This Is What All the Great Ones Do

Eliminate choice.

There are millions of people who never seem to “make it” or “live up to their potential.” They feel stuck, and they don’t make progress on the things they know they want to make progress on.

Then there are a few that do make it, that do live up to their potential, and that do make progress, consistently.

Why? How? What’s the difference?

There are a few key factors, but the number one difference between those who dream and those who live their dreams is this:

Reps taken under emotional resistance.

That’s the whole game.

Almost everyone has:

• Goals they say they want

• A sense of potential

• Enough intelligence and opportunity to move forward

But very few:

• Are willing to face emotional resistance

• Have designed their life in order to make progress automatic in the face of emotional resistance

The reason you don’t make real, consistent progress on the things you say and know you want to make progress on is because you haven’t designed your life properly with emotional resistance in mind.

Until you take one core idea and build it into your life, you’ll always have that dreadful feeling of misalignment between your current reality and your potential reality.

The one core idea is simple:

Eliminate choice.

The design that smashes through emotional resistance more powerfully than anything else is the one that eliminates the ability to choose.

Here’s the two-step design — including how it works and why it works:

1. Specific Structure

First, you need clarity in the form of specific structure. Meaning, you need to know what to do, when to do it, and where to do it.

Goals play a part in this because they give you something to aim for. It’s also more fun — shooting a basketball with no hoop is lame.

A general heuristic here is that if you can be more specific, be more specific. The more specific you are, the more clarity you will have, which reduces decision fatigue, which frees up more energy for what you want to do.

You start with a target. Select a timeframe. Define what you need to do, when you’re doing it, and where you’re doing it. Here’s an example:

Target: Gain 10 lbs of muscle

Timeframe: 8 weeks — ending on February 24th

What to do: Workout at the gym 5x a week (here’s a great example of where to get more specific… What exercises are you doing? On which days? How many sets? How will you keep track of your sessions and progress?)

When: Walk in the front door by 6:00 pm on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday and leave by 7:00 pm. Most people would simply say “Monday-Friday” to define those five days. But your brain doesn’t see Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday when you do that. That gives your brain a hole, which manifests as confusion and an excuse—more emotional resistance—as to the specificity of your actions. If you can be more specific, be more specific. Make it abundantly clear.

Where: LA Fitness

Now you know exactly what you’re shooting for, you have your timeframe, you have your defined actions, you know exactly what you’re doing when you step into the gym, you know when you’ll arrive to the gym, and you know where you’re going.

But that’s only half the battle. You’ve been here before. You’ve built the “system.” You’ve clarified what you needed to do. But before we move on to the critical second step, there’s a few important things to note:

1. Lots of people make a goal of going to the gym. Fewer people define how many times per week, fewer people define which exercises they’re doing and on which days, fewer people define how many sets, fewer people define how they’ll track their progress, what time they’ll be at the gym, where they’ll be… do you get it?

2. The less specific you are, the more your brain has to interpret and solve. Interpretation creates confusion. Confusion creates emotional resistance. Specificity removes all three.

3. Do not mix goals with each other. For example, nutrition is an aspect of gaining muscle. But your eating habits are separate from your workout habits. They are two different buckets. Conflating the two into the same structure will leave your brain thinking about accomplishing two things at the same time. That increases emotional resistance. You do one thing, at one time, with all of your being.

4. You’re doing the work to specify your actions now so you can eliminate choice and emotional resistance later.

Now for the critical second step…

2. You Do Not Have a Choice

After step one, you know exactly what to do. Here’s where the magic happens:

It’s Monday. You know you’ve specified that you’re going to the gym. You know all the details about the what, when, where and so on.

5:30 rolls around. “Eh, I’m not sure if I feel like going to the gym.” “I’m hungry.” “I had a long day at work.” The list goes on.

None of it matters.

Why?

Because there is no choice.

You’re going to the gym at 6:00, and you’re following your structure of workout.

There is no negotiating.

There is no other option.

You do not have a choice.

Emotional resistance is here. Good. You need reps under emotional resistance. That’s the whole game.

You don’t have a choice. Your only option is to follow what you already chose to do — what you WANTED to do.

“No” does not get a voice. “No” does not get a vote.

The people that do not give their emotional resistance a vote, those are the “few” people. They show up, no matter what. They are consistent, because there is no choice. There is no negotiating.

This is especially important in the initial stages of your pursuit. You don’t have as much momentum. You’ve got to “self-start.” But this is why having an abundantly-clear structure is important — you know exactly what to do. Little to no brain energy is expended in that regard. Then when it’s time to act, you come face-to-face with emotional resistance. It’s uncomfortable. You’re scared. You’re unsure. But all of it is noise, because you have no choice.

People fail to achieve their goals because they don’t have a specified structure and because they allow themselves to choose between doing the thing and not doing the thing. They allow their mind to negotiate.

