Author of “Atomic Habits” James Clear featured an insightful idea in his Newsletter that I want to share with you. He said “Clarity isn’t about knowing what you want to do with your life, it’s about knowing what you want to do this week.”

I think it’s brilliant. We put so much pressure on figuring out what our purpose is, what career we want to be in, where we want to live, what type of lifestyle we want to have or successes we want to earn. We feel like having a clear understanding for what that looks like will help guide our daily decision making.

While that is true and there are few things more powerful than a strong life vision to follow with discipline, it’s a very difficult task. Life is so unpredictable that good plans fall apart quickly and the ones that last are actually more flexible than rigid.

That’s why Clear says a more practical clarity to have is shorter term, visioning out what the week looks like. And having a clear plan for the week does a few helpful things.

First is, if you do have macro life clarity, it helps you to narrow your scope and pick out the right actionable things you need to do to make progress on it. Big plans come together through daily action, and knowing what needs to get done this week to serve the master plan improves the likelihood it will work.

Second, a week is about the right amount of time to optimize your personal rhythms. A lot of people overlook the design of their life and in doing so, are at risk to being overcommitted and compromising their self-care routines. Putting a plan together for the week helps you see how you can prioritize your health, get good-quality work done, and have time for the important people in your life. I find that viewing a full week as a single unit makes it easier to consider everything in balance.

And last, you can do things in a given week that help you figure out your overall life plan. Rather than committing to years of volunteering for a nonprofit, you can plan to show up once in a given week and see how you like it. Rather than building your identity around a certain hobby, you can try it out once or twice and go from there.

We don’t want to experiment with our life because we only have one and we don't want to get it wrong. But we get a new week every 7 days. This helps us to be a little bolder, riskier, and les sustainable at times to inform us in knowing what we want and like overall.

So if you’re feeling a bit off track in life, just start with what the next week looks like: 

How many times do you want to exercise?

What fun things do you want to do? Who do you want to see?

What do you want to work on, and for how long?

You’ll find that there’s a lot of joy and fulfillment just in creating a good plan for a new week and following through on it.

As you build out your new weekly design and looking for the most influential things you can do to improve your life, there are 9 Super Habits that transform an inconsistent ‘hit or miss’ person into a self-disciplined and dependable machine! If you’re curious to know what they are and how they work, check them out!

As optimistic, cheerful, and encouraging as I try to be, I do believe that we need to be mindful of ‘toxic positivity’. We cannot reject reality and prevent ourselves from processing the range of emotions that life has to offer. If we do then we create an impossible expectation for how life is supposed to be and feel guilty that we’re ungrateful when we feel bad for ourselves.

However, with that in mind, I also do believe that our perspective is our choice. And while it isn’t healthy to reshape everything that happens to us into the positive, I do think we’d benefit from doing it more often. And that’s because of the insight underlying today’s quote:

“Be happy for no reason.”

Sustaining happiness is an internal game. Ed Mylett says “You have to take you with you”, so no matter what accomplishments you achieve, it’s still you receiving them. Even if there’s a lot to celebrate, you won’t find a reason to, or feel genuine about it, if internally you’re not letting yourself see it.

So rather than trying to extract happiness from everything around you, you can choose to infuse happiness in what you do. This is what “being happy for no reason” means - you choose to be happy and create the reason rather than wait for reasons to prompt your happiness.

As an example of this concept, I saw a video an Instagram that jokingly proved this point. It’s a video about a man who chooses to believe that his partner is thinking about him and blushes when he sees she left a pile of shipping boxes on the ground, and laundry thrown about the bed.

What this video so creatively highlights is how everyday stimuli that normally feel like an inconvenience can easily be reframed to mean something else. I’m not saying that you need to be joyful doing laundry to get this working for you, but it makes you wonder - What else do we experience on a daily basis that we could choose to relate with differently, and how would that simple shift improve the quality of our lives?

In treating daily micro-moments with grace, patience, and gratitude we reroute our thinking, which prompt new emotions that impact the way we show up for everything else. So give it a try for a day. Tell yourself “Tomorrow, I’m going to be happy for no reason,” and see how you like it!

There’s one word that transforms despair into hope, failure into opportunity, and disappointment into a second chance. That word is - “Yet”.

I don’t know how to do that… Yet.

I haven’t even closed a sale… Yet.

