Category Archives: productivity

Matchers and Mismatchers

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Sometime during the 90s, I listened to an audio program that explained the differences between matchers and mismatchers.

Matchers are “yes, and” people who see the upsides of an idea more prominently than the downsides. If you share a new idea with them, they’ll see how the idea could work and may offer suggestions for what else you could do to make it even better.

Mismatchers are “wait, but” people who see the downsides of an idea more prominently than the upsides. If you share a new idea with them, they see what could go wrong and may point out the risks and drawbacks.

I’m a matcher. I find it easy to feel optimistic and enthusiastic about a new idea, often thinking about what could go right before I think about what could go wrong.

I’d say that my Mom is a mismatcher. When I’d share my youthful ideas with her, she’d often express skepticism and might point to some of the risks. I think that’s because she herself was raised by parents who lived through the Great Depression and learned the dangers of excessive optimism.

Incubating Ideas

Another lesson I learned from that same audio program was that it’s wise to involve matchers in the early phases of developing an idea. A group of matchers working together will raise the level of excitement and enthusiasm. They’ll help to develop the overall vision. They’ll see the best possible outcomes.

If, however, you bring one or more mismatchers into the early development phase, it’s like throwing a wet blanket on the whole affair. They’ll suck all of the joy and fun out of the process that matchers love, and they’ll think they’re doing everyone a favor by voicing risks and concerns early. Many otherwise viable ideas die early deaths this way. If you have one mismatcher in a room full of matchers, the mismatcher will be the one that everyone else wants to strangle. The matchers will likely regard the mismatcher as obstructing progress and unnecessarily slowing things down.

Mismatchers do have an important role to play, but it’s generally best to bring them in a bit later, after the vision has grown more solid and real to the matchers – when the idea is starting to take on a life of its own and isn’t so vulnerable to collapse. That’s when it’s good to invite someone to poke holes in the idea and to consider what could go wrong. Mismatchers will often notice flaws and risks that matchers overlook.

As a matcher I can confirm that it’s immensely frustrating to involve a mismatcher too early in a creative project. They’re usually well intentioned but don’t see just how much their cautious nature kills momentum and drains enthusiasm. An idea in the incubation stage can be very delicate. Like a newborn baby, it needs to be nurtured first. If you criticize it for its inadequacies right out of the womb, that isn’t going to help. You have to see its potential first.

Becoming More Balanced

Early in business I was overly optimistic about certain deals. I didn’t adequately consider the risks and got burned more than once. If I’d pay more attention to the mismatcher advice at the time, I might have avoided those problem situations. But looking back I don’t feel that it’s so terrible that I went through those bad deals because I learned a lot from them. They helped me to develop more balance. I grew wiser and made smarter decisions afterwards that led to better results.

Over time I began to realize that being a matcher or mismatcher isn’t a permanent condition. These are default ways of thinking, but we don’t have to remain internally stuck in one mode or another. We’re capable of developing both aspects.

When I do creative projects today, I start with matcher mode. I work through the purpose and vision. I get enthusiastic about the results that will be generated. I think about the positive ripples. I get aligned with doing the project. If I share the idea, I prefer to share it with matchers, so they can help me better understand the idea’s potential.

When the idea is a bit more developed, I turn to the practical side. I identify the risks and list them out one by one. I look at the potential downsides. I consider problems that may arise and how to address them.

Matcher mode is faster. Mismatcher mode is slower. When I want to speed up and go faster, I shift into matcher mode. When I feel uncertain about the risks, I downshift into mismatcher mode and work through more details in advance.

Opportunities Include Problems

Consider that if a problem does arise, it’s rarely fatal. Problems almost always lead to learning experiences that make us smarter and more resilient in the long run. The Great Depression may have been a big setback, but most people got through it okay.

While you might get an “I told you so” from a mismatcher who predicted your problems in advance, a good response might be: “Yeah, and look at these other results I got too. It was still worth doing.”

Many problems don’t actually need to be solved. Some problems may simply be regarded as side effects to be accepted. An example would be if we do a program with live call times. Of course some people won’t be able to make the times we choose. We can partially address this by providing recordings. And we can also accept that it’s just the nature of live calls that some people will have scheduling conflicts, and that’s okay.

When you pursue interesting opportunities, problems will arise. Many mismatchers tend to overplay the presence of problems, presuming that each one must be solved before a project can proceed. That may be a wise precaution if you’re building a spacecraft, but for many projects that approach would be overly cautious. In some cases speed of execution is a lot more important than solving every problem that comes up.

When iOS 13 launched about a month ago, people complained that it was buggy. I noticed some bugs too, but on balance I appreciated the new update way more than the bugs annoyed me. I also knew from experience that Apple would eventually push out bug fix updates, and of course that’s been happening. Apple could have waited until a higher standard was met, but for most people iOS 13 was probably good enough to ship, even knowing that there would be problems.

