You need more than one purpose because no single thing, not a marriage, not your kids, not one business, can keep you full for a lifetime. That’s what Grant Cardone told me, and it started with a quarter he lost when he was eight years old. Have several things you’re obsessed with, let them feed each other, and you stop being one loss away from zero.

This was Grant’s third time on the Addicted2Success podcast, and it went up in September 2016, a couple of weeks before his book Be Obsessed or Be Average came out. He asked how he looked on camera. I told him he looked like a million bucks. Then I corrected myself. A hundred million bucks.

He came back with a dark joke about what he’d do if he were only worth a million. I won’t repeat it word for word, but the point under it was clear. For Grant, enough is never enough.

The lost quarter: never have only one

I asked when multiplying money first clicked for him. He said there were two big events. The first was when he was eight. His dad gave him a quarter to go to the store and he lost it. When he got home and owned up, his dad told him never to play with money. His grandfather happened to be at the house that day. Grant described him as a gambler and an unbelievable character, a guy who was “either balling or broke.”

His grandfather grabbed him and said the problem wasn’t that he’d been playing with money. The problem was that he only had one quarter. Never have only one quarter.

Grant said he’s lived by it since. You’re going to lose a quarter one day. If it’s your only one, you’re at zero.

The second event was the 2009 crash. He said he was already in the top one or two percent from a wealth standpoint, and even people at the very top got hit. It cut things close for him. His explanation: the money had made him average. He’d lost his obsession with going out and expanding.

Then he said something I didn’t expect. When he ran into Addicted2Success, he asked himself what he’d been thinking. He had great books and programs, but he hadn’t gone wide the way we had.

Make it, keep it, multiply it

Grant said there are three things people need to learn about money. How to make it. How to keep it. How to multiply it. In his view most people never learn the first, fewer learn the second, and almost nobody learns the third.

On keeping it, he pointed at Kanye. Grant said at the time that Kanye was $55 million in debt and asked how many Bugattis anyone needs. Take the number as Grant’s claim in 2016, not a current fact. His bigger point was that money is meant to be used. He said money is going down in value, so it has to go out and produce “babies.”

I told him it’s not what you have, it’s who you become. People don’t just want Grant’s stuff. They want Grant. Too many people chase the things around them instead.

Can you have more than one purpose? Grant’s answer

Grant said he’d read The ONE Thing and liked it. Then he said he doesn’t have one thing. There has never been one thing big enough to keep him excited.

“I’ve never had one purpose. That was just a bunch of people telling me I had one purpose.”

He doesn’t think any single purpose can fill a person up, and he used his own life to make the point. He’s married to a great woman, and she can’t fill him up. He has two kids, and they can’t either. One business didn’t satisfy him. Neither did the second or the third.

That sounds cold until you hear the rest. He wasn’t saying his family doesn’t matter. He was saying no one person or project should have to carry all of it.

And the purposes pay for each other. Grant said his real estate business showed him what’s possible because it works when he isn’t working. He told me that releasing a book in a big way loses money, and that his real estate and his other two companies fund projects like that. Everything touches everything. Put real energy into each one and you lift all of them.

That’s the quarter story grown up. One quarter, one business or one purpose all leave you a single loss from zero.

I told Grant this hit home. When I started blogging and building Addicted2Success I went all in. Whatever it takes, laser focus, and I didn’t stop until I had a team. Then I moved to the next thing, and the next. People get confused and think it’s one thing for the rest of your life. I don’t buy that. We’re meant to grow. Look at nature. It grows.

There’s nothing between obsessed and average

All the greats did more than one thing, Grant said, and they all did things they didn’t want to do. He’s heard people say you should only do the things you want to do. Grant said he does things he doesn’t want to do every single day. If you don’t, you won’t grow your business and you won’t keep it.

His line was that an obsessed person doesn’t care if they have to clean a toilet. They might hate the task. They do it anyway.

So I asked him what gives him that constant flow of energy. He said it’s a choice. There’s nothing in between obsessed and average. You’re either all in or you’re not, so quit kidding yourself that there’s some gray in the deal. Steve Jobs, Mozart, Elon Musk: if we know the name, Grant said, they didn’t come from the average camp.

I see the same gap between being interested and being committed. People draw a line in the sand, which is still the halfway point. You have to draw it in cement.

Everybody is already addicted to something

Grant doesn’t think you need to become obsessed. He thinks you already are. Everybody has an addictive quality, he said. His were survival, talking and fun times. The question is what it’s pointed at.

Some people get addicted to information instead of execution. For Grant at 25, it was drugs.

