*People who struggle with motivation and who lack the drive and sense of urgency they once felt (or have always wanted to feel) for running down their biggest goals.
*Business owners who haven't been able to lock onto a logical and methodical business plan and assemble the right team to help them implement it; or, conversely, those who have a good plan, but can't motivate themselves or their employees to move it forward with ruthless effectiveness.
*Anyone who's been stepped on, beaten, or flat-out ignored by the world; anyone who's been told repeatedly that they'd never make it; and anyone who's willing to look deep into their own past to uncover vast deposits of one of the world's most powerful renewable energy sources: revenge.
“Sometimes we spend so much time trying to find how to win at life that we miss the entire point. Maybe you need to look for why to win in life.
Did somebody humiliate you? Did somebody manipulate you? Is there a teacher or family member who made you feel ashamed? We’re all driven in different ways, but the right enemy can drive you in ways an ally never can.”
Having the right friends in the right places can help your career, but as it turns out, having the right enemies in your life can help launch you straight towards extreme success and significance faster than you ever thought possible.
It's vitally important to select the “right” enemies, however, as you'll learn in this book, and to engage your emotions in the proper way, channeling those feelings into productive pursuits instead of self-destructive ones.
Patrick Bet-David is a legendary entrepreneur who came to America with basically nothing (his family literally escaped from Iran, crossing a bridge moments before it was destroyed) and inspired millions of others to put real effort into their own personal development, curb their vices, and help build up their communities.
The man also has enemies, it's true, but he’s used them in productive ways, instead of getting himself stuck in a cycle of anger and retribution that would have scuttled his chances of any meaningful success long before he ever got started. Choose Your Enemies Wisely explores the link between logic and emotion, and acts as a bridge between the two.
Myself, I’m much more logical than emotional. Which is great for business planning, but sometimes I just don’t feel anything when I think about what I have to do each day to move my business forward. I don’t automatically get fired up, which can be just as harmful to one’s dreams as being someone who's always boiling over with emotion, yet has no actual plan.
I’ve read three of Bet-David's books so far and he’s never let me down yet. Choose Your Enemies Wisely will teach you how to build a solid business plan, fortify it with logic, amplify it with emotion and feeling, and dominate your competition in business and in life. But it also goes even deeper than that...
This book will convince you to raise your standards, and to declare your dream as a future truth, along with everything that implies. Bet-David also discusses the 14 different types of enemies you can select, where to find them, and how to use them most effectively.
Not only that, but you'll also learn what to look for when assembling your inner circle, how to make your brain crave hard work, and much more besides.
Enemies are everywhere, but not all of them deserve your focus and attention. There are also opportunities everywhere, but not all of them deserve your focus and attention either.
After reading this book, however, you'll know how to select the right enemies and where to find them, how to find and assemble the right allies, and finally, how to bring it all together to get everything you've ever wanted.
#1: Combine Logic and Emotion If You Want to Win
“Your business plan must be both emotional and logical. That’s why I want you to see which side you favor, and where you need to improve. If you’re only logical, you have probably struggled to inspire people.
With my approach, you will know what you need to change to accomplish that. If you’re only emotional, you have struggled to develop systems and stay organized. This is why you’ll benefit from the structure of a methodical plan.”
Overly emotional leaders will never keep their personal chaos under control for long enough to execute a structured, effective plan, but overly logical leaders will fail to inspire their followers to execute even a supremely well-crafted plan.
Self-knowledge can help you bridge the gap, but self-knowledge never just arrives on its own. You have to go out in search of it. You have psycho-analyze yourself and determine where you're deficient, and then take steps to correct the balance. It doesn't happen without effort, but that effort is worth it because often it's one of the biggest constraints holding you back from victory.
Being more logical or more emotional isn't "better" than the other way around, but they each have their unique drawbacks, of course. A boring, logical plan just doesn't spark the kind of activation energy needed to move forward. Especially not at the relentless pace that's often required for extreme success in business.
