31 Quotes That Put Life’s Ball In Your Court“What we insistently desire, over time, is what we will
#1 — “And so it is, that both the Devil and the angelic Spirit present us with objects of desire to awaken our power of choice.” — Rumi
You have the capacity to choose.
In fact, spiritually and religiously, I believe that’s one of the core reasons we come to this earth.
So, which decisions are you going to make?
Your power of choice already exists. The goals you set simply awaken that power and activate it in a certain direction.
#2 — “The discipline of desire is the background of character.” — John Locke
Your character is your floor, or your minimum standard.
Your minimum standard is what you’re willing to let into your life.
Discipline can be about willing yourself to do something, but usually, it’s about having the discipline to say “no” to the things that don’t ultimate serve you.
Saying no is such a struggle for some people that author Greg McKeown devoted an entire chapter in his bestselling book Essentialism to teaching you how and when to say no.
“The discipline of desire” is really the battle of when you say no.
#3 — “To be a man is to desire. The slothful man, however, is a dead man, an arid waste. His desire itself has dried up.” — William R. May
Henry David Thoreau once said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
The song is still there, it just wasn’t expressed.
You fulfill your potential through expression. Movement, activity, action, and performance are what make us alive.
#4 — “Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.” — Dan Brown
Psychologically, studies have shown we fear loss far more than we appreciate gains.
When we avoid loss, we over-inflate the downside. We imagine it to be far worse than it really will be, which stifles our courage.
Courage is the difference between being “approach-based” to your life vs. “avoid-based.”
Being avoidance-based comes from avoiding (whether real or imagined) pitfalls.
Being approach-based means the ball’s in your court. You’re actively seeking as opposed to avoiding.
What are you avoiding?
In The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer teaches a principle the analogy of someone with a thorn in their side.
Rather than healing the wound, the person simply wraps layers and layers of bandages on top of the thorn, leaving it there.
In fact, they have to re-arrange their entire life around this thorn. What used to be easy and comfortable becomes increasingly difficult as they have to arrange all circumstances around avoiding putting pressure on the thorn.
What are you avoiding to the extent that you’re re-arranging your entire life about what to avoid?
Remove the thorn.
Or as Susan Jeffers wrote, Feel the Fear…and Do It Anyway!
#5 — “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” — Epicurus
This principle is so important that entrepreneurial coach Dan Sullivan created an entire framework around it which we later expanded into a major published book, The Gap and the Gain.
“The Gap” is measuring where you are right now in comparison to where you want to someday be. It’s an endless horizon that can never be realized.
“The Gain” is measuring where you are now compared to where you used to be.
Epicurus is teaching us not to get into the “Gap.”
In that book, we record audio commentary after every chapter.
After one of the chapters, Dan reflected on who it is that struggles with the “Gap,” or measuring ourselves compared to where we want to be, the most.
He said it’s not the student that gets C’s or D’s. It’s the student with perfect A’s. It’s the student with a 1600 SAT. After spending their whole lives at the top, they assume there must be nowhere else to go.
No.
Do not ruin what you already have. Wherever you’ve come, there are more good things ahead. You’ve never reached the “limit” of your happiness.
#6 — “Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” — William Blake
Could you start that business if your life depended on it?
Could you make that phone call if your life depended on it?
Could you finish that workout if your life depended on it?
Could you earn a million dollars, if your life depended on it?
The classic example of “if your life depended on it,” is commonly used in self-help because it so clearly illustrates the difference between ability and desire.
In each of these hypothetical scenarios, your innate ability didn’t actually change, only the stakes for performance.
In short, your desire changes when you raise the stakes.
You can achieve some totally unthinkable things. Just think about what you could truly do if you, or the life of someone you know, depended on it.
If someone else raised the stakes, you already know you would rise to the occasion.
Don’t wait for someone else. Raise the stakes yourself.
#7 — “Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.” — Napoleon Hill
“Pulsating” means DAILY.
You haven’t raised the stakes if you’re not chasing your goals daily.
If it’s not something you do daily, it’s not a priority.
If your desire is to transcend everything, it needs to be daily.
Waking up early? Exercise? The book/play/app you want to write/create? Are you doing those things every day?
Daily activity is how you spend your time. How you spend your time reflects everything else.
As Richie Norton says, the ultimate test of character is how you spend your time. He uses the example that most people say “family first” and then proceed to put work first.
