One of the hardest parts about being the best version of ourselves is making consistent good choices. As Darren Hardy says “You make your choices and then your choices make you.” And that’s because choices lead to actions, and actions generate results.

But sometimes, those good choices involve doing things that conflict with the commitments we’ve made, or are outside of our the standards we want to hold ourselves to. Is it reasonable to skip a workout when you’re feeling a little sick? What about if you have a critical project at work? Or if an opportunity pops up that you don’t want to miss?

There’s a lot of grey area… And that’s why I’m making up a word today: “Acception”. An ‘acception’ is an acceptable exception. It’s a choice you make where you’re fully considering the factors at play and decide to skip, reschedule, compromise, or do a smaller version of what you committed to.

It’s a choice to move forward in the direction that deviates from what you would normally want to do, but you feel it is best for you.

It’s an exception that is being made for the right reasons.

And here’s why you need to be really thoughtful when it’s acceptable to make an exception: Our minds are constantly trying to convince us to make exceptions to the rule. That it’s okay to not do this or follow through on that this one time, but those decisions are often motivated by the wrong things and it can become a a slippery slope.

The tricky part about this process is knowing when you mean it. Your mind will give you reasons and excuses, and it might seem like it’s acceptable to make an exception, but is it really? And especially when you’re trying to determine what you authentically think about something in the moment, your rational thinking is being biased by the emotions and context of the here and now, and you can convince yourself that any choice is logical.

That means, the only way to know if something is truly an ‘acception’, an acceptable exception, is upon reflection. When you are removed from the moment of the decision and you reflect on the choice you made, the truth comes out. And it’s the reason why getting feedback and reviewing your performance is so critical. Without taking a pause to think it through, you don’t get any clearer on what your values are, what your tolerances are, what are acceptable exceptions, and it leaves your decision making up to chance.

To get this idea working for you, my recommendation is that you implement your own daily performance tracking system so that you can start seeing the truth of your choices, and tap into your next level of self-discipline as a result.

I hate to break it to you… There’s no such thing as a perfect person. Even the most disciplined person has days and moments where they give into temptation or make a choice that doesn’t fully align with their values. A lot of credit is given to those who stay consistent and committed, and rightfully so. But an equal amount of credit is due to the person who gets knocked off track but can recover quickly. 

Let me explain this using the metaphor of a plane. When a plane takes off it has a destination in mind. The shortest, fastest path to that destination is a straight line. But when in the air, planes face headwinds that push them off path. 

In a first scenario, the headwind hits and the pilot doesn’t do anything about it, so the plane flies two degrees off course. Hours later when it’s time to land the plane is hundreds of miles away from where it should be and needs to make significant corrections to reach its destination.

In a second scenario, the headwind hits and knocks the plane two degrees off course. But this time the pilot notices and adjusts the plane’s direction. At the end of the flight, the plane ends up exactly where it’s meant to be, and it gets there one microcorrection at a time.

The reason most people quit is because they find themselves too far off course. They take on a monthly fitness challenge that now seems impossible, or have business projections that now are just a pipe dream. They see the difference between where they wanted to be and where they are, and give up because the gap is just too big. 

But if you have the awareness to know that you’ve been knocked off course, you can make a small correction in the moment that gets you back on track. You can prevent a big divide by taking corrective action before too much time passes. 

This is just as true for a plane flight as it is for your personal goals. You have a day where you lacked consistency or missed the mark, a ‘cheat day’... The end result of that choice can go two different ways. Either you let it go unnoticed and snowball into more misaligned days, or you do something about it to get right back on track. 

Getting back on track is simple to do and requires these two things: The awareness that it happened and the discipline to take corrective action.

The natural reaction is to feel bad for yourself, criticize, and lament your mistake. But the most successful can overcome the negativity they’re feeling, pick themselves back up, and fix it before too much damage is done. It’s those who can consistently and quickly reorient their approach that spend the least amount of time off track. And therefore, they’re the most effective at reaching their goals and getting where they want to go.

Let me know if you can relate with this... You have a full day of good, intentional, healthy choices. You get up without pressing ‘Snooze’, get a good workout in and a healthy breakfast, stay focused on your work and do a good job avoiding distractions that pop up or time scrolling on social media, cook a healthy dinner and enjoy it while you’re present with loved ones, and now it’s time to wind-down for bed.

