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During Navy SEALs training, which is really tough, recruits can quit by ringing a bell three times. Then they get a shower and a hot meal, and they’re done with the struggle.
No more physical ordeals. No more being wet and sandy. No more sleep deprivation.
And no more opportunity to be part of a SEAL team.
Afterwards the recruits who quit can offer up any reasons they want, but it doesn’t matter in terms of results. They’ve demonstrated that they will give up on the team, so the team grows stronger when they leave.
SEAL training, especially hell week, is a filter. It separates the quitters from the committed. It separates those who align with the team from those who don’t.
The SEALs have a sense of the giant pumpkins they’re looking for, including people who won’t mentally or emotionally quit no matter what, so their training tries to filter for people with the qualities they want. It isn’t perfect, but it does filter out of a lot of people who wouldn’t be good matches for the SEALs.
While you could say that these are values-based filters, they’re really behavioral filters. It doesn’t matter why someone rings the bell – only that they ring it. It doesn’t matter why someone refuses to quit – only that they never ring the bell. Ringing the bell is a simple binary behavioral test. Quit or don’t quit.
The SEALs don’t need to do complex testing for values alignment. They can just have a simple test to see who quits and who doesn’t. They let the quitters go, and they invest in those who stay. This way they end up with a fairly aligned group – a group full of people who resist quitting.
Throughout the rest of the training, there are many more tests. At each point people either pass or they don’t. The training could be seen as a series of binary challenges.
I share this because I invite you to think of this as a lens or frame for considering some of your real-life challenges. I don’t recommend using this as your one-and-only frame, but it’s a nice one for simplifying the way you look at complex problems and cutting to the core issues quickly.
How many challenges can you reduce to binary pass-or-fail tests?
Fill in the blank: You either ______, or you rang the bell.
Think of a goal or challenge you’re currently facing. How does it look when you reduce it to a binary challenge? Get it done, or ring the bell. Does this help you see what kind of commitment you’ll need to avoid ringing the bell?
My 365-day blogging challenge can be reduced to a binary, pass-or-fail test. All I have to do to succeed is not ring the bell any day this year. Every day the choice is simple: create or quit. Either I ring the bell, or I don’t.
Is it always bad to ring the bell? No, sometimes it’s the right move. You just have to consider how you’ll feel about it afterwards. What meaning will you assign to it?
Ringing the bell can mean years of regret, or it could mean something very positive. You have to consider ringing the bell in the context of your big picture framing.
After six years in Toastmasters, I rang the bell and quit. To me that represented a graduation. It was a success. I had invested six years in the club and went from 7-minute speeches to designing and delivering 3-day workshops on the Vegas Strip. So that particular bell produced a glorious ringing sound to celebrate the journey and what it meant to me.
Ringing the bell on my computer games business after 10 years gave me mixed feelings. It was part joy and part sadness – the death of the old and the birth of the new. It was still a positive meaning overall but very different from leaving Toastmasters.
Note also that some people will view your bell ringing differently than you do – and differently from each other. When I left the computer games field, some people treated it like a failure while others congratulated me for making the change.
One interesting way to think about your personal relationships is to ask: What kind of person will never ring the bell on you? Who is capable of being your true, long-term friend?
This loops back to the recent article on Fragile vs Resilient Relationships. A fragile relationship will lead to someone ringing the bell and quitting. A resilient relationship is one where no one will ring the bell.
Truthfully you will have to ring the bell sometimes. You have to quit the misaligned, so you can find what’s truly commitment-worthy for you. You could see life as a process of discovering those deeper commitments where ringing the bell is simply not an option.
Now that I’ve been food logging for 15+ weeks straight, the simple practice of writing down what I eat each day has made me want to revisit another practice: time logging.
I’ve done time logging before and have found it useful, but I don’t think I’ve ever done it for more than a week or two at a stretch.
On a short-term basis like a few days or a week, time logging is good for doing a quick recalibration. You may notice some areas where you’re wasting time, which will become glaringly obvious in the first day or two of logging. But what about the subtler issues that may not show up during that time?