Their priority is reflected in how they spend their time.
Your priorities are reflected by how you spend your time.
If you haven’t made something daily, it’s not a priority.
This is why Brian Tracy says to Eat the Frog every day. Do the biggest, most important task, first thing in the morning.
#8 — “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” — George Bernard Shaw
Or as Stephen Covey taught, all things are created mentally and spiritually before they’re created physically.
If you don’t like your current physical circumstances, examine the spiritual and mental causes behind what caused them.
Then pivot.
#9 — “Your input determines your outlook. Your outlook determines your output, and your output determines your future.” — Zig Ziglar
What do you consume on a daily basis?
Your input is measured by the things you eat, watch, read, and listen to, but also in the thinking patterns you allow into your life.
Your mindset determines your outlook.
What mindset do you want to have?
You can control your own mindset. Yes, you can adopt a growth mindset about growth mindsets.
Or as Zig Ziglar would also say, “It’s your attitude, not your aptitude, that determines your altitude.”
#10 — “The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.” — Robert Kiyosaki
The bigger your dream, the more people you attract.
Those people will be a sounding board. You can go back and forth and actively ratchet upward. Your desire increases, grows, and changes in beautiful ways when there are other people depending on you.
Those people are your biggest advocates when you do inevitably face disappointments.
Create an ecosystem to attract people to your goals. Former NFL player Bo Eason shares an example of this in his book There’s No Plan B For Your A-Game, where he shares the goal his son Axel has to play in both the NFL and the NBA, something that has almost never been done.
Because he has this seemingly impossible goal, all sorts of doctors, nutritionists, athletes, and other people want to (and do) help Axel. When he tells the right people about his goal, they get excited about it.
Incredible things start to happen when you start to ask for help, in a genuine and selfless way.
#11 — “Nearly all rich and powerful people are not notably talented, educated, charming or good-looking. They become rich and powerful by wanting to be rich and powerful.” — Paul Arden
In an interview with the New York Times, Laszlo Bock, who at the time was the Senior VP over People Operations at Google, said GPAs and standardized test scores are meaningless metrics when it comes to finding and hiring good candidates.
Instead, he says, they look for qualities such as the ability to learn on the fly, the ability to lead and follow independent of official hierarchy, and the ability to learn from mistakes. He even shares that an increasingly larger percentage of Google’s workforce has no college degree at all.
The candidates Google hire really, really, really want it.
There’s no substitute for really wanting to work at Google.
And not just wanting it enough to wish for it, but wanting it enough to reverse-engineer and figure out how to truly do it.
What do you want?
What you want determines what you will get.
You don’t need to justify your wants to anyone. As Dan Sullivan has said, “you want something because you want it.”
#12 — “The first principle of success is desire — knowing what you want. Desire is the planting of your seed.” — Robert Collier
As the Chinese proverb goes, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.”
You already have desires.
Give them room to grow.
#13 — “A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.” — Ayn Rand
Competing with others is a very narrow game to play.
When you compete with others, you allow them to set the standard and the benchmark. Paradoxically, you dramatically limit your progress when you do this. This is because suddenly, your entire life revolves around being only marginally or slightly better than the people you surround yourself with. As an example, if you’re a runner, you’re only focused on how you can become 1 second faster than the current record-holder.
What a terrible way to live.
In addition to burning and ruining the relationships you have with those people, you’re not even playing your own game. Your performance is focused on and revolves around their ability rather than your own.
Contrast that with Michael Jordan, who did not select anybody else as the benchmark except for himself.
He wanted to be the greatest of all time. Period.
He didn’t care when he already was, that he had surpassed other people’s “benchmarks,” because he hadn’t yet surpassed his own.
This is the difference between what Simon Sinek calls the “finite” game vs. the “infinite” game.
The finite game is finite because it ends.
Don’t let your game end. Comparison is not only the thief of joy, but also the thief of continued progress.
Set your own benchmark.
#14 — “Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses.” — Daniel Pink
All goals that don’t have true mastery as the ultimate motive will in one way or another stunt your learning and growth.
They’ll be a shallow shell of the experiences you could have had, and you won’t be able to apply or “count” the energy you expended in a meaningful way if your goal isn’t mastery.
A an example, when I launched Personality Isn’t Permanent, my second major published book, I wanted it to sell a million copies or more.
