How To Trick Your Brain Into Becoming Unstoppable

Do you feel like you're currently winning in life or do you feel like you're struggling?

See, a while ago I made a video about the winner effect. The winner effect. The winner effect. Not the winner effect. You don't want that one. Um, because this well-studied phenomenon is both powerful and scary. Quick recap.

So, in a study, they let two mice compete for territory and they drugged mouse B so that mouse A is guaranteed to win. The next fight, they don't drug mouse B anymore, but mouse A would still dominate the other mouse 'cause it had more confidence, higher testosterone, and a winning streak, aka the winner effect. And I guess the other one had the winner effect. It's an unforgiving cycle that shows up everywhere in life, right? The rich get richer. Successful entrepreneurs can hire the best people to become even more successful. And men who have a lot of love interest from women become more attractive because of the existing love interest. Basically, the more you win, the more likely you are to keep winning. And the more you lose, the more likely you are to keep losing. You're either on an upward spiral or a downward spiral.

The good news is winning is all perception. And in this video, I'll walk you through my newest findings on how to trick your brain into the winner effect at will to become unstoppable. Referencing the best ideas from different books and studies, and we'll start with the simple ones, and then they get more and more impactful over time. And the final one will make by far the biggest difference. So, I guess you're going to have to watch the whole video. Haha, you know how it works. There's also going to be a guide below that summarizes everything in this video.

If you're new here, I'm Leon Hendris. And on this channel, we talk about life strategies to achieve our goals faster while also maximizing enjoyment, playing the game of achieving our goals. And I'm making this video because I also need a refresher myself.

So, the good news is winning is subjective. It's all perception. So, if you're currently having your face pushed into the dirt, nothing's working, and life is tough, you can trick your brain into a self-reinforcing cycle of winning and get on that upward spiral. However, the bad news is winning is subjective. It's all perception. And chances are, if you're watching this, you're crushing it in life. You're making tons of money. You're extremely good-looking and humble, just the average viewer of my channel. But you keep being hard on yourself and it's like you're driving a race car with the handbrake on. And if you just let that handbrake go, you become a whole different animal, a different whole animal.

So, picture this. Imagine there are two people who are doing one of the toughest jobs out there, which is door-to-door sales. I actually did that when I was 18 in Australia until I figured out that it was an MLM. Anyways, different story. So, imagine this. Person one knocks on the first 10 doors. Nobody answers. This sucks. The next door, somebody does answer, but they're kind of rude. And they go, "Why do I deserve this?" Eventually, somebody actually asks some questions about the products, but they don't buy. And they just go, "This doesn't work."

And then picture a person two that goes, "Wow, it's so crazy that you can just knock on people's doors." And then someone actually opens the door and they go, "I almost got into a conversation with that person." And then eventually when someone almost buys, they go, "I almost made it. This is so cool. I was so close." The way they show up at the door will create more of the results which they perceive they're already getting. Right? Person one, whatever they're selling, they're going to be like, "You don't want any of these, do you?" He's barely going to push himself. He's barely going to try. And the worse it gets, the worse he gets. Whereas person two is all in. The win is always so close, takes massive action, tries so many things, and is simply on an upward spiral. The better it gets, the better he gets.

However, this is a spectrum. You're not either or. So, where are you right now on the upward spiral or downward spiral? Let's say it goes from 0 to plus 100. So, if you're at 100, you have such high confidence and delusional optimism that you go after goals that are kind of impossible. I don't know, like starting an electric car company, maybe. But because of your confidence, you try everything and somehow make it happen. Which again, proves that you're the best. You're the most awesome genius person ever. So, you go after even more impossible goals, like, I don't know, let's go to a different planet, and you're just an unstoppable force of nature.

If you're at a neutral zero, then you could probably make something happen if you get a bit lucky and you believe in yourself. But when things don't go your way, that's when it gets tough. But if you are at minus 100, it really doesn't matter. You believe that something is just wrong with you and you're doomed to fail. No matter how hard you try, it's just not going to work.

