Book summary “Be obsessed or be average”: summary

Introduction

You live in a culture that promotes moderation, balance, and settling for average results. This middle path leaves you stressed about money, vulnerable to economic shifts, and unfulfilled by your daily work.

Grant Cardone argues in Be Obsessed or Be Average that you must reject this standard. Obsession with success is not a mental disorder or a character defect. It is a vital gift and the only force powerful enough to protect you from mediocrity.

The book shows you how to harness this drive across four core areas. You will learn to reframe obsession, establish daily practices, dominate your resources, and master sales.

• How do you turn obsessive thinking into fuel for your goals?
• What daily routines keep your focus locked on massive targets?
• How do you conquer scarcity and take control of your financial future?

1. The Gift of Obsession

Society wrongly labels extreme drive as a psychological disorder like ADD, ADHD, or OCD. When you stop suppressing your desire for immense success and instead nurture it, your creativity and energy are fully unleashed.

Obsession with success is not a character defect or an illness, but rather a vital gift that enables individuals to achieve greatness.

Grant Cardone was told by a rehab counselor that he had an addictive personality and a disease and that he should drop grandiose ideas of wealth. He instead used that drive to become a top salesperson and business owner.

The Epidemic of Average

Society suffers from a widespread epidemic of average where people settle for merely getting by, leading to widespread financial insecurity and disengagement. Economic and lifestyle statistics demonstrate that the majority of the population lives paycheck to paycheck, carries massive debt, relies on assistance, or remains disengaged at work because they follow conventional, mediocre advice.

• 62 percent to 76 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck according to Bankrate.com.
• Over half of the U.S. population is on some form of government assistance based on a 2012 Washington Post article.
• There are 28 million small businesses in America, with 75 percent run by solopreneurs.
• 92 percent of small businesses make less than $250,000 a year and 67 percent break even or lose money.
• There is $1.3 trillion in total American college debt in 2015.
• Over 30 percent of college graduates do not work in their studied field.

Suppressing Ambition

When you try to conform to average standards and squelch your high ambitions, the bottled-up energy often manifests as self-destructive habits, depression, and addiction. Embracing the scarcity mind-set or a middle-class thing leads directly to personal ruin.

Grant Cardone suppressed his childhood ambition to get rich and ended up spending five years wasting time in college, accumulating debt, and developing a severe daily drug habit that culminated in being beaten up and needing seventy-five stitches. He had $40,000 in college loan debt at age twenty-three and paid $27.50 per month rent for his dumpy apartment.

2. Finding Purpose and Daily Practice

You do not need to enjoy the specific tasks of your job to love what you do overall, as long as your efforts serve a larger purpose. Committing to success and taking care of your family requires doing tasks you might dislike.

Grant Cardone learned this from his father, who picked up pecans and sticks in the yard so attentively it looked like he loved it, explaining that you do not always need to like what you do to love what you do. Cardone hated his first two years selling cars but acted like he loved it until he mastered the profession and eventually fell in love with it.

Achieving massive success requires total immersion, clear purpose, and relentless daily goal-setting practices.

Writing your goals down daily in the past or present tense creates a powerful future that continually pulls you forward. You must write unachievable wins every morning and night on a legal pad as if they have already been accomplished, preventing the mind from treating them merely as future desires. Cardone wrote $4 billion in real estate holdings daily when he only had about $400 million, and previously wrote twenty apartments or more for years before buying his first multifamily deal in forty-eight units in Vista, California. Today he owns 4,500 units total.

Daily Goal Practice

Answering a structured set of diagnostic questions across multiple life categories helps identify positive obsessions and build a complete sense of purpose. You should repeat these questions at the same time every day without judging or second-guessing.

• Keep a legal pad next to your bed.
• Write down your major unachievable goals every morning and night.
• Write goals in the past or present tense as accomplishments rather than future desires.
• Answer the personal interest, money motivation, skills, market research, legacy, inspiring people, lifestyle, and what-if questions with the first response that comes to you.

Feeding the Economic Beast

To achieve stability and success, you must become obsessed with making money a priority and treating your business like a produce stand. Most people have screwed up priorities regarding money, wasting time on minor expenses while neglecting top-line growth. You must treat companies like produce stands by constantly asking what can be exchanged with the marketplace today.

At an oil refinery field in Lake Charles, Louisiana, workers would risk their lives on dangerous twelve-hour shifts and then blow their entire paychecks in a bar on Friday night while complaining about being underpaid. One client invested $22,000 in a training product and made a return of $3 million in ninety days.

You must immerse yourself in continuous learning and turn travel time into education time to fuel your drive.

• Cut whatever costs you can cut and be quick about it.
• Invest 95 percent of your time focused on getting money and 5 percent on budgets.
• Focus on increasing income and growing the top line instead of worrying about books.
• Load your phone with podcasts and audiobooks for driving and travel time.
• Make the super successful your mentors by buying their books, attending conferences, and reading interviews.
• Ensure people who live in your home and work at your company read the same material.

