I find that growth-oriented people who want to discover the very edges of their potential have a recurring problem…

They don’t know what to do next!

They aren’t clear on the direction of their growth, the most impactful thing they could be doing to improve themselves, or the next steps they need to take to realize their potential.

This is where I want to highlight the two directions that are always available to us: To solve the problems we’re facing in our lives or to access new possibilities.

This mirrors the two great motivational forces we have in life, which are the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. And as long as we’re thinking through this lens we’ll always have an idea for what we can improve next.

First let’s talk about problems. Problems are results that we aren’t completely happy with. It could be that we missed the mark altogether, or that there were issues in our process for achieving the desired result. In either case, a problem highlights that we could have done things better, and with that acknowledgment comes an opportunity for improvement.

Then we can talk about possibilities. Rather than thinking about what didn’t produce good results, we can think about what the next level of result we could attain is. This gets us thinking more creatively and more ambitiously as we build upon the foundation we’ve already established.

But if I’m being honest, a possibility is just a different type of problem. Rather than it being a problem of insufficiency, it’s a problem of missing out on the next tier of result that is yet to be.

Let's use diet as an example to highlight the difference: A problem in our diet could be that we aren’t meeting the standard we’ve set for ourselves around how healthy our meals should be. We can solve this problem by getting rid of unhealthy snacks, finding a few new healthy recipes, or creating a new grocery shopping list system to make sure you have access to healthy ingredients.

Now let’s say that you’re happy with your diet, that you’re meeting your current standard. This means that the opportunity for improvement is to think about to raise your standard for my diet, and understand what a healthier diet would even look like.

This takes you into the creative brainstorm of what’s possible for you in your healt - How a vegan diet might support you, what supplements you could take to improve digestion, or whatever it might be. The problem isn’t one of insufficiency and not meeting expectations, but rather not maximizing the opportunity that is your personal nutrition.

If you’re falling short of the results you desire, that’s a direct problem. If you’re looking to elevate the results you’re getting to something even better, that’s an indirect problem in the form of a possibility. Identify both in your life and you’ll always have something to pursue in the name of becoming the best version of yourself.

The actionable element of this is to become more aware of the problems and possibilities you have in your life. So let’s create that consciousness right now:

What’s one problem you’re experiencing in your health, work productivity, or mindset… And what’s one possibility you have in those same areas to elevate beyond your current results?

When I went to college I received a degree in neurobiology and I remember during my studies, there was a massive finding in the field that reshaped our understanding about rewards.

Studies found that the biggest dopamine spike we experience isn’t in receiving the reward itself, but in anticipation of it.

Let’s connect this to James Clear’s ‘Habit Loop’ that he shares in “Atomic Habits” - The 4 steps of a habit are the cure, craving, routine, and reward.

Basically what this finding proved is that the biggest dopamine spike occurs during the craving step, when the idea for the behavior was planted in your mind, rather than during the reward step after the behavior has been completed.

Biologically this does something really vital - It creates motivation for the action. Because we have this enriched positive state that happens before the routine, we’re more prone to follow through on the routine to claim the reward (even though the benefit of the reward is less significant than the craving).

While this finding has direct impacts on the ways that we experience reward, I think it also has implications in the way that we experience pain.

Have you ever felt completely resistant to getting an early morning workout in, but then once you’re there you realize it’s not that bad?

Or have you ever avoided a certain task that has been weighing on your mind, like taxes, and then once you get into it it’s not as confusing or hard as you thought it would be?

Those are examples of how we actually feel more pain in anticipation of the action rather than in doing the action itself, and why the biggest battle we fight is just to get started.

Now what can we do with this information?

First we can use it as awareness. If we feel a resistance to doing something, we can reason with ourselves that it won’t feel so painful once we get started. This gives us the awareness we need to will ourselves forward.

But more importantly, it highlights the difficulty of converting intention into action. It explains why you can big plans for who you’re going to be and what you’re going to do when you go to bed, and not show up for it the next day as it all goes out the window.

