Choose Your Enemies Wisely, by Patrick Bet-David

This Book is For:

*People who struggle with motivation and who lack the drive and sense of urgency they once felt (or have always wanted to feel) for running down their biggest goals.

*Business owners who haven't been able to lock onto a logical and methodical business plan and assemble the right team to help them implement it; or, conversely, those who have a good plan, but can't motivate themselves or their employees to move it forward with ruthless effectiveness.

*Anyone who's been stepped on, beaten, or flat-out ignored by the world; anyone who's been told repeatedly that they'd never make it; and anyone who's willing to look deep into their own past to uncover vast deposits of one of the world's most powerful renewable energy sources: revenge.

Summary:

“Sometimes we spend so much time trying to find how to win at life that we miss the entire point. Maybe you need to look for why to win in life.

Did somebody humiliate you? Did somebody manipulate you? Is there a teacher or family member who made you feel ashamed?

We’re all driven in different ways, but the right enemy can drive you in ways an ally never can.”

-Patrick Bet-David

Having the right friends in the right places can help your career, but as it turns out, having the right enemies in your life can help launch you straight towards extreme success and significance faster than you ever thought possible.

It's vitally important to select the “right” enemies, however, as you'll learn in this book, and to engage your emotions in the proper way, channeling those feelings into productive pursuits instead of self-destructive ones.

Patrick Bet-David is a legendary entrepreneur who came to America with basically nothing (his family literally escaped from Iran, crossing a bridge moments before it was destroyed) and inspired millions of others to put real effort into their own personal development, curb their vices, and help build up their communities.

The man also has enemies, it's true, but he’s used them in productive ways, instead of getting himself stuck in a cycle of anger and retribution that would have scuttled his chances of any meaningful success long before he ever got started. Choose Your Enemies Wisely explores the link between logic and emotion, and acts as a bridge between the two.

Myself, I’m much more logical than emotional. Which is great for business planning, but sometimes I just don’t feel anything when I think about what I have to do each day to move my business forward. I don’t automatically get fired up, which can be just as harmful to one’s dreams as being someone who's always boiling over with emotion, yet has no actual plan.

I’ve read three of Bet-David's books so far and he’s never let me down yet. Choose Your Enemies Wisely will teach you how to build a solid business plan, fortify it with logic, amplify it with emotion and feeling, and dominate your competition in business and in life. But it also goes even deeper than that...

This book will convince you to raise your standards, and to declare your dream as a future truth, along with everything that implies. Bet-David also discusses the 14 different types of enemies you can select, where to find them, and how to use them most effectively.

Not only that, but you'll also learn what to look for when assembling your inner circle, how to make your brain crave hard work, and much more besides.

Enemies are everywhere, but not all of them deserve your focus and attention. There are also opportunities everywhere, but not all of them deserve your focus and attention either. After reading this book, however, you'll know how to select the right enemies and where to find them, how to find and assemble the right allies, and finally, how to bring it all together to get everything you've ever wanted.

Gain Access to 100+ More Breakdowns with a 14-Day Free Trial

Key Ideas:

#1: Combine Logic and Emotion If You Want to Win

“Your business plan must be both emotional and logical. That’s why I want you to see which side you favor, and where you need to improve. If you’re only logical, you have probably struggled to inspire people.

With my approach, you will know what you need to change to accomplish that. If you’re only emotional, you have struggled to develop systems and stay organized. This is why you’ll benefit from the structure of a methodical plan.”

Overly emotional leaders will never keep their personal chaos under control for long enough to execute a structured, effective plan, but overly logical leaders will fail to inspire their followers to execute even a supremely well-crafted plan.

Self-knowledge can help you bridge the gap, but self-knowledge never just arrives on its own. You have to go out in search of it. You have psycho-analyze yourself and determine where you're deficient, and then take steps to correct the balance. It doesn't happen without effort, but that effort is worth it because often it's one of the biggest constraints holding you back from victory.