Even after 105+ days of food logging, I’m still maintaining the habit. As you might guess there are diminishing returns, so the insights I’m learning now are more subtle than what I figured out during the first few weeks.
The main reason I’m still food logging is that the habit itself is beneficial, and since it’s so habitualized now, it would be harder to stop than to continue. I do it by default without thinking about it. Since maintaining the habit is still yielding positive effects, like helping me optimize how I eat and losing weight with ease, it’s a no-brainer to keep it going. So it’s not just about what I learn from the logs. The logging practice helps me stay on track and apply what I’ve learned.
This makes me extra curious about time logging. Of course it’s beneficial over the span of a few days, but what if I maintained a daily time long for 100+ days in a row? I can see how that could be very beneficial.
I’d surely still be discovering more insights after 10+ weeks. Maybe they’d be pretty minor by that time, but it wouldn’t be entirely worthless to go that long just for the learning experience.
But I think the best gains wouldn’t come from discovering new areas of improvement but from the ongoing daily awareness. If I keep logging day after day and week after week, I always have to face the data. There’s no way to return to blissful ignorance, like I could do with a short-term trial. So I expect this would improve my ability to apply what I learn more consistently. The daily logs could serve as rails to keep me on track.
Imagine time logging for a week and then stopping. You might see that you wasted a lot of time on unproductive activities that week. Then you could end the experiment by telling yourself, “Okay, I see what I need to fix.” But did you actually fix it afterwards? How long did your fix last? Or did you just continue the same habits afterwards and shove the awareness of that problem into a back corner of your mind?
It’s a very different situation when you make this level of awareness inescapable. Every day you must face it with no ability to escape it. If you take a minute or two to review your logs at the end of each day, it’s going to generate a reaction within you, such as a feeling of accomplishment or disappointment. That’s a good form of personal accountability.
Even if your tracking commitment is temporary, it could help you create a meaningful change in your habits (and your results) if you maintain the habit long enough. You could also lean in with a 30-day commitment and then extend it as long as you like the results.
I like this idea in principle, but tracking all of my time feels like a lot more work than tracking what I eat. When I did time logging in the past, it could feel burdensome or invasive, and my logs were a bit hard to decipher afterwards. That’s because I’d update the log whenever I switched activities. So the intervals between entries would differ from day to day. I’d have to review them in more detail afterwards, figuring out how much time I actually spent on various activities. I don’t favor this style of logging for a long-term approach.
I’ve also tried some time tracking apps. They always sound good in principle but suck in practice. I feel like they get in my way more than help me. Some people seem to like them, but I always find that the added complexity of trying to remember how to use them isn’t worth the pretty charts and graphs.
In Conscious Growth Club, we do a themed 30-day group challenge at the start of each month. I believe next month’s theme has to do with sparking joy, so anyone who wants to do the challenge gets to pick a daily activity that they believe will spark joy for them. Then the challenge is to do that activity every day for 30 days in a row.
I often like doing these challenges, but I felt out of sync with this one since I didn’t feel that time logging fit the theme. That’s when I realized that maybe it should fit the theme. I thought that if this habit doesn’t spark joy, maybe my approach is wrong.
Food logging sparks joy for me. I like doing it each day, and I feel no resistance to it at all. It’s like a mini-game that I play each day. It’s satisfying to review the completed puzzle of what I’ve eaten each day and to see what I did right and what could be improved.
This encouraged me to tweak the way I do time logging to make it spark joy for me.
If I’m going to do daily time logging for at least a month and possibly many months in a row, it has to be easy. I can’t feel like it’s disrupting my normal workflow or getting in my way. This means it should not require a lot of writing. I don’t want to fuss with specialized apps. The logs should be short enough that I can review each day at a glance and see where my time went. If I’m spending 30 minutes a day recording entries and reviewing them afterwards, that would be way too much.
I usually spend no more than 5 minutes per day to maintain my food log. With time logging I’m willing to go up to 10 minutes a day, but not more than that, including the time I spend reviewing the logs.
