Self Improvement Daily Podcast

When you’re on an airplane you’re surrounded by a bunch of strangers - people you know nothing about but happen to be sharing space with. And if you’re not very social on planes then it’s likely they’ll stay that way and go on with their life.

But recently when I was on a plane and stood up to stretch my legs, I scanned ahead of me about 8 rows and noticed the top of someone’s head but this time, it was someone I knew - someone I just spent 4 days with supporting communities in Nicaragua.

Because of our time together, she’s not a stranger. I know how her husband proposed to her. I know what she’s passionate about. I know what her dreams are, what she’s building, what she values, and a little bit about what makes her the way she is. She’s not just another random person on an airplane, she’s a dear friend.

Seeing her amid the sea of others, I chose to do something that you’ve probably thought of or done before, but I want you to really deeply consider it again:

I chose to see everyone else on the plane not just as another person completely out of context, but as someone with a story just like her.

Every seat is filled with someone who’s a parent or friend. They each have a hometown, heartbreak, and moments of triumph. Every person has their own expertise, insecurity, and vision for their future.

We go about life and we forget that every person we encounter is one of the most important people in the world to someone else. What if we chose to see them like that ourselves?

There’s a faith-based term called ‘Imago Dei’ which roughly translates to ‘seeing the image of God in others’. Religious or not, the principle is simple - slow down to see others at a deeper level for who they are.

If we were to do that - We’d be friendlier, kinder, and more helpful. We’d be more tolerant, patient, and curious. We’d see how much humanity we share with them and not just that we happen to be in the same place at the same time.

Anyway, that was the perspective I acquired when I saw my friend on the plane. Before we met she was just a stranger, and now she’s someone I care deeply for. And I believe each person is capable of the same should we take the time to get to know them.

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I went to Nicaragua for a humanitarian trip and it led to many introspective moments, one in particular I want to share with you. 

I was remarkably safe the entire time - the people there are so kind but there’s always risk when you visit a foreign country and go to remote villages. That must have been in my mind as I arrived at a very meaningful question:

Let’s say it all ended today, and my friends and family wanted to distribute every dollar to my name in my honor… What would I want them to do with my money?

Of course our impact is about way more than where we put our money, but it’s an interesting scenario to consider. Sad and hopefully not going to happen any time soon, but interesting.

What are the specific causes, communities, or organizations you’d really want to impact? Is there an initiative you’re starting that you’d want them to help bring to life? Remember it’s not money for your friends and family, they’re the ones allocating it on your behalf.

For me, what I’d want them to do is carry out the vision I have for my nonprofit the For Purpose Foundation. I’m building a movement helping people change their life and change the world. Where people become the best version of themselves and in turn give their best to the causes they care about. 

And while that’s what I’d want them to do, if I’m being honest, I don’t know that the people who are closest to me would know to do that. What that tells me is I’m not showing up as big or as bold as I could be for what I believe in and care the most about.

Which leads to an important perspective that extends off of the original question: If that’s what you’d want people to do with your money if you weren’t here, why isn’t that what you’re doing with your time, talent, and money while you are here?

I’m realizing that I’ve been too passive about the movement I aspire to build. I’ve been waiting for the right conditions, the right context, the right timing. And I imagine you might be too.

I want you to seriously consider this question: If you wanted your friends and family to distribute every dollar to your name and carry on your legacy, what would you want them to do?

And further if you have the courage to do so, ask yourself what’s holding you back from investing more of yourself in exactly that right now?

Cheers to changing our life and changing the world!

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One of ‘humanity’s fatal flaws’ is that we are designed to prefer immediate gratification. Our inclination to meet our immediate needs for high-carb foods, energy conservation, stimulation, and safety (among other things) is responsible for many of the choices we make that we later regret. 

It’s a battle we fight every day: What feels good in the short term is bad in the long-run… And what’s best for you in the long-run often doesn’t feel good in the short term. 

For that reason - personal development, self-growth, and ‘living your best life’ is often associated with being more disciplined. In doing so we reject our impulses and take action in ways that serve as investments for our future-self.

Given this context and speaking of Future-Self… I’m currently re-reading the book “Be Your Future Self Now” by Benjamin Hardy and wanted to highlight a brilliant way he expands on the way we relate with our efforts to delay gratification:

Either we’re sacrificing for our future self, or we’re investing in them.

Sacrifice makes being disciplined seem like it’s inconvenient and undesirable. Like there’s a big cost that you feel that decreases your quality of life.

