As of January 15th, when I am writing this article, the New Year has just begun. Instagram is being flooded with #newyearnewme posts, and people are tweeting about their 2019 “come ups.” A majority of these people are just rehashing the same tweets and posts from the year before due to the fact they failed in 2018, thus causing them to give it another college try in 2019. And then, once they inevitably fail again in 2019, they will rehash and repeat again in 2020. This will continue to go on in 2021, 2022, and so on and so forth.
The biggest problem with New Year's resolutions is that people think they absolve everything they’ve done over the course of the entire lives prior. But it’s not really how it works. This is like those get-rich-quick schemes. Instead of saving a little bit of cash every day, people want to spend that money on lottery tickets, hoping to skip the work it takes to become financially stable. A lot of people in our industry and in our world follow the New Year's resolution way of life: “Let’s get rich quick and skip those annoying process steps.”
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And you know what? More power to those who skip the process and get to the pot of gold. If you never had to get your masters or had to make shakes or clean the weight room, well, good for you! But that is not the way I’d want to live my life.
There are a lot of times my wife and I will sit back and look at our lives. We will look at our financial struggles and then discuss how we are going to go about fixing them. Sometimes there are tears, and sometimes there are arguments, but we will always have a plan. We always end with the same gratefulness and thank God that we weren’t given everything because life is about how you overcome the struggle of it. And boy, between the two of us, we have struggled a lot. Some of those decisions brought on by ourselves and others out of our control. But both have shaped us into strong, independent people. We are able to think for ourselves, plan, and survive on our own intuition.
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We aren’t dumping money into the lottery hoping to get rich quick. Why? Because we know one, how unlikely that is, and two, we enjoy the process. The process is much more enjoyable when you have a plan. Having a plan and vision inspires hope. Having a plan for your vision helps you enjoy everything that’s going on around you and helps you appreciate the small little things you would miss if you just skipped from A to C without being able to see B.
For example, look at how many people go broke after winning the lottery. I don’t have the data to support this, but I’d bet it’s more than likely that these are people who’ve never saved or managed their money correctly prior to winning. They had a dream but not a vision.
A dream you wake up from is always there even when your eyes are open. So the dream was to be rich. Eventually, they woke up. They got rich and didn’t have a plan for what was next. They didn’t have a plan during the struggle. They thought, “Hey, I’ll just get rich, and it’ll solve all these terrible problems I have.” This is why they never learned anything from the struggle. They were left hopeless and unable to bear the situation they were going through.
Let’s say you’re an intern or an assistant. And in your role, all you do is complain about everything that goes on around you. In your complaining, you convince yourself that everything is going to be sunshine and rainbows once you’re a head guy.
Well, news flash, bud, being a head guy doesn’t make things any easier. If you sit there and don’t take in the scenery or observe what’s going on around you, well, when you become a head guy, you’re screwed. Why? Well, if you sit there and don’t fully invest yourself in making weight charts or attendance sheets, you’re not going to know what or how they should look like when you ask an assistant to make them.
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It’s not about making these “New Year, new me” resolutions; it’s about dedicating yourself to the daily process, having a vision, and having a plan in every aspect of your life.
Want to be a millionaire? Have a plan and dedicate yourself daily to the process. Want to be a head strength coach? Have a plan and dedicate yourself daily to the process. Is it going to suck at times? No doubt it will.
But if you have a vision and a plan of action, then you can dedicate yourself to the process knowing that it’ll help paint that big picture. Not only that, but you’ll be better prepared for when you reach the top of the mountain. If you’re going to climb up Everest, then you’d better make sure you bring a jacket or you won’t last long at the top. What’s the point of reaching the peak of the mountain only to die once you get there? Like a famous man once told me, “Embrace the suck.”
