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Success is a Choice
Matt Karamazov
July 19, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 20 minutes
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I can’t envision any scenario where I’d be living the kind of life I have now if I hadn’t come across John C. Maxwell’s books more than a decade ago.
From minimum-wage nightclub bouncer to full-time writer, fitness influencer (I wish there was a better word, but let’s go with it), and global literacy advocate, he’s seen me through all of it, and this short, powerful book contains more of his wisdom per word than you’ll find anywhere else.
The fact that you can just walk into a library, request this book, and read it for free never fails to fill me with gratitude, and I’ve written a complete breakdown of Success is a Choice that you can read here.
A fairly detailed preview is here in this email though.
Before we get into the breakdown, in case you missed it, this video is a recording of a live masterclass where I explained my note-taking system I used to take detailed, effective notes on more than 1,250 books.
Here are the YouTube timestamps:
1:19 - It All Started with One Book
5:10 - The 3 Simple Tools I Use
8:10 - Advantages of Google Docs
11:00 - What Should Make It Into Your Notes?
16:00 - Stay in Flow as Much as Possible
23:15 - Put Everything in Your Own Words
24:30 - Two Tactics for Remembering
29:10 - Excellent Book Recommendations
31:55 - The Best Way to Learn Anything
I’ve got more videos lined up this week too, like “Summarizing 100 Great Self-Help Books in 1 Sentence Each,” a video breakdown of Be Useful, by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a few more.
Subscribe to get notified when those come out!
But now let’s see why…
This Book is For:
*Anyone who has had difficulty in the past making choices that were aligned with the higher version of themselves that they knew existed somewhere, but in unrealized form.
*Ambitious professionals who never stop investing in their own education and success, and who want to absorb some extra wisdom from a globally-recognized expert in leadership and personal development.
*Leaders of all types of organizations - leaders with titles and those without - who are looking for a playbook they can use to inspire those they seek to lead and show them the way to greater heights than they've ever reached before.
*Everyone who feels as though there are unrealized talents and untapped potential trapped somewhere within themselves, and who need just a little bit of encouragement and guidance to help bring it out.
Summary:
“Live the life you were meant to. Try to see yourself as you could be, and then do everything in your power to believe that you can become that person. That is the first important step in becoming a successful person."
Reading this book feels like gaining access to secret knowledge - except nothing here is a secret. John C. Maxwell has exposed millions of people to these life-changing and career-lifting ideas over many decades of global thought-leadership.
Maxwell's books always pass the test for whether I'll decide to read anything else an author has written: immediately after I read his book (and many times, during), my life just gets better. Sometimes in profound ways.
The present book is all about choices, and specifically, those choices that are always leading us either toward or away from our desired future.
Every single thought we think and action we take is either a +1 or a -1 on the road to achieving our vision, and Success is a Choice is studded with +1s on every damn page.
It's a book about stacking the odds in our favor by doing every single thing within our power to give us the best possible chance of succeeding. A lot of it comes down to simply making the right choices, and this is a manual for how to do that (virtually) every time.
Making the right choices - over and over again until you win - is how you eventually construct your dream life, and consistently making the incorrect choices will make this as-yet-unrealized dream life a more and more distant reality. It's really as simple as that.
We all start with different talents and abilities, advantages and disadvantages, and it's the choices we make in addition to our talents that makes the greatest difference.
It's in the choices we make to believe in ourselves; to fire up our passion; to initiate action; to focus our energy; to cultivate good relationships; and embracing practice (all covered in the book) where we can recognize our power to make the desired changes in our lives. It's choices, all the way down.
In this breakdown, we're going to talk about how you have the power to choose your attitude, your actions, and your beliefs, and that these choices will ultimately determine your level of success.
We're going to talk about the most dangerous kind of safety you need to avoid at all costs, and how to shake up the world.
We're also going to talk about the utter necessity of keeping your standards high, and why taking big swings in life is far superior to any other, more conservative strategy.