Investing in your future self feels way more additive and productive. Like a traditional investment, you’re allocating resources now for a greater amount later. We willingly and consciously offer what we have now as a means of getting a return on our investment.

And it makes so much sense. Your Future Self is you today, but more! More capacity. More skills. More character. How are you supposed to become more? Investing today to yield more tomorrow.

So the next time you’re holding yourself accountable to making the decision that serves you in the long-term - choosing salad over fries, getting to bed on time when your friends are staying out late, saving money for a program and not blowing it on things you don’t need - try to view it as an investment.

It’s not feeling like you’re refusing to give yourself something that you want now… But rather choosing to give yourself something way more valuable in the future. 

Now don’t get me wrong, it still might feel like a bummer. This new perspective doesn’t guarantee that you’ll always feel inspired to invest in your Future Self.  But rather than doubling down on how much you’re sacrificing, putting more pressure on yourself that it’ll all be worth it, you can view it as an intentional bet you're placing on yourself and one day, you’ll get to see how it pays out!

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The unfortunate part about holding yourself to a high standard is that you can be really hard on yourself. A mistake is viewed as a setback against what was possible, a change of plans can disrupt efficiency, falling short on a goal can make you feel like you’re not good enough…

We talk about having a growth mindset but it’s one of those things that is really easy to say and much harder to do. I know for myself I’ve often tried to convince myself to see the good, opportunity, and lessons in challenges but in my heart had a hard time believing it. 

I’m proud of how far I’ve come with it, and how much better life is when you can genuinely turn failure into feedback. That’s why I want to share an incredible perspective I learned from my good friend Gregory Benedikt. In his Newsletter last week he talked about treating life like a GPS.

Do you know what a GPS does when you’re driving and you make a wrong turn or miss an exit? It recalculates. Given the information it has at hand, it determines the best path to get to your destination.

It doesn’t shame you or tell you how awful you are… It quickly reroutes you.

Imagine we build that some reflex for ourselves, where rather than being held up by a mistake we just adjust to it? Negative thought spirals and emotion would no longer consume us. We’d just do our best to follow our new path, and execute our new plan.

The main element at play here is detachment. That’s the first layer. If you can successfully separate from the outcome and steward the experience of it, there will be way less resistance when things go awry. 

And if you want to take it one step further like Gregory does in his own way, embrace those changes with curiosity. Reframe them as a great thing to have happened, a blessing you didn’t know you needed, with wonder for what might come from it. 

If you want to learn more about Greg and his work, I’ve got his website linked here where you can sign up for his Newsletter.

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One of my biggest fears as someone who works hard and makes sacrifices is that I’m doing the wrong things. The reality is, no matter how talented or consistent you are, if you’re not taking action in impactful ways then you’ll never generate the results you deserve.

That’s been me in business committing to a marketing tactic… In my energy trying to fix daily midday brain fog… And in my mindset when I got really discouraged by rejection.

At the heart of it, I didn’t know if what I was doing was actually working and it caused me to question my decisions. That led to hedging my bet trying to do too many things, not doing any of them well enough, and basically guaranteed that I would underachieve.

Ultimately it’s a matter of being crippled by uncertainty. If only I knew for certain that doing one thing would create undeniable progress, I’d do it all day long. If only I knew what specific inputs were responsible for positively influencing desired outputs… So that’s what I sought to create for myself.

The only way you can know if what you’re doing is actually working is by measuring it and drawing a correlation. This is central to the ‘4 Disciplines Of Execution’ philosophy where you’re encouraged to identify ‘lag measures’ and ‘lead measures’:

Lag measures are the outcomes you want at the end of the day… And lead measures are the activities that are most likely to generate those outcomes.

Here’s the process I’ve arrived at. First you get clear on what you want (lag measure), then you place your best bet on what you think is most likely to get what you want, then you focus up on doing that thing, and after you’ve done it for a significant enough amount of time, observe if more action leads to more results.

In many ways it’s an experiment, which is simple in theory but not necessarily easy in practice.

