Featuring a quote from 18th century poet Alexander Pope, I must say that there is more to this thought than his immediately perceived. There’s a silver lining to it. The quote is “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed."

When I first read this I had the impression that this is too far on the side of being unemotional and detached from reality. I thought that if you don’t expect anything then sure, you can’t be disappointed. But the consequence to that is it’s also restricting your ability to feel enjoyment and celebration.

But then I really thought about the first word of the quote -Blessed. “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.”

This highlights the extent of the gift that detachment is. So many people are preoccupied with cause and effect of things and the expectancy of results that it prevents them from being present in the moment. It causes people to be less engaged in the input, which is where moments live and life is experienced. 

It’s a blessing that you expect nothing because it means that you have no attachment to the output and you can dedicate your full-attention to the input.

The beautiful part is, this helps you focus on what’s in your control. We can shoot to attain certain results but at the end of the day we cannot guarantee them. What we do have fully agency over though, is the way we position things and set them up for success.

When we’re too invested in the outcome and we fall short of achieving it, it’s disappointing. That’s a universal response. But that’s not to say we can’t celebrate the wins of life! Of course we can, and we should! But the focus here is we cannot expect them because that will affect the way we go about doing things.

And that’s the silver-lining of positivity - to live a more joyful and uplifting life it serves you to prevent contrasting emotions like disappointment and frustration. Understanding now that those emotions come when reality didn’t meet your expectations, you can curb their influence on you by not having set expectations in the first place.

Now I must say, I’m not suggesting you don’t have any expectations for anything. I believe there are certain standards you must uphold for yourself and those around you to create your best environment, but I share this perspective because it might help you interrupt the pattern and give you a new way of thinking about your relationship with generating results.

I don’t talk a lot about nutrition or diet because I don’t know nearly enough about it to contribute anything meaningful. But even so, despite conflicting articles and information, there is a consensus about what is the best diet. If you want to start eating healthier this is what you need to do:

Pick the diet that you can stick to.

It’s that simple. The best diet for you is the one you can stay consistent with. The reality is all different diets have a widespread of benefits - vegan, paleo, intermittent fasting, gluten-free, and each of our bodies are different so it’s hard to make any recommendations about it. What matters most is your compliance with it - the best diet for you is the one you can stick to.

When you can pick a diet that is reasonably within your financial means and your social interests, you’re more likely to follow through on it and therefore discover how it affects you. You’ll be able to start figuring out what makes you feel at your best when you commit to a sustainable diet and reflect on how much energy you had throughout the day, did you have any discomfort, etc.

This also helps you align on what’s most manageable for you over the long-term. Is it healthy for you to have dessert and drink alcohol every night? Probably not, although of course there’s research that suggests chocolate is great for you and a glass of wine at night is too. But the point I’m trying to make is if you tell yourself you can’t have dessert, or you can’t drink alcohol ever because it’s part of an unhealthy diet, then you’re setting expectations that aren’t organically compatible with your life!

In my coaching I encourage people to find that best fit amount so that they have the right amount to shoot for. This is the true definition of temperance - it’s not completely eliminating something from your life, it’s about finding the right amount of it that is in alignment with your values.

So if you want to get into a healthier lifestyle and commit to a more healthful diet - pick the one that you can stick to. It might be oversimplified but when you set that expectation from your logical, reasonable best-self, you’ll find that it might be a little challenging, and it will hold you accountable, because with good intentions you set a new standard.

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I want to use a metaphor to explain how we’re affected by the things around us. I want you to picture a big powerful ship.Whether it’s a military ship, a cruise ship, or some other vessel, it spans long across the water. This ship is capable of traveling long distances through difficult currents to get to its destination.

A ship has one primary purpose, which is to stay afloat. It has been expertly crafted to maintain buoyancy with the right distribution of weight and materials to ensure that it can glide on top of the water. Now here’s the lesson - ships don’t sink because of the water around them, they sink because they get water in them.

The same is true for you and the influences of your life. You might be surrounded by the very thing that is your demise but it does not need to negatively impact you. Like a ship on top of water, you must navigate the danger, temptation, and vice around you without letting it affect you. Just because you’re surrounded by something does not mean it will dictate your life. Of course it has the potential to, should you let it win, but there are real things you can do to decrease the chances of that.

