Category Archives: productivity

Goal Traps

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The end of a calendar quarter and the start of a new one is a great time to set fresh goals for the next 90-days.

In Conscious Growth Club we go through a 5-step quarterly planning process each quarter, whereby our members review their recent progress and then set and share their goals for the coming quarter. As part of this process, I host a live Zoom call to review the goals that members have set and to highlight best practices and potential pitfalls. The intention is to help members set goals they’re more likely to achieve.

We just did one of those calls this morning. I find them motivating and inspiring because they unearth a lot of insights into how we set worthwhile goals and make real progress, one quarter at a time. It’s especially rewarding to watch members improving in this area each time they go through the process. Some have made impressive strides in the past year, getting a lot more clarity about what actually inspires them and what doesn’t. We pay a lot of attention to the relationship between goals and actual results, and that’s a big part of what we explore on these calls.

During these calls, I like to point out some best practices as well as traps to avoid. I thought a nice topic for today’s blog post would be to share some of those tricky traps to avoid, which can reduce the effectiveness of goal setting. This is really just scratching the surface because today’s call was 3 hours long, so we really go into a lot of depth in CGC, but I’ll aim to share some of the less obvious yet still important items instead of those you’ve likely encountered elsewhere.

Deferred Decisions

A goal is a decision and a commitment. Setting goals can be uncomfortable because you’re narrowing your options and tightening your focus, and it’s common to try to keep your options open by pretending to commit. A common way to water down your goals is by defining a goal as a decision to be made and thereby not really committing yourself.

A telltale sign that you’re doing this is your goal includes words like define, decide, identify, figure out, determine, research, etc. Your framing is that your goal is really to make a decision instead of to implement a decision. But if you don’t know what result you’re trying to achieve, you haven’t really set a goal yet.

It’s fine to research a decision if you really need to do that first. But is your research in service to an end result, or are you just waffling and delaying because you feel uncomfortable – and calling it research?

If people can set a goal to go to Mars and then do the research along the way, what’s your excuse for needing to do the research before you’ve committed to a result? Your destination can still be reasonably clear even before the research is done. That takes courage, so be courageous, decide, and commit.

I recommend making the decision when you do your goal setting. That’s part of what setting a goal is about. Make your choice then and there. Don’t punt your decision into the future, or you’ll end up doing that every quarter. Declare the results you intend to achieve before the quarter begins.

If you choose wrong, you’ll find out soon enough, and you can choose a different goal if it’s really that bad. Or keep the same goal, and plot a different course to it. But it’s usually better to start making progress towards one clear target that may not be the best choice, and then change course while you’re in motion, than to keep your target definition unclear to begin with.

Head-Based Goals

While it’s good to set goals that are rational and sensible, recognize that motivation is emotional in nature. You don’t actually have to pursue any goals for rational reasons. Logic alone can’t even say that your survival matters. So goals that are too head-based tend to be weak in terms of their motivational effect.

Head-based goals look great on a screen, and that’s usually where they’ll remain till you abandon them.

Goals need an emotional context to be motivating. It really helps if you associate a sense of meaning, purpose, character transformation, or story progression with your goals. Otherwise you’re likely to remain stuck in your head when you think about acting on a goal, running yourself in circles and not really progressing towards a worthwhile result.

Numbers goals are a common issue here, like making a certain amount of money or hitting a particular exercise target. If there’s no emotional context to the numbers, they may be demotivating instead of motivating. Some numbers may feel significant to you – perhaps earning $10K per month feel coolers than earning $8K per month – but often such goals are better defined from the heart side rather than the head side.

You can still hit your financial targets if you come at them from a story-based angle, and doing so will probably be more fun too. Picture Apple explaining what you can do on one of their new devices, putting the numbers in context and sharing why they matter: This speed means you can now edit 4K videos, and isn’t that super duper cool?

Remember the marketing campaign for the original iPod? Do you remember how much storage it had? What I remember is: 1000 songs in your pocket. Isn’t that a better context for the number than saying it has 5GB of storage?

It’s wise to do the same for your own numbers. Otherwise the numbers probably won’t give you a strong enough reason to care.

You can do this for exercise goals too. Running for 60 minutes each morning is nice, but I find it more meaningful to know that I can run a loop around the nearest casino and back home again because it’s a meaningfully bigger loop that I used to run. Or I can run to a particular park and say hi to a half dozen rabbits I’ll usually see there. Running to the rabbit park and back is a more emotional way to define a goal than running for an hour.

If you’re going to bother with numerical goals, make damned well sure to give them an emotionally meaningful context. That will significantly increase your likelihood of success.

Some processes of goal achievement are more heart-aligned than others too. Your destination may feel emotionally inspiring, but if the process to get there is dreadfully dull, you’ll likely have trouble with consistency.

The actual emotion linked to your goal isn’t that important, as long as it’s meaningful for you and gets your heart in the game. Some people love the energy of edgy or risky goals. Others prefer playful goals. And still others like linking their goals to social connections, so pursuing their goals involves deepening their relationships. What matters is that you feel something that stirs you to act. That something is emotional.

Splatter Goals

Usually people don’t do so well with splatter goals, where it looks like a random list created by throwing darts at a dartboard. Such lists might include a health goal, a social goal, a career goal, a financial goal, and a lifestyle goal. But they may not mesh well together or support each other. It looks like someone just picked a random token goal for each area of life.

Instead of trying to splatter your energy in multiple directions, consider a hub and spoke model for goal setting. Have one clear central goal for your quarter (the hub) and a few more related goals that support and enhance that hub goal. This is especially useful when you’re working towards a transition like a career, relationship, or lifestyle change.

Trying to make too many unrelated changes in a quarter will likely dilute your focus. But if you know there’s just one central goal to accomplish, and getting that done is the key result that matters to you, arrange your goals to keep your eyes on that prize. You know that your priority is to keep moving towards that goal each day. If that’s all you get done during the whole quarter, it will likely be a memorable and worthwhile quarter.

Suppose your hub goal is to quit your job and start a new business. Then your spoke goals may include doing setup projects for your new business idea, exercising daily to help burn off stress, wrapping up projects at your job, training your replacement, finding a mentor, etc. That can be a lot to pack into a quarter already, so it’s probably not helpful to pile on other goals like building your dating skills or learning a musical instrument. Just focus on the big transition. When that’s done then consider other goals.

The “Big System” Goal

One final problem I’ll share is when you set a goal to plan and implement your “big system” for radically upgrading some part of your life – usually your workflow, your finances, or your business processes.

People rarely succeed with this approach because it’s too much change all at once. Many won’t even be able to implement their systems for a day, let alone a week, a month, or longer.

While a calendar quarter may seem like a long time, it’s actually pretty short and can blow by faster than you expect. It’s so easy to bite off way too much, especially when it comes to habit changes, and those “big system” goals tend to disguise a lot of smaller changes that will likely take way longer than one more calendar quarter to effectively install.

