“Fit for Success is a great tool to help you become the best you.

It
makes you think and it offers concrete examples of how you can
change the way you approach challenges. I’ve learned that most
situations are not inherently good or bad; they are categorized by
how you react to them. Fit for Success has helped me to identify
when these situations occur and to make conscious decisions about
how I respond.”
—ANNIE THORISDOTTIR, Two-time Crossfit Games
champion

“For seekers of knowledge who want a concise and enjoyable read

that covers the spectrum of philosophy and psychology, Nick Shaw
provides a book on leadership and holistic living that is both
educational and inspiring.”
—DANIEL LUNA, retired Navy SEAL and Leadership Coach

“Fit for Success is an insightful, practical guide to navigating the real-

world situations that so many people face. Nick Shaw has a way of
getting to the root of the issue and giving suggestions about how to
make lasting changes, not fads. It reads like a letter from a friend,
not just another self-help book.”
—NITA STRAUSS, professional guitarist

“Success is built on a foundation of deep knowledge. Nick Shaw has

done a truly thorough job ravaging hundreds of books on the topic
and has pulled together themes that drive long-term success. A truly
useful read.”
—GREG CONNOLLY, Founder and CEO of Trifecta

“Fit for Success is a compelling exploration of the habits and tools

that create positive change. Nick draws on his own personal
adversity and response, summarizes a wealth of research in an
easily digestible manner, and provides real and actionable insights
you can put into practice today. Fit for Success is easy to read,
insightful, and a must-have for anyone on the path of personal or
professional betterment.”
—MICHAEL SHORETZ, Founder and CEO of Enlightened Ice
Cream

“Success cannot be guaranteed, but by applying the simple practices

described in this book, you can meaningfully increase your chances
of obtaining it. It’s not a magic fix, but it’s a great start.”
—DR. MIKE ISRAETEL, Olympic nutrition consultant,
competitive bodybuilder, and PhD in Sport Physiology

“Nick breaks down the nuances of success into an easily digestible,

fun-to-read book. His insights can be applied across all areas of life,
including my patients trying to lose weight. Anyone trying to achieve
success in their life should read this book.”
—DR. SPENCER NADOLSKY, Board-Certified Family
Physician and Obesity/Lipid Specialist

“This book feels like it was made for 2020—a year full of adversity.
Its contents, however, are timeless. I’ve found my longterm success
as a husband, father, businessman and multi-year CrossFit Games
Champion through the constant pursuit of behaviors and habits that
make me better than I was yesterday. In this book, Nick has skillfully
drawn a roadmap for creating and implementing those habits, so you
can find success as well.”
—RICH FRONING, 8-time CrossFit Games champion

“Nick Shaw is a builder of people and a pioneer in the personal

development industry. His passion and knowledge have been an
extremely valuable combination helping to accelerate the growth and
success of our baseball program. Anyone wanting to maximize their
potential or the potential of their team would benefit from Nick Shaw
and Fit for Success.”
—ERIK BAKICH, Head Coach of the University of Michigan
baseball team and 2019 NCAA Coach of the Year

“Nick Shaw has a proven record of putting success principles into

action. This book promises to be an essential read for anyone who
wants to tackle the challenges of business, sport, and life head-on.”
—PHIL ANDREWS, CEO of USA Weightlifting

“Those who know Nick Shaw and his company, Renaissance

Periodization, will quickly realize this book sticks tightly to his core
values of evidence-based practice to help people achieve their full
potential. Fit for Success combines years of experience gained in the
health and fitness industry; extensive business, psychology, and self-
help work; and meaningful personal stories into a fun, helpful, and
easy-to-read book.”
—LORI PLOUTZ-SNYDER, Dean of the University of
Michigan’s School of Kinesiology
Fit for Success: Lessons on Achievement and Leading Your Best Life
Copyright © 2020 by Nick Shaw

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the
express written permission of Nick Shaw and Story Farm, Inc., except for review purposes.

Published in the United States of America by Story Farm, Inc.

www.story-farm.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication-Data available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-578-76555-6

Editorial director / Bo Morris

Lead editor / Shaun Tolson
Art director / Jason Farmand
Copy editor / Laura Paquette
Production manager / Tina Dahl

Printed in Canada by Friesens Corporation Pirated by (Croker)

First edition, December 2020

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my children, Zachary and Emma:
I hope that I can be an example to
you, inspiring you to achieve your own
extraordinary success on whatever path
in life you choose to take.
IT IS MY GOAL to help more than a million people around the world
through my company, Renaissance Periodization, and I hope that
through this book I am also able to help you. I want to personally
thank you for reading it, and I hope that you are able to take a lot
from it.
I strongly believe that we have all seen the worst that 2020 has
to offer. Because of that, we all have the opportunity to better
appreciate the good in the world as we move forward. Remember,
every day is a gift. So let’s make the most of it and become
successful together!
I hope that you will share with me your success stories and the
victories that you have taken from this book. You can find me on
Instagram: @nick.shaw.rp.
Sincerely,
 CONTENTS

PREFACE BY LORI SHAW

FOREWORD BY BOB HARPER

INTRODUCTION

THE HABITS OF SUCCESS

CHAPTER 1: Work Ethic

CHAPTER 2: Internal Locus of Control

CHAPTER 3: Positive Mindset

CHAPTER 4: Discipline

CHAPTER 5: Purpose & Meaning

CHAPTER 6: Failure

CHAPTER 7: Recharge

CHAPTER 8: Conclusions

RECOMMENDED READING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 PREFACE

ON JANUARY 14TH, five days before my son’s eighth birthday, I sat

in a doctor’s office and listened as a nurse advocate relayed the
results of a mammogram and a biopsy of a tiny bump that I had
found near my right armpit a few months earlier. “There were cancer
cells present in the biopsy,” she said.
From that moment on, everything changed.
I learned that I had stage-two breast cancer that was “triple
negative,” meaning it was the most aggressive form of cancer that
there is. I elected to have a double mastectomy the following month,
but during surgery it was detected that the cancer had spread to two
of my lymph nodes, so those were removed as well. Shortly after
returning home from the surgery, a complication arose that collapsed
half of my lung and sent me back to the hospital for three painful
days, during which I was intubated with a chest tube. One month
later, I started a sixteen-week round of aggressive chemotherapy,
which was followed by five intensive weeks of equally aggressive
radiation. To make matters even worse, only one week into my
chemotherapy treatments, the coronavirus pandemic reached the
United States and forced me to endure those chemotherapy
treatments by myself.
During all of that, I had a choice to make. I could ball up in the
corner, crying my eyes out every day over the cruel hand I had been
dealt and lashing out at everyone for this horrible thing that shouldn’t
have happened to me. Or I could feel all of those emotions—as
anyone would—but then swipe them off my screen and focus on
getting better and being positive.
It didn’t take me long to choose how I wanted to react. Within
days of my diagnosis, I decided I was going to surround myself with
positivity—mostly for and because of my kids. I was determined to
remain the strong, happy, loving, involved, supportive, and funny
mom that they had always known. I also knew from my husband’s
reading and research that optimism and a positive mindset can play
a role in healing and recovery.
In fact, many of the practices of self-improvement that Nick, my
husband, had learned over his years of reading and research were
applicable to my situation. I began meditating every day, for
example. Throughout treatment, I didn’t push myself too hard—I
gave myself plenty of grace on the days I didn’t feel well—but I made
sure to get outside every day in the spring to enjoy gardening with
my kids. Honestly, those spring blooms got me through some dark
days. Ultimately, I focused on the things that I could be grateful for,
like savoring meals with my family. I chose happiness and positivity.
I’m not a superstar athlete like many of the contributors to this
book—the people we work with at Renaissance Periodization. But
the principles that they follow to achieve their goals—and the
principles that are outlined in this book—are what helped me to
successfully overcome a serious cancer diagnosis. Not only that, but
they are instrumental in my ability to live a happy and successful life
going forward.

Lori Shaw
September 2020
 FOREWORD

I REMEMBER MEETING Nick Shaw more than 5 years ago, the way
that so many people these days do—through social media. I was
heavily into the CrossFit world at the time and when I saw RP
Strength’s before-and-after transformations I thought to myself, I
gotta meet this guy! Nick and I began corresponding on Instagram
and eventually he came out to meet me at my gym in Chelsea. I
liked him immediately.
I have been helping people with their diet and exercise plans for
as long as I can remember. I’ve been in the health and fitness
industry for more than 25 years. I’ve worked with overweight people
as a trainer on NBC’s hit show The Biggest Loser for 18 seasons.
You could say that I’m completely obsessed with anything related to
health and fitness. There really isn’t an exercise routine or diet plan
that I haven’t tried or researched thoroughly. Naturally, I wanted to
learn absolutely everything about RP Strength—straight from the
man himself. Nick took me on as a client and we began speaking
daily.
The teacher had now become the student (and I think Nick
would agree that I’m a really good student.) He gave me my plan
and we were off! He told me that not only was my body going to
change but my performance in the gym would, too.
What I loved about Nick’s program was that it wasn’t about
cutting any major macronutrients. I was so excited that not only
could I eat complex carbs, but it was encouraged almost every time I
sat down to eat a meal. The key to Nick’s program was balance.
Balance in measuring out all of your macros: protein, fat, and carbs,
and on top of that adding your fresh leafy greens and veggies.
I’ve always wanted to train smart and Nick assured me that the
fuel that I would be getting from my food would work for me in the
gym and boy did it! I started performing much better and felt the
fittest I had been in years. Everyone I regularly worked out with
noticed the difference. I felt like I found a secret treasure map and at
the “X” there was box filled with rice, pasta & bread! For me, when I
depleted my body of carbs, I felt like a fish swimming upstream and
when I began to give my body what it needed, it gave me the results
I wanted. It was a match made in heaven.
Fast forward a couple of years and I’m working out in the same
gym where I first met Nick, unaware that my life was about to change
forever. It was Sunday, February 12, 2017, a day that I have no
memory of whatsoever. I don’t remember getting up that morning to
take my dog for a walk or walking to the gym for my workout with
friends. I was told that I had complained of feeling dizzy, and in the
middle of the workout I just went to the ground. I was having a
“widow-maker” heart attack. And not only that, but I also went into
cardiac arrest.
They call it a widow-maker for a reason. Only about 10 percent
of people survive. If it wasn’t for the fast action of the staff calling
911, grabbing the AED, and finding a doctor that just happened to be
there that day for an event, I would not be writing this foreword right
now. Two days later, I woke up in the hospital after being put into a
medically induced coma. When I was told what had happened, I
couldn’t believe it. To top it off, I was also experiencing short term
memory loss, like Dory in Finding Nemo. I would be told why I was in
the hospital, I would get super emotional, and then a few minutes
later I would have to ask again what happened and why I was in the
hospital. It was a very surreal time, and I can honestly say it was the
hardest time of my life.
When I was finally discharged from the hospital a week later, I
was just trying to figure out what my “new normal” was going to be. I
had to change everything about the way that I worked out and the
way that I was supposed to eat. I’m not a person that adapts to
change very well so it was definitely challenging. I went from
Olympic-style weightlifting and pushing my body to extremes in the
gym to just walking at 2.5 mph on a treadmill in cardiac rehab and
riding a recumbent bicycle. For several months, the only thing I was
allowed to do outside of rehab was walk. At first I could only get
around the block before I would get winded and have to come back
home. Time and patience increased my walking distance, and by
following the strict instructions from my doctors, I started to feel
physically stronger.
Everything about my life had to change and that included my
diet. I made the decision to reach back out to Nick and to sit down
with him to figure out a plan that was going to be right for me and be
on par with what my doctors wanted me to do. I had a history with
Nick and I trusted him completely. I knew I was in good hands. Nick
gave me a roadmap to my new way of eating. I needed balance now
more than ever, and when I talked to Nick about my new dietary
restrictions, he had all the answers. He also hooked me up with a
trainer to make sure I was comfortable in the gym again.
I no longer felt like I needed to leave it all out on the gym floor
when I worked out. I just wanted to feel confident again and
ultimately, just feel good. Nick heard me and adapted to what I
needed. For that, I will always have nothing but love and respect for
him. This man is the real deal. Not only is he knowledgeable about
eating sensibly and working out effectively, he really does care. He’s
the perfect balance of caring, leadership, and information. When you
hear what he has to say, you just want to do it because you know
that you are in very good hands.
I believe in Nick and the fundamentals of what he teaches. To
make real changes you have to have both discipline and a positive
mindset, which are two of the pillars in his program. Not surprisingly,
they are also two of the pillars in Nick’s roadmap to success, which
is the focus of this book. Just like he does through his fitness
company, Renaissance Periodization, Nick has created a program in
this book that focuses on the behaviors and the habits that can lead
to success.
Nick Shaw has been a blessing in my life, and I know that
through this book he can be that same blessing for you.
Bob Harper
September, 2020
 INTRODUCTION

JANUARY 14, 2020. It’s a date that I will never forget. For the first
eight hours, the day felt like a normal Tuesday. I helped my wife,
Lori, get our seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter ready for
school, then I drove them to the town’s elementary school. After a
couple of hours spent catching up on work emails, paying bills, and
checking in with various Renaissance Periodization team members
all over the country, I went to the gym to get a workout in for myself.
Lori had a doctor’s appointment at 1:30 that afternoon, but
because our kids needed to be picked up at school around 2:00, we
couldn’t both go to the appointment. Lori left to go see her doctor
and I stayed home to pick up the kids an hour or so later. Just as I
was getting ready to hop in the car, my phone rang. It was Lori.
When I answered, I could immediately tell that something was
wrong. She was crying.
That’s when I learned that my wife had breast cancer.
This can’t be right, I kept thinking as I listened to my wife share
this horrible news while I drove to the elementary school. This has to
be wrong. Lori is in great shape—she’s young and she’s healthy. I
realize now that this thought process is the default mode that people
immediately shift into when they’re given this type of diagnosis. We
didn’t have enough information yet. We didn’t know how bad it was
or what stage Lori was in. All we knew was that she had cancer.
No one ever expects to get bad news like that. I was in shock.
 Up until then I had lived a life entirely devoid of tragedy.
Thankfully, both of my parents were still alive and the only deaths in
the family—my maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather—
had occurred before I was born. For thirty-two years I lived a life
having never experienced truly devastating news. This diagnosis
changed all of that.
Three and a half weeks later, Lori had surgery to remove the
tumor. The procedure was a success, but she still faced almost four
months of chemotherapy, and then radiation treatments after that.
Shortly after the surgery, a pandemic caused by the outbreak of
Covid-19 began to spread across much of the world. By the end of
February, that pandemic had reached the United States and our
own, personal world was thrust into chaos.

I HAD ONLY TAKEN LORI to one chemotherapy appointment, her

first, when shelter-in-place orders were issued across much of the
country. That meant I would have to balance working at home with
the homeschooling of our two kids and also help my wife to manage
her chemotherapy treatments, only now she would have to drive
herself to the cancer center. On top of all that, there was the stress
of knowing that the economy was in potential turmoil. As the
unemployment rate spiked and gyms closed, I was worried about
losing customers. I was also worried about the forty-five members of
the Renaissance Periodization team. I didn’t want my employees or
coaches to suffer, and I certainly didn’t want to lay anyone off. But I
also didn’t know what to prepare for. It felt like the world was ending.
At that moment, it would’ve been easy for me to play the victim
card. Fortunately, I was well prepared to take on these challenges. In
the fall of 2018, a hernia surgery derailed my strength training
regimen. After the surgery I could only walk initially, so I began
listening to audio books while I walked around the neighborhood. It
started with Rich Dad, Poor Dad—I wanted to make sure I was doing
everything right for my family’s finances and to improve my business
—but it quickly snowballed from there. I read as many books as I
could get my hands on, listening to audiobooks or podcasts
whenever I was in the car. Before long, I was only reading or
listening to self-improvement books. Over the course of a few
months, I began to spot trends in all of the various principles taught
in those self-improvement books, and I soon discovered how they
were all interrelated.
As Lori battled breast cancer and the world went haywire thanks
to a global pandemic, I knew I couldn’t be a passive victim in these
circumstances. In doing so, I would relinquish the power that I had to
impact our future. This was the moment when I was forced to put
into action all the lessons that I had learned from my reading. We still
had a long, hard road ahead of us, and it was time to put my
hypothesis to the test.
A person’s mindset is one of the key pillars of success. In fact,
there are seven main habits to success, and a strong work ethic lays
the foundation. That is where everything starts and where change
can begin; however—as I learned—without the right mindset, it’s
impossible for anyone to be successful, whether in sports, business,
or battling cancer.
I realize that I have been incredibly fortunate up to this point in
my life. I was raised the right way by two incredibly hardworking
parents, I have a great family, and I’ve built a successful business.
Through my own experiences and the information that I’ve gathered
from extensive reading on the subject of self-improvement, I have
created a roadmap to success. It’s an approach to successful living
that has worked for me, and it’s supported by the experiences and
habits of many others, all of which are shared in this book.
As a global pandemic continues to impact the world, it’s easy to
feel overwhelmed. It’s also easy to feel powerless. But if you are
equipped with the right knowledge, you can successfully overcome
any obstacles in your way.
THE HABITS
OF SUCCESS
AT RENAISSANCE PERIODIZATION (RP), my team and I have
published numerous diet and strength training books that address
the hierarchical nature of the factors that lead to success. We view
those hierarchies like a pyramid made up of different levels. The
most fundamental factors form the base of the pyramid, while other
necessary aspects tied to those fundamentals make up the middle
sections. The least impactful factors—the ones that aren’t critical to
general success but are crucial to obtain the best possible results—
form the top of the pyramid.
In much the same way, the habits of success that are featured in
this book form a similar hierarchy. Some are foundational: without
them, success simply isn’t possible. Others are core pieces to
maximize success, while some take the form of success-enhancers.
Interestingly, each one builds off of the more significant habit that
precedes it.
Let’s take a closer look at the seven key habits to success that we’ll
explore in greater detail in the chapters ahead, starting with the most
significant components and working our way up the pyramid:

1. WORK ETHIC
By definition, this is the most foundational habit for success in any
venture. A strong work ethic is critical, since success itself is only
possible through the application of hard work.

2. INTERNAL LOCUS OF CONTROL

This is the belief that individuals—not external forces—have control
over the outcomes of the events in their lives. Hard work is
necessary for success, and it’s imperative to recognize that you are
the one tasked with doing that work. It’s also important to recognize
what you can and cannot change. That understanding will allow you
to focus your hard work on the right initiatives.

3. POSITIVE MINDSET
You may be a hard worker with an exceptional locus of control, but
it’s still possible that you may find yourself feeling overwhelmed. You
may even become pessimistic about your limited abilities and how
much you think you can change. For those reasons, it’s important
that you remain positive. An optimistic mindset actually increases
your chances of success.

4. DISCIPLINE
It’s not always going to be smooth sailing. Sometimes, you will have
to really dig in to get things done, and that requires discipline.

5. PURPOSE
Even with a positive mindset, a sharp locus of control, a strong work
ethic, and plenty of discipline, things can derail you. In particular, you
may find yourself getting off track and focusing on less important
projects. Knowing your purpose will help you to target your
productivity, making sure that you’re not simply doing things, but that
you’re doing the right things. If, at some point during the process,
you ask, “What am I grinding for?” your purpose will provide the
answer. It will also help you to stay disciplined and to keep going.

