Category Archives: LIFESTYLE

Asthma Is Getting In The Way Of Good Sex. But It Doesn’t Have To

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Aligning Rewards

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We had an interesting discussion on a recent Conscious Growth Club coaching call about making sure that the financial rewards of your career path are aligned with the ways you’d like to be rewarded.

For instance, you may want or expect to be rewarded for some of the following:

  • devising a creative solution to a problem
  • successfully completing a project
  • helping a co-worker solve a problem
  • reporting a problem that could cost the company if not solved
  • acting with honor and integrity
  • telling the truth in a difficult situation
  • encouraging and/or mentoring a team member
  • stretching yourself to develop a new skill
  • working hard

But what people are actually rewarded for often includes:

  • keeping your mouth shut and your head down
  • obeying orders without question
  • agreeing with the boss
  • looking busy
  • lying
  • closing sales at any cost
  • successfully hiding how distracted and unproductive you are
  • leaning on team members to cover for you
  • completing trivial tasks
  • generating data that doesn’t help the company achieve any meaningful purpose

Misalignments like these can occur regardless of how much control and independence you have over your work.

When I started my computer games business in 1994, I expected to be rewarded for my creativity, programming skills, work ethic, and for project completion. I went bankrupt waiting for such rewards to come through.

What actually generated income was closing deals with publishers, and those deals introduced dynamics which were misaligned with my expectations. Creativity wasn’t high on the list of what publishers wanted at the time.

Eventually I was able to create better alignment, partly by shifting my expectations and partly by shifting the reward structure of my business. That involved changing my business model. No one really cared about my programming skills but me, but at least I could be rewarded for my creative ideas and execution. The area where I most had to shift my expectations was marketing. In order to succeed with that business, I needed to up-level my marketing skills, and I had to adjust my expectations to account for good marketing as an activity that would be financially rewarded. I also had to note that weak marketing was financially punished.

I ran into similar challenges with my personal development business some years later. My initial income streams rewarded me in mixed ways. When I generated income from ads on the site, I was rewarded for blogging, for traffic growth, and also for selling and optimizing ads. I was okay with the first two, but I wasn’t as fond of being rewarded for people clicking on ads and leaving the site instead of sticking around to read more articles.

I dropped that model in 2008 and explored other models that felt more aligned. My current models, such as doing workshops, offering courses, and hosting Conscious Growth Club, are good at rewarding me for helping people achieve positive transformations. The more people get good results, the better it is for me since this means more repeat business. This also financially incentivizes me to keep creating more and better courses, to design and deliver more workshops, and to keep supporting and improving Conscious Growth Club.

In this case too, however, I also have to adapt to what the real-world situation rewards. Almost any business, including mine, rewards good marketing. I’ve wanted to improve at marketing too, so I’m okay with this. I’ve tried to set things up so as to align my rewards with doing marketing honestly and honorably, and that’s been working well.

When the actual rewards are nicely aligned with the desired behaviors, life and business flow more easily. You can focus on doing the work and getting better at your core skills, and you can expect to be rewarded for this because the business model is aligned with rewarding you for such behaviors.

What can really mess you up is when your business or employment situation has a misaligned reward structure, so you get rewarded for behaviors you’d rather not reinforce, and/or you don’t get rewarded for behaviors where you feel like you really do deserve some acknowledgement.

In this article so far, I’ve mainly focused on the financial rewards since those tend to be the easiest to assess and measure. But we can extend this to other rewards such as how you’re being appreciated.

When I generated income from ads, people would thank me for my articles and how they benefitted from my writing and ideas. They wouldn’t usually thank me for the ads, although some people did when an ad helped them discover something personally useful.

These days I normally get thanked for insights and ideas I share, especially those that help people get results. I get thanked most often for course lessons, for blog articles, and for helping people in Conscious Growth Club. So that’s all pretty well aligned because these are all areas where I’m continuing to invest.

I don’t typically receive appreciation or rewards for all the study, research, and experimentation I do in private, unless I share something beneficial to others along the way. I don’t get rewarded for making mistakes or pursuing false starts, such as partly developing something that never ships. But I do get rewarded down the road for the results that these activities eventually lead to, and that seems adequate for now.

It’s important to keep an eye on sustainability too. I can be rewarded temporarily for overworking, for instance, but then I get punished for it when it catches up with me. I can generate surges of extra income when I want, such as by launching something new, but if I overdo it, then I get punished on the lifestyle side when life becomes nothing but work, work, work all the time.

Take a look at how you’re being financially (and otherwise) rewarded in life and business. How well do these rewards align with your desired behaviors? Are you being incentivized to grow, improve, and execute in the ways you like? Is the current reward structure sculpting your character in ways you like and appreciate? How are you being over-rewarded or under-rewarded?

If you like what you see, great. And if not, then you have an important problem to solve. One option is to re-align your personal priorities, and get with the program. See if you can release resistance to how you’re being rewarded, and agree to let those rewards sculpt your character as they will. So if you’re rewarded for sales, then get aligned with up-leveling your sales skills, and accept that you’re pursuing a path of becoming a better salesperson. Sometimes this is workable while other times it’s just too unpalatable.

