While working, I repeatedly listen to Dr. Bob Rotella’s audiobook, How Champions Think: In Sports and Life. I’m drunk with awe over his book. Here are words from Dr. Rotella that are burned into my DNA. I hope his words ignite the Olympian flame in all of us. First, have wild, extravagant dreams. So, if we’re doing stage performances, it’s truly not a leap to imagine winning an Academy Award. And if we have severe stage fright, it’s truly not a leap to imagine winning an Academy Award. Bob (yes, we’re on a first-name basis, although he doesn’t know it) says essential rules for thinking like a champion are as follows: to dream so big that others think we’re crazy and to be as optimistic and persistent as humanly possible. And we must visualize our heroes, such as my heroes, Olympian sprinter Femke Bul and my swim coach, who just tried out for the Olympics, and think, “We’re going to be even better,” says Bob.
After listening to the entire audiobook, I set some extravagant goals, and I genuinely think they’re all possible for all of us, no matter where we are in life:
- Become an Olympian swimmer.
- Earn half a million a year as a Chief Marketing Officer at a public company within 20 years (only once my employer leaves for the heaven realm or leaves the industry, as I have a karmic requirement for loyalty to his family).
- Win an Academy Award for Best Documentary within 15 years.
- Become enlightened by loving everyone unconditionally, experiencing only positivity, and expanding on the practical philosophy of unconditional love taught by Paul Friedman of The Marriage Foundation.
We’re all a work in progress—we are all under construction. Our potential is unlimited, and that means we can achieve anything. All of us can—without exception!
And then I realized that a loved one is the best poet in the world. Yes, it’s true. His poems evoke quite a response from people worldwide, and one moved me to tears for a full day. And I’ll stand by the view that his poems are the best in the world, as I believe it with every moment of my existence. And I know we can all be the best in the world at our crafts, too, as we are all dreamers and go-getters, aren’t we? Yes, anybody who says otherwise doesn’t know our potential, which is beyond unlimited. We are magnificent without comparison—the world’s best at everything positive we desire!
Today, I listened to Brian Tracey’s audiobook on goals as I worked, and he said to write our goals down daily, even rewriting the same goals repeatedly to burn them into our psyche. So, I’m writing my goals each day, and it’s fun, as each goal checked off is a rush—a reward—a win! Brian says that goals written with clarity give 10x the earning potential. So, why not 100X the earning potential? He also instructs us to write three tasks per goal we can do immediately to come closer to success. We deserve the rushes from checking off little goals that accumulate into realizing impossible dreams.
This system caused me to watch documentary film how-to videos every day. I also negotiated with a loved one to get one extra swim coaching lesson monthly. I can achieve the extra lesson if I complete an aggressive list of cleaning chores. And if I go hog wild on cleaning (which amounts to 330 cleaning tasks checked off my list each month), I reward myself with a second additional swim lesson. One of my goals was to turn the dwelling into a paradise, so I’m knocking off two birds with one stone by wildly cleaning to get an extra swim lesson.
I also heard in Bob’s or Brian’s audiobook that moving fast makes us happier and more productive, so I’m changing my morning routine to reflect this. I wake up and then eat a steamed omelet (two large free-run eggs) with Himalayan Sea salt. I then eat Sunny Boy cereal with berries and almond milk, covered in unsweetened dark cacao powder. I also drink almond cashew milk with greens powder, making breakfast my most important, delicious meal. Then I’ll make the bed and do the dishes. And then I’ll do ten minutes of exercise bike sprints and have an ice-cold shower, followed by ten minutes of spiritual videos at double the speed with subtitles. Then, I begin work for the day.
As for my swimming, I have a constraint that I can only swim on weekends. But I need at least 5 hours of swimming a week to consider competing at a top level. To address this, I plan on getting bus tickets and swimming for 2.5 hours on Saturdays and Sundays, which totals 5 hours every weekend. ChatGPT gave me a great 2.5-hour swim routine, too, and I’ve discovered that the AI is a pretty intelligent swim coach. And when we’re pumped, ChatGPT gets excited and provides even more brilliant instruction.
Thinking about our goals gives us adrenaline rushes! Brian Tracey instructs us to always think and talk about our goals, not what we don’t want. We attract what we think about, say, or do, so home in on the goals that will take us to extreme success. It starts with setting goals and rewriting them daily, along with three tasks per goal, until we burn them into our DNA. That’s the starting-block formula for unleashing our unlimited potential!
So, if we’re gunning for a certificate, what about a PhD, an academic teaching role, or the presidency of AU? Or we could become the President of AUSU and then the Prime Minister of Canada. Or we could win an Academy Award, become a gold medalist Olympian, write a book that turns into a blockbuster movie, become a nun, and open convents across the globe, anointed a Saint by the Catholic Church. We’ve got all this in us and infinitely more, even if today we are dying, anxiety-riddled, overweight, impoverished, incarcerated, stigmatized, persecuted, or labeled with a thousand disabilities. So, set wild, radical, magnificent goals. We are already everything we dream of being. It’s in us now.