Mike Sturm

If you have 3 minutes at the end of the day, you can do this — and it will change the way you approach each day.

Photo by Daria Shevtsova on Unsplash

Here’s a question for you: what were you doing at this time 4 years ago? Unless a huge life-altering event happened to you at that time, you might have trouble answering the question. If you did have trouble, it’s likely because you don’t keep a journal.

By now, you’re probably familiar with at least some of the benefits of journaling regularly, so I won’t recount them here. But I will discuss a problem that many of us face regarding journaling: it seems to daunting to do regularly. So we don’t end up doing it, and thus don’t reap the benefits.

Well, I love simple and elegant solutions to persistent problems. So here’s a good one for you.

The problem

You don’t have time to journal. Or maybe the prospect of sitting down to write out what happened during the day makes you want to curl up in the fetal position on the floor. I feel your pain.

Heck, I’m a writer, but I still struggle with the idea of sitting down to journal. But we’re all aware by now of the documented benefits of journaling, right? It helps you get more focused on what’s important. It helps you better process what happened during the day. It makes you a more present person, and prevents weeks, months, and years from flying by with you being unable to remember what that time meant to you.

So what do you do?

The Solution

The 3 x 3 journal. Take no more than 3 minutes at the end of your day, and answer these 3 questions. Take no more than 1 minute on each.

• What did I get done today?
• What should I have done, but didn’t?
• What will I do differently tomorrow?

It’s dead simple — almost too simple. But that’s the point.

When done correctly, these three questions help you establish 2 effective habits. First, they get you in the habit of reviewing your day in terms of what you accomplished (praise and recognition for yourself), and what you are motivated to change (the basis of personal growth).

Secondly, reflecting in this way each night trains your mind to approach your day more proactively. Because you know that at night, you’ll be recording what you did, as well as what you’d have done differently, you’ll tend to be more motivated to accomplish important things. There is a bit of shame in writing “I didn’t accomplish anything,” or in listing things that are not in line with your priorities.

How to Do it

There will be the temptation to complicate this process, but it’s important to keep it simple. List one or two things under each question. Write less than you feel like writing. That will keep it a habit for longer. One minute per question may not seem like a lot, but in this context, it is—as long as it’s a quiet minute, where you’re not distracted by other things.

An important note here is that your answers to each question should be both specific and realistic — specifically your answers to the second two questions. Don’t come at this from a place of how you see your self ideally years from now. Don’t come at this from an angle of thinking you can be perfect tomorrow. Be realistic with yourself.

What did you get done today?

You can list as many things as you want, but the best way to answer this question is to think in terms of priorities and progress toward goals. This should happen a bit naturally, as having to write things out tends to discourage listing things you’re not proud of having gotten done.

You can look back at a to-do list that you used, but that’s wholly unnecessary, and probably a bit distracting. The point of this question is for you to look back during a time when you’re not in the thick of work and activity (i.e. about to go to bed), and reflect back on your day.

What Should You Have Done, But Didn’t?

As you list out what you did get done, you’ll probably come up with something you know you should have done, but didn’t. We all have those things, as most of the time, we know we could have done just a little more. List that here.

But don’t get carried away. Limit your answer to this question to one thing. The point isn’t to beat yourself up about what you didn’t do. The point is to record one area for improvement. Any more than that is just beating yourself up.

It’s also important to be realistic. Whatever you list here should be something you could have realistically done — given your constraints during the day. The underlying question here is simply how you could have done just a little better—emphasis on little.

What Will You Do Differently Tomorrow?

Your answer to this question will likely flow right out of your answer to the previous question, but not necessarily. In some cases, what you will do differently tomorrow has a lot to do with what you didn’t do today. But in some cases, it’s actually what you did do today that establishes what you want to avoid tomorrow.

This question allows you to play back the tape from today’s game, if you will. You can think about how things played out, and search for times where you felt like you tripped up a bit, made the wrong decision, or acted thoughtlessly. Think about habits you’re working on, and if you didn’t stick to them. Did you stray outside your diet? Did you not work out? Or did you say something to someone that you know was ill-advised or flat-out wrong?

This question gives you the opportunity to take what you uncovered during the first two questions, and turn it into a positive commitment. You will do this tomorrow. You will make this change. And so on.

Again, be sure to be both specific and realistic here. Writing “I will be a better partner tomorrow” or “I will be more grateful” is a cop-out. That’s not an action you can take tomorrow, it’s the result of many days’ worth of action. Limit your replies to concrete actions you can take tomorrow, which will make your answer to the first question tomorrow one you’re proud to write.

Learn to Make Yourself Proud

A big part of this exercise is learning how to be proud of yourself. It’s not about being boastfully proud and cocky. But rather, it’s about providing a way to recognize what you did, as well as set up a clear and specific route for getting better tomorrow.

This exercise should make you feel good, and give you a bit more of a purpose throughout the day. You want to be able to write answers tonight that you’re proud of. So when your’e making decisions throughout the day, think about the fact that you’ll have to write about them tonight, and work to make your answers ones you’ll be proud of!

Replacing common phrases in your thoughts and speech can radically improve your work and interpersonal relationships.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

Language has a significant effect on how we experience the world, which has a correspondingly significant effect on our behavior. Our word choice can build or destroy relationships, make or break deals, and shape our sense of self. And yet we neglect these effects quite often.

The words we choose create a large part of reality. They establish and define commitments. They feed or change expectations—both in ourselves and in others. Words act as lenses, through which we view the world, and with which we build the narratives of our days, months, years, and lives.

So how much attention do you pay to the words you use?

Let’s take a look at four commonly used words and phrases, and how simply using an alternative can change the game entirely.

Have to, Need to, and Going to

There’s a huge difference between the things you have to do or need to do, and the things you’re going to do. The difference may seem small, but it’s there — and it sets you up to approach that thing as something you’ve chosen to do, rather than some burden laying on top of you.

In saying “going to,” you’re also speaking with a sense of commitment and intention. You’re on this thing. It’s a way of “faking it till you make it.” Maybe it seems dumb, but consider the low cost of doing this, compared to the potential benefits. If you just try this small change, it doesn’t take a lot of effort from you, but its benefits could be great.

If this seems a little crazy, consider this: your mind can’t tell the difference between the things you’ve committed to doing, and the things you haven’t, but that continue to be on your plate. To your anxious mind, it’s almost all the same — there’s just varying degrees of pressure distributed among the stuff you’re thinking about. Making this small change in phrasing can help to establish a small, but distinct division in your mind.

Can’t vs. Won’t

People often use “can’t” when they mean “won’t”. There’s a major difference between the two. Can’t implies an inability. It means that even if you wanted to, you would not be physically able to do this thing. But that is not often the case.

You usually can do this thing, but you’re choosing not to, for whatever reason. Perhaps your reasons are good ones. Perhaps this thing is too costly, too time consuming, or would come at the cost of something more important. Those are all valid reasons for choosing not to do something.

But when you say “can’t,” you do a small, but impactful thing: you take the element of personal freedom and choice out of the equation. You speak as if there is no choice. You’re not asserting your values, your priorities, and your previous choices. And your mind processes that “can’t” as an outside constraint, rather than a conscious choice you have made. It takes away credit from you for a decision, and does the exact opposite of making you feel empowered.

As you speak, so shall you think, and thus, so shall you act. If you speak in terms of what you won’t do, rather than what you can’t do, you subtly acknowledge your freedom of choice — as well as the choices you have made so far. You stand firm in your decisions — both in the past, and right now. That’s something that can make you feel empowered, which is always good.

You don’t need to say the exact phrase “I won’t”. Similar phrases will do, like “I choose not to,” or “that isn’t a priority for me right now.” The key is to say to yourself that you won’t be doing this, even though you can.

Want vs. Need

There is a very real difference between what we need and what we want. The entire modern minimalist movement has sprung up around this distinction. And for whatever the failings of that particular movement might be, what it gets right is that we often confuse our needs with mere wants. And that confusion complicates our lives.

Needs are not completely uniform across people or situations. Some people need things that others do not. But whoever the person, and whatever the situation, needs have to be understood by answering the deceptively simple question: can I be okay for the time being without this? If the answer is yes, then that thing is not a need. It’s a strong want, and it may well be pursuing, but that means you’re setting yourself up for worse disappointment by continuing to misspeak, and say that you need this thing.

When we speak of needs, we trigger a nearly automatic thought process within ourselves. We trigger thoughts of scarcity, threat, and crisis. Consider what “need” means. A need is something which, if we don’t get it, we face an existential threat. Our minds come equipped with an entire response system to handle existential threats. Potential unmet needs throw us into a mode where we fire off all sorts of hormones into our nervous systems. It makes for a stress response that can be avoided, if only we were able to re-frame this distinction between needs and wants.

Know vs. Perceive

Assumptions are harmful. They can make you look foolish when you make one that doesn’t turn out correct. They can hurt others by changing how others treat them on what ends up being a flimsy evidence. They are a poor basis for most actions.

When we say we know something, and it’s not a mundane fact, we’re usually in danger of making an assumption. This is especially true if we’re claiming we know the thoughts, motivations, or intentions of others. Even if we have managed to correctly guess in the past, those things are risky for us to claim we know.

So rather than using the words “I know” or derivatives (I’m certain, I’m sure, there’s no doubt, etc.) use the words “I perceive”. This does two things:

• First, it allows you to avoid committing verbally to something that could be an assumption. It gives you wiggle room, and allows others to avoid acting as if what you said is gospel (and thus proliferating assumptions).
• Secondly, saying “I perceive that…” forces you to think in terms of why you believe what you do. It forces you to cite observations and evidence, rather than your hasty conclusions about what they all mean.

The Overarching Principle: Speak Intentionally

We humans — for the most part — are a verbal bunch of beasts. We talk a lot. And that has been great on the timeline of social development. But talking also gets us into trouble when we do it without intention.

Reacting by speaking tends to end badly when there are a lot of emotions at stake for the speaker and the listener. Thinking out loud when someone is trying to nail down specifics can result in all sorts of miscommunication and bad faith.

Choosing the right words is important, and the 4 phrasings above are a great first step in improving how you deploy words in your life. If nothing else, just remember: words help build our reality. If we choose words poorly, the reality we build will reflect that. So, choose your words wisely.

Building excellence is as simple as looking for helpers, and working to be a helper yourself.

Photo by Rachel on Unsplash

If you had to start from scratch today, and build a company with an excellent culture, how would you do it? If you are committed to starting to grow your personal brand or company, what is the most effective first step you can take?

What if you had to look no further than Fred Rogers — host of long-running children’s program, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood? Rogers once gave the following advice in an interview:

“My mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.”

He’s spot on. There are helpers everywhere. They are the folks whose first instinct is to put aside their stuff for a few minutes, and get you what you need. They’re the folks that ask you good questions, and try to understand things.

No matter your endeavor, look for helpers. They’re out there, just find them. Find them, bring them in, and keep them close. Also, keep them fulfilled. Keep doing that, and the rest will take care of itself.

Look for the Helpers

Helpers don’t need to be experts. They don’t need an impressive list of achievements or skills. In fact, some of the most helpful people don’t have either of those things. But they have something much more valuable: enthusiasm to contribute.

We often think that the right amount of skills or expertise make someone an effective contributor .Companies will often hire for skills; it’s why job listings still have long lists of things that candidates supposedly need to be proficient at or certified in. When we look for help in our own endeavors, we look for a long list of accolades, awards, and experience.

But in my experience, having those skills and accolades (in most cases) is not what makes for the best contribution. The person may be competent, but competence doesn’t equal contribution; there is so much more to it.

There are perfectly competent sociopaths all over the world. They’re good at what they do (i.e., they’ve got skills), but that often comes with being difficult to work with, or being set in their ways. When you’re looking to someone for help — be it growing your company or helping with your personal project — the last thing you need is someone to fit your thing to their most favored pattern.

How to Spot Helpers

Helpers are easy to spot, if you know what to look for. They are the folks who — though they may not have many of the skills listed on paper — have something that will motivate them to master any one of those skills: the desire to help.

A helper is not merely an enthusiastic person, though enthusiasm is a part of it. Helpers are not only excited to help, but also know how to go about helping. They know how to ask questions, get an understanding of what they do and don’t know, as well as what’s important to know. Then, they get to work. They build solid relationships, listen well, and connect.

The thing about a skilled person who isn’t a helper is that they will never outgrow their skills, unless it directly helps them primarily. Helpers, though, see that growth works both ways. They will give of themselves to learn more, so they can help grow others and an organization. They know that they’ll get growth in return — and that it takes time.

Be a Helper Yourself

Perhaps the best thing you can do in a company or a community is be a helper. Not only is it more beneficial for the organization long-term, but it’s also easier to start doing right away.

The best approach is to start by asking questions. If you ask enough questions, and really try to understand the answers as they’re given, you will begin to make progress. You don’t even have to be knowledgeable about something in order to help.

