This is the new framework of Naveen Jain, a billionaire philanthropist and entrepreneur. If you’re looking to do something new in business, in a project, or toward a cause it’s important to understand how effective you can be at solving the problem. Before committing and obsessing over this new endeavor you need to make sure it’s worth your time and effort. Naveen Jain encourages you to ask 3 simple questions: Why this? Why now? Why me?

Ask “Why this?” to understand if it will actually drive impact and change. “Ask Why now?” to evaluate if new technologies or circumstances will allow this problem to be solved in a new way. And ask “Why me?” to hone in your skillset and if you are uniquely positioned to tackle the problem in the right way.

Recently, I’ve been guilty of being on the wrong side of this. I’ve been feeling entitled to certain results or meeting certain expectations, hoping that bigger, better, more - would validate the hard work I’ve been putting in. I’ve been letting external factors determine my sense of self-worth and influence my happiness. While I do trust my intentions and I know it comes from a good place, it’s the wrong way of thinking.  

The key word in this quote is the word ‘knowing’. “The secret to having it all is knowing you already do.” When you know something, it is certain. There is no doubt, no reconsidering, no wasted energy on different possibilities. Our reality is determined by what we perceive to be true, and if you perceive that you absolutely know something then it is truly part of your reality.  It becomes an inevitability that will exist once time has taken its course.

The best way to achieve big, ambitious goals, is to go back to the basics. What do you have right now? Are you taken care of? Are you comfortable? Are you making it? You might take it for granted, but time and again you have been provided exactly what you need to thrive and flourish, and you can have faith that you’ll continue to receive everything you need. Everything you can do, and be, and create, and provide, already exists within you. You are born with it and while it may take time to access it, knowing you already have it is the secret to having it all.

Something I have valued my entire life is grit. Underlying grit is a belief that hard work pays off, that patience is a virtue, and that investing in yourself and others drives results. The foremost expert on the subject is the founder and CEO of Character Labs, Dr. Angela Duckworth.

Everything that Angela just stated validates one of my core beliefs - Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. But an important extension of that thought is that hard work needs to be sustained over time, despite opposition and setbacks, in order to realize its fullest potential. Regardless of the setting you find yourself in, I encourage you to adopt a more gritty mindset so that you can stop taking “No” for an answer and persevere in areas that matter to you.

Does it ever feel like things aren’t happening fast enough for you? Like your patience is running out or you’re losing sight of what you want? Or that time is passing by and you’re afraid that you’re not making the absolute most of it? Maybe it’s time for you to take ownership of your destiny and start creating it.

I grew up playing sports so I’m going to use a sports analogy - It’s time to play offense in life.

Playing offense is about being the aggressor. Push the boundary, be disruptive, and be bold. Get creative about how you pursue your goals and stay persistent. Playing offense is about trying new things to see what might work so that you have a chance to get what you desire. Yes, things may need to get worse before they get better, and failure is a real option, but even with the ups and downs at least you know you’re trying and you’ll probably get to your final destination faster. 

The alternative is to keep playing defense, which is about maintaining the status quo, resisting change, and protecting the value in the way things are. There’s nothing wrong with that, unless you’re protecting something that doesn’t feel fulfilling or satisfying to you, or it doesn't bring you happiness.

You can start playing offense by committing to something important to you, refusing to settle for what’s just “okay”, and taking action toward something you care about. I get it, it’s uncomfortable and not sustainable to do all at once, but when you take your first small offensive step then there’s a hope and belief that you can score a goal.

As we go about problem solving in our lives we usually find that the simplest solution is the best fitting. But it’s not like the simplest option just pops up and waves its arms at you... You need to discover it and think it through from a number of different angles. Simplicity comes from understanding a complex objective and distilling it down into its most basic parts. And the reality is, that process involves a lot of hard work. 

You need to work hard in order to make something look effortless.

We’ve all been there… We’ve been struggling at something for long enough that we look around to see how other people are managing, only to find someone who makes it look so easy. How nice it would be if it was that easy for me! What you don’t see is the trial and error process, the experimentation, and the failures that preceded what they’re now making look so easy.

It’s counterintuitive because when observing someone that looks so effortless, you do not see the complexity or even recognize that what they are doing is inherently difficult. But that’s only because they have worked through the learning curve to synthesize the task into the most simplified form of action. Simple solutions seem to exist in plain sight and they don’t appear to be that clever. But that’s exactly the point - They appear to be so effortless that they aren’t noteworthy, they just fit.

I say this all to help you understand that the people around you who seem to be in a flow state, and the user-friendliness of your life is there by design. It required a lot of thought and hard work to make it look so effortless.

