I'm sitting in the passenger seat of my dad's sedan, leaning forward to see if my milkshake has been made yet. My Purdue polo is still damp from our round of golf that morning. My forearms and neck are a little too red. Across the drive-thru window, I see the ice cream scooped into a cup and shoved under the blender. Whole Oreos are pulverized into tiny scrumptious bits. Just seconds until the treat is mine.

"So you've set this goal for yourself," my dad says in reference to my dream of working at Shell. "And you have to get all As in 13 credit hours in 16 weeks this summer, all while working a full-time summer internship, just to have a shot at an interview?"

The Scoops worker hands us our ice cream. I take a giant sip of my Oreo shake.

"Exactly right," I reply.

My dad pauses for a minute. It's quiet in the car as we pull away from the window and make our way to the next destination.

"Do you think anyone's going to feel sorry for you if you don't get that job?"

Silence.

"Well, probably not," I eventually say. "I'm fortunate to be in a major with great job prospects. I will eventually find something. It just might not be what I know I'm capable of." 

Staring out the window, watching green mile marker after mile marker fly by on the way home, I mull over his question, with some old memories coming back.

Every day of my freshman year in high school during gym class, I walked by a twenty-foot-tall, maroon and gold athletics record board in the corner of the Brebeuf Jesuit high school gym. It listed the sport, event, name and time next to the record. The best of all who came before, and a few still there, was recorded on the board. The bar for excellence was set, and I looked in awe at those who achieved them.

I had accumulated my own record board: a mental corner where I set the bar for what I had achieved and what I believed I could achieve. And I knew, sitting there staring out the window, my neck was craned up at the bar on my record board; there was an unsettling gap I had to try and jump for.

I think we fail to look up to the people we could be. We're enamored with our neighbor and their new job and new car, but not with the potential achievement of ours that's a year's worth of dedication away. 

These models of desire surround us: neighbors, coworkers, family and friends. By default, we see them and tend to inform our desires based on them. Their lives as reference points smack us in the face. But the person I could be as a reference point? It takes focus and energy to create an intentional model of that person. It is created not by default, but by disciplined design according to my values.

I want to look in awe at the person I know I could be1.

As Matthew McConaughey phrased well in his 2014 Oscar acceptance speech, I’m chasing the person I could be:

So you see every day, every week, every month, and every year of my life, my hero's always 10 years away. I'm never gonna be my hero. I'm not gonna attain that. I know I'm not, and that's just fine with me because that keeps me with somebody to keep on chasing.

The line item on the personal record board that summer? Getting the job I considered amazing. And I wouldn't be humiliated or a failure if I didn't get it. It was the difference for me between good and great, not destitute and manageable life.

It was the difference between acceptable in the view of others and acceptable in my own. I knew I was capable of it – what would it mean if I didn't achieve it?

I was reminded by my dad that it wouldn't mean much to those around me, but it would mean a lot to me. The gap between my potential and today is something I have to fight for.

If you set a goal and achieve 90% of it, reaching some level of success previously unseen, that's great. Friends and family will reassure you you've done a great job. The last 10% is hard to achieve. They're ok that you didn't.

But are you?

The drive to reach my goal couldn't come from someone else. It had to come from me. It had to come from the excitement of realizing that vision of my future where my expansion of belief leads to an expansion of capability and, ultimately, achievement.

The well of grit and persistence needed to fight for your big goal must be fed from a source of intrinsic, not extrinsic motivation to fill the gap. 

I often think of Theodore Roosevelt’s appeal for daring over inaction:

​​Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

I can’t control the outcomes I pursue, but I can fight on behalf of a process to reach them. How fulfilling would life be if I knew I rose to my potential and did my best? 

As I continued the rest of the summer, I asked myself daily, "Who's gonna stop you?"

Now, I understand there are very real barriers to success that stem from your background, unforeseeable negative events, and more. That's real and I don't want to downplay the role luck plays in success. It's far more real than many feel comfortable admitting. It means we can't take credit for 100% of our success, which is a blow to the ego. And I'm hands down one of the luckiest people alive.

Who's preventing you from closing the gap between who you are and who you know you can be?

That summer, I would run through a list in my head, refuting each excuse one by one:

Time? Many have done more with less. I could reprioritize. Just an excuse.

Opportunity? Many have created opportunity through a shift in perspective. Just an excuse.

Peers? In my control to change. Just an excuse.

Each time I would go through this mental list, I kept arriving at the same final, irritating–yet valid–reason I wouldn't achieve my dream.

The reason was me.

So again I asked: "who's gonna stop you?"

You are, Grant. The answer is only ever you.

You're the one who decides to be stubborn, to choose comfort over growth, or to settle when you know you shouldn't.

And the gap between here and my potential? Between here and my best?

That's all me.

There's no one here to feel sorry for me for leaving it alone. For seeing the possibility and letting it idle in hibernation–a grizzly bear of potential tucked safely inside its cave.

I say, poke that bear.

Convert that idle potential into motion. Fight past the slog of the first step. Who’s gonna stop you? 

The rest of the summer was a blur of long hours and late nights. By August, all my hard work paid off. I made the grades, had an interview, got the internship and, ultimately, the full-time job.