On many occasions, the act of someone answering your question will help them come to a better understanding of a problem, and they’ll have a solution they didn’t have before. And all you had to do was ask a question.

Once you become knowledgeable and skillful to some extent, you can begin coming up with solutions. You can jump from one problem to another — asking questions and gaining even more skills and knowledge. At that point, you have helped your organization tremendously, and you’ve also helped yourself.

See that’s the thing about helpers: they’ll always begin by helping others, but they end up helping themselves considerably.

Look for the helpers, and be one yourself. 
As far as an organizational or personal growth strategy, you can do much, much worse.

Making sense of ancient Toltec principles, and using them in your daily life.

Photo by Valery Sysoev on Unsplash

In 1997, former surgeon Don Miguel Ruiz published the book The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom. It became a runaway hit, making the New York Times Bestseller list and becoming one of Oprah Winfrey’s “favorite things”. It has gone on to influence a generation of people, providing them with a different and simpler way to guide how they live their lives.

The book is usually described as more of a spiritual and new-age type book—largely because of its more mystical statements about everything being “made of love” and other similar metaphysical claims. But the 4 “agreements” — which are basically simple operating principles — are still worth taking a look at. They provide a simple set of instructions for living.

Below, I break these “agreements” down in simple terms, and describe what it looks like to use them in daily life.

Be Impeccable With Your Word

Ruiz’s first “agreement” is to be impeccable with your word. It’s kind of a two-part principle, in that he’s using two meanings of “word”.

In one sense, Ruiz is saying that if you make a commitment (give your word), meet it. Do what you say you’re going to do, and direct your efforts toward making sure you do. Place that at the top of your priority list. Doing so makes your word worth something to others, builds trust, and enriches your relationships — which makes for a better life. It also makes you feel better about yourself, because you’re a self-actualizing person who gets things done when you say you will. Impeccability about commitments also includes being choosy about which commitments you make. Be shrewd and don’t let yourself get cornered into commitments you can’t keep. Learn to say “no” to things as a way to preserve your integrity.

In another sense of “word”, you need to carefully choose the words you use. Words matter—often much more than we think. Words have the power to create bonds and commitments or break them. They have the power to evoke emotions and actions from others. Everyone has a different background experience that they bring to each interaction. Different words can carry different connotations— triggering different emotional responses, depending on who you’re talking to. So part of choosing the right words is really understanding the audience and context for those words. You have to read the room, and read people.

The last part of being impeccable with your word involves not using words with ill intent. This means not using words to gossip about others or say hurtful things. Ruiz urges us that part of being choosy with your words is to make sure that your intent is good, rather than harmful. Avoid gossip or saying things with the intent of bringing others down. Try to speak from a place of respect for others — regardless of how they’ve spoken to you.

Don’t Take Anything Personally

So much of the anxiety and conflict of day to day life comes from taking things personally that are not truly personal. Ruiz explains that the reasons that others say and do things is not because of you; it’s because of them. People are not reacting to what you say and do — at least not directly. They’re reacting to how they feel about what you and others say and do, and how they feel about themselves. There is a lot of projection at work in how others treat you. You merely contribute to, but don’t control what other people say and do to you.

When you understand that people’s words and actions are a projection of their thoughts and feelings, you can stop taking them personally. Your job isn’t to try to change others. Your job is to be who you know you should, and let others react to that in whatever way they will. Just know that when others react in ways that make you feel bad, it’s not about you.

Don’t Make Assumptions

There’s an old saying that when you assume, you make an ass out of “u” and “me”. How many times have you caught yourself in a spiraling series of thoughts and worries about something? How much of that spiral was based on something you knew for sure?

We often base our thoughts and reactions on assumptions. We assume we know what others are thinking or feeling. We assume we know how things will play out. We assume we understand all the reasons for things. But we don’t. In many cases, we can’t.

If you pay attention to your mind, you’ll notice all sorts of assumptions. It’s not that you’re a bad person for assuming. Our minds are habituated to making assumptions, so that we can act quickly. It’s how our early ancestors had to act to survive while predators roamed around them all day. But these days, we’re safe from predatory animals. We don’t need to act quickly every day. We can slow down and ask if we’re sure about the conclusions we’ve come to. In most cases, we’re probably not sure. So the next step is to ask questions.

Asking questions is one of the most powerful things we can do. It takes practice to get really good at asking questions effectively. But when we begin to do it regularly, we’ll find that we become more curious and less reactive. When we stop reacting to things based on our assumptions, and instead ask questions, a world opens up before us. The petty arguments subside; the worries and fear all but vanish. We become free from the heavy anchor of assumptions.

Always Do Your Best

There are few feelings as good as when you have completely given yourself to a worthwhile endeavor. Think of the times you’ve put forth your efforts at service work. Think of the times you’ve been in a flow state and given 100% on a big project. Think of times where you’ve been fully present and listened to someone who needed it. During those times, you were doing your best. The great feeling that followed was the acknowledgment of the power of this agreement. When you do your best at whatever you do, you feel whole.

Doing your best doesn’t mean knocking yourself out at every moment and pushing yourself to exhaustion every day. Your best will change depending on various factors. When you’re operating on less sleep, when you’re sick, or when you’re having a difficult time, your best will yield different results. To that end, it’s important not to judge yourself constantly based on results. In fact, the key to knowing if you’ve done your best is to be honest with yourself about what you had to offer, and what you gave. Be honest and respectful of yourself — of your body and your mind.

Your best is also a long-term thing. Doing your best in general means pacing yourself and allowing rest when it makes sense to. So don’t burn the candle at both ends now, as most likely, it means leaving little for future things that also deserve your considerable efforts.

Priorities are a huge help here. Knowing which things are most important can help you to modulate your efforts. Your best at a medium priority is different than your best at your top priority item. It’s great to “leave it all on the field,” but when you’re playing on multiple fields, it’s definitely not wise to leave it all only one field.

How to Remember and Practice Them

There’s an easy mnemonic device to help remember these agreements: IPAD.

1. Impeccable: Be impeccable with your word.
2. Personally: Don’t take things personally.
3. Assumptions: Don’t make assumptions.
4. Do your best: Always do your best.

Keep this device in your mind, and whatever else your habits or goals, use these agreements as your underlying tool to get where you’re going.

Get these misconceptions out of your mind, and open yourself up to growth in all areas of your life.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop

Unless you really take time to know yourself, you can’t effectively grow yourself.

We all want to become better versions of ourselves. But the path to do that is less than clear and direct.

We can find a vast array of pieces of advice online or by asking people we know. But the hard part isn’t so much finding out the steps involved in growth, but rather adopting the right mindset about what growth is in the first place.

Specifically, there are 2 big myths or misconceptions about growth that I’ve found to be persistent and pervasive. I’ve seen them in others, and I see them popping up all the time in my own thoughts and expectations.

They’re more than myths, they’re also roadblocks—barriers to growth. So let’s look at them and understand how to overcome them.

Myth 1: Growth Only Happens In One Direction

We tend to view growth as happening in limited, unrelated spheres of our lives. There’s professional growth, financial growth, spiritual growth, and so on. Growth in one area requires a different kind of effort and mindset than growth in others, and there’s really no overlap or relation.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

These areas of our lives are not separate. They’re inextricably linked, and the growth that we achieve at any given time will only look like growth if you look at the larger whole.

Here’s an example. Say things have taken a turn in your relationship, it looks like it’s on the outs. So you spend some more time really sitting down with yourself and your significant other, trying to figure out where to go from here. It’s tough, it’s emotional, and it ends in a breakup — there’s sadness, sentimentality, etc. It pulls your mind away from your work, and as a result, things look worse in your professional life.

But after the soul-searching and the breakup, after taking some time away from ruminating over work all the time, you come out of it with a better understanding of yourself and what you want out of life. You realize why that relationship didn’t work. You realize what your shortcomings are, and what you really want from a partner. You go out into the world ready to build (or rebuild) a better version of your life.

So yes, your professional growth may have stagnated or regressed for a little bit. And for a week or two, it looked like your personal growth was flat or trending downward (I mean, a breakup isn’t a high point of growth, right?). But the time you took to deal with your personal stuff — despite it starting out bad — was indeed growth. On the whole, things are better. You’re out of a relationship that wasn’t good for you anymore, and you’ve learned more about yourself and the life you want.

The Truth: Growth Is Holistic and Requires Shrewd Investment

Did that personal growth come at the cost of some professional momentum? Yes. But that’s okay. That’s how it happens. You need that give and take in the different places in your life. You’re investing.

Growth is growth — whether you’re growing financially, or growing personally. And like financial growth, personal growth only comes through investment. Here, instead of money, you’re investing time and effort. But just like investing money, it’s all about timing.

You withdraw from your professional growth account, and invest what you took into your personal growth. Because the timing was right when you made your investment, though you took something from your professional growth account, you invested it in a place where that time and energy was able to grow well beyond where it would have elsewhere.

Myth 2: Growth Always Feels Like Growth!

Despite all the science and step-by-step processes we might employ on our personal growth journeys, so much of how we evaluate ourselves relies on how we feel. When you’re growing, you can feel it, and when you’re not growing, or regressing, you can feel that, too.

But feelings can be deceiving.

In the example above, where you’re going through a somewhat painful breakup, you’ll be feeling all sorts of negative things. There won’t be the exhilaration and feeling of forward motion that we crave moment to moment. But make no mistake. Growth is happening.

That’s the thing about growing. Many times, it comes as a result of a hearty dose of pain. And it is in going through that pain — rather than finding a way around it — that we grow. Learning to appreciate that, and deciding to appreciate the pain, is one of the first steps to growth.

Truth: Know and Leverage Type A and Type B feelings

Don’t get me wrong, we still need to use our feelings about our progress and our lives as guides; there’s no substitute for that. However, there are (at least) two kinds of feelings we can have about ourselves: (a) immediate, short-term, and immature feelings and (b) higher-level, long-term, mature feelings.

The type (a) feelings are reactive, focused on pleasure in the moment, and feelings of exhilaration and adrenaline. They come on mostly as a result of external stimulus, like things happening to us. But they are short lived. They also tend to distract us from long-term pleasures.

These feelings are terrible guides. They push and pull us in different directions, but rarely toward long-term goals and sustainable fulfillment. They’re also, by nature, fleeting. They come and go quickly.

The type (b) feelings are more proactive, focused on pleasure through reflection and feelings of fulfillment, wholeness, and appreciation. These feelings come upon reflection about where you are, what you’ve accomplished, and where you might be going. They come from within, and as a result of looking at and evaluating your life holistically.

Get to know the difference between these feelings, and gain a powerful tool in your toolkit for growth.

When it comes to growth, it’s worth heeding the ancient advice inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: “know thyself”.

So if nothing else: know thyself, grow thyself.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

Why I’ve stopped caring about how many emails are in my inbox, and why you should, too.

The term Inbox Zero became ingrained in the vocabulary of life-hackers, GTD-ers, and productivity enthusiasts circa 2006 — when productivity writer Merlin Mann coined the phrase in a series of posts on his site 43 folders. From there, it gained quite a following, and also became a sort of productivity status symbol — with people bragging about achieving “inbox zero” all over the internet.

As with any viral productivity concept, an Inbox Zero book was in the works. But neck-deep into a book contract for Inbox Zero, Mann dealt a blow to the exalted idea in an essay talking about why he wasn’t going to continue writing the book.

It’s now become unavoidably clear to me that I’ve been doing each of these things poorly. The job, the making, the pleasing, and, yeah, the being at home. And I can’t live with that for another day. So, I’ve chosen which one has to go. At least in the way it’s worked to date. Which is to say not working.

I’ll let you guess which.

Because, that? That choosing? That’s what my book needs to be about. Not about pleasing people….Not about abandoning your priorities to write about priorities.

My book needs to be about choosing a hard thing and then living with it. Because it’s your thing.

But, that part’s gone missing for just a little too long now. Certainly not missing from my handsome and very practical rhetoric — it’s been missing from my actual life and living. In a quest to make something that has increasingly not felt like my own, I’ve unintentionally ignored my own counsel to never let your hard work fuck up the good things. Including those regular people. Including, ironically, the real work.

I first read these words in real time — in 2011 — when I was quite sure I would be pre-ordering the Inbox Zero book, and that it would change my life. But after reading these words, I became sure of three things:

1. Merlin Mann is one of a very short list of my heroes.
2. He did more to change the game by not releasing this book than he probably would have if he had released it.
3. The email inbox is no longer a useful measure of productivity

The third point is my focus in this essay. While at one time, email served as both a useful mode of doing and measuring productive work, its days of doing so are nearly over. Going forward, the inbox can only serve as the exception, not the rule, when we’re measuring how productive we are. A shift in our thinking is sorely needed.

That shift, I say with only a slight smirk, is the opposite of inbox zero: inbox infinity. It’s a shift of attention away from our inboxes.