What is the difference between prioritizing your schedule, and scheduling your priorities? I’m not going to tip-toe around it. Prioritizing your schedule means you don’t have complete power. People can very quickly fill up your schedule if you’d let them, and you’d have no say in what you do and what you don’t. While it is important to prioritize your schedule and be able to satisfy the tasks in front of you, what is the nature of those things? If important things come up, you may not have the same flexibility to adjust to new demands. In fact prioritizing your schedule is more of a responsive approach to the way you spend your time because you are letting external factors be a leading decision maker in what you ultimately do.

But when you schedule your priorities, you are in control. You decide up front what is important to you and you make sure you allocate time to do it. It’s a very proactive approach in that you design your life in advance with the intention of doing what you want to do and when you want to do it. Whether it’s time with your kids, a significant other, at the gym, self-care, or in a hobby, the fact that it’s important to you means that it deserves your time, and you can satisfy that when you schedule your priorities.

So pull out a schedule, make your best guess at what your pillar time commitments are - work hours, extracurriculars, meetings, whatever - then fill in the gaps with the things that are truly important to you. For me, Thursday night is date night, and unless extremely urgent I don’t schedule calls or work for that evening because that’s something that is important to me. It really is that easy, and there’s no excuse not to try it.

Don’t prioritize your schedule, schedule your priorities.

We all wait for the right time to 'feel ready' before committing to doing something different. But that process of ‘waiting for the right time’ often stalls our progress. We inherently have a negativity bias that will highlight all the reasons why we shouldn’t or can’t do something, sabotaging new ideas at the onset because it threatens the current comfort we are experiencing. That’s why motivation is such a convenient excuse... We tell ourselves that there are conditions to when we can try something new.

The primary misconception is - Change doesn’t usually come about because we want it to, it usually comes about because we have to. It’s driven by necessity, and necessity does not require motivation.

Our brains work counter to this and there are a few things we can do to overwrite it. The first is to act quickly. When the impulse strikes, train yourself to take a committed action before your brain gets the chance to intervene and encourage self-preservation. Self-preservation exists in direct contradiction to change, and as Mel Robbins shares in her book “The 5 Second Rule” we have a very narrow window before our brain starts taking action out of self-preservation.

If you don’t feel like doing something, that’s very normal. In fact your brain is influencing you to do that. But you don’t need to feel ready or motivated to do something in order to do it. In every moment we have choice, and inducing change to invest in our future is most often within our best interest.

I am fascinated by evolutionary biology and how evolution has created us to be a certain type of species that exhibits certain traits. But the issue is we’ve created a  society where those traits are so out of place. In her work, Dr. Ellen Vora has identified a few of those misplaced optimizations, with a longer emphasis on the mechanism itself and how it designs us for survival.

"There's three things that are adaptive in the past that are really maladaptive these days. One of them is that we want to be lazy, another is that we really enjoy calorie dense food, and the other is that we're hardwired for survival - Which is a really good design on a savannah where 99% of the time you're not particularly stressed but 1% of the time it's life or death. We live in this flipped script now where we are chronic low-grade stress all the time, and it's not so life or death for the most part. We're sort of designed to be hypervigilant in anticipating negative consequences and to be obsessed about that. There's not survival advantage to being hardwired to be chill. I think the more that we can surrender and trust and show up and say 'all I can do is do my best and then I release the outcome, I don't control that part' then that's the way to push back against our hardwiring for survival."

All of the cognitive biases we have, and the predispositions, and subconscious behaviors were all created as a result of what helped us survive evolutionarily as humans. And as Dr. Vora pointed out one of the most maladaptive forms of that is our stress response. In order to combat our natural physiological tendencies to perceive threats and our hyperactive fight or flight sympathetic nervous systems, we need to detach ourselves from the results and accept them as they are rather than obsess on how we can influence the outcome.

Any time someone asks me “Brian, how do you come up with a new idea every single day?” I respond with one word - “Observation”.

There is so much going on around us in the world, and a lot of it we cannot even perceive. But those things that we can perceive often present themselves in a way that only reveals the surface of what it means, the tip of the iceberg, and when you get inquisitive you can get into some really powerful realizations.

To observe is to notice the things going on around you as they are. While it doesn't sound profound it is very difficult to do because it demands your focused attention, which is being pulled at from all angles. You cannot dive deeper into a thought or concept until you become aware of it, and being observant of your surroundings allows you to access this depth that exists around us.

As you can probably hear, observation is not everything. It is merely the first step in a process that cascades into a much deeper opportunity for understanding. Everything has a history and series of associations tied to it, and gaining insight into that helps explain why that thing exists, not simply that it does. And also important to note, observation is not actionable, it is simply a mental process that provokes action. If you attract the right thing into your life and you observe that it’s there, nothing changes. It’s your exercising that opportunity that reaps the benefit you wanted in the first place.

So I challenge you to observe. Don’t just hear, listen. Don’t just look, see. There is so much out there to be explored and you must first know it’s there through observation before you can dive much deeper into it.