Edition #16

Hi All!

Here is your weekly serving of practical guidance and inspiration to ensure you live your life with purpose. Feel free to forward this along to friends and family. Enjoy!

I wanted to give a quick shout to the 12 amazing individuals who have joined us since last week. Thanks for being here and welcome to the Never Idle team!

Read Time: 7 Minutes

Master Your Mindset

From Realization to Transformation: Pick Your Tribe Carefully

I walked into a dive bar.

Ready for a night out with my friends, shooting pool and drinking beers.

The night carried on that way until an old, grungy guy came up to us and said: “I’m V, I got next.”

My friends and I looked at each other, smiled, and then I said “Sure, no problem.”

We finished, I had lost so my friend played against ‘V.’

I disconnected and took a seat, looking at this guy.

He was racking the balls like his life depended on it, “I’ll break,” he said.

I watched the game for a few minutes and V was alright but didn’t quite back up the persona he gave off.

Then I looked around the bar a little further.

The whole place was filled with ‘V’s’ — Guys who had nothing else to live for besides beers and pool at the local dive bar.

In other words, the place was filled with bums.

I started to think, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’

If they are here and I am here, I must be a fuckin bum too. And I was.

The night finished up and I went home but I couldn’t shake that thought.

Not long after, that friend group dissolved and I thought to myself, ‘I’m done hanging out with bums. There has to be more to this life than turning into the next V.’

I was hanging around losers and it turned me into one.

Then it hit me, ‘If I want to be a winner, I need to start surrounding myself with winners.’

This realization changed the trajectory of my life.

You can experience that same change and I want to help you do that.

Here’s how:

Picking Your Tribe

The old cliche “You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with,” is fuckin true!

Stop writing it off as a cliche and start internalizing. Use it to build a tribe that can turn you into the man or woman you want to become.

Ask yourself:

1. Where and who am I spending my time with? When I look around do I see successful people or do I see bums?

Your answer to these questions will tell you all you need to know about your current path. If you have winners by your side, hell yea! Learn from them. Keep going! If you don’t, your next questions are:

2. Who do I want to become? Who do I want to emulate?

I didn’t want to be V, my entire pride surrounding a pool game at a bar. I wanted more. I still want more.

I want to own my own business.

Produce my own income.

Live a healthy life.

Build my life to maximize time freedom.

So I started to look for people who were doing this already. The people I wanted to emulate.

3. What information/content/material am I consuming daily? Is it serving who I want to become?

This can go hand in hand with who you want to emulate but sometimes it is easier to look at it from an input perspective — what information you take in regularly — rather than selecting specific people you want to learn from.

For example, if I was interested in Stoicism but had no clue who Ryan Holiday was, I could focus my attention on finding Stoic resources and then formulate my tribe based on who rises to the surface.

The key here is to focus on the principle: If you want to become a certain type of person, the information you consume has to align with that.

Asking yourself these questions will help you wisely select the people you aspire to be, the material you decide to consume, and ultimately will determine the person you end up becoming.

Build your tribe, cut out the rest of the noise, and put yourself on a path you can be proud of!

Hone Your Habits

Bad Habits Series: Clear The Airwaves

This is the 2nd issue in a series on bad habits. The goal is to equip you with tactics you can use to break the bad habits in your life.

When you see a delicious chocolate cake on Instagram, what are you likely to crave?

A piece of that cake.

I don’t blame you. It’s tempting as hell.

Marketers know this well and try to put as much temptation as they can in front of your eyeballs to get you to indulge in their products.

Trying to resist temptation is difficult.

An easier path is to clear the airwaves — reduce your exposure to things that are going to tempt you to act poorly.

This is an incredibly simple concept, yet we tend to expose ourselves to tons of temptation all day long, often without realizing it.

Want to stop eating poorly?

• Maybe don’t follow dessert accounts on Instagram.

• Maybe don’t keep bags of chips in the pantry.

Want to stop overspending?

• Maybe don’t scroll Amazon looking for the latest deals every hour.

• Maybe don’t link your credit card to 20 different websites.

The more you reduce your exposure to these little yet powerful triggers, the more friction builds up between you and the bad habit.

Cut off the habit at the source. Avoid the cue that ends up triggering the craving.

Look, I won’t belabor the point too much. It’s simple to understand. The difficulty is implementing it.

As spoken about in the Master Your Mindset section today, focus on your inputs.

Inputs matter a lot!

Bad inputs force you to constantly overcome temptation.

Check out your environment this week:

• Your home or apartment

• Your online shopping cart

• Your apps on your phone

• Your work environment

What is stirring up the temptation for your bad habits?

Become aware and then look for ways to clear your airwaves.

Put your mind at peace to make informed decisions rather than take reflexive action.

Good luck y’all!

Words of Wisdom

You can complement this weekly newsletter with short reminders, ideas, and thoughts about personal development by following me on Twitter.

Thanks for reading! And always remember…

Slow and steady. Never Idle.

Until next week,

Austin Sargent