No matter where you are in life, what you’ve done, how long you’ve been doing it, this is true for every single one of us - You’re just getting started.

When something begins it indicates a change of state.  A change from nothing to something, no activity to activity. Things in our life are constantly in motion and every single day we start and stop and start again. While this might seem like something that prevents us from picking up momentum, it actually functions more like a cycle that constantly renews itself and redirects itself. 

This happens because when you’re at the beginning of something, there’s this energy around it, a tangible excitement, that encourages you to invest more of your attention in it and dedicate yourself to it. This fuels your ability to pick up speed at the task and soon be going faster than when you left off!

But now more on the experiential side let’s debunk something important. How is it that you can be doing something for 10 years and you’re just getting started? Well what I’ve found is that as you spend more time on something and dive deeper into it with more expertise, you realize how much more there is to learn and grow into. It raises the capacity and you realize that you are even earlier on in the process to mastery than you originally thought because there’s more to achieve.

No matter where you think you’re at developing a skill, building a business, or achieving a project, you’re just getting started! And that’s the best thing that could happen because then you can approach your work with a more youthful energy.

This is a really important but implicit distinction between price and value. For convenience sake we label things a certain price to communicate their relative value, but that sells things short because it doesn’t account for the very complex nature of our decision making processes. As people we actually prefer to transact with value because it feels more equitable. There’s no one better in the world to make this distinction than the author of the incredible book “The Go Giver”, Bob Burg.

As it is with many things in life, creating, receiving, and evaluating value is an empathetic process. It requires self-awareness to know how your life history allows you to draw certain conclusions, and understand how someone else may perceive the transaction and value built into it differently.

This thought is inspired by a great and inspirational leader, Winston Churchill. Well known for his resilient and positive perspective, he is known for the quote  “The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

Every single day and in everything you encounter, you are making choices about how you perceive things to be. Things are not inherently good or bad, they are as they are, we are the ones who assign meaning to it. It’s the glass half full approach - The pessimist looks to see how much is already gone, and the optimist looks to see how much is left. It’s the exact same amount being perceived in two entirely different ways.

Obviously the preferred approach is to be the optimist. Our lives are so much richer when we choose to see the positivity and possibility around us, but this contradicts the negativity detecting beings we were evolutionarily designed to be. Like anything, overcoming our nature and being an optimist takes practice. It requires gratitude even when you don’t feel like it. It takes consistent mindfulness upon receiving the privileges we take for granted. And it asks you to see the silver lining in situations that are far from ideal. 

It’s not going to happen over night, but with the intention to grow in that way you can replace the pessimist who sees the difficulty in every opportunity to  become the optimist who sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

Something that I have come to love in my life are systems. Systems are important because it helps you to generate consistent and reproducible outcomes. Many elements in our lives are very simple and operate similar to a function, which is basically the process of an input being altered based on some rules to produce a new output. What a system can do is it can help package the input into something easier to use and optimize the function to generate the specific outcome you desire.

For example - Let’s say you want to get better at flossing at night. Very simply you can create a system for your toothbrushing routine that incorporates flossing. Maybe you start storing your floss on top of your toothbrush, triggering you to interact with it in order to brush your teeth. Or maybe you keep your toothbrush in a new place, like a cup, bristles down as a reminder to look for the floss you placed in the cup as well.

Easy enough right? And it’s very reliable. But if it’s so easy then why don’t we do it more often? It’s because building the system takes a little time and effort upfront to establish. But something I firmly believe is that you need to invest in building the system in order to make consistent progress in your life. It is the one decision that helps you make the right future choice over and over again.

These systems can be applied for just about anything - From exercise to sleep to social media consumption to relationships to self-care to fun! I’m being really intentional about designing systems in my life that correspond with things I want to prioritize, my values, so that the important things are represented in the actions I’m taking and the results I’m generating.

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.”