I still remember the call I received telling me I got the job. I was in my room at my college house2. Once they told me I couldn't stop smiling. As I walked the brick-lined sidewalk up Northwestern avenue and crossed into the Purdue Engineering mall toward class, I couldn't help but notice how the green of the tree leaves popped, how the clouds formed wisps across the blue sky, brushstrokes of a perfect painter. How the air had a refreshing crispness to it. All these things were magnified by an immense feeling of gratitude for reaching my goal. But most of all for closing, in part, the gap between where I was and the potential I saw for myself. Potential that no one else would have mourned the loss of, but which I chose to honor and pursue.

So when you see the gap between where you are and where you know you could be, look up with hope and expectation and ask yourself:

"Who's gonna stop you?"

Thank you to Caitlin Huston, Chris Angelis, Jude Klinger and Jeremy Nguyen for their feedback on drafts of this post.

Water flies into my eyes as it splashes over the bow of our green canoe. The wind whips across the lake, creating white caps all around us. I squint hard, trying to keep a good view of the target path ahead. Dark clouds loom in the distance and a hazy horizon behind us gradually approaches.

I'm kneeling on the floor of the boat, bracing my knees against the inner walls for stability, doing everything I can to stay in position as I paddle against the waves. The boat rocks up and crashes down hard over and over again.

STROKE! STROKE! STROKE!

My sternman, Ian, and I labor against the waves, but they're too fierce to handle. Water crashes into our boat as the right side tips over an inch too far. Water rushes in, tilting the boat until we fall out into the cold Canadian water.

Our tent is floating left, our gear bags right. We wrangle each item and the boat, pushing them to the shore as our lifejackets helped keep us afloat.

The canoe is filled with water. We both grab the canoe and try to move it, but the water is too heavy. The boat doesn't budge. I reflexively grab my water bottle, ready to remove the water from the boat. I start bailing, but with every other bottle I get out of the boat, a fresh wave crashes over the side, filling it back up. It's an exercise in futility and I'm exhausting myself in the process.

Meanwhile, the remaining paddlers on the wilderness camping trip have become tiny dots on the horizon — far from shouting distance. While I was bailing the boat, Ian ran up the rocky shore, waving his hands to get their attention and help.

He gets the attention of our adult trip leader, Pete, and once he gets to us and sees me, he starts cracking up.

"You thought you were going to save the boat with a water bottle?" 

Me: “Yes?”

Pete had the perspective I needed. I couldn't bail the boat by myself. My initial plan to fix the problem was insufficient. I had to let go of my old plan and find the right one.

Why is it so hard to take someone else's advice? Is it ego? All the work we've put in so far on our ideas that we would hate to think was a waste? We’re often too slow to switch to better tactics, especially when it's someone else recommending it. But the path gets a lot easier if we decide to care more about getting through the problem than who gets the credit for solving it. It goes from bumpy gravel to smooth pavement. I didn't think about whose idea it was to get the water out of the boat — I wanted to get to our campsite!

Switching tactics to achieve a goal faster means abandoning something that worked for you in the past, but doesn't now. An idea you invested in and refined into something beautiful, but whose time has already gone.

If the tactic can't serve you in the future and you can't recover any value from it now that things are different — it's sunk. It's the canoe underwater and me using too small a bottle to fight too large a wave. 

Letting go of that idea releases you to find a new one.

A sunk cost is something you’ve spent (time, resources, effort building an identity, etc) that is irrecoverable and, therefore, should not influence your future decisions.

Sunk costs impact us all the time, but perhaps rarely as much as the sunk cost of our identity. 

Nobel Prize winner and author of "Thinking, Fast and Slow" Daniel Kahneman has a powerful view of sunk costs that stands strikingly apart from the ego-driven defensive arguing we so often see today:

"When I work, I have no sunk costs. I like changing my mind. Some people really don’t like it but for me changing my mind is a thrill. It’s an indication that I’m learning something. So I have no sunk costs in the sense that I can walk away from an idea that I’ve worked on for a year if I can see a better idea. It’s a good attitude for a researcher. The main trap that young researchers fall into is sunk costs. They get to work on a project that doesn’t work and that is not promising but they keep at it. I think too much persistence can be bad for you in the intellectual world."

Kahneman cares more about learning than defending his views.

The accumulated experience of our lives has created the person we are today. We've made choices along the way to become who we are. 

The person you used to be is a sunk cost. 

You can't get the time back that you spent being them, but you can choose to let go of who you were to become who you believe you can be.

If you love that person’s brand, great. If not, great! Why not become the better version you know you can? Don't defend the brand of the person you used to be if you don't like it.

Wendy at work says you're acting so off-brand? Who cares, I like this new brand better!

Ignoring sunk costs is like looking up and realizing you can jump out of a deeply grooved rut you don't want to be in anymore. You can toss the water bottle aside and salvage the boat the right way. The horizon is not brown dirt and inevitable trajectory.

It's blue sky and possibility.

Why not look up?

Thank you to Ian Vanagas, Nick Drage, Minnow Park, Philip Hendricks, Sena Gürdoğan, Jeremy Nguyen, Corey Wilks, Psy.D., Leo Ariel, Edvardo Archer, Michael Shafer, Russell Smith, and Kym Ellis for their feedback on drafts of this post.

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We make a wide variety of products that each have a targeted and impactful end use, but the feed going into the plant is one big italian dressing of a mixture.

