Sometimes there’s just something about people that is contagious, it’s an enthusiasm and passion that you can feel and want to be a part of. But when it comes to understanding what passion is it can be difficult to articulate. Fortunately the founder of The Passion Centre Kira Day has a formula for us.

Passion = Meaning x Investment, and meaning can be broken down into 3 types of needs - Personal, universal, and functional. In designing your environment to be conducive in those different areas you can have your needs met and thrive like you’re meant to as the beautiful human you are.

You probably hear this expression every so often, but today I wanted to give it a new perspective. It’s the thought, “It must be nice…”

It’s the “Oh they have a maid… that must be nice….” or “Oh they got to fly first class… It must be nice…”

It’s said off-handedly and in kind of a sarcastic tone, but what it actually means is there is some hint of jealousy or envy about not having what other people have. Comparison is the root of many evils, and the ego is constantly trying to position itself and us relative to others. 

We know better than that. We have more control than that, and let’s change the perspective on this often derogatory thought. This is where positivity and particularly gratitude comes in. The things that you take for granted are the things other people in the world are jealous and envious about. “Oh they have a house to clean? It must be nice…” and “Oh they can afford to travel? It must be nice.” 

Instead of throwing this term at the aspirational version of yourself, reflect it into the present and give credit to the incredible things around you. Everything that happens can be spun however you want it to. Will you default to the comparative ego that is never satisfied, or will you revert to gratitude as the leading interpretation. Wherever you position yourself, no matter how big you become or important you’re perceived to be, there will always be people above you and people below you. So there will always be relativity and comparison. Choose to see the positive side of that fact, and choose to say “you know what it really is nice”.

Earlier this week was Daylight Savings Time, and I want to make a habit of leveraging it for the rest of my life. Whether we’re springing forward like we just did or falling back, we can use it as an opportunity to think about our morning and evening routines and how they’re serving this. I already have strong routines but there is always room for improvement, so I am challenging myself to incorporate a stronger routine that minimizes technology usage at night.

Why is this even important? Well, it’s because your evening sets you up for your next day even more than you think. One of the most important elements of a productive day is your energy, and if you don’t put yourself in a good position to get a lot of rest then you start your day playing catchup.

The founder of Optimize and former interview guest Brian Johnson calls this having a PM bookend. Basically, what is your nightly routine and how is it designed to set you up for an impactful tomorrow? I’ve taken this to heart and this weekend I strengthened my evening routine to ensure that I’m more set up for my next day, both from an energy standpoint but also in preparation and in my priorities. 

I made a video where I take you around my room and show you the specific decisions I made to not only choose how I want to spend my time, but make it easier for me to do so on a consistent basis.  Find out how to check out that video by visiting www.selfimprovementdailytipos.com/resources/pm-bookend.

Tell me this hasn’t been you... You want something really bad, like a promotion or launching a new project or an opportunity to meet somebody you’ve always wanted to meet. It’s on the schedule, you prepare really hard for it, and all of a sudden for some reason it falls through. Either the event cancels or you don’t get the promotion or the introduction is delayed. It’s pretty disappointing, especially after having put in so much effort to make it happen, but that’s not the end of the story.

Life will go on and the opportunity will return, will you be prepared to make the most of it when it does?

With that in mind, I want to highlight this perspective shift between setbacks and setups. You can choose to see things as holding you back, making it more difficult for you to get what you want, or you can see it as a new opportunity to differentiate yourself even further and make the absolute most of the opportunity. The same circumstance can be spun in two different ways.

The setback mentality is more of a victim mentality. It’s the “Why me?” response where you feel like things are unfair and conspiring against you. The set up mentality is an ambitious, opportunistic approach that places you in control of your destiny, and it's more of a hero mentality.

Before you can be anyone else’s hero you need to be your own, and it starts with the way you view the circumstances in your life. Do you perceive a roadblock, obstacle, or challenge in your path? Great! That’s setting you up for something great, it’s not setting you back.

I want to highlight a misconception about intentionality that might be helpful to you. Intentionality is thought of as being very deliberate. You know exactly what you’re doing and why you're doing it. It’s something that you commit to doing without losing focus or getting distracted. That is why the term “deliberate strategy” is used to direct people around a common goal.

