Will You Set Yourself On Fire?


I knew that everything would be different from that day forward.

It was a watershed moment for me.

I had just been asked the most important question of my young life….and I knew I had to answer it.

“What will you become?” lingered in the air, demanding to be answered.

I wasn’t asked that question by a mentor or a friend.

No, I was asked that question by someone much closer to me.

I asked that question of myself.

You see, many people are waiting. Waiting for a spark. Waiting for someone to give them permission. Waiting for the right moment. Waiting for someone else to ask them that question, when they should ask it of themselves.

I’m a big believer that the best person to get you started towards a better life… is you. The right moment is right now. You don’t need to get approval from anyone. You don’t need to wait for a spark. No. You can set yourself on fire.

That’s what I did. I wanted a different life and I demanded a different life for myself that very day. Everything changed and if you do the same, everything will change for you.

The first thing you have to do, is to develop a creed. What do you believe in? What principles will guide your process? You have to be in agreement with yourself on questions like these:

How will I define success?

Will I do whatever it takes to get there?

Will I follow a disciplined process that’s necessary to achieve success?

People who wait, pessimists and herd followers all have a high probability of achieving mediocrity in life and little risk of much more. But in exchange for safety, they surrender their chance of being above average. Everyone has to decide whether that’s okay. And, if not, what they’ll do about it.

Who wouldn’t dare to be great? No one. Everyone would love to be successful. The real question is whether you dare to do the things that are necessary in order to be great. Are you willing to be different, and are you willing to work when others relax?

In order to have a chance at great results, you have to be open to doing both. Because you can’t do the same thing everyone else does and expect to be different.

Here’s a riddle: If your goal was to play professional baseball and you knew that you had to be in the top 1% of baseball players in the country to get selected by a major league team, what’s the first thing you have to do – the most important thing – in order to have a chance at being selected?

The answer may not be obvious, but it’s imperative that you would have to be different. If you did the same as everyone else, you may do well or you may do poorly, but you would certainly not do different. And being different is absolutely essential if you want a chance at being successful. In order to get to the top, you have to escape the crowd.

If the level of effort you put into becoming financially free is conventional (just like the effort from everyone else), you’re likely to get conventional results. Only if your effort is unconventional are your results also likely to be unconventional.  The bottom line on striving for success has a lot to do with daring to be great.

There’s a great quote, “the cautious seldom err or write great poetry.” This means that although playing it safe means that you probably won’t make many mistakes, it also means you probably won’t do great things either.  In order for something to be comfortable, it usually means it has to be conventional. And they don’t build statutes of people who are considered conventional.

Most success began as discomfort. The things most people change are the very things that cause them the most discomfort. But it isn’t easy to do things that are discomforting.  Therein lies the difference between the mediocre and the magnificent.

Any attempt to achieve success also has to accept the reality of being different. And in the course of trying to be better, you have to take on the attitude of being different.  There is no way around this.

If you spend your nights and weekends reading and studying what it takes to be successful, you will be different from those that spend their nights and weekends focused on leisure.

If you save your money so that you can turn it into investment capital, you will be different from those that blow all their money on material things that don’t matter.

If you plan ahead and have an image of what you will be in the future, you will be different from those you crawl thru life and accept a future that someone else has designed for them.

It’s not supposed to be easy. And why should it be?  Why should success be available to those that won’t learn the principles of success, those that won’t dare to be different or the lazy? Why should people be able to have an above average life with average work and average principles, and without learning things that most others refuse to learn? And yet many individuals spend their days with the false belief that they can.

Being different is the only road to success, but it isn’t for everyone. Each person has to decide whether he’s emotionally equipped to do what it takes.  Not everyone will.  It’s those who believe they can, that should take a chance on being great.

What will you become?

Will you set yourself on fire?