Josh Terry Plays

You're not stuck. You're skipping steps. #SelfImprovement #personaldevelopmentjourney

Most people don’t fail because they’re lazy. They fail because they picked something too big. Everyone wants to be level 10, so they pick a level 10 goal—a business, a book, a complete identity overhaul. But they’ve never finished anything smaller. So they burn out halfway through… and start over again. Growth isn’t built on ambition alone. It’s built on loops. Want something. Do something. Get a result. That’s how you level up. Start smaller. Build proof. Finish things. Then go bigger. That’s how it works.

Most people don’t realize how regulated therapy is. You can’t just take a test and become a therapist. You have to pay for a degree, follow strict rules, and stick to a narrow, approved approach designed to keep people safe—but not necessarily to help them grow fast. Therapists are trained to return people to baseline. That’s important work. But it’s not transformation. Coaches aren’t bound by those same rules. The best ones can challenge you harder, move faster, and help you break the rules of what you thought was possible. If you’re done with maintenance and ready for momentum, coaching hits different.

It took me five years to learn this. And I'm going to teach it to you in less than a minute. The advice people give Is often the opposite of what you should do. For example, you may have heard that you should “try harder” to push yourself if you want to grow. That advice is for lazy people. And if you care about growth, then you’re not lazy, And you’re already trying as hard as you can, So the skill you need to learn isn’t effort. It’s restraint. If people keep telling you to try harder, and all you want is to do as much as you can, then you need to learn to set limits instead. Because you’re not them. And you don’t need their lesson. You need the opposite one.

If you’re stuck, you might be obsessing over one thing, when in reality, the reason you’re stuck is a combination of many things. It’s not just your habits. It’s not just your mindset. It’s not just your environment, your schedule, or your goals. It’s all of them—interacting. And if you only focus on one, you’ll keep looping. Most smart people try to solve their problems with more intensity. But intensity on the wrong part of the system just makes things worse. The real work is learning to zoom out, see all the variables clearly, and figure out what combination unlocks momentum. That’s what I help people do. Not by giving them a new strategy, but by helping them understand themselves well enough to take the right step—at the right time—with the least wasted effort.

It took me seven years to learn this but I'm going to teach you in less than a minute. The lesson other people teach isn't always the lesson you need to learn. You may have noticed winning CEOs talk about patience all the time. And successful sales guys say you need to help others if you want to make a sale. You also might find yourself being patient and helpful, getting terrible results, and wondering why. This is because the CEO started his career aggressive and demanding, and didn’t succeed until he learned the lesson of patience. He's excited to talk about patience because it was the lesson that unlocked his success. But it came from combining aggression with patience. The sales trainer was selfish when he was in his early twenties. He was so focused on making the sale that it turned people off. And he got results once he added helpful consideration of others. So now he feels like helping others is the solution. But it's not the full recipe. And if you're not aggressive, and you're a patient and helpful person, these aren't the lessons you need to learn. You need to learn to hold others to high standards, stand up for yourself, and fight for what's yours. You need to learn how to be a shark. The fact that a lesson helped one person doesn't mean it will always help you. Because sometimes you need to learn the opposite lesson. #neverstoplearning