Two of my favorite pieces of advice to give people are…

1. Know yourself.
2. Own your shit.

I even started my podcast, Master Your Mission, with those five words in the first few episodes. 

Knowing yourself and owning your shit are both qualities of a person who is self-aware. Google defines self awareness as conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives, and desires.

I personally think that self awareness is one of the most overlooked keys to fulfillment and success in life and in business. The opposite, not knowing yourself, is really a liability.

Self awareness builds integrity. When you have integrity, you own your mistakes and you do what you need to do to correct any situation in which you’ve made a mistake or to avoid repeating the same mistake. You treat people with fairness and you don’t try to take advantage of people. When you have integrity, you care about your reputation and you genuinely want your customers to have...

But will you ever actually be able to achieve success? What you believe about your own ability to succeed may be your answer.

Enter Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University.

In her 2006 book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she wrote that people are on a continuum based on their beliefs about where their ability to succeed comes from. Some people believe that success is innate. Those people have what she called a fixed mindset. Other people believe that success is based on hard work, learning, and their persistence. According to Dweck, those people have a growth mindset.

She concluded that, although people may...

I can’t swim. I’ve previously told the story of my most recent attempt to learn how to swim in a past episode of my Podcast, Master Your Mission, called Great Things Are Happening Just Outside Your Comfort Zone.

What you may not know about me is that I love to travel. I’ve been to some really cool places all over the world. In many of these places, I’ve found myself in the middle of the ocean on some small boat, clinching my fists with my stomach turning in fear because of the fact that I can’t swim. 

To clarify, I’ll give an example of what I mean. When I visited Puerto Vallarta, in Mexico, my travel buddies and I wanted to go on a day trip to visit the beach in a small town called Yelapa. The only way to get to Yelapa from Puerto Vallarta is a 40 minute boat ride through the choppy ocean down the Pacific Coast. Now, I don’t mean a cruise ship boat ride. I mean a small boat that can hold maybe 10–15 people max. Check...

Every time you saw your reflection, you’d see a distorted image of you staring back. You’d go through life believing that the image you saw in that mirror was how other people also saw you.

And even though you could look down at your body and touch your face, you still believed that other people saw you the way you saw yourself. Can you imagine how much that would affect your confidence, your interactions with other people, and the way you moved around the world?

How do you see yourself? When you see your reflection in the mirror, do you see the same person you envision in your mind? 

What about the reflection you get of yourself from those around you? Do you think that reflection is accurate? Do people see you the way you see yourself?

Most of the time, the way we see ourselves is not how others see us. We know our own deepest,...

We call them know-it-alls, fancy pants, and maybe sometimes assholes. Don’t be those people. 

I can’t think of one instance in which a person could know so much about a subject that they could never learn something new about that subject. It’s even possible for the most expert of experts to learn something from a novice.

Many successful people claim that they never stop learning. Learning means that you’re growing and progressing from where you are to a place of better understanding.

In your business, you may find it hard to find time to fit learning something new into your schedule, but it’s actually a lot...

No, I’m not talking about some supernatural power of picking things up with your mind and throwing them across the room. 

All my gym rats out there may have previously heard the expression, “Do you even lift bro?” Whether you’re a gym rat or not, you probably understand the importance of exercising and eating healthy foods. 

Exercising can help you build muscle and replace fat, keep healthy joints, build strength and efficiency in cardiopulmonary function and so much more. Keeping your body in tip top shape so that it performs at a high level means that you eat right, exercise, and even go to the doctor for regular checkups. 

When we talk about exercising and taking care of our bodies though, we often forget about the health of one of the most important parts of our bodies—our minds. 

When it comes to your mind, do you even lift bro? Are you doing the things you should be doing to care for your mind like you would care for...

When you’re a customer, how do you treat the people who work in and own the businesses you frequent? Let’s say you go into a local restaurant and they totally screw up your order. How do you handle it? Is your first reaction to yell, scream and get irate? Or are you patient, understanding and willing to give the business the opportunity to fix it?

What about the flip side? In your business, do you provide the type of excellent customer service that you expect to get from other businesses when you’re the customer? 

Be honest.

I’ve seen people, who are entrepreneurs themselves, act a plum fool with other business owners over the smallest things. I’ve seen them be rude and condescending to the the employees of another establishment over things that could be fixed really easily.

Alternatively, I’ve seen entrepreneurs, who expect exceptional service everywhere they go, be short and unwilling to bend when their customers aren’t...

If you’ve been putting off your dream of becoming an entrepreneur, you should stop putting it off and start your business now. Why? Well, tomorrow isn’t promised and the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll get to where ever it is you want to go. 

Procrastinating on your dream is not the move. The problem with procrastination is that it leads to more procrastination. In fact, it leads to endless procrastination. We convince ourselves that we’re not good enough as we are and that we need something else in order to be successful. Unsurprisingly, we never actually acquire that something else. 

When you’re lacking things like large budgets, a ton of expertise, and an audience with money in hand, what do you do? How do you start your business in spite of imperfect conditions?

You master the art of the imperfect start. Here’s how:

1. Give yourself permission.

The first thing you need to do is allow yourself to believe in your ability...