Self Improvement Daily Podcast

My personal mission statement is to help convert human intention into action. I believe that if we were able to follow through on our best intentions, for ourselves and others, the world would be a much better place. 

That’s why I’m so obsessed with behavior change. Action is the only mechanism for generating results. The world operates on the law of cause and effect, nothing happens on its own. That’s why improving own ability to follow through, and do the things we know we need to do to change our life and the world, is among the most important things we’ll ever do.

With that in mind, let me present to you what I’ve distilled to be the Follow Through Formula. And if it sounds overly simple, that’s because it is:

Follow Through = Knowing What To Do + Actually Doing It.

When you’re clear on the action you need to take to make progress on a goal, and you take action on it, life will open up for you. It’s like finally figuring out the rules of the game - once you know them, you can win.

But it’s easier said than done. ‘Knowing what to do’ requires that you’re clear on what you want, which is one of the hardest questions to answer. It also requires that you know the best way to attain what you want so that you maximize your chances at success.

‘Actually doing it’ fights against our own evolutionary biology to be lazy and negative. There are forces around us that act like a headwind, making things so much harder than they need to be. And there are so many other things to do that making time for what matters most is a real challenge. 

That’s why it’s so critical we understand the fundamentals: Following through is just a matter of knowing what to do and actually doing it. Easier said than done.

The only thing keeping you from the life, health, career success, relationships, and everything else you imagine for yourself is your ability to follow through. And if you feel like you’re not as far along as you thought you’d be by now, more likely than not it’s because you haven’t mastered parts of this formula.

And that is something I’d love to help you with. To kick off 2026 I’m leading the Year Of Follow Through Challenge. It’s designed to help you start getting the results your uncommon potential deserves. And for just one week I’m offering a 50% discount on it. Click here to lock in your Year Of Follow Through.

Sometimes when life gets hard - when you’re feeling tired, less motivated, uninspired and dragging yourself through the motions - it’s normal to want to quit. It’s common to ask the question “What am I even doing this for?”

Especially when it comes to something like personal development that is so demanding… It’s so much easier to give in and stop fighting. You’ve probably reached that point, I know I have. Yet here we are. Why do you think that is?

I wanted to understand my reasons for being so committed to my self-growth and I encourage you to do the same. Because if it’s something that’s so fundamental to the way we go about life, there’s got to be something deeply meaningful and valuable fueling it.

For me, I believe that self improvement is the path to maximizing my happiness and sense of fulfillment. Moments in my life where I’ve felt the most alive and proud have been times when I was fully applying myself, testing my limits, and fully applying myself.

One layer further, I believe that my ultimate happiness and fulfillment comes from maximizing the difference I make in the world, and that my capacity to impact is directly correlated with the height of my self-growth. The more I squeeze every drop of potential, the more I have to give, and the better I feel about my existence.

It’s emotional. It all serves to increase the richness and potency of my life experience.

That’s what motivates me to make positive choices for my health every day - it gives me the energy, confidence, and mental sharpness I need to attack what’s in front of me.

That’s why I turn inwardly with curiosity - to explore my innerworking and understand how my biases and beliefs influence the way I show up.

That’s why I am constantly refining and optimizing my personal practices - with more effectiveness and efficiency I can create leverage and multiply my output.

That’s my reason, and I want you to reflect on yours. You don’t have to do this. You choose to. You choose to take the path of sacrifice, discipline, and focus. And I want you to uncover why because when you do, it validates it all. It gives it all purpose, and there’s nothing we desire more.

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Public spaces are always such an interesting place to observe the way humanity operates. It’s fascinating to see social norms at work. This is top of mind because last week I was on an airplane and someone drastically violated the convention.

The plane lands, the seatbelt sign is off, and the man sitting next to me slides off his seat, into the aisle, and sneaks his way half way up the plane. The audacity! Doesn’t he know he needs to wait his turn? Doesn’t he know how selfish it is to do something at everyone else’s expense?

As I witnessed other people reacting to the calamity I thought deeper: What are the consequences to making a choice like that?

One possibility is that there are none, and that the man was completely oblivious to how he was supposed to behave in that situation.

The more likely answer is, very little. Beyond the short-term discomfort of getting dirty looks and passive-aggressive comments, his life is relatively unimpacted. In fact it’s probably way better because he saved himself 10 minutes of his precious time.