6. FAILURE
You can be as disciplined as humanly possible, with a strong work
ethic, a positive mindset, and a resolute focus on your purpose, yet
there will be times when you will still fail. It’s just going to happen
from time to time, but how you choose to deal with it can determine
how successful you ultimately become.
7. RECHARGE
All of this seems a bit draining, doesn’t it? The truth is, it can be.
Even the most highly disciplined and driven folks can burn out. That
is why it’s important to recharge. You can do this through exercise
and nutrition, through personal growth, and through meditation and
self-reflection. Now that you understand how the pyramid is
structured, let’s examine each habit individually, including how you
put them into practice.
 CHAPTER 1

WORK ETHIC

“Be humble. Be hungry. And always be the

hardest worker in the room.”
—DWAYNE JOHNSON
THE NOTION OF WORKING HARD or being a hard worker is such
a commonly extolled virtue that saying as much borders on banality.
“Of course hard work is required!” people will say, rolling their eyes.
And they have a point: hard work is so universally espoused as the
key to success that it’s easy to assume it is the only requisite
ingredient.
However, hard work is often, dare I say, overrated. Don’t get me
wrong, working hard is important, especially if you want to be
successful. But the extent of how hard you work isn’t always
commensurate with the amount of success you ultimately achieve. A
construction worker who diligently applies himself and works hard
every day is likely to earn a promotion. In that example, the level of
success reflects the level of hard work that was applied. But is it also
true that the most successful artists are the ones who also work the
hardest? Almost certainly not. In fact, the best artists—in most cases
—are the sculptors or painters who have the greatest amount of
natural talent.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WORK AND SUCCESS

Hard work alone will not guarantee you success. But it plays two
influential roles in determining the amount of success that you
ultimately achieve. As you already know, success is the byproduct of
several different factors; any success that you achieve as a result of
those other factors is magnified by the amount of effort that you put
in. If you’re talented, you’ll be more successful the harder you work.
If you get lucky, hard work will capitalize on that luck and net even
greater results. If you have a strong support network, then the harder
you work, the more you can utilize that network to accomplish great
things.
That’s the role that hard work plays as a supporting player. But
supporting players rarely win MVP awards and hard work—as you’ll
recall—forms the base of our pyramid. That means it’s not just a
supporting player, it’s also your team’s superstar. That brings us to
the more impactful role that hard work plays.
Simply put, hard work is the only thing that actually creates
success. A brilliant inventor might have hundreds of amazing ideas,
but if he or she is too lazy to write them down, to expand on them,
and to do the legwork to develop them, then that inventor will
achieve zero success. The most talented baseball pitchers don’t
strike out batters or win games just because they have talent. They
still have to throw the ball.
In a direct sense, work causes success. And in some cases, the
minimum amount of work that is required for success can be quite
high. Creating a vaccine requires scientists to spend hundreds, if not
thousands, of hours working diligently in their laboratories. Computer
programmers must write hundreds of thousands of lines of code if
they want to create an effective computer program. And Olympic
weightlifters must train for thousands of hours if they want any
chance to represent their countries and to compete on the world’s
grandest stage.
Failing to meet these minimum thresholds of effort doesn’t lead
to less success, but no success at all. Programmers who don’t finish
writing the necessary lines of code will develop not a less functional
program, but one that does nothing useful whatsoever. And chemists
who don’t log all the necessary hours of research in the bio lab won’t
create a less-effective vaccine. They simply won’t create a vaccine.
The hard truth of the matter is this: if you want to be successful in the
modern world, you have to work long and hard just to have a chance
at it.
Hard work is unique. Think of it like the engine of a satellite-
launching rocket. It doesn’t matter how advanced the rocket’s
navigation system is or how amazing the satellite payload might be if
the engine thrust to take it into space is missing. Of course, engine
thrust by itself won’t produce a successful launch. But without the
thrust from a good engine, nothing at all can happen. Hard work is
your engine thrust—and it matters a great deal how willing you are to
do that work.

STRENGTHENING YOUR DESIRE TO WORK

“I was brought up to believe that I could do anything I wanted to if I
was willing to put in the work,” says Annie Thorisdottir, a two-time
CrossFit Games champion. “I have always poured my heart into
everything I have done. Do it at 100 percent effort or not at all.”
In simple terms, successful people have three related abilities in
great abundance—the ability to work hard, the desire to do it, and
the commitment to follow through on it. In many respects, the ability
to do the work is dependent on talent or skill. A farmer might need to
load 100-pound jugs of water onto a truck bed, for example, but if he
cannot lift one-hundred pounds, he won’t be successful because he
can’t do the work that is required. Similarly, a musician who lacks the
talent to compose won’t be able to create anything noteworthy of his
or her own.
Ability is critical, but desire is the big magnifier. Take the
example of the farmer. Even if he is capable of lifting 100-pound jugs
of water, he may have no desire to do it. Therefore, true work ethic
requires not just the ability to do the work, but the desire to do it and
the commitment to follow through. Ability and desire are important
factors, but you cannot overlook being committed to the work. You
can have all the ability and desire in the world, but you must be
capable of following through and committing to that work if you want
to be successful.
Fortunately, there are ways to improve your work ethic. In fact,
there are ways to strengthen all three factors of it: your ability, your
desire, and your commitment. You can improve your ability to do the
work by learning—if the work is cerebral in nature—as well as
through practice. The old adage that practice makes perfect may or
may not be true, but practice definitely improves overall ability. It can
also enhance your desire to do the work. Past success also plays a
role in enhancing desire, as does meditation on the relationship
between work and success. A person’s desire to work hard acts like
a volume knob on their success. The more they turn up their desire,
the greater their success (or potential success) becomes. In other
words, the stronger your desire for success, the more you’ll want to
do the work that is needed to achieve it. Finally, you can enhance
your commitment to follow through on tasks in a number of ways, the
simplest of which is a daily to-do list. By making a list of must-do
tasks every morning (or the night before), you can hold yourself
accountable to getting done what needs to get done. Tracking your
commitment becomes as easy as checking a box, and by selecting
realistic (but still challenging) daily tasks, you can build a habit of
completing projects that will keep you on the path to success.
At its core, success is achieved through difficult tasks that are
consistently completed. Therein lies the significance of a strong work
ethic. No amount of motivational tricks, mindfulness practices, or
self-care will ever create anything. Only work does that. Famous
authors are successful—and by extension, famous—because they
put in the work to write the books for which they are well known. If
you yearn for success, you must be ready to work, eager to work
hard, and to see that work through to its completion. That’s the key
to every success story.
Just working hard, however, will not lead to success. In fact,
incredibly talented people can often find themselves overwhelmed by
the amount of work that they assume must be done to achieve that
success. By failing to focus their work on the specific tasks that
matter—instead toiling over the many tasks that matter very little (or
don’t matter at all)—those incredibly hardworking people can wind
up unsuccessful.
To avoid making those mistakes, you’ll need to cultivate an
internal locus of control.
 PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE
Create and use a daily to-do list: Making a to-do list for each day
prioritizes your most important tasks and holds you accountable,
which ensures that those tasks are completed. Make sure that you’re
including tasks that are actually accomplishable that day. These daily
to-do lists provide you with incremental successes each day, which
create positive momentum to keep you going.
 CHAPTER 2

INTERNAL LOCUS OF
CONTROL

“You have power over your mind — not

outside events. Realize this, and you will find
strength.”
—MARCUS AURELIUS
DURING WORLD WAR I, soldiers lived for long periods of time in
the trenches, constantly under attack and always fearful of artillery
strikes. Two decades later, many soldiers experienced similar
psychological conditions during beach invasions in the South Pacific
throughout World War II. In both cases, soldiers were at the mercy of
those artillery strikes; they had no control over the outcome of those
offenses. Their only option was to duck and cover, hoping that
nothing happened to them. This style of warfare wreaked havoc on
soldiers’ psyches.
You might be asking, what does artillery shelling have to do with
this book? The answer lies in an individual’s ability to control his or
her outcome.
Internal locus of control is the degree to which people believe
that they, rather than external forces, have control over the outcomes
of the events that make up their lives. Soldiers on the offensive, who
are assaulting an enemy position, will have more control over their
outcomes due to a number of factors, including the size of their
platoon and the route that they take to attack their enemies. Those
soldiers have an internal locus of control, whereas those who are
under a siege of steady artillery do not. The soldiers who are taking
cover in the trenches are simply hoping that they’ll be lucky and the
shrapnel from the blast won’t injure or kill them.
Here’s a more relatable example. Imagine you are on a diet to
lose weight, and you have to take a business trip. Many external
factors will pop up during that trip that could derail you. Your flights
could be delayed, or colleagues could bring doughnuts into the
office. You can’t control the timing of your flights or the actions of
other coworkers, but you can be prepared by having healthy snack
options with you. By taking back the power to make the best of the
situation that you are dealt, you are giving yourself an internal locus
of control.
When Lori and I learned of her breast cancer diagnosis, Zionna
Hanson, the CEO of Barbells for Boobs, offered some helpful advice.
Focus on the things you can control, she told us. Don’t spend time
focusing on the cancer itself—that won’t improve anything. You have
to shift your focus and your mindset onto the things you have power
over. You cannot control your diagnosis, but you can change your
mindset, your attitude, and your habits to make sure you kick
cancer’s ass and get started on the proper road to recovery. In other
words, there is always a lot of work to do, but knowing where and
how to focus your efforts is crucial.
Just how important is a strong internal locus of control? In his
book Choice or Chance: Understanding Your Locus of Control and
Why It Matters, Stephen Nowicki shares decades of research on the
subject and reveals that people who think and believe that they have
control over the outcomes of their lives suffer from fewer behavioral
problems in school; live longer, healthier lives; are in better control of
their finances; and tend to be happier and more satisfied.

STOIC PHILOSOPHY
Marcus Aurelius is widely regarded as one of the top stoic
philosophers of ancient Rome. Stoic philosophy draws largely upon
the idea of self-control. Aurelius reasoned that regardless of your
circumstances or how bad an external event might be or seem, you
have the ultimate ability to control how you respond to it.
This idea, although ancient in its origin, helps to explain why
cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has recently become such a well
supported mode of therapy. The main premise of CBT is to challenge
the cognitive distortions that arise in the mind. If you have a day
when you slip up on your diet, for example, you might initially think
that you’re doomed. That thought can spiral into other negative
thoughts, and before long you might be thinking that you’re destined
to fail at everything. Someone who is conditioned by CBT, however,
would think of examples that disprove that generalization.
Challenging your own thoughts takes practice, but it can be an
effective tool in shaping how you respond to any situation.
The idea is similar to the first habit that Stephen Covey identifies
in his best-selling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,
which emphasizes the importance of being proactive. An individual
who is proactive rather than reactive takes a position of power. No
matter the circumstances, they can shape how they feel about
something. Covey points to Viktor Frankl—who survived being a
prisoner in a World War II concentration camp—as the perfect
example. Despite being subjected to terrible conditions and losing
his family, Frankl never relinquished control. He focused on the belief
that he was meant to survive, that his purpose was to write powerful
works like Man’s Search for Meaning, which could help many more
people in the future. That ultimate purpose allowed him to overcome
traumatizing obstacles. “Everything can be taken from a man but one
thing,” he later wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “the last of the
human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of
circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

FLOW
Can our mindset assert that much control over our lives? Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi, in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience, asserts that it can. Csikszentmihalyi tells a story about
another prisoner of war, Major James Nesmeth. According to
Csikszentmihalyi, Nesmeth was taken prisoner during the Vietnam
War. Despite being detained in terrible living conditions, Nesmeth
shifted his focus to the elements that he could control. Every day he
visualized playing eighteen holes of golf. When he was finally
released, after years of confinement, Nesmeth returned to the golf
course and, despite not having swung a club in years and also being
severely malnourished, he played better than he ever had.
To be in a state of flow that produces extreme happiness or
enjoyment, Csikszentmihalyi suggests that we must first be in control
of our consciousness. We need to choose the outcomes that we
wish to seek out. In doing so, we will set specific goals to accomplish
and challenges that must be met, which will push us past what we
thought possible. As we do this, we get so caught up in the process
that we lose our worries about all external factors. Our sole focus
becomes the task or goal at hand as we pursue it. This is how the
best professional athletes can perform at such high levels, even
when hundreds of thousands of fans are cheering and watching
them perform. These athletes are in complete control, but in that
moment that control is effortless. That is being in a state of flow.
“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive,
relaxing times,” Csikszentmihalyi writes. “The best moments usually
occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a
voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
To achieve true happiness, we must have a say over what paths
we pursue. This idea of flow crosses over into multiple areas, too;
the pursuit doesn’t necessarily need to be highly physical. For
example, while writing this book, I experienced my own state of flow.
Many times I would find myself in a zone where I’d be scribbling
down notes, interlocking different ideas, and exploring how they all
tied together. This book was a challenge that I chose to take on, and
in doing so I was able to dive in and push my own limits.
In his book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of
Happiness and Well-being, Martin Seligman identifies the factors
that determine a person’s general well-being and incorporates state
of flow, though he doesn’t use those exact words. In his earlier
attempts to uncover the source of happiness, Seligman placed most
of the significance on positive emotion, but in Flourish he expanded
on that study, creating the acronym PERMA (Positive Emotion,
Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement). Positive
emotion still plays a pivotal role, but Seligman also alludes to being
in a state of flow through the inclusion of “meaning” and
“achievement.” Remember, to achieve a flow state you must have
goals to pursue (meaning) and you must ultimately accomplish them
(achievement). In that way, a state of flow not only influences a
person’s overall well-being, it also plays a role in determining a
person’s level of success.

AUTONOMY
Having an internal locus of control is important to success—but
relinquishing some of that control to coworkers or subordinates is
also a necessary step. To do so, you must trust the power of
autonomy. When giving your colleagues autonomy, you present them
with an overall goal and let them decide which course of action is
best to take. You trust that they have the talents and abilities to
accomplish the task at hand. You don’t micromanage. This takes
time, so you must either train your employees effectively from the
start or you must hire smart and qualified people who know more
than you do. That is the only way you can develop complete trust in
them and their capabilities.
Those with a massive work ethic can struggle with relinquishing
control, but by not providing the people that you work with (and those
who work for you) autonomy, you can negatively impact your own
success. I learned that lesson the hard way . . . more than once! My
first introduction to the importance of autonomy came during a
summer internship when I was in college. We students were given
an opportunity to run our own businesses, and for this internship that
business took the form of a painting company. Rather than acting as
the owner of the business and hiring a crew to tackle the physical
work, I hired a group of my friends—my first mistake—and then
worked alongside them as a painter (mistake number two). I spent
more time micromanaging the other painters than I did working to
improve the business, bringing in more projects, and growing the
company.
When I launched Renaissance Periodization several years later,
I ended up making a similar mistake at the onset. I adopted the
mindset that if things were going to get done, I would have to do
them myself. I got so bogged down replying to emails and answering
client comments and concerns—all these customer service tasks—
that I ran out of time during the day to address the company’s
marketing and social media campaigns, which were necessary if
Renaissance Periodization was to scale up its business. Only when I
got out of my own way and hired people to handle those customer
service tasks did the business take off. Today, because all of my staff
members work remotely, the people that I’ve hired have a high level
of autonomy. And I’ve learned that when I stay out of the way and let
those people do their jobs, it’s a win-win.
Daniel Pink addresses the main components of success in
Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. As he asserts,
we all want to have a say and to be in control of where we go and
what we do. Offering autonomy gives this feeling of freedom back to
your colleagues and teammates and, in doing so, you make sure
that everyone moves forward with a heightened internal locus of
control. According to Pink, this often produces a more intrinsic
motivation, which leads to better (or more) success. Simply put,
those individuals will be better aligned with one another and on the
same page, even if they take different routes to accomplish the same
collective goal.
Intrinsic motivation is key to success because it’s literally what
keeps people going. External motivations like money or material
possessions are nice, but they have a shorter period of
effectiveness. Intrinsic motivation, Pink argues, is more sustaining.
Paying a child to do household chores, for example, may seem like a
great idea, but it will only incentivize them in the short term. They
won’t gain a sense of satisfaction by completing the task or learning
how to master a new skill, and they won’t be motivated to complete
those chores in the future if pay isn’t involved.
Charles Duhigg outlines just how much influence autonomy can
have on a company’s success in his book The Power of Habit: Why
We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Duhigg spotlights a
manufacturing plant in Ohio that allowed its employees to design and
choose their own uniforms. It also provided them with some authority
over their shifts. According to Duhigg, those employees’ productivity
rate increased by 20 percent. “Giving employees a sense of control,”
he wrote, “improved how much self-discipline they brought to their
jobs.”

OWNERSHIP
As you now understand, developing an internal locus of control shifts
the ownership of any outcome back to you. This pertains to positive
outcomes as well as negative ones. If a business deal goes bad, for
example, you—as the owner of the company—must accept the
blame for it, even if somebody else at your business was ultimately
responsible. If you’re in a leadership position, you oversaw that
employee’s training, so it all comes back to you. That is ownership.
But owning any issue that arises is also empowering because it
means you will also own the solution to those problems. Having
ownership of things that go wrong gives you the power to make
corrections. Even that contributes to your internal locus of control.
Studies about how people eat have revealed the influence that
external forces can have on us if we are not careful. They’ve also
shown how an internal locus of control is paramount to success
when dieting. In an experiment detailed in the book Willpower:
Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, two sets of restaurant
patrons ordered chicken wings, but waiters constantly cleared the
tables of any scraps while the patrons in one of the groups were
eating. The other group ate as the remnants of their finished wings
remained in sight on the table. Perhaps not surprisingly, the group
that had no visible evidence to show them how many they had eaten
inevitably overate.
Now’s a good place to address social media, since it can be a
dangerous reality as far as your locus of control is concerned. Too
often, people will compare themselves to others on social media,
going so far as to evaluate their own success and happiness by what
they see via other people’s posts. In doing so, they are relinquishing
their own internal locus of control. It’s important to acknowledge that
social media acts like a highlight reel. By and large, it only offers
people a glimpse at the positive aspects of someone’s life. Most
people do not post their struggles, failures, or regrets. Remember,
you have the power to choose how you respond to any external
stimulus. You can choose to be jealous or angry about what you see
on social media, or you can choose to not let it bother you. Even
better, you can use it as fuel for your own success.
You might think that you won’t be influenced by other people’s
circumstances or the details of their lives versus your own, but
consider this: in 1997 the Quarterly Journal of Economics published
the results of a survey where 80 percent of the people polled said
that they would rather make $34,000 per year (when the average
salary was $30,000) than $36,000 per year (when the average salary
was $40,000). Think about that. The vast majority of people
preferred to make $2,000 less per year only because that particular
salary compared more favorably to the average.
Successful people tend not to give away their control and power
to others. They are not concerned with keeping up a certain look or
appearance, especially when that money can be better spent on
themselves or reinvesting in their own success. Before you go out
and buy that fancy car or take that exotic trip, ask yourself why you
are really doing it. Consider your own ego and then make the best
choice for yourself in the long run, not just for immediate gratification.
It takes a lot of discipline to do that, but if you start training your mind
to think that way, you’ll find it easier as time goes by.
You may believe that you won’t fall victim to this, but think about
the trips you take and the types of gifts you buy for your family and
friends. Are you spending too much just because of the new norms
that social media has created? According to Parenting magazine, 76
percent of parents spoil their kids to avoid feeling guilty. “Mentally
strong people,” Amy Morin wrote, “don’t waste energy on things they
can’t control.” Remember that.