Being more logical or more emotional isn't "better" than the other way around, but they each have their unique drawbacks, of course. A boring, logical plan just doesn't spark the kind of activation energy needed to move forward. Especially not at the relentless pace that's often required for extreme success in business.

People might even prefer to work for a more "logical" leader, but no one in that organization is going to achieve anything great. Why would they? What's their incentive? Where's the drive?

Conversely, working for an overly emotional leader might be a dreadful experience for many people, but with someone like that, things are getting done. That's for sure. It's never just another boring day in the office when there are fireworks and flameouts everywhere you turn. Unfortunately, leaders like that just take their teams in a bunch of different random directions and never end up anywhere.

#2: How and Why to Raise Your Standards

“Once you identify who you need to beat, you will naturally raise the standard for what you must achieve.”

Committing to raising my standards changed my life forever. I was first introduced to the concept by Tony Robbins in his cringily-titled book, Awaken the Giant Within. Amazing book, horrible title. Anyway, Dr. Benjamin Hardy also talks about standards and raising your "floor" quite extensively in his excellent business book, The Science of Scaling.

The idea is that with personal and professional standards, you maintain a minimum acceptable level of effort, performance, and results. You aim higher, which causes you to take the kind of massive action that your higher standards naturally demand from you.

What's more, you experience extreme cognitive dissonance when you fail to live up to your higher standards. When your self-concept is such that you see yourself as someone who competes at a high level, works at 100% effort while they're at work, and who expects to succeed, you will naturally begin to perform at that level. Your external world will resolve itself into the shape of your self-image.

Selecting an enemy to fight forces you to raise your standards as well. You have to do this, because if you want to beat that enemy, you have to get on their level. Then you have to beat them, go beyond their level, and tower over them.

The problem is that your new, higher standards often aren't visible in a vacuum. You don't even know what's possible for you, because you haven't seen it modeled in the form of an enemy. Observing your chosen enemy in action, you witness a level of self-belief, strategic planning, work ethic, and will to win that you didn't even know existed. But now, you know. That's who you have to beat.

#3: The Difference Between a Competitor and an Enemy

“There’s a difference between competition and enemy. You can list your competitors without any emotion. But who pisses you off? Who’s the person who said you’d never make it?”

Not every one of your competitors has to become your enemy. In most industries, there are simply too many of them. If you're a real estate agent in New York City, for example, your "competition" is hundreds of thousands of agents, spread across a vast distance. You'd be spending all your time keeping track of their latest wins and what they're doing, and you wouldn't be getting your own work done.

So you have to be a little more selective when it comes to choosing enemies. It's best to have just a few, each motivating you in different ways, which we'll get into in the next Key Idea. You want focused aggression, not scattered jabs.

What makes this process even more difficult is that some enemies come with too much energy attached to them. Sometimes an enemy will be so strong, will bring up such violent emotions in you, that it becomes impossible to focus on executing your plan. So you also have to balance this with emotional regulation, which of course is easier said than done!

The final mistake, though, is selecting an enemy with no emotional resonance, who will never really become any more than a competitor. If you don't feel anything when their face comes to mind, if they don't inspire you enough - enrage you enough - to get down to work, then you haven't yet found your enemy.

#4: The 14 Types of Enemies

Outside Yourself:
1 - Someone you hate.
2 - Relatives who try to hold you back.
3 - Manipulators.
4 - Gossipers.
5 - Someone to prove wrong.
6 - Your ex-spouse or former business partner.
7 - Someone who doubts you.
8 - People who quit on you.

Within Yourself:
9 - Scarcity mindset.
10 - Your own limited thinking.
11 - Your ego.
12 - Contentment/mediocrity.
13 - Fear of success.

My Vote for the Most Powerful Enemy That Drives Winners:
14 - People who are beating you because their vision and accomplishments are greater than yours.

Patrick Bet-David makes such a key distinction here, because it's true, you might find that you have more enemies within you than without. Maybe it's your own ideas of there "not being enough to go around" or your fear of success (which doesn't sound like a real thing, but it definitely is!) that are your true enemies, instead of some random kid in 3rd grade who said that you were lame.

