I just discovered something that I always knew to be true but I didn’t have the words, or psychology to explain it.

Throughout my life, I’ve always been able to set intermediate goals to help me push me through hard, long or difficult tasks. Getting through an 8 hour drive by playing a game to just make it another 45 minutes… Doing 2000 burpees in a day by focusing on just 500 at a time… Chunking down a big project to redesign my website into daily steps.

These big deeds got done by mentally reframing them into more doable amounts, and only recently I heard Former Navy SEAL Rich Diviney talk about his formula for how this works. When there’s a difficult, uncertain task that you need to push yourself to get through, you need 3 elements: Duration, Pathway, and Outcome.

Duration is picking a point in time that isn’t an endless horizon, but something concrete and digestible. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the impossibility of a task, you mentally reframe it to the next milestone. Psychologically this works because when you hit it, then you get rewarded by the achievement and get infused with more motivation that will help you attack the next milestone.

Pathway is about the action plan. It’s clearly defining what needs to happen within the constraints you’ve outlined, and how you’ll go about making progress toward. There needs to be a belief that what you’re doing will work in getting you to the milestone.

And last is Outcome. You can’t completely trick yourself out of the larger task at hand, in the back of your mind you know that there’s more to come after the immediate milestone. That’s why you need to believe that the overall mission is meaningful. That the outcome you’re pursuing is worthwhile, and that you believe in the overall result you’re set to achieve.

After learning this framework I put it to the test, and it worked. I got on the treadmill and wanted to run on it fast for 15 minutes. The original plan was to run the first half fast and then drop the pace down a touch to ride it out. Once I got halfway, I figured I’d stretch the fast pace a little more to 10 mins. Then when I got to 10 mins, instead of slowing the pace I chose to speed it up for the next 5 minutes to push myself. And even further, in the last minute I sped it up even more to finish strong!

I don’t know that I could have committed to the workout I just described... It was way faster than I thought possible, and the only way I achieved that was by setting intermediate milestones on the path to something greater. 

This is a framework you can apply to anything that feels hard to do. Reframe to an intermediate duration, align your pathway to achieve it, and connect it to the larger outcome. Step by step, you’ll go further than you knew you were capable of!

There are two great motivating forces in life: The pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of discomfort.  But that’s not to say they’re even… Our need to avoid discomfort is a far more powerful motivator than getting more of what we want. We are all psychologically wired to avoid pain.

I saw this recently with a client of mine. He’s an ambitious entrepreneur whose business isn’t growing like he wants it to, but he hasn’t been doing much about it. He’s been stuck in a disappointing, underperforming cycle and has grown comfortable with it. And he feels justified about it because he thinks he’s “doing all the right things” and just doesn’t have enough time for anything else, stuck and at full capacity.

That is until I had him complete a time audit, and it was compelling. Just one week of reviewing how he spends his time, on a half hour by half hour basis, completely shifted his perspective. He’s been telling himself that he didn’t have the time to put into more marketing, and that his travel schedule has been keeping him from being more successful, but this exercise illuminated something different. He’s been wasteful of his time. He’s been irresponsible. And the pain of accepting it struck him like a dagger.

This elevated pain is creating ripples into his daily choices. Instead of rationalizing that he doesn't have the time for thing, now his self-image is being put into question. And it hurts, so he’s changing his habits. And now that he’s aware of how distracted he’s been doing unimportant things, he’s more unwilling to tolerate it.

Motivation is just a fuel for action, and the more reason you have for changing your life in a specific way, the more likely it is to happen. 

The same psychological concept ties into the idea of loss aversion. People are more motivated to avoid losing something they already have than they are to gain something new. A study from behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman suggests that ‘people feel the pain of losing $100 about twice as strongly as they feel the pleasure of gaining $100.’ 

This is why subscription services like Netflix position their renewal message as “Don’t lose access” vs “get more entertainment”, and apps tell you to “not break your streak” instead of encouraging you to “increase your streak”. It’s a tactic you’ll start noticing everywhere, and they do it because it works - pain influences behavior and motivates change more than pleasure ever could.

I heard Sahil Bloom say something that really stood out to me. He said that “life is more about direction than speed”.

It’s an interesting distinction because so often we get caught up in treating life like a race. We’re impatient and we want to achieve our goals sooner so that we can move on to achieving the next one. So much of our focus goes into doing things faster and doing them better, but before any of that, what’s most important is to make sure we’re doing the right things.