Your other option is to change the reward structure. This may involve negotiating with an employer for different terms, switching employers to find a more aligned reward structure, or changing the business model you’re using.

It’s important to be proactive here. You do have options. If you don’t like what the current reward structure is doing to you, then get into a more aligned reward structure, even if you have to design the business model yourself.

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Time To Talk Day: 4 People On How They Started A Conversation About Mental Health

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‘Overly-Sexualised’ Pretty Little Thing Ad Banned For Objectifying Women

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How to Spot a Future Vegan

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Given the rapid rise of veganism we’ve been seeing lately, which by some accounts has increased by a factor of 10 or more in recent years (at least in the USA), it seems clear that this explosive growth is going to continue for a while.

It stands to reason that many people who aren’t vegan today eventually will go vegan, perhaps sometime within the next few years.

I’ve had a lot of experience seeing people transition from non-vegan to vegan, including hundreds who’ve emailed or talked to me about this before, during, and/or after their transitions.

I’ve also seen people who’ve been familiar with veganism for years but show no signs of transitioning. This got me curious to ponder more deeply about the differences.

Based on this experience, I’ll share some observations about common differences between future vegans and non-vegans. Technically both groups are non-vegan today, but I use the “future vegan” label to distinguish those who show the telltale signs of someone who’s on their way to eventually becoming vegan.

These are generalizations and predictions based on personal observation, so take them on that basis. You could also read this article to see if you recognize any of the transitional signs within yourself, and then consider whether you think those could be suggesting a personal transition coming up for you.

Moreover, while this article is just about veganism, I think you could also generalize some of these ideas even more and ponder them as advance indicators of other types of transitions, such as signs that someone may be heading for a career or relationship transition.

So here we go…

Curiosity and Engagement

Future vegans engage with the world. They actively look around and observe. They seek information and want to learn new truths, including truths that may upset them. They’re willing to have their realities upended now and then. Veganism sparks their curiosity, so even if they feel resistant at first, they’re also compelled to learn more about it.

Non-vegans don’t engage as much with the world, preferring to stick to the familiar. They don’t read as much about unfamiliar topics. When they spot an alternative lifestyle such veganism, they don’t feel as curious to learn about it. They figure that if it’s unfamiliar, it’s probably not worth learning about.

Attracting Vegans

Future vegans frequently attract other vegans and vegetarians into their lives, often without deliberately trying to do so. Sometimes it appears that vegans recognize them as kindred spirits, while other times the future vegans appear to be subconsciously taking action that will predictably inject themselves into social spheres where vegans are more abundant, as if the future vegans are courting the influence.

Non-vegans tend not to experience this attraction effect. From their perspective vegans and non-vegans tend to keep to themselves most of the time. If there’s a rise of veganism in the world, they don’t see it happening as much.

Debating About Veganism

One especially common sign of a future vegan is how much they like to debate and argue with vegans. It’s part of the process of working through their objections and resistance to going through the transition for themselves. To get good at debating this topic, they also have to learn more and more about veganism, which invites them deeper into the rabbit hole and eventually plays a role in convincing them to go for it.

Non-vegans generally don’t care to debate about veganism, and they aren’t very good at it anyway due to lacking the knowledge, experience, and curiosity to fully participate. If they do engage, you’ll usually find them being emotionally dismissive, raising one or two easily countered objections and then opting out, or they’ll just quote the Bible and leave it at that. They don’t really see the point in debating when their minds are already made up. Some will object to the whole notion of a debate happening at all while they’re around.

Dabbling in Veganism

Future vegans tend to dabble and dance with aspects of veganism or vegetarianism, often for years, before transitioning. Many will buy appliances that are much loved in the vegan community, such as a Vita-Mix. Some will apologetically say they like to eat “rabbit food” now and then, or they may feel increasingly drawn to plant foods like salads and green smoothies. They may go to vegan restaurants or a vegan event, or they’ll buy a vegan cookbook and try out some recipes. Some will catch themselves watching documentaries about factory farming. There are telltale signs of progressive investment. In fact, the non-vegans in their lives will often recognize these leanings (and often try to dissuade the future vegan) before the future vegan consciously recognizes where they’re heading.

Non-vegans tend not to experiment or lean in this direction. They don’t even want to try it or test it. It’s not something they perceive as worthwhile or interesting, not even around the edges. It’s a complete non-starter for them.

Caring

Future ethical vegans value caring and regard compassion as a quality to be developed. They generally like the idea of becoming more compassionate and see it as a worthwhile direction of character growth. This eventually leads them to question how they’re contributing to the treatment of animals, and they start thinking about how this relationship could be improved. They may also begin to care more about the planet and question how their diet and lifestyle aligns with caring.

Non-vegans tend to have more static views of caring. It’s not a quality they desire to extend and further develop beyond a certain framework. They tend to have hard edges around their boxes of caring, frequently enforced by religious views. It’s pretty rare to see signs that they have any interest in becoming more caring or compassionate towards animals, let alone towards human beings from different cultures.

Independent Thought

Future vegans value their ability to think and choose for themselves. They prefer to make their own choices regardless of what other people may think, sometimes going with the grain of society and sometimes going against it. Making a choice to go vegan often requires a strong independent will that puts following one’s own intellect above obedience to others’ demands or expectations.