It’s at this time of night when your will has been spent, you’re feeling tired, and you’re at risk of undoing all of the good work you’ve done all day. Healthy meals are erased by binging on dessert and sweets when you’re not even hungry. You give in to the allure of your phone notifications and catch yourself scrolling mindlessly for 30 minutes. You do ‘one last thing’ for work that leads to doing many other work-related things that aren’t that important. And before you know it, your good day has been spoiled by a few bad choices.

This is the unfortunate fate for many of us. We do so well all day and then in the evening lose self-control. And for those of us who are committed to being our best, we can’t afford to let our guard down at the end of the day.

There’s something called ‘revenge bedtime procrastination’ where people feel the need to make up for their busy daytime schedule by letting loose before bed. It’s an outlet to combat rigidness with unrestrained personal leisure time.

And it comes at a cost the consciously we’re unwilling to pay. We don’t want to undo our good work today or set ourselves back for tomorrow, yet ‘revenge bedtime procrastination’ is common because we’re susceptible to lapses in judgment at the end of a long and tiring day.  We don’t want it or choose it, yet it hijacks our mind and pulls us off course.

Here are a few things you can do to offset this:

1. Have a step-by-step night routine. Rather than needing to figure out what the right choice is, you can decide that in advance, making it much easier to follow through on more productive behaviors. My recommendation is to set an alarm in the evening that kicks off your night-routine so that you have the awareness to do it consistently.

2. Set some rules. Included in the details of your night routine, you can set rules for yourself. Things like “no sugar after 8pm”, “no using my phone in bed”, “no emails after dinner”, etc. This helps establish a boundary and makes it clear to you if you cross it.

3. Utilize accountability. Knowing that you need to answer to your choices later, even your most-tired self is motivated to avoid the consequences of letting someone else down. When you’re aware of what the culprits of your ‘revenge bedtime procrastination’ usually are, you can structure accountability to address it directly

We’re all more likely to make poor choices when we’re tired, but don’t let your guard down at the end of a long day. Instead let your good choices compound uninterrupted in the direction of your goals.

One of the lesser talked about but biggest influences in our daily decision making is ‘necessity’. Necessity basically refers to how important it is that something gets done. And when something truly needs to get done, people figure it out somehow, some way.

The power of necessity is clear in an example Darren Hardy shares in ‘The Compound Effect’, but he calls it ‘Why Power’. He basically sets the scene of a plank connecting to skyscraper buildings. Would you cross the plank for $20? No way. But what if your loved ones were on the other side, they need help, and the building was on fire. Would you cross then? I bet you would, or at least you’d be way more likely to!

That’s exactly what necessity does - it influences you to do things you wouldn’t if you didn’t have the need to. It changes the way you evaluate risk, find motivation, and navigate the world in order to meet the demands of the moment.

Last week I was getting on an airplane and had a middle seat. As I found my row, the woman on the aisle was fast asleep and blocking my way. Under normal circumstances, waking up a stranger by tapping them on the shoulder is something I’m very unlikely to do. But in this moment, with a line of people behind me waiting to find their seats and no alternative option, I didn’t hesitate for a second and woke the woman up right away.

Necessity works unconsciously. It’s not like I thought through all of my options in real-time on the plane… My brain made an instantaneous evaluation, weighing the necessity of the moment, and drew a conclusion. Necessity influences you at all times without even realizing it.

And necessity takes two different forms:

The first is as something that you want, like a goal you’re passionate about or approval from a loved one. When you want something so desperately, you become willing to do things that other people won’t.

The second form is as avoiding something you don’t want. A father works long hours at a job he doesn’t like to keep his family from facing hardship, or a mom who finds super-strength to lift a car to save her trapped child from getting crushed. 

To really simplify it, humans are motivated to change course in order to satisfy unmet needs. And the greater the unmet need, the more motivated you become to do something about it.

I’ve been referring to self-improvement lately as a process that happens “brick by brick”.

In the name of improving our lives, we wish that we could introduce sweeping changes to our lives all at once… But the reality is that positive change  needs to be introduced one element at a time for it to be truly sustainable and lasting. 



The term ‘brick by brick’ refers to the process of building a brick home or a wall. It’s a slow job of smearing some mortar and cement, positioning a single brick on top of it, and repeating the process over and over again. Each brick needs to be placed precisely in order for the entire structure to be strong.

