I had a conversation with my brother last week and I experienced something odd - We disagreed with so much certainty on a fact, and I only realized just now why that was. As part of my travels I’m driving from the Chicago airport to Milwaukee, and estimating the length of time it would take, Apple Maps told me it would take about 2 hours. When I was talking to my brother about it he said, “Oh that’s a short drive, I flew it and it only took 30 minutes. Should be like an hour drive."

Neither of us pressed the issue, but we both knew ourselves to be right. And we both were. You see, I was estimating the distance from the airport in South Chicago (Midway), and he was estimating from the airport in North Chicago (O'Hare). He didn’t have all the details, so he made a decision based on the facts he knew.

This is where awareness comes in, and it plays a key role in everything we do. With awareness we have more information to draw conclusions and make choices. If my brother were to have learned of our travel plans his frame of reference would have changed, and he would have seen how my estimate was just as right as his. Essentially, there were two right answers within the context of the conversation.

We can’t be naive to the fact that we see everything through our own perspective. While the example I gave was more objective and related to fact, this certainly applies to things that are subjective and a matter of opinion. The point being, if we don’t actively raise our awareness to the things around us, and pursue new perspectives, we will exist in the circle we already know. 

There’s not much growth to be found there, so let me ask you this question - What are you actively doing to add new perspective to your life?

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. 

If you’re looking to grow alongside a community of like-minded improvers, then click here to join the Better Together Community.

Recently I saw Coach Daron K Roberts post about something that made me double take. I think the reason it did was because something clicked for me, and I hope in sharing the same can happen for you.

Coach Roberts commented on the “But What Abouts…” of life. Looking to quit your job and go full-time on your side hustle? “But what about having health insurance and benefits.” Looking to set a new goal for yourself? “But what about the last goal you set that you didn’t achieve.” Looking to dive deeper into a passion of yours? “But what about all the time you’ll spend on it.”

You can hear the nature of these 'BWAs', as Coach Roberts calls them. They’re not explicitly telling you not to do it, but they are suggesting that you take more time to ensure you know what you’re getting yourself into. While that is absolutely healthy and something you should do, the BWAs never stop. There will always be another “But what about” scenario to think through, and if you wait until you’re 100% ready, with all concerns addressed... Well that will never happen.

These BWAs can come from two sources. The first is from yourself. I firmly believe that these extra considerations are just rational stall tactics your brain uses to resist the change you’re trying to bring to your life. The second source is other people. But know that they can only see your decisions through their own frame of reference, and the caring concern of others is often the way they project their own insecurities and fears onto you.

Should you make well-thought out decisions? Of course. But can you realistically consider every last detail? Not if you’re trying to get anything done. Life is risky, you must make the leap sometimes without knowing exactly what’s there to catch you. Don’t be held back by the prospect of perfection. To wrap this up, I’d like to ask you this question - How often do you talk yourself out of doing something?

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. 

If you’re looking to grow alongside a community of like-minded improvers, then click here to join the Better Together Community.

I want to feature a quote that gets you feeling cozy while delivering a meaningful lesson all at the same time - “If the world feels cold to you, kindle fires to warm it.”

The first thing to mention is how this message is framed. Notice it says “if the world feels cold to you.” It acknowledges that everyone has their own experience and perception of things, and everyone needs to take their own unique approach to addressing it. The world can be a cold place but more than anything it comes down to how you see it and what you’re going to do about it. 

This quote is a metaphor, right? It basically means that everyone has their own unique way of kindling a fire, or changing certain things in their life. But there are 3 common steps that people need to take in order to do so effectively.

First is you need to gather resources. Figure out what you have to work with (brush, branch, sticks, twigs) so that you have the fuel you need to light the fire. You’ve got to know what's available to you. Then you need to prepare. Make a fire pit so that it’s safe, organize the resources so that they can be used most efficiently, and set expectations about what the desired result is - How long the fire will last. Then you need to light the flame. The pit will not produce heat until there’s fire, and you need to take action to put everything you've done to work. It’s all for not unless you get started and try your best to do something meaningful.