Non-vegans tend to be more conformist and obedient to the will of others. They’re more deferential to authority. Many have been conditioned against independent thought, especially with heavy religious conditioning. They fall back on rules and frames taught by others about the role of animals, such as by repeating the story that animals were created to serve humans. They regard their loyalty to the old rules and stories as being more important than independent choice.

Courage

Going vegan requires courage. This isn’t so much about bravery though. It has more to do with heart-alignment and following one’s deeper feelings, even when the road ahead isn’t clear. When someone demonstrates courage in other areas of life, such as by summoning the courage to leave a misaligned job or relationship to pursue something better, that’s a good indicator that the person may be inclined to eventually use such courage to explore veganism as well.

Non-vegans tend to be more risk averse and conservative, preferring to maintain the status quo instead of exploring the unknown to seek significant gains. Their fears, worries, and concerns speak to them more viscerally than the voice of courage.

Growth

Future vegans are interested in growth, and they understand that growth is about creating improvement, not about achieving perfection. Veganism isn’t a perfect diet or lifestyle, but it is a significant improvement for many people and certainly for animals and the environment, and this positive step forward is good enough for future vegans to regard the transition as worth pursuing. Future vegans eventually recognize that progressing to the problems of veganism is a graduation of sorts from the problems of being non-vegan.

Non-vegans tend to be more static and absolutist in their thinking. All they need is to identify one potential flaw or objection (usually a heavily debunked one) to dismiss veganism outright, even as their current lifestyle has many more flaws. They rationalize that getting enough of X, Y, and Z nutrients as a vegan would somehow be a dealbreaker problem while overlooking more severe problems linked to their lifestyle, such as high rates of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. A key pattern is that non-vegans tend to look for reasons not to change while future vegans frequently look for reasons to change.

Alignment

Future vegans value internal alignment in their thoughts, feelings, and mental models of the world. They dislike cognitive dissonance and want to resolve certain questions. They acknowledge that treating animals as products is not a satisfying solution, and they seek better answers to the questions of how to eat and live.

Non-vegans are more tolerant of cognitive dissonance. They can handle frames that are too misaligned for a future vegan to hold. Alignment is not such a big deal to non-vegans because they value other aspects of life more highly, such as obedience to authority.

Inevitability

Many future vegans reach the point where going vegan starts to feel inevitable. They’ve already decided that they’ll eventually do it. They’re just figuring out how to make it practical for them. For some people there’s a lot to adjust in terms of diet, lifestyle, and social life, and they want extra time to come to terms with this.

Non-vegans of course never reach this point of inevitability. They’re more likely to see it as inevitable that humans dominate animals, which also leads to other inevitable conclusions like humans dominating other humans. They’re more likely to frame diet and lifestyle as being chosen for them rather than something they get to choose.

* * *

There are other factors too, so please don’t consider this an exhaustive list, but the ones I included here are some of the main ones that pop out. It’s really the combined weight of multiple factors that matters. Many future vegans will only show a few telltale signs before they transition, but they’ll be important indicators of investment.

If you recognize some of the future vegan patterns within yourself, you might enjoy reading the very thorough article called How to Be Vegan, which I wrote in 2015. It’s not about how to transition per se. It’s about what it’s actually like to be a long-term vegan, and it’s rich in details that you aren’t likely to find elsewhere. It will inform you about lifestyle aspects you may not have even thought about yet. It’s also the longest article I’ve ever written, long enough that if you actually read the whole thing, that’s another hint and a half that you’re heading for a transition.

I’m currently in my 24th consecutive year of being vegan. Before I transitioned in January 1997, I have to admit that I also showed many (but not all) of the telltale signs that I was heading in this direction, such as buying a Vita-Mix about two years prior and testing recipes from some vegan cookbooks. I also had the inevitability sign, knowing that I was eventually going to transition many months before I finally did it. It was only a matter of when.

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Listen to the Screams

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By being vegan for as long as I have (and vegetarian a few years before that), about 5000 fewer animals were harmed and killed by my lifestyle.

But since I blogged about this aspect of my lifestyle (including writing my longest article ever, called How to Be Vegan), I’ve since influenced hundreds (if not thousands) more people to try vegetarianism or veganism for months or years or to adopt such a lifestyle permanently. So the combined impact of going vegan and publicly sharing what I learned is likely beyond 1,000,000 animals by now. That’s based mainly on feedback people have shared with me over the years.

And then since many of those people I influenced have also influenced others in similar ways, some of them very actively, the total ripples are probably somewhere in the millions of animals… and still going.

Maybe this impact is a drop in the bucket relative to the 50 billion animals killed for food each year, but one drop can still create ripples. And of course we could identify more ripples such as the resource savings like water and electricity, the reduction in emissions, etc.

When we create a change for personal reasons, we often don’t see how far the ripples of personal change will extend beyond ourselves.

And similarly, when we don’t change ourselves, we don’t get to see the positive ripples that could have come into existence, if only we’d taken a few more steps.

What’s most personally meaningful to me about this aspect of my lifestyle, however, is the internal shift it created within me and some other ripples created by that shift.

