This quote is more existential in nature, but I think incredibly important to consider.

Referring to Steven Covey’s “7 Habits Of Highly Effective People”, habit #2 is “to begin with the end in mind.” We’re going to take that recommendation to the furthest extreme and relate it with the ultimate end we’re aware of, which is our death.

That’s where today’s quote comes in: “You can’t take anything with you, but you can leave something behind.”

When we pass, everything that has ever existed about us in the physical plane stays in the physical plane. Our possessions continue on taking up space in the world. Our home occupies the same piece of land even though we’re no longer in it. Even our bodies decompose into organic materials that are recycled and reused by nature.

Everything gets left behind.

And that’s not just the material, tangible things we have in our life, but also the intangible, immaterial deposits we’ve made as well.

This is what it means to leave a legacy. It means that when you’re no longer here, the impacts of your existence are still being felt. The larger the impacts, the stronger the legacy. 

You can leave wealth for your family. You can leave ideas, philosophies, values, and lessons with family members, friends, and followers. You can leave businesses, movements, and projects that continue on with their mission even though you don’t. And importantly, it’s the way that you helped redirect people’s life paths, which then creates infinite ripples into the future.

Our capitalistic society tells us to consume and acquire more things. That the more we have the better. But if we think about what we leave behind through this broader lens, what matters more - The leftovers or the legacy?

So let’s be intentional about what we want to leave behind because it shows us where to invest ourselves today and we can make sure to bring it into our world. 

The truth is, when we reach the end of our life is uncertain. There are people going to sleep tonight who won’t go to sleep the next. Tomorrow is their last day, and they have no idea. While unlikely, it’s foolish to think that person couldn’t be us. 

So how can we show up today so that something meaningful is left behind, that our lives did make a difference. What head start and opportunity are you providing for loved ones? What ideas and lessons? What projects and movements will continue on. What lives have been permanently changed by your presence?

If you’re not happy with the extent of your answer right now, go out and change that, today.

Do you want to make your life a story worth telling? My good friend Gregory Benedikt put together a step-by-step guide to help you define your legacy and take action on it! You can get that guide here!

Our life is governed by the choices we make on a daily basis. The small daily choices impact our energy levels, our focus, and the way we show up to everything else.

Make good choices and feel great. Make bad choices and feel worse, which makes it harder to make a good choice next.

Big decisions set the framework for our lives - Where we live, what we do for work, who we date and marry, where we go for vacation, where we go to school, etc. As you can imagine, any small changes to any of these things completely shifts your environment and puts you on an entirely different life trajectory.

Choices are powerful and extremely influential. This is why we invest so much time and energy into making the right decisions for ourselves to put us on the life-path that we feel is best for us.

But no matter how informed we are, how much research we’ve done and how diligently we’ve thought about the decision, the end result is unpredictable. In fact what becomes of our decisions is way more variable than we realize.

This is where I want to borrow something I heard Ellen Langer say - Instead of being so consumed with making the right decision, what if we poured ourselves into making our decisions right?

This means that no matter what path we find ourselves on, we invest ourselves in helping to shape it into what we want. It means that we don’t overthink the inputs and we save our best selves to manage the outputs.

Yes it’s important to be really confident about your partner before you choose to marry them, but it’s still up to you to build it into a wonderful marriage. Yes it’s critical to know if you’d enjoy the lifestyle of a certain town and can practically afford it - But you still must follow through on doing things you enjoy to make a new town a better home.

My intention is not to discredit the importance of being really thoughtful about the decisions we make, as I mentioned choices are everything. The perspective I wanted to add is that the outcomes of our decisions are quite variable, and if we want to experience the best parts of those decisions, we need to make it happen ourselves (and we have more control over the end result than we realize). 

It’s not just about making the right decisions, it’s also about making your decisions right.

Trust me, I get it - Not all days are sunshine and rainbows. Some days are simply harder than others and it’s often out of your control when they come. As much as we’d like to have a strong mindset and leverage gratitude and perspective to improve our perception of the day, that’s not to say we can magically make hard days easy.

Let me share a fact that offers an important point of reference. Let’s say that the worst days of the year are the days that fall in the bottom 10% of all days you’ve experienced. That seems pretty fair. With that logic, 10% of the 365 days in a year means that you have 36 really bad days. And further, if 1 in 10 days are really bad and they’re spaced out evenly, then we can expect to have one every week and a half or so.

The argument I’m making is that our bad days are much more common than we realize. 

To me, this means that we should not judge ourselves for having them. We should not allow ourselves to completely deflate when we face them because we have them often. And most importantly, we should prepare ourselves for them so that they don’t drag us as far down when they do come.

A core idea I learned from HEROIC that I’ve integrated into my personal philosophy is the idea of raising your baseline. Yes, 10% of our days are going to be our worst days, but we can control how bad these worst days get. 

Rather than getting completely derailed from your work, you still get your main needle-moving task done. Instead of bingeing sweets as a way to cope with negative emotions, you stay determined to maintain a certain level of nutrition. Instead of allowing negative news to completely impact your emotional health and wellness, you have tools in place to help you process more healthily.

