How to Create a Great Life

0:06Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you want to get better at setting, planning, and achieving your goals, go to goals2025.com. I just created a new ebook to help you set, plan, and achieve your goals for 2025. So that is goalswithans2025.com. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about how to create a great life. And I want to open up with a story that I found online that I think is kind of a really great way to start it. And it says, imagine that you talk to the creator of the universe before your birth, and you get to pick the person that you become.

0:50And you say to the creator, I want to be the most courageous. And so the creator replies, then I will give you monsters to terrify you so that you can conquer them. You say, I want to be patient. And the creator replies, then I will make you work harder and longer so that you can learn to wait. You say, I want to be wise. The creator replies, then I will give you failures that crush your spirit so you can learn the value of judgment. Then you say, it sounds like a rough life though. Can you give me a good life? And the creator replies, just like we measure the quality of a blacksmith by the strength of his steel, I measure you by what you are at the end, not the fire and the hammer that it took to make you.

1:34A good life is not an easy life. A good life makes you into a good person. And that, my son, is a hard life. So when you look at this, I want you to start to think about what you want in your life and how skills to become a better person, strength, courage, wisdom are not gifted to you. There's something that you have to earn. And so you have to kind of go through adversity to build a great life. A great life is not gifted to somebody. A great life is built. And a lot of times life kind of feels like a big paradox. You know, you want an easy life and you want comfort, but deep down, you know that the things that truly shape you into who you're going to be comes from challenge.

2:24They come from hardships. And growth in life is not handed to us. It's forged through us, kind of like the same way with steel through the fire. And so the hardest things that you've ever been through, you probably would never want to go through them again, but you probably wouldn't want to have not gone through them now that it's in the past. And the reason why is because those things give you the biggest lessons. The way that I think about it is I played a lot of sports when I was younger. and I had some coaches that were really easy on me and I had some coaches that were really hard on me. And I'm sure if you've played sports before, you can kind of think of this as well.

2:59The easy coaches, if I'm being honest with you, most of the people around me didn't really respect the easy coaches. And because they were easy coaches, the teams weren't as good, we ended up losing a lot more. But if I think of like the coaches who really changed my life the most, they're the ones that were hard on me. They wanted the best for me. We were always the best teams. We won a lot of games. They kind of pissed me off in the moment, but I was like, you know what? I know that I'm getting better from being around this person. That's how life is as well. A good life is not easy. In an easy life, going throughout everything doesn't make us any better.

3:35And so we all want courage. We all want wisdom. We all want patience. We all want every one of those things. but how could you develop courage without fear that you have to conquer first? How could you cultivate patience in your life without moments that test your limits? Growth requires discomfort and so often I hear people say, how do I give me like the secret pill for this? Give me the your best tip or trick for this and for a lot of my answers it's like there isn't a secret pill. You've got to get your ass kicked sometimes to come back stronger. And that's how life is a lot of times. The pain of your life isn't there to break you.

4:20The pain in your life is there to build you. So we should try to embrace this pain when it comes in because inevitably it will come. But we need to think about it as we're going through it of, hey, this serves some sort of purpose in my life. It serves some sort of purpose. I don't know what it is, but I know that this is being brought for me in my life. Because a courageous person isn't born courageous. There's someone who has seen their fears, they've come in contact with their fears, and they figured out some sort of way to work with them. And I know a lot of people don't start businesses because of the fact that they have some sort of fear.

4:58And then they say, well, that successful person doesn't have fear. And every person that I've ever met that has quote unquote success that people would want in some sort of way. They're not somebody who just has no fear at all. They're somebody who has all of the exact same fears. They just don't listen to the same fears that everyone else does. And so they've got to go through things. They've got to see the fears and do it anyways. That builds their courage. You know, when I was first starting out my business, the one that I currently have, which this was now nine and a half years ago, I remember I was in so much fear because I I left the company I was at.

5:33I was making great money as a young person. And I just decided to start a business where I was going to be podcasting and coaching people. And podcasting in 2015 was nothing. It was hard to explain to people how to find a podcast back then. And so I remember after I quit my job a couple of months later, I was just full of so much fear. I don't know if I can do this. Then my sister came out. I was over at her house for Thanksgiving and she came out and she had this box I was with her. And she's like, Hey, have you ever seen this box of dad's stuff? And it was like a couple of his shirts. It was, uh, his glasses.

