All 65 Stature Lessons Complete

Yesterday I finished creating and publishing all of the lessons for the co-creative Stature character sculpting deep dive.

The full course is 16 hours and 20 minutes of audio, with the average lesson being 15 minutes. I wanted to keep the lessons for this course very focused and tight.

There’s also a 138-page workbook to accompany the audio lessons, including a one-page summary for each lesson and exercises to apply each lesson. That’s complete as well.

Additionally we have full text transcripts published for most of the lessons now, and the remainder will be done within the next several days.

And next up there are several more bonuses to create for the course as well, so we’ll add those as soon as they’re ready.

Here’s the full list of published audio lessons:

Module 1: Awareness

  1. Introduction
  2. The Airing of Grievances
  3. The Airing of Commendations
  4. Who Do You Think You Are?
  5. Impossible Invitations
  6. Summoning Your Power
  7. Avoiding Your Power
  8. To the Pain
  9. To the Love
  10. Backstory
  11. Personal Trainers
  12. Self Sculpting
  13. Your Origin Story

Module 2: Harmony

  1. Choosing Harmony
  2. Ridiculous Ridicule
  3. Stepwise Character Growth
  4. Aligned Income
  5. Expressive Alignment
  6. Expressive Commitment
  7. Family
  8. Making Progress
  9. Sweet Surrender
  10. Character Care
  11. Immortality

Module 3: Desire

  1. Opinionated You
  2. Pointers to Desire
  3. The Child Inside
  4. Wanting
  5. Inner Demons
  6. Chorus
  7. Pretending to Care
  8. Spontaneity
  9. Decision Rituals
  10. You Are So Lovable

Module 4: Courage

  1. The Voice of the Heart
  2. Trust
  3. Dancing with Fear
  4. Edginess
  5. Directness
  6. Adaptability
  7. Don’t Get Stuck
  8. Opening the Heart
  9. Courage Training
  10. Defending Your Character

Module 5: Will

  1. Responsibility
  2. The Source of Power
  3. Investment
  4. Balance
  5. Fame
  6. Reputation
  7. Dreaming Sideways
  8. Character in Crisis
  9. Wireframing
  10. Defining Your Core
  11. Fire

Module 6: Voice

  1. Memories
  2. Sculpting the World
  3. Embodiment
  4. Mortality
  5. Experiences
  6. Authority
  7. Self-control
  8. Developing Discipline
  9. Releasing
  10. Journey’s End

While I could say that this was a 3-1/2 month project since I’ve been designing and recording lessons for it since December, it was actually a multi-year project since I’ve been engaging with these ideas and developing this course in some fashion for a few years.

Originally this was going to be conceived as a course on clarity, then it evolved into one on goal setting. But I realized that in order to do those topics justice, we have to get to know ourselves very deeply. In order to set aligned and intelligent goals, we have to know who we are and what matters to us. In order to have clarity about anything else in life, we must create sufficient clarity about ourselves.

Without this depth of self-understanding, it’s very difficult to set meaningful goals and work towards them consistently. If you’ve ever set a goal and then lost sight of it within a few weeks or months, then you’re already familiar with that experience.

To do such deep work into personal awareness, we need ample courage too, so that’s a major part of the course with a whole module being dedicated to it. Sometimes the most courageous acts involve looking deeply into the parts of ourselves that most disturb us.

I’m delighted that many of the lessons were co-creatively inspired by feedback and suggestions from course participants who signed up during the first quarter of the year. Some people provided some really great seeds of ideas that were developed into full lessons or parts of lessons. For instance, I recall that lesson 2.2 on Ridiculous Ridicule (i.e. your inner critic), lesson 3.5 on Inner Demons, lesson 5.5 on Fame, and lesson 6.9 on Releasing were all created because of suggestions received.

I’m absolutely delighted with how this course turned out. It’s been a tremendous amount of work and a huge focus of my life for so long. I’ve been publishing each lesson as soon as it’s ready, so new lessons have been getting added every week since we started in early January. Hundreds of people signed up for Stature in January and have been going through it. Some are going slowly, still on Module 2 or 3. Others are close to finishing Module 6.

I feel pretty happy now that the long journey of creating the core lessons for this course is complete. I have this nice warm feeling in my heart this morning. Even though many of us are in some form of lockdown right now, I feel a strong sense of connection with the people who’ve been going through the course, like we’ve been communicating energetically from a distance. I also feel that what we’ve co-created together is really beautiful and magnificent.

Creating this course is easily one of the top five projects of my life, largely due to the decades of experience it took to create it. It feels amazing to share this unique creative contribution with people.

It’s been transformational for me to engage with these ideas so deeply for so long. I feel that I’ve emerged from this process a different person, especially in terms of my ability to focus well and maintain good self-control. Developing this course refactored my previous ways of connecting the dots among ideas, so now I mentally and emotionally link ideas together in ways that feel fresh and exciting. It felt like going through a gradual rejuvenation process, and some aspects of life feel easier as a result.

While the world is undergoing major shifts right now, I feel grounded and safe in the midst of the chaos. Somehow this course gave me a deep sense of inner peace. That may also be because I’ve improved many of my habits and reworked my entire daily routine along the way.

It’s especially satisfying to know that since this is a timeless course, people can be benefitting from it for decades to come.

A huge thanks to my wife Rachelle as well for helping with the course creation, including compiling and editing the lesson transcripts, many discussions of ideas, and abundant cuddle breaks to recharge along the way. ❤️

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Silence

In his autobiography Ben Franklin shared that one of his virtues was silence. He included this description:

Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling conversation.

Think about how much time and energy you could save by avoiding trifling conversation and communicating just for the benefit of others or yourself.

I suppose this depends on how you define benefit.

How beneficial is it to comment on what someone shares for the sake of commenting? So you connect for an extra second or two. How much does that matter?

How much of your conversation will even be remembered the next day, let alone a week or a month later?

