Do you ever wonder wish you could achieve exponential progress in your life? The solution lies in this episode as Jimmy shares a simple strategy to help you achieve exponential progress through his 3-E Formula!
Episode Keys
- The releasing of yourself from the past to grow into your desired future.
- How to reach new heights in wealth, family, charitable and other areas of life by implementing the 3 E’s.
- Why you must change your thoughts to grow into your bigger future!
- How to evolve from the person you are to the person you want in five easy steps.
- Where you wish to be can be realized by evolving your routines and gaining more energy in the process.
Podcast Transcription
Today is a new day. You have the same hours as Elon Musk. You have the same hours of Mike Cook of Apple. You have the same hours of every über successful person on the planet. So why are you where you currently are? Hey, good morning! This is Jimmy Williams with Live a Life By Design, your Monday morning moments of motivation brought to you here by the doctor of motivation ministry, Jimmy Williams. I tell you I am pumped for another good week. And let me explain why. On last week’s podcast, we talked about the book, Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective [and Inspirational] People. Lori Few and I broke down those seven habits and it gave me a chance to kind of think, Throughout my week, some of the areas that I may need to work a little more and develop to reach the next level of success.
Now, one thing we have to be careful of in life is we don’t simply want to be successful for the sake of being successful. The real purpose of achieving success is to bring about change in our environment, whether that be the world, our household, our company, our relationships, our spirituality, you get the point. You don’t wish to become successful simply to have more money. Now I do not know of anyone this side Bill Gates, who’s worth billions of dollars, Jeff Bezos, billions of dollars, that do not wish to help mankind in some way. They wish to leave a legacy of betterness than when they got here. And most of the people that I know that are local in our areas of our state in the United States that have been successful, have always contributed back to those who need assistance. They provide libraries, museums, educational institutions, they give scholarships, they buy houses. Whatever’s necessary to help you and I see that there is a better way than simply focusing on ourselves. Have you noticed that high achievers in life are those people that really care more for others than they do themselves? That the simple fact of growing a company from nothing, just an idea to a behemoth international organization, and they didn’t even think twice about stopping. Failure was not an option.
I want to share with you today a few moments of those things I thought about this past week. And it came to my mind as I had my journal out – and I hope you’re journaling, that’s where I get a lot of my ideas and thoughts, is thinking with pen and paper in hand helps me to become more of a growth mindset. So this week I got to thinking about a gentleman that’s had a tremendous impact in my life and my career. I read his first book while I was still in undergrad school and don’t laugh. I bought it at a used bookstore. I couldn’t afford the new one. Anyway, I was Kraft macaroni and cheese broke, man. I tell you, I did not even have the money for Kraft cheese, but I went into this bookstore and I saw a title of a book that just caught my eye. Now, keep in mind, this was one of the poorest periods of time in my life, but yet maybe one of the most happy of times. I didn’t have responsibilities, least none that were as large as today. I did not have anything on my mind other than going to school and enjoying life. I had no children, no mate. I simply had me and the university I attended. I had a lot of friends. I had a lot of acquaintances, but this one book when I opened the first few pages, as I thumb through it there in the used bookstore, spoke volumes to me and I had to buy this book.
So for – don’t laugh – a total of 50 cents. I brought a paperback version of Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. Now, Napoleon Hill had quite a start in life. He became the founder and pioneer in writing on the genre of success and motivation as well as positivity. If we purely looked at Napoleon’s background, you would wonder how this may have remained so positive in his mind and achieved so much success in his life. His mother died when Napoleon was only 10 years of age. His father remarried and Napoleon became very, very rebellious. His life was filled with failure, which is the backbone to most of his success. I hope you caught that. He learned from his failures and created a successful career. He had to drop out of law school, not because of his grades, but he couldn’t afford the tuition and costs. He began writing books and discovered he had a knack for writing success-topical books.
During the process of writing a series of articles about famous and successful men, Hill met Andrew Carnegie. Now Andrew Carnegie was the wealthiest man in the United States at this time. Impressed by Hill’s skills, Carnegie commissioned him to interview more than 500 millionaires to gather enough information required to discover the formula for their success. The result of this research, along with Carnegie’s assistance, was The Philosophy of Achievement, a multi-volume study course published in 1925. It was published as the title, The Law of Success. Hill focused on freedom, democracy, capitalism, and harmony in his writings. His belief that negative emotions, such as fear and selfishness, are the reasons behind the failure of unsuccessful people. Hill has sold and continues to sell millions of copies of his books throughout the world. And one of my favorite and Napoleon hill quotes is, “strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.” Whew man, I just get goosebumps stating that quote. “Strength And growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.”