6:07It was his, his watch, a couple of other random things. And there were these letters that my, my dad wrote my sister. And so my dad was in jail for a little while when I was a kid and he wrote her a letter, wrote her, it was like three or four letters. And one of the letters I was reading and it said, I hope you live your life with courage, love, and laughter, love dad. That's how it ended. I hope you live your life with courage, love, and laughter. And there was an asterisk next to the word courage. And then if you went down below his name next to the asterisk, it said, courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the ability to carry on with dignity in spite of it.

6:43And I remember reading it and I was like, holy shit. Like, I feel like, yes, my dad wrote this for her, for her 19th birthday, but I feel like the universe is giving me this message right now through my dad from a letter that he wrote to her when she was 19 years old, which was like 15 years prior. And I was in so much fear, not wanting, like wanting to grow my business, but don't know how I'm going to make it happen. I was in so much fear. The thing that I realized in that moment was that I needed courage. I needed to feel my fears and I needed to do it anyways. And so I got, for those of you guys watching on YouTube, I got the, the, that tattooed on my arm and in my dad's handwriting, just blown up.

7:22And it says, live your life with courage, love, and laughter. And I liked that. I just love the fact that he put in an asterisk, courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the ability to carry on with dignity in spite of it. And so if you want to be courageous, you're going to have to go through your fears in order to get more courageous. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. And you've got, you're going to, in some sort of way, have to face your monsters as you face your monsters. The great part about them is that the scariest your monsters ever are, or before you ever face them.

7:56As you continue to keep facing them, it's like they shrink, they become less scary. And most of the time in our minds, we're making our fears way bigger than they actually are in real life. And as you face your fears, they have less and less control over you in your life. So that's the way it is with courage. But what about with like patience? We all wanna be patient, right? Patience works the same way. You become more patient the more your patience is tested and you do not react. The more that someone can push your buttons and it doesn't do anything to the calm that you are. For you to become the calm in the center of the storm, you must go through the storm and not react to it.

8:41You know, that's why some people, you probably know people like this that have been through absolute hell in their lives. And when you're around them, they're some of the most peaceful people. They're so calm. They're so patient. It's like, cause they've already been through hell. What's going to happen right now? You know, the way I like to think about it is I picture it like a redwood tree. If you've ever seen a redwood, they're, they're massive. And like, you can, you know, they're a thousand years old, 2000 years old, and they're hundreds of feet in the air. And there's, it would take 20 men with their hands out trying to hug this thing to go around the entire bottom of the tree.

9:14That thing, nothing, no storm is going to sway that tree. A hurricane could not knock over a redwood. So when I'm thinking about being patient, being calm and being the eye in the center of the storm, the calm that is in the center of the storm, it's like, I wanna be like a redwood. Nothing is going to sway me in any sort of way. What's another thing that we want? We all want wisdom. Wisdom is another great example of this. Wisdom, a lot of times, comes from massive failures. Failure is often seen as like the enemy. The amount of times that I've heard people that are not starting the life that they want, not starting their business, not going after this person, not trying something that they've been wanting to try for a long time, getting themselves out of their comfort zones, because they have some sort of fear of failure, which is absolutely insane.

10:05Failure is seen by so many people as the enemy, but it's actually one of the greatest teachers in life. You can read a book or you can go screw up stuff. You're going to learn a whole lot more when you screw things up. Each setback that you have, like I don't see failure even existing unless you give up. The only time you fail at something is when you give up. And each setback that you have on the way to figuring these things out has some sort of lesson for you. And the amount of times, like I said, that I've heard a business owner that holds them back because of the fear of failure. No, you can't fail if you do not stop.

10:41And when you look at success, Honda, the creator of Honda, says success is 99 % failure. If you look at my life, I've had multiple quote unquote failed businesses before I've had the successful one that I started nine years ago. But I don't see those other businesses as failures because I learned what to do, what not to do, how to be a bad manager, how to be a good manager, how to develop many different skill sets were in those quote unquote failures. but they were necessary for me to be able to have this business be a success. You know, if I look at like relationships in my life, I've had multiple quote unquote failed relationships with girlfriends in the past before my marriage.

11:20And my wife and I now have been together for 11 years. But I don't think if I hadn't had those quote unquote failed relationships in the past that I would have been a good boyfriend, a good fiance, a good husband, any of those things. So they're all giving me the knowledge that I need to ultimately be the person that I need to be and develop that wisdom. And so wisdom comes from life experience and a lot of your life experience and wisdom will come from your failures. You cannot try to, well, you can try to avoid them if you want, but you're not going to get out of your life what you want. Your strength throughout your entire life, you have to understand comes from your struggle.