What many people don’t realize is that if I hadn’t gone vegan more than 2 decades ago, I wouldn’t have started my personal development blog 15 years ago. I wouldn’t have written articles in an effort to be helpful. I wouldn’t have cared enough to do something like that. Doing this kind of work takes way more heart energy than I used to have. The voice of caring just wasn’t loud enough or strong enough to motivate this much action or this long of a commitment.

My sense of caring about people is inextricably linked to caring about animals. What may seem counter-intuitive though is that I also care more about non-vegans than I used to. You might think that the opposite would be true. Wouldn’t going vegan make me feel more disconnected from non-vegans? After all, such people hurt animals, which I care about.

As a vegan I feel more emotional pain than I use to. But I also feel more love and connection than I used to. They come as a package deal.

When someone hurts animals, for food or otherwise, I feel the pain of that. It stings my heart. When I’m at my best, I don’t try to numb myself to such feelings. I allow them to have their say. I see those feelings as important. They remind me that I care. I remember what it was like not to care about such things and to feel no sting at all, and I have no desire to return to such an existence. I like having stronger feelings of caring and connection, and I accept that a heightened sensitivity to violence is part of that.

Caring is difficult but also beautiful. Truth be told, seeing ripples that reduce the number of animals harmed and killed doesn’t do much for me motivationally. Maybe it’s nice karmically, but I feel the most alignment juice from the heightened sense of caring.

Going vegan many years ago seems to have created some kind of permanent shift in my vibe that I can’t undo – and wouldn’t want to undo. One of the scariest things to me in life would be to return to a state of emotional numbness and to forget what it feels like to care a lot.

Even though it can be hard, I like being sensitive to the pain of other beings. I like that I can sense the vibes of suffering, like a radio transmission that never turns off. Those signals are so much louder and clearer than they once were. There is a lot of suffering in the world, and a lot more of it is coming from animals than humans. As much as we can point to human suffering, we’d need to hurt and kill 7x the planet’s human population every year just to match what animals are going through. And we’d have to achieve that population through a massive increase in rape to match the forced reproduction those animals endure.

If you’re sensitive to vibes, turn your heart towards human suffering and listen for a while. Then turn your heart towards animal suffering, and notice how that signal sounds. When I do this, I certainly feel some sorrow on the human side. The animal side is overwhelmingly sad though; I can’t listen to it for more than 30 seconds without crying.

It may sound odd to label this sensitivity as beautiful, but somehow it just seems accurate. Because of our ears, we may be disturbed by unpleasant noise now and then, but isn’t it worth the price if it means we can hear beautiful music and communicate with each other?

So many of my articles were written from a desire to be helpful, often because I picked up a signal of human sadness, struggle, stuckness, or confusion – or even curiosity or wonder. Somehow those signals are just so loud and clear most of the time. All I have to do is listen, and the writing and speaking takes care of itself. When the heart is aligned, the brain does what it’s supposed to do.

So many issues that I struggled with in the past just seemed to resolve themselves when I listened more with my heart instead of always trying to plan, strategize, and force things with my head. The voice of caring provides such a beautiful form of guidance. So much clarity flows from the simplicity of caring.

When I think back to my pre-vegan days, it feels like a time of darkness. I just had no idea how emotionally numb I was back then… and how vibrationally unaware and insensitive I was. I couldn’t even fathom what more was eventually going to be possible. What I now label as numbness or darkness, back then I would have simply called feeling normal or neutral. I had no idea how quiet my “normal” world was back then.

Today what I consider normal is to feel an abundance of vibrational and emotional signals. These signals are always flowing, circulating, and broadcasting. People want help. Animals want even more help.

One of the strongest human signals I hear these days is a desire to feel connected. I sense so much loneliness, aloneness, and disconnection. Many people have become so numb and desensitized, yet they still yearn for something more – something they can’t even define. Some part of them wants to be embraced by love, connection, healing, understanding, acceptance, appreciation, and acknowledgement. Even though the world is more connected than ever tech-wise, today’s outlets are letting people down on the emotional side. It’s ironic that the more connected we become, the less connected many people feel.

I think part of the solution is to listen more to pain… not just your own pain but the pain signals that are constantly being broadcast. Pain signals are usually louder than pleasure, joy, and delight. Happiness purrs while pain screams.

If you want to hear the loudest pain signals on earth, go within, tune into your heart, and then listen with your heart to the signals being broadcast by animals right now. Listen to the 23 billion chickens on the planet right now… or the 1 billion cows… or the 780 million pigs. Listen to the ones that are slated for your consumption if you feel entitled to some of their bodies. Can you hear what they’re broadcasting? What do you sense when you tune in and just listen for a while?

Sensitivity to pain is also sensitivity to so much more – love, beauty, inspiration, creativity, fun, and so many other frequencies that make this life precious and worthwhile.

It’s easy to find conscious people with a variety of dietary lifestyles, vegan or non-vegan alike. But where I tend to see mostly agreement is in terms of how animals are currently being treated by humans. It’s hard to find people who consciously agree with our current practices.

