(03:39) When you sit down, you hit it and you don’t stop until the timer goes off. Putting your gym clothes out before you go to bed. I don’t know what it is. That will create an environment that supports you to win. See, I learned a long time ago if you’re trying to avoid something, it’s easier to avoid the dragon than to slay it.
(03:55) It’s easier to get all the junk food out of your cabinet, throw it in the garbage, don’t buy anymore, then to go in there every time and make a good decision. The second is relationship environment. This is friends, families, but it’s also your virtual mentors. Think the books, the YouTube channels you subscribe to, your podcast. When I want to get unstuck, I literally go, “Okay, what am I consuming? What am I listening to? What am I looking at? I curate my social feed.
(04:17) I unfollow things. I subscribe to stuff. I go to my podcast list. I go look at books that I need to read. Kind of remind myself to kind of revamp my focus so that I can improve my environment that’s coming into my eyes and my ears. I’ve learned that other people can only meet you as deeply as they’ve met themselves.
(04:33) And sometimes we hope that people can hear what we’re saying, but the fact is that you’re sharing your heart and they’re so shallow cuz they haven’t done the work. And sometimes you get frustrated because they can’t receive what you’re trying to give. But the truth is is you can’t pour into those too shallow to hold what you give.
(04:49) So sometimes you just got to allow other people to go on their own journey. And anytime you feel stuck with somebody else, just realize it’s probably an internal reflection of how you feel. The third is the internal environment. And this is everything from the essence of your thoughts to your beingness. It’s what you focus on.
(05:04) Your world isn’t as it is. Your world is as you are. And if you can’t practice gratitude into despair, then you’re going to have a hard time being grateful when you get great things that come to you. if you can’t focus on your thoughts to rewrite or reframe when you’re feeling stuck to say, “Hey, I feel powerful. I feel abundant.
(05:20) I feel expansive and really just keep repeating that even if you don’t feel like it, it’s going to be tough. And at the end of the day, if you don’t have a spiritual practice, some kind of way to feel grounded, to connect to all of it, you’re always going to feel alone and distant from everything that you’re after, and it’s going to feel lonely.
(05:34) So go do these steps to fix your environment to start the process of getting unstuck. But after you’ve dialed in your environment, you need the fuel to take action, which brings us to step number four. Protect your energy. You can’t do more if you don’t have more. Your energy will affect your mood. A lot of people feel stagnant or stuck.
(05:50) It’s because they’re full of self-doubt. I know that was true for me. Imposttor syndrome. I’d be worried all the time. At one point in my life, I got adrenal fatigue and shingles on my body. It’s a physical response to what’s going on in my life. And what I discovered is that my energy is directly proportionate to my success.
(06:07) What I didn’t realize is that my fitness and my energy level is directly tied to my net worth. I call it belt buckles and bank accounts. My belt buckle should never go up and my bank account should never go down. And what I’ve realized is over the years, the fitter I’ve got, the richer I’ve got. So, these are the three energy boosters that are going to get you focused and help you get that momentum back in your life.
(06:26) The first one is prioritize the pump. If you follow me on social media, especially on Instagram, you’ll see me post my workouts and always say exhaust the body, tame the mind. I default to working out before I do anything important. Getting on a stage, shooting videos, having important conversations. My philosophy is very simple.
(06:42) I got to get my body right to get my mind right. And if I don’t exhaust the body, I don’t tame the mind. Sometimes you’re having a bad day and all you got to do is drop down and do some push-ups. The second is to measure your macros. It’s so simple. Somebody asked me at the gym the other day.
(06:57) They said, “One fitness advice you give to everybody.” I was on their Instagram and I said, “Measure your macros.” Most people, they have fitness goals. They have energy goals. They want to change their body. They want to transform their life, but they can’t figure out their nutrition. If you don’t know your proteins, carbs, and fat for your specific goals of your body, that’s going to be impossible for you to energize yourself properly.
(07:14) Number three is you got to take recovery seriously. I train right now for my iron man 16 to 20 hours a week. If I don’t get my sleep at night, then I won’t be able to get the benefit of the training. So, I could have worked out three, four, five hours that day and without the sleep, I don’t integrate the benefit of that work.
(07:31) I don’t actually have a wake up alarm set. I have an alarm for going to bed. Sets to go off at 9:00. If I need to sleep in until 6:00 cuz my body’s tired, I will sleep into 600. Most days I wake up early, but I’m getting up and I’m doing 3 hours on a bike. But energy is useless if it’s used randomly.
