Having an intense desire to succeed is the key ingredient to living the life of your dreams. For our purposes, we will examine some of the ways to keep that desire in the gym, on the field or any other fitness endeavor you choose to participate in. However, these tips or attitudes can be used in any area of your life.
One of the main elements that all successful people have is that they know what they want. They may not know at the time how they are going to achieve this, but they know which direction they are going to be moving. Another way to look at this is that they all have goals. It is great to have long-term goals, i.e. five years down the road, but we also need to focus more in the short-term. Short-term goals would mean anything that you are going to achieve within the next year. This may be individual goals or goals that are stepping stones to our long-term goals. It is not enough to just have goals that are an occasional passing thought; we need to fully commit to these goals. This means writing them down and visualizing them constantly. For example, if you want to gain twenty pounds of muscle, use that measuring stick as a long-term goal. Short-term goals that may help you reach that goal are gaining five pounds of muscle, putting fifteen pounds on all of your maximum compound lifts, eating five to six quality meals a day and getting seven to nine hours of sleep a night.
We can see that we need patience and perseverance to achieve any goal. Colonel Sanders visited 1,009 restaurants before someone agreed to sell his chicken recipe, all while in his sixties collecting social security checks! Another great example from the fitness world is Arnold Schwarzenegger. As a teenager in Austria, Arnold used to tell his friends that he was going to become the greatest bodybuilder of all-time, go to the United States and become a movie star and then go into politics. Everyone thought he was crazy, but he believed and he already knew the outcome. Arnold had goals and dreams and nothing was going to stop him, there was simply no other possibility. Arnold used to have a saying, “The mind is the limit. As long as the mind believes you can do something, you can do it…As long as you really believe 100%.” It is obvious that Arnold truly believed these words.
In closing, I think that it is important that we maintain a sense of urgency. We can’t keep putting our dreams off until tomorrow; we need to take action today. All successful people take action and they take it immediately. They don’t worry about the hows and they don’t see failures, they see learning experiences. In the gym, do everything like it is the last time you are going to do it. Keep the end in mind and you will have success beyond your wildest dreams!