Tag Archives: productivity

Business and Meaning

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The world of business can provide an endless stream of activities, whether you have a job or run your own company. If you read books or take courses on advancing your career or growing your business, you’ll pick up even more to-do ideas.

I usually enjoy the world of business, but in order to keep my life in balance, I need to regularly refocus on the big picture and avoid drowning in busywork. Sometimes I have to step back from business to regain perspective.

Business can be addictive, whether it’s going well or not. When the results aren’t flowing, there’s a scramble to fix that. And when the results are flowing well, ambition can kick in and make you want to aim even higher. It’s easy to get caught up in these cycles and forget to ask: Why am I doing all this work? What’s the point?

What helps me stay in balance is reminding myself that all of this is temporary and that death is part of the roadmap – death for me and death for any business ventures I participate in. At some point it all ends, even if some of it outlives me.

This perspective helps me think about what’s worth doing and what isn’t. I think carefully about the meaning of the projects I put on my plate and whether they’re purposeful enough to justify the investment of time and energy. I want to feel that my business activities are enhancing my life and those of others. If the meaning isn’t there, however, it makes me feel that I’m spinning my wheels and speeding down the road towards death without enjoying the journey enough. And that realization motivates me to change course sooner or later.

Meaning isn’t static though. What may be a meaningful project one year may feel hollow in a different year. I have to keep checking in to see where the meaning can be found next. Sometimes I’ll find it on the creative side, other times on the social or contribution side, and sometimes in areas of fresh exploration or personal challenge.

I read a lot of business books, and I often find the meaning aspect lacking. Such books may share tips for greater efficiency and systematizing, but they often overlook why that matters. They talk about improving results, but not all business results will feel meaningful. Have you ever achieved results that others may applaud but that feel mostly meaningless to you? Do you want to do more hollow-feeling work?

Growing a business is often accepted as an assumed goal, but a business doesn’t have to grow bigger to deliver meaning and purpose. Sometimes growing bigger may run contrary to purpose, killing the joy in the operation and destroying the meaning. I’ve met people who’ve grown their businesses and seem less happy for it, and I’ve met people who’ve grown their businesses and seem to revel in the experience. One person’s meaning is another person’s albatross.

Even when an author shares the meaning and purpose that led them to make certain business improvements, their meaning may not motivate me in the same way. I still have to find my own meaning if I’m to apply the ideas with sustainable motivation. It’s hard to apply someone else’s ideas if I don’t root them to my own personal meaning.

One practice that works well for me is to incorporate meaning into my project designs. When I begin a major new project, such as creating a new course, I write up a design doc for it. This helps me think through the key details of the project in advance and look at the big picture. An important part of this doc is a section on personal meaning. I consider why I want to do the project and what it means to me, and I type up my answers. Even if I expect a project to create some external results, I still ask myself why I should care about those results.

Sometimes I don’t find enough meaning in a project, at least not in the initial version of it, but while it’s still in the design phase, I can tweak the design until I feel the meaning is strong enough. This can be surprisingly easy. A few small tweaks can make a world of difference. Simply deciding to do a project in a playful style can sometimes make it feel meaningful enough. Finding a meaning often comes down to approaching it from the right angle or framing it the right way, as opposed to doing a major redesign.

When a project feels deeply meaningful, that’s when I can commit to it. That’s when it feels like a worthwhile investment of my life energy. This kind of motivation sustains me.

See this as an invitation to find the beauty in each of your work projects. It’s probably there already if you look at each project from the right angle.

Why did you accept this assignment? Why do the work? Why does this matter to you? What will this do for your character growth? What makes this a worthy investment of your precious life?

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My Strengths (According to Reader Feedback)

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Earlier this week I invited my blog readers and customers to share what they considered to be my strengths, and now I’ll share the results with you.

First, I appreciate the feedback. There were many different answers and perspectives, so I looked for patterns to condense the key ideas into a meaningful list.

The subheadings show the main groupings that I was able to identify. In some cases this was a little tricky while in others it was easy to identify clusters because the words and phrases people used were often very similar.

The bullet lists include some short direct quotes from people’s emails, some slightly modified or condensed quotes (such as to make the grammar consistent or to simplify them), and common words or phrases that people shared. I tried to pick representative samples when possible, but this isn’t an exhaustive list. Some of the samples could be shifted to other lists because they match multiple patterns; I did my best to put them in reasonable spots.

The paragraphs after the bullet lists include some extra personal commentary from me.

Note that nothing on this list is based on strengths that I consider myself to have, and none is based on other forms of feedback. This list is only derived from reader and customer feedback that was specifically sent in response to Monday’s blog post, What Are My Strengths?

Here’s what I ended up with. These aren’t in any particular order.

Open-Mindedness / Growth Mindset / Curiosity

  • Radical open-mindedness
  • Openness to new concepts and ideas
  • Capacity to challenge old beliefs, even when it goes against social pressure or conventional lines of thinking
  • Growth mindset, applied to multiple areas of life
  • Giving ideas careful consideration before deciding if they’re right for you
  • Ability to grow and release beliefs that no longer serve you
  • Subjective reality
  • Being a very “unstuck” person (inspirational)
  • Open to trying new stuff and being vulnerable
  • Courageous in quitting what doesn’t work for you (diets, relationships, values, etc.)
  • Willing to try new things and explore new patterns of thought
  • Inquisitiveness
  • Curiosity
  • You have the ability to stay open where most people have been closed off for a very long time
  • To tip a situation on its side and make a different assessment
  • Your thirst for knowledge to evaluate and condense all this into powerful thoughts
  • I love your curiosity and the way you keep exploring new subjects

I was surprised by how many people mentioned open-mindedness as one of my strengths since that isn’t a term I’d usually apply to myself. I definitely see myself as curious though. This feedback helped me see how strongly connected curiosity and open-mindedness are. Obviously our minds have to be open enough to explore unfamiliar territory.

The fact that people would call out open-mindedness as a strength also makes me wonder about the contrast. Does this mean that some of my readers would like to further develop this quality for themselves? This makes me curious about open-mindedness and how to teach or encourage the development of that quality more deliberately. This is probably an area of self-development that I tend to take for granted.

