In using your goals to get what you want…
The most important thing isn’t why your goals matter.
What matters most is how you’re using your goals.
Not just knowing your why.
Or looking at your goals every now and then.
What matters most is deeply conditioning your goals.
Monthly.
Weekly.
Daily.
Continuously.
Every second using your goals to get your mind in gear.
For driving your best actions.
Here’s the video for Upgrade YOU 1.3. conditioning your goals.
Like a rectal exam I avoid doing taxes.
I just sent off the K1 to a business partner.
As usual it’s only a couple of days before the filing deadline.
I hate it’s happening again this way.
Next year I’ll get out ahead of it.
See, here’s the thing, it’s super simple for me to do this.
It takes me little time to organize my stuff and get it to the accountants.
Just I put it off somewhere down the bottom of my list till it needs to be done.
Too many of these letters to you are JIT.
In business just in time manufacturing is extremely valuable, but it also risks jamming the production line.
Over the years I’ve drafted 675 of these letters that were never sent.
That’s all good, it’s part of the creating process; when you’ve gotta flow, you’ve gotta flow.
But I rarely go back to drafts.
I tend to keep it fresh, so I’m constantly creating and sending you new stuff.
The cost of course is time, and more specifically just in time.
Too many of these letters I’ve written you in real time, which I enjoy, but also messes with our process.
It leaves little time to get the team involved, and too often we rush proofing and getting these articles up and out.
To be sure there’s a nice flow from writing to a tight deadline.
But to keep scaling, and to optimize quality, we must be more methodical.
It’s 7:27 am.
I’ve breached one of my protocols.
I haven’t had enough sleep, but the body is so full of energy I just got up, and sat down here to get the day flowing.
My sleep app says I fell asleep at 2:22, so I’m running on less than 5 hours, which I generally consider to be a sleep deficit.
In the early days on Wall Street that was a long night’s sleep.
Even a couple of years ago I might have called that sufficient, but not anymore.
Is a tried and true form of torture.
Keep a human awake, and ideally in an uncomfortable position, and over a short number of days they’ll break.
In our society, especially in the world of high achievers, getting by on little sleep can be a badge of honor, when ultimately it’s a signal other things are wrong.
Certainly there are times in your life where you’re cutting sleep, but consistently deprive yourself of sleep and it will come out elsewhere.
A client sat for lunch with an accountant who said he was into personal development.
For most of the lunch he kept signaling how hardcore he was, sleeping only a handful of hours a night, cranking, efficient, effective, all that stuff.
My client was kind enough to avoid telling him that’s one of the reasons he is grossly overweight.
My hair is sticking straight up.
I’d never go to work this way, but hey this is WFH, so I look a little WTF.
It’s 9:00 am, it’s a late start for me, because I got a late end.
I’ve learned the crucial importance of getting the right sleep, and so I took my 7ish hours.
Woke up and did my a.m. trance in bed.
And now here we are.
Suit pants and shirt.
Hair standing tall because I’m pre-shower, and because I’m growing it out for a new Character.
This is September Man here.
Rather than getting up, getting organized, and then starting your day, we’re starting quick and dirty.
I’ve set the timer for an hour.
The brain told me to write this to you, which wasn’t my original plan, but as a creator, when it flows, you’ve gotta let it flow.
But we’re gonna do it fast enough so there’s enough time left for the frog I’d committed to eat.
That’s one of my alternate book titles for Navy SEAL Goggins’ book.
Another is Read To The End.
If you’ve read his book you know what I mean.
The first two thirds of Goggins’ book is about him transforming from 300 pounds into a SEAL and one of the world’s best ultra athletes.
What’s so powerful in this is, as I wrote about here, it was far from a natural evolution for Goggins.
He built himself into the man he needed to become.
Taking on hard goals, and doing what it took, regular David Goggins became Goggins.
Up until this point his story is about being hardcore, and persisting.
But then it takes a strange twist.
Goggins is struck down.
With a client we’re focused on solving something very hard in his business.
In his industry, it’s never really been done.
We know that’s because it’s a hard problem to solve, and that’s the point.
If we can solve it in his business, it will work forever.
His business will massively scale.
Him and his executive team will be able to focus on other things to drive the business even further.
I won’t repeat the Edison quote, coz you know it.
10,000 fails isn’t failure if you’re iterating to your solution, is it?
Ultimate failure is never trying.
Settling for a sub-optimal solution.
Giving up too soon.
Failure is the point we keep driving through to get to success.
