I’m disciplined.
I have routines that I follow every day without fail. A lot of my day is scripted, without an actual script.
I made myself into a good writer and speaker, in large part due to doing it all the time. Discipline helped me teach myself basketball. By making it to the pros, I got into the top 1% of basketball players and athletes worldwide.
The fact that I deliver these articles fairly consistently might be the very thing you like about them (to say nothing of the content).
Being disciplined is a personal trait that I happily talk about.
These are things that you know about me or could easily learn if you read / listened to enough of my material. I’d tell you about it myself if you asked. I want you to know.
This is the “light side” of me. We all have light sides: the positive, seemingly impressive aspects of our beings that we readily show off to the public and gladly accept admiration for.
Your light side is all the skills and attributes that you mention when someone asks you how you’ve become successful. The light is all the positive traits of your being that you’re happy to have people know about.
Most people, when we’re thinking about it, show only our light sides. You and I are no exceptions.
What we don’t know is each other’s dark sides. We should know our own, though — thoroughly.
I know mine well.
I’m vindictive. Vengeful. I hold grudges. I have an unhealthily long memory for things that well-adjusted people would easily “let go” of. The saving grace of my dark side is that I’ve learned to channel that energy into positive activity (most of the time).
Getting kicked off my college basketball team and having my parents trash my post-college hoop dreams were the best things that happened to my sports career: talent alone probably wouldn’t have been enough to take me pro. A lot of players have talent, and winning on talent is an uphill battle.
Engaging that dark energy to activate my skill was (and still is) a winning combination.
I’m more competitive than the average person. I keep ongoing competitions active in my mind — the very people whom I’m competing to defeat don’t even know that these battles exist. And they never will. But I know.
This “dark” energy, not the positive traits, is the reason why you know my name.
***
Most everyone knows about their light energy. You have to — it’s what you consciously put on display about yourself every day. Everyone knows you for it and you’re proud of it. When you talk about yourself, your light energy traits are the first (and often only) things you mention about yourself.
To reach your full potential, though, you’re gonna need more than that light. You need to engage the dark.
Your dark energy is the side of you that the world doesn’t know and that you may not want the world to know. And that’s fine — they don’t need to know. All they need to see are the results.
But you? You need to know what that dark energy is and where it resides within you.
Because you need to learn how to identify, activate and harness it — no matter how unbecoming the light side of you may (publicly) think it is.
In private, you’re happy about the dark energy — you know it’s the true you at your core— unless you’re so in denial about your dark side that you’ve grown to hate yourself.
Think Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, two sides of the same person who kills himself when he can’t reconcile both sides of his being, or Tiger Woods publicly unraveling when word of his many extramarital affairs went public a decade ago.
Their dark sides went public, and they couldn’t handle the fact that the world knew about them.
The dark energy is your activator. It’s the USB charging cord that charges the smartphone and allows it to work. While the phone is a $1,000 device, and a replacement USB cord is only $19 USD max, without that cord, the smartphone is stupid.
Plug into your dark side.
You can read about that drive that I used to go pro in sports, and how that is just one piece of the life and business philosophy and framework I created my business around in my book Work On Your Game — you can order it here: http://WorkOnYourGameBook.com
Make sure to take the following MasterClasses related to this very topic —
#310: The Brightest Lights Come From The Darkest Moments
#309: Don’t Ask For It – Take It
#963: How To Let Your DOG Out
#962: You’re Not Here To Be Average
#853: Competition: You Gotta Be A DOG
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Get started with your free trial here: http://WorkOnMyGame.com/GameGroup