LUCK
Is a strong work ethic and an internal locus of control all we need?
Could there be any external factors at work? The answer is
decidedly yes. In 1926, George S. Clason wrote as much in The
Richest Man in Babylon, a book of financial advice that he founded
on the teachings of many 4,000-year-old parables. “Men of action,”
he wrote, “are favored by the Goddess of good luck.”
Luck does play a factor, but believe it or not, you can even have
some control over how lucky you might end up being. First, you need
to be, as Clason surmises, a person of action. If you never take a
chance and you never get going, you’ll never be in a position to
benefit from luck. You must first have the work ethic to produce what
is necessary, as well as the accountability over your own actions to
steer your efforts in the right direction. Once that action is put into
place, your luck increases. Think of playing the lottery. It’s the
ultimate game of luck, but you can’t win anything if you don’t first buy
a ticket.
That being said, there is a time and place for luck to factor in.
Malcolm Gladwell addresses this in his book Outliers. Bill Gates,
Steve Jobs, and Scott McNealy were all born within a few years of
each other, and each stumbled upon computing technology in the
industry’s early years. Glad-well suggests that the timing represents
their good luck. But simply being born between 1954 and 1956 didn’t
give those three entrepreneurs an immense advantage. They still
had to put in the work to create their business empires. They just
benefited from a little bit of luck that put them in the right place at the
right time to take advantage of the opportunity.
Of course, there are occasional times in business when luck in
its truest sense can make a difference. In his book The Success
Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and
Investing, Michael. J. Mauboussin shares a story about a job
interview that he had early in his career. As Mauboussin reveals, one
of the company’s managers connected with him over their shared
love of the same Washington, D.C., football team. That gave
Mauboussin an advantage over the other candidates—at least in the
eyes of that particular manager. If Mauboussin gets the job because
of his allegiance to a particular football team, suddenly he is thrust
into a business environment surrounded by influential colleagues
and better resources. That opportunity becomes a catalyst for future
opportunities that the other candidates might never receive. So, by
projecting the rest of Mauboussin’s career, you can see how one
element of luck at the start can set him on a different, more
successful path than other equally qualified candidates who were
interviewing for that same job.

THE RISKS OF HAVING TOO MUCH CONTROL

As much as I’ve highlighted the importance of taking control of your
own outcomes, too much control comes with its own disadvantages.
If you overemphasize your internal locus of control, you may too
quickly disregard an outsider’s point of view. As Daniel Kahneman
outlines in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, internalizing too much
can make people susceptible to a phenomenon that he calls “What
You See Is All There Is.” It’s a form of bias where you get overly
caught up on only your side of the story and fail to see other points
of views.
As you can imagine, this way of seeing the world can create
costly mistakes. You must consider alternative points of view if you
want to make the best choices, especially if you are tasked with
formulating business projections. Simply put, the best decision-
makers are those who are supported by a diverse team of people
who offer many different viewpoints. It is imperative that you have a
good team in place, with members who feel comfortable sharing their
opinions and views—even going so far as to try to poke holes in your
proposed course of action. This will help you to avoid potential
setbacks or obstacles when you implement your plans.
If you are too focused on your own control and your own views
you may neglect what your competitors are doing. While it’s
generally a good idea to stay in your own lane and not pay much
attention to what others are doing, you don’t want to be caught
completely off guard. Having a good team around you will prevent
that from happening.
Above all else, it is imperative that you keep your ego in check.
The bigger your ego, the less likely you will have a system of checks
and balances like this in place. It’s also less likely that you will take
potential threats seriously. As with everything, there is a happy
middle ground for all of these habits of success, and the most
successful people know how to stay rooted in the middle.
Too much focus on your internal locus of control can also lead to
some bizarre and irrational fears. Consider traveling by airplane
versus traveling by car. Many people are afraid of flying because it’s
something they cannot control. They feel more comfortable and safer
driving because they are controlling the car, even though statistical
analysis proves that people are far more likely to be hurt or killed in
an automobile accident than a plane crash.

A PRAGMATIC APPROACH
Because we are human, we are bound to focus on some elements
outside of our control from time to time. Don’t get discouraged if you
find yourself doing this. Even the most successful people slip up
every now and then. In fact, there are times when it’s necessary to
focus on external factors. “Overall, I remind myself not to worry
about things outside of my control,” says Navy SEAL Dan Luna. “I
also think it is foolish to not consider something just because you
cannot control it. Using mental energy to think about things outside
of your control can assist you in your next step.”
So the key is not to completely avoid spending energy on things
you cannot control, but realizing when you’re doing it. The sooner we
realize that, the quicker we can get our minds back on track,
focusing on the things we can control. Doing so will improve our
mental state and also keep us on the road to success.
With a strong work ethic in place and a developed internal locus
of control, you will be on the path to success. But the realization that
you’re the one who has to do the work—that ultimately, it’s all on you
—can be difficult to handle. As that reality sets in, it’s easy to feel
overwhelmed or pessimistic about how much you may be able to
change. To be your most productive and to avoid doubts detracting
from your success, you’ll need a positive mindset.
 PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE
Keep a journal of your largest obstacles to overcome: By jotting
down the challenges or setbacks that you faced each day and
whether or not you had control over them, you’ll begin to understand
what outcomes you can control. Identifying that element of control
will either focus your attention on solutions you can create, or it will
reveal that those issues are out of your control. Knowing which
issues are out of your control will allow you to focus your energy and
attention on matters that are within your control.
 CHAPTER 3

POSITIVE MINDSET

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t

—you’re right.”
—HENRY FORD
TO UNDERSTAND THE IMPORTANCE of thinking positively,
consider a patient who is battling cancer. If that patient stays upbeat
and continues to think positively about their chances of defeating
cancer, they’ll convince themselves that they can do it.
Subsequently, they’ll set out to do everything in their power to control
how they get better. They will strictly adhere to their medication
protocol, they’ll drink the right amount of fluids as directed by their
medical care team, and they’ll do their own research and reading to
learn of other things that they can do to improve their chance of
success. But if a patient adopts a negative mindset, they’ll feel like a
victim. They’ll likely complain constantly, and they may begin to think
that they won’t get better. That can lead to that patient not adhering
to the routines prescribed by their medical care team. Out of those
two scenarios, which patient do you think has the better chance of
beating cancer?
In his books Learned Optimism and Flourish, Martin Seligman
asserts that optimistic people generally live healthier lives and are
less prone to getting sick than people who adopt a pessimistic point
of view. That’s not to say that you can prevent cancer just by
adopting a positive mindset, but it is a reminder that once you are
presented with a challenging diagnosis, you have the choice as to
how you perceive the situation and how you respond to it. You must
not forget that you have the power to choose how you respond to
any situation in which you find yourself.
Say you are in a car accident that is not your fault. You are not
seriously injured. If you adopt a negative mindset, you’ll feel like a
victim. That will impact your mood, which will also impact how you
treat your coworkers, friends, and family. Those negative interactions
can put a strain on your personal life and they could also lead to
troublesome situations at work. In this scenario, thinking negatively
could be the catalyst of a downward spiral of emotions and
interactions, all of which pull you further away from success.
Alternatively, you can choose to be grateful that you were unharmed,
which will make you feel more appreciation for being alive, for the job
that you have, and for your family and friends. That is the power of
mindset. It’s choosing to have the right attitude, which is key in laying
the foundation for your success. Without it, you’ll end up on a path
that only leads to mediocrity.

SELF-BELIEF
In the eighty-three years since it was written, Napolean Hill’s Think
and Grow Rich has steadily risen to become one of the most popular
self-help books of all time. The overriding theme of the book is that
you must first believe in yourself before you can achieve success.
Without belief in yourself, the chances that you will take that first step
in the right direction are slim. It might sound gimmicky but it’s
absolutely true—your ability to take action is powered by self-
confidence.
Mindset isn’t everything, of course. I might have the desire and
the willpower to play in the NBA. I may even have a strong belief in
my ability to do it, but skill and natural athleticism are two factors that
also greatly contribute to my chances of becoming a professional
basketball player. Nevertheless, the role that your mindset plays can
be the difference maker when all other pivotal factors are accounted
for. “Mind is everything,” said Paavo Nurmi, a nine-time Olympic gold
medalist and legendary Finnish distance runner. “All that I am, I am
because of my mind.”
Alex Hutchinson’s book about human potential, Endure: Mind,
Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance,
focuses on endurance athletes. It provides glimpses into the minds
of successful runners and investigates how their self-belief leads
them to success. Hutchinson explains that through high-intensity
training, disciplined athletes can increase their pain tolerance. It
stands to reason that if you are willing to spend hours and hours
enduring pain, your mindset must be incredibly strong. In fact,
Hutchinson further connects a positive mindset with success by
revealing that many unproven Kenyan runners simply show up at dirt
tracks in Kenya to train alongside some of the country’s best
runners. Not surprisingly, many of those Kenyans develop into elite
runners themselves; that success stems from a level of self-belief
that few others have.
We can point to many other sports examples as proof that self-
belief and a positive mindset are difference makers. Until Roger
Bannister broke the four-minute mark for the mile in track and field,
many thought such a feat was impossible. Once Bannister
accomplished it in 1954, however, other runners soon began running
sub-four-minute miles themselves. In the book Peak: Secrets from
the New Science of Expertise, authors Anders Ericcson and Robert
Pool share a story about Gunder Hägg, a Swedish endurance
athlete who trained on a homemade, 1,500-meter track and often
had his father time his laps. As the story goes, his father one day
sensed that his son was lacking motivation, so he told Hägg his time
was four minutes and fifty seconds for the 1,500 meters. It was an
impressive time, but it was also a lie. However, that false lap time
provided Hägg with the added motivation and self-belief to keep
training—and to train harder. He went on to set 15 world records in
races ranging from 1,500 to 5,000 meters in length.
Conversely, the record that racing horse Secretariat set on a
one-and-a-half-mile dirt track at the Belmont Stakes in 1973 is one
that still stands and that many pundits expect will never be broken. It
seems likely that horses do not have that same innate belief or
knowledge that records exist and can be broken.

PLACEBO EFFECT
The placebo effect provides a good test for the power and influence
of a person’s mindset. It’s also a topic of contentious debate within
the scientific community. In many cases, taking placebos has
produced positive effects even when patients weren’t taking any real
medicine. The exact mechanisms of how they work are still a
mystery, but Professor Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel
Deaconess Medical Center believes they can work, albeit with
limitations. “Placebos may make you feel better, but they will not
cure you,” he says. “They have been shown to be most effective for
conditions like pain management, stress-related insomnia, and
cancer treatment side effects like fatigue and nausea.” In the same
way that mindset will not make you the next Michael Jordan, the
placebo effect only goes so far. But if taking nothing can make you
feel better and reduce your discomfort, then that says a lot about the
power of our mindset.
Author David Epstein in his book Range: Why Generalists
Triumph in a Specialized World references a Finnish medical study
during which doctors treated two groups of patients suffering from
meniscus tears. Those in the first group underwent surgery to
physically repair the tendon, while the other group received a “sham
surgery”—they were taken to the operating room where incisions
were made and then sewed back up, but no reparative work was
done to the injured tendon. Interestingly, both groups of patients
experienced similar recovery outcomes. Again, the placebo effect
and self-belief will not guarantee success, but knowing and believing
in yourself provides a foundation to get you started. It will help you
build the momentum to make progress.

GROWTH MINDSET VS FIXED MINDSET

As a general rule, successful people share a similar mindset, one
that is focused on self-improvement. These people constantly think
about how they can improve every aspect of their lives. According to
Carol Dweck in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success,
these successful people possess a “growth mindset,” which is the
belief that abilities are not innate and that they can be enhanced. If
you adopt a growth mindset and discover that you are not inherently
good at something right away, you’ll believe that you have the ability
to improve. People with a growth mindset often seek out challenges
that will allow them to learn and to grow, and they are generally more
accepting of criticism and take inspiration from other people’s
success.
 The opposite of a growth mindset is one that is fixed. People
with fixed mindsets believe that their skills and intelligence are pre-
determined and unalterable. They often avoid challenges because
they assume they cannot succeed. Because of that, they are less
likely to take risks. They also receive criticism poorly and feel
threatened by others’ success. Not surprisingly, a growth mindset is
critical for success as it instills a perspective that embraces learning,
adaptation, and evolution. If you don’t have a growth mindset and
belief in yourself, you won’t be very likely to begin work on improving
yourself.
Legendary business coach Art Turock believes that everything
starts with mindset. According to Turock (as outlined in the book
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise), if you believe that
talents are innate, you will be easily convinced that you do not have
the necessary skills or ability to succeed. If you believe that
someone is smarter or more charismatic simply because they were
born that way, you won’t pursue the education or work on the skills
that will improve those aspects of yourself. Turock advocates a
growth mindset and believes that through deliberate practice in
specific areas, people have the capability to improve.
From my own observation, people who adopt a growth mindset
are less likely to let their egos get in the way of receiving
constructive criticism. That creates a positive feedback loop, which
provides a steady stream of advice and guidance, allowing them to
adapt, improve, and to continually move closer to their goals.

FIXED ABILITIES
Much like the nature versus nurture debate, a question is often
raised about mindset. Are you born with the abilities that you have,
or can you train to be better and stronger? Although it’s easy to get
lost in this debate, nearly everyone agrees that it’s a combination of
the two. According to Drew Bailey, a psychologist at the University of
California Irvine: “Without both genes and environments, there are
no outcomes.” In The Sports Gene, David Epstein references U.S.
Olympic softball player Jennie Finch to make this point. Several
years ago, Finch pitched to a variety of Major League Baseball
players, striking each of them out. Even though those MLB players
had incredible skill of their own, those skills did not immediately
translate to a softball environment. (On softball fields the mound is
positioned closer to home plate and the pitchers use a different wind-
up, which means batters have to track the ball from a different
release point than what they are familiar with if they play baseball.)
If it helps, think of people like personal computers. Athletes, as
an example, are born with an inherent hardware component
(genetics), but they still require the right software programming
(experience, practice, and training) to be successful and to maximize
the full potential of their hardware. I could have a work ethic stronger
than that of any other living person, but without the right physical
attributes and hardware, no amount of hard work will turn me into the
next Kobe Bryant. In fact, if you look closely at Bryant and Michael
Jordan—two of the greatest basketball players of all time—you’ll
notice that they were similarly sized and possess rare “hardware”
(innate talent) along with a resolute work ethic. The combination of
their hardware and software is what allowed them to become all-time
greats.
Epstein also compares two champion high jumpers: Stefan Holm
—who trained for much of his life—and Donald Thomas, who
participated in track and field while in high school but then took years
off before returning to the sport and experiencing almost immediate
success. In Thomas’s case, genetics overshadowed how much (or
how little) he trained leading up to his success, but his past
experience in high school still makes the case that preparation and
training play at least some role in an individual’s ability to succeed.
What does this all mean for mindset? It means that even if life
gives you lemons, you can still make lemonade through a
commitment to working hard and staying positive. You can choose to
be optimistic about your abilities. And for those who do have the
advantage of being born with plenty of natural ability, an optimistic
mindset (combined with a dedication to practice) can lead to even
greater success.

OPTIMISM
If you see an opportunity present itself, do you first think of what
could go right? Or do you immediately think about everything that
could go wrong? If you want to be successful, you’re going to have
to think a lot about what can go right, not the other way around. A
successful mindset requires optimism in spades, especially if you
have entrepreneurial ambitions.
Fortunately, the mind’s explanatory style can be reconfigured
through training, which means you can learn to be optimistic even if
you don’t currently think that way. Pessimists generally think of
things in terms of the three Ps: permanent, pervasive, and personal.
If you are a door-to-door salesman and a prospective client slams
the door in your face, you’ll believe it happened because of one of
those three Ps—you might think that your skills are inferior and will
never improve (permanent), you might think that you lack a strong
personality whether in business or your social life (pervasive), or you
might assume that it was something about you specifically that
motivated that person to close the door (personal).
If you adopted an optimistic perspective, on the other hand,
you’d reason that that person was just having a bad day. You
wouldn’t infer that the outcome of having the door slammed in your
face was a reflection of you or what you did. It’s easy to see which
explanatory style and outlook will lead to more success, isn’t it? The
more optimistic you are, the better you’ll be at shaking off failure and
moving forward in the face of those challenges. A growth mindset
and optimism go hand-in-hand. You cannot have one without the
other.
Optimism can have a positive impact on more than just your
success; it can also improve your health. In Flourish, author Martin
Seligman recounts the results of studies that show that optimistic
people are 25 percent less likely to have a second heart attack when
compared to the baseline average, whereas pessimists are 25
percent more likely.
Optimism may not be all that we need, but it is a great place to
start. According to Gabriele Oettingen, who has studied optimism
extensively, thinking optimistically is only beneficial if those thoughts
are still rooted in reality. She coined the term WOOP (Wish,
Outcome, Obstacle, Plan) as a good way to build upon dreams. The
third O—obstacle—is key, since it requires people to consider the
hurdles in their paths and to create a plan to overcome them. That
dose of realism will help you to better manage your expectations; it
will guide your work ethic and allow you to set more realistic goals.

SELF-DOUBT
Even if you are an optimist and choose to view the glass as half full,
you may still be burdened with self-doubt. Nearly everyone
experiences self-doubt, but balancing it with at least equal portions
of self-confidence is crucial. In fact, having some self-doubt can be a
good thing. It can improve our relationships, since a person with
some self-doubt is going to put more emphasis on getting along with
others. It can also keep our egos from growing too large or our
confidence in our abilities from getting out of hand. After all, if you
are overconfident, you’ll be less likely to prepare as long or as hard
as is needed. If you think that you can just show up and crush the
competition, you’re likely not going to spend the extra time in the
gym or at the office. Having a bit of self-doubt can help counter this
so that you strike the right balance between being under–and over-
prepared.
Of course, too much self-doubt is deadly to success because it
can prevent action. And without action, ideas remain just that—
ideas. Even great ideas mean nothing without action, so it’s
important to be aware of your self-doubt and to understand the role
that it is playing. If it’s preventing you from taking action, you must
eliminate it.

OPTIMISM BIAS
Optimism may be what you are striving for, but as is the case with
many things in life, a dichotomy exists between too much and too
little. What you are striving for is the perfect amount of positivity. You
must balance optimism with a hint of caution. If you’re too optimistic,
you can develop a belief that you are less likely to be impacted by a
negative or challenging event. This unrealistic way of thinking is
known as optimism bias and it can manifest itself in various forms.
 In Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman introduces an
optimism bias known as the planning fallacy. Ultimately, it’s an
underestimation of the amount of time and resources that will be
required to complete a given project. It can often impact
entrepreneurs, and it’s something that I (and my team) at
Renaissance Periodization experienced during the development of
the RP Diet App. Something we thought would take months or
maybe a year actually took multiple years, and we encountered
numerous setbacks and suffered plenty of failures along the way.
There’s another equally harmful optimism bias known as the
sunk-cost fallacy. Simply explained, this is a person’s tendency to
stay loyal to a behavior or endeavor based on the amount of time,
energy, and/or money that they initially invested in it. I made this
mistake with RP by sticking with a particular software program,
despite the fact that it was inefficient for some aspects of our
business. In particular, customer orders didn’t always go through the
system, but after a while I just learned to deal with it because the
thought of switching to a completely new software and transferring
all of the customer data that we had accrued was overwhelming.
Eventually, we had to build a custom website that allowed us to sell
and deliver products directly to consumers. As I learned, there
comes a time when the right course of action is to admit defeat,
regardless of the amount of time or money that has been spent.
If you have investors or a board of directors, a healthy dose of
optimism is just what they want. Nobody who invests their money
and/or time into a project will be happy or will continue to invest if
that project’s leader is pessimistic or lacks confidence. In those
circumstances, being optimistic is incredibly beneficial. Just be sure
you don’t fall victim to an optimism bias.

