I wish we could control the outcomes of our lives. I believe that if we knew with certainty that we put something in and will get what we want out, we’d be way more motivated and hard working. But as we all know, nothing in life is guaranteed. There are many things that are out of our control and unfortunately, results are one of those things.

So when you put your heart and soul into something, you give it your very best, and you still don’t get the outcome you want, it can be very defeating. It makes you think that your goals might not even be worth working toward and makes you wonder if you’re capable of the level of greatness you always imagined for yourself.

If you feel defeated, like nothing that you do is working and anytime you push two steps forward you get dragged 3 steps back, you’re not alone. We all experiences big and small losses on a daily basis and we all need to recover from them. Resilience is the speed that you do so, and if you want to become more resilient in the face of failure, this is for you.

Kind of cliche, but the first thing we must do is pick ourselves up when we fall down. We need to build our confidence back up with a few small wins. We need to get ourselves back into a positive direction so that we can begin to build momentum. The challenge is, this is when things are the hardest because you have more resistance to overcome.

And that’s why you start small. You don’t need to recover from losing a sale, or a bad breakup, or not getting that job by going out and replacing it. It’s demanding to jump right back in at the same level and often too overwhelming to consider. 

That’s why you start with small wins. You get a workout in and choose a healthy meal. You do something for yourself that you enjoy. You knock off that tedious task that has been in the back of your mind. You find a way to get back in motion.

The most resilient people I know are so effective at bouncing back quickly because they have these fundamentals locked into place. Their natural state of being is one of consistency, discipline, and intentionality, which allows them to build themselves back up without having to put effort into it. They do it on autopilot.

Something I tell myself all the time, that Brian Johnson from Heroic says, is “The worse I feel, the more committed I am to my protocol.” 

That’s my encouragement to you. When you feel defeated, you can bounce back faster and avoid things slipping any further than they already have by doubling-down on the fundamentals that support you in being at your best.

If you don’t have a personal protocol, let me share mine with you. I practice 9 Super Habits that take only moments to do but they ensure that I enforce high standards for myself in my energy, productivity, and mindset, so that I consistently do the things necessary to feel and perform at my best. When you feel defeated, these 9 Super Habits make you feel unstoppable.

Something that most people would label as a positive characteristic trait is possessing humility. When someone is humble they’re known to be more conservative in their lifestyle and choose not to be self-promotional about their achievements.

However, you can arrive at that same endpoint behavior in two different ways. The first is “humble minimizing”, which is an unhealthy way of discrediting yourself, and the other is “humble assured” that comes from a more grounded and self-confident place.

Let’s dive into each.

‘Humble minimizing’ is a symptom of having low self-worth. In the face of success, you choose to deflect the attention because you feel like an imposter for having it. You speak humbly about the circumstances and factors that lead up to certain accomplishments, and while it comes off as modest and grateful, it’s actually an unconscious influence to limit your role in it. As the term suggests, you use humility to minimize yourself in the face of achievement.

‘Humble assured’ is a more genuine expression of humility. You fully recognize the role you played to be successful, but you don’t find the need to make it known. You find quiet confidence in your own ability but would prefer to make it about other people, and other things, to be in service of the moment. You accept that other things contributed to the end-result but it doesn’t threaten you because you know you had a hand in it as well. It's a more certain, self-assured energy where you genuinely know that it wasn’t a fluke, and that you have the skills and know-how to succeed again.

To make this concrete, let me share a personal example. A moment in my life when I was ‘humble minimizing’ was when I got my first job out of college. I spoke about the conditions that led to me getting the job, which included a lot of past relationships helping to open doors. It was a prestigious job in medical device sales, and I credited getting it to those factors. If I'm being honest, deep-down I believed that I wouldn’t have gotten the job had it not been for those relationships.

Having a more ‘humble assured’ perspective now, I can absolutely see how this opportunity was only available because of these relationships. But I also know that I wouldn’t have been a candidate for it had I not graduated with honors, with a degree in neurobiology, and being a really good communicator. 

I point this out because on the surface, both ‘humble minimizing’ and ‘humble assured’ create the same outcome. The difference is the intention and energy behind it. Knowing the distinction here, you can reflect on moments where you choose to be humble and better understand what’s motivating them. 

It’s not binary and there’s a lot of gray area between the two, but the core question I’d ask is “Do I feel lucky or do I feel like I earned this?” Continue to be humble and elevate others, but don’t do so at the expense of your own self-worth.

Personal development 101 teaches you the mindset that “You learn more from your losses than your wins”... That “failure is feedback”... and “Either you win or you learn”...

I know that at its core, all of this is true. But I had a hard time believing it for a while until I saw it from this different approach.

I like thinking of goals as targets. This helps me understand that the results I get are a byproduct of the process that created it. In other words, any time I don’t meet expectations or fall short of a desired result, I can review what I did to cause it.

“Failure is feedback”. Right?