He traced it back to denying parts of himself. He always wanted to be the coolest guy in the room, the James Bond guy, obsessed with success and money, and he was told not to be. By his late teens he was denying so much of himself that when someone offered him weed, he said yes. It went to weed every day, then pills, then cocaine every day. He said he’d been stuck in it for nine years.

What turned it around was a treatment center. He put the drugs down for 28 days, came back, and replaced that addiction with the things he said he should have been addicted to all along.

I mentioned someone I’d been coaching who wanted to give up drinking because of what it was doing to their relationship and business, but hadn’t made a real decision. Grant’s response was deliberately extreme. Either go all in on being a drunk, or make the decision to be the other guy: obsessed with your health, with being a great dad, with helping people not drink. Read that as Grant forcing a choice, not as advice to drink. If you’re dealing with addiction, get professional help. Grant’s own turn started in treatment.

Why Grant doesn’t love himself just the way he is

Grant told me his mom once said she loved him just the way he was, right after he’d been telling her about all his dreams as a kid. About 30 years later his sister said the same thing. He wondered how many times he’d heard it.

His pushback was blunt. So what? He didn’t love himself just the way he was. If you’re broke, not living on purpose, you can’t get away from a job you don’t like, or you’re stuck in a house you don’t like, why would you love that? His words were that you should become obsessed with hating it. Obsessed or average, pick one.

I think it comes down to the meaning we give it. How painful would my life be if I didn’t take the action?

Keep looking for the vein

Grant has a phrase for this. Keep looking for the vein.

Internet marketers tell him they tried. They hit the list, put the program out, ran Facebook ads. His answer is that you either found the vein or you didn’t. He compared it to a nurse who wants blood from your arm. She doesn’t quit after one try. She keeps looking. The obsessed person, he said, won’t get seduced by an excuse.

He used his own launch as the example. He said he was giving 30,000 books to schools and donating his book proceeds to charity. It was working pretty well, but not where he wanted it. A free audio chapter didn’t move it enough either. So they kept looking.

The day before we recorded, he said, he’d made a bigger offer: a store credit for anyone who bought the book and wrote a review, good or bad, a 10-hour video of him reading the book, and 13 coaching sessions after it shipped. He said sales went nuts. That was his 2016 launch play, not an offer you can take up today. The lesson is the behavior: working pretty well still isn’t the vein.

The purpose of money is that you can lose it to win

His internet team asked about the ROI on all that. Grant said money wasn’t his problem. The book was the target. Then he said this:

“The real purpose of money is that you can lose it to win.”

He thinks a lot of ROI talk is just trying to make sense of average. He pointed to the MyPillow guy. Grant had never bought one of his pillows, yet there he was talking about him. In his view the big players are obsessed with market domination, not this quarter’s spreadsheet.

I told him about someone I’d spoken to who was putting a little money into Facebook ads to dial in a new program. You’re paying for the data and the analytics, so you’re smarter on the next move. And say you drop 5K or 10K into an ad and someone who sees it pays you 100K to speak at an event. How do you measure that?

Grant told me about a Facebook campaign his team said didn’t work because it drew complaints. He called that awesome, because the feedback showed him how to communicate with people. Another ad, about drug treatment and switching one obsession for another, got more comments than normal and no purchases. People said he was just switching one addiction for another. He said that’s exactly what he was doing.

Sometimes, he said, you have to miss a bunch to figure out where the bullseye is. Take all of this as Grant’s view of his own businesses. Speak to a licensed advisor for financial advice.

Feed the Beast, starve the doubt

I asked for his favorite chapter. He said Feed the Beast. The question he gets most is where he gets the juice, and his answer is to feed the beast and starve the doubt. He called it feeding the darkness in you. Quit denying the part of you people told you to hide. Fuel it, and get the people around you to fuel it too.

He said he wanted to give everybody permission to find their addictive personality and refocus it. I told him a lot of people live in a fantasy of who they think they should be, and deny the parts of themselves they could be tapping into.

When I said thanks a million, he said a hundred million, and that he was hunting a billion next. Then he told me to come see him in Miami. I was in Venice, California, and he reckoned LA had plenty of ideas and not enough action.

Here’s my take. If one thing going wrong would wipe you out, you’ve got one quarter. Pick the second thing you’d be obsessed with, give it real energy, and let your purposes pay for each other.

FAQ

Can you have more than one purpose?

Yes. Grant Cardone told me he’s never had one purpose and doesn’t think any single purpose can fill a person up. Marriage, kids and one business all mattered to him, but none was enough alone. Several purposes can fuel and fund each other.

What did Grant Cardone mean by “never have only one quarter”?

