Category Archives: productivity

Your #1 Priority May Lead You Astray

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While it’s good to set goals and establish priorities, there’s a risk when you become myopically focused on a single outcome.

Single mindedness can be okay for a while if you’re progressing nicely, but if you’ve gotten stuck and the needle isn’t moving, this stuckness can prevent you from making progress in any area of life. And that can really make you feel trapped or stagnant.

Have you ever seen the following issues in yourself or someone else?

  • Still needing to lose weight being used as an excuse not to invest in social life or relationships
  • Long-term troubles with financial scarcity or chronic health problems postponing meaningful lifestyle improvements
  • Misaligned relationships delaying entrepreneurial pursuits
  • Still living with one’s parents being used a reason not to date

Have you ever told yourself that you really, really have to fix one particular area of life before you can properly improve another area of life?

I’ve definitely done that before. I did it when I was broke. I did in my first marriage. I did it when I was feeling out of alignment with my first business. I repeatedly fell into the trap of obsessing over areas of life that were stuck, and somehow that made the stuckness even worse.

Sometimes it’s really hard to make forward progress in your area of greatest stuckness, even when you make that area your #1 priority. Sometimes it just won’t budge no matter how much force and effort you apply.

This can be immensely disheartening and draining. In particular, I found it super draining to keep trying to fix my finances when I was broke. I only fixed this area by shifting my attention to different parts of life that eventually led to good solutions for that stuck area.

I see similar patterns in others who keep trying to force progress in an area that isn’t progressing.

What’s the solution?

Give up… at least for a while. Surrender that stuck area to stagnation. Go invest what little energy you have left in some other area of life that you’ve been neglecting.

You’ll probably be astonished at how quickly you can make progress in a different area of life that isn’t being choked by the same degree of stuckness.

Maybe your finances are terrible right now, but you might make serious progress in your health and fitness at this time. Or switch your focus to having fun for a week or two.

Maybe you’re stuck with health problems, but you could potentially make wonderful improvements in your social life if you give it more attention (at least online at this time). A richer and more aligned social life could actually help you become healthier.

Many people, including me, have found that it’s when we give up and go attend to some other aspect of life, we finally start progressing in our primary area too – often in ways we never would have predicted.

I’m not entirely sure why this is – it just works so damned well though.

We could use the Law of Attraction frame and say that shifting focus elevates your vibe, and that helps get the stuck energy flowing again. We could say it’s due to stress reduction or a confidence boost. We could say it’s due to freeing up mental resources and thereby restoring your problem solving abilities. We could say that there’s a social effect, where more people may notice that you’re not such a Debbie Downer anymore, and now they’re happier to connect with you and bring you aligned opportunities and invitations.

How we explain this isn’t what’s most important here – use whatever frame you like as long as it gets you moving in some other direction. Just try to be open-minded about the possibility for non-linear progress. Realize that there are multiple potential reasons why it may be wise to shift your focus away from your #1 priority for a while.

There’s a good chance you already sense this instinctively. Do you notice a subtle voice nudging you to shift focus away from your stuck area? Do you think there may be a part of you that knows that the path to a solution requires some lateral movement first?

I know it can be hard to rationally explain to other people why you should shift gears. It’s like owing money to a gangster. You can’t justify that the best way to pay them back is for you to take a break from focusing on your finances for a few weeks. You may feel like you’ll lose your kneecaps if you go that route.

Try not to create that type of relationship within yourself though. Realize that breaking away from your #1 priority may be an intelligent and rational choice, even if your inner gangster doesn’t trust that it will work. At some point you have to face the hard truth that you’re not progressing and that continuing down the same path isn’t magically going to start working in the next week or two.

I’ve stumbled upon some of the most amazing advancements on my path of personal growth from lateral exploration. Here are some examples:

  • Volunteering in a nonprofit association helped me learn what I needed to make my first business profitable.
  • Going to Disneyland for 30 days in a row helped spawn the idea for Conscious Growth Club.
  • Attending a Hay House conference (mostly on spiritual topics) helped me change careers from game development to personal development.
  • Blogging about that same conference (but in a different year) led to a book deal and later speaking at that very same conference – twice.
  • Doing my first workshop led to meeting Rachelle, with whom I’ve shared a wonderful 10+ year relationship, including tons of travel adventures.
  • Doing a joint-venture business deal eventually led to an invitation to join the Transformational Leadership Council, which gave me dozens of growth-oriented friends along with more travel adventures.
  • Getting into international speaking led to some wonderful social and romantic experiences.

Getting stuck happens. Staying stuck is a choice.

Sometimes the energy doesn’t want to flow forward. Sometimes it wants to flow sideways. Maybe from a multidimensional perspective, sideways for you is actually forward in the grand scheme of life, the universe, and everything.

Recognize when the energy isn’t flowing in the direction you expect, and go look for where it does want to flow. Stop exhausting yourself with tiresome paddling, and find the current again.

Don’t be stubborn when you get stuck. Get back in tune with the possibility space. Stay humble, and remind yourself that you don’t know everything. Sometimes the fastest route forward is exactly where you don’t expect to find it.

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Fragile Habits

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Some habits are more fragile than others.

Once established, some habits are very delicate. If you miss a day or try to alter them, it’s easy to knock them out of place completely and see them fade out.

Other habits are more resilient. You can push and prod them, change them in different ways, and they still stick pretty well. At the extreme they act like borderline addictions – it’s harder to stop doing them than to keep doing them.

For me early rising is a relatively fragile habit. I need to be strict with it to keep it in place. I can let myself sleep in a little later very infrequently, like a few times per quarter for an extra hour or two if I really want, but otherwise it’s an always-on habit seven days a week. If I start permitting exceptions even once a week, there’s too much chance of falling out of the habit. Knowing how fragile it is makes it easier for me to accept its fragility and thereby maintain the habit.

Daily exercise is a more resilient habit overall, but some aspects of it are more fragile, so I still have to be careful with it. The timing is sensitive; it usually works best if I do it first thing in the morning. The format is less sensitive, but I’m most consistent with running outside. The duration is very flexible since I can maintain this habit just as well whether I do 30 or 60 minutes or more. The frequency is semi-fragile. If I do 5-6 days per week, I’m good – I don’t need to do this every day to maintain it.

How do you know how fragile certain habits are and to what extent? You test, and you keep track of what you learned from testing.

When some people fail to install a habit or lose a good habit they’d previously gained, they see it as a personal failing. I think that’s a weak way to frame it. Look to the parameters of the habit instead. If those had been slightly different, you might have succeeded. Don’t beat yourself up when a habit doesn’t stick. Examine how you were approaching the habit instead. Where did you cross the line from consistency to collapse?

