I’m still working on my understanding of this and would love to hear your perspective on it. There’s a subtle but fundamental difference between knowing something and believing something. They carry different energies and they’re more appropriate in different settings. I think there’s a lot of value in exploring that difference.

So far my take on it is - When you know something, it comes without a doubt. There’s a level of certainty and conviction. It’s about a set of facts and sure, the same details can be interpreted in different ways, but when you know something there’s really sound reasoning behind it. Knowing is connected to knowledge, which is more a reflection on the way things work and specific details.

When you believe something, it acknowledges more openness and room for interpretation. It suggests that you’ve drawn a certain conclusion and you’ll defend it, but it’s still negotiable. New information could conflict with what you currently believe and you’ll have to incorporate that into the next version of your understanding.

What’s really important to mention about belief, though, is there’s a lot of passion behind it. There’s more of a wanting or longing behind a belief. You’re invested in it and feel like whatever it is that you believe impacts you. It’s more emotional.

Comparing knowing and believing more directly, the core difference is the level of certainty assigned to it. But that’s to to say that more certain is better. When you believe something, you rely on faith to fill the void of the certainty you lack. And that can be an incredibly inspiring, motivating, and empowering force.

Life calls for both knowing and believing. Both are ways that you relate with the events and figures of your life, but they provide subtly different experiences.

Human attention is at a premium right now. Marketers use clickbait headlines to make you curious and pay attention to their products. The people in your life send you text messages hoping that you’ll get back to them quickly. Your work wants you to apply your skills, talents, and time in service of their mission. There’s a lot going on where we’re being pulled in a bunch of different ways. 

But let me ask you this question… When was the last time you gave yourself your undivided attention?

A time when you just sat and reflected on what you want… When you slowed down to check in on how you were feeling… When you silenced all other inputs and allowed yourself to just be and not do…

Saying it out loud, it sounds like such an obvious thing to do, but it’s so rare. It seems as though the moment our attention frees up there are two things already there to claim it. And it also seems as though when we consider how we want to spend our time the one thing we most fail to prioritize is ourselves.

You deserve your undivided attention. You need to make sure that you have what you need, that you’re taking care of yourself and prioritizing your own well-being.

The reason why it might not be as natural for you is because it’s hard. It’s hard to sit with yourself, unstimulated. In fact we often add more to our plate and keep ourselves “busy” to avoid the unfamiliar feeling of being alone with our thoughts.

If you’re open to it, let me suggest a few questions you can ask yourself to check in: How energized have you been feeling? How productive have you been feeling? How is your mental health? What are you working towards, and how is it going? What are you most excited about?

Turn off technology, turn off the roles you feel like you need to play, and even turn off the other people in your life. Be intentional about giving yourself your undivided attention.

We know it’s the best thing we can do for everything else, isn’t it the same for ourselves? When you do you just might learn something new! Then once you know better, you can do better. 

Recently I had lunch with some friends and left really inspired. My buddy Timmy told us about an expression that he and his team have been building around. And it’s a very simple expression - Today can be the day!

Today could be the day that you meet the man or woman of your dreams. Today could be the day that you discover that new passion. Today could be the day that you finally get started on that thing that you’ve always wanted to do. Today could be the day that you’re fed up with the way you’ve been living, the life you’ve been tolerating, and you decide to make a change. A new day brings endless possibility and every moment of it is unknown yet full of opportunity.

But equally important to consider, today could be the day you get in an accident and die. It could be the day that you learn about an unfortunate medical diagnosis. It could be the day where you hear some bad news about a loved one or get in an awful fight with a friend. Just as much as the day has shades of optimism, it has layers of despair. There are people that wake up every day who have no idea that there life is going to change forever.

Today could be the day.

So what’s our task within this? The truth is, everything we have right now could be gone tomorrow, so live with overwhelming gratitude. The richness and possibility of life is constantly around you but it often goes unnoticed or unaccessed. 

Instead of missing the opportunity to meet your new best friend, be present and courageous to take what the moment is giving you. Live as if something amazing is going to happen because then something will! It’s always out there, it just needs to be uncovered.

Today will come and go, and then it will become yesterday. Don’t live with regret about what you wish you would have done, or who you wish you would have become. 

Today could be the day! For what? That’s for you to figure out. And when you do, it’ll be a day unlike any else, and it’ll make you feel like you’re really living!

I’m committed to making more out of my days, unlocking new possibilities, and giving this life all I’ve got! I’m not going to be where I want to be tomorrow, but I can get a little closer. And so can you!

Featuring an iconic quote from prolific entrepreneur Henry Ford (no relation), I wanted to remind you of the power of your own expectancy. You are unconsciously influencing everything that happens around you, some people call it manifesting, and it’s important to make sure that you’re allowing yourself to be in alignment with your best self.

The quote goes “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.” The simplicity of this quote suggests something fundamental. The future is yet to have occurred and it’s impossible to forecast. There often aren't right answers, there are only options that reveal themselves to be more favorable or appropriate over time.