In the end, your level of success is mostly determined by your choices, multiplied by your effort. Luck exists, sure, and not everything worth attempting has a 100% chance of succeeding. We know that.
But there are three things that the most successful people on the planet all do exceedingly well: they get started, they keep going, and they never give up.
Key Ideas:
#1: Change Your Beliefs, Change Your Life
“Personal breakthroughs begin with a change in your beliefs. Why? Because your beliefs determine your expectations, and your expectations determine your actions. A belief is a habit of mind in which confidence becomes a conviction that we embrace."
The main takeaway of Dr. Maxwell Maltz's classic book, Psycho-Cybernetics is that it's literally impossible for anyone to outperform their self-image, to achieve anything greater than they believe themselves deserving of achieving. This is exactly what John C. Maxwell is driving at here as well.
Your expectations determine your reality, and we see what we expect to see.
If you believe yourself incapable of negotiating a deal any larger than $10,000, that's exactly the level you'll remain stuck at. Try to close business for, say, $25,000 or $100,000 and you'll self-sabotage, and otherwise subconsciously create the conditions for your own failure.
You don't believe that you can do it, and you don't expect that it will ever happen, so why take the actions that would cause anything different to happen?
Moreover, as Maxwell reminds us, this is a habit of mind, developed through repetition, that can become a defining "script" that we keep running, eventually causing us to resign ourselves to staying at our previous level.
Of course, no one is seriously suggesting that you can "believe" your way into becoming a top 1% expert in your field by next week, or that you'll automagically 10X your income by "expecting" it to happen. But if you don't expect it to happen, it won't, no matter how long you're willing to wait.
The good news, however, is that beliefs are malleable. We can choose them for ourselves, and we can adopt different ones if our current beliefs aren't serving us or taking us where we want to go.
Again, this is a habit of mind. We become what we think about most of the time, so it makes sense that, should you wish to create different (and better) results in your life, you should spend most of your time thinking about how exactly you're going to make that happen. And, crucially, believing that it's possible with consistent effort over a long enough period of time.
I mean, what's the alternative?
What else could you believe about yourself that's better?
If you can choose what to believe - and choose what to reinforce through repetition - why would you choose to believe anything other than the most empowering beliefs you can find?
#2: When You Think of Limits, You Create Them
“Your potential is really up to you. It doesn't matter what others might think. It doesn't matter where you came from. It doesn't even matter what you might have believed about yourself at a previous time in your life. It's about what lies within you and whether you can bring it out."
What lies behind you and what lies ahead of you are as nothing compared to what lies within you. Ralph Waldo Emerson said it a little differently than I did in that first sentence, but that's from memory, so give me a break, okay? Seriously, though, he's absolutely correct.
Obviously, we have some limits to what we can have, achieve, do, and become. But most of those limits are self-imposed. If you actually pushed on some of those limits, they'd fall right over or collapse into dust. They're imaginary. Set up by your own mind to protect you from disappointment and feelings of failure.
But let me ask you a question: what would your limits be if no one (including you) told you what they were? What could you accomplish if there were nobody to swoop in and say, "No, you can't do that"?
As we've seen, beliefs can be changed. You have the ability to choose between empowering beliefs and disempowering beliefs, and the choice that you make has a lot to do with how your life eventually turns out.
More often than not it's a case of your disempowering beliefs never having been questioned. Never having been scrutinized or put to the test. The truth of your abilities and potential is far more expansive and unlimited.
When you think of limits, you create them.
#3: Someone Will Notice
“Set your standards high and keep them high, even if you think no one else is looking. Somebody out there will always notice, even if it's just you."
Another one of the most important things I've learned after reading more than 1,250+ books (at the time of writing) is that you must never, ever, EVER lie to yourself. It's one of the most damaging things you could ever do.
The simple truth is that you have an internal monitoring system that is paying close attention to every single thing you say and do - even those things you only say to yourself.
There's a part of you that's constantly keeping a running tally of the lies you've told yourself, the promises to yourself that you've broken, and all those times you let yourself down.
