
What if you could become the kind of person who rises above 99% of the world in the next 12 months? In this episode, I break down the real reasons most people stay stuck and the three habits the top 1% master behind closed doors.
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Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you love this podcast and you want to get some inspirational tips, tricks, mindset stuff sent directly to your cell phone and you live in the United States or Canada, text me right now. 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305. Today I'm going to be talking about how to get ahead of 99% of other people in this world in 2026. And I don't just mean in income and becoming the top 1%. I mean the top 1% of people who have the most joy, happiness, love, money, experiences, everything. Because you've probably been told to work harder and to grind more and to hustle your way to success. Which sure, you do have to put some hard work in there. But to tell you the absolute truth, hard work is not the main thing that separates the 99% of people in this world from the 1% of people in this world. What separates them is three things that they do when no one else is watching. So if you truly want to get ahead of 99% of people that are walking this planet, you need a new system that is built on discipline and vision and emotional mastery. And in this episode, it's going to be the playbook for you to become that person. And it all starts the moment that you decide that the old you isn't going to be coming with you into the next year. The big point I want you to understand is this. If you want 1% results in this life that you have, you cannot follow the 99% crowd. Like, let's be honest, most people, when you look at the lives that they have, is that inspiring to you? Do you want to fit in with those people? Because 99% of people are scrolling more than they're working on themselves. They're talking more than they're taking action, they're sleeping more than they're actually taking care of their brain and body and family. They're just not doing something that is, in my personal opinion, inspiring. You probably don't want to be like them. So if you want to win, you have to consciously remove yourself from wanting to copy people who are stuck. And the reason why I say you have to consciously do it is because your brain wants to fit in with everybody else. It is a part of the tribal mechanism that lives in our brain that kept our species alive. But when you look around over the next year, I want you to realize, no, I don't want to be like those people. I don't want to be like those people. So I'm going to stop having that tribe mentality and go, I actually want to distance myself from those people. You do not want to be like the crowd. I promise you, you don't. The 1% that have the best lives in this world are weird. Like, they move differently, they don't fit in, and they think way different. The average person thinks like today, in the next 10 minutes, the average person that's like in the 1% of having an amazing life, think decades ahead of everyone else, while everyone else is just refreshing. TikTok. And so you've got to understand this. If you want to be a 1% experience, money, happiness, joy, fulfillment, life type of person, then you're going to be rare. And if you want a rare life, you need to be a rare person and you need to have rare habits, period. And so you need to start thinking in decades, not days, like most people. This is really what I want you to understand is like an important reframe for this entire episode, is that most people are anxious because they're so stressed out about the thing that's right in front of them, they're just too busy putting out fires and being reactive versus being proactive in their life. The reason why most people are stuck is because they're obsessed with short term dopamine hits from scrolling on TikTok and Instagram and shopping for another pair of shoes, versus long term fulfilling life. The 1% of people, they're playing the long game, they're proactive, they're focused on the long term. And every step that they take today is a building block for the life that they are focused on creating. And so you've got to ask this to yourself. Like the daily decisions that you make each day, are they aligned with the 10 year vision of yourself in your life? Do you even know what the 10 year vision of yourself in your life is? Or are you just trying to escape your current reality with like momentary hits of comfort by food or by TikTok or Netflix or shopping, whatever it might be? And so if you're at home, you're not driving your car and you have a pen and paper around you, like pull out your journal real quick, write these questions down, right? The question like, where do I want to be in 10 years? Think about it. Be as unrealistic as you possibly can be. Ask yourself, once you figure that out, what habits does that version of me do every day? The type of version of me that can create that life in 10 years, what habits do they have? And then what am I doing right now? Important question. What am I doing right now that's making that version of me impossible? How am I getting in my own way of building myself into the person who has an amazing life in 10 years? Most people aren't failing, they're just impatient. They're so focused on the next hour of their life and just not paying attention to the long term. And that impatience kills long term potential. And so you, if you want to be different, need to start thinking in the long term. And these are the three things that I have kind of identified that like the 1% of people who have the most amazing rare lives do differently than everybody else. Okay, the first thing is this. They outwork everybody else. And when I say outwork, I want to be very careful of the way that I'm saying. I'm not Talking about grinding 18 hours a day to prove something to your dad, which is some unresolved trauma from your childhood. When people think of like hustle and grind and work hard, they think like, I need to work more hours in the day. That's not what I'm telling you to do. This isn't about burnout. This is about intentional intensity. Now I like that phrase is very important. Okay, I'm going to be intense in a very intentional way. So I'm not saying work more hours. I'm saying work more in the hours that you have. Because the average person that works eight, nine hours a day probably getting 30 to 30 minutes to an hour and a half of actual productive work done. Most people don't need to work harder as in hours in the day. Most people need to be more efficient and focus with the hours that they work every single day.
