The 9 UNCOMMON Keys to Winning

0:28So, hey, guys, are you frustrated with where you're at right now?

0:33This is The Ed Myron Show. Welcome back to the show, everybody. So today we're going to discuss one of my favorite topics, winning and a winner's mindset. And I know it's kind of an over-discussed theme and topic in life, but I think it's worth revisiting today. I'm going to give you, at the end of today, nine keys to having a winner's mindset. And by the way, there are hundreds of keys to winning. I'm just going to give you nine of them that maybe you haven't heard in a while or ever heard before. And I think winning matters in life, that we feel like at the end of our life, it counted for something.

1:06That, you know, I believe you were born to do something great with your life. And I believe at some point in your life, you knew it. You know, is there anybody who ever, by the way, made you feel that way? If you're blessed, maybe there's one of them in your life. When you're a little boy or a little girl, just the way they would look at you just made you feel like you were special. that you were going to do something great, that you were born for a reason, that you had a destiny and that life was going to be great for you. And at the end of your life, you would be proud of yourself, that if you have a God in your life, that God would be proud of you, your family would be proud of you.

1:39Think about that person. Can you picture them? Did you have that person? Maybe it was your mom or dad or a grandparent or an uncle or an aunt. Maybe it was a coach or a teacher. I don't know. But most people have somebody when they're a little boy or a little girl, if they're blessed, that just their look, the way they talked about you, the feeling you got, the energy you got when you were around them made you feel special. And if you could picture their face right now, you know, many people for me, that was my grandfather, my papa. He would look at me when I was a little boy. I'm named after him.

2:12I'm Edward III. And just the way he would look at me, and he would tell me, you're going to do something great, Eddie. You're going to have a great life. You're going to be the one in our family. Every time another grandkid was born in our family, it was the cutest thing because I'm the oldest grandchild and named after him. And he had a bunch of grandchildren. But every time he would have another grandchild, he would call me and say, your cousin was born today. I remember my great cousin, Peter, was born. And he said, cousin Peter's amazing. And he's got blue eyes. And he was six pounds, eight ounces or whatever it was.

2:41And we're so proud of him. And I remember going, that's great, Papa. And he would tell me, he goes, but hey, you're still my favorite. You know, you're still my favorite. He just made me feel that way. Do you have that person? And if you do, just for a second, picture their face. Let me tell you something about them. Whether they've passed away. If they've passed away, honor them with the life you built. Honor them with the winning on your terms. If they're still here, make them proud of you. Make them proud of you. I just want to say something about them to you. If you were just picturing their face.

3:12Many times when you picture those people's faces, it almost makes you emotional, doesn't it? because they may be the only one who's ever seen it in you. I want to tell you something about them. They were right. They were right about you. Don't ever forget that. The reason you felt that emotion is they were right. They saw who you really are. Now, maybe nobody else has ever seen it. Maybe the world's ignored it. Maybe you've forgotten it. But I promise you, they never forgot it. They loved you. They believed in you. And they saw who you truly were. And so just know they were right. And just know from me to you, you were born to win.

3:48You were born to do something great with your life. And I think finding out what that is is one of the greatest days of your life. When you discover what the win is for you. You know, I interviewed Sal Khan on my show. And he created the Khan Academy. He was working at a big hedge fund. Very brilliant man. And at one point in his life, I think he wanted to be a very wealthy man. And then he figured out that wasn't the win for him. The win for him was impact. And he created this academy that's reached 165 million people with education in 190 different countries. And I asked him when I interviewed him, are you glad you made that decision?

4:22He says, yeah, most days I am. He got clear on what winning in life meant for him. And I think when you get clear, whether that's impact or contribution or wealth or the memories you're going to make or just the emotions you want to feel, getting clear on what winning means to you is everything in life. and so many people go through their entire life never discovering what the win would be. And I think the reason they don't discover it is they never really do the hard work of auditing what matters to me. And for the record, what mattered to you 15 years ago may not matter to you anymore. Maybe you got a lot of it and you no longer need more of it.