GOAL SETTING
Yes, it’s important to set goals. But just like optimism, there are
pitfalls to goal setting. The first one is what psychologists describe as
false-hope syndrome, and it pertains to setting goals—sometimes
lofty goals—without factoring in the amount of hard work and
dedication that will be required to achieve them. This syndrome lures
people into a false sense of confidence. For example, you may want
to lose 50 pounds, which is a fantastic goal that many people would
benefit from. But that goal can very easily become unrealistic if you
don’t set a feasible time frame in which you can accomplish it. If you
set a goal of losing 50 pounds in a couple of months, you’ll likely be
overwhelmed by the amount of hard work and dedication that will be
required to lose that much weight in that short a period of time (if it
can be done safely at all). In that state of being overwhelmed, you
are much more likely to give up. The downside here is not that the
goals are too ambitious, but that the failure to reach them quickly
discourages people early on and leaves them feeling like the pursuit
is hopeless.
Behavioral economists have expanded on this idea by creating
the hot-cold empathy gap. The “hot” refers to a person’s emotional
state and the desire to immediately satisfy urges. The “cold” state
reflects someone’s analytical side, which logically deduces the best
course of action but does so without giving credence to the power of
desire. In the book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health,
Wealth and Happiness, authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sun-stein
set up a dinner party scene to illustrate this point. If a bowl of
cashews is left out on the counter before dinner, party guests may
snack on them to the point that they ruin their appetite. That’s being
in a hot state. If they were to think about the dinner party days
before, those same guests might decide not to snack on anything
ahead of the meal. That’s an easy decision to make at that time, but
it becomes much harder to follow through on once hunger is
introduced and snacks are readily available. It is easy to set goals
and to make proclamations for yourself when you are thinking
logically and rationally. But it becomes much harder when you must
battle your emotions, especially once primal urges want to take over.
Still, you shouldn’t shy away from setting really big goals. Lofty
goals can play a positive role in creating your sense of identity and
determining your purpose. Jim Collins, in his book Built to Last:
Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, calls them “Big Hairy
Audacious Goals” (or BHAGs). These far-reaching goals will help
you to set the standard for yourself and/or your company and they’ll
serve as a catalyst for you taking action. If your goal is to run a
company that holds a majority of the market share in a new field, for
example, that overall goal will guide your company’s vision and the
actions that it will take. That over-arching goal will make it easier for
you to create subgoals, which will guide you down the path to
eventual success. Think of it like a road trip. Your BHAGs are your
final destination, but smaller goals (set weekly or monthly) are the
turn-by-turn navigation that your GPS system provides.
Accomplishing those sub-goals builds positive momentum and fuels
your motivation to accomplish the larger goals that you’ve set. Just
remember that too many sub-goals can be detrimental; if not held in
check, those daily tasks might prevent you from accomplishing the
bigger-picture objectives that you have to meet.
George T. Doran created an acronym to help people in setting
objectives. He called it SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable,
Relevant, and Time-bound). If you want to be successful, it is
paramount that you set goals that fit the SMART acronym. Be sure
that those goals make sense to you whether you are in a hot or cold
state. If your goals pass the SMART filter, you are on the right track.
Think of it as a checklist:
Are your goals specific to what you are trying to achieve? If you
want to run a mile in less than five minutes, for example, it
makes sense to set goals that cover how many miles you should
run per week and what you should eat to maximize your
performance.
Can you accurately measure your goals? This is important,
since it allows you to understand if you are progressing. If you
want to bench press 315 pounds, for example, you should
measure how many sets and how many reps you perform during
each workout, and the weight that you’re lifting each time.
Can you actually attain your goals? If they are realistically
achievable, your goals will be much more appealing.
Do your goals really matter to you? Are they relevant? It is
important to set goals that align with your values and your
purpose. Do not set goals for yourself that will only please or
benefit someone else.
How long will it take you to achieve your goals? Do not fall
victim to false-hope syndrome and oversell yourself. If you have
 a large, imposing goal, you will be better off breaking that goal
up into smaller sub-goals. You may want to lose 100 pounds, for
example, but you’ll be discouraged if you think that you can
achieve that in a few months. Instead, set a goal to lose 10
pounds every six to eight weeks.

EGO
If we know that a growth mindset leads to more success, why would
anyone be resistant to outside opinions or unreceptive to
constructive criticism? It’s because our egos get in the way. As
author Ryan Holiday succinctly states, “Ego is the enemy.” A big ego
prevents people from listening to feedback, accepting criticism with
an open mind, or working as hard as their goals require them to. It
also leads to a self-serving bias.
Imagine that you’re driving your car and you get passed or cut
off by someone driving recklessly and much too fast. If you’re
anything like me, you’ll immediately proclaim that person to be a
terrible driver. That’s a common, real-world example of the self-
serving bias. It’s a way of thinking that attributes another person’s
faults or mistakes to their ability level, but their successes to luck.
Similarly, that bias would lead someone to attribute his or her own
success to their skill and their failures to bad luck. In the driving
example, that “reckless” driver might be rushing home to a sick child
or to the hospital for a family emergency. When working under a self-
serving bias, you might not consider that possibility.
When you suffer from a self-serving bias you inevitably devote
less time to developing and cultivating your skills. During RP’s early
years, I was working in the business much too often (instead of
working on the business), and my ego prevented me from devoting
time and energy to improving as a business owner. Had I reduced
the size of my ego, I would have learned earlier and could have set
up the business for greater success. Be careful in over-attributing
success to your skill level. You must stay committed to the process
of self-improvement.
To reduce the size of your ego, you must detach yourself from
the situation. In other words, don’t let emotions get the best of you.
Train yourself to step back and look at the situation objectively. Once
you set your emotions aside you will be more able to see things for
what they are. In turn, you’ll make the correct choices in regards to
what needs to be corrected or improved.
By limiting the size of your ego, you’ll also be more equipped to
accept the blame for mistakes that you or your team members have
made. Taking ownership of those problems is a critical piece of the
puzzle. It will allow you to find solutions to those problems and to
further prevent them from happening in the future. A small ego will
also allow you to deflect praise onto your partners and/or colleagues.
Not only will this improve morale, it will also reinforce the notion that
you are smart—you’ve proven it by hiring even smarter people to
work for you.

BRAIN FOOD
To develop a healthy and positive mindset, you must be judicious
about what you’re consuming. This pertains to what you feed your
body and what you feed your mind. As you likely know, nutrition
plays a key role in maximizing a person’s physical performance and
abilities. Without going into too much detail, your body will function at
its best if your diet is comprised mostly of lean protein sources
(meats, low-fat dairy, fish/seafood, eggs, and soy-based
alternatives); healthy fats (nuts, nut butters, avocado, olive oil, and
coconut oil—in moderation, of course); and healthy carbohydrates
(fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and rice). Once you know what
you should be feeding your body—for more information, refer to The
Renaissance Diet 2.0—you should also understand what you should
be feeding your mind.
The term “brain food” doesn’t mean that certain foods will
improve your mindset. Instead, it refers to the things that we expose
our minds to. The most successful people feed their minds with
content that enriches their lives or allows them to grow as human
beings. In other words, they focus on things that are educational or
beneficial. Social media, movies, and television programs aimed
solely at entertainment don’t make the list. That doesn’t mean that
you should avoid them altogether—those outlets are fine in
moderation—but be careful what you’re consistently feeding your
mind. If you are constantly engaging in negativity, that brain food
could shape your explanatory style and promote a more pessimistic
outlook. Elevate your mind and you will elevate yourself in the
process!
By now you understand why you must be a hard worker and that
you—and only you—can put in that work. You also know what you
can control and what is beyond your control. And when it comes to
the things you can control, you recognize that you must be carefully
optimistic and ready to work with a growth mindset.
Even though you have that understanding and are prepared to
think positively, the journey that you must take to be successful will
likely be strewn with obstacles and challenges. To be frank, the
journey will be difficult. To get through it, you’ll need to be disciplined.
 PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE
Keep a journal of at least three good things that happen to you
each day: Making note of the positive aspects of your life on a daily
basis will not only help you to develop gratitude and appreciation for
them, it will also help to keep things in perspective. It’s human nature
to dwell on the negative things that we experience; too often we
easily overlook the positive. By purposely identifying those favorable
things—and writing them down—you’ll begin to train yourself to see
and appreciate the positives when they occur.
 CHAPTER 4

DISCIPLINE

“Discipline is the bridge betweengoals and

accomplishment.”
—JIM ROHN
IT’S EASY TO TALK ABOUT having the right mindset or focusing
only on the things that you can control, but it’s another matter to put
them into action. I learned this for myself earlier this year as Lori
battled breast cancer and endured chemotherapy treatments, all
while we were subjected to months of quarantine due to the global
pandemic caused by COVID-19. It was a challenging time, to say the
least. As I learned, keeping a positive mindset and focusing only on
the things that you can control requires more than just an
understanding of those concepts. This is where discipline comes into
play.
I was raised by two incredibly hard-working parents, and through
that upbringing—and also possibly genetics—I grew up with a strong
work ethic, understanding that hard work pays off. But I learned
about discipline (and its importance) firsthand as a cross-country
runner during the summer between my freshman and sophomore
years of high school. I wasn’t a particularly strong runner as a
freshman, and I didn’t make the varsity team. At the end of the
school year, our coach gave the team its summer marching orders.
We were to run 100 miles over the course of the summer, which
would strengthen us for the start of the fall season. I focused on
completing that objective, and when I returned to school in the fall I
found myself able to keep pace with the top runners on the team
from the year before. There was no secret to my improvement—it
was my discipline and the hard work that I put in to log those miles.
As it turns out, no one else on the team had run a full 100 miles over
the summer.
That was a lightbulb moment for me. I realized that if I worked
hard and did what others would not, I could perform as well or even
better than them. More recently, in reading the book Extreme
Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by retired Navy
SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, I experienced another
epiphany. According to the authors, “discipline equals freedom.” In
fact, they acknowledge that the most successful people that they’ve
worked with also happen to be the most disciplined. That connection
is no coincidence.
But discipline is still difficult to maintain. There is a reason that
many people only talk of being successful. It’s easy to talk about the
things you want to achieve when you’re not putting in the work to
achieve them. It’s another thing entirely to put in the work to reach
those goals.

MOTIVATION
Many people wrongly assume that inspiration and motivation are
what drive people in the pursuit of their goals. While they are both
great attributes that are necessary to take initial action, both are
short-lived. It’s often easy to find inspiration, and while that
inspiration can be the spark that lights a fire to get you going, those
feelings of inspiration can quickly fade. A healthy dose of motivation
can usually pick up the slack, but nobody is motivated all the time.
The thing that differentiates successful people from the masses is
discipline. It’s the commitment to do what is necessary no matter
what.
Just to reiterate, unwavering motivation isn’t necessary for
success. You’d like to be motivated all of the time, of course, and
that’s something that people strive for, but it’s often wrongly assumed
that you must be motivated all the time if you’re going to be
successful. World-class athletes, just like beginners, struggle with
motivation sometimes. It’s good practice to seek out sources of
inspiration and motivation—they’ll always be helpful—but the key is
to use the initial spark that those sources provide to develop a
system of habits that can help you to stay disciplined. Don’t be
discouraged on days when you’re lacking motivation—instead, rely
on your self-discipline to carry you through.
 Think of all the times when you knew that you should do
something—a workout or a business-related task, for example—but
you just couldn’t find the drive to do it. Now imagine that in those
same instances, you could summon an inner power that allowed you
to complete that task. That’s not motivation; that’s discipline.
Discipline is the attribute that keeps you motivated, and learning how
to hone in on self-discipline is as close to a superpower as anyone
will ever have. Remember, being successful requires traveling down
a difficult road, one where hard work is required at every turn. Self-
discipline is what’s needed to get you to the finish line at the end of
that road.

LONG-TERM THINKING
Imagine that someone places a warm, delicious doughnut in front of
you. If you’re like many people, you’d probably waste little time
taking a bite and then thoroughly enjoying the rest of it, too. But now
imagine that you are overweight and your doctor has advised you to
lose at least 20 pounds. Do you succumb to the temptation and
devour the dough-nut, in the process moving further away from your
goal? Or, do you think of the long-term consequences that come with
the choices that you make in the here and now? We are all human
and susceptible to urges that offer immediate gratification; however,
those who can withstand those urges and focus on the bigger picture
are more likely to find success. In fact, a longitudinal study in New
Zealand revealed that people who possessed more self-control (and
thereby, more discipline) were healthier and more financially secure.
They even had better teeth.
On the topic of teeth, I used to dread going to the dentist. My
wife, on the other hand, was never worried about it. Of course, my
wife also took great care of her teeth, using an electric toothbrush
twice a day and regularly flossing. I did neither of those things. After
one particularly rough dentist appointment, I decided to mimic my
wife. I began using an electric toothbrush and I flossed daily. Not
surprisingly, this newfound discipline improved the health of my
teeth, which made future trips to the dentist much less stressful.
 As you may have already guessed, all of this means that the
ability to think long-term is paramount to success. Let’s say you’re
running a business. You know that your reputation means
everything. Furthermore, you know that sending the right message to
consumers is a critical piece of the formula. If you receive an offer
from a company that is willing to pay you thousands of dollars each
month to promote its product, would you take it? If you automatically
answer yes, you might be in trouble. Let’s say the company’s product
isn’t trustworthy, or there is little evidence that the product delivers
on its promise. Your endorsement of it could negatively reflect on
your own reputation. If you are swayed by the immediate gratification
of thousands of dollars each month, you could be setting yourself up
for longterm failure.
Take youth sports in this country as another example. Many
American parents think that their children need to specialize in a
sport from a young age, that this will be the key to their children
developing into professional athletes someday. It also provides some
immediate gratification for both the parents and the children; those
kids, given their focus on only one sport, will likely be the best
players on their respective teams. In reality, a focus on early
specialization has been shown to increase the chances of injury. It
has also been proven to produce less successful long-term results
since the kids are more likely to burn out at some point along the
way. Marv Marinovich, for example, prepared his son, Todd, to play
football, going so far as to control almost every aspect of Todd’s life
—the young football player was never allowed to eat fast food, even
as a child! Todd earned a scholarship to play quarterback at the
University of Southern California and was later selected by the
Oakland Raiders in the first round of the 1991 NFL draft. He certainly
enjoyed short-term success in his younger years. Soon after Todd
entered the NFL, however, he developed a substance abuse
problem, and within three years he was out of the league entirely.
It would be easy to misinterpret the Marinovich family’s story as
a cautionary tale about being too disciplined. After all, Marv made
choices early in his sons’ life that were influenced by a long-term
goal. Yet, Marv was too focused on his son being a great football
player. He was seduced by the immediate gratification of watching
his son play better than any of the kids around him. Remember, a
parent’s ultimate goal is to ensure their children’s long-term success
and happiness. Marv let his son’s immediate success derail him from
making decisions that would ensure Todd’s best possible future.
Some of today’s most accomplished athletes are successful
because they don’t lose focus on their long-term goals. “I realize that
not every day will be a great day, but every day is an opportunity to
get closer to where I want to be, whether I’m motivated or not,” says
Annie Thorisdottir. “If you only work hard on the days where you feel
like it, you will not experience progress long term.”

GRIT
If you’re going to stay dedicated to your long-term goals, you’ll need
to be disciplined. In other words, you’re going to need grit—strength
of character, perseverance, and passion for your long-term goals.
There’s no better term or definition to support this chapter on self-
discipline.
Grit and a positive explanatory outlook go hand in hand. That
relationship is something that Angela Duckworth extrapolates on in
her aptly titled book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. It
is difficult to persevere and to think about the long term if you aren’t
optimistic that you can reach your goals. Having grit is having the
ability to look failure in the face, get back up, and keep going after
setbacks or failures. It is the relentless pursuit of your goals, holding
those long-term goals in such high regard that you are willing to do
just about anything to reach them.
If and when you fail, you must have a growth mindset and a
positive explanatory style. You must consider any obstacle that you
encounter as a learning point, as a way to improve. There is a lot to
be said about simply outworking your competition. Being gritty sums
that up. If you are committed to daily improvements and you cultivate
a mindset that supports that endeavor, you’ve got plenty of grit.
Gritty individuals show up to practice early with an open mind.
They are committed to their long-term goals and are willing to put in
however much time and practice is required to learn and improve. “I
may not always have the strongest or best mindset, but I always
push through or bounce back regardless,” says Mattie Rogers, a
national champion and world-medalist weightlifter. “A lot of it is an
unwillingness to settle for anything less than all of my effort, and that
carries me through even the roughest days.
“There are almost more days I don’t necessarily feel like training
or eating as I should than days where I do,” she continues, “so it’s
just learning to be uncomfortable and do things I may not want to
do.”
In Flourish, Martin Seligman references studies on grit that were
conducted by Duckworth. She concluded that a person’s grittiness—
their ability and willingness to buckle down and to stay committed to
a task—was more important than their level of intelligence. People
with lower IQs but more grit regularly outperformed those who had
higher IQs but less grit. Those studies reinforce a popular saying that
we now know to be true: hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t
work hard.

DELIBERATE PRACTICE
Imagine that you want to take up a new sport, like golf. How would
you choose to pursue that new interest? You could visit the driving
range on your own to hit balls and hopefully (but not assuredly) get
better. You could schedule a few social rounds of golf with some
friends. Or you could find a swing coach and schedule lessons to
target specific areas of your game. Many people would opt for the
first two choices, but if you really want to excel as a golfer (especially
if you’re new to the sport), the third option provides the only avenue
to do it.
The act of getting better—no matter what activity or endeavor—
requires not just practice, but deliberate practice. As outlined in the
book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders
Ericsson and Robert Pool, deliberate practice differs from ordinary
practice in seven important ways:

1. It usually requires an objective way to measure performance

and track the standouts.
 2. It requires a coach who can take you further using training that
is defined by purpose and meaning. Using our golf analogy, if
you are only hitting balls at the range on your own, you likely
won’t get much better, even if you practice a lot. You need
specific guidance from a coach to give you direction on ways to
improve.
3. Deliberate practice pushes you outside of your comfort zone.
4. It relies on clearly defined goals and objectives for each practice
session.
5. It includes timely feedback on where you can improve.
6. It trains you to create mental representations. Over time, this will
allow you to monitor yourself internally, which means you won’t
need as much external coaching as you might have in the
beginning.
7. Deliberate practice allows you to develop new and specific skills
that enhance the ability you already have.

If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is a lot! In fact, this type of
deliberate practice requires so much energy and focus that even the
most successful athletes and performers in the world typically only
practice this way for a handful of hours each day, at the most.
Deliberate practice is hard—that’s why so many people resign
themselves to just being “good enough,” instead of working to be the
very best that they can be.

