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*People who are looking to increase their mental resilience, and those who would be willing to exchange an easy life for the strength to endure a difficult one.

*Elite athletes looking for an edge over their competition and a mental performance enhancement that will help them dominate the field.

*Business professionals seeking to upgrade their focus, mental toughness, decision-making skills, and their ability to handle top-tier pressure in the toughest situations they'll face.

*Anyone who is interested in exploring the highest reaches of human capability, and in determining where exactly their true limits lie.

What is reality? Reality is that which refuses to go away, even after you stop believing in it. Philip K. Dick was certainly right about that.

At the basic level, It Takes What It Takes is a masterclass in accurately assessing the nature of reality in front of you and building an effective strategy to help you deal with it, no matter what.

No. Matter. What.

The author, the late Trevor Moawad, was a top mental conditioning coach ("the world's best brain trainer") who worked with superstars in the NFL, elite professionals at Harvard Business School, Fortune 500 companies, the military - basically anywhere you see ambitious strivers and world-class competitors pursuing their potential, you would have found Trevor Moawad, helping them manage their negativity and achieve any goal they set for themselves.

His life's work was to motivate the motivated. Not by pumping them up with fake positivity or silly affirmations; not by wishing and hoping for performance improvements, and not by instilling a blind faith in positive thinking.

Instead, he helped these elite individuals return to reality, face the very real obstacles in their path, and come up with a plan for what to do in the very next moment, which is the only time when any of us have any real power.

Importantly, he wouldn't let them get too high or too low. Negative thinking works negatively 100% of the time, naturally, and just because you're thinking negatively doesn't mean you're being realistic. But positive thinking often has very little to do with reality either, and it's in navigating between those two extremes where we can find that next gear.

Just like in bowling, where beginners often have those bumpers on either side of the lane to prevent the ball from ending up in the gutter, neutral thinking can help you stay centered and stay on the path taking you where you want to go.

Neutral thinking, as Trevor would say, is a high-performance strategy that emphasizes judgment-free thinking, especially in pressure situations. It acknowledges that the past happened. However, the past isn’t predictive. It can influence the present and thus, the future, but it doesn't guarantee it.

Neutral thinkers calmly and coolly assess challenges, take inventory of their unique strengths and abilities, and determine the best path forward, often with incomplete information about the true nature of reality, but never running from it.

The past doesn't determine your future; what you do next determines your future. Neutral thinking is about gaining as much clarity as possible, reclaiming as much control as possible, and then asking, "What would a winner do in this situation?"

One of the strongest lessons in this book is that winners behave like winners, and average performers exhibit average behaviors. You can't behave like an average person and expect to be anything more than average. You have to think like a winner, and most importantly behave like a winner if you want to stack the probabilities of success in your favor.

Another strong lesson is the absolute imperative to reduce the flow of negativity into your life - for the sake of your performance, sure, but also just for the sake of your sanity and your quality of life too. A staggering experiment that Moawad ran a few years ago illustrates this point well.

Long story short, over the period of a few weeks, he voluntarily exposed himself to the constant stream of negativity that's breaking over the eyes and ears of basically everybody hooked into mainstream society, virtually 24/7.

The poor guy didn't even last a month.

The constant negativity quite literally broke him, and yet that's what people are living with - voluntarily - every single day! The negative news, the anger and vitriol online, the sad, angry music, etc. It was all too much. It poisoned Trevor's life until he quite literally couldn't take it anymore. The full story is in the Book Notes section of this breakdown.

There's a lot more to discuss, including the Law of Substitution, and what Trevor calls the "Illusion of Choice," all of which is detailed down below. It all adds up to one hell of a winning strategy for life, and while few books are perfect, this one has the power to help you reframe your reality, reject the negativity, and recover the astonishing power of choice you've had all along.

#1: The Neutrality of Reality

Reality is no more - and no less - than the world as it actually is. Reality is not as we wish it to be; it can only be as it actually is. How could it be otherwise?

Persisting in delusion isn't going to help you, and a plan that isn't based on reality is no plan at all. It could be the most perfectly thought-out, most meticulous plan anyone's ever thought of in the history of plans, but if it's not based on reality, it's not going to work.

Wishing reality was different isn't going to change it either; reality is stubborn. It refuses to bend to your preferences or desires, but it's also here to help you...if you work with reality rather than against it. Again, reality is here to help you. That's what neutral thinking is based on.

Wanting things to be different than they are only handicaps your ability to respond effectively to changing circumstances. It's in your best interests to seek reality in its true form, regardless of how painful it is to observe or acknowledge it.

But there's also something comforting about the rigidity of reality: it's a constant. In the same way that a 45lbs bar in a gym in Canada is going to be a 45lbs bar in a gym in South Africa, reality is exactly what it is, regardless of whether you had a horrible day or a fantastic day.

You don't have to like the outcome, but acknowledging it dispassionately is what's going to allow you to formulate the correct response. Taking reality as it is, committing to facing it no matter what, will lead you to the correct choice of action. It will show you the next steps to take.

Fighting against reality, however - denying it - will get you nowhere. Reality remains undefeated.

#2: The Illusion of Choice

Arnold Schwarzenegger says that when you have a vision, everything else becomes easy. Everything becomes clear. Suddenly, you don't have a choice anymore, but you have a clear path.

You know exactly what must be done to reach your goal, to make your vision a reality. If you want to achieve that goal, you have to follow the path. That's the one choice you can make that removes all other choices.