Instead of trying to transform so many habits at once, pick just 2-3 small habits to change first, maybe even just one. Land a beachhead with a 5-minute or 10-minute change in your day. Do that for at least 30 days first. Once you get it established, and it feels like you don’t need much discipline to maintain the habit, then you can build it out more.

Otherwise if you’re trying to change many parts of your day to fit into some beautifully designed system, you’ll probably find that you never get any sort of implementation to stick. Training yourself to implement that whole system and to be consistent with it will probably take more than a year, so bite off small pieces each quarter, work them into habits, and only add more when you’re able to be strongly consistent with the few pieces you’ve added so far.

Realize that the game of life is long. A year or two isn’t so bad for making a long-term improvement that could serve you well for decades. It’s worth the time to build the foundation one piece at a time.

I hope you found these goal traps insightful. Setting well-formed goals is a skill that takes years of practice to develop proficiency, so please be patient with yourself. Keep practicing this skill one quarter at a time, and study the relationship between the goals you set and the actual results you experience, so you can keep improving year by year.

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Direct Exploration

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While we can learn a lot from other people, such as from books, courses, classes, and online resources, I often find it valuable to learn from direct experience, even when doing so is slower and more error-prone.

There’s something special about exploring in the dark, gradually figuring out your own ways to accomplish something instead of having ready-made solutions spoon fed to you.

You can always look up a recipe for any dish you can imagine, but it can be more rewarding to set the cookbooks aside and bumble your way through. Maybe you’ll discover a dish you really like making. One of my favorites – the ultimate rice bowl – wasn’t discovered in any recipe book. I figured it out from personal experimentation. It’s simple and easy to make, and I love making it now and then. And since I figured it out myself, I also know many different ways to vary the recipe and have it still work, and my understanding of rice bowls is more robust because of that. I feel more confident and competent in this area because I’ve mapped much of the territory personally, as opposed to relying on a guide to tell me the highlights.

The risks of experimenting on your own include making more mistakes, getting stuck in pitfalls you could have avoided, and doing extra work to “reinvent the wheel.” But even when you’re rediscovering what’s already known to many other people, the personal experience of discovery can be more rewarding, and your knowledge will likely be less fragile. Your discovery of the wheel will be uniquely your own – and a lot more special than just buying a wheel.

Many years ago I decided to build my own PC by buying all the component parts from various sources and assembling it myself – motherboard, CPU, RAM chips, graphics card, hard drive, case, power supply, etc. It wasn’t worth the effort to save a little money, but I felt a special connection to that PC for years because I assembled it myself. It wasn’t just some mass market machine I’d bought from Dell. And the machine I built worked better and lasted longer than the pre-built ones I bought around the same time.

This month I’ve been experimenting with music composition again, mostly by messing around in Logic Pro. There’s a lot I don’t understand about how to layer a composition, so some of my experiments didn’t sound very good. But even though I could learn this skill faster from people with experience, I like fumbling around to see what I can figure out on my own. The discoveries feel more rewarding when I stumble upon them versus if I learn them from someone else.

This skill comes in handy in business too, especially when diving into something new. I didn’t know how to generate income from blogging when I first started in 2004 because blogging was still relatively new. So I experimented with income generation to figure how to make my work financially sustainable. I still got ideas from other people, but I had to test them in different ways to understand how to apply them to my business. Since I directly experimented a lot, I now know many effective ways to cover expenses and then some, so I feel confident and secure with income generation too. It’s just another rice bowl to me.

When you learn from other sources, you may acquire knowledge that’s more structured but also more fragile and rigid. You probably won’t gain the range and flexibility that comes from direct personal exploration.

I have degrees in computer science and mathematics, but what I learned in school wasn’t very helpful when I set out to design and program computer games. Most of the academic knowledge I’d gained was way too narrow and brittle. I advanced faster by studying programming on my own – often just by messing around to see what I could do. I also coded in different languages and on different types of devices. I learned so much more about coding by tackling dozens of small projects than by studying techniques from others. And learning coding on my own was way more fun, engaging, and interesting than formally studying it in school.

This isn’t an either-or proposition. Learning from others can be immensely valuable too. I’ve had some wonderful breakthroughs on that side as well. Just watch out for areas of life where you lean too heavily on the side of structured study and overlook the incredible long-term value of direct exploration. Use formal study to seed your own experimentation, not as a replacement for it.

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Fun Is a Personal Standard

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Whatever you’re currently doing to earn money, is it fun for you?

Would you still enjoy your income-generating activities even if they paid half as much?

Still fun with less pay? Or does the fun depend on the money?

Earning money can be fun. Spending money can be fun too.

But what if earning money isn’t fun? Then to earn more, you have to push yourself to do even more work that isn’t fun. Your reward is very mixed then – more money perhaps but also less fun. That creates a drag that will likely cause your income – and your ambition – to stagnate.

A lot of the world’s offers for income generation aren’t particularly fun. In fact, many of them seriously suck. Do this boring-as-hell work for a paycheck. That’s a crappy ass offer. Who’d be desperate enough to say yes to that? Lots of people apparently since most people don’t like their jobs – don’t become one of them.

You don’t have to accept a crappy ass offer that isn’t fun. You can either keep looking till you find a fun and inspiring offer, or better yet, create your own offer.

Safe Isn’t Fun

To bring some fun into this picture, I think it helps to choose income generation strategies that challenge you to grow. If you make it too easy, you’ll be bored.

A fun game is at least semi-challenging. Challenge alone won’t make the experience fun, but it will surely help.

Many people look to their past hobbies and strengths for income ideas. That tends to be a relatively weak approach that can easily lead to boredom. What if instead you develop income ideas based around what you’d like to explore and experience? Why rehash the past that you’ve already explored when you could lean into something new and adventurous?

What new challenges fascinate you? What seems a bit out of reach?

When I created my current business in 2004, my background was in programming and game design, having already invest 10 years in that path professionally. I could have generated income from my programming skills, but I saw that it would be more fun to figure out how to earn income from writing and speaking instead. Those income streams would be more challenging, growth-oriented, rewarding, and fun.

The edginess of making money from communication skills made the process more fun. Getting paid for my first professional speech was more fun and rewarding than getting paid the same amount from leveraging my programming skills.

Programming was safer, and speaking was scarier. Safe isn’t fun. Scary is often fun. Would you rather safely sit in your car in the parking lot of an amusement park… or would you prefer to go on the rides?

Earning decent income isn’t that hard if you’re having fun and enjoying fresh growth experiences from your work. Then it’s largely a matter of finding and testing the right strategies. But it can be really hard to earn good income if you don’t enjoy and appreciate the work you’re doing.

The Standard of Fun

You can earn income doing what isn’t fun. Or you can earn it doing what is fun. If you want the second option, don’t be a person who tolerates the first option. You get the lowest standard you’re willing to tolerate.

