12 Things You Should Give up If You Want to Be Wildly Successful (In the next 12 Months)

I was never successful.

In fact, I considered myself a failure for decades. Then I got several wake-up calls that slapped me in my only-a-mother-could-love face:

• Near-miss with cancer
• Multiple romantic breakups in a row
• Diagnosed with deep anxiety/depression
• A failed business with a trail of devastation

Now I’m often described as wildly successful. I’m unrecognizable. And I’m not that smart or talented. Here’s what I had to give up. You should too.

Give up pursuing lukewarm goals

Mediocre goals piss me off.

Some people are okay with having goals that are more like wet dreams they’ll never achieve. Full of “one day” “someday” … more like mayday, mayday we’re going down.

Replace lukewarm goals, visions, and habits with obsession. That’s what no one talks about. Become deeply addicted to one thing and do it like a hero!n addict.

Writing became that thing for me. I don’t think about writing like a nice little fairytale. No. I look like a crazy person when I do it or talk about it.

Obsession looks unsustainable.

Obsession looks bat-sh*t crazy.

Obsession looks like hustle culture.

Obsession makes little sense to the onlooker.

Obsession attracts all sorts of miserable critics.

Good. It’s better to be obsessed and become successful than it is to flap through life like a ducky about to be cooked for dinner.

Give up on being told what to do like a slave

I got told what to do for most of my career.

My employer loved to use the phrase “breach of compliance” as a way to threaten me if I didn’t follow their policies to a tee.

The problem with the average life is you can’t follow your curiosity.

Successful people allow themselves to be pulled down rabbit holes dictated by their curiosity. When they find a path to an unknown land they don’t stop.

They keep going. They get lost. This turns into deep work. Deep work turns into flow states. Flow states make them look like they’re doing superhuman things.

Worship rabbit holes. They’re where creativity that changes your life is found.

Give up on useless talent

Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham observed that many talented people go nowhere in life. They’ve got all the university education and PhDs but they can’t fight their way out of a paper lunch bag placed on their precious heads.

He says inside his startup-building empire those who were determined never failed.

They always found a way. They lit their whole idea on fire if it meant finding a way. They were determined to stop at nothing and so they turned noes into yeses.

All you have to do to be determined is to find a goal worth achieving and then refuse to take no for an answer.

Give up being practical

Practicality equals death.

Tech guru and OpenAI creator, Sam Altman, observed the most successful people he’s ever worked with are delusional. They sound like they belong in a mental asylum.

Unsuccessful people don’t believe in themselves.

They need external validation. They need a Twitter verification tick to feel like an expert. They need mommy to tell them they did a good job and they can do it.

Delusional people don’t. They’ve brainwashed themselves to be obsessed with a cult they created in their own mind.

For example, no one could ever tell me I wouldn’t be a millionaire. I just deleted their number if they said that to me. In every 9-5 job I’ve had people heard my exit plan and thought I was crazy. Now I’m living that exit plan and they think I’m even crazier.

“It’ll all end in tears,” they say.

No it won’t. I’ll die on this hill before I let my online academy go up in flames.

A big driver of delusion is the idea of freedom. True freedom that doesn’t require back-to-back meetings, managers, realistic goals, permission slips, and job interviews disguised as servitude.

Why the heck would you ever want to be practical?

Give up avoiding failure, embarrassment, humiliation, or ridicule

Most people are deathly afraid of the downsides.

Worst of all, they’re afraid to be humiliated or face embarrassment. So to avoid these perils they embrace safety culture, say the right things, get told what to do, and destroy 95% of their potential.

Maybe I’m an idiot, but I love being embarrassed. I love being humbled. I even loved seeing $1.2M of my own money get lit on fire when it got taken from me.

My best friend wanted me to check myself into rehab. He thought I’d lost the plot and would jump in front of a train. No joke.

How the heck can you be okay with losing that much money due to your own fault? You should be crying, not smiling. This isn’t funny Tim. This is one of the worst events of your life that’ll set you back years.