DISCIPLINE CARRYOVER
Self-discipline is most commonly associated with health and fitness,
but it can be applied to—and positively impact—many other facets of
your life. You can learn to be more disciplined financially, for
example, limiting the types of purchases that provide instant
gratification but ultimately get in the way of you saving more or
improving yourself. Instead of buying designer clothes, for example,
you could invest that money in a retirement fund, or you could enroll
in a weekend course to learn a new skill or strengthen one that you
already have.
 If you apply discipline to your spending habits, you’ll be better
equipped for retirement—and better equipped to resist the allure of
persuasive advertising campaigns aimed at convincing you to spend
money . . . most often on frivolous things. In The Willpower Instinct:
How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to
Get More of It, author Kelly McGonigal, a leading researcher at
Stanford University, urges readers to imagine their future selves. As
she acknowledges, human beings are notoriously bad at delaying
immediate gratification. But if we can envision ourselves in the
future, she says, we can make better decisions for the long term. In
fact, financial institutions are now employing this same technique,
which encourages their clients to invest more into their retirements.
In The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s
Wealthy, Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko provide even
more motivation to be disciplined with your finances. According to
Stanley, many of the millionaires in the United States didn’t inherit
their wealth or strike it rich with a brilliant new product, company, or
service. Instead, through disciplined spending habits, they were able
to save and invest, slowly accumulating their wealth.
Discipline doesn’t just enhance our fitness, nutrition, or financial
regiments; it can also significantly impact our emotions. In fact, in
their book Emotional Intelligence 2.0, authors Travis Bradberry and
Jean Greaves suggest that having control of your emotions is as vital
to success as overall intelligence. Many successful people have
higher-than-average IQs, but Bradberry and Greaves acknowledge
that success also stems from effective interactions with other people.
Consider a business scenario where you must work with an
unlikable boss or colleague. That person’s negative personality traits
—whatever they might be—are certain to make the prospect of
working with them more challenging. But if you are self-aware and if
you can control your emotions, you’ll limit the number of negative
interactions that occur between you and that unlikable colleague or
boss. Keeping your emotions in check will prevent arguments from
forming and that, by itself, will prevent you from possibly
squandering away opportunities for greater advancement.
Being emotionally disciplined will also help you to make better
long-term choices. In particular, it will help you to avoid making rash
decisions. Let’s say you’re running a business and a major
competitor in your industry launches a new product. If you overreact
to that news and make hasty decisions to respond in some way, that
could weaken your company and its position in the marketplace, not
strengthen it. Emotional overreaction, especially from someone in a
leadership role, can be construed as a sign of weakness. If you
panic, chances are the people who work for you will, too. And if no
one is thinking logically or rationally, your company could be headed
for significant trouble.
The more you can slow yourself down and use your rational
mind, the better off you will be. By stepping back from a situation
before engaging in any emotional responses, you’ll have time to
evaluate the scenario. This allows the executive functioning part of
your brain—the human aspect of the brain—to take over for the
more animalistic part of the brain, which is reactionary. Letting the
executive functioning part of your brain do the heavy lifting whenever
you need to make decisions that impact both the long-term and the
short-term outcomes is always a wise strategy. Implementing this
type of approach will also train you to become more aware of your
emotions. Self-awareness leads to better self-management, and if
you can better manage your emotions, you’ll make better decisions
overall.

HABITS OR SHORTCUTS?
For worthwhile endeavors, shortcuts simply do not exist. It’s clear
now that discipline is hard; however, there are ways to make it a little
easier. That assistance takes the form of establishing habits.
“Successful people aren’t born that way,” says author Don Marquis.
“They become successful by establishing the habit of doing things
unsuccessful people do not like to do. The successful people do not
always like doing these things themselves, they just get on and do
them.”
The first time we work to complete any new task, our brains are
working harder than normal to process all of the information that is
required to do that work. Over time, as we repeat the steps
necessary to complete that task, the brain begins to automate the
process. This forms the basis of a habit, and those habits allow us to
be more efficient with our energy usage throughout the day.
Habits are essentially made up of three parts, the most important
of which is the cue. A cue triggers the brain to turn on autopilot. To
use a dieting analogy, if you always look in your pantry as you walk
by it, that glance can signal the start of a familiar routine, which
might be to grab a handful of the unhealthy snack that you most
enjoy—a hyperpalatable food (food that tastes really good), which
provides immediate gratification. To change a habit, you need to
replace the routine with something else. In this particular example,
you’ll want to replace the hyperpalatable food choice with something
healthier. There needs to be something there to help fill that void, but
choosing a better alternative creates a win/win situation.
To take a more extreme approach, you can eliminate the
temptation altogether. In this pantry example, that would mean not
buying the unhealthy foods that you typically snack on. Not having
those foods accessible will weaken the initial cue (it might eliminate it
completely). At that point, the whole sequence can be bypassed. On
the flip side, if you want to create a new habit of flossing your teeth
regularly, you can improve your chances of succeeding by putting
the floss somewhere you will easily see it every day. The more you
can simplify and make your habits easier, the less willpower you will
have to exert. And since our willpower is limited each day, creating
these habits conserves our mental capacity, which allows us to do
more and to direct that willpower toward more important tasks.
Staying disciplined and sticking to the process of creating new
habits is hard work, but you can make it easier on yourself through
pre-commitment. If you want to start working out early in the
morning, for example, you’ll obviously want to set an alarm (probably
a second one, too), but you can also lay out your gym clothes next to
your bed the night before, which will make it easier for you to get
going in the morning. As another example, planning and prepping
meals for the week is a great way to help you stick to a diet. If you
have a prepped meal for you at work, it will be easier to eat what
you’re supposed to rather than navigating the challenges that come
with going out for lunch—challenges that include social pressures
from friends or coworkers and the alluring sights and smells of
delicious (but unhealthy) food. And if you struggle with time
management at work, you can create a daily schedule where you
reserve a block of time to answer emails, or you can devote an hour
for you to focus on the most important tasks that day. We are all
human, and when left to our own devices we can struggle with
staying on track. Preparing like this ahead of time will make things
easier.
Aristotle believed that we are what we repeatedly do.
“Excellence, then,” echoed Will Durant, an American historian and
philosopher, “is not an act, but a habit.”
Being disciplined—and staying disciplined— is ridiculously hard,
but developing habits over time will allow you to reduce the amount
of mental energy that is needed to stay on task and to do the right
things. Remarkably, the human brain represents only 2 percent of
the body’s total size, but it uses almost 20 percent of the body’s total
energy. Creating beneficial habits will allow you to put the majority of
that energy consumption to good use.

TOO MUCH DISCIPLINE

Just like the behavioral skills that we have discussed in previous
chapters, there can be a downside to having too much discipline.
This is most often seen and most easily understood in the world of
fitness. It takes discipline to stick to a workout routine, especially a
vigorous one, but if you are too rigid in terms of your discipline, you
could push past your own limits and wind up injuring yourself. If you
are so disciplined, for example, that you must work out every day, it
is likely that you won’t allow yourself enough recovery time.
My colleagues Dr. Mike Israetel and Dr. James Hoffmann coined
the term “Maximum Recoverable Volume” (MRV). They deduced that
there is a healthy limit to how much fitness training one body can
endure. Your MRV is the maximum amount of work you can do while
still properly recovering. Calculating MRV requires documenting
training sessions that slowly increase in intensity. Once performance
dips, training intensity is greatly reduced until the athlete feels fully
recovered, at which point the process repeats itself, only at a slightly
higher intensity at the start. After three or four cycles, patterns will
emerge that determine the best estimate of an athlete’s current MRV.
Personally, I am someone who often pushes myself to the limits,
sometimes past what I thought my limits were. If you operate in a
similar way, you must be smart and acknowledge when you’ve
reached existing limits. Only then can you make the choice to
consciously push past them with an understanding of the possible
risks involved. You can also be overly disciplined in business. If you
impose strict checklists or guides that all employees must follow, you
may be limiting your team’s potential. Having goals or quotas that
must be met can sometimes backfire, since they introduce incentives
that aren’t always in the best interest of the company. For example, if
you offer a bonus to each member of the sales team that reaches a
threshold value, some of those salespeople might stoop to unethical
tactics, including competing against their colleagues, instead of
working with their colleagues for the betterment of everyone and the
company as a whole.
As chronicled in The Impulse Society: America in the Age of
Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts, it’s not uncommon to see this
playing out at venture capital firms, where the more immediate
interests of board members and investors looking for a return on
their financial backing can clash with the business strategies of slow
and gradual growth. Incidentally, those strategies for measured
growth over a longer period of time carry the best odds for long-term
success. It’s another example of the risks that come with seeking
immediate gratification.
Much like how over-training can lead to injury, too much
discipline in business can also lead to burnout. Being successful
absolutely requires a tenacious work ethic—and many times an
almost obsessive passion for your desired goals—but being able to
focus on yourself at times to recharge the batteries is equally
necessary.
You can even have too much grit, which David Epstein reveals in
his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.
According to Epstein, Army cadets who commit much of their time
and energy to the military can often feel overly committed to staying
in the Army, even if they learn that they are better suited for a
different career path. The same can be said for sinking too many
resources into a specific goal, which ties back into the sunk-cost
fallacy. Not surprisingly, people who have too much grit are more apt
to suffer from this form of bias.
Just remember, you must walk a fine line between having too
much of something and not enough. Finding that right balance is
crucial, even when it comes to your own self-discipline. Telltale signs
that your discipline is getting in the way of success include feeling
overtired all of the time, general irritability, and frequent injuries. If
any of these things begin to define how you feel or act for days on
end, you would be better served dialing things back and allowing
yourself to rest and recover.

A PRAGMATIC VIEW
There will be times when you are motivated to face your struggles
and obstacles head on, and there will be days when you’d much
rather take the path of least resistance. All successful people
experience these conflicting emotions, including the world’s best
athletes. Many people believe that champion athletes don’t
experience days of low motivation. I can tell you from my own
experiences as a coach that they most certainly do. What
distinguishes them from the masses is their ability to keep going and
to push through, even on days when they don’t feel like it.
The most successful people in all facets of life have learned that
they simply need to convince themselves to take the first step toward
positive action. It can be a literal step in the direction of the gym or it
can be reaching for a healthy snack in the fridge versus an unhealthy
one. Just getting started is usually enough to carry you through the
difficult tasks that lay ahead. “I find that the days that I don’t feel like
training often end up being the days I get the best workouts in,”
reveals Nita Strauss, an RP athlete and one of the world’s best rock
guitarists. “I make a deal with myself that I will get dressed, go to the
gym and do 10 minutes of cardio. If, after that, I’m still not feeling it,
then I’ll go home. Once I am there and doing it, it sticks. I haven’t
gone home early from a workout yet.”
 At this point it might seem that you have all the tools in place to
be successful. You’re committed to working hard. You understand
that you should only focus on the things you can control. You’ve
trained yourself to think optimistically, to establish a growth mindset,
and to not let your ego get in the way. And you’ve learned that you’re
going to need a lot of discipline, but you’ve also learned that there
are ways to strengthen that dedication.
There is something that you’re still missing. It’s a commitment to
learning and adhering to your purpose. After all, you can work hard
and do everything right, but if you don’t know why you’re doing it you
won’t get very far. Remember, success doesn’t come from working
hard on just anything, it comes from working hard on very specific
things and for a very specific reason. Only that reason will allow you
to know which specific things are worthy of your attention and the
subsequent hard work that you will devote to them.
 PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE
Make specific plans for the goals that you want to accomplish
and the habits that you want to create. It’s important that you
make detailed plans for the actions that you want to take.
Committing to those details will hold you accountable, and they’ll
make it easier for you to develop better discipline. For example, if
you want to start a new fitness program, it’s not enough to say, “I’ll
go to the gym tomorrow.” You must be more detailed than that. Pick
a specific time. Say: “I’ll work out at 3:00 p.m. tomorrow. I will pack
my gym bag ahead of time and will take it with me to the office.”
Those details will make it easier for you to following through on that
commitment.
 CHAPTER 5

PURPOSE & MEANING

“Ever more people today have the means to

live, but no meaning to live for.”
—VIKTOR FRANKL
IN TODAY’S WORLD, we live better than at any other point in
human history. We have more wealth, more prosperity, and the
ability to live longer and healthier lives than ever before. Yet, Viktor
Frankl, in the quote on the previous page, hits the nail on the head.
Despite all of our advancements, people seem to be in poorer health
as far as their mental well-being is concerned. Sure, we can enjoy
quick fixes of happiness from good food, new possessions, or
advancements in technology, but those bursts of positive emotion
are fleeting. Remember that Martin Seligman’s PERMA recipe for
happiness (positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning,
and achievement/accomplishment) depends on both “meaning” and
“achievement.” True happiness is rooted in a person’s sense of
purpose and the achievements that they make by doing what they
love to do.
Before you convince yourself that making lots of money will
provide you with a lifetime of happiness, consider Daniel Gilbert’s
discovery (outlined in his book Stumbling on Happiness) that once a
person is financially stable enough to cover their basic needs, the
additional money that they make or acquire doesn’t bring them
additional happiness. Based on Gilbert’s research and the studies
that he conducted, the old saying that money can’t buy happiness is
true. This is not to say that making more money doesn’t conjure
positive emotions, but making more money typically requires more
time spent working. And at some point, too much work can be a
negative, as it eats away at the time that you could be devoting to
other aspects of your life that provide a healthy balance, like
spending time with friends and family, for example.
PURPOSE
Simon Sinek champions the idea that every person has the right to
fulfillment, that experiencing that sense of fulfillment is something
that everyone can control. It’s not by chance, he argues, that people
achieve that emotional state. “Every single one of us,” he writes in
Find Your Why, “is entitled to feel fulfilled by the work we do, to wake
up feeling inspired to go to work . . . and to return home with a sense
that we contributed to something larger than ourselves.” When you
start with a larger overall purpose, Sinek reveals, that purpose draws
others in. By and large, this is a good thing; after all, we have all
found inspiration before. Successful individuals have the ability to
inspire others, to convince people to follow them in their mission and
to be a part of something bigger than themselves. When you create
this atmosphere it draws out the best in others. People who are
inspired and motivated to be a part of something special are more
likely to enjoy the work that is required, and that enjoyment also
means that they’ll put in their greatest effort and produce their best
work.
Rock guitarist Nita Strauss reveals a similar calling. “I’m fueled
by the desire to make a new path where there wasn’t one before,
succeed while inspiring others, and getting to do what I love,” she
says.
A crucial component in striking a good balance between time
spent on things that you enjoy and time spent working is to find a
profession that doesn’t feel like work. You’ve likely heard that a key
to being happy is finding a career that appeals to you, to truly love
what you do. That is generally true. In fact, it’s best to think about
things in this way: a job is merely something that people have and do
to make a living; a career can best be defined as a person’s focused
line of work, something that drives them to be successful; but a
“calling” is something that provides people an outlet to find their true
meaning and purpose in life. A calling becomes part of your identity.
Even if you love your job, there will be days—possibly many of
them—when it will feel like work. On those days you might not glean
much enjoyment from the tasks that you perform, but you’ll be more
inclined to put in the work to get them done if you harbor a passion
for what you do and you understand your overall mission. You’ll still
need to be disciplined, but that passion and your purpose are crucial
to success.
Entrepreneurs are impacted in this way more so than many
other businesspeople. In the beginning, their passion for the
enterprise that they wish to create is what drives them, but as they
progress and as that initial idea takes shape, the amount of work that
is required to see it through becomes monumental. It’s not
uncommon for many entrepreneurs to teeter on the brink of burnout,
but through a focus on their bigger purpose, by and large they see
the project through. All of this to say, you can work 80-hour weeks,
but if you don’t believe in what you’re doing, those 80-hour work
weeks will soon feel like too much of a burden and not worth the
commitment.
Elon Musk effectively describes what it’s like to be an
entrepreneur. “Running a start-up is like eating glass and staring into
the abyss,” he says. Needless to say, that doesn’t sound like much
fun, which is why any successful entrepreneur needs a strong sense
of purpose to keep going.
A strong sense of purpose plays a key role in professional
sports, too. Take the Oakland Athletics during the 2000s as an
example. The organization’s purpose was not only to be competitive
with the best teams in Major League Baseball—organizations with
deep pockets that fielded teams with the highest payrolls in the
league—but to be competitive by following a different strategy in how
it built its roster of players. The Oakland A’s were a smaller market
team, which meant they couldn’t spend $200 million on a roster. The
A’s general manager, Billy Beane, knew this and recognized that he
couldn’t pay for star players who led the leagues in home runs, like
the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox did. Instead, he focused
on identifying the key statistics that led to wins, like on-base
percentage. Players who excelled in this statistic were generally
undervalued by the rest of the league, only because those other
teams overlooked the statistic’s importance. That sense of purpose
—of competing and winning by following a different (unproven)
formula—was the thing that kept the Oakland Athletics focused on
what must be done to succeed. The team made the playoffs after
following this strategy in 2002, and even though they didn’t win a
championship, the team did set an American League record with 20
consecutive victories during the regular season.
James Kerr, in his book Legacy, spotlights New Zealand’s All
Blacks rugby team (named for their original black jerseys and
knickerbockers) and showcases another way that purpose and
meaning can play a pivotal role in sports. The team is constructed
around a culture and a powerful legacy. Players on this team
demand excellence from themselves and each other; they’re led by a
purpose to further that team legacy, living up to the expectations and
the legacies of players who came before them and establishing an
even stronger legacy for future players to adopt and expand upon.
All Black players strive to be better on the field, plus they push one
another to become better human beings off the field through
community service. It all ties back to the concept of creating and
furthering a lasting legacy.
Individual athletes, like weightlifter Mattie Rogers, also focus on
their purpose, which manifests itself as the goals they want to
achieve. “My why to get through hard days is knowing how much
work I have put in to get to this point,” she says, “And knowing that
stopping or giving up would be throwing away so many days that I
struggled through and came out on top even when I did not think I
could. I know what I want to accomplish and I know I’m nowhere
near that yet, so I try and take the hard times day by day and rep by
rep and get as much out of myself as I can that day.”

SELLING YOUR PURPOSES

With the rising popularity of social media, it’s becoming easier to
spot the “influencers” who are pushing products just to make a quick
buck. In the nutrition and fitness world, these influencers are often
scantily clad and pedaling the latest fat-loss supplements or detox
teas. As the sales and promotional landscape continues to evolve,
companies are finding that it’s more important than ever to cultivate
an authentic and honest relationship with the people who are
essentially showcasing their products. When you have a true
purpose—your “why”—you’ll find it easier to relate to your
customers, because those customers will recognize that your
purpose is to create products that help people. In short, that
authentic purpose will lead to greater success.
Human beings are emotional creatures. We are often guided first
and most strongly by our emotions, as opposed to logic or reason.
By sharing your (or your company’s) purpose, you are also sharing
with customers your story; the emotional ties to those stories can go
a long way in helping people to understand your purpose and
support it. As Simon Sinek points out, Apple’s loyal customer base
was first formed in 1984 following the brand’s Super Bowl
commercial, which implied that Apple’s new and introductory
personal computer would be unlike anything on the market. The
tagline of the advertisement—“You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like
1984”— referenced George Orwell’s dystopian novel to suggest that
a person who bought an Apple computer would be an individualist,
someone who made their own decisions and shaped the direction of
their own lives. The commercial resonated with a lot of people and
its emotional tie stuck.
Even today, people continue to buy Apple products because of
the company’s commitment and purpose to being different, instead
of being driven by whether the products are better than those
produced by a competitor.
In regards to my own company, Renaissance Periodization, our
team members value our commitment to being an evidence-based
company. They never promise easy results, they only promise that if
you bring your work ethic, they will provide a plan to help you reach
your fitness goals. The company also established the Renaissance
Science Scholarship Fund at the University of Michigan in 2017.
After I founded RP with my business partner Dr. Mike Israetel, we
agreed that we wanted to give back to the school and its Kinesiology
program that had given us our start. I believe that both these aspects
of our business—a focus on evidence and helping others—have
helped us to create our success. When you are true to your purpose,
it no longer becomes a sales pitch. Instead, your purpose—once you
share it with the public—naturally attracts people to what you are
doing. I have never been particularly good at sales, but I’ve always
worked hard, remained true to my commitment to help as many
people as I can, and fostered a spirit of authenticity. Those attributes
are what shaped RP’s success.