Fun work is essential to me. In Conscious Growth Club yesterday, we did a two-hour group coaching call, and it was fun, not just for me but for many of the members too. We shared a lot of laughs and silliness along the way, which actually enhances the coaching experience and doesn’t detract from the value. Would you rather be on a fun coaching call or a boring one? Don’t you think that fun is more motivating and inspiring than boredom?

Does your work spark joy for you? Do you look forward to showing up? Do you get excited when Monday morning comes up again, and you get to sink your teeth into some juicy and interesting projects? If that’s not your reality, then why the heck are you still showing up? Are you doing it for the income that will be perpetually held back by your lack of motivation? That’s a lame investment of your time and energy. What’s the long-term payoff? Sadness and regret? Step off!

Work doesn’t have to be a dreadful slog. You can choose to make it edgier and more fun. You can bring more of your playful personality to the experience. If you get fired for that, I’d say that’s a great reason to be fired. If your workplace can’t handle your having fun while doing your work, fuck ’em! Leave those dreadfully dull people behind, and work with fun-loving people instead. They’re out there if you’re willing to look and if you’re willing to rise to that standard and not accept less.

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Committing Before You See the Solution

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A simple yet common common difference I’ve repeatedly seen between various friends could be described like this:

  • Some friends commit themselves to a problem before they’ve figured out the solution.
  • Some friends try to figure out the solution before they commit themselves to the problem.

By and large the first group makes significantly faster progress while the second group so often gets bogged down and stuck.

Consider on which side you normally fall here.

Are you able to commit yourself to tackling a problem or undertaking a lifestyle transition before you have it all figured out?

Or do you need to have all of the major pieces figured out first before you can get moving?

I like committing to challenges where I don’t know how everything will work out in advance. Life feels more fun and adventurous that way. Risk adds some nice edginess to life.

Another advantage to committing first is that it upgrades your motivation. When you feel committed to a problem, you push yourself harder to solve it versus when you’re still in pre-commitment. And so you come up with more creative solutions because you have more pressure to do so.

Some people fear and avoid this kind of pressure, but used judiciously it can be a tremendous ally. You find out what you’re really made of when you have to come up with a solution or suffer some significant consequences. You’ll do a lot more to figure out the how-to details once you’re in motion.

Will you always pull through and avoid failure? Probably not. I sure didn’t. Sometimes I over-committed myself and failed. But I still prefer that option because the more I commit first, the more I can fine-tune my calibration. I get better at figuring out when I’m really over-committing and when I should lean in, stretch, and trust myself more.

There’s still uncertainty and risk though. You could always guess wrong. But it’s okay to have some failures. You can recover and learn a lot from a spectacular failure.

Note that there’s a character sculpting effect here too. Each option causes you to develop into a different type of character. It takes more trust and self-confidence to commit before you can see the full solution, so the first option is good if you want to play that kind of character. If, however, you’d prefer to play a slower moving and more cautious character who skips a lot of opportunities and is very selective, the second option might be a better fit for you.

Just be aware that you do have options. Some problems can be pre-solved before you commit to them. Some problems are way too difficult to pre-solve until you’re fully committed, especially when the details or circumstances keep fluctuating.

Many times when people pre-solve a problem, they have to throw out their solution when it doesn’t actually work. But at least it may get them moving towards and eventual solution.

Especially take note of any areas in your life where you’ve been trying to figure out a solution for such a long time, and you’ve gotten stuck because you really haven’t committed yourself yet. Do you think it’s time to commit first and just move forward before you’ve figured out the details, trusting that you’ll solve whatever needs to be solved along the way? Remember that you always have that option, and it’s a powerful one.

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Your Relationship with Failure

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Here are some quotes from J.K. Rowling about the fear of failure:

Part of the reason there were seven years between having the idea for Philosopher’s Stone and getting it published, was that I kept putting the manuscript away for months at a time, convinced it was rubbish.

Fear of failure is the saddest reason on earth not to do what you were meant to do. I finally found the courage to start submitting my first book to agents and publishers at a time when I felt a conspicuous failure. Only then did I decide that I was going to try this one thing that I always suspected I could do, and, if it didn’t work out, well, I’d faced worse and survived.

Ultimately, wouldn’t you rather be the person who actually finished the project you’re dreaming about, rather than the one who talks about ‘always having wanted to’?

The notion that you might fail can really slow you down. But it’s not the failure itself that’s the problem. The problem is your relationship with failure.

Consider the grand opening of Disneyland, which happened about 65 years ago on July 17, 1955. It was supposed to be a press preview day with limited attendance, and it was a spectacular failure.

Here are some things that happened that day:

  • Disney was expecting 11,000 guests because they sent out a limited number of invitations, but 28,000 people showed up. Someone sold thousands of counterfeit tickets. Another guy set up a ladder in the back of the park and charged people $5 to sneak in that way – and many did.
  • The crowds trying to reach Disneyland caused a 7-mile backup on the Santa Ana Freeway. People were stuck in their cars for so long that they had to relieve themselves on the side of the freeway – not sexually, you slut! It was too hot that day.
  • The temperature topped 100 degrees (38 C), hot enough to melt the fresh asphalt on Main Street into a sticky tar that ensnared women’s high-heeled shoes.
  • Some paint in the park wasn’t quite dry, and some people were getting paint on their clothes.
  • Due to the huge crowds, the park’s snack stands and restaurants ran out of food at lunchtime.
  • Due to a plumbers’ strike, the park wasn’t able to install enough drinking fountains before opening, so people weren’t finding enough access to water. Many accused Disney of doing this deliberately to gouge them for the expense of sodas.
  • Due to the heat and the crowds, most of the rides broke down at least once, causing more frustrations.
  • The Mark Twain riverboat was so overloaded with guests that it ran low in the water, and water from the river was sloshing up onto the deck.
  • The park was full of press, who canned the experience, which was referred to as Black Sunday. Some press predicted the park wouldn’t survive.

Things didn’t immediately improve. Disneyland had more problems in the weeks after the opening, including people smashing up most of the cars on the Autopia ride by driving them too aggressively.

But these many failures didn’t matter that much. Disneyland still did a lot of things right. They eventually fixed the problems, which was like a game of Whack-a-Mole since new problems kept arising. Disneyland was always going to be a work in progress.

Our lives are like this too. Just because you have a spectacular failure doesn’t mean the game is over. You take your licks and get right back to working on your goals. Acknowledge and fix problems one by one. Keep learning and adapting.

Imagine being Walt Disney on Disneyland’s grand opening day. Tons of press are there. The park bears your name. It’s been a 20-year journey to evolve your vision for a theme park into a reality. You’ve struggled endlessly just to get the financing in place, and then there were even more struggles to get the place designed and built. So many people have doubted you, including your brother and business partner Roy. You’ve been preparing for and anticipating this glorious day for a long time. And then some asshole screws up your plans by making thousands of counterfeit tickets, and your people can’t tell the real tickets from the fake ones. Your plans for a wonderful opening start falling apart right before your eyes, and all the attention and the cameras are on you – not to mention all the investors who want to know whether investing in your vision was a good idea.