4:57Or maybe you just didn't get it and it wasn't what you wanted. And so getting clear on right now, what is the win for you? And when you get clear about that, then you can go to work on winning. But until you have clarity, you can't define it. Winning is measurable. It's tangible. That's why they keep scoring sports. At the end, we don't have to wonder who won a game, right? It's the amount of points or the runs scored or the goals, whatever it is in life. So for you, you got to know what the goal is. You got to know what the score is. You got to know what the runs are in your life. And most people go through their entire life really not knowing.

5:31They're kind of wandering generalities. And those are the people, I think, that get to the end of their life. And when they get to the end, they live with regret. I don't think at the end of your life you're going to regret the times you lost. I really don't. I've had a lot of losses in my life. I think you regret not trying. I think you will regret not chasing. I think you will regret not making the effort to get uncomfortable. I think you could really regret never even getting clear on what it means. And whatever it is to you, it's okay. It doesn't have to be what culture tells you. I had a friend of mine that was just over in Italy on vacation.

6:06She goes, boy, they've got it figured out over there, over the U.S. The U.S. is all hustle and grind and six-day work weeks and achieve, achieve, achieve, accumulate, accumulate, accumulate. She said, when I was over there, it was, you know, people will go to three-hour coffees and they work four days a week and they just seem to be happier. And I said, well, if that's your win, if, you know, enjoyment and relaxation is the win for you, then that's a win. But there's a lot of people who grind and achievement and accumulation and contribution and making a difference and expansion is their win. Neither one's wrong.

6:39Neither one's wrong. But what is wrong is to go through life chasing something that isn't your win because someone else told you you should have it, or your mom and dad did, or your peer group supports it. What's also not a great way to go through life is just like really never knowing. And I can tell you if you ask the question enough, you'll find the answer. You know, maybe it's just that you haven't asked it enough or tried enough different things. You know, I talk to young people all the time. I say try different things because Matthew McConaughey said on my show, for example, sometimes life's a process of elimination and figuring that's not what I'm good at or that's not what I want.

7:14But you don't know that if you don't try a bunch of different things. And so my challenge to you to begin today before I give you these nine keys to a winner's mindset is to get clear on what it means. Because, man, that's a huge win in and of itself. I believe you're in the top 5 % of people on the planet where you know what winning means for you. I think 90, 95 % of people kind of go through life as a wandering generality, just sort of not even really in pursuit or search of the wind, thinking they'll get around to it. And then they get later in life. And I think that's the big regret when you look back, don't you?

7:48It's like, I didn't try. I never got clear on what it was. I didn't know what my life meant. And sometimes what you think it is, it isn't. That's why you got to try things in life. I could tell you at 53 years old, what means the most to me and winning now is very different than when I was 23, which is very different than when I was 33. The other thing I figured out at 53 is I don't know nearly as much as I thought I did. And I kind of like it. I think when I was 23 or 33, I thought I knew a whole bunch. And as you get a little bit older, life humbles you a little bit and you realize, I don't know as much as I thought I did.

8:22There's a lot more I don't know than I do know. and I like that because it makes me go through life wanting to learn, wanting to grow. For me in my life right now, when I was younger, I wanted recognition and significance and, you know, I wanted to be somebody, you know, that was very, very important to me. And I'm not saying that it's not anymore, but my priorities now are more contribution, growth, memories and experiences. People matter, things don't to me as I get older. And sometimes you have to have a bunch of things before you figure that out. And for some people, things do matter and there's nothing wrong with that.

9:01So it's just a matter of knowing what the win is. Okay, please get clear on that. So this to me is sort of a winner's mindset. Things you need to have. There's hundreds of things you need, but I'm just going to name nine today for you to think about because I want to serve you and just stimulate the winning in you. So number one, you have to believe you deserve to win. you're never going to achieve in life beyond what you believe you're worth or what you deserve to have. And I think what holds many people back from even getting clear on winning is inside, they just don't feel like they deserve to win, that they're not worthy of winning, that people like them don't win.