Think of it like climbing a mountain. Of course, first you want to make sure you’re climbing the right mountain. David Brooks has a book called “The Second Mountain" talking about the mistake many people make… Climbing the first mountain of wealth, status, and notoriety, only to realize that there’s the mountain of meaning and purpose behind it. 

I also like talking about progress using the metaphor of a mountain. Let’s say the goal is to get to the top of the mountain. There are many different ways you can achieve that. You can follow the paved trail, you can make the difficult climb up a steep face, you can even cut your losses, go back down to the bottom and take a different way up. You choose the path that is most likely to take you where you want to go. In other words, you pick your strategy for how you’ll achieve the goal.

And once you’ve decided on your strategy and chosen your path, now you need to walk on it. These are the tactics, the action steps you take in executing the strategy. Of course, the faster and better you take these steps, the faster progress you make.

With that in mind, saying life is more about direction than speed is analogous to saying that life is more about strategy than tactics. The tactics depend on the strategy just like the speed depends on the direction.

What does this look like? It’s doing work you enjoy rather than what pays you the most. It’s investing in building relationships with people who you deeply connect with, not those who make you look cool. It’s building toward the lifestyle of your dreams rather than spending money on the things that make you feel good in the short term.

Every step forward has a direction associated with it, and if you’re going the wrong way, going fast will take you even further off alignment. And if that happens, hopefully you realize it and can course correct before it’s too late.

When we look back at our lives, some things can be kind of cringy.

You can’t believe that you took so long to finally make the big move you’d been thinking about, and wish you’d done it sooner because you lost time. You look back at the way you showed up in a conversation or situation, and you’re embarrassed by how immaturely or irresponsibly you handled it. 

And while it’s a very normal response to look down on yourself, it’s not a fair thing to do. The version of you that’s looking at things today is not the same person that made decisions in the moment. Don’t shame yourself for who you used to be. I bet you were doing your best... And it was all a necessary part of you becoming who you are today.

My favorite quote comes from Maya Angelou and it goes “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” And the reason this resonates so much for me is because it explains how we could play small and make mistakes, without discrediting that we made an attempt to apply ourselves.

Every moment we experience - past, present, or future - is limited by the level of consciousness we meet it with. We can only act with the awareness we have, information we know, and options that are available. We use that context and apply it in the best way we can. So any shortcoming that comes as a result of that isn’t a negative strike on our character, it’s representative of the limited consciousness we had.

And that’s why "when you know better, you do better.” WIth more awareness and new information you can make a different choice. You learned something new so now you can do something new. Our personal evolution is a product of this trial and error feedback loop.

It’s kind of like how hindsight is 20/20. What that means is that you can see things now that you couldn’t see before. You have a different awareness for the situation today than you did when you were in it.

So why find fault for things that you didn’t know about? Why shame yourself for the mistakes you made, when you were simply doing your best with what you had?

If we approach our lives with that level of grace, and curiosity to uncover the things hiding in plain sight that we’ve been missing, we accelerate our growth and improve the quality of our lives.

As someone who has been obsessed with the idea of behavioral design, and how to help myself and others be more likely to take action in the ways that align with their best self, I just realized I’ve been overlooking something critical:

If you want to increase the likelihood that you take action, make the action more fun to do.

How simple? We are naturally attracted to doing things that are fun. We don’t need any incentive, or any discipline, or any willpower, or anything to do what we genuinely think is fun. We are wired for it, and we can use it to improve our approach to living our best lives.

It’d be ridiculously hard to make yourself work out in the gym all day, but it’s a no brainer to spend the day on the ski slopes and get the same amount of exercise in. It’s hard to sit down and create content to market yourself, but it’s easy to have a deep conversation with a friend and record it. 

The reason that’s the case is because ‘fun’ is one of the factors that your unconscious mind considers when it creates meaning, produces emotions, and makes choices for you. 

And that’s because our mind’s processing works on two different layers: Conscious influence and unconscious influence. 

Conscious influence comes from the way you determine things to be. You can shape your reality when you have the awareness to do it. However, 95% of the time, it’s unconscious influence that’s calling the shots behind the scenes. Things like necessity, perceived difficulty, belief systems, and social pressure all contribute to what the unconscious mind resolves to do.