Here’s how I’ve operationalized this for myself to grow my business, using slightly different vocabulary:

1) Desired Outcome: Lead more workshops in online communities (which I’ve seen grows my business)

2) Measured Output: # of connections with individuals who lead these communities

3) Action Input: Reconnect with 5 people in my network every day, book catch up calls with them, find ways to add value to their world and if appropriate ask for referrals and recommendations

4) Conditions Of Experiment: Commit to doing that for 3 months without questioning the strategy

5) Set Target For Significance: Consider that 3 new aligned connections, one of which leading to collaborating in a Workshop, to be evidence of a meaningful outcome 

Again, the point is to know clearly how well something is working. With a more objective and informed look at it, you can better determine what to do next.

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People are truly busier than ever, and that’s not a good thing. 

When you’re busy you’re stretched beyond capacity and don’t know that you’ll be able to deliver on all of your responsibilities…

When you’re busy you’re more likely to deprioritize your own wellness because it seems to have the smallest negative impact, especially when compared to the needs of others who are depending on you…

The things that take precedence in life, that are truly important and valuable, aren’t the things that you’d say make you busy. Busy means stressed and beginning to burn out. If it didn’t have a negative feeling to it, we’d represent that by saying our life is ‘full’.

There are two reasons why it’s so easy to be busy:

1) There’s more to do than ever. We no longer live small and simple lives. The scope of the world has expanded dramatically with the internet. Information and ideas are everywhere and because of that, there’s so much more we want to do. 

This is causing us to feel like we’re falling behind because there are so many more things we’re aware we can have, do, try, and contribute to. Other people are doing it, so why can’t we? Well, it’s because we’re confined by the same 24 hours we always had.

2) We’ve been raised up in an environment that rewards the pursuit for more. Over the course of our lives we’ve been taught that important and valued people achieve more. And as social creatures who just want to be liked by others, we seek validation by adding more to our plate and impressing with our accomplishments.

This has led to a natural state where, to meet that need, we unconsciously take on more. It contributes to a mindset of ‘compulsive productivity’ and is the reason why creating space for ourselves can feel so uncomfortable.

As an overachiever with big ambitions, this has been my story. I’ve been training for this, taking on a new volunteer position for that, hustling a new project for the other… All in the name of hoping other people make me feel good about myself.

And here’s what I learned about that: You try to do it all, you do none of it well. And that makes you doubt yourself even more because you’re not succeeding in the ways you feel like you should, especially for how smart and hardworking you are.

This is why I personally made a shift away from productivity and now consider intentionality to be the North Star in my life.

It’s not about doing more things… It’s about doing better things more, and more things better. 

It’s easier said than done, and if you’re curious, I’ve created a system that serves as my best chance of figuring that out. Click here to give it a look.

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I was presented a challenging question by a friend and mentor, Markus Kallius. I’d like to answer that question and extend it to you:

What’s your fruit in the world?

The context comes from using the metaphor of a tree. The quality of a tree’s fruit depends on the quality of the tree. There are many things in life that can be contorted to look different than it actually is. But that’s not the case for fruit - Only a healthy tree can produce high-quality fruit, and a sick or malnourished tree can only produce undesirable, affected fruit.

So what are our fruits as humans? 

They go beyond just results because those are caught up in appearance and can be deceiving. What are the ways that we as humans express ourselves into the world that can’t be faked? Things that are pure and raw without any framing around it?

The first one that comes to mind is how we feel about ourselves. It’s hard to deceive our deepest intuition, and while we can put on an act for others, how we feel about ourselves in private is really telling of the quality of our person.

Reflecting on that for myself, I can look at my efforts with pride knowing that I’m trying hard. And while I do have insecurities and doubts, I’ve largely accepted them and don’t let them sink my self-esteem.

Your turn: How do you feel about yourself in private?

The second fruit that comes to mind is also an internal perception, but this time related to how authentically we’re living. How genuinely do you feel like you can be yourself?

For me, I feel like I’m the most myself around my wife, family, and close friends. I’ve had a history of not being completely honest about things for fear of what others would think about me, and I’ve made a lot of progress on that. 

Your turn: How authentically are you living?

And the last fruit that comes to mind is how connected others feel to us. Do they feel safe, supported, and seen? Are they asking for your advice and desiring your company?

This is harder to measure because you can’t get in someone else’s head and know for certain, but you can use past conversations and stressful situations as evidence. 

I do get a lot of requests for guidance, but that’s the space I’ve chosen to take up in the world. So that might not be as applicable for me. As it relates to quality time with others, I find myself seeking to make plans with others more than they ask me, but am confident in the quality of the connection when we do get together.

Your turn: How connected do you feel others are to you? 

