Recently I’ve been enjoying learning more about Florence Nightingale, a 19th century nurse who put herself in some of the most difficult conditions to take care of people who were sick and wounded. She’s known to be the founder of modern nursing, which only becomes more impressive when you learn that she for many years was afraid to reject the life that was expected of her and live out her calling.

It’s with that context that I’d like you to consider one of her most famous quotes: “Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.”

It’s written in older English, and spoken in the negative, so let me state what I understood Nightingale said more directly - Growth and progress are only possible when you are unhappy with the status quo.

This is a complex topic to break down. I’m a huge advocate for being grateful for what you have and reframing life events so that you have a more positive perspective. There’s a lot of personal improvement in that. But what NIghtingale suggests here is a layer beyond that. We do not need to accept things for how they are, we can play a hand in creating things how we want them to be.

This is the difficult tension to find between appreciating what you have and still having ambitions for more. Are you truly grateful if you want more? Or settling for less than you're capable of if you’re content with what you have?

History’s greatest innovators saw the problems in the world as they existed and created solutions to those problems. Those who maximize their life push past the confines of the immediate to experience what lies beyond. There’s an element of chronic dissatisfaction that’s required to drive change, or else there would be no reason to change.

So I guess my point in sharing this is to recognize that there’s a spectrum to it. It’s obvious to reject the injustices we see in the world and want to be part of a better way, but it’s less obvious to make adjustments to the things that are already good enough. Perhaps this is a moment for you to pause and reflect on your life, and observe areas where you may be tolerating something that’s below the standard you want to have for yourself, or where you're allowing ‘good enough’ to fill up the space the deserves greatness.

At first you might disagree with this but please have an open-mind to consider it in the context I’m about to provide. I’m confident that will change. The perspective is that you shouldn’t do anything for free.

This doesn’t mean that you need to charge people money for everything you do. Conventionally when we think of doing things for “free” we see it through the lens of a transaction. But money is just one form of currency, a way to exchange value, and there are many other forms of currency you can utilize. 

But it also doesn’t mean that you need to be transactional and calculated about everything you do. That’s not being abundant and certainly not something that maximizes the impact you can have on the world. In fact I encourage you to be more generous with your time, energy, network, and resources than is comfortable for you. Even and especially when you have no plan to get anything in return. 

What I really mean is that you should never allow yourself to label what you give others as free. There’s an immense amount of value, experience, and intention put into what you share, and calling it “free” discredits all of that. It diminishes it down to nearly nothing.

When something is presented as free, that’s how others receive it. They value it less. This is exactly the opposite of the intention to maximize how helpful you can be. You’re giving it freely because you want it to be accessible and useful, you want it to influence and impact, but things that are free are simply undervalued.

That’s why you shouldn’t do anything for free - it belittles what you have to offer and sets it up to be fractionally impactful. 

So this is what I propose you do instead… Present what you’re providing for free as a gift that you’re giving. When you choose to give someone a gift, they don’t ‘owe’ you anything for it. But they receive it knowing the time, effort, and thought that went into it. They see the value in it because they know it’s valuable and you have chosen to cover the cost so that they can enjoy it at no cost.

Please be abundant, generous, unselfish and freely giving of your gifts and talents. But make sure they’re appreciated and valued so that they can go off and do the good in the world that they’re meant to!

As much as we’d like to get everything we ever want right when we want it, that’s not how life works. And it’s probably for the best because we learn so much more in the process than in the attainment. 

Life is going to throw some punches. We work hard for a long time and get overlooked for that promotion we genuinely feel like we earned. We experience a personal injury, or have a chronic condition that makes life physically painful. We have a new idea that we’re really excited about and the people you share it with shut it down, telling us that we can’t pull it off or it’s not going to work.  

When life dishes us discouraging, inspiration-draining moments, we start to feel bad for ourselves. And it’s in those moments where we need to build up the habit to get out and serve. This is something I learned from Tim Tebow who has a policy with a friend where he doesn’t make a dramatic response to adversity until he’s gone out to serve. And here’s why it works.

