I’ve always been fascinated with people who became super successful at an early age.

Not just millionaires and billionaires.

I’m talking people who figured it all out while others are still trying to “get their life together.” People who jump out of bed every morning, looking forward to going to work. People who seemed to have “skipped the line” in their careers without paying their dues like everyone else.

Every time, in the heat of arguing, it’s in our human nature to do our best to win. However, arguing can get quite irrational when we lose focus on what we’re trying to resolve. If we’re not focused on solving the problem, we’re wasting time and energy that can be diverted into something more positive.

If you want to lose weight, you need to eat fewer calories than you burn. That’s simple physics, and there’s no way around it.

Exercise usually burns somewhere between one hundred and five hundred calories per hour, depending on how intense it is and how much of your body it uses. On the other hand, you can easily cut back your intake by a thousand calories a day with a few small changes to your diet. That’s why weight loss is commonly said to be 70% diet and 30% exercise.

Everyone, without exception, struggles with the negative voice in their head.

And before I built the billion-dollar brand Quest Nutrition, I did too.

The first half of my life was controlled by a negative mindset. I was often paralyzed by fear. Wrecked by insecurity. I didn’t think too highly of myself.

This episode was initially published as an article on vanschneider.com by Tobias van Schneider.

It begins:

At least once a day I get an email from someone reaching out to me asking for advice on how to become a designer. Or more specifically, how to become a freelance designer with your own clients.
Now, my advice might shock you a bit. When I started out as a designer, I lied about my career.

Life is complex. One day you’re happy, working on your daily tasks, and the next day you wake up, thinking: “What the fuck should I do with my life?”

Am I right? We’ve all been there. When one of my readers responded to an article last week, I asked her: “How’s it going?”

She said: “Am doing well. Been interesting times figuring out which direction to go to next in my life journey.”

Last week I talked to a friend who was in the same position. And everyone will face the same challenge one way or the other over the course of a long career.

I’ve been there many times as well. No one is immune to being confused. Let’s face it — there are literally a million things you can do with your life.

Sometimes, to become successful and get closer to the person you can become, you don’t need to add more things — you need to give some of them up.

There are certain things that are universal, which will make you successful if you give up on them, even though each one of us could have a different definition of success.

You can give up on some of them as soon as today, while it might take a bit longer to give up on others.

Getting here wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. That’s for sure.

Most startups fail within the first five years of launching. So many startups are going bankrupt or in a death spiral and shedding jobs in the hope of staying afloat to buy a few more months of life. It’s sad.

So what has made WordStream different? What makes WordStream a unicorn in a sea of startup donkeys?

In this day and age, it can be hard to keep your child from being exposed to Elon Musk. Although you may do your best on the home front, they may inevitably stumble across a profile piece or news item on TV at a friend’s house or the computer at the school library. For that reason, it’s better to be prepared for your child’s eventual exposure to Elon Musk and to know how to respond to the questions you may be asked.

The most important skill for a young person today is learning quickly and effectively. Since the Great Recession, nobody buys the false impression that you can get a credential after studying for four years, land a job, and then have a career with the same core set of skills over your entire life. Even professional career tracks like medicine and law are under outside economic and technological pressure to change and adapt at a faster pace than ever before.