Persistence and Determination Alone are Omnipotent

Teammates, to recap, the key question is how do you stay Fired UP to keep trying – to keep doing – to keep persevering – to keep from quitting – to keep from giving up – to keep persisting – to keep pressing on after you’ve had your failures or, as Dr. Seuss would say, “your hang-ups and bang-ups?” Here are two secrets!

1. The bigger your goal the longer it will take you to accomplish it – which means you need to have the stamina to maintain course and speed when things get bleak. I’ve always found and firmly believe in the concept of healthy body = healthy mind. Get yourself in shape! Your brain relies on your body for nourishment – to give yourself the best possible chances for success you need to keep your brain and body partnership thriving through exercise and great nutrition.

2. Assuming you have the stamina to press on through thick and thin, you’ll still need protection against the “quitter demons” – these are the little voices you’ll hear in your head or from those you love and trust or from repeated failures. To beat the little bastards back use the weapon of Perspective. Remind yourself of your position in life compared to those less fortunate – and dig deep here – example – you can read, remember how many can’t or perhaps once could, but no longer can – that no one is shooting at you – that food will be on your table tonight – that you have friends, loved ones, clothes, so on and so on. The key here is appreciating the perspective of your situation in comparison to other things in life. It’ll keep you grounded and on track when others might want you to join their misery…after all misery loves company!

As you attack your 2015 goals, I hope you’re able to use these to keep your persistence engine stoked, because at the end of day, persistence is the only thing that gets, and keeps, you going to achieve your goal. I’ll leave you with my favorite quotation of all-time:

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "Press On!" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. J. Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States.

I go more in depth in my book Be Unstoppable: https://www.perfectonline.com/product/BeUnstop

 

CHARLIE MIKE – (Press On in military speak!) ALDEN

Take control of your body – Take control of your life!

Phil and I do talks around the country on the general theme of “Take control of your body – Take control of your life.” The link between exercise and a better life is well proven.  From beating back depression, to living longer and to just plain living a happier more fulfilled life can all come from just 30 minutes of exercise a day. We’re not talking about hard-core, Navy SEAL training like Phil and I endured. The positive elements of exercise can be enjoyed just by putting one foot in front of the other.

If exercise is so good for you, and it’s not that hard to do or take that long to do, then why don’t more folks do it?! In a word: habit. Understanding your habits and knowing what habits are working in your favor and which ones are holding you back, can be your key, quite literally to a better life. But before you can set a course for a habit that can put you on a happier path, you need to understand what a habit it is, how habits work and how they control most of what you do in life. It’s a pretty simple concept actually: habits are nothing more than a collection of simple actions that form a more complicated routine of actions. In SEAL Team, a classic habit that they taught us was the “how-to-shoot-a-gun” habit. The instructors would constantly remind us that they could teach a monkey to shoot a gun if it understood English! Here’s their secret training recipe: they broke the habit into tiny bite size actions – site alignment, then trigger control, then breathing and finally surprise. We spent hours and hours dry firing a gun until they felt we had mastered the basics of this habit….and a few thousand rounds later we had it relatively mastered.

The habit of exercise is not nearly as tedious as learning how to shoot a gun Navy SEAL style, but it is the same principle. My habit for exercise goes like this:

·         Understand why I want to exercise -  Makes me feel good/gives me energy and I hate my fat pants

·         Decide when I want to exercise and determine what exercise I can do that day and execute.  I literally decide 24 hours before on what and when. I find that working out first thing in the morning leaves me with the smallest chance of procrastinating and if I exercise in the evening I’m too amped up to go to sleep. (I’m not alone, several studies have proven this same thing – those that work out first thing in the morning have the highest success rate.)

 Now, I’m not asking you to form a habit overnight on committing to 30 minutes of exercise a day, but I am asking to you to try it in bite size chunks. Literally the only thing you have to lose is weight. Besides, consider your options: Don’t exercise and suffer the consequences of a shorter, unhappy life or form an exercise habit you can live with so you can live better and longer!

I know the option I’m choosing!

Set that clock ten minutes earlier tomorrow and knock out 20 pushups – one at a time, standing between each one. Can’t do a pushup – no problem – drop to your knees and knock them out one at a time.

Make life great,

Alden

Make Your Life Count!

Teammates, over the past year the marketing team of Team Perfect has been on a quest to distill the essence of Team Perfect into a single phrase. They call it a “tag line”, I call it our mission statement reduction sauce – our mission statement reduced into 4 words or less. It’s not an easy thing to do – edit words down to the bare minimum yet still capture the key meaning of your purpose. There are lots of examples of tag lines, but few really stir the soul – a couple of effective ones that come to mind are Nike’s “Just do it” or Apple’s “Think Different” campaigns. Both capture the prospective company’s personalities – of course, at the end of the day, tag lines or mission statements or slogans or credos are just words. However, when they are backed by action such as Apple’s consistent design philosophy to “think differently” about what a piece of technology looks, feels and works like or Nike’s continual pursuit to associate their product with people that don’t talk about performing – they “Just do it” – then the words begin to take meaning…

To reduce our “mission statement” is to get to the core of why Team Perfect exists (and continues to persist!). We have seven core values at Team Perfect and our first one is:

#1. We CARE about the health of our customers” is our front sight focus. And the reason we care is that we link health with the ability to never give up, and when you’re armed with the capacity to persevere no matter what the odds are, then you have the ability to make a difference. Think about it for a second – what’s your purpose? What are you going to do with your life? Why?...What Fires you Up?...what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? (i.e…what would you do if you knew you wouldn’t give up?!). Doing anything new or different is hard enough – but it’s exponentially harder if you’re out of shape!

So what’s my favorite phrase?

“Make your life count.”

It’s up to you – you define your life and what it’ll be. After all, at the end of day, what’s really important in life? How many objects you own or the number of zeroes in your bank account? Doubt it... I bet, if you’re really honest with yourself, you’ll come to the conclusion that I have: figuring out ways to make a positive impact on something or someone – leaving the world a little bit better than you found it while having one helluva good time. In other words: Making YOUR LIFE Count. So be like Apple and think differently about your life, because your life is uniquely yours…and once you’ve decided what it’s going to be, be like Nike and Just do it!