Now add ‘fun’ to that list. If something’s fun it can offset the influence a negative belief or the perceived difficulty has, and supports you in following through on that action.

Here are some quick, easy, and generalized ways to make something more fun to do: Do it outside in nice weather, do it in a different setting, do it with people you enjoy, make it a game, make it an adventure, or add variety.

One of the things I’m excited to explore is how to apply this to my own personal development systems and filling out my Self Improvement Scorecard. I’m very motivated to use my self improvement systems, but if I could find a way to make it fun, I know that would take things to the next level. Stay tuned until I have updates on that!

My favorite personal development book of all time is “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy. It gives words to the commanding power of consistency that I’d always known to be true, and is responsible for the most important tool in my personal development which is my Self Improvement Scorecard. It’s a book I read once a quarter to reinforce the fundamentals.

The reason we put time into reading books, listening to podcasts, and exposing ourselves to world-changing ideas is because we want to experience extraordinary self-growth. In “The Compound Effect” Hardy articulates the unexpected and shocking math behind it:

Let’s say you want to improve by 1000%, which can be measured as 10x-ing your income, impact, the quality of your relationships, and your vitality in life. And to achieve that you only need to improve by 0.1% every week day. Not 1%… 0.1%. 1/10 of 1%.

Here’s the math: 0.1% a day is 0.5% a week... 0.5% a week is about 2% a month which compounded adds up to 26% a year. You let that compounding continue and at 10 years you’re at 1000%.

You don’t need to put 1000% more in to achieve 1000% results, just 0.1% every single day.

Now the question becomes, how do you do that? 

It’s by consistently making subtle but meaningful positive improvements. Review one mistake you made and what you could do differently, so that you know for next time. Do one more rep in the gym or make one more sales call to slightly increase the odds in your favor. Adding one more layer of intention into your morning routine, creating one small efficiency in a process, or acknowledging one choice that could have been better. 

As long as you show up with the intention to grow, you’ll find a 0.1% improvement opportunity.

But compounding doesn’t work if you miss days and you’re inconsistent. You can’t improve every once in a while, it needs to be every single day. Every single time. That’s how momentum builds. That’s how growth becomes exponential. And that’s how progress becomes faster than you imagined possible.

For me, every day when I complete my Self Improvement Scorecard, that’s when I gather the awareness I need to know what .1% better looks like for tomorrow. The awareness translates into new choices, new systems, and new actions. And that’s what generates the exponential results. 

If you want to see 0.1% growth in action, click here and I'll show you my Self Improvement Scorecard!

I just spent a few days with my family and it was interesting to observe myself in some of the interactions. 

My Mom made a suggestion about a restaurant to go to, even though she’s already taken me there probably a dozen times…

We went on a kayak together and she asked me if I knew how to do it, even though we’ve probably already done it about a dozen times…

I put some breakfast in the toaster, and my grandma heard the ‘ding’ and notified me that the toaster was done, even though I heard it myself and was on my way toward it...

These were simple, everyday situations but there was a lot happening behind the scenes. In my initial gut-reaction, I felt myself getting frustrated or offended: 

“Does she not remember that I’ve been to this restaurant before?” “She doesn’t think I know how to kayak?” “She doesn’t think I know when my food is ready?” 

Because I had the presence to observe these feelings, I didn’t let them influence how I chose to behave. Instead I got curious about why I had those thoughts in the first place. It’s not that I don’t appreciate my Mom and Grandma, I realized that these situations involving them was triggering my ego.

The ego acts as your sense of individuality. It defines the border between you and others, and wants to validate where you fit in relative to the group. My mentor David Meltzer often talks about how the ego uses separation and comparison to achieve that individuality, and expresses it through various needs: To be right, to be offended, to feel inferior, to feel superior, to be recognized… To be separate.

The ego also has the intention to preserve a positive self-image. It wants to boost your perceived status within the group, which is why it often gets the reputation for contributing to arrogance and selfishness. The ego interprets situations around you through a lens that’s designed to make you look good or feel better about yourself, which then leads to corresponding behaviors.

That’s exactly what happened during my family time. My ego was trying to hijack the moment and be heard. But through intentionality and self-awareness, I could control those impulses so that they didn't send me in the wrong direction. 