There’s an opportunity cost when we engage in trifling conversations. We may experience some connection, but it’s a shallow and forgettable form of connection, like being sprayed with a mist that evaporates when the conversation ends.

Do you have any conversations that you still recall years later because of how deep, meaningful, or special they were? How often do you have conversations that you still remember one year later? And how many just blur together in a sea of nothingness?

If you do a lot of online commentary, try to recall some of the most significant commenting you’ve engaged in from the past five years. How much of your communication really benefits others or yourself?

How much criticism have you offered to others that fell on deaf ears or that actually made a situation worse?

I encourage you to play around with your definition of trifling. See what happens if you raise the floor and refrain from making the bottom 25% of commentary that you’d previously considered okay.

What’s borderline trifling that you don’t actually need to share? What cheap laughs could you pass up, even when you have a witty remark on the tip of your tongue that you’re immensely proud of? What debates could you decline to get involved with?

This is an exercise in training up your self-control and self-discipline. When you learn to hold your tongue and be more selective in what you share, it can yield meaningful benefits, including improving your relationships and productivity. Sometimes it’s more beneficial to communicate nothing.

When you release some trifling conversation, you may feel a void in its place, and it may be a deeper void than you expected to see. The invitation is to fill that void with something rich and meaningful to you. If not for trifling conversations taking up space, where else could you invest your time and energy?

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Using Paper Tools

While digital tools can be nice for productivity because of their features, they also have many drawbacks:

  • Digital tools tether you to using a digital device, which can be full of highly accessible distractions.
  • Software still tends to be rigid, limited to the capabilities that are actually implemented by the developers.
  • Software tools have a learning curve. The more tools you use, the more learning time you have to invest. For some software it could take a full day or longer just to become modestly productive with it.
  • Software tools often drag you into dealing with upgrades, add-ons, and security and privacy issues.
  • The more software tools you use, the more complicated your tech life becomes, and the more tech issues you’re likely to have.
  • Software tools often have a useful lifespan that’s limited to a few years unless you keep upgrading. Many tools don’t endure for a decade.
  • For each software tool you use, you may get more email because of it – for support, tips, upgrades, privacy policy updates, etc.
  • If you stop using the software, you may not even be able to access what you’ve created with it. You might be locked into years of upgrade cycles, even if you don’t use it that much.
  • Software tools sometimes break and don’t work, so you may have to seek support or search for solutions online, which chews up time.

While there are many benefits to using software tools, there are many hidden costs as well. Consider all the time you’ve spent researching, learning, evaluating, upgrading, and maintaining various software tools. Are you getting a good payoff for your investment when you consider the total time you’ve had to invest?

Now add the additional time you may have lost from digital distractions when you use software tools, especially on an Internet connected device. How often did you break away from using a genuine productivity tool to check email or social media or to look something up online?

I tend to be wary of over-relying on software tools when I think about the total cost of using them. I like using a relatively small number of tools, especially highly flexible ones like Scrivener. I lean towards minimalism in this area, so I don’t have to maintain such a large collection of tools. I also unsubscribe from nonessential emails related to the software I use, so they don’t distract me. I know I can look something up online when I need it.

Often I prefer to turn towards tactile, low-tech tools such as plain paper, spiral notebooks, index cards, file folders, sticky notes, pens, markers, and a marker board. Such tools can be impressively good for productivity.

Here are some of the benefits of working with such tools:

  • It’s easier to get into a deeper, zen-like focus with paper tools. There’s nothing to click on. There are no icons to distract you.
  • The interface is clean and simple. Pick up a pen or marker and put ink on a surface.
  • Such tools are still immensely flexible. You can write or draw anything you want. You can write lists, sketches, and mind maps on a single page if you want, all with the same tools.
  • Writing by hand forces you to slow down. This makes you think more carefully about what you’re creating. It may feel uncomfortable at first if you’re enmeshed in the digital world, but it’s really nice when you get used to it.
  • The simplicity of the tools enables your mind to flow more energy into emotional awareness while you work. This can be really helpful for spotting problems in your ideas early.
  • If you’ll eventually create something in a digital form, you know that the paper version isn’t final. This can take the pressure off and reduce perfectionism. You have space to play with the ideas and see what emerges.
  • Paper tools have no built-in clocks, so you can work more timelessly and really get into the zone. You can always set a digital device to remind you about appointments if necessary. Or work facing a window (or outdoors), and reconnect with the patterns of sunlight.
  • You can lay out a large amount of information at once, easily moving pieces around. Index cards are especially easy to rearrange and reorder.
  • The interface of using your hands with pen, paper, and other offline tools can be more pleasing and enjoyable than using less flexible digital interfaces.
  • Offline tools require no electricity or Internet access. You can use them anywhere.
  • There isn’t much of a learning curve for such tools. You probably already know how to use them. And you may discover new ways to use them with practice.
  • You don’t have to deal with more emails or tech support.
  • When working offline, and you feel tempted to look something up online “real quick,” you may not bother to do so if your digital devices are out of reach. Much of the time those quick lookups aren’t even necessary and would only lead to other distractions anyway. You can maintain a separate paper side list of items to look up later, so you can stay on task.
  • Whatever you create on paper will likely endure for your lifetime if you want it to last that long.
  • You knowledge of how to use paper tools could still be relevant for decades. You don’t need to worry about retraining yourself when they get upgraded. So you can really invest in depth with these tools over time, and they won’t leave you behind.
  • You can still convert anything you create on paper or a marker board into a basic digital form just by photographing it.
  • Time seems to pass more slowly when working offline. You may feel like you have 50% more time to get your work done, especially without the distractions of the digital world.

I especially love index cards for working out ideas, doing deep planning work, and for recording short routines. I use index cards for recording simple processes and checklists too. My morning routine is written on an index card.

I often use index cards to plan my days. I have stable cards that I use for recurring tasks, and I can make new cards for novel tasks. Then I just arrange them in the right order, and there’s my plan for the day. If I don’t finish everything, it’s easy to bump cards to the next day. If I want to rearrange tasks mid-day, I just reshuffle the cards.