It’s good to experiment with your habit parameters to see where the fragility is and where you can count on flexibility and robustness. Which tweaks are risky? Which changes are pretty safe? You can discover these answers through experience.

When you lean where the fragile edges are, you can go right up to them when you want extra flexibility without crossing them. Granted these edges will usually be fuzzy, but you can still map out where the safe zones and danger zones are.

I recommend establishing a strict baseline for your habits that you know you can stick with first. This is why I like 30-day challenges as a good starting point. Start with solid consistency for a good month at least. Don’t even skip one day. When you feel confident that you could continue as-is, you can try tweaking the habit here and there to map out the fragile zones. Maybe back off to 5 or 6 days a week. Try doing the habit at a different time of day. Change the duration. Change the setting.

Learn where flexibility works and where it doesn’t. If a habit starts to break, and you catch it early, you can return to your previous baseline for another week or two before you experiment again.

If you totally lose a habit for a while, you can re-establish it with a fresh 30-day challenge. But remember how you broke it, and do your best to avoid making that same mistake again.

One reason I struggled to lock-in being an early riser is that I thought I could be semi-flexible with it, like it would be fine if I gave myself a “cheat day” once a week or so. From many years of emails and coaching calls with people attempting to adopt a similar habit, I can tell you that this is a super common mistake that holds many people back. Too many times I gave myself permission to stay up late, and I screwed it up and lost the habit. I learned from experience that I need to be strict with it to maintain it. That realization keeps me on track. It’s actually easier to get up at the same time daily versus only six days a week.

My recent food logging habit, on the other hand, seems very resilient. It would be hard to break it, partly because it’s so easy to keep going with it. This is also a simple habit to re-establish even if I did break it since it doesn’t require any significant willpower to pick up where I left off. So I’m gradually opening up to be less strict while still keeping to the core value it provides, which is awareness of what I’m eating. I’m starting to eyeball the quantities of more foods that I eat often and where the calories normally fall into tight ranges. One banana is only going to have so many calories, and I really don’t need to weigh a few olives each time. It’s not going to matter much if my estimates are off by +/- 50 calories at the end of a day, especially since my exercise and activity varies each day too. Doing this habit imperfectly still provides essentially the same benefits as doing it perfectly, as long as I don’t fall below some minimum standard of tracking.

If you struggle to adopt or maintain certain habits, consider that you may be dipping into the fragile danger zone with them too often. You may be trying to maintain a more casual and flexible relationship with the habit than it permits. But you may also be able to squeeze more flexibility out of a habit if you accept the necessity from stricter form on the most fragile aspects. For instance, I can choose different routes to run each day.

There’s freedom in strictness. It’s more peace-inducing to know where the boundaries are since then you know what it takes to maintain the habit. Know your minimum standard means that you can trust the habit to stick as long as you stay at or above that standard.

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Your Giant Pumpkin

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One of my favorite business books is The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz. It uses the analogy of growing giant pumpkins and applies it to building a business.

The basic idea is to figure out who your best customers or clients are, so you can specifically tailor your business to serving them well. Then ideally you’ll attract more people like them and build a thriving business that’s also a joy to run.

Here’s the key though: To grow a giant pumpkin, you need to pluck the smaller pumpkins off the vine – whichever pumpkins aren’t good candidates for eventually becoming giant ones. Ultimately you want all of the vine’s energy flowing into growing just one pumpkin – the pumpkin that will become your giant one.

Mike suggests actually firing your misaligned customers (i.e. your partial matches), even if it means letting most of your customers go. Then rebuild from whatever is left, even if you only have one or two clients left after purging.

Note that this is similar to Marie Kondo’s strategy of releasing whatever possessions don’t spark joy for you. You could regard The Pumpkin Plan as The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up applied to business. Keep what sparks joy. Let the rest go. Then make sure whatever else you add sparks joy too. It’s about raising your standards and then keeping them high.

When you develop higher standards for the customers you attract, you can focus on building long-term, win-win relationships with them. Such people are delightful to serve. They appreciate what you do for them.

Consider a company you love to deal with. Compare that with a company you hate dealing with. Now flip it around. For the first company, you’re probably an awesome customer, and they may have good reason to want to invest more in a relationship with you. Would you like that too?

For the second company, however, you may be a bad customer for them, and they may be better off repelling you because they can’t actually do a good job of pleasing you. But they may be able to please and delight a different kind of customer. Do you see how that might be possible? A company that sucks for you to deal with might actually be decent or even good for someone else. You may not be a good investment for them, but someone else might.

I think how far you take this frame depends on your type of business and how much work is needed to serve people. With my blog I can serve lots of people who never become paying customers, and I’m fine with that because the Internet makes this very efficient. But since we also offer courses and Conscious Growth Club memberships, I have to be careful about the incoming flow there. If we attract misaligned people into the courses and CGC, it could make the business a hell to run and really slow us down.

Fortunately the nature of my work does a pretty good job of attracting the right people. I’ve published more than 1550 blog posts, so that does a lot of filtering by the nature of the topics. Once they read enough free articles, people are generally pretty good at figuring out if we’re a good match or if we’d be better off going our own separate ways.

When I first started blogging in 2004, I didn’t think about this. But over time I realized that blogging serves to filter for aligned versus misaligned matches. It attracts a pool of people who want to keep investing in a long-term relationship together, and it (sooner or later) repels people who don’t want that.

Occasionally I write articles to deliberately repel certain types of people when it’s pretty obvious that we wouldn’t be good matches for working together long-term. Here are some examples:

