Hello, hello, and welcome to episode 16 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. As always, I'm so grateful that I get to be with all of you today.
Every time I start thinking about the content for a podcast episode, I'm always looking at the conversations I've had with my clients and I'm creating content that is useful to them. To them, because I know it's going to be useful to you as well, even if you're not my client right now. But every now and then there is something I want to share that is very profound to me that has transformed my life in more ways that I can even explain.
And today's episode is one of those topics. So I want to encourage you to really make time to listen to it. You might even want to listen to it two or three times because the words I'm going to use may sound very simple. But the meaning and when you apply what I'm going to teach you today is profound.
Okay, so I want to start by sharing a story that comes from the Bushido code, which is the moral code of samurais. And it says, a samurai. They must die before going into battle. What used to happen was that samurais, before they went to battle, they would go through a process in which they would mentally die.
They would face their mortality and they would embrace that there was a high probability they were going to die in battle and that there was a hundred percent certainty we're going to die someday. And the reason they would do this is so when they went to battle, they weren't concerned with living or dying.
And they could give themselves fully to the battle, to every moment they're fighting their opponents. I think this is Incredibly wise, because if you think about someone going to war and being so scared of dying, they're not going to be at their best. They're not going to be fighting, being present, using their best tools and strategies in that moment.
So it's smart that when a warrior is going to war to actually face their own death and detach from it so they can be fully present. And I think we can all learn this from the Samurais and apply it to our own life. Your battle is the road, the process you're going to go through in order to achieve your vision.
So if we start thinking about what is our battle? What are we going to fight for in this life? It could be about our business, growing our business, doubling our revenue, raising this amount of capital for a project, creating this level of impact, affecting so many lives in a positive way. It could be providing for our family, whatever it is that it's your goal, your vision for yourself.
That, I want you to think about it as winning the battle. That when you get there, that big goal, that huge idea you have that you want to accomplish, that is winning the battle for you. And then I want you to ask, what is the part of me that I have to let go, the part of me that has to die so I can go and pursue this goal with everything I have without the fear or the doubt stopping me?
So what is the part of you that has to die? All of us as human beings, we live in a paradigm. that says life should be some way and life shouldn't be some way. We have had world wars because some people think life should be a certain way and the other half think it shouldn't be that way. And we experience this every time.
And one of the things I often see is that we say, If I have a goal and I work hard for it, I should accomplish it and this I should accomplish it or I should accomplish it in this amount of time or I should accomplish it with this amount of ease. That should is one of the parts of ourselves that we need to let die because life will be whatever life is.
Life is never what we think it should be. Life is what it is and you cannot control all the outcomes of your life. You can't control if you're going to win the battle or not. You can't control it more than a samurai going to war can control the battle themselves. The only thing you can do is set that goal, set that vision, let go of the shoulds or shouldn'ts and go into battle with everything you have.
As part of my one on one coaching, I offer to all my clients a monthly group call in which we talk about various topics and we do some coaching. It's incredibly fun and enlightening and we learn from each other. Well, recently in that call, we were talking about this same topic. And what we did is we went around and each person had to say what is the part of themselves They need to let go or the part of themselves that has to die in order to go into the battle the hundred percent, their heart and their mind.
And here's some of the things they said, which I think all of them are brilliant. I have to let go of what other people think about me. I have to let go of how long it's going to take. I have to let go. of wanting to be certain of every step and making sure every step is going to work. I need to let go of my own doubt.
I need to let go of the fear of failure. We are going to fail. That's not optional. But if we decide to play this game, we are going to become someone we are proud of. And we may create incredible things that even surprise us. Again, in this group call, one of our clients was saying that he started a project that he thought he would get done in two years, and it's been 10 years and the project is still underway.
But he said something that I thought was so beautiful. He said, But the person I've become by pursuing this project for 10 years, even if I've continued to fail, even if today I haven't accomplished what I said to accomplish, it's worthwhile because I've expanded my network because I've learned so much because I grown my confidence because I have created other projects as a consequence of pursuing this.
And I think for all of us who are visionaries, who are pursuing something that is big and scary and exciting, looking at the possibility of failure, looking at the possibility of criticism, looking at the possibility of not making it in the time we wanted to make it is incredibly important and taking it in and saying, yeah, maybe I will fail.
Yeah, maybe people won't like what I do. Yeah, maybe it won't take me a year, it will take me 10 years. And still, I want to go into this battle. And still, I'm committed to this vision and this goal. And still, I want to give everything I have to accomplish this vision. Even when I know there's a probability that it won't happen.
In an interview I saw with Kobe Bryant, the interviewer asked him, and I'm paraphrasing here, Well, there's some players that play to win, and there's some players that play to avoid losing. Which one are you? And he said, I'm neither of those, because if I'm too focused on winning, I'm scared that that might not happen.
And if I'm too focused on not losing, then I'll probably lose. What I focus on is figuring it out, is learning something from the game. And I think this is exactly what the Samurais do. They're not as concerned with their life or their death for COVID not winning the game or losing the game. It's playing the game.
So since we're starting a new year, I want to invite all of you to create a vision that is so big and so exciting that it also scares you a little bit, that it may even sound impossible to reach. And ahead of time decide, you know what, maybe I won't ever get there, but I am gonna play this game with everything I have.
I'm gonna look failure in the eyes and say, you can come to me, it can happen, and still I'm gonna fight for what I want. You're gonna look at other people. And they may disapprove. They may criticize you. They may even get upset with you. And still, you're going to pursue this vision, this dream, this goal, because this is the game you're going to create for your own life.
So the other topic we covered in the monthly group call is who decides what's possible for us. Most of us, when we're deciding on our vision for our future, we look at our past. And we, Based on that, decide our new vision, which is an incremental growth from the past. But who says that's the only possibility?
Some of us look at others and what they've done to see what is possible for us. We also ask the people who are closest to us if they think something is possible for us. But I want to remind you today that the only person in the entire world who can decide what is possible for you, So in 2025, instead of growing incrementally, Dream big, take big risks, go play the biggest game you can play with your life.
Because at the end of the day, we all know we're all gonna die. So my friends, dream big, take big risks, look failure directly in the eye, and create the biggest and most exciting game you can for your own life.
