YOUTUBE 📚 THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 📚 PATREON

*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.

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 he's 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 in order 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.

#1: Change Your Beliefs, Change Your Life

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: Yesterday Doesn’t Exist

The past doesn't exist anymore, the future will never exist, and so, really, all you have is right now. This present moment. But if I had to choose between living in the past, and living in the future, I'd take the future every time.

Sure, learn from the past, extract its lessons and look back on all the great times you've had with fondness, but you can't live there. As executive coach Dan Sullivan always says, make sure that your future is bigger than your past.

Successful people are always analyzing what they could have done better in the past, looking for the lesson and crystallizing the wisdom, but they don't stay in the past. They use the past to set themselves up for a better future. Your past is what it was, but your future is what you'll fashion it into.

#3: When You Think of Limits, You Create Them

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.

#4: A Dangerous Safety

Your dreams don't have to make sense to anyone but you. They don't have to be "practical" - that's why they're called dreams!

But dreams are a huge part of makes life worth living. It's having that great big exciting "thing" pulling you out of bed each morning that gives brightness and vibrancy to your days and bounce to your step. It gives you an energy, an aura (for lack of a better word) that is persuasive, captivating, and magnetic.

Personally, I find dreams to be more motivating when there's actually a real chance that you may one day achieve them. Again, it all comes back to beliefs. But honestly, it's whatever keeps you alive! The actual results of taking action toward your dream each day barely even matter. Because if you don't have a dream, man, you're dead. You're dead - it's just that they may not bury you for another few decades or so.

One supremely important thing to keep in mind, though, is that there is literally no downside to dreaming (and acting) BIG. To making BIG moves and taking MASSIVE action in service of what's most important to you in this world. "Realistic" barely even enters into the equation. You'll never regret pursuing a massive dream. But you'll be crushed by settling for realistic.

#5: Shake Up the World

I want you to notice something about the world we're all living in. The people who have taken over their respective fields and who dominate the marketplace with their products and ideas are all confident, shameless self-promoters.

Not in a negative way (or at least not all of them), but they are all supremely confident individuals who have set an extremely high valuation on themselves and then gone on to force the rest of the world to recognize that value.

One of the most important ideas I've ever come across in all my wide reading is that the universe takes you at your word. You teach other people how to treat you, and if you show up to command their attention and respect - most people will give it to you. People take you at your own valuation. Set a high price on yourself, be loud about your value, ability, and worth, and other people will see these things in you too.

In the same way that you can don a suit, march into an office building you've never been to before, and no one will stop you, the rest of the world won't be able to stop you if you're moving fast enough and making enough noise. The whole world is like that office building. Enter with enough confidence, and barely anyone will even attempt to stop you. They'll just assume that you know exactly who you are, where you're going, and why you deserve to be there.

The timid, tentative, average masses were never going to make it. They're going to get stopped at the door of the world because they've chosen not to wear that "suit" of confidence and blow right by security. So go over the top. Be "shameless." Be assertive. You can even be a little bit crazy.

Actually...no. Don't just be a little bit crazy; be completely fucking unhinged. You see, here's another Great Truth of the world that only a few people realize: if you're only a little bit crazy, they'll think you're weird. But if you are absolutely, totally fucking unhinged, they'll make you their leader.

#6: Someone Will Notice

Another one of the most important things I've learned after reading more than 1,300+ 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.

#7: The Inevitable Result of Taking BIG Swings

Remember that lame poster we all had hanging in our classrooms when we were kids? The one that said, "Shoot for the moon; even if you miss you'll land among the stars"? Yeah, that one? Well, turns out there's a lot of truth in that idea.

Arnold Schwarzenegger hit on the same idea in his book, Be Useful. He said that if you aim for a smaller goal, then the larger goal is automatically out of reach. This is because going after a big goal changes you in ways that going after a smaller, more "realistic" goal just doesn't.

The strategy that you deploy and the actions you take in service of a 10X goal are fundamentally different than those required to pursue a 2X goal, and small, incremental steps will never get you to 10X. They'll get you to 2X at most, whereas even if you aim for 10X and miss, you may end up at 6X or 8X instead.

Where exactly you end up is shrouded in the fog of the future, but the one single guarantee is that you will changed by the attempt. It's inevitable, and there's simply no way that you can take massive hacks at an audacious goal without being affected by the effort. The actual, specific results you achieve matter far less than the mere fact that you actually went for it.

#8: Make Yourself Bigger

You don’t overcome challenges by making them smaller. You overcome them by making yourself bigger! That's the side of the equation you need to work on.

What's fascinating about this is that when you make yourself bigger, your problems become (relatively) smaller. Of course, problems can grow in size too. You have to stay on top of things.

But the goal here is to become so large and powerful that any and every single problem you could ever face pales in comparison to the vital power of your personality and will.

#9: Set Yourself Apart

It's never been easier than it is today to be great. Barely anyone is even trying to be great, so your competition is effectively zero. The bar is so low, it's on the goddamn ground. You can literally just step over it and win.

When you make the choice to separate yourself from your competition - to do whatever it takes to make your dream a reality - you've already placed yourself in rare air, inside a close-knit society of winners and high-achievers who are miles above everybody else in terms of results and accomplishments.

Nowadays, something like 99% of podcasts don't make it past episode 10. That means if you publish just 11 episodes of your podcast, you're automatically in the top 1% of podcasts - worldwide. And it's not just in podcasting where this shows up. Basically, people don't show up. That's the problem!

If you do, however - if you not only show up but give it your all - then that makes you one dangerous individual with a very good shot at being successful in anything you choose to do in life.

That's not to say that you should settle, or even that you should be glad that your competition didn't show up. It's far more honorable to beat an opponent that's actually worthy of you. But just realize that simply by starting, you're already winning. Now, the only thing left to do is not quit.

#10: The Greatest Good You Can Do for Another

All this talk about "beating the competition" obscures a fundamentally important point. Success isn't just about yourself. Not only is it damn-near impossible to succeed without the help of others, it's also extremely fucking lonely.

My core business philosophy is that you can get anything you want in life, just as long as you help enough other people get what they want. I learned that from Zig Ziglar many years ago and have never forgotten it.

Success is cool and everything, and fast cars are awesome. Being able to travel wherever and whenever you want, and never look at grocery prices when you go shopping? I love all these things and more. But there's a stronger, more lasting satisfaction that comes as a direct result of helping other people win that you literally could never experience by yourself.

Much of my work involves showing other people how to become more successful in life, and making it easier and faster for the people coming up behind me. But a massive part of my own motivation is the awesome feeling that comes with holding up the mirror to their own greatness, what they're already capable of, with or without my help. That's a real joy.

Always remember not only to share your own riches, but to show others their own as well. Help people out. Encourage them. Guide the way. Offer them your protection and guidance, as someone who's traveled further down the road they're planning to embark upon. Because as George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch:

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