I was driving to a meeting in LA a few weeks ago and was presented with a really interesting lesson about choices and risk.

I gave myself plenty of time to make the drive, and left early in the morning so that I missed the majority of the traffic. But in LA, that’s nearly impossible. As the traffic started to pile up I noticed an Express Lane available on the far left-hand side. As someone who has learned to value my time, I chose to pay a few dollars to expedite my trip.

I was cruising in it for a while, passing many cars in the standard traffic as you’d expect to in the paid Express Lane until it started to slow down too... Then it was stopped altogether. Meanwhile the standard line crept along and all of the progress I made was erased. As we were still stopped, I reasoned that the overall I was going slower in the Express Lane than I would have ifi I just stayed in the normal lane.

This is a moment that would make many people frustrated, paying more to get a worse result. But having given myself ample time, I didn't feel the stress and instead was able to extract this lesson.

I had certain assumptions about what the Express Lane would do for me. Based on past experiences, I unconsciously determined that getting in it was the right choice. At some level I calculated the likelihood of the different scenarios and found it reasonable that the Express Lane would be faster and worth the money.

But just because that’s what I concluded does not mean it’s guaranteed. There was risk. When you quantify the risk, you’re determining the probability that an undesirable result will occur. Sometimes you take action with lots of risk, where the upside is unlikely but impactful. In this case the risk was small but happened nonetheless.

That is calculating this all from my limited level of awareness. Had I made this drive during rush hour more often, I would have more experience and information to work with. I’d be able to better quantify the risk because I’d have more data points.

And I think that’s the overall message I’m trying to share - You need to take ownership of the choices you make. I was solely responsible for choosing to take the Express Lane, which means that I need to accept the consequences. Things don’t just happen - there’s a reason why they don’t go the way you expect them to. In taking time to understand what’s in your control, what could be done differently, and what factors are at play, you can prepare yourself to get better outcomes.

We’re in a world where so much attention is dedicated to division. There’s so much talk about this side being right and that side being wrong. There's a difference in opinion on whether a certain action is moral, fair, unjust, or unacceptable. All of this variation is a byproduct of people having different beliefs.

But these differences between us are indisputedly critical.

Living in an echo chamber where we only hear what we want to hear limits our perspective and awareness. What we believe to be the truth is often more subjective than we think, and represents our unique values rather than the facts of how things are.

But no matter who you are, where you come from, or what side of things you’re on… We all share the same thing - a deep connection to love. So putting the differences aside, let’s commit to loving each other.

But what does that even mean? Well think about how that plays out with your loved ones:

Love is a deep care for someone’s well-being, and a willingness to make personal sacrifices for their benefit.

Love is a deep acceptance for who someone is, and that what you might see as weakness or flaws are ingredients of their uniqueness.

Love is intimacy, being able to vulnerably share parts of yourself and receive those parts from others without judgment or feeling judged. 

Love is a commitment to all of the things just mentioned, even when you have reasons to think otherwise, even when emotions run high, and even when it’s inconvenient. It’s letting your care, acceptance, and intimacy shine through the cloudy moments.

Everything I just described, it’s not too much to ask. We’re all capable of loving strangers, and each other, more fully. The bar isn’t that high. We just need to stop looking at the differences as something that threatens us, and start embracing our similarities. Because we all want to love and be loved. So let’s commit to loving each other.

The human mind is designed for pattern recognition. It happens in the neocortex, which is one of the most advanced parts of the brain, but it still plays an evolutionary purpose. We all have a predisposition to seek familiarity because whatever is understood to be more certain is determined to be more safe. Detecting patterns is fundamental to that, those who were better at it were more likely to stay alive.

In the modern world, it also happens to be that those who are better at identifying patterns tend to do better in life and business. When you recognize that something is happening again, and the result of it is undesirable, it prompts your awareness quicker to make an adjustment. It offers a faster feedback loop that allows you to optimize your efforts.

But one of the biggest challenges we have is knowing when something has become a pattern. How many times does something need to happen for it to be significant enough to call it a pattern?

While this is oversimplified, an expression I heard recently is “Once is an instance, twice is coincidence, three times is a pattern.”

This addresses both sides of the problem. Some people change course before they’ve given something it’s fair chance to work. Some people tolerate things that continue to not work well enough for too long. Getting to three points of feedback gives you that optimal tension where you’re accommodating both. 

