Abraham Lincoln was quoted saying “If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my ax.” There’s an obvious lesson in this quote, but beyond the immediate I want to use this metaphor to illuminate other under-spoken lessons.

Sharpening the ax is all about preparation and working smarter not harder. Instead of wasting a bunch of energy swinging a dull ax trying to chop down a tree, you’ll be much more efficient if you improve the quality of your effort. That’s where it might actually be more time efficient to invest in having your activity produce more concentrated value.

But despite this quote, a sharp ax doesn’t cut a tree down by itself. You need to show up and swing the ax. Life rewards those who show up, who aren’t afraid to put in the required work that advances an idea or generates the desired result. The law of attraction is useless without the law of action, and swinging the ax is showing up day in and day out to take action.

Then last, it’s not enough to have a sharp ax, and to swing it at a tree. You need a strategy. You need to find the weakest point of the trunk and you need to be precise and consistent with hitting it exactly in that spot. This is why taking the time to evaluate a situation, and then building a plan to execute that strategy is so vital because then it tells you how you need to show up and take action.

I want you to embody all qualities of the ax. Sharpen your skills so that you can do more with less effort. Show up and do be afraid to take swings. And be strategic and consistent with how you apply yourself to maximize the impact of your effort. 

To incorporate these principles into your life right now I want you to reflect on this - How are you swinging the ax right now, and what can you do to be more effective with it?

On your personal development journey, you need to be sure you have the right foundation in place. Discover the 7 Fundamentals To Self Improvement and instantly accelerate your growth! (Who knows what you might be overlooking and how it’s holding you back…)

If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily text messages that help you grow and discover yourself every day.

I believe one of the biggest mistakes you’ll ever make, and one of the greatest regrets you’ll ever have, is to give up on yourself. But what that means isn’t exactly what you’d think.

Giving up on yourself isn’t about quitting, it’s about losing faith in yourself and your abilities. It takes humility to know when it’s the right time to move on. Giving up on yourself isn’t characterized by having low energy and motivation to perform, it’s about not having the desire to make things better and to get back on track. Giving up on yourself has nothing to do with external results, it has everything to do with the way you internally relate with the decisions you make.

The reason giving up can feel so appealing in the face of anxiety and overwhelm is because it’s easy. Humans are hardwired to avoid discomfort, and giving up on yourself is a defense mechanism that protects you from the fears or pain you’re experiencing. 

But that approach is flawed and doesn’t work in the long run. While you can give up on yourself you can never leave yourself, so every day you’ll need to look at yourself in the mirror and live with the reality you’ve chosen for yourself. It’s a sad life, and even if you fall into it know that it’s not permanent.

Know that failure is a normal part of life, so don’t internalize it as a reflection of you. Things never go perfectly according to plan, so don’t judge yourself or your capabilities when they don’t. If you feel like giving up, Ed Mylett has an incredible philosophy on it, born out of his father’s recovery from being an alcoholic. It’s called “the power of one more”. Commit to trying just one more time. Choose to stay sober for just one more day. That’s how you never give up on yourself, and I encourage you to step into it with resilience.

On your personal development journey, you need to be sure you have the right foundation in place. Discover the 7 Fundamentals To Self Improvement and instantly accelerate your growth! (Who knows what you might be overlooking and how it’s holding you back…)

If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily text messages that help you grow and discover yourself every day. 

Not in the US or Canada? Send me a DM on Instagram to @self.improvement.daily

As much as we try to prime our brains to see the positive in the world, the reality is there’s a lot of bad stuff that’s unavoidable. We naturally are exposed to various forms of trauma and take on pain that leaves physical and emotional scars in our beings. Our natural evolutionary response to this is acting like it’s not there. To push it down and repress it so that other people aren’t aware of it. But that tendency was developed as an old survival instinct, and in modern life it is now out of pace. The unfortunate consequence is that when pain is not acknowledged, it bottles up and begins to grow deeper roots that inhibit you in many ways.