First is preparation. Understand the environment you’re entering. What storms are out there and how might that expose your weaknesses. Think through the physics of what materials and structures you need to maximize your frame. ​​Sun Tzu says in “The Art Of War” - “Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought”. Preparation creates confidence, which creates more presence to make the right decisions in the moment.

Then also, it’s really about highlighting the intention. What is the mission? What are you meant to do? When you add that perspective to the moment you have more awareness to know what is in alignment and what’s not. A ship chooses to leave the shore and take on the open ocean for a purpose, and when you connect to yours you find more direct ways to navigate the waters as effectively as possible.

The expectation cannot be that you avoid risk and danger at all costs, but rather that you can confidently move through it knowing how to prevent its influence on you. Like a ship surrounded by water, you must keep the negative influences out of your life if you want to stay afloat.

I’m a huge advocate for building life systems. I find that when you have standardized routines and processes you get reliable results. Having said that, there’s an interesting caveat I want to add that I’ve only recently been thinking about.

What if your routine is feeling too routine? Meaning, what if the things you’re consistently doing are only functioning at a surface level. The sequence of events have been carefully determined to create a certain result, and it’s possible that you’re only receiving a fraction of that result because your mind isn’t in it. Similar to how sometimes we do things to “check the box”, when we aren’t fully-engaged in the activity it’s possible that the benefits are diluted.

In 2023, I really wanted to revamp my morning routine. I do it consistently but felt like the process wasn’t preparing me for my day as much as it could or how I would have liked it to. So I implemented something to interrupt that normal process and my experience with it so far has been tremendous. 

Basically, instead of just going through the list of things I do in my head, I now have a list written down with an intention assigned to each. This gives a voice to the reason “why” I do it rather than just doing it. With this new list, now my process is to first read the intention before I begin. After that I do the behavior with the intention in mind, and then I acknowledge that I completed by reflecting on how effectively I fulfilled that intention at the end.

What this has done is it has brought consciousness to what had become unconscious over time. The more you routinely do something, the more subconscious it becomes. It’s is a process called automaticity. This is great when you want to stay consistent with something because you can do it on autopilot, without much effort. But in order to get the full benefits of doing that behavior, you must pay attention. The more engaged you are in something the deeper the imprint it leaves.

So beyond being in good habits, which is a challenge in itself, the next step is to stay full-engaged in those habits. The benefits will decay over-time if you’re not intentional about cultivating them. Your task is to be more present, more often, doing the things that serve you most, so that you can be as prepared as possible to take on life and make the most of it!

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If you're someone who is ambitious, who wants to achieve a lot in life and create amazing abundance for themself, then pay close attention to this. John Assaraf has a philosophy that we should “lift each other as we climb”.

Picture yourself climbing the ladder of success. You find yourself climbing up and reaching new heights you’ve never reached before. You even see yourself start to pass people on the path. It may be tempting to leave them behind, because that’s energy and focus that you could use for your own ascension. But the best thing for you to do in the moment is to actually help people when you can, even when it is inconvenient, and there are 3 reasons why.

Reason #1 - It will actually create more value for you. Pat Flynn has a quote that goes “the universe has this amazing way of giving to those who serve first.” Call it Karma, call it collective consciousness, but what’s undeniable is the pattern that those who take care of others are taken care of themselves. 

Every time you help someone you make a deposit. You make an investment big or small, in the success or well-being of someone else. What happens to that investment is that it grows to a much larger amount without you even knowing it. Eventually, that new multiplied amount finds its way back to you in indirect ways, adding value to your life that you didn’t know you were missing.

This transitions into reason #2 - You never know when you’re going to need help yourself. That ladder is steep and it’s tiring and sometimes, it’s going to bend in ways that you aren’t capable of navigating yourself. When you help others you become more willing to receive help yourself. This is abundance, knowing that things don’t exist in conflict with each other but in synergy. The more deposits you placed in others, the bigger the pot of value is that you can pull from when you need it. Everyone needs help and you can invest in getting the support you need, when you need it, by being of service now.