  • 10 Reasons You Should Never Have a Religion – Highly religious people generally don’t make good matches for my business. I’m an ex-Catholic and don’t belong to any religion, and that bothers many of those people who see me as a heathen or heretic or some kind of demon. I know because in my early years of blogging, they used to send me long emails filled with Bible quotes telling my why I was doomed. So partly I wrote that 2008 article to deliberately piss them off and clear them out (which actually worked quite well). I want my business to be build upon mutual respect with the people I serve. People who are too religious don’t respect my open-mindedness and curiosity much, and I don’t have much respect for beliefs built upon layers of goofy nonsense (including the beliefs I was taught when I was younger). Moreover, having a head full of religious dogma really gets in the way of exploring many aspects of personal growth that require open-mindedness and framing flexibility. While I do believe you can be religious and still grow, I’d much rather work with people who’ve outgrown such training wheels and have the maturity to go faster. We don’t really know how this reality actually works at a base level, and we never will, and we need to deal with that intelligently. So I see getting past this clingy, false truth phase as an important prerequisite for getting into the much juicier aspects of personal growth. That said, I’m okay if such people want to keep reading my blog posts, and if a few do become customers from time to time, that’s okay too. But I don’t want my business to cater to their fictions. Some people have actually thanked me for how my work helped them overcome the constraints and limitations of misaligned religious beliefs, and I welcome more customers who want to take that journey too. So that article is also an invitation.
  • How to Be Vegan (and other articles on veganism) – I’ve been vegan for 23+ years, and my wife is a long-term vegan too. We’re ethical vegans, so we see it as unethical to treat animals and their bodies as products for human use. I wasn’t born vegan, so I know what it’s like to live with a very different values system as well. I’m fine having customers with opposing values in this area. But it’s important that they don’t have an issue with my being vegan because these values infuse my business too. For instance, if we did a live event and served food at the event, we’d make sure that are the meals were plant-based. To some people that will be attractive. To others it will be acceptable. But some would resist dealing with that kind of business. If people are too resistant to values that are really important to me, it will create friction in our ability to invest in each other long-term. We’d lose respect for each other. With an online business this friction is lower than it would be under different circumstances, but I still want people to do their part to self-select. If someone has an issue with veganism, they’re unlikely to be a strong long-term match. But someone could still be non-vegan and accepting of my lifestyle and values, and we could still invest powerfully in each other. I am used to interacting with people with different values, and I want to work with people who can handle this as well for our mutual benefit. Moreover, I love attracting fellow vegans as customers, so this filter works well both ways.
  • Please Begone From My Reality, Foul Trump Supporters – Trump supporters are quite possibly the worst mismatches for my business. One of our core principles is truth alignment because truth is a key growth accelerator, and such people are demonstrably far from it, not to mention Trump himself. The whole America First mindset obviously doesn’t mesh well with a global business that attracts readers and customers from all around the world. Imagine what it would do to this community if it were infected with lots of hatred, violent attitudes, ridiculous conspiracy theories, and so much other Trumpian nonsense. This isn’t about politics at all. It’s mostly about basic intelligence. So personally and professionally, I prefer to repel Trump supporters like infected zombies that might bite if they get too close. I don’t want customers that I’d feel inclined to punch (and that many current customers would want to punch too). If I did cater to Trump supporters, they’d eventually piss off many of my very best customers, much like you see certain customers fighting over masks at various retail stores like Costco or Target. I’d rather have a harmonious business that sparks joy. Trump supporters spark nausea.

I think you get the idea.

Since I’m very actively involved in the business (including writing the blog posts, creating the courses, and doing the coaching calls in CGC), it’s important that people are able to accept me personally too, at least well enough to feel good about being customers of my business. I think the best policy here is honesty and openness about what I’m into. So I don’t try to hide my personal interests, including those that will repel some people, like D/s play or open relationships.

Some people will try to make their businesses appeal to as many people as possible by following the rule “Thou shalt not take a stand.” I might be able to grow my business differently if I did that too, but I wouldn’t enjoy it as much. It wouldn’t spark as much joy. And I think my customers and readers would pick up on that too, and it would drag down our relationships.

Consider that if you hold yourself to a higher standard of customers who spark joy for you, you’ll very likely want to engage with and invest more in your business – because you like it. You’ll remove a lot of the friction that many entrepreneurs suffer from. It’s challenging enough to develop and evolve a business with the best customers. You don’t need to inject mixed feelings, doubt, worry, and procrastination to make it harder on yourself. Just think of what it would be like to run a business that attracts mostly Trump supporters, and you’ll get a better idea of how important this is.

Even after three years of doing group coaching calls in Conscious Growth Club, I still look forward to them. The reason is simple – the wonderful people we have inside and the cooperative spirit we create together. We still have our differences, including some hefty debates now and then, but deep down there’s enough alignment that we can work very well together to help each other grow.

A group like CGC is vulnerable and delicate though. It’s hard to create a group like this, and it would be easy to break it. I do my best to make sure that the stream that feeds it isn’t filling up with people who’d ruin what we’ve built.

I often frame my blogging work as writing for current and future CGC members. I primarily write for the giant pumpkins, and a big part of this involves pruning those who’d resist what we’re doing. As I see it, there’s no need for bad blood when that happens – the mismatches are simply someone else’s giant pumpkins.

My web traffic these days is significantly lower today than it was at its peak many years ago, yet my business is doing better than ever. We have zero debt, abundant cash, and solid and stable income streams. There’s a wonderful group of aligned customers who appreciate what we offer and who want more. That’s a really nice place to be, especially during a pandemic when many other businesses aren’t doing so well.

I think it was critical not to try to be all things to all people, such as by writing only fluffy articles that no one could object to. If you want to invite stronger alignment, you have to invite objection too. That’s true both personally and professionally. But the rejections are usually quick and painless. The long-term relationships you build can provide so much mutual benefit over time.

It’s really about impact. A business will be more impactful with some people than with others. If you get duped into dealing with too many mini-pumpkins, you probably won’t have the long-term impact that would really light you up and make you love going to work each day.

You may not really know who your giant pumpkin is when you start. I didn’t. That’s okay. When pumpkins start growing on a vine, you won’t immediately know which ones to prune and which one to keep. Give it time. Pay attention. Look for the serious misalignments, and prune them quickly. Then feed more energy into the candidate pumpkins till a clearer winner emerges.

More generally, pay attention to which aspects of your business spark joy, and invest more in them. And notice which aspects spark nausea, and prune them. This is especially important to do for your customers. Aligned relationships are good for all involved.

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Appreciation Density

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In the past 11 weeks, I’ve lost an average of 1.15 pounds per week, mainly just by logging what I eat. This simple practice has helped me tweak and adjust my meal choices even though I’m still eating the same foods as I was previously. I’m eating less food in terms of calories, but my current diet is actually more satisfying than before. Since there’s no sense of restriction or deprivation, it’s frictionless to maintain this approach.

Let’s say that the appreciation density of a meal is your overall physical and emotional satisfaction with it, divided by its calories:

Appreciation Density = Satisfaction / Calories

I don’t exactly know how to calculate physical and emotional satisfaction though. Maybe we could rate the satisfaction of meals on a 1-10 scale, but fortunately that isn’t necessary. We can just compare based on equivalent calories by asking whether one meal is more or less satisfying than another. We can also do this at the level of individual ingredients.

Through food logging and a little reflection, I saw that some meals (and some ingredients) are more satisfying than others for the same number of calories.

I’ve learned that roasted eggplant is really satisfying relative to its calories. Peaches and strawberries are super satisfying as well. Steamed broccoli and zucchini with some hummus is a delightful meal – very satisfying for so few calories.