It is within our power to influence what happens next. We are creators in that way, and it’s very exciting. But just as much as we can create the future of our dreams, we can also unconsciously create the life we're trying to avoid. A life of complacency, mediocrity, and reaction.

If you think that you can’t do something, then you’ll find all of the reasons that prove that to be the case. You’ll stack so much evidence that it will appear as if there’s no alternative, and you’ll lose sight of all other possibility and opportunity.

But similarly if you think you can do something, then you’ll start collecting all of the information that proves it right. Instead of seeing the 99 reasons why something won’t work you focus on the 1 reason it might. This helps you to be more persistent, resilient, and determined as you find a solution (until you do!)

That’s how your mindset has the power to shape your reality. Your mind will find the evidence for whatever it is you choose to believe. This evidence then affects what you’re thinking about, the way you’re thinking about it, and what actions you take in response. 

Belief leads to action, which leads to results. So if you believe that you can’t, you’ll take actions that are in line with that and you’ll get congruent results. But if you believe that you can, you’ll take a different set of productive actions that mold the world to your vision.

“Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.” And hopefully now you see why that’s the case, so you can start believing that you’re capable of achieving the things on your heart.

If this quote landed for you today then it certainly will do the same for someone else you care about. Share this episode with them and help themand make their dreams come true!

It can be really frustrating when you have a long list of things to do, that you’re genuinely inspired by and excited about, but for whatever reason you don’t have the energy to show up for it...

This could cause you to be less productive at work and it affects your output, less present with the people in your life and you feel like you’re missing key moments, or less motivated to take care of yourself and your health suffers.

Unanimously I think we’d all agree that it’d be nice to have a little more energy throughout the day. And the truth is, you’ve probably been thinking about your energy the wrong way and it has been costing you. So let’s unravel the most major misconception about energy so that you can experience life with more presence, enthusiasm, and vitality.

When people think about getting more energized, they think about rest and recovery. We’ve been taught that energy is a finite resource and we must reserve it for the times when we really need it. This is even engrained deeply into our evolutionary past as humans were optimized to expend a little energy as possible and abide by the 'law of least effort' to survive. After all, the more energy you save, the better your chances for being able to escape a threat.

But that’s a scarce way of thinking and it’s not representative of how energy actually works, especially as it relates to our emotional experience of feeling energized today. What we really need is a fresh wave of motivation, inspiration, and enthusiasm throughout the day, not a bank of energy ready to go in case we need to escape in some massive burst.

So let’s correct the misconception. Yes, rest and recovery is fundamental to refilling your stores…

But the energy it provides is better spent adding to the quality of the moments in your life rather than just sitting there in storage! So instead of reverting to being lazy and inactive all day, we must redefine our relationship with energy. And what I propose is an underrated truth about energy…

It takes energy to make energy.

When you’re feeling tired, the best thing you can do is get moving and get active. While you may not feel like doing it in the moment, what this does is it opens the door to using that stockpile of energy that is being held in reserve. Your energy is not scarce, it is abundant, you have more than enough of it and you’re only accessing a fraction of it on a daily basis.

As your perception of energy starts to deplete, the first thing that gets turned off is your higher level thinking. When this happens you become more reactive, more emotional, and more impulsive as your subconscious mind takes over. This causes you to feel lazy, make excuses, and do the things you’re not proud of but feel good in the moment.

But if you want to live a more engaged, connected, disciplined, and fulfilled life, you need to stay alert, awake, and aware. Although it’s energetically demanding, you need to get your conscious mind back online because that’s what enables you to have a much richer life experience.

So commit to creating more energy throughout the day by being more active. Briefly stop what you’re doing and use movement to get your blood pumping. It will allow you to show up that much more for your life, and you’ll look back at the end of the day when it’s time to get some rest and feel that you were truly alive.

I hope that helped! My mission is to help you feel on fire more often so that you can go out and change the world in the way how only you know how! That’s what this is all about, and I’m here with you every step of the way!

I’ve recently become aware of the idea of having evolution goals. As an alternative to having traditional goals, which are very concrete and ideally have a lot of details in them, evolution goals are more aspirational. It’s more like setting an intention that holds you accountable to pursuing life a certain way.

For example, you could have a health goal to lose 15 pounds in 45 days. That’s very tangible and from there you can brainstorm strategies to achieve it and commit to daily actions. An evolution goal is more along the lines of “to be in elite shape for my age”.

Or another example, you could have a goal with your partner to go for a vacation in the summer of 2023. Again, a specific goal that is clearly achievable. An evolution goal would be more along the lines of “to maximize the amount of love, intimacy, and connection I have with my partner.” The traveling accomplishes that in the short-term but the evolution goal is never fully realized.

That's because of the term being used here - evolution. An evolution goal isn’t necessarily something that is meant to be completed, it’s something that is dynamically updating as time goes on. You can certainly build out the short-term, more tangible goals that give a pathway toward your evolution goal. But even those goals will have to change as the seasons of life change, your capacity and interests change, and your expression of the evolutionary goal takes a new form.