But from today forward, you can just...stop doing those things!
You don't ever have to lie to yourself again, and it's vital for your success and fulfillment that you don't.
In life, you get what you tolerate, and so another important consideration in all this is the kind of standards you set - and maintain - for yourself. What are your standards? What are your non-negotiables? What do you absolutely refuse to compromise on, give up, or do?
Your standards and your internal dialogue matter to an extraordinary degree. Someone is always looking and listening. Most of the time, it's you. You're the one you have to impress. You're the one you have to consistently fight for, and the one you have to categorically refuse to give up on.
Book Notes:
“Some people say that they feel burned out. The truth is that they probably never were on fire in the first place."
“Spend more time with people who see you not just as who you are but as you could be.”
“Prior to his success on Mount Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary had been part of another expedition, in which the team not only had failed to reach the summit but also had lost one of its members.
At a reception for the expedition members in London, Hillary stood to address the audience. Behind the platform was a huge photograph of Everest.
Hillary turned to face the image of the mountain and exclaimed, 'Mount Everest, you have defeated us. But I will return. And I will defeat you. Because you cannot get any bigger, and I can."
“The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own."
“Developing discipline always begins with a struggle. There is no easy way to become a disciplined person. It has nothing to do with talent or ability. It is not a matter of conditions but of choice.
But once the choice is made and practice becomes a habit, two things become obvious.
The first is a separation between the person who practices and the one who doesn't.
The second thing that emerges is a winning spirit. The harder you work, the harder it becomes to surrender."
Action Steps:
#1: Raise Your Standards
We don't rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our standards and systems. Your standards represent the quality of life you refuse to compromise on. The level you insist on operating upon.
For each area of your life, I want you to make your standards conscious, and choose to elevate them from where they are now. If there's one area of your life that isn't up to your satisfaction, raise your standards in that area and refuse to settle for anything less.
Decide on your standard for that area (finances, fitness, family, etc.), make a plan, and never, ever lie to yourself about the results of that plan or your current trajectory. Practice brutal self-honesty, and make a self-promise that you will make this new standard your new normal.
#2: Choose One More Empowering Belief
You choose your beliefs, which then determine your expectations, which, in turn, determine your reality. So start choosing some more empowering beliefs!
You already have a set of beliefs for each and every area of your life, the only problem is that you didn't consciously choose all (or even many) of these beliefs, and thus you're operating under mistaken beliefs that aren't taking you anywhere near where you want to go.
Similar to the previous exercise, choose one area of your life you're not currently satisfied with and examine the beliefs you have in that area. Do you believe that "people like you" aren't meant to succeed? Do you believe that "money is hard to come by"? Do you believe that you'll "never lose the weight"? None of these beliefs are serving you. And, importantly, you have the power to change them.
Then, what you need to do is reinforce those new beliefs through constant repetition. Surround yourself with people who believe the kinds of things you want to believe. Read books and watch YouTube videos created by people experiencing the kinds of results that you want.
Do this often enough, for long enough, and your current, disempowering beliefs will gradually be replaced by more empowering ones.
#3: Offer Mentorship to Someone Two Steps Behind You
The best way to learn anything is to teach it to someone else. You don't even have to be too far ahead of someone else to be a great teacher. In fact, there's such a thing as being too advanced to be a great teacher.
For example, you wouldn't go to Bill Gates to learn how to build a website. Sure, I mean there's no doubt he could do it, but he likely hasn't done so in years. Taking a company public, raising investor money, navigating governmental policy - sure, go to Bill for things like that. But if you just want to learn how to build a website, go to someone 10 steps behind him but a few steps ahead of you.
A good rule is to spend 33% of your time helping people behind you, 33% of your time networking and strategizing with people at your level, and 33% of your time learning from people more advanced than you are. I'm not sure where you'd spend the other 1% of your time - picking up another John C. Maxwell book wouldn't be a bad idea though!
"The path to success is to take massive, determined action."
-Tony Robbins
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With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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