Some foods have diminishing returns if I include too much of them. For instance, 10g of olive oil on a salad may be pretty satisfying relative to the 90 calories it adds. But would 20g of olive oil be twice as satisfying? No, definitely not. Doubling the olive oil might only increase the satisfaction by an extra 20%, so it’s probably not worth it.

Adding 1/3 of an avocado to a salad can be really nice. But if I use a whole avocado, is it 3x as satisfying? Nope. I find that the sweet spot is to use about 1/4 to 1/2 of an avocado on a salad to get the maximum satisfaction relative to the calories.

Through lots of experimentation, I’m gradually figuring out better balancing points where I eat quantities of foods that raise the satisfaction level of a meal but where consuming more would lead to diminishing returns. So when I compose meals, I require each ingredient to pull its weight by meaningfully contributing to the overall satisfaction.

Note that satisfaction is mainly an emotional assessment. It’s based on how I feel during and after eating. How satisfied I’ll feel isn’t perfectly consistent. One day I may find 100g of some item optimal while I might prefer more or less of that item on a different day. By paying attention to my logs and connecting them to my inner sensations, I’m getting better at predicting what kinds of meals to make based on how I feel.

I don’t try to hold back from eating. I eat when I’m hungry. I just put a little more thought and care into making meals very satisfying relative to their calories.

Suppose you eat a 500-calorie lunch today. Have you ever considered how you might compose a 400-calorie lunch that’s actually more satisfying? If you could figure that out, you could shave off 100 calories per day while actually enjoying your lunch more. Now scale this up for every meal and snack, and come up with more solutions and variations. You could enjoy your food more while actually eating less.

I already eat an all vegan, mostly whole foods diet that typically includes 10+ servings of fruits and veggies per day, so take that into consideration. Making this diet highly nutritious isn’t an issue. But I don’t think I’d feel as emotionally satisfied if I tried to adapt this approach to a junk food diet. Whole foods leave me feeling better emotionally and physically.

I’ve been including some small indulgences, but I use them where they really add to the satisfaction. For instance, if I slice up two peaches (100 calories), and I add 50 calories worth of coconut whipped cream, that treat has a high appreciation density for its 150 calories, more than eating three peaches without the topping.

Another nice dessert is one date plus four pecan halves (80 cal). Split the date in two, and push two pecan pieces into each half – it’s like eating raw pecan pie. For this small addition of calories, it’s super satisfying as a little snack.

I don’t worry about empty calories in terms of low nutrition. I frame empty calories as too little satisfaction per calorie, which could include adding too much of an ingredient beyond a certain sweet spot of satisfaction.

By focusing on enjoying and appreciating my meals relative to their calories, I’m getting more appreciation per calorie today than I was when I started. I really enjoy the foods I eat. It feels like I’m doing the opposite of dieting, but I’m losing weight by eating this way.

This useful frame can be extended to other areas of life by generalizing the definition of appreciation density, like this:

Appreciation Density = Satisfaction / Cost

Cost could be your investment of time, energy, money, or some other factor.

So you could use this frame to select work projects, choose which friends to engage with, or decide how much time to spend on social media each day. Which investments satisfy you best? When does the satisfaction start to diminish?

Imagine what you could discover by combining this frame with time logging. Is 30 minutes of social media twice as satisfying as 15 minutes? How much journaling or meditation time is optimal for you? Would you feel more satisfied with an extra hour in the morning or the evening?

If you’re feel unsatisfied in some area of life, look at your appreciation density. Are you deriving enough satisfaction from your investments? If not, where’s the waste? Where are the empty calories? Where are you investing time, energy, money, or other resources and not getting much satisfaction in return? Obviously that waste needs to be cut if you want to increase your appreciation density.

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How to Extract 5-10x More Value From Your Personal Growth Investments

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We’re used to thinking about “receiving value” as a passive endeavor most of the time. We expect items and services that we purchase to provide value to us. We pay the price up front, and then we feel entitled to just relax and enjoy the value we’ve purchased.

It’s easy to expect that if you spend the money, your purchase should cough up its full value to you. I paid for you. Now give me what I’m owed.

But only some parts of life work that way, like if you buy and enjoy a nice latte. Buying it is the hardest part of the transaction. Drinking it is easy.

But have you ever made a major purchase that you were a little hesitant about because you knew it would require extra work, like buying a new phone or computer? Or maybe you paid for a trip. Or you stretched yourself to go to a seminar. What happens in those cases? The value delivery isn’t totally passive.

There’s an active element in many purchases. You must do your part to fully extract the value you’re paying for. You have to learn and set up the tech you bought. If you go to a seminar, you have to pay attention, take notes, and do your best to apply what you’ve learned afterwards; the ideas don’t automatically implement themselves. Even if you buy a fun video game, you still have to become skilled enough to enjoy it; it takes some effort to extract the fun.

Recently my wife and I bought some new adjustable pillows. They came overstuffed (as expected), so we had to remove some of the stuffing to adjust them to our desired firmness. It took extra work just to receive the full value of a pillow.

Some personal growth value can be derived passively. You can read articles and books, listen to podcasts, and watch videos. You may learn some interesting ideas this way, including many useful reframes. You may make some easy tweaks here and there. You’ll gain some clever hacks as well. But there are much bigger gains to be made that require extra effort to extract and apply.

Passive value is great. It’s just limiting. It would be nice if we could transform all parts of our life through easy consumption, but that isn’t the case.

I must have consumed about a billion words of personal growth content by now in the form of books, articles, audio programs, videos, speeches, seminars, and more. I’ve also created a lot of it. But in terms of the value I’ve received from personal growth, I’d say that the passive value benefits are no more than 10-20% of the total. The other 80-90% is on the active value side, requiring non-trivial effort to extract it.

Joining Toastmasters is a good example. You may gain some knowledge by showing up for the meetings. Sit in your chair, listen, observe, and maybe jot down some notes about anything that strikes you as interesting. I’ve seen members approach Toastmasters in this way, and they generally progress very slowly. It’s hard to even notice that they’ve improved much after a year or two; it’s like their skills are mostly frozen in time.

The members who advance fastest embrace the extra work to extract the value. They write and deliver speeches. They enter speech contests. They volunteer for different meeting roles. And they generally progress a lot faster. For $60 in dues, these members extract thousands of dollars worth of value.

But of course it takes more work to do this.

I’d say this is just something to accept about personal growth. If we acknowledge in advance that we’ll have to do this extra work, we won’t resist it so much, and we’ll be paid back with a much bigger avalanche of value.