And what do you do? You shrug it off and get right back to work the next day.

Failures happen. This is part of life. While other people may make a huge deal out of it, is it really that big of a deal? So what if you have a spectacularly bad failure! That isn’t the end. It’s just a learning experience, so learn from it. Life continues the next day.

People may criticize you. You may be embarrassed. Accept the consequences, and then get right back to it and re-engage.

You needn’t retreat and slink away in shame. Be proud that you failed. So many people are too cowardly to even try working on something meaningful. They talk themselves out of pursuing bold ideas before they begin. They treat the prospect of failure as a reason to quit before they start.

Many of Disney’s ideas, including some rides they tried, had to be scrapped and replaced. Each ride was a big project unto itself, so some of those failures ended in the death of a project. But the death of a project doesn’t have to kill the big picture vision.

Take this idea to heart. You can fail a lot with your projects, but your big picture goal can remain intact and achievable. Some ideas and projects along the way will be dead ends, and you’ll have to let them go. So you’ll need different projects and ideas to help you reach your goal. Don’t equate the failure of your projects with the death of your long-term goal.

Don’t pursue your goals as if you know you can’t fail. Of course you can fail! But don’t make such a big deal out of failure. It will happen. You’ll rack up plenty of failures if you do anything interesting in life. Let each failure be a badge of honor. It means you’re making a good effort. A good failure is a powerful learning experience.

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Business and Meaning

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The world of business can provide an endless stream of activities, whether you have a job or run your own company. If you read books or take courses on advancing your career or growing your business, you’ll pick up even more to-do ideas.

I usually enjoy the world of business, but in order to keep my life in balance, I need to regularly refocus on the big picture and avoid drowning in busywork. Sometimes I have to step back from business to regain perspective.

Business can be addictive, whether it’s going well or not. When the results aren’t flowing, there’s a scramble to fix that. And when the results are flowing well, ambition can kick in and make you want to aim even higher. It’s easy to get caught up in these cycles and forget to ask: Why am I doing all this work? What’s the point?

What helps me stay in balance is reminding myself that all of this is temporary and that death is part of the roadmap – death for me and death for any business ventures I participate in. At some point it all ends, even if some of it outlives me.

This perspective helps me think about what’s worth doing and what isn’t. I think carefully about the meaning of the projects I put on my plate and whether they’re purposeful enough to justify the investment of time and energy. I want to feel that my business activities are enhancing my life and those of others. If the meaning isn’t there, however, it makes me feel that I’m spinning my wheels and speeding down the road towards death without enjoying the journey enough. And that realization motivates me to change course sooner or later.

Meaning isn’t static though. What may be a meaningful project one year may feel hollow in a different year. I have to keep checking in to see where the meaning can be found next. Sometimes I’ll find it on the creative side, other times on the social or contribution side, and sometimes in areas of fresh exploration or personal challenge.

I read a lot of business books, and I often find the meaning aspect lacking. Such books may share tips for greater efficiency and systematizing, but they often overlook why that matters. They talk about improving results, but not all business results will feel meaningful. Have you ever achieved results that others may applaud but that feel mostly meaningless to you? Do you want to do more hollow-feeling work?

Growing a business is often accepted as an assumed goal, but a business doesn’t have to grow bigger to deliver meaning and purpose. Sometimes growing bigger may run contrary to purpose, killing the joy in the operation and destroying the meaning. I’ve met people who’ve grown their businesses and seem less happy for it, and I’ve met people who’ve grown their businesses and seem to revel in the experience. One person’s meaning is another person’s albatross.

Even when an author shares the meaning and purpose that led them to make certain business improvements, their meaning may not motivate me in the same way. I still have to find my own meaning if I’m to apply the ideas with sustainable motivation. It’s hard to apply someone else’s ideas if I don’t root them to my own personal meaning.

One practice that works well for me is to incorporate meaning into my project designs. When I begin a major new project, such as creating a new course, I write up a design doc for it. This helps me think through the key details of the project in advance and look at the big picture. An important part of this doc is a section on personal meaning. I consider why I want to do the project and what it means to me, and I type up my answers. Even if I expect a project to create some external results, I still ask myself why I should care about those results.

Sometimes I don’t find enough meaning in a project, at least not in the initial version of it, but while it’s still in the design phase, I can tweak the design until I feel the meaning is strong enough. This can be surprisingly easy. A few small tweaks can make a world of difference. Simply deciding to do a project in a playful style can sometimes make it feel meaningful enough. Finding a meaning often comes down to approaching it from the right angle or framing it the right way, as opposed to doing a major redesign.

When a project feels deeply meaningful, that’s when I can commit to it. That’s when it feels like a worthwhile investment of my life energy. This kind of motivation sustains me.

See this as an invitation to find the beauty in each of your work projects. It’s probably there already if you look at each project from the right angle.

Why did you accept this assignment? Why do the work? Why does this matter to you? What will this do for your character growth? What makes this a worthy investment of your precious life?

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My Strengths (According to Reader Feedback)

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Earlier this week I invited my blog readers and customers to share what they considered to be my strengths, and now I’ll share the results with you.

First, I appreciate the feedback. There were many different answers and perspectives, so I looked for patterns to condense the key ideas into a meaningful list.

The subheadings show the main groupings that I was able to identify. In some cases this was a little tricky while in others it was easy to identify clusters because the words and phrases people used were often very similar.

The bullet lists include some short direct quotes from people’s emails, some slightly modified or condensed quotes (such as to make the grammar consistent or to simplify them), and common words or phrases that people shared. I tried to pick representative samples when possible, but this isn’t an exhaustive list. Some of the samples could be shifted to other lists because they match multiple patterns; I did my best to put them in reasonable spots.

The paragraphs after the bullet lists include some extra personal commentary from me.

Note that nothing on this list is based on strengths that I consider myself to have, and none is based on other forms of feedback. This list is only derived from reader and customer feedback that was specifically sent in response to Monday’s blog post, What Are My Strengths?

Here’s what I ended up with. These aren’t in any particular order.

