If you do not teach yourself how to act consistently, then someone else will control your life.

Have you ever felt a lull in the middle of a day? Have you ever woken up and needed a pick me up?

I would typically grab some caffeine ‒ whether it is in tea, coffee, or some other drink.

But sometimes you need something other than a drink or more energy. Sometimes you need to change your thinking instantly in order to keep going. You know that it is hard to consistently move in the direction of your goals.

You need to course-correct. You need to shift your thinking.

"To me, there are three things everyone should do every day. Number one is laugh. Number two is think. Spend some time in thought. Number three, you should have your emotions move you to tears. If you laugh, think, and cry, that's a heck of day."

- Jim Valvano

"No regrets" is a popular saying. But how many people actually have no regrets?

Surely, we would all love a life full of happiness and joy. But sometimes we need to face the tougher parts of reality in order to learn how to truly live.

One of the best lines from the movie Braveheart is that "every man dies, but not every man truly lives."

We attract what we constantly think about.

We live in a world that is focused on flash, and not fire. Focused on appearance and not substance. Focused on puffing our chests but not rolling up our sleeves and having guts.

It is time for that to change.

Now, we all need to think about substance. Yes, we can still have style, but the style must serve the substance.

As each day passes, it becomes harder and harder to impress anyone.

But it is time to go back to basics. There are certain things that should impress you. Here are seven of them.

Life is simple. There are three steps:

What do you want?

What does it cost to get what you want?

Pay the price.

I can't help you with step one.

Step three is up to you.

However, step two will trip you up.

Achieving anything has a cost.

The "cost" of something is this: what do I need to give up in order to get it?

When it comes to a short-term goal, you will have to give up significant things in order to hit your goal.

Here is what you need to give up now to be achieve something awesome before 2017 runs out.

Have you ever woken up with a feeling of slight stress or anxiety? Or maybe it was extreme stress?

You likely have felt stress because you had failed to learn the most important skill for someone aspiring to achieve: time management.

Jim Rohn said the "Time management is the best-kept secret of the rich."

Have you ever felt like there is too much to do in a day - like there is no way you can accomplish everything that you want to accomplish? Maybe your intentions are so large that you can never match your actions to them.

Here are some practical, useful, and important mistakes that you need to fix in order to improve your time management.

Nineteen years ago, I gave a speech at my high school graduation. I was honored to have a chance to speak with my fellow classmates in our final high school moments.

If I gave a speech to graduates today, here are some of the thoughts that I would want to share with them. But first, a little about what has changed for me in the last 19 years…

Sometimes we learn something after it would have been really helpful to know it.

In light of that absolute truth, I am often asked to speak at high schools, universities, and graduate schools, and one of my favorite topics to share with students are the things that I wish I knew when I was younger. After giving many of these talks, I thought I would take the time to share my seven favorite pieces of advice.

Here are seven things that I wish I knew when I was younger.

I recently watched a tribute video to an old friend who died around a year ago. I met this man in law school. He taught moot court, and I was in his class. After I saw the tribute video, I wanted to write down a few thoughts about him, and I ended up writing quite a bit. As a tribute to him, I want to share with you what I wrote last night. There is actually a great lesson in this brief memory, and I plan to write more about it in the future. In fact, this situation in my life inspired to write about reinvention. I kept a lot of the spontaneous comments in the story, so you could hopefully feel the emotion that I felt as I wrote.

About 18 months ago, my great friend, Tim Lowe (he rocks, by the way), sent me a link to a YouTube video called, "Simon Sinek: Why Leaders Eat Last." Tim asked me to watch the video because he wanted to discuss the contents. Apparently, Tim really enjoyed the video. I told him I would absolutely watch the video and would follow up with him soon.