Which is better? Buy a fancy new phone and barely learn how to use it… or buy a fancy new phone, master it, and enjoy more value from it just about every day? I’d say the answer depends on your priorities. Which areas of life are really worth mastering?

In my own business, I’ve found that people who accept this basic fact about reality make for much better customers too. They’ll do the work of extracting the value, such as by fully completing every lesson of a course. Some go through each lesson multiple times. They’re happier too because they get good results this way. So it’s win-win to focus on such people. It’s a very sustainable business model. I love customers who will go all-in to extract the value and then tell me about their great results afterwards. What’s not to like about that?

I think this also explains why some content creators burn out when they mainly serve people who are looking for passive value. You’ve probably heard of YouTubers who’ve called it quits due to frustration or overwhelm. I think one reason is that it’s less satisfying to try to help people get results through passive value, like if they’re mostly just watching videos. Such people may only be receiving 10-20% of the value that active value seekers would be able to achieve, so they may not be as appreciative or supportive of the work because they aren’t getting as much out of it.

Contrast this with serving an audience who will work harder to extract the value, so they may receive 5-10x as much value from the same amount of material. They’ll be a lot more appreciative, supportive, and forgiving, and it will be more rewarding to serve them.

It’s so much easier to satisfy and delight people who are willing to invest some extra effort to receive the full value of your contribution. They don’t just consume content. They actively test and apply ideas. They explore and experiment with you. They engage with the work. And they often reflect ideas back with improvements.

I’m this type of person myself. I’ve learned the hard way that being too passive doesn’t pay off that well. I get better results from personal growth investments where I have to do extra work to extract the value. Consequently, I’ve been beyond satisfied with some of my personal growth investments over the years because I’m willing to do a lot more work beyond just making purchases, watching videos, and showing up to calls.

I’m the kind of person who will spend $10K on someone’s coaching program and get $100K in value from it – hence I LOVE $10K coaching programs because I get such terrific results. The passive value is worth perhaps $10-20K. The other $80-90K of value is from the extra work I do to squeeze more value out of it.

When buying a piece of software that I’ll use a lot, I’m the kind of person who will watch every tutorial video and spend many extra hours learning the interface and practicing with it, so I can extract more value from using it over the years. I grew up using software where reading the manual was often essential because the interfaces were much less intuitive, and there was no Google to look things up.

Here’s a simple tip for extracting 5-10x more value from your personal growth investments: Decide in advance that you won’t be outworked when it comes to extracting the value. Show up with a pick and shovel.

Don’t just go a few steps beyond passivity. Ask yourself what standard is expected of you for extracting some decent value from your investment. Then beat that standard – by a lot.

If you buy a book, for instance, we could say that the baseline standard is that you’ll at least read it. But what standard did you apply for the books where you got the most value? Did you discuss them with others, take notes, test ideas, read them multiple times, bookmark pages, etc?

You’re severely limiting your progress if you focus on passive value through osmosis. Don’t wait for value to seep in. Go squeeze the full value from your investments.

Be like an outstanding juicer. Don’t leave wet pulp behind.

Now it may not be realistic to always apply this standard, but when it really counts, it’s an awesome standard to use.

When I was in my 20s, I wouldn’t just buy an audio program and listen to it once. I’d listen to some of them 50+ times (for a 6-hour program), to the point where I had them virtually memorized. I can still hear the voices of Earl Nightingale, Brian Tracy, and Denis Waitley echoing in my head sometimes. Additionally, I kept testing the ideas from those programs in a variety of ways. I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on personal growth materials, so I did my best to squeeze all the juice out of what I could afford.

This approach paid off very well. I juiced one $60 time management course for all it was worth, applying the ideas to go through college faster, thereby saving a few thousand dollars just in tuition. (College was a lot less expensive in the 90s.)

The truth is that a lot of personal growth ideas work amazingly well, but it takes work to extract and apply the best ideas. Don’t lament this fact. Do your best to accept and then embrace it.

Despite the pandemic I’ve learned that many readers of my blog are having an amazingly good year. Some directly credit their active application of personal growth ideas as being instrumental in helping them stay positive, overcome setbacks, navigate career pivots, and spot aligned opportunities. It’s great to see them adapting and thriving by being so active during these months.

We’re surrounded by tremendous opportunities for growth, learning, and improvement in life and business right now, but those who show up with picks and shovels are extracting a lot more value than those who are mostly relying on their eyes and ears.

How have you been showing up this year?

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Your Weekly Priority Card

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When you have a lot of quarterly goals, it can be tricky to keep them prioritized, especially since priorities can shift as you go through the quarter. So it’s good to have a reliable practice to refocus your attention on your top priorities.

One simple practice I’ve been using lately is to create a priority card at the start of each week. It’s just an index card with my top priorities for the week listed on it. I keep it near my desk and normally review it to begin each workday, along with reviewing my other quarterly goals. This helps me see the week’s priorities in the context of bigger goals, which makes me feel more committed to progress.

Here’s what my priority card for this week looks like:

It only takes seconds to fill out one of these cards, so it’s very straightforward. This week my #1 priority is to finish and publish the two remaining bonuses for the Stature course. One bonus is a short text document – basically a character design sheet – which is almost done. I expect to have that one done and published today or tomorrow. The final bonus is a collection of audios (Stature builders) that will likely take me a few days to finish.

My other priorities include making some improvements to the Stature portal and doing a postmortem for the Stature project.

I expect to do these in the order listed. I’ll have the Stature project 100% done when these items are completed, which will be a nice result. It feels good to bring a long project to full completion.

Do I know I can complete these items in a week? I know I can work on them a decent amount this week, but since they involve some creative work that’s tricky to predict time-wise, I may need more than a week to finish. That’s okay. I can continue working on them next week if necessary. But the priority for this week is to move these projects forward towards completion.

These projects have detailed action steps listed in Nozbe, so the priority card items refer to known projects that have already been mapped out. I know what needs to be done, so the main decision is to flow through these particular action steps this week.

There are dozens of other projects that I won’t touch this week – eventually they’ll get their turns as well, but I can only fit so much into a single week. While I could jump around and make progress on lots of different projects in a week, this week I’d like to maintain more of a mono-focus and move this one project forward, especially since it’s so close to the finish line.

I can still maintain habit-based activities such as daily blogging and other pre-scheduled commitments each week. The priority card helps me make good use of my discretionary work time – i.e. those blocks of time that aren’t already spoken for.

Setting priorities also helps to clarify posteriorities. Anything not listed on my priority card for a given week isn’t a priority for that week. I may still be able to work it in, but I’d rather make progress on the priorities first. This doesn’t mean that other items aren’t important, but it does mean that I’ve decided they aren’t as important for me to attend to in the current week.