I love keeping supplies well-stocked, so I never feel a sense of scarcity when using such tools. I have almost 2500 index cards in my office closet, some thinner and some thicker. I have dozens of pens and markers, so if one runs out, there’s always a backup.

I also like using a 4′ x 3′ marker board on wheels. Then I can move it wherever I want it. I often use it to hash out ideas when I feel like standing and moving around while I think.

My goals for the quarter are written on a piece of paper, and I review them every morning just by looking at the paper. This helps me get focused on my day and think about how what I’m doing today is moving my larger goals forward.

Many plans and ideas for future courses and for Conscious Growth Club are written on paper and filed neatly into file folders. I use a 5-drawer flat file cabinet to store my most accessible files on their sides, so they’re very visible and don’t get buried in a vertical file cabinet. Sometimes I’ll use a drawer to lay out ideas for a project on index cards, and then I can slide the drawer closed when I’m done. It’s like having an extra table top surface, but there’s no visible clutter when the drawer is closed. I’ve layered the bottom of each drawer with a thin rubbery mat, so the cards don’t slide around when I open and close the drawer.

Paper and digital tools aren’t mutually exclusive. I use both. I don’t write blog posts on paper. But I did outline my book by organizing sticky notes into columns on a large sheet of paper. Each sticky note contained a key idea I wanted to include in the book. Each column of sticky notes became a chapter of the book. Laying out the sticky notes in an intelligent order was a nice way to visually organize the book. Then I used software to do the actual writing.

Another thing I like about paper tools is that they help me feel connected to a sense of history. Sometimes when I’m working on paper, I like to light a candle nearby and imagine what it was like for various historical figures to work with simple creative tools. When reading books written hundreds of years ago, I’m often in awe of the writing style and the creativity expressed without the benefit of digital tools. This helps me realize that I don’t need fancy digital tools to do my best creative work.

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Daily Templates

I have long resisted making my life too structured and routine because I felt it would become too boring and monotonous, where each day is basically a repeat of the one before, and it feels like I’m trapped in the Groundhog Day universe. One solution I like is to use simple structural templates for how I flow through my days, and then I can just pick a template for each and follow it.

For instance, if I want to create a course lesson and a blog post in a day, I can do those in either order. I just want to have both published by the end of the day. Some days I’ll write and publish the blog post first. Some days I’ll design, record, and publish the lesson first. So all I have to decide on those days is which I’ll do first, and with that one decision, the rest of the structure falls into place. My preferred structure is to create a piece from start to finish and stick with it till it’s published. Then I move on to the next item. But the order of those items doesn’t particularly matter.

Some days I don’t record course lessons, so I can use different templates for those days. And of course weekend templates can be totally different as well.

The advantage of having a few templated structures to choose from is that I spend less time pondering what I should do next. I mainly just have to make one decision for how to begin my day, such as starting with a blog post, and then the rest of the day falls into place. Then I can spend the bulk of my day taking action by following the template I’ve chosen for that day.

A template is just a guide for when I have nothing else scheduled. I might need to modify it for any given day, like if I have an interview scheduled. But I can also create extra templates for known scenarios that happen often enough but not every day, such as doing coaching calls in Conscious Growth Club. On those days I know to limit myself to templates that include time for the coaching call.

A template is similar to a schedule, except that I don’t really schedule tasks by the hour. These templates are even simpler. They’re just lists of contexts to flow through in a given order.

For instance, one template for a workday could be as simple as:

  • Breakfast
  • Watch new lessons for the latest course I’m taking
  • Write and publish new blog post
  • Process communication
  • Lunch
  • Design, record, publish, and announce new Stature lesson

This might be a typical template for some weekdays. On other days I might have different items like planning work, administrative work, other creative projects, and so on.

Even with the simple list above, I can create different variations on it. What if I have an idea for a new course lesson right when I wake up, and I don’t want to wait till the afternoon to work on it? Then I can pick a different template that begins the workday with the course lesson. Since the other types of tasks are already laid out in a reasonable order within that template, I don’t have to refactor my task order. The other tasks all fall into place.

Using simple templates like this reduces the mental burden of deciding what to do and when. While it may seem like it’s not a big deal to decide fresh each day the order of every type of task, it actually is a big deal when you consider how much decision fatigue can accumulate by the end of a long day, and you multiply that across many weeks. Using templates saves a lot of unnecessary decision making, and that mental energy can be invested elsewhere. For me it may show up in having more enthusiasm for the afternoon work.

I can also have different templates for different parts of the day, like a few morning routine templates and a few different evening routines. So I could have morning templates, evening templates, weekday templates, and weekend templates. And there can be several variations of each.

I like spelling these out on index cards. Then I can grab one index card for each part of the day, and that gives me the template for the whole day.

I can also have templates for lighter days, half days, and heavier work days, depending on my energy and enthusiasm. There’s really no limit to how many templates I can create. I can even name them on the index cards, so I can quickly recognize each template at a glance.

Additionally, within each template, I can also have subtemplates. So there could be subtemplates for processing communication, and within those I could have different arrangements of tasks like checking email and the Conscious Growth forums. Or I can have subtemplates for creating course lessons because some steps can be done in different orders, like when I record the lesson and when I add the lesson summary and exercise to the course workbook.

Think of templates as recipes. You probably don’t want to eat the same meal over and over, so why would you flow through each day in the same sequence, especially if you have options? But you probably don’t want to plan every day from scratch either, so you can use templates to focus on your known favorites, just as you can use recipes to make your favorite meals repeatedly. This can provide a nice balance of stability and variety.

If you ever feel bored with your templates, you still have the option of breaking away from them and using a different approach when that appeals to you. And you might even learn something that could inspire new template ideas. Just as you may want to freshen up your habitual recipes now and then, you’ll probably want to freshen up your templates sometimes as well.