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Rob Dial
So you don't need to hustle more. You don't need to add extra hours of work into your life. You need to stop prioritizing things that are on your to do list that don't actually truly matter. And so think about that for a second. When I say work harder, I'm not saying work more hours. I'm saying be more focused when you're sitting down to execute. And so this is how you can start to build a life, right? Just a couple of very simple things that I want you to think about when you're sitting down to try to outwork the other 99% of people. The first thing, number one, which is an absolute non negotiable, is to schedule what's called deep work hours every day. If you want to learn more about it, you can listen to my podcast episodes on Deep Work. You can read the book on deep work that was written by, I think his name is Cal Newport. What I'm saying is at least two hours of deep work. That's absolute non negotiable. And I mean deep work means the rest of the world does not exist. Your, your phone is on airplane mode. Your notifications on your computer are turned off. Your and your brain is bringing the absolute most focused energy as much as you possibly can. Like you in these moments. Like the difference that I see between someone who's like a very successful productive person and the average person is that the, the, the most successful people when they like click on, they're like a heat seeking missile for accomplishing the most important task of the day and getting them checked out. Outworking isn't about time, it's about focus. So you need to ask yourself what do you need to do to become more focused? I wrote an entire chapter in my book specifically on how to grow your focus so that people can become better at it. Because I was so obsessed with, okay, it's not about the hours in the day, it's about the intensity and the focus in the day. So how do we grow our focus? And so what do you need to do to become more focused? That's the thing that you need to think about. And then the second thing that I would recommend is that try to stack your wins before the world wakes up, before your kids need you, before your doubts catch up.
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Rob Dial
Cause people have so much trouble getting to bed or waking up earlier is just go to bed earlier, go to bed. If you, if you're like, oh my God, I can't wake up, go to bed earlier. And if that's not working, go to bed even earlier. Eventually your body will hit the max on how much you can sleep. And this is all honesty. Some of the most productive people that.
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I know go to bed when their.
Rob Dial
Kids go to bed at like 7 or 8pm because there's not a whole lot of stuff that's happening after that. You know, if you get, if you go to bed at 8pm and you have eight hours of sleep, you get a full eight hours. That means that your natural wake up time is 4am naturally fully well rested hours before your kids are probably going to wake up, before the world wakes up, before all the notifications, before all the news comes out to tell you about how crazy the world is today. It's like this focused time where you can work on yourself and work on your mission. So that's another way to outwork everybody else. That's the first thing. They outwork everybody else. The second thing is they out heal everybody else. Actually healing. What's holding you back? Listen, the biggest reason why you're not where you want to be, it's not your schedule, it's not your strategy. It's the stuff that's inside of you that you haven't looked at yet. You cannot outwork trauma. Believe me, I tried it for over a decade. Didn't work. You can't meditate your way past self hatred. You can't affirm your way out of deep rooted shame. Most people are dragging 500 pounds of unprocessed pain into every single new year with them and wondering why they can't run. So a lot of people like you don't have a discipline problem. You have a wound that's still bleeding problem. Let me explain what I mean by that. Like, this is how it actually shows up in real life. So people will be like, well, I'm not as successful as I want to be because I procrastinate. Okay, well that procrastination is what you're observing that's happening in your life and you're not lazy or any of that. But you might be procrastinating because you're actually terrified of being judged. So procrastination is the symptom of the judgment that you're afraid of.
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Why?