Open-Mindedness / Growth Mindset / Curiosity

  • Radical open-mindedness
  • Openness to new concepts and ideas
  • Capacity to challenge old beliefs, even when it goes against social pressure or conventional lines of thinking
  • Growth mindset, applied to multiple areas of life
  • Giving ideas careful consideration before deciding if they’re right for you
  • Ability to grow and release beliefs that no longer serve you
  • Subjective reality
  • Being a very “unstuck” person (inspirational)
  • Open to trying new stuff and being vulnerable
  • Courageous in quitting what doesn’t work for you (diets, relationships, values, etc.)
  • Willing to try new things and explore new patterns of thought
  • Inquisitiveness
  • Curiosity
  • You have the ability to stay open where most people have been closed off for a very long time
  • To tip a situation on its side and make a different assessment
  • Your thirst for knowledge to evaluate and condense all this into powerful thoughts
  • I love your curiosity and the way you keep exploring new subjects

I was surprised by how many people mentioned open-mindedness as one of my strengths since that isn’t a term I’d usually apply to myself. I definitely see myself as curious though. This feedback helped me see how strongly connected curiosity and open-mindedness are. Obviously our minds have to be open enough to explore unfamiliar territory.

The fact that people would call out open-mindedness as a strength also makes me wonder about the contrast. Does this mean that some of my readers would like to further develop this quality for themselves? This makes me curious about open-mindedness and how to teach or encourage the development of that quality more deliberately. This is probably an area of self-development that I tend to take for granted.

Independence / Freedom / Unshackled by Social Norms

  • Led by your own reflections
  • Internal locus of control
  • Putting yourself out there (seemingly) fearlessly
  • Being fully yourself, genuine, living life by connecting deeper with yourself and your values
  • You practice what you preach, and you don’t make lame or cliché statements
  • Free to explore many different ideas without being tied down to selling a system
  • Willingness to go against prevailing social norms
  • Seeing you go against grain helped me see that the reason I was so unhappy was because I was listening to my social conditioning rather than my heart
  • To constantly reinvent yourself
  • Nonconformist
  • Foregoer

This one didn’t surprise me, but again it makes me think about the contrast. I’m well-aware that many readers feel shackled by social and family expectations and want to break free of that. Wednesday’s article on Misaligned Relationships addresses this issue to some extent – it was partly inspired by the early feedback from this exercise.

Internally I don’t tend to think of myself as having these strengths because I’ve lived this way long enough that they just seem normal to me. Instead I frame this as making choices that feel aligned. What other people may perceive outwardly as going against social norms, I perceive as sensitivity to alignment issues. I place more weight on my inner satisfaction with my decisions than I do on other people’s reactions. This has served me well for many years.

I also like to remind myself that people often regret what they didn’t do. They lament how they kept quiet and didn’t express themselves. People regret being too conformist. I’d prefer to avoid racking up regrets, so I take other people’s warnings about this seriously. I don’t seek to be a rebel, but what feels aligned can sometimes be unpopular.

Range / Breadth

  • Writing about topics others are ignoring
  • I love the frequent blog posts on all kinds of topics
  • The different topics that you talk about that cover all sorts of issues
  • Your willingness to explore ideas on the nature of reality and spirituality without rejecting human needs (money, success, sex, etc)
  • You have an abundance of experience, and it is interesting to see how you have overcome difficult situations: bankruptcy, divorce, stealing, etc.
  • It is interesting to see how you manage current events: Covid-19 for example
  • Prolificness
  • The huge amount of perspectives you offer, in a generous and non-pushing way

Some would see having too much range as a weakness, so it’s nice that others recognize it as a strength. I also see it as a strength to have a lot of different interests, much like Leonardo da Vinci did. A lot of my best insights come from transplanting ideas from one field to another, such as turning 30-day trials that I learned in the software field into 30-day personal growth challenges.

Range is essential for staying motivated and enthusiastic about my work. If I narrowed my range too much, I’d feel trapped and bored. I like being able to mix up what I learn, explore, and create. It’s good to know that there are people who appreciate that. Many experts recommend “niching down,” and the reason I don’t do that is because it wouldn’t satisfy me on the inside to limit myself so much. I’m curious about more than just one niche, and I don’t think that niching down would create the kind of life I want to live.

From my perspective though, this strength tends to emerge from following what stimulates me while avoiding boredom. But this only works when I balance variety with good self-discipline and consistency. Otherwise I could end up bouncing around from one project to the next and never finishing anything (i.e. shiny object syndrome). That was a real problem for me in the past, and fortunately I recognized that I had to build up my self-discipline to compensate. So note that sometimes you need the balance of two seemingly conflicting strengths to access the benefits of either.

Exploration & Experimentation

  • Presenting ideas from a perspective of exploration and testing
  • You encourage people to try things that might be different from what you choose
  • Willingness to explore and experiment
  • Reflecting on your own experience and extracting the universal truths and lessons that you can share with others
  • Connection between exploration and universal truths (grounded in experience)
  • Willingness to learn and experiment with new challenges
  • Balancing consistent structure with flexibility, especially when doing 30-day challenges
  • To thoroughly look at yourself and the world around you, both with your feelings and with your brain, reflect on it, take action, and tell us everything
  • Living a life that sends a message to us all that anything is possible
  • The ability to always find a new perspective on things, to not get stuck in a rut
  • Seeing you do different experiments
  • Risk taking experience (really important you push boundaries)
  • Willingness to explore
  • Exploring the world

This one feels pretty aligned with how I see myself. I do love to explore and experiment. People seem to appreciate that my lessons stem from experience and that I like to test ideas in the real world.

This may seem close to curiosity and open-mindedness, but I list this as a separate item because it’s the sharing of these experiments that provides value for people. Some people find that the explorations I share encourage them to explore more as well, even if they’re doing totally unrelated explorations. It’s good to see that this strength is contagious. The more we explore, the more we influence and encourage others to explore.

Depth & Immersion

  • Immersive coverage from many angles
  • Exploring a challenge from so many different angles that it forces a breakthrough for readers
  • Take a challenge that is common to your readers, and absolutely hammer the problem with endless different tools, perspectives, and actionable ideas
  • Blog series
  • Can always go back and review the basics in your blog – habits, discipline, 30-day trials, goal-setting, purpose, productivity, time-management, health, exercise, and diet
  • Daily nuggets of thought provoking ideas
  • So many good bits of information and wisdom
  • Sharing the insider’s perspective
  • Level of depth you cover in your topics is second to none
  • You clearly show a vast amount of knowledge and passion for personal development which solidifies your credibility
  • Your ability to provide fresh insights into well trodden self-help topics
  • The depth and detail you go into on the issue and lead on to how to tackle the problem
  • Thorough

Because I often write longer articles, I attract readers who like longer articles. Same goes for the in-depth courses – they attract people who like and appreciate in-depth courses. People who want quick sound bites probably won’t be attracted to my work.

Internally I don’t think of depth and immersion as direct strengths. I see these as side effects that derive from wanting to connect the dots between different ideas. Many of my blog posts are explorations of different angles on a topic to clarify my own thinking.

How can we explore open relationships in an ethically aligned way? Is there a non-sleazy way to do online marketing and have it be effective? What modes of generating income are the best for long-term character sculpting? These are the kinds of questions that my mind likes to explore and resolve. So I would identify my underlying strength here as a drive for real understanding and a dissatisfaction with shallow answers.