What problems don’t really matter much even if they happen? What problems could you fix later if they happened? What problems would be relatively easy to pre-solve or prevent if just think them through?

Also think about the opportunity side: What opportunities are you delaying or at risk of missing because you’re fussing over potential problems? How will you feel if someone else beats you to the punch because you moved to slowly? Are you really being cautious… or merely sluggish?

Problem or Excuse?

It’s common to see people pointing to problems as roadblocks. How many times have we heard people mention these or similar problems as reasons they can’t move forward in some area?

  • I can’t afford it.
  • I don’t have the time.
  • My family won’t let me.
  • I live with my parents.
  • I don’t have the skills.

If you lean too heavily on mismatcher mode, problems tend to become excuses for inaction. The existence of a problem is all you need to put the brakes on.

If you can lean towards matcher mode though, then problems can be seen as hidden opportunities, including all of the problems listed above. True matchers are advancing in all of these situations.

Finding Your Balance

If you lean too heavily on matcher mode, you may take a lot of action that blows up in your face. Or perhaps you start out overly optimistic, and then you run into unforeseen difficulties and get bogged down. The mismatchers in your life will declare “I told you so” again and again.

If you lean too heavily on mismatcher mode, you’ll talk yourself out of many decent opportunities. Your excessive skepticism will kill ideas before they’ve been nurtured into viable projects. You’ll probably repel most of the matchers in your life, so your social circle will likely be rich in fellow skeptics. You may even consider yourself one of the more balanced ones, wondering why your friends are such downers.

To move interesting goals and projects forward, it helps to develop a balanced approach, either within ourselves or on our teams. A strong matcher or mismatcher can be a valuable asset in the right team position. But I think we can also learn to balance these modes of thinking as individuals, which also helps us to develop more respect for whichever mode of thinking isn’t our dominant one.

A well-balanced matcher can provide drive and energy to maintain the momentum of a project while also staying attuned to potential risks – but without getting bogged down in minor problems.

An unbalanced matcher can be overly impulsive and reckless, thereby adding more problems to a project which only increases the workload. They tend to assume that injecting lots of wild, passionate, yet chaotic energy into the mix is helpful, but of course it often isn’t.

A well-balanced mismatcher can identify problems and help develop solutions and contingency plans, contributing to the advancement and refinement of the project.

An unbalanced mismatcher tends to be overly skeptical or cynical and merely adds a critical voice without offering solutions or intelligent risk assessment. They tend to assume that pointing out problems and voicing concerns will be valued by others, but of course it often isn’t.

When you realize you’re out of balance, just as I did, it takes some effort to practice a different mode of thinking, but it can be done. Getting burned enough times or missing enough opportunities can be good motivation to make changes. But another thing that helps is just gaining experience.

I find that thinking about these modes consciously really helps me to achieve more balance, so I hope that becoming more aware of these modes is useful for you as well. Sometimes I’ll switch back and forth multiple times at different phases of a project. There are matcher and mismatcher modes for development, for launching, for marketing, for serving customers, and so on.

And remember these final rules of thumb:

  • Shift into matcher mode when you want to go faster (or if you sense that progress has been too slow or nonexistent).
  • Shift into mismatcher mode when you want to be more cautious (or if you sense that progress has been too chaotic, unstable, or stressful).

The key is to apply these modes of thinking at different times, so they don’t interfere with each other.

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Edgy Goals

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If you often find yourself rebelling against your own goals, your goals aren’t rebellious and edgy enough for you.

You’re trying to set goals like everyone else, but you’re not like everyone else, so stop trying to fit in. Start setting goals that you’re not allowed to set. Turn your rebelliousness into motivational fuel by setting goals that are edgy and rebellious to begin with. Otherwise you may find your goals way too boring and unmotivating, and you’ll eventually quit.

Do you give yourself enough latitude to explore rebellious or edgy goals?

Even though some of the stuff I did when I was younger was a bit crazy, I often found edgy goals easier to achieve because they were so much fun.

Here are some simple rebellious goals I achieved during the early 1990s:

  • Steal every bottle of White-Out from the UC Berkeley student store in one day (many dozens of bottles).
  • Steal a $40 ping pong paddle from a locked cabinet of a sporting goods store.
  • Go out for a day of shoplifting with a friend till we filled the back of his pickup truck with stolen appliances. (We ended up filling much of the cab too, even having large boxes on our laps as we drove back.)
  • Find a way to consistently steal items with sensors on them.
  • Learn to count cards at BlackJack and play in the casinos in Vegas, including getting all of my meals comped.

I kept running into a conflict whereby someone would punish my edgy fun and try to set me straight, including four arrests. What gives?