More good news, this is a learnable skill and wherever you're at right now on the spiral is simply a reflection of how skilled you are at it. And you can jump up and down that spiral whenever you choose to, no matter what your circumstances are. And the people we look up to the most have simply maxed out their skill in one of the areas of their life, whether it's career or spirituality, right? The most successful CEOs can put themselves in a state of absolute certainty and confidence while everyone believes there's no way we can do this. And then they rally their entire team because it transfers to them. Or we all have that one friend who's just always in a good mood because they always find the good in everything. So, the better you become at this skill, the more effective, successful, or happy you're going to be depending on what you're optimizing for.

Now, here's where it gets really exciting. When I do the self-assessment, I'm at about 40, but I used to be at a minus 40. I used to be so pessimistic. No matter what you told me, I would find a way to spin it in a way where it wasn't empowering and life was hard and unfair. And I got to a point where I just couldn't keep going like this anymore. And I applied the tools that we're going to dive into here to activate the winner effect. And then years later, one of my best friends called me because he was worried about something and he needed a pick-me-up. And he said, "Yeah, the reason why I call you is because you always find the good in everything. And you always spin things in a way where it's most empowering." So, my point is, when you build this skill once, how your brain works changes and it becomes your default. So, you do it once and you'll benefit for the rest of your life.

So, let's dive into the tools to actually build this skill. And a lot of them build on top of each other, but don't get overwhelmed. In the end, just pick whichever ones you think will be most impactful for you. And you can always skip one if it doesn't resonate. The first one is the one that had the biggest impact early on in my life. And it's the fundamental skill that leads to all the other ones we're going to talk about. And once you see this, you can't unsee it. So, give me some time to properly explain it.

Picture this. Which one is small and which one's big? This one is gigantic, right? Compared to the little tiny one over here. But wait a minute, there's more. Everything depends on your frame of reference. In physics, that's the viewpoint from which an observer makes measurements and describes physical phenomena like velocity or motion or, in this case, size. Are these Formula 1 cars really fast or are they slow? Well, if you look at them from up close, it looks very different than looking at them from a bird's-eye view. For example, the way we look at challenges: Is it a cute, tiny little inconvenience like a cute little bug on the floor, or is it this massive problem that's going to kill me?

Let's say you're born in upper middle class in America. You get a college education, you struggle to get a job, and after months of searching, you settle for one that only pays you $50,000 a year. That's a big L. If all of your friends are making six figures, it's like you're starting from this reference and then you go down here. But if you're from the favelas of Rio and you get a scholarship to study in the US, then you get a job for $50,000 a year in America, you may have just ended generational poverty. I think growing up humble or frugal is a blessing, especially later in life, right? 'Cause you view everything through that frame of reference. The fact that I no longer expected to cut open the toothpaste to scrape out the last bits as I was taught as a kid because, you know, we're very uh frugal, that already feels like abundance to me.

So, if there's something you want to be grateful for, there's a win that you want to celebrate, you want to hop onto a smaller circle to make that win feel bigger, right? You want to zoom into the race car so that it looks faster. And on the flip side, if there's a problem or a challenge, you want to hop onto a bigger circle. You want to zoom out so that way it looks smaller and it's more manageable. So, changing your frame of reference can be called reframing because everything we look at is already framed. Might be neutral, might be empowering, might be not so empowering, but now we just choose to view it from the most empowering frame of reference. And this is where we can get delusionally positive and confident and still be factually correct. Because is this circle big or small? It all depends on how you view it.

One example that gave me the chills that Tony Robbins was talking about was when he got the diagnosis that he had a brain tumor. And just like everyone else, his first reaction was, "Why me?" Like, why is this happening? But after freaking out for a while and talking to the doctors, he collected himself and he thought, "How else could I think about this?" And he chose to think of it this way: "Finally, a worthy opponent." And I think for any massive challenge that we have that can be really defeating, that's a very incredible frame to take. 'Cause what does that assume? That assumes we are so powerful and so big, finally something that matches my skill. Like a friend of mine, he got sick with an autoimmune disease and he used this as an opportunity to see it as his ultimate accountability coach because he can't afford to eat crappy food or get bad sleep. And so he's like, "This is great because I'm going to be healthier than everyone else I know." And funny thing is, he is. Especially when we're going to be in our 40s and 50s, that's when a lot of people will start having problems. He will not. His health is dialed.