The Inbox is the Wrong Focus

In his essay, Mann makes an important distinction between real work and some other stuff that we may think is work — but really isn’t. That is to say, there is stuff (in both our inboxes and our lives) that has all the marks of real work: it takes effort, time, attention, and space on a to-do list. It seems like work to us, but it’s not worth doing in the same way real work is worth doing.

And while at one point in history — maybe before 2006(?) — the email inbox might primarily contain the beginnings of real work, that is most certainly not the case now. The overwhelming amount of emails I see contain stuff that is not top priority — and the ratio of priority work to noise in our inboxes continues to shrink each year. It follows that the more time, attention, and energy that you spend getting your inbox to zero, the less of those valuable resources you’re spending on the things that matter to you.

Think of it this way: how many more people now have a direct line of communication to each other, compared to previous decades? It’s exponentially more. Those people can — with only a few modest physical actions — put stuff in your inbox. And if you’re using your inbox to determine how productive you are, all those people who can just toss stuff in it, are getting an inordinate amount of your time and mental energy.

A shift is needed.

Inbox zero — for the vast majority of us, is the wrong indicator of having done real, important work. The real work is very likely not hanging out in our inboxes. That’s not to say that emails aren’t worth sending or looking at, it’s just to say that so many emails are the equivalent of someone popping their head up in the cubicle farm and shouting about something. They want to be heard, but you’re not obligated to engage with them.

Enter inbox infinity.

Inbox Infinity

Reaching inbox zero is a red herring. The more years that pass with email being a go-to mode of communication, advertising, scamming, and data-mining — the less and less it matters how many emails you pare down your inbox to.

So here’s my bold proclamation: forget your inbox.

Repeat after me: “It doesn’t matter how many emails are in my inbox. Emails alone do not create immediate obligations.”

Maybe repeat it again, for good measure.

In fact, the more time you spend organizing your inbox, the less time you have available for doing work that actually matters. So at this point, I’m embracing an inbox filled with emails — if that’s what happens. I’ll get to the ones I can when I can. But processing my emails no longer holds a top place in my work processes — at least not a place anywhere near the top.

This is no small point, so allow me to extrapolate. A hidden assumption of those who embrace inbox zero is that in some way, most of the work worth doing comes from or revolves around emails. But is that true? How many top priority things have come from email and ONLY email?

Sure, someone may send you an email about something important. But ask yourself this: is this the very first awareness you could have possibly had of this important work that needs doing? In most cases, the answer is “no”.

What’s more likely is that the hugely important email you received could have been prevented by having been proactive and strategic in your work and your communication with stakeholders in your life.

Even better, it’s probably some information pertaining to work that’s being done, and the email is basically a way to ensure that everything is documented, so confusion or disagreement is avoided in the future. But that’s ancillary work; it’s not the important kernel of the project — the intensive effortful work.

Going forward, I’m going to stop using the amount of emails in my inbox as a marker of how productive and organized I am. I’m done wasting my time trying to do something with all the emails, because of all the times I did achieve inbox zero over the years, there was no tangible progress made on the important projects of my life. None, zero.

Kind of ironic, no?

What follows below is how to stop the undue focus on emails, take control of your time and attention, and put the focus back on the work that needs doing — whether anyone has emailed you about or not.

How to Run Inbox Infinity

Is “Inbox Infinity” a kind of sarcastic response to a misguided measure of productivity? Maybe. But within it, there’s a seed of a useful method to help you get out from the long shadow of email. Here are some guidelines:

1. Hold your top 5. Keep a list of the top 5 things you are working on, and make sure it is updated whenever one of those things change or are completed. Can it be more than 5? Sure, but understand that it comes at the cost of effective focus.
2. Use an effort check. Before you go check your email, ask yourself (and answer honestly) if you have made a satisfactory effort on those 5 things so far today. If the answer is “no”, fix that first, before checking email.
3. Manage the Urge. Whenever you sit down to work and feel the urge to check emails, ask yourself if you truly believe that there is something in your inbox which, upon reading it now, could either trump your top 5 things, or significantly change your priorities.
4. Timebox your time in you inbox. Set a maximum time each day that you will spend on processing & responding to emails. Break that time up into blocks throughout the day, if that works better. Stick to this unless the emails hold the key to progress on your top 5.

If you do this right, you’ll find that in the long run, you end up receiving fewer emails that cause you to worry or compel you to answer right away. Why? Because the only emails that should worry you are the ones about your priorities — and a few others here and there. And they’ll only worry you if they make you think maybe you’re not properly engaged with those priorities.

For emails you receive that relate to things other than your top 5 projects, but seem urgent, you’re faced with a choice: either answer quickly and feed into the sense of urgency from the sender, or let it sit until you have the time and have worked sufficiently on your top 5 things.

If you really feel pulled to answer an email now, it’s important to ask yourself why. If it doesn’t have to do with your top 5 things, or doesn’t promise to unseat one or more of your top 5, why is it so imperative that you answer now?

Sometimes there will be a legitimately urgent email you can answer quickly, but if you pay close attention to your email habits, those are rare for most of us. The exception to this would be if your job is completely tactical, in which case your only job may be to make sure that you’ve responded to every email query that comes through. Otherwise, those “imperative” emails are indeed rare.

In Summary

Am I saying that email doesn’t matter at all? No. But what I am saying is that in 9 out of 10 cases, your inbox is the wrong place to measure how productive and organized you are. The best indicator of how productive and organized you are is that:

• you have an updated, small list of your most important projects
• know where you are on each of your top projects, and
• you’re actively working on those top projects first, before attending to other things that pop up (usually in your inbox).

If nothing else, just pay attention to how often you’re going back to your inbox. Unless you’re totally tactical and tied to email, going back to email more than once per hour is probably coming at the cost of doing deep and important work on your top projects. Just having an awareness of that is a great first step.

How to improve your decision-making and level-up your growth by harnessing the power of disagreement

Photo by xandtor on Unsplash

Have you ever heard someone say the following phrase: “I could be wrong, but…”?

Nine times out of ten, what follows is a long explanation that makes it clear that the speaker is pretty sure they’re not wrong. Unfortunately, most of us act this way in some area of our lives.

We all carry biases with us, and those biases — by definition — color how we perceive things. Because biases affect our perceptions, they also affect how we think, which affects how good our decision-making process is.

Many people think that the way to make better decisions is to somehow get rid of biases and make a completely objective decision. I have yet to encounter such a thing. Getting to complete objectivity isn’t the way to make better decisions, instead, the way lies in harnessing disagreement.

If you earnestly seek, understand, and integrate disagreement with your position before making a decision, you can massively increase the quality of the decisions you make. That includes deciding not to take action in some situations — which can save you wasted time and effort.

The key, then, is knowing how to harness the power of disagreement to enrich your decision-making process.

No Disagreement? No Decision!

Alfred P. Sloan —arguably one of the most effective executives of the 20th century — used to refuse to make an important decision without the presence of disagreement. As Peter Drucker explains in his beloved The Effective Executive:

Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here. Then, I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until the next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.

As Sloan saw things, without disagreement, there was no way to even understand the importance or the substance of a decision. Sloan understood that everyone has a slightly different perspective. And he recognized that for an important decision, the likelihood of everyone actually seeing things in the same way — rather than simply not speaking up — was unlikely.

What is more likely than unanimous agreement is apathy or disinterest. And if someone involved in a decision-making process is apathetic or disinterested, the quality of the decision can suffer. This is true just as much for a single person making a decision as it is for a group.

What follows is a brief primer on how to seek, understand, and integrate disagreement to help you make better decisions — which will help you cement more robust growth.

There is no such thing as “unbiased”

Those who seek to improve their decision-making skills usually start out by seeking a way to make an “unbiased” decision. Unfortunately, there really is no such thing. Also, such a thing would be utterly useless. Think of what a bias is — it’s a way of seeing things that favors or leans on some value system or worldview. You need your biases in order to make decisions — otherwise nothing would matter to you. So it doesn’t make much sense to eliminate your biases.

The goal is not to get “unbiased” views and adopt them, but rather to identify your own biases, then identify other biases that counter your own. Once you understand the various biases at play in the domain of your decision, you can seek out opinions and ideas coupled with biases that clash with your own. Then you can start looking at arguments from various sides together — understanding where they come from (i.e., their biases).

The goal is not to completely lose your bias, but to put it up against other biases and see what sticks after the battle.

How to Find and Use Disagreement

It can be hard to find disagreement — especially if stakes are high. So you have to get creative. Your approach will likely differ, depending on whether you’re making a decision largely on your own, or in a group setting.

In A Group

If you’re in a group setting, and you’re trying to pull disagreement out, you may have to use some tricks to loosen people up and get them to reveal some qualms or worries they have.

A great way to get a group talking about disagreements is to ask: let’s say we decide to do X today; what is the craziest, worst outcome 6 months down the road that we might not have seen coming? Then let people answer.

The word “crazy” gives people license to toss out some worst-case scenarios without worry of being pinned to them. But their answers will give you insight into where their heads are at — what their biases might be. Then you walk slowly from “craziest, worst” toward the middle, until you see what people were too scared to offer up initially.

On Your Own

It can be even harder to find opposing viewpoints to your own when you’re working on a project by yourself. But if you get creative, you can find ways to solicit healthy disagreement.

These days, you need only hop on the internet, search for terminology about the decision you’re trying to make, and find a good opposing idea. You need to be careful not to find overly simplistic or poorly argued viewpoints, since it’s easy to dismiss them, and simply use that as ammo to prove your own point of view.

Having go-to sources of disagreement is key. Peer-reviewed journals for different industries are good — depending on what information you’re looking for. Having people that you trust, but that disagree with you, is key. Get to know them personally, or simply have access to their ideas for your review. There are plenty of people with whom I disagree, but who make compelling, intelligently argued points. When I’m trying to formulate a stance on something, I make sure I take in their thoughts.

Time and Charitable Interpretation

This is where time is key. You have to spend time finding disagreement — especially when you’re by yourself. You have to find the most compelling example of a disagreement with your own view that you can. Then you have to interpret it charitably. The bigger the decision, the more important this is.

Giving an idea or argument a charitable interpretation means building the strongest possible version of the argument or point of view. This way, if and when you poke holes in it, you’re doing so to a worthy opponent. Ultimately, this helps you make better decisions, because you’ve truly tested your own idea. Hopefully, you’ve actually modified your idea due to having to take into account a dissenting viewpoint.

Pulling the Trigger

Ultimately, at some point, you need to make a decision. One temptation — especially for the more introspective crowd— is to either wait for more information and/or ruminate for longer. But be careful not to use “getting more data” as a means of procrastinating. For any decision, there is a point of data saturation — meaning that more information will not help make a decision more apparent to you; it’ll simply add noise and prolong things.

Of course, we don’t want to make a decision too quickly, and without taking key data into account, either. So how do we find a balance? This is where disagreement is helpful.

Your initial inclination or beliefs give you one end of a spectrum. Seeking out disagreement and understanding it charitably then gives you the other end of the spectrum. The process of making the decision then becomes getting comfortable with your understanding of the area in between your initial position or biases and the disagreement at the other end. When you feel that you understand the spectrum of options and opinions, and have in some way altered your own initial opinion, it’s likely time to make a decision.

Here’s a final note on pulling the trigger and making a decision: deciding not to do something — to stay put — is a valid option. To invoke Drucker again, he urges executives to ask the question if we do nothing, will this issue ultimately take care of itself? If the answer seems to be (mostly) yes, it behooves us to let things be, and go after other initiatives, where our action can have a more direct impact.

We as humans often get spooked by circumstance. Something happens (or a series of things happens) and we feel that we need to do something in order to address things. But we don’t always have to react. In many cases, we can simply observe and stay put, continuing on as before, and refusing to waste energy being reactive to the ebbs and flows. That can make a huge difference.

The Takeaway

We all have to make decisions in our lives in order to grow. These decisions can be complex and seem to involve a lot of possible information to review. To make the best decision (which could be deciding to do nothing) necessitates seeking, understanding, and integrating disagreement. Doing so will allow you to leverage the power of both your biases and those of others, to modify your view of things — or strengthen your initial view through having sufficiently challenged it. Once you’ve done that, the decision you make will be stronger, due to having more thoroughly understood your options.

Learn to seek, understand, and integrate disagreement, and take a huge step toward more robust decision-making and personal growth.

Photo by Almos Bechtold on Unsplash

How the gurus of self-help unwittingly derail our progress by creating unreal expectations.

When we’re kids, we’re bombarded by talk of magic. From children’s books, shows, movies, and games — to Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy — there’s no shortage of magical explanations for things. Our entire worldview is filled with magical explanations of things.

Part of growing up, it seems, is leaving magic behind, and focusing instead on understanding how things work. That’s not to say that there is no place for wonder and admitting that we don’t know something. In fact those attitudes are a great way to start learning and improving.