Independence / Freedom / Unshackled by Social Norms

  • Led by your own reflections
  • Internal locus of control
  • Putting yourself out there (seemingly) fearlessly
  • Being fully yourself, genuine, living life by connecting deeper with yourself and your values
  • You practice what you preach, and you don’t make lame or cliché statements
  • Free to explore many different ideas without being tied down to selling a system
  • Willingness to go against prevailing social norms
  • Seeing you go against grain helped me see that the reason I was so unhappy was because I was listening to my social conditioning rather than my heart
  • To constantly reinvent yourself
  • Nonconformist
  • Foregoer

This one didn’t surprise me, but again it makes me think about the contrast. I’m well-aware that many readers feel shackled by social and family expectations and want to break free of that. Wednesday’s article on Misaligned Relationships addresses this issue to some extent – it was partly inspired by the early feedback from this exercise.

Internally I don’t tend to think of myself as having these strengths because I’ve lived this way long enough that they just seem normal to me. Instead I frame this as making choices that feel aligned. What other people may perceive outwardly as going against social norms, I perceive as sensitivity to alignment issues. I place more weight on my inner satisfaction with my decisions than I do on other people’s reactions. This has served me well for many years.

I also like to remind myself that people often regret what they didn’t do. They lament how they kept quiet and didn’t express themselves. People regret being too conformist. I’d prefer to avoid racking up regrets, so I take other people’s warnings about this seriously. I don’t seek to be a rebel, but what feels aligned can sometimes be unpopular.

Range / Breadth

  • Writing about topics others are ignoring
  • I love the frequent blog posts on all kinds of topics
  • The different topics that you talk about that cover all sorts of issues
  • Your willingness to explore ideas on the nature of reality and spirituality without rejecting human needs (money, success, sex, etc)
  • You have an abundance of experience, and it is interesting to see how you have overcome difficult situations: bankruptcy, divorce, stealing, etc.
  • It is interesting to see how you manage current events: Covid-19 for example
  • Prolificness
  • The huge amount of perspectives you offer, in a generous and non-pushing way

Some would see having too much range as a weakness, so it’s nice that others recognize it as a strength. I also see it as a strength to have a lot of different interests, much like Leonardo da Vinci did. A lot of my best insights come from transplanting ideas from one field to another, such as turning 30-day trials that I learned in the software field into 30-day personal growth challenges.

Range is essential for staying motivated and enthusiastic about my work. If I narrowed my range too much, I’d feel trapped and bored. I like being able to mix up what I learn, explore, and create. It’s good to know that there are people who appreciate that. Many experts recommend “niching down,” and the reason I don’t do that is because it wouldn’t satisfy me on the inside to limit myself so much. I’m curious about more than just one niche, and I don’t think that niching down would create the kind of life I want to live.

From my perspective though, this strength tends to emerge from following what stimulates me while avoiding boredom. But this only works when I balance variety with good self-discipline and consistency. Otherwise I could end up bouncing around from one project to the next and never finishing anything (i.e. shiny object syndrome). That was a real problem for me in the past, and fortunately I recognized that I had to build up my self-discipline to compensate. So note that sometimes you need the balance of two seemingly conflicting strengths to access the benefits of either.

Exploration & Experimentation

  • Presenting ideas from a perspective of exploration and testing
  • You encourage people to try things that might be different from what you choose
  • Willingness to explore and experiment
  • Reflecting on your own experience and extracting the universal truths and lessons that you can share with others
  • Connection between exploration and universal truths (grounded in experience)
  • Willingness to learn and experiment with new challenges
  • Balancing consistent structure with flexibility, especially when doing 30-day challenges
  • To thoroughly look at yourself and the world around you, both with your feelings and with your brain, reflect on it, take action, and tell us everything
  • Living a life that sends a message to us all that anything is possible
  • The ability to always find a new perspective on things, to not get stuck in a rut
  • Seeing you do different experiments
  • Risk taking experience (really important you push boundaries)
  • Willingness to explore
  • Exploring the world

This one feels pretty aligned with how I see myself. I do love to explore and experiment. People seem to appreciate that my lessons stem from experience and that I like to test ideas in the real world.

This may seem close to curiosity and open-mindedness, but I list this as a separate item because it’s the sharing of these experiments that provides value for people. Some people find that the explorations I share encourage them to explore more as well, even if they’re doing totally unrelated explorations. It’s good to see that this strength is contagious. The more we explore, the more we influence and encourage others to explore.

Depth & Immersion

  • Immersive coverage from many angles
  • Exploring a challenge from so many different angles that it forces a breakthrough for readers
  • Take a challenge that is common to your readers, and absolutely hammer the problem with endless different tools, perspectives, and actionable ideas
  • Blog series
  • Can always go back and review the basics in your blog – habits, discipline, 30-day trials, goal-setting, purpose, productivity, time-management, health, exercise, and diet
  • Daily nuggets of thought provoking ideas
  • So many good bits of information and wisdom
  • Sharing the insider’s perspective
  • Level of depth you cover in your topics is second to none
  • You clearly show a vast amount of knowledge and passion for personal development which solidifies your credibility
  • Your ability to provide fresh insights into well trodden self-help topics
  • The depth and detail you go into on the issue and lead on to how to tackle the problem
  • Thorough

Because I often write longer articles, I attract readers who like longer articles. Same goes for the in-depth courses – they attract people who like and appreciate in-depth courses. People who want quick sound bites probably won’t be attracted to my work.

Internally I don’t think of depth and immersion as direct strengths. I see these as side effects that derive from wanting to connect the dots between different ideas. Many of my blog posts are explorations of different angles on a topic to clarify my own thinking.

How can we explore open relationships in an ethically aligned way? Is there a non-sleazy way to do online marketing and have it be effective? What modes of generating income are the best for long-term character sculpting? These are the kinds of questions that my mind likes to explore and resolve. So I would identify my underlying strength here as a drive for real understanding and a dissatisfaction with shallow answers.

Some people said they made specific changes in their own lives that were inspired by what they read in my blog. Going vegan and going jobless were the most common changes mentioned. They liked that I covered certain lifestyle changes from multiple angles with an insider’s perspective.

Some people were actually grateful for making changes that they initially resisted. They noted that it was because I addressed a topic from so many different angles over a long period of time that convinced them to finally try it for themselves.

