Your life is something you commit every day. It’s not somewhere you arrive.

1. Ask yourself what you have the potential to offer that is so unique, compelling and helpful.

Before I become a personal development trainer and public speaker, I asked myself what I can uniquely offer to others. What it is that I am good at.

It is through learning how to communicate my value to others that I learned to be a good trainer that people make schedules ahead of time to attend my classes.

You have a unique potential. So unique that nobody else in the world can steal it from you. But you have to develop that potential. You have to choose one thing and become a master of it.

2. Take great joy and satisfaction in the pursuit of mastery.

Your personal growth depends on your pursuit of the thing that you want to be a master at. And you can do that only when you compete against yourself, not others.

Mastery is not about status, control or dominance. It is about learning something so deeply that you develop an intuitive feel for it, so much so that your ability can seem supernatural to others.

There is a world-known athlete in my country Ethiopia who still makes me doubt my eyes when I see him sprint 10,000 meters as if he is from another world. Haile Gebrselassie has become an outstanding athlete through the pursuit of mastery.

3. Determination and hard work keep you in the game.

Whatever you are trying to achieve, the only thing that is going to make you survive the choppy waters is your determination to reach your mountain.

You are not going to find out your strength until something/someone picks you up and hurls you back out to sea. Your determination is standing between your death and your racing naked through shark-infested waters.

Your determination is your commitment to your life-long personal growth. Your determination is the grit that will make you keep going when you wash up on some deserted island, disoriented and bloody and beaten and staring into the horizon with no sign of rescue.

4. Be obsessed.

If you are not obsessed with achieving your goals, then stop what you are doing and find whatever does obsess you. You must be in service to something bigger if you are to survive the setbacks and challenges life throws at you.

Be obsessed with your passion, your work and pursuing your goals. Be obsessed even when a problem is standing in your way. Be obsessed enough to solve the problem or die trying. Collect the dots and connect and complete them.

There is no point in life where you say ‘I am not going to move forward from this point on.’

“In the metaphor of life, we cannot stop walking. There is no point at which the path becomes a drop-off and you’re excused from moving forward.” — Brianna Wiest

5. Don’t follow a pre-existing path.

In the words of Joseph Campbell,

“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”

What has worked for someone else probably won’t work for you.

There was a public speaker I admired and respected at the beginning of my career. All I wanted at that time was to be like him, speak like him, stand up and control the platform like him. Because I wanted to be him.

Instead of developing my strengths, I used my energy trying to copy somebody else’s way of doing his job. This took so much energy from me that I felt like I was losing myself.

I found myself through following my own path. There is no “next step”. You transform your weakness in ways that create advantage through developing yourself.

You face failure even if you are afraid. You still move ahead anyway. The failure might be humiliating and spectacular like mine was when I stood in front of many people to give my first speech.

When you fail in ways that other people won’t, you learn things that other people don’t and never will.