If you're ugly, you could say, "Well, that's great because it made me funny. I had to develop a personality because let's be real, a lot of great-looking people, you know, they have cardboard personalities." Or if you're not subscribed to my newsletter, you could be like, "Well, that's great because there's actually no way to reframe this. This is just bad." So, go get the guide below. I'll summarize everything below here.

This next one I highly encourage you start with because it'll blow your mind seeing what's possible. See, when I first transformed my ability to tap into the winner effect and changed the way that I view things and reframe, I heard about something called the no complain challenge. Basically, for 7 days, you're not allowed to complain. And if you do complain and you get stuck there, then you have to start over again. What I changed that into is this delusional mindset challenge where I would reframe every single thing, no matter what happened. And I would spin it into the most delusional way possible just to see how far I could push my mind. And I would say, don't start with 7 days. Just start with 24 hours and get a rubber band and flick it to remind yourself. Set alarms on your phone or just put sticky notes all around 'cause the key thing is actually remembering that that's what you're doing 'cause your mind just goes into autopilot. And don't worry about, "Ah, that's not really realistic and I got to be reasonable." No, just try it on the way you would try on a costume, right? It's not clothes that you're going to be wearing forever. Just try on this costume and play with it to see what your mind is capable of and just push it to the max.

When you're writing an email, just every letter you type, you go, "This is the most incredible thing someone has ever written. The person that receives this email, they're going to have their mind blown. I'm barely even trying and this is incredible what I'm doing here." You stub your toe and it's just so great because it didn't kill you. It makes you stronger. You just become unstoppable. You feel this throbbing pain. You're like, "Yes." Any room you go into, in the back of your mind, you go, "I own this room. Everyone in this room wishes they were me." Just allow yourself to be narcissistic just one day.

When I did this, I had to start over multiple times. And I actually did it one night when a friend of mine was going out with me and I asked him, "Hey, please just join me for this challenge because it's very tough to do it, but if we do it together, we're going to have a really good time." And to this day, my friend says, "This was the best night of my life that I've ever had. We had so much fun. We goofed around so much and we just felt so alive and unstoppable and it was just a game." But lo and behold, your brain will adjust. And don't worry, you're not going to become a narcissist overnight, right? Like if you are lower on the upward spiral and you're like at minus 20, it'll push you up to plus 20, plus 40, plus 50, but you won't go overboard. Don't worry.

This next one could really piss some people off. It might spark a debate, which is great. I invite that. And if it doesn't resonate, just skip it. It's fine. There's a frame that I come back to that has made me just a way happier person by default. And whether it's true or not is highly debated, especially by people who are considering themselves realistic. Let's say there's a scale from 0 to 100 on how good life can get. The default frame I like to take when I'm in a bit of a shitty mood is that my life is already here, 98%. And life doesn't really get much better from here. And it's the same thing for you. But it's so easy to get into the mindset where we're like, "Oh, but I have all these problems. There's so many things that I want that I don't have that I'm maybe at 50% right now." But we're actually already at 98%, we're just focusing on the 2% gap right here. And if you were to achieve your wildest dreams, it really just adds 1%.

Here's what a 50% life actually looks like. You're born in the Dark Ages. They were probably called the Dark Ages for a reason. It was cold, miserable. There's hunger and famine. You sleep in a barn. There's no AC or heaters. Guaranteed traumatic childhood. You're lucky if you made it to 30. Most of your siblings probably died as children. There's a tyrannical leader that's exploiting you. Your village could get pillaged any day. And on top of that, you believe that when you die, you burn in hell for all eternity. So, there isn't even any escape. That's 50%. But at least you're not at 20%, like your friend Matilda, who's a redhead and she's currently in the torture chambers being turned inside out. And 10% is our caveman ancestors. How do they sleep at night with no AC, covered in mosquitoes, surrounded by saber-tooth tigers? I can't even sleep with the temperatures off by 2 degrees.

Being born in the 21st century, life maxed out 98% 'cause things can't really get that much better. You have food, you have shelter, you have all these things, but how horrible things can get is unimaginably deep. And that's the power of looking down. There's always someone who has it way worse than you, who wishes they were in your position.