And this becomes more clear when you think about shooting a bow and arrow at a target. You take a few deep breaths, pick your line and match your bow to it, carefully pull back the bowstring, and release to shoot the arrow. Depending on where the bow goes, you get feedback that informs your performance. So you diagnose your process, make small adjustments to your aim and technique, and try again!

Let’s say you missed the target. Is that a failure? I don’t think so. Because slowly but surely, one attempt at a time you get more reference points and a better understanding for how to do better in the future. This means that each “failed attempt” is just a gentle nudge in the direction of improvement.

Believing that you failed is just the disempowering meaning you choose to assign to an event.

When you miss your target, do you want to choose to see your performance as falling short, not good enough, and hopeless? Or do you want to see it as an honest step forward?

Trust me, this is easier said than done. I know it can be emotional and devastating to not reach your goals, or meet the level you wanted to after putting so much of your heart into something. It may cause you to feel like a failure. But that’s just your unchecked unconscious beliefs influencing your perception and connecting a sad story to what objectively happened with no emotional charge.

And that, I believe, is what’s at the heart of all of the great advice related to failure being a good thing.

When you can observe your performance for what it is, you become so much more capable of using it as feedback and integrating it into your process, and therefore make progress.

If you feel like you’re vulnerable to this, like you are your own toughest critic and often disappoint yourself, one of the 9 Super Habits is dedicated to helping you to get better at seeing your performance for what it truly was (and to see the golden lessons in everything that will accelerate your success. Check them out!

I wanted to dive into an African proverb that you’ve probably heard before - “If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together.”

What stands out to me is the conflict in the quote. If you take the two thoughts separately, they each have individual merit.

It is perfectly reasonable to want to go faster, and therefore not having anyone else with you to slow you down may be helpful. And we know that we can accomplish things far greater than we’re capable as individuals when we work together as a team…

But back to the conflict - Whether this is intentional or not, the quote almost discourages you from going fast and alone because it contrasts so strongly with going far and together. And cleverly what it does is it calls out an unconscious, hard-wired, fatal flaw of humanity to help us realize how much it’s impacting us.

We are neurologically optimized to take action in ways that deliver short-term gratification rather than long-term reward. That’s why as humans we can be impulsive, lack will power, and make choices we later disagree with. It’s an evolutionary bias.

Using that perspective, going fast and going alone is the default pattern. It gives you immediate gratification and a quick win. It seems like the right option in the moment because it delivers the most immediate results.

But there’s a knowing within us that it’s not just about going fast. If we want to accomplish truly remarkable things, we need to pace ourselves and enroll help. And while it is thankless and underwhelming to be patient, we know that it’s the pathway to success in anything we desire.

And that’s the choice we have in this quote. It’s conditional. Either we go fast and alone, or we go far and together. Our logical mind reasons that we should choose the latter, but reflexively we often find ourselves on the path of the former. 

Being able to delay gratification is a super-power. Those who wait are those who win.

We live in a society of options. There’s no shortage of ways to do things or things to try. Education is no longer a differentiator because knowledge is so easily accessible.  This means that when something doesn’t appear to be working, we can so easily move on to something else in pursuit of doing better things.

However, I’ve found that the faster path to getting what you want isn’t to keep jumping from thing to thing to find the best... But rather to just do things better. Often the issue isn’t the tool, it’s our ability to use it.

This reminds me of what Tony Robbins says about resources and resourcefulness - Lacking resources isn’t the problem, a lack of resourcefulness is. When you find ways to do more with what you’ve got, you’d be surprised to find out how far the raw materials you have will take you.

A question I get all the time is “What’s the best productivity software to use?” Is it Todoist, Notion, Asana? My answer is always the same - The best tool is the one you can use well. They all do just about the same thing with the smallest of differences between them, and all of them will fall short of expectations if you don’t know how to use productivity systems well.

This parallels a thought that Jim Rohn popularized, “Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better.”

We don’t need better things, advanced technologies, innovative strategies, or anything new to create new results. Of course there’s opportunity in that, but the bigger opportunity is to simply place your focus on doing things better.

Your results and outcomes are within your control. There’s no silver bullet or fast-hack that will make you an overnight success. Progress is earned through incremental improvement, and that means you need to be hands on in building the skills required to do things better.

I’ve been observing people for quite some time, particularly evaluating them through the lens of their productivity, and I’ve found that there are 4 levels of progression that we must go through to feel like we’re making the most of our time. That progression is bored, busy, balanced, and bliss.

Starting with being bored, this is when you’re simply under-stimulated. You have extra time on your hands, you’re at a loss for what you’re passionate about, and you find yourself doing things you don’t really care about to fill the day. In our crazy world, this is uncommon because there are so many things that are requesting our time.

A step up from that is to be busy. This is when you have full days with things going on and places to be. It seems like there’s not enough time in the day to get it all done, and it feels more fulfilling because at least you’re not wasting time being bored. We’re all familiar with what it’s like to be busy…. But the problem in this phase is that you don’t have enough meaningful engagement, or the things you’re engaged in have large costs to them.

