Graham

So I was 12 years old. My parents went through a really bitter, ugly divorce. We changed schools to a new school, so I didn't really have friends. So the ground beneath me was pretty unsettled.

Grew up in a small town in Ohio, in the Rust Belt outside of Toledo. And I mowed lawns—I mowed lawns about six hours a weekend to make money. That was the best-paying job. I had a Sony Walkman and I started listening to books on tape.

For whatever reason, our library had this self-help section. So I had these books like Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and Lead the Field by Earl Nightingale; The Universal Laws of Success and Achievement by Brian Tracy. So there were only three or four of them. So for the next several years I just would—six hours a weekend—literally brainwash myself, walking back and forth in the hot Ohio sun.

And these authors, thank God, just had incredible content that I really needed at that time. I was this young, impressionable kid that was having a lot of trouble in my life, and I had these frameworks to just hang my life on, for lack of a better word.

And there were really three big ones that came from that. One was, hey, you don't get to be a victim. Yes, you have things that have happened to you, and they're not necessarily your fault, but you walking around blaming people and thinking, "Woe is me," that's not going to serve anyone. You got to take control of your life.

Now, that sounds probably really obvious to you and me right now, but back then, that was a new concept for me—grabbing control of your life. And then they were huge about deciding what you want and writing down your goals. And I got really into that. I would write my goals down three or four times a day, literally all through high school.

And then the third one was, you gotta make some choices. So you can have any goal you want, but you can't have 20. So you pick the one or two that you're really excited about, and then you have to draw a bright line and give yourself permission to not do goals three through 30. Those are really the three concepts I'm summarizing from thousands of hours of lawn mowing.

So then what happened—to answer your question—I started feeling this the first time when I started applying this to really small things like getting an A on a test or running a faster mile or something like this, and it just worked exactly like all the authors said. I just kept pushing the boundaries of what I thought I could do, and I never really ran into—and I still probably have yet to run into—boundaries that you couldn't blow through.

Building Alpine - Colossus