(07:46) Which brings us to step five. Build momentum with easy wins. I’m all about momentum because once you start, it’s the hardest part. All planes burn the most fuel when they take off. It takes way less energy once you’re in the air near altitude to maintain. It’s that initial inertia and overcoming and it takes longer than you think, but that’s how you win.
(08:05) Think about your fitness side. You probably have fluctuated through the same weight for the last 5 years. You go up, you come down, you go up, you come down, but there’s an ideal weight of where you want to be. And if you actually just did the effort to get to the ideal weight, maintaining that fluctuation mark looking absolutely shredded is the same amount of effort as you have been going up and down where you’re at.
(08:26) You’re just not where you should be. The reason why people are able to do this is because winners don’t have bad days, they have bad moments. Instead of having a bad moment where you decide to eat half a bag of chips, remind yourself you can decide to reset. You can go brush your teeth, say, you know what, apple and some healthy food for the rest of the day.
(08:45) I do not need to continue this thing. Don’t turn bad moment into a bad weekend. So, I’m going to share with you three hacks to build momentum. The first hack is building a streak. A streak is at least seven days in a row. Day 1, day two, day three. My son, the other day he came to the gym with me. It was day four.
(09:00) The next day he was like, “I’m not sure if I’m going to go.” And then he’s like, “Nope, I’m going to go. That’ll be day five.” And he just built a winning streak of momentum. Number two is tell other people what you’re after. Share your dreams. If you want to go to the gym more consistently, tell people. If you want to quit drinking caffeine, tell people.
(09:15) If you want to spend less time on social media, tell other people. Like I said earlier, you become your conversations. Make those commitments to other people. Number three is get good at saying no. What I’ve learned in life is the more you want to grow, the more you have to say no. So, you want to remove things so you have the space to be able to grow.
(09:31) But if you’re stuck, there’s a powerful way to hack your psychology to get moving. Which brings us to step number six of getting unstuck. Raise the stakes. Most people will do more to avoid pain than they will to gain something. A little over a year ago, I did this thing called Project Visible Abs. So, I decided over 90 days, I’m going to go from like chubby Dan to shredded Dan.
(09:53) And I made a commitment that if I didn’t hit that goal that I would have to get on stage in a manini as is dadbod, no shave, no tan, no nothing if I didn’t hit my goal. If you want to ask yourself if I had some determination or some focus, you better believe it. I don’t want to get on no freaking stage.
(10:09) I don’t want to do no fitness competition. Here’s the way I think about it. No stakes, no rewards, no results. Because you’ll do more to avoid pain than to get a gain. So there’s two parts to really amplify this concept. The first one is actually rewards. Not only do you want to avoid things, what is the benefit of achieving the goal? Okay, so I use mini rewards along the way as a way to just acknowledge the success.
(10:31) I know it’s not going to work as good, but here’s a cool idea. If you want to get your family involved in supporting you, then make the goal, your reward, something that they want. Maybe it’s a vacation, maybe it’s time with them. It’s kind of funny cuz then they’ll start asking you, “How you doing with that? How you doing with that? How you doing with that?” And they won’t ask you, “Hey, do you want dessert for dinner tonight?” or do you want to come waste the afternoon watching a baseball game when you know you should be going to the gym? Like it’s kind of
(10:52) cool getting their involvement because they’re benefiting from your goal. But the second part is the stakes. It’s to avoid the pain. So what can you do? You can put money on the line. One of my favorite things to do is to commit to donate to a charity that absolutely hate. Maybe it’s a political party. The second part is to put your pride on the line. Make a public declaration.
(11:11) That’s what I did. I went on social media and told the whole world, “Here’s what I’m doing over the next 90 days. On this day, I’m weighing in.” hold me accountable. You better believe my pride was on the line. Yes, I also didn’t want to embarrass myself on a fitness stage, but I also had public accountability from my friends.
(11:25) The real hack is to just tell people about it. So, you become what you think about most, and we use our words to activate our goals. But what about the distractions that keep getting in the way of your ambition? Which brings us to step number seven of getting unstuck. Monetize your procrastination. This one’s going to sound crazy, but hear me out.
(11:40) When I was starting as a programmer, I realized that I would code software instead of doing my homework. Anytime I didn’t want to do my homework, I went and wrote code. Anytime I didn’t want to clean my apartment, I went and wrote code. And I realized that if I could create a scenario where I got paid, anytime I was procrastinating, that was a cool place to live.
(11:58) I think about like art class and math class. For me, I go to math class, the bell would ring, and it would seem like it would take eternity before the bell rang, the class was done. I go to art class, I sit down, I grab my pen, the bell rang again, it felt like it took 3 minutes. What’s the difference? When you’re doing the work you love, then it’s hard to feel stuck.