Holding daily meetings and maintaining constant leadership presence keeps a team aligned, accountable, and driven toward targets. Teams devolve into uncommitted individuals without daily reinforcement. Cardone once requested hourly reports on sales from a department head, which felt entirely unreal to the team leader until it was implemented to ensure success.

• Meet with your team every day.
• Ensure every order comes with a target and a deadline.
• Walk into the sales office frequently to check on team members and provide attention.
• Celebrate staff and their successes immediately.
• Display company mottos and messages on every door and throughout office spaces.
• Bury employees in sales messages to instill motivation and confidence.

3. Dominating Time, Money, and Mindset

Overcoming doubt and financial scarcity requires dominating your time, money, and personal brand without relying on traditional work-life balance.

Starving Doubt

Doubt is the ultimate dream killer and form of mental terrorism. You cannot fix it by digging into past dysfunction or assigning blame.

The author spent time attending twelve-step workshops and seeing counselors who focused on dysfunctional families and finding the inner child. This process only led to powerlessness and confusion. You do not fix problems with problems, but with success. You should only take advice from those doing better than you. When the author told a counselor he wanted to talk about his gifts and successes, the counselor immediately recommended a prescription for lithium.

Internal criticism or self-doubt regarding massive goals requires an immediate numerical counter. When doubting whether he could build a $4,000,000,000 real estate empire, the author wrote down the target number and compared it to the $400 million he had achieved at the time.

You can break self-doubt using specific actions:

• Make a list of crazy goals.
• Take out a pencil when in doubt and write down the numerical target.
• Write down the current number where you stand.
• Consider who else has done it and how many times.

Naysayers protect you out of love and fear, while haters are bitter and envious. Both groups serve as fuel and free promotion for your success. Naysayers are often family members who want you to play it safe, while haters actively want you to fail. Instead of fighting them, you should use naysayers as guides and turn haters' negative energy into fuel. Let massive success be the ultimate revenge. The author's mother routinely gave cautionary warnings about quitting jobs, taking partners, investing in real estate, and moving to California. Despite critics, the author achieved a 200 percent growth of his online audience on the way to a projected reach of 200 million people.

Dominating Money and Time

Overcoming financial scarcity requires shifting your inherited poor or middle-class money beliefs. Most people inherit financial limitations and view money with scarcity, complaining about small expenses.

Eighty percent of current millionaires are first-generation millionaires. You must examine your money mantras and recognize that money is everywhere. The author realized his mistake after a bank defaulted on three large real estate loans in 2008 following a period where he had backed off his hustle. Previously, he wasted mental energy complaining about a $57 steak-and-lobster meal, $19 3-D movie tickets, or $9 organic bananas. To dominate money, you must take courage to connect with new customers using the battle cry "Who's got my money?"

You can master your finances by taking explicit steps:

• Answer the money assessment questions regarding mantras, thoughts, and spending triggers.
• Admit if you have a financial problem.
• Switch scarcity thinking into abundance thinking.

Burnout and vacation-starvation are not caused by overwork, but by losing touch with your monster purpose and becoming unobsessed. While running sixteen eight-hour seminars per month in the US and Canada while consulting between stages, the author experienced what others called burnout. He realized he was just tired of a rote delivery and had settled for modest success. Renewed energy comes not from taking time off or seeking balance, but from getting reobsessed with your purpose and eliminating white space on your calendar.

True domination requires making time for what matters rather than relying on traditional time management. High-value individuals delegate low-value tasks like mowing lawns and stack their calendars with high-impact meetings. The author spends quality time with his young children by taking them for a drive to a local coffee shop every morning before school.

You can reclaim your schedule with focused actions:

• Write down the parts of your life you want to be great in.
• Make time for them rather than making excuses.
• Pay someone else to do tasks that are not part of your obsession.

Mapping your personal and professional expertise on a chart clarifies your authority and provides ammunition to expand your brand. Draw your face in the center of a paper with columns for professional life and personal life to list your traits and areas of expertise. This exercise helps you define your unique value proposition, such as becoming the Godfather of Sales, and opens doors to new opportunities. The author mapped out professional traits like sales genius and self-made millionaire alongside personal traits like father, husband, and recovered drug addict.

You can clarify your market position using this practical exercise:

• Draw your face in the center of a piece of paper.
• Draw two columns labeled "professional life" and "personal life".
• Write down what you have expertise in and what traits mark you in each column.
• Break down the categories and write a short statement of who you are and why you dominate.

4. Sales as the Lifeblood of Success

Sales is the ultimate driver of any enterprise, and making giant claims combined with relentless closing ensures business survival.

Grant Cardone asserts that a company does not depend primarily on research, manufacturing, or ideas, but entirely on revenue generated through sales. Founders and leaders must control the top line by driving new sales and acquiring customers relentlessly. Avoiding sales or claiming a dislike for it is a direct denial of business survival.

Grant Cardone stated he did not get into sales because he liked it, but purely out of the necessity to survive.