And it’s not just that each time we get closer and closer.
It’s that you want to love the pursuit.
Driving a car you must make constant choices about what to do.
Speed it up. Slow it down.
Turn here. Turn there.
But a train on the rails, well, it’s all locked in from here.
You just need to keep it moving and the rails lead you where you’re meant to go.
This is what I mean by putting it on the rails.
And just get doing.
Where do you get stuck in driving your goals?
Ultimately, in all the thinking that gets in the way of doing what you know you want to get done!
I’ve seen this is the method to top performance in basically every pursuit.
You might be watching a boxer stand around talking about stuff, and then they just get moving.
Jumping rope.
Shadow boxing.
It’s those small actions that pull their mind into what they’re doing right now.
Some boxers even need to get hit a few times before their brain really pulls into gear.
But once it does, they’re very hard to stop from here.
This PPP is an acronym you can use to best drive your goals.
And to feel your absolute best every day—
Power of Positive Projecting.
I’m trying to keep these letters to you tighter, so let’s just get to the point.
Because your brain is constantly projecting your reality.
Literally, it’s looking around you right now, seeing a tiny part of the world (only as far as the eyes can see).
Yet, somehow it has an entire “movie” of what the world is.
Think about this for a moment.
Your head is filled with a projection of what you perceive the world to be based on the content you’re feeding your brain.
e.g. if you saw a week of news that somehow the world had become a magical, happy utopia, how would you be imagining the world different right now?
Your life is exactly the same.
All the time your brain is referencing movies of your past, present, and projecting your future.
So make it PPP.
You have no idea what will happen in a business!
That’s what I most learned as a distressed investor at the Carlyle Group.
Investing in public securities you convince yourself that the management team and you can somehow predict where this quarter or year is headed.
Yet, as a control investor, sitting on the board, with more information, you quickly see how little you know.
And the nothing you can actually predict.
Yes, yes, we all know our world is based on guessing the future.
Economic forecasts.
Revenue projections, all the way down to EPS.
It all seems smart and thoughtful and precise, and rationalized by data…
And then, well, for any number of reasons, the world doesn’t behave according to our models!
As we’ve seen this year…
Man, our predictions would have been right on if it wasn’t for Covid!!
For better and worse, btw. (e.g. Amazon vs. United Airlines)
I saw the same in 2008.
The credit crisis and recession blew up many businesses, and completely blew out all projections and cash flow models.
The question we were forced to ask is…
“You can only push yourself to the wall,” I said to him.
“What do you mean?”
“Push, push, push, push will only get you so far,” I said.
So what takes you all the way?
I draw a lot of charts for myself.
There was a time in my old apartment where every wall was covered with charts.
Laughing about it, but being serious, my friend Liz used to say, “hmm, I hope you don’t bring people over here…”
That apartment I saw as my lab—like a scientist scribbling all over a chalkboard looking for a solution, it was where I did my work solving the mind.
When I moved and took all the charts off the walls I counted some 36 charts, just in my office, and I won’t tell you how many in total.
The point being that I’ve always been able to “see” developing more clearly than saying it.
So I showed him this chart that you see above.
Waking up I think I’m alone.
There’s no woman wrapped around me.
No body pressed up against me, face full of hair.
And then I see him at the end of the bed.
Green eyes staring at me, as if he knew I’d soon be waking.
We lock eyes.
I motion for him to come over.
He doesn’t want to, so I drop into trance.
Staring at a point on the wall is how I used to do it.
Like the Heightened State of Awareness exercise in Focus Tools, fixating your attention is the simplest way to get beyond that mind.
But I no longer need that.
I simply blank the mind.
Years ago, what feels a lifetime ago, I’d wake up to a mind that was racing.
And then like chasing a horse after it’s bolted out of the gates I’d be running around after it all day.
I suspect you know what I mean.
When I’m doing what I want, then I’ll feel amazing.
I didn’t tell myself that.
If you had asked me all those years ago when I was just so desperately scrambling to escape my life and be living the life I truly wanted…
I would have said I was happy.
Running like mad to figure it out, sedating myself with escapes, thinking that was “happy.”
Knowing, not just believing, but knowing, with certainty…
When you’re doing what you want, then you’ll feel how you want to feel.
It’s the lie your brain is constantly telling you.
The lie our consumer economy is selling you.
The lie our society spoon feeds you from cradle to grave.
The lie that nearly everyone will live and die by.
The lie that keeps nearly every human on the planet at some low level of what you might call happy.