Our baseline is directly correlated with our standards. When we raise our standards we raise our baseline for how we show up on our worst days. Having higher standards makes your good days better and your bad days better because it gives you clarity around what you’re willing or unwilling to tolerate. It gives you a clear expectation for the quality of your daily choices even when you don’t feel like it.

In order to be more prepared for your worst days, so that you don’t slip so easily off track and recover fast, you need more structure, discipline, and clarity to your standards.

If you don’t know where to start with that, I’ve put together a video series about the 9 Super Habits that teaches you exactly where to start in helping you be more consistent in your health, more productive and focused every day, and more disciplined in your mindset.

You might not even realize it, but there’s something about your life right now that used to be your goal or dream.

Maybe you bought a house or moved to a new city... You’ve completed that project... Launched that thing... Landed that job... Brought that event to life... Or ran that race.

The reason I mention it is because maybe it doesn’t feel like it. It’s unnatural for us to see all of the life milestones we’ve reached because we’re facing forward and those are now behind us. And now we see new goals, new aspirations, new dreams on the horizon that we’re passionately moving toward.

The psychology behind this is what Dr. Benjamin Hardy calls “the gap and the gain”. Rather than measuring our progress from who we used to be to where we are today (the gain), we more often measure the difference between where we presently are and where we want to go (the gap). 

And that’s why I want to shake up the pattern and bring your awareness to the fact that right now, you’re living what used to be a goal of yours.

When we acknowledge the gains we’ve made in our lives and recognize how far we’ve come, it inspires us that we have what it takes to keep on going. I’m not arguing that we should forever stay complacent with what we have - ambition is healthy and important - but that we’ll feel more fueled and energized by the fact that we can in fact reach our goals.

So let’s take that pause right now. Think about the one area of your life where you feel like you’re falling short, or your present performance within it isn’t where you want it to be.

Now I want you to think back one year, and reflect on where things were at in this area of your life then.

And again, another year, reflect where things were at then.

Maybe that perspective helps you give credit to all of your growth, advancement, and improvement. Sure, you see the gap and know there’s more progress to be made, but now you also see a little more of the gain.

If the idea of making fast progress excites you and you want to know the most effective things you can do to accelerate your self-growth and success, that take less than 15 minutes a day to do, click here to learn about the 9 Super Habits!

It’s tricky to figure out what to do with our emotions. There is a lot of consensus in self-improvement with different people saying the same thing in different ways. Emotions are different though, and there's more variety in recommendations.

On one hand, there’s the Stoic side of self-improvement that talks about being in control of your emotions. Often misunderstood as emotional repression, Stoic philosophy very much encourages you to acknowledge and feel emotions, but to not let them influence your decisions or behaviors. Stoicism is about having a fortified mind that is stronger than the environment, whether that be emotions internally or unfair externally. 

Then there’s the somatic side of self-improvement, which encourages you to fully embrace and embody your emotions. It suggests that if you feel something, let it be expressed because otherwise the energy will be stored in your body. Somatic exercises encourage you to uncover past emotions so that you can heal the traumas associated with them and free up your meridians and energetic pathways.

And then there’s the more biological approach led by people like Joe Dispenza who talk about how emotions are meant to be observed because they’re the body’s way of communicating something to us. The line of thought suggests that emotions play an evolutionary purpose to help us self-regulate and survive. And Dr. Joe talks a lot about how we can train ourselves to replace the emotions we feel with new emotions that are representative of who we want to become rather than who we are.

With that brain dump complete... What do we do with emotions? What’s the right, healthy thing to do with emotions?

I can’t possibly answer that and I see value in all of these approaches. My basic encouragement is to be intentional about it. WIth your needs and your desires for who you want to become, find the points on the spectrum that serve you. 

If you want to be more resilient and less reactive, try the Stoic approach. If you want to be more emotionally available, try somatic. If you want to create more alignment, congruence, and manifestation, try biological.

No matter the path, emotions are a part of our human experience, so it suits us to find our ways to navigate them.

As a culture we’ve romanticized the idea of ‘happily ever after’. We’re told to ‘never quit’, ‘always be loyal’, and to 'stick it out'. And in that there’s an extra suggestion that anything else is weak or selfish.

I think that’s a bit unfair.

I’ve found that life has seasons, rhythms, and flows. Certain times requires certain things, and other times require other things. That’s why today I want to add this very important perspective: “It doesn’t need to be forever for it to be right”.

There are friends that come and go in your life, and play a really pivotal purpose while they’re in it. When the friendship slowly fades away it’s no one’s fault, it ran its course. I have many friends like that who I’m not as close with but am still deeply grateful for how they impacted my life.

The same goes for a hobby or interest. Right now I’m doing Jiujitsu and I already know that it’s not something I’ll do for the rest of my life. But that doesn’t discredit what it’s doing for me now. Because even though I know I’m going to move on from it some day, does that mean I shouldn’t have the same enthusiasm for it today? That would be a disservice to the opportunity.