It got me thinking, if the upside outweighs the downside, why doesn’t everyone look out for their own self-interest and hurry their way off the plane at other people’s expense?

I think it’s because we all have a social contract to not inconvenience others. When we all agree to maintain a certain standard of order, it works out better for all of us. 

Imagine if people didn’t stop at stop signs to let other cars go by? 

Imagine if we didn’t wait our turn to enter a venue? 

Imagine if we all got up once the plane landed and pushed our way to the exit?

It would be chaos. There would be more aggression and micro-violence and things would be horribly inefficient. And that’s an environment where the majority of us are worse off. So to offset that, we follow the rules for the sake of doing what’s in the best interest of the collective.

Regardless of whether this man was at fault or not, I prefer to receive his behavior with curiosity. What about him caused him to do this? What about this offended me? What are the forces creating this environment? 

Life is better that way, it doesn’t make things any better to get angry about them.

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I try to live as intentionally as possible. What that means for me is I want to be extremely thoughtful about every choice that I make, weighing the short and long term implications so that I take action in ways that most serve me. 

In practice, my intentionality is limited by my awareness. I can do my best to make good choices, but that's only as good as how aware I am of the options I have and my understanding for how things will play out. 

With all of that in consideration, that’s why I see ‘intentionality’ as the marriage of awareness and discipline. The more aware or conscious I am, and the more disciplined I am to acting faithfully on my best options within that awareness, the more intentional I believe that I am.

An intention is just an idea. From the options available to you, it’s what you’ve determined you want. In some ways, setting an intention primes your unconscious to act in alignment with it, but in more ways it leads to having unmet expectations for yourself. 

That means you need to do more to translate intention into action. After all it’s following through on the intention that brings it into your reality. 

One thing that I’ve found has really helped me with that is stating my intentions. When you do that, you take something that’s happening internally and give it an external voice. It enrolls other people in the intention and changes the environment around it. 

No longer can you pass up a commitment with no consequences, now there’s a real possibility someone will ask about it, and you don’t want to disappoint them.

I’ve used this in big and small ways. From telling a mentor that I was committed to writing the first draft of my book to telling my wife that I was only going to check one thing on Instagram. Literally sharing the intention with someone else makes you so much more compliant to following through on it.

And when you do that, you’re living intentionally. Your life is filled with more of the things that are important to you. You show up in the ways that you want to. And to me, that’s what it’s all about!

If you’re curious to see how my intention setting system works, which I call my Self Improvement Scorecard, click the link in the description - I’ve got a video all about it!

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As someone who has built his life around the idea of being as consistent as possible, who reads “The Compound Effect” once a quarter to reinforce my own dedication to being consistent myself, the reflection you’re about to hear is deeply personal.

Ask anyone who has achieved anything and they’ll tell you that you have to be consistent. There is nothing that replaces the compounding growth generated from reliable and repetitive action. 

Yet, consistency by itself isn’t enough.

If you think about the mechanics of consistency, it eventually leads to a plateau. With enough time the incremental gains you get from being consistent flatten out because you’ve maximized the capacity of the result. 

For example, if you do 50 push-ups every day, a month, your maximum amount of push-ups without rest will probably steadily increase. But if you do 50 push-ups every day for 10 years, it will no longer make you stronger. It will serve to maintain the upper limit you’ve established.

So for people who do the same thing, at the same interval, growth gets stagnant. If people take the same consistent action for long enough, they will eventually stop improving.

Don’t get me wrong, consistency is still a remarkable catalyst - and perhaps still the best one available to us! Most people don’t reach the “breaking point” I just described because they struggle to be consistent enough to reach it.

But it needs to be supplemented with increases in effectiveness, intensity, or frequency to truly become the exponential force we know it to be.

Effectiveness: 50 push-ups a day with better form will make you stronger. 

Intensity: 70 push-ups a day will make you stronger.

Frequency: 50 pushups twice a day will make you stronger.

That is until your life calibrates to the added demand, and your results acclimate to the level established by the new action plan.

Consistency is incredible. Increasing the quantity, quality, and leverage of the action you take consistently makes it exponential.

It’s the reason why routines eventually feel too routine. We’re meant to expand and push beyond our limits to discover our next.