But over the past decade or so, something has been going on in the self-help and personal development world. The idea of magic has somehow crept in. The idea that we can somehow improve ourselves and make big changes in the world by circumventing normal action and cause/effect mechanisms seems to be gaining momentum.

But what is that doing to us? How is that affecting our quests for personal growth?

The Magic Hour

In 2006, Rhonda Byrne released the book The Secret, which describes and encourages people to engage in a kind of magical thinking. It must have been in the zeitgeist, because within 5 years, as Steve Jobs attempted to beat what would end up being terminal cancer, his biographer chronicled Jobs’ approach as heavily anchored in magical thinking.

The term “magic” then took off. By 2015, Elizabeth Gilbert used the concept in her book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. Around that same time, Marie Kondō released her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying up. And alas, a new paradigm for personal growth was born.

As more and more online content about self-improvement cropped up, use of the word “magic” skyrocketed — and it continues today. More than that, the use of the term “Life-Changing Magic” continues in content all around the internet and traditional media.

But is that a good thing? Is viewing and describing our interaction with the world through the lens of “magic” helpful? Or does it oversimplify and obfuscate things — causing us to fail at the task of understanding ourselves and understanding reality?

Magic vs. Method

So what is magic anyway? When we see an article or book with the phrase “magic” or, better yet, “life-changing magic,” what is at play? Regardless of what the author might intend or explain, connotations draw us in. Nearly everyone has a dense set of ideas and (more importantly) feelings about magic.

When we were children, magic was a big part of our worldview, and depending on how life progressed for each person after that, it may have remained there in some way. So when we see the word magic, offered up as a serious descriptor of something in life, it’s very easy to leave behind critical inquiry and everyday reasoning.

When we describe things as “magic” or “magical”, and especially when we describe something as “life-changing magic,” a few detrimental things happen to our thinking. First of all, when things are described as “magic” the connotation is that they happen without direct or strenuous effort. That might be the very definition of magic as it’s used in work about self-improvement; magic means spooky action at a distance — both at a physical distance and at an intellectual distance. Just do this one thing, just change your mindset, and things fall into place — as if by magic.

Furthermore, when magic frames a discussion of something, mystery is accepted — rather than questioned. Things are left unexplained that we might normally feel compelled to deeply and shrewdly investigate and understand, so we can leverage that understanding to more effectively make things happen. This is especially harmful when we take a view of our mental lives as magical in some way. While we can certainly drum up thoughts and desires from seemingly whole cloth, it does little good to do that while abandoning the practice of taking a hard look at your emotional and cognitive patters, as well as behaviors, and getting to understand how your mind works.

The Damage of the Word “Magic”

Even if the actual process that an author or speaker lays out isn’t really magic, but more like a tried and true method, it can still be harmful to describe it as magic. Why? Because connotations are often much stronger than actual descriptions. This means that you can describe an empirically sound, difficult, and methodical thing all you want, but if you use the word “magic,” the perception will often be that somehow less effort and frustration is involved — which is false.

Does that sound dumb? Of course it does! But that’s simply Marketing 101: words — even single words — matter greatly because they can have such a deep effect on people’s perceptions and behavior. The words we use to present things to people — even ourselves influence how we view things and behave.

So if we’re going to describe something as “magic” or “life-changing” or both, we’re structuring expectations and framing things in a way that is quite vulnerable to misunderstanding and disappointment. That mis-framing can be the difference between someone sticking with something, or abandoning it in frustration — because their unrealistic expectations weren’t met.

Everything’s “Life-Changing Magic”, So Nothing Is

At the end of the day, personal growth isn’t really secret or magical. So why not approach it that way — rather than by pretending that there’s some piece of it that somehow defies normal understanding? That would reduce the likelihood of people forming unrealistic expectations of the world and themselves, and (I imagine) would increase the likelihood of people sticking to something that’s difficult — because they were never presented it as if it were immediately and magically life-altering.

That’s the thing about “magic” — as well as things like revolutions, disruptions, and inventions. They’re neither as immediate nor radical as they seem. Everything is gradual and incremental, what makes it seem otherwise is where our attention is. We’re not paying attention, so we don’t see the subtle changes happening.

In fact, think about the most practical meaning of the word “magic,” — as in what stage magicians do. The most basic principle of the craft is that things look like they happen seemingly out of nowhere — because your attention is not on the action. It’s an illusion, possible because we don’t see what we’re not paying attention to. Misdirection is key in magic, and it’s why we stare slack-jawed every time we see a trick. It seems like it all happens in a flash, and defies the laws of physics, but it doesn’t. We just have a skewed view of things, because we weren’t watching closely.

When it comes to self-improvement, and the so-called inner game, there’s no possibility of magic because whether we want to or not, we’re captive audiences to all the stuff in our minds. Your mind won’t let you misdirect and trick yourself for long. So the only real way forward is not by magic, but by incremental but steady change. It’s not sexy, fast, whimsical, magical, or anything like that. And rather than trickery and misdirection, it requires complete and total honesty and transparency with yourself.

Can that seemingly slow, steady, and un-sexy inner game produce big things? Absolutely! It just doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and sustained effort. That’s the great news: if you do things in small and doable steps, you’ll find the kid of progress that’s much harder to lose than the kind you make with sweeping and whimsical maneuvers.

I’m a fan of magic, but I refuse to play tricks on myself or others in order to grow. I refuse to oversimplify and paint in broad, sweeping strokes — especially when it comes to making myself and the world better. In my experience, my mind usually figures out the tricks, and revolts agains them. Instead, I’ll embrace method: tangible, workable, and at times slow steps toward sustainable and significant long-term growth.

Join me, won’t you?

Photo by Camylla Battani on Unsplash

Staying smart by playing dumb, and avoiding catastrophic mistakes

In March of 2018, the BBC published a story about surgeons at Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi who were 2 hours deep into brain surgery before they realized they were operating on the wrong patient. The error was discovered when the surgeons got to the part of the patient’s brain where a blood clot was supposed to be, but they didn’t see it.

What went wrong?

Here we have professionals — with extensive training and expertise — who have done procedures like this many times. They take the preparatory steps and get all of their tools ready, but then cut open the wrong patient. How does something like this happen? More importantly, how can such an error be avoided in the future?

The answer is dumb questions. Asking dumb questions may just save us from some of the most terrible mistakes we can make.

It may seem pretty dumb to ask one’s fellow doctors in the OR “hey, are we operating on the right person?” Most medical professionals would likely take it as an insult to their expertise and skills — an embarrassing thing to bring up. But precisely because that question wasn’t asked, the cost was more embarrassment than those professionals have probably ever felt. They made a huge mistake; a dumb mistake. One which could have been prevented by asking a dumb question.

We all make mistakes. More than that, we need mistakes; they help us learn and grow. But there is a difference between making the right kind of mistake and the wrong kind. Knowing the difference between the two, and how to avoid the wrong kind of mistakes is one of the most beneficial things we can learn.

The Right and Wrong Kind of Mistakes

Everyone makes mistakes. Some are more costly than others. The hope is that whatever the cost of a mistake is, the value of the lesson learned (and applied) has an equal or greater value. Because of that, mistakes are still valuable — as long as they are not repetitive.

That’s the difference between the right kind of mistakes and the wrong kind. The right kind of mistakes are documented, reviewed, and consequently drive a change in behavior so that the same mistake is not repeated.

The wrong kind of mistakes are the ones explained away as either “human error”, supposedly unique conditions, or are blamed on the victims of said mistakes.

Unfortunately, the wrong kind of mistakes happen all too often. And so Santayana’s adage proves itself true: we who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.

How to Prevent Bad Mistakes

The most effective way to prevent making bad mistakes is to play dumb. Seriously. It feels weird to do because we all like to think we’re pretty smart. But it’s often exactly when we think we’re the smartest that we make stupid assumptions. Then bad things happen — things that could have very easily been prevented — like cutting open the wrong person’s skull.

So here’s a quick principle to take into account: 
the “dumber” the question is, the higher the cost is of not asking it and wrongly thinking you know the answer.

Take the Kenyatta brain surgery case: it may seem dumb to ask if the patient on the operating table is the right one, but the cost of not asking that question turned out to be huge. If you can overcome the weird feeling of asking the question, you can save a whole lot of grief.

But many of us can’t get past the discomfort of asking the dumb question. So we don’t do it. Most of the time, nothing happens. But every once in a while, that discomfort keeps us from doing the simple thing that could have averted disaster.

So how do you stay smart by playing dumb? Ask dumb questions — like “hey, are we about to cut open the right person’s skull?” The thing about so-called “dumb” questions is that whatever their cost to our reputations, the cost of wrongly assuming you know the answer is much larger than whatever embarrassment you feel by asking them.

The Power of Checklists

And it’s not like you have to literally ask the dumb questions — that’s actually what procedures and checklists are for. Situations where very simple and basic oversights or assumptions have huge costs — like aviation, combat, space travel, and surgery — have adopted checklists. These checklists effectively ask and solicit answers to the “dumb” questions, so nobody has to feel embarrassed.

And before you say something like “well, how’s this going to help me — who is not a brain surgeon or an airline pilot?” —think about the opportunities you have in your life to avoid the high costs of assuming simple things are done. I guarantee you there are some. Here are a few examples:

• Did you forget your underwear as you’re packing for your business trip?
• Did you leave the stove on before you left for vacation?
• Did you proofread that important email you’re about to send to a big client — to make sure you spelled their name correctly?

In all of these examples, it’s not like any of these questions point out particularly difficult work. It’s just that we don’t normally spend much time thinking about these deceptively simple things, because we assume we were smart enough to remember to do them. But when the stakes of not thinking about them are high, it helps to be reminded to check that we took care of them. And it’s not because we’re careless, it’s just that our minds have a lot of cognitive load on them at any given time, and we never quite know what things we might not be able to think of.

Don’t be afraid to use checklists in your daily life. They lighten your cognitive load, so you can spend your mental energy on things that deserve more of it.

Harmful Assumptions

I’ve been through enough training in project management, quality control, and sales to find the common thread running through them all: asking seemingly dumb questions to uncover hidden information.

In project management, you’ll often find conditions ripe for bad mistakes. The sheer volume of work and information — along with the pressure of deadlines and requirement — push people to make all kinds of assumptions, and thus mistakes. Failing to ask dumb questions allows incorrect assumptions to continue on in the project, which results in poor quality, missed deadlines, or dissatisfied stakeholders, because at some point assumptions were made about what the end result should be.

In quality control, you’ll find that you often need to ask “why” a few times in order to get to the root cause of an issue — so you can fix the thing that will prevent numerous future issues. If you don’t ask a bunch of questions, you end up fixing the wrong issue — the one that isn’t the disease itself, but merely another symptom. That causes waste and allows fore the recurrence of future issues.

In sales, beginners often think the game is played by talking most of the time — by “educating” a prospective customer about your product or service and having them listen to you. But the best way to sell is actually by gathering information, which is done by — you guessed it — asking questions! In some schools of sales training, there is literally a method of questioning referred to as “dummy questions” — where you ask questions that may seem way too dumb to ask. And it is often those questions that you think you know the answer to that yield the most valuable issues that your product or service can help address. But you’ll never uncover them if you don’t ask seemingly dumb questions.

You Have to Be Smart to Play Dumb

Asking dumb questions is part of getting smarter. It means you’re smart enough to know that errors are made all the time. It also means that you’re smart enough to understand that the smarter people get, the more they stop thinking about the simplest details (for the most part). And furthermore, asking dumb questions is a smart move because you can learn stuff by doing it that you never would have uncovered if you didn’t.

An even more advanced move is asking the same question more than once. This is particularly useful when you’re asking about someone’s motivation or reasons for what they’ve chosen, or what they’re thinking about doing. The more important or stressful the decision is, the less likely the first answer is the real one. So it pays to ask the question again — but usually in a different way.

Much of what you do has to respect the context and mood of a discussion, but the point remains the same: dumb questions are anything but dumb. And the more you leverage the power of dumb questions, the more you can leverage the intelligence you gain from them.

credit: Mohamed Hassan

They may be poorly written and totally implausible, but they hold a valuable bit of wisdom

I am a firm believer that you can learn something from everyone you interact with. It’s easy for us to learn from well-known geniuses and successful folks in the public eye.

But what about email spammers? What — if anything — can we learn from them? As it happens, those error-riddled, poorly translated emails can actually teach us an important lesson about deciding how and where to spend your time and effort.

The “Nigerian Prince”

Anyone reading this is probably familiar with the “Nigerian Prince” email scam. You get an email from someone claiming to be a prince or government official of some kind in an African country — like Nigeria.

The emailer insists that some wealthy person has passed away and that you have been selected to help transfer the money out of the country. For that service, you’ll get a sizable fee. All the person needs is some of your private information: bank account number, social security number, etc. Or they need you to send some money upfront to cover fees, and they will transfer a decent sum of money to you.

