Adopt the mindset that you can literally do anything you want in life and you willMost people die with the life they settled for. A few don't. Here's what separates them.A limitless mindset that I can do anything changed my life. This idea can bizarrely change your life too. To get to the essence of the idea, I need to take you beyond the cookie-cutter mindset info that is all over social media. A happy-go-lucky view of the world won’t make you successful and wealthy. That’s clickbait. I never used to have a limitless mindset. I was overweight, depressed, hated my 9-5 job, and didn’t want to live anymore. One evening I discovered these “Power Talks” from Tony Robbins. They were recorded in the 90s, long before podcasts existed. Tony sat down with individuals most people hadn’t heard of. The whole point of each talk was to reinforce the idea you can literally do anything you want in life. He interviewed regular people who became astronauts. And spiritual gurus like Deepak Chopra. After the first talk I called bullsh*t on the idea, as you do. But I was bored and had to pass the time on the way to work because I parked an hour away from the office to save $5 in parking fees. After about the 30th Power Talk, a switch flicked in my head. It became obvious to me what Tony was trying to drill into my stubborn brain. I could literally do anything I put my mind to. I didn’t get the inspiration then do nothing. Nope. I went to the staff directory of the 40,000-person bank where I worked. I looked up all the General Managers and Chief-level staff members. I called them on their cell phones out of the blue. And I just assumed I would be working for them in the future. I even told them so. Then I asked for advice on how to skip the line and reach their position. Some of them told me to f*ck off. No joke. But most helped because they admired the total bat sh*t craziness of my approach. I wasn’t just delusional. I risked my job to call them and talk the way I did. One complaint would have ended my career. I eventually got a gig working for one of these Chiefs much sooner than I thought. We’re still friends. And he still thinks I’m crazy. The world wants to place limits on your imagination. It wants you to get on your knees and ask for permission, get more experience, wait your turn, be patient, get underpaid in the name of “that’s what you deserve,” and choose one path and stick to it until retirement. The internet burned this worldview to the ground. AI and social media finished the job. You can now literally do anything you want in life with zero barriers. No one is watching. No one gives a f*ck if you fail. And there are infinite opportunities to replace the current ones you have access to. Let me explain the power of the mindset that you can do anything you want in life. The war hero with a naughty secretJoseph Cyr is a son of a gun. You’re about to see why. In 1951, he got on a ship and headed to the Korean War. He was the ship's sole medical officer, responsible for the health and lives of every man on board. As the war raged, he completed dozens of complex surgeries and saved many people’s lives. Everything from reattaching limbs to cutting open chests to remove bullets. Not a single patient died. Dude was a freaking hero. There was only one problem: “Joseph Cyr” was actually Ferdinand Demara, a high school dropout with absolutely zero medical training. Ferdinand had stolen a real doctor’s credentials, forged some paperwork, and walked onto the ship with a smile. When patients started piling up, he didn’t panic because he had zero medical training. No. At night he read books on how to perform surgeries. The next day he’d perform them. He felt successful because he saved lives. When he returned home, he got busted for not being a real doctor. The public was outraged. “Why’d you do it, man?” His answer was chillingly simple: he just didn’t see why he couldn’t. Ferdinand couldn’t be stuffed waiting 4 years to get a medical degree. He just decided he was a surgeon, so he became one. Before you go and do the same, I must tell you that I don’t suggest you become a fake doctor. That’s not the point. The point is people tell themselves stories about why they can’t do things when they can. The story you tell yourself becomes reality. You can change the story. You can rewrite it. Or, like Ferdinand, you can pretend the rules don’t exist. The delusional 16 year old that defied a room full of PhDsBoyan Slat decides at age 16 to clean up the ocean. He gets in front of a room full of billionaires and PhDs and tells them he is going to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world. World governments had already declared the problem impossible. The world’s brightest scientific minds unanimously agreed that cleaning the oceans was impossible. The area was too big, the currents too unpredictable, the cost too astronomical. It would take thousands of years and tens of billions of dollars. So the fat cat scientists went back to work and kept reading National Geographic. Boyan was a punk high school kid. He had a total disrespect for authority and experts. He decided to fix the problem himself. He dropped out of his aerospace engineering degree and founded The Ocean Cleanup. The biggest problem to solve was the extreme current of the ocean. Instead of moving his cleanup machines through the ocean, he got the ocean’s current to move the rubbish into his cleanup machines. 10 years later, this punk kid is now an adult and his company has removed hundreds of thousands of pounds of rubbish from the ocean. There is a solution. There is hope. Seals don’t need to swim in your beer packaging anymore and get drunk with frustration. Boyan didn’t make enormous progress because he had a high IQ or a degree. He did it because his brain wasn’t mature enough to understand what was impossible. He assumed the problem could be solved so he just got to work. Most of society sees a problem and goes, “The government needs to solve this and change my adult diaper.” A small part of society sees a giant problem and says, “No one is going to solve this, so I must do it, instead of complaining like a toddler.” The moment you stop seeing problems and start seeing opportunities, your entire life changes. You realize what Star Wars creator George Lucas said: “We are all living in cages with the door wide open.” There’s a dumb fish called a Northern Pike. If you put it in an aquarium and divide the space in two with a piece of glass, the Pike will try to get to the other side. Each time it will bruise its nose when it hits the glass. After three days, the lazy Pike gives up on life and stops trying. It’s conditioned to stop trying after three days of failure. Conditioned by failure, it accepts the |