Now, this small shift is counterintuitive, but so impactful that Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy decided to write a whole book about it. And honestly, this is one that I get to practice more myself. The book is called "The Gap and the Gain," and it's talking about two different frames. The first one is the gap, which is where you're measuring against an ideal. It's the perfect vision, a goal that you haven't reached yet, or it's someone else's standard. It's like comparing yourself to the richest person you know. It's like looking at the horizon. It's a moving target and you can never really reach it and you always feel behind. Sounds obvious, but that's our default.

The gain, on the other hand, is measuring yourself against your past self. How far you've come, the progress that you've made, and the things you've learned, the skills you've acquired. And this one creates progress. It creates gratitude, confidence, and motivation. And again, we've already read this on tons of Instagram captions and motivational posters, but are we actually doing it? Personally, I'm not really.

Now, this next one is the best tool to actually shift from the gap to the gain. And it's what the authors recommend in the book, too. And it helps especially when you're in a rut or you feel like you've lost some momentum. See, after I sold my first business, I felt like I was on top of the world. I could tackle anything. I could make anything work. And I had so much confidence and momentum. And this time I wanted to find something I was passionate about. So, I tried a bunch of different businesses. I tried a bunch of different skills and things, and I failed at a bunch of things. And after a year of that, I looked back and I felt like such a failure, even though before I felt so on top of the world. And it's simply so easy to forget your past wins and just discount them. But you probably have a treasure trove of them. Or maybe you're actually winning right now, but you still feel terrible because you just say, "Oh, they don't count." Right? They're just a given. And again, it's your frame of reference, but you can turn that around at any point if you just look for proof that you're someone who wins and you're someone who gets things done. And the more proof you have, the stronger the belief and the feeling.

So, here's what I did. I opened a document and I wrote a list of 100 wins. Could be big or small. And it really could be anything, right? Like a business that you built, the first customer you got, graduating high school, just asking that one person out that you really liked, whatever it is, it could be anything big or small. And what I did was I bookmarked it and for a while, while I was in this rut, I would first thing in the morning open this document, read through all of them, and then add three or 10 more. My bet is that when you do this, your brain starts presenting you with all these wins that you just discounted that you had forgotten. And when you just take a bath in them, you're going to feel like a completely different human being, going back to how you felt after a big win. Again, you have access to that at any point.

And so, what the author talks about is writing down three wins at the end of each day because it's so easy to feel like, "Ah, I didn't get this done and this takes so much longer than I expected." But just writing down those wins, it just feels so much better, getting you into the gain, not the gap. And I used to do this with gratitude, right? You know this typical gratitude practice. You write down three things that you're grateful for every day. Yay. Okay, I would do it. And I always felt like it doesn't really do much. I mean, I kind of feel it, yes, but it's like if I skip one day, it doesn't really change that much. But what I would notice over the years is that I would walk down the street and be like, "Wow, isn't it great that I'm alive? I'm so grateful for my friends." Out of nowhere, I would never get these thoughts. But I realized that me practicing writing this down, I trained my brain to just randomly have these things pop up, right? The same way that people have negative thoughts pop up. And today it's so easy for me to be grateful 'cause I just practice that muscle. 'Cause over time, you just build new neural connections in your brain. Think of them as seeing a map full of streets and there's highways too. And when you think a thought repeatedly, myelin forms around it, which is this substance to fire it even quicker, right? And those you can think of as highways. It's the default thing that happens when you don't even think of it, right? It's lightning fast. When myelin forms around the neural connections that create gratitude, you become one of those people that is just always in a good mood, no matter what happens. And again, once you build this skill, you have it for life.

But I hear you say, "Aren't extreme winners really hard on themselves?" And it's true, but there's a little nuance here that I want to add to this. So, one way that you can acknowledge a win and celebrate a win is to just be out of your mind. Like, "I can't believe this happened. This is so incredible." Another way that is often more powerful is to go, "Great, that's a win. Of course, that's just who I am." And it's a subtle nuance because it's not about discounting it and saying, "Ah, it doesn't count." But it's like, "Yeah, of course." Like, which one's more powerful? You win the gold medal and you're like, "Oh my god, I can't believe I made that happen. This is I couldn't even picture this." Versus you win the gold medal and you're like, "Of course, it's who I am." Which one anchors it even more in who you are and how you move through the world? It's just proving what you already know in your bones because what signal is it sending to yourself that you are out of your mind happy and surprised that you won? Well, just that you are usually not someone who wins. So, it's a great tool to add to the mix of skills here because I think it amplifies it even more. Or if you're doing the 24-hour challenge or you're counting your wins, you go, "Yep, of course that's me. Yep, that's who I am." Still being happy, still celebrating it, but from the frame of "of course."