When it comes to self-improvement, people overestimate how much they can take on at once but underestimate how profoundly they can change over time. They think they can lay 10 bricks at the same time and don’t realize how quickly they can lay 1000 bricks when they follow a disciplined process. One habit, routine, and life-system at a time, brick by brick you can build up your life.

This is what it looks like. Let’s say that you have some bad habits and you want to completely revolutionize your health. The unsustainable approach is to begin a new diet plan and commit to working out out every day starting immediately. But adding too much all at once will cause your foundation to crumble. 

Focusing one week at a time, starting with getting into the gym twice, then three times, then four times, then adding cardio and ramping it up progressively… And then starting a new diet plan by cutting out sugar after 8pm, then completely, then swapping extra carbs with plates of vegetables… In 2 months you could actually achieve your big health goals and feel like it wasn’t that hard to do. 

From there you can take on even more ambitious health initiatives like running your first marathon, and you’re so much more likely to succeed with it because you have a foundation of muscle and strength that makes you less vulnerable to injury, and you are in the habit of fueling your body better so that you can maximize your recovery.

That’s what it looks like to introduce positive change to your life ‘brick by brick’. That’s the sustainable path toward becoming the best version of yourself. And if you need help building the discipline and structure you need to succeed with this incremental approach, this is something I know will help.

A main reason that people choose to invest time in their self improvement is because they want to accelerate their progress. They have goals and ambitions to grow their business, get into a healthy and active lifestyle, to make an impact, and they realize the clock is ticking.

What I’m about to share are 3 steps any person can take to accelerate their progress so that they achieve the level of success they know they’re capable of, and it comes from personal experience.

For many years I believed in my heart I was capable of great things, that I was going to do something amazing in the world, but I didn’t have the results to justify it. Month after month falling short of my goals, it made me doubt that I had what it takes to succeed. And it stayed that way until I learned and implemented these 3 steps, and it completely shifted the trajectory of my life.

Step 1) Incorporate daily behavior tracking.

Plain and simple: “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” Most people aren't doing anything to track their performance and it's the main reason why they're falling short of their goals. It’s the thing keeping them stuck at a plateau. The reason it’s so game-changing is because without the data to know what's working and what's not, improvement is a guessing game.

For something to 'improve' means that it experienced a positive change over time. This requires that you have clear metrics for how things were at the beginning and how they ended up. It’s the direction of progress between those data points that indicates progress, and it’s with that clarity you can guide the direction of your growth.

Step 2) Implement a reliable system of execution

Once you have your tracking in place, now you need to take action in the ways that most influence your results. I bet you already know what you should be doing… You just need to do more of it, do it more consistently, or do it better to get the results you're after.

High-quality, consistent, disciplined follow through comes when you structure your environment to make taking action automatic. Things like an implementation intention, accountability, and systems all help you funnel your time and energy into real action-taking. Saying you're going to take action is usually just an empty promise without an environment backing it up.

Step 3) Optimize your approach with feedback

Back to the original point, feedback is the only thing that actually accelerates progress. It’s the mechanism of incremental improvement because you can take each insight as a clue to the solving the puzzle of being as effective as possible. Without feedback, you don’t change anything about the way you’re taking action and you continue generating the same results.

And good, high-quality feedback requires that you take action and have tracking in place to measure how you did. It's a cycle that leads to optimization: 

Take action → Measure how you did → Make adjustments to your actions + environment → Repeat with a new and improved action.

That is optimization, that’s how you get better results with less effort and in less time, and that’s how you accelerate your progress. But many people don’t know where to start in actually creating meaningful improvement in their life, or are unwilling to do the basic things that generate fast-improvement. I was one of them until I got fed up with disappointing myself and falling short of my goals. 

And that’s when I began my decade long journey of figuring it out for myself. But you can skip that trial and error and implement it all in just three weeks in a step-by-step process I created. It is a self-growth, goal-achieving, best-life accelerator. Check it out here.

Now more than ever, we are tasked to make so many decisions in any given day. Decisions about different things to do, options to select between, what’s worth our attention and what’s a distraction… And it wears us down leading to fatigue, paralysis, and added difficulty to navigating life.

Last week I heard a perspective on this from my good friend, Kate Manser. She’s an unbelievable speaker, author, coach and leader of the You Might Die Tomorrow movement. I co-hosted a live session with her for my coaching community and she shared a powerful principle: “You need to aim for 60-70% certainty when making a decision.”