You should evaluate your daily sales approach and product commitment by asking these specific questions:

• Is what I am doing every day making a difference for the better?
• Do I love my product?
• Do I love selling my product?
• Do I own my own product?
• Have I insisted that my family buy my product?
• Should people go into debt for my product?
• Do I continue to call people back after they have told me they are not interested?
• Could I charge double for my product and still make sense of the cost?

Stay Dangerous

To achieve high ambition and personal growth, individuals must constantly move out of their comfort zones and hometowns rather than settling as the biggest fish in a small pond. Grant Cardone explains that comfort is the enemy of obsession and that avoiding danger actually traps people in vulnerability. By intentionally moving to unfamiliar cities where they know no one, individuals build the confidence to succeed anywhere and awaken their drive.

88 percent of all people live within a couple miles of where they grew up, according to a 2008 Pew research report.

Grant Cardone moved from a small town in Louisiana to Chicago, then Houston, La Jolla, California where he stayed for twelve years, then Los Angeles where he met his wife, and eventually across the country to Miami.

You can test your current comfort level and expansion with these questions:

• Are you expanding and re-creating who you are?
• Are you reaching for new audiences?
• Are you creating new products?
• Are you developing new streams of income?
• Are you the biggest fish in a small pond?
• Are you the smartest person in the room?
• Are you always worried about one client?
• Are you scared at this very moment?

Entrepreneurs must reject the middle-class dogma of diversification and instead put all their capital, time, and energy into expanding their own business. Cardone argues that traditional diversification advice assumes people are lazy and want to pay financial middlemen. Instead, owners should practice offensive spending, push revenue to the top line, and reinvest thirty to forty percent of income back into business expansion.

Mark Cuban stated that diversification is for idiots, and Andrew Carnegie advised putting all eggs in one basket and watching that basket.

30 percent to 40 percent of your income should be reinvested back into business expansion.

Relentless Closing

Sales organizations fail primarily because salespeople never present offers or ask for the order, and managers fail to hold them strictly accountable. Cardone highlights mystery shopper findings showing that failing to ask for the order happens frequently due to salesperson neurosis. Leaders must micromanage sales metrics, track every activity hourly, and hold daily sales meetings to review pitches and objections.

A mystery shopper program across five hundred American companies revealed that salespeople fail to present an offer more than 70 percent of the time.

Over 50 percent of sales organizations miss quotas according to the Bridge Group survey. Over 70 percent of the time, salespeople never present figures to customers.

You must examine your own closing discipline using these exact review points:

• Did you present an offer?
• Did you present terms and figures?
• Did you back off from the close?
• Why did you fail the close?

Making giant, ambitious claims forces individuals to elevate their delivery, whereas conservative underpromising is a form of deception that stunts growth. Cardone argues that instead of underpromising, leaders should make massive, substantiated claims that capture attention. This commitment creates the pressure required to innovate, improve offerings, and perform at peak levels to satisfy the promise.

Grant Cardone told a prospect with twelve salespeople that he guaranteed six deals by noon in a thirty-minute pitch; the company ultimately secured five deals by noon and two more by 2:00 PM.

78 percent of consumers have bailed on a transaction because of a poor service experience according to a 2011 American Express survey. Robert Kraft bought the New England Patriots for $172 million in 1995, and the team is worth $3.2 billion today.

Conclusion

Obsession, sales mastery, and relentless daily disciplines combine to create total life domination by transforming every potential obstacle into fuel for continuous expansion.

You can take control of your destiny by shifting your mindset from cautious moderation to full obsession. Treat your goals as absolute survival requirements rather than optional preferences.

1. Embrace obsession as your natural state and reject the myth of balance.
2. Set massive targets every morning and evening to lock your focus on expansion.
3. Treat sales and promotion as the ultimate responsibility for every area of your life.
4. Dominate your time ruthlessly and refuse to let scarcity dictate your ambitions.
5. Ignore your critics and amplify your message until your presence fills the market.

10 Key Ideas

1. Obsession with success is not a character defect or an illness, but rather a vital gift that enables individuals to achieve greatness.
2. Society suffers from a widespread epidemic of average where people settle for merely getting by, leading to widespread financial insecurity and disengagement.
3. Achieving massive success requires total immersion, clear purpose, and relentless daily goal-setting practices.
4. To achieve stability and success, you must become obsessed with making money a priority and treating your business like a produce stand.
5. Overcoming doubt and financial scarcity requires dominating your time, money, and personal brand without relying on traditional work-life balance.
6. Naysayers protect you out of love and fear, while haters are bitter and envious, and both groups serve as fuel and free promotion for your success.
7. Sales is the ultimate driver of any enterprise, and making giant claims combined with relentless closing ensures business survival.
8. To achieve high ambition and personal growth, individuals must constantly move out of their comfort zones and hometowns rather than settling as the biggest fish in a small pond.
9. Sales organizations fail primarily because salespeople never present offers or ask for the order, and managers fail to hold them strictly accountable.
10. Making giant, ambitious claims forces individuals to elevate their delivery, whereas conservative underpromising is a form of deception that stunts growth.