And then reason #3 - When you get to the top, who are you going to enjoy it with? The fulfillment you feel when you reach your goals will feel much emptier if you’re alone. By lifting people as you climb, you’ll find more people were able to make it to the top alongside you, and you can celebrate with them. At the end of the day, isn’t it all about your happiness anyway? The mentality of “do it at all costs” is flawed because there doesn’t need to be costs. You can enjoy the journey and the destination when you do it the right way, which is by being of service and lifting as you climb.

The thought parallels the profound African Proverb “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”. Teamwork makes the dream work. You don’t need to do it alone, and you’ll want people around you to enjoy it with. So the next time someone extends a hand asking for help, lift them up as you climb.

This featured quote represents a timeless principle through a modern lens. I’m sure you’ve heard of the idea of not taking things “for granted”. It basically means that there are so many things in our life that we’ve grown accustomed to, that are just normal components of our life and we don’t know much different. But there are many people that don’t have those same things and there’s nothing they want more in the world than that.

Just to provide a few examples: If you are able-bodied and you can walk, that’s a gift. There are many people who can’t, whether it be because of an unexpected accident, a disease, or old-age. We don’t often think about how nice it is to be able to walk until we realize what it would be like if we couldn’t.

The same goes for basic utilities - Water, electricity, internet, insulation. Imagine how much more uncomfortable and inconvenient your life would be if you didn’t have those basic things. There are people on this planet right now who don’t.

But now getting more narrow on today’s quote - “Never take a single breath for granted.” As humans, breath is the indicator of life. If you’re not breathing you’re no longer living. Every single moment you take a breath is another opportunity for you to experience this miracle that is life.

Truly, everything about life is extraordinary. Not only thinking about the odds that you came to be in the first place, but the way that all of your body’s processes are working in perfect synchronicity is phenomenal. And it should be viewed as such, but many people are blind to it.

Many people go another day, getting through what’s ahead of them and “checking the box” in life. They’re not present in the moment, finding joy and curiosity in what’s around them, or feeling the edge of their capabilities. They’re just kind of existing, but they’re not living.

I don’t know anything about what happens after death, but what has been documented for people on their deathbed is that one of their main regrets is to not have showed up for life as fully as they could have.

The end of our life is always around the corner and nothing is guaranteed. So how can you honor that moment and live with more intention, presence, and purpose right now? Tying it back to a timeless principle, all of this echoes what the Stoic philosophers called “Memento Mori”. To summarize, it translates to “you will die”, but it suggests that you must live as fully as possible until that day comes.

I know it’s impossible to never take a single breath for granted, but commit to taking as few breaths for granted as possible. Now that you know better, you can do better.

I don’t mean to be morbid, my intention is to be real and support you in living a life you’re proud of. If you want help with that, click the link here and we can schedule a time to connect about it!

Something that is hard-wired into us, over the course of years of evolution, is negativity bias. To put it more simply, as humans we are designed to find the bad in things. This is because back when our brains we’re evolving, it was very important that we were hyper-aware of the things in our environment that were negative, dangerous, threatening, or otherwise concerning. It literally was a matter of life and death.

But today, things are very different. We don’t require the same vigilance for the things around us, yet that part of us still plays a central role in our psychology. This is often the source the prevents us from dreaming bigger, feeling capable, and having confidence - it’s because our brain finds all the reasons why we "can’t" and overlooks the reasons why we can. It’s an unconscious bias, but we can overcome it by being more conscious about how it affects us. With a little more awareness and understanding this inclination doesn’t have the same power over us.

So how can we get intentional about working on this? It’s by setting an intention on how you want to be in certain situations. When you choose how you want to be you have an extra force in your psychology that pulls you to be that way.

One of the ways we can do this is by implementing a “How can we?” response pattern. Instead of allowing your brain to see all of the reasons why a new idea won’t work, you can train yourself to ask a more empowering question.

Let’s say you couldn’t focus during your meditation. You could get self-critical and judgmental, which is negativity bias, or you could ask yourself “How could we do better next time?” It represents the perspective of possibility and opportunity rather than despair and deprecation.