11:58There's a common thread that's in all of these traits that we're talking about. Strength. Now we're not talking about physical strength. We're talking about mental strength. It's the kind that allows you to keep pushing on and keep pressing and enduring when you're going through the hardest moments. And when you're going through those hard moments, to learn from them, to adapt, to evolve and become stronger the next time that you try it than you were before. And so it's like, I always use the example because it's the perfect example, like going to the gym, no person would think that you could just go in and just having never worked before, curl 50 pounds in each arm.

12:36But if you see someone curling 50 pounds in each arm and their biceps are way bigger than you, you know, I can eventually get there, but I've got to put my muscles through a lot of strain. I've got to break them down. They've got to regrow. I've got to break them down. I've got to regrow and it makes you stronger. It's the exact same thing with your mental strength. It's just the only difference is you can't actually visually see it like you can a bicep. And so you've really got to start embracing. If you want a great life, you've got to embrace the hard moments in your life. The story of this that I started us with, with the creator's conversation teaches that a good life isn't free from hardship.

13:15It's a life that molds you into a good person. And so what does it look like when you want to embrace those hardships? Well, I think what you need to do is you start reframing and start looking at your challenges in life differently. You know, there's only two ways to really look at your life. And for instance, I was the type of person, I was the first type of person I'm about to tell you, and I have developed it into being a second type of person. Life either happens to you or it happens for you. For the first half of my life, 19, up until 19 years old, when I started getting into personal involvement, I'm 38 now.

13:47So half of my life, I was such a victim. Life was always happening to me. I was always making excuses. It was always everybody else's fault. I was the victim, victim, victim all the time. It was happening to me. There was nothing I could do. I was a victim. Now I believe that life is happening for me. I think that everything that's happened to me, good and bad, is brought to me in some sort of way by God, life, the universe, whatever you believe in to make me better. So instead of asking stuff like, oh, why me? Why does this always happen to me? Why do I always get hurt so much? Why do I always get all these bad things that happen to me?

14:23and playing the victim card all the time, try asking yourself, what can this teach me? This shift, it doesn't make your pain disappear. It doesn't make anything easier, but it gives your pain a purpose in some sort of way. And then you start to see your challenges as opportunities for growth, and you can reclaim your power and be the person that's in control of your life versus the victim of life. And I remember, and I really truly, with like every fiber of my being, believe that this is how life works. and I remember about two and a half years ago when our dog Toby passed away, we took him in and he was getting cremated and so we dropped his body off at the vet and the vet had been working with Toby for years and years and years.

15:06And so we dropped him off and then about four days later, we had to go back in because Bear, our dog, had to be fixed. And so the doctor who we've been with us for years and he obviously knows what just happened with Toby has to have like the tough conversation like, hey, in order to do this, I've got to put him under. But as you know, there's some sort of risk in putting any dog under and some dogs don't just wake up. And I was like, yeah, I understand. And so we dropped him off in the morning and for hours and hours and hours, there's nothing. There's nothing. And the only thing I can think about all day long is like, where's the phone call that he's okay?

15:38Where's the phone call that he's out of surgery? And I remember stopping at some point in time and being like, okay, this has been a really hard week with everything that happen with Toby. If something happens to bear, I know that there's a lesson that I'm supposed to learn from it. And I trust that whatever I go through is brought to me for me to grow and improve from. And I remember thinking this though, but I just really don't want to learn any more fucking lessons this week. That's the way that I had it. Now, luckily everything was good with bear, but I remember being in that moment being like, either way, whatever happens, I trust.

16:11And when you can trust, it allows you to feel like, oh my God, I don't have to bear all this weight on myself. And so you've got to decide to keep going. It's like that phrase, if you're going through hell, keep on going. Like, why would you just stop in hell? Just keep on going. Every fear that's faced, every moment of patience as practice, every failure that's endured is a step toward becoming the person that you're meant to be. Why would you ever want to not get that lesson? And you have to remember a great life isn't an easy life. A great life is a challenging life that you learn from and that you grow from and you become a great person through all of those challenges.

16:50Remember, you're not being destroyed when you go through all of that pain, you're being forged. And so you've got to keep going. The strength that you seek is on the other side of all of those hardships that you're going through. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. Once again, if you want to download that book on how to dominate your 2025 goals, Go to goals2025.com, goals with an S, 2025.com. And once again, I will leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better.

17:23I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.