You can likely think of examples for most of these internal/external enemies (though it's the internal ones that you really have to go looking for), but the most interesting category here is the last one: those people who are beating you because their vision and accomplishments are greater than yours.

Before I say anything else, I do have to make one thing clear. Not everyone who's accomplished more than you have is "beating you." Some people are just playing different games than you are...and that's fine. You don't have to play the "richest person in the graveyard" game if you don't want to.

But there's a positive version of this too, and that's where you're so inspired by someone else's grand ambitions and their Olympian self-belief that you start to think quietly to yourself: "I could do that." And you know what?

You might! If you truly gave it everything you have within you, perhaps you could succeed at the highest levels too. You could. And there's really only one way to find out. You'll never see what you're truly capable of unless you're severely tested, and so maybe that's exactly the type of enemy you need: the type of enemy that reflects back to you visions of your own potential, and inspires you to go after it.

#5: Wake Yourself Up

“A confrontational approach isn’t for everyone. In fact, in the book, The Art of War, Sun Tzu says, ‘Never wake up an enemy.’ But for me, I was trying to wake myself up.”

Great generals throughout history were always careful never to back their enemies into a corner, because they knew that if they did, then their enemies would "wake up" and fight back harder than ever.

You never want to give an enemy no way out, because then they'll decide that they have nothing to lose, and you do not want to fight an enemy that feels as though they have nothing to lose.

Your enemies don't even need to know that they are your enemies! They don't need to know that you're after them, that you're paying attention to them, or even realize that they exist. If they do catch on, they might adjust their strategy to compensate for the increased competition, or even step up their efforts against you.

But if you simply select them as an enemy inside your own mind, they can secretly guide your actions and decisions, giving you unlimited motivation for extreme accomplishment, without any of the downsides of engaging in an actual battle.

#6: How to Train Your Mind to Power Through Hard Work

“Your psyche has to be rewarded for paying a price. You program your psyche by using a reward to reinforce your dream.

When you decide on the award in advance of achieving your dream, you are programming your mind to believe I’m willing to pay a price because this reward is going to happen.

This is a continuous feedback loop that you must integrate into your plan.”

This is such a psychological cheat code right here. It's something that too few people understand, because they fail to establish a connection between the hard work they're doing now, and the reward they're working for that's going to materialize in the future. Sure, some people have a vague idea of some future reward, but you have to make it vivid.

Your mind will do virtually anything you ask it to do, but you have to give it something in return. You have to reward your own psyche for putting in such insane effort to achieve your goals, and it's one of the most powerful psychological feedback loops you can establish.

For example, if your goal is to earn an extra $100,000 this year, that's fine and everything, but it's unlikely to have the kind of psychological gravity necessary to pull you through the tough times between now and then. It's just a number, unattached to anything, and it has no significance. What will that extra $100K actually get you? What's the end game? What's the point? Figure that out, and you suddenly give your psyche a reason to care.

#7: Turn Your Desired Future Into Your Present Reality

“Declare your dream as a future truth and start to live in the present as if your future truth has already become a reality.”

Here's another powerful idea for you, and the perfect one with which to close out this section. It has to do with imagining that your desired future is as irrevocable as your past. Meaning, a future that's so certain to get here and become real, that it's just as real as your past that physically already happened.

I've come to call this The DeLorean Technique, whereby you imagine your Future You comes back from the future to visit Present You, just to tell you that your desired future is actually real. You successfully created it, and all you have to do is follow the steps.

If that sounds confusing, just picture your desired future as vividly as something that actually happened in the past. Think back to your strongest, most vivid, most emotional memory, and how clearly you can recreate that in your mind right now. How you can feel yourself there, see what you saw then, hear what you saw then. Every last detail. Now imagine that your desired future is just as real.

Most importantly, you don't have to wait to act like your future self. You can think ahead to how the person who's achieved all of your most massive goals would actually think and behave, and you can be that person in this very moment.