Eventually I’d had enough punishment and tried to straighten myself out. But that didn’t work either. I felt like a shell of myself. Trying to make meaningful progress in life felt like pushing through molasses. Without sufficient edginess I couldn’t stay consistently motivated. There would have to be extreme time pressure and some kind of threat for me to get much done, and even then I couldn’t always motivate myself to push through.

If you’re the type of person who got into trouble when you were younger, always getting punished for this and that, why are you trying to play it straight today? If you struggle to achieve relatively straightforward goals, perhaps you’re not the kind of person who can play it straight and expect to succeed. Perhaps you’re too much of a rebel for that strategy to work.

The key breakthrough was when I asked a simple question:

What can I do that feels edgy, rebellious, and fun but isn’t illegal?

What might be against the rules? What might push some boundaries? What would have some element of risk?

I figured there must be some interesting goals I could pursue that would feel edgy but still be legal. I could still break some rules and have fun doing so.

Eventually this led me to achieve some goals that felt edgy but weren’t illegal, such as:

  • Graduate from college in 1.5 years instead of 4 years
  • Retain my freedom, and never be anyone’s employee again after graduating college
  • Turn blogging into a viable business, starting at a time when most people didn’t know what blogging was, and those that did mostly thought of it as personal journaling with no viable business model

Knowing how to set edgy goals served me well, and to this day I still love projects and pursuits that feel edgy to me. If there’s no edge, then what’s the point of doing them?

Here are some more recent accomplishments from the past few years, all of which had an element of edginess to them:

  • Create and launch an online club where members encourage each other to step up their ambition and their heart-alignment
  • Do a 40-day water fast while making daily YouTube videos of the experience
  • Create a highly original 60-day audio program in 60 days about a different way of relating to life, the universe, and everything.
  • Do a six-in-seven (earn $100K+ in 7 days or less)
  • Marry a delicious Canadian, and import her permanently 😉

If I try to set and achieve a “normal person” goal, the goal will suffocate me. And if you’re reading my blog right now, I seriously doubt that you’re a normal person either.

If a normal person would look at your goals and think they’re cool, that isn’t cool at all. A normal person should look at your goals and exclaim, “The horror! The horror!”

If no one thinks that your goals are too edgy or too rebellious or just plain weird, you’re playing the game of life without enough risk and fun.

Consider this standard: A good goal for you will torment a normal person.

Stop being so damned obedient all the time.

Where’s the fire?

If your current goals aren’t inspiring you, take the old goal list and burn it.

When you have a good goal, the goal ignites you like a match lighting a torch, and that torch keep burning long enough to drive that goal across the finish line. If you keep feeling that you must push yourself with low motivation, your goal probably sucks. Throw out that goal – just give up – and set a goal that has more fire in it. Stop going for security, and go for character growth instead.

People think that risk is a bad thing that they should avoid. So they often set goals that they could easily achieve if they were motivated enough. And then ironically they can’t feel motivated enough.

Look at your goals and ask which ones you could easily achieve if you were 100% motivated to achieve them, all day every day, until you crossed the finish line. If you realize you could definitely achieve every goal by that standard – that the only think stopping you is putting in the time and having enough motivation to keep taking consistent action – I suggest that’s a weak goal. It means there isn’t much character growth and edginess in the pursuit.

Instead, set goals that even if you were 100% motivated to achieve, you’re still not sure how you’re going to pull off that goal. In order to achieve the goal even with sky high motivation, you’re still going to have to stretch yourself, such as by developing new skills, new strategies, and new connections. You’re going to have to expand your previous limitations in order to achieve the goal.

The fire comes from knowing that even if you do your absolute best with daily perfect motivation, you may still fail. Success isn’t guaranteed. Just to have a shot at success, you have to do your best and then some.

Even if you don’t always succeed in achieving such goals, the experience of feeling ignited is so much more fun that trying to be normal.

As you work on an edgy goal, you grow as a person, and that growth is immensely rewarding. That’s the real treasure to be found. The goal is like a MacGuffin in a story – a plot device. The goal exists to help drive the story forward, but the story of how the goal is achieved is often a lot more interesting than the final achievement of the goal.

Perhaps it’s time to make a new list of goals for yourself. Bring the edginess back. Set goals that are against the rules. Set goals that people will tell you that you’re crazy to pursue. Set goals that no one else would care about but you. Set goals that look scary but also like they’d be a hell of a lot of fun. Set goals that you’re not sure you can achieve even if you had 100% consistent motivation to pursue them. Set goals that would torment a normal person.

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The #1 Reason People Fail at 30-Day Challenges

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Many people fail with 30-day challenges, usually not making it past the first week. And the #1 reason for failure is that they didn’t make a crystal clear commitment to do a specific activity for all 30 days.

Giving your mind a clear enough commitment is a key to success with 30-day challenges. Committing to 5 minutes per day of a specific activity in a specific location at a specific time of day is usually a lot more effective than a vague commitment to “do some exercise” each day.