At least at the time, it didn’t.
If my goal was to sell a million copies in and of itself, it largely would have been a waste of a launch.
I was disappointed, but to say that that launch was a waste would be completely missing the point.
I learned incredible things from launching that book.
I learned where my strategy was ineffective and where my performance was falling short.
I’ve published 4 books since Personality Isn’t Permanent, and I’m working on my next. I applied the lessons I learned to all the future books I wrote.
For example, my more recent book Be Your Future Self Now is the #6 book in all of Korea at the time of this writing.
Far from being a waste of time, launching each of my books was a powerful learning experience. This is because my true goal in writing books isn’t only to sell millions of copies, but to learn in the process how to write timeless books that are “So good they can’t be ignored.”
Any ups and downs you experience along the way can be applied and used if mastery is your objective.
There’s a strategy for buying real estate called the “1031 Exchange,” where you roll all the money tax-free from one property into a bigger property each time you buy/sell real estate that Robert Kiyosaki teaches in his book Rich Dad Poor Dad.
Mastery is like doing this, but emotionally instead of financially.
You get better and better with every experience, regardless of what any individual step in the journey may look like.
#15 — “If you desire ease, forsake learning.” — Nagarjuna
When Josh Waitzkin was learning Tai Chi, he would intentionally work with people far better than him. This allowed him to learn far faster than the average student. Although this approach was far more difficult, he also reaped far greater benefits.
As part of this, he constantly was receiving critical feedback of where he could improve. In martial arts, un-learning an incorrect form is just as important as learning the correct way.
Learning and un-learning are literally the re-mapping and re-wiring of how your brain works.
Your brain can literally change completely when you apply yourself to learning and un-learning.
As an example, when I was a teenager, I played War of Warcraft for 15 hours a day. I barely graduated High School. The prospect of going to college at all, let alone getting a PhD, would have seemed nearly impossible if you had seen me at the time. In 2019, I graduated from Clemson with a PhD in Organizational Psychology.
In between High School and 2019, I un-learned the habit of playing World of Warcraft. I shifted my daily activities to reflect my future self instead.
You can learn or un-learn anything. The world has never had more information so easily accessible to so many people simultaneously.
#16 — “Without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value.” — Jim Rohn
Richie Norton is a bestselling author and world-renowned executive coach.
In his book The Power of Starting Something Stupid, he shares that his brother-in-law Gavin unexpectedly passed away in his sleep. Shortly thereafter, he also lost his newborn son Gavin, whom he named after his uncle.
While grieving from these experiences, a mentor and friend asked Richie and his wife Natalie what they had learned.
After giving this question some thought, this is what he said:
“The more I thought about it, the more my life took on a very real sense of urgency. I became acutely aware of my time limit. I found myself face to face with the realization that circumstance was completely outside my realm of control. Not only this particular set of circumstances, but circumstance in general.
…I realized that if we sit around waiting for our circumstances to change, for a time when we can finally live life the way we really want to live, chances are very good that we will stay stuck waiting forever.”
From this experience, Richie created a new motto:
“Live to start. Start to live.”
He calls this motto “Gavin’s law,” after his brother-in-law and his son.
That motto has led Richie and his family to travelling around the world, starting multiple businesses, all living from their dreams.
Live your dreams now.
Mortality is real. Live the life you want today. Allow the urgency of living your best life to propel you forward.
As Richie says, “Life is short. That’s not a cliche.”
#17 — “When I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.” — Viktor E. Frankl
In a recent coaching call I was in, someone asked me about the best way to design their future self.
I explained that unless your future self is well-connected spiritually, it won’t be very meaningful.
I don’t know Viktor Frankl personally, but I can’t help but wonder and think that perhaps, the reason that he was able to hold on, is because he knew spiritually he had a mission to accomplish and that God wanted him to write that manuscript.
After he was liberated from the Nazi concentration camps he wrote that manuscript, which later became Man’s Search for Meaning, one of the most influential books ever. Millions of people have been personally, profoundly, and deeply impacted because Viktor Frankl wrote that book.
He was spiritually connected to his deepest desire.
What is it that you have a spiritual mission to do?
What were you called to accomplish?
Your deepest, truest, desires will guide you through.
#18 — “Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.” — Napoleon Hill
Journaling is priceless.
