your strengths, but do not passively discover who you are. Actively decide and create who you are. If you abdicate this duty by allowing others to tell you who to be, you will struggle greatly in life and likely fail to achieve greatness. So discover your passion and follow it, but do it as the person you create. The difference is a life of mediocrity and creeping misery compared to a life of freedom and passion.
Brendon Burchard is the founder of the High Performance Academy, the host of The Charged Life podcast, and the author of the number one New York Times bestsellers The Motivation Manifesto: 9 Declarations to Claim Your Personal Power, The Charge: Activating the 10 Human Drives That Make You Feel Alive, and The Millionaire Messenger: Make a Difference and a Fortune Sharing Your Advice. Brendon has the number one–rated personal development show on YouTube and is one of the one hundred most followed public figures on Facebook. His educational work has helped millions of people around the globe achieve the results they are looking for in the areas of business, marketing, and personal development, and his programs, such as Experts Academy and World’s Greatest Speaker Training, have helped thousands of people—including me. So of course I had to interview him!
Getting time on Brendon’s calendar to meet him in Portland was surprisingly easy because he manages his time like a boss. Of course, it helps that we’re friends, but he genuinely has more free time than anyone else I’ve met at his level of achievement because he has consciously built his life that way. The man truly practices what he preaches at every level.
Brendon believes that humankind’s main motivation is to seek personal freedom, which he defines as the ability to fully express who we are and pursue the things that are meaningful and important to us. But we have two enemies that get in our way every single time. One of them is self-oppression, our tendency to put ourselves down. The other is social oppression, the people who judge us and fail to be supportive of who we are or what we want. Brendon suggests that we can overcome these two barriers by developing what he terms a “competence-confidence loop.” The more you understand something, the more confidence you will have to pursue it further, despite what anyone else may say. And of course, the more you pursue a subject and learn about it, the closer you’ll get to true mastery.
This strategy is similar to Stewart Friedman’s advice in the sense that both require knowing what matters most to you. But Brendon believes that we should be intentional about our aspirations rather than focusing on what may feel the most practically achievable. He recommends recording three words on your phone that describe your highest, best self. These are the words you would most want someone to use when describing you, and they should apply to both personal and professional settings. Some of the words I’ve heard from game changers are: engaged, grateful, energized, warm, loving, devoted, and impactful. Choose three that resonate with you, then set an alarm to go off three times a day and remind you of this aspirational sense of self.
When you act without intention, you will experience self-doubt. But when you are reminded of who you want to be throughout the day, you are more likely to act in accordance with your highest goals. This process serves as an endless feedback loop that leads you to find more confidence in yourself and thus to become more competent. You can actively generate the emotions that you most want to feel by doing things that are in line with your vision of the person you want to be. Brendon believes that the most important skills to master are setting intentions and taking the necessary steps to become that person. In other words, instead of discovering who you are, you become powerful when you decide who you are.
No conversation about acting with intention would be complete without input from Robert Greene, the author of the New York Times bestsellers The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law (coauthored with 50 Cent), and Mastery. In addition to having a strong fan base within the business world and a deep following in Washington, DC, Greene’s books are hailed by everyone from war historians to the biggest names in the music industry (including Jay-Z and 50 Cent) because he has relentlessly studied the world’s best to see what makes them tick.
I sought out Robert because long before I interviewed him, he transformed my career. Twenty years ago, I helped to start part of the company that held Google’s very first servers, eventually attending board meetings with people who were twice my age and about a hundred times more experienced. (Of course, I was the most junior person in the room, so I wasn’t allowed to speak at those board meetings, but I got to witness what went on in them.) As a rational engineering kind of guy, I simply did not understand the powerful executives around me. Their choices and the way they conducted themselves often made no sense to me. They looked irrational, if not downright crazy.
Then I picked up a book that changed that dynamic. It was called The 48 Laws of Power. This incredibly well-researched book included stories from throughout history examining how people in power had gotten there and stayed there and elegantly distilled lessons from those stories into actionable “laws.” A week after I read it, I sat in the next executive staff meeting and realized: These people are not crazy. They’re powerful! The rules they are following are entirely rational, but they’re not engineering rules. They’re power rules.
That taught me how to function at a new level in Silicon Valley, how to work in a venture capital firm, how to raise money, how to work with powerful people, and how to do what I now do at Bulletproof every day. If I hadn’t known those rules that enabled me to start thinking like a chess player, I wouldn’t be where I am now. The 48 Laws of Power not only changed the course of my career, but it also inspired the structure of this book.
When I sat down with Robert and asked him about his views on becoming the person you want to be, he said that most of us have always known who we wanted to be—we’ve just forgotten. When you were a kid, it was probably pretty obvious. He refers to the subjects you were inclined to pursue, even when you were as young as three years old, as your primal inclinations. These are your basic strengths, and they should not be taken lightly, because you are a completely unique person. No one else has ever had or ever will have your exact set of molecules or your DNA. And your unique brain learns at a much faster rate when you are learning about something that excites you. When you want to learn, you do. Robert says that if you’re forced to learn something that you’re not interested in, you will absorb only one-tenth of the information that you would if you were deeply engaged in the subject.
Yet when most people choose a career, they heed the well-meaning advice of their parents and friends or chase money instead of pursuing the things they truly care about. You can get pretty far this way, but you’ll never develop true mastery in something you don’t love because you won’t be learning at your optimum rate. Robert says that if everyone discovered the one thing they really loved and spent all of his or her time and energy on it, mastery would develop organically. I can attest to the fact that it does.
It really comes down to playing to your strengths, something I wish I had learned to do sooner. When I was starting out in my career, I sucked at project management. I didn’t like the way it felt to be bad at something, so I decided to get better at it. I put all of my energy into becoming a certified project manager and ended up just barely average at something that drained my energy and went against my natural strengths. I realized that I could have better used the energy I’d wasted becoming a less than halfway decent project manager to really move the needle in other areas. So I deleted Microsoft Project and worked with experienced project managers who seemed to have magical unicorn project management powers but in reality were simply good at their jobs because they loved what they did and had mastered the necessary skill set.
Later, I was able to put this lesson into practice when I went to Wharton, where people worked really hard to get straight A’s. I decided ahead of time to get base knowledge and just barely pass the classes that actively drained me in order to free up energy to dive deep into areas that fascinated me. I ended up intentionally getting a D in several classes, but I got the same MBA that my straight-A friends did without feeling like a failure. Focusing on the areas I loved did more for my career than spending extra time on areas of study that didn’t light me up.
With coaching from the legendary entrepreneur coach Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach, I have learned to prioritize my actions into three