At eight, Grant lost a quarter his dad gave him for the store. His grandfather said the problem wasn’t playing with money. It was having only one quarter. Grant took it as a lesson: you’ll lose a quarter one day, so don’t let it be your last.

What does “find the vein” mean?

It’s Grant’s phrase for refusing to stop at “we tried.” Like a nurse who keeps looking until she finds a vein, an obsessed person keeps testing until something clearly works, and doesn’t get seduced by excuses when results are only okay.

Is there anything between obsessed and average?

Not in Grant’s view. He said you’re either all in or you’re not, and calling it gray is a way of explaining average. He also believes everyone is already obsessed with something. The choice is what you point it at.

What are the three things people need to learn about money?

Grant says how to make it, how to keep it and how to multiply it. In his view most people never learn the first, fewer learn the second, and almost nobody learns the third. Speak to a licensed advisor for financial advice.

Why you’re not sabotaging yourself is simpler than a willpower problem. You’re living what you really value, and it already shows in how you fill your space, where your time and money go, where you’re organized and disciplined, and what you think and talk about most. Dr. John Demartini calls these value determinants. Once you can see your real values, you have two choices. Set goals that match them, or change your values to match your goals.

A couple of nights before we recorded this episode, I went to one of John’s events. It was about a two-hour session and I could see people all over the room having breakthroughs. So when he sat down with me for the podcast (it went up in August 2016), I had a list of questions I didn’t get to ask that night.

The answer that stuck with me most came near the end. I asked him about people who keep sabotaging themselves with money. He told me he doesn’t even like the word. More on that below, because it’s the most useful reframe in the whole conversation.

Why what you say you value isn’t what you really value

John has written over a hundred books, including The Values Factor, and in my intro I said he’d read close to 30,000 books. His whole body of work comes back to one idea. Everybody lives by a set of priorities, from most important to least important, and your life already demonstrates them.

The problem is that if you ask people what their values are, they hand you what he called “social idealisms.” Family. Health. Kindness. Wealth. The stuff that sounds right.

He brought up the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg here. As John put it, most people are either avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, subordinating to mothers, fathers, preachers and teachers, or following the herd of whatever their society says is normal. Very few are living by what they actually value.

Then he said the line I want you to remember:

“I’m not interested in what people say. I’m interested in what they’re living.”

He also warned about injecting other people’s values into your life. Learning from mentors is smart. Trying to be somebody you’re not, in his words, is “almost guaranteed to be self-defeating.”

How to tell what you really value: the value determinants

When I asked how we become more conscious of our values, John listed the questions he uses. Answer them honestly, based on what you actually do and not what you wish you did:

• How do you fill your space? What’s sitting around you right now?
• What do you spend your time on?
• What energizes you?
• What do you spend your money on most?
• Where are you most organized?
• Where are you most disciplined?
• What do you think about, visualize and affirm to yourself most, and is it already coming true?
• What do you love talking to other people about?
• What inspires you, and what do the people who inspire you have in common?
• What’s a goal that’s persisted in your life and keeps getting achieved?
• What do you love learning about?

Look for the answers that repeat. That’s your real hierarchy, not the one you’d put on a vision board. John has a free version of this on his site, the Demartini Value Determination process. He said it takes about 30 minutes, and you can come back every three months to see how your values are shifting.

Here’s the one that hit me personally. I said to the audience, look at your library. What books are in it right now? It’ll show you what you value most. Then I had to admit something on air. I know for sure I don’t have enough books on finance. I wasn’t struggling, but I felt like I could be doing a lot better. John said he’d read about 1,400 books on finance and economics. That’s the difference in one shelf.

Why you’re not sabotaging yourself

This is the part I mentioned at the top. I asked John whether people who can’t get ahead financially are sabotaging themselves because they can’t hold the money in their container.

He pushed back straight away. He said he doesn’t find sabotage a productive word, because when someone says they’re sabotaging themselves, it means they don’t know what their real values are. They keep expecting to live by somebody else’s values. When their actions keep following their own, they call it sabotage.

Once they see their real values, he said, the story changes. They stop seeing sabotage and start seeing decisions that make perfect sense. “No wonder I keep doing that.”

I think that’s more useful than any amount of beating yourself up. You’re not broken. You’re doing exactly what your real values tell you to do. If you don’t like the results, the fix is the values or the goal, not more willpower.

Your spending already shows what you really value

I told John that so many people live in the fantasy of being wealthy. They see the glitz and the glamour, and it ends up being more of a nightmare than a fantasy.

