The mindset that builds unlimited success

We all have this idea of who we would like to be. You watch somebody great doing great things and you think, what would it be like to be that? So the big question sits there staring at you. Who am I? What am I?

I will tell you what I found, and I mean this sincerely. Instead of trying to answer that question, I went to work on the other elements of it. What can I do? What can I get done in life? What can I accomplish this week, this day, this hour?

I have spent real time studying philosophy, looking inward, looking outward, looking and looking. And the answer kept coming back the same way. You do not find yourself by staring at the question. You build yourself out of what you get done.

Trophies do not make the man

It is achievements that mark the man or the woman. Not the awards. You get to go on stages, you get trophies and ribbons and certificates and all this other stuff, and none of it makes the person.

What makes the person is the achievements themselves, plus the belief in yourself that you can keep producing more of them. More positive effects. More space for yourself and for others. More command of the material world, earned honestly and ethically. There is nothing wrong with any of that.

It belongs to me. It does not own me

I own a phenomenal amount of the physical universe, and the key point is right there in the sentence. It belongs to me. It does not own me.

I have seen people amass great wealth and great piles of stuff, and I look at their lives and I go, it owns them. They think the stuff is them. That is the wrong equation, man. Because every bit of it can be taken away, and if the stuff was the person, the person just disappeared with it.

The helicopter

Let me give you an example from my own life. I bought a helicopter and got to fly it all over Italy, and it was amazing. It was also one of those things where I checked the box, and then, being very honest with you, I got a little bored with it. So I decided to sell it, and I found a buyer almost right away.

Just about the time the buyer showed up, the financial authorities in Italy confiscated the thing. They said I owed a tax on it, which I do not buy for a second. But they are the ones with the stamp, so now it is a whole process, and there is a real chance they end up winning. It is wrong, and the good guys do not always win. That is part of life.

So somebody may end up snagging a machine I owned outright and righteously. You know what I told myself? Get over it, man. It is just a thing. My belief in myself says I can go replace it five times over.

That is where the freedom comes from. My security is based on my abilities, not on the materialistic stuff, not the gold in the safe, not the money in the bank, not the real estate. All of that is transient, and it can disappear in the blink of an eye. One day we parked that helicopter after a great trip, and the next thing I knew it was gone. Everything else I have could vanish the same way, but my certainty that I can replace it and keep flourishing cannot.

There is no making it

Every now and then you take a pause and do an assessment, and you are tempted to say, I made it. Nope. There is no such thing as making it. There is only the voyage of arriving, and the job is to keep arriving while you push the port farther out.

The road to greatness never ends, and that is the best news I can give you. It is boundless, like outer space, and it just keeps going. So do you. So do I. Let us not go looking for our boundaries; let us keep pushing them out.

The world needs people who live this way. The people we admire are the ones out there doing it, making great effects, helping people, building things together. I admire them, I want to be one of them, and I want more for myself and for the people around me too. You see how it works. It is endless, and I intend to keep it that way.

One last thing about the question we started with. When I stopped asking who am I and started asking what can I get done, I unleashed the desire to live, and boy, have I lived. I have gone through a lot, I have learned a tremendous amount about myself, and I have worked very diligently to get rid of the things I did not like about myself. That work is available to you this week, this day, this hour. Do not wait for the answer; go make one.