Unlimited: How to Build an Exceptional Life (23 page)

Don’t limit yourself to just one role model. Times change, and individual circumstances or random acts of serendipity must be taken into account. I’ve studied the careers of fitness gurus, self-help masters, brand builders, journalists, and pop culture messengers—everyone from Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons to Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey, Anthony Robbins, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Barbara Walters. The list goes on. All of these people have achieved goals that I aspire to, and reading up on them has guided and inspired me again and again. How did they get their start? How did they build their success? What was their trajectory? That helped me know what steps to put first in my process and which to leave out entirely.

This technique, by the way, applies to anything you choose to pursue, whether it’s in your career or your personal life. Let’s say your goal is to lose weight. Look to people you know who have been successful. Maybe you know a colleague who has recently lost fifty pounds. Ask questions about their process, what worked for them, how they got through the plateaus, how often they exercised, what kinds of exercises were most effective, what foods they avoided, and so on.

SPREAD YOUR BETS

As you gain knowledge in your area, remember that your objective is not just to amass information, but to wrangle it all into some sort of system that will help you move toward your goal. When you study those who have been successful, pay particular attention to the order of events as they happened. Martha Stewart worked at
Family Circle
magazine, one of the most successful magazines in its category, for five years before starting her own magazine,
Martha Stewart Living
. No doubt her five years there taught her much that helped her make
Martha Stewart Living
a huge success. I’ve chosen to follow that model in my own career as well. A couple of years ago I was given the opportunity to start my own magazine, but with Martha Stewart’s trajectory in mind, I decided to pass. Instead, I accepted an offer to be a contributing editor to
Self
, the most successful women’s health magazine on the market today. I realized that it would probably be better in the long run to align myself with a top “book” in my field, learn from the best, and
then
strike out on my own when the time was right.

Now, an important caveat. For many reasons, don’t limit yourself to following a single model. You have to be able to stay current and forward thinking as the world changes. This is a fluid universe, and you must always be ready to revise your knowledge and adapt your game plan. In my magazine example, I’m realizing now that in today’s environmental, economic, and technological climate, more and more of us are seeking information and entertainment online, and the paper magazine is becoming a dinosaur. Declining ad revenue is forcing many magazines to fold. So a Jillian Michaels magazine may not be in my future after all. Times have changed since Martha’s success, and I’m respecting that, adapting accordingly, and currently choosing instead to focus on my website content at
JillianMichaels.com
.

Learning everything you can about your field is absolutely key as a first step to achieving what you want. When you are informed, you have the ability to act powerfully, in a way that effects true,
lasting change. Without knowledge, you will fail over and over because your actions will lack merit. So your next step is pretty simple: you gotta practice. Practicing means applying what you learn. If you want to lose weight, you have to practice weight-loss behaviors. You have to practice healthy cooking and working out in order to enhance your effectiveness at those things. If you want to be at the top of your professional field, you have to practice the relevant skills. Practice does make perfect, but only if you are practicing the right things in the right way.

PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE

I bet you’re thinking,
Practice. That’s obvious. I’ll skim this part
. Think again. This section is a long one, for good reason. There are many pivotal components to this concept, so buck up and pay attention. The traditional assumption is that we are born with certain talents or a lack thereof, and that brands us for life. This is simply not true. No characteristic of the brain or body constrains us from reaching almost any level of achievement. This is why practice is so important.

Say you want to go back to school—you should practice test taking and writing skills. Say you want to become more assertive at your current job; you need to practice communication and cooperation skills. It seems obvious, but there’s a catch: putting in hours of plain old hard work like your grandmother told you to isn’t going to cut it. It might make you okay, maybe even good, but it won’t make you great.

Greatness requires a much more specific kind of work—what we’ll call
target practice
.

Target practice means taking action to work SMARTER as well as harder in pursuit of your goals. I also refer to this work as
specific practice
. But before we get into all that, let’s establish exactly what you’re going to focus your energy on. What is it that you are practicing?

Are you wondering what the hell I’m talking about? Maybe you’re thinking,
Easy. I want to practice tennis so I can improve my game
. Okay, that’s true, but what aspects of your game are you going to put your energy into? More specifically, what aspects of the game do you have the
power
to improve? It’s no good worrying about who your opponent is going to be, or whether they will be better, stronger, or faster than you. But you can focus on your serve, your backhand, and your net play, thus being proactive and making yourself stronger for any opponent who might come along.

So when looking at what to practice, you have to focus your efforts on things you have the power to change and improve. Often we think that the outside world has to change before we can.
If only I had a better boss … If only I had my degree … If only there were more job opportunities, then I’d have a better career. If only I were thin, then I would fall in love. If only there were a gym closer to my house, I’d work out more. If only, if only, if only …

This reactive mode of thinking will get you nowhere fast. Reactive people focus on other people and on external circumstances over which they have no control. This is fruitless and serves only to drain your valuable energy and contribute to feelings of hopelessness, inadequacy, and victimization. Without a proactive focus, you will find yourself in that dreaded loop where you continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. If something truly is out of your control, no matter how hard or how smart you work, the likelihood is that it will remain unchangeable by you.