So how do we split up the italian dressing into all of the individual ingredients on the back of the bottle?

How do we create these valuable products?

We send the feed through a series of vessels of varying sizes at a wide range of temperatures (50 to 1000 degrees) and pressures (pressures up to the equivalent of being 5000 ft under the sea surface). Millions of gallons a day are boiled, cooled, chemically-reacted, and more.

Change a temperature and pressure at one step in the sequence, and the product goes off-spec. The sequence matters. That's why there are trained professionals monitoring the plant 24/7.

And as a result of the precise sequence of these steps, we create a product that enables a half-million pound plane to fly safely across the country.

The interesting thing is, it all starts out cold at the beginning, and ends up cold as a product. But the extreme variation in conditions in between make the product what it is. The product makes my Ford Escape engine work like a top; the feed would break it.

It's similar in life. Every experience you have prepares you for a version of the future, but the way you get there matters.

Who I was 10 years ago as a freshman in college would be overwhelmed by the responsibilities I have today; the person I've become can handle it.

So if I see an opportunity to grow my character—to engage with stressors that I believe will lead to long-term character development—I want to pursue it. I want to be refined, cast and shaped into someone of strong character, because that's what will maximize my resilience in the future.

That's what process goals can provide. This year, I'm writing more, reading my bible in a year, increasing the intensity of my workouts and coaching lacrosse for the first time. All of these involve discipline and commitment over time, not just sprints.

They each add their own version of personal pressure to my life. Pressure that I hope will refine, cast and shape me into a more capable person while having fun along the way.

The goal is to scale the pressure addition as quickly as I can, like a learning curve but for the disciplined pursuit of character-building.

And if I could find ways to do that year-in, year-out?

Wow, what fun that would be.

When you live somewhere boring—and we all live somewhere boring—then we have a choice about the way we will see that place. We can spend our days thinking like everyone else, seeing the same things over and over, and never once wondering about how they got that way, or why they stayed that way, or how they could be better. Or, we can learn. And if we make the choice to learn, and to be curious about the things around us, then we are essentially making the choice never to be bored again. (Leslie 179)

I moved out of Indiana in 2016 to work full time in Mobile, Alabama on the gulf coast. I left a city I grew up in, and remember that when I moved here, people asked me what there was to do in Indianapolis. I always came up with the big name items, but realized I hadn't been to all of them even though I lived there for over 18 years. People come from all over the world to see the Indy 500, but it wasn't a big deal to me.

Why is it that people visiting your home city may experience more of its big ticket culture destinations in a week than you experienced in the decades you lived there?

As I sit here writing in Daphne, Alabama, thinking of things to do when I host someone from home, I realize I'm doing the same thing now! I struggle to think of interesting things that a visitor might want to do, because I've kept to my little bubble in Mobile. Why does it take someone from out of town visiting for me to venture out and explore all that my area has to offer?

By necessity, I started with eyes wide open when I moved here. But now I'm in a bubble. We all exist in multiple bubbles. There's an internet/social media bubble we live in. A physical bubble governed by the distance we're willing to drive on a normal day. And several more. Without intentionally avoiding them, bubbles form around you. It's like a frog that can't tell it's gradually boiling; you gradually build these invisible barriers around yourself through habits that keep you from experiencing new and exciting things around you.

That bubble could also be one of comfort level at work where you don't talk to someone because the previous person in your job never did. You think it improper by custom. And miss out on potential great relationships.

I don't want to go 10 years before I experience the best my hometown has to offer. I want to explore as much as I can so that when someone visits, I know I'm giving them the best of Daphne.

It starts with asking a question. How did things here come about? I'm with Laura—I choose to be curious and never be bored again.

“You can choose to use your curiosity to look at a situation differently. If only you're aware enough to realize you have a choice.” (Leslie 187)

What will you explore next in your hometown that you've delayed? Go try it out! You might just find your new favorite destination.

I grabbed another ball, started a full sprint, and launched a shot at the goal. Then I jogged back in front of the lacrosse cage and did it again. And again. And again. Until I was gasping for air and had to sit down for a break.

The process had become a game.

A game where reps were the goal, not perfect shots or accolades. Without the shine of the field's lights or roar of the fans, it was just me, trying to get better.

And the crazy part was, I was having so much fun it didn't seem like work. When I began writing this blog back in earnest in early 2021, I started out having fun. But then after writing what I thought was a good piece, I told myself I had to write one just like it, and spend even more time on the next piece to hit the same bar of quality I established in my head.

What started as an hour or two turned into 10+ hours on a single piece. Because I knew I would have to devote all my week's free time to publish one post, I didn't even want to start climbing that mental mountain.

So instead of seeing it as a burden, I want to see writing as an opportunity to play.

John Cleese, one of the writers of Monty Python, referenced a study of architectural creativity in his book, "Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide." The study showed that a characteristic of the most creative architects was that they knew how to play with their work, or be "enjoyably absorbed in a puzzle."

I want to see the writing process as an opportunity for play, not punishment. So that I can have fun reaching my process goal of writing more frequently and ignoring the outcome goal of only publishing perfectly thought out arguments. I know that my future writing skill is proportional to the number of words written, not just the number of perfect pieces published.

So here's to writing more. To having fun with the writing process. And to the idea that what I was practicing with my lacrosse shot all those years ago wasn't just how to score a certain number of goals, but how to lovingly play with the process of getting there.

