“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”  Winston Churchill

If anyone knew what walking through hell was like it was Winston Churchill. Every day his country, particularly during the blitzkrieg, was on the verge of anniliation. But Churchill never quit, never wavered. He kept walking through hell.

There are a lot of so-called self-help experts out there who will tell you that pursuing your dream will ultimately bring you happiness. And they’re right. Except that they leave out one major component of pursuing success –  you will be walking through hell most of the time before you realize success. You will make mistakes that will cost you money you desperately need. You will, most of the time, feel like you are completely wasting your time. You will face doubt each day. Everyone around you will advise you to quit. You will face rejection and indifference almost 100% of the time by those who have the power and influence to make your dreams come true immediately. You will feel frustrated and incompetent. There will be days when everything goes wrong, your back is up against the wall and your dream feels like it’s collapsing under the weight of all of your failures and mistakes.

When pursuing a dream, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and smarter. It’s an evolutionary process in which you grow into the person you need to be in order for success to visit you. Not everyone is able to persevere and realize their dream. There is one reason for this. You must have a big WHY. Your WHY is the reason you are pursuing your dream. Some call it a mission statement but it is much more than that. Your WHY is something that dominates your thinking. For some it’s a desire to never be poor again. For others it’s about improving the lives of their family or society. Your WHY represents the core reason you are pursuing a dream. Elon Musk’s WHY is to colonize Mars. Winston Churchill’s WHY was to preserve Great Britain. Mother Teresa’s WHY was to improve the lives of the poor. Steve Jobs WHY was to bring computers into the home. Your WHY is like the sun except instead of orbiting planets there are dreams and goals that orbit around your WHY. Your WHY sets everything in motion and, if it’s personal enough and fueled by emotions, it will create the passion that will enable you to walk through hell and come out the other side a success.

Neuroscientists and research psychologists are revolutionizing our understanding of why we do the things we do. In particular, they have stumbled upon cutting-edge scientific evidence that most of our problems in life stem from a lack of self-control. And, more importantly, they have found that a lack of self-control is caused when our willpower is at its weakest.

Excersising willpower, it turns out, saps the brain’s precious fuel (glucose) and once depleted it causes you to become irrational, impairing your ability to think clearly. When you overuse your willpower, it drains precious brain fuel, causing you to do things and say things that create most of the problems in your life. Loss of willpower makes you more susceptible to addictions, moral lapses, frivolous spending, outbursts of anger, relationship problems and every sort of lapse in judgement normally prevented by your ability to control destructive impulses. Loss of willpower results in a loss of self-control.

The key to staying on course for a successful life is to preserve your willpower and brain fuel for activities that move you forward in life and help you realize your dreams and accomplish the goals behind those dreams. This is where habits become so important. Habits are automatic behaviors, thinking and decision making that consume very little brain fuel and thus, preserve willpower energy. The more things you can automate in life through habits, the more you free up your brain to exert willpower. Habits preserve willpower.

True long-term happiness is found in doing work that you love and which, at the same time, enables you to meet your needs and financial obligations in life.

According to my research, over 95% of the 361 individuals in my study did not love what they did for a living. Even more revealing, 96% of those struggling financially indicated that they did not even like what they did for a living. How on earth can you be happy when you hate what you do for a living? The answer is, you can’t.

Odds are, if you’re reading this and are struggling in life, you probably don’t like what you’re doing for a living. And, as a result, you are unhappy most of the time. The solution is to find something you love to do that can produce enough income to support your lifestyle. But how do you even start the search?

There is only one way. Experimentation. You have to devote time, on the side, to experimenting with different activities. At a minimum, you must devote six months of concentrated side-time to each new activity. Six months is all it takes. Within six months you will either feel passionate about the new activity, or you won’t. If you don’t feel the passion, move on. Passion is your brain’s way of communicating to you that it loves the activity. When you are passionate about something you will want to do it all the time. Passion is the driver for finding something you love.