I know this might be a more difficult metaphor to follow so here’s the summary - When something isn’t how you want it to be, you can change it by taking the necessary steps to fixing it. Through the lens of positivity, if you feel like there is too much hate, negligence or disrespect in the world, you can collect the resources, do the prep work, and get started in a way that changes the things around you. We do these things implicitly but hopefully this framework helps you see the process behind the things we do naturally.

With that in mind let me ask you a question - What in your life could use a little change for the better?

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. 

If you’re looking to grow alongside a community of like-minded improvers, then click here to join the Better Together Community.

This is a dense topic I’ve really committed to understanding on a deep level, and I love the way Robin Sharma articulates it. He says that, “Your behavior reflects your deepest beliefs”. Our beliefs are a byproduct of everything we’ve learned about the world and the way we exist in it. If you think about it, we were born with no beliefs, no values or morals, nothing other than the baseline physiological systems and reflexes required to keep us alive. Everything else was learned at one point or another.

But one level further, once we do learn these lessons and mold the thoughts we have about the world, those details start to integrate into your subconscious mind. They become reflexes, biases, and a lens that puts a tint on everything you see. The purpose of this is to make the world more predictable and sensible to you.

These lenses influence us to make decisions and behave in certain ways without us even knowing it. Why? It’s called cognitive dissonance. When your behaviors don’t line up with your mind’s expectations, your brain feels threatened by the unfamiliarity and starts to panic. To avoid that panic we act in ways that are in alignment with what we believe.

That is why, as Sharma put it, your behavior reflects your deepest beliefs.

Now is this permanent? Of course not! If we learned something once, we can learn something new. But the brain does resist any change you introduce to it. That’s why you need to be really intentional about how you go about unlearning and relearning the world, so that you don’t spend time and energy fighting against your subconscious tendencies. 

Like I said, I’m committed to understanding this, and if you’re curious to understand how your subconscious beliefs might be influencing you to do things you don’t want to do, and in some cases are even sabotaging your success, then I put together a video you’re really going to want to watch. Not only do I explain exactly what’s happening in your brain that’s the reason you’re feeling held back, but I show you how to reshape your beliefs and transform your subconscious so that you can be more disciplined, more productive, and things start to click for you in your life.

Click here and provide your email so I can send you instant access to the video, as well as an E-Book that touches on the subject in a different way!

Something that I’ve been making a point of doing recently is appreciating the depth of people. While a stranger might only be in front of you for a random moment, there is a long history that brought them to that very moment full of celebration, heartbreak, new ideas, mistakes, and meaningful experiences.

That same history lives in our relationships. No one can take away the experiences you shared with others. For me, whether it’s the blood and sweat I shed alongside my soccer brothers on the field, or the late uncertain nights packing boxes in a corner office with my startup colleagues, I've found that relationships develop when you have shared moments. And that’s why this expression rings true: "You can’t make old friends". That title must be earned.

So, yes, invest in new relationships so that you can grow alongside people who will support your future, but also appreciate the role that old friends have served in your life. Maybe life took you down different paths and you grew apart, or you had a falling out, or you aren’t as close as you used to be, I encourage you to reflect on those times to observe the growth you experienced and how those people were a major part of it.

It’s easier said than done, but if you feel like it’ll serve you I have a recommendation. Ask yourself this question - Do you remember an amazing time you had with an old friend? Send them a text or give them a call, I’m sure they’d love to hear from you.

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.

If you’re looking to grow alongside a community of like-minded improvers, then click here to join the Better Together Community.

In our lives we all have a similar pursuit - We want to be happy. One of the more difficult parts of that is understanding for ourselves what makes us happy, and how much of it we need. No matter who you are or what you do, in this world there is always bigger, faster, stronger, richer, nicer, more successful... You name it. What that means is we need to find the amount that is right for ourselves. In my mind there are two different ways to relate with this, one I’m going to argue is better than the other.