I’m not really that good at this… Yet.

I don’t belong somewhere like that… Yet.

Adding the word ‘yet’ completely shifts the tone of any expression of disappointment so that it ends with a hint of optimism.

And that’s the truth, isn’t it? Nothing in life is completely finite. As long as you’re still alive and in it, you can create a new result. You can keep working toward something to acquire the skills, network, strategies, or resources required to make something happen.

‘Yet’ is the gold standard of a growth mindset. It suggests that your current reality isn’t fixed, and that it can evolve and grow into something else. It also urges you to be resilient as it encourages you to try again in an effort to reach your goals.

And last, it also places your current self in your future vision. ‘Yet’ suggests that there’s a ‘you’ that’s yet to be, a person that you’re crafting from every decision you make, and that all of the deposits you place now will come into play in the future.

Would you want your best future self to give up when things get hard, quit at the first sign of resistance, and respond to life with complacency rather than ambition? I doubt it. And your best future self wouldn’t want that for present you, either.

I want to partner with the world’s most influential people to solve the world’s biggest problems. And I’m not doing that to the extent that I want to… Yet!

I know that in every person I meet, every idea I share, and every moment of service I step into, I’m putting puzzle pieces together that help move me one step closer to that future vision.

That’s how I’m using the power of ‘yet’, and I have a feeling we’ve only just begun!

As someone who has supported hundreds of people through my own 21 Day Challenge, and who has completed nearly a dozen self-improvement challenges myself, there are some things I see come up time and again that I want you to be aware of.

It’s tricky because on one hand Challenges are so effective at igniting fast transformation... But on the other hand the transformation often the Challenge doesn’t do much more than offer a small blip of motivation that fades until you go back to how things used to be.

These are the 4 things you need to have a plan for so that you can lock in the growth and good habits you worked hard to earn in a Challenge.

1) Environment. When you’re in a personal development Challenge, it’s likely that you told the people in your life about it like work colleagues, family, and friends. In doing so you established boundaries that other people receive, and you invite them to support you in completing the tasks of the Challenge.

However, when the Challenge ends, so do people’s perception of their role in your growth. They don’t have the same discipline, patience, or influence on you. So if you want to keep with it you need to set up a new supportive and protective environment.

2) Clarity. When you’re in a Challenge you know exactly what’s expected of you. When the Challenge is done, especially if it was difficult, you’re likely to find a version of it that you want to continue on with.

But if you don’t clearly define what the new task is you give your brain space to negotiate, offer excuses, and make exceptions that slowly pull you off track. So be clear about what your continuation plan is so that you know exactly what you’re accountable to.

3) Accountability. Plain and simple, our behavior and choices are drastically different when we have accountability. We desperately want to escape the pain of social confrontation so we follow through on our commitments even when we don’t feel like it.

Often Challenges incorporate a version of accountability in that you need to report your progress. This creates an expectation and pressure to stay consistent. So if you leave the challenge and lose accountability, find a way to supplement it immediately.

4) Commitment. By accepting a Challenge, you made a commitment to yourself to try something new and show up different. But this means that there’s a time-frame and end-date to your new, motivated approach. So when a Challenge ends many people quickly lose motivation and they allow their mentality to rest. Your level of discipline no longer has something to live up to and strive toward.

Instead, find a new package that your new self can step up to. A new commitment that makes demands of you. A better environment, clarity of plan, and accountability have no weight if you aren’t mentally bought into what’s happening next.

Ironically, that’s my 21 Day Challenge gives you the infrastructure you need to permanently have an enriched environment, clarity of plan, accountability to your choices, and a commitment to always pursue being your best-self. Click here to check it out!

Success is just a cover for what people genuinely want within it, which is happiness.

Money buys us things and helps us to contribute to causes that make us happy. Playing a role in meaningful and influential projects makes us happy.

It’s no secret that we would benefit from a little more genuine happiness, but I think the majority of us struggle to find it. That’s why I want to make a clear distinction: Let’s not mistake happiness for hedonism.

Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure and self-indulgence. It’s choosing to feel good in the moment at the expense of how you’ll feel in the future. When we’re guided exclusively by what we want right now we’re setting ourselves up to make unhealthy, immoral, and sometimes regretful decisions.