To many of us, it sounds like there’s no way that these scams could work, and yet they do — all the time. What’s more interesting is that, if you’ve ever received one of these emails in an English-speaking country, you have likely noticed that the emails prominently feature glaring spelling and grammar errors — not mere typos, but just plain poor writing in general. There’s simply no way a government official in charge of all this money is going to send an email like this.

But that’s the genius of these things. That poor writing and almost obvious implausibility — that’s the cornerstone of the whole plan. And it can teach us about how we in the content game should write for an audience.

The Benefits of the Blatant

Most of us who see these emails disregard them almost immediately. We just know from looking at it for a second that it’s bogus. As I said, the emails are terribly written.

So why don’t these scammers spend more time writing the emails in a way to make them look more professional? I mean, if the goal is to rope in as many folks as possible, shouldn’t you spend time making emails that are more convincing, and less likely to be deleted?

Not quite.

Here’s the thing: those “errors” — the terrible spelling and grammar — are actually done on purpose. And that is exactly the genius of them. The scammers aren’t interested in wide appeal. They don’t want people who are hard to convince — because those people would not make good customers.

As Libby Kane writes in a piece on Business Insider, Microsoft computer scientist Cormac Herley did some interesting research on this. The egregious errors that seem to ruin the scammers’ credibility with most people are actually a key part of the profitability of the scam:

…it’s in the scammers’ best interest to minimize the number of false positives who cost them effort but never send them cash. By sending an initial email that’s obvious in its shortcomings, the scammers are isolating the most gullible targets. If you trash their email, that’s fine. They don’t want you, someone from whom there’s virtually no chance of receiving any money. They want people who, faced with a ridiculous email, still don’t recognise its illegitimacy.

As Herley tells the book’s authors, “Anybody who doesn’t fall off their chair laughing is exactly who they want to talk to.”

Spam and phishing exercises purposely have spelling and grammar errors so that they don’t end up hooking fishes who are anything but gullible. By doing that, they eliminate nearly all of the most wasteful work that they’d have to do trying to lure in people who would require the most coaxing.

By sending terribly written, implausible emails, these “Nigerian princes” send a signal that clearly shows the people who are not their core audience: “this is not for you — go ahead and delete it.”

What this Strategy Can Teach Legitimate Marketers

This “Nigerian prince” strategy can be used in reverse for marketing and audience creation in general. Understand that there are people who are willing to get on board, and there are others who will — even after initially hopping on board — bee looking for reasons to jump off. Sure, it may feel great to get a whole lot of followers quickly, after a viral something-or-other. But most of those people jump off pretty quickly.

The real trick is to telegraph something about your product or service that makes it clear who your ideal client would be, but more importantly, who your ideal clients wouldn’t be. If you’re about to say but, EVERYONE is my ideal client! — that’s actually a big part of the problem.

Not Everyone is a Potential Customer

You shouldn’t want everyone to become your customer. That is not sustainable, nor is it (after all the work it takes) profitable. To try to appeal to everyone is a poor investment of your time.

There will always be a group of people that will require more work to retain that is worth it. Save yourself the costs of on-boarding them and keeping them by preventing them from buying in the first place. The idea that these Nigerian prince scammers use — sending “filtering-out” signals — is a great way to do that.

But what does this come down to when you’re not a scammer — when you’re selling a legitimate product or service? I think it might boil down to two things:

1. Practice honesty and transparency about what you’re doing, and more so, what you’re NOT doing.
2. Simplicity — a simple, non-wordy message about what your thing and brand are all about (and again, what you’re NOT about).

Doing those two things is NOT easy. The words you use, the designs you use, and where those things are published are all part of proper conveyance of your message — and properly vetting potential customers. But I think that focusing on those two things can help you to be more efficient in reaching the kind of customers that will really want want you offer — rather than ones who continually demand something they thought they were getting, but that you never really offered.

Photo by Oladimeji Ajegbile from Pexels

Enlightenment is not just for meditators or yogis, but it’s often misunderstood and misused, which ruins it for everyone

What does the word enlightenment mean to you?

Does it evoke images of a monk in a saffron robe, sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, with a slight smile of contentment? Does it conjure up thoughts of Instagram photos of a perfectly dressed and perfectly made-up “wellness influencer” on top of a mountain at sunrise, heartily breathing in the aroma of a steaming cup of coffee?

What about a mother of 4 young children, in wrinkled clothes, with frizzy hair, making PB&J sandwiches for her kids — 2 of which are hanging on to her legs while she navigates over and around the toys scattered on the floor of the kitchen?

Almost no one thinks of the latter image when they think of enlightenment. But why not? Why can’t someone with a hectic life, urgent demands, and barely enough time to think about their clothes be enlightened?

I think they can. In fact, I know they can. No matter what your situation, you too can become enlightened — because we’ve all got the wrong idea about what enlightenment is.

What many of us think is enlightenment is actually a form of escapism. And it’s important to understand the difference.

So, What Is Enlightenment?

Over the years, enlightenment has been sold to us as a form of quiet mental solitude — a tranquil transcendence, where one floats above the problems of the workaday world. It’s long been packaged as the result of long meditation sessions and days or weeks-long silent retreats.

Surely, the rest of us — with our 9-to-5s, families, relationships, hectic schedules, bills, and drama — we can’t get enlightened, right?

What utter nonsense.

If that’s enlightenment, I’m not sure it’s something that I want. But enlightenment isn’t any of those things. It’s not withdrawal or transcendence. It’s the opposite. Enlightenment is engagement. Enlightenment is embedment. Enlightenment is being engaged with and embedded in the goings on of your life — each and every day.

Enlightenment means being a full and enthusiastic participant in your life. It means understanding your relationships, admitting and working on your shortcomings, striving toward your goals, and being okay with whatever challenges and pain come your way.

The Myth of the Two Lives

Contrary to many popular ways of thinking, you can become enlightened right in the middle of your crazy, problem-filled, nerve-wracking daily life. In fact, there are more opportunities for enlightenment there than you can find anywhere else. Many of us fail to see this, because we have come to believe in this myth that we lead two separate lives.

On one hand, there is this thing that we call our daily life. There’s a job, bills, a family, friends and neighbors, fights, jealousy, sex, anxiety, self-doubt — and the myriad things that bombard us each day.

On the other hand— supposedly — there’s this joyful, peaceful way of life away from all those struggles of daily life, called “enlightenment”. It’s a place of serenity and joy; it’s the promised land, the endgame. There’s this accompanying idea that enlightenment happens separately from all of the challenges and struggles of daily life, and so you need to unplug and retreat in order to really get enlightened.

Maybe that’s how some folks get there, but I wonder how sustainable it is for them once they dip their toes back into the fast-paced workaday world from which they came? Does that enlightenment scale? My guess is no.

One thing that I’ve learned recently is not to view enlightenment as some graceful, peaceful, transcendental, esoteric, out-of-this-world phenomenon. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Enlightenment is actually a down and dirty, roll your sleeves up, stumbling-bumbling, imperfectly perfect thing. It’s something that you both learn in the trenches, and deploy there.

And enlightenment is not just for a select few, it’s for everyone.

Enlightenment is Engagement, Not Escapism

You can’t become enlightened by disconnecting from the things that make up your life — unless you’re leaving it all behind forever. Rather, enlightenment happens when you fully engage with the components of your life as they are right now.

I used to buy into this idea that enlightenment would come to me if I detached myself from the the ins and outs of daily life, and brought my mind up to some other level — whatever that means. But what I realized was that when I attempted to do that, what I was really doing was practicing escapism. I was instead adopting a different ritual to make me less connected to the things in my life.

Am I saying not to mediate? No. Am I warning you that yoga is a waste of time? Not at all. These practices are valuable practices that can help you de-stress, clear your mind, and gain insight. But those things alone will not do the trick. Once you do de-stress and clear your mind, it’s time to get re-engaged with your life — time to take action.

What I am saying is that whatever your mode of pursuing enlightenment (or its many synonyms), make sure you’re not practicing an elegant form of escapism.

Remember, just because your brand of escapism looks like a sacred practice, complete with all the ornate bells and whistles— doesn’t mean it’s not still escapism.

The fact is, you are either engaging with or avoiding the stuff in your life, and at a subconscious level, your mind knows which one you’re doing. And it will either stress out or relax accordingly.

Be Sure You’re Not an Escapist

Relaxation doesn’t come from escape. We tend to think that it does, but that’s only a short term phenomenon. Relaxation comes from engagement and decisiveness. When you have taken on the things in your life head-on, and made the decisions you know you need to — when you’ve changed the things you can, accepted the things you can’t, and learned a bit better how to tell the difference — relaxation is the natural response.

There are many different ways to do those things — many different spiritual or self-improvement practices. But those same practices can either be used to engage, or used to escape. Make sure you’re choosing the right one. Your mind and body will thank you.

So, by all means, meditate, do yoga, pray, leverage the power of crystals. If it gives you the strength to engage with both the pleasure and the pain of your life, then it’s enlightening.

If whatever you’re doing is helping you learn how to navigate challenges, overcome obstacles, process your emotions, and enrich your relationships — keep it up. But if what you’re doing is a hiding place, a crutch, or a way of putting off taking on the tough things in your life — it’s most definitely not a path to enlightenment; it’s escapism.

There are so many ways that we can turn things from possibly enlightening to full-on escapism. The trick is to keep asking yourself: am I fully engaged in my life, or am I ducking out of it? Ask yourself every day — whatever it is you’re doing. Ask yourself as you veg out on the couch, or dip into a pint of ice cream: am I doing this as part of engaging with the stuff of my life, or is this escapism? Asking and answering that question honestly — that’s enlightenment. No robes or retreats necessary.

Photo by Ravi Roshan on Unsplash

How death reminds us of how we should be living

A colleague of mine died a few weeks ago. 
Strike that. A friend of mine died last week.
He was indeed a friend.

Sure, we worked together, and met because of work, but he was more than that — he was a friend. He was also an excellent engineer, a skilled woodworker, a great storyteller, and a walking encyclopedia of interesting tidbits about a wide range of topics. His name was Dick. And I miss him already.

Dick’s death prompted me to think about an age-old question that I usually pretend to not care about the answer to — until someone dies. That question is: where do we go when we die?

I have an answer — but it’s not the answer. It’s not the kind of answer we’re used to hearing when we talk about death. It doesn’t involve heaven, hell, or any other supernatural realm.

In short, I don’t think we really go anywhere when we die. But also, we essentially go everywhere.

Nowhere and Everywhere

In a sense, we go both nowhere and everywhere when we die. Think of all of the things you said and did during your lifetime. Think of all the times you shared a laugh, a smile, tears, or a profound and comfortable silence with others. Think of the things — even the little things — you helped others with, or the interesting viewpoint you shared that got someone thinking. Those things stick around in peoples’ memories. All those things were as much you as anything we might call a soul — and they live on in how those people you impacted live their lives.

Your impact may only be on a chosen few people in your life, but those people impact others, who impact others, and so on. The marks you leave help others make theirs, and so on ad infinitum into the future. Names and faces may be forgotten, but the traces of life live on beyond those otherwise incidental features of a person.

Even if you were to die tomorrow, think of how many lives you would have touched in your time. And by “touched” I don’t mean in some profound, make-a-movie-about-it way, there are so many small ways that we touch peoples’ lives that we don’t even realize.

It can be a single conversation where you made someone feel really heard for once. It can be a piece of advice that seemed so simple to you, but it changed a person’s whole day, week, and month. These things are difficult to calculate, but they are real and important. They’re the real stuff of this crazy, wonderful mess we call life.

After death, you continue to exist as the difference you have made in this world. The people whose lives you touched, whose paths you’ve helped guide, and whose minds you’ve changed, carry a bit of you with them.

Taking Comfort, Taking Action

Knowing that in a very real sense, we live on after death, we should be able to take comfort — but also take action. We can take comfort in the fact that whatever the verdict ends up being about the soul and the afterlife, we live on after death here, on Earth.

From this truth emerges a clear, actionable principle for living one’s daily life: Since you live on after death as the impact you made on others, strive to make the most of that impact.

What’s funny about life is that we so often misjudge the impact of the things we do. In terms of lasting impact, the huge project on which you spend so much time and effort trying to push to completion can often pale in comparison to a simple heartfelt conversation with someone over coffee . It helps to keep that in mind, and stay open to simply connecting with other people.

We all worry about our mortality, because we all know we’re going to die, and basically none of us wants to. We’ll probably always worry about whether or not there really is a heaven or hell — or a soul to go either place. But whatever your feelings on those metaphysical minefields, it sure helps to remember that your afterlife here on Earth is every bit worth working for. And every death that touches our lives should serve as a reminder to get to work.

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source: Wikimedia Commons

An essay on a different way to think about both hard work and failure.

A few nights ago, I read my 5 year-old daughter a book about Amelia Earhart, which featured the following quote:

I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.”

