The Circles Of Life: Which One Are You On?

The world has changed in big ways over the last 15 years. AI tools. Remote work. Social media algorithms tuned to keep your attention forever. Infinite distraction. More noise than ever before.

And yet … success still comes down to the same thing it always has. Your mindset.

I’ve been talking about mindset on this blog for a long time. Today I want to share one of the framings I think about most when it comes to it. I’ll call it the Circles Of Life. There are two of them. We all live on one of them, whether we know it or not. The path between them is a personal decision.

The Circle Of Nothing

Most people live in a frame of mind that’s not conducive to success. Their own thoughts … plus the thoughts they allow into their heads from outside … literally forbid success. That kind of mindset actively attracts failure. It also tends to revel in the failure of others.

These are the people who chastise others who find success. They assume the successful must have done it on the backs of other people. You know this type. They exist everywhere.

Here’s the loop they’re stuck inside:

They live in a world of anger and fear. Their actions become wasteful as a result … they don’t really accomplish anything. That breeds frustration, often with themselves. So they look for escape. Today that escape is mostly the algorithm. Social media feeds. 24-hour news. AI-generated outrage content. Anything that delivers a dopamine hit while requiring nothing of them. That input propagates more anger and fear. Which breeds more frustration. Which sends them looking for more escape.

And the cycle keeps running … until you die.

The Circle Of Success

There’s another way. This circle is entered by DECISION. You don’t arrive at it by luck. You actually decide to flip the bird at the other circle.

Fewer people live on this one. It’s the road less traveled. But the world rides on the backs of people on this circle, whether the people on the other circle want to admit it or not.

At the core: doing the right actions. Things that help others. Things that do the greatest good for the greatest number. Ethical work, real work, work pointed at positive goals. That builds an expectation of positive outcomes. People on this circle don’t expect failure … they operate on the assumption they’ll succeed. Even when they fail, they extract the positive and apply it to the next attempt. That keeps them working on the right things instead of burning energy on negative ones. Which produces real results. Which makes it easier to expect more positive outcomes next time.

The cycle keeps running … and it breeds success.

What’s Actually Happening Underneath

Bear with me, because I want to share the framework I use to understand WHY these two circles work the way they do.

I believe we are all a composite of spirit, mind, and body. Your body isn’t you … it’s a physical vehicle so other people can recognize you and stuff. Your mind is a computational tool that mostly consists of pictures and concepts. And then there’s the actual YOU … the spiritual energy behind both. We are, in actuality, separate from the mind and body. That’s my view.

Energy can be free flowing. It can be held in suspense. It can be dispersed.

Free flowing energy is like a river on the move … going somewhere, doing something. Held-in-suspense energy is stationary but disturbed … like the spot where two hoses pointed at each other meet. Dispersed energy is shooting off in all directions … like dropping a rock in a pond and watching the water scatter outward.

Because we ARE energy, we manifest these three characteristics. When we’re flowing, things are moving for us. When we’re held in suspense, we feel stuck and tend to try to make others around us slow down too. When we’re dispersed, we feel like we just need to get out of here … our mind going a billion directions at once.

Our energy is affected by outside energy if we let it. Walk into a room full of dispersed people, you start feeling dispersed yourself. The world around us consists of energy in various forms. Even matter … “stuff” … is just energy held in suspense.

Now think about that. Matter is energy held in suspense. Not flowing. And we constantly surround ourselves with it. The more of it you have around, the more rigid or dispersed you tend to feel. There’s a real correlation between how much stuff is in your physical space and how freely you can flow.

The same logic applies to information inputs. The content you put into your head is energy. Anger-and-fear inputs are energy held in suspense … they keep you stuck. Free-flowing inputs … real ideas, real learning, real connection with real people … keep you moving.

The Circle Of Nothing is what happens when your energy gets stuck. The Circle Of Success is what happens when it flows. The 6 principles I’m about to share are the practical mechanics for flipping the energy from one to the other.

1. See Yourself Achieving Your Goal

This isn’t a new concept. You’ve heard about visualizing what you’re going for. Most people picture themselves sitting eyes-closed in bed imagining something groovy. Others use guided visualization apps or video tools. For me, all of that always felt like a roundabout way of tricking yourself into doing something you already naturally know how to do.

Let’s make it more real.

Take out a sheet of paper. Write out your ideal day. I’ve heard this exercise from a lot of people, and it works. What you’re going for: SEE yourself living a day you could live over and over again and be completely happy. Where do you live? What do you do? How do you feel? What food do you eat? Who do you wake up next to? What does your house look like? What’s the air like? What does it smell like?

Sit down and do this on paper in as much detail as you can possibly come up with. Might take you a few hours to do it right. Here’s what you’re actually doing.

By getting very exact and thorough, you’re more completely immersing yourself in that new reality. And all of us have a deep-down, spiritual ability to make the real world match the reality we create. Most people just forgot they have that ability, but it’s there in all of us. The exterior world is just the lowest common denominator of all our individual realities put together. Individually, we can create our own. Through this exercise, you’re creating yours and doing it thoroughly.

You’ll start to THINK in that reality. It becomes a part of you. And one day, you’re very likely to pull out that sheet of paper, read what you wrote, and be floored at how much of it came to fruition.

Don’t be surprised. It wasn’t luck. You created the world around you. You just did it according to a design spec you wrote down.