A clear commitment is binary. Either you did it or you didn’t. There’s little or no wiggle room to give yourself credit for non-compliance.

If you say you’re going to “exercise for 30 days in a row” then does walking count? What about cleaning? Decluttering? Grocery shopping? If you racked up some credits on your Apple Watch for moving a bit, will you count that as your exercise for the day? If you were to ask 10 different people if you’ve successfully completed your challenge for the day, would they always agree? If it’s not certain that every reasonable person would agree, your challenge definition is probably unclear.

If your definition of success is vague, it’s almost a given that you’ll see your standards slip as you go, and within a week or two, your 30-day challenge will have faded completely. Then you’ll beat yourself up for not being disciplined enough.

Lots of people have never completed even one 30-day challenge. And they think it’s due to a lack of discipline. It often is, but not in the way you might think.

When I do a 30-day challenge, most of the discipline happens before Day 1. It’s the mental discipline to clearly decide on the parameters and make a real decision to do the challenge. I get myself to the point of being all-in before I start. The discipline happens in the pre-challenge setup work. This may also include enlisting social support and clearing out any naysaying influences. If I’ve decided to do the challenge, I’ll do it, but my brain needs to understand the nature of the commitment before I feel like I’m all-in. I need to set myself up to succeed in advance. If I don’t frame the challenge properly, I’ll fail at it just like everyone else.

I also understand the long-term importance of nailing these challenges. If I get good at them, I can leverage these challenges to kick off many new explorations, build new skills, create new habits, and more. The long-term payoffs for success are huge. For instance, I’ve been vegan for 22+ years because I started with a challenge to go vegan for just 30 days. Similarly, if you keep stringing yourself along with one failed challenge after another, you’re setting yourself up for decades of disappointment. So if you’re going to do these, stop kicking your ass on Day 10 when you realize you’ve already quit. And pre-kick your ass 10X harder before you even begin Day 1.

When you’re doing a 30-day challenge, honoring your commitment has to be one of the most important parts of your life. If you keep stringing yourself along with failure after failure, you’re hurting your future self.

When people succeed with a 30-day challenge, the success happened mentally and emotionally before Day 1 even started. There’s usually clear evidence that a real commitment has been made. It’s the difference between telling a friend “let’s get together sometime” versus agreeing to meet at a specific time and place and being absolutely certain that you’re going to show up.

Think of it like a legal contract. You want the details of the agreement with yourself to match the overall intention. A contract that merely says “let’s agree to do some stuff this month” is likely to go nowhere. Same goes for a B.S. declaration like “work on my social skills” or “improve my productivity.” If your intention is so vague that I can’t accurately predict what you’ll be doing each day, you probably won’t make it past the first week.

Write down your 30-day commitment before you begin. Then rate it on a 1-10 scale, where a 1 is super vague like “improve my finances,” and a 10 is clear language suitable for a legal contract. In my experience most people won’t score higher than a 3 with this rating. They’ve set themselves up to flake in advance, just the way any flake would: Let’s get together sometime. Sure, let’s do that.

At least 80% of success with a 30-day challenge happens before Day 1. Did you fully commit to a clear and specific activity? Was it defined well enough that a lawyer would approve of the clarity and specificity?

Sometimes I need to play it safe when a challenge can be risky, and I give myself an out if I think I need it. I did that with the water fasting challenge. It didn’t feel safe to 100% commit to many days with no food, so I made a list of potential problems to familiarize myself with the danger signs, and I gave myself room to quit if I perceived that my health was at risk. I had no significant problems though and ended up going for 40 days. A legal contract can have these kinds of exemptions too. So it’s fine to practice risk management when there are practical risks to consider.

When you gain enough experience with these challenges, and you can trust that your internal standards will be high enough, you can sometimes use a more vague definition and get away with it. But even so, it’s still usually better to be specific.

Think of your contract with yourself as the floor (not the ceiling) of what you’re going to do. You can always outperform the specs of a contract. But when you have a rough day, you may sometimes do only the minimum, so make sure that minimum is good enough to satisfy you and get some decent results. You can do more when you’re feeling up to it.

Whenever you attempt to make a change in your life patterns, some part of your brain is going to resist. It expects the old patterns to continue, and it freaks out a bit when the input changes. That’s normal. But you’d better be aware of the existence of this part of yourself, and you need to intelligently compensate for it. A good way to do that is with a clear commitment that’s fully understood. This helps your brain get into sync with the new expectations before you begin. If those expectations are fuzzy, your brain won’t successfully get past this freakout period, and it will use whatever wiggle room you permit it to pull back to your old reality, even if that reality wasn’t serving you well.