First, being of service to others makes things no longer about you. The offense that we feel and the injustice we received can linger in our minds forever. But when you go out with the intention to help others, you make your mind think about the well-being of someone else and it makes you think more objectively about your own.

That’s because of the second reason, which is that service provides perspective. We naturally want to play the comparison game, and when we go to serve people who need more help than we do, we realize that we don’t have it that bad. But more importantly, when you can reject the comparison game, you gain insight into the breadth of problems you could be facing. You gain insight into the sea of all that could be wrong, and how you’re only experiencing the tiniest sliver of it. It helps you scale down the perception of your problems.

And last, you get a natural helper’s high. Ultimately the best way to work through negative emotions is to begin to cultivate positive ones. And one of the fastest ways to positively reset your physiology is to go help others. So being of service helps your body override feelings of discouragement and replace them with feelings of hope.

That’s why there’s the expression “When you need help, get helpful.” The fastest way to get anything is to give it away.

And as for being of service, Martin Luther King Jr says “Everybody can be great because everybody can serve.” So let’s find a way to be great by being of service more often."

The human mind is designed to do primarily one thing: Keep us safe. It is vigilant about seeking to understand situations, details, and circumstances and how they might be impacting our safety. It’s this primary objective that is responsible for the scarcity mindset, negativity bias, and the natural inclination to be lazy that we must fight in pursuit of being our best self.

Central to this threat detection system is a dislike we all have for uncertainty. The reason being, if something is uncertain that means it’s inherently unpredictable. You don’t know what’s going to happen next and therefore, whatever it is could pose harm.  But it’s this resistance to uncertainty that keeps us in our comfort zone, living out familiar lives that produce familiar results. If we want to do something else we need to break the pattern.

The opposite of uncertainty is faith, surrender, and trust. It's a deep, intuitive knowing that whatever lies on the other side of uncertainty is what’s meant to happen. Difficulties are fuel for growth, opportunities are divinely planted, and all of it is part of a larger plan that is nearly impossible for us to understand.

Faith, surrender, and trust must happen consciously before they integrate unconsciously. You have to teach yourself to believe these things are true for them to become true. You surrender by accepting and allowing. You have faith by choosing to assign a positive meaning to life events. You trust that everything around you is perfectly placed to facilitate your personal evolution, even when it hurts.

Again, it’s the uncertainty of the situation that makes it all difficult to do. But the uncertainty is just a perception that you might be in harm’s way, and when you recognize that most of the things we worry about aren’t a matter of life or death, and that our worst fears are often unfounded, we can embrace surrender, faith, and trust more fully. 

To make the most basic elements of this thought more actionable, here’s an affirmation you can use the next time you start feeling resistance: “It’s true that I’m safe and secure, so I choose to accept the uncertainty in my life.”

Our growth and development is primarily driven by our environment, and one of the things that we can do to manufacture a more positive, inspiring, go-getting environment is to set goals. In order to get anywhere in life we need to know where we’re going, and a clearly articulated goal gives you that destination to work toward.

However, there’s a science and art to goal setting. Some goals are too big and impossible to comprehend that they don’t seem achievable, and paralyze you in inaction. On the other hand some goals are too uninspiring or easy to actually motivate you to make any major adjustments to your life.

That’s why we need to have the right tension for our goals, and the way we do that is by ensuring our goals are two things: Difficult and doable.

When a goal is difficult, it creates a demand on you. In order to achieve a difficult goal you need to do things that are difficult for you to do. As Jim Bunch puts it, goals are in place to “evolve you” and it’s the personal evolution you experience in pursuit of a goal that causes you to become capable of achieving it. 

When a goal is doable, it means that you see a path forward to achieving it. You’ve seen others accomplish something similar or even you’ve already done it once yourself. When a goal is doable it inspires you with a willingness to try.

I’ve found there are 3 ways to know if you’ve found the right tension for your goals. First is based on your own past experience. If you have metrics or reference points that you can build around, it helps you find that right degree of difficulty and doability. Second, if you don’t have personal experience, enlist someone else who does. They can fill in the gaps of your awareness and offer reference points that help you home in on the right amount of tension for yourself.

