How To Get Ahead of 99% of People In 2024

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Most people underestimate how much you can change your life when you focus on yourself for 6 months because they’ve spent the past 5 years doing the opposite.

You can get ahead of 99% of people in 2024.

But only if you attack the year with 3 things;

Intention, intensity, and iteration.

Let’s start with intention. 

You need to figure out what you want.

Why?

Well, look around you and see where not knowing what you want gets you.

Most people are running around mindlessly, not knowing the direction they’re heading in and when you don’t know what direction to go in, you can’t make any sort of meaningful progress, you live a life that is a constant loop of distraction, lacks fulfillment and has you longing for something more.

Mindless action is the enemy of your success.

So what you need to figure out to create this direction and avoid mindless action is 3 things;

1. The life you want to live

What do you want in your life?

How do you want to live? What do you want to do for work? What’s your partner like? 

Figure out what your dream life looks like and if you’re struggling with this, craft an anti-vision, what you don’t want in life, and then use that to figure out what you do want.

This is a vivid picture of your life, one that you can use as an overarching direction to head in.

Without it, you’ve no way to set goals that mean something.

2. The person you want to become

If you could be all you could be, what would that look like?

What habits would you have? What mindsets? What mannerisms? What’s your physique like?

This is the meaning of life.

To pursue becoming all you could be.

This again is a vivid picture that can, and should, be used as an overarching direction in combination with your dream life to set your intentions.

3. What you need to do to get there

When you’re figuring out the life you want to live, you’re painting a picture in your mind of what you want, the direction you want to head in over the long term.

But to get there you need to have a direction in the short term that pushes you toward that life.

So set 3 goals for 2024 that will move you 1 step closer to that picture you painted.

A physical goal such as gaining 10lbs of muscle, a financial goal such as consistently earning 10k a month, and an impact-related goal around the impact you want to make and the value you want to give to the world.

Once you have those goals reverse engineer them into a daily action, a task that you can focus on completing every single day that over time will add up to your goals and therefore you moving toward your dream life.

This is crucial.

If you don’t work on moving toward your goals every single day without fail, you’re missing out on compounding and you’re missing out on momentum - 2 of your best friends when it comes to getting ahead.

And the work you do on your goals each day needs to be in a state of deep focus and flow.

Prioritising focused work on your goals in the pursuit of progress is essential.

Without focus, you’re going to suffer in terms of quality of work, hence your results and progress will suffer and you’re going to be much less productive.

These tasks that you broke your goal down into are the micro focus that over time adds up to the macro focus of your goals and dream life.

If you want to change your life, you have to focus on these and do them daily.

Next, Intensity.

Intention helps you figure out what you want, where you want to go, and what you need to do to get there.

But intensity is how you put in enough effort and energy to get the results you want to get and make the progress you need to make.

Because getting ahead of the majority of people isn’t going to be easy.

You’ll have to hold yourself to a standard that makes you proud.

You’ll have to act like a professional.

You can’t expect to make any sort of progress if you only do the work when you feel like it, if you only show up on your good days and if you act like an amateur.

Getting great results is harder than most people imagine, hence why 99% of people don’t get great results.

And if you look around you at everyone walking the streets, you’ll notice something…

They’re amateurs.

They don’t know what they want, they’re overweight, they’re dressed like kids and you know for a fact that they’re looking for the first excuse in their head not to do the work and you also know that they’ll damn sure find it.

It’s amateur.

And if you act like them, you can’t expect to get results that are world-class.

Making progress, getting ahead of 99% of people and changing your life requires you to set standards for yourself.

It requires you to say to yourself, no matter what, this gets done.

And you don’t negotiate with yourself.

The moment you start negotiating the standards you’ve consciously set for yourself is the moment you lose self-respect. 

If you give yourself permission to not rise to your standards once, and if you allow yourself not to do it once, you’ll allow yourself not to do it twice.

You have to come at your work and your goals with a level of intensity, professionalism, and seriousness, that most people will think is over the top.