When you fail at a 30-day challenge, there’s a reason for it. For most people that reason for failure could have been spotted at the start of Day 1: the lack of a clear and committed decision. They flaked on the challenge before it even started, and there’s little chance of making it past the first week. They didn’t do what it took to succeed in advance.

Actually doing a 30-day challenge tends to be very rewarding, motivating, and fun – if you’ve set it up correctly. The discipline required to complete such a challenge isn’t as much as it seems – again, if you’ve set it up correctly.

My favorite 30-day challenges have been those that introduced me to new modes of living. They expanded my possibility space. They permanently shifted my relationship with reality. Some are still paying dividends years or even decades after I did them.

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Brits Work An Extra 2.5 Weeks Every Year Compared With The Rest Of The EU

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Your Best Work

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Do you have a job or career path that supports you in doing the best work of your life?

If I were to ask this of various people, some would laugh at the ridiculousness of this question because it’s a standard they’ve never come close to experiencing, so a jaded reply is all they can muster. If I ask certain friends who are very fulfilled by their work, their answers would be something like, “Of course… why would I tolerate any less?”

Consider that if you’re not aligned with this standard of doing your best work, then you’re currently tolerating a lesser standard. For some reason you’re currently okay with not doing your best work. Maybe that doesn’t sit well with you, but you’re still tolerating it.

Why is that? What’s stopping you from doing the best work of your life this month? Why not take on a project that requires the very best you have to offer?

If you do less than your best, you know that you aren’t playing the game of life very well, and that awareness haunts you, and it drags down your motivation and self-esteem.

You’ll likely avoid connecting with more ambitious people as well since you’ll probably feel uncomfortable being reminded that your standards are lower than they could be. If you stick with less ambitious friends, however, you’ll only reinforce the lower standards that keep you stuck. Low standards tend to encourage social cocooning and hiding.

Motivation for High Standards

Where does the motivation come from to maintain high standards then?

Maintaining high standards just for our own personal gratification is tough. It’s also tough to maintain false standards for other people, like pretending to care about issues that don’t align with our values. The sweet spot of motivation is when we can satisfy our most important values and also connect with people who truly care about those values too. This encourages us to maintain high standards because we’re immersed in a circle of caring. We care, and the people around us care.

So there are two parts to a pattern of highly engaged work that brings out your best. First, your work needs to align with your values. Choose projects that matter to you personally, so you’ll care about doing quality work. Second, you need people who will deeply appreciate your work. These people could consist of co-workers, clients, customers, family, or friends, as long as they appreciate and support you in doing your best work.

What if you can’t choose your own projects? Perhaps you’ve temporarily granted someone else the authority to assign work to you, but you retain the option to reclaim that authority whenever you want. You’re not powerless. You can renegotiate the arrangement to get your work aligned with what you really care about. Or you can switch to different work where you can find that alignment, which may involve switching jobs, teams, or companies.

If your boss doesn’t support you in doing your best work, admit that you hired a bad boss, and let that person go. A key reason for hiring a boss is to serve you in doing your best work, so don’t tolerate a boss who falls below this standard. At least talk to your boss, raise a discussion about how to do your very best work, and offer suggestions and guidance for how to make this a reality. Be committed to getting what you need. If your boss isn’t (1) motivated and (2) capable to help you do your best work, that boss needs to go. And if you choose to remain beyond that realization, you can’t possibly continue to blame your boss since you hired that person to begin with, and you can un-hire that person when you’re ready to commit yourself to real professional growth. People of high standards don’t tolerate low performing bosses. If you tolerate a low performing boss, you proclaim to all around you that you’re a low standards person.

What if you got yourself trapped in a situation where no aligned work is possible? Then chalk that up as a bad decision on your part, and lean into the challenging process of correcting that mistake. This is a common mistake indeed, often accompanied by difficult lessons, and it usually takes serious effort to unwind it. But you can unwind it, and it’s wise to do so. The worst thing you can do is keep investing in a misaligned path. Shifting directions will bring relief, even when you must take a step back financially and/or professionally to get unstuck. There’s no shame in taking a step back to adjust course; this is so much better than investing another year being loyal to low standards.

Quite often you won’t even be able to see an aligned path while you remain stuck pursuing a misaligned one. There are many reasons for that. One of the most significant reasons is that people who are doing aligned work won’t normally be interested in making offers to those who maintain lower standards. When you do misaligned work, what you may not realize is that you’re advertising to everyone else that you’re a low standards type of person, and high standards people are likely to avoid connecting with you. In other words, the cool people won’t invite you to be on their teams because you’re making yourself look like a bad investment.

Misaligned work drags down your energy, and people pick up on this. In fact it’s pretty obvious if you shift between circles of high standards and low standards people. People who are doing their best work tend to broadcast certain frequencies of emotional energy and enthusiasm. Those who aren’t aligned with such standards tend to broadcast some restlessness or discomfort with their work instead, often without being consciously aware of it.