The first thing about this quote that jumped out to me, of course, was the brave and defiant attitude. Amelia Earhart was simply going to do what she set out to — chivalry and conventions be damned. Earhart was a big personality, and she gained the admiration of millions by doing something that other women didn’t dare do.

That’s the simple reading of her quote. But there’s something more at work here. It’s something that actually runs counter to Earhart’s big personality and the popularity she gained as a result of her bold moves. Particularly, that last sentence — about your failure being a challenge to others. That’s particularly interesting because it’s not a take on hard work and failure that I’ve heard before — or really, since.

Essentially, Earhart is laying out a formula for a really fulfilling way of life, and it has two components:

1. Find something that you think must be done — whether by you, or just by anyone — it simply must be done. Live with the motivation to do all you can to help get that thing done. Have a solid mission.
2. When you fail at that thing (which you will) — be willing to donate that failure. That is, let your failure be a challenge to others as well as your future self. Donate it for the good of the mission.

How often do we view the things we do as things that we must do — must try — even when, and especially when, failure is a likely outcome? Ask yourself. Look at your to-do list (if you have one), and see how many projects make you feel this way?

Look at your most recent failures — those times you gave it solid effort, but you fell short. How many of those did you view as a challenge to others? Much like me, you probably handled them by sulking, ruminating about it, and eventually just started working on something else. But you kept it to yourself.

Failure Shouldn’t Be About You

A lot of writers and speakers are talking lately about failure. Most of it has to do with what failure can do for you — how it can help you, how you can spin it, and so on. But failure doesn’t have to be about you at all. In fact, if you care enough about what it was you were trying to accomplish when you failed, it shouldn’t matter who does it, so long as it gets done. In that way, your failure should act as a genuine challenge to someone else — a challenge to pick up where you left off, and take that thing across the finish line where you couldn’t. And when they get further than you, you should be ecstatic!

In other words, if you care deeply enough about your mission, you don’t keep your failures to yourself — you donate them. You donate them to the cause, a sacrifice to the altar of the mission. You show your devotion to this thing you’ve chosen to pursue — because it’s not about you, it’s about getting the thing done. Your passion for this mission has transcended your ego.

How many of our failures do we view that way? Likely not many. But that’s not surprising. After all, it’s hard to do that. It’s hard to care so much about something that you don’t even care if you’re the one who gets it done, and you feel just as good when someone else does it as if you were to do it.

Find A Mission

That may sound like a lofty goal, but I think it’s one worth pursuing. When you have a goal like this, you do something really difficult to do: you lose your ego. You leave your ego behind because its importance pales in comparison to the importance of what you’re trying to accomplish.

When you do that — when you really leave your ego behind for the sake of the mission — you develop a kind of productive invincibility. You don’t wait for the mood to strike you to do work; you just work. You aren’t influenced by the winds of random feelings, fads, or trends. You just think of how to best do this damn thing, and get to work. You aren’t afraid to fail, because it’s not about you — it’s about the mission. And because you’re not afraid to fail, you try more, fail more, and learn more — and do so much more quickly.

The mission doesn’t have to be big. It can be small. It can be helping one person do something to advance their career. It can be cooking a healthy and tasty meal for your family. It can be beating a record on your morning run. When you care about the other person’s career, your family’s experience of a great meal, or running done well — and you take yourself out of the equation — it becomes easier to give your all.

The best pieces of writing I’ve done happen in this way. I forget that I’m trying to get my writing noticed. I drop my pride about whatever insight or piece of self-help I’m pushing out. Instead, I beam with excitement as I see writing that captures something, that inspires, and that serves.

And paradoxically, when it stops being about me or my involvement, that’s when I end up deriving the most benefit. The writing gets noticed, people thank me, I get other opportunities. Funny how that works.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

A lifetime of misery can come from chasing the wrong kind of happiness

Without thinking too much about it, answer this question: what is the end goal of your life? All of the accomplishments, relationships, and possessions you may be chasing right now — why are you chasing them? What is it that they promise you, that makes you want them?

More likely than not, the answer is happiness. The external things we chase seem like they will make us happy. We struggle and sacrifice, plan and prioritize, all so that we can get those things that will supposedly make us happy.

But is that really how it works? How is it that we find happiness? And what exactly is happiness, anyway?

(wikimedia commons)

Jōsei Toda and Relative vs. Absolute Happiness

Jōsei Toda was a teacher and activist in Japan during one of the most devastating times of that country’s history. He is probably best known as one of the founders of Soka Gakkai, a lay Buddhist organization formed in 1930 — which has becomes one of Japan’s largest religious organizations.

Along with his mentor, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, he believed that the ultimate end of human existence is happiness. Any undertaking — whether education, entrepreneurship, or religion — should have the goal of making people happy.

But there is a catch. Toda was quick to point out that we are often confused about what happiness is, and that this confusion was actually at the root of a great deal of unhappiness. We often chase things that we think will make us happy, but in turn we make everyone — including (eventually) ourselves — miserable. To help explain why this is, Toda made the distinction between two kinds of happiness: relative happiness and absolute happiness. It is by chasing the former — when we should be chasing the latter — that we short-change ourselves, and sometimes others.

According to Toda, relative happiness describes the more common, but also more transient concept of happiness. It’s the one that we look for outside of ourselves — in people, things, accomplishments, and so on. Though it’s easier to attain, it’s also ultimately not sustainable. It doesn’t last, and we find ourselves craving more.

Absolute happiness describes a kind of happiness or sustained joy that you find within yourself. It doesn’t rely on people, places, things, or goals — and so it is stable through the flux of life. Unlike relative happiness, it doesn’t fade due to circumstances, and it makes both your life and the lives of others richer. It’s absolute happiness that we should be chasing, and actually, that’s the great thing about it: we don’t have to chase it at all.

Relative Happiness

So much of how we feel depends on circumstances. If things are going our way we feel good; if not, we usually don’t. We may set goals, begin projects, and browse for new gadgets Amazon, all with the implicit belief that whatever we accomplish or purchase will contribute to our happiness. But this is what Toda calls “relative happiness.”

Relative happiness speaks of a condition in which one’s material desires or immediate personal wishes are satisfied. While there is no limit to what we can hope or wish for, there is always a limit to what we can have materially and how long we can hold on to it.

Whatever we accomplish or acquire, it is subject to loss, degradation, or simply our own loss of interest and enthusiasm. It is well known that we as humans are subject to what’s called hedonic adaptation — the phenomenon whereby we become used to some new wave of happiness, and suddenly demand more. We get a new thing, get giddy about it, get used to that giddiness, and get hungry for another hit. Wash, rinse, repeat.

This adaptation happens in part because the source of that good feeling is outside of us. It is relative to what we have, what we’re doing, or who we’re with. Because it’s relative, it simply doesn’t last. And because it doesn’t last, it’s not the type of happiness we should be chasing.

Absolute Happiness

A happiness based on external circumstances is fleeting and unreliable. But the kind of happiness that comes from within — the kind you can feel even while you sit cramped on a smelly, crowded bus, or while you scrub kitchen floors on your aching knees— is absolute happiness. Toda explains it quite well:

…absolute happiness means that living itself is happiness; being alive is a joy, no matter where we are or what our circumstances. It describes a life condition in which happiness wells forth from within. It is called absolute because it is not influenced by external conditions.

Absolute happiness doesn’t grasp for anything, it’s not conditional upon anything happening; it just is. In a way, absolute happiness comes when you actually give up striving to obtain happiness. The striving for happiness itself gets in the way of happiness, because it’s there in us already. It’s deep down, covered by the thorny shrubbery of desire, jealousy, anger, and negative self-talk. But it’s there.

The striving for happiness itself gets in the way of happiness, because it’s there in us already. It’s deep down, covered by the thorny shrubbery of desire, jealousy, anger, and negative self-talk. But it’s there.

Tapping Into Absolute Happiness

Realizing absolute happiness comes from slowing down the ever-grasping mind, and cutting away the numerous attachments (e.g., “if I had this, I’d be happy; if this happened, I’d be happy”). It comes when your mind stops reaching and starts settling — as in, coming to rest. It comes when you realize that even if you don’t achieve anything else, you are alive right now, and you have the ability to — by a simple act of your own will — take a deep breath.

You can live in this moment. You can sit here, and observe and divide this moment into an infinite amount of tinier moments — each bursting with all kinds of sensations and thoughts that you weren’t even aware of before. You can observe the truly overwhelming wonder of your own mind just being. That’s where absolute happiness grows.

You don’t need to meditate to do this. You can do thousands of different things, from making a sandwich to driving to work, and you can realize and tap into this. It’s there for you, but you’ve allowed it to be buried. You need not add anything to your life to find it. You simply need to take away all the things that have blocked your way. It’s work, but you already have all you need to do that work.

If this sounds crazy and spiritual, that’s probably because it is. Maybe you have another name for it, rather than spirituality— so use that. The point is, there is this latent ability within each of us to stop and peel back a myriad things that have grown over our sense of happiness.

We need not add anything to our lives in order to be happy. We can be happy now, and strive for whatever it is we want while already happy. To me, that sounds much better than the alternative. Don’t you think?

A meditation on why it’s necessary to embrace life’s detours.

Photo by Burst on Unsplash

In May of 2001 — when I was about to graduate from high school in my suburban Illinois town — I had a conversation with an Army National Guard recruiter. Their table had been outside of the school’s lunchroom every Friday for nearly the whole year. Sometimes they had a decent group of students standing and chatting with them, other times, barely a soul. But there was clearly always an open invitation to every student who wasn’t quite sure where money for college was coming from: Be all that you can be.

I’m not sure what motivated me to visit the table on that particular day. I was, and had been largely a pacifist since I was quite young, and had no appetite for the regimentation of the armed forces. Really, more than anything, it was the fact that I knew where I was going to college, but was pretty surprised by just how much in student loans it would cost me. I was ready to explore my options.

One version of the story is that I decided to stay true to my youthfully idealistic pacifist principles, and refused to join the military-industrial complex. Another version of the story is that I heard how long I would have to commit to a strict schedule, tough physical training, and possibly being shipped to harm’s way — and I chickened out.

It wasn’t until a few months later — as my roommate and I watched black smoke billowing from the Pentagon — that I realized that however close I was to actually taking up that recruiter on his offer, I dodged one hell of a bullet.

How Many Different Ways Could Your Life Have Been?

Fast forward 18 more years, and I find myself wondering about what might have happened if I had decided to become a soldier. Would I have ended up in Iraq? Afghanistan? Germany? Perhaps just one of the Carolinas? I’ll never know.

But part of me thinks that I may have ended up in roughly the exact same place I am now. For all of the things that circumstance provided in my life, there seems to be quite a few things that — given the proper understanding of my disposition and traits — seem inevitable.

Am I saying that I believe in fate? No. I don’t think that we’re all doomed to end up in some certain way no matter what we do. But I also don’t believe that a fork in the road always represents two radically different paths. As a consequence of this, I also don’t believe that the determining factor in one’s life is where and whether or not you go to college, what your major is, where you get your first job, and so on.

While there’s no denying that there are certain paths one should probably consider in order to become successful, those paths are rarely direct.

The Path Worth Taking

For every great journey in a classic biography or inspiring story of successful people, there are a series of ups and downs, and twists and turns that deviate substantially from what one’s guidance counselor would recommend as a path to success. And I don’t think it’s helpful to ignore that, and pretend like the steps are well-defined, straightforward, and fool-proof.

The path is rarely direct. And if it looks that way, it’s either not a path worth taking, or you’re just not close enough to it to see the meandering twists and turns.

The journeys of the great lives we know (and many more we don’t) are filled with sharp turns off course, diversions into unknown territory, unforeseen obstacles, fear, doubt, and anxiety. And those turns off course — if we were to take them out of the equation, and only consider the straight line from childhood to success in any given great biography — we would likely lose the most valuable parts of the journey.

Don’t Avoid the Detours

We seem to have this deep-seated desire to take the shortest, most direct path to get to where we’d like to go. And in turn, we get frustrated, hopeless, or afraid when things take us off that direct path — and into the challenging and familiar. But we often don’t realize that those challenging and unfamiliar things that look like they’re not part of a path to success are actually the things that contribute most to it. They are the fuel for growth. They enrich us and strengthen our resolve. They provide a rich tapestry of new ideas and skills.

Don’t avoid the detours — at least not all of them. They may seem inconvenient or even detrimental at the time, but you need to stay open to the new and unexpected experiences that life throws at you. It is often on these journeys where we thought we knew exactly where we wanted to go that we end up finding an even better place to end our journey. As long as you allow your convictions and your principles to guide you, the circumstances can play out however they want, but wherever you end up will be somewhere close to where you needed to be.

Photo by Quincy Alivio on Unsplash

Whether you meditate, exercise, journal, or sleep in — the most effective morning routines boil down to one essential component.