In fact, you need to become that person immediately, because by doing so, you pull your desired future closer. You not only pull your future success closer, but you also make it inevitable.

Gain Access to 100+ More Breakdowns with a 14-Day Free Trial

Book Notes:

“YOU have no enemies, you say? Alas! My friend, the boast is poor; He who has mingled in the fray Of duty, that the brave endure, Must have made foes! If you have none, Small is the work that you have done. You’ve hit no traitor on the hip, You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip, You’ve never turned the wrong to right, You’ve been a coward in the fight.”

-Charles Mackay

“It’s important to clarify what emotion is not and what it is in the context of business planning. Emotion is not impulsive, irrational, melodramatic, temperamental, or hot-blooded. Emotion is passionate, obsessed, maniacal, relentless, powerful, and purposeful.

The words for what emotion is not describe the people who have chosen the wrong enemy. The list of words for what emotion is describes the audacious few who become unstoppable.”

“If I talk about what to do before I talk about why to do it, I lose people.”

“The 12 Building Blocks are: Enemy and Competition; Will and Skill; Mission and Plan; Dreams and Systems; Culture and Team; Vision and Capital.”

“The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”

-Winston Churchill

“New mistakes are okay. Old mistakes are not.”

“Let no one rob me of a single day who isn’t going to make a full return on the loss.”

-Marcus Aurelius

“The minute you break your word to yourself, you have sabotaged your entire year.”

“Plan like Japan; execute like America.”

“A static business plan is a losing business plan.”

“She goes out of her way to talk a big game so others will doubt her.”

“What you should be doing is playing people who are beating you as much as you can tolerate.”

-Jordan Peterson

“Choose enemies that give you energy, not drain your energy.”

5 Unworthy Enemies:

1 - Companies trailing you in the marketplace.
2 - People you have surpassed in your business or on your career path.
3 - Relatives who put you down because they are jealous of your success.
4 - Toxic people who try to pick fights and bring out the worst in you.
5 - Small thinkers with a victim mentality.

“Identify all the competitors and underestimate none.”

“For private colleges, their competition isn’t just other private schools and lower-cost public schools. It’s also changes in student loan policies, a recession, and, maybe more importantly, a shift in how people view education.

The moment the narrative shifts and people stop believing that a college degree is required for career success, the value proposition gets destroyed. Taking a broad view of your competitors doesn’t mean stressing out about what could go wrong. It means being deliberate about identifying your competitors to see how they will go after you and poking holes in your own business model.

Once you see this, you have to adapt your key differentiators to meet the needs of your customers. For the top universities, online education started out looking like a threat, but once these schools realized they could create their own online courses and degrees, it became an additional revenue source.”

7 Indirect and Unseen Competitors:

1 - Interest rates.
2 - Changes in customer behavior.
3 - Technology that can make you obsolete.
4 - The economy and economic trends.
5 - Legislation and lobbyists.
6 - Companies that meet customer needs in different ways.
7 - Paradigm shifts that impact your value proposition.

“You can hire all the research firms and consultants you want, but the best approach is to research the competition yourself.”

“I’ve done this for every job I’ve ever had. When I started with Morgan Stanley in 2001, I’d call Smith Barney and TD Waterhouse and make up a good story. I knew what would qualify me as an ideal prospect, so I would say that I recently inherited money.

Then I would ask, ‘What’s different about you? Why should I trust you with my aunt’s hard-earned money?’ I would listen and take notes.

Then I would say, ‘My brother has a friend who works at Morgan Stanley, and he thinks we should pick them.’

They would start talking, and I would start writing! I wanted to know exactly how they sold against us. And guess what? With my detective skills, they never outsold me again.”

“I realized in that moment that, for all my faults and mistakes, I had done two things right. I had chosen my enemies wisely, and I had chosen my life partner wisely. The enemies propelled me, and my wife supported me.”

“Don’t be surprised if your enemies come back to you. You know that expression, ‘Hustle until your haters ask if you’re hiring.’ It’s happened to me dozens of times, and I’ve hired many of them. Some of my enemies even became allies who helped me fight bigger enemies. And that can only happen if you treat your enemies with the compassion and mutual respect the moment calls for.”