He said he’s asked millions of people worldwide if they want to be financially independent. They all put their hands up. But in their minds they’re picturing the lifestyles of the rich and famous. They’re spending on depreciables and consumables that won’t build an asset base. In his experience, 1% or less actually want to study the numbers, study investments and patiently build assets over time.

His line was blunt: “Tell me what you value most, I’m going to show you where your money is going to go.”

Think of the person who says they can’t get ahead, then keeps spending on clothes, trips and instant gratification. In his view, they don’t really want to be wealthy. They want to live the things they keep doing. He said he’s interviewed billionaires and people who are broke, and the ones who are committed to building wealth have it in their top four values. The others don’t.

That’s not investment advice, and it isn’t a judgment on anyone’s spending. It’s a mirror. If you want the mindset side of money, read how to change your money blueprint before it caps your income. Here, the question is simpler. Does your bank statement agree with what you say you want?

The only two ways to fulfillment

John said there are only two ways to have fulfillment. Set goals that match your values, or change your values to match your goals. They have to be congruent.

To change a value, you stack up associations. List the benefits of something you want to rise on your value list and it goes up, because now you have more reasons to do it. List the drawbacks of something you want to drop and it goes down.

I asked if that’s just putting pen to pad. He said no. Writing it is an inventory, but you have to actually feel those benefits and drawbacks until they change your perception. He gave the example of an eight-year-old girl singing in front of 400 people at school. If they give her a standing ovation, she’ll want to sing again. If she forgets her words and people walk out, she probably won’t. We already move through our values based on pains and pleasures. You can let the world do that to you, or you can take command of it.

For wealth specifically, his process went like this:

1. Find out where wealth building actually sits on your value list.
2. Raise it, using that stacking process.
3. Link what you need to learn to the values you already have.
4. Learn the way you learn best. Visual, auditory or kinesthetic. YouTube, mentors and small chunks of reading all count.

He said you don’t have to read books to become financially savvy. He’s had mentors in almost every area of finance, and one hour with them is sometimes better than the book. Everybody loves learning what’s important to them.

Inspiration vs motivation

I asked John the difference, and his answer is the simplest I’ve heard. When you live by your highest value, you’re inspired from within. Nobody has to remind you. As you go down the list, things get more extrinsic, and you need outside motivation to do them.

His highest value is researching and teaching. He said he does it every day and doesn’t miss one. Domestic stuff? He said he’s about as domestic as a cockroach. He made a list of what he loves (research, writing, traveling and teaching) and delegated everything else.

I jumped in with “high income generating activities.” He added one word: meaning. You want income because it means you’re serving others, and meaning because it’s serving you. Put the two together and you’ve got your niche.

If you’re still doing every low-priority task in your business yourself, that’s often the real reason you’re burned out. And John didn’t think burnout comes from hours. He said people doing what they love can go 18 hours a day without feeling stressed, while someone forcing themselves through uninspiring work for that long is heading for a heart attack. He also said that whenever you’re not fulfilling your highest values, you increase the odds of addictive, compulsive behavior to compensate.

I told him about a mate of mine who’s worth hundreds of millions and is happy and grateful all the time. I was standing there when somebody asked if he ever burns out. He laughed and said he wasn’t a candle. John’s take: he’s doing something meaningful and serving a lot of people.

John went further on the brain side, too. He believes that when you work toward your highest values, the brain remodels itself to support it, and the executive center lights up. He also said the brain is about 10% neurons and 90% glia, and that the study of glial cells will matter as much as neurology in the decades ahead. Take that as John’s view, not settled science. He also recalled Deepak Chopra’s Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: live on purpose and you age differently.

Where entrepreneurs get their values wrong

I asked if there’s anything apart from values that holds people back. He said one of the most unwise things an entrepreneur does is assume what’s important to them is important to everybody. They come out with a cool idea and spend years fighting uphill.

He described two overlapping circles, like a vesica piscis. One is what you’re inspired to do. The other is what people are inspired to receive. The center is where the power is. If you can’t wait to get up in the morning and deliver it, and they can’t wait to get it, you’ve found your niche.

Can everybody be an entrepreneur? He said the capacity is in everyone, though not everyone will use it. He’s seen people who worked for security their whole lives find that overlap and take off.

What self-love has to do with your values

I get emails about this all the time, so I asked: how do we love ourselves more?

John said the only time we don’t appreciate ourselves is when we compare our daily actions to other people’s values that we’ve injected into our lives. Live by your own and you can look in the mirror and say thank you. He told me a Vogue magazine interviewer once asked who he’d be if he could be anyone in the world. His answer: “I have no desire to be anybody but me.”

His last 30-second speech was the same idea. Look in the mirror and know that no matter what you’ve done or not done, you’re worthy of love. And give yourself permission to do something extraordinary.