But what does passion look like? Think back to when you were a child. Do you remember any activity that you did as a kid that you could spend an entire day doing? That’s what passion looks like. Any activity that you can engage in for hours at a time without wanting to stop is a passion activity. When you find a passion activity that requires developing any marketable skill (can generate income), pursue it.

I had the opportunity to talk to Richard Branson at a speaking engagement we both spoke at last year. One of the things I asked him was if he would define what he does as work. He said no. He never saw what he did as something most would call work. So when you read about the work ethic of individuals like Richard Branson or Elon Musk or Warren Buffet, dismiss it. What the world calls work, they call enjoyment. Do you think you could do something for 14 hours a day that you enjoyed?

Your beliefs are likely holding you back in life. We form habits from our beliefs. If we have negative, limiting beliefs, we will adopt daily habits that mirror those beliefs. “I’m not smart” forges the habits of not studying, not listening and not focusing. “I can’t lose weight” forges the habits of eating too much, eating poorly and not exercising.

Become aware of your beliefs. Identify those that are negative and are holding you back. Once you change your beliefs, changing your habits becomes easier. The main reason habit change is so hard is because we fail to change the beliefs behind the bad habits we have.

Willpower is the ability to force yourself to focus on something for hours a day, day in and day out. Willpower is a limited resource that forces the brain to consume a lot of brain fuel (oxygen and glucose). Because the brain cannot store its fuel, this means every time you force the brain to work it must send a signal to various organs and glands to increase production of glucose. The brain would rather not do this. It will fight you when you are engaged in forced focus of any kind. When you want something enough, however, this Want Power overrides the brain’s natural inclination and forces it to secure more glucose. The brain has no choice but to obey the command.

If you want something bad enough, your brain becomes your servant. If your passion for something is not that great, the brain becomes the master and will force you to stop engaging in forced focus. Want Power creates willpower.

Habits represent unconscious behavior, thinking, choices and emotions. A habit is formed when neurons (brain cells) talk to one another repetitively. A neuron is three things: the nucleus, the axon (cable) and the dendrites (branches similar to a tree). When neurons get mapped inside the brain as a “habit” here’s what happens:

• The myelin sheath (fatty substance that surrounds each axon) gets thicker. Thicker means healthier and better.
• The # of neurons talking to one another gets reduced.
• The chemicals released by the axons and received by the dendrites speed up.

Why is this important to know? The larger the myelin sheath, the larger the axon. Large axons translate into higher intelligence. Bigger axons increase your IQ. The lower the # of neurons needed to talk to one another, the lower the consumption of brain fuel (glucose and oxygen). The brain cannot store brain fuel. It has to get it from the body. So the brain naturally prefers habits. The faster the release and receipt of chemicals by the axons and dendrites, the less effort is required by the neurons. The end result is a more efficient, better communication process between neurons.

In short, habits make the brain work better. The brain is always looking to create habits for this reason. Habits put you on autopilot. If you adopt good, daily success habits, this puts you on autopilot for success.

What happens to your brain when you engage in daily self-education?

When we engage in learning, our brain releases a protein called Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF). The release of BDNF has the effect of turning on a part of the brain called the Nucleus Basalis. When the nucleus basalis is turned on it releases a chemical called acetylcholine. The purpose of acetylcholine is to excite neurons to talk to each other. When neurons start talking to each other, a new synapse is created. The nucleus basalis is then turned off by this same protein (BDNF) and this new neural connection is locked in (sealed, so to speak) and the new learning then becomes a memory. The more we review the new learning, the stronger this new neural connection becomes and the easier it is to recall that information.

BDNF is fertilizer for the brain. It’s purpose is to help nerve cells (i.e. neurons – also known as brain cells) grow. When we make learning a daily habit (i.e. reading every day to learn) we turn on this nucleus basalis, create more neural connections (synapses) and, thus, our brains grow bigger and we become more intelligent.

There is another side benefit of daily learning that is only now being studied by neuroscientists – the more synapses we have the less likely it is that we will fall prey to Alzheimer’s disease, particularly if we continue to engage in daily learning after age sixty-five.