To make meaningful progress on interesting projects, something else has to wait. If you don’t decide in advance what has to wait, your focus is more likely to become scattered or chaotic throughout the week. You’ll still have to make those prioritization decisions at some point, but your decisions may be ad hoc and inconsistent if you don’t maintain a reliable process for weighing options and deciding.

Filling out a weekly priority card after reviewing my quarterly goals works well for me. I’m basically breaking off a chunk of my quarterly goals to set priorities for the upcoming week.

I encourage you to make your own priority card for this week. Test this idea to see if it helps you focus better and improve your results. Grab and index card and a marker or pen right now, and make it so.

After you fill out your priority card, keep it somewhere convenient, so you’ll review it each day. I recommend that you use one of your devices to set a daily reminder to review it at a certain time, so you’ll have a convenient trigger for the review action.

As I noted earlier, it’s best to set priorities for the week after reviewing your quarterly goals. If you don’t have quarterly goals intelligently defined, you can still apply this idea without them, but it’s best to set weekly priorities based on long-term goals. Also consider joining us in Conscious Growth Club next year, and we’ll walk you through a 5-step process to define and update your goals at the start of every calendar quarter. It does take some practice to get into the rhythm of doing this, but it makes a world of difference in the progress you can make. A delightful benefit of this kind of investment is being able to set and achieve meaningful goals and advancing them week by week and quarter by quarter.

Update (several hours later): As expected I got one of the remaining Stature bonuses completed and published today. So that’s a very nice start to the week!

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Graduating From $20 Problems to $20K Problems

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One simple tip for inviting more abundance into your life is to elevate the cost of the problems you normally focus on.

Suppose you order groceries online and have them delivered. And suppose the company screws up several items in your order. Maybe you feel inclined to complain and get a refund on those items.

Perhaps you take some time do the following:

  1. Feel upset.
  2. Vent to someone else about it.
  3. Think about following up with customer service, wondering how they’ll respond.
  4. Actually write to customer service.
  5. Feel distracted while awaiting a response.
  6. Read the response from customer service.
  7. Receive a polite apology and $20 refund on your order.
  8. Finally let it go.

So you successfully processed and solved a $20 problem.

That’s fine. You can do that, but be wary of making a long-term habit of this. Ten years from now you may still be dealing with $20 problems. Is that what you want? Or would you like to graduate to more expensive problems?

The more time you spend thinking about $20 problems, the less time you spend dealing with different classes of problems – $200 problems, $2K problems, $20K problems, $200K problems, etc.

Even if you solve lots and lots of $20 problems, you’d have to solve 1000 of them to equate to the financial impact of solving one $20K problem. You can ignore hundreds of $20 problems and solve just one $20K problem now and then, and you’ll still come out way ahead financially.

Of course there are other considerations. Solving lots of $20 problems could add up to a significant mental and emotional impact. It’s not only about the money. But it can still be helpful to consider the financial impact of each problem you’re dealing with to consider if it’s really worth your time.

I still deal with $20 problems now and then, but I try to limit myself to the ones that matter to me. For instance, Rachelle and I recently spent some time considering new pillows to buy for our bed. This was a $50 problem. But since we’ll be spending a lot of time sleeping on those pillows and since a bad choice could cause some angst, including physical discomfort and lower quality sleep, we wanted to take the time to select some really good pillows. Taking an hour to weigh options and make that choice seemed reasonable. So even though it looks like a $50 problem, we could also see it as a $50K problem for the potential productivity and lifestyle impact.

However, if the impact of a decision is really just $20 or $50, then it’s best to work on your framing. Realize and accept that the more time and energy you spend dealing with decisions at this level of financial impact, the more you steal time from investing in bigger, more impactful decisions.

I know it can be hard to let go of $20 decisions, but this is an important skill to develop if you want to progress financially. You can’t keep collecting coupons year after year – unless you start finding $20K coupons.

Here are some frames you may want to progress towards:

  • Your Starbucks points don’t mater. If some of them expire, you’ve lost a few dollars. It’s not even worth caring about. It’s not even worth your time to check their latest promotions.
  • It doesn’t matter who pays for dinner. You can pay. The other person can pay. It’s better not to spend much time thinking about it since that just wastes neural energy.
  • Buy the best quality tech you can afford. Then you needn’t waste time wondering if you should have bought something better. Don’t skimp on your tools.
  • Take all the mental energy you would have spent fussing over $20 decisions, and use it to negotiate a meaningful raise at work, or do a new marketing campaign for your business. Even if you just bring in an extra $5K per year, that’s equivalent to solve 100 $50 problems or 250 $20 problems.
  • Solve fewer, bigger problems. Let lots of little problems die unsolved.
  • Instead of solving lots of little problems, solve the problem of finding someone to solve those little problems for you.

Keep progressing. At some point you have to stop fussing over $20K problems and opportunities, so you can focus on $50K or $100K issues.

At one point a $20K opportunity may excite you, but to progress beyond that level, you eventually have to start seeing $20K opportunities as partial matches and let them go. It’s really hard to see $50K opportunities when you’re still tempted by $20K ones, just as it’s harder to spot paper money when you’ve trained your mind to notice coins on the ground.

When you’re dealing with a problem or an opportunity, pause and ask yourself: Is this a $20 issue? A $2K issue? A $200K issue?

Which class of problems and opportunities feels aligned for you to deal with right now? What kinds of problems make you feel really good when you solve them (versus feeling empty or dissatisfied)? Are you keeping your focus at your desired level? Are you reminding yourself to let go of the partial matches?

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Studying Yourself

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You can make a lot of interesting personal growth gains by studying yourself and your own responses instead of trying to follow someone else’s behavioral prescriptions. Studying yourself is especially useful in the areas of health and productivity habits.

What actually creates good results for you? Quite often you’ll find that what works best for you in real life won’t be found in any book or seminar. You can learn ideas from others to inspire your own experimentation, but you may get the best gains by assembling your own unique collection of behaviors and practices.

When doing self-experimentation, it’s important to protect your self-esteem from your behavioral results. Look at your behaviors and their effects separately, and honestly assess their impacts and results. Don’t wrap your self-esteem into the effects of your behaviors because problem behaviors can be changed. Beating yourself up for having a problematic behavior will only slow you down. Let the behavior be the problem you want to work on; don’t weave it into your self-image.

As I mentioned previously, I’ve been engaging in a detailed self-study of my diet for the past 7.5 weeks. I’m raising my awareness about what I’m actually eating and how different meals affect me. Based on what I’m learning, I’m making lots of micro-adjustments and doing small tweaks to optimize my eating habits.