If you consciously choose to continue participating in the treatment of animals as products, I suggest that you stay tuned into their pain. If you’re going to continue opting in, I think it’s wiser and more beneficial to you to feel the hurt and the pain as opposed to numbing yourself. Feel the ripples you’re supporting. Invite and accept the future pain of the thousands of animals who have yet to be hurt and killed from your actions. Feel the ongoing rapes and forced pregnancies to spawn these animals. Don’t run from this reality. Don’t tune out from it. Don’t try to pretend that this pain isn’t real. These are loud signals. Listen to them and tune in.

Listen whenever you purchase animal products. Listen while you cook. Listen with every bite. Let these signals have their say. Let them speak to you honestly and directly. Hear the screams again and again and again.

And each day, choose consciously what you’ll eat and how you’ll live.

I know… it takes courage to do this. It’s a growth experience, regardless of where you land afterwards.

If you can listen to the screams each time and still maintain your current lifestyle, then great – you’re aligned. If you can listen to the screams and feel compelled to change your lifestyle, also great… you can create the alignment you desire. But if you can only maintain your lifestyle by tuning out or trying to numb yourself to the reality and the ripples, that’s a glaring misalignment to address, wouldn’t you say? If you’re going to participate in the flow of hurting, raping, and killing animals, then do so consciously. Don’t go dark or numb just because you dislike the screams. If you’re okay with contributing to ripples of suffering, them the screams should serve as a palatable sauce that makes your meals richer and more meaningful. This can be your way of honoring the thousands of animals who sacrifice their lives for you. Don’t discount or diminish their pain. Appreciate what they’ve done for you because of the high price they repeatedly pay to appear on your plate.

If you’re going to contribute to the screams, then appreciate the screams. If an animal had to give its life or its milk or eggs to please your palate, don’t you think those animals deserve some appreciation at the very the least? When you tune into the screams, beam back your best vibrational thank you.

If you consciously choose to prey on the weak, appreciate the weakness that empowers you to do so. Consciously own the part of you that feels aligned with thoroughly dominating other living beings.

If you can do that, you need never be fearful of vegans. You can stand firm and simply own what you’ve decided is right for you. You ought to be able to make statements such as these:

  • I feel aligned with dominating weaker beings and placing their lives in service to me.
  • I feel aligned with the efficient breeding, feeding, and killing of animals for my benefit.
  • I feel aligned with contributing to the pain of animals.
  • The pain that animals endure enhances the appreciation of my meals.

If such statements feel misaligned to you and you can’t see yourself embracing such an attitude, you’ve got some realignment work to do. And of course if you can embrace such attitudes, they’ll create similar ripples throughout your human relationships as well.

In short, if you’re going to cause pain, it’s important to love the pain you’re causing. Consciously acknowledge, accept, and embrace the pain as an honest and authentic part of your lifestyle. That pain is real. That pain happens every day. Stay aligned with the truth.

Generating pain is a normal and routine part of the package of treating animals as products. If you think it’s okay to treat animals as products, then get yourself aligned with contributing to ongoing ripples of pain. And listen to the screams since that’s part of your truth.

If you don’t listen to the screams of the world, you won’t be sensitive to the real depths of joy and connection either.

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NHS Chief Takes Aim At Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop And Booming ‘Wellness’ Industry

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Call, Raise, or Fold

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Let me share one of my favorite techniques for simplifying complicated decisions.

There’s a popular form of poker called Texas Hold’em, and in this game (as well as in many other poker variants), you just really just have three possible decisions on each turn: call, raise, or fold.

So you can call – or match – the current bet. You can raise – or increase – the current bet. Or you can fold by quitting the hand.

Note that I’m simplifying this a bit more by considering checking to be a form of calling because when you check you’re keeping a zero bet at zero. And I’m also considering making an opening bet to be a form of raising since you’re going from a zero bet to a positive bet. And furthermore, let’s assume for the sake of simplicity that we’re playing what’s called limit poker, so the bet size is fixed. In a spread limit or no limit game, you’d also have to decide the size of your bets when you raise. So I’m deliberately constraining this analogy because it’s meant to be a simple tool, not a crazy complicated one.

Now if you’re a poker nerd, it’s easy to get caught up in thinking that there are more decisions to be made, like figuring out whether to bluff or trying to assess how strong an opponent’s hand may be. But to an outside observer watching you play, all that any player actually does in terms of what’s actionable and involves an outcome-based choice is to call a bet, raise a bet, or fold. In any situation there are really just those three options.

I often like to think in terms of these three options when I have a big decision to make.

I can call. I can maintain the status quo and keep my energy investment the same as before. I can raise. I can escalate the situation and put more energy into it. Or I can fold by exiting the situation.

Suppose you’re at a career crossroads. You can call by maintaining your current path as-is. You can raise by seeking to bet even bigger on your current path, such as by going for a promotion. Or you can fold by exiting that career and doing something else for a change.

In tricky relationship situations, you have the same three basic options. Invest the same. Invest more. Or invest less.

Reducing any decision to three options is an oversimplification of course, so don’t consider this tool to be your one ring to rule them all, but in some situations it works really well because it gets you to the core of the decision quickly, so you aren’t drowning in noncritical details and spinning yourself in circles.