And last, there’s the intuitive way that you feel. Good goals are meant to make you feel a little nervous. You want to feel the quiet anxiety of knowing that pursuing this goal will challenge you, because not sensing that means your goal isn’t difficult enough. You pair that with the confidence to know that you’re prepared to give it your best. You notice yourself already stepping into a heightened state of focus and resilience, and if you don’t have that response then maybe the goal isn’t difficult enough. Your intuitive feeling layers on top of the reference points you’ve established to help you confirm that your goals have the right tension

So based on whatever is most important to you right now, set a goal that strikes that right tension. As Jim Bunch also says “Goals are written in sand not in stone,” so if you gain more awareness or information that your goals need to be adjusted to match the optimal tension, then make those changes.

There are almost 8 billion people in the world today and no two people are the same. We have different genes, were raised in different environments, learned different lessons, had different life experiences, and came to value different things. Everything about you comes together to make you who you are.

And because you’re the only person to live a moment in your body and experience the world through your eyes, “No one knows what it’s like to be you.” 

On one hand, this is why it’s so important that you communicate with other people to help them understand. It’s important to articulate the ways that you feel and the factors you’re weighing in decisions you’re making - otherwise you’re operating off of unclear and potentially misaligned assumptions. And people may not be giving you what you need even when they’re doing their best to.

On the other hand, it asks that you have patience and grace with others. Be aware of the fact that others don’t have the perspective you do, and perhaps that’s why there’s disagreement or frustration. It’s by keeping an open mind about the differences you have with others that lets you collaborate with them better.

And equally important to note, just like no one knows what it’s like to be you… You don’t know what it’s like to be anyone else. That’s why it’s best for us to approach others with curiosity and not judgment. It’s the reason why your ideas and solutions aren’t always well-received. We all live at our own level of consciousness, which means that we we see, experience, and perceive is unique to us.

So if you’re going through hard times and other people are having a hard time giving credit to what you’re experiencing, it’s because “no one knows what it’s like to be you.” Or if you have big goals and dreams that other people don’t understand or find worthwhile, it’s because “no one knows what it’s like to be you.” 

If anything, let all of this be a reminder that you deserve to be the most authentic version of yourself. As Oscar Wilde famously put it, “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” Get clear on what you want out of life, pursue it relentlessly, and when necessary let others into your world by telling them about it.

The single greatest influencing factor that determines your actions, and as an extension your results, is your environment. It provides an ever-present pull force that guides you in a certain direction. Take the metaphor of being in a canoe on a river. With no effort the river’s current will take you exactly downstream. In order to go anywhere else, you need to fight the current and row.

Your environment is a collection of all the forces that are acting on you at once and determine the flow of your river. It determines the path of least resistance, and it’s so impactful that Jim Bunch is known for saying “Everything is an environment and environment is everything.”

I was reminded of this in a very simple but relatable example: My alarm going off in the morning. I’ve had a lot of success putting my phone on a charger across my bedroom so that I need to get up to turn it off. It’s textbook environmental design.

However, a few weeks ago we were experiencing a heat wave so I was sleeping with a fan on. The noise of the fan drowned out my alarm, so I made an adjustment. I started setting my alarm on the Amazon Alexa device next to my bed. When the alarm went off, instead of being forced to get up and turn it off, all I had to do was speak. I found that it made getting myself out of bed way harder than it used to be because it required more will-power than necessity.

So I made the switch back, am putting my fan on a lower setting so I can hear the alarm again, and have been getting up in the morning with more ease.

When it comes to life change, many people overlook the simplicity of changing your environment. We think about willing ourselves into new actions until we build habits, but the far more effective approach is to change your environment so that the desired behavior is a natural byproduct of the design. That what you want to do is downstream, and all you need to do is let your river float you to it.

I’ve found the most effective forms of environment are incorporating accountability to add consequences for poor choices, and implementing systems that make impactful things easy to do. If you want to change your environment in the most positive of ways so that you become extremely consistent with your health habits and choices, and ridiculously productive and focused in your work, check out what I’ve put together about the 9 Super Habits. They make an extraordinary life effortless.