I love this next one. It's super fun, especially if you're prone to worrying. If you're someone who is very good at seeing problems and why something won't work, this will change your life. And it did for me. I used to be addicted to worry. I would worry so much that it truly crippled me. But with this one, we use it as a tool. See, when we worry, we usually start out with, "Oh, like this bad thing is going to happen and then this other thing is going to happen that makes it even worse and then it affects this other area of my life and then therefore it gets even harder to do this, right?" Like whatever it is, you can probably picture your own example. So, we start out here and it just gets worse and worse and worse, right? It's a downward spiral. What we do in this exercise is we push worry in the other direction. So, think of it as positive worry. So you go, "Man, if I get this thing done, I will make so much more money. With that money, I can hire someone and then we can put out more stuff and we can get even more results and then I feel more confident and then this thing is going to go right and then this area of my life is going to get better."

And this is one of the key differences between matches and mismatches. If you've seen the video about the rectangles, if you're a matcher, you're more likely to see what's possible and you discount the negative. And if you're a mismatcher, you're more likely to see what's different, what's wrong. And matchers are just so much more motivated to take quick action 'cause they just dangle the carrot in front of themselves and they go, "Oh my god, I'm so close. And if I just get this one thing done, then everything else is going to fall. All the dominoes are going to get into place."

Once you worry positively, this one comes next. This is how you make it easy to stay motivated and accelerate the upward spiral and winner effect massively. Tim Ferris talks about this in "The 4-Hour Chef," which is a book about speed learning. And speed learners use this everywhere, for example, when they're learning a new language in a matter of weeks. Here's a scary example. These are the months that children are born on average. And these are the months on average for players who are in qualifying teams, meaning teams that are competing at a high level. And this is for soccer, by the way. In this case, you're four times more likely to succeed if you're born in January than if you're born in December because the beginning of the year is the cutoff. Therefore, the kids that are born in January, they happen to be bigger. They happen to be more developed, which makes a huge difference if you're 5 or 10 years old. And they do better initially. So, they have more confidence. They get more time playing, right? They're not sitting on the bench. They get the ball passed more often because they're stronger. And their belief develops: "I'm just good at stuff." When everyone's an adult, you're the same size, right? But because they started out with this early win, it made all the difference.

Another example I always give for this is Mr. Beast. Biggest creator, gets millions, hundreds of millions of views. And yes, for years he tried to make it work, but most people don't know this. His first video actually went viral where he made some video about Minecraft. He got hacked or something. And views are the most addictive substance in the world. And as a 12 or 13-year-old whenever he started, he just got a fat injection of that straight into his dome. And he was just hooked. He just kept chasing that high because he knew it was possible. He knew he could do it. When you have a big win like that, dopamine gets released and it tells you whatever you did to get there, keep doing that, which is what keeps your motivation high. It keeps your desire to create that again. And I'm sure you've seen this graph somewhere, the transition curve or the emotional cycle of change. And in the beginning, you have uninformed optimism, which makes you think, "Oh, this is not that hard. I can do that." Until you get informed pessimism and you have the crisis of meaning, that's where you may give up. But if you had this early win, it just keeps you going. It builds so much momentum that you make it through this and slowly you climb your way back up. It's like this momentum that you can get in the beginning to get you through the really tough period.

So, whenever you're tackling a new project, you're launching a new product, you're making your first YouTube video, you are dating again after a breakup, how can you set yourself up for an early, easy win to build momentum fast? And to zoom in, it's even more powerful when you do it on a daily basis, right? So, if you're going through a tough time right now, just getting up early, showering, brushing your teeth, like all these are little wins that you stack. Whereas on the flip side, if you're starting with checking your phone, you just start off with a loss and your dopamine is jacked and you know how that works. I'm sure you've been there, too. Either way, chase the early win to build massive momentum.