Thinking back on the original question, “What’s your fruit in the world?”, I guess I have a different take on this… You’d think that our ‘fruit’ as humans would be what we put out into the world, but things aren’t always as they seem. I think our truest nature comes out in private, when there’s no performance and all we have left is ourselves.

It’s the part that others can’t really see. Maybe that’s why the expression goes “You’ve got to change the roots to change the fruits”.

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One of the most influential people in my self-growth, and the concepts I’ve shared for years on the podcast, is my mentor Jim Bunch. He introduced me to the concept of living life by design, not by default. He taught me the everpresent influence your environment has on you. He helped me finetune my understanding about our belief system and how it gets expressed into the world. He helped me determine my core values as a person.

And with all of that said, there’s still one thing I got from Jim that lives above all else. Jim has a mantra, a life philosophy that speaks to the core of what I’m here on Earth to do: “Change your life. Change the world.”

Our purpose is to maximize our potential, to become the most conscious, authentic, best version of ourselves… So that we can maximize the impact we have on the world. 

I’m committed to changing my life so that I can change the world in the way only I’m capable of, and helping others do the same.

It’s so resonant for me that it echoes the foundation of the nonprofit I’ve started called the For Purpose Foundation. We’re building a movement for people who want to change their life and change the world, and give them the resources, outlets, and support to achieve both.

Our impact and our self-growth are more intricately connected than you might think. Both are dynamic processes that are never complete. They’re everpresent intentions that guide our decisions. And they both interact with each other. Reaching the ceiling of our impact informs us on how we need to expand as an individual. It determines the direction of our growth, the skills and characteristics we need to develop, in order to elevate our capacity to impact. 

You can’t maximize your difference in the world without maximizing your potential… And you can’t feel like you’re using your potential to the fullest if it’s not contributing to something bigger than yourself.

I don’t know that there are two things I feel more passionable about - changing my life and changing the world - and I plan to see just how far I can take both.

It’s a master-intention that governs everything else. It dictates what I do on a daily basis to be the best man, husband, friend, family member, and collaborator I can be. It reminds me what all the hard-work and sacrifice is for. It’s even woven into the intro for my podcast because it’s what I want you to hear every day:

“A better world starts with a better you and yes you can.”

Whether you realize it or not, you’re already part of the movement. Welcome! Now let’s get to work, changing our lives and changing the world.

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The single focus that is most central to my growth, improvement, and personal process is to be as intentional as possible. It’s my North Star, my guiding principle, and the thing that I’m complimented about the most. 

It also happens to be my biggest insecurity - that I don’t actually have good intentions and I’m just an incredibly selfish person - and as a result I’ve overcompensated to place a high importance on operating with intention in everything I do.

All that aside, I’d like to run through what I’ve come to understand to be true about intentionality and why it’s so effective.

First, there is nothing that will change your life more effectively than being intentional. There are pursuits that will change your life more, but none more effectively. And that’s because being intentional helps you create the realities and futures you want most. When our efforts are oriented in the direction of what we value most, and what's most important to us, our actions follow suit and our reality shifts accordingly.

Changing your life like that requires two different things: ‘Awareness’ to know exactly what you want amid all the tradeoffs and options available to you… And ‘Discipline’ to follow through on what you’ve chosen despite the resistance and circumstances around you. 

Simply put, being more intentional is an ongoing process where you continue to elevate your awareness (or consciousness) and increase your self-discipline. 

But here’s the thing that a lot of people misunderstand: Being intentional isn’t about being perfect, or waiting to make the perfect choice. It’s faithfully moving forward as best as you can with the level of awareness you have. It’s not meant to be overthought, overcomplicated, or a cause for delay… It’s an imperfect convicted step.

This all connects closely to my favorite quote of all time by Maya Angelou - “Do your best until you know better, then when you know better, do better.”

Which brings me to the final point. Intentionality is optimization. We’re constantly acquiring more awareness, filling in gaps of knowledge or learning about new options. Intentionality requires both a willingness to change your mind when new information is presented, a flexibility to accommodate life as it happens… And discernment to stay committed to a certain path even when something else comes up that’s attractive or distracting. 

Ultimately intentionality is about choice: Awareness informs the choice, discipline fulfills it. And the more you can be aware of the choices you’re making, or guiding the choices that are being made unconsciously, the more you’ll steer your life in the direction of what you most authentically want.

It’s making good on our good intentions for who we want to be, how we want to show up, and the impact we can make in the world. Is there anything more important than that?

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