And I’d argue it’s the same for our purpose. We feel so much pressure to know what our purpose is in life. But your purpose can change. In fact it should! For me in high school and college it was to be the best student-athlete I can be. In my first jobs it was to help people with their pain management and physical ability. And now it’s supporting people like you who want to ignite their potential in service of making the world a better place. None of these purposes were right or wrong - They were all appropriate for the time. 

“It doesn’t need to be forever for it to be right”, and I feel like we miss out on being present with what we have now because we know someday it’ll be gone. But even then, it matters immensely because it shaped you into who you became.

A key piece to improvement is reviewing our performance. But when we enter our evaluation with the intention to find opportunities to make things better, we naturally see things through the lens of what wasn’t good enough.

We can be more intentional than that! Rather than reenforcing our negativity bias, let’s commit to seeing what’s going right before addressing what went wrong. There are a few reasons why this is such a powerful perspective shift and they all build around the concept of priming.

The first moments of an interaction, reflection, or evaluation set the anchor. Everything else that comes after that is placed relative to the anchor. So if we start with a more positive reflection of all the things that went right, it sets the tone. This means that areas that fell short or didn’t meet expectations are viewed through the lens of opportunity rather than criticism.

In addition, priming naturally shifts our awareness. When we start with what went wrong, it’s easier to find more things that went wrong. But the opposite is true too. So we can prime positive awareness and ultimately shape our perspective.

All of this leads into an important end - Our intention is to do well.

We’d prefer not to have a lapses in performance, but ultimately when they happen it serves us to turn them into learning lessons that help us do better next time. Starting with what’s going right infuses more belief that you can succeed, that the goal is achievable, and that belief helps fight off any doubt or discouragement that might creep in. 

This is why I like starting my conversation with either gratitude or wins. When you do that, you establish the anchor, prime positive awareness, and set yourself up to believe that you’re capable of the results you want. Give it a try and see if it changes the nature of your conversations.

I’ve been experiencing a theme recently that has come up in myself and in others. Self-improvement is all about making progress, pushing forward, and growth. That’s what the word ‘improvement’ suggests, telling us to urge forward at all times.

But what if it’s not a season to push and grow? What if now isn’t the right time to initiate personal change and transformation?

I want to introduce the idea of being in maintenance mode. Maintenance mode is when you use all of the focus, attention, and energy you normally put toward growth to sustain your current level.

Life can change fast and it can place unexpected demands on you. It could be a new responsibility at work, a family or personal health issue, a temporary difficult situation we must manage, or anything else that life has to throw at us.

Rather than trying to step up to the challenge and keep growing, it often makes sense just to keep things where they’re at. The reason that’s the case is because if you try to take it all on and continue, it’s likely unsustainable. This causes you to strain yourself to the point where you need to recover, and progress is lost.

Alternatively, if your core focus during trying times is to maintain your current level, and make sure you do not compromise your baseline, when it all passes you’ll be poised to pick up right where you left off.

What does maintenance mode look like? It means instead of setting stretch goals or trying to elevate your standards, you hold yourself to a level that you’re familiar with and you know what’s required of you.

Shifting things into maintenance mode is not weak. It’s self-aware, and as one of the pillars of self-improvement, it’s a necessary ingredient to living a fulfilling and purposeful life.

I’m a huge advocate for having structure and routine in life. Jocko Willink says “Discipline creates freedom”, and I believe that we have more license to be creative when we have lines to draw within because it helps us know where to start.

However, there are some downsides to having overly rigid routines. When we do the same things over and over again it leads to something called ‘automaticity’. This is what the mind does - It tries to offload the cognitive demand of repetitive tasks so that you can save your higher-level thinking for more important things.

While this is a great and helpful mechanism for many things, it creates problems when it causes us to be unconscious for things we’d rather be more present for (and engaged in). For example, gratitude journaling. Automaticity slowly makes the practice a little more automated, meaning you become less connected to the experience, experiencing less gratitude only receive a fraction of the benefits.

So, when we settle into routines over time we start to get less out of them. 

The engine behind automaticity is that we gravitate toward what we’re familiar with. It’s an evolutionary trait that we all share as humans, so if we want to create breakthroughs to our next level we need to break out of our current routine.

This means that we need to create a pattern interrupt. We need to inject consciousness and awareness into what we’re doing to bring us back to it. When you pierce the facade of how things have been you get more choice in how things end up.

We all want a breakthrough. A breakthrough in our health and wellness where we start crushing our workouts, buzz with energy, and get really good rest. A breakthrough in our work where we do a great job with that project, are assigned more responsibility, and increase our income. And the fastest way to achieve that is by doing things different from how you’re currently doing them.

So what can you do differently to ignite the breakthrough you’ve been looking for? For me, right now it’s by experimenting with my eating and sleeping schedules. Reflect on it for yourself and see what you come up with! 

If you want to learn a few small things you can do to radically increase your energy, productivity, and mindset, I’ve put together a video series about the 9 Super Habits that have the power to transform your life with little effort behind the scenes.