You almost always have to say a genuine no to the misaligned path before life will show you what the aligned path looks like. Quit the old first. Then work on building the new. I know that seems scary sometimes, but it works. You’ll be surprised at how quickly your energy and self-esteem can pop back up once you leave misaligned work behind. Life tends to respect those who commit to keeping their work standards high.

Aligned Appreciation

It would be nice if this alone were enough, but it isn’t. The next major point of stuckness is when you gain the freedom to do aligned work but still don’t feel the drive and motivation to do your very best. This is especially common among people who quit unfulfilling jobs to do something independent. After the newness of the transition wears off, they’re struggling to be productive.

The issue here is that even though the work itself may feel aligned, there may not be a strong enough connection to the people who will most appreciate it.

Initially you may try sharing value with the people that are most accessible, but you’ll usually get a ho-hum response in return. Selling can feel especially difficult when you’re trying to sell to people who are only semi-aligned with what you’re doing, even if many of those people are generally supportive of you (like old friends and family).

This is a good time to pause and ask questions like these:

  • If I do my very best work, which people would deeply appreciate and value it?
  • If I do my very best work, which people will only semi-appreciate it?
  • How can I scare off the second group, so I can only deal with the first group?

I imagine that the first question sits well with you, but the third question probably seems a bit harsh. Why should you scare off people who will semi-appreciate your work? Can’t you serve them too? Isn’t it better to serve more people, even if some aren’t receiving 100% of the value?

I understand this type of reasoning. It seems reasonable to want to serve as many people as you can. Of course some people will deeply appreciate your work, and some will only semi-appreciate it. But there’s a serious risk if you try to serve both groups equally, and that risk is that your standards will drift downwards.

The people who semi-appreciate your work will likely to be the larger group. You’ll get more feedback from them over time than you will from the most aligned people. They’ll influence your standards more than any other group if you let them. This is true of semi-appreciative bosses, teams, friends, relatives, co-workers, customers, clients, etc. Semi-appreciative matches are more common than deeply appreciative ones.

Semi-appreciative ultimately means misaligned though, but the misalignments won’t all be in the same direction. In order to improve at serving the semi-appreciative people, you’ll have to make concessions in opposing directions. You’ll always be trying to balance degrading your service to some of them with upgrading your service to others. The realization that it’s impossible to really please this group will degrade your own alignment with your work. You can’t powerfully serve the semi-appreciative group and still do your best work. By definition if you do your best work, the semi-appreciative will only semi-appreciate it. Usually this leads to blocks like procrastination and perfectionism.

Being semi-appreciated is only semi-satisfying. If you try to achieve more satisfaction or appreciation from serving this group, you’ll have to do work that feels less aligned, but that won’t satisfy you internally. There’s no way to win with this approach. At best you’ll have to disconnect from caring about serving these people and just do your own thing regardless of how they feel. But wouldn’t it be better if you could have both: inner alignment with your values and deep appreciation from the people you serve?

That’s possible, but in order to get there, you’ll want to focus on serving the most aligned people. When you do your best work, those people are delighted. However, you’ll get more feedback from the semi-appreciative, and they won’t be fully pleased with your best work, so they’ll suggest lots of conflicting changes in different directions. They’ll invite you to become someone you’d rather not become. And you’ll be tempted to serve them because there are more of them, and their feedback is the most frequent. If you prioritize numbers over alignment, you’ll automatically drift away from doing your best work. How many times have we seen this pattern play out in creative fields?

Instead of trying to serve the semi-appreciative outright, it’s easier and more fulfilling in the long run if you make it clear that you’re not going to adapt to serving them. This may seem like a bad idea at first, but the positive side effect is that when you demonstrate that you’re not aligned with serving the semi-appreciative, you’ll demonstrate that you’re an even better match for the deeply appreciative.

By making a bigger commitment to doing your best work, you may repel some semi-appreciative folks, but you’ll become that much more attractive to the deeply appreciative. This will make it easier for the most aligned people to recognize you as someone rare and special. It will help them feel more excited about investing in a long-term professional relationship with you. Quality invitations and opportunities will flow through them. You’ll also see more referrals from these deeply appreciative people.

Over time this will change the flavor of your life and work. The semi-appreciative may still engage with you, but they won’t be as front and center as before. Their presence will tend to recede into the background, crowded out by lots of highly engaged and deeply appreciative people. You won’t feel motivated to connect as much with the semi-appreciative when your life is rich in people who deeply appreciate your work. Most of your creative energy will flow into serving the deeply appreciative.

You won’t necessarily need a huge volume of deeply appreciative people, although this depends on what kind of work you do. Even if you only have a few people who deeply appreciate your best work, like a few co-workers or team members, that can make all the difference in the world. How many people would you really need to sustain yourself professionally?

