You deserve to bet on yourself, but no one can make you do it. Either you’re interested in being the master of your own fate or you’re content with living life on the sidelines, waiting for someone to decide when you get to play and when you have to ride the bench.
If you’re part of the former group, then this article will only serve as a brief reminder of all the reasons why you choose to bet on yourself. If you’re still waiting for someone to save you or believe that the government and the kindness in people’s hearts will take care of you, hopefully, this article can get you to make some major changes in your approach to life because I have news for you:
No one is coming to save you.
If you don’t bet on yourself, someone is going to take you and put you in play for their own schemes and dreams. When they’re done with you, they’ll discard you because you no longer serve their mission. If you doubt this, remember: nowadays, you’re actually less valuable the longer you stay with a company.
The people who hire you are betting on themselves.
Betting on yourself is the fastest way to success. Waiting for the world to give you permission to be great is the slowest way to mediocrity. Now it’s time for you to learn how and why you need to take to do this as well.
1) Betting on yourself removes the illusion of job security
The problem with hitching yourself to someone else’s vision is that you transfer all the risk to them. You live and die by their success, rather than your own. While this feels safer, this presents a few problems.
First, the most obvious one: if they fail, you fail. The difference is that if they fail, they’ll have failed trying to make something happen, taking risks, and betting on themselves.
This typically means that they’ve learned something valuable along the way that couldn’t have been learned any other way but ownership of the process.
If they don’t succeed and you bet on their success, then you have to find another person or group to bet on. You’ll constantly be drifting from dreamer to dreamer, never striking out on your own. You’ll always be the person looking for jobs and never the one offering them.
2) You take calculated risk to pursue opportunities
Your mindset changes when you start to bet on yourself.
You stop only seeing the downside of risk. You stop seeing opportunities as pure risk, where you can only lose, and you start seeing them as speculative risks where you have a chance to win.
People who don’t bet on themselves are strictly in the business of minimizing the downside. They’re always looking for the safest way to do the least amount. They can never go further than their lowest ambitions.
When you bet on yourself, you start to see the upside of every option in front of you. You make moves based on the best possible scenario. Some might see this as blind optimism, but it’s anything but that.
See, most people are terrified of doing anything where there isn’t a guaranteed outcome. The problem is that the most valuable things in life all have an element of uncertainty in them. You take calculated risks that minimize what you can lose but maximize what you can gain.
But people who aren’t willing to bet on themselves refuse to do even that. They want the safest path, regardless of what they have to give up on to get to stay on it.
3) Your performance standards raise in all areas of your life
Betting on yourself makes you raise your standards in every area of your life.
When you bet on yourself, you start to see yourself as company stock. However, unlike stocks that you invest in, you have control over the performance of the company that issues the stock.
To succeed, you increase the value of the company that you’re investing in, and to do that, you increase your good habits and discard the bad ones. You start to live your life with a level of seriousness, urgency, and diligence that is reserved for those running an entire corporation.
You cut off relationships that hurt you and cut out habits that don’t serve you as you get into the habit of betting everything on yourself. I talk about this change often when I mention how I bet on myself many years ago. If you’re looking to make a change check out these 10 steps to change.
The Four Confidences is a little guide that’s big on advice for building confidence
This is a short book that answers the burning question of our time: “How do I build confidence?”
The Four Confidences is based on cold, hard experiences. Not theory. The same way I got confidence in my athletic, academic, and social abilities is what I share here. When I wasn’t confident enough to stay sober, I relied on these techniques to help me stop drinking.
Download the Free Guide4) Betting on yourself makes you see opportunities everywhere
A scarcity mindset is a direct result of wanting to maintain your current position instead of growing what you have. You’re playing the whole game of life to not lose rather than to win.
A fixed mindset is the direct result of a scarcity mindset.
After all, why bother trying to increase or improve your position in life if everything is already taken and your station is fixed. It’s because you don’t bet on yourself because if you did, then you’d realize that you live in a world of endless opportunity and all that it requires is the willingness to bet on your abilities, talents, and drive.
5) Betting on yourself forces you to develop an uncomfortably close relationship with the truth
This is due to the level of personal responsibility that betting on yourself requires.
You don’t get to come up with excuses and reasons why your life is the way it is. Either you took care of business or you didn’t.
This level of control scares most people because this level of control comes with personal responsibility. This is ultimately what betting on yourself comes down to—absolute control over your destiny. I’m convinced that you can’t discover your purpose until you take the responsibility necessary to bet on yourself. Until then, you’ll just be adrift.
People who are insulated by the safety of others are like children that are never fully exposed to the harsh nature of the world.
6) It’s the only way to get information from your intuition
Betting on yourself is the only way to develop the gift of intuition.
Intuition is important to get ahead because without it, you’re playing with the same information and insights as the common person. However, if you want to get ahead then you’ll have to compete with people who have honed their intuition.
Sometimes you’ll be wrong about your bets, but these are the moments that your intuition provides feedback to you so that you can be even better. You have to learn to trust your gut and in doing so, you strengthen the signal that your gut gives and you hone your ability to recognize it.
This only happens when you act on it and acting on it is only done when you bet on yourself.
A recap of what you get from betting on yourself
- It removes the illusion of job security
- You take calculated risks to pursue opportunities
- Your performance standards raise in all areas of your life
- It makes you see opportunities everywhere
- It forces you to develop an uncomfortably close relationship with the truth
- It’s the only way to get information from your intuition
If you aren’t willing to put skin in the game for your own life, don’t expect it to get any better.
The rest is up to you.
The Four Confidences is a little guide that’s big on advice for building confidence
This is a short book that answers the burning question of our time: “How do I build confidence?”
The Four Confidences is based on cold, hard experiences. Not theory. The same way I got confidence in my athletic, academic, and social abilities is what I share here. When I wasn’t confident enough to stay sober, I relied on these techniques to help me stop drinking.
Download the Free Guide