True, deeply-rooted happiness isn’t experienced in a moment. It’s the recognition that we have integrity and character, that we’lre applying ourselves fully in our lives, and that we’re growing. The Greek’s call this “Eudaimonia” which is a state of personal flourishing.

At the root of the difference between happiness and hedonism is one of humanity’s greatest challenges - to delay gratification. Rather than always doing the thing that makes us feel pleasure in the moment, like having extra dessert or entertaining ourselves by scrolling on social media, we are intentional about the choice we’re making in the moment and how it serves our future self.

To help you step into authentic happiness, here’s a frame of thinking to consider: No matter what choices you’re making you’re giving yourself a gift.

Hedonism is a gift to your current self, and making intentional healthy choices is a gift to your future self.

When you find yourself in a moment trying to evaluate a decision, I’d challenge you to ask this question to steer your thinking: “Would this be a gift to my future self or my current self?”

Not only do those who delay gratification do less things that they later regret, but they place investments that adds to their potential for how much happiness they can feel in the long-term.

One of the most common pieces of advice people give for relationships is that you must be willing to compromise. That you must be willing to meet people in the middle to live a mutually supportive life.

This advice fairly suggests that if you’re inflexible about how you go about things, it creates consequences and problems that impact your well-being more than the small compromises would. But that’s not the only way you need to think about it…

The term ‘marriage’ literally means to bring the elements of two things together. It does not require that we compromise, or that you can’t get exactly what you want. It simply means that there are more details and factors that must be considered.

It’s true that there are real tradeoffs in life. We can’t have it all. But don’t let that keep you from realizing that you can have way more of what you want than you realized.

One of the brightest minds in business today Ray Dalio talks about compromise like this: "Rather than seeing things as a ‘this or that’, how do we get as much of both as possible”?

If we take a few extra moments to think beyond the immediate decision and get creative about what other options are available, it’s very often that there are win-wins that you hadn’t considered.

For example: Planning my wedding, it was very important to my wife’s mom that incorporated unity candles and had a religious component to our wedding. But when we envisioned our wedding day, Irene and I agreed that we didn’t want to incorporate religion in our main ceremony.

So rather than rejecting the request altogether, we weaved it into the wedding in a more private way. We win because we had the ceremony we wanted and Irene’s Mom wins because we represented the religious practice she values.

Would you call that compromising? I wouldn’t. We all got exactly what we wanted!

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to compromise and sacrifice what you want, but I am telling you that you don’t need to.

Wouldn’t it be way better if everyone got everything they wanted and not just a diluted version of it? It simply requires that you do things differently.

So bring to mind something you might be compromising on right now and ask yourself “Is there a way for everyone to get what they want?”

I’m sure there’s a version where everyone gets more of what they want at the very least, and that’s a step in the right direction.

We’re not perfect people. There are times when we act out of integrity of who we know we can be. Many of us may have past choices that we regret and histories that we’re not proud of.

If you feel like you’ve made some mistakes… You’re not alone. All of us can be better, and that’s the beautiful thing about self-improvement - All of us are getting better!

That’s why it’s critical that we all play a long game, and if there’s something I’ve learned about the long game it’s that “The truth always wins.”

But for many of us the truth has consequences, especially when we’re unwilling to accept what we know to the truth to be or we’re unwilling to take action on it. The truth needs to find other ways to be expressed. And these ways are often more disruptive and come with more damage because they had to overcome resistance.

For example, let’s say that someone has a secret or has been holding onto a lie. Instead of the truth being fully expressed voluntarily, it can eat away at your self-worth and integrity to find its outlet. If you’re constantly convincing yourself that you’re in the right relationship, or have the right job, even though deep down you know that’s not the case… It will drag you down and hold you back.

Your truth is your alignment. It’s your internal GPS that gives you feedback on where you’re headed, and it’s the wind at your back that will take you where you want to go.

Living your truth is a journey of self-awareness (knowing what it is) and self-acceptance (finding peace in who you are). And the best way to do that is to be brutally honest with yourself, find people you trust who can be honest with you, and lean in.

While you can deceive yourself for a lifetime, you can’t deceive your life. The truth always finds a way to win. It’s your choice to get the truth on your team or to keep competing against it.

Something that is undeniable about self-improvement, and featured everywhere, is the importance of consistency.

I am a massive proponent of consistency and know in my soul that it’s the greatest unlock for success and positive progress.

But the question that I haven’t heard a great answer for is… Why?