In fact, we can usually apply this tool in an even simpler way.

Maybe you’ve heard the expression Go big or go home. To go big is to raise. And to go home is to fold or to give up. There is a third option though – calling – which is basically akin to staying put.

However, in many tricky poker situations, professional players will advise that calling is rarely the right choice. Most of the time you should be thinking: raise or fold. This is because when a choice seems difficult, it’s usually because the best option is to raise or fold, and you’re not sure which is best.

So if you find yourself at a crossroads, consider that you may really have just two viable options: raise or fold. Go big or go home.

And here’s a way we can compress the options even further. If you’re able to rule out calling, and you’re convinced that you’re in a situation where raise or fold are your two best options, then if you can rule out either one of those options as clearly being an incorrect choice, then in a pseudo-Sherlock Holmesian style, we can know that the other option is your best bet.

For instance, if maintaining your current path just isn’t working for you, then you’re down to a classic raise or fold situation. Now if it’s also pretty obvious to you that there’s no way in hell you’d want to raise by betting even bigger on that path and investing even more energy into it, then your decision is clear: it’s time to fold.

Or consider a tricky relationship situation where maintaining the current level of investment and engagement isn’t making you and your partner happy. You know it’s never going to improve if you both keep calling the way you’ve been doing. That’s another classic raise or fold situation. Now suppose that in this case, you just couldn’t see you and your partner ever breaking up. Deep down you still believe that you’re kindred spirits and that you’re meant to be together, and you have compelling reasons for believing that. You couldn’t stomach the possibility of folding; it just doesn’t make sense. Your choice is clear then: it’s time to raise. It’s time to recommit to the relationship in a much bigger way. It’s time to heal what needs healing and fix what isn’t working. It’s time to raise the level of truth, love, and power in the relationship to a whole new level. Get some deeply honest communication flowing again. Express your appreciation for each other, and do more of what makes you feel in love. Have more sexy time. Find new ways to empower, encourage, and uplift each other. You may know that it’s going to be hard, but you’ve got to do it. It’s time.

Folding or raising in real life is more complicated than pushing your chips a few inches forward or tossing your cards into the muck. The consequences will likely be trickier to deal with… unless maybe you’re playing a hand with a lot of money in the pot.

Let me gently remind you here to be careful not to confuse the truth and power aspects of a tough decision. We can overcomplicate such decisions by weaving in all kinds of extraneous details to keep ourselves stuck in analysis paralysis on the truth side, when the actual decision may be a no-brainer if we cut to the core of it – like of course you need to fold, or of course you need to raise. But damn… now there’s a lot of crap to deal with either way once the decision is made.

When you’ve decided that it’s time to fold, you may have a tendency to keep asking yourself, But if I fold this hand, then what will I have left? If I fold my job, how will I pay my bills? If I fold my relationship, then who will love me again?

And the answer is simple. Just get back into the game, and you’ll be dealt a fresh hand. A fresh hand brings fresh hope. A weak hand doesn’t.

You may need to step away from the table to regain your composure sometimes, and that’s totally fine. Now and then you’re going to get rivered by that nutter who hit their improbable inside straight draw. Bad beats are part of life. You take your licks, and you get back in the game when you’re ready.

Try not to worry so much about the next hand when you know it’s time to fold your current hand. Go ahead and grieve the loss as your cracked aces going down in flames, and then let that hand go and release that energy. It’s fine to think about the future, but the game is played one hand at a time. Have you finished playing your current hand yet? If not, then finish that hand before you worry about the next one. Otherwise you’ll split your energy between past, present, and future, and that’s only going to weaken you. Focus your energy on the present challenge, the present situation, the present decision.

Call, raise, or fold – it’s a simple tool, but it’s really good for freeing up stuck energy and getting back into the flow again. In 2004 when I felt out of alignment with my computer games business, and I’d been calling for years, I finally decided to fold. And I decided to bet big (or to raise) on blogging and speaking that same year. In 2009 I folded one relationship, and a few months later I raised on a new one. And then some years after that, I re-raised by getting married again. With each transition came a burst of fresh energy and this delightful feeling of flow.

When we get stuck, it’s often because we’re calling too much when we should be raising or folding more. Calling is the choice to maintain the status quo. That may seem okay for a while, but life will eventually destabilize the status quo if we don’t consciously do it ourselves.

The big transitions in life are usually raise or fold decisions. Put more energy in, or withdraw your energy so you can invest it elsewhere. We only have so much energy to invest, so it’s wise to make sure that our investments are continuing to create good value for ourselves and others and that we aren’t wasting energy chasing our losses. We have to make decisions based on how the energy is flowing right now, not on where it’s been. It’s the same with poker. We have to look at the current pot odds of each bet anew.

When you’re not in the flow, raising and folding can help you grow beyond the stuckness. Calling? Not so much. Calling makes sense when you’re in the flow.

So what’s a tricky decision you’re facing right now? And what happens if you view that decision through the simple lens of call, raise, or fold?

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Making Sense of Infinite Possibilities

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You could say that one reason we can make simple decisions each day with relative ease is that we only have a handful of options to choose from, and that makes it easier to make a reasonably good choice.