Challenging People to Change / Teaching People to See Reality Differently

  • Challenging people to think alternatively
  • You have an uncanny knack for blogging about issues that I am currently struggling with in a way that gives me a fresh perspective and a new way to think through a problem
  • Revealing blind spots
  • How you destroy my world (i.e. old collections of beliefs and attitudes that aren’t working) -> new world of better results
  • Your ability to get through to people and make them inspired to actually act upon your ideas
  • Encourage well rounded development (physical, intellectual, spiritual, social, etc.)
  • Effective at training me to see reality more accurately
  • The motivation that you inspire to try what you say to do
  • You continue to be a wonderful example
  • Your daily blog posts are good reminders to stay on track with my personal goals and values
  • You consistently give me something to think about/implement in my life, which I love
  • Giving people a fresh perspective on things in a very simple-to-understand and act-upon way
  • Sharing your views and experiments allows me to challenge my views
  • Make us think deeply about all aspects of our existence
  • Ability to see and communicate new perspectives, new ways of seeing reality
  • Disruptor
  • Giving me new perspectives

This one struck me as one of the most interesting items on the list. People actually like and appreciate that I challenge them to think differently. They like that I nudge them to destroy their old worlds, especially if those worlds aren’t giving them the results they want anyway.

Admittedly I didn’t really think of this as a personal strength, but multiple people noted that this is what really provides long-term value for them. Even though they may resist at first, they ultimately like having holes poked in their old models of reality. They like being challenged to raise their standards. They like learning alternative points of view to digest and think about. They like that I don’t play it safe by only writing about topics inside their comfort zones.

I think this strength comes from what I do for myself. I frequently challenge and question my own models, and much of what I write stems from that questioning. This in turn encourages others to ask similar questions.

I love this because it means that by investing in my own growth, I’m providing a good service to others, as long as I continue to share what I learn along the way. This was a big part of my original vision for starting this blog in 2004. I love personal growth and wanted to make it my full-time occupation. I trusted that if I kept learning and sharing that it would provide sufficient value to people. That turned out to be true.

Sometimes I still have to remind myself that this is a key part of my business and lifestyle. I have to keep exploring, experimenting, and questioning because that’s the engine that feeds everything else. Fortunately I’ve always loved doing that, so it doesn’t feel like a burden. I don’t see myself ever losing my deep curiosity about life.

Sincerity / Honesty / Transparency

  • Honesty
  • Transparency
  • Honest and transparent with your readers
  • Your firm inner strength that knows exactly what you believe and hold dear and is as solid as a rock
  • You are tremendously honest and direct
  • Establishing trust with your audience by means of your sincerity of expression
  • Your ability to gain my trust because of your honest, approachable, and intelligent style
  • By being honest and transparent, you bring authentic solutions and connections
  • You tell things as they are and as they seem to you; I have not found hidden agendas to try to get me to buy something

It didn’t surprise me that people mentioned this, but I also see it as more of a side effect rather than a primary strength.

This one is due to sensitivity to how I feel about my life and about the relationships with the people I serve and connect with regularly. I see relationships as a huge part of life, and I want my relationships to be strong, supportive, and growth-oriented. This includes relationships with people, with my work, with myself, and with reality itself.

I find it interesting that no one really named this inner sensitivity as a strength of mine, but it shows up as a key factor in multiple strengths that people experience externally. Perhaps it’s not too much of a stretch to see that being sensitive to your internal states and seeking inner harmony can actually create ripples of value for others. If you seek more alignment on the inside, you may express more of your strengths outwardly.

Sensitivity can be a powerful strength if you honor it as such.

Clear Communication

  • Writing and speaking
  • Your clarity of writing
  • Relaying spiritual or difficult-to-understand concepts in a relatable manner (for a computer-friendly audience)
  • Being able to take a thought and breaking it down and explaining it very well
  • Tying real world examples into your writing or courses are extremely helpful
  • You are concise, and all of your sentences are usually necessary and relevant
  • Very good at articulating and getting your point across
  • Even when you make appeals to emotions, you structure your points in ways that both the logical and emotional parts of my mind can agree with
  • Your ability to bring razor sharp analytical skills to topics that are often dismissed as “woo woo” – and thereby provide your readers with deeper understandings
  • Your ability to convey complex ideas in a simple and straightforward manner
  • Your writing skills. the way you can popularize complex ideas with simple examples
  • Your very clear and easy to follow explanations – I don’t have to read it twice to fathom out what you are saying
  • You have a way of reducing the fluff of personal development
  • Helps shorten the learning curve for me
  • I like how you communicate in clear manner; your writings are easy to follow and enjoyable to read
  • Articulation

This isn’t too surprising. If people didn’t like my communication style, they wouldn’t stick around. So it makes sense that I attract people who like it.

While I could write in a more flowery style, I actually dislike it when other writers do that in their books and articles. It just makes my brain work harder to extract the meaning. I value directness and plain language in other people’s writing, so I try to practice this myself. To me the purpose of writing is to communicate useful ideas, not to showcase clever writing skills.

I also had some high school teachers that pushed me to eliminate verbal flabbiness when possible. So this strength was largely trained through education and practice. Having a background in computer science and math helps too since clarity is essential in both fields.

Rationality & Practicality

  • Your ability to think things through
  • Real world examples
  • You waste none of the reader’s time, and you get immediately to the pragmatic and practical concerns
  • Focus on results, real-world problems and challenges
  • You are grounded and rational
  • Clear-sighted intelligence
  • You are always interesting, thought-provoking, and you provide advice that is applicable in the real world
  • You see reality (as it is and is not) more clearly than I do
  • Logical, intelligent, and honest viewpoint
  • You’re able to come up with models of reality that are actionable as well as effective
  • You do actually offer a potential solution and don’t just leave us thinking, “Well I knew that already, but what do I actually DO about it?”
  • In your hands, Subjective Reality has a structure and is seen as a kind of practical tool
  • Well-balanced mix of your well-developed mental and emotional intelligence
  • Logical

This one also links with a background in math and computer science. Try programming a computer with good intentions and positive thinking. You have to think rationally and logically to get results from coding.