Here’s my take. Most people already know what they really value. They just don’t like the answer. So pull up your calendar, your bank statement and your bookshelf this week, write down what they say, and decide which way you’re going. Change the goal or change the value. Knowing this and doing nothing with it is the same as not knowing.

FAQ

How do you know what you really value?

Look at your actions, not your words. Dr. John Demartini’s value determinants ask how you fill your space, spend your time and money, where you’re organized and disciplined, and what you think, talk and love learning about. The answers that repeat are your real values.

What is the difference between inspiration and motivation?

Inspiration comes from your highest values, so you act without reminders or rewards. Motivation is the outside push you need for things lower on your value list. Demartini says the further down the list a task sits, the more motivation it takes.

Is self-sabotage really a values mismatch?

Demartini says what people call sabotage usually means they’re judging themselves by someone else’s values while acting on their own. Once you see your real values, the pattern looks like a decision, not a failure, and you can change the goal or the value.

Can you change your values?

Yes. Demartini’s method is to stack associations. Link many real benefits to a value you want to rise and drawbacks to one you want to drop, and actually feel them. The alternative is setting goals that match the values you already have.

Why can’t I get ahead financially if I want to be wealthy?

Demartini’s view is that your spending follows your values. If money keeps going to consumables instead of building assets, wealth building probably isn’t high on your value list yet. That’s a values question first, not a willpower one. Speak to a licensed advisor for financial advice.

Most people want to move forward in their careers, but knowing exactly how to do it isn’t always easy. You might be putting in the hours, meeting deadlines, and doing everything your manager expects, yet still feel like you’re standing in the same place professionally.

Working hard certainly matters, but career growth often requires more than dedication. The people who find new opportunities tend to pay attention to where their industries are heading, build useful relationships, and make deliberate decisions about their professional development.

You don’t necessarily need to change jobs or completely reinvent yourself to make progress. Sometimes, a few well-timed decisions can have a much greater impact than years of simply waiting for the next promotion.

Here are five career moves worth considering if you’re ready for bigger opportunities.

1. Develop Skills That Make You More Valuable

One of the smartest investments you can make in your career is learning something that increases your professional value. Industries change, technology evolves, and employers regularly adjust what they expect from their employees. Skills that helped you land your current position may not be enough to qualify you for the next one.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, employers expect significant changes in workforce skill requirements over the coming years.

A few findings from major workplace reports highlight why professional development deserves attention:

• 39% of workers’ existing skill sets are expected to change or become outdated between 2025 and 2030, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025.
• 93% of talent acquisition professionals believe accurately assessing candidates’ skills is essential to improving hiring quality, according to LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting 2025 report.
• 51% of American employees were actively looking for another job or watching for opportunities in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to Gallup’s workforce research.

These findings suggest that remaining competitive requires preparation, especially when many other professionals are exploring their options. Start by looking at job descriptions for positions you’d eventually like to hold. Notice which skills appear repeatedly and compare those requirements with your current abilities.

You might discover that improving your data analysis, communication, project management, or leadership skills could help you qualify for more advanced positions.

You don’t need to learn everything at once. Choose one relevant skill and find practical ways to develop it through courses, workplace projects, or independent learning.

2. Make Your Professional Achievements More Visible

Doing excellent work is important, but people also need to understand what you’ve accomplished. Many professionals underestimate their experience because they focus on everyday responsibilities rather than the results of their efforts. They might describe themselves as responsible for managing projects without mentioning that they consistently delivered those projects ahead of schedule.

There’s a meaningful difference between explaining what you do and showing the value you bring. For example, instead of saying you handled customer communications, you could explain how you improved response times, resolved recurring issues, or helped retain important accounts.

This approach is particularly useful when updating your resume, preparing for interviews, or discussing advancement opportunities with your manager.

If you haven’t updated your resume in a while, there’s a good chance it doesn’t reflect everything you’ve accomplished. New responsibilities, completed projects and skills you’ve developed over the years can easily get overlooked when you’re used to focusing on your daily work. When updating your resume, resources such as Zety’s free resume builder can help you structure that information and decide how to present your experience. The important part is making sure your resume reflects not just the positions you’ve held, but also the contributions you’ve made and how you’ve grown professionally.

Keep a personal record of successful projects, new responsibilities, and positive feedback throughout the year. Having those details available makes it much easier to explain your professional progress when an unexpected opportunity appears.

3. Build Relationships Before You Need Them

Professional networking sometimes gets treated as something you do only when searching for a job. In reality, meaningful relationships can be valuable throughout your career. A former colleague might introduce you to someone working in your desired industry. A professional connection could recommend a useful training program, share an upcoming opportunity, or offer advice about a career decision.