What opportunities do you see in your life to play, rather than go through the motions?

I'm sitting in a long room with a 20-person meeting table. 3 classmates and I huddle at one end of the EPICS (engineering projects in community service) meeting room. Red and orange leaves fall against the floor-to-ceiling windows on one side, scribbles and sketches on the room-length whiteboard on the other. We discuss our latest ideas for meeting our community partner's needs, and how we could drive meaningful progress in one semester. I bring up an idea, and one of our group members, Ted (not his real name), shoots it down as impractical. I sit back and think, "man, why is he being so harsh? I hope I can contribute to this team."

A week later I had new ideas, and brought them up to the team again. This time, someone else questioned the idea, and I remember thinking: "hey, they just think that the idea's stupid, not that you're stupid." So I tweaked and reframed the idea to see if we could come to a better group decision.

I realized I could view his words as a criticism of my idea, not of me. By separating my identity from my idea, I was free to play with the idea. To refine it and make it better.

I wasn't under attack.

So, separate the criticism of your idea from a criticism of you. This is different than just having thick skin and not caring if someone makes fun of you. This is filtering feedback about your ideas from feedback about who you are as a person.

The idea I have is just a collaborative piece of art, a puzzle on a table with others sitting around it. I have a limited number of pieces I can bring to the table and my collaborators bring some only they can provide. It comes together to form something better than either of us could have created on our own.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson write about this in their book, The Metaphors We Live By:

Try to imagine a culture where arguments are not viewed in terms of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending, gaining or losing ground. Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. It would seem strange even to call what they were doing "arguing." In perhaps the most neutral way of describing this difference between their culture and ours would be to say that we have a discourse form structured in terms of battle and they have one structured in terms of dance.

How can we dance with our ideas, and what changes when we decide to do so?

No longer do you stop at first order consequences of your ideas because you're scared to subject them to scrutiny. You pour gas on the fire of your creativity because you allow them to be stood up against the inspection of others. Fear of attack stops us from thinking through things. Separating my idea from my identity makes me not have to be afraid.

You take a one-dimensional view on creativity where you're working alone and move to a multi-faceted, generative view where sharing and working on each other's ideas becomes the norm. Every conversation becomes an opportunity to learn and grow. Every conversation becomes an opportunity to compound toward improvement. Every conversation becomes an opportunity to inch forward in our understanding.

Next time you get into an argument, watch your counterpart's face when, instead of responding with equal aggression, you ask: "may I have this dance?"

The jewelry smith pulls her sledge hammer back, positioning herself just right in front of her bench and launches it forward, sending shards of clay flying across the cold smith shop floor.

She obliterates the clay jewelry mold.

Sitting on the table is a silver crown, an achievement of artistry that is only now revealed after days of relentless crafting.

The smith reviews her product with pride—but her eyes quickly hone in on a small piece of the crown: a design flaw. She curses herself for not spending more time getting the mold just right. "Time to try again," she sighs to herself. She has to go back and make a new mold, wait for that to set, re-melt and pour the molten silver, wait for it to cool, and finally re-inspect and polish it.

Expensive practice.

When it comes to decision-making, we can be just like the jewelry smith. We focus on getting to the final decision (the crown) and rush through designing the mold that enables it to be made. But in doing so, we can unnecessarily hurt our odds of a good outcome, leading to rework and time lost.

Expensive practice.

The mold is our awareness of the problem. Expanding our awareness of the situation smooths out imperfections in the mold and increases our likelihood of making a high-quality decision.

I read a series of books by Tim Gallwey a while back, the first of which is called "The Inner Game of Tennis." A key idea of the inner game is that just becoming more aware of a problem's (or situation's) attributes greatly increases your ability to influence it.

In singing, hearing well is just as important as having a high-quality tone. Most people, including those who don’t profess to sing well, can distinguish between a C and a D note—a full tone—and even a C and C sharp—a half-tone. But where it gets interesting, and where most musicians differ from the general public, is that they can hear quarter-tones and smaller. Their awareness of the sound coming from their mouths is stratified in granularity that the general public never experiences. As a result, they can use that feedback and adjust their tone to create, well, magic. This granularity—this magic—is the difference between jaw-dropping performances and ones you forget about the next day.

Just like skilled musicians, increasing your awareness of the way things are improves your ability to influence how you want them to be.

But we're not wired to default to high awareness; we're wired to default to judgmental reactions that lead to overcorrections.

Why is awareness hard? Because just being aware of something requires that I don't judge it. When something happens, I instinctually pin a value to it, such as good or bad, right or wrong. If I only watch it, pretending to be a non-biased bystander, I can more readily see reality. My judgments on the events warp the events themselves. Instead of seeing a forehand that hit the ball on the edge of my strings, and a ball that subsequently goes into the net, I see the worst shot of the decade, and the futility of me even trying any more.

It turns out judgment leads to extrapolation, a huge thinking problem in humans, but seeking awareness without extrapolation muffles that tendency. Instead of one bad shot leading me to forecast my inevitable downfall in tennis, I just acknowledge that I missed a shot, lost the point, and have another chance to do better now.