The lie that—
Something in your life needs to change is how to feel happy.
Do you know how coffee works?
How about what it does to spiders as you see on the chart above?
Of course most of us know how it works in you.
You drink it, feel more energized for some time, then it wears off like booze.
Or if you’ve habituated to it, perhaps you don’t even get much buzz anymore, but you still habitual drink it.
So most of us know the effect, but do you know how it works in your brain?
And why it leads you to crash?
What I mean by “not-energy” is knowing how caffeine tricks your brain.
Many of us want to know how to get more energy.
Yet, we’re never taught the things that give and rob energy from you. (e.g. thinking steals tremendous energy)
Caffeine doesn’t somehow stimulate more energy in you.
It merely mutes the natural chemical in your brain, adenosine, that accumulates between sleep cycles.
In effect, caffeine blocks the receptors in your brain from detecting this natural sleep agent, which fools you into thinking you have more energy.
That is until the caffeine wears off after its average half-life of 5-7 hours, and in one big rush your brain realizes how sleepy it really is.
This is the caffeine crash.
This situation has obviously thrown a spanner into our year.
Boom, crash, there go the goals you had for the year.
Or worse, many people are scrambling just figuring out how to get by.
What it means for our years is still a mess.
Yet, we’ve all seen what it’s done to your days.
How’s it looking for you?
For most of us it’s gotten harder, hasn’t it?
Getting up at a certain time, into that rhythm you used to have.
Having your setup, those things that would set the cadence of your day.
A clear set of tasks to get done.
And what about your mind?
How’s all this had you thinking and feeling?
Lots of people have deeply impacted our world.
We have cities, buildings, other things named after them, and special days we celebrate them.
Many have had such a lasting impact.
But only one man reset time! (at least for many of us)
Was he even a man?
Meaning, what does it mean to have died and risen?
Was he the son of God? (and what is such a thing anyways?)
Could he do miracles, or was he just an ordinary man with an embellished history?
Did he even exist at all, beyond the stories and teaching tales told of him?
This song started playing randomly on my phone this am.
I don’t know if you know it?
By Sia, in the chorus she sings—
I’m gonna swing from the chandelier, from the chandelier
I’m gonna live like tomorrow doesn’t exist
There’s some bad “teachings” from this song I’ll talk about in a bit.
But there’s much good to get from it too.
There’s of course lots of bad sh*t going on right now.
People are sick and dying.
Our economy and financial futures look bleak.
For the greater good we’ve given up all of our freedoms, uncertain what we’ll get back.
Yes, we can sink in this.
Spend your days and nights filled with terror, fear, worry, anxiety, depression.
Or you can use these hardest times to get stronger.
Now is obviously a hard time for many of us.
First and foremost all of our hearts go out to those who are sick and directly impacted by the virus.
For many others on the frontlines, in our medical and emergency services, it’s harder than ever.
Yet fortunately, this is what they are trained to do.
A friend in emergency medicine said to me.
His business is emergency, and he’s been conditioned to deal with it.
“You can’t know whether you can save the patient, or often even what surgery they need.”
But that’s when you fall back on your most basic training, he says.
“You do the most important thing right now that the patient needs, and go from here.”
It’s simple, right?
But especially in our hardest times, this can be very hard to do.
Meaning it’s the tie I wear when I’m working from home.
You know, like your favorite sweats that you might only wear indoors.
This is my tie version.
Home tie is just one of the “devices” I’ve developed over the years for working from home.
See, as many more people now know, it can be hard to work from home, right?
You have lots of distractions you don’t have in an office, don’t you?
Like this Kat sitting right next to my keyboard.
When I worked on Wall Street I never understood why busy people wasted so much time.
Much of the day in fact gets slaughtered in things that have zero bearing on your success.
Just chopping things out.
And focusing on what truly matters, you can massively amplify your success in far less time.
Thinking is the same.
As I’ve written about lots of times—like here, here, here—the brain is a hellish machine that ruins your life.
Killing your seconds.
Killing any chance you have of living in a positive mindset.
Killing precious moments you could be focused on valuable things.
Killing your life.
Such is the plight of humanity.
I’m pretty good in the mind.
Tens of thousands of hours researching these topics.
Hours a day of mental conditioning does this for you.
But I’m still human, and sometimes still need a bailout of my own thinking.
Some of them are experts in the mind.
Others are my friends and clients who I’ve helped over years on these topics…
Who can then help me back when my mind starts to run on.
Such as yesterday.
When Cuomo announced we were locking down New York.