But just because you’ve observed a pattern of results doesn’t mean it’s easy to disrupt it. You need to be really creative to understand what’s informing that pattern and what forces have shaped it. From there you can make the necessary adjustments to your environment or action to create a new design, that then produces a new pattern.

There are trends and patterns to be recognized in simple tactics, like observing that you’re more consistent with your exercise and have a better diet when you get a morning workout in. Or it can be as complex as understanding your relationship with rejection, and the emotional cascade that comes from it and how it impacts your relationships.

That’s the work! And there’s always more to do. But you’re in the game, and that’s the exactly where you need to be!

One of what I call “humanity's fatal flaws” is our hardwiring for immediate gratification. As beings living in dynamic environments with constantly changing threats, it was important that we have a feedback loop to make sense of the world around us. This feedback loop was designed to keep us immediately safe, as that was more imminent, so that’s what our species evolved to do. 

Unfortunately in the modern world, there are many things that give us immediate gratification that are bad for us in the long run, and many of our daily struggles come in fighting this battle of delaying gratification and choosing to do what most serves us over the long term.

What I’ve only recently come to realize is that this need for immediate gratification might also be responsible for our unending need for achievement. We want to feel like we’re living meaningful, purposeful, contributing lives. The shortcut, short-term way of getting that is through accolades, material things, and validation. It’s winning that award, buying the fancy car, or being complimented that makes us feel valuable in the moment. It plays into our unconscious desire for status and it makes us feel good to claim it. 

But we know, from our own lives and stories we hear about others, that these things are empty. The joy that comes from extrinsic sources doesn’t last. There’s even a phenomenon called 'hedonic adaptation' that talks about how we get used to nice things and that over time they no longer feel so nice, and in order to feel the same way again we need to find something else. It’s a hamster wheel where you’re seduced into chasing things that don’t ultimately serve you.

What we can do is trade that for things that bring true, lasting fulfillment - like living with integrity, dedicating your life to something bigger than yourself, and investing in building deep relationships with people you care about. These things are a slow burn. They don’t create moments of heightened fulfillment and purpose like some other things would, but they build a foundation of self-respect and purpose. They make you feel good about your life even when there’s nothing special going on with it. 

We’re in a worthiness epidemic. So many people, myself included, are investing too much of ourselves in doing and achieving more to make us feel good about who we are. But the beauty is in the being, not the doing, and that happens every moment of every day.

Every morning I read “The Daily Stoic” by Ryan Holiday and last week he featured a timeless Stoic principle  - Amor Fati, which translates to “love of fate”.

Directly, it’s a reminder to make the most of whatever happens in life. We don’t choose the cards we’re dealt, but we do choose how to play them. We tap into our best lives when we do our best, regardless of where life takes us. There’s a hint of intentionality embedded in the concept where it’s upon us to choose what we do with and how we relate to our circumstances.

This bleeds into a more robust meaning of Amor Fati, bringing in the “art of acquiescence”. To acquiesce is to give in, accommodate, or accept without complaint or protest. Oftentimes our reaction to difficult circumstances is to feel like we’re wronged or that things are unfair. But acquiescence is this beautiful acceptance for how things are, fully acknowledging what’s out of our control and not feeling attached to what happens because of it.

Which brings us to the most advanced, intense meaning of Amor Fati which goes beyond accepting and into wishing. Imagine relating to life’s circumstances with the perspective that no matter what happened, it’s what you wanted to happen. 

Rather than trying to consciously manufacture results and achieve your goals, what if you had this underlying faith that you are exactly where you need to be at all times, experiencing exactly what you’re supposed to. It would assign a positive, divine meaning to every life event where nothing could possibly go wrong. It’s a radical approach, but one that completely eliminates discouragement and disappointment in life. And depending on what you believe religiously, this is similar to the ultimate faith many people place in God.

Regardless of what level of Amor Fati you feel you’re prepared for, or that will serve you, there are elements of this worth considering. Having a love for fate, a dedication to embracing what is rather than fighting against it, frees up our energy and gets us in motion living a more powerful life.

I came across a fascinating concept that I heard from Dr. Samuel Wilkinson, who’s an author and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Yale. He takes an evolutionary approach to understanding human nature and discovered how our species is uniquely caught in between two identities.

It primarily relates back to an idea called sexual dimorphism, which relates to how body types are different between males and females in a species. Sexual dimorphism is high in animals like lions and moose, where males are much larger and have prominent features like manes or antlers. Reflecting on humans, we have some sexual dimorphism where men are generally bigger and grow more facial hair, but not as convincingly as other species.