Rob Dial
Well, maybe because, you know, your dad only praised you when you performed or got straight A's. So now you're, you're just so focused on being perfect. And if you're not perfect, you're going to be judged. And so what do you do? You end up procrastinating. So procrastination is just the symptom, the judgment. And the fear of judgment is the actual wound that comes from your childhood. And that shows up in many ways. It could be the fear of failure, it could be the fear of judgment, it could be the fear of, you know, not being loved. And it shows up as, oh, symptom, procrastination. And so now doing something imperfect feels dangerous because of the way that your dad treated you when you were young. Or you might say, well, I'm not where I want to be because I overthink. Well, you don't overthink because you're indecisive. You might overthink because, you know, you were taught as a kid and that, you know, making the wrong move and doing something wrong meant punishment or embarrassment or emotional withdrawal from your parents. And so you've learned to overthink because you want to make sure you make the perfect decision. Because back in the day when you were a kid, if you didn't make the perfect decision, you did something wrong, you were punished, or you were embarrassed, or your, your parents would emotionally withdraw with you. And so now you're looking at, oh, I overthink. No, overthinking is not the problem. Overthinking is the symptoms of the deep seated cause which you need to heal within yourself. Last one is an example I'll give you. Like, maybe you want to post on Instagram for your business. So you don't post content or like, you don't ask for the sale when you're sitting in front of a client or you know, you're afraid to speak your truth in some sort of way. It's not because you don't want it or you need to want it more. It's because your nervous system still remembers being shut down at some point in time. Or maybe you were ignored or maybe you were laughed at when you were trying to express yourself or your parents said that you're too much or you know, you know, children are supposed to be seen and not heard and you learn to dim your flame. And so you're looking at going, oh, I need to post more on Instagram for my business to grow. But in reality that's the symptom. The problem is that your nervous system is still afraid of being shut down by expressing yourself. So you see what I'm talking about here. Like, these aren't just like surface level mindset blocks. They're emotional imprints in your nervous system from childhood that are still running the show, that are causing you to self sabotage. And until you heal the root of this problem, the sabotage will just keep showing up and shape shifting in some sort of way in your life. That's why you have to heal what's in the way. You know, it's easier to run a marathon when you drop 500 pounds of pain that you're carrying with you, right? So if you feel like, oh my God, I'm working so hard, but I'm not moving anywhere, that's usually the reason why when I coach business owners that are like stuck and they're not scaling, if they're like a million dollars a year and they have five or six employees and they're trying to get to 10 million and they're not, they're trying so hard, it's usually comes back to this thing right here. So when I say healing, what does that mean? In your everyday life, it means taking radical ownership for your triggers, for your stories, for your defaults, for your habits you're trying to break and working every day to heal that inner critic that keeps sabotaging your progress. So you need to stop with the blame game. It's not your mom's fault or your dad's fault, or your boss's fault or your partner's fault. It's you. Now you know what happened to you in your past wasn't your fault, but it is your responsibility. And so every morning, like it's important if you want to work on this is just take a pen and paper and ask yourself, what am I avoiding feeling right now? And whatever comes up, feel it. Don't try to fix it, don't try to bypass it. Just feel it. You know, that's what actually looks like to heal yourself every single day. And then the third thing that I have really found, the most successful people in the world do they outlast everybody. They have mastered consistency and boredom. The truth is this, 99% of people give up when it's too routine, it's too boring, or if it gets too hard in some sort of way like the 1%, they expect it to be hard. They keep going anyways. They expect it to be boring. They keep going anyways. Everyone's consistent when it's exciting. But winners like they're consistent when it's boring. Remember this success is is about doing the boring things every single day. It's not about these big huge moments. It's about just being consistent, doing the same thing day in, day out, day in, day out. Not getting shiny object syndrome and wanting to shift to something else, but just hammering away. Having a great year is not about having a hot start to the year. It's about showing up every single day no matter what. And so the shift I want you to start to think about is that boredom and isn't a problem. Boredom is usually a good thing. It's what's needed in order to break through. You know, it's like if you're mining for gold, you're going to have to take thousands and thousands of hits with that hammer in order to to get into where the gold actually is. So think about the boredom is just those thousands and thousands of hits until you finally get to the place where you're trying to get to. Repetition and boredom, they're not punishment. It's just the process that is required to in order to get to where you need to go. And so your job is not to feel motivated. Your job is to be relentlessly consistent. Relentlessly consistent. Even when your feelings don't feel like showing up. And so you've got to pick your non negotiables. Like what are your one to two non negotiables that if you did every single day for the next 365 days would change your life. What are your one to two non negotiables? And then do those things every single day for the next 365 days. Make them small so you can cross them off your list. But incredibly important things that move the needle in your life and you track them to make sure you keep doing them. You stack them so they continue to compound on each other and you just don't break the chain. And so really what you want to think about and through this episode is, you know, if you get nothing else from this episode, you want to remember this. The fastest way to get ahead is to become the type of person who shows up no matter what, who has a long term vision in short term, like, you know, short term urgency. But long term vision is what you're working towards, who honors your word and takes action when no one else is watching and does the boring things and continues to heal themself and values peace over drama and, you know, process over these short term bits of dopamine and being a disciplined person over being comfortable. No, this is about you building yourself into being somebody who is unrecognizable in 365 days. Not because you achieve some sort of goal or hit some sort of weight loss thing you're trying to get to, but because you're building yourself into the best version of you that you can become. And remember, you do not want to fit in with anybody else. You want to be different, you want to be weird, you want to stand out. That is what you need to do in order to have a life that's better than 99% of people out there. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me obdial jr r o b D I A L J R If you want to learn more about coaching with me outside of the podcast, you can go ahead and go to coachwithrob.com, once again, coachwithrob.com and with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.