I don’t need to be super granular. It doesn’t matter when I go to the bathroom or how many minutes I spend on emails. I want to focus on the broad strokes first.
My old time logging approach would look like this:
5:00a Get up, brush teeth, dress, get water 5:15 Go running 6:15 Walk in park 6:25 Shower, dress 6:35 Make breakfast, eat 7:00 Blogging ...
But for my new approach I want to try something like this:
5 - Run 6 - Eat 7 - Blog ...
So it’s much simpler and quicker but at the expense of detail. I’ll just have one entry per hour, which would be 17 lines total in a typical day for me, depending on when I go to bed. That fits nicely in a small notebook, as long as it has at least 17 lines per page.
If I forget to record an hour or two, I can update the log afterwards since it will be in my recent memory.
If I want to do more detailed logging for some parts of the day, I can still do that, but I won’t make that part of the baseline habit. I can always be more detailed when I feel like it. Some weeks I might focus more closely on certain parts of my day, like optimizing my morning routine. I like this level of flexibility.
The exact borders between one activity and the next don’t matter that much to me. Whether I spend 75 or 90 minutes on an activity isn’t normally significant.
What I really want to know is where the bulk of my time is going. I want answers to questions like these:
So it’s the big-picture balance that I want to work on here. That’s more important to me than making low-level tweaks right now.
I liked this idea enough that I figured, why wait? So instead of starting on September 1st, I started yesterday morning.
Within Conscious Growth Club, I can still frame this as a 30-day challenge for September since this way of time logging does spark joy for me. I’m excited for what I’ll learn from it and how it will help me improve.
I’ll probably go considerably longer than 30 days if I can keep this low-maintenance while still being useful. I approached food logging with an open-ended attitude when I started, so I think I’ll use the same mindset here.
I’m also wondering where else I could explore daily logging. I’ve done many variations of this in the past, but so far food logging and time logging have been the most interesting. I could see real potential in doing some sort of social logging or perhaps logging of Internet usage, although time logging will cover that to some extent.
Have you tried time logging before? What’s the longest you’ve ever done it? Wanna join me for a 30-day challenge, starting September 1st?
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For the month of August, I’ve been doing a new dietary experiment. I’m eating grain-free, legume-free, and sugar-free. I’m doing this mainly out of curiosity to see what effect it has. I think I’m far enough along (about four weeks) that this would be a good time to share what I’ve learned.
The biggest adjustment was switching some common food sources, especially carbs. Instead of brown rice or rice noodles, I’ve been eating more potatoes, sweet potatoes, and starchy squash. Instead of beans or tofu, I’m eating more fruit, nuts, and veggies.
While I’ve removed refined sugar sources like coconut sugar and maple syrup, I’m still having some sweet fruit, including bananas, berries, and peaches. I’m allowing but limiting dried fruits, so I normally won’t eat more than 2-3 dates in a day.
This was a fairly modest adjustment. I still like all the foods I get to eat, so it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice. I just focus on a different subset of the wide range of foods I like. One favorite meal I’ve been eating more often is a big plate of roasted potatoes, red peppers, and sweet onions.
I’ve also been eating a lot of salads. One of my favorites includes romaine or mixed greens, shredded cabbage, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, avocado, 10g olive oil, 24g balsamic vinegar, and a sprinkling of seasoning (nori, kelp, sesame seeds). I often eat this with some olives on the side.
I haven’t noticed too much difference in terms of mental and physical differences, but there is some.
The main difference is that I feel less hungry for much of the day, especially between meals. I’m eating slightly less because of that, but most days I’m still coming in between 2000 and 2200 calories. At first I felt some cravings for certain foods, like a rice bowl, but those went away after the first week.
Exercise-wise I haven’t noticed any meaningful difference. I like to begin most days with a 5-mile run, and my runs have felt about the same this month. If there’s a difference one way or another from this dietary change, it’s too minor to detect. Or it’s possible it may take longer for there to be enough of a difference to notice.