These connections rarely develop overnight, which is why building relationships before you need assistance makes sense. Start with people you already know. Reconnect with former coworkers, stay in touch with mentors, and take an interest in what others are working on. You can also attend industry events, join professional communities, or have thoughtful conversations on LinkedIn.

The key is to approach networking as an opportunity to exchange knowledge rather than immediately asking for favors. When someone shares an interesting project, ask about their experience. If you come across an article that might help a colleague, send it their way. Small interactions like these help maintain professional relationships without making every conversation feel transactional.

Over time, you’ll develop a network of people who understand your interests, recognize your strengths, and may think of you when relevant opportunities arise.

4. Take on Responsibilities That Challenge You

It’s easy to become comfortable doing work you already know how to handle. You understand the expectations, spot potential problems, and can complete most tasks with little difficulty. While that familiarity can make your workday easier, it doesn’t always encourage professional growth.

Taking on new responsibilities gives you the chance to develop abilities that your current position might not otherwise require. Suppose you’re working in marketing and want to move into a management role. Volunteering to coordinate a small campaign could give you experience with planning, delegation, and communication.

Similarly, someone interested in operations might benefit from helping improve an inefficient internal process. You don’t have to wait for a formal promotion to begin developing these abilities.

Look for manageable opportunities to contribute beyond your usual responsibilities, particularly when they align with the direction you want your career to take. Of course, taking initiative shouldn’t mean accepting unlimited additional work. Before agreeing to a new project, consider whether it offers useful experience and whether you have enough time to complete it properly. The goal is to become more capable, not simply busier.

5. Make Career Decisions With a Long-Term Plan

A higher salary or impressive job title can make an opportunity attractive, but neither automatically guarantees meaningful career progress. Before making a major professional move, think about where you’d like to be in three to five years.

Do you want to manage a team, specialize in a particular field, work independently, or eventually start your own business? Your answer can help you evaluate which opportunities are actually worth pursuing.

For example, a position offering a modest salary increase but greater responsibility might provide valuable experience for someone hoping to enter management. On the other hand, a higher-paying position with limited development opportunities may not be ideal if you’re still trying to build important skills.

Consider the people you’ll work with, the knowledge you’ll gain, and the professional options a position might create later. It’s also worth reviewing your goals periodically. Personal priorities change, and the career path that made sense several years ago might no longer fit your circumstances. You don’t need a perfectly detailed plan for the next decade. Having a general direction, however, helps you make more intentional decisions instead of accepting every opportunity that comes along.

Final Thoughts

Career growth doesn’t always happen through dramatic changes. Often, it comes from smaller decisions that gradually improve your professional position. Learning relevant skills, communicating your achievements, building relationships, accepting useful challenges, and thinking carefully about your future can all contribute to greater opportunities.

Not every effort will produce immediate results. Some relationships take years to become valuable, while certain skills only become useful when the right position opens up. What matters is continuing to prepare yourself for opportunities rather than assuming they’ll appear simply because you’ve worked hard.

The next significant step in your career might begin with a decision you make today.

To define success for yourself, strip out every goal you borrowed from someone else, then ask what you actually want the money, the title or the attention to give you. Usually it’s freedom, security, significance or power, and some of that doesn’t need a bank balance at all. Write your own version down, then check that you’re ready, willing and able to go after it.

I gave the talk above when I was 29, with no notes and no structure. People always asked me for the techniques and the hacks. Here’s what I told that room instead. “A lot of people see the glory, but they don’t actually see the story.” The website, the movies, the magazine covers are just the highlight reel. The lessons are in the hard yards before any of that, and a lot of mine came from chasing success that wasn’t mine.

Before my story, I asked the room how old they were when they first fell in love with self-development. One man said four. He’d sat on the porch of his great-grandmother’s school teacher, a woman born a slave, and she told him nothing could stop him. It didn’t come from a book. It came from one person who meant it.

Why you keep chasing someone else’s definition of success

The line I want you to take from that speech is this: stop chasing unicorns, AKA somebody else’s definition of success.

For years I put successful people on a pedestal because I hadn’t developed my own story yet. When you don’t know what you want, you grab the nearest picture of success and run at it.

The people you admire are great. But ask the better question: where does that greatness lie in them, and where does it lie in you? Go for that. Whatever you call it (your personal definition of success, what success means to you), it has to come from inside, or you’ll get there and feel nothing.