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Sprinkle Goals

I think of a sprinkle goal as being a token goal that’s added to a goal list to try to create better balance. It adds the impression of balance, but it doesn’t really connect with deeper meaning or purpose.

Picture the sprinkles on top of a cupcake. They look nice, but they don’t really add much substance to the cupcake. And if you only have sprinkle goals, then you have no cupcake at all. You just have some colored sugar.

Here are some examples of sprinkle goals:

  • Read 10 books
  • Exercise more
  • Spend time with my wife / husband / kids
  • Connect with my friends each week
  • Spend less time online
  • Make a new social media post each day
  • Spend X hours per week on decluttering
  • Organize my finances

To really determine if a goal is a sprinkle goal, you have to view it in context. You’re the only one who can make that determination about your own goals.

One person’s sprinkle goals may actually be meaningful for another person. For one person a goal like reading 10 new books may feel very purposeful, while for someone else it’s just something tossed onto the pile to pay lip service to learning, creating the illusion of more balance.

Sprinkle goals don’t generate much commitment, and they’re often phrased noncommittally. A common sign of a sprinkle goal is when a goal contains words like more or less. It doesn’t connect with real behavioral changes or specific outcomes.

Sprinkle goals are lazy goals. When someone sets a sprinkle goal, they haven’t thought through much to the implementation side. They usually stop at the formation of the goal and leave it at that, so it just perpetually hangs there in space. It isn’t turned into something specific. There isn’t a sense of wanting to follow through into action when the goal is set.

A sprinkle goal normally lacks a connection to deeper meaning and purpose. It may take a stab in that direction, but it somehow misses.

Which 10 books are you book are you going to read? Why do you want to read them? What will be missing from your life if you skip this? What’s the point?

Why do you want to spend more time with your wife? Doing what specifically? Does watching TV together count? What are you trying to change or improve about your relationship?

One way to spot a sprinkle goal is to ask: If this were my only goal, how much would it matter?

What if your only goal was to read 10 books? What if your only goal was to spend more time with your kids? Those could matter enough if they’re connected with a deeper meaning and purpose, but most of the time when people ask this question, the hollowness of their sprinkle goals becomes apparent.

Is it so terrible to have sprinkle goals? No, you could have a few. They may still add some value to your life. But you’ll probably get more value if you redefine them into more meaningful and specific ones.

A sprinkle goal is really an excuse not to think deeply about setting true and meaningful goals in some area of life. Setting a goal like “read 10 books” hides the fact that you haven’t really figured out what role self-education will play in your life or what new skills and knowledge you want to gain and why.

Setting a goal like “spend more time with my husband” means you haven’t really thought through where your relationship is going and how you’d actually like to see it grow and improve.

A sprinkle goal is a replacement for the hard work of real goal setting. They’re often added on top after you’ve gotten tired of thinking deeply about your other goals, and you don’t want to invest the same depth of thought into other areas of life. So you just toss in some placeholders to create the illusion of balance.

Because they don’t matter much, you probably won’t achieve your sprinkle goals either, and it may be best that you don’t since they’d otherwise distract you from working on more meaningful goals. But even adding sprinkle goals to your goals list is generally a mistake because it creates clutter and makes you feel less accomplished. You’ll be tempted to treat them like other goals, but they’re really too malformed to be truly actionable in a meaningful way. Whether you do them or don’t do them is of little consequence.

Cautiously watch for sprinkle goals infecting your goals list, and prune them when you notice them. It’s okay to feel the void of not having a goal to cover some aspect of life such as your relationship or your self-development. Don’t race to fill that void with sprinkles. Hold out till you do the work of baking the whole cupcake.

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New Goals Mandate New Behaviors

Tomorrow in Conscious Growth Club, we’re having our quarterly planning review call. This is a group video call where I review the quarterly goals that some members have shared in our forums, and I look for potential issues as well as noteworthy items to share with them.

It’s similar to a code review, where one or more programmers look over another programmer’s code, looking for bugs or security flaws, calling out good practices, and noting areas for improvement.

We all have blind spots, but our blind spots aren’t the same. Having a second pair of eyes to review your goals or plans can help spot potential issues that you may have overlooked. Another person may also spot hidden opportunities that you could be missing.

Having gone through this process multiple times with the same people, I’m becoming more familiar with the patterns. The bright side is that many people do achieve their goals, usually not all of them, but they do make meaningful progress. It’s great to see people chipping away at their goals quarter after quarter.

I’d say the number one challenge that people have is being able to focus on their goals consistently enough with action, day after day, week after week, till the end of the quarter. Setting a goal isn’t enough of course. We also have to set ourself up for consistent action, and that part tends to be more difficult than many people expect.

The hardest part is usually getting the right habits in place to support our goals. This includes answering questions like:

  • What will I do to move this goal forward each week?
  • Which days will I work on this?
  • How will I work on this?
  • How will I track my progress?
  • How will I bring my focus back if I start getting distracted?

Perhaps the most important question is actually this:

How will I prevent myself from falling off track?

Goals need rails. They need scaffolding to support them. They need structure to back them up. There has to be something in place so that when the initial motivation fades – and it almost always fades – we’ll keep going and going and going until the goal is achieved.

Even modest goals can take incredibly tenacity to achieve. It’s just so easy for a goal to go off course when the habits to support it aren’t strong enough.

Progress logging helps. Social support helps too. But character-wise it all comes down to self-discipline to keep moving a goal forward to completion. Reconnecting with the purpose and meaning behind a goal can rekindle some motivation, but it takes discipline to do even that.

It’s nice to think that goals are achieved with thoughts and feelings, but the reality is that goals are achieved by behaviors. It’s the habitual actions that move a goal forward. Even if a goal requires a series of unique and varied actions each day, it still takes a behavioral habit to get yourself to engage with those actions consistently.

Turning a goal into a collection of habits is a bit of an art form. For me this is one of the most challenging yet creative aspects of personal growth. I never get it quite perfectly, but it’s so rewarding when I’ve finally locked in the right behaviors, and I can see that a goal will be achieved by keeping those behaviors going.

