I often get down on myself for not doing enough for the world.
Every day we’re inundated with news of a new global crisis. How do you pick what to fix? How do you decide where to put your energy? There’s just too much that needs to be changed.
So often, instead of doing anything, we end up doing nothing.
We wallow in our own exhaustion. We drown ourselves in the noise and turn on the new Netflix show or scroll through Instagram to avoid having to confront the issues all around us.
I brought this concern up to my trainer, Aaron. I told him how exhausted it made me. He responded with something I didn’t expect…
Don’t seek to fix the world’s problems...seek to fix yourself.
You will inspire far more people if you work to become the best version of yourself than you ever will trying to fix the world.
We can only fix ourselves. Yet we spend so much of our energy trying to fix others to no avail. Because they too, can only fix themselves.
This last month I’ve dedicated myself to training every morning. I work out for one hour with Aaron then for the next hour he takes me through a chapter of a business book we’re going through.
I constantly ask him, how will this help me make the world a better place…and he always responds in kind...first we’ve got to make you better.
He brings up the Ironman a lot. When I signed up for it a year and a half ago, I just wanted to finish the race within the cut off time of 17 hours but he made me set that audacious goal of doing it in under 12 hours. We trained for 8 months and it worked...I finished in 11 hours and 57 minutes.
I didn’t even want to film that episode. I wanted to stay focused. Ammar convinced me to capture it in the weeks leading up to the race. And he was right. Because the reality is that I had no idea how much of an impact setting my own personal goal for my own personal development would have on others. I wasn’t focused on making the world better. I was just focused on doing something I thought would be impossible for me. But to this day it’s one of our videos that resonated the most with you all. I’ve met countless people over the last year who told me that after watching that video, they looked at their lives and asked themselves, “What do I think is impossible?”
So don’t worry about changing the world. Don’t worry about fixing everyone and everything around you. Don’t focus on the impact. At least not right now. Instead, focus on yourself. Figure out what the limiting beliefs are that you’ve been telling yourself for too long and what you’re going to do to change them.
The world is paying attention. You won’t have to say a word. You won’t have to flaunt. Everyone around you will see your transformation, and many will start to question what they’re capable of too.
This is what it means to lead by example. This is what it means to inspire. Not through talk but through action.
So, forget the world for now. Instead, work on yourself.
The ripple effect that follows will be far more impactful than you’ll ever know.