The real path to success lies in knowing how to change yourself from the inside out. What can you work on
right now
to make your situation better? Can you be more patient, determined, creative, positive, knowledgeable, or flexible? By using a proactive focus, you direct your energies toward practicing the things you can change, which will help you gain control of most situations and, ultimately, your life.

For example, suppose you want to lose weight, but your family is always eating junk food around you. What should you do? You can try talking to your family and getting them to change their
eating habits. But what if they don’t? Even if they do, how will you control your coworkers who are eating crap around you, or the strangers at restaurants who sit next to you? You really can’t. The solution is to focus on you. Create different active-family quality times that aren’t about food, like challenging each other to Wii tennis every night instead of watching TV. At work, try bringing in healthy snacks for your coworkers, and instead of happy hour start a walking group and see who joins. If people don’t get on your bandwagon, set healthy boundaries and continue to perfect the things you can control, as that will set you up for success.

It’s not what happens to you, but your response to what happens to you, that makes or breaks you in this life. By changing your responses, you change the end result. Don’t spend your life reacting to the emotional lives and behavior of others, thereby allowing their weaknesses to control you. Instead focus on your own actions and values.
That
is where true freedom and accomplishment lie.

MASTER OF YOUR UNIVERSE

High achievement is not reserved for a chosen few. Despite prevailing beliefs that certain people are born gifted while others are doomed to languish in mediocrity, current research is showing us that this
isn’t
the case. In studying modern-day “prodigies,” psychologists and others have found few signs of extraordinary achievement before the subjects began intensive training. This means, in short, that anyone can master anything they choose if they work hard enough for it. Yes, the price is high, but greatness is within all of us.

I know what you’re thinking, because I thought it, too:
Bullshit. Some people are born with physical or mental attributes that allow them to excel at certain things
. While this is true in some specific cases—yes, if you’re five foot two, you probably won’t be playing pro ball for a living—in most, it’s not.

We are all born with attributes that we can develop, be they physical or mental. Most of the time, the way we live and work alters our nature and development. For instance, for a long time many people thought Lance Armstrong was a great biker, in part because of his oversize heart. But now they are saying that it’s the other way around, that endurance training will cause the heart of an athlete to grow (in this case a good thing), in adaptation to the strenuous demands put upon it. After they stop training, their hearts return to average size.

Baseball players develop the ability to extend their throwing arms farther back than regular Joes, through years of practice. Athletes have the ability to change not only the size of their muscles but their composition as well, depending on the sport they are practicing. We can develop more of the fast-twitch, explosive-strength fibers for sports like sprinting and Olympic lifting, or we can develop more slow-twitch endurance-muscle fiber for sports like marathon running.

This goes for our brains as well. The areas of our brains that are repeatedly stimulated produce more of a special coating, called myelin, that facilitates the smooth, rapid transmission of electrochemical messages between the components of the central nervous system and the rest of the body. So things we repeat can become “second nature.”

Even the territories of our brains can be reassigned. The brains of children who diligently practice music literally develop differently. The regions of their brains that control tones and control fingers take over more territory. Fascinating stuff, right?

TARGET PRACTICE

The fact that we can physically and mentally adapt in these ways means that almost nothing is beyond the scope of our capabilities—the key is harder, smarter work. Target practice.

Target practice, however, is not just about the adaptations that help us achieve success. It’s also about developing skills, methods, and strategies to use in conjunction with any attributes you may augment.

The key components of target practice are goal deconstruction, constant self-examination and monitoring, and immediate feedback from yourself and others. You are still going to put in the hours of hard work, but you will zero in on your weaknesses so you can overcome them and blast through all obstacles.

The sad truth is that most people practice the same things over and over, and while they may become good, they never become great. In fact, some studies have shown that an entire lifetime working at something doesn’t necessarily make us better and in some cases can actually make us worse. I know doctors, lawyers, trainers—you name it—who have been working in their profession for years but aren’t at the top of their field. They might be putting in the hours, but often they are just spending a lot of time making the same mistakes over and over, getting discouraged, and becoming apathetic.

That’s why the
how
of practice is so important. It can mean the difference between achievement and stagnation. It doesn’t matter what you’re practicing: your jump shot, finding your soul mate, or anything in between. You probably don’t think that practicing applies to getting a healthy emotional connection with a loved one or controlling impulsivity—but you
should
. Doing specific practice in these areas means taking effective action, analyzing the results or your progress, and learning from your mistakes. It will add up to greatness no matter what aspect of your life you’re practicing.

The process can be tiring, and it leaves
no
room for ego, but it works. If you want to take your life to new heights, you must learn how to apply this technique to your endeavors. Let’s take a look at the first step: breaking it down.

BREAK IT DOWN