“Take a broad view of your competitors and assume they wake up every day with the goal of putting you out of business. Studying the competition and choosing the right enemies will continue as long as you care to have a business. Choose wisely.”

“You have to train your mind to be stronger than your feelings or else you will lose yourself.”

-Mike Tyson

“Enemies light the match. Will keeps the fire burning.”

“The word ‘want’ has zero weight behind it.”

“Going forward, there’s no place for your wants. Imagine for a moment that, no matter how bold an idea, you knew you couldn’t fail, and no one could hear this thought but you: What would you declare? If you’re committed to your vision, tell me what you will do.”

“When you improve, your business improves.”

“The current version of you doesn’t have the skills to execute your audacious plan.”

“When buttons get pushed, we act differently. That’s why your job is to figure out how to push your own buttons.”

“Train people well enough so they can leave; treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”

-Richard Branson

“If you want to be a part of the audacious few, you must start with audacious dreams.”

“If the dream excites you, you’ll work as much as you need. Thinking about what you want is the dream. The emotion comes from picturing what your life will look like when you achieve your goals. If the plan is clear, you and your team will know how to create systems to direct your energy and accomplish tasks.”

“He didn’t do one thing to celebrate. The next month, his income went from $72,000 to $5,400. Because he hadn’t rewarded himself the previous month, his subconscious was wondering, Why am I busting my tail for nothing?

By sitting in the bank, that money didn’t create any emotion. His problem was that he hadn’t experienced the emotions from the reward that would drill into his subconscious the value of hard work.

Most people are very good at rewarding themselves when they make money, and more often than not, they overdo it. But every once in a while, it’s the complete opposite.

Both you and your family have to see the reward of your working as hard as you are, or else what’s the point? Why would you keep putting in the effort? Thinking about how you will celebrate makes your dreams come alive.”

“Goals are the specific outcomes we aim for on our way to achieving our dreams. Dreams direct our energy; goals take that direction and create a laser focus. When goals are specific and measurable, giving us deadlines and putting rewards in place, they work.”

“A powerful dream becomes a future truth.”

“Trust in God, but lock your car.”

“I simply couldn’t outwork bad systems.”

Especially if you’re going to drive people hard, they’d better feel five things:

1 - They are part of something.
2 - They are cared for and supported.
3 - They are making a difference.
4 - They are having fun and celebrating success.
5 - They are being recognized for their contribution and feel needed.

5 Benefits of Hiring a Rock Star:

1 - Sets the tone.
2 - Raises the bar and brings out the best in others.
3 - Shows what’s possible.
4 - Elevates performance.
5 - Expedites results.

“To hire rock stars, you must be a rock star.”

“During the hiring process for every company I lead, we assign a book for each candidate. They are required to read it and come back with a one-page paper. It’s a great filter for our culture. Better to know sooner rather than later if they are readers who are committed to learning. Based on that one assignment, we learn a lot about coachability and reliability.”

14 Things to Look for in an Inner Circle

1 - Confidentiality: what’s said stays in the inner circle.
2 - Zero tolerance for games: manipulation leads to loss of trust, and trust is the foundation of the inner circle.
3 - Accessible: easy to get a hold of.
4 - Opportunity magnet: good attitude.
5 - Lacks drama: doesn’t see themselves as a victim.
6 - Someone who gives insight (constantly teaches): shares insights on new books, interesting articles, and new ideas.
7 - Pays attention to details: special touch and goes above and beyond.
8 - Strong Rolodex and high credibility: they know people, and because of their credibility, these people take their calls and respond to their proposals.
9 - Respect in their approach: the way feedback is given; the way they deal with others.
10 - Defends you: tells you what’s said about you behind your back; protective of the relationship and your credibility.
11 - Dependability: you can bank on their word.
12 - Exchange of value: not one-sided; picks up their share of the checks.
13 - Fun and humble: zero tolerance for arrogance.
14 - Presentable in appearance: never sloppy.