But it’s the exact reason they never do anything worth talking about or achieve anything worth mentioning.

And with those standards, you need to make sure that you’re chasing 3 things:

1. Mastery

Without chasing mastery of your craft, you’re never going to get to a good enough skill level to produce the results you need to produce.

This comes back to your intention from earlier.

Focusing on your daily actions for your goals, doing the reps day in and day out and practicing with the intention of improving each time you do the work.

2. Meaning

If you don’t pursue meaning through becoming all you could be and achieving your dream life (your intentions), then the goals you’ve set and the work you need to do will be meaningless.

If the work is meaningless, you’ll procrastinate, you’ll struggle to focus on the work and you won’t enjoy it.

But if you set your intentions correctly, being true to yourself, then your goals and your daily actions will be meaningful.

Therefore because the work is meaningful, you’ll find it easy to do, you’ll find it easy to focus on and you’ll actually enjoy doing it.

3. Curiosity

Without chasing curiosity, you’ll find you’re never learning.

You’re never asking questions, investing in yourself, gaining knowledge, and therefore you’ll be limited in what you know how to do.

So follow what grabs you and pursue your curiosities.

When you combine the pursuit of mastery, meaning, and curiosity with the standards that you set for yourself, you come at your goals and the work with intensity.

You give enough energy and effort to produce high-quality work, get results, make progress, and get ahead of 99% of people.

But if you do what everybody else does, if you’re mindless not only about where you want to go but about what you’re doing, if you’re just running through the motions with no intensity, you’re being an amateur and you’ll never make progress.

Finally, Iteration. 

Everyone talks about consistency, but what they don’t tell you is that you can be consistently bad.

You can do something every single day, but if you never aim to improve, you’ll stay at the same level.

So instead of being consistent, be consistently iterating.

Each time you practice, each time you do the work, aim to do 1 thing better.

This won’t make massive changes day to day, but don’t worry.

This game of changing your life and getting ahead of 99% of people is a long-term game.

So simply by showing up every single day and doing 1 thing, just slightly better than last time, you get to experience the famous compounding curve of 1% improvements.

But that only happens, if you do 2 things;

1. You play the long game and show up daily, not expecting results tomorrow

2. You consistently iterate, aiming for progress

Because that’s where most people mess up.

They set these big goals and then they show up inconsistently for a month and then they quit because they didn’t get any results.

No shit.

You didn’t show up consistently, you didn’t iterate and you didn’t do it for long enough.

This can be hard to do depending on what field of work you’re in, but that’s why I recommend everyone to build something of their own.

If you build something meaningful to you, that you enjoy working on, that makes an impact on the world and provides value, not only do you find it easy to play the long game and consistently iterate, but you get to build something that lets you live life on your terms.

That’s hard to do when you’re stuck in a career being told when you have to work, what you have to work on, and when you get to go on vacation.

In terms of what to build, it’s entirely up to you, I’m a massive proponent of the creator business model.

Mainly because it involves you creating impactful, valuable content around whatever interests you and it builds a traffic source, authority, respect, and trust allowing you to monetise in whatever way you want, whether it’s a course, a physical product, coaching or an agency.

But regardless of what you build, or whether you stay in your career path,

If you want to get ahead of 99% of people, you have to set your intentions so that you don’t mindlessly wander through life and end up where you don’t want to end up.

You have to attack your goals and work with intensity to produce work at a high enough standard that’ll get you the results you need to achieve your goals.

And you need to iterate over time so that you can see progress and experience compounding and momentum.

Remember, most people underestimate how much you can change your life when you focus on yourself for 6 months because they’ve spent the past 5 years doing the opposite.

- Ross.

And when you’re ready, here’s how I can help you:

• Achieve Self-Mastery, unlock your true potential, and smash every goal you set with MasteryOS

• Join the waitlist for cohort 2 of Done In 4

• Learn how to build a multi-6-figure audience and business with Personal BrandBldr