Journaling gives you access to a ‘mental photograph’ of whatever you were thinking about on the day you wrote it down.
This mental photograph is literally impossible to access in any other way.
If you rely on memory alone to remember your goals, your goals and memories will drift. As Dr. Brent Slife taught, our memories are not objective entities stored somewhere like a computer file. Rather, they change and shift in the present to reflect the circumstance and context through and under which they’re considered, much like Pixar’s Inside Out.
When you write down your goals, you make them non-negotiable.
You can’t argue with the written words on a page when you go back to them. Ink is permanent.
Your goals aren’t real until they’re written down.
Writing down your goals forges a point of no return, from which forms an inflection point of growth and change.
Write it down. Watch it happen.
#19 — “No desire is meaningless or inconsequential. If it pulls you, even a little bit, it will take everyone higher. Desire is where the Divine lives, inside the inspiration of your desire. Every desire is of profound importance with huge consequences, and deserves your attention.” — Mama Gena
All behavior is goal-driven.
Everything you do has an outcome.
For example, you opened this article because you were interested in reading the rest of it after you saw the headline.
But reading an article online wasn’t what you were really after: you wanted personal transformation in your life.
It’s the thing behind the thing that counts.
Clayton Christensen, former Harvard Business School professor, created one of the most famous theories in business, the “Jobs To Be Done” theory.
In this theory, he states that what customers want is not the product, but rather what the product can do for them.
He famously uses the example that people don’t buy drills, they buy the holes that those drills can create for them.
What you want probably isn’t the million dollars, it’s what you can do with the million dollars.
Operate from the goal behind your goals.
That’s your real goal.
#20 — “The significance of a man is not in what he attains, but rather what he longs to attain.” — Khalil Gibran
Matthew McConaughey was once asked by someone who his hero was.
After giving this some thought, he replied that his hero was himself 10 years into the future.
In his Oscar speech, he said:
“You see, every day, every week, every month, and every year of my life my hero’s always 10 years away. I’m never gonna be my hero; I’m not gonna attain that. I know I’m not, and that’s just fine with me because that keeps me with somebody to keep on chasing.”
Similarly, in an interview with Tim Ferriss, Josh Waitzkin said “…myself 20 years from now is my teacher.”
Your present is determined by your future self.
Who is your future self?
What do you long to attain?
#21 — “If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.” — William James
Tim Grover was the performance coach for Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Charles Barkley, and many other elite athletes.
He once said, “You don’t have to love the hard work. You just have to crave the end result so intensely that the work becomes irrelevant.”
The goal determines the process.
When driving, your destination determines the roads you will take. Unless you’re driving for the specific purpose of looking at the scenery, you don’t really care which roads you take as long as it gets you the result you want.
In fact, sometimes the GPS will suggest different routes depending on the time of day, to give you the best result possible.
The goal determines the process, which determines your result.
#22 — “It is not from nature, but from education and habits, that our wants are chiefly derived.” — Henry Fielding
When Elon Musk was a young child, he read lots of sci-fi books, among them the space epic The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, many of which influence his view of the world today as well as his present goals.
Nobody told Elon Musk that he should go to Mars.
Nobody told Elon Musk that he should build electric cars.
Rather, he trained himself to desire those things by the things he read. He wasn’t born desiring them already.
The same is true of you.
You can choose what you want your desires to be.
What will you train your desires to be?
#23 — “A strong passion for any object will ensure success, for the desire of the end will point out the means.” –William Hazlitt
The more specific your desire, the more specific the means will be.
As an example, when I first started writing, I set a goal to get a book deal.
But not just any-size book deal. I wanted a six-figure book deal.
And not with any publisher. I wanted a deal with one of the “Big 5” publishers headquartered in New York.
In 2018, Willpower Doesn’t Work was published with Hachette, one of the big 5 publishing houses. My advance was over 6-figures.
Before that, I had a conversation with Jeff Goins, who told me that if I wanted a six-figure or greater book deal, I should wait. At the time, I had tens of thousands of followers and email subscribers, and I could have gotten a book deal. Perhaps even a really good book deal. But it wouldn’t have been the deal that I wanted.
To get a six-figure book deal with one of the big 5 publishers, I learned that I needed 100,000 email subscribers, or more.
The goal of 100,000 email subscribers became the means.
If I had wanted any book deal, I wouldn’t have needed 100,000. But I had a specific goal.