The main part of this is food logging, which involves writing down everything I’m eating, so I can see the rational truth as it really is. Pen and paper is far superior to memory here. I also add up the calories to get a sense of how calorically dense each meal is.

This helps me do little experiments, such as seeing what happens if I eat 500, 700, or 1000 calories before noon. Is it better to have a lighter 300-calorie dinner or a denser 700-calorie one? What happens if I mix walnuts into my steel cut oats versus a little coconut oil versus not adding any fat? Soon I’ll test eliminating the oats and eating something else for breakfast, like roasted potatoes, onions, and peppers with zucchini hummus.

Later this month I also plan to start testing what happens if I go grain-free and legume-free at the same time. I’ve done grain-free and legume-free tests before, but I haven’t done both at the same time except while I was also eating 100% raw.

One result I pay attention to, which is partly subjective, is how my morning runs feel. Do I feel energetic or sluggish? Do I feel motivated or run, or do I feel like skipping more days? I can also check my pacing since my watch records that. I’ve learned, for instance, that if I have a relatively low-calorie day (like 1600-1700 calories), I’m likely to run slower and feel less energetic during an early morning run the next day. Skimping on calories just makes me feel less energetic.

I can also see that just the act of measuring and paying more attention to what I’m eating is making it very easy to lose weight. I’ve now dropped 10.8 pounds since I started on May 14. This seems like a very easy way to slim down. It’s really about paying attention, which leads to better choices.

I like that there are no rules with this approach. I’m just paying closer attention to some of my body’s responses, and I’m making refinements based on that.

Another side effect is that I’m enjoying good food more than ever.

I’m really loving peaches and typically eat a few each day now, as long as we have some ripe ones. I’m buying 24 of them at a time to make sure I don’t run out so quickly. Costco has been having some really amazing yellow peaches in stock lately. I’m also eating lots of blueberries, strawberries, apricots, broccoli, zucchini, yellow squash, bok choy, kale, mixed greens, celery, and spinach.

You can extend this kind of experimentation to other areas of life. This can lead to some real breakthroughs.

I love the way I generate income, which I arrived at through many years of experimentation. I enjoy the combination of doing launches a few times per year plus passive income streams in the background.

I also love having an unusual relationship. I don’t know of any other couples who relate to each other like Rachelle and I do. Our relationship is rich is laughter, cuddling, affection, playfulness, and sexiness. Even after 10+ years together, the relationship still feels spicy. To make that possible, we just had to go our own way and do what works for us.

Some people resist going off script to experiment because of judgment from other people. But improving your results is a good antidote to that. If someone complains that you’ve gone off the deep end, poke fun at them for only playing in the shallow end where all the kids are peeing. The deep end is where you’ll find better results.

If you’re really worried about other people’s approval, however, you’ll likely get more of it from the people you respect if you stop chasing approval from people you don’t respect. Why on earth would you respect someone who criticizes you for using the perfectly valid and rational tool of self-study?

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How Long to Install a New Habit?

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Some sources used to say that it takes 21 days to form a new habit, which most people are likely to find overly optimistic. Even 30 days is on the optimistic side.

The truth is that the time to install a new habit depends on the person, the habit, the environment, and the motivation.

How much experience do you already have with habit formation? How much have you trained those discipline muscles?

What temptations are present that could draw you away from the habit? How tempting are they?

What’s your purpose for installing the habit? Is it really compelling, or does it barely register?

As a general rule of thumb, I’d say 60 days is a decent average ballpark estimate for getting a new habit reasonably well installed, but some habits could take twice as long to put on autopilot. Furthermore, some habits will never be properly installed no matter how much time passes – they’ll always require a nontrivial amount of conscious willpower to keep executing day by day.

Moreover, even a habit that gets installed for months or years can still be broken eventually.

I’m often surprised at the range of times it takes to install a new habit. There’s a lot of variability.

When I first went from vegetarian to vegan, I started with a 30-day trial. I’d been vegetarian for 3.5 years at that point. The last item I dropped was cheese. I’d say it only took me about a week to feel like I was permanently vegan. I lost seven pounds in that first week as my body finally had a chance to purge years of built-up dairy clog. Seeing what was coming out of me made it easy to decide to never put it back again. That was 23.5 years ago, and it’s been a no-brainer to maintain that habit ever since. I doesn’t require any willpower to stay vegan. I’m never tempted to go back to the old world I left. That would feel like undoing a graduation.

I had figured that going fully vegan would take more practice and adjustment, but it was actually one of the breeziest habit changes ever. The purpose aspect made this habit way easier than most.

Becoming an early riser was more challenging. I struggled with this one for years till I stumbled upon the counter-intuitive technique I shared in How to Become an Early Riser. That led to success. I do occasionally fall out of this habit now and then, usually by choice to experience something different for a while, like having more nighttime hours. But I still love those early morning hours and keep returning to the long-term stability of this habit. I think that in the past 90 days, I’ve stayed in bed past 5am perhaps two or three times to cuddle with Rachelle for an extra hour or two. So this one is very stable.

Whenever I want to reboot this habit, I’d say it takes me less than a week to feel like I’m back in the flow with it. Remembering the benefits surely helps.

Oddly a very simple habit like doing proper hygiene for my teeth took 1-2 months of consistent practice to feel like I’d really installed to the point where I do it automatically without thinking much about it.

For my daily blogging habit this year, it took about 45-60 days before I felt like I’d woven it into the fabric of my days, and it didn’t feel like some external task that I was wedging in. If I had an unusual schedule that disrupted the timing for the habit, then it might feel a little misaligned, but that’s been relatively rare.

Zeroing out my email inbox was another easy habit to install, taking virtually no time at all. I was never the kind of person who’d allow hundreds of emails to pile up in my inbox though. I feel like it’s a lot to have more than 5-10 messages in there at once. I prefer to bring my email inbox back to empty whenever I check it, and leaving even one message in there doesn’t feel right. If I’m not going to reply to a message right away, I move it to a different folder to be processed later. I never use my email inbox as a to-do list.

Frankly I don’t understand people who allow thousands of emails to pile up in their inboxes. They must use very different framings because I could never imagine allowing that to happen. I’d feel like I was priming myself to feel stressed and undisciplined whenever I had to look at such a mess. I wonder how people are able to frame a cluttered inbox without having it lower their confidence and self-image. Do you really feel like you’re on top of your projects when you look at that giant list of messages? Wouldn’t it feel so much nicer to leave it empty each time if you could do that on autopilot without having to think about it?