A while ago I wrote a post called Thank You for the Pressure, in which I brought up the idea of mental reflexes. The mental reflexes we develop can significantly impact how we respond to stressful situations. I mentioned how kindness to yourself can be hugely helpful. But this default to kindness—while valuable in many situations—skips over a key step in the process of effectively managing a situation. In between stimulus (the event) and response (the positivity), there is a space.

A space for awareness.

This space is your opportunity for assessment. You want an accurate assessment of reality before knee-jerk solutions color your judgment. Without acknowledging the need for awareness, you scuff and distort your mold and short-circuit your ability to solve the problem. Just by acknowledging that space for awareness, we can improve our ability to use it to improve our future decisions. More space becoming aware of a problem can mean less time reworking a premature solution.

No one wants to overpay for practice when the stakes are high. Making space for awareness can keep those unwanted costs down.

What do you think? How does rushing through the identification of problems impact your work? Let me know in the comments below.

My wife is an optometrist, and sometimes she has the opportunity to help children who've always had poor eyesight see clearly for the first time. She takes them through the normal refraction steps, figuring out their proper prescription. And then she takes them outside with makeshift glasses. The leaves on the trees become sharp all of a sudden. The joy on the woman's face in the parking lot as she hugs her son is all of a sudden clear from the child's new lens.

The first step in identifying the proper prescription is called a blur out. The patient's vision is intentionally made blurry to quickly find the edge of what they can see. This edge is used to gradually move to the point where the optometrist finds the proper prescription for the patient.

The same is true with writing. To write well is to see clearly. But the path to good writing is filled with bad writing. With blurry ideas.

I have to allow them to be blurry in order to make them clear.

The blur happens when you first put words on a screen (or paper) and try to explain what you're thinking. Like a lens you're constantly trying to focus, getting a little clearer, a little clearer—what looks better, 1 or 2?—until you see something beautiful for the first time.

You're chiseling away on your monolith, searching for your David.

It’s like swatting at a piñata until you hit the stuffed llama and gain enough confidence to hit it again. You look ridiculous at first, and there’s no guarantee each blow will land, but as you string a few solid hits together, you get closer and closer to the sweet prize inside.

But without being willing to look silly and act without a crisp view of the future, you’ll never have the courage to take the first swing.

The following is a quote from Theodore Roosevelt's childhood journal, as quoted in The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris.

One day they read aloud an advertisement in huge letters on a distant billboard, and I then realized that something was the matter, for not only was I unable to read the sign, but I could not even see the letters. I spoke of this to my father, and soon afterwards got my first pair of spectacles, which literally opened an entirely new world to me. I had no idea how beautiful the world was until I got those spectacles... while much of my clumsiness and awkwardness was doubtless due to general characteristics, a good deal of it was due to the fact that I could not see, and yet was wholly ignorant that I was not seeing. (Morris 34)

Just like Roosevelt had no idea how much of the world he wasn't seeing (if only he had my wife as his optometrist!), I have no idea how exciting an idea can be until I write about it. Until I bring it into focus.

That's why I write.

I want to experience what he and the child in the parking lot experienced, but with ideas and possibility. To chisel and chisel, and eventually discover my David.

I can't plan for the moment that I get to clarity, but I can pursue it with energy and get a little closer each day. I know it will be difficult and meandering, but I’m trusting it will be worth it.

It has been so far.

50 college-aged men all stomped their right foot together on the cloth surfaced risers.

Clap. Clap. Stomp. Clap. Clap. Stomp.

And again. And again. The end of Didn't my Lord Deliver Daniel was hurtling toward us—only a minute left of my favorite song. (Enjoy Westminster Chorus’ version of it here)

After a day of meeting a local college's singing group, we stood on the stage of a church in Florida, rows of seats fanning out away from us. The audience was full of Purdue fans and the other collegiate singers. We almost never performed for other collegiate groups, and the opportunity to do so raised the stakes for us, whether we acknowledged it or not.

The last minute of the song is like a high-wire tightrope act. It's powerful when pulled off smoothly, but just a minor slip-up and you crash and burn. You're on a collision course headed for catastrophe or beauty—no where in between.

We all stared laser-focused on our director's hands, following his signals to lead us into the ending smoothly. What resulted was one of the most electric feelings I've ever had at a performance. One where you're physically tired but can't help but grin ear-to-ear because of how much fun you're having on-stage with your best friends.

Electric focus

When everyone in the group concentrated 100% of their attention on the director, magic happened. It was a step change from 99% to 100% focus. But instead of a 1% improvement in quality, it became our best performance of the year. It's like trying to connect an electrical circuit. Make it 99% of the way there, and nothing happens. But once you make contact, BOOM, you transmit a whole new level of energy. Productivity, effectiveness and the power of a performance all become leaps and bounds better.

Through focus.

In a world of endless, instant distraction, being able to pull away and focus enables leaps in improvement to be made. But how do you focus?

You have to want it.

Desire drives focus1. Which in turn, drives quality of outcomes.

The question then becomes, how do I cultivate the desires that will help me lead a great life? To start, write down what you really want. Be specific. Then build a practice cultivating desire around those things.

That day in Florida, everyone on stage wanted to give everything they had to each other. What resulted was a performance I'll never forget.

This is a follow-up to last week’s piece, “Pumping Iron at the Mind Gym.” In that, we talked about taking a concerted effort to get better at the fundamentals of knowledge work. Here, we explore how to improve faster once we’ve identified the skills we want to improve on. Enjoy, and as always let me know what you think via email or in the comments below.