Repressed emotions can overwhelm your psychology and dominate your perception. It can act as a lens that you see everything through, molding facts and circumstances to fit within the context of your emotions. This happens as a mix of a self-fulfilling prophecy and confirmation bias, and it can be so strong and innate that you don’t even recognize it’s happening.

So if you want to overcome the grip pain and trauma has on you, and reclaim control of your reality, you need to do something really difficult. You need to allow yourself to feel the pain. When you bring it to the surface it can be processed in a healthier way, and while the events that brought that pain will never go away, you can change the way you relate with it. There’s an expression “If you want to heal a wound, you need to feel a wound” and it’s much easier said than done. But the obstacle is the way. You cannot go around matters like this, you must go through, and getting vulnerable with yourself and others allows you to begin healing the pains you’ve been carrying.

This is heavier than usual, and if you feel up for it I want to ask you to reflect on this question - Is there something negative that has happened to you that you haven’t allowed yourself to feel?

On your personal development journey, you need to be sure you have the right foundation in place. Discover the 7 Fundamentals To Self Improvement and instantly accelerate your growth! (Who knows what you might be overlooking and how it’s holding you back…)

If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily text messages that help you grow and discover yourself every day. 

Not in the US or Canada? Send me a DM on Instagram to @self.improvement.daily

One of the most important things we can do in life is set expectations, for ourselves and for others. Setting expectations has a few critical benefits.

First, it allows you to live with more intention because it leverages advanced decision making. The reality is we often know what we want to be doing, we want to work out, eat healthy, make that phone call, but our present emotional and physical state encourages us to do otherwise. But setting expectations reminds us of what our best self wants to do, not what our mind is telling us in context.

The second thing it does is it creates accountability to act in accordance with your expectations. When you don’t it creates cognitive dissonance, which is simply a tension in your mind between what you expected and what happened in reality.

Taking a unique spin on this, I want to encourage you to think about how you can reset expectations. Sometimes, when you set expectations you don’t have enough information to determine what you truly want. You know what you think you want, but when the time comes it could be different.

For example, let’s say that you’re out at a birthday party and you decided you only want to spend 2 hours there because you have a lot of errands to do. But then say that a friend you haven’t seen in ages turns up to the party right as you’re leaving. Is it worth dismissing your commitment to only stay for two hours to spend time with your friend? Maybe, maybe not, and that’s where you need to reset expectations in real-time.

The value of setting expectations is it brings more consciousness to your decision making. It helps you make choices that align with what you want from a wider lens than simply responding to the moment. Having made a judgment in advance then gives you a point of reference to make new decisions against, with new information, to evaluate how things have changed.

Is this a slippery slope? Sure, it could be, but life is unpredictable and it’s important to be able to accommodate spontaneity and opportunity when it arises. What’s important is that you address this spontaneity with intentionality and stay in the habit of doing what serves you most.

On your personal development journey, you need to be sure you have the right foundation in place. Discover the 7 Fundamentals To Self Improvement and instantly accelerate your growth! (Who knows what you might be overlooking and how it’s holding you back…)

If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily text messages that help you grow and discover yourself every day. 

As a society we’ve been taught to think in a very linear way. When it comes to problem solving, the school system has told us that there is one right answer. In order to get the question right we reproduce a formula that we’ve learned in the past and apply it to the data set in front of us. Creative thinking was reserved for the arts and more expressive tasks. But as we’ve gained experience over the years, not only have we learned that there often isn't any right answer, but there are many potential and viable answers. Through this we’ve learned to appreciate creativity in problem solving to discover new ways of doing something well that are more efficient or higher quality.

This is called divergent thinking and it’s best represented in this thought experiment. Answer the question - What can you do with a brick? Well of course you can build with it, you can use it as a door stop, you can pin a piece of paper down with it. You can even get really creative and say that you can use it like chalk and draw with it. But then even expanding upon that, what if you could make the brick different sizes, different shapes, different materials? That opens up a whole new world of potential uses.