Some people said they made specific changes in their own lives that were inspired by what they read in my blog. Going vegan and going jobless were the most common changes mentioned. They liked that I covered certain lifestyle changes from multiple angles with an insider’s perspective.

Some people were actually grateful for making changes that they initially resisted. They noted that it was because I addressed a topic from so many different angles over a long period of time that convinced them to finally try it for themselves.

Challenging People to Change / Teaching People to See Reality Differently

  • Challenging people to think alternatively
  • You have an uncanny knack for blogging about issues that I am currently struggling with in a way that gives me a fresh perspective and a new way to think through a problem
  • Revealing blind spots
  • How you destroy my world (i.e. old collections of beliefs and attitudes that aren’t working) -> new world of better results
  • Your ability to get through to people and make them inspired to actually act upon your ideas
  • Encourage well rounded development (physical, intellectual, spiritual, social, etc.)
  • Effective at training me to see reality more accurately
  • The motivation that you inspire to try what you say to do
  • You continue to be a wonderful example
  • Your daily blog posts are good reminders to stay on track with my personal goals and values
  • You consistently give me something to think about/implement in my life, which I love
  • Giving people a fresh perspective on things in a very simple-to-understand and act-upon way
  • Sharing your views and experiments allows me to challenge my views
  • Make us think deeply about all aspects of our existence
  • Ability to see and communicate new perspectives, new ways of seeing reality
  • Disruptor
  • Giving me new perspectives

This one struck me as one of the most interesting items on the list. People actually like and appreciate that I challenge them to think differently. They like that I nudge them to destroy their old worlds, especially if those worlds aren’t giving them the results they want anyway.

Admittedly I didn’t really think of this as a personal strength, but multiple people noted that this is what really provides long-term value for them. Even though they may resist at first, they ultimately like having holes poked in their old models of reality. They like being challenged to raise their standards. They like learning alternative points of view to digest and think about. They like that I don’t play it safe by only writing about topics inside their comfort zones.

I think this strength comes from what I do for myself. I frequently challenge and question my own models, and much of what I write stems from that questioning. This in turn encourages others to ask similar questions.

I love this because it means that by investing in my own growth, I’m providing a good service to others, as long as I continue to share what I learn along the way. This was a big part of my original vision for starting this blog in 2004. I love personal growth and wanted to make it my full-time occupation. I trusted that if I kept learning and sharing that it would provide sufficient value to people. That turned out to be true.

Sometimes I still have to remind myself that this is a key part of my business and lifestyle. I have to keep exploring, experimenting, and questioning because that’s the engine that feeds everything else. Fortunately I’ve always loved doing that, so it doesn’t feel like a burden. I don’t see myself ever losing my deep curiosity about life.

Sincerity / Honesty / Transparency

  • Honesty
  • Transparency
  • Honest and transparent with your readers
  • Your firm inner strength that knows exactly what you believe and hold dear and is as solid as a rock
  • You are tremendously honest and direct
  • Establishing trust with your audience by means of your sincerity of expression
  • Your ability to gain my trust because of your honest, approachable, and intelligent style
  • By being honest and transparent, you bring authentic solutions and connections
  • You tell things as they are and as they seem to you; I have not found hidden agendas to try to get me to buy something

It didn’t surprise me that people mentioned this, but I also see it as more of a side effect rather than a primary strength.

This one is due to sensitivity to how I feel about my life and about the relationships with the people I serve and connect with regularly. I see relationships as a huge part of life, and I want my relationships to be strong, supportive, and growth-oriented. This includes relationships with people, with my work, with myself, and with reality itself.

I find it interesting that no one really named this inner sensitivity as a strength of mine, but it shows up as a key factor in multiple strengths that people experience externally. Perhaps it’s not too much of a stretch to see that being sensitive to your internal states and seeking inner harmony can actually create ripples of value for others. If you seek more alignment on the inside, you may express more of your strengths outwardly.

Sensitivity can be a powerful strength if you honor it as such.

Clear Communication

  • Writing and speaking
  • Your clarity of writing
  • Relaying spiritual or difficult-to-understand concepts in a relatable manner (for a computer-friendly audience)
  • Being able to take a thought and breaking it down and explaining it very well
  • Tying real world examples into your writing or courses are extremely helpful
  • You are concise, and all of your sentences are usually necessary and relevant
  • Very good at articulating and getting your point across
  • Even when you make appeals to emotions, you structure your points in ways that both the logical and emotional parts of my mind can agree with
  • Your ability to bring razor sharp analytical skills to topics that are often dismissed as “woo woo” – and thereby provide your readers with deeper understandings
  • Your ability to convey complex ideas in a simple and straightforward manner
  • Your writing skills. the way you can popularize complex ideas with simple examples
  • Your very clear and easy to follow explanations – I don’t have to read it twice to fathom out what you are saying
  • You have a way of reducing the fluff of personal development
  • Helps shorten the learning curve for me
  • I like how you communicate in clear manner; your writings are easy to follow and enjoyable to read
  • Articulation

This isn’t too surprising. If people didn’t like my communication style, they wouldn’t stick around. So it makes sense that I attract people who like it.

While I could write in a more flowery style, I actually dislike it when other writers do that in their books and articles. It just makes my brain work harder to extract the meaning. I value directness and plain language in other people’s writing, so I try to practice this myself. To me the purpose of writing is to communicate useful ideas, not to showcase clever writing skills.

I also had some high school teachers that pushed me to eliminate verbal flabbiness when possible. So this strength was largely trained through education and practice. Having a background in computer science and math helps too since clarity is essential in both fields.

Rationality & Practicality

  • Your ability to think things through
  • Real world examples
  • You waste none of the reader’s time, and you get immediately to the pragmatic and practical concerns
  • Focus on results, real-world problems and challenges
  • You are grounded and rational
  • Clear-sighted intelligence
  • You are always interesting, thought-provoking, and you provide advice that is applicable in the real world
  • You see reality (as it is and is not) more clearly than I do
  • Logical, intelligent, and honest viewpoint
  • You’re able to come up with models of reality that are actionable as well as effective
  • You do actually offer a potential solution and don’t just leave us thinking, “Well I knew that already, but what do I actually DO about it?”
  • In your hands, Subjective Reality has a structure and is seen as a kind of practical tool
  • Well-balanced mix of your well-developed mental and emotional intelligence
  • Logical

This one also links with a background in math and computer science. Try programming a computer with good intentions and positive thinking. You have to think rationally and logically to get results from coding.

I got into personal development as part of my recovery from self-destructive behavior, so learning to behave more sanely and rationally was a life-saver for me. Consequently, I have a healthy respect for rationality.

While I’ve explored lots of esoteric and woo-woo personal development ideas too, my journey began with an intense need to solve real problems in my life, so this practical grounding has been with me for a long time. I know how valuable an investment in personal development can be because of how beautifully it transformed my life.