New goals mandate new behaviors. And that’s the part we tend to resist. It’s where we drop the ball most often. A goal could be well-formed. It could be clear and achievable. It may be deeply purposeful. But it won’t become a reality unless we reconfigure our behaviors to transport us there.

Recognize that each goal represents a significant behavioral change. Getting the right behaviors in place is difficult, and it’s so easy to underestimate just how difficult it is. Most commonly we set too many goals. This is easy to do by making estimates for what we can achieve based on assuming that we’ll instantly change our behaviors to align perfectly with our goals. But of course that doesn’t happen. Developing the right behaviors is a major goal unto itself, perhaps the biggest one of all.

Instead of setting a dozen goals for a quarter that all require significant behavioral changes, it may be better to just set 3-5 goals or even 1 or 2 sometimes. Then put a lot more effort into the behavioral changes needed. Once you’re doing a good job with those behaviors, then consider adding more goals to the list.

Alternatively, you can set several goals for a quarter, but then just focus on creating the behavioral shifts for one or two of those goals during the first month. Then work on behavioral changes for a few more goals once those new habits feel stable.

Self-discipline is a limited resource, so you’re likely to burn out if you try to use it for too many changes at once. It’s wise to use it sparingly, first to design a new habit and then to practice the habit sufficiently till you can continue mostly on autopilot, and less discipline is needed to maintain your momentum. Then you’ll have the capacity to tackle more changes.

You can also frame some (or all) of your goals as behavioral changes, which can make you more aware of the work involved. Then you may discover ways to accomplish multiple goals with similar behavioral changes, such as training yourself to follow a morning routine that could help you achieve a few different goals.

If you’ve noticed the same goals coming up for you repeatedly and you find your rate of progress unsatisfying, consider looking at your goals from a behavioral angle or even framing them primarily from that direction. This will help you become more away of the real changes needed as well as the self-discipline demands that you’re placing on your character.

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Writing From the Void

Normally when I want to write a new blog post, I take a few minutes to tune into an idea, and then it begins to flow into writing. Getting an idea involves listening with my inner senses, as if I’m scanning some electromagnetic field for signal matches. When I discover a match, I can lock onto it, and then it’s rather easy to let the idea flow through into words.

The idea comes through as energy that I perceive as oscillations in my thoughts, and it combines with memories and other knowledge as I write. So first I get an initial sense of the idea in my mind, but it’s really through the process of writing that I grow into a full understanding of what’s being expressed.

So I don’t really know what article I’m writing till it’s written. Sometimes I can only see the beginning third of it or so, and the rest comes into view after I’ve written part of it.

I also get ideas from other sources, like people making suggestions. But the best articles that people appreciate most are usually writing with the process of scanning for inspiration and inviting it to flow through. I’ve shared more about this process in the article How I Write.

An interesting thing that happened today was that when I tried to summon an article idea, nothing actually came through. I sensed that the field of energy that I normally gather ideas from had gone silent. This happens now and then, and usually what I do is just assume that I don’t need to write anything at that particular time. I figure there’s no message to deliver. So I don’t write anything on those days, or I try again later in the day.

Usually when nothing comes through, it’s because there’s some inspiration to be followed in a different direction that doesn’t involve writing. I have to broaden my idea scanning to include more frequencies, not just the ones in the writing ideas spectrum. Then I usually notice that I’m pulled towards an idea for what to do next. It could be a business idea or a personal idea. When I sense the energy signature of an aligned idea, I like to flow into it with action right away.

Today, however, when I did the broader scanning and invitation process, still nothing came through in any direction. That seemed odd, but it does happen now and then too. So I decided to just sit with that for a while. I sat and did nothing and waited. If the inspiration field is silent, perhaps doing nothing for a while is the right course of action.

Eventually I got the idea to try an experiment, which was to write in a different way. Instead of waiting for some signal to come through, I popped open my journal and decided to write from within the space of nothingness. No special inspiration. No ideas coming through. Just write from the void. You’re reading that journal entry now.

I began thinking about how many writers write every day whether they feel inspired or not. I almost always wait for inspiration. But what happens when my timing and the timing of the inspiration don’t coincide? That’s a concern for this year because of my one-year daily blogging commitment. Can I expect that I’ll always be able to write from inspiration as I have in years past if I’m doing this more frequently than ever?

I’ve gone to the well of ideas so many times before, and the ideas feel like they already exist in some form, like they’re grapes growing on a vine, and I’m plucking a grape off the vine. Then my assignment is to consume and digest that grape and turn it into a new article. The vine still feels like it has an abundance of grapes, but I also feel that perhaps it’s time to explore some other idea space and leave the grapes to others sometimes.

These signals often feel like they’re coming from other people. It feels like I’m tuning into what someone out there wants helps with, and then I write an article for that person. I often feel like I’m tuned into the energy of an individual or perhaps a small group of people with similar desires when I write new articles.

Something I value about this daily blogging challenge, however, is the opportunity to explore other aspects of writing and self-expression that I may not have considered as much. I’ve leaned on a certain mode for getting ideas for so long that it’s second nature to me. And so it feels a little too easy to keep leaning on that skill.

Today is my 100th day in a row of blogging (I started on December 24th). So I don’t have any doubt that I can keep this up for a full year. But writing every day with the same approach I’ve been using feels like hanging out on a plateau. I think what I’ve been sensing lately, especially with respect to having my own wake-up call, is a desire to move beyond this familiar and comfortable mode of writing. It’s easy. It’s abundant. I can write that way all day and produce an infinite stream of content. But I’m not seeing much inner growth in repeating the same approach day after day.

I can also switch media like doing video and audio, but I’ve done that as well, and I still summon ideas using the same approach, so it doesn’t really feel new. It only felt new up to the point where I grew just as comfortable creating through other media, but then it’s pretty much the same.