If you come to a fork in the road, take it! — Yogi Berra

Wouldn't it be nice to get up to speed on a new project faster? To develop a skill critical to your new job faster?

Of course it would! But when we arrive at key junctures in our skill development process, which way do we go? How can we learn faster?

We all use paths of logic or mental shortcuts to arrive at our answers to problems. But when we're new in an area, we often have some faulty assumptions about how things work.

It's like stumbling onto a 5k race's finish line after taking a wrong turn and running an extra mile. I end up at the same finish line as everyone else, but not because I knew what I was doing. Plus, I'm way more tired.

But when asking someone else a question in a new domain, I often default to result based questions (yes or no question like is it a good idea to workout?), without exploring the path of logic behind it (e.g. why is working out good for you? How do different exercises impact your body?).

Until I explore the logic behind their conclusions, I won't be able to develop consistently good conclusions myself.

And that consistency is the key. I need a repeatable process (even with variance in outcome) if I want to derive solutions for myself.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman talks about the common over-reliance on facts and under reliance on first principles in his autobiography: "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman:"

All the guys in the class were holding up their French curve up at different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is horizontal. They were all excited by this ‘discovery’ - even though they had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already ‘learned’ that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any curve is zero (horizontal). They didn't put two and two together. They didn't even know they 'knew'.

He goes on to say one of my favorite lines of his:

I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way - by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

Their knowledge is so fragile. At the slightest test, it cracks. Why?

Because they didn't explore the paths of logic that led to those answers. There was no path validation.

When you know what the building blocks are, you can play with them to create novel, yet valid, outputs. When you don't, it's hard to validate the outputs.

The sooner you can validate the paths the expert takes to get to their conclusions, the sooner you can graft those paths of logic to your own mental model of the world and create your own, novel conclusions.

It's like paying for a car and never learning to fix it yourself—you can do that, but it will likely cost you more over the life of your car than if you understand how everything under the hood works.

So how do you do this? You ask for process feedback.

Take your best guess at the path of reasoning to get a conclusion (your process), then validate it with someone who should understand that path (an expert).

Revealing your process can be scary. No-one wants to think they're not logical. Which is why when we start something new, it can be so hard to ask someone for feedback on the steps we took to get our conclusions.

So maybe what learning takes isn't just cleverness.

Maybe what learning takes is courage.

Courage to look dumb. Courage to reveal our potentially—sometimes likely—flawed line of thinking to someone we may not know well. Courage to be wrong. Without it, path validation is too scary.

But when you care more about getting better than looking dumb, you'll have the courage to practice path validation.

And the reward for learning faster? You get to solve bigger problems faster.

What's not to love about that?

I came across an interesting idea from researcher Andy Matuschak recently, which is that "athletes and musicians pursue virtuosity in fundamental skills much more rigorously than knowledge workers do."

He goes on to say this about it (a few notes omitted for brevity, see link above for full text):

Top-tier athletes are fanatically disciplined about improving their foundational skills—skills which transcend any sport, the same kind of agility drills you might see an army recruit do. Top-tier musicians do likewise: Lang Lang, for instance, is still working on his scales after 30 years as a concert pianist. They’re not just doing rote drills: they’re working to improve those skills critically, poring over performance videos and working with coaches.

By comparison, Knowledge work rarely involves deliberate practice. Knowledge workers seem surprisingly unserious about honing fundamental skills like reading ..., note-taking ..., developing ideas over time ... I suspect this is in large part because the possibility of improvement isn't salient. ...

What might it mean for knowledge workers to fanatically pursue virtuosity in these fundamental skills, in the way that athletes seek in their fundamental skills?

(Note that Andy updates this note periodically, so this text may not match his current post exactly.)

If I frame practicing these fundamental knowledge work skills of writing, speaking, and developing ideas over time in terms of athletics, I think of a gym for knowledge work.

A mind gym.

This is my office that I walk into where I can repeat and develop fundamentals that are critical to my future success.

For writing, I can get my reps in by simply writing about a complex (for me) topic 30 minutes a day. If I wanted to max out, I could set aside time and not let anyone interrupt me. How would an athlete react if, mid-workout for their sport, a teammate walked in and said: "hey, can you stop mid-rep so I can talk to you for thirty minutes about this thing I'm curious about?" Athletes protect their workouts. Knowledge workers should protect time for honing their fundamentals.

Every post I publish is another rep for me and my writing. And I do strive for virtuosity in writing. Does it mean I'll get there? No, but it means I can get a tiny bit better with each repetition.

For speaking, I can sign up for a presentation, take a speaking course and record myself speaking at those engagements to provide myself with feedback. Each one is a rep.

For developing ideas over time, I have to capture my ideas somewhere that I can revisit them later. Every note I write down (I use roam research personally and this blog publicly), I can search and revisit my ideas later to consider how my views may have changed as I've developed.

Every year for the past six years I’ve written a reflection on the previous year and resolutions for the next year. I began this activity prior to six years ago, but only then did I start saving them somewhere I could revisit them. The tracking of the change over time is key. It’s fascinating to see how my priorities and goals have shifted as I’ve grown. Each year is a data point, but the several years in a row reveal a trajectory to you that’s difficult to see without that catalogue of past ambitions.

