"Just be yourself" might be the most dangerous advice you were ever given.

I know how that sounds. It's a nice thing to say, and the people who say it usually mean well. But think about what it actually means for a second. If you stay exactly who you are, where you are right now, you never get better at anything.

And here's the part most people miss. You don't even get to stay the same.

You are either growing or shrinking

When I was younger, a couple of ideas got stuck in my head that completely changed the way I think about this. The first one was simple: you're never standing still. You're either growing or you're shrinking.

People think that if they do nothing, they'll just stay the same. That isn't true. The gym is the easiest example. If you go, push yourself, and do the work, you get stronger. If you don't go, you get weaker.

There's an old Greek myth about a man named Sisyphus. He was punished in the underworld, and his punishment was to push a boulder uphill forever. If he ever stopped, the boulder rolled back down and he had to start again.

That's a dramatic picture, but I think it's how life works. Your investments, your financial future, the man you're becoming, your muscle in the gym, the way your mind develops, even the patterns of language you use. None of it ever stays the same. You're either going up or you're going down.

The second idea I heard was this: choose your hard. Life is always hard. You just get to choose whether it's hard now or hard later.

Think about trying to get strong. You can sit on the couch, watch TV, play video games, and eat ice cream and pizza. That's easy now. But later on you have health issues, less discipline, less motivation, and less strength to do the things you want to do.

Or you can flip it. You get up and go to the gym. You make a salad and cook a steak instead of ordering pizza. That's harder now. The weight is heavy, and it's a struggle. But through that struggle you actually become better, and later on you breathe better, your health is better, you're stronger, and your mind works better.

When I put those ideas together, they boiled down to one. The path that builds me into the man I want to be, the one that gives me the results and the life I want, is almost always going to be harder. And it's almost always going to be better.

Harder but better.

If you want an average life, do average, normal things. If you want an extraordinary life, you have to do extra compared to what the ordinary person does. Inputs and outputs. Cause and effect. If you want to be more than average, you have to do more than average.

Why "just be yourself" keeps you stuck

The biggest reason this advice is dangerous is that labels lock you in.

I first understood this while reading Napoleon Hill's books Think and Grow Rich and Outwitting the Devil. Hill talks about something called autosuggestion. The idea is that whatever you tell yourself repeatedly starts to become true.

It's scriptural too. Scripture says, "Death and life are in the power of the tongue, And those who love it will eat its fruit" (Proverbs 18:21, NKJV). God spoke creation into being. In Genesis 1:3, God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. And we are made in His image. If God's words hold power, and we are made in the image of God, it makes sense that the words we speak over ourselves hold more power than most people think.

Now think about what "just be yourself" means for investing.

Say you know you should have your money working for you, but you've never invested and you don't know how. If you just be yourself, the thought goes like this: I don't know how to invest. I'm not an investor. So I'm not going to invest.

That means you never get better. And by never getting better, you actually get worse, because of opportunity cost. A dollar you invested ten years ago is worth a lot more than a dollar you invest today. A dollar you invest today is worth a lot more than a dollar you invest ten years from now. Every year you wait is money that could have been working, growing and compounding for you.

It's the same in business. I'm building Stock Market Starters because I believe teaching people to invest is the most valuable thing I can do. I'm not that good at business yet. The software tools I've built aren't even paying for themselves yet. If I took the advice to just be myself, I would quit.

It's the same at the gym. I started going almost two years ago with my brother. He's younger than me, and he's still stronger than me. When I started, I didn't have the form, the technique, the routine, the endurance or the strength. I felt weak and out of place. If I had just been myself, I would have stopped going.

So instead of "just be yourself," decide who you want to be and aim for that. Look at who you are right now. Keep the parts you like and make them better. Take the parts that need work and improve them, or cut them off and do something different.

How to actually become who you want to be

There are two things that make this doable.

The first is to make the hard thing easy. Suffering is the path to greatness. At the gym, your muscle fibers actually tear and then repair stronger. Growth costs something. So the trick is to make the harder but better thing easier to do than not do.

When I started going to the gym, I didn't have the habit yet. But every day my brother knocked on my door: "We're going to the gym in 30 minutes. You ready?" Then ten minutes. Then, "Let's go." Skipping meant letting him down and letting myself down, so going became easier than staying home. Eventually the habit was built, and now I go five or six days a week.

If you don't have a brother knocking on your door, set it up another way. Find someone to hold you accountable. Set five alarms so it's more annoying to turn them all off than to get up. Lay your gym clothes out the night before.

The same thing works with investing. Set up automatic recurring investments so a set amount goes in every time you get paid. Once you start, momentum builds, and the further you get, the less likely you are to give up.

The second thing is don't lie to yourself.

Confidence comes from trusting yourself, and trusting yourself comes from keeping the promises you make to you.

I heard an idea in an audiobook once (I don't even remember which book). Picture walking across a little bridge to work every day, and deciding you'll pick up one pebble and throw it into the river every single day for 90 days. Once you decide that, you do it, no matter how pointless it feels. You don't get annoyed on day seven and throw in a handful to be done with it. One pebble, every day, exactly as you said.

That's how you learn to trust yourself. Scripture says, "And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32, NKJV). I try very hard not to lie to myself or to others. I'm not perfect at it. But when you speak truth and then relentlessly do what you said you would do, you become the person you decided to be. Build the vision, lay out the steps, and then do the steps. Even if you don't get all the way there, you'll be a lot closer than where you started.

None of this is about burning down your personality or the joy you were born with. It's about becoming who you were created to be, on purpose.

To be honest, it has a cost. Habits are slow to build. If you invest, you'll lose a little money at some point. If you build a business, it will cost you time and energy. But in my experience, it has always been worth it. And when you feel resistance, that's usually a sign you're on the better path.

If investing is the hard thing you know you should be doing, I want to make it easier. That's why I created the First Stock Challenge, a free challenge for beginners who want to learn to invest for themselves. You can learn about the First Stock Challenge here.

And if it isn't investing, ask yourself what the hard thing in front of you is, and how you can make it easier to do today.