So we’re going to talk today of what I titled the Three E’s of achieving exponential progress in life: engagement, energy and embrace. Let’s take the first E required to achieve success in your life. That’s engagement. If you truly wish to experience growth and success in life, you must be fully engaged in whatever is your career or undertaking. Gallup, the famous polling company, studied engagement and employees of 112,312 businesses and learned that true engagement and focus in the duties of the employees resulted in a factor of 36% of them truly being engaged in 2020. This is a 10 percentage point increase from the year 2000. So when you are seeking success, you must be engaged fully in the mental and emotional connections of your colleagues, supervisors, customers, and other people that the value you bring to the marketplace will enhance what their needs currently are.
Most of the industry leaders of history achieved success only after many years of fully submersing themselves in the value creation they were bringing to the world. To become and remain engaged in your passion, you must be clear in your values and purpose for what you’re doing and who you’re doing the work with. It is incredible when you are fully engaged in the task, I can get to work early in the morning from 6:00 AM til 9:00 AM and feel like I’ve gotten six hours where the work done based on my productivity. I am completely engaged before the day’s events ever start. I am engaged in what is my number one of my big three I must complete that day. And the importance of that is, then you must take that engagement and infect your team of which you work. You must become engaged so much that they wish to also become engaged in the synergy is overwhelming. So the first E is in engagement.
Now the second E is energy. One of the most industrious and committed people to the purpose and creation of value products in the marketplace is Elon Musk. This man sleeps in his office on a sofa most nights and has a net worth in excess of $201 billion with a B. Now I’m telling you, he is the richest man on the planet according to Forbes magazine. He doesn’t sit back on his laurels because he’s attained such greatness in wealth. He is driven more today than he was as he was climbing the ladder of wealth and success. He could be enjoying the spoils of his years of toil and dedication of bringing products to the world that fascinate and change markets in paradigm-shifting ways. But Elon Musk chose to do something with far greater purpose. He wished to change the way the world drives and the types of cars that we buy.
He wishes to change that life on this planet is not the only planet for which we can have life. He’s developing rockets that will take human beings to the moon and beyond. He truly does not have limiting ideas. He has exponential thoughts. Musk is a dynamo of energy and is so busy running Tesla and Space X that he schedules his day out in five-minute increments. He sleeps six hours per night and works between 85 to 100 hours per week. He spends 80% of his workday on engineering and design. You see, he’s given that future thought of how to create greater value, 80% of his time. Now, am I saying that you should emulate or copy Elon Musk’s schedule? Of course not. I’m not saying that. That’s his schedule. However, I am asking you to emulate his energy level to achieve greatness. He is finely tuned to the task at hand all day long.
Earlier, I said to you that we have 36% of our employees engaged based on the Gallup study. Elon would be an anomaly in that study. He was so engaged all day long in whatever task he must complete. To do this, he does remove unnecessary distractions from his life. Can we say cell phone? And he gives himself the work environment to achieve break throughs that have thrust him into a level of net worth that others only wish they could achieve. Elon Musk knows the meaning of energy. He knows how to create it. He knows how to sustain it, and he knows how to recreate it when depleted. He understands that full engagement to the task at hand is infectious in his organization that now builds automobiles that others only dream they wish they had the idea. He’s so far ahead of battery development, that the other car makers are struggling to even get a foothold. He’s in the rocket-making business that has done wonders in terms of technological advancement. NASA has even contracted Space X for projects that the government wishes to build for space exploration. He has truly been a value creator for the world. You could do the same if only you’re fully engaged and you have the energy to do for.
The third and final E is embrace. Now, by embracing change or evolvement, you can become something tomorrow that you aren’t today. As a person, you are similar to the caterpillar that eventually becomes something beautiful and flies freely in the air to see the world from a different viewpoint. Based on a 2011 article in Psychology Today by Dr. Douglas LaBier, we can evolve ourselves in five simple steps as human beings. Step one, begin by listing the specific qualities or capacities that you believe are undeveloped or underdeveloped in your life, or even if they don’t exist, list them down. These are ones that you want to grow and become visible to others. Step two, for each one of these special qualities or capacities, envision, what it would look like if you did embody that quality in your daily life, write out examples of what each of these qualities may look like and describe them. It can help to maybe imagine seeing your evolved self as through a character in a movie. Step three, describe the totality of that broadened expanded picture of your evolved self in a few sentences. Number four, envision a rope is attached at one end of those qualities that you want to evolve above you. The other end is attached to you. Now, picture this rope pulling you steadily upwards toward those evolve qualities you desire. And step five, finally, list what you can do each day that strengthens and practices these qualities that you’re evolving towards. As the rope pulls you toward them, you see yourself strengthening that muscle of those qualities through exercise.
These five steps can be utilized to help us become more than we are today to help us become -that’s right – bigger, better, and bolder than we were yesterday. By purposefully seeking growth through the three E’s: engagement, energy and embrace, you will find yourself growing in areas of life. You never thought possible this week. Your challenge is to list the areas of your life you truly wish to experience growth, then focus on one of them by applying the three E’s above to that particular characteristic. So go ahead, enjoy and achieve your greatness. You can do so by living your life by design.
