Grant Cardone - Be Obsessed or Be Average

M y entire life people have been telling me that my obsession with success is a bad thing.

Ive been called a work addict, compulsive, obsessive, never satisfied, out of balance, tyrannical, and impossible to work with. Ive been told Im too demanding and that I have unreasonable expectations for myself and others. I have had professionals suggest that I have ADD, ADHD, OCD, and much more. Friends and family have told me to chill out, calm down, relax, and take it easy.

The reality is that no matter how much I have tried to squelch or control my obsession with success, it has been the one thing most responsible for my being where I am today. My obsessions have taken me from lost and broken in every way at the age of twenty-five to owning five privately held companies with sales of $100 million a year, being named one of the top ten most influential CEOs in the world, and being a New York Times best-selling author of five books, an internationally acclaimed speaker, an attentive husband, a doting father of two girls, and a contributing member of society.

I am not braggingI just want to make perfectly clear that what Ive achieved in life is not because of some particular invention, luck of timing, inside deal, or special intelligence. I am where I am today only because I embraced my obsession with success.

That being said, before I gave myself permission to fully own my obsession and harness it for good, denying my obsession almost killed me. I learned the hard way that denying your obsession or being obsessed with the wrong things can be very destructive.

Im going to share my story about discovering my obsession and how that alone has given me this super life. I will share with you the tools Ive discovered along the way to put my obsession to work for me. I want to give you permission to be completely and unapologetically obsessed tooregardless of who you are, where you come from, what your family is like, or what your crazy big dream is.

Before I wrote this book, I wrote The 10X Rule, a best seller about the importance of thinking and executing at massive levels. In short: If you are going to have a budget for a project, you should set it for 10X what you initially considered; if $1 million is the amount of money you want to earn annually, then you better set a target of $10 million per year, in order to get close to where you desire. The 10X Rule was ultimately about multiplying your goals to achieve any objective.

After I released The 10X Rule, so many people wrote me saying things like, I am trying to 10X my business and I am having trouble staying with it or This 10X thing is throwing my entire life into disruption. Thats when I realized that there was a missing piece to the puzzlethe idea of obsession. Obsession is the missing piece, that mind-set that will allow you to apply the 10X rules in your life and business.

Sure, you can be successful without being obsessed, but you cant reach the levels of success I am talking about without being obsessed. Its the single common factor that super successful people around the world share.

To show you how to become obsessed and harness that obsession to build your own success, Ive broken this message and guide down into manageable chapters.

The first chapter of Be Obsessed or Be Average explains how obsession saved my life and why its so important. I define obsession and what it means to me. Chapter 2 will erase the conventional wisdom that average and safe are all you can achieve and explain why you need to replace mediocrity and doubt with a burning, purposeful, animal obsession. Then in chapter 3 well look at how you can identify your own obsession. Ill walk you through some key exercises you can use to find out what you really want most in life.

The next chapters build on that foundation, guiding you through the tough process of beginning to follow your obsession. Ill prove why its important to feed the beast of your obsession in chapter 4. In chapter 5 well explore why you need to starve the doubt, block out naysayers, and embrace haters. Chapter 6 talks about all the ways you can learn to use your obsession to dominateyour past, your thinking, your money, your area of expertise, and your brand. And chapter 7 explains why playing it safe is the most dangerous thing you can doand how to stay dangerous against great odds. These principles will guide you in your quest for success.

Then well shift to practical business advice that will help you make your obsession real, not only to you but to everyone around you. In chapter 8 Ill share my world-renowned sales knowledge to help you understand the importance of sales to realizing your obsession and how to become a monster marketer, promoter, and salesperson. Chapter 9 will focus on winning customersand how you can overpromise and overdeliver. In chapter 10 well turn to the people you work with, especially employees, and Ill show you how to build a culture around you that is totally aligned with your obsession. Well close out chapter 11 with advice on how to be a real leaderor in my words, how and why you must be a control freak. These are all the practices you will need in order to not just maintain but grow your obsession into a thriving, lucrative, and powerful business that can maybe even create an entirely new industry or disrupt an existing one.