How to Be a Fighter Jet in Life

You are either a crop duster or a fighter jet, and if you’re a crop duster right now, you’d better bust your hump to turn into a fighter jet starting today.

Now what do I mean by that?

I mean that hardworking people and high performers are like fighter jets. A fighter jet is an extremely powerful and sophisticated machine built to exact specifications. A fighter jet crew has a checklist with over a hundred tasks that they must complete before every flight, all to make sure the machine operates at maximum efficiency.

Now, regular folks—average people who struggle—are crop dusters. They putter along with “enough” energy and “enough” speed. They make “enough” money and they are “close enough” in their relationships, usually with people who just came into their lives at random. When you look at a literal crop duster, it’s rusty and held together with spare parts and it looks like it’s about to fall apart.

Same thing with crop duster people. They’re constantly on the verge of crisis because “enough” quickly turns into “barely enough” and finally “NOT enough.” 

That’s why we should all aspire to be fighter jets in life. When you are a fighter jet, you reap the greatest rewards in life.

Being a fighter jet means:

• Getting more done in less time (both at home and at work)
• Having more impact and meaning through work
• Feeling less stress and a greater sense of peace
• Having massive amounts of all-day energy
• Improving your health and wealth

Here’s how you do that…

• You need to put more structure in your days
• You need to have clarity of passion and purpose
• You need to build your skills and leadership ability
• You must have mental resilience and passionate persistence
• You must dedicate yourself to constant and never-ending improvement  (otherwise known as Kaizen)

Let’s take this analogy a little further. A fighter jet requires different care and handling than a crop duster. A fighter jet has personal, professional, and relationship discipline.

A fighter jet, like you, requires expensive jet fuel and extensive maintenance. That means you must have the personal discipline to stick to the highest quality nutrition (and only small amounts of treats), as well as proper sleep and regular exercise.

A fighter jet is also deadly accurate and operates with precision handling. This represents your professional discipline in punctuality (showing up on time and never being late), bringing your best self and high levels of energy to work, exceeding expectations, and always asking for and looking for extra opportunities to contribute to the cause.

But fighter jet self-care doesn’t end there. You also need an advanced and well-trained pilot—the type that is much more intelligent than the one that gets behind the stick of a crop duster. The pilot of your fighter jet is your mind, and it needs to have the right mindset of adding value, having focus, sharing abundance, go-giving, and generosity.

Never have a scarcity mindset. Reject all fear, greed, and doubt.

Finally, in relationship discipline, a fighter jet is loyal to family, friends, and its source of higher power. You seek to improve these relationships every day, just as you seek constant and never-ending improvement in your personal habits.

How you do anything is how you do everything. Your relationship with your health often reflects your professional success. If you have strong personal habits and take care of yourself, it’s more likely that you’ll have strong professional habits and bring a fighter jet mentality and high performance to your work. But if you’re disorganized in one area of life, it often shows up in every area of life.

Making a commitment to getting better every day, the “Kaizen principle,” is the key to building “wealth in your health” and wealth in your bank account. These go hand-in-hand. Just as you wouldn’t hand over a fighter jet to a novice pilot with just 40 hours of experience, neither would anyone hand you great responsibility in your career if you haven’t yet proven you have high-performance habits.

If you want to dominate your path and build your family’s wealth so that you can have financial and time freedom, then you have an obligation and responsibility to family, yourself, and your business or career to be at your best in every area of life.

Never doubt yourself. Never think that you can’t do it. I’m living proof that anyone can succeed. I was just an immigrant kid who escaped communism and came to the United States and achieved the American dream. And if I can do it, anyone can.

Now to show you how being a fighter jet plays out in business, I have an exclusive excerpt for you from my book, “Man Up: How to Cut the Bullshit and Kick Ass in Business (and in Life).” Take this to heart:

According to Forbes magazine, 13-percent of Americans are entrepreneurs—but that alone doesn’t make them fighter jets in my book. We also know that 80-percent of businesses fail, or at best, simply flutter along, sporadically breaking even but mostly causing stress and anxiety in the lives of the poor bastards who started them. So it’s safe to say that many entrepreneurs start as fighter jets but become crop dusters when they underestimate the amount of time, money, and effort that are required to get their businesses off the ground. I was one of them.

You see, crop duster entrepreneurs assume that going into business is going to be easy. They think, “If I build it, they will come.”

The reality is that you built it and no one came. No one cares about your better mousetrap. No one cares about your better service and how you’re revolutionizing an industry. No one’s out there waiting for you to create the better business model. Fighter jet entrepreneurs know these facts. And once I understood this and accepted these facts, then everything changed for me!

Fighter jet entrepreneurs build a better mousetrap, and then they commit to doing the necessary work to out-market, out-sell, and out-service the competition. They find creative ways to use influencers to get the word out about their products and services. They’re always finding better and faster ways to leverage social media sites, search engines, apps, and video sites to spread their messages. Fighter jet entrepreneurs commit to becoming effective leaders. They’re decisive, they’re great communicators, and they have clarity of vision. They focus on personal growth and development as much as they focus on business growth. They work at becoming emotionally resilient. While crop dusters are emotionally reactive, fighter jets have mastered the art of managing their emotions. Rather than emotionally reacting to a situation or problem, which causes people to lose respect for them, fighter jets respond with calmness, focus, and strategy to situations, which further solidifies their leadership and authority. Fighter jet entrepreneurs also understand the value of building a strong team of effective employees who are driven, loyal, and capable of bringing their vision to fruition.

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For more “fighter jet” wisdom from Bedros Keuilian, grab your copy of “Man Up” today at ManUp.com.