I want to be a knowledge worker who gets their reps in. Instead of only finding me pumping iron (I highly value physical workouts), you can find me clacking keys, composing essays to figure something out. My office is my mind gym and I want to get my reps in so that one day, maybe, I can be a virtuoso at the fundamentals of knowledge work.

What fundamentals do you want to develop and how do you plan to get your reps in? Let me know in the comments below.

I walk to the treadmill with my number on it, ready to run for the next 27 minutes. Then I realize that I walk to the treadmill to switch stations and then put the treadmill pace at a walk for a few minutes while everyone finishes transitioning to the weight floor. And in those first few minutes, my heart rate stays low, my water bottle full, my towel unused.

What if—today—I started right away?

So instead of starting at a walk, I started at a run. While not quite as fast the rest of the time, I kept close to my normal pace. At the end of the session, I was shocked to see how much more distance I had covered than usual. I was able to hit 3 miles, something I had done only once before in over 150 workouts at Orange Theory.

If you just get started, you will frequently surprise yourself at the end by how far you've come.

Conquer that space!

Why does starting right away make a difference?

Between the creation of a goal and the first action step toward it is this space. A space that can grow and grow in size until it's too intimidating to cross. I realized if I didn't let this space balloon, I could cross it without any accumulation of daunting weight that would inevitably gather left alone. It's like milk that is fresh and delicious when enjoyed from a just-poured-glass on the counter, but rancid and untouchable after leaving it out for too long.

The problem is progress is not linear. When setting a goal, it can be easy to think "I will hit this 1st sub-goal within 30 days, the next one after 60 days, and so on until my annual goal is accomplished."

But progress compounds. It's not until you reach a certain stage-gate that you realize you may now have the expertise to compress the timelines of the rest of your plans. Thinking progress is linear pushes you to wait and prevents your rocket ship from ever getting off the ground. After putting in effort that shows no promise initially but finally reaches critical mass, several of your sub-goals could potentially be achieved in a flurry of accomplishment over a short time, contrary to your plan. It's a steam-valve release of outward progress where most of the goals that you've laid the groundwork for are achieved relatively quickly. We can plan all we want, but have to acknowledge that there will be massive twists and turns along the way.

One Inch of Belief

Starting not only gets your rocket ship off the ground, but gives it its best chance at reaching escape velocity. A ship touching the ground can be miles away from a ship one inch off the ground.

That one inch is belief. It takes belief to think that even though the end goal isn't a slam dunk, you have what it takes to learn and adapt on the journey to accomplish it. "Yea, I'm not the best at this now, but I believe I can learn to be great. So I'm stepping in the direction of growth." This is what I’m trying to do with this blog — to slowly get better at writing over time.

That one inch of belief is what launches successful people out of bed in the morning. That even if a shred of progress can be made, they will make it.

And what happens at the end? You'll be shocked at what was actually possible with the time you had.

The first time I ran right away on that treadmill, I didn't know that I would break my personal distance record. But when I closed in on the end of the workout, it became inevitable.

So start right away. Conquer your space. Take your first inch with belief. You may quickly realize you are much more capable than you think.

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Where can you take your first inch with belief? Let me know in the comments below.

The most inspiring people testify. They share how they struggled to get to where they are and why that means my struggle may lead to somewhere better. It's not moving to hear "wake up early and work out every day." It's inspiring to hear the unique details of someone's story. Of how they made it work for themselves. What comes through isn't just the details—it's the struggle, the earnestness with which they rose up to meet their challenges. Universal themes come through in how they relive their story.

Any self-help book can tell me the 10 top habits of successful people—I want to meet one. To see myself in them. Like a camera aperture widening to take in more of its surroundings, newly illuminated possibilities appear.

That's the most important thing a leader can do: widen the aperture of others and expand what they believe is possible for their lives.

I walk to the kitchen, nothing.

It's my junior year in high school, and I've signed up for more AP classes than I should have. This week, my solution to surmounting the towering pile of homework is to optimize my sleep schedule, based on the cold hard facts of what sleep pattern is best: one hour naps between one hour work sessions, and repeating until the morning.

I continue this cycle for a week and a half, until one of my friends in calculus looks at me, taking stock of the deep bags under my eyes: "Grant, you look exhausted - are you ok?"

No, I wasn't. Operation optimize sleep schedule had not panned out, and it was time to abort.

It turns out, I had already eaten my pizza earlier that night, in between naps. But I was so out of sorts from my hair-brained sleep plan that I forgot all about it.

It's ok to try new tactics to get new results, but you need to be able to notice how things are actually turning out along the way. I didn't have the self-awareness to see quickly enough that the sleep schedule was a dud. My friend helped me with that.

Better awareness of ourselves, the people around us, and our environment is what helps us learn faster. That's the difference between lightning fast feedback loops that help us learn quickly and grow, and sluggish feedback loops that relegate our learning to a slow trod through mud.

I want to know what's going on quickly, so that I can course correct and get better.

Maybe then I won't reach for pizza that isn't there.

"I like people who try very hard, and I like people who attempt to conceal their effort, but I especially like people who let all their effort show. We are all Frankenstein monsters—patchwork quilts of past experiences—trying to pass ourselves off as whole and cohesive things." — Ava and the Bookbear Express

I want to get better so I can serve better, so that I can create belief in others by showing them they're capable of more than they think. I used to love sprints. The 3-hour marathon workout once a week. But now, I choose the long slog. To set my sail toward a destination I desire to get to and slowly work my way there, enjoying the ride along the way. To live in the moment on my boat and catch fish, soak up the sun, say hello to and develop meaningful relationships with passersby.