Morning routines have been a big deal for a few years now. People from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe seem to have something to say about the best morning routine to make your day as successful as it can be. Some are simple and easy, others are complex and brutally difficult. Many are somewhere in between. But is there anything simple and fundamental that we can distill from them — something to use to make a no-frills effective morning ritual?

I think there is, and it comes down to a simple word: re-dedication. The most effective morning routine is one that involves you rededicating yourself to your mission — whatever that may be. And if you don’t have a mission, your best mornings will involve you rededicating yourself to figuring out your what your mission is, and then dedicating yourself to it.

This morning re-dedication is unique and intimate — meaning that it only works if it builds on your particular quirks — your unique points of view, strengths, and shortcomings. If it doesn’t, the likelihood of it being both effective and consistent tend to drop significantly.

Make the Morning Uniquely Yours

First and foremost, the best morning routine is the one that works best for you — meaning that it gets you excited and invigorated, and creates energy, rather than saps it. And as good as Elon or Ellen’s morning routines are, don’t overlook the fact that they are them and you are you — and that’s not a bad thing. So just as you are different than either the monarch of moonshots or the titan of talk television, so should your morning routine be different.

It helps to keep in mind Ockham’s Razor as it relates to productivity: don’t spend more time or energy on tools, habits, and hacks than you would actually doing the stuff that needs to get done.

This also applies more specifically to morning routines — meaning that you shouldn’t adopt a morning routine that takes a bunch of time and energy to set up and keep doing. Yes, you need to push yourself to do something different and uncomfortable — that’s how growth works. But the more different and uncomfortable your new morning routine is right off the bat, the less likely you are to stick to it early on, and thus the less effective it will be.

The best approach to building a morning routine is to make a few changes at a time — unless those changes are ones that your over-tired, sluggish, hungry, thirsty, and lazy morning self will be excited about. But here’s the real trick: the details of the morning routine are less important than you think.

The Magic Component: Re-dedication

Whatever the details of your morning routine, the one thing it should always include is an element of re-dedication. If you’re already interested in adopting a new morning routine, you’ve probably already got goals, objectives, a mission, or some kind of aspiration that you’re working toward.

The heart of a great morning routine is your act of rededicating yourself to whatever valuable thing you’re working toward. The reason for this is simple: we are almost never more energized and focused than when we have a heightened awareness of our purpose or mission. An act of re-dedication to that purpose is a great way to cultivate that heightened awareness — which cultivates increased energy and focus.

For me, the re-dedication ritual is intertwined with various things I do each morning. I have my trusty list of objectives, projects, and tasks — where it’s easy to look at the mission and re-dedicate myself to it. But I also re-dedicate myself while I’m exercising, or while I’m engaged in my morning spiritual practice (which for me is a combination of chanting and meditation). Even in the shower — if I’m really on my morning routine game — I will re-dedicate myself to the important goals in my life.

It’s really very simple. When I don’t do that — when I don’t spend time rededicating myself to the important missions of my life, I am simply not as likely to be effective. So whatever I did in the morning — no matter how great it sounds on paper — if it didn’t include acts of conscious re-dedication, it probably hasn’t done much for me.

Great Mornings Expand Beyond the AM

Some of the best morning routines don’t even begin in the morning; they begin the night before. They begin with preparing yourself for re-dedication in the morning — making that easier to do. They begin with making a list of things that are nagging at you, and committing to doing something about at least one of them tomorrow.

Great morning routines are really just expressions of a great approach to the day. This is not to say that you can’t have really productive morning activities without sitting down the night before to plan. But when you spend at least a few minutes the night before doing some planning or setting intentions for the next morning, you place a heavy burden on the very groggy and usually less energetic version of yourself.

The last relevant point I’ll make here is this: don’t place too much of a burden on yourself with the morning routine business. Just because you read an article about meditating and journaling that got you really psyched about morning routines — that doesn’t mean that you have to stick to those practices for any period of time.

Journaling, list-making, and other morning routines are not valuable in and of themselves; they bring value through structuring your awareness around certain things. It’s re-dedication, just in different forms. You can just as easily rededicate yourself to your mission while you quickly pack your bag and hurry off to the airport.

An effective morning routine not about the specific physical actions you take; it’s about what your mind is doing as you start your day. It’s about whether or not you sincerely rededicate yourself to what you’re trying to accomplish.

You will never be more productive than you are with a clear mission that is front of mind. The morning routine that pushes you to clearly understand and dedicate yourself to that mission is the best morning routine for you.

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The practical reasons for “loving thy neighbor,” and how to make it a habit.

What do you think when you hear the word compassion? Most likely, what comes to mind is touchy-feely, emotional, and impractical — right? And that reaction makes sense, considering how compassion has been approached throughout history.

Most of the time, compassion comes up in the contexts of religion or philanthropy— the kind of stuff normally segregated from strategy and the for-profit business world. But compassion is useful for more than becoming a saint or savior; it’s actually a very practical and strategic thing to practice. It is a trait that brings as much benefit to the people who show it as the people on the receiving end. It’s actually a great tool for self-improvement.

Of course, realizing the strategic and practical benefits of compassion requires approaching it a bit differently. I call this approach strategic compassion. It’s somewhere between the naïve “love and be nice to everyone” and the overly cynical “fake it so you can get what you want”. I like to think it’s a more nuanced and realistic approach to behavior — for a human emotional spectrum that every bit as nuanced.

The What and the Why of Strategic Compassion

Definitions of compassion abound, and writings about its value are quite numerous as well. Most of these writings approach compassion from the standpoint of how compassionate behavior helps others. When you treat others with compassion, you help them, they feel better, and the good feelings radiate out to others, fostering a generally positive environment. And than’s fine. But there’s a much more prudential (i.e., beneficial to the practitioner) side of compassion.

Strategic Compassion is the skill of judging and interacting with others based on a charitable understanding of their circumstances, and assumes that everyone has value — and thus are potentially equally valuable to each other.

Compassion as a Skill and an Attitude

I am not playing fast and loose with words here; compassion is a skill — just like anything else. Yes, some people seem to be compassionate naturally, which fools many into believing you are either born compassionate, or you’re not. That would be like saying that because some people naturally have better aim than others, there’s no way to develop the skill of aim. And that’s absurd.

Since compassion is a skill, you can develop it like any other skill. You simply need to develop a method of practice that engages the right mechanisms, and repeat that over and over, in different contexts, until it becomes — for the most part — your default.

Developing compassion is about putting yourself in the right frame of mind, which is about developing cues to stop or slow non-compassionate thought processes as they happen, and begin compassionate ones. Doing that comes from embracing the two core concepts of compassion — which are a combination of principles and processes. These two concepts are charitable understanding and assumption of value.

Charitable Understanding

Adopting a charitable understanding of others involves being willing to put forth the effort to understand where they are coming from, why they think what they think and do what they do. It means that you give others the benefit of the doubt — assuming that they are acting in a sincere effort to build a happy life for themselves, and any terrible or dumb things they do or think are missteps along the way.

There is plenty of precedent for this way of thinking. Plato famously attributed to Socrates the view that no person intentionally does evil — meaning that any supposed evil acts are simply ignorance on the part of the evil-doer. As Socrates explained it, we’re all basically aiming at something we perceive to be good — at minimum, our own happiness. It’s just that sometimes, we mistakenly believe that the way to get there is by doing some twisted or misguided things.

If you are inclined to believe that some people are just hell-bent on doing evil, consider the logical conclusion of that way of thinking. Consider a person not touched by sever mental disorders, who has done some bad things. There are really only two explanations for their behavior: either they knew the things they did were unjustifiable, and did them anyway — just because OR they thought their behavior was justifiable, even thought others may disagree, and they did it.

The first explanation doesn’t make a lot of sense when you dig into it.If someone thinks that something is unjustifiable, how can they then also believe that they should do it? It is borderline nonsensical. We do things that we believe are in some way justifiable — even if we’re a bit unsure — we believe in the moment that there is some justification. This was Socrates’s basic thought on the matter. I am inclined to agree. And using this as a jumping-off point helps for a much better connection with a larger swath of people. You can get along better, make more connections, and see much more benefit by using a charitable understanding of others.

Assumption of Value

The second part of strategic compassion is the assumption of value. The basic idea is this: assume that you and others are valuable — as human beings and as sources of insight into whatever topic is at issue. Assume that just as you bring things to the table (knowledge, skills, personality traits), so also do they.

This is likely to be a difficult assumption to make — especially in cases where someone has wronged you or show themselves to be incompetent. In cases like this, the temptation may be to view the person as less valuable due to their lack of past regard for you, or record of poor performance or lack of skills. But remember, the operative term here is “assumption”. You’re not making a decision based on evidence here, you’re assuming something.

But in the name of a logical argument for assuming value, here is a quick few sentences. While past performance is the best predictor of future performance, it is not a certain predictor. A person can fall short hundreds of times, only to come through at the next opportunity.

Also, it is often by failing many, many times, that a person is able to succeed in the future. Furthermore, the very fact that others assumed a person would produce results like before may well be a contributing factor to why they ended up producing the same results. This lack of faith can manifest in various ways — many of which have an effect on a person’s behavior and performance.

Again, this is an assumption. It is helpful if you act upon it, not so much if you attempt to analyze and disprove it. It’s also not a primary principle to follow naively. If you assume that a person brings value, but they simply don’t, and it looks like they may hurt you or others — you can find a way to leave them behind. This assumption is not a permanent reversal of how you manage relationships, it’s simply a way to approach others initially, in order to optimize the possible value from your interactions and relationships.

How Strategic Compassion Helps You

Being compassionate manifests in charitable actions, sure. It can show itself by way of helping others, making sacrifices, or just listening, but compassion itself is not really about action, it’s about attitude. Compassion is a way of viewing others. When you view other people as worthy and valuable — worthy of your consideration and attention, and valuable regardless of their value to you— you will tend to act differently toward them. So while actions are certainly involved they’re actually more of the side-effect of the attitude, which is the important thing.

Being compassionate on a regular basis has many benefits. For one, people will generally tend to return the favor; they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, and treat you better. As with anything, there will be outliers, who will just be an ass to you even at your most compassionate. And that’s fine. Nobody bats a thousand.

Compassion also benefits you by creating a much more positive state of mind. The less time you spend painting others in a negative light, or shutting them out, the less stress and anxiety you will feel. Think of that stuff as baggage that you carry around with you. Compassion provides you with a way to simply put those bags down and walk away.

Another benefit of being compassionate is that you can learn much more. I have long believed that you can learn something from everyone you interact with. Even if you haven’t experienced this personally, think about it for a second. Every person has had an entirely different set of experiences in their life. Though you may share common threads with a person, their experiences are still quite different from yours, and so their point of view is also different. If you fail to take advantage of that in your interactions with others, you’re simply failing to use a readily available, free source of learning.

We encounter impermanence every day, but we seem to forget it when remembering it would do us the most good.

Photo by Mikito Tateisi on Unsplash

I have worked at a handful of companies (both non-profit and for-profit) for 20 years. I’ve had kids for nearly 5 years, but already, I am struck by the parallels between the two endeavors: working and parenting. One shared feature of both working and parenting is the abundance of surprises and frustrations.

Kids, colleagues, and clients are all great at taking a day that seems to be going as planned, and flushing it down the toilet (sometimes literally). ’m not complaining — actually, in a way I’m expressing gratitude for these frustrations and surprises. Because those things that seem so frustrating at the time can actually be the most beneficial things to happen to us. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still frustrating — but that frustration is fertile ground for some pretty great personal and professional growth.

Progress in life consists of reducing as much as possible the amount of things that can make you lose your composure.

An Unusual Measure of Progress

I once heard a saying — and if no one can find the source, I’ll assume I made it up: progress in life consists of reducing as much as possible the amount of things that can make you lose your composure. The better you are at taking things in stride — at staying calm under pressure and continuing onward — the better you’re doing. You can make all the money in the world, and have a great job, but if every little hiccup throws you into emotional turmoil — you can’t be doing well.

In fact, the folks who get to the top — who get the money and notoriety and all that — but who are known for losing their minds at the drop of a hat, it’s pretty clear what the cost of all that “success” was, right? The cost was their mental and emotional (and likely personal) stability. In that sense, the success is hollow; it’s “success” in name only. It is empty achievements gained by trading in any semblance of sustainable character.

As a metric, I like measuring the number of things that can throw you off your square, derail you, or whatever you want to call it. I like it because it’s a metric that — unlike how much money you make, or how many people bought your product — is entirely within your control. It may not seem like it, but whether or not you lose your s*#t is up to you. You may feel like you’re going to lose it when something doesn’t go as planned, but you control what that feeling turns into. So if it almost never turns into an outburst of you being a jackass to others, you’re doing well for yourself.