I got into personal development as part of my recovery from self-destructive behavior, so learning to behave more sanely and rationally was a life-saver for me. Consequently, I have a healthy respect for rationality.

While I’ve explored lots of esoteric and woo-woo personal development ideas too, my journey began with an intense need to solve real problems in my life, so this practical grounding has been with me for a long time. I know how valuable an investment in personal development can be because of how beautifully it transformed my life.

I do see value in exploring pure thought experiments, but I still like to link them to real-world results when possible. Otherwise if an idea just hangs there in space and I can’t use it to improve my results in any area of life, I don’t see it as being of much long-term use other than for the entertainment value.

Open-mindedness and exploration help to balance this strength though. Rationality can become a weakness if you overplay it and let it lock you into a linear mode of thinking. I think it’s rational to realize that you always have more to learn, and that means exploring the unknown.

Creativity & Originality

  • Thinking, visualizing, and communicating outside the box, in fact in a different galaxy
  • The outside the box ways of communicating
  • The creativity in the courses I have taken, particularly Stature, communicates concepts in ways that simply don’t seem available elsewhere
  • I see creativity and a lot of clear thinking in you
  • Your freshness and originality
  • You can combine two very different mindsets: analytical and intuitive in a way which is quite symbiotic in nature, and gives rise to solutions that are unique and creative
  • Innovative thinking

This strength feels like one of contrast to me. If we didn’t have school systems and corporate jobs that pressure us to devalue inner harmony, I doubt that I would seem as creative or original.

While the world’s misalignments may create opportunities, part of me wishes this weren’t the case. I think it would be more pleasing and satisfying to live in a world where most people followed their paths with a heart and stayed sensitive to inner harmony.

In the past I valued being an out of the box thinker and deliberately leaned into that. These days I’d prefer to do away with the box altogether, so no one has to be stuck inside of it.

From my perspective, I’m basically trying to live the life I learned about from watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. Explore the galaxy. Keep learning and growing. Have interesting relationships with people from different planets. And always be aware that there’s an empath on board to keep you honest.

Caring / Empathy / Ethics / Generosity / Heart

  • A good heart
  • You come across not only as an expert in the field but also as a friend who cares for others and who genuinely wants to see them improve their lives; not just saying they do. That’s where I get my trust for you from.
  • Giving a lot away for free, including uncopyrighting
  • Accessibility – covering relevant issues readers care about, helping people feel they aren’t alone
  • You’ve transcended the common online business model (AdSense, affiliates, etc.) and have a moral dimension to your work
  • It’s been inspiring, from a distance, to watch your trust in Life pay off
  • Your genuine desire to help
  • You have strong imaginative power which makes you able to empathize more with people
  • You are friendly and warm in your interactions
  • The connection that you somehow convey through your writing, so it feels like you are targeting my own personal problem
  • You seek to cause as little harm as possible
  • You seek to help and heal through bringing knowledge and encouragement to people
  • Generosity and your service-orientation; to put out so much free content is a beautiful gift
  • Being able to offer a lot of quality content on your website without charge
  • Compassion
  • Heart of service
  • Shows that you care about people and surroundings
  • It is heart warming to see how you genuinely want people to grow and develop themselves

Awwww… I do indeed care about helping people. I think this could also be a quality flowing from sensitivity. I often feel like I pick up on energy, feelings, and intentions from the people I connect with, even at a distance.

When I was younger, I didn’t value such qualities, but now I see them as essential to being in tune with the flow of life. I think caring has a lot to do with listening, not just with our ears but with all parts of ourselves. I feel fortunate that some caring influences came into my life at the right time to help steer me in this direction. Going vegan played a significant part in this as well; that really opened up the heart-brain communication pathways.

Some people who mentioned these items also requested that I do more videos or podcasts, so more of the emotional connection comes through. I can understand that, although I still really like the experience of writing. I feel that writing helps me slow down, so I can go deeper into the exploration of ideas.

I still like video too though, especially live video. What some people may not see is that we do live video coaching calls in Conscious Growth Club 36 times per year. We just recently passed 100 of those calls, so from my perspective I’m already doing a significant amount of video.

Personality / Playfulness / Positivity

  • Many people have a growth mindset or focus and discipline, but they can’t bring the playful and unique approach to it
  • Humor
  • I love how you inject your personality into each post
  • It gives your posts that personal touch and authenticity which even the most sceptic of readers can respect
  • As readers we feel invited and brought to your side as individuals who are constantly exploring
  • To not get dragged down by others or bad energy
  • To always stay positive and believe that things will be better
  • To trust yourself and reality
  • Playfulness

In this area I think it also makes sense that people who dislike my personality or sense of humor wouldn’t stick with reading my blog for long.

I often have mixed reactions when other authors inject their personality into their work. Sometimes I really like it, and sometimes I find it cheesy or annoying if it feels like they’re trying too hard. I aim to strike a balance and not force it, preferring to keep the ideas front and center most of the time.

I also think that expressing some playfulness helps to create a stronger connection over time, and it makes the work more enjoyable too. It’s good to know that it’s possible to attract people who appreciate playfulness.

Focus / Discipline / Determination / Work Ethic / Consistency

  • I doubt there are many things in your life that don’t serve clear and well-thought-out goals
  • You aren’t stumbling through life blindly
  • Goals & character building
  • Time management
  • Discipline / self-discipline
  • Hard-working
  • Dedication
  • Determined and disciplined
  • Consistency
  • Balancing with open-mindedness: It seems like tightness and rigidity tend to appear in people who have a high level of self-discipline, but it’s quite the opposite with you
  • Your regular contact; I do like the daily connection

Self-discipline was a hard quality to build, but I did make gradual gains by continuing to invest in it. I feel this is important to balance other qualities that can potentially pull against focus and consistency, like the desire to go out and explore something new.

Self-discipline can also create traps of its own if you overplay it, potentially stifling creativity and spontaneity.

I like to see these different aspects like parts of a song, where each instrument gets its opportunity to shine, and they can all play harmoniously together.

I’m glad I did this little experiment. It gave me some interesting insights and helped me connect the dots between how I think about my strengths and what other people perceive. It’s interesting to realize that outward strengths may come from deeper places that aren’t easy to identify.