Or if there’s a daunting new business idea you have. Instead of reflecting on the idea with all of the reasons why it’s going to be hard or where you might fail (which prevents you from even trying), you can ask yourself the question “How can we get the first version of this business off the ground?”

It completely changes the energy you use to approach a challenge. Unconsciously the default is negative, that’s just the way our brains are designed to work, but consciously it can be positive and optimistic. To promote the latter, the goal is to interrupt the normal pattern, create awareness on how you want to relate with the situation, and use the prompt you’ve now learned to change your thinking. You do it enough times and it will become more natural, more familiar, and more default.

You’ve heard it a number of times, the greatest resource we have is our time. We make money to buy ourselves more time, or concentrate the value we can experience within a certain amount of time. More time means more freedom to do the things you want to do, with the people you care about, for the reasons that inspire you.

One of the most important ways to save time is to do things more efficiently. This involves getting the same amount done with less investment, which comes in the form of time, effort, and money. The more efficiently we can live our lives the more capacity we have for the other things.

Something I’ve found to be one of the most important tenets of efficiency is centralization. Centralization means that everything is concentrated, organized, and structured in a way where it is easily accessible and coordinated. 

Think of the concept of the centralization of power in government - That has to do with concentrating the decision making power into a small committee. This is only effective when they have easy access to the information they need and the resources they need to execute key functions.

Now if you want to be more efficient in your life, managing all of your responsibilities seamlessly at once, you need to centralize things. It’s the harmonizing of your self-care, work, relationships, and passions that allows you to squeeze more out of life! And that’s only achievable when you have a strong centralized system to manage it all.

I’ve implemented this for myself in two ways, and it’s also what I have the people I coach do. First is I have a Self-Improvement Operating System. This is the engine and core process behind my development because it allows me to take in all data in one place, recognize patterns and trends, and make decisions to improve in key areas. This lives in a single, centralized place.

The second is about task management. By having a robust task management system and a process behind assigning priorities and urgencies, you can be intentional about how you fill your schedule and thus how you spend your time. I have a core routine in place that helps me keep this resource up to date as things are dynamic, and it helps me to centralize my thoughts, key projects, follow ups, errands, and everything else that helps me to live more efficiently.

If you think a little more structure and intentionality in your life will help you to manage responsibilities, increase your performance, and take better care of yourself and those you care about, then I’d love to help you with that. Again it’s one of the centerpieces to what I do in my coaching. If you want to learn more about that and see if it’s a good fit for you, click here to schedule a time for us to chat about it!

I heard this thought through one of my favorite authors, the brilliant mind behind the iconic book “Atomic Habits”, James Clear. He related our life experience in a very simple and profound way, saying that we don’t always choose the load, but we do choose how to carry it.

The implication behind this is that many people waste their time and effort complaining about the circumstances. It’s unfair that you got looked over for a promotion. That injury you sustained is the reason you can’t work out and you’re gaining weight. The truth is, a lot of what happens to us is out of our control - that’s just the load we carry. What is in control is how we carry it.

Is your tendency to avoid it altogether and act like you don’t need to carry it? Is it that you procrastinate and delay the inevitable because you don’t feel like it? Maybe your ego gets in the way and you struggle to lift it and make life harder than it needs to be.

In having an awareness that we do have a say in how we carry the load, even though we didn’t choose the load, it allows us to get more resourceful. Instead of focusing all of your energy on the problem, this transitions your attention to possible solutions.

What if you chose to get some help in carrying the load, that would make it a whole lot lighter wouldn’t it? Or what if you invested in some tools that helped you wheel the load and make it more manageable? There are options available to you, and when you get your ego and pride out of the way, you’ll begin to see them.

You do not choose the load but you do choose how to carry it. This gives you power in your life when you feel powerless. It gives you the agency to make things right when it appears as though you’ve been wronged. 

A piece of advice I constantly hear from the world’s most successful people, from all backgrounds, is that everything changed for them when they took ownership of their life. They’re not defined by their environment, they assign their own meaning to it and make it whatever they want it to be.

To wrap this up I’d like you to internalize this question - What is yours to carry and how can you carry it better?