I do see value in exploring pure thought experiments, but I still like to link them to real-world results when possible. Otherwise if an idea just hangs there in space and I can’t use it to improve my results in any area of life, I don’t see it as being of much long-term use other than for the entertainment value.

Open-mindedness and exploration help to balance this strength though. Rationality can become a weakness if you overplay it and let it lock you into a linear mode of thinking. I think it’s rational to realize that you always have more to learn, and that means exploring the unknown.

Creativity & Originality

  • Thinking, visualizing, and communicating outside the box, in fact in a different galaxy
  • The outside the box ways of communicating
  • The creativity in the courses I have taken, particularly Stature, communicates concepts in ways that simply don’t seem available elsewhere
  • I see creativity and a lot of clear thinking in you
  • Your freshness and originality
  • You can combine two very different mindsets: analytical and intuitive in a way which is quite symbiotic in nature, and gives rise to solutions that are unique and creative
  • Innovative thinking

This strength feels like one of contrast to me. If we didn’t have school systems and corporate jobs that pressure us to devalue inner harmony, I doubt that I would seem as creative or original.

While the world’s misalignments may create opportunities, part of me wishes this weren’t the case. I think it would be more pleasing and satisfying to live in a world where most people followed their paths with a heart and stayed sensitive to inner harmony.

In the past I valued being an out of the box thinker and deliberately leaned into that. These days I’d prefer to do away with the box altogether, so no one has to be stuck inside of it.

From my perspective, I’m basically trying to live the life I learned about from watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. Explore the galaxy. Keep learning and growing. Have interesting relationships with people from different planets. And always be aware that there’s an empath on board to keep you honest.

Caring / Empathy / Ethics / Generosity / Heart

  • A good heart
  • You come across not only as an expert in the field but also as a friend who cares for others and who genuinely wants to see them improve their lives; not just saying they do. That’s where I get my trust for you from.
  • Giving a lot away for free, including uncopyrighting
  • Accessibility – covering relevant issues readers care about, helping people feel they aren’t alone
  • You’ve transcended the common online business model (AdSense, affiliates, etc.) and have a moral dimension to your work
  • It’s been inspiring, from a distance, to watch your trust in Life pay off
  • Your genuine desire to help
  • You have strong imaginative power which makes you able to empathize more with people
  • You are friendly and warm in your interactions
  • The connection that you somehow convey through your writing, so it feels like you are targeting my own personal problem
  • You seek to cause as little harm as possible
  • You seek to help and heal through bringing knowledge and encouragement to people
  • Generosity and your service-orientation; to put out so much free content is a beautiful gift
  • Being able to offer a lot of quality content on your website without charge
  • Compassion
  • Heart of service
  • Shows that you care about people and surroundings
  • It is heart warming to see how you genuinely want people to grow and develop themselves

Awwww… I do indeed care about helping people. I think this could also be a quality flowing from sensitivity. I often feel like I pick up on energy, feelings, and intentions from the people I connect with, even at a distance.

When I was younger, I didn’t value such qualities, but now I see them as essential to being in tune with the flow of life. I think caring has a lot to do with listening, not just with our ears but with all parts of ourselves. I feel fortunate that some caring influences came into my life at the right time to help steer me in this direction. Going vegan played a significant part in this as well; that really opened up the heart-brain communication pathways.

Some people who mentioned these items also requested that I do more videos or podcasts, so more of the emotional connection comes through. I can understand that, although I still really like the experience of writing. I feel that writing helps me slow down, so I can go deeper into the exploration of ideas.

I still like video too though, especially live video. What some people may not see is that we do live video coaching calls in Conscious Growth Club 36 times per year. We just recently passed 100 of those calls, so from my perspective I’m already doing a significant amount of video.

Personality / Playfulness / Positivity

  • Many people have a growth mindset or focus and discipline, but they can’t bring the playful and unique approach to it
  • Humor
  • I love how you inject your personality into each post
  • It gives your posts that personal touch and authenticity which even the most sceptic of readers can respect
  • As readers we feel invited and brought to your side as individuals who are constantly exploring
  • To not get dragged down by others or bad energy
  • To always stay positive and believe that things will be better
  • To trust yourself and reality
  • Playfulness

In this area I think it also makes sense that people who dislike my personality or sense of humor wouldn’t stick with reading my blog for long.

I often have mixed reactions when other authors inject their personality into their work. Sometimes I really like it, and sometimes I find it cheesy or annoying if it feels like they’re trying too hard. I aim to strike a balance and not force it, preferring to keep the ideas front and center most of the time.

I also think that expressing some playfulness helps to create a stronger connection over time, and it makes the work more enjoyable too. It’s good to know that it’s possible to attract people who appreciate playfulness.

Focus / Discipline / Determination / Work Ethic / Consistency

  • I doubt there are many things in your life that don’t serve clear and well-thought-out goals
  • You aren’t stumbling through life blindly
  • Goals & character building
  • Time management
  • Discipline / self-discipline
  • Hard-working
  • Dedication
  • Determined and disciplined
  • Consistency
  • Balancing with open-mindedness: It seems like tightness and rigidity tend to appear in people who have a high level of self-discipline, but it’s quite the opposite with you
  • Your regular contact; I do like the daily connection

Self-discipline was a hard quality to build, but I did make gradual gains by continuing to invest in it. I feel this is important to balance other qualities that can potentially pull against focus and consistency, like the desire to go out and explore something new.

Self-discipline can also create traps of its own if you overplay it, potentially stifling creativity and spontaneity.

I like to see these different aspects like parts of a song, where each instrument gets its opportunity to shine, and they can all play harmoniously together.

I’m glad I did this little experiment. It gave me some interesting insights and helped me connect the dots between how I think about my strengths and what other people perceive. It’s interesting to realize that outward strengths may come from deeper places that aren’t easy to identify.

This makes me wonder if Leonardo da Vinci would identify the same strengths in himself that other people would credit him for. Did he see his incredible range as a strength? He might have even seen it as a weakness since so many of his works were unfinished when he died. I read the book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, which was insightful, but that cannot reveal how he actually thought.

Consider that as you develop your own strengths, other people may credit you for how those strengths affect them, but they may not be able to identify the core strengths that give rise to those outward expressions. You may experience and frame your strengths differently. For instance, no one identified writing from inspiration and choosing topics based on inspiration as a strength of mine, even though that’s a huge deal to me and something I’ve invested in greatly for many years. That strength also stems from sensitivity to signals that carry ideas.

Consequently, if you spot a strength in someone else and then try to emulate if yourself, your results may fall flat if you miss the core strength that gives rise to the outer expression. If anyone wants to get good results emulating some of my strengths, they may get stuck if they don’t invest in increasing their sensitivity to inner and outer signals.