This makes me wonder if Leonardo da Vinci would identify the same strengths in himself that other people would credit him for. Did he see his incredible range as a strength? He might have even seen it as a weakness since so many of his works were unfinished when he died. I read the book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, which was insightful, but that cannot reveal how he actually thought.

Consider that as you develop your own strengths, other people may credit you for how those strengths affect them, but they may not be able to identify the core strengths that give rise to those outward expressions. You may experience and frame your strengths differently. For instance, no one identified writing from inspiration and choosing topics based on inspiration as a strength of mine, even though that’s a huge deal to me and something I’ve invested in greatly for many years. That strength also stems from sensitivity to signals that carry ideas.

Consequently, if you spot a strength in someone else and then try to emulate if yourself, your results may fall flat if you miss the core strength that gives rise to the outer expression. If anyone wants to get good results emulating some of my strengths, they may get stuck if they don’t invest in increasing their sensitivity to inner and outer signals.

I’m grateful for everyone who chose to respond to these questions, so thank you for that. It was an eye-opening and reflective experience for me, and I hope you got some value from reading this post. I also encourage you to think about how inner qualities that you might not even think about as strengths could actually flow into providing value in ways you may not have considered yet.

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Create and Share

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Many people who want to earn a living from creative work get stuck trying to figure out a business model. Meanwhile they’re not actually doing much creating. They’re waiting for clarity.

Waiting for clarity is a waste of time. So is trying to figure out the perfect transition plan in advance. It’s easier to find clarity when you’re in motion.

I suggest that you start simpler. Focus on getting into the rhythm of creating and sharing. Don’t worry about monetization. Don’t worry about the business model – not if that’s a cause of stuckness for you.

If you’re going to focus on anything, seek to find the people who will appreciate what you can create and share. Appreciation is a sign that value is being received and acknowledged. If there’s no appreciation, such as thank you’s and other forms of acknowledgement coming back to you, chances are that little value is being delivered. Don’t mistakenly assume that this implies you’re not creating value. It’s more likely that you’re not sharing with the right people.

If you create something and share it, and the people you share it with don’t appreciate it, stop sharing with them. Someone else will appreciate it, so share it somewhere else – anywhere else. Even if you bop around randomly trying to find the right people, it’s better than wasting your life sharing with misaligned people who will whine at you or ignore ou.

If you’re sharing on social media, I’d go so far as to drop the people who don’t like what you’re sharing or who go out of their way to criticize you. They’ll only slow you down. Clear them out, and make some room for aligned people to get through.

It’s fine if some people in your audience are neutral, but if they’re dead weight as far as appreciation goes, then don’t invest in trying to please them. Just let ’em go.

Trust that you’ll find your audience. You’ll find your real audience faster by quickly firing the wrong audience members.

Seek to create in tune with appreciation, at least if you want to make your creating and sharing sustainable. Money is a form of appreciation, and if the appreciation is there, it isn’t that hard to turn that into income. But it’s pretty damned hard to do that if there’s little or no appreciation.

You can still work on business models. You can still experiment with income generation along the way. But the fundamental piece to get working early on is creating and sharing. No one can stop you from doing that. You can start on that today.

Once you find people who appreciate your work, you can even co-create your business model with them. That’s how I got started. People who appreciated my work shared ideas and suggestions for how I could monetize it. Some gave me examples of how other people were monetizing work that I might adopt as well. All I had to do was follow that flow, and it was the regular creating and sharing that made it sustainable.

You’ll probably have some objections to doing this. That’s fine. My counter-objection is that creating and sharing, even without much of a plan, works a lot better than vacillating, delaying, second-guessing yourself, and perhaps the most popular lament of all: I don’t know how. So if your objections are keeping you stuck, maybe they don’t amount to a hill of beans. If you create and share regularly and you move towards people who appreciate what you share, you can eventually have lots of hills with lots of beans.

Remember how easy it was to create stuff when you were a kid. Just grab some colored paper, glue, scissors, and make a mess with it. Someone will appreciate it if you show it to enough people. I’ve seen displays in modern art museums that look no better than what a five-year old could create, and there are still people who appreciate it. So get your crusty, whiny, cowardly AF adult brain out of your way, and just create and share stuff. If you don’t know where to start, pretend that you’re five years old, and start anyway.

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Framing the Problem

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People often get stuck with certain ways of framing their problems that actually prevent them from creating solutions. Usually they learn these frames from other people, especially people who swear that a particular frame worked for them. But that doesn’t mean the same frame will work for everyone else.

Suppose you define a financial problem as a mindset problem or a problem with limiting beliefs. These limiting beliefs are holding me back! I’m stuck in a scarcity mindset! This is why I’m still struggling!

Maybe your mindset could use some improvement, but you’d be surprised at how many problems don’t actually require mindset shifts in order to solve them. I’ve met plenty of wealthy people, and I can assure you that many of them have the same old limiting beliefs about money that everyone else does. Meanwhile some people think they need to resolve all their limiting beliefs about money in order to attract more money. That isn’t true at all.

Similarly you can have a really abundant mindset towards money and still not attract much of it. I’ve met some financially broke people who seem to have abundance-aligned mindsets, yet money doesn’t flow to them very well. They may have good mindsets, but a good mindset doesn’t pay the bills.

Framing a problem as a mindset issue may not actually get the problem solved. This is especially true for financial and social problems.

Many problems are easier to solve when you define them differently. For instance, if you define your financial and social problems as behavioral issues rather than mindset issues, you may find them easier to solve. What would a behavioral solution look like? This would include taking different actions and training yourself to adopt different habits.

You may also find such problems easier to solve if you define them as spiritual problems. What would a spiritual solution look like? This could include looking at the character sculpting purpose behind the problem. You’d see the problem as meaningful and purposeful, which can reduce your resistance to it, so you approach it as a worthwhile invitation rather than a curse.

When you run into a problem that isn’t budging even after years of struggle, clarify how you’ve been framing it, and switch to a different frame for a while.

So if you’ve been defining your money struggles as a mindset problem, try switching to a behavioral frame (you’re taking the wrong actions) or a spiritual frame (you’re resisting the purpose of this challenge) or a social frame (you’re serving the wrong people) or some other way of defining the problem. Then develop solutions based on the new frame.