9:38Or maybe the fact that you've not won yet, you think predicts the future that you're not ever going to win, that you've had enough mediocrity in your life, or maybe even losing in your life or setbacks in your life, or people hurt you, just not getting there, that you think that just defines the rest of my life. Well, there's lots of examples of people that I don't need to give you that won in midlife and later in life. There's also a bunch that won very young in life on their terms. And so you have to believe you deserve it. You know, I give this example all the time of the thermostat analogy, but what you believe you're worth, your identity is like a thermostat setting on your life.

10:13Like in my, this studio right now, it's pretty cold. It's like 70 degrees and it regulates the temperature in this room. So if If in my life, if outside right now it's about 90. And so as it gets hotter and hotter and hotter outside, what's this thermostat do? It cools the room back down to what it's regulated at, which is 70 degrees. Our lives work that way as well. If we only believe we're worth 70 degrees of happiness or success or wealth or abundance, if we start to heat our life up and we start to produce some real results, what ends up happening is we subconsciously or unconsciously turn the air conditioners on of our life and cool it back down to what we believe we deserve to have, what we believe we're worth.

10:53And so you have to believe you deserve it. You got to increase your thermostat setting to create the capacity and the space for that life to fit inside of it. If you don't have the deserving, there's no space for it to exist, right? But what's great, once you believe you deserve to win, it opens up a whole new door in your life to a whole new room. I really look at this like once you believe you deserve to win It opens this new room and what happens is it's almost like an empty room What happens is though your mind goes to work on furnishing that room with the people the places the things the objects The feelings the emotions that furnish that space that you're now opened up to But if you don't believe you deserve to win the door is closed and you can't get in there So the first things first is to believe that you deserve it and to really do the work on that to repeat that to yourself to work on your self-confidence, to keep the promises you make to yourself.

11:44One of the fastest ways to getting to believe you deserve it is to work on your self-confidence. And one of the ways you work on your self-confidence is you keep the promises that you make to yourself. When you keep making those small promises and you keep them to yourself, you open up the capacity because you start to say to yourself, man, I'm doing things other people aren't willing to do. I deserve to have a life other people aren't going to get. So when you do difficult things, you begin to believe you deserve to win because you're doing things other people aren't willing to do or things you weren't willing to do before.

12:13And so believe you deserve to win. Number two, the big-time winners, they don't want to just win. They want to dominate. I can tell you that the winners that I know, they don't want to just win. They want to dominate. They don't want to just beat you by a little bit. They want to run up the score. I think about the Michael Jordans or the Tom Bradys or anybody in sports that you really admire. They want to dominate. Any political figure that you like, they want to dominate. the people that you admire in your life. You know, you look at Martin Luther King in life. He didn't want to just have some progress.

12:42He wanted complete transformation and for his dream to happen. To me, that's a dominant mindset. Tiger Woods on the golf course, man, he wanted to dominate, not just get one win, but win the next week and win the next week. He wanted to chase Jack Nicklaus, which I'll talk about in a minute. You know, do something great with your life. The real people that want to win, they want to dominate. It's not just, ah, I'd like to get a little one there. They want to do something awesome with their life. And because they have that big vision, they want to crush it. They want to do something significant that elevates the standard.

13:13Winning is one standard. Dominating is a whole other standard. And I know that the real winners in life want to be dominant. Not in an, I don't mean this like, you know what I mean when I say it? Like dominate, meaning the biggest possible win you could get is what dominance means to me. It's not necessarily being better than someone else, although it might be if it's a competition. but what it means is I want to do something big. I want to do something awesome. I don't want to just be small. If I want to live a life of bliss, I want a ton of it. If I want to live a wealth, I want a lot of it.