“Vision is what makes people never want to stop. You may see some similarities between dreams and vision. But the biggest difference is that dreams are more personal and have a timeline.

You can fulfill a dream. A vision extends beyond you and your family. It’s for the people you lead and the world at large, and it never stops. It’s transcendent and will outlast even you.”

“Be stubborn on vision but flexible on details.”

-Jeff Bezos

“The moment you start fighting for something bigger than yourself - a true vision - you’ll be introduced to a version of you that you’ve never seen before. No superpower matches this. None.”

“Why are we treating ourselves like the underdog? Why can’t we see ourselves as killers who are just getting started?”

-Tim Ardam

Patrick Bet-David's 10 Business Principles

1 - Never compromise our non-negotiables.
2 - Micromanage until there is trust.
3 - What brought us here won’t take us to the next level.
4 - No one has 100 percent job security, including the founder or CEO.
5 - Create positive peer pressure by challenging one another.
6 - Beat your prior best.
7 - Treat the company’s money like it’s your own.
8 - Be radically open-minded but not easily persuaded.
9 - Fight any temptation to lower expectations and standards.
10 - Create an environment where our team is taken care of financially and professionally.

“I declare my dream as a future truth and will live in the present as if it has already become a reality.”

“The only way for you to succeed is to be at your best - in terms of attitude, skills, organization, and energy.”

“It’s taking the time to look ahead in your life, to visualize both success and regret. You have to dream and tap into your imagination by constantly saying, ‘Imagine one day if…,’ and then create the habits to make it a reality, all the while inspired by the visuals that are constantly in front of your eyes.”

“I’ve said over and over that a business plan first has to move you. Without being moved, without getting emotional, you won’t follow through.

The emotional current that lives inside you is a constant reminder of why you are working so hard. By knowing how to ask questions that tap into your deepest desires (just as Pelley did for Musk), your plan takes on an entirely new meaning.

I also believe that emotion alone isn’t enough. Musk, like all of us, needed a logical plan that precisely detailed how to channel that emotion.

Emotion is the why. Logic is the how. It leads you to specific actions that are required to start a business, scale a business, and put all the pieces together to design your dream life.”

“You are prepared to have your best year ever. Your best year brings you one step closer to your best life.”

“My why is impact. My why is hope. My why is using business to solve the world’s biggest problems. It all started for me twenty-one years ago when I chose the right enemy. If you’re ready to build a multigenerational business, there’s only one thing left to do: Choose your enemies wisely.”

Gain Access to 100+ More Breakdowns with a 14-Day Free Trial

Questions to Stimulate Your Thinking:

The quality of your questions determines the quality of your life. That's also how you get the absolute most out of any book that you decide to read:

You ask great questions the whole time - as though the book was on trial for its life.

Here in this section are a few questions that can help guide and stimulate your thinking, but try to come up with your own additional questions, especially if you decide to read this book the whole way through...

“Why do you want to defeat this enemy? What will it feel like when you defeat this enemy? What reward will you give yourself when you defeat this enemy?”

8 Key Questions About Competitors:

1 - Who are your direct competitors?
2 - Who are your indirect competitors?
3 - What competitors aren’t so obvious but still need to be monitored?
4 - Who are you underestimating? The people who get underestimated the most are those without much experience. They have nothing to lose.
5 - Where are your opponents strong? What markets/areas will you concede?
6 - Where are your opponents weak? What markets/areas will you attack?
7 - Who can you acquire? What strategies will you employ to acquire them at the lowest valuation? (Weaken them to drive down the price.)
8 - Who could acquire you? What strategies will you employ to get acquired at the highest valuation?”

“In what ways do people improve by associating with you?”

“Why will next year be different?”

“How many lives have you changed positively in the past year?”

“Have those around you made more money than they ever have?”

“How does your plan incorporate making others around you wealthy?”

“What do you want your top leads/sales reps to make in the coming year?”