For instance, if you only have so much food in your home, or so many stores and restaurants within reach, then you may find it easier to decide what to eat each day. You don’t have to consider infinite options. You narrow your focus to what’s most accessible.

But what about making bigger life choices, like what career path to explore next? This is a situation where you may feel like you’re drowning in possibilities. There are so many factors to consider. Many decisions could lead to positive outcomes, but many could lead to undesirable ones. What if you pursue a career you don’t like? How do you know how to make this choice?

What does it mean to have clarity in such a situation? How can you possibly achieve clarity when there are so many options to consider?

The simple answer is that you must collapse the possibility space to make it smaller. You must somehow narrow your options.

How can you do this? Aren’t all things possible?

You may have this sense that in each moment, you can make any possible decision. But is that really accurate?

Consider a simple decision like what to have for your next meal. On the one hand, it may seem like you could potentially eat any possible food for that meal. This may seem especially true if you live in a big city with lots of accessible restaurants within easy walking or driving distance. You may literally have thousands of different meal options accessible to you.

Now and then you may even feel overwhelmed by all the choices. But somehow you still decide, and you make such decisions every day. Even deciding not to eat anything is a choice.

How on earth do you do that? How do you face such immense possibilities and still decide?

When you actually make such a decision, you don’t consider every possible option. You only consider a small number of possibilities. You collapse the space by giving attention to certain factors that will eliminate most options. You might consider your mood, how much time you have, the cost, the relative distance, your cravings, past memories, and so on. Sometimes you’ll simply think in terms of patterns. Ultimately you may find yourself making the decision pretty quickly. And then you get to experience the result.

Now if you get a bad result, you may avoid making that same choice again in the future. And if you get a good result, you’ll probably be more likely to make a similar choice in the future.

So over time you may develop some internal heuristics to help you make better choices. You can rely upon past experience to guide your future choices.

When you’re new to a situation, you can make a choice semi-randomly or based on simpler factors like convenience. You may also lower your expectations and not worry so much about a bad outcome, knowing that such outcomes are more likely when you lack experience.

But you also have another option, which is to let someone else make the decision for you. For instance, if you go to a new city where you know someone, you could ask that person for a recommendation and then just eat at whichever place they suggest.

Letting other people decide for you is what you probably experienced a lot when you were a child. Someone else decided what to feed you, and you just ate it. And you also had your internal reaction to what you ate, which helped give you a basis for making decisions on your own later in life.

Notice the power of those internal reactions. I think that sometimes we don’t pay enough attention to this.

How did you discover your favorite foods? You probably tried a bunch of foods, and you paid attention to your internal reactions when you ate them. And somewhere along the way, you learned to predict that certain foods would give you favorable internal reactions when you ate them. Of course there are other factors involved too, like the company you’re with or how frequently you eat certain meals, but over time you learned to make predictions from past experience.

So first you had to map the possibility space well enough by choosing semi-randomly or by letting someone else decide for you. And eventually that led to some improvement in clarity about what you liked to eat.

We could say then that the clarity we seek is the ability to predict our internal responses to different events. This predictive ability becomes more accurate as we gain experience. Without experience we cannot make accurate predictions, and hence we cannot expect to have intelligent clarity.

Here’s the counter-intuitive part. We may think that gaining more experience and exposing ourselves to more options and possibilities will lead to massive overwhelm. It’s the paradox of choice, isn’t it? The more options we have, the less clear the correct choice is, and the more overwhelmed we feel, right? But this only applies to unexplored spaces.

Suppose you walk into a wine store, and you’re thinking of buying a bottle of wine. And suppose that you’re a total novice when it comes to buying and drinking wine. You may have a hard time choosing. There are too many options to consider. It’s hard to make a good decision. And even after making the decision, you’re likely to doubt yourself.

But now suppose you’re a master sommelier, and you walk into that same store. Are you likely to feel just as overwhelmed as the novice? It’s more likely that you’ll find it easier to make what you consider a good choice – a choice that gives you a positive internal reaction. You must still confront the same massive stock of wine bottles as the novice, but your greater experience cuts the field of possibilities down to a manageable size. Your superior mental map of the space allows you to rule out entire sections of the store as unlikely to yield the results you seek. And you’ll probably consider fewer options than the novice will, and you’ll be able to make your choice with less stress and greater ease.

Experience compresses reality. As you gain understanding and skill within a pocket of this existence, you also refine your palette. You learn where to go and what to do to achieve worthwhile results that satisfy you. What’s counter-intuitive is that as you expand your circle of experience, your level of clarity will tend to increase as well. As you explore what appears to be a vast space of infinite possibilities, you construct mental models that bring order to the chaos, and this has the effect of simplifying your impressions of the space of possibilities.

Another way to express this idea is by saying that clarity is at least partially a result of the relationship between the explorer and the terrain. A novice explorer in uncharted territory cannot hope to have much clarity. But if the novice simply explores anyway, even if in a bumbling way initially, the explorer will gradually learn the territory, and the explorer’s sense of clarity within that territory will increase.