Specific goals engineer specific means.
#24 — “When your desires are strong enough you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.” — Napoleon Hill
“Appear” is the key word here.
You’re not the only one who desires wealth, health, incredible relationships, great spirituality, and social validation/fame.
Other people want those things too. Unfortunately, most people allow lesser desires to crowd out the things they really want.
Like weeds in a garden, fluffy or unimportant desires often choke out the deepest and most important.
This problem usually happens when people have too many desires. They want conflicting things. As a result, the garden becomes cluttered and messy.
As Jim Collins said, “If you have more than 3 priorities, you have none.”
When your desires become stronger, it’s because you’ve weeded the garden of any conflicting desires that were in the way.
#25 — “Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.” –Michelangelo
Daniel Lapin, author of the book Thou Shall Prosper, outlines 10 principles for wealthy and prosperous living. One of them is “never retire.”
Interestingly, Harvard Business Review discovered that people who retire later live longer.
The cause for this is simple. simple. Many people do not fill their lives with meaning when they stop working. They quite literally and very sadly no longer have a purpose in life.
Going back Viktor Frankl, he was able to survive the most hellish of circumstances, because he had a reason to.
He knew exactly what he was going to do as soon as he got out of that concentration camp. His hope in the future literally kept him physically alive despite being in the worst of circumstances.
Always having more to accomplish than ability to accomplish it ensures you’ll continue pressing forward.
#26 — “Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.” –Socrates
In another article I wrote years ago titled 35 Hard Truths You Should Know Before Becoming Successful, I opened by explaining that it’s never as good, nor as bad, as you think.
Regardless of your accomplishments, life will go on.
Regardless of your setbacks, life will go on.
Don’t be scared of successes. You will adapt far faster than you think you will, and you’ll simply expect your new life as the normal and as the standard.
It’s uncomfortable to leave your comfort zone, but you’ll bring that zone with you when you do.
You’ll become increasingly used to bigger and better things.
#27 — “I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.” — Mark Twain
Clarity is one of the hardest things to master.
I’ve sat in rooms with successful entrepreneurs and CEOs who at times still struggle to find out what they want.
I myself changed trajectory on the entire book I was writing last year. I began and ended 2023 with a totally different topic and focus.
Clarity requires honesty.
It requires you to continue to strip away layers of the onion.
It requires you to be fully transparent with yourself and others.
When you know what you really want, it impacts everyone around you. You start acting from your core desire, which is oftentimes totally scary. You expose yourself.
It’s also totally worth it.
#28 — “Desire will in due time externalize itself as concrete fact.” — Thomas Troward
In the beginning of Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill tells the famous story of Edwin C. Barnes, the man who “thought” his way into a business partnership with Napoleon Hill.
He intensely desired this so much that he hitched trains to get to Edison’s factory and began working for him as an entry-level employee.
In the back of his mind, his dream never went away.
Eventually, Edison’s company released a product with the famous slogan “Made by Edison and installed by Barnes.”
The energy from your desires can’t be ignored forever. It will come to pass.
While in federal prison, Andre Norman desired to change and improve his life. He began to desire to go to Harvard.
Eventually, he became a Harvard fellow. He’s now an internationally renowned speaker who helps people around the globe take responsibility for their life and their decisions.
Your desires will lead to very interesting and powerful places if you allow them to.
#29 — “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” — Henry David Thoreau
In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey explains the difference between our circle of concern and our circle of influence.
Our circle of concern is everything that may affect us, or that we may become “concerned” with.
Our circle of influence is much smaller. Our circle of influence is limited to the scope of events that we are directly responsible for and capable of shifting.
Most people are running in circles around their own circle of concern, without spending quality time in their circle of influence. They’re worried about things they can’t control and people they don’t know.
You don’t need to do that.
Focus on your circle of influence, and let the rest alone.
#30 — “The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods.” –Socrates
Having fewer wants comes from a) already having attained your wants and b) being more selective about those wants.
On having what you want already, Florence Shinn said “Faith knows it has already received and acts accordingly.”
How much faith do you have in your future self?
On being selective about what you want, you’ve probably done quite a bit of thinking about what you want if you’ve gotten this far.
How selective will you be?
#31 — To again quote Neal Maxwell:
“What we insistently desire, over time, is what we will eventually become.”
Who do you want to become?
What will you do about it?