(12:14) My dad used to say, “If you love your work, you’ll never work a day in your life.” I think he might have got it from somebody else, but the whole point is when you’re passionate about the activities you do to make a living, it’s hard to feel stuck. So, these are four ways to create value and get paid to procrastinate.
(12:29) Number one, build a skill set. A skill set is something that other people value. Maybe it’s learning how to sell, maybe it’s graphic design, maybe it’s AI automation. Figure out a skill set that you love that other people value that they’ll pay for. Number two is build a product. I like to build software.
(12:45) You can build doghouses. Honestly, it’s whatever you want to create with the skill set. But building a product changes the game because then there’s a creative process that will feel like you’re contributing to the world instead of just doing a thing for somebody else cuz they ask you to do that. You’re actually building it for yourself, which is a lot of fun.
(13:02) Number three, build your knowledge. I find that when I read or consume things to teach other people that I learn it better. So anytime you’re reading, read for other people. Anytime you’re develop the skill set to teach it to somebody else. Build a community around what you’re learning. That’s why we want to build our knowledge.
(13:19) We want to invest in our brains so that we can add value to other people just by the things we know. Number four, build an audience. This is like the biggest hack. At the end of the day, the new oil is attention. If you want to stand out in this world and really connect to your purpose, then sharing everything you’ve learned, even your struggles, feeling stuck, and how you overcame it, is a great way to build an audience of other people.
(13:40) They’re going to look to you for advice. Feeling useful to other people is one of the most powerful things that we can get to in life. Everybody wakes up going, I hope I am useful today. When I think of monetizing procrastination, and building your audience, think about like these Twitch streamers.
(13:53) If you don’t know what that is, it’s crazy. They get paid millions of dollars to sit there and live stream them playing video games or talking to their community or doing crazy things or talking to famous rappers. It’s bananas. But that is a way to actually get paid to do the thing you procrastinate at. But all these things mean nothing without the final ingredient that separates the dreamers from the achievers.
(14:14) Which brings us to step number eight. Take messy action. In life, a lot of people get stuck because they’re worried about making the right decision. My philosophy is make a decision and then make it right. Whenever I feel like I don’t know what the next action is, I always think about these few ideas. First one is mins. M I NS which stands for most important next step.
(14:34) If I want to do something, I just ask myself, what’s the most important next step towards that outcome? I remember talking to a kid at my Kings Club program for youth and I said, “What’s your dream?” He says, “I want to be a home builder.” And I said, “What’s stopping you?” He’s like, “Well, I got to hire people and I got to find people want me to build their home and I’m just a kid.
(14:50) ” I said, “Or maybe the most important next step is just sell somebody a doghouse.” He’s like, “Oh, I could do that.” And I was like, “Yeah, you could do that tonight.” Walking down the street, knocking on a neighbor’s door. Most important next action is a great framework to ask myself, “What do I need to do next?” If you were not embarrassed by the first attempt at doing the thing you want to go do, then you’ve waited too long.
(15:08) So, for example, go message five people that have done the thing you want to do. Doesn’t matter what you’re trying to get unstuck around, and just ask them for help. Even if nobody replies, you’ll know that you took massive imperfect action. And the last one is JFDI. It’s actually the license plate on my car because it’s a reminder to me that no matter what, the only process to move forward is justing do it.
(15:30) And one of my mentors told me once, he sat me down and he said, “Hey Dan, I believe every person on earth is here to do one thing.” And I know this is my purpose is to wake up to be the 10.0 version of themselves, the best version of themselves. In many ways, you think about the person you needed most in your darkest days, that version of you.
(15:47) Who would you have listened to? And as you become that person, the second part is to share that person with the world, to be that for other people. Because you may not feel accomplished today, and that’s why you might feel stuck, but I’m telling you, no matter where you’re at in your life, there’s somebody that’s two steps behind you that would love for you to show up in their life to tell them how to make those two steps.
(16:04) I don’t think you’re lazy. If you made it all the way to the end of this video, that tells me a lot about who you are, the character, your willingness to try to solve this problem. I think you’re just missing some action. So, right now, start with writing everything down. Go back to step one. Get it out of your head.
(16:22) Get out of your head or your debt. You want to get it down and start taking action against that list. That momentum will build the confidence and your confidence comes by keeping the commitment you make to yourself by writing that list and doing that every morning. Try that. Get unstuck.
(16:37) Guarantee you’re going to find me in a few months. You’re going to tell me everything’s changed for you. And if you want to learn seven things I quit to go from broke to millionaire, click here and I’ll see you on the other