This is an advanced topic that relates to personal development - Collecting data and tracking your behavior. Essentially, we need to break down our goals into daily action items to know if we’re making progress. But knowing those steps are representative of accomplishing the goal, and maybe not the goal itself, you need to be critical about where the logic falls through and when the action might not be contributing in the way you intended. 

For example let’s say your goal is to wake up at 6am on weekdays. One of the things you might want to track is how often you press the snooze button. Well there’s an implied correlation between your wake up time and if you pressed the snooze button… but what if you didn’t set your alarm for 6am?

Or on the language learning app Duolingo. Let’s say your goal is to be able to have a 5 minute conversation with a native speaker in 2 months. So every day you’re learning and tracking the experience points you have accumulated. But what happens when you go through a few lessons without the same concentration, for the sake of gathering experience points rather than to learn the language?

I bring this up because it highlights the importance of working smarter, not harder. It’s not strictly about the volume or amount of effort applied, but rather the efficiency and effectiveness of that effort. And it’s important to think through how your brain might come up with easy ways to accomplish the task you’ve set out to do, but does so in a way that doesn’t generate the desired result.

I share a lot about mindset, perspective, and seeing the best in everything. And while I do my very best to practice what I preach it’s not always possible. Life is complex and different things can trigger you in a certain way at a certain time, and it affects you.

I feel like there’s an unfair expectation these days that you’re always supposed to be happy, for things to always be going perfectly in your life, because social media biases our understanding. We only have visibility into the best parts of others lives, and it takes a toll when our life feels differently.

That’s why I want to share this today. It’s okay to be off. 

I can guarantee everyone has off days. Everyone breaches integrity on occasion. Everyone is a hypocrite at one point or another. The human experience is full of problems and challenges that keep things from being perfect all the time. And that’s okay!

What's important is how we try to respond to these moments. Of course I can’t always do this, but I try to adopt the perspective that all of these things are happening for me, with a faith that everything will resolve as it should.

It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s okay. It happens. But to begin improving your situation you can give yourself the space and time to process real emotions you’re experiencing. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Acknowledge that things aren’t exactly as you want them to be, that you aren’t perfect, and then redirect it back to where you want to go and start getting back on track.

It’s okay to be off, we all experience it, and we all learn from it.

In the 17th Century British philosopher John Locke coined the term “Tabula Rasa”. This theory came counter to the traditional way of thinking, which was that genetics and biology determine who we become as people. Locke argued that we come as a blank slate in this world, like a sponge to new information, and that most of what we carry in our behavior and personal expression is learned and not genetically inherited.

If that's true, we can use this philosophy to start gaining an awareness of our own tendencies. If our tendencies are a product of the things we learned throughout our life, it means that this understanding is subjective and therefore can be changed.

If you grew up and your parents said “money doesn’t grow on trees” or “money can’t buy you happiness”, then that’s what you learned to be true about the world. In either case it’s the exposure to that thought that shapes your understanding and relationship with money. But by working through these learned behaviors, and gaining self-awareness about the root motivation and desire built into this way of thinking, you can rewrite what you believe to be true so that it’s more supportive of the person you want to be.

If we all are a tabula rasa, a blank slate, then that means we literally can become anything or anyone! The reason we are a certain way is because that’s what we’ve been taught to believe. So understand, the doubts you have about yourself, the limiting beliefs you hold, the biases you carry, your preferences - They all come from learned experience. And in order to start rewriting these default patterns, you need to unlearn and relearn something new.

You’ve probably heard this one a number of times. The quick explanation behind the meaning of this expression is - When you miss out on an opportunity, or a phase of your life ends (when a door closes) it creates space for new opportunities to arise  and phases to begin (another door opens). To me this makes sense and actually fits within the general laws of the universe. Things in life trend to achieve a state of equilibrium to maximize something called entropy, which is a measurement of the order or disorder in a system. Basically, if something offsets that equilibrium in a negative way, with a door closing, then the natural universal response is to reestablish an equilibrium by opening new doors.

But an important piece of achieving this equilibrium requires you and your taking action. In fact, the quote we’re speaking about is only a fraction of the full quote stated by inventor of the telephone Alexander Graham Bell - “When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”

While the universe creates abundance and so many different opportunities to reset the balance, we as humans can be too narrow-minded and focused on the wrong things to even notice the possibilities. But with this new awareness comes an amazing opportunity to take action in a positive and impactful way! And it all starts with trusting a physical law of the universe - “When one door closes, another one opens.”