My mission statement is to help convert human intention into action. And now, knowing that we experience more pain in anticipation of doing something, we can use that as a way to help us understand our intentions and ultimately, what we want.

In case you didn’t know, the way I support people in that mission is to help them design the systems, mindsets, and procedures to follow through on their best intentions with real and tangible action.

That’s why I put together a video course about the 9 Super Habits - to help you actually become the healthy, productive, and disciplined person you know you’re capable of being. Want to change your life and change the world?

Start here!

The one person we can never get away from in life is ourselves. We are constantly in our heads having an internal conversation of thoughts that reflects our perception, needs, beliefs, and desires.

But sometimes those thoughts aren’t helpful.

It’s the voice on your shoulder criticizing you telling you that you’re not good enough. It’s a reinforcing script that suggests one failure is a statement of your poor character rather than an isolated moment of learning. It could even surface thoughts that are offensive and scandalous, things that you’d never take action on but you wonder why they came to mind in the first place.

But here’s something that I heard from Ed Mylett that has taken me a while to process: “You don’t need to believe every thought that you think.”

When we’re born, we are a blank slate. As we develop we learn different lessons, have different cultures and norms imprinted on us, and install a set of beliefs that become the filter our daily thoughts run through.

All of this to say - Thoughts of self-criticism, unworthiness, or offensiveness do not come from you. They come from the conditioning you were exposed to.

It’s within our power to challenge our thoughts, question our beliefs, and reroute our internal dialogue to something else that serves us. Rather than being at the mercy of these unconscious thought patterns we can choose to have more constructive thoughts through consciousness.

And that requires that we interrupt the pattern.

Have a self-defeating or self-critical thought about how you gave a bad presentation? Shift that to a thought of being proud you stepped up to the opportunity, and that your presentations will get better.

Feeling triggered by something that a loved one does and notice yourself thinking poorly of them? Change your line of thinking to be more empathetic, and choose to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Just because you’re thinking something does not make it true to you. There are layers of bias and years of conditioning that influence the thoughts we have. Being mindful of that will help you be more in control of the thoughts you think and therefore, impact the emotions you feel, the actions you take, and the results you get.

Author of “Atomic Habits” James Clear featured an insightful idea in his Newsletter that I want to share with you. He said “Clarity isn’t about knowing what you want to do with your life, it’s about knowing what you want to do this week.”

I think it’s brilliant. We put so much pressure on figuring out what our purpose is, what career we want to be in, where we want to live, what type of lifestyle we want to have or successes we want to earn. We feel like having a clear understanding for what that looks like will help guide our daily decision making.

While that is true and there are few things more powerful than a strong life vision to follow with discipline, it’s a very difficult task. Life is so unpredictable that good plans fall apart quickly and the ones that last are actually more flexible than rigid.

That’s why Clear says a more practical clarity to have is shorter term, visioning out what the week looks like. And having a clear plan for the week does a few helpful things.

First is, if you do have macro life clarity, it helps you to narrow your scope and pick out the right actionable things you need to do to make progress on it. Big plans come together through daily action, and knowing what needs to get done this week to serve the master plan improves the likelihood it will work.

Second, a week is about the right amount of time to optimize your personal rhythms. A lot of people overlook the design of their life and in doing so, are at risk to being overcommitted and compromising their self-care routines. Putting a plan together for the week helps you see how you can prioritize your health, get good-quality work done, and have time for the important people in your life. I find that viewing a full week as a single unit makes it easier to consider everything in balance.

And last, you can do things in a given week that help you figure out your overall life plan. Rather than committing to years of volunteering for a nonprofit, you can plan to show up once in a given week and see how you like it. Rather than building your identity around a certain hobby, you can try it out once or twice and go from there.

We don’t want to experiment with our life because we only have one and we don't want to get it wrong. But we get a new week every 7 days. This helps us to be a little bolder, riskier, and les sustainable at times to inform us in knowing what we want and like overall.