“What benefits, both financial and nonfinancial, do others derive from being around your best self in the upcoming year and decades that follow?”

"Judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers."

-Voltaire

Gain Access to 100+ More Breakdowns with a 14-Day Free Trial

Action Steps:

So you've finished reading. What do you do now?

Reading for pleasure is great, and I wholeheartedly support it. However, I am intensely practical when I'm reading for a particular purpose. I want a result. I want to take what I've learned and apply it to my one and only life to make it better!

Because that's really what the Great Books all say. They all say: "You must change your life!" So here, below, are some suggestions for how you can apply the wisdom found in this breakdown to improve your actual life.

Please commit to taking massive action on this immediately! Acting on what you've learned here today will also help you solidify it in your long-term memory. So there's a double benefit! Let's begin...

#1: Mine Your Past for Motivation

If you take the time to look back over your life so far, you'll be able to locate the best enemy you have to help you achieve everything you've ever wanted. Your "best enemy" could be someone you've forgotten exists, or they could be someone who won't get out of your face (or your mind) right now, but they're there. You can find them, and you can use them to help you win. You just have to look for them.

Many of the questions that Patrick Bet-David asks in the book can be helpful here, many of which are reproduced above. Who hurt you? Who said that you weren't good enough? Who told you that you'd never make it? Even today, who still doesn't believe in you? There. You've just found some potential enemies.

#2: Select Your Most Useful Enemies

Not all enemies are created equal. Like we've covered in the Key Ideas above, there are some people who won't make a "useful" enemy for you, for various reasons. Either they still make you too angry to stay focused on executing your logical plans, or they don't provide enough of a psychological impulse to get you moving.

So you're going to have to go through your list of enemies from Step One above and narrow it down. Ideally, you'd select a few enemies, but probably not more than 3-5 of them. You're looking for people who push you into action, who you're driven to prove wrong, and who can keep you going when apathy sets in, or when the journey towards your goals gets too comfortable and you start to slow down.

#3: Know Your Enemy Better Than They Know Themselves

Study the competition thoroughly, and enter the conversations that are already happening inside their own heads. Find out what drives them: what their motivations are, what kinds of challenges and threats they face, and what kinds of opportunities they have access to.

Find out how they talk (to themselves, to their employees and coworkers, to their customers), and dissect their business models. Find out everything you can about them. You're probing for weaknesses, soft spots in their strategy and operations that you can exploit. Spy on them. Know them better than they know themselves.

#4: Raise Your Standards

Once you've selected the proper enemy, you'll see exactly who you have to beat, and you'll know exactly what level of excellence you have to reach in order to beat them. Selecting the proper enemy gives you insight into what it takes to win, and whether you're actually willing to go that hard. You may not be! But at least knowing your enemy gives you a baseline, a benchmark that you need to hit.

What you'll find, though, is that raising your standards is its own reward. Yes, it'll help you compete at higher levels - it'll even help you dominate your enemies. But perhaps the greatest thing that raising your standards will do for you is show you the potential that was always there within you, just waiting for you to call it out.

#5: Define Your Success Criteria

Don't turn this into a "forever war." Know when to stop. Decide how you'll know that you've won, and once you've reached that point, have an exit strategy. Picking fights can be an excellent success strategy, but it's not a lifestyle.

With that in mind, define your success criteria, and make them explicit. Tangible. For example, when you hit $1,000,000 in revenue, commit to reviewing your list of enemies and see if they still carry the same emotional weight. That teacher in high school who said you'd never make it will have to stop yapping once you're a millionaire, wouldn't they? Once you've won the war, lay down your arms.

#6: Add Logic and/or Emotion to Your Business Plan

Your business plan is likely deficient in either logic or emotion - or perhaps both! So determine where you're weak, and make sure to compensate for where you're falling short. If there's no logical rhyme or reason to your business strategy, your plan of attack, or what you're even trying to achieve in business or how, then you need to spend some more time on the logical side.

