 No one ever wakes up 30 pounds overweight in a job that they hate, single and alone wondering why their life doesn't have any purpose or any meaning. You often just wake up and that is the case, but the good news is that that didn't just happen accidentally. There was a predictable path that led to that happening and the other good news is that becoming a fulfilled successful person is not an accident either. Now in this video I want to introduce a brand new 10 day personal development challenge that I think can help you get on the right path. What's up guys? Now before we jump in here, the first link below is for a free goal setting download. So I've actually put together a free worksheet to plan out how to have the best year ever of your life. It's the first link below in the description, you'll also get an email every couple days on how to use goal setting to change the direction of your life, so check it out right there below. Now regarding this 10 day personal growth challenge, I want to jump in to the first piece which is the power of choosing a deliberate direction to go in in your life. For me, when I first got into all of this, one of the big things that I knew was going to make a big difference in the quality of my life was trying to figure out my career and to do something primarily that I really liked to do daily regardless of how much money I earned. So I got tired of the groundhog day, waking up every day, doing the same wake up time, wake up ritual, drive and commute to work, the 9 to 5, come back home and then eat and then that was basically my life for years. The big thing for me though was that I didn't really know what to do next. So all I knew was that I didn't want this specifically, what I had daily, but I didn't know what I should actually be going after or what I should be doing instead. So for me to kind of overcome that groundhog day was a very, very difficult thing to do and I learned if you're not really sure what to do, choose a general direction of excitement. So I came up with this idea. I was like, if I could just earn $2,000 or $3,000 a month, if I could just get that, then I could replace my day job. It didn't matter that I was basically starving, but at least I could cover my expenses and spend those nine hours, which is a lot of hours, doing something that I really wanted to do instead. So I didn't even know specifically how that was going to happen. What kind of business I was going to start. Never had a vision of ever writing a book or ever shooting a YouTube video, but that general direction, that was enough to begin a path of kind of deliberate living. So deciding that I was going to do something differently was by itself the impetus to actually go on and build a pretty awesome life. So the first thing is to choose a deliberate direction that you want to go in. The choice of something different is often enough to get that snowball going. Now the second thing is really to acquire valuable skills in the process. So I'm not a big believer that if you just work hard, magic shit happens. I don't see that to be true. What I do see to be true is that the world's most successful people have very, very evolved and progressed skillset from the average person. A world-class pianist or violinist has a skill set they've been chipping away at for decades to get where they are. A pro athlete gets paid millions because of a skill set they have. A professional author who made a million dollars last year from selling books has a unique skill set I don't have. The liberally choosing a direction is great, even if you don't even know what you want. But then from there it's deciding on specific skills you want to acquire. So in the building of my life and the building specifically of this business, one of the main things for me building this channel and writing books was what are the skills I have to get better at in order to live a higher level life. So at first it was writing articles and later it was coaching people and learning how to be good at that and then it was sales and marketing. But after that it was writing books and I had to learn not only how to write a book but to be a good writer, to be a good teacher, to learn how to market and sell a book. You know it was all self-published, I had no publishing house or agent. I had to learn all of those skills one by one by one in order to get to the next level of my life. And then ultimately the evolution is now where the main thing that I love to do the most is shooting these videos. These videos are the next evolution of my skill set. And you can even see going back over the last few years that it started with pretty grainy, pretty crappy videos but it doesn't take long to get better. I mean within a year they were starting to be decently solid videos. And even though the editing and the stylistic, the post-production stuff never came until years later and now there are just people that work for me to do that, it was one of those things that was really a slow, steady, unsexy progression and it wasn't something that really I noticed overnight but it all began with that one question. What am I going to do to improve my skills and get my skills to the point where I'm able to actually produce the quality that I like? For you those skills can be as hard as how to earn more money or save more money or they can be as soft as how to be a friendlier, more agreeable person, how to have better social interactions and be less awkward. Both of those are valuable life quadrants. The final thing is really to commit to mastery, which means avoiding an automatic life. I watched this interview with a top sports psychologist and she was saying that in studying Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Flo's research, the number one thing she works on with her athletes is getting them to a spot where the difficulty of the training is close to their aptitude, is close to their skills, because the second that they get up to a certain level where a new technique or a new training method is too easy for them, they don't have to think about it, it's automatic, that's when their skill development and mastery progression stops or halts. The same is true in life though, right? The second where you go to your new job, you're stressed out, you're on edge, so you spend extra time to learn how to get better. You're rapidly growing, that learning curve is steep, but after maybe three months, maybe everything's boring for you. The same is true when you're learning tennis, you're learning to type for the first time or you're learning to write in English class, but the secret is always being at that level where it's always difficult a little bit, because then you're always keeping that mastery curve, that gap between the difficulty and your skill. You're always keeping that hunger to get better, and the essence of maintaining and continuing to build a deliberate life, the essence of that is really, how can you continue to get better every day, every week, and every month, even if you don't even know what direction you want to go in? But how can you acquire more masterful skills and improve your character and these old fashioned virtues to the point where you are breathing rare air? So avoid the automatic life, the life of no thought, of being the worker bee, the cog in the wheel who just shows up, clocks in, clocks out, but try and do that in your love, in your friendships, in your free time, in your work is not easy. It's a lot, but by thinking about the deliberate direction you want to go in is the biggest thing that will make a massive difference in the quality of your life. Now I'm going to be introducing a couple of those videos over the coming weeks and the coming months on really the deliberate path of personal development of personal growth. I'm going to really try to have the videos focusing on deliberately designing the direction of your life. And I think this is the foundation and the most important, the Alpha and the Omega. Now before you go again, I've included a free goal setting worksheet you can use with it. It's how to design the best year of your life. You can check it out right there, the first thing below and then check out the related videos right here.