So if you’re feeling a bit off track in life, just start with what the next week looks like: 

How many times do you want to exercise?

What fun things do you want to do? Who do you want to see?

What do you want to work on, and for how long?

You’ll find that there’s a lot of joy and fulfillment just in creating a good plan for a new week and following through on it.

As you build out your new weekly design and looking for the most influential things you can do to improve your life, there are 9 Super Habits that transform an inconsistent ‘hit or miss’ person into a self-disciplined and dependable machine! If you’re curious to know what they are and how they work, check them out!

As optimistic, cheerful, and encouraging as I try to be, I do believe that we need to be mindful of ‘toxic positivity’. We cannot reject reality and prevent ourselves from processing the range of emotions that life has to offer. If we do then we create an impossible expectation for how life is supposed to be and feel guilty that we’re ungrateful when we feel bad for ourselves.

However, with that in mind, I also do believe that our perspective is our choice. And while it isn’t healthy to reshape everything that happens to us into the positive, I do think we’d benefit from doing it more often. And that’s because of the insight underlying today’s quote:

“Be happy for no reason.”

Sustaining happiness is an internal game. Ed Mylett says “You have to take you with you”, so no matter what accomplishments you achieve, it’s still you receiving them. Even if there’s a lot to celebrate, you won’t find a reason to, or feel genuine about it, if internally you’re not letting yourself see it.

So rather than trying to extract happiness from everything around you, you can choose to infuse happiness in what you do. This is what “being happy for no reason” means - you choose to be happy and create the reason rather than wait for reasons to prompt your happiness.

As an example of this concept, I saw a video an Instagram that jokingly proved this point. It’s a video about a man who chooses to believe that his partner is thinking about him and blushes when he sees she left a pile of shipping boxes on the ground, and laundry thrown about the bed.

What this video so creatively highlights is how everyday stimuli that normally feel like an inconvenience can easily be reframed to mean something else. I’m not saying that you need to be joyful doing laundry to get this working for you, but it makes you wonder - What else do we experience on a daily basis that we could choose to relate with differently, and how would that simple shift improve the quality of our lives?

In treating daily micro-moments with grace, patience, and gratitude we reroute our thinking, which prompt new emotions that impact the way we show up for everything else. So give it a try for a day. Tell yourself “Tomorrow, I’m going to be happy for no reason,” and see how you like it!

There’s one word that transforms despair into hope, failure into opportunity, and disappointment into a second chance. That word is - “Yet”.

I don’t know how to do that… Yet.

I haven’t even closed a sale… Yet.

I’m not really that good at this… Yet.

I don’t belong somewhere like that… Yet.

Adding the word ‘yet’ completely shifts the tone of any expression of disappointment so that it ends with a hint of optimism.

And that’s the truth, isn’t it? Nothing in life is completely finite. As long as you’re still alive and in it, you can create a new result. You can keep working toward something to acquire the skills, network, strategies, or resources required to make something happen.

‘Yet’ is the gold standard of a growth mindset. It suggests that your current reality isn’t fixed, and that it can evolve and grow into something else. It also urges you to be resilient as it encourages you to try again in an effort to reach your goals.

And last, it also places your current self in your future vision. ‘Yet’ suggests that there’s a ‘you’ that’s yet to be, a person that you’re crafting from every decision you make, and that all of the deposits you place now will come into play in the future.

Would you want your best future self to give up when things get hard, quit at the first sign of resistance, and respond to life with complacency rather than ambition? I doubt it. And your best future self wouldn’t want that for present you, either.

I want to partner with the world’s most influential people to solve the world’s biggest problems. And I’m not doing that to the extent that I want to… Yet!

I know that in every person I meet, every idea I share, and every moment of service I step into, I’m putting puzzle pieces together that help move me one step closer to that future vision.

That’s how I’m using the power of ‘yet’, and I have a feeling we’ve only just begun!