I look around and see a world full of self-expression. Every day people are cranking out more and more content and consuming the content of others. While initially I found that fascinating and fun to participate in, now it feels a bit too boring and predictable if I keep using the same approach. It’s an infinite game, but it feels overly bounded to me.

I’m going to continue the daily blogging challenge, but I want to explore other ways of doing this going forward, especially in terms of how I generate ideas. It’s appealing to seek ideas in frequency ranges where I’m not used to scanning. I’m really not sure what form that will take or what it will look like. And I really don’t even know where to begin. I just sense that it’s time to mix things up.

This isn’t an April Fools’ joke by the way. I thought about doing one, but that also feels a bit cliché, and if you can believe this, I’m actually still getting emails every month from people falling for the one from 2011. It’s been eye-opening to discover just how many people would like to be enslaved. So I have to consider how a playful joke may affect my email inbox for the next decade or so.

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Balancing Achievements and Experiences

In Conscious Growth Club, we’re going through our usual quarterly planning process now. This is a five-step process that we go through four times each year as we set goals for each new quarter. It starts by reviewing the previous quarter and seeing how we did, relative to the goals we set three months prior.

One of my favorite parts of this process is reviewing the previous quarter and noting what actually got done. When I was younger, this type of review would often serve as a wake-up call regarding all the things I didn’t get done. These days it’s a nice way to remember the previous three months. In the past I focused more on achievements. Now I strive for better balance between achievements and experiences.

Instead of just listing accomplishments when I begin this review process, I like to list experiences too. This helps me recall me how I actually spent my time and what value I gained from it.

For instance, here are some items from my list for Q1 2020:

  • Went to Panama with TLC, emcee’d the first day of TLC (went very well), and saw the Panama Canal
  • Had to lock down and stay at home starting in March due to coronavirus
  • Bought a Nintendo Switch and finished Zelda: Link’s Awakening with Rachelle
  • Joined the Ignite Video Challenge and created and shared 17 videos for it
  • Watched the first season of Star Trek: Picard
  • Did my first YouTube live premiere (for the Stature launch video)
  • Continued guitar lessons and started learning “Personal Jesus” by Depeche Mode
  • Finished reading Albert Schweitzer’s bio (a long book and a long journey)
  • Bought a new Apple 32” Pro Display XDR monitor and stand (my nicest monitor ever)

These may not be considered accomplishments per se, but I like to record them to remind me of some things I experienced during the quarter. When I view these in the context of other goals accomplished, such as launching the new Stature course and publishing the first 60 lessons for it, it helps me get a more rounded picture of the quarter.

In the past I would over-focus on achievements, and if I didn’t have enough of those in a quarter, I felt like I’d slacked off and should push harder the next quarter. But now I like to consider achievements in balance with experiences.

Playing through the Zelda game with Rachelle was a fun and playful experience that we both enjoyed. Reading Albert Schweitzer’s bio was something I whittled away at in the evenings before bed, often occupying my thoughts as I went to sleep. Buying the new monitor was an interesting stretch purchase since it’s the priciest monitor I ever bought, and I visited it in the store a few times before finally taking it home. These are all experiences I was glad to have this quarter.

Creating a more thorough list also helps me recall some things I had to deal with during the quarter, which could explain why I did or didn’t achieve the goals I had set. Obviously the coronavirus situation changes the game plan for many of us.

When I see the Panama trip on the list, I remember the dozens of bug bites that Rachelle and I left with. Even two months later, we’re both still recovering from those bites. The bugs there are vicious towards vegans.

Every quarter I create a new list of achievements and experiences, and I’ve been doing this for years, so I can skim through these lists to remember the highlights of those periods.

In a way this is similar to time logging. But instead of logging my days, I’m logging my quarters on a more macro scale. This gives me an interesting viewport into where my time is going over the span of a quarter. On that scale I don’t really care where each hour or even each day went. But it’s good to get a bird’s eye view of how I lived during that three-month period of my life.

This is turn helps me make better decisions for what I’d like to accomplish and experience in future quarters. It especially reminds me to include some experiential pursuits just because I enjoy them – seeing shows or concerts, taking trips, and having fun with friends.

One lesson I’ve learned in particular is that I feel best about a quarter when it’s nicely balanced, meaning that I didn’t just work, work, work all the time. I actually feel sad for a quarter that looks like it was too much work, even if I accomplished a lot. I like seeing quarters that include lots of experiential richness, especially because they give me the gift of better memories afterwards. I especially like looking back on a quarter and thinking, I really packed a lot of fun into those three months.

The coronavirus situation seems to be making me even more appreciative of all the wonderful experiences that can be had again when this passes. I look forward to the time I can feel aligned with traveling or even just going out to run errands nearby.

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Beverly Hills Rambo

Did you know that Eddie Murphy wasn’t the original choice the play the character of Axel Foley in the movie Beverly Hills Cop? That role was actually given to Sylvester Stallone, but he couldn’t get some of the comedic elements right, so Eddie Murphy was brought in to replace him.

And did you know that Clint Eastwood wasn’t going to be the original Dirty Harry? Frank Sinatra was set to play that role. Unfortunately Sinatra broke his wrist and couldn’t lift the gun, so the role went to Eastwood instead. Why couldn’t Sinatra just shoot with his other hand?

Who could forget Marty McFly from Back to the Future? That role wasn’t played by Michael J. Fox initially. The movie actually started filming with Eric Stoltz in the lead role, but he was cut after a few weeks due to not being perceived as funny enough.

Changing actors during production is costly, but it isn’t uncommon. Sometimes this happens very late into a production. British actress Samantha Morton completed her role for the movie Her, where she played the voice of the AI. But she was replaced by Scarlett Johansson during post production, meaning that the entire role was re-recorded.

Given all the money being spent by the movie industry, you might expect that they’d get these decisions right the first time and lock everything down. But the reality is that creating a film can be an evolutionary process where decisions are made and then reconsidered along the way.

Sometimes you just have to make your best guess and go forward with action. Even when you do your best to make good advance decisions, you can’t always tell how things will work out. Sometimes you’ll make costly mistakes that will be problematic to fix or redo later.