2. Don’t Compare Yourself To Others. Compare To Who You Could Be.

It’s natural to look at people who have accomplished more than you … or who simply have more than you … and feel a bit down. You wonder what’s wrong with you. Why haven’t you accomplished that?

Look at what you’re actually doing when you think those thoughts. You’re invalidating yourself. Making less of yourself. You should have no better friend on this planet than yourself … and there you are, sitting around running yourself down.

Such questions also rely on a flawed assumption: that there’s some magical element of success the other person has and you don’t. What?! Everything you need to build your empire in life is right between your ears. You need nothing more. All that’s left to do is (a) stop getting in your own way and (b) start using what you have.

And remember this: you get what you flow power to. You, as a spiritual being, are a source of immense power. You create new realities by validating them. Validate your incompetences, you’ll get more incompetences. Validate your shortcomings, you’ll further them. Validate the success of others, you’ll see more success … including your own. Validate your own strengths, you further them.

What you focus on grows. That’s not a poster slogan. That’s the actual mechanic.

3. Associate With Success-Minded People

Emotion and energy are contagious. The energy framework above explains why. When you’re around people whose energy is flowing, yours starts flowing. When you’re around people whose energy is stuck or dispersed, yours starts mirroring theirs.

So it just makes sense to surround yourself with people who support you and aspire to achieve the things you want. This is why mastermind groups are so powerful. Even if everyone in the group is in different businesses, they all aspire to success. Being in that sphere is supportive in a way that’s hard to explain unless you’ve felt it.

The flip side: you need to control or get away from people in your environment who pull you down. If you have a family member or “friend” who belittles you when you talk about your goals or makes fun of you when you blog, you need to exercise some control over that. Do you ever get around a particular person and just feel disturbed or low? You need to make a decision: handle it or part ways. Most of the time it can be handled by a direct conversation … ask them to stop. Most will. In the rare case they won’t, you need to part ways.

You have the right to control your own environment. You have the right to control what goes in and out of your own head. Exercise that right.

4. Build A Success Library

Most successful people read a lot. They build a library. Call it a success library if the material serves to improve your life.

Look at most people. They don’t have a success library. They hardly have a library at all because they hardly read anything anymore. Their “library” is whatever just popped up in their feed … 90 seconds of scroll-by content, a clickbait headline, three rage-bait posts in a row, an AI-generated summary of something they’ll never go read in full. There’s nothing redeeming in any of it.

A success library is something different. It’s books, courses, podcasts, and other long-form material that genuinely furthers your knowledge or expands your viewpoint. The stuff that takes more than 90 seconds and actually asks something of your attention.

Books matter. Long-form content matters. Material that DOESN’T conveniently fit in a feed … in 2026 especially … matters more than ever.

Which leads into the next one.

5. Fill Your Head With Good Stuff

We’ve all heard the phrase “You are what you eat.” It applies mentally too.

The Circle Of Nothing self-perpetuates because of the garbage people choose to let into their heads. In 2010 when I first wrote about this, the main culprit was 24-hour cable news … people yelling at each other, controversy on a loop, twisted stories for clicks. That hasn’t gone away. It’s just been joined by something worse.

Social media feeds tuned by algorithms specifically engineered to keep you angry, afraid, or scrolling. AI-generated rage-bait content flooding every platform. Comment sections optimized for outrage. Push notifications timed to interrupt you exactly when you’d otherwise be doing something real. Most of what gets put in front of most people today is designed to mentally extract from them, not give to them.

Why would I let that into my head? If my reaction to that stuff is anger, anxiety, or the urge to argue with a stranger, WHY am I consuming it? Me getting angry at my phone screen solves nothing. It just means I’m accomplishing nothing useful with my actual life.

Most algorithmic feeds are a cancer on our minds. They zoom in on every bad thing and make it seem like that IS the world. They twist stories to extract clicks. They reward outrage because outrage is what keeps you scrolling. If today’s algorithmic feed was a person I knew, I’d straight-up kick its ass.

Only you control what goes into your head. If you let it in and dwell on it, you’re validating it. Giving it energy. You might as well wrap your lips around the tailpipe of your car … because mentally, that’s exactly what you’re doing every time you doom-scroll, every time you spend an hour watching an AI-generated outrage video, every time you let the algorithm decide what you’ll think about today.

6. Draw Strength From Other Success-Minded People

You might notice a theme here. 🙂

I’d actually rephrase this one slightly. I don’t believe we “draw” success from others. We VALIDATE success in others … and by doing that, we validate success in ourselves.

When you go to a conference, you’re not just networking. You’re putting yourself in a space where the dominant energy is people who actually want to build things. You see other people moving forward. That validates the assumption that forward IS possible. Your own forward gear gets unstuck.

It’s contagious. And it moves you along.

The Decision Is Yours

The two circles are real. The choice between them is constant. It’s not a one-time decision you make and then never have to make again … it’s a decision you make every time you reach for your phone, every time you choose what to consume, every time you decide whether to talk yourself out of your own goals or talk yourself into them.

Most people don’t realize they’re making the decision at all. They drift onto the Circle Of Nothing because gravity … and the algorithm … pulls them there by default. The Circle Of Success requires intent. It requires you to actively decide.

The 6 principles are the practical mechanics. The framework underneath is the why. The decision itself is the only thing that actually moves you between the two circles, and only you can make it.

Make it consciously.