You’ve felt this before. You have so many things that you want to do, swirling around your head, but no specificity relating to them. What does that mean? You now HAVE to make a choice, in the moment, with no clarity, amidst a sea of options. Interpretation, confusion, emotional resistance, negotiating, and now you’re at the end of another year, coming up with another set of faulty resolutions, thinking about all your potential, upset that you wasted more time.

Eliminate choice. Specify your actions and know that there is no existence of choice when emotional resistance meets you.

This is what separates the few from the millions. They do not ask permission from their emotions. They do not wait to feel ready. They do not rely on their feelings to make decisions. They intentionally design their life in a way that eliminates choice, and then they eliminate choice from their mind.

When your only option is progressing towards your target, and you know exactly how to progress towards you target, what do you think happens?

You flip the script. Emotional resistance isn’t inevitable, YOU are inevitable, because you have eliminated the choice for anything else.

Those are the foundational two-steps. But there’s still a few more missing pieces.

Final Calibrations

1. The feeling is the secret. It’s key to train your body emotionally for the future you intend to have. What would it feel to like smash through emotional resistance every time, not because you choose to, but because you have no other choice? What would it feel like to accomplish your goals? What would it feel like if your progress was automatic? What would it feel like to wake up knowing that you’ll progress towards your targets? What would it feel like to be one of the few? Train your nervous system from the end state (the feeling of your wish fulfilled) to create space for your its existence.

2. Sometimes life will choose for you not to make progress that day — you get in a car accident, there’s a medical emergency, you have a mandatory commitment elsewhere, etc. The point is… you don’t choose. If life makes the choice for you, then so be it, but barring anything massively unseen or dramatic, you have no choice.

3. The reps don’t define you. So many people walk through life believing that who they are is dependent on their actions. Every action then feels heavy and full of pressure. You are not your actions. It’s not healthy — and not true — to go about life saying, “If I do this, it says something about who I am.” In reality, this action is just a rep, an exploration, a form of play. Treat it that way.

4. Never act at the level of “my potential.” Act at the level of “this rep.” When you act at the level of your potential, every rep carries a hidden meaning, “If I do this well, I’m living up to who I could be. If I do this poorly, I’m failing.” It’s like a verdict is constantly hanging over your head, and you can never be present and fully empowered, because your imagined potential is always beyond your current reality. Your actions become existential, the stakes make you feel like you need to prove something, and emotional resistance is invited, because why would your brain and your nervous system like that type of pressure? This is why people who constantly think about their potential do less, not more. The game isn’t about “living up to your potential.” It’s about this rep. Remove the potential and bring your energy and focus down to this rep. Whatever happens from there is what happens from there.

5. Even though the reps don’t define you, identity work does make a difference. Someone who is a “reader” will naturally find themselves reading a book more than someone who merely “wants to read a book.” Be the person. Feel what it’s like to be that person. If you want to be someone who goes to the gym, identify as someone who goes to the gym, and feel what it’s like to be someone who goes to the gym.

6. This isn’t an outcomes-based game. The joy is in the pursuit. If you got handed the achieving of your goals right now, you’d feel unfulfilled. A basketball game isn’t fun just because the scoreboard says you won, it’s fun because you played and won. If you’ve ever had the other team forfeit and you’ve been given an automatic win, you know the unfulfilled feeling. Play and find out what happens.

7. This is an adventure of proof-of-work. With that, comes a natural push-pull dynamic. The higher your goals, the more resistance reality will give you to make sure you’re putting in the proof-of-work required to get there. The higher you climb a mountain, the more resistance you feel. It’s nature’s way of filtering out who’s really about it. The people that climb the farthest are the people that move regardless of the resistance.

8. You can create as many specific structures as you’d like. What those structures look like is up to you. That’s where you have a choice. Once you make the structure, there’s no room for negotiating.

9. The more creative a goal/action/structure is, the more unbounded the container should be, in terms of what’s allowed inside it. For example, if you have a writing container, don’t make the structure so specific as to what exactly you have to write, how many words, etc. Let it be a flow based process, like a flowing river (your creativity) contained by its riverbanks (your specific structure). That’s balanced between masculine and feminine.

10. In addition, create containers that are completely unbounded. Meaning, schedule time where you can do whatever you like. Perhaps create a list of things that can fill that container so you don’t fall towards cheap dopamine, but balance the more specific and structured times of your day with more flow-based structures.

11. There are errands to run and little things in life that need to get done. Be intentional about them — create containers for those, too. Don’t let them leak into other containers. It can be a big, generalized window, like “Errands and little things Mondays and Thursdays 3:30pm-6:00 pm.” When life pops up with a necessary oil change or a grocery run or laundry, you know where to put it and when to act on it.

12. Feel the joy, the satisfaction, the peace that comes from knowing that everything is working in your favor.

Notice the word “discipline” has not appeared once. Discipline implies that there’s a choice, and you’re disciplining yourself to do one thing over another.

Everyone heralds David Goggins as a master of discipline. But discipline is the wrong word. The real mechanism is the elimination of choice. He knows what to do, and he does it. It doesn’t require discipline, because there is no other option.

Once choice is gone, action becomes automatic.