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Episode: How to Get Ahead of 99% of People in 2026
Date: November 28, 2025
Host: Rob Dial
In this high-impact episode, Rob Dial unpacks how to get ahead of 99% of people by 2026—not just in terms of wealth, but in happiness, fulfillment, relationships, and long-term satisfaction. Rob challenges commonly held beliefs around “working harder,” and instead provides his playbook for rare results: cultivating discipline, vision, and emotional mastery. The episode combines motivational insights with actionable strategies, offering listeners a road map to become the person they desire to be by embracing uncommon habits and mindsets.
Tribal Mindset vs. Standing Out
“If you want 1% results in this life that you have, you cannot follow the 99% crowd.” (03:04)
Thinking in Decades, Not Days
“Most people are anxious because they're so stressed out about the thing that's right in front of them... they're being reactive versus being proactive in their life.” (04:40)
“I’m not talking about grinding 18 hours a day to prove something... This isn’t about burnout. This is about intentional intensity.” (06:10)
“Outworking isn’t about time, it’s about focus.” (11:49)
“Some of the most productive people I know go to bed when their kids go to bed at like 7 or 8pm... so you can work on yourself and your mission.” (13:43)
“You cannot outwork trauma. Believe me, I tried it for over a decade. Didn’t work.” (14:15)
“What am I avoiding feeling right now? And whatever comes up, feel it. Don’t try to fix it... just feel it.” (16:51)
“Everyone’s consistent when it’s exciting. But winners—they’re consistent when it’s boring.” (18:19)
“Your job is not to feel motivated. Your job is to be relentlessly consistent, even when your feelings don’t feel like showing up.” (20:06)
Journal Prompts (05:32)
Commit to Deep Work (11:37)
Embrace Radical Ownership (16:32)
Define Your Non-Negotiables (19:50)
On the Need for Vision Beyond Fitting In:
“You do not want to be like the crowd. I promise you, you don’t. The 1% that have the best lives in this world are weird. Like, they move differently, they don’t fit in, and they think way different.” (02:58)
About Boredom and Consistency:
“Success is about doing the boring things every single day. It’s not about these big huge moments. It’s about just being consistent.” (18:35)
The Heart of the Episode:
“The fastest way to get ahead is to become the type of person who shows up no matter what, who has a long-term vision and short-term urgency, who honors your word and takes action when no one else is watching, and does the boring things and continues to heal themself and values peace over drama and process over short-term dopamine.” (21:00)
Final Call to Action:
“You want to be different, you want to be weird, you want to stand out. That is what you need to do in order to have a life that’s better than 99% of people out there.” (21:57)
Rob Dial’s episode provides an energizing, no-excuses framework for those who want to live extraordinary lives. By shifting your thinking from short-term comforts to long-term vision, focusing your effort, healing your inner wounds, and showing up—especially when it’s hard or boring—you can separate yourself from the crowd and experience the rare, deeply fulfilling life of the 1%.
Key takeaway:
If you want to get ahead of 99% in 2026, outwork (with intention), outheal (your past), and outlast (through discipline and boredom). Show up every day, for a year, and become unrecognizable—in the best way.
Stay motivated, stay rare, and make the next year your most transformative yet.