From the actor’s perspective, it sucks when you get cut, especially after putting a lot of work into a role. Stuart Townsend trained and rehearsed for two months to play Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, only to be replaced by Viggo Mortensen four days into filming. Peter Jackson concluded that Townsend looked too young for the role. Couldn’t Jackson have figured that out sooner? Maybe he could have made that choice sooner, but sometimes you don’t really know how a piece will fit till you see it in context.

Sometimes you’ll also get blindsided by what life throws at you. In the movie Aliens, the actor James Remar was originally set to play the role of Corporal Hicks, but he was arrested for drug possession, so James Cameron replaced him with Michael Biehn.

When you tackle an interesting creative or business project, problems come up along the way. It’s rare for such projects to breeze through predictably from start to finish. Sometimes you have to make difficult choices as you go.

And sometimes you’ll be the one getting cut because someone else has made that decision, or they fell into circumstances where they had little choice.

In film production such cuts and changes are ideally made to create a better movie. Of course there can be politics involved, but sometimes it’s just the right choice. It’s hard to envision a better Beverly Hills Cop than Eddie Murphy, but would you want to be the one to tell Sylvester Stallone that he wasn’t funny enough after you’ve already cast him in the role?

When you face a difficult decision to make, ask yourself what’s best for the story of your life. What’s your big picture? When you put that picture first, what decision wants to emerge? What’s the right thing to do, regardless of the implementation difficulty?

Sometimes the right decision for your story is that it’s time to cut someone from your cast. Sometimes you need to replace the script for your life. Sometimes you need to pursue different roles. And sometimes you just need to step back and trust everyone to do their jobs.

It’s easy to look at a crappy film and wonder how the studio could have released it like that. Couldn’t they tell it was going to be bad in advance? Couldn’t they see all the mistakes they were making along the way? In many cases the answer is yes, but it’s still difficult for someone to step up and make those calls. How do you cut an actor who’s been training hard for months for a role? How do you let go of a long-term career that isn’t working for you? Sometimes it’s easier just to let it go badly and hope that the next project is better.

Imagine looking at your life through the lens of being the movie director in charge of it. Do you like how the picture is progressing? Do you have the right people in the right roles to make it work? Do you need to make any cuts or changes to ensure that the film turns out well? And there any counterproductive forces at work that you need to address?

What keeps you going through all of these tough decisions? Ultimately it’s your vision for the film – or your vision for your life. You can let a variety of different forces push you one way and then another, or you can sit in the director’s chair and direct.

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Coronavirus Adaptations for Local Businesses

In Conscious Growth Club, we’ve been discussing the coronavirus situation since February 26, and our discussion thread called “Coronavirus preparation” is now up to 325 posts and still growing. Perhaps a half-dozen related threads have been started as well, as members are discussing topics like self-care in isolation, immunity boosting tips, and sharing updates on what’s happening in different countries. So we’ve had some visibility on it this sooner than most, which gave us a head start on mentally and emotionally preparing ourselves for it.

Contrast this with various local businesses that haven’t been as aware of what’s coming up and were thrown for a loop at the speed and surprise of changes coming at them.

Let me share some local Las Vegas businesses how have been adapting.

Casinos and Hotels

The casinos and hotels are shut down statewide. So the Vegas Strip is shuttered. This essentially turns off the flow of money coming into the city.

The larger operations seem to be paying their employees for the next 2 weeks up to 30 days, but the smaller ones are already laying people off. I read that about 206K casino employees are out of work now.

This is going to crash the cities economy, badly enough that I think it will take years to recover. When we reach the point that the bigger casinos have to start laying people off, it will take them a long time for them to rebuild afterwards. And it will take a while to rebuild tourism to the city.

These larger operations don’t have a lot of good adaptations right now other than laying everyone off. It’s not like they can convert their large spaces to other social uses. They’ve had to turn off just about every revenue stream: hotel stays, gambling, shows, restaurants, night clubs, spas, arcades, etc. The entire resorts are closed.

Some local places have remained open 24/7 for many years, so they literally had to hire a locksmith to come over and install locks. They’d never had cause to lock their front doors because they had never closed before.

Additionally Cirque du Soleil, which has many shows in Vegas, laid off 95% of its global workforce, basically letting go of all of its performers.

Presently the casinos seem to be begging the federal government for bailout money, along with many other businesses.

Some resorts actually have to pay rent because they don’t own the land they’re on. The Bellagio is in this situation, for instance. So what happens when rent is due, but there’s no money coming in?

Fitness Studio

My local fitness studio has adapted to this situation quickly. They converted their in-person classes to online streaming classes. They provided all active members with access to a private area of their website where we can watch streaming classes online. Each day they post a schedule of classes.

Today, for instance, there are 11 classes include various forms of yoga, pilates, bootcamp, and barre. There’s even an indoor cycling class, which I guess is suitable for people who have exercise bikes at home.

It looks like they may stream a class live the first time and also record it. Or maybe they just record them all – it’s hard to tell. But they’re streaming on a schedule with only one class available at a time, and you cannot pause a video in progress, so it simulates the feeling of live classes. It’s less flexible though because if they’re recording these anyway, they could just make all recordings available at all times.

They must be in a tough situation though. Rachelle and I have each done a few of the streaming classes. They’re well done, and I like that this option is available so I can continue what I started in February in some fashion. But it’s not as good as the in-person experience at the studio.

This studio is part of a growing chain across several states, so they can pool resources to create the online classes. The ones we watched looked like they’re being recorded in Vegas though. Some people were wearing Vegas shirts in one video, and another was done by an instructor we know from our local studio.

This must be a tough situation for them. If the online classes are only needed for a few weeks, hopefully it will help members keep their memberships going and not cancel. But if this situation goes on for months, I think more people will conclude that they should cancel their memberships. I think people will find it hard to justify paying as much for online video workouts as they do for the live in-studio experience.