The main effect I do notice on my runs is that if I don’t eat enough on the previous day, I feel more tired and sluggish during my run the next morning. So if I only eat 1800 or 1850 calories instead of 2000+, I feel less energetic the next day when I go running. Running feels a bit harder, especially when going uphill. That’s true even if I have a big dinner the previous day; the day’s total calories matters more than the size of the previous meal. So even if I don’t feel hungry enough to need those extra calories, I find it best to eat at least 2000 calories per day. I also experienced this same effect before doing this dietary experiment, but with this different way of eating, it’s easier for me to feel satisfied on fewer calories, so I’ve “run” into this issue more often this month.
I also notice a difference in mental performance if I eat too little. Some days I’ve felt a little mentally sluggish and then observed that I haven’t been eating enough relative to the time of day. So I’ll eat some more food, maybe 200 calories if I just want a snack, and this helps my mind feel sharper. It’s been interesting to observe this connection between food intake and mental performance. Multiple times I’ve made the mistake of eating too little, but I didn’t notice that I wasn’t eating enough till I tried to do some mental work and felt unmotivated to do it. Fixing the problem is as easy as eating some fruit or nuts.
Emotionally I haven’t noticed any discernible difference. I normally feel emotionally stable and positive, and I don’t sense any changes in that area this month. When I eat 100% raw, I notice a significant improvement in mood within the first few days, but that hasn’t happened with this diet.
After about four weeks of this dietary experiment, I feel the benefits are relatively modest, given the trade-off of narrowing my food choices. I do like that this different way of eating has encouraged me to explore different meal options, like the peach bowl I shared yesterday (which I had again this morning). I’ll at least finish off the full month, but I’m not seeing enough benefits to warrant a long-term change here.
I am curious, however, if the reduction in hunger between meals is due to removing grains, legumes, sugar, or some combo of those. So I may try reintroducing some foods slowly next month to see if I can gain more awareness there. You may have your guesses, as do I, but I gain the best insights from seeing how my body and mind actually respond, which often doesn’t match people’s predictions.
In terms of results, tweaking which plant foods I eat doesn’t seem like nearly as big of a deal as getting all animal products out of my diet. That was the most important step, especially given the long-term mental and emotional gains, many of which were very noticeable in the first week or two. The biggest deal beyond that was to eat 100% raw for a while.
I’ve continued to lose weight this month (I lost another 5.8 pounds during the 4 weeks of this experiment), so this diet hasn’t interfered with that. I have been losing weight a bit faster this month than before, but it’s hard to say if that’s significant. I think it’s too little time to know for sure.
I’m still keeping a food log of everything I eat, and that simple habit alone has made it really easy to lose weight. I’ve been doing daily food logging for 15 weeks now, and I’ve lost 18.8 pounds in that time, which is an average of 1.25 pounds per week. This has felt practically effortless. Just taking a few minutes per day to write down what I eat has raised my awareness of exactly how much I’m eating each day.
Food logging has been such a nice tool for raising awareness that it’s creating results without my having to deliberately do anything more. It’s very different doing it for 15 weeks in a row versus doing it for only a few days or a week. I intend to maintain this tracking habit at least through the rest of the year because I’m still learning from it, and it really is super easy to keep doing it after 105 days of consistency. Another 100+ days seems like a breeze.
I often get asked what I eat as a vegan, so I’ll share one of my favorite breakfasts that I’ve been enjoying lately. I’ve eaten this simple meal for most days of the month.
Previously I would typically have steel cut oatmeal for breakfast, but this month I’m doing a 30-trial of eating grain-free, legume-free, and sugar-free. So I needed to figure out a breakfast that would satisfy those criteria.
This breakfast is also:
Here we go…
2 sliced peaches (110 calories):
60g grain-free granola (340 calories):
170g unsweetened almond milk yogurt (140 calories):
After mixing:
So good! I just love the combo of the juicy softness of the peaches, the creaminess of the yogurt, and the mild crunch of the granola.
