Ultimate Days Masterclass

Remember to stretch

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.

Not by a bullet, or hardcore ultra event, or his two heart surgeries, but by a mysterious illness that has his body shutting down.

He doesn’t know what to do.

It’s getting worse, and his doctors too are out of solutions.

But then Goggins stumbles onto a miracle cure—

Stretching!

As it turns out, for all those years being hardcore stretching his capabilities, Goggins hadn’t been stretching his body.

And now his psoas was so tightly wound, it was strangling him like a snake around your belly.

That’s why I suggest the alternative title of Read To The End.

Because if you just read the first parts of Goggins’ book, you too might think driving hard goals is only about being hardcore.

When even as the most hardcore Goggins learns, to sustain top performance, you must be properly restoring.

Keep in mind, you can only push, push, push so far.

Especially now.

I’ll still be writing less the next few weeks, and I hope you too find time to stretch this summer!

We keep failing, but that’s the point

System For Winning

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.

We’ve only failed 3 times so far…

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.

Putting it on the rails (in 2 steps)

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.

Take the thinking out of it

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.

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3 ways to best use your PPP (not that one)

Ultimate Days

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.

Why PPP?

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.

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How do you set business goals, NOW?

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.

The illusion of predicting the future

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…

remove the block and all lives matter

“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 drew him this chart

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.

This one thing is what matters most in life

Ultimate Days

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.

Drifting back to wake

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.

3 truths how to feel happy that few of us want to hear, let alone can or will train!

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.

The biggest human lie

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.

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How to get more energy, without coffee

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?

Caffeine gives you “not-energy”

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.

live your ultimate days, even when the world has gone to sh*t

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.

Has your daily routine gone to sh*t?

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?

This man had so much impact, he reset time

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)

Who was this Jesus?

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?

So long as ur home, you might as well swing from the chandelier

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.

Lemons from Lemonade

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.

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Advice from the ER—Especially now this 1 principle matters most

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.

“It’s always chaos around here”

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.

This is my home tie, and 2.5 other devices for best working from home

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.

Dress to impress YOURSELF

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.

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How you stop the virus killing your life, by focusing on these 3 things

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.

70,000 mostly negative redundant thoughts

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.

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Forget about Mad Max, Dark Knight Rises, becoming a virologist

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.

Fortunately I’m surrounded by pros

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.

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Calm is more contagious than any virus or meme

You’ve certainly seen the Keep Calm and Carry On meme but do you know where the phrase comes from?

In 1939 in preparation for World War II the British government printed Keep Calm and Carry On posters they pasted all over London.

The purpose was to keep up British morale ahead of the imminent Nazi bombings.

And also to ensure when the bombing started, the Brits remained strong.

“Your buddies die when you panic”

“In the SEAL teams,” my shooting instructor said to me…

“The first and most important lesson you’re taught is that calm is contagious.”

Calm breeds calm.

“And that’s most crucial in a firefight,” he said.

If as soon as bullets go flying operators start running around like headless chooks of course more die.

1 thing 5X+ more terrifying and contagious than Coronavirus

There are some things we just shouldn’t say in our modern world.

And more personally, I shouldn’t say.

Since I was a kid I’ve been told to keep my mouth shut.

But often I’m too busy jamming my foot in it saying stuff like…

$850,000,000+ COMPLETELY wasted

By just two candidates running terrible campaigns.

One of the smartest investors on the planet, Tom Steyer, invested $253,718,074 to “buy” zero delegates.

Imagine what social impact that money could have had invested in the sad, rampant homelessness in Steyer’s hometown.

For his $600,000,000 Bloomberg at least bought himself double the delegates of mayor Pete and nearly 10% of Bernie’s count.

If only he’d spent another $5,400,000,000 he might have had a chance.

In the pursuit of social justice more money has been “invested” in cheesy advertising by two dozen Dems than any other campaign in history.

Yet we’re still looking at a near certain Trump victory.

Maybe it’s OK to say that, but not so sure about this…

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will the super you keep showing up?

an old buddy said to me the other day—

what’s going on?

it’s like I don’t know how you’re gonna show up anymore.

you started popping up in ties on videos.

then you dropped your email headers and started to get simple.

I just don’t know who you’ll be next time I see you.

who are you going to be?

I asked—

when you get home tonight and you’re with your family.

who are you going to be?

which version of you shows up there?

how do you speak?

behave, be?

how is that version of you different to who you show up as in business?

with your buddies?

when you’re hanging with one of your oldest and best friends?

How Soon Will We Forget This 86,400 Lesson From Kobe?

Within minutes of Kobe Bryant’s reported death, wikipedia was updated.

People were tweeting about him.

Talking about how tragic it is.

Musing on how precious life is.

While many people talk about it…

Kobe Lived It

Some time ago I wrote about something special that Kobe showed is inside us all—

I have self-doubt. I have insecurity. I have fear of failure. I have nights when I show up at the arena and I’m like, ‘My back hurts, my feet hurt, my knees hurt. I don’t have it. I just want to chill.’ We all have self-doubt. You don’t deny it, but you also don’t capitulate to it. You embrace it.

What’s so special about folks like Kobe is they have all the same foibles as the rest of us.

It’s just, they never let it hold them back.

They’re maniacally focused on what most matters to them, and go after it HARD every day.

How Are You Using Your 86,400?

How many people will spend a few days talking about Kobe.

Talking about how life is precious.

How quickly it can all end.

And then get back to wasting many of their precious 86,400 seconds every day?

Kobe would never waste precious seconds on the clock that way.

Video Warning: It’s Pretty Extreme

It’s extreme to ask yourself, how many seconds a day are you wasting your life?

To ask yourself, if this was your last year on the planet, what would you cut out?

150,000 people die every day—roughly 2 every second—so what makes us think this won’t be our unlucky day?

We’ve been wary of putting out this video coz I still try to hide my extreme…

But Kobe made me think fck it, this is how I strive to play the game of life.

And it seems to me that Kobe lived much the same way.

Mamba Mentality.

You’re either focused on what truly matters or wasting your precious 86,400 seconds on the clock.