Leave your life of mediocrity and live a life of passion!

Read time: 4 minutes

As many of you know, at 31 years old, my life was a complete trainwreck.

I was 70 pounds overweight, emotionally, physically and financially bankrupt.

And, I had no idea of how to fix any of it.

In a couple months, I’ll be 20 years sober.

I am not sharing that with you for you to congratulate me or for accolades or anything.

I am sharing it for anybody who feels like they are lost and might not feel like they have any passion or purpose.

It is NEVER too late to start over or to build a new dream!

If I can do it, anybody can!

Most people fail in sobriety or addiction recovery for a few reasons:

1. They remove the harmful behavior, but don’t replace it with healthy behavior
2. They fail to connect with any passion and purpose
3. They have no healthy support system

Then in a couple weeks, or even just a couple days later, life gets hard, and since there is no new healthy system in place, they immediately revert back to old harmful behaviors because that is what they are programmed to do.

I did it too for 15 years.

So, after I was in enough pain, I finally made the shift to change my life… it wasn’t easy… I won’t lie.

But, I wanted to live more than I wanted to die…

SO, I surrounded myself with success.

THAT is, in my opinion, vital for any real high level of success… health, money, sobriety, love life, etc…

And, when we live that way, we “stumble” on to our passion and/or purpose.

For me, I realized that to stay sober, I had to surround myself with sobriety, so I got mentors and went to different types of meetings with like-minded people.

Then I started eating healthy and exercising and lost 50 pounds, and realized if I wanted to stay fit, I needed to surround myself with fitness, so I became a personal trainer.

Then I started a business selling rare coins, but didn’t know how to run a business, so I got a business mentor and within the first year, I was selling $3M/year.

Understand?

We NEED help.

We need to ask for help.

Asking for help is a sign of strength, NOT a sign of weakness.

ALL successful people have coaches, mentors and accountability partners, and in most cases, TEAMS of them.

NOBODY reaches the top alone.

And, it is not because we are dumb or somebody is necessarily smarter… it is because I was:

1. Humble enough to ask for help.
2. Willing to apply successful systems into my life.

So, that is just MY story.

Maybe you’re not abusing any drugs or alcohol, but you’re stuck in life, love, health or business.

Here is my simple 4-STEP FRAMEWORK I used, and still use, to get unstuck and transform my life.

1. TAKE ACTION!!!

This is always #1. If there is no action, there is no progress.

This is a Universal Law, not Dennis’s Law.

You can read all the books and watch all the podcasts, but if you don’t do anything, you will not gain anything.

2. FIND YOUR PASSION!!!

This is also vital for success.

And, why is that? Well, if we are not passionate about something, we will eventually struggle.

If you start a business doing something just for money, but you’re not passionate about it, you will burn out and not be happy.

We always think we’ll be just fine if we just have money, but that is bullshit. I can attest to that.

*** Tips for finding your passion to follow in a minute.

3. FOCUS!!!

We MUST stay focused!

Turn off the crap and focus on what matters.

Things to avoid:

• Mindless scrolling
• Toxic people
• The news
• Politics
• Porn
• Etc.

4. LIVE WITH INTEGRITY!!!

If we can’t be honest, we can’t change.

That means being honest in everything we do… AND with yourself.

If we say we are going to do something, do it.

Finding your passion and purpose

Again, if we don’t have passion and purpose, life can feel meaningless and unfulfilling, which is why we drink, use drugs, overeat, watch porn, over spend, etc…

All of those things are simply 1 of 2 things:

1. Distractions from feeling “less-than”
2. Our attempt to have purpose.

Both are bullshit and are not legitimate excuses for behaving that way.

My passions were buried under my fears and insecurities about:

• Being bald
• Not feeling smart enough
• Not being able to impress my emotionally unavailable grandfather
• Not living up to the “world’s bullshit standard of success.”

Once I realized that, I found that I LOVE helping others improve their lives and build their dreams.

I realized that I loved the beach.

I realized that I love exercising and the challenge of taking care of my body.

I love scuba diving.

I realized that I don’t need anybody in my life to feel whole and complete… I am already whole and complete and if people in my life take any of that from me, they are no longer in my life.

These all give me passion and purpose everyday.

Now all of my actions align with these passions and values and I LOVE waking up in the morning and making each day as successful as possible.

That does NOT mean that I am perfect.

I still fail and make LOTS of mistakes, but none of them keep me down long because life is too short.

I have set my life up to live my passions and purpose every single day on some level.

Sometimes it is sharing on social media, sometimes it is helping a friend, or even a stranger, sometimes it is working 12 hours a day on business projects and sometimes it is laying on the beach.

ALL have value to me.

If something does NOT have value to me or is not helping me achieve my goals, I rarely do that.

This is called having healthy boundaries.

Establishing healthy boundaries is a game changer.