Before you, are many paths you could take.

Some lead to success (which you must define yourself) — your best self; others to ruin — not yourself.

Don’t let this overwhelm you — even a step towards ruin is not something that’s necessarily fatal. It’s better to act without knowing what the results will be, than to do nothing out of fear of failure. Inaction is always a choice you can make — but it’s a choice that leads to nowhere you want to go.

With determination, persistence, action and reflection  most paths lead to a well lived life. Determination to do something you desire to do that others say you can’t. Persistence to keep going even when everything is pushing against you. Action to speak with doing, instead of speak with talking. And reflection to know what’s working and not, and to build a life of value and principle.

The paths that lead to ruin are any decisions you make that are against yourself and your core truth. In my mind, success is becoming more and more yourself as time goes on. You can be the richest, most powerful and famous person in the world, but aren’t successful if you hate yourself, or hate everything around you.

You are always changing, but you are always uniquely YOU if you listen to yourself.

Influence is everywhere, good and bad. Fitting in is the opposite of standing out. And the temptation of being more like someone else will always be within easy reach. But 🗣👾💥🧞‍♂️ that. That’s not you, that’s them. If everyone wants to be like them, so be it. Not me, I’m going to be more like me.

And if you ever find yourself more like them and less like you, don’t worry, there’s always a road back to who you are. You might have to trace your steps, or go in a different direction, but as long as you’re still breathing, then you’re still alive, and if you’re still alive, there’s always a chance.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,

— Josh Waggoner

When everything feels overwhelming, when you feel like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders, when a problem you’ve been facing just won’t seem to go away, keep it simple:

Just show up.

We always want to have glorious, heroic successes, wins and changes. The ability to turn our problems into opportunities immediately, without so much as a blink. But big things don’t start big. Big things start tiny and grow.

Tiny actions are sticky. The more you do them, the more they accumulate and combine into massive amounts of change. When you feel as though you have an impossible task in front of you, start with just showing up today.

You don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company by tomorrow.

You don’t have to be the best parent in the world.

You don’t have to be know everything first before you start something.

You just have to show up.

No expectations, no need for being exceptional or trying to be picture perfect today. You don’t need to add 10 more habits to your daily routine. You don’t need to impress anyone. You don’t need to be smarter, richer, famous, successful.

Just show up today.

It’s a simple idea that’s hard to execute, but creates massive momentum in your life.

All you have to do is show up, and the day is yours.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,

— Josh Waggoner

“When we surrender to the fact of death, not the idea of it, we gain license to live more fully, to see life differently.” — Sarah Lewis, The Rise

You often hear tales about the regrets of the dying —

“I wish I worked less.”

“I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

“I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”

“I wish I had the courage to express my feelings.”

“I wish I had let myself be happier.”

…

— and then you think to yourself, “Wow, they are speaking my language. That’s exactly how I’m feeling right now. I really need to change some things and reprioritize my life.”

You could sum up these words as a desire for more courage, boldness, room for friendships and happiness. We all want that. Who doesn’t want that?!

But then life happens, things get in the way, and you get distracted by the daily motion and push off the idea and desire to change to a later, ‘maybe someday’ unknown date.

At least this is what happens to me.

We opt out of what we really want, in order to focus — or more like default to — what our peers, circumstances, culture, setbacks and reality tells us.

One big takeaway I’ve come to with starting the Renaissance Life is that life is not living.

Life is not living.

Which is ironic that life is what distracts us from what really matters and gets in the way of actually living to the fullest.

There are plenty of distractions and pressures and systems and pain and fears and doubt and insecurities and all of these important yet silly things that derail us into living as if we were still asleep.

But in the face of death, all of that fades away. However, do you really want to wait until your inches away from death to actually live by the person you wish to be? Hell no. The quicker the better, God willing.

This is me opting in to a meaningful life.

This is your chance to join me and do the same.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,

— Josh Waggoner

Never end a day with failure.

Even if it’s 11:59 PM and your entire day was up in flames and laughable bad, spend that last 1 minute doing something positive and you consider a win.

Be that small — brushing your teeth, setting out your clothes for tomorrow, tidying your space for the morning, mediation, making a todo list for tomorrow, journaling and thinking about your day, or whatever you would feel happy and accomplished if you did.

 

Always finish each day with a victory.

Regret is baked from the actions we never take.

Stay up until you’ve had a success, no matter how small it is — unless going to bed early is how you would measure a victory. The point is to set your mind and expectations for tomorrow by accomplishing something today. Every little thing we do right, cause a chain reaction of possibility down the line. By accomplishing at least one thing in an otherwise 💩 day, you’ve won — now you can go to bed with a smile on your face and feel more refreshed and ready to start the day tomorrow.

 It’s often the small things that we ignore or toss aside — feeling that doing wouldn’t amount to much — are actually exactly what we need, and that makes all the difference in our lives.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursing,

— Josh Waggoner

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” — JFK, September 1962, Putting a Man on the Moon

Are you doing things because they are easy?

So is everyone else.

 

It’s difficult to stand out from the crowd when you are doing exactly what everyone else is doing — talking about things they wish they would do, living as if asleep. If I just had more time… If I just had more money… If I just was a little more this, a little less that…

I’ve thought it myself. I’ve experienced the consuming feeling that I’m not good enough, nor ever will be. Not good enough for my dreams. not good enough for mastery or creativity. Not good enough for happiness.

BS.