People might even prefer to work for a more "logical" leader, but no one in that organization is going to achieve anything great. Why would they? What's their incentive? Where's the drive?
Conversely, working for an overly emotional leader might be a dreadful experience for many people, but with someone like that, things are getting done. That's for sure. It's never just another boring day in the office when there are fireworks and flameouts everywhere you turn. Unfortunately, leaders like that just take their teams in a bunch of different random directions and never end up anywhere.
#2: How and Why to Raise Your Standards
“Once you identify who you need to beat, you will naturally raise the standard for what you must achieve.”
Committing to raising my standards changed my life forever. I was first introduced to the concept by Tony Robbins in his cringily-titled book, Awaken the Giant Within. Amazing book, horrible title. Anyway, Dr. Benjamin Hardy also talks about standards and raising your "floor" quite extensively in his excellent business book, The Science of Scaling.
The idea is that with personal and professional standards, you maintain a minimum acceptable level of effort, performance, and results. You aim higher, which causes you to take the kind of massive action that your higher standards naturally demand from you.
What's more, you experience extreme cognitive dissonance when you fail to live up to your higher standards. When your self-concept is such that you see yourself as someone who competes at a high level, works at 100% effort while they're at work, and who expects to succeed, you will naturally begin to perform at that level. Your external world will resolve itself into the shape of your self-image.
Selecting an enemy to fight forces you to raise your standards as well. You have to do this, because if you want to beat that enemy, you have to get on their level. Then you have to beat them, go beyond their level, and tower over them.
The problem is that your new, higher standards often aren't visible in a vacuum. You don't even know what's possible for you, because you haven't seen it modeled in the form of an enemy. Observing your chosen enemy in action, you witness a level of self-belief, strategic planning, work ethic, and will to win that you didn't even know existed. But now, you know. That's who you have to beat.
#3: The Difference Between a Competitor and an Enemy
“There’s a difference between competition and enemy. You can list your competitors without any emotion. But who pisses you off? Who’s the person who said you’d never make it?”
Not every one of your competitors has to become your enemy. In most industries, there are simply too many of them. If you're a real estate agent in New York City, for example, your "competition" is hundreds of thousands of agents, spread across a vast distance. You'd be spending all your time keeping track of their latest wins and what they're doing, and you wouldn't be getting your own work done.
So you have to be a little more selective when it comes to choosing enemies. It's best to have just a few, each motivating you in different ways, which we'll get into in the next Key Idea. You want focused aggression, not scattered jabs.
What makes this process even more difficult is that some enemies come with too much energy attached to them. Sometimes an enemy will be so strong, will bring up such violent emotions in you, that it becomes impossible to focus on executing your plan. So you also have to balance this with emotional regulation, which of course is easier said than done!
The final mistake, though, is selecting an enemy with no emotional resonance, who will never really become any more than a competitor. If you don't feel anything when their face comes to mind, if they don't inspire you enough - enrage you enough - to get down to work, then you haven't yet found your enemy.
#4: The 14 Types of Enemies
Outside Yourself:
Someone you hate.
Relatives who try to hold you back.
Manipulators.
Gossipers.
Someone to prove wrong.
Your ex-spouse or former business partner.
Someone who doubts you.
People who quit on you.
Within Yourself:
Scarcity mindset.
Your own limited thinking.
Your ego.
Contentment/mediocrity.
Fear of success.
My Vote for the Most Powerful Enemy That Drives Winners:
People who are beating you because their vision and accomplishments are greater than yours.”
Patrick Bet-David makes such a key distinction here, because it's true, you might find that you have more enemies within you than without. Maybe it's your own ideas of there "not being enough to go around" or your fear of success (which doesn't sound like a real thing, but it definitely is!) that are your true enemies, instead of some random kid in 3rd grade who said that you were lame.
You can likely think of examples for most of these internal/external enemies (though it's the internal ones that you really have to go looking for), but the most interesting category here is the last one: those people who are beating you because their vision and accomplishments are greater than yours.