And this next one ties really well into it because it's a great tool to get early wins. And if you don't do this, you set yourself up for failure. So, a friend of mine set a goal to make $100K a month in his business within the next 10 weeks. And you think that would be an early win, right? That's great. However, the highest he's ever made was $15,000 per month. That was a record month for him. And I said, "So, if you double your highest grossing month ever, and you make $30K a month, would that be a win or would that be a loss? Just set it to like $20K or $30K." And he set it to $50K, which I think was still way too high. And by the end of it, he didn't even hit the $30K a month. And the whole time was a drag for him because he always felt behind. And it was just really rough and demotivating. And I know in a previous video I talked about how to set massive goals to change your thinking. But the key distinction here is that you want to set massive goals for the long term, but in short sprints, you want to set yourself up with little wins, right? Because you always overestimate what you can do in a small time and you underestimate what you can do in a longer time period. Our expectations in the beginning of what it takes to win is just way off. And often times growth is exponential, right? And so it took me 9 months to get my first 1,000 subscribers and then 3 months later I had 100,000 subscribers. I couldn't have set goals accordingly. So it makes sense for me to get 100 subscribers in 3 months. But for my yearly goal to set 50,000, 30,000 subscribers, whatever, right? So often times the way to build early wins is just by managing expectations and setting small goals in the beginning and defining what winning looks like before you even start the project.

This next one is another great way to get early wins and it just makes everything more fun. In the video about the big leap and we talked about the zone of genius and zone of excellence, sometimes we just believe that things are supposed to be hard, right? Otherwise, we don't deserve them and then we just pick hard mode for no reason. Are you currently in a career or a business where you're spending most of your time doing what you're really great at? Think about someone like Mark Zuckerberg. He hired the best people in the world to up his image, look more hip and cool, and work on his presentation skills, and he still sucks at it. Nobody's convinced that he's not a lizard. We know that he's crawling on the walls eating flies when no one's watching. But imagine he had a public speaking business. He's constantly going to feel like a total loser, and it's going to be very hard for him to feel like he's winning. If you put someone like Lady Gaga in a cubicle crunching spreadsheets, she's going to feel like the biggest loser in life. And if you take someone like Tiger Woods off the golf course and you just have him spend time trying to be a good, loyal husband, you know, it's just not that good at it. That doesn't mean that you have to change your whole career. But on a day-to-day basis, pick the projects and the way that you could achieve goals by doing what you're really good at so it's easy for you to win. And I think the same goes for relationships or things like dating. Date the people who are obsessed with you. Don't chase after the ones who just aren't that into you. I will never understand why people do that. It's just a guaranteed way to make yourself feel horrible about yourself.

So, we talked a lot about early wins and how to get them, but it can actually backfire and have the opposite effect if you get one little nuance wrong. This is one that Uncle Huberman talked about. To summarize it, they gave groups of children like a test and afterwards one group they praised for the results and they were like, "Wow, you really did well in that score. You were really smart. You're really intelligent." Whereas the other group they praised the children by saying, "Wow, you really tried. You really gave it your all." What they found is that the children who were rewarded for the results became much less motivated to try again and gave up much more quickly. Whereas the ones that were rewarded for the effort, make sense, they just kept trying and they actually then ended up getting better results. So for yourself, make sure that you reward your efforts, not your outcome, as you're getting these early wins. So you detach your self-worth from the results and you attach to something that you control, which is your inputs and how hard you try.

You know, I got pretty lucky with my first business. The fact that it just worked out so quickly. I mean, I was also in a position where I had a very hot fire under my butt to make it happen, but it ended up working out pretty quickly. And I feel like after that, I was really spoiled when things didn't work out quickly enough, I gave up way quicker. And had I celebrated more the effort that I put in, then the result that I got, I think I would have had a lot more resilience with the businesses that I tried starting after that.