I told my mom without tone or frustration that we’ve been to that restaurant before. I explained that I’ve been on a kayak many times, and feel capable, in a non-condescending way. I thanked my grandma for telling me the toaster had finished.

It’s interesting to think about what you think. And it’s important to observe your behaviors and lived experience because it provides clues to what’s happening behind the scenes.

Do you have that quiet, nagging thought in the back of your mind that says “'I should be further along by now”?

That was me for years. Smart, hard working, always learning, always busy doing what I thought were ‘the right things’. I could talk a big game but deep down knew I was slowly becoming the guy who couldn’t back it up.

For those who read lots of self improvement books, listen to podcasts, and have all the right information, it can be really frustrating. You see so many others who are no smarter or talented than you are succeeding and wonder why you haven’t figured it out yet for yourself. 

I call this being a "personal development junkie” where you keep yourself so busy consuming new things that can change your life that you don’t actually get around to doing it. There’s a disconnect between what you’re learning and what you’re applying, and a core misalignment between what you know you’re capable of and what you are actually achieving.

At first I thought there was something wrong with me, but then I realized that wasn’t it… There was something wrong with my process. 

I wanted to improve but I didn’t have a system for measuring my performance. I wanted to make faster progress but I didn’t have a system for receiving and implementing feedback. I wanted to be a high performer but I didn’t have a strong enough foundation built to sustain it. I knew better but wasn’t doing better.

Systems are the engines behind execution. And the problem was, I wanted to go fast like a Ferrari but I had a lawnmower’s engine. That’s why I committed to upgrading my engine and building better systems. And slowly but surely, I bridged the gap and started getting the results I knew were possible for myself.

It started with my baseline layer of self-awareness. I implemented a new system of personal performance tracking so that I knew how I was showing up on a daily basis. I incorporated productivity systems, getting consistent with following a balanced schedule for the day and organizing my tasks so that I was focused on getting the most important things done before the rest. I built a system that improved my morning and night routines, and got me in the consistent practice of gratitude journaling which completely shifted my mindset.

I felt like I was falling behind but I made up ground because I focused on creating more structure around me, and it’s the best thing I ever did for my self-growth. If you thought you’d be further along by now, but you’ve plateaued at a level of business success, unhealthy habits, and overbusy days that keep you falling short of your potential, then you would get a lot out of a systems upgrade.

And if you don’t know where to start with that, or you want to see how I did it, I take you through it step by step in the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge.

Something that is amazing about the world we live in today is how something that used to be impossible, or science fiction, is now a reality. Nights were lit by candles until Thomas Edison introduced electric lightbulbs to the world. Letters had to be physically mailed across the world to be read by someone else until the invention of the fax machine, and then improved further through email. Even in our pockets we have devices that operate with touchscreens, which were futuristic inventions in fantasy worlds.

But this isn’t just true for technology, it’s also true for human physiology. As a former Division 1 college athlete, my favorite example of this is Roger Bannister. For years runners were trying to accomplish the incredible feat of running a mile in under 4 minutes. Everyone who tried failed, and scientists even concluded that biologically human hearts were incapable of sustaining such demand. That is until May 6, 1954., Roger Bannister broke the barrier and completely changed the game. Within 13 months, 4 other runners also broke the impossible 4 minute mile barrier.

The limitation in life isn’t the physical or technological characteristics of things, it’s our belief of what’s possible. We conclude that things are impossible from our current level of understanding, but knowing how incomplete that is, it’s foolish to think that we’re right. 

Given what we understand about the properties of physical matter, it seems impossible to be able to teleport. But given what we knew about physics, we also thought that planes would be too heavy to fly… Or given the way human anatomy works to breathe in air, it seems impossible for humans to to breathe underwater. But animals like frogs can do both, so is it really impossible?

Tthinking something can’t be done keeps you from even trying to do it. And that’s the real limitation - the belief that it's impossible. 

I’m giving pioneering and innovative examples, but the same principles are true when you scale them down to your life. Is it really impossible to get that promotion, look as good as you did in college, convince that dream client to work with you, or live overseas? Of course not! Other people have done it, so why can’t you?

A renewed belief about what’s possible gives you a reason to go for it. It’s not guaranteed, but it’s only those who try for something that achieve it. What is guaranteed is that you won’t get what you want if you don’t try.