Your evolution goal serves as the North Star that your life optimizes around. When you have clarity on who you want to be, how you want to exist, and what you want to prioritize, you can continue to reference that clarity as you navigate the immediate moments in front of you. It provides an extra lens of accountability to make decisions that are in alignment with the life you want to create.

It’s broad, I know, and maybe what I’m describing is called something else that you’re more familiar with, but ultimately I hope this perspective will help you live the life that you’re proud to live.

Let’s be real… There’s a lot to do in a day. You’ve got your work and mission, which deserve your very best. Then there are responsibilities like kids and families that are a priority, you have passions and projects that you enjoy doing, and of course there’s your self-care to ensure that you have the capacity to show up on fire for all of the above.

That’s why today I want to share with you 3 tips that when incorporated in your life, will give you an hour of time back so that you can have more balance, harmony, and success.

Tip #1 - Use a schedule to sniff out distractions. 

Nir Eyal, a friend of mine who’s a world-renowned author, wrote a book called "Indistractable". In this book he makes a really important distinction - If you want to avoid getting distracted you need to be clear on what you’re being distracted from. 

In other words, there is no ‘distraction’ unless you’ve clearly defined ‘traction’. Traction is simply when you’re following through on what you want to be doing. Your schedule is your testament to all of the things that you want to get done. It’s your intention for how you plan to spend your time, and when you see it as a reference point of that intention you can quickly determine what is a distraction and get better at avoiding them.

Tip #2 - Get in control of your communications

We live in a world where pings, dings, and rings are constantly hijacking our attention. When we address these notifications it pulls us out of a task and redirects our focus. Once that text, email, or phone call is addressed, we return to the original task but we need to refamiliarize ourselves to return to producing quality work.

And that’s the problem. There’s something called “attention residue” which causes our brain to remain occupied by what we were just focused on even when we’re no longer paying attention to it. It causes us to have a fraction of our normal cognitive function and perform at a fraction of our fullest capacity.

So in order to eliminate this ‘mental hangover’, what you can do is batch your communications. Dedicate a few segments of 30 minutes throughout the day to stack your communications with other people so that you can stay more focused outside of that time.

Tip #3 - Productivity isn’t about getting more done, it’s about doing what you want to be doing

Society has come to equate how productive we are with how much we get done. That’s not the case. Productivity is actually about how effectively you spend your time, which includes work, personal, and self-care activities. 

When you broaden your lens to view other non-work related things as productive, you start seeing how good of a day you’re having. You realize how on top of everything you are. And with that positive perception you gain momentum that carries you between tasks, helping you transition fast and keep pace with the day.

And a bonus tip: Give yourself buffer time

This is an extension of the last point about momentum. You can really magnify the impacts of having momentum by running ahead of schedule and completing things that you didn’t expect to. What’s the best way to do that? Give yourself some dead space to make sure you get through fewer, critical things. And also, adding buffers in your schedule helps you take on the inevitable things that come up in the day without consequence.

Implement these things - using a schedule to sniff out distractions, get in control of your communications, redefine productivity, and give yourself buffer time - and you’ll feel how effortlessly your day flows!

Something that frequents every personal development podcast, blog, interview, video, everything… Is the concept of getting better at saying “no”.

We all know how valuable of an asset our time is and saying “no” is our way of protecting it. But if you’re like me, who at times can overcompensate for boredom by making myself too busy and overstimulated, I have a hard time enforcing my boundaries.

I’ve been really working on it for the last 6 months, so much so that my theme for the year is “have a plan and stick to it”. And it all started to click a little better when I got this piece of advice - When you’re deciding whether or not to do something, it needs to be a “Heck Ya” or else it’s a “No Thank You”.

What this does is it raises your standard for what you commit to. If you don’t increase the caliber of the things that are worth your time , then you’ll be spending your day doing things at a fraction of the quality that you could.

You deserve to feel like you’re putting your heart into everything you do. That’s a real possibility in your life. And the only way you get there is by raising your standards.

Now with all of this in mind, I’m not going to tell you to uproot everything all at once. I have things that I need to delete from my life that I either don’t have the courage or timing to do. That can all iron out with time, and you should revisit what feels like a “Heck Ya” in your life and what doesn’t because things are dynamic and evolve. 

But what you can control moving forward are the new things you commit to. Given how fluid things are and how quickly things cycle, you’ll be shocked to discover how quickly things reset and how possible it is for you to get better at reserving your time for the things that matter most.

So the next time you’re making a decision to do something or not, ask yourself “Do I really want to do this?” If your answer is “Heck Ya” then follow the pull of it. If it’s anything else, politely say “No Thank You.”

As long as you keep finding your edge of what’s comfortable, and pushing it, you’re growing. We all have a friend that needs to here this specific message - Forward them this article and play a role in helping them find better balance in their life.