Choosing Your Personal Culture

If your goal is to achieve your life’s purpose (and I hope it is), you have no choice but to choose a personal culture of excellence. Choosing convenience might help you get by, but you’ll never achieve as much as you will if you choose excellence. You have to work for excellence.

Deciding Where Your Duty Lies

Although Jesus, Socrates, and Joan of Arc are a few of the more notable martyrs, countless people have given up their lives for their duty over the last few centuries. And these martyrs include the soldiers who go to war to protect their country and their families, knowing well that they might not return. But they do it anyway, because they feel it is their duty—as a mother, a father, a wife, a husband, or a citizen.

Changing Your Life With Perseverance

When I was in the military, I took a performance test that was disguised as an advanced training course. The test was designed to weed out the best people to pursue a new career in diving. It was an impossibly strenuous course, and we operated on little to no sleep and limited nourishment.

Building Confidence and Character

Throughout our lives, we’ll all experience adversity—in our personal lives, our careers, or both. We meet adversity when we learn to take our first breath, and we encounter it again and again for the rest of our lives. Not only is adversity a great test of character, it’s often what motivates us to keep trying until we get it right.