Don’t be a one-frame wonder. You will get stuck if you do that. Eventually a problem will come along that doesn’t fit your frame very well, and it will be nearly impossible for you to solve it using your “one frame to rule them all.”

We fall into these traps because a good frame will work until it doesn’t. You may get good results for some problems using a mindset frame, but eventually you’ll encounter a problem that isn’t impressed by your mindset-based approach. It will persist no matter how much mindset work you do. But a behavioral solution might solve the problem for good.

Many problems become much easier to solve when you switch frames. Look at the problem from a different angle. Ask: How else could I define this problem?

And if you can’t think of at least 10 different ways to define your problem, well… then you have a mindset issue. 😉

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What Are My Strengths?

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During some recent morning runs, I’ve been listening to a series of Michael Michalowicz books: The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, Profit First, Clockwork, and Fix This Next. He also wrote The Pumpkin Plan – one of my all-time favorite business books.

In the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur book, there are some questions about identifying your strengths and leveraging them in business. I think I know mine pretty well by now, but this stirred up my curiosity about how my blog readers and customers see my strengths and which particular strengths are most relevant for them. I also got to wondering how I could better use my strengths to make a difference for people.

So I thought I’d use today’s blog post to ask a few simple questions directly and invite you to reply via my contact form.

From your perspective…

  • What are my strengths?
  • Which strengths of mine are most important to you (in terms of serving you well)?
  • How do you feel I could (or wish I would) use my strengths to serve you better?

These questions are intended for people who’ve been engaging with my work long enough to form opinions about this.

That’s it! I’ll personally read every response and reflect on what I learn from this. It would be great if I this spawns some actionable ideas too.

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Self-Accountability

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Using an accountability buddy to help you consistently stick with a habit or work on a goal is fine as a temporary measure to get yourself into the flow of action, but it’s also a crutch.

Ultimately you want to be accountable to yourself first and foremost, not to a buddy, team, company, organization, app, or external entity.

That may sound counter-intuitive, especially if you’re accustomed to external accountability.

External factors can increase your sense of accountability because you don’t want to let other people down. You want to do your part to pitch in. That’s understandable.

But externals don’t last. At some point you’ll move on from the school, team, company, boss, parents, or situation that provides your accountability. Then what? Find another external group to hold you accountable? Accountable to what? Their goals or yours?

Being accountable to others often adds extra busywork too. You may need to do extra paperwork or reports to prove your efforts to someone else. Bosses do performance evaluation. Teachers dole out assignments and tests. Concerned parents check up on you. When you’re accountable to yourself, you can track your own data when you find that beneficial, but you needn’t bother with extra reporting to convince others of your standards.

In the long run, I think you’ll find the payoff better if you invest most deeply in self-accountability. You always have yourself, so your inner accountability buddy is with you 24/7 for life.

I like holding myself accountable to my future self. I know that I’ll be my future self someday, so my loyalty is to him. I want to build him up with good habits that enhance his life. I want to complete projects he can look back upon and feel proud of. I feel grateful that my past self put me in a strong position because of his many efforts, and I know my future self will feel the same about my efforts today.

Can you still hold yourself accountable for doing your personal “shoulds” when no one is looking? When no one would know or care, can you still push yourself? Can you go the extra mile when you’re the only one to hold yourself accountable?

It’s fine to add the benefits of external accountability on top of personal accountability. Working with a strong team can be super motivating. But be wary of substituting external accountability for internal accountability. Don’t lean so much on the externals that you let your inner fire atrophy.

If the team goes away, if you lose your job, if the external accountability drops off, do you still maintain strong discipline? Or does the structure of your life fall apart when it’s just you alone and no one is watching?

I struggled with this for a long time in the past, leaning too much on externals for accountability. When strict structures went away, my life crumbled from lack of discipline. I was accountable to no one, not even myself. I got in enough trouble that the courts intervened to hold me accountable, sentencing me to dozens of hours of community service. I ultimately concluded that was no way to live and began the struggle of trying to hold myself to a higher personal standard.

That was not an easy path by any means, but I do feel it’s been stronger than relying on externals to push me. It feels better to push myself because then it’s a choice, and I can be sure to push myself in purposeful ways that makes sense to me. My orders to myself are meaningful, carefully chosen, and aligned with my values. I don’t have to deal with ill-considered commands from elsewhere.

Personal accountability also enabled me to stretch into areas where no one else was directing me to go. I didn’t go vegetarian and then vegan because of external pressures. I chose it and committed. I didn’t do so many personal growth experiments because of external accountability, even when I blogged about them. I can still do private 30-day challenges and feel just as accountable, even when there’s no public eye watching me.

No accountability buddy got me out of bed at 4:30 this morning. No one pushed me to run for an hour, then do yoga. No one is telling me to get my work done today. No one will achieve my goals for me.

Again, it’s okay to lean on external accountability to get yourself into motion sometimes, but don’t let your personal accountability languish from lack of investment. Personal accountability is more reliable and consistent than external accountability, but it takes more practice to build.

Even when you’re doing something service-oriented, the internal accountability can come from the effect it has on your character. Fall in love with the inner rewards of being a kind, generous, and compassionate character. Do you want to embody such a character? If so, then hold yourself accountable to behaving in alignment with that character. Look into a mirror, and see what the guy in the glass has to say.

Do you want to spend your whole life being driven by carrots and sticks from other people? Or do you want to empower yourself to build a strong, self-accountable character who can do your should-dos without whining, complaining, or external rewards and punishments?

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Your Work Attitude

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This is one of my favorite quotes from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (in the passage on work):

Work is love made visible.

And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.

And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.

And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

Consider that the attitude and energy you bring to your work can enhance or poison your output and the ripples you’re creating.

Sometimes it’s easy to discount this for our own work, so flip it around and look at it from the other side.

Do you care about the attitude and energy other people invest in their work? Does that make any difference to you?

Would you prefer to buy products and services from people who enjoy and appreciate their work, who care about what they’re creating, who find the work purposeful and fulfilling, and who want customers to have good experiences?

Or is it all the same to you if people grudgingly show up to jobs they hate, working under poor conditions with bosses who are mean to them, feeling stressed and anxious while creating products and providing services they really don’t care about, so you can have that added value in your life?