One issue Rachelle and I both noted though is that on some of the videos they’re creating, they’re clearly not practicing good social distancing. They have an instructor and several students on yoga mats within arm’s length of each other sometimes. That’s a concern. I think a lot of people are having a hard time noting just how disciplined we need to be about social distancing.

Rachelle and I stopped going to classes at this studio about two weeks ago. We were sad to stop, but we saw this situation coming a while before it began to unfold locally. Initially after we stopped going, the studio tried to adapt with fewer classes and more sanitation procedures, but I knew it wasn’t going to matter.

That’s a pattern I’ve seen a lot locally. Businesses are trying to incrementally adapt, but often by the time they figure out their incremental adaptations and announce them to their customers or clients, the situation has already moved beyond that.

Music Store

Initially the local music store where I take guitar lessons tried to keep their stores open but with more limited hours. Fortunately our Nevada Governor shut that idea down by ordering (instead of merely requesting) all nonessential businesses to shut down.

I did my last lesson there more than two weeks ago and canceled all upcoming lessons indefinitely, having a glimpse of what was about to unfold. I told someone at the store that I expected the store would be closed by the end of the month. I don’t think he believed me at the time.

During the past week, the store sent out a couple of emails announcing reduced hours for their physical locations and added the ability to continue lessons online, saying that the guitar teachers would follow up with their students individually about this. Their plan was to still have the teachers stream the lessons from the stores.

I knew this wouldn’t last long. A few days later the store had to completely by Governor’s orders.

I’m not sure if they’re going to try adapting to this now by letting their music teachers team and stream lessons from home. That seems a bit risky for them because they take a cut of the lesson tuition. So it’s like cutting themselves out of the loop, although they could still handle booking and billing lessons.

I like the in-person lessons, but I don’t think I’d want to do them remotely if given the options. There are other ways I could take online lessons that are more flexible. And I’d miss the face-to-face aspect.

Farmers Market

Close to our house they’ve converted the usual weekend farmers market into a drive-through version, so people can get fresh produce without leaving their cars. There’s a short video of it at the link below if you want to see how it works.

This seems like an okay adaptation at first, especially since the helpers wear gloves when they handle the produce and money. But the video still shows some examples of people not applying good social distancing as they move around the area, so while this may be better than going to an overcrowded grocery store, it’s still showing risky behavior.

An even worse issue is that when a local food bank announces that they’re giving away food, like in a parking lot, people swarm the area to acquire the food. These giveaways may be well-intentioned, but there’s a serious lack of awareness or discipline about the criticality of social distancing, which makes it easier for the virus to spread.

If we keep seeing this pattern locally, it’s just going to make the situation worse.

Strip Club

Vegas has a lot of strip clubs, and this situation puts many of them out in the cold. One local club quickly tried to adapt by offering drive-by strip shows. The idea was that patrons would stay in their cars, pay $100, pull up to a window, and a stripper would perform for them from a distance for 10 minutes. No touching allowed of course.

This idea generating some local press, maybe for its creativity or simply for its desperation, but was dead on arrival. The club didn’t have a chance to implement it before the it was ordered fully closed by the Governor, along with all other nonessential businesses.

Earlier today I learned that a strip club in Portland came up with a different idea. Partly as a joke, the club’s owner suggested on social media that they should convert to a food delivery service and have the strippers deliver food to people. Some people started to seriously inquire about the idea, so the owner decided to do exactly that. Now they have strippers with drivers (who also serve as security for them) taking food orders and delivering food. They say they’ll even deliver food to the coast (about an hour’s drive from Portland) if people are willing to pay enough for it. The name of the new service: Boober Eats.

Since strippers typically work as independent contractors, they’re not eligible for unemployment benefits. So while it’s to be expected that they may try to create new income streams, reporters have noted that the place in Portland isn’t practicing social distancing.

One source noted that while the owner is providing masks, disposable gloves, and sanitizing wipes, there are major problems present with social distancing:

But social distancing seemed to be a struggle for the women themselves. The club has turned into the headquarters for Boober Eats, and on Friday, it remained full of dancers, delivery drivers and members of the media. Some of the dancers greeted each other with hugs and took selfies together.

Source: Oregon Live

So there’s a genuine risk that this could become a coronavirus delivery service.

Problems with These Adaptations

These adaptations, while understandable, creative, and perhaps even admirable in some situations, aren’t without issues, especially when it comes to social distancing.

I think we’ll likely run into more local businesses trying to make similar adaptations, and I caution everyone not to ignore social distancing since it remains so critical right now.

Some of these problems can be solved with better attention to detail. For instance, we don’t not need lots of students on a streaming yoga video to demonstrate the postures. One or two would be sufficient, separated by a generous distance. And the Farmers Market could assign one person to one or two tables, so their paths aren’t crossing each other and they stay in their own zones.

The USA has now surpassed 42K reported coronavirus cases. Three days ago (on March 20) we were at 16K cases, and on that day I predicted that we’d surpass 50K cases sometime on Tuesday (tomorrow). Unfortunately we’re right on schedule, even slightly ahead of schedule.

My other predictions were that we’d reaching 100,000 USA cases on March 27 and that we’d reach 1,000,000 cases on April 3rd. Of course it’s possible that we may not do enough testing to achieve those predictions on the reporting side, but the virus is still showing abundant momentum to get there whether or not testing can keep up with it. Many experts suggestion that the true cases are likely to be at least 10x higher than the reported cases, so we could be looking at 10M+ true cases (or more) sometime next week. That can and will overwhelm many hospitals.

I’ve also noticed that this virus is moving socially closer. Last week I learned that a friend of a friend of a friend died from it. Then last night a friend’s niece passed away from it. More people that I connect with on social media have been reporting their own confirmed or likely infections.

Now imagine all of this being 25X higher sometime next week. And then it will flow right into 50X and then 100X without stopping.

If the adaptations seem reasonable, they aren’t. If they seem ridiculously strict, they may be just barely adequate.

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