Total calories = 110 (peaches) + 340 (granola) + 140 (yogurt) = 590
Here are the granola ingredients:
The peaches are from Trader Joe’s (this time, but I usually get them from Costco), the granola from Costco, and the yogurt from Whole Foods. Getting groceries from 3+ different stores is pretty normal for a vegan, and fortunately all of these stores are close to us.
Here are some variations I often make:
If you like coffee, this goes really well with coffee too. I recommend trying it with a cup of Stumptown Founder’s Blend (organic) mixed with 50 ml of coconut milk (no sugar).
I especially like how this meal makes me feel. It digests easily, gives me good energy, and leaves me feeling light and happy. This is a really satisfying breakfast to have after a morning run.
Enjoy!
I did some reflection in my journal about why I like my life so much. Here’s what I came up with:
I like that my life isn’t overloaded with so much activity. Sometimes I get really busy, but over the course of a year and during most months of the year, I have plenty of time to think, reflect, and ponder.
This month a number of friends told me how much I seem to be a person of deep thought. I do love to think deeply about many different topics, and I’m genuinely curious about so many aspects of life. For someone like me to be happy, I absolutely need abundant space to engage in deep thought.
I can’t really help doing this. Most of the time I’m not even aware of it. It just seems normal to me to keep asking questions about the nature of this reality. I’m always trying to connect more dots and deepen my understanding of how life works.
I feel less happy when I fill my schedule with too much activity and don’t have as much time to think.
I especially love morning runs because they carve out an hour of thinking time each day. One reason I like going for longer runs is that I gain more time to think and ponder.
I find thinking to be a gloriously rewarding activity. It’s been super important for me to create a lifestyle rich in time to think. It definitely makes me happy to have this kind of lifestyle.
The world of money sometimes interests and excites me, but much of the time I find it rather mundane and boring for my tastes. So I usually prefer to keep this aspect of life in the background instead of the foreground.
I still consider money when making business and life decisions, but I prefer not to base decisions mainly on financial concerns. I’d rather make decisions based on other forms of value, such as appreciation, exploration, or growth.
For me to be happiest, I’ve found it best to see income generation as a problem to be thoroughly solved, so financial concerns don’t get in my way too much.
I like having years’ worth of savings, so even if all of my income switched off suddenly, I could coast for a long time – plenty of time to create new income streams, even if I had to start over in a whole new field from scratch. And even if the savings evaporated, I’ve invested enough in a variety of income skills that I feel that I could replenish it as needed.
“Get the money problem solved once and for all” was something I worked on for many years. I like having this area of life solved well enough that I can give more attention to other aspects of life.
I love to explore. I get bored easily, so wandering through different learning experiences is a big part of my life. This also gives me plenty of source material for connection more dots.
Centering my life around exploration and discovery was a terrific choice that has made me way happier than investing in a traditional corporate career.
Friendships are a big source of value for me. I especially like connecting with people who are a bit unusual. I’m often sponging mindsets and ideas from other people, testing them for myself to see how well they work.
I’m good at making new friends quickly. I tend to just assume friendship with new people instead of feeling like we have to go through a long building phase together. I think life is too short to do otherwise.
Having dozens of growth-oriented friends (and hundreds if not thousands of looser connections) makes me a lot happier than when I used to have no growth-oriented friends. I especially like that lots of interesting invitations and ideas flow to me through my friendship network. I appreciate the ongoing stimulation this provides, even though sometimes it feels like the flow is a bit too high, and I have to withdraw a little.
Last but definitely not least, my marriage to Rachelle is a key source of happiness. I appreciate her every day. Being in love for 10+ years is absolutely wonderful.
Every day I get to share the words “I love you” multiple times with someone. What’s not to like about that?
We spent a LOT of time together. It’s rare for us go more than a few hours without interacting, verbally and through touch and affection. Somehow we naturally make each other happier. When people see us together, they can tell we just belong with each other.
