My advice to anyone starting out:
Develop a very strong opinion about yourself.
Know exactly who you are & who you are not.
If you don't, someone else will try to tell you who you are, and you might just start believing them.
Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre.
The level of competition is thus fiercest for “realistic” goals, paradoxically making them the most time- and energy-consuming.
If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too.
Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.
Unreasonable and unrealistic goals are easier to achieve for yet another reason.
Having an unusually large goal is an adrenaline infusion that provides the endurance to overcome the inevitable trials and tribulations that go along with any goal. Realistic goals, goals restricted to the average ambition level, are uninspiring and will only fuel you through the first or second problem, at which point you throw in the towel.
If the potential payoff is mediocre or average, so is your effort.
The fishing is best where the fewest go, and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone else is aiming for base hits.
There is just less competition for bigger goals.
Major cheat code for life: Master the art of the fresh start. From a bad morning. From a bad interaction. From a missed workout. From a poor decision. The goal isn't to avoid the fall. It's to shorten the time between the fall and the reset. Fast recovery compounds.
Miyamoto Musashi was right when he said do not count your defeats before the war is over. One victory can make them all forgotten. You are not behind. You are one breakthrough away from erasing every loss.
Ten lazy years can disappear the moment you lock in. Six months of discipline can erase a decade of drifting. Momentum is magic. It turns yesterday's failures into tomorrow's fuel.
If you want to recover faster from setbacks then skip the "why me" phase entirely and go straight to "what now." Victim mindset isn't just a feeling, it's also a sentence structure.
Change the sentence and you change the trajectory.
Confidence doesn't come from believing in yourself. It comes from having done the uncomfortable thing enough times that your nervous system stops flagging it as an emergency. Because nothing is actually hard, it's just unfamiliar.