August 1st, 2011 by KP

The Keys To Mastery & Success

A lot of things in life are long awaited. Usually it is never too late once they happen. Patience is the key to a healthy living… with a splash of appropriate impatience.

“I like it when things take off… when things get big… It’s exciting. In 6 months the world will know who SHM are”

The universe presents trailheads, and you can choose to take it, or not. It’s up to you whether you wake up to it & you do something with it

You often get to the point where you don’t quite know where to go. The important thing to do, is to keep showing up, no matter what.

Visualize as if it’s happening right now. Exactly as if it is happening NOW. You don’t wish, not “I want to do X”, instead, it is. It is already reality.

Every attempt at overreaching, playing tricks or looking for a quick fix to get better, they just don’t work.

Key 1: Surrender to your Passion

Like in the talent code – find your ignition, know what fuels & ignites your passion. And visualize it, use the ignition.

To begin with, you’ll need more ignition to keep the motivation up, to use as fuel to get the habit in motion. Like in world’s strongest man when they’re pulling a truck or a tractor or something, yes the man burns 80% of his fuel in the first few meters, but it’s essential to get it moving for that first 20%. Then once it’s in motion, it will take more fuel to stop it than it actually will to keep it moving.

Get ignited & get the fuel for the first 20% to get it moving & create the habit (the beginning of the addiction)

E.g. Would you have thought you would one day enjoy reading html code & figuring out html & php? No of course not. But it was necessary. So you pushed through the barrier of struggle enough times to where now the skill set is at such a level where you actually don’t mind when there are problems with coding, it’s actually fun.

It is going to be the same thing with producing. Except this isn’t just necessary, there’s also a passion to fuel it! It’s just going to get harder before it gets easy, so fall in love with the process. Don’t be scared to fail, welcome the idea, because all a ‘failure’ means is that you’ve learned a lesson so you’re making progress.

As Brian Tracy says “Everything is hard, before it is easy.”

Most of the population can’t get the first key, because they don’t know what they want to do with their life.

What you do as a career, becomes what you do for the majority of your waking hours. Which becomes who you are. It defines you. So what happened to you when you grew the “skill” of html – or you “fired certain signals by doing certain actions constantly and wrapped neural circuits with insulation” to create that skill, you were doing html EVERYDAY. So of course you fired that action of learning html everyday, the “skill” was born. Of course it was. The same thing happens to the rest of the population with their professions. Lawyers, doctors, checkout clerks, dentists, beggars, waitresses, you name it. They all become masters of their professions, because they do it EVERYDAY. They do it so much that they grow the skill, master it, get comfortable, and that defines them. It is now very uncomfortable for them to switch career options, so that’s just ‘who they are’ from now on.

So now that you know your passion, you just have to do it, everyday! It’s that simple. Or so it may seem haha. That’s where ignition from “The Talent Code” comes in.

“I work really hard. I LOVE what I do, and that makes me want to work really hard. So I don’t dread working really hard, because I don’t see it as work. The idea of excelling in my passion even further gives me a burning desire to take action. It isn’t work, it’s progress. I don’t work, I progress.”

I haven’t worked a day in my life since I was 17. How can you call doing something you love work? Work to me is getting paid by someone to do something you don’t want to do. I love what I do, and with that progress is what paves the path of the process.

I wake up in the morning at 6am, with no alarm clock, but because my body wakes me up. I wake up in the middle of the night, my mind racing with ideas, all because I am INSPIRED by what I do.

The first greatest struggle: Feeling that you dream will never come true. That no one believes in you. Like you’ve got this bat & ball, but no one will let you on the field to play. Like you’ll never get a chance. You can end up, with that struggle, with a lot of friends. Because there’s plenty more people who have a bat & ball, and don’t get let on the field either. They end up sitting around, drinking beers, and talking about it at night if you believe any of it. You’ll get a lot of friends that way…

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

How do you master anything? One baby step at a time.

You’ve got to take a chance, you have to jump… and risk falling on your face. Then when you do fall on your face, a lot, and you do it enough times to where you start to get experienced, you realize that you’re going to be ok, it wasn’t as bad as you thought it was going to be, and not only that, but when you get back on your feet you’ll have made leaps & bounds in progress. The harder you fall, the deeper the lesson is learned & ingrained.

As you begin to work, then the struggles you have are that you are not valued, you are not valued in what you do. Other people are more valued in the arena than you, they’ll call you in in the morning, and they won’t work you in until late afternoon, you’re the last one to be dismissed. They don’t care about your time, they’ll just keep you around. You get your feelings stepped on, a lot. That’s the next stage of struggle that you must work through.

The thing that struck me immediately, was that I knew what I didn’t know.

Always assume the audience is smarter than you.

Crystalize your existence, and do something about it. Don’t make excuses, don’t blame anyone. It comes down to you. Excuses are like assholes, they shouldn’t be anywhere near your tongue. You know what you need to do if you want to get better. Practice. Practice. Practice. Find the ‘sweet spot’ where something is just outside of your reach, you have to struggle & fight to figure it out & achieve it, but when you do, you feel unstoppable… Limitless. Deep practice. The Clint Eastwood stare… make errors, pause, go back & slow it down at a pace you can work with, figure it out, then speed it back up. Work in chunks, the smallest chunks possible. These chunks create the first piece of a larger chunk, and it continues. Self discipline, and practice, practice, practice.

Our job is to figure out our place, know what we were destined for, then go for it, and go for it with some grace. But not the grace of effortlessness or seamlessness, but the grace of passion, failing forward, getting stuck & feeling like you have no where to turn but you keep showing up. That’s grace.

When you become more successful, and you get more offers than you lose, you get offered gigs & opportunities where you don’t even need to audition, that’s awfully nice. Then the problem you have is, you lose your friends, you don’t have those friends anymore. Now instead you have people who are jealous, they feel that you have more success than you deserve, you have ‘their’ career. You have to deal with the loneliness of that. And then you find that you always have a true friend in your passion, and that you realize that now you have more time to put in to your love of producing & music, you realize you have a very true companion in your passion, and then it all feels much better.

Everyone is significant, everyone is important. We all have the capacity for excellence, and for greatness, we just need to hit pause once in a while and take a look at US instead of worrying what everyone else thinks about us, or what everyone else is doing, or what we might be missing out on. Before we can help others, we have to be help ourselves first. It’s up to you whether you wake up to it & do something with it.

Key #2 coming soon to a screen near you