I’m grateful for everyone who chose to respond to these questions, so thank you for that. It was an eye-opening and reflective experience for me, and I hope you got some value from reading this post. I also encourage you to think about how inner qualities that you might not even think about as strengths could actually flow into providing value in ways you may not have considered yet.

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Create and Share

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Many people who want to earn a living from creative work get stuck trying to figure out a business model. Meanwhile they’re not actually doing much creating. They’re waiting for clarity.

Waiting for clarity is a waste of time. So is trying to figure out the perfect transition plan in advance. It’s easier to find clarity when you’re in motion.

I suggest that you start simpler. Focus on getting into the rhythm of creating and sharing. Don’t worry about monetization. Don’t worry about the business model – not if that’s a cause of stuckness for you.

If you’re going to focus on anything, seek to find the people who will appreciate what you can create and share. Appreciation is a sign that value is being received and acknowledged. If there’s no appreciation, such as thank you’s and other forms of acknowledgement coming back to you, chances are that little value is being delivered. Don’t mistakenly assume that this implies you’re not creating value. It’s more likely that you’re not sharing with the right people.

If you create something and share it, and the people you share it with don’t appreciate it, stop sharing with them. Someone else will appreciate it, so share it somewhere else – anywhere else. Even if you bop around randomly trying to find the right people, it’s better than wasting your life sharing with misaligned people who will whine at you or ignore ou.

If you’re sharing on social media, I’d go so far as to drop the people who don’t like what you’re sharing or who go out of their way to criticize you. They’ll only slow you down. Clear them out, and make some room for aligned people to get through.

It’s fine if some people in your audience are neutral, but if they’re dead weight as far as appreciation goes, then don’t invest in trying to please them. Just let ’em go.

Trust that you’ll find your audience. You’ll find your real audience faster by quickly firing the wrong audience members.

Seek to create in tune with appreciation, at least if you want to make your creating and sharing sustainable. Money is a form of appreciation, and if the appreciation is there, it isn’t that hard to turn that into income. But it’s pretty damned hard to do that if there’s little or no appreciation.

You can still work on business models. You can still experiment with income generation along the way. But the fundamental piece to get working early on is creating and sharing. No one can stop you from doing that. You can start on that today.

Once you find people who appreciate your work, you can even co-create your business model with them. That’s how I got started. People who appreciated my work shared ideas and suggestions for how I could monetize it. Some gave me examples of how other people were monetizing work that I might adopt as well. All I had to do was follow that flow, and it was the regular creating and sharing that made it sustainable.

You’ll probably have some objections to doing this. That’s fine. My counter-objection is that creating and sharing, even without much of a plan, works a lot better than vacillating, delaying, second-guessing yourself, and perhaps the most popular lament of all: I don’t know how. So if your objections are keeping you stuck, maybe they don’t amount to a hill of beans. If you create and share regularly and you move towards people who appreciate what you share, you can eventually have lots of hills with lots of beans.

Remember how easy it was to create stuff when you were a kid. Just grab some colored paper, glue, scissors, and make a mess with it. Someone will appreciate it if you show it to enough people. I’ve seen displays in modern art museums that look no better than what a five-year old could create, and there are still people who appreciate it. So get your crusty, whiny, cowardly AF adult brain out of your way, and just create and share stuff. If you don’t know where to start, pretend that you’re five years old, and start anyway.

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Framing the Problem

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People often get stuck with certain ways of framing their problems that actually prevent them from creating solutions. Usually they learn these frames from other people, especially people who swear that a particular frame worked for them. But that doesn’t mean the same frame will work for everyone else.

Suppose you define a financial problem as a mindset problem or a problem with limiting beliefs. These limiting beliefs are holding me back! I’m stuck in a scarcity mindset! This is why I’m still struggling!

Maybe your mindset could use some improvement, but you’d be surprised at how many problems don’t actually require mindset shifts in order to solve them. I’ve met plenty of wealthy people, and I can assure you that many of them have the same old limiting beliefs about money that everyone else does. Meanwhile some people think they need to resolve all their limiting beliefs about money in order to attract more money. That isn’t true at all.

Similarly you can have a really abundant mindset towards money and still not attract much of it. I’ve met some financially broke people who seem to have abundance-aligned mindsets, yet money doesn’t flow to them very well. They may have good mindsets, but a good mindset doesn’t pay the bills.

Framing a problem as a mindset issue may not actually get the problem solved. This is especially true for financial and social problems.

Many problems are easier to solve when you define them differently. For instance, if you define your financial and social problems as behavioral issues rather than mindset issues, you may find them easier to solve. What would a behavioral solution look like? This would include taking different actions and training yourself to adopt different habits.

You may also find such problems easier to solve if you define them as spiritual problems. What would a spiritual solution look like? This could include looking at the character sculpting purpose behind the problem. You’d see the problem as meaningful and purposeful, which can reduce your resistance to it, so you approach it as a worthwhile invitation rather than a curse.

When you run into a problem that isn’t budging even after years of struggle, clarify how you’ve been framing it, and switch to a different frame for a while.

So if you’ve been defining your money struggles as a mindset problem, try switching to a behavioral frame (you’re taking the wrong actions) or a spiritual frame (you’re resisting the purpose of this challenge) or a social frame (you’re serving the wrong people) or some other way of defining the problem. Then develop solutions based on the new frame.

Don’t be a one-frame wonder. You will get stuck if you do that. Eventually a problem will come along that doesn’t fit your frame very well, and it will be nearly impossible for you to solve it using your “one frame to rule them all.”

We fall into these traps because a good frame will work until it doesn’t. You may get good results for some problems using a mindset frame, but eventually you’ll encounter a problem that isn’t impressed by your mindset-based approach. It will persist no matter how much mindset work you do. But a behavioral solution might solve the problem for good.

Many problems become much easier to solve when you switch frames. Look at the problem from a different angle. Ask: How else could I define this problem?

And if you can’t think of at least 10 different ways to define your problem, well… then you have a mindset issue. 😉

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What Are My Strengths?

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During some recent morning runs, I’ve been listening to a series of Michael Michalowicz books: The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, Profit First, Clockwork, and Fix This Next. He also wrote The Pumpkin Plan – one of my all-time favorite business books.

In the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur book, there are some questions about identifying your strengths and leveraging them in business. I think I know mine pretty well by now, but this stirred up my curiosity about how my blog readers and customers see my strengths and which particular strengths are most relevant for them. I also got to wondering how I could better use my strengths to make a difference for people.

So I thought I’d use today’s blog post to ask a few simple questions directly and invite you to reply via my contact form.

From your perspective…

  • What are my strengths?
  • Which strengths of mine are most important to you (in terms of serving you well)?
  • How do you feel I could (or wish I would) use my strengths to serve you better?

These questions are intended for people who’ve been engaging with my work long enough to form opinions about this.

That’s it! I’ll personally read every response and reflect on what I learn from this. It would be great if I this spawns some actionable ideas too.

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