13:42If I want to help a lot of, if I want to help people, I want to help a lot of people. I want just a little bit. So you got to want to dominate. Number three, you got to get laser focused. Your obsessions become your possessions. So I see so many people say they want to win. But the truth is they're not laser focused. They're not obsessed. See, there are healthy obsessions in life. There are things that are healthy to be obsessed by. And the more you can get obsessed, the more you can get laser focused, the more you can shrink it and get on it. I really believe some, you show me somebody who believes they deserve to win.

14:15And then number two, they want to dominate and get a bunch of winning in their life. And third, they get laser focus, they dial right in on exactly what they want, exactly what they need to do. I'm telling you, this person's going to win. They're going to get what they want. It may not be today. It may not be tomorrow. It may not even be when you expect it to be, but it's coming. It'll be there eventually. You keep, see, you keep getting after it. A break will eventually come. You keep getting after it. A break comes your way. I'm telling you, but it's not usually in the timeframe that we want it to be.

14:49And so many people are not laser focused. You have to get into this obsession mode where you want it as something you think about all the time. It's almost like you wake up thinking about it. You go to sleep thinking about it. Middle of the day, you can't get it off your mind and you work towards it all the time. This is what winners do. Number four, which is the inverse of this. You got to eliminate distractions. See, if you're going to get laser focus. The only way to do that is the lack of distraction. So you got to make a list. What are the things like for me, I'll give you an example right now.

15:22What are the things that distract me? What my phone, right? My phone, social media, by the way, most of you know, I've taken a long break from that right now, just sort of focusing on my health and some other things. I got to tell you that elimination of social media, that elimination of my phone all the time. Oh my my gosh, was that distracting me from being laser focused on my goals. As a guy, I got to be honest with you. Here's the second thing that distracts me. Sports center, sports in general. My family says to me all the time, dad, haven't you watched those highlights already? And the truth of the matter is I have.

15:54I'll watch the same highlights of the same game three and four and five times. It's insane. And so for a lot of you, it is sports that distract you or your phone that distracts you. Maybe it's reality TV, maybe distracts you. And then the third thing for me that distracts me is my worries. Just in my case, it's my worries and fears that run through my mind and they distract me from being focused on what I want. And so it's odd. It's physical distraction for me like the TV or the phone, but it's also my mind and it's the worrying and the fears and the what-ifs are distracting and it depletes your energy.

16:35It depletes your focus. And so it's eliminating distractions in your life. Let's go through this so far. You show me somebody who completely believes, first off, they get clear on exactly what winning means to them, which almost nobody does. So now you're in the top 5%. Now you believe you deserve it. You've increased that thermostat setting. You don't want to just win a little bit. You want to dominate and get a lot of winning. Third, you are laser focused on your obsessions becoming your possessions. Fourth, you cut out the two or three things that distract you, you're dangerous. You're going to make something happen.

17:07So ask yourself, what distracts you right now? What are the one to three things that are distracting you most of the time and eliminate them or at least reduce them? And if you don't, you're not going to win. You're not going to win. Number five, I think you have to have the sense of the historic. There's a great article in Newsweek like a million years ago on Tiger Woods golf mindset back in the day. And it was called the Dominators, by the way, that's where I get that dominate word from. And they wrote about Wayne Gretzky at the time and Tiger Woods and Joe Montana, all these greats and sports, Martina Navratilova, a bunch of different people.

17:39It said all of them sort of had a sense they were making, doing something historic. And you say, well, Ed, I'm not going to build a company that's, you know, Facebook or maybe doing something historic for your own family. Maybe you're changing your family tree forever. Maybe you're breaking some bondage in your family of a way of thinking or pain and trauma in your family, and you're going to shift it. Maybe it's just going to be the first wealthy person. You know, I talk all the time about being the one in your family, that in every family, when you see a happy family or a wealthy family, one or the other or both, that at some point back in their lineage, they probably weren't.