The glory vs the story: how I got it wrong first

My story starts at about seven years old with Space Jam. I got my mum to buy me a plastic six-foot ring and jumped off bricks to dunk on it. I told her I wanted to be like Michael Jordan. She told me I could be Joel. She handed me Michael Jordan’s Rare Air, my first exposure to training your mind and surrounding yourself with people better than you.

She also gave me a book called 50 Ways to Make Pocket Money. I tried about 20 of them. The one that hit: I earned $50 working for the next-door neighbor over the holidays, spent it on Toblerone bars and mint patties, and knocked on doors selling them back to the neighbors at double the price. I think they felt sorry for me. Then I put the profit into limited-edition NBA cards and traded them at school. I didn’t feel like I had limits.

Then I hit year eight, still 12, and Mum started saying the same thing every morning when I jumped out of the car: “Take a risk. Try something different.” So that year I punched someone out for messing with my mates, let off a flamethrower in the middle of science class and stole chocolates from the grocery store across the road and got arrested. She pulled me aside and explained that wasn’t the kind of risk she meant.

Her next move was Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad. A lot of it went over my head at 12, but two ideas stuck. A nine-to-five job is less stable than it looks, because you can lose it and the economy can crash. And you don’t have to work for money, you can make money work for you.

I got the dream job and felt empty

As a teenager I went all in on hip-hop. I knocked on a radio station’s door week after week until they let me intern for free. Then I told American record labels I could get their music played on one of Australia’s biggest hip-hop and R&B stations. I couldn’t, really. But the exclusives arrived, and eventually the station manager gave me my own midnight show. It took off. I interviewed big artists, shopped beats from producer friends, and at about 20 I scored a record deal with Atlantic Records and moved to Miami.

That was the glory. Within about two years I was waking up every day feeling empty. I had no control. That line about making money work for you kept coming back, so I walked away, and my friends and family thought I’d lost it.

Flying home to Perth, I missed my connection and ended up in a San Francisco motel at 2 a.m., asking myself if I’d made the right decision. A Tony Robbins infomercial was on the TV. I went home, got into his books, put them down because I wasn’t ready yet, and took a sales job because I was driven by money.

The CEO brought in Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street, who by then was teaching sales the ethical way. In a workshop he challenged me to write down my vision for success, my strengths, my passions and the solution I was bringing to the world, then read it out in front of everyone. My answer: I love self-development and I’m good with computers, so I could share inspiring ideas with the world. That’s how Addicted2Success started.

Freedom, not money: the desert job that showed me the difference

I got Ds and Fs in high school English, so I believed I couldn’t write. Then my first article for the site went viral. So did the next one. People didn’t want a research paper. They wanted it straight and simple.

Money was still my motivation, though. I took a job up north in the Australian desert with an environmental team clearing land for Chevron, catching snakes, lizards and kangaroos in heat I remember as about 132 degrees Fahrenheit. It was 28 days on, a week off, and a lot of negative people around me. So I’d jump in the car and play Tony Robbins tapes to unplug from it. His message was that when your back’s against the wall, you burn the boats. There’s no other option.

I doubled my content and started networking. In about three months back then, the site jumped from around 400,000 views to over a million, and I was making about $6,000 a month from advertising. Then I walked in and fired my boss.

Here’s the part that matters. Driving home that day, I booked a trip to Italy. I’d never been to Europe. And it hit me: “I was looking for freedom, not money itself.”

Get out of the paper prison

A lot of people are in what I call the paper prison. They’re trapped in the idea of why they need money, and they’ve never asked how they actually value it. Some people want money for significance. Some want power. Some want security. Some want freedom. What they don’t realize is they can find some of those things without the physical money itself.

This isn’t a wealth-building lesson. If you want that side, read how to change your money blueprint before it caps your income. This is about your definition of success. If what you really want is freedom, then a job that pays more but owns every hour of your week isn’t success, no matter how it looks on paper. Name what the money is standing in for, then look for the most direct way to get that thing.

Commit long enough for the truth to show up

About three years in, the site had reached around 40 million views worldwide and over 2 million followers on social media, and I got to interview Tony Robbins. I asked him how the real people stand apart from the flood of coaches, bloggers and YouTubers. As I remember it, he said the cream rises to the top. A lot of people aren’t willing to master, they dabble. Even if you work slowly, if you commit to something for ten years minimum, you’ll be the one who hung in there and the one who gets remembered.

Then I asked what we could actually act on. His answer, as I recall it, was that the biggest advantage you can have in business and in life is truth, and the only way to get truth is through experience. You have to get your hands dirty.