Now transplant this same explorer to a new territory and repeat the process numerous times. There are surprises to be found in each new area, but every surprise encountered improves the mental maps and models of the explorer. Eventually our explorer becomes less frequently surprised and may even become good at finding the most worthwhile and valuable parts of new expanses of terrain. The experience of clarity stems from the explorer’s increasingly sophisticated mental maps as well as an increasingly sophisticated set of personal preferences. This is because both understanding and desires are refined and polished by experience.

It’s fair to say – and to accept – that there is no clarity to be found outside of experience. Experience is the mother of clarity. And this points us in an actionable direction. If we wish to gain clarity, we must get busy gaining experience. And we’ll generally achieve the greatest gains by courting fresh, new experiences as opposed to repeating previous ones. Thus, if you want to hit the accelerator in terms of clarity gains, make a habit of embracing new and different experiences. Go where you’ve never been. Do what you’ve never done. Try what you’ve never tried. This will have the triple benefit of upgrading your mental models of reality (truth), refining your palette of desires (love), and boosting your ability to blaze a trail to your desires (power).

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Honoring Negative Predictions

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There are situations in life where we develop fairly consistent negative predictions regarding how those situations will turn out, but then we don’t actually honor those predictions.

For instance, suppose you’ve had some corporate jobs, and they’ve never turned out well for you. You never really liked them. They’ve never put you in situations where you’ve deeply enjoyed your work each day and where you’ve felt aligned with the company’s purpose. Suppose that something about these jobs always felt off to you.

And suppose that currently you find yourself unemployed and wanting some income. Does it make sense to apply for another corporate job?

If you repeat this type of experience again, it may yield some income for you, but it will likely hurt your sense of clarity because you’ll be deliberately acting in opposition to the clarity you’ve already developed. You already know this isn’t likely to lead to a positive outcome. You’re already able to predict that the outcome won’t be very good.

So why would you repeat what’s likely to be a predictable mistake? Why would you make a deliberately bad decision like this?

Well… note that you can still do this. People do such things often. But you also have to accept that if you’re willing to do this, it absolutely will hurt your ability to have clarity. How can you possibly hope to have more clarity if you’re failing to act in alignment with the clarity you’ve already achieved?

If you desire clarity, then clarity must become a high value in your life. You have to elevate it to a level of importance and keep it there.

Otherwise if something else is more important to you than clarity, such as having a stable job, you’ll keep going back to the stable job even if it degrades your experience of clarity. Or if you need a relationship more than you need clarity, you may often find yourself in a confusing relationship.

One obvious way to improve your experience of clarity is to stop doing whatever opposes your current best predictions. Stop taking those actions that give you a negative outcome, which you’ll perceive as a negative internal reaction.

This doesn’t mean that you have to avoid every negative situation. Just start avoiding the most predictable ones. Stop taking the actions that you already know aren’t going to lead to positive outcomes with positive internal reactions.

The sheer obviousness of this stares us right in the face, doesn’t it?

How can you expect to discover foods you like if you always keep eating foods you already know you don’t like? It’s never going to happen. You’ll never get clarity about the foods you love if you’re wasting time eating what you don’t like. The way out of this trap is to stop eating the foods you don’t like. Reject them soundly. Honor your best predictions.

What would happen to a kid who adamantly refused to eat certain foods that she didn’t like? Eventually the parents would get a clue and would stop offering her those unwanted foods. And then she’d have a much better chance of being offered foods that she actually liked. This isn’t particularly complicated, right? Just say no to what you don’t want, and you’ll have a better chance of getting what you do want.

But what if this same child doesn’t object. Or what if she only puts up some token resistance and then eventually caves in and grudgingly accepts the unwanted food? Well… most likely the parents will keep offering her that same food in the future, right? If they learn that she tolerates it, then she’ll be given more of what she tolerates.

Moreover, if the parents keep giving her tolerable but still mostly undesirable meals, then what chance will she have of discovering more desirable foods? Very little, unless some outside force disturbs the situation.

Are you succumbing to this pattern in any areas of your life?

Are you tolerating a job that you don’t really like?

Are you tolerating a relationship that isn’t what you actually want?

Are you tolerating living in a city that you don’t like living in?

If you’re doing anything along those lines, then here’s a big dose of clarity for you. As long as you’re willing to keep doing those things – as long as you’re willing to tolerate these situations – you’ll make it essentially impossible to improve your sense of clarity. You’re absolutely going to stay confused, and you’re very likely to keep experiencing what you don’t want.

That’s pretty much a given, isn’t it? How are you supposed to map out what you want while you’re still tolerating what you don’t want? Those paths are incompatible.

Is it absolutely guaranteed that if you leave such situations, you’ll find something better? Not quite. But it’s highly likely, especially if you haven’t explored much of the possibility space yet. If there’s an expansive space you haven’t explored yet, you have a good chance of finding something much better than the merely tolerable.

That said, you may have to explore a bit to find it. But isn’t it better to explore and have real hope of finding something better than not to explore and cling to irrational false hope?

The lesson here is both simple and unpopular. When you’ve figured out what you don’t want, stop doing it. Stop doing what’s similar to it as well. Say no loudly and proudly. You needn’t explain yourself. You needn’t apologize for your lack of interest. Just let your no be a no. This is critical if you ever hope to discover your bigger yes.

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