THE RIGHT MOTIVATION

According to business author Daniel Pink, motivation is made up of
three components: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
We’ve already discussed autonomy and how the power to make
your own choices is an important ingredient in the recipe for
success. And it only makes sense that mastery—the acquisition or
development of the skills necessary to complete tasks—is a factor of
motivation, since you’ll feel more compelled to set a new goal if you
already have confidence in your ability to accomplish it. Not
surprisingly, purpose is an integral piece of motivation, too; a great or
desirable cause can keep you on track to put in the necessary work.
However, motivation is not constant—even for the most
successful and committed professional athletes. Annie Thorisdottir
has opened up about that very topic on Renaissance Periodiziation
podcasts. “Obviously, I’m motivated,” she says. “But nobody is
motivated all of the time. We’re so hooked on having to be motivated
all of the time. We don’t have to. It’s perfectly fine to have these
moments where you’re not. My thing is just knowing why I’m doing
the things that I’m doing. I know why I go to the gym. I have my
reasons for wanting to get better. . . . . As long as I know my why, it’s
not a question of whether I’m going to go or not. I am going to go
whether I’m motivated or I’m not motivated, whether I feel like it or I
don’t feel like it. I’m going to go to the gym. I’m going to put in my
best effort of that day and that is how I know that I’m doing
absolutely everything in my power to become the best version of
myself.”
The concept of a greater sense of purpose defines some of the
most recognizable corporations. As Jim Collins reveals in his book
Good to Great, the executive team behind Walmart has always been
fanatical about selling goods at the lowest possible prices. The
company’s motto—“We save people money so they can live
better”—reflects this purpose, and it was something that the
company’s founder, Sam Walton, stressed from the beginning. In
fact, some corporate decisions, like streamlining Walmart
headquarters of any plush amenities, were made specifically so that
the company could adhere to its larger purpose.
The Zappos shoe brand provides another great example, which
the company’s former CEO, Tony Hsieh, details in his book
Delivering Happiness. According to Hsieh, he constructed a
corporate culture that made his employees excited to come to work,
and that spilled over into the work that they performed. Because they
enjoyed being at work, Zappos employees were committed to
instilling a similar level of happiness in the customers who were
purchasing shoes on the company’s website. Exceptional customer
service was always Hsieh’s number one goal, and by keeping that
purpose in mind, he was able to take the necessary steps to
accomplish it.

A HIGHER CALLING – NAVY SEALS

To subject yourself to the type of training that is needed to become
an elite Special Forces operative requires a higher calling. I’ve read
as many books about the Navy SEALs as I can, and a prevailing
theme across all of those books is the call to service that is required
to be a Navy SEAL. The soldiers who graduate to that rank have a
higher sense of purpose, and that purpose provides them with the
necessary motivation to fight with and for their brothers in arms as
they serve their country. As Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney
explain in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength,
that focus on a purpose bigger than your own is what allows you to
push yourself further. It’s at the core of what allows the Navy SEALs
to accomplish their missions. In fact, the Navy SEALs prove that
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was right. “He who has a why to
live,” Nietzsche said, “can bear almost any how.”
Conversations that I’ve had with friends of mine who are Navy
SEALs reinforce this belief. That higher sense of purpose, they’ve
told me, allows them to endure things that exceed most people’s
limits. One Navy SEAL, who grew up as an only child, connected
with his teammates as brothers, and that sense of brotherhood
became his higher purpose. “Having the closest thing to a brother I
have ever known,” he says, “and not wanting to disappoint them or
let them down was what kept me going.”
After learning about the Navy SEAL culture, which supports a
higher purpose of brotherhood and accountability, it becomes easier
to understand how those elite operatives can successfully complete
such dangerous and important missions. “We’re in this business
because we believe in it—because of who we are,” says former
Navy SEAL Dick Couch in his book The Warrior Elite. “It is the desire
to belong to an elite group—to become a warrior. Those who
succeed have high expectations of themselves, and they want to
associate with others who share those expectations.”

TOO MUCH PURPOSE

The flipside of purpose is having too much: being so committed to a
purpose that you lose the ability to rationally analyze the world
around you. As way of example, let me introduce a throwback to the
early 1970s—the creation of Atari. Nolan Bushnell founded Atari in
1972 and, in doing so, he laid the groundwork for modern-day video
games. Bushnell had a passion and a commitment to science fiction
and he loved technology. These passions served him well; Atari
games like Asteroids were a smash hit. After Atari was acquired,
however, Bushnell became too consumed by his love affair with
technology and his desire to pave the way for the future. Eventually,
he was forced out of Atari, so he tried to make it on his own. He
attempted to start numerous other bootstrapped tech companies, yet
with every opportunity his futuristic vision got the best of him. He
invested himself in so many different avenues that none of them
sustained success after Atari. Ultimately, Bushnell was deemed to be
too far ahead of his time, which prevented the necessary
groundwork from being laid to take his post-Atari business
enterprises mainstream.
Bushnell’s story is a cautionary tale of the risks that can come
from being too consumed with your greater purpose. In Bushnell’s
case, he was focused on too many sci-fi projects. You should be
deeply passionate about your work, but you should also be able to
focus on your efforts in the here and now. There is a fine line to walk
in this regard. Ultimately, you should find your passion and harness
your energy toward a goal, but you must not lose sight of the work
that must be done today to reach that goal. Your focus must remain
on the work that you do today—but use your passion and your
greater purpose as the compass to lead you in the right direction.

PURPOSE ROOTED IN REAL LIFE

Many successful businesspeople and well-known entrepreneurs
have carefully molded their purpose around a specific vision for what
they want to create, be it a product or an enterprise. But your
purpose doesn’t have to be crafted in a similar manner. In fact, your
purpose may not be a vision of business success at all. In some
cases, you may find that your purpose is developed around the
important personal relationships in your life.
Nita Strauss follows a dual purpose, one inspired by those whom
she loves and one directed toward those who have questioned her
abilities. Her purpose is to make her family and friends proud since,
as she acknowledges, they “believed in me and expected the best
from me when I didn’t believe in myself.” However, she also reveals
that she works hard “to prove any doubters in my field wrong.”
Finding purpose and meaning through a personal relationship
can be a powerful guide as you establish a career or strive for
excellence. Just ask Erik Bakich, the head coach of the University of
Michigan baseball team, who implements RP principles into his
players’ training regimens. He brought his team to the finals of the
College World Series in 2019 and subsequently earned NCAA
Coach of the Year honors. “I made a promise to my dying college
coach before he passed away to continue his inspiration and his
legacy,” he says. “There is no amount of money I would trade for the
experience and relationships made in college, and I want all players I
get the opportunity to coach to have the same experience. That’s the
‘why’ for my chosen coaching profession.”
As Coach Bakich reveals, when your ‘why’ is large enough, it
can supersede the allure of lucrative paychecks. A true purpose will
be far more motivating than any amount of money. When you have a
meaning like that, you will be far more likely to stay on the right path
and remain dedicated to your goals and your overall mission.
Whatever your passion or career may be, a clearly defined
sense of purpose can be your guiding star through the setbacks
along the way. If your guiding star is bright enough, you will likely
attract others to join you, and through that mutual collaboration you
will increase your odds of significant success.
Yet, even with a resolute work ethic, self-direction, a positive
mindset, plenty of discipline, and clarity of purpose, you will find that
at times the going will be tough. There will be setbacks and
challenges. You need a strong and meaningful purpose to follow and
to focus on because during your journey you will fail. Failure is so
common, in fact, that you should expect to fail along the way. And
while we can’t avoid failure, how we choose to respond to it will
make a world of difference.
 PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE
Make a list of your core values—personal and/or professional—
and place them somewhere you’ll see them frequently. Many
days you won’t need a reminder of why you’re putting in the work or
what specifically you’re working for, but there will be times when
you’ll grow frustrated, overwhelmed, or discouraged. On those days,
this reminder will provide a necessary boost of morale to overcome
any challenges that have temporarily gotten the better of you.
 CHAPTER 6

FAILURE

“There is no such thing as failure. Failure is

just life trying to move us in another
direction.”
—OPRAH WINFREY
I KNOW WHAT YOU MUST BE THINKING. Why is there an entire
chapter dedicated to failure in a book that is intended to provide
readers with a roadmap to success? The short answer is this: as you
pursue your goals you will occasionally be met by failure. It’s almost
inevitable that your journey will include moments of failure at one
time or another. We are all human. We’re not infallible. Mistakes
happen and failures occur, but how you respond to those failures can
dictate whether or not you eventually find success. It takes a special
person to take failure on the chin, check their ego at the door, and to
learn from their mistakes. But oftentimes that is what’s required to be
successful.
Human beings learn best from trial and error. We make mistakes
but we figure out how to correct them, and we do this from a very
young age. A toddler who is learning to walk will stumble and fall, but
they’ll pick themselves up and keep trying. In time, they’ll be walking
with steadiness. And they’ll soon learn to run by following this same
process. It is part of the human condition to learn from mistakes.
“Your child needs practice failing,” Amy Morin writes in her book, 13
Things Mentally Strong Parents Don’t Do, “so he can learn to
rebound.”
Yet, when we get older, we go to school and we’re taught that
making mistakes is bad, that mistakes are a sign of weakness or a
mark of inferiority. We lose points on tests for the mistakes that we
make, and after at least a dozen years of schooling, we’re
conditioned to equate mistakes with poor performance. Not
surprisingly, people become scared of failure; they certainly don’t
believe that failure begets success.
 However, to make mistakes is distinctly human, as Kathryn
Schulz explains in Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.
According to Schulz, human beings have the advantage of a strong
belief system, and if we believe that errors and mistakes are
inevitable, we’ll be much better off. Knowing that we are not infallible
will help us make better choices. Rather than always fighting to be
right, we should embrace learning from the mistakes and the errors
that we’ll almost certainly make along the way.
This idea is hardly new. People have learned from their failures
for thousands of years. Take the 21-year reign of Genghis Khan, who
founded the Mongol Empire, as way of example. Jack Weatherford
documents in his book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern
World that the emperor rose to power and created an empire without
any formal education or divine enlightenment. “His success,” writes
Weatherford, “was derived from a persistent cycle of pragmatic
learning, experimental adaptation and constant revision driven by his
uniquely disciplined and focused will.”

MINDSET
Being able to adapt, to grow, and to change based on the results of
our actions is paramount. Charles Darwin proved this through his
discovery and subsequent study of evolution. It is not the strongest
species that survive, nor the most intelligent, Darwin observed.
Instead, the ones most responsive to change are the ones that
succeed. This concept of adaptation reflects back on the notion that
a growth mindset is more valuable than one that is fixed. If you have
a growth mindset, you see failure and obstacles as ways to learn
and expand. But if you have a fixed mindset, even the thought of
failure is terrifying.
Anyone who doubts the validity of this association only needs to
consider the career of one of the most successful professional
athletes of all time. “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career,”
Michael Jordan once acknowledged. “I have lost almost 300 games.
Twenty-six times, I have been trusted to take the game-winning shot
and missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed.”
 Can you imagine the greatest basketball player of all time shying
away from taking the game-winning shot because he was afraid of
failure? With that mindset, he would never become the best of all
time. No one likes to fail, of course, and psychologists have even
proven that people have a strong aversion to failure (read Thinking,
Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman for more info). But the important
thing is to first acknowledge that failure might—and often will—occur,
and then commit yourself to the task with all your effort anyway.
Michael Jordan was successful in part because of his ability, but also
because he adopted the right mindset and took the right approach to
possible failure.
Those who have a growth mindset, who embrace new
challenges and the setbacks that come with them, will learn more
and improve more than those who are intimidated by the possibility
of failure. In fact, the most successful people often view failure as a
positive. They recognize that each failure is a small step toward
eventual success. “I have not failed,” Thomas Edison famously
declared when asked about his journey to invent the lightbulb, “I
have just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” That is the type of
mindset that overcomes setbacks and perseveres when failures do
occur.
Perfection may be the goal, but it shouldn’t be your expectation.
Dieting provides an ideal example. Someone who follows a three-
month diet plan, which allows them to have five smaller meals per
day, will be faced with 450 opportunities to mess up. The people who
achieve the best results when dieting, based on my observations
(and also data from the RP Diet App), typically adhere to their macro
or caloric counts 85 to 90 percent of the time. That means you can
be less-than-perfect on 50 of those 450 total meals and the odds will
still be in your favor to achieve great results.
It’s important to note, however, that the people who slip up on
one meal during a day don’t let that mistake spiral out of control. If
they did, mistakes during one meal would multiply into mistakes
made for every subsequent meal that day. Soon, that negative
momentum carries over into multiple days and then, before you
know it, you’ve lost an entire week . . . sometimes even a month. At
that point, with your momentum gone, it’s easy to throw in the towel.
Kelly McGonigal, in her book The Willpower Instinct, refers to this as
the “what-the-hell effect.” The basic idea is that general consistency
is more powerful than attempting to be perfect.
Tim Grover, one of the top trainers in professional basketball,
has worked with Hall of Famers like Michael Jordan and Kobe
Bryant. In his book Relentless, Grover describes those athletes as
cleaners. Grover explains the cleaners’ attitude like this: “You can’t
control or anticipate every obstacle that might block your path. You
can only control your response, and your ability to navigate the
unpredictable.” When you pair that type of stoicism with a growth
mindset, suddenly, challenges and failures don’t seem so upsetting.
If you can adopt that way of thinking, you will see obstacles as tools,
simple pieces of information that will help you to shape your new
path.
Professional sports provide proof that occasional failure doesn’t
prevent success. Championship teams in the NBA, for example, lose
around 20 games during the regular season each year—even more
if you count the playoffs. Or think about it this way: a Major League
Baseball player who carries a .300 batting average for his career is
almost guaranteed to be voted into the Hall of Fame. That means
that the greatest players in history failed more than two-thirds of the
time that they stepped up to the plate.
Professional sports also teach us that initial failures can be
overcome and the highest level of success still achieved. Bill Walsh,
who coached the San Francisco 49ers to three Super Bowl
championships during the 1980s, nearly stepped down as head
coach early in his career after two losing seasons. During the first
two years that Walsh served as head coach, his team won only eight
games and lost twenty-four. But Walsh learned from his mistakes
during those first two seasons; in 1981, he led the 49ers to their first
Super Bowl championship and subsequently earned Coach of the
Year honors.
Even super forecasters (for sports bets and other projections)
adopt this type of mindset. These professionals, who are known to
successfully predict future outcomes more than the so-called
experts, are always learning, growing, and keeping an open mind.
They take new evidence as it comes to them and modify their
predictions as necessary. They also almost never speak in
absolutes. Instead, they refer to percentage likelihood. If they feel
that an event is probable, they might declare that they are 70 or 80
percent confident. They understand that even successful individuals
are wrong a lot of the time.

OBSTACLES ARE OPPORTUNITIES

Successful individuals have a habit of seeing failures or challenges
as an opportunity to better themselves. Even in times of panic or
crisis, those individuals generally remain calmer, use logic and
reason, don’t let their emotions get in the way, and consider how
they can leverage the challenge to improve themselves or their
situation. During a lecture to the U.S. Naval Academy, Dan Luna, a
retired U.S. Navy veteran and retired Navy SEAL summed that up in
a very succinct way. “Obstacles are opportunities,” he told the
audience.
This notion that obstacles, failures, and crises can be beneficial
in the business world is an idea supported by Andy Grove, the
former CEO of Intel. “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis,” he
explains. “Good companies survive them. Great companies are
improved by them.” To improve during difficult times, you must first
identify your areas of weakness and then devote time and resources
to them. Even during challenging times, you can choose where you
focus your time, energy, money, and other resources. Many
situations are just that—situations. In most cases they’re neither
inherently good nor bad; it’s up to us to determine that based on how
we perceive them. Successful individuals play the hand that they
have been dealt and figure out a way to work with what they have. If
you choose to focus on self-pity, you’ll end up ruminating on the
hardships in front of you rather than troubleshooting a way out of the
hard times you are currently in.
Oftentimes, the obstacles that you encounter will reveal a
distinct, slightly different path than the one you were originally on;
but that new path is the one that will lead to success, or at least get
you closer to it. Contemporary author Ryan Holiday emphasizes this
point in his book The Obstacle Is the Way, in which he explains that
the challenge that stands in your path today will eventually become
the way for you to move forward. This perception is borrowed from
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who declared during his reign
from 161 to 180 AD: “The impediment to action advances action.
What stands in the way becomes the way.”
Whatever you encounter or are presented with, make the choice
to perceive it as a positive. Lessons can be learned from everything.
Being passed over for a promotion at work will reveal to you the
things that you need to work on. A bad test grade in school will make
you realize that you must study harder and also make changes to
your study habits or routine. If you fail a lift at the gym, you’ll know
that you need to improve your nutrition, devote more time to
recovery, or alter your workout program altogether. That old proverb
“whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is generally true.
This is the mindset that I brought to Lori’s cancer diagnosis in
early 2020, and it was a mindset that I was able to maintain through
months of quarantining during the coronavirus pandemic that
followed. Yes, I was stuck at home, but I decided that was good. It
gave me time to solidify my routines and habits. I had an opportunity
to home-school my kids and to help them with their education. It
provided me an opportunity to write this book. No matter how bad
the situation seemed, I was determined to not consider myself a
victim of those circumstances. Instead, I was going to come out of it
all better than ever, and my kids were going to be smarter when they
returned to school and more skilled when they went back to their
Brazilian jiu-jitsu classes.
When things seem dire, the easy road is accepting a victim’s
role. Don’t take it. Instead, take control of your mindset and focus on
the things that you can control. Be disciplined in your implementation
of a new, positive attitude.

FAILURE IS INEVITABLE
The world that we live in is chaotic and unpredictable. The
coronavirus pandemic certainly proved that. Even the world’s best
super forecasters are wrong the majority of the time. What does all
of this mean for those of us who aren’t exceptionally skilled at
predicting the future? It means we are bound to be wrong a lot of the
time. Even some of the world’s greatest leaders—Alexander the
Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Winston Churchill—all made major
mistakes during their lives and during their periods of command.
Because the world we live in is often crazy and unpredictable, the
best way to learn is simply through trial and error. That’s the
message that author Tim Harford shares in his book Adapt: Why
Success Always Starts with Failure.
Think of your ideas as different species. Then consider what we
now know about natural selection and evolution. Survival of the
fittest means that many of your ideas are going to fail. But it also
means that the best ideas and the best adaptations of failed ideas
will rise to the top. Those ideas and adaptations represent success,
or at least the pathway to it. When marketing executives create
social media campaigns, for example, they typically start by selecting
10 to 20 images to use, but they anticipate that the majority of those
images won’t be effective. They’re only looking for a few standouts
that make an impact, which will guide them toward understanding
what visuals to use going forward.
Just remember, this process of change and adaptation never
stops. The moment you think you can stop is likely the moment that
your competition will pass you by.
If you want to improve, you must be open to feedback. Peter
Palchinsky, a brilliant engineer who worked for the now-defunct
Soviet Union, conceived of three principles related to failure and
adaptation, which Harford outlines in his aforementioned book.
Those three principles are:
1. Seek out new ideas and try new things.
2. Make your first attempts small when you can, so you can
survive if they don’t succeed.
3. Seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes.
These may seem simple and they may sound like common
sense. But when you factor in ego and other human biases, these
mantras are anything but simple. If you wish to be successful, you
must always keep an open mind and you must be tolerable to new
ideas and honest feedback. Failure to do those things will likely lead
to failure overall.
 If you’re still not convinced, read Why Smart Executives Fail:
And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes by Sydney
Finkelstein. As the author explains, very smart and highly
accomplished individuals fail—and so do the organizations that they
run—precisely because their egos get in the way. They fail to take
action when presented with evidence that contradicts their previously
held beliefs, and they purposefully avoid seeking out advice and
perspectives that may challenge their views. In short, they are
stubborn and believe that their views are always correct.
Starting out small is something that many people struggle with,
simply because they’re enthusiastic to get started and they’ve been
conditioned to believe that the only way to succeed is to do
everything that they can. Yes, they’ll eventually need to put in all of
their effort, but it’s best to ramp up to that, especially if you have no
prior experience in what you are attempting and therefore no
knowledge that it’s the right approach to take. If you experiment on
large-scale projects that take up most of your time and resources,
you are likely setting yourself up for failure that will be too great to
recover from.