What made the email habit easy to install was actually a different habit that took way longer to install properly – at least several months to get it going and perhaps a few years to get it down consistently. That habit was to maintain a structured personal management system for my projects and tasks. I use Nozbe for that, and I’m still happy with it.

Another related habit is that I question whether certain emails should even be sent to me in the first place. If I had an inbox piling up with emails that I wasn’t even opening, I’d unsubscribe from them, tell the senders to stop sending those kinds of messages, or add an automated filter to block them. That’s the main reason there’s no pile-up – such emails are nuked before I even see them. That means fewer distractions and no negative priming for clutter. Think of how much time and focus is wasted by looking at the same messages repeatedly.

The habit of daily exercise also took a while to install – about six months to really get it ingrained. I may still fall out of this habit now and then, but it’s easy to reboot. For a proper reboot, at least a six-week commitment is warranted. Exercising for 30 days won’t necessarily make it stick.

Some habits are so worthwhile that even if they take a long time to install, and even if they remain vulnerable afterwards, they’re still worth the investment. Getting my personal organizing systems in order was one of those. I struggled with that for a long time, but it pays off with so much delightful flow and long-term confidence. It’s so great to be able to trust such habits to follow through on bigger commitments. This makes life more rewarding and fun, and it grants more freedom for spontaneity. If you like freedom, fall in love with order.

In my 20s I was way too impatient with many habits. If I couldn’t get something working in a few weeks, I’d often drop it and try something else. Now that I’m in my late 40s, I’ve learned to think more long-term, knowing that even if it takes many months or years to tame a new habit, that habit could be paying dividends for decades. So it doesn’t phase me to think about investing in a new habit for several months, just to get started with it. When you think about a habit enduring for decades, who cares if it took a few weeks or six months to acquire it?

Don’t worry so much about how long it takes to install a habit. Instead, consider which habits could so enrich your life that they’re worth a six-month commitment to get them installed and running on autopilot. When a habit is on autopilot, it feels uncomfortable not to do it, and your day doesn’t feel complete without it.

Remember that the months ahead are going to pass anyway. Depending on the investments you initiate today, you could find yourself with a really awesome long-term habit on autopilot by the end of the year – or your autopilot could be about the same as it is now. If you expect that there will be some challenges, and you conquer those hills anyway, you’ll get to enjoy some nice results. Think of this as a gift for your future self.

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No ❌ Days!

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I’m more than half done with my 374-day blogging challenge, which started on Dec 24, 2019. I’ve done 191 days and have 183 days to go. My blog currently has 1517 published posts, so there will be an even 1700 at the end of the year.

These types of daily challenges are mentally won or lost before Day 1 begins. It’s best to remove the doubt first. This includes anticipating the objections that various parts of your mind will come up with and how you’ll deal with them as they arise. If you’re unprepared for those objections, they may surprise you along the way and make you want to quit, which you’ll likely regret.

One simple internal defense against quitting is to see your daily commitment as an issue of honor. I tell the whiny parts of myself that we can’t quit because that would be dishonorable, so we’re not going to go there. They have no good counter-argument for the honor issue, so they surrender to it. Many of those parts care about honor as well.

Another defense mechanism is that I tell myself that when it gets difficult, it’s a growth experience. It’s easy to write when I feel inspired. It’s harder to write when I’d rather not write, but in those writing sessions, I build more self-discipline, confidence, and the ability to surrender to what I’ve already decided to do. I also stretch my creativity to work with whatever level of energy and motivation I have, which makes it more efficient and reliable.

Here’s an especially powerful skill to add to this collection. Acknowledge the tremendous negative memory that would be created by quitting partway through. Going six months and then stopping isn’t half a win. It’s a loss, one that will still be remembered decades from now. That would be a terrible curse to bestow upon my future self. I’d rather gift him with a lifetime memory of success. While some may look back on 2020 as a cursed year, I want to remember this as the year I wrote and published more than I ever have in any other year. For me it’s a year of stretching my self-discipline and building more creative confidence.

You can let circumstances write the story of this year for you, or you can choose to write your own story. This year is only half written so far. What will you write for the second half? Have you already made that second half a win or a loss in your mind? Are you already regretting tomorrow?

When I’ve quit on certain challenges in the past, many years before I started blogging, I still hold those memories today. I’d have preferred to look back upon memories of pushing through to meaningful successes and accomplishments instead of stopping before crossing the finish line. The enduring sting of those memories motivates me not to create more of them.

Remember that whenever you quit on yourself, you curse your future self with the lifelong memory of quitting, and your confidence takes a hit. That’s a big price to pay. It’s easier to just do one more day of discipline, again and again, till you achieve your goal. That’s always the basic decision, isn’t it? One more day of discipline or a lifetime of regret – which do you want?

Quitting on a personal commitment isn’t neutral. It doesn’t just drop you back down to even, as if you never started in the first place. It’s a genuine setback, especially for your long-term self-trust and self-confidence. It gives you a negative result, and it can take a while to recover from that.

One reason I chose to do this blogging challenge is so that I’ll always have the memory of 2020 being the year I published to my blog every single day. I want to add that to my life as a cherished reference experience, just like I cherish the memory of exercising every single day some years, the first one being 1997.

This daily blogging goal isn’t 100% under my control. Something could happen to me along the way that physically prevents me from completing it. If such an event were to occur, I could forgive myself if there wasn’t a realistic option to do otherwise. But I’m not going to quit on myself since that would create a lifelong disappointment.

When you do 30-day, 90-day, or 365-day challenge, what’s your defense against quitting partway through? Figure that out before you begin. It’s part of the early game of success. Create the victory in your mind before you step up to the starting line; otherwise you’ve already defeated yourself.

In Conscious Growth Club, we do fresh 30-day challenges at the beginning of every month, so 12 times per year. Members who choose to participate chart their progress, either by adding a checkmark or an X for each day of the month, like this:

I like to tell people: Decide before you begin that there will be no ❌’s. An ❌ is not an option.

Really I think we shouldn’t even have ❌’s as part of the challenges. We should use a skull and crossbones ☠️ emoji instead to drive home the point that if you miss a day, you failed the challenge, and now you’re wallowing in freakish misery forever.

That kind of framing may sound harsh, and I’ll agree that it is, but it really helps to prevent ❌’s.

Ideally the only progress logs we should see for these challenges ought to look like this:

I’d love to see this become the standard for every member who does them. And this is why we train on these challenges again and again – to kill the ❌’s for good.

No ❌ days – ever! It’s all ✅’s – or the lifelong misery of ☠️.

With this post that’s 192 days in a row… 182 to go. 🙂

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