Defining your life around expectations and frustrated with yourself because of who you are and who you’re not is not a meaningful way to live.

Difficulty defines us. It doesn’t tell us who we can or can’t be — it shows us who we could be with work, stamina and creativity. Seeking difficultly gives us an opportunity to measure who we are, and strive to be better the next round.

There’s no doubt about it, hard challenges are HARD, but they also channel your energy towards a goal. Easy challenges are a great way to half*ss your way through life. Just like you are what you eat, you are how you act.

What we do defines our character. How does cutting corners, choosing the easy or even default option define you as? Resilient? Inspiring? Wise? Or exactly what we don’t want to be.

Seek Difficultly, not for difficultly’s sake, but rather to experience the kind of life you can have when you channel your energy towards a massive goal that’s bigger than yourself.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,

— Josh Waggoner

When you end up where you don’t want to be,

When life pushes against you,

When you drift from the path you set out to follow,

When pain, failure, fear, despair, loneliness, and struggle greet you at your home,

It’s up to us to make the most of our circumstances and find a way to calm the storm and focus on our next step through the rain.

In fact, it’s our responsibility.

This thing that you’re up against…

This setback that’s been dragging you down…

This is your chance. This is your moment to be better.

To improve ourselves and strive for purpose and meaning.

Maybe this even is exactly what you needed? A catalyst that spins you towards a heroic journey you dream about. A chance to help others by helping yourself, and show them how to do the same.

Circumstances, the things that have happened to us specifically, do not change, but we do. We change because of the circumstances that get in the way of our bulldozing ego and show us a better way to live.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,

— Josh Waggoner

Negative thoughts lead to negative outcomes.

Fear, fearing failure for example, leads to holding yourself back, which ultimately leads to being close-lined by your fear, aka fail. Success seems to allude you at every turn for some reason, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t seem to break through. We lock ourselves inside of a (gerbil) maze of our making, unable to find the way out.

We stress about stress. Worry about worry. Every chance of us making a mistakes, lead us to being more and more indecisive.

Even expecting great things to happen can lead to ‘sudden’ disappointment, when they don’t happen, or when you get so close, but no cigar. It’s very rarely you can go into a movie with skyscraper size expectations of how perfect is and actually feel the same once the credits roll. The bigger the expectations, the harder they fall.

Like a gerbil wheel spinning around and around, bringing us back to exactly where we don’t want to be.

That said, it’s not that pursuing greatness is bad per se. Going after great things is an amazing goal to have. The problem is latching on to anything other than the pursuit — the journey — at the same time. The moment we expect something to happen, we lose sight of the present and dwell on the prize at the end of the rainbow.

It sounds like a mind-bender, but thinking a goal is inevitable, will make the goal unattainable. While you’re focused on what should happen, the work needed to make it happen is gathering dust in the corner.

Let It Go

In order to make any great thing happen, we have to let go of our expectations, let go of the prize, and focus on the next action we need to do that’s in front of us. If you expect a raise at work this year, but never get one, how are you going to motivate yourself to get over that awful disappointment? But if you have a goal for a raise, and then focus your entire work force on doing a incredible job at work, they’ll probably give you a raise and then sum just to keep you around. It all depends on what you are focusing on. Are you focusing on the carrot? Worried about the stick? Or pacing and bracing yourself to out run, out work, out create, out enthuse everyone else.

The goal is inevitable only when you focus less on the goal and more on the very next step you need to do to get closer to the goal. Each step, an impactful action. That’s the key to your maze.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,

— Josh Waggoner

How do you stand out in a world where the internet has given us all equal opportunity?

Where anyone can become a photographer?

Where anyone cat start an online business, blog, or write a book, or build an app, or do exactly what we do? (or — more likely — exactly what we want to do?)

There’s nothing that stands in the way from any one of us from building a life around our dreams, except time, energy, creativity, pushing past fear and uncertainty and a little elbow grease 💪

Far from easy, but completely attainable.

The tools are accessible.

The knowledge and insights how to do it are out there.

And everyone wants to do it.

So how do you stand out?

Take the path of greatest resistance.

The most difficult paths, are the least traveled ones, but the most rewarding.

The hard things are the fulfilling things. If you find yourself saying, ‘why hasn’t anyone done that yet?’ Maybe you’re the one who’s supposed too.

But don’t choose difficultly for difficultly’s sake. It’s not about the difficulty itself, its about choosing a challenge that lights you up with excitement and pushes boundaries of creativity and expression like never before.

Stay BOLD, Keep Pursuing,

— Josh Waggoner

What do you need to add?

What do you need to remove?

What do you need to double down on?

It’s hard to get where you want to, when you don’t know what’s working or what’s holding you back.

Add. Remove. Double down.

Stay BOLD, Keep Pursuing,

— Josh Waggoner

What can I do right now to move the needle a little closer to my goals?

I don’t want to be perfect (perfect is boring) but I do want to challenge and improve myself a little every day.

Rushing never leads to Mastery. When was the last time you crammed for something and actually could remember it for more than a couple of days? Ever?

Learning is a steady swing of the axe.

The goal is to be a little better than yesterday.

A little more consistent.

A little more action, less maybe’s.

A little more open, a little less ego.

A little more patience, a little less worry and stress.

A little more focus, less scattered.

A little more energy.

…

Forget about what others are doing or not doing. As long as I stay focused on that small, steady change, I’ll get where I need to go.

Stay BOLD, Keep Pursuing,

— Josh Waggoner