This makes perfect sense when you go to the extreme of 100% certainty. What would need to happen in order to be 100% certain about something? Life is notoriously unpredictable making 100% certainty basically impossible. But what about 95%, 90%, 85% certainty… What needs to happen to get to that point?

In short, it requires more thought, more research, and more energy, often to the point where it offers diminishing returns. As you’re trying to think your way into higher levels of certainty, you don’t get anywhere near as much out as you put in. And the reason is, all of that extra effort is theoretical. It’s limited by your understanding of how you think things will transpire when you choose different unknown paths. 

That’s why the fastest way to increase certainty is to get practical feedback. To make a decision and observe what actually happens. There’s no way to predict reality like experiencing reality. The insight you can extract from something that tangibly happens is unquestionably more informative than continuing to think more about what might happen.  

Let’s take the example of making a putt in golf, and let’s say you’re 70% certain that it’s going to break 9 inches to the left. On one hand, you can take an extra 5 minutes to evaluate every factor including the wind, the dampness of the green, etc. Or you could just hit the putt once and see what happens.

But in the case of playing a round of golf, you don’t have the luxury of a second try. The first one is the only one that counts. But even so, what often happens beyond seeking 70% certainty is you stop using the most impactful details and get biased by minor details, which could skew your overall understanding of the shot. This creates a higher likelihood that you get a bad result.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink” he talks about the sharpness of our intuition through a process called “thin slicing”, and how we can think our way out of the right decision if we take too many unimportant factors into consideration.

And ultimately, many of us hesitate to make big decisions in our life because we fear that we’re going to make the wrong one.  It’s embarrassing to look back and realize we made a mistake… And as we make decisions on the direction of our businesses, what events to attend, travel plans to book, people to invest more time in, we want to be thoughtful about our choices.

But the truth is, most decisions are reversible. It’s not that you only have one chance to hit a putt, you get many. So the fastest way to know how things work, and to be set up for success, is to make decisions sooner so that you can get practical feedback faster. So don’t put too much pressure on yourself... And give yourself the space for trial and error.

I don’t normally do this, but if you want to watch this hour-long, very powerful session I hosted for my Coaching Community featuring Kate and her take on Decision Making With Urgency And Meaning, particularly through the lens of our own mortality, you can watch it here!

There are some things that we procrastinate on, delay doing, and avoid unlike anything else. The longer we wait, the more anticipation builds making whatever it is feel insurmountable. This is true for things like doing a cold plunge or taking a cold shower, getting around to doing your taxes, or beginning a difficult conversation.

But the truth of it is, we overestimate how much these things are going to hurt, or how frustrating they’re going to be, or how uncomfortable it might make us. Our minds create a perception that what we’re about to do is a bigger deal than it is, and it keeps us stuck in inaction.

In my experience, I’ve found that it’s not as bad once you start. A cold plunge was colder and more painful in your head than it is when you’re actually in it. Taxes are way more confusing when you’re thinking about them rather than in the thick of doing them. A difficult conversation is way more constructive and natural than you expected it to be.

The reason it's not as bad once you start is because there’s a shift in intention. No longer are you negotiating with yourself about if or when you’re going to do the thing, and instead you start investing yourself in how you’re going to do the thing. ‘If’ creates an uncertainty where your mind gets to fill in the blank with a worst case scenario, but ‘how’ means you’re in the experience of it and there’s less up to interpretation.

Metaphorically it’s like hiking up a mountain. At the bottom as you’re about to start, you look up and see how daunting it is. But once you’re actually hiking, you just have to take it one step at a time. There’s an exaggerated expectation of how hard it’s going to be at the beginning that gets put in its place once you get started.

And rightfully so, that’s why the hardest part of anything is to start. I do a lot of Spartan Races, which are like Tough Mudders with obstacles and barriers, and they say “The hardest part about running a Spartan Race is getting to the starting line.” More dreams die from the fear people experience before getting started than from being incapable of doing it.

So for that thing that feels too big for you, that you don’t feel prepared for, you’ll never feel fully ready for it. And, the fastest way to feel more confident is to begin and you’ll realize, it’s not as hard as you made it out to be in your mind.

It’s not as bad once you start, so get to it! Otherwise you’re choosing to sit in the pain.