Yes, what Darren Hardy has popularized as “the compound effect” is real. And yes, what David Metlzer says about “zeroing out” when you miss a day on your streak is true.

But why specifically do results compound and successes escalate when you’re consistent?

The best answer I have for that is - Consistency creates leverage.

As Alex Hormozi describes it, the amount of leverage you have determines the amount of output you have for a given input. More leverage means more output.

The way that I see it, when we’re consistent we create leverage by becoming more efficient and effective.

It’s by being more efficient and effective that we can literally produce higher-quality outputs from the same raw materials of input.

The core mechanism of consistency is it gives you more repetitions. WIth more repetitions you get two very important things: More feedback and more attempts.

First about feedback - More feedback gives you more clarity on what works and what doesn’t. Per the 80/20 rule, feedback illuminates the 20% of the things that generate 80% of the results. Doing more of the right things means there’s less wasted effort, and less wasted effort is more efficient. This creates leverage.

Now about having more attempts - For you to get better at anything, you need to just do it more times. Theorizing and planning doesn’t actually give you the hands-on experience you need to tangibly improve. A rule of the universe is we naturally get better at things the more we do them, especially when under the guidance of ‘deliberate practice’.

This causes us to increase our level of skill. And when we have improved skill, we can do things more effectively (and therefore with more leverage).  

The last part about this that needs an explanation - Why are consistent repetitions more valuable than just repetitions?

Well the first and obvious reason is that more consistency leads to more repetitions, so it gives the process more opportunities to work. But more pointedly, consistency causes clarity and skill-development to stack.

When there’s time between repetitions, we don’t capture the enriched state of the previous improvement. The clarity becomes less cohesive, and the skill becomes less fluent.

Improvement and skill development follow a regression curve where over time the quality degenerates. If more time passes, your next repetition has more ground to make up and needs to ‘redo’ the previous advancement that was lost.

This is why consistency itself is another mechanism for creating leverage - It creates efficiencies and effectiveness within the process of development.

Now multiply these two factors of how repetitions work to create more clarity and skill, and how consistency promotes faster levels of progress... That’s how consistency is truly an exponentiator!

Knowing this information is one thing, but doing something with it is another. You must work to be consistent in your health and daily focus so that consistency can work its magic behind the scenes. If you want to see my secret sauce to being more disciplined and consistent in all areas of my life, this is for you!

In an effort to make self-improvement more relatable, I want to share a personal example of how I’ve been working through something that has really been holding me back. If you’ve ever felt like an imposter, low on self-confidence, or like what you do isn’t good enough, this is especially for you.

Our beliefs serve as the unconscious filter that everything in our life passes through. Solidified over years of feedback, lessons, and learnings, our beliefs are responsible for the immediate meaning that we take out of what we experience.

Here’s one way this concept has been showing up in my life - Over the last few months I’ve been aware of a belief I have that I don’t offer enough value in my work. To compensate for this belief I’ve found that I do two things.

1) I compulsively over deliver on everything I do to make sure I’m delivering enough value (which is good!)

2) I have a tendency to overload things to try and create more opportunity for value (which actually decreases value because it makes the best stuff harder to find).

And interestingly, I’ve observed this belief in action in an odd way. When I receive a text from a client or someone who is paying for my support, I automatically assume it’s bad news.

My mind defaults to thinking they’re upset or they want to cancel. All from just a notification that I received a text from them.

Of course I don’t want this to be my reality and my unconscious filter, so for a few months I’ve been working on it. As part of the daily high-performance review and reflection I do at the end of every day, I’ve been prompting myself to find one instance that suggests I’m giving ridiculous value in my work.

This means every day I’m training my mind to see all of the reasons why I’m great at what I do and how much it changes people’s lives. The way that our belief system shifts is through evidence. For months I’ve been stacking evidence to support the new belief, that I’m giving ridiculous value in my work, so that I begin to see it unconsciously too.

And, so that someday soon when I get a text from a client my gut-reaction is “they’re texting me about a huge win in their life” rather than thinking they’re upset about something.

Honestly that’s more often the case, and it’s the way I want to think because it inspires me to be bigger and bolder in my mission to change lives and change the world!

No one is above this work! I hope you realize that. And know that the more we allow ourselves to show up for it, the better we get! If you want to check out my daily performance review / routine, watch this video where I run you through it top to bottom!