FEEDBACK & LEARNING

While you can learn from failure at any time, there are points along
your journey to success when failure can be more beneficial. In
particular, failure that occurs quickly—and in the beginning—can
often be a better teaching mechanism than failure that occurs over a
longer period of time. “Your first try will be wrong,” says Aza Raskin,
the creative lead at Mozilla Corporation, which developed the Firefox
internet browser. “Budget and design for it.”
Think of golf, specifically putting. Obviously, the goal is to get the
ball into the hole in as few strokes as possible. But think of how
much more difficult it would be to make a putt if you couldn’t see how
the ball rolled after you hit it. Now imagine that you can suddenly see
what the ball does. You can see how quickly or slowly it rolls,
whether it turns to the right or the left, or not at all. Your next putt
becomes much easier. Instant feedback like that can have a similar
effect in business. Immediate (or quick) results allow you to make
better decisions earlier in the process. As authors Richard Thaler
and Cass Sunstein write in their book Nudge: “Learning is most likely
if people get immediate, clear feedback after each try.”
In particular, the human brain needs immediate feedback to
solve problems. It takes a lot for human beings to deviate from
homeostasis, so if we don’t receive clear direction or guidance based
on our current actions, we’re likely to continuing acting in the same
manner that we always have. This is known as the status quo bias.
When tasked with having to make a choice, people are generally
more inclined to hit the easy button.
Cognitive dissonance is another bias that can interfere with our
ability to properly respond to failure. After making a mistake or failing
in some way, your initial response may include thoughts like, “I’m a
failure.” But in the next instant, you may think, “I made a mistake.
Now I need to move on and correct it.” Those two thoughts are at
conflict with one another, and the challenge is to condition yourself to
hold onto the second thought and to dismiss the first. Ego and
general stubbornness can play a role in making this more difficult
than it seems. As Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and
Slow, human beings are averse to loss, which means we are more
likely to hold onto a bad idea (or one that has failed) thinking that we
can turn things around. Doing so prevents us from acknowledging
that we failed. But remember that failure is sometimes necessary to
achieve success.
You must also be careful of another bias: hedonic editing, which
Harford outlines in Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.
This is the desire to want to merge the good with the bad. For
example, if you make two financial investments and one gains
$5,000 but the other loses $2,500, you may say that you still came
out ahead, that you’re up $2,500. This lessens the emotional impact
of the failure, but it also makes it harder to learn the proper lessons
and to improve from the mistakes that led to that failure. Businesses
can make this mistake as well, especially those that create multiple
products or variations of the same product. If they group all of those
products together into a single sales figure, business owners will
have difficulty analyzing the ones that aren’t delivering results, since
their numbers will be skewed by the ones that are selling. I have
trained my team at RP to pay close attention to the company
products that add minimal value. This allows us to devote more
resources to the ones that are providing the best returns.

ITERATE
Those who have experience with start-up businesses are likely to
know the term MVP. It stands for Minimum Viable Product. As
explained by Eric Ries in the book The Lean Startup, an MVP is a
product that you may not be 100 percent happy with, but that allows
you to validate your hypotheses. It is likely low risk and it should
represent a minimal amount of financial investment. The purpose of
an MVP is to gather feedback from consumers. You may know that
there are areas in which you can improve the product and that there
are challenges to overcome, but an MVP allows you to test your
ideas and, more importantly, to iterate and improve based on the
feedback that you receive.
To continually iterate is to acknowledge that what you’re doing
now is better than what you did before. But, it also comes with the
understanding that what you’re doing now won’t be as good as what
you are likely to do in the future. You want to embrace sending your
ideas out in the world for that real-life feedback. Receiving that
feedback and subsequently iterating based on what you learn is a
tried-and-true formula for positive achievements. “The real measure
of success,” Thomas Edison once said, “is the number of
experiments that can be crowded into twenty-four hours.”
At RP, we followed this strategy by unveiling digital diet
templates in early 2015 that were clunky Excel files. They didn’t look
like much, but they delivered great results. We released them in that
rough-around-the-edges format to make sure that the general
product concept was one that our potential customers would buy and
use. We received great feedback—and our clients achieved
exceptional results—so we iterated in 2016, improving the original
formulas to produce even better results. Still, the templates weren’t
polished in their appearance. In 2017, we iterated again, this time to
improve the look and feel of the product, but even as we did that, we
knew that we would soon replace those templates with a dynamic
and interactive option offered through the RP Diet App, which we
were building based on all of the user feedback we had received to
that point. Today, we continue to iterate along the way through
constant software development.
Consider the social media platform Facebook. For more than 15
years, Facebook has refined its approach and evolved its offerings
based on data that it has gathered from the feedback provided by
millions of its members. Similarly, Gmail (email by Google) for years
was branded as “beta,” even though millions of users had already
signed on to use it.
Perhaps the best example of iteration is Apple’s iPhone. Today,
the smartphone can do seemingly everything under the sun, but
remarkably, the first generation of the phone was lacking options as
basic as a “copy” function. That goes to show how much Apple has
committed to iteration and it helps to explain why and how the
company has become so successful. If you wait until your product is
perfect, you may miss the chance to capitalize on what you’ve
created. But if you take a chance and roll out something that still has
the potential to be better, you can gather invaluable feedback to help
you improve it.
While recording a podcast, I was once asked where I thought RP
would be five years in the future. My answer was only that it would
be remarkably better than what it was at that time. I knew that we
would commit ourselves to constantly improving little by little. That is
how you become successful. You constantly seek the little
improvements and you stay on that path. The incremental changes
compound themselves over time. You might not even realize that
progress is being made on a daily basis, but over time “little by little”
eventually becomes a lot and the changes can be drastic.

CULTURE
Creating a culture at work that supports learning and improvement
via feedback—in other words, a culture that acknowledges that
failures are part of the process—can enhance businesses’ ultimate
success. It also stands to reason that a culture dictated by indignant
leaders who berate those who have made mistakes can be
counterproductive. In such a scenario, it’s not unreasonable to
imagine people trying to hide or cover up for mistakes if the
consequences of making them are so severe.
That being said, exceptions should be made after severe
mistakes, ones that jeopardize safety or lead to sizeable losses in
revenue. But even in those cases, a successful leader will own the
mistakes of his or her colleagues and will look to make procedural
changes or fix training protocols to ensure those mistakes aren’t
made again. In their book In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters and
Robert Waterman write: “Tolerance for failure is a very specific part
of the excellent company culture—and that lesson comes directly
from the top. Champions have to make lots of tries and consequently
suffer some failures or the organization won’t learn.”
More than 20 years after that book’s publication, successful
executives still acknowledge this to be true. “I make mistakes all the
time and talk about them openly with people up and down our
hierarchy,” said Dave Finocchio, the former CEO of Bleacher Report.
“It fosters a culture where people should feel comfortable critiquing
themselves honestly.”
The U.S. Air Force serves as a great example of the successes
that can come from understanding that mistakes happen and that
accomplishments are created by the lessons learned from those
mistakes. As Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool chronicle in Peak:
Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, the U.S. Air Force
created its Top Gun program to remedy its struggles in air combat
during the Vietnam War. Pilots in the program would engage in
training combat scenarios with their instructors, then conduct
“postmortem” analyses to go over why specific decisions were made
and key factors or details that were missed. That immediate
feedback allowed those pilots to make positive strides right away.
Just how successful has the program been? The numbers tell the
story. During the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, two enemy aircraft
were shot down for every one U.S. fighter jet that was shot down. By
the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, however, American pilots
were shooting down more than 30 enemy fighter jets for every one
U.S. aircraft that was shot down.
TOO MUCH FAILURE
It’s certainly clear by now that failure can lead to success, but like
everything in life, too much of any one thing can be problematic.
When it comes to failure, that can take the form of too many small
failures—they do add up over time—or too much failure all in one fell
swoop. Failures can be helpful, so long as lessons are learned from
them. When those lessons aren’t realized—usually because too
much ego is involved—the failures will begin to add up, sometimes
repeating themselves. At that point, you and your venture could be
doomed.
A big component to success is being able to handle the
dichotomy of too much and too little ego. Those who are successful
tend to have an ego, but they use it to funnel themselves in the right
direction. Their ego drives them to be successful; it fuels their hard
work and discipline, but it does not overcome them. It does not blind
them to learning from their own mistakes and being able to pivot
accordingly. You must be able to balance that dichotomy, and as you
mature it should get easier to spot when things cross the line. Aim to
be self-aware and honest with yourself. Having a good team or
support system in place can go a long way in helping with this, since
those teammates will let you know when you begin to cross the line
and when your ego is too active in the decision-making process.
It isn’t always easy to make the right choices or decisions. A
study of U.S. judges presiding over parole hearings, as outlined in
Roy Baumeister and John Tierney’s Willpower: Rediscovering the
Greatest Human Strength, provides necessary proof. According to
the study, judges were more lenient or more generous with granting
parole when they were well-rested or immediately after they had
eaten lunch. Conversely, they were less lenient as they grew tired or
hungry. There’s a takeaway from this study that can help everyone. If
you’re forced to make a tough decision, aim to do it in the morning,
when you’re well rested, or shortly after you’ve eaten, when your
blood sugar (and energy level) is at its highest. Just be careful of a
scenario in which many difficult choices must be made at the same
time. In those circumstances, it’s not uncommon for decision-makers
to fall into the status quo bias, especially as they begin to feel
mentally taxed from the difficult decisions that they’ve already had to
make.

REAL WORLD VIEW

Failure is simply a part of life. It’s also a part of most great success
stories. Any successful person’s biography will be strewn with stories
about hardships, mistakes, and failures. Take Shoe Dog by Phil
Knight, which provides an insider’s glimpse at how Nike was created.
Regularly throughout the book—seemingly at least once in each
chapter—the reader learns that for quite a long while the company
was hanging on by a thread. Mistakes were made and friendships
were lost. Yet, in the end, Nike and its “Just Do It” slogan are
prevalent throughout sports all around the world.
There are plenty of other stories that reveal the early-career
failures of today’s well known celebrities or successful artists.
Stephen King’s first book idea was rejected more than 30 times. At
one point in her life J.K. Rowling (creator of Harry Potter) was a
single mother on government assistance. Even Walt Disney was
once deemed to “lack imagination.” We all know how Disney
rebounded from that evaluation.
The key is not avoiding mistakes altogether or shying away from
failure. Instead, what makes people successful is their ability to
weather the storm with the right mindset. “I understand they happen,
and they are to be expected,” Navy SEAL Dan Luna says of
mistakes. “Often, I will separate it logically and emotionally to
examine the setback or mistake.”
“It’s always easier to blame others or external factors when
something doesn’t go the way you want it,” adds Annie Thorisdottir.
“However, it’s crucial to look inwards first, see if something that you
are in control of could have altered the outcome of the situation, and
devise a plan on how to make sure this does not repeat itself in the
future.”
Success does not happen overnight. Instead, it is cultivated by
the repetition of high-level effort and redirection when failure occurs.
At the end of the day, the act of success requires a whole lot of work
—work that is done in an uncertain, always-changing environment,
and work that is done without any guarantee of accomplishment. In
fact, that work only guarantees at least some, occasional failure.
This path can become exhausting, and if you’re going to travel
down it long enough to see eventual success, you’ll need ways to
shed this fatigue and to recharge your pursuit.
 PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE
Make a list of your three biggest failures to date and what, in
hindsight, you might have done differently. This exercise will help
train your mind to connect mistakes or failures with the lessons that
can be gleaned from them. You can then use the information that
you obtain from that analysis to set new goals and sub-goals that will
keep you motivated.
 CHAPTER 7

RECHARGE

“Energy, not time, is the fundamental

currency of high performance.”
—JIM LOEHR
BEING SUCCESSFUL IS NOT EASY. Moreover, it can be draining.
Even a person who enjoys that struggle and enjoys working
exceptionally hard toward a specific goal can push too hard for too
long and burn out. Fortunately, there are steps that can (and should)
be taken to prevent this. First, acknowledge your limits and the need
to recharge. Anyone who’s looking to achieve success must realize
that keeping their foot on the gas pedal will eventually leave their
tank empty. In the quest for success, the notion of burning the candle
from both ends is a legitimate risk. By taking the proper steps to
recharge yourself, you can avoid the pitfalls of burnout.

RECHARGING PHYSICALLY THROUGH NUTRITION

Nutrition is a fundamental key to recharging. If you want to perform
at your best, you need to dial in your nutrition habits. A Ferrari owner
would never fuel up with regular unleaded gasoline. They’d only
select super premium at the pumps, knowing that their sports car
won’t perform the way it should at 200-mile-per-hour speeds if its
gas tank is full of low-quality fuel. Your body and mind work the same
way.
A well-balanced diet is the goal. Achieving that requires an
understanding of six nutritional priorities for healthy eating. (For a
deeper dive into performance nutrition, refer to The Renaissance
Diet 2.0).

Nutritional Priority #1 – Calorie Balance: One key to being

successful is longevity. Very few people become successful
overnight. The longer you are alive, the better your chances of
finding success. Calorie balance plays the biggest role in your
nutritional strides for better longevity, since it has the largest impact
on your weight. You definitely don’t want to overeat, which puts you
in a caloric surplus, but you don’t want to under-eat, either. As
doctors Mike Israetel, Jen Case, and Trevor Pfaendtner explain in
Understanding Healthy Eating: A Science-Based Guide to How Your
Diet Affects Your Health, maintaining a healthy bodyweight is a
critical step in establishing longevity and boosting your overall
health.
For evidence, look at offensive and defensive linemen in the
NFL. They know that to be the best and to perform at an elite level,
they need to be a certain size. However, once they retire, most of
those linemen look to lose a significant amount of weight. They know
that they can’t continue to be 300-plus pounds and expect to live
long and healthy lives.

Nutritional Priority #2 – Food Quality: The best way to maintain a

healthy bodyweight while consuming fewer calories is by eating high-
quality foods. If you focus your diet only on the food choices outlined
in the Brain Food section of Chapter 3, you’ll find it almost
impossible to overeat. This means consuming mostly lean proteins,
fruits/vegetables, healthy fats, and healthy carbs like whole grains. If
you need help controlling your caloric intake, focus on eating less
junk food. By eliminating fast food and regular soda (some diet soda
is ok), you will make it easier on yourself to lower your calories,
which will get you to a healthier bodyweight.

Nutritional Priority #3 – Macronutrients: When you eat for health,

first and foremost you must focus on the amount of protein in your
diet. Most people don’t eat enough protein, but this is easily
corrected. As long as you don’t have any pre-existing medical
conditions, eating more protein than you need is much less of a
problem than not eating enough of it. In fact, increasing your protein
intake will likely help you to retain more lean tissue while shedding
unwanted body fat. And because protein is satiating, eating more of
it will leave you feeling less hungry throughout the day. Beyond that,
so long as you’re consuming a healthy number of calories each day,
it generally doesn’t matter how many total grams of carbohydrates or
grams of fat you are eating. In other words, if you control your caloric
intake and you consume enough protein, your split between
carbohydrates and fats matters much less. (The opposite is true if
you are eating for optimal body composition. But in this scenario,
we’re only outlining the best ways to eat for general health.)

Nutritional Priority #4 – Nutrient Timing: When you’re eating for

health, the timing of when you eat barely matters. Eating a
regimented diet of high-quality foods and sticking to a healthy caloric
intake each day are the most important steps. In other words, eating
two or three larger meals a day is no better or worse than choosing
to eat five or six smaller meals. This is great news for entrepreneurs
and busy individuals, as it provides more flexibility for your meal
schedule.

Nutritional Priority #5 – Hydration: While obesity is a legitimate

concern in the United States, dehydration is not. If you’re making
sure to drink when you feel thirsty, you’re generally on the right track.
But a good way to gauge your level of hydration is to monitor the
color of your urine. If it’s mostly clear, you’re drinking enough fluids
throughout the day. (Please note: those who are training for and
competing in athletic or endurance events will require a more
rigorous review of their hydration.)

Nutritional Priority #6 – Supplements: Too many people think that

supplements are magical pills that will boost their training or weight
loss results or their chances of success. They’re not. If you eat a
well-balanced diet, you generally don’t need to take any
supplements whatsoever. But because we live busy lives, it’s not
always possible to eat well-balanced meals all the time. In those
instances, supplementing with a basic multivitamin and fish oil can fill
in the holes. They can act as an insurance policy if you do have
lapses in your diet from time to time. Other items, like protein
powders, protein bars, or ready-to-drink shakes are worthy
supplement options, too. They’re not mandatory, of course, but their
added convenience can be a blessing for many of us living busy
lives.

The most important lesson about nutrition for general health—

and as a recharge—is to stick to the fundamentals. Claims that
promise the world or seem like a quick and easy fix should be met
with skepticism, since there’s no evidence to support that those
magic cures actually work. For more detailed insight into nutrition for
general health, read the aforementioned book Understanding
Healthy Eating. Just remember, consistently sticking to a solid
nutrition plan is what matters most.

RECHARGING PHYSICALLY THROUGH EXERCISE

The same basic principles of good nutrition also apply to exercise.
Magical exercises that boost your productivity or decrease that
“stubborn belly fat,” like all those television commercials and
magazine advertisements promise, simply do not exist. What does
provide results, however, is long-term consistency and dedication to
regular exercise. Finding an activity that you enjoy can go a long way
toward making those two things very attainable.
Strength and resistance training with weights has been shown to
offer many health benefits, including reduced likelihood of
osteoporosis and increased overall quality of life in a person’s later
years. And, best of all, effective, life-changing exercise doesn’t
require extensive time commitments. A few short sessions per week
might be all that is necessary to improve your general health. You
don’t need fancy equipment or exercises either. Just stick to basic
compound movements like squats, lunges, presses, and rows. Even
better, convince a buddy to join you or join a class. That will provide
some extra accountability, which will improve your chances of
sticking with it.
Through exercise—especially exercise that pushes you outside
of your comfort zone—you will not only strengthen your body, you’ll
condition and strengthen your mind. You’ll improve your mental
toughness by routinely working through situations where you feel
uncomfortable. And when you combine that exercise with a healthy
diet and good eating habits, you’ll be taking the necessary steps to
recharge. Stephen Covey, who wrote The 7 Habits of Highly
Effective People, likens these actions to sharpening a saw. He
reminds us that to perform at our best, we must take care of
ourselves physically. Exercise and nutrition are two key components
of that.