When you have a clear path, everything that could deter you from that path becomes a lesser choice. A false path.

For Arnold, having that vision of becoming a world champion bodybuilder removed the choice he had to party on the weekends, or skip the gym "just this one time." If he wanted to make his vision become a reality, suddenly, he no longer had a choice. Neither will you. You will lose your false freedom, because you traded it for clarity, purpose, and meaning.

In your life, you think you have a choice, but you really don't. Not if you're serious about reaching your goals. There is a specific set of actions you must take, and if you don't take those actions, then you won't reach your goals. So do you really have a choice about whether or not you take those actions?

The goal that you choose determines the path you must take to get there, and that path will determine what kind of choices will become available to you. If you want to grow a successful business, you certainly have a choice about whether you want to run Facebook ads or YouTube ads, but you don't have a choice regarding whether or not you work on weekends and holidays.

If your goal is to get into fantastic shape, you have a choice about what kind of workouts you perform, but you don't have a choice regarding how much sleep you get, whether you drink water or not, or whether you eat Doritos four times a week. Those are only choices available to people without fitness goals. And those are perfectly fine choices! People can do what they want. But you don't have a choice anymore.

Competing against your own choices means to sabotage your own efforts to follow the path that leads to your ultimate goal. You sabotage your original decision whenever you decide to do something that will take you off that path.

Your choices have to align with your desires, or else you're just deceiving yourself. To realize your vision, you need to sacrifice what you want now for what you want most. That's the deal. That's the price that reality demands that you pay.

By committing to that path no matter what, you may lose your "choices" but in their place you gain your freedom.

#3: The Law of Substitution

Your mind can literally only focus on one thing at a time, and one of the most explosive psychological discoveries of all time is that you get to choose what that one thing is. And whatever shape that dominant thought takes, that's the shape that your external reality will take as well.

Just like multitasking is actually the brain switching back and forth really quickly between tasks, your mind isn't actually capable of holding two thoughts in consciousness at the same time. What's happening is that your mind reverts back to your dominant thought, whatever you decide that is.

By doing so, everything else gets blocked out automatically. Select your dominant thought - the one most empowering thing you can think that's going to get you to where you want to go - and your mind will automatically shut out every other competing thought.

Naturally, you won't be able to do this indefinitely. I can focus on my work for hours on end, but eventually, I'm going to have to focus on what's for dinner. Other thoughts, concerns, stressors, etc. are going to intrude upon your consciousness, and you don't have complete control over that process. But you can always choose to return to that dominant thought.

What you need to do is run an ad campaign inside your own mind. Advertising works - that's why it's a multibillion-dollar industry. It's effective. Advertising makes people do things, including you. So it's not a question of effectiveness, it's a question of what kinds of advertisements are running inside your own head.

#4: Doing Into Feeling

There's a virtually foolproof technique I used to use to get myself to the gym, regardless of how I felt about the matter. It's wonderfully simple and effective.

Basically, what I would do is tell myself that all I had to do was gather my gym clothes by the door. I didn't have to go all the way to the gym, I only had to gather up my things.

Then, once my gym clothes were by the door, I told myself that all I had to do was take them out to the car. That's it. I didn't actually have to drive to the gym. Just take my gym clothes out to the car.

Maybe you can see where I'm going with this.

Essentially, I did this every step of the way until I was in the locker room, dressed for my workout, mere steps away from walking onto the gym floor and beginning my workout. More often than not, by the time I got this far, I was actually feeling it. I wanted to go work out by this time, even if it was the last thing I wanted to do even thirty minutes ago back at the house. I acted my way into feeling.

The other way? It just doesn't work! Trevor's right: It's hard to feel your way into achieving a damn thing.

Sure, you can get "motivated" and hyped up for a few minutes, but it's very hard to maintain and extremely uncertain, subject to the whims of your feelings and emotions. Actions, however, fuel emotions, and by acting in a certain way you can cause yourself to feel a certain way, even if it's far removed from your current state. I've proven the truth of this principle time and again, and so has Trevor Moawad and all the superstar athletes he's worked with.

Don't try to fight the reality of your feelings and emotions. Reality remains undefeated. Wake yourself up as you get moving. Motion drives away sadness, fatigue, and lethargy. Motion leads to motivation.

#5: Winners Behave Like Winners

You can't perform average actions, put in average effort, to achieve average goals, and expect to become anything better than average.

More harshly, you can't behave like a loser and expect to somehow, miraculously come out a winner. Now personally, I don't believe that anyone who truly and honestly does their best could ever be called a loser, but that's a discussion for another time.

Here, I just want to plant the idea in your mind that winners everywhere, no matter who they are, and in what field, are those who perform winning actions, consistently over time, over and over and over again until they succeed. That's what makes them winners: their actions, their effort, and their commitment.

So no matter what you aspire to achieve in life, all you have to ask yourself is what a winner would do to achieve it...and then go do that!

You can simply reverse engineer success in this way and work backwards from the end result. If a winner in your industry would make 100 sales calls a day no matter what, invest in a professional-looking suit, maintain a high standard of personal hygiene, etc., then you know exactly what you have to do.

Selecting a reverse role model can also work: someone you definitely don't want to end up like! Think about your goal or your vision and then come up with a list of behaviors and attitudes that people who would be unsuccessful in achieving it might adopt.

No matter what your goal, there's someone out there who has achieved something similar - what does that person do all day? What do they believe about themselves? About reality? Who do they surround themselves with? What kind of standards do they hold themselves to? How fast can they shift into neutral?

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