Even when we aren’t doing any particular activity, we enjoy each other’s beingness. Spending time together doing just about anything is very satisfying for us. This makes us optimistic for the future too. It’s a special feeling looking forward to spending so many more days together.
These are just some aspects that create happiness in my life that came through while journaling. There are others of course – a healthy lifestyle surely helps – but these have been more top-of-mind for me lately.
What makes you happiest? If you have a happy life, be sure to pause and appreciate what’s going well. And if you’re still working on getting there, see if you can identify what specific changes need to happen to increase your long-term happiness. Then do what it takes to truly solve those problems one by one. Even if it takes years or decades, the time is going to pass anyway. You may as well give the gift of happiness to your future self by investing where it counts.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown much better at making purchases that I don’t regret. This includes clothing, tech, furniture, appliances, and more.
When I was younger, I often made poor choices in this area.
Here’s the key difference.
When I was younger, I would basically ask these types of questions when considering purchase options:
These questions led me to focus mainly on value. I often wanted to feel like I was getting a good deal. To me a good deal meant a reasonable level of quality at a good or great price.
And that’s basically what I got. I’d buy items that were adequate for my needs, and I’d often find ways to get them at good or great prices. The price alone could be a strong motivator.
Today I think differently about making purchases. Now I tend to ask these types of questions when considering a purchase:
I still love a good deal, but I’ve found it best not to make that my main concern. These days I’d rather buy a great option at a decent price than buy a good option at a great price.
What I’ve discovered is that appreciation is worth paying for. It’s worth paying more for better quality. I define better quality as items that feel a bit indulgent to me. Sometimes these items feel almost sinful.
When I made a so-so purchase, I normally don’t appreciate the item as much after I’ve bought it. Owning it isn’t as exciting as getting it. There’s a bit of a letdown after the purchase is made.
But when I make a really aligned purchase, I typically like and appreciate the item at least as much after I have it and sometimes even more. I’ll often comment, “I like this even more than I thought I would.”
This doesn’t necessarily mean I have to spend extra, although sometimes that can be a factor. It’s more about focusing on my feelings and seeing where they lead. It helps to slide away from being too objective and to consider the subjective lens.
The key is to pay more respect to the emotional reality of a purchase. I now give more weight to how much I’m likely to appreciate and value an item for the time it will be with me. In the past I felt like I always had to have extra justification for that, like any excess emotion had to be balanced with extra logic, especially if I had to pay more for some increased emotional satisfaction. Now I realize that spending for gratification is actually a wise choice in general and that I don’t need to go overboard in trying to justify that.
Consequently, I feel that my life is becoming richer in possessions that I really like. I still fumble sometimes, but I can see that I’m doing a better job of aligning my physical environment with a mindset of abundance.
Interestingly I also find that this attitude helps to drive my income higher because it carries over to the income side. Just as I think about spending to create emotional value, I also think about how different approaches to income generation will create different levels of emotional value. This helps me invest in income streams that enrich my life emotionally. If I feel good about a stream emotionally, it’s easier to keep investing in it, and it also removes some friction.
A common source of friction is when you don’t really like what you’d have to do to increase your income. If you can reduce that friction, it’s easier to grow your income and while enjoying the process.
What kinds of questions do you ask when considering a purchase decision? See if you can articulate what’s going through your mind. Turn that inner mindset into a short list of questions. Then look at those questions, and consider how they may be affecting you. Can you see how your buying mindset links up with your long-term appreciation?
Also notice which possessions you appreciate the most. What mindset did you use for them? What questions did you ask?
When you can identify the mindset (and the questions) that generate the most appreciation and the least regret, you can apply that mindset more deliberately. Then you can shorten it to a quick rule of thumb to use again and again.
Note that this is mostly a subjective mindset, but it carries over to the objective side. Thinking about appreciation is a shortcut that helps me pay a more attention to the full ownership experience, including potential long-term maintenance and support needs.
My rule of them is the title of this post: buying appreciation. That’s a simple shortcut to remind myself of what I really want. I’m not just buying utility or adequacy. I’m buying long-term appreciation.
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