RECHARGING MENTALLY
Many of the self-improvement books dedicated to willpower and self-
control tout the importance and the power of mindfulness and
meditation. If the thought of meditation makes you roll your eyes,
you’re not alone. For the longest time I took a similar stance on the
significance of meditation. But in all my reading on the general topic
of self-improvement, I continued to discover that meditation plays an
important part in the lives of many successful individuals. Eventually,
I decided that I needed to give it an honest try for myself.
As I discovered, meditation is a great tool for reducing the
amount of stress in your life. Sitting quietly and just being aware
helps you to become more in tune with your thoughts and emotions.
When you consistently practice mindfulness, you gain the ability to
slow things down. That provides clarity and minimizes the impact
that our emotions can have on the decisions that we make.
Meditation can help people avoid the common pitfalls of cognitive
biases. In fact, mediation has even been said to help increase
creativity and the brain’s efficiency.
Plenty of formal evidence exists to support the practice of
meditation. We should all take time out of our days to be mindful.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to meditate in a formal
way. If you’re skeptical about meditation, just do something that
allows time for quiet reflection.
If the idea of structured meditation—or even quiet mindfulness—
doesn’t excite you, consider keeping a journal and writing down key
thoughts or ideas that you have each day. In fact, Martin Seligman,
in his book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness
and Well-being, suggests journaling three blessings on a daily basis.
When you focus on things for which you are grateful, you find that
you gain a better appreciation for life in general. Gratitude is linked to
a greater sense of well-being, and that improved state of being can
improve overall performance.
During the quarantine period that we all lived through in 2020, I
took a similar approach. Sure, I could have dwelled on the negative
aspects of it all, thinking that I was stuck at home. Instead, I chose to
be thankful and to cultivate feelings of gratitude. In my case, the
quarantine provided me more time to spend with my family and more
time to dedicate to my health. I made a point to be grateful and
thankful that Amazon deliveries kept a steady stream of new books
arriving on my front doorstep, and that meal-prep companies like
Trifecta Nutrition could deliver exactly what I needed for food so that
I only went to the grocery store if I chose to. When you search for it,
you can find the good in things.

RELAXATION
Journaling, as mentioned above, represents one of many outlets for
“passive recovery,” a term that my colleague Dr. James Hoffmann
has coined for ways that people can recover after rigorous training
sessions. Of course, passive recovery can also apply to recovering
from hard work and the extended periods of discipline that are
needed to be successful in any endeavor. Additional examples of
passive recovery tactics include the following: reading; watching
television or a movie; listening to music; spending time with friends,
family, and pets; playing a musical instrument; practicing some forms
of yoga; or cooking and enjoying a good meal. (If you do choose to
watch TV, don’t get stuck in the habit of watching too much of it and
putting off the other items listed in this chapter.) The key is that you
allocate some time each day for you to unwind.
Those passive recovery techniques, as well as others that exist,
can provide numerous health benefits. Among their many positive
impacts, those activities can lower your heart rate and blood
pressure; slow your breathing and decrease your metabolic stress;
improve your overall mood; decrease anxiety; and lower perceived
levels of fatigue.
 The moral here is that periods of relaxation (in whatever form
appeals most to you) are crucial if you want to be feeling your best
and ready to tackle the next day’s tasks. We cannot burn the candle
from both ends; the more time that you can devote to relaxation
(while still accomplishing all that you need to), the better off you will
be. If you find it difficult to relax because you need to continue
working toward success, remember that that’s just your ego talking.
You need to take time to relax and recharge. There are times, of
course, when you need to push yourself harder than you ever have
before, but those times must also be balanced by periods of
relaxation and recovery. If you never let off the gas pedal, you’ll
eventually wear yourself out.

SLEEP
Movies and media suggest that those who are successful, especially
at the highest level, work while others are sleeping. They’re up at
4:00 a.m. and they’re sleeping only a few hours each night. For
most, that’s not true. There is a fine line between working hard
enough and long enough to accomplish your goals and also
prioritizing yourself and taking care of yourself, which includes
getting a proper amount of sleep. Not allowing your body to recharge
impacts your mind, which also impacts your results—no matter the
endeavor. As doctors James Hoffmann, Mike Israetel, and Melissa
Davis outline in their book Recovering from Training, sleep is vital to
success. “Sleep is a major regulator of autonomic balance,” they
write. “Sleep is thought to restore immunological and endocrine
function, increase parasympathetic activity, and enhance memory
consolidation, among other benefits. Larger amounts of growth
hormone can also be released during sleep than during wakefulness,
and this is thought to aid in tissue regeneration.”
Even though sleep has been proven to offer all of these benefits,
it’s still overlooked by many people because they believe they are
too busy. But being “too busy” most often means that you’re not
prioritizing the right things. And by not prioritizing the right tasks,
you’re working inefficiently, which limits the amount of time that you
have to devote to everything else in your life. Inevitably, people are
not prioritizing the time that they need for relaxation. The average
person needs between 7 or 8 hours of sleep per night. But you also
need to account for the time spent trying to fall asleep. If you stay
disciplined and force yourself to go to bed at a reasonable time,
you’ll soon discover the difference that more sleep can make.

DAILY ROUTINES
Getting a head start on the day is generally beneficial, but there’s no
mandatory wake-up time that every successful person adheres to. It
really is a personal preference. You have to figure out what works
best for you, given your schedule and demands.
For me, I’ve found that I work best when I can be up a bit earlier
than the rest of my family. It gives me time by myself when I can
focus on my own needs before the needs of my family come into
play. The same is true for social media. If I’m awake early enough—
when not many other people are up and actively posting on
Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter—there are fewer distractions that I
have to deal with and I can better focus on what needs to get done.
Aristotle once said, “It is well to be up before daybreak, for such
habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom.” That premise is
explored and substantiated by authors Robin Sharma (in The 5 AM
Club) and Hal Elrod (in The Miracle Morning). If you develop a solid
morning routine, for example, you can easily fit in exercise and
reflection, as well as complete other important tasks, before other
obligations in your life pull you in different directions.
Elrod outlines key principles or activities that make up a
productive morning using the acronym SAVERS (Silence,
Affirmations, Visualization, Exercise, Reading, and Scribing).
Similarly, Sharma introduces a 20-20-20 plan, where a person
devotes twenty minutes to exercise, twenty minutes to reflecting, and
twenty minutes to education. Both are effective strategies for making
sure those important activities and principles are incorporated into
your morning routine. But it’s important to note that these general
principles can be applied to various lifestyles, including those in
which early morning wake-ups are not the norm. The key is to set
aside time for yourself each day—time to focus on improving
yourself through exercise, through reflecting or meditation, and
through a commitment to education. If you can calm your mind and
better control your emotions, you’ll be better at responding to
external factors that are outside of your control.
Through these dedicated tasks you are also working on
strengthening your personal willpower. It takes discipline to get up a
bit earlier, to push yourself physically, and to focus on steadying your
mind. If you can harness the benefits that come from these actions,
you will continually improve. The differences may not be felt
overnight, but marginal improvements that compound over weeks,
months, and years can be powerful.
Here’s how I structure my morning:
5:00 a.m. – Wake up and aim to do some type of cardio activity,
such as rowing, running or incline walking on my treadmill.
5:30 a.m. – Create my to-do list for the day, make notes/ journal,
and examine my upcoming schedule.
6:00 a.m. – Shower and eat breakfast.
6:30 a.m. – Read at least fifty pages. (This takes thirty to sixty
minutes to complete, depending on the complexity of the book and
how many notes I am taking.)
7:30 a.m. – Be ready for my family to wake up, so I can help get
their breakfast ready.
I typically go to bed around 10:00 at night. It takes discipline to
try to get seven hours of sleep, but I have experimented with
different times and routines, and I have found that when I commit to
this particular schedule I typically feel my best. You may not
experience immediate success by following this same routine, and
that’s okay. You must adjust it to fit your schedule. The main
takeaway is to spend some time focusing on yourself and aiming to
improve, at least a little bit, every single day.
You want to find a balance: working as hard as you need to
without overdoing it. Pushing yourself and constantly making
important decisions is draining. But if you can devote some time to
focus on yourself—even if it seems next to impossible—you will
emerge more productive. Remember, you must fix yourself before
you can fix the world.
CONTINUED EDUCATION
As we covered earlier in this chapter, you can recharge by dedicating
time to relaxation and activities that take your mind off of the tasks
that occupy your time when you’re in work mode. It can also be
achieved by reading self-improvement books, which I experienced
firsthand during the years that I spent learning how I could better
myself as a person and business owner. (Incidentally, those years—
and the hundreds of books read—became the research for this
book.) As I saw for myself, the process of learning how you can
improve yourself is a positive feedback loop. The more you learn and
pick up new ideas from brilliant writers of the past and present, the
more you can use those ideas to better yourself and your business.
You don’t have to read a book a week or commit to anything too
crazy, but you are likely missing out on opportunities to improve if
you disregard the significance of reading books dedicated to
bettering yourself. Even reading fiction can be beneficial—it can help
lower stress levels and offer new perspectives.
Continued education doesn’t only take the form of reading. It
also includes listening to podcasts or attending seminars, either in
person or online. Even keeping a daily journal can further your
education, so long as you’re keeping tabs on what you did well each
day and what didn’t go well. By chronicling those achievements and
those setbacks—and by reviewing your journal with some regularity
—you can learn how to be more successful in the future. All of these
actions are investments in your future self, which offer incredible
returns.

REAL WORLD VIEW

The principles outlined in this chapter may make sense or look good
on paper, but if you’re questioning how necessary they really are,
consider that some of the most successful people in their fields
implement them on a regular basis. Annie Thorisdottir, for example,
prioritizes her diet and her sleep schedule. “The desire to be better is
what drives me every day,” she says, “and not eating right or getting
enough sleep means not fully committing to becoming the best
version of myself. I will not do that to myself. Proper nutrition and
plenty of sleep is always a priority.”
Similarly, Coach Bakich understands that he needs some
downtime throughout the year, since recruiting and off-season
training are a full-time commitment even before the season starts. “I
take a few weeks off in the month of December for vacations and
family time,” he acknowledges. “That’s a good recharge.”
And even when she’s on the road touring with her band, guitarist
Nita Strauss still finds time for herself. “To me the best recharge is
just a little simple self-care, taking a day or two to indulge in a little
lazy time,” she says. “Watch a show you like, sleep in, take a bath.
The emails might pile up, but you’ll escape burnout.”
 PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE
Commit to bettering yourself by introducing new physical and
mental activities into your daily and weekly routines. Whether
you decide to start a comprehensive fitness regimen—or intensify an
existing one—or you just begin walking a mile or two in the mornings
or evenings during the week, this added (or new) exercise will not
only improve your overall health, it will provide a nice balance to the
strenuous work that occupies your typical work day. The same is true
for your commitment to read more or to listen to educational
podcasts.
 CHAPTER 8

CONCLUSIONS

“People who succeed have momentum. The

more they succeed, the more they want to
succeed, and the more they find a way to
succeed.”
—TONY ROBBINS
IF YOU WERE TO MAGICALLY OFFER a group of people six-pack
abs or millions of dollars, I guarantee you that the vast majority of
them would raise their hand to accept. But if you were to explain to
that group of people what it takes to actually achieve washboard abs
or to acquire millions of dollars, you’d be surprised how many people
would lower their hands.
I’ve learned that people are always looking for a secret to
success or a way to bypass a lot of the hard work. What I have
discovered about the secret to success, however, is that there is no
secret. Instead, it requires a relentless commitment to the basics.
The sooner you learn and believe that, the faster you will achieve
your own success (so long as you put in the hard work to get there).
Take the quest for six-pack abs. Quick fixes, fads, and gimmicks
won’t get you there. The only thing that will is a commitment to work
hard every single day for months, sometimes years. That is the
secret to success.
The funny thing about success, especially in business, is that the
people or companies that ultimately prove to be successful need a
bit of momentum to get started. The fundamental principles outlined
in this book can serve as your own boost of momentum. Once you
achieve some preliminary success, it’s important that you capitalize
on it and use that as the driver to keep going. Putting in the time and
the necessary effort won’t be easy, but a longterm commitment is
required if you want to maximize your potential success.
You’re going to need to start with the foundation of a tenacious
work ethic. Without it, the other principles outlined in this book won’t
amount to much. You can have the best ideas in the world, but
without acting on them—in other words, without injecting them with a
lot of hard work—they won’t deliver success. Once you understand
that hard work is paramount, you’ll need to focus on what you can
control. Sometimes you won’t have the power to change the hand
that you’re dealt, but you can change how you respond to it. In doing
so, you will empower yourself, and you’ll learn the best course of
action to overcome obstacles and to achieve success.
Throughout the entire process, a positive mindset and self-
efficacy is crucial. This way of thinking, knowing that you can
influence your outcomes via hard work, is what leads to personal
growth. Whether you’re an athlete or a businessperson, your
mindset—and the actions that you take based on how you perceive
the world around you—gives you the ability to influence outcomes.
Assert your discipline to help you win the small, daily battles. Those
will compound over the weeks, months, and years ahead. If you
consistently create the right habits, you will slowly transform into a
new (better) person.
You must also know your overall purpose. That will help you to
push through the hard days when things go wrong and you find
yourself questioning if all the hard work is really worth it. When your
“why” is stronger than the struggle, you know you are on the right
path. But make no mistake, you are going to struggle along the way.
You will fail at times. Understanding this at the beginning and
focusing on your sense of purpose will be your guide, keeping you
on the right path to overcome these obstacles. You must also be
prepared to learn from your mistakes. In doing so, you will grow and
improve—and you’ll be one step closer to success.
The fundamental nature of success’s requisite hard work creates
a dichotomy. It’s easy to think that to be successful a person only
needs to work hard. While hard work is absolutely necessary, being
successful over the long term also requires a balance between work
ethic and the willingness (and commitment) to recharge. You have to
take proper care of your mind and your body if you want to maintain
that necessary work ethic. And when you recharge, especially when
you focus that time on self-improvement, you raise the ceiling of your
potential success.
For my wife and me, cancer did not define our lives. It did not
define our family. Instead, we changed our mindsets. We focused on
being more optimistic, and we chose to focus only on the things that
we could control. These were key factors that allowed us to get
through Lori’s battle with breast cancer, from the initial shock of the
diagnosis through the surgical stage and the months of
chemotherapy that followed. It would have been easy to play the
victim card, especially when we, like much of the rest of the world,
were forced to quarantine for months due to the coronavirus
pandemic.
Yes, we were dealt a bad hand in 2020, but my wife and I
refused to let it define us. Instead, we used the principles outlined in
this book to make the most of it. The fundamental shift that we made
in our mindset—to become more grateful for the little things and to
focus on what we could control (instead of all of the uncertainty in
the world)—allowed us to overcome the hardest battle that we had
ever faced.
Success isn’t relegated only to athletics or business careers.
That lesson was made very clear to me in early 2020. Fortunately,
the fundamental habits that are necessary for success in business or
athletics are equally transferable to any facet of life. If you desire
success, these are the principles that you must adopt and the habits
that you must create. In doing so, you maximize your potential to
achieve it.
 RECOMMENDED
READING

AS I WROTE THIS training guide for success, the following books

provided inspiration. Several of them are referenced numerous times
throughout the chapters, while others are only briefly mentioned.
Regardless of the prominence of their role in this book, all are worth
a read and all have contributed to my own success as a business
owner, as well as my own personal growth as a husband, father, and
coach.

13 Things Mentally Strong Parents Don’t Do

Amy Morin

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

Tim Harford

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Kathryn Schulz

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras

Choice or Chance: Understanding Your Locus of Control

and Why It Matters
Stephen Nowicki

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and

Purpose
Tony Hsieh

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Daniel H. Pink

Ego Is the Enemy

Ryan Holiday

Emotional Intelligence 2.0

Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves

Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of

Human Performance
Alex Hutchinson

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose

for You and Your Team
Simon Sinek, David Mead, and Peter Docker

Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness

and Well-being
Martin E. P. Seligman

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

Jack Weatherford
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and
Others Don’t
Jim Collins

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Angela Duckworth

In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run

Companies
Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr.

Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

Martin E. P. Seligman

Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the

Business of Life
James Kerr

Man’s Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Carol S. Dweck

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and

Happiness

Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

Outliers: The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

David Epstein
Recovering from Training: How to Manage Fatigue to
Maximize Performance
James Hoffmann, Mike Israetel, and Melissa Davis

Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable

Tim S. Grover

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

Phil Knight

Stumbling on Happiness
Daniel Gilbert

The 5AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.

Robin Sharma

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in

Personal Change
Stephen R. Covey

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant

Gratification
Paul Roberts

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use

Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful
Businesses
Eric Ries

The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of

America’s Wealthy
Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko

The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret

Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM)
Hal Elrod
The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials
into Triumph
Ryan Holiday

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and

Business
Charles Duhigg

The Renaissance Diet 2.0

Mike Israetel, Melissa Davis, Jen Case, and James Hoffmann

The Richest Man in Babylon

George S. Clason

The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary

Athletic Performance
David Epstein

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in

Business, Sports, and Investing
Michael J. Mauboussin

The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228

Dick Couch

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It

Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It
Kelly McGonigal

Think and Grow Rich

Napoleon Hill

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman
Understanding Healthy Eating: A Science-Based Guide to
How Your Diet Affects Your Health
Mike Israetel, Jen Case, and Trevor Pfaendtner

Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from
Their Mistakes
Sydney Finkelstein

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I MUST BEGIN BY thanking my wife, Lori Shaw, for inspiring me to

write this book. Even as she battled through breast cancer this year,
she always put her family first. Her strength—both physical and
emotional—as well as her mindset and her character continue to fill
me with awe. Thank you, Lori, for your unwavering support in my
journey to build a successful fitness company and to write this book.
I also must express sincere gratitude to my parents, who raised
me to value hard work and to understand the importance of doing
the right thing. They have always encouraged and supported me in
the pursuit of my dreams, whether those aspirations were academic,
athletic, or business-focused.
I consider myself to be incredibly fortunate. I have met and
worked alongside a number of impressive individuals. My biggest
mentor, Dr. Mike Israetel, is also one of my best friends and the co-
founder of Renaissance Periodiza-tion (RP). He has constantly
challenged me to reevaluate how I think, and he has been
instrumental in developing my approach to fitness, work, and life.
Without his help and guidance, Renaissance Periodization—and
likely this book—would not exist.
They say that if you are the smartest person in the room, then
you are in the wrong room. Luckily for me, that has never been the
case. I have been constantly surrounded by some of the best and
the brightest individuals in the fitness industry. To all of the RP
coaches, employees, and contractors: thank you for making
Renaissance Periodization what it is today. I couldn’t do it without
you. And thank you to the app engineering team for making the RP
methodology accessible to the masses.
A special thanks to Shaun Tolson, whose expertise and help
editing this book was instrumental to its success. Also, thanks to my
colleague Tiago Faleiro for his feedback and insight after reading
early drafts of every chapter.
Get in the best shape of your life with the
RP Diet App, designed to be your
personal diet coach in your pocket and
all for less than $15/month. The RP Diet
App helps create a custom diet for you
based on your schedule, lifestyle, and
goals. It updates weekly based on your
progress. The RP Diet App has helped
tens of thousands of individuals around
the world reach their health and fitness
goals. Download the app in the Apple
and/or Google Play stores to get started
today!
“ Nick Shaw is the real deal. He’s the perfect balance of caring,
leadership, and information. When you hear what he has to say, you
just want to do it because you know that you are in very good hands.
I believe in Nick and the fundamentals of what he teaches.”
— BOB HARPER, personal trainer, TV personality, and New
York Times best-selling author

NICK SHAW is the co-founder of

Renaissance Periodization (RP), a
multi-million dollar health and fitness
company that has improved the lives of
hundreds of thousands of clients
around the world. His story—and the
story of RP—has appeared in a Forbes
feature story, which chronicled
Renaissance Periodization’s rise from a
small business into an influential tech
company with an industry-leading app
available through Apple’s App Store
and Google Play. Nick has also helped
to coach numerous world-class
athletes, including CrossFit Games champions, international
medalists in weightlifting, UFC fighters, Navy SEALs, and
Olympians.