Before I say anything else, I do have to make one thing clear. Not everyone who's accomplished more than you have is "beating you." Some people are just playing different games than you are...and that's fine. You don't have to play the "richest person in the graveyard" game if you don't want to.
But there's a positive version of this too, and that's where you're so inspired by someone else's grand ambitions and their Olympian self-belief that you start to think quietly to yourself: "I could do that." And you know what?
You might! If you truly gave it everything you have within you, perhaps you could succeed at the highest levels too. You could. And there's really only one way to find out. You'll never see what you're truly capable of unless you're severely tested, and so maybe that's exactly the type of enemy you need: the type of enemy that reflects back to you visions of your own potential, and inspires you to go after it.
#5: Wake Yourself Up
“A confrontational approach isn’t for everyone. In fact, in the book, The Art of War, Sun Tzu says, ‘Never wake up an enemy.’ But for me, I was trying to wake myself up.”
Great generals throughout history were always careful never to back their enemies into a corner, because they knew that if they did, then their enemies would "wake up" and fight back harder than ever.
You never want to give an enemy no way out, because then they'll decide that they have nothing to lose, and you do not want to fight an enemy that feels as though they have nothing to lose.
Your enemies don't even need to know that they are your enemies! They don't need to know that you're after them, that you're paying attention to them, or even realize that they exist. If they do catch on, they might adjust their strategy to compensate for the increased competition, or even step up their efforts against you.
But if you simply select them as an enemy inside your own mind, they can secretly guide your actions and decisions, giving you unlimited motivation for extreme accomplishment, without any of the downsides of engaging in an actual battle.
#6: How to Train Your Mind to Power Through Hard Work
“Your psyche has to be rewarded for paying a price. You program your psyche by using a reward to reinforce your dream. When you decide on the award in advance of achieving your dream, you are programming your mind to believe I’m willing to pay a price because this reward is going to happen. This is a continuous feedback loop that you must integrate into your plan.”
This is such a psychological cheat code right here. It's something that too few people understand, because they fail to establish a connection between the hard work they're doing now, and the reward they're working for that's going to materialize in the future. Sure, some people have a vague idea of some future reward, but you have to make it vivid.
Your mind will do virtually anything you ask it to do, but you have to give it something in return. You have to reward your own psyche for putting in such insane effort to achieve your goals, and it's one of the most powerful psychological feedback loops you can establish.
For example, if your goal is to earn an extra $100,000 this year, that's fine and everything, but it's unlikely to have the kind of psychological gravity necessary to pull you through the tough times between now and then. It's just a number, unattached to anything, and it has no significance. What will that extra $100K actually get you? What's the end game? What's the point? Figure that out, and you suddenly give your psyche a reason to care.
#7: Turn Your Desired Future Into Your Present Reality
“Declare your dream as a future truth and start to live in the present as if your future truth has already become a reality.”
Here's another powerful idea for you, and the perfect one with which to close out this section. It has to do with imagining that your desired future is as irrevocable as your past. Meaning, a future that's so certain to get here and become real, that it's just as real as your past that physically already happened.
I've come to call this The DeLorean Technique, whereby you imagine your Future You comes back from the future to visit Present You, just to tell you that your desired future is actually real. You successfully created it, and all you have to do is follow the steps.
If that sounds confusing, just picture your desired future as vividly as something that actually happened in the past. Think back to your strongest, most vivid, most emotional memory, and how clearly you can recreate that in your mind right now. How you can feel yourself there, see what you saw then, hear what you saw then. Every last detail. Now imagine that your desired future is just as real.
Most importantly, you don't have to wait to act like your future self. You can think ahead to how the person who's achieved all of your most massive goals would actually think and behave, and you can be that person in this very moment.
In fact, you need to become that person immediately, because by doing so, you pull your desired future closer. You not only pull your future success closer, but you also make it inevitable.
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