If you want to see my personal process for how I maximize my consistency, and systematically fine-tune my action plans in the direction of never-ending, relentless growth, I have a video showing you my personal Self Improvement Scorecard in action. Click the link in the description if you want to check that out!

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One of the most fundamental things to understand is the workings of the unconscious mind. Over 95% of our day is spent living out the emotions and behavioral patterns that our mind’s produce unconsciously. On autopilot we navigate life with very little ability to intervene or influence it. It’s only when we disrupt what happens automatically that we can knowingly choose something else.

Daniel Kahneman popularized the ideas of ‘fast and slow thinking’. He noticed that there are two pathways of thought, the first that is quick, reactive, and beyond our control… And another that is slow, deliberate, and calculated. Fast thinking is reacting, slow thinking is responding, and it always happens in that order (if slow thinking happens at all).

An easier way to relate with this concept is to think about your impulses. An impulse is an immediate desire motivated by something you’re not aware of. It could be an impulse to pick up your phone and scroll, have an extra serving of chips or dessert, or get angry at a loved one or colleague. An impulse happens without full cognitive processing so it’s an unfiltered expression of a deeper rooted desire.

If you don’t have the awareness to know you’re feeling an impulse or the willpower to address it, it will win, and it will steer your behavior in unsustainable ways. This is the preferred direction of the unconscious mind as it plays out its programming.

However, at any given moment we can override our impulses. Our conscious will and choice is greater than our unconscious nudges. It’s within our power to put our phone down or avoid picking it up in the first place. We’re capable of resisting the temptation of snacks and sweets. We can feel an impulse and choose to not act on it, but that’s only possible when we’re aware that it’s happening and clear on what we want in the long run.

As it relates to our own self-growth and steering our lives in a healthier and more productive direction, we can work on both sides of the issue. For impulses we can design our environment so that it’s more difficult to access the thing that satiates the impulse, or add consequences when we do. To override we can cultivate more consciousness through visualization, priming, and generating clarity.

And to operationalize this concept, I want you to pick one thing that you’re vulnerable to giving into. Add consequences by promising to yourself that you’ll make the right choice on it. Prime yourself by envisioning the next time you’ll face off with that impulse and thinking through how you want to handle it. 

A small exercise like that goes a long way in supporting you in making the right choices, consistently, that build up the life you want to have, step by step.

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Without a doubt the biggest driver in our world today is money. It’s the driving force behind legislation, business, and humanitarian work. It’s the source of so much greed and corruption. And it’s the one thing people think they need to be happier.

Evolutionarily, our unconscious desire for money is a proxy for a deeper need: To secure resources for ourselves and loved ones. Our minds have evolved to engage in behaviors that ensure we have the food, water, and safety we need to survive. This translates into our modern world where having money ensures we’ll be able to access everything we’ll need to stay alive, and the more we have, the more we can count on it.

It’s a desire that runs deep: If I were to ask people across the world, “I have $100,000… Do you want it?” you’d be hard pressed to find someone who says no. And that’s for this exact reason - money can do a lot for people.

But the point I want to highlight today is - People don’t actually want money… They want what it provides for them. 

Money is a currency which means it’s a vehicle for exchanging value. Money itself is pretty valueless, but what it can get for you is worth everything. And when someone says they want to have more money, that’s not what they actually want: 

-They want the security that comes with having money. 

-They want the freedom to not have to do things they don’t enjoy, or spend time in ways they don’t want to, to acquire it. 

-They want the pleasure of buying things and experiences that bring them happiness. 

-They want the opportunity to be more aggressive in the ways they invest in building a team and acquiring the tools they need to maximize their personal mission.

But the thing is, there are other paths to acquiring these things. Money is not the ‘end all be all’. It’s one of the impact vehicles we have available to us whose utility is obvious and most easily understood. It’s worth investing in the other pathways, especially when your personal finances aren’t the biggest constraint to you getting what you want.

That’s partly my story. In a different line of work, I know I could be making a lot more money. There are things I do every day that I could be getting paid for. But I choose to do them anyway because they help me access what I actually want - a sense of fulfillment and meaning in my life building up projects that I believe in.

Money is important, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not everything. And really money is just a mechanism for getting what you really want, and my encouragement is to explore acquiring those things more directly.

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