18:12And then one person in a family shows up and changes the way they think or the way they live, the way they operate in the world. and to me that person is doing something historic. Maybe it's building a historic company, right? But your life, I think sense of the historic means my life counts. There's going to be a record of me being here. What do I want it to be? I have a sense that my life ends at one point and at the end of it I want it to have amounted to something, that I was born for a reason, that I'm not just some coincidence, that I matter, that I have a destiny, that what I did counted in this life, that I can't take these things with me when I pass away, but I want to leave something here historically in my life.

18:55What do you want to leave? The change you make, the emotions, the memories, the people you helped. Maybe it's the things you gave away, the accumulations, being the one in your family. Maybe it's building a historic company that changes people's lives. But having a sense of the historic is what winner's mindsets are focused on. Number six thing winner's mindsets are focused on are habits. See, the separator is what you do on the days where you're not feeling like it. It's not the days you feel great. It's not the days that you're, wow, everything's great. I woke up. I'm on fire. It's what happens when everything is on fire, when it feels like everything's burning down around you.

19:32Under pain, under pressure, we respond reflexively, meaning our habits. So if you have great habits, you've built great habits that when everything's burning, you can function, right? When everything is breaking down around you or it's not going the way you want or you just don't feel like it in a given day or you're experiencing a bunch of failure, that your habits kick in and you're a habit-driven person. You show me somebody with great habits in their life and they can operate on the days that aren't so good. That's the separator for the winners that end up doing something historic that are dominating in their life.

20:10They're a habit driven person. They built those in because they know, listen, life is about there are bad days. There are bad months. There are bad seasons, right? Or winter comes for everybody. So since you know that's part of life, why would you not build the reserves around you so that when they come, you can still function? Be a habit-driven person. And that leads me to number seven. You need to have smaller dispersion. And let me tell you what smaller dispersion means. It's the gap in between when you're down and when you're up. It's how long you lay down when you get hit. It's the dispersion of your emotions.

20:49So my son is a golfer and I'm not a very good one. And so my dispersion, meaning how far left or right I can hit a ball is very, very wide. I can hit one a mile left or a mile right. I play what they call military golf, left, right, left. I don't have one miss. I can miss both ways. If you have a backyard on the left side of the golf course, I can hit a ball in your swimming pool. And if you've got one on the right side of the golf course, I hope you've got shades to block your windows because I may be coming through them. Right. So my dispersion is wide. My son is a better player than me because his dispersion is more narrowed.

21:23He can hit it left and right as well, but not as far left or as far right. And for him to be, he's now turning pro to play professional golf, for him to get better and better, he has to shrink his dispersion where, yeah, there's misses left and right, but they're not quite as far left and right. In life and being a winner, you have to have less dispersion in between your good days and your bad days, in between when you're up and down. We're all going to get knocked down. The question is not whether you're even going to lay there for a little bit because you're going to. The question is how long?

21:53How big a dispersion between when you're down and you're up? You understand it? So I have been knocked down many times in my life, as has every person who's won it, whatever they want. And we've even laid there for a minute. Everyone says, get back up. Hey, sometimes it's okay to lay there for a minute and assess. There's a reason in boxing they give a standing eight count, right? It's because you get a chance to assess. There's a reason why there are rounds in the UFC and in boxing so that you get a chance to sit back down, take a break, recalibrate, reassess, get coached again. So there's nothing wrong with being knocked down.

22:27And there's even nothing wrong with laying there for a little bit. But how long you lay there will determine whether you win or not. You've got to shrink your dispersion between the good and the bad, the up and the down. You know, never make a decision in an emotional state. And although emotion matters in business, I have found the most successful people are able to keep the dispersion of their emotions pretty much under control. They never get too low and they never get too high. They don't believe everything is great when it's going great and they don't believe the world is ending when it's going bad.