This brings us to balanced. So you’re not bored... And you have full days, you’re not just busy doing things that are taking up your time... Being balanced is having the right amount of the right things. I prefer using the word 'harmony' because that’s really what happens here, all your activities synergize to produce wonderful days with a full breadth of experiences and outcomes. Being balanced is only possible when you can discern what is a valuable use of your time, cutting out the excess so that you can address all of your needs.

And then, following that is bliss. It’s a state of fulfillment, peace, and ecstacy. You don’t feel rushed or pressured to do anything but instead feel presence with everything you do. I believe that our ultimate pursuit is to create bliss in our lives.

Interestingly, these 4 phases exist as a cycle, with variations on two criteria: How much you have to do, and the level of alignment of what you’re doing.

You start with boredom, where you don’t have a lot to do and you’re not living in personal alignment. Then there’s busy where now you have a lot more to do but it’s still out of alignment. Then you get to balance where you have a lot to do and now it’s aligned with who you want to be. And finally is bliss where you again don’t have much to do but what you do is fully aligned. And once you lose that alignment, you get bored.

If you want a visual to see how the cycle works, check it out here!

As a huge proponent for establishing high standards for myself as the focus of my self-growth, I’m always intrigued to understand how other people talk about it. Inky Johnson recently came on Ed Mylett’s podcast and shared what he believes the difference is between a standard and an expectation.

They seem pretty synonymous, don’t they? Both relate to a level of performance that you hope to achieve. Both relate to being accountable to clearly established criteria... However, Inky says that a standard is born internally and an expectation is imposed externally.

The best organizations and individual performers are built around having standards. Standards are intrinsic. They are woven into the fabric of how things are done, without concern for what others think. When you have a standard it means that you’re unwilling to allow yourself to fall below the level of intentionality, quality, and consistency that you have for yourself. Failing to meet a standard is a matter of integrity and character.

That’s not to say that expectations aren’t helpful, they absolutely are. But know how they impact you. Since expectations come from the outside, they come with more pressure. There’s more space for disagreement or miscommunication. Expectations can be motivating because other people are invested in your performance and you don’t want to let them down. If you respond well to external accountability, having expectations could be extremely effective. 

Inky was a star football player before having a career ending injury, so let’s use a football example. The standard of a football team is reflected in the way they prepare and compete on the football field. It’s the culture they bring to every moment, ensuring that they give themselves the best opportunity they can to win.

The expectation of a football team is that they beat a weaker team, attract high quality talent, and don’t make any game-losing mistakes. In other words, the expectation is about a result and the standard is about the process. 

Your standards establish your personal baseline. The higher your standards, the higher your baseline. And if you want to raise your baseline and hold yourself to a higher standard in the way you approach your health and work, understanding and being consistent with the 9 Super Habits makes high-performance inevitable. If you want to learn about the 9 Super Habits and how you can implement all of them in just 15 minutes a day, this is for you!

We’ve all had moments where we realize that we just wasted our time.

It’s working on that project only to realize that one of the first details as wrong, and you need to redo the whole thing. It’s getting caught in a research or social media rabbit hole and when you snap out of it you can’t believe that hours passed. It’s putting your heart and soul into arranging a present for someone that they hardly appreciate or never use...

Our natural response to this is to get discouraged. We ruminate on all of the other things we could have been doing and that would have been a better use of our time. We feel frustrated because we have so much going on and couldn’t afford to lose any more time, yet we did. 

But the problem is - When you disparage and get upset with yourself about all the ways you wasted your time… You’re just wasting more time and creating even more time debt.

It doesn’t serve you to focus on lost time.

Our way out of any form of debt is to get more efficient with the resources we have available. Rather than incurring more debt and digging ourselves into a deeper hole, we need to offset what we lost with more positive production.

So as it relates to time debt, our solution is to then find ways to get more done in less time. 

Now how do we do that? 

We create efficiencies. We get more out of what we put in by being more focused and organized, by streamlining our processes to reduce waste, and by increasing the quality of what we do.

Practically, this means that when we find ourselves having just wasted time, we need to take corrective action. We need to get right into productive activity that makes up for the lapse we just experienced.

Now this is kind of meta - Preparing this thought for you, I was pulled off schedule helping my Mom with some chores around the house. Not wanting to get behind for the day, I was intentional about transitioning quickly out of that into undistracted work on this. And because I set that intention, I was able to get this done faster and make up for some of the time debt I incurred.

Tony Robbins says “Where your attention goes, energy flows.” So let’s put our attention on the right proactive things to do rather than get stuck on the mistakes we made, making them even bigger mistakes!

If you’re looking to create efficiencies in your time management and daily focus, three of the 9 Super Habits are dedicated to helping you become exponentially more productive. Click here to learn what they are!