Divergent thinking is realizing that there are multiple perfectly suitable solutions to one problem, or reasonable answers to a question. Instead of being fixed in the normal, traditional ways of doing something, you can be an innovator that gets resourceful and creative.

When it comes to the problems you encounter in your life, I encourage you to try divergent thinking. Let your imagination run and think outside the box, you never know what you might come up with! To help that integrate today let me ask you a question to ponder - What should you be approaching with more creativity in your life?

If you’re on your personal development journey, you need to be sure you have the right foundation in place. Discover the 7 Fundamentals To Self Improvement and instantly accelerate your growth! (Who knows what you might be overlooking and how it’s holding you back…)

If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily prompts that help you get to know yourself better and build a more meaningful life every day.

This is something you might be missing that I really need you to hear, so if you’re skimming through this I'd encourage you to read it more carefullly today.

You’re interested in self-development because you’re looking for something. Maybe you’re in a life transition and hoping to establish a healthier and more productive lifestyle. Maybe you’re an ambitious leader who is looking for an edge to achieve more in life. Or maybe you’re someone who is battling something within themselves, like low self-confidence or sense of purpose in life, and you want to improve upon it.

No matter the reason what is most important is that you get what you need. In order to not waste your time, it’s important that you are putting yourself in a position to get results from the time you’re investing in your self-growth.

With all that in mind, this is what you really need to understand - If you want something to change in your life you need to play an active role in changing it.

This means that reading this article is not enough. Learning about what you could do differently is not enough. If you do not have something in mind that you’re specifically looking to improve then the information will just wash over you. Yes, it’s good to acquire new bits of information here and there, but information will only give you a tiny fraction of what you’re really looking for.

It really all boils down to this question - What are you working on? Do you want to be healthier? Do you want to compare yourself to others less? Do you want to strengthen the love and intimacy in your relationship? What are you working on?

If you don’t have an answer, then I can help you find it!

I’m beginning to organize a 3 day Self-Growth Sprint so that you can pinpoint exactly what you should be working on and more importantly, what you can do about it to begin creating the life, influence, and fulfillment you dream about. If you're interested to be considered for this private 3 day experience, then you can join the waitlist here: https://grow.selfimprovementdailytips.com/self-growth-sprint-feedback.

I wanted to highlight a quote from a really good friend of mine named Case Kenny. On his podcast New Mindset Who Dis, he shares his gift for taking big concepts and simplifying them into relatable, modernized wisdom. When it comes to the difficult questions of life and living your potential he boils it down to two words: ”Nah, bigger.” 

It’s saying ‘no’ to accepting things how they are right now, and believing that there’s more possibility on the horizon for you. It’s saying ‘no’ to feeling like there’s a permanence to the circumstances you’ve grown to tolerate, and instead aspiring for growth and development. It’s an invitation to step up in your life and a reminder that it’s okay to want more. No matter if things are good, bad, or ugly - "Nah, bigger!"

The reason this is so important to think about is because a lot of people don’t let themselves think this way. They prefer what is comfortable and familiar to what is uncertain and ominous. But with these people, I imagine there’s a part of them that asks themself the question. They wonder what things would be like if they tried something new and exciting. They hear that little voice in their head that craves more out of life, and they wish they had the courage to listen to it more often. But many people don’t, and I want to ask you to reflect on it - Is that you? Are you the type of person that genuinely believes you’re destined for more, but you keep putting it off for later? Are you the type of person that craves to be heard and seen, but you don’t have the confidence to do anything about it so you ignore it?

The first step to materializing everything you want is to acknowledge it. To be honest with where things are and where you want them to be. Bridging that gap is life’s greatest game, and the fact that you’re reading this means that you have the desire to step up for it. Now let’s make it happen!

If you don’t know where to get started with building a better future for yourself, I’m hoping help you with that. If you’re serious about making massive strides and transforming your life faster than ever before, you can join the waitlist for The 3 Day Self-Growth Sprint and establish critical foundations that will catapult you forward when you stop overlooking them. There are limited spots in this first cohort, but you can reserve yours right now.