Right after he said that to me I started telling everyone. This one event was exactly what I needed to happen. I’d become a cocky a-hole and needed a PlayStation reset for my mind. And I got it. Thank you god that doesn’t exist.

Let the sh*t get wiped across your face. Taste it even.

Because on the other side is some of the best motivation you will ever find that’ll lead to relentlessness. And relentless people become unstoppable beasts.

Become a beast.

Give up moving slow

Many people move too slowly.

They have no urgency. Or no timeline. Or no deadline. You can’t win like this. Every day you’re slowly dying, so if time isn’t top of mind, you won’t achieve all those lofty goals before your death day.

Wildly successful people move fast.

• They do sprints
• They find loopholes
• They take shortcuts
• They apply cheat codes
• They look for faster ways
• They steal ideas like an artist

Stop moving at grandpa speed. You’re missing all the best opportunities.

Give up seeing success in absolutes

People look at Elon Musk and think he’s amazing.

I look at him and see a smart, brilliant, billionaire jerk who can’t hold down a wife and never sees his kids. In one area of life he’s 10/10. In other areas of life he’s a loser at rock bottom that is crazy unsuccessful.

Stop thinking success in one area of life makes someone worth idolizing.

Give up seeing breakups as a bad thing

Over the years I’ve studied successful people while writing for Addicted2Success dot com, I saw a trend.

Pretty much every successful person has gone through a bad breakup. The breakup forced them to get their life in order and rebuild.

In the process they became unrecognizable and unlocked some hidden greatness.

I look at my own romantic failures and feel blessed by them. Before I got married I nearly let a woman talk me into joining a religious cult. Breaking up with her saved my life and stopped the process from happening. Thank god :)

Breakups are an opportunity for enormous growth.

Give up being massively better at anything

Transformations are BS.

The problem is they promote the lie of overnight success. They suggest all that happens is you face adversity and then suddenly discover a magic cure and everything is solved. It’s never that way.

True success is built on habits that produce tiny progress.

• Making $273.97 per day is $100,000 a year
• Reading 5 pages per day is 1825 pages a year
• Running 10 miles per day is 3650 miles a year
• Becoming 1% better per day is 37x better a year

Chase compounding gains. Add leverage to make the results go exponential.

Give up winning (for now)

The problem with winning is it can make us confident. That can lead to overconfidence which makes our ego the enemy.

Counterintuitively, losing builds character. When you lose you learn. When you learn you eventually earn. With the right character, you’re much more likely to become someone people respect and therefore want to help.

Respect brings opportunities to your door that overconfidence would’ve slammed shut.

Give up stopping where most people stop

Quitting is the new trend.

Quiet quit. Quit a bad job. Quit capitalism. Quit social media. All this quitting painfully misses the point.

Successful people remind themselves that when they feel like quitting, it’s the same point where most people quit. By just continuing they’ve already found a way to outperform the average person without any special talent or guru strategy.

Continue to work when success looks impossible, and you’ll get all the results that make what you did look impossible.

Give up pretending you know the most

When you think you’re an expert you end up telling people.

So these strangers stop giving you ideas and insights because they assume you know it all. Or, frankly, they hate your attitude.

But when you look like you know nothing people let their guard down. They tell you stuff they probably shouldn’t. They let you in on secrets you can’t google or ask ChatGPT for.

Eddie experts are the real epidemic.

What you want to be is humble and realize that you know not even 1% of what exists out in the big, bad world … and actually, that’s the best part.

Bonus: Give up waiting for the perfect information or circumstances

“When this happens then I’ll act.”

I get this excuse all the time in my online business. It drives me nuts. There is no perfect time to do anything. The perfect time is right now, while you’re still breathing and your brain still functions normally.

If you have all the information to make a perfect decision, you missed the opportunity – Alex Hormozi

Great opportunities don’t come when you’re ready. They come when you back yourself and boldly decide to feel the fear and take action anyway.

You’ll figure it out as you go.

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