Mindfulness’s Overlooked Sibling

We hear plenty these days about mindfulness — about being aware of what’s going on in your mind, and being present and grateful, and all of that. And all of that is healthy and helpful. But what we hear less than we should is the corresponding message about impermanence: things — both physical and mental — don’t last; they fade away, so act accordingly.

For all of mindfulness’s benefits, it doesn’t quite get us to that point where we can acknowledge and use an awareness of impermanence. It allows us to experience impermanence at work — the arising and falling away of thoughts, sensations, and emotions — but that experience alone doesn’t force one to embrace impermanence as a pervasive feature of life. That realization takes experience and reflection — something that needs to be stacked on top of mindfulness in order for it to be fully benefit us.

In essence, mindfulness is good, but it’s not enough. In order to get the full benefit of what we experience during our various mindfulness practices, we need reflection. We need to reflect on what we experience as part of mindfulness, in order to help us realize just how often things simply pop up and then fizzle out. And that can be the source of a certain amount of joy and calm — especially in tough situations.

If you’ve observed and then reflected on your mind’s activity for long enough, you will learn firsthand just how short the lifespan of a particular feeling is. Even ones that seem to span days, weeks, or years really don’t continuously survive during that whole time. They pop in and out constantly — giving way to other things in the meantime that pop in and out of your mind.

So back to that frustration I was talking about earlier.

This Too DOES Pass

You’ve likely heard the saying “this too shall pass”. It’s supposed to help us deal with unpleasant things — and keep us from losing our minds when we get frustrated, sad, disappointed, or whatever negative feeling takes hold. So we are often tempted to use this mantra in cases like frustrations with our kids or colleagues — repeating it in our head to calm us down. But our minds are no fools. If we don’t have evidence to support this mantra, we can’t trick our minds into believing it. If our mind has not experienced the rising and falling away of things over and over, we’ll never acquiesce to that simple truth. We’ll continue to ride the wave of anger right into destructive outbursts.

That’s where mindfulness and reflection come in.

The thing about having some kind of mindfulness practice coupled with reflection is that it changes this saying ever-so-slightly, to one that works even better to calm us down: this too does pass. Accepting that old saw that this too shall pass may seem simple and easy, but until you’ve seen it in action through your own observation, you’ll be hard-pressed to actually believe it.

Once you’ve experienced this “passing” firsthand, the “shall” turns into a “does” — as in you’ve seen this feeling before, and it does pass. It becomes like watching a movie you’ve seen several times before. You no longer jump at the scene where the actor pops into the frame unexpectedly. You’re not on the edge of your seat, anxious to see how it ends. You say the lines before the actors do. You smile knowingly as the plot twists unfold. The original emotions give way to a knowing appreciation of the film as a whole. You’ve seen this movie before, and now that the initial emotions of mystery and novelty have given way, you can appreciate it in a much deeper way.

Mindful + Reflective = Equanimous

Like I said at the outset, a great metric for progress in life is how few things there are that can knock you off your square. The word for this is equanimity: the state of being consistently calm, cool, and collected — in various situations.

Note, equanimity isn’t the state of being unflinchingly positive and enthusiastic. It’s not the state of being numb and withdrawn due to a lack of caring about anything. Rather, equanimity is the state of having “seen the movie before” so many times that you are not taken by surprise when the inevitable plays out. It’s being intimately aware of how these feelings of frustration — just like they pop into your head — also pop out.

Being mindful, plus reflecting regularly on what you observe in your mind, yields equanimity. Watching the mind’s movie over and over helps you learn the lines, and anticipate all the things that used to be surprises. As a result, there isn’t much left that can really throw you into a tizzy. You’ll never stop feeling the feelings of frustration and everything else; never forget that. It’s just that eventually, you get to know the feelings well enough that they no longer have the power to overtake you. So rather than feelings pushing you quickly into negative actions, you sit for a minute while you remember that this too does pass — as everything does.

On the difference between active and passive goals, the “goal” of goal-setting, and meeting reality on its own terms.

Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash

Here’s a question that might sound dumb: why do we set goals?

The short answer is that setting goals is the best way to make sure you keep on growing. The longer answer (and the more important one) is that goals provide us with the building blocks of a fulfilling life. If you set the right goals, stay engaged, and see them through, chances are good that you’ll live a fulfilling life.

But a word of caution here: you need set the right kind of goals. Because setting the wrong kind of goals can actually be detrimental in two significant ways. First, the wrong kind of goals can derail you from seeing goals through. Secondly, even if you do achieve the goals, the wrong kind of goal can leave you feeling disillusioned or burned out. Either way, the wrong kind of goal can make you feel sour about the whole enterprise of goal-setting.

Whether you write your goals down or not, whether you create a vision board, chant affirmations, or do exercises imagining yourself succeeding — ensuring that you think about and embrace goals in the right way can make all the difference.

The Two Types of Goals

The first (and most common) kind of goals are passive. They come out of a way of thinking that centers around what you would like to have, be, or receive. These kinds of goals are more common — especially for those who don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the process of adopting goals.

The second (and less common) kind of goals are active. They come out of a way of thinking that centers around what you would like to be doing, or what activities you’d like to be engaged in. The reason these types of goals are less common is because they tend not to revolved around thoughts of completion or resolution and passive enjoyment (like their passive counterparts). Rather, active goals involve effort, problems, trade-offs, and other things that we tend to try to avoid when thinking about how we would like things to do be in the future.

This piece of writing is intended to lay out the difference between the two kinds of goals and the ways to formulate them. My hope is that, at the very least, the kind of goals you adopt will be changed ever-so-slightly. We set ourselves up for disappointment when we throw ourselves at the mercy of a worldview that doesn’t jibe with how reality is. In the case of goals, we nearly guarantee disappointment and disillusionment when we formulate our goals in a way that ignores both our psychology and the steady march of time and events.

Passive Goals

For lack of a better descriptor, we’ll call the wrong way to formulate goals passive goal formulation. It centers around achievement — meaning obtaining something — which sounds just fine on the surface. But hidden in the words of such goals is a problem.

Many of us set goals for ourselves based on where we want to be or what we want to have in the future. That’s the language of achievement we’re used to. The key words here are the verbs: be and have. As verbs go, those are essentially passive. There is no action involved in either being or having. There is no activity, no work, no problems, no struggle.

A goal that centers around either being or doing carries with it an implicit hope — which is then made explicit: it’s the hope to be passive. This is the wrong way to formulate goals, because it sets your sights on passivity — on being or having. If goals are supposed to continuously motivate you to action, you’re essentially using the hope of passivity to motivate you to activity. Now how weird is that?

Specifically, the issue is the desire for passive enjoyment. Passive goal-setting relies on the desire to find fulfillment in being some way or having something. The problem with this approach is that one of two things happens:

1. Passive goals fail to properly motivate you for any significant length of time
    
   OR
2. Passive goals — once achieved — fail to fulfill you.

We’re probably most familiar with the first outcome, and it’s probably why you’re reading about goal-setting right now. We have all set goals where— after a while — we lose steam. We fall short, and feel a bit deflated. Then it’s on to the next goal, and perhaps we learned a little something along the way.

Less common is the second outcome: you achieve your goal, but it fails to provide the expected fulfillment. This problem — while arguably more rare — is more dangerous than the first. It’s dangerous because when we achieve a passive goal, we feel the urge to quickly move onto the next thing — the next goal. We feel strangely unfulfilled by having climbed that particular mountain, so we find a new one — a taller one. The problem with this is that life then becomes a serious of mountains. We’re forever climbing — which would be fine — but in many cases, we’re not enjoying the climb itself.

Active Goals

Goals built on wishes to be or to have tend lead down a road of disillusionment or abandonment. So what can replace them? Active goal-setting.

Active goal-setting is the opposite of passive goal-setting. Rather than building goals on the passive verbs to be or to have, you construct goals using active verbs. Instead of conceiving of success or accomplishment as being free from effort, problems, and trade-offs, active goals assume that those things will happen almost without exception. And so they build that acceptance into the picture of success and accomplishment. That is part of what makes active goals so much more effective; they’re more realistic.

To get an idea of what this looks like, you can ask yourself a simple question to help produce an active goal. Ask yourself a few questions, and build the answers into a goal:

1. What activities do I wish to be engaged in 6 months from now? 
   A year from now? 
   3 years from now?
2. What problems would I like to have?
3. What trade-offs would I be happy to be making?

When we’re formulating goals, we tend not to think of these things, because they sound negative. We don’t tend to think of goals as active things because we envision achievement as something we receive. But as I hope I’ve illustrated above, we’re not after achievement — we’re after fulfillment. And there is a large body of thought and research telling us that fulfillment isn’t the result of having things, but the result of doing things (i.e., activity).

The Link Between Activity and Fulfillment

Aristotle wrote that the aim of a good human life was not achievement — though achievements can certainly help build one. Rather, it is in the use of our uniquely human functions that we find fulfillment. It’s not the completion of the project — where we sit back and reap the passively accepted benefits — that we find that thing that makes it all worth while. Instead, it is the use of our reason, creativity, and human spirit that we find fulfillment. And what could engage those things more than being knee-deep in a challenging project?

At the end of the day, those who are actively doing things are most likely to feel fulfilled. It’s that simple. You can certainly enjoy sitting and doing nothing for a few hours or days, if you’re resting or recuperating. But after much longer, the enjoyment fades. That’s because we need to be involved in activity to get that sense of fulfillment. It’s what rouses that most crucial part of our human spirit, human nature — or whatever you want to call it.

The point is simply this: set goals, but set active goals. Set the kind of goals that aren’t rooted in a wish to simply enjoy completion and achievement. Set the kind of goals that acknowledge the never-complete, always challenging nature of reality. Set goals that involve doing more work, dealing with more problems, and being active. It’s a lot less likely you’ll be frustrated our disappointed that way. And it’s all because you refused to form unrealistic expectations — and because you embraced what fulfillment actually means.

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Sales is the butt of many jokes, but it might be more important than we realize — especially if it’s done the right way.

In his 1849 essay historian Thomas Carlyle dubbed economics “the dismal science”. The title was a joke, based on the fact that for decades, music had been referred to as “the gay science”. I’ll pause to allow your anachronistic laughter.

The gist of the joke is that while music took the seed of the human experience and grew out of it both profundity and verve, economics took that same seed and reduced it to a lifeless series of transactions. Economics hasn’t much recovered from that portrayal since. And I’m not sure how much it has an interest in doing so.

Economists are still called upon by both governments and businesses to do their dismal work — predicting and analyzing — in the hopes that some advantage can be gained. The dismal science, however dismal, reigns supreme.

There is another discipline that receives a similarly bad rap, but that I think we need more than many of its detractors realize: sales.

If economics is the “dismal science” because it analyzes away the vivacity of the human existence, perhaps sales can be called something a bit warmer: the hopeful science.

Sales is an optimistic discipline; it has to be. The art and science of sales operates under the article of faith that it’s possible to get nearly anyone to enter into a transaction with nearly anyone else, for nearly anything— so long as the process is done correctly. Now that’s optimism if I’ve ever heard it. And it’s that optimism that gets sales a bad rap.

Hope can do funny things to a person, and to an organization. The hope that millions of buyers exist out there — and you need only begin dialing their numbers — that hope remains very real in sales organizations around the world. The jury is still out on just what a realistic expectation is for how many of those potential buyers can reasonably expected to buy. And candidly, salespeople aren’t too interested in what a reasonable expectation is. There’s no incentive for them to. We must believe that everyone is a potential customer, otherwise we’re throwing in the towel before the fight even begins.

But again, hope can make us do funny things.

Hope can blind us. Hope can keep us from seeing truths that are so plain to others that when they hit us like a ton of bricks, we swear they came out of nowhere.

And that’s the balancing act of sales: be hopeful enough to keep trying, but not so hopeful that you persist even when there is no reason to hope anymore — and you cross a line. It’s at that point, where — if you’re not careful — you can cease to regard the buyer as a person with feelings and autonomy. It’s where you can take that optimism too far, and think that if you simply say the right thing, or tweak the process a bit, you can get those persistent “no” replies turned into a “yes”. It takes self-awareness to avoid doing that. But it must be done.

The sale is never more important than the relationship. If you sacrifice the latter in order to get the former, you won’t sell much more for much longer. Yes, anyone can be a buyer, but not everyone is a buyer. That’s a subtle difference, but the ramifications are huge.

That’s where I think a second adjective can be applied to the science of sales. Sales is not just the hopeful science, but the helpful science.

Fred Rogers has a famous quote that he attributed to his mother:

‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’

A good salesperson is a helper. She or he does for a customer what can help them. Sometimes that means helping them understand why this might not be a good fit. Sometimes it’s doing a bit more than the normal scope of work calls for. But whatever it does call for, it’s necessary work.

So what does all this mean for the discipline of sales? It’s both a description and a prescription. Sales is the helpful and hopeful science. So if you want to be a good salesperson, be both hopeful and helpful.