Maybe you could even have a great career serving just one person – if it was the right person who had the motivation and the means to fully support you professionally. If you only served one person on earth in the most powerful and aligned way you could, who would that person be? If you can gain some clarity on that answer, it may help you identify a larger group of people who’d deeply appreciate your work as well.

All else being equal, would you rather serve the people who will deeply appreciate your work, or would you rather serve those who won’t? Do you really think you’ll do the best work of your life without the flow of that appreciation? If so, how’s that mindset working for you so far?

Saying No Before Finding the Yes

How do you reach the point of aligning your work with your values and serving the most appreciative people? Usually this involves saying no to the misaligned and the semi-appreciative. Stop capitulating to misaligned invitations. Stop trying so hard to please and satisfy the semi-appreciative.

If you have an offer to do something that won’t bring out your very best work, decline that offer. But also learn from that offer. What was misaligned about it? What would a better offer look like?

Tolerating lower standards isn’t a path to higher standards. So think about becoming less tolerant of the misaligned. This will reclaim some wasted energy that you can reinvest in a more aligned path. A common complaint from those who are doing misaligned work is that they don’t have the time and energy to pursue anything better. Of course they don’t – their time and energy is being drained away. It’s wise to plug that drain first, and then the energy and motivation can start to rise.

There are consequences when you shift directions, but the consequences of staying stuck are generally much worse. You may have some bills that go unpaid for a while, which is really no big deal in the grand scheme of life. A difficult transition is still a transition. What matters is simply that you make it happen. It doesn’t have to be pretty.

I’m not suggesting that you adopt a “screw the world for not appreciating me” attitude and just do your own thing regardless of what people think. We live in a social world, and we depend on each other. I invite you to engage with the world, not to retreat from it. No one engages with everyone on earth; we all engage with subsets of humanity. Which subset would most appreciate the work you could do? Which subset would you be delighted to serve?

If you find a subset of humanity that deeply appreciates your best work, that’s a good arrangement for you and for the people you serve. But it’s also good for the semi-appreciative and others who may seem less aligned with your work. By setting a high standard for serving the most aligned and focusing on them first and foremost, you’ll still serve many of the semi-aligned anyway. Moreover, you’ll be setting a positive example that will encourage others to raise their standards as well. This is generally good for all of us. We’ll all benefit from seeing more people doing their best work in the world, even if their specific work doesn’t inspire us personally.

Have you ever felt elevated and inspired by a world class performer in a different field than you’d ever pursue? Can you still appreciate and respect when someone does their best work, even if it doesn’t completely align with your values and preferences? If you follow the path of doing your own best work, you’ll elevate and inspire many more people along the way, including people in different fields. But if you hold back and tolerate misalignment instead, you may long regret that you missed out on a deeper level of fulfillment, despite many invitations from life to play in a bigger game. In the long run, the difficult alignment work is worth the effort, especially when you consider the types of ripples you’ll create either way.

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Creative Ambition

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In the past several months, I’ve been stretching my creative muscles, taking on more ambitious projects including the 30-day Deep Abundance Integration video course and the 60-day Submersion audio course. The former was recorded in Aug 2018, and the latter was recorded in Dec 2018 and Jan 2019.

I just published lesson 60 for Submersion yesterday. I still have more bonus material to create for Submersion in February, but all of the core lessons are now complete. Currently there are 550 people enrolled in Submersion, and more are joining every week since we launched in early December.

For their core lessons, Deep Abundance Integration has more than 36 hours of material, and Submersion has about 26 hours. In terms of word count, I’d estimate at least 500,000 words for both combined, not counting the bonus content. By comparison my book Personal Development for Smart People was 83,000 words, and many books published in this field now are around 55,000 words. My entire blog is around 2 million words. So each deep dive is a major work equivalent to multiple books.

If this volume of material seems like it would scare away the timid, indeed it will, and that’s intentional. I’m a depth guy, and I love engaging with people who appreciate serious depth. Real life is varied and complex, and simplistic answers that might have seduced me a couple of decades ago don’t appeal to me these days. I want to dance inside the chaos and do my best to explore and express the hidden order within in. This is really difficult work, and that’s the space in which I thrive.

For years I’ve been wanting to create larger works on rich and complex topics, so these projects have been lighting me up inside. I like that they challenge me to delve into my best thinking, connecting more dots than ever before. I love ending the day with the feeling that I pushed my mind to operate at full capacity and squeezed as much deep work out of it as possible.

I especially like the edginess of tackling a creative project that I don’t actually know how to complete when I begin it. It feels good to commit first. I know I won’t be bored because there will be so much to figure out along the way. I can be fully engaged with this kind of work because it demands that I do my best.