The first way is to pursue satisfaction. On one hand, satisfaction represents fulfillment and a happiness found in meeting expectations, but when you look at the secondary definitions you start to see the full story. To satisfy a request is to do just enough to get the job done. It’s to attain the bare minimum required to consider something complete. When you’re satisfied you got enough of what you want, but it carries this undertone that more is out there that you’re not accessing. There’s a subtle suggestion of complacency in satisfaction.

The second way is to pursue contentment. When you’re content that means you find fulfillment and joy in the way that things are. The difference is your relationship with your ambition. Instead of feeling a yearning for more, and drawing comparisons between how things are and how they can be, you have more presence within your happiness. Your ambition is independent of your current state of happiness and therefore, it plays a healthier role in your life.

It’s tricky because being both content and satisfied means your needs are met, you have enough, but it’s how you think about ‘what is enough?' I encourage you to determine what is enough to make you content or satisfied, but then to know there’s more out there and to not feel complacent. You can be happy and grateful for what you have and ambitious all at the same time, and pursuing contentment over satisfaction in my opinion better supports that. With that in mind, let me leave you with this - When was the last time you thought about what is enough for you in your life?

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. 

If you’re looking to grow alongside a community of like-minded improvers, then click here to join the Better Together Community.

I don’t mean to be morbid, but we’re going to touch on death for a second. Something that is beautiful about life is that we need the contrast of death to see its meaning. This contrast is not unique - Light has value because there’s dark. You can only know someone’s a good person because there are evil people. The right thing to do is only right because there’s also a wrong way to do it. Life has meaning because death exists.

The thing about these contrasts is they are dynamic. Contrasts create a spectrum and at one moment things can fall in one spot in the spectrum, and the next moment it can be in a different spot. In that way, the two sides of the contrast are always competing and trying to pull reality toward their end.

Let me remind you of a famous quote from the iconic movie “Shawshank Redemption”. It says “Get busy living or get busy dying.” In any moment one or the other is winning that tug of war, and if you want to live a more enriching life with moving experiences you need to chose to live more and die less.

Now what does that look like? Be courageous and take chances. Be present when around good company. Be curious about the possibilities that surround you, and pursue them. Do the things that expand your mind and body. That’s all living is, expanding the number and quality of the experiences you have in the same amount of time. It’s fitting more of what lights you up into your life. It’s your choice to say yes, move forward, and feel the moment. And to help you tap back into that feeling let me ask you this question - When did you feel the most alive in your life?

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. 

If you’re looking to grow alongside a community of like-minded improvers, then click here to join the Better Together Community.

In Japan they practice a philosophy called Kintsugi. At the surface, Kintsugi is a way of repairing broken pottery so that it’s functional again. But what’s fascinating is that, according to Kintsugi tradition, when filling in a crack you should use higher quality materials, sometimes gold and silver, to fill the gap.

Kintsugi relates to a more common Japanese philosophy called Wabi-sabi. The core idea is that it’s okay that things aren’t perfect, and instead of treating imperfections as blemishes you view them as history of their past. It injects an appreciation for how things have been instead of just optimizing for how things are now.

That pairs poetically with what I mentioned previously about the materials they use to repair. Not only are they okay highlighting the blemishes and cracks in the pottery, but they invest in them. They use high value metals to communicate that the piece is not useless, in fact it is now more valuable because of its history.

Imagine if we treated ourselves that way. Upon looking at the obvious imperfections within ourselves, we choose to celebrate them, honor them, and fortify them. It becomes a point of pride, and each imperfection is further evidence of how much you’ve done and how great you are. Damage is objective, the evidence of it is clear. But the meaning around that damage is subjective, and the Kintsugi philosophy is your path to more positively relating with your past.

You’ve probably been doing this for yourself without you even knowing it, so let’s figure out what that is - What broke you but caused you to grow back stronger?

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. 

If you’re looking to grow alongside a community of like-minded improvers, then click here to join the Better Together Community.