The reason this is important is because more sexual dimorphism is closely correlated with promiscuous mating activities and aggression, where the most dominant males have multiple mates. This of course contrasts against species who are monogamous and mate for life where less sexual dimorphism usually exists.

Again, humans are right on the cusp of being different but not too different, placing us in this odd tension. And this is just one example of how we’re caught between two identities. Dr. Wilkinson calls this “the dual potential of human nature”. It’s the same root that causes us to be capable of being both violent and cooperative, selfish and altruistic, good and evil. It also explains the conflict where men generally have the desire for multiple sexual partners but find more groundedness in one. Not to mention the cultural influence that overlays the biology.  

It’s this tension that is the great pursuit of humanity. It’s a test of our character. Consciously we know that healthy interdependent behavior is safer and better for all, but there’s still the temptation of greed, power, and position. It’s a battle we all face, our character is on the line. And in my opinion, our personal development is one of the tools we have to win this fight and become an unstoppable force for good in the world.

There are two great motivating factors in life - the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. These two forces govern what we feel like doing in conscious and unconscious ways. They both work, but the avoidance of pain has a much stronger influence. Understanding that, it serves us to get it working for us, which is what inspired today’s quote: “Let it hurt.”

Ironically, this is the opposite of avoiding pain. “Letting it hurt” is acknowledging, embracing, and allowing the pain to wash over you. Many people turn to substances, vices, and other outlets to make the pain stop or to distract themselves from confronting the painful reality they’re facing. But the pain is rich. There’s so much opportunity in it which only comes out when we choose to immerse ourselves in it.

Just as we’re motivated to avoid pain, we’re deeply impacted by experiencing it. Because it hurts, it makes you questions the systems, structures, strategies, and decisions that led to that point. The pain tells you that you did something wrong, and it brings radical awareness to everything that brought you to that point. Because it interrupts the pattern, it becomes a fuel source for sweeping transformation that is naturally done in an effort to avoid the pain in the future.

I had a profound moment of experiencing this personally, recently. There are certain aspects about my business that I’ve been avoiding. They’re truths I didn’t want to accept, so I acted like they didn’t exist. That is until I chose to ‘let it hurt’, and it created a space for me to get really honest with myself. It’s from this emotional state that I could really understand things that were working, things that weren't, and most importantly what I could do about it. 

And here’s the silver lining. Growth is inherently painful and an extraordinary life isn’t meant to come easy. But if the greatest joy we’ll experience is self-actualization, and a realization that we’re becoming all that we’re capable of, then the pain is an indicator that we’re on the path. 

It’s okay to get frustrated, emotional, discouraged, and to call into question what you thought was true. We’re all human. But in the name of personal growth, it takes the crucible that is these pointed moments of pain to birth our fullest potential. So let’s be committed to leaning in, learning from it, and keep moving forward!

Tom Bilyeu, a wildly successful entrepreneur and the founder of Impact Theory, says that there is “one belief that matters,” and that is a belief that if you put time and effort into something that you’ll actually get better.  It’s an obvious truth but many people operate out of a different belief system, which leaves them vulnerable, victimized, and out of control. 

This foundational belief is synonymous with having a growth mindset. Carol Dweck popularized this in her book by the same name. But I’ve found that having a growth mindset is one of those things that is easy to talk about and much more difficult to execute, so I wanted to share my process for it.

The human mind cultivates beliefs through evidence. It takes the things you think, do, and experience and makes sense of it. It codifies everything unconsciously as a point of reference that informs you about how to keep yourself safe. This means that to genuinely cultivate a growth mindset, you need to find consistent evidence that you believe things can in fact get better.

What I do for this is complete a night time routine of personal performance tracking. Every day that I show up for my tracking, I’m reinforcing the belief that with time and effort things get better. Otherwise, why would I be doing it? And further, for the areas of my performance that I fall short of the standards I have for myself, I diagnose why. Each time it’s an extra action that provides more proof for the growth-minded belief.

Actions speak louder than words. I love the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote that goes  “Your actions speak so loud I can't hear what you say.” The same goes for your mind and belief system.

So to build a growth mindset, you need to consciously create moments of reflecting on your performance and identifying pathways to improvement. Do it enough times consciously until it becomes the unconscious pattern too.

If you want to build your growth mindset, so that you extract more lessons from setbacks and move forward more powerfully in your health, work, and life, check out the video I made about my Self Improvement Scorecard and it’ll give you some good and tangible ideas!