But I feel like that’s short-sighted. One fundamental thing a deliberate strategy is missing is context. You can be so focused and head down on a certain strategy that you miss the opportunities around you. You become blind to the way things are dynamically changing and are too occupied to consider that the original strategy might not actually the best fit. For that reason, it’s important to leave room to be flexible, which is why it’s often more appropriate to commit to an “emerging strategy” approach. 

With approach you're still intentional, but you’re intentional about the goal you’re looking to achieve and pursuing the path of least resistance to getting there. You can learn something new about the environment you’re working within that changes what you think is the best way to proceed. This is a very entrepreneurial approach, heavily relying on feedback to guide your next steps.

This should be refreshing though because no longer do you need to stay disciplined to a rigid strategy, but rather you stay disciplined to being observant of the dynamic context around you. I encourage you to embrace more of an emergent strategy so that you make progress in the best way possible, not just the way you thought was best in one singular context.

You’ve heard it before but I’ll say it again - Everyone makes mistakes. We’re all human and we aren’t perfect. Occasionally we make a silly error, or read a situation wrong, or get forgetful about something. What’s important to think about is the perspective around those mistakes.

Maybe this is top of mind for me today because I made too bigger mistakes lately. In the last interview I recorded I had the microphone turned around backwards, so the audio quality was worse than usual. Whoops. And then with a live presentation I was giving on Zoom, I didn’t know until the end that my slides weren’t changing. My bad. 

The unfortunate part to making mistakes is that there are real consequences to the action. It feels bad because you either let someone down, you feel vulnerable, or it hurts your confidence. However, people are usually pretty tolerant, because everyone makes mistakes, and if you acknowledge the error you can quickly make things better.

An important piece to this too - If you’re in a position to make a mistake then you’re trying! You’re putting yourself out there in a situation that you aren’t 100% confident in, and you’re giving yourself the opportunity to grow. With the lessons in your mistakes you become more self-aware, start seeing some of your blindspots and hone in on what are your strengths. Just like you can perceive rejection as one step closer to a “yes”, you can view a mistake as one lesson closer to understanding.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, mistakes are good - When you let them serve their purpose.

Let's dive into a subtle line in an iconic song, “It’s a small world”. The line goes “smile means friendship to everyone.” Fundamentally, wouldn’t the world better if everyone was our friend and we had no enemies? Well it’s not as far away as you’d think, The simple gesture of extending a smile to someone communicates a lot. In such a simple way, it expresses that you see them and respect the journey that has brought them to this very moment. It’s inviting and demonstrates not only that you’re not a threat to them, but your intention is to support them, and that you want the best for them. These are all things that your best friends would be thinking, and all of it is conveyed in a smile.

As you’ve probably heard before, it requires far fewer muscles to smile than to frown. So… smiling helps others, it’s easy to do, and last it’s good for you! Smiling serves as a bottom up trigger that informs your brain on its current emotional state, and causes it to secrete positive neurotransmitters.

Smiling is a universally good thing, it’s a mannerism that transcends culture, and at an evolutionary level it signifies that you’re not a threat. If you're not a foe then you must be a friend, and I don’t think it’s too far of a stretch to say that “smile means friendship to everyone”.

Goals are effective in helping us package our dreams and desires into attainable elements. They are milestones and checkpoints that you can reach to understand that you’re making progress and on the right path. It’s helpful to set goals because then you have something tangible and objective to orient yourself toward, but what’s equally important is knowing what the goal represents, so that you’re doing something you genuinely find meaningful.

Let’s say a dream of yours is to hike Mount Kilimanjaro. Sounds like a tall task (literally) that requires a lot of preparation. You could set intermediate goals to help make sure you can achieve that dream. For example, what’s the progression in training required to accomplish such a feat? You can set goals to make sure you're physically prepared. What are the requirements when it comes to travel, accommodations, visas, and everything that’s needed from a logistics standpoint? You can set a goal to get all of that done with enough advanced planning. And the resources required to do it, do you know what equipment you need?

The dream itself is made up of smaller, incremental actions that are required to pursue the dream, and the best way to do that is to set goals that quantify your progress along the way. So dream big, absolutely that’s one of my core values actually, but also be practical and actionable in pursuit of those dreams.