It’s Easy to Fall Asleep at the Wheel. Don’t.

5 min readMar 28, 2019

It’s so easy to sleep your way through life.

It’s way too easy to do that. One minute, you’re sixteen and, the next minute, you’re fifty-five… and life has flown right past you.

When you’re twenty, you think life is VERY long. You look at your mistakes and shrug them off. You feel invincible and unstoppable and you think you know everything there is to know.

And then you get to forty… and you realize three things about life:

It keeps going faster.
You don’t know shit about life.
You’re still at the beginning and you’ve got much less time to get to the finish line.

And if you really take hold of the truth of those three things, your forties become a phenomenal launching pad for change, growth and evolution.

Unfortunately, too many people run their 40s, 50s and 60s the same exact way they did their 20s: foolishly assuming there’s plenty of time, constantly repeating the same life patterns and mistakes, allowing excuses to rule the day and falling into the excuse of “Maybe it’s too late now.”

Why don’t we start by taking ‘maybe’ out of your vocabulary?

Here’s the deal:

It doesn’t matter what decade you’re in: 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s.

By the time we hit 2050, people will probably be living into the 110s with EASE.

So let’s just cut the excuse that you don’t have enough time to take your life in a new direction. We’re all running out of time and tomorrow is promised to no one, including the babies who are still 16, 17, and 20.

At the end of the day, here’s what this ‘living your best life’ boils down to:

You have to stop falling asleep at the wheel of your life.

It’s time to take COMPLETE OWNERSHIP of where you are right now.

You created this. You chose this. You are living the consequences of every action and inaction you’ve ever taken.

Don’t get sad. Get focused.

Since you created this, ONLY you can change this and you can change it starting today.

Wake yourself up. Your life is moving with or without you.

Get your hands firmly on the wheel of your life and steer it in a brand new direction.

How do you do that?

1. Stop making the same choices.

This should be a no-brainer but it’s not.

For example, you’ve gotten three degrees and you’re still earning the same kind of money you’ve earned for the last ten years and, somehow, you think getting another degree will lead to you making double what you make right now? Think again.

Getting another degree is driving down the same road and expecting to wind up somewhere else. You won’t.

Another example: you’ve yo-yo dieted for the last twenty years, dropping thirty pounds here, forty pounds there and, every single time, gaining back all the weight and then some… and now you think Keto is the answer to every other fad diet you’ve ever tried.

I’m not knocking Keto if you plan to do Keto for a lifetime… but, if you KNOW you can’t do Keto until you’re 90, why are you making the same yo-yo diet decision and expecting to end up somewhere else?

You won’t.

If you want a different life, you need to make different choices.

2. Go ALL in on fewer life goals.

Pursue three major life goals at once and no more than three.

Truth be told, I’d like to say ONE but no one’s going to go with that.

A maximum of three. If you’re really in the driver’s seat of your life and you know it’s going to take everything you’ve got to get where you say you want to go, there’s not enough time to do DMA (Daily Massive Action) on more than 3 major life goals at the same time. Get good with that and budget your time wisely.

For example, if you want to lose fifty pounds, write a book and build a business, all by the end of this year, here’s what I’m going to tell you: You’re about to fall asleep at the wheel.

Why? Because you can’t put WHOLE mind into PRESENT action on all three goals at the same time.

Pick ONE. Go all in this year on that one. As soon as you achieve that one, pivot and focus on the other.

Most people don’t want to hear that they have to choose so they diffuse their focus, fall asleep at the wheel and then, on December 31st, wonder where the time went.

You set too many goals. You got discouraged when you realized that dividing energy doesn’t work. You fell back asleep. Don’t do that.

3. Vigilantly hold to higher standards for your life.

How high are your standards?

How much sleep do you need to get at MINIMUM? Are you requiring that of yourself?

How hard do you work on your goals EVERY SINGLE DAY? Are you requiring that of yourself every single day?

Who’s in your inner circle? Have you fired the toxic people from your life?

I could go on and on but you get my drift.

Far too often, our standards are low, our boundaries are weak and then we wonder why we’re always dealing with life dramas and putting out fires.

If you don’t know what you will and will not accept, you’ll get anything life throws at you.

At the end of the day, here’s the bottom line:

It’s time to wake up.

There are no guarantees that you’ll wake up tomorrow but you can certainly wake yourself up today.

And if your goal is to be somewhere completely different in ten years than you are right now, guess what you have to do?

Wake the hell up and move the hell on.

Stop sleeping at the wheel. Wake up.

#yourewelcome