If, on the other hand, you've got a clean, fancy, and superbly formatted business plan that just doesn't raise your heart rate even a little bit, then you need to add some emotion to it. You could have the perfect plan, an amazing product, a team of rockstars, great marketing assets and more, but if, when you wake up in the morning you just...do not care, that's a problem. Fix it now.

#7: Select Your Inner Circle

Examine the list above (in the Book Notes section) and assemble your list of rockstars. The quality of your life is greatly determined by the quality of the books you read and the people you associate with, so do not skip this step! It's critical.

Decide who's worthy of being closely associated with you, and also, just as importantly, resolve to make yourself worthy of the best company. Rockstars only want to hang out with other rockstars. A-players only want to work with other A-players. So if that's not you, that's going to hold you back.

You can build a stacked network of absolute killers (and I mean that in the best possible way), but you have to earn your own place in that network, and you have to keep earning your place every damn day. As they say, if you want to fly with the eagles, you can't scratch with the turkeys.

#8: Conspire to Make Your Allies Successful

One of the guiding principles of my life (one that I learned from Zig Ziglar) is that you can get anything you want in this world, just as long as you help enough other people get what they want. Yes, select useful enemies and commit to absolutely dominating them, but your allies? Plot and plan and strategize and conspire to make them as successful as possible. It all comes back around.

For this step, what you're going to do is make a list of all your "allies" or partners in business and in life, and take note of what they want in life. Where are they going? What are their goals? What can you help them achieve? Keep this list handy and refer back to it often. Whenever there's an opportunity for you to make a key introduction, pass along a key resource, or really just help them out in any way, you'll have this list that you can keep coming back to. Again, it all comes back.

#9: Declare Your Dream as a Future Truth

In this final step, you're going to do exactly what it says here: Declare your dream as a future truth. You're going to visualize your desired future (intensely, vividly, utilizing all five senses), and you're going to make a self-promise that you're going to make it real...no matter what.

The future needs to already exist within your own mind. Everything is created twice: first within your consciousness, and once again in the external world. You need to see it, feel it, hear it, smell it, and taste it. It has to be real and inevitable.

What's also going to help you tremendously is to make a list (yes, another list!) of every single benefit that's going to come to you once you've externalized this inner reality, this future vision. Every single good thing that you're going to receive, feel, and experience needs to be made tangible to your consciousness, and you need to revisit this visualization as often as possible. Ideally, every single day.

This sounds all metaphysical, but it's really not. Your brain literally can't tell the difference between a real experience and a vividly imagined one, and so for all intents and purposes, what you envision becomes real to your conscious and subconscious minds. You're still going to put in the work. The visualization is really just the beginning, despite what all those "positive thinking" charlatans want you to believe. But once you've declared your dream as a future truth and committed yourself to its external accomplishment, there's not an enemy on Earth who will be able to stop you.

"The path to success is to take massive, determined action."

-Tony Robbins

Gain Access to 100+ More Breakdowns with a 14-Day Free Trial

About the Author:

Patrick’s amazing story starts with his family immigrating to America when he was 10 years old. His parents fled Iran as refugees during the Iranian revolution and were eventually granted U.S. citizenship.

After high school, Patrick joined the U.S. military and served in the 101st Airborne before starting a business career in the financial services industry. After a tenure with a couple of traditional companies, he was inspired to launch PHP Agency Inc., an insurance sales, marketing, and distribution company – and did so before he turned 30.

PHP is now one of the fastest-growing companies in the financial marketplace. Patrick is passionate about shaping the next generation of leaders by teaching thought-provoking perspectives on entrepreneurship and disrupting the traditional approach to a career.

Patrick speaks on a range of business, leadership, and entrepreneurial topics including how and why to become an entrepreneur and the importance of learning how to fully process issues.

From a humble beginning as a young immigrant escaping war-torn Iran with his parents to founding his own company, Patrick has gained a first-hand understanding of what rags-to-riches means and how it is fueled by freedom and opportunity – the core tenants of the American Dream.

Choose Your Enemies Wisely, by Patrick Bet-David

This Book is For:

Summary:

Key Ideas: