I was given a piece of advice, that initially wasn't intended as advice, but over years of it being repeated, drilled into my mind and my every day, became one of the most powerful driving factors to how I live my life and progress towards my goals. It was simply this: "This life wasn't meant to be easy." Life is hard. You'll come up with countless examples if you read that "life is hard" over and over again. Life is hard. Life is pain. The beautiful thing is: You can control a lot more of it than you think. You get to choose your hard. And don't get it twisted, not doing anything is a choice. That's choosing for it to be much harder later. We have the amazing ability as human beings to communicate lessons and experiences to make each others' lives better. There's virtually nothing you can venture into in life, or experience, that someone else hasn't already been through. Whether it's deep down or not, you know what's coming up next. If your diet is a mess, and you work a desk job, and watch TV or scroll social media all evening and never get out and get active, you know you'll gain weight. You know you won't be healthy forever. You know life is going to get really hard later. But congratulations because you can choose to make life hard now, so it's not hard later. It's hard to get up an hour earlier. Hard to get to the gym. Hard to life the weight one more time than last week. Hard to run 30 seconds longer than last week. But that daily hard will make your life so much easier when in 20 years you're still healthy, active, less pain, less medical bills, less strain and stress. If you're un-happy in your relationship, and a little voice in your head says that it's not going to be forever, but you do nothing, you know it'll go wrong. You know it'll be painful to have the conversation when it comes up on its own. You know every day it gets harder and harder, and you become more and more afraid of facing it. But the beautiful thing is, you can choose the hard now, and have the conversation, so it's easier later, so it's easier now than it would be in six months.

Human nature is to focus on a negative. Without intentional effort behind developing positive habits, we will develop bad habits naturally. You can find this within your own thoughts and your inner dialogue. A lot of people that set out to lose weight will say "No more candy" "no more pizza" "no more XYZ" This is developing several bad habits in their mind. Firstly, I believe there is benefit in thinking towards abundance. Rather than depriving yourself of something, focus on what you get to do. Rather than thinking you don't get the tasty sugary food, think about how you get to find a way to enjoy healthier foods. Secondly, the brain will naturally become obsessed with what it thinks about. 90% of your thoughts every day, primarily subconscious thoughts, are all the same thoughts day after day. They're the habits, rhythms and routines your mind goes through to operate day to day. If you're constantly thinking about how you don't get to have a type of food, and you miss that type of food, and it would be great to get to the cheat day of having it, you're going to set yourself up for failure and eat the food because you'll become obsessed with it. So look at the positives. Rather than taking something away from your life, add something to it that will create a positive change. You can alter your articular reactivating system in your brain (those 90% of your thoughts) by reminding yourself to have the right thoughts about the right things several times a day, until it's a subconscious obsession. You'll see examples of this at a simple, every day level. If you think about how you never see yellow cars, and you can't think of a recent example of a yellow car, I promise next time you're out driving you'll see a yellow car. You can make your mind obsessed with the positive habits that will make you the person you want to be. It takes intentional, daily effort, to build the habit until it's on auto-pilot.

We all know that growth = change. In order to go where you want to go, and be what you want to be, you must change. You must learn. What are you learning today, right now? Do you have intentionality behind it? WHY are you learning that thing, and how does it apply to the mission for yourself, and your team or your family? What is a measurable effect of you successfully learning and applying that skill or knowledge?

Choosing the right habits to dedicate developing the discipline for every morning can be crucial to growth and success. What habits are you working on right now? Or what habits have served you best in the past?