Now, a great way to detach yourself from the outcome and tap into the winner effect before you get a win is this tool. The winner effect has kind of a chicken or the egg problem, right? It's easy to feel wins when you're winning, but what if you're far from a win that you're chasing right now? You're less likely to get the win and you can't feel like you're winning, etc. Now, this is the egg that will hatch the feeling of winning so you can win and feel more like winning. And the tool is visualization. Olympic athletes use visualization to rehearse the perfect performance in their mind before they do it and also in a lot of cases rehearsing how it might go wrong and how they then adjust from it. Right? Focusing on the process. The Navy Seals during the training told me to see myself already having completed the exercise or the challenge, whatever we're doing. For example, when I was supposed to hold my breath in the ice bath after I've already been in there for 10, 15 minutes, they said, "You're not leaving here until you hit, I think it was 14 seconds or 12 seconds." And I could only do seven in the beginning. You know, they had me slow down my breath and visualize it and just when that jerky movement comes in where I can't breathe, just sit in it, right? And just visualize myself making it. And if you saw the video, then you know I went way past that. I think like 18 seconds or something like that. Because when you feel like you've already achieved it, you show up very differently. I mean, think about the knocking on doors for door-to-door sales example that we talked about in the beginning, right? If you already visualize yourself, "Yes, this person is going to buy. It's going to be incredible." You have way more resilience, resourcefulness, confidence, everything gets better. This is not some law of attraction BS. It's a tool to help you perform better and feel better by jumping up on the upward spiral.

Visualization has made a huge difference in my life, especially when I had very low confidence and I, for example, when I started my first business, I would visualize myself building this successful business so that I can move back to Australia, be reunited with my girlfriend at the time, 'cause that was my goal. That's why I started the business. And it got to the point where I visualized it so much that I would have dreams about it. And I would have dreams making it back to Australia, being reunited with my girlfriend, and I would cry in the dream. And then I would wake up and my face was actually wet 'cause I was crying while I was sleeping. That's how you know you visualize so much that your subconscious is just trained to focus on that. I started out with such little confidence 'cause I had no idea what I was doing. But over time, I just got this sense that I got this. Like, I can do this. And I started taking action according to that, right? I took risks. I launched more products. I worked really hard 'cause I had this lingering sense that it's going to work out. Now, I don't know if I'd also achieved it had I not visualized, but I can't really split test that. And I think it massively supported me. So, if you're currently chasing a big win that would transform your life, but it feels so far away, try visualization. And I'm sure you can find some really good resources online on how to do it properly.

This next one is tough to build, but if you start small and you stick to it, it'll build insane levels of confidence and self-belief. How often do you commit to doing something and you don't follow through, even if it's just a daily to-do list where you just check off a few things and you said you were going to do more, but time went past and you just weren't able to make it. The thing that happens here is that next time you set a goal or a to-do list, in the back of your mind, you already know, "Ah, probably not going to do it" because I have this track record of not completing it. And this is because you broke your word to yourself, right? And the more you keep breaking that trust, the less you trust yourself. And that's again the winner effect at play. And there's a massive difference in how people carry themselves, who stick to their words, to the words that they say to themselves and their commitments versus people who just always let themselves down. And everybody kind of knows it and they know it, too. So the next time they have a moment of inspiration, they say, "I'm going to do this thing." In the back of their mind, they already know it's probably not going to happen. It's just this track record of broken promises. And the most important relationship is with yourself. And that's why I think something like 75 Hard is really good, right? Because it's all about building that track record with yourself. However, it's detrimental when you're failing because it's more proof that I'm not someone who sticks to their commitments. So, one way is to always make sure that you follow through. The other way, which I would recommend, is be very careful what you commit yourself to and start small, right? Small commitments day-to-day, whether it's just waking up on time, again, building small wins, right? And just put one thing on your to-do list so that you know when you take that off. Yep. And anything else is a bonus. And how people treat you is a reflection of how you treat yourself.

Which brings me to what I think is the most impactful one to activate the winner effect. So far, everything has been about how to manage yourself to activate the winner effect. But this one is about other people. See, I first observed this with my friend group in high school. After high school, I went traveling for a year with the intention of completely reinventing myself. And there are so many ways that I changed, skills that I learned, experiences I had, and I was so looking forward to coming back and just honestly showing my friends, "Hey, look at how different I am now." But when I came back and I was around my friends again, it was almost like nothing had changed about me. And there was a switch that was flicked that just turned off all the reinventions and growth that I had experienced. And it's because the way they were treating me and the way they were expecting me to act was just this outside force that whenever I tried to be the person that I had become, they would make fun of it or they would challenge it or they would be confused and be like, "What?"