I was a guy behind a blog doing little podcast interviews, so I had to ask myself if I was really getting my hands dirty. I started stretching. Not so much that I’d snap, but enough to grow. I jumped in front of a camera. At first it took a bunch of takes. Now it’s one take. That’s why I’m blunt about people being addicted to information instead of execution. You can’t read your way into your own definition of success. You have to test it.

Ready, willing and able: the three zones of excellence

After interviewing hundreds of successful people, I kept looking for the pattern under what they said. I boiled it down to three zones of excellence:

• Beliefs (ready). Your mindset, and knowing the direction you’re going in.
• Habits (willing). The daily energy bolts of action. Fifty swings at a big tree in one day won’t knock it down. Swing at it every day and eventually it falls.
• Skills (able). Mechanical skills, like learning Photoshop or speaking better, and emotional skills, like how you communicate with people.

You can’t skip one. Imagine you’re ready and willing to be a doctor, and someone comes in who needs a leg amputated a certain way. You’ve got a chainsaw and no skill. You’re going to make a mess. When a client tells me they can’t make something happen, I run the three zones and we can usually pinpoint it. Usually it’s the habits or the mindset they haven’t followed through on.

Turn up the volume on the whispers of wisdom

Looking back from seven years old to 29, my purpose kept giving me little nudges. The books. Tony on a motel TV. Jordan Belfort making me write it down. I call them whispers of wisdom. My friend Peta Kelly calls it the quiet tap on the shoulder. I fought them for years because I thought I knew best.

Everyone has heard them. Some of you just have the volume turned down. Crank it up.

The Christian speaker Myles Munroe, who died in a plane crash in the Bahamas in 2014, made a point I love. A manufacturer doesn’t build a product and then say, let’s see what it’s for. The purpose comes first. The way I heard it, God made us the same way, with a purpose already inside us. Your job is to keep listening for it.

The one-week-to-live test

I live up in the mountains in Santa Barbara, and in the mornings my friend Joe and I stand on the balcony and practice our gratitudes. Gratitude, meditation and networking are the habits I’ve seen come up again and again with the people I interview. One morning, out of nowhere, Joe asked me: if you had one week to live, what would you do?

Nobody had ever asked me that. I told him I’d spend 24 hours with someone filming me, spilling out everything I know for anyone to use, kind of like Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture. I’d been offered millions for Addicted2Success at that point, but if nobody would pay that on the day, I’d sell it for something like $500,000 and fly my friends from around the world to the southwest coast of Australia for a final party on a big boat.

Joe said, “Isn’t that interesting?” All the things I was doing to make more money and build the business didn’t matter in my final days. “You’re not going for the money, are you?” Then he asked how I could start operating from that place a little more. Not fully, because that would be irresponsible. Just more.

That’s the best tool I’ve found to define success for yourself. Answer Joe’s question honestly and you’ll see which goals you borrowed.

How to define success for yourself in 5 steps

1. Answer the one-week question. Write what you’d do with seven days left. That list is closer to your real definition of success than your vision board.
2. Name what money is standing in for. Significance, power, security or freedom. Then find a way to get some of it now, without waiting for a number.
3. Audit your unicorns. List the people whose lives you’re chasing. For each one, write the greatness you see in them and where that same thing lives in you.
4. Check ready, willing and able. Is your belief there? Are your daily habits there? Do you have the mechanical and emotional skills? Fix the weakest zone first.
5. Commit and stretch. Pick a timeline long enough for truth to show up, think years rather than weeks, and stretch enough to grow without snapping.

It would be a damn shame to die without giving the world your unique gifts and your unique greatness. Stop chasing the glory you saw on someone else’s page, and start writing your own story.

FAQ

How do you define success for yourself?

Remove the goals you borrowed from other people, then ask what you want money, status or attention to give you. Write that down in your own words. Test it with one question: if you had one week to live, would you still want it?

What does it mean to chase someone else’s definition of success?

It means copying another person’s goals, lifestyle or numbers without knowing whether they fit you. I call it chasing unicorns. You can admire someone, but look for where their greatness also lives in you and build from that instead.

What is the paper prison?

The paper prison is being trapped by your need for money without knowing what you value it for. People usually want significance, power, security or freedom. Some of those can be found without the physical money itself, which changes what success looks like.

What are the three zones of excellence?

Beliefs, habits and skills, or ready, willing and able. Beliefs give you direction, habits are the daily action, and skills are both mechanical and emotional. You need all three. Being ready and willing with no skill still makes a mess.

Is it wrong to define success by money?

No, but money is usually a stand-in for something else. When I fired my boss and booked a trip to Italy, I realized I’d been chasing freedom, not money itself. Name the feeling you want, and you’ll make better decisions about how to get it.