This is not about good financial literacy habits or money management... It's about how you view the use of your time and money as tools. In a capitalistic economy we rely on mutual exchanges in order to give and receive value. But in this way everything is painted as very transactional. This means that it appears the exchange happens all at once, the entirety of value for full compensation at the moment of transfer. This is why we describe it as how you “spend” your money or how you “spend” your time, because the resource is determined to be completely allocated all at once.

Instead, let’s think about this transaction through the lens of investing your time, and investing your money. When we buy food, we’re investing in our well-being and the lasting effect it has on the body and its ability to perform. When we invest our time in a project it provides lessons and learnings that we take with us far longer than the literal time we spent working on it. This perspective on the way we spend our most valuable assets deconstructs the transactional nature of the exchange and highlights the prolonged benefits we receive, which is a more accurate representation of what we get.

This all comes together in a very common term - Return on investment. By labeling the way you spend your time and money as an investment, you have the opportunity to squeeze as much value out of it as you can in order to get a better return. This allows you to evaluate the exchanges you have that involve your time and money in a new way, with more clarity on what you’re actually getting for it. Seeing it as an investment allows you to be more intentional about how you spend your valuable resources, and ultimately allocate them in a way that produces more joy and fulfillment.

Here's a story something that happened and I’m still shaking it off!

I had been working for months to make the interview with Tanya Ramos happen. I’m co-founding a project that is incredibly interwoven with her work at Pencils of Promise, the mission she stands for, so I wanted to start building a relationship with Tanya as a way to begin exploring opportunities for collaboration and mutual support. The call was booked as the culmination of a ton of hard work, accomplishing a big goal that I had set, and I lost sleep the night before out of excitement and fear that I wouldn’t wake up in time for the interview.

Well as luck would have it, I converted the time zones incorrectly into my calendar and was late for the interview! I immediately felt dejected and so disappointed in myself, that I could squander an opportunity like this that I’d worked so hard for, and was very critical of myself. I started scrambling trying to make everything work and needless to say, was really flustered. But then I thought about the situation and what my ideal response is: Breathe, be calm you can’t change the past, have faith that she’ll understand, and focus on what you can do moving forward. Taking a moment to be mindful and intentional allowed me to refocus, appease her concerns, and conduct the interview as scheduled! It was mission accomplished, the interview was incredible and it represents something I’m really passionate about. And it all was possible because I managed my emotions, had faith in the process, and chose to take action!

This is  good news and bad news all in one because it's the same news applied in two different ways. The way things are right now, they’re not going to be like that forever. But that’s exciting and an opportunity we need to seize because everyday we are creating our future.

When things are going really well, that's great and I love to hear it. But they won’t be like this for long. It’s most definitely possible that things could change for the worse overnight. If that’s the case then recalibrate, find the lesson, and proceed in the best way you can. Alternatively, things can get way better too! The satisfaction you’re currently experiencing might only be a fraction of how things are meant to be, so it’s always important to keep an open mind as things morph and change in your life.

Or if things are not going so well at the moment, then keep fighting, because this phase is only temporary. View it as a necessary trial that will equip you with the mindset and strength you need to excel in the future. It is so much easier said than done, but you still can reclaim the life you deserve by fighting through it today.

In any and all of these cases, it’s important to acknowledge this: Your current state is not your ultimate state. Good, bad, right, and wrong, things will be different shortly and it’s up to you to steer your life in the direction you want. So believe in yourself and your destination because I believe in you, and know wholeheartedly that you are capable of great things!

A pervasive problem that we see in society today is this idea that vulnerability is a weakness. That you should maintain a tough persona to show others how resilient you are. Be tough, yes, but also be emotionally available and honest. Tanya Ramos, the CEO of the For Purpose organization Pencils of Promise, was taught to be protective and strong as a child, but she found that being vulnerable and honest has allowed her to excel as a leader!  

The humility and authenticity of Tanya’s message concedes that you’re always going to need others to help fill in for your weaknesses or deficiencies. The opportunity, thought, is that the sooner you are receptive to receiving support the sooner it will stop holding you back.