And I realized a massive driver of who we are and how we act is based on how other people are expecting us to act. And it creates this really fascinating group dynamics where we had this one guy in our friend group who was always the butt of every joke. He was always the punchline. And it was this social hierarchy thing where people just categorized him as that. And there were moments where he would try to fight his way up, this poor guy, and the one or two guys that always made the meanest jokes, they would just beat him right down. When new people joined the friend group, they immediately saw, "Oh, okay, this is his role. Everyone expects him to act this way and he has this role in the hierarchy." And honestly, the advice that I would have for this guy is just, "Dude, you need to get new friends." Because fighting your way up against this entire group that expects you to act this way and anytime you push back, they punch you right back down. And it doesn't even have to be violent or aggressive. It could just be like confusion or just like, "Oh, what is this guy doing?" Right? Or just the way they talk to you.

If people don't expect much from you and let's say you have a win and they act surprised, I think that's one of the most destructive ways, right? These subtle low expectations that people have. And you see this in family dynamics, too. When parents believe that their child has problems or they're weak or there's something flawed with them, the child takes that on. Like, "Why am I getting so much attention and my siblings don't get any attention because they seem to be doing fine? There must be something wrong with me." And it goes back to the partners that you choose. If you're choosing a partner that treats you like a 10, you will feel and become so attractive because of that because you become so radiant and confident. And again, we could say, "Oh, well, you shouldn't care what other people think." But we do. Something I've noticed about people who say they don't care about what other people think is that they actually care a lot and they want everyone to know how they don't care because they have trust issues and they want to guard themselves and be like, "Well, I don't care." Deep down, they really do. They just want you to think that they don't 'cause they're scared. I care what people think, especially close friends of mine. And even if I didn't, how I'm being treated still affects how I see myself. I mean, think about it. If you enter a room and everyone turns their head and when you speak, everyone gets quiet and when there's a problem, everyone looks at you to decide what to do next. How can you not feel confident and like a winner? Now, take the opposite. How can you not feel like a loser?

How are the people around you treating you? Are you the one that they come to when they have a challenge? Do they trust your word and your perspective? Do they respect you? Are they inspired by you? All these questions are a good way to gauge how you're being perceived. And most of it is going back to how you stick to your own commitments, right? Because if you keep letting yourself down and you tell everyone, "Oh, I'm going to do 75 Hard" and you announce it to your friends and then day seven you quit, they trust you less and they lose respect.

So, how do you turn this around? So, I recently had an intervention with a friend of mine about this. He had gone through a breakup and for years he hadn't been on a single date. One was because he was just busy, but also because he built some negative momentum, right? And he felt like, "Uh, I don't know, it's just not working out anymore." And in his friend group, people started making jokes about it. And then I ran into him at a New Year's Eve party. It was a nice mansion. Hundreds of people there. It was really cool. There were even goats at the party. And he was saying, "Oh, maybe at midnight I get lucky and I can finally kiss a girl again, or maybe I'll kiss one of the goats." And here's the thing, there were girls around. But he kept reinforcing this story, these jokes that, "Oh, well, I'm the guy who doesn't have success with women." And I told him, "Dude, you need to stop doing that because the more people you tell about this, you become that guy. They start treating you this way. And when women hear about it, that's one of the most unattractive things. You're digging yourself into a hole here. And I will not reinforce that in you, and I will not treat you this way because you're an attractive guy and you're a good man." And luckily, he's now in a much better spot. But the point is, train people to treat you like a winner. And anything less than that, don't tolerate it. Not from an arrogant place, but from a place of having a backbone. 'Cause even if you don't think you care what people think, it'll massively reinforce how you feel about yourself.

Now, all these made a big difference in my life, there's still plenty of improvement. I know I threw a lot at you here, so I summarized everything into a simple guide if you're ready to implement this right now. And I recommend you watch this video next, which is about a process which I learned from this billionaire dude on how to achieve massive goals in less time. It worked for me and I think it could be helpful for you too. So, I'll see you over there. Stay driven.