Co-Creation

A key to unlocking this creative flow was to frame these projects as co-creative experiences. I launched them first, sharing the ideas and intentions as honestly as I could. Those who signed up had the ability to share feedback, suggestions, and questions as we went along. Lessons were published shortly after they were recorded. Each batch of lessons generated new feedback which informed the design of future lessons. Those who shared feedback during the development process truly influenced the creative process. If different people had signed up, these courses would have turned out totally differently.

There was a substantial volume of feedback shared along the way. For Deep Abundance Integration, the daily commentary during the live calls added up to about 900 pages, and more was shared via email as well. I spent dozens of hours reading this feedback, taking notes, and considering suggestions. I found this process incredibly valuable; it helped me understand the mindsets and frames that people used. I especially came to see how certain frames cause people to get stuck. Both courses involve adjusting our mental models to unlock more flow. Our frames often impose limits that reality needn’t obey, and better frames that remove these blocks.

Creative Obsession

Over the years I’ve experimented with different ways of working on larger creative projects. What seems most effective for me is to approach them as obsessive deep dives, much like tackling a personal growth challenge like the 40-day water fast I did in 2017. I put almost everything else on hold to clear the space, so I can focus on the creative work as my #1 project for a while. Even when I’m not actively working on it, my mind obsesses in the background. Everything links to the project. Little else exists except that one core project.

Some people can write a page a day and go on with their lives, and after a year they have a book. That doesn’t work for me. I find it way too slow. I work much better in creative bursts, and I mean that in a fractal sort of way. I like having 1-3 month creative bursts spread throughout the year, separated by breaks to resurface and attend to other parts of life. And within those larger bursts are shorter bursts of a few days to delve into specific subtopics. And within those are bursts of some hours to delve into a particular lesson or two.

The space between these bursts is critical to the creative process. It takes time for my mind to chew on ideas, ponder possibilities, and make new connections. Much of this happens subconsciously. A highly effective way to stimulate creative insights is to take in seemingly unrelated input. In these spaces I travel. I see movies. I read books. I play games. I attend events. I talk to people.

I didn’t create a 200,000-word course in 2 months by working for 8 hours a day x 5 days a week. I worked with the flow of inspiration. Sometimes that meant working 12 hours a day, occasionally for a few days in a row. Sometimes that meant working 2 hours, taking a break, and then working a couple more hours in a day. Other times it included traveling (San Diego in December and Mexico in January) or doing something unrelated for a day or two.

Even during the apparent breaks, the obsession still gripped me. While working on Submersion, I couldn’t help but interpret every experience through the lens of Subjective Reality. My mind would dwelling on the project while brushing my teeth, while driving, while watching a movie, or while on an airplane. Everything links to the project’s ideas, partly because the ideas are expansive enough that everything in life can link to them.

Aligning Intentions

I find that creative work is very sensitive to my intentions. If my intention is to create something for the money, I’ve killed the flow before I’ve even begun. That’s a needy and pathetic intention that reality doesn’t respect. The result will be some form of punishment.

Here are some intentions that work:

  • Add something unique to the universe
  • Help people undertake some major personal transformations
  • Pursue a path that hasn’t been fully explored yet
  • Dive into the unknown
  • Create something that I’d appreciate if someone else were to create it
  • Commit to traversing the whole tunnel before the end of the tunnel is visible
  • Co-create the experience with very aligned people
  • Attempt a creative project that requires me to do my best to even have a chance of success
  • Create something that might be useful to future AI, not just for humans
  • Seek answers to the hardest questions I could ask

Reality seems immensely supportive of these types of intentions.

There’s a real sense of satisfaction that comes from adding something unique and different to the world, and the feedback shared by people going through these courses has been tremendously positive. I don’t see how anyone could go through all 30 Deep Abundance Integration lessons or all 60 Submersion lessons and not be significantly changed by these experiences. Each one represents an intense tunnel of transformation. For those who complete both, I doubt their friends and family will recognize them afterwards.

Submersion in particular is one of the most ambitious creative projects I’ve ever attempted, representing some of the best work of my life. The universe seemed to support its creation in the most beautiful and synchronous ways, leading me to the right insights, resources, and connections at just the right times.

Reframing Creativity

I’ve noticed that many creative types tend to frame creativity as a private pursuit whereby one cocoons oneself in a sanctuary of solitude and nudges one’s brain to output something interesting. That framing proved problematic for me and not nearly as productive as alternative frames.

My current framing is that creativity is inherently co-creative. Instead of withdrawing from the world to create in silence, I prefer to lean into more engagement with life, with people, and with experiences throughout the creative process. Creativity flows beautifully from a high level of engagement with people, places, and events. This engagement is best when it happens in waves, and between these waves are stretches of time to record and structure the insights that arise.

I have more ideas for upcoming deep dives, and of course people continue to suggest new ones as well. We’ll get to those in good time. For now I want to allow some space for people to continue going through our last two deep dives, and during this time we’ll also finish filling out the bonus content.

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