If you see these two scenarios as meaningfully different when you’re on the customer side, how can you not see them as meaningfully different when you’re on the creator side?

Do you believe that your attitude affects (or infects) your impact?

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Generative Learning

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Generative learning is when you generate your own solutions to a problem or challenge, get feedback from reality, and learn from your mistakes.

This is similar to the evolutionary development model of software development, whereby you do some coding, play around with your app, and then evolve it some more.

Contrast this with learning solutions from other people. The limitation here is that other people’s solved problems probably don’t perfectly match your current problems.

When I was building my computer games business, I often came up short when trying to apply other people’s advice. They didn’t know my skills and talents. They didn’t know my concerns and limitations. Consequently, their advice would often land flat with me.

I had a similar experience when I was in a $30K per year business mastermind group in 2018. We’d do some masterminding sessions, and I’d often walk away with a collection of advice from other people that made little sense for my situation. People shared what worked for them, not what would work for me. What others advised usually didn’t align with my values, skills, customers, business model, or much else about my business. I often found it more practical to bounce ideas around with my wife.

It’s still nice to mastermind with other people, but not because their ready-made solutions will work. Masterminding is good for stimulating you to do your own experiments and explorations. I found it better for the vibe and the encouragement. The actual business advice was weak and misguided.

Where I tend to get the best results in life is from generative learning. It’s basically trial and error with a fancier name. As simple and effective as this is, people still don’t do enough of it.

It’s hard to come up with good business models that check all the boxes: lucrative, sustainable, personally fulfilling, purposeful, achievable, ambitious, fun, etc. If you apply someone else’s ready-made business model, you’ll probably feel some resistance in applying it to your own life. I think that’s because deep down, you know it’s a bit off. It’s a mismatch for you. Some people can do it, but you have to be really obedient, and many people just aren’t.

Someone else’s model can serve as a starting point for exploration, but there’s no substitute for doing the actual exploration work. Keep generating and testing your own solutions to problems.

When I look at advice on diet and nutrition, I can’t find anyone who teaches how I actually eat.

When I look at other people’s businesses, I can’t find anyone who teaches how to build and run a business like mine.

In all the relationship books I’ve read, I haven’t found any that describe how I relate to people.

I don’t know of anyone else teaching the philosophy of life that actually works for me.

There are lots of people teaching lifestyle design, but none of them teach the lifestyle that works for me.

I like being very organized, but I don’t do organizing like anyone else does. People sometimes ask me if I use some particular system. I can only do my system, not anyone else’s.

I sometimes pick up ideas from other people, but I haven’t allowed anyone to collect me as their protégé. My solutions were all arrived at through generative learning. I experimented till I found what works.

I’m actually pretty happy in my life these days. Even with the coronavirus situation, this has actually been an incredible year for me. One reason is that I’ve been moving quickly through my own forms of generative learning. For instance, the daily blogging serves as a new generative learning experience every day of the year, so my writing can evolve faster. Readers are telling me that I’m doing some of my best work ever this year, but I also think I’m doing some of my worst writing this year. I’m making more mistakes to learn faster.

If I try to directly apply what I’ve learned from other people, it always falls flat. I can’t get myself to do it. It’s always flawed. It’s always missing some key elements that would actually make it work for me.

But generative learning – good old trial and error – that’s been the most reliable path to finding solutions.

The “error” part sucks because who wants to fail? But if we can embrace the suckiness of that and know that it leads to more personalized, effective solutions, it’s easier to stomach it.

How are you personally responding to the coronavirus situation? Are you handling this situation as someone else taught you? Or are you finding your own way through this? I’ll bet you’ll get the best results by figuring out your own approach. Who else is capable to telling you how to intelligently reshape your life during these times? Only you can do that.

Let reality be the judge. Reality will show you whether your solutions are effective or not. If your solutions fall flat, accept that. I hate it when a solution that looks beautiful in the planning phase gets a failing grade from the real world. But I also know that it’s just feedback. It’s part of the learning process. And so I go back to the drawing board and try something else, just as optimistic as the previous time. I’m optimistic because I know that generative learning works in the long run.

What would happen if you embraced personal responsibility for generating your own solutions to life’s problems instead of trying to learn solutions from others? What if devising and testing solutions was 100% on you? What if no one would ever give you any advice? What if you couldn’t read or research to find any solutions?

How would you go about solving some of your problems, relying only on your existing knowledge and skills and good old trial and error? What if your only main problem solving tool was generative learning?

I’d bet that if you leaned more heavily on this tool, you could go faster. You’d stop waiting for other people to teach you things, and you’d come up with your own solutions. Some of your ideas won’t work, and you’ll learn from them. The more you explore and experiment, the sooner you’ll find what does work – for you.

Other people won’t solve your problems for you, but social support is still immensely valuable. Social support is good for generating ideas for experiments to do. It’s good for emotional encouragement. It’s good for pushing you to think bigger and to amp up your ambition. It’s good for pointing out shortcomings in your approaches. It’s good for opportunity abundance. But don’t regard other people as a pathways to fast and easy, ready-made solutions. You’re the ultimate problem solver in your life.

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Discipline Ripples

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A nice side effect of my daily blogging challenge is that it’s helping me become more disciplined in other areas of life. This in turn increases my capacity to get more done because I can trust that I’ll have abundant discipline to flow through more tasks and projects.

I expected that there would be some discipline ripples, but I’m pleased that they’re better than I anticipated.

Staying caffeine free feels easier than ever. I’m also easily avoiding other stimulants like any forms of chocolate, caffeinated tea, etc. It feels like the part of my brain that recognizes and wants to avoid addictive patterns has been strengthened.

Maintaining my early riser habit feels easier than ever, and I’m often getting up earlier than my usual 5am alarm. This morning I got up at 4:30, which is happening more often. I’ve noticed that I feel less inclined to linger in bed even if I could justify that it’s not time to get up yet. When my body feels awake, it wants to get up and move, not stay in bed longer than it needs to.

On average I’m running for about an hour each morning. This morning’s run was 70 minutes. That used to feel like a long run; now it feels like a normal everyday type of run. The minimum I run is 45 minutes since anything less feels like it’s too little.