As someone who has supported hundreds of people through my own 21 Day Challenge, and who has completed nearly a dozen self-improvement challenges myself, there are some things I see come up time and again that I want you to be aware of.

It’s tricky because on one hand Challenges are so effective at igniting fast transformation... But on the other hand the transformation often the Challenge doesn’t do much more than offer a small blip of motivation that fades until you go back to how things used to be.

These are the 4 things you need to have a plan for so that you can lock in the growth and good habits you worked hard to earn in a Challenge.

1) Environment. When you’re in a personal development Challenge, it’s likely that you told the people in your life about it like work colleagues, family, and friends. In doing so you established boundaries that other people receive, and you invite them to support you in completing the tasks of the Challenge.

However, when the Challenge ends, so do people’s perception of their role in your growth. They don’t have the same discipline, patience, or influence on you. So if you want to keep with it you need to set up a new supportive and protective environment.

2) Clarity. When you’re in a Challenge you know exactly what’s expected of you. When the Challenge is done, especially if it was difficult, you’re likely to find a version of it that you want to continue on with.

But if you don’t clearly define what the new task is you give your brain space to negotiate, offer excuses, and make exceptions that slowly pull you off track. So be clear about what your continuation plan is so that you know exactly what you’re accountable to.

3) Accountability. Plain and simple, our behavior and choices are drastically different when we have accountability. We desperately want to escape the pain of social confrontation so we follow through on our commitments even when we don’t feel like it.

Often Challenges incorporate a version of accountability in that you need to report your progress. This creates an expectation and pressure to stay consistent. So if you leave the challenge and lose accountability, find a way to supplement it immediately.

4) Commitment. By accepting a Challenge, you made a commitment to yourself to try something new and show up different. But this means that there’s a time-frame and end-date to your new, motivated approach. So when a Challenge ends many people quickly lose motivation and they allow their mentality to rest. Your level of discipline no longer has something to live up to and strive toward.

Instead, find a new package that your new self can step up to. A new commitment that makes demands of you. A better environment, clarity of plan, and accountability have no weight if you aren’t mentally bought into what’s happening next.

Ironically, that’s my 21 Day Challenge gives you the infrastructure you need to permanently have an enriched environment, clarity of plan, accountability to your choices, and a commitment to always pursue being your best-self. Click here to check it out!

Success is just a cover for what people genuinely want within it, which is happiness.

Money buys us things and helps us to contribute to causes that make us happy. Playing a role in meaningful and influential projects makes us happy.

It’s no secret that we would benefit from a little more genuine happiness, but I think the majority of us struggle to find it. That’s why I want to make a clear distinction: Let’s not mistake happiness for hedonism.

Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure and self-indulgence. It’s choosing to feel good in the moment at the expense of how you’ll feel in the future. When we’re guided exclusively by what we want right now we’re setting ourselves up to make unhealthy, immoral, and sometimes regretful decisions.

True, deeply-rooted happiness isn’t experienced in a moment. It’s the recognition that we have integrity and character, that we’lre applying ourselves fully in our lives, and that we’re growing. The Greek’s call this “Eudaimonia” which is a state of personal flourishing.

At the root of the difference between happiness and hedonism is one of humanity’s greatest challenges - to delay gratification. Rather than always doing the thing that makes us feel pleasure in the moment, like having extra dessert or entertaining ourselves by scrolling on social media, we are intentional about the choice we’re making in the moment and how it serves our future self.

To help you step into authentic happiness, here’s a frame of thinking to consider: No matter what choices you’re making you’re giving yourself a gift.

Hedonism is a gift to your current self, and making intentional healthy choices is a gift to your future self.

When you find yourself in a moment trying to evaluate a decision, I’d challenge you to ask this question to steer your thinking: “Would this be a gift to my future self or my current self?”

Not only do those who delay gratification do less things that they later regret, but they place investments that adds to their potential for how much happiness they can feel in the long-term.