With the increased running, I’m flowing through many more nonfiction audiobooks, finishing 2-3 per week, so that will add up to 100-150 audiobooks per year at this rate. I just finished League of Denial yesterday, and this morning I started Big Magic. I’ll finish Big Magic tomorrow and start another audiobook on Sunday.

Work projects are flowing very nicely. I’m doing a better job of staying organized and completing projects in an intelligent order. I’m not perfect at this, but I notice that instead of feeling driven to choose the work for each day based on intuition or emotional impulses, I’m more easily flowing into the most rational project to work on next. And when I sit down to work on it, the discipline is there to stick with it for hours.

I’ve already written more blog articles this year than I did in 2019, 2018, and 2017 combined. By the end of June, you’ll be able to add 2016 to that as well. So that will be like doing four years of blogging in six months.

The interesting thing about 365-day challenges is that initially they’re hard, but eventually they become easy. I’d say that happens somewhere around day 45 to 75. After 6-9 weeks into such a challenge, the resistance crumbles, and the training effect begins to take hold. By enduring that long and not missing a single day, you’ve grown stronger. And it’s easier to keep going because now you get to do the rest of the challenge with a stronger, more aligned, less resistant mind.

It’s hard to stretch ourselves to tackle discipline-building challenges, but note that it does get easier as your mind grows stronger.

The mind that whines about getting up early isn’t the same as the mind that’s already gotten up before dawn for many weeks in a row. The new mind thinks the old mind is a wimp for whining about such an easily maintainable and personally beneficial habit.

The mind that whines about giving up chocolate isn’t the same as the mind that’s free of that addiction and recognizes it as an unnecessary weakness.

The mind that would whine about running for an hour each day isn’t the same as the mind that’s been doing it for weeks, thinks it’s normal, and suspects that 75-minute daily runs would probably be no big deal either.

You’ve gotten used to your current level of self-discipline, but you could train yourself to go beyond that and create a new normal for yourself. Your new normal may yield much better results than your old normal. The transition may be difficult, but once you’ve locked in your new normal, it’s really no more difficult than your old normal. Raising your standards is hard. Keeping them raised is much easier.

When you train up your discipline and then apply it to your life, you don’t suffer every day because the rewards of discipline are greater than the temporary pleasures of an undisciplined life. Life without chocolate isn’t a sad life. It’s a more focused and mentally stable life since the body no longer has to deal with the ups and downs of the stimulant effect.

The sad life is that of the stimulant addict who’s in denial about their addiction. The sad life is a life without daily exercise and its many neurological benefits. The sad life is that of the person who has to suffer with the results of undisciplined habits taking their toll year after year.

Training up your discipline is hard – yes. But not training up your discipline is way, way, way harder.

Imagine what more you could experience and enjoy with more discipline – the ability to get yourself to take rational actions that create desirable results again and again. That’s worth some challenging training, so you can access those long-term benefits.

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Committing to the Stretch

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One thing I love about blogging is that by writing about many aspects of personal growth, I improve and deepen my understanding of those aspects. Writing helps me glean fresh insights connect the dots in new ways.

This has been especially true of workshops and courses. Initially such projects felt daunting, but eventually I got the hang of them. Now a big part of my motivation for selecting such projects is the rich personal gains I’ll make in my ability to understand and apply the material.

The next major deep dive I want to create is a course on creative productivity called Amplify. I expect to start working on it this summer. Just knowing that this project is coming me up is making me extra observant of my daily habits and workflows. I’ve made a lot of tweaks and improvements to how I work this year as I seek to better understand how to flow through a variety of creative projects, large and small.

One frame that works especially well is committing to a project before you know how to complete it. It’s extremely limiting to only say yes to projects when you can already see the finish line. Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the growth and challenge?

When you demand that you’re going to have to teach something where you aren’t 100% certain about the outcome, that kind of commitment feels edgier. It keeps you on your toes, feeling awake and alert.

You don’t have to fake it. You don’t have to overextend yourself. You can challenge yourself to make a commitment at the edge of your comfort zone while still feeling confident that you can pull it off.

This kind of confidence goes beyond your belief in your own knowledge and skills. You have to stretch further into trusting reality, expecting that if you take on something bold and worthwhile, reality will back you up.

I’ve noticed that when I set well-aligned goals, reality meets me halfway. The goal has to include some kind of personal stretching though. It can’t be too easy. If reality thinks that I’m copping out and taking it easy, it won’t lend a hand. But if reality sees that I’m offering to stretch into the unknown, it just seems to love that kind of offer.

Sometimes I think that this is a big part of our collective life purpose here. We’re here to explore the unknown, and that requires stretching ourselves beyond the familiar and the comfortable. We have to push into the dark areas of life that we don’t 100% understand.

Life opens the floodgates of support when it detects a real commitment to exploring the unfamiliar and the uncomfortable. When we play it safe, however, life just yawns at us.

People often struggle to achieve easy and accessible goals. What they don’t often realize is that this is why they’re failing. They set their sights so low that life (and other people) mostly ignore them. And no fire burns within them for pursuing life’s low-hanging fruit. Stretch for the upper branches; don’t just hug the trunk.

Consider your biggest upcoming goal. Are you playing it safe by setting a small and easy goal? Are you playing it safe by keeping your options open and not really committing to it 100%? If you’re playing it safe at all, you know it, and life knows it. There’s no hiding. Life won’t reward you for playing small.

What’s the goal that scares you a bit? What’s the goal that stirs up some desire when you think about it, but you also think it could be too much? Where are the edgy goals?

Have you committed to the edginess? What would life say about that? How would you know what life thinks? Well, has it clearly indicated that it accepts your offer? Or does it seem to be ignoring you?

When you make a good offer to life, life responds. It demonstrates that your offer is accepted. When you get no response, make a stronger offer.

Your goals are offers to life. Life will respond well if it likes your offers. If life doesn’t respond, it doesn’t mean that you’re unworthy or that life doesn’t like you. It just means that life declined your offer.

It takes time to discover what types of offers life appreciates from you. So make a lot of offers. Learn what life accepts and what it ignores. The pattern I keep seeing is that life loves stretch offers backed by a clear willingness to commit.

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