Skill compounds incrementally over time. Not in giant leaps. But no one wants to hear that. No one goes to a motivational seminar to hear, “if you try really hard for 30 years without stopping, you can become great!” But that's how it works. Reps, reps and more reps. My diet is inconsistent - darn you, delicious-tasting chocolate chip cookies! But I've kept up a workout routine I've been proud of. Surprisingly, it's much easier to go regularly than it is to actually show up once a week.

Repeat good things until you're great... Then continue.

-Grant

My rest is short-lived. Ten minutes after take-off, the baby drags me out of my nap.

I'm used to the sighs of fellow passengers as they look at babies nearby like they would look at an alarm clock set for a few minutes from now. They don't want it to go off, but they know it could disturb their peaceful perusing of Sky Mall Magazine's latest tech at any moment. I know the parents want nothing more than for their kids to have a peaceful, quiet plane ride. This would not be a quiet ride.

I wake up from the nap I so longed for and can't help myself--I grin ear-to-ear and start laughing.

The baby started it. She had begun to giggle as her mom played with her.

It started quietly, then grew into this cackling fit of delight. For fifteen minutes the baby kept laughing.

This wave of joy spread like a ripple to everyone around the baby. Fellow passengers looked at each other and started laughing. Soon the entire back half of the plane was cracking up, relishing the beauty of a baby's laughter.

Joy is contagious. And if we let our guard down long enough to catch it, it gets magnified.

Catching joy lets it seep into your bones. You let yourself feel the joy in the moment instead of brushing it aside. But it's not just big moments full of anticipation; it's the little ones too. Beautiful flowers on a routine shopping trip you hadn't noticed before. A cool breeze on a warm summer evening. When I notice these little things, I can't help but appreciate the many blessings in my life.

As I disembarked from the plane back in 60-degree Mobile, Alabama, I felt warm, but not because of the weather. I knew that with just a little mindset change, I could look for and find joy not just in big, highlight-reel events, but in countless tiny, everyday moments. Moments that make up this beautiful, messy mosaic of my life. If I looked hard enough, I could now find joy in all of them. 

That’s a beautiful sight.

Thanks to Compound Writing members Steven O, Lyle M, Dan H, Rajat M, Ryan W, Vandan J, and Angelo for reading drafts of this.

I pulled up to this exit and out of nowhere, the entire town of Spanish Fort, Alabama descended upon this 20-square-yard piece of asphalt. Four cars were waiting to turn in and traffic in either direction kept them—and, by extension, me—from moving. 

I immediately thought to myself, "Wow, what a terrible decision! I can't believe I thought I was going to get home in the next hour if I took this route."

This happens all the time with decisions. It may not matter much in low-impact situations like a traffic jam. But in high-stakes situations compounded over the course of a lifetime, it can dramatically impact whether you reach the goals you lay out for yourself. 

You make a decision you think is reasonable given what you know at the time. Then, the situation plays out according to chance, and sometimes things don't go well. It's natural to think that the result determines the quality of our decisions. We assume we made a bad decision and swear off that way of operating. Usually, however, that is wrong.

It turns out, results are not a useful gauge of our decision quality.

You can only judge the quality of a decision by the information you knew at the time you originally made it. When you fast forward in time, your view of the decision can change dramatically. And hindsight bias is the culprit.

Hindsight bias is a natural mental shortcut that swaps the information we know now for the information we knew at the time of the decision. The decision outcome is part of this new information that clouds our thinking about our original decision. If the outcome is good, hindsight naturally steers us toward thinking the decision was good. If the outcome is bad, hindsight steers us toward thinking it was bad.

To draw useful conclusions, we have to contextualize our decisions. We need to look at the broader class of similar decisions in order to judge the quality of our decision.

To improve our judgment, therefore, we can focus on deepening our understanding of similar situations. If you learn how things normally turn out in a scenario with a certain set of inputs, you can increase your chances of making a good decision in that class of scenarios. That's why the best decision makers in any field either have tons of direct experience or they've learned indirectly from mentors or books about how those situations normally turn out.

Lawyers review case studies, precedents and persuasive rhetorical technique to improve their ability to argue cases. Engineers study scientific first principles to understand how the systems they engage with react most of the time (skyscraper foundations, chemical plants, microprocessors). This study coupled with experience equips them with an internal probability distribution they can leverage to make better decisions in their fields. And they can add color to and sharpen the topography of this mental map over time as they learn more.

Lots of the feedback we get from decision outcomes just isn't helpful. It doesn't provide clear insight to improve our future decisions. And there's no perfect guide to tell you when it's good or bad. It's up to you to hack through the feedback thicket with your cognitive machete.

What you shouldn't regret

“Good judgment is the result of experience and experience is the result of bad judgment.” -- Mark Twain

If you have relevant foundational knowledge and carefully apply it to your decision, you shouldn't regret the decision after a bad outcome.

We regret a decision because we think we could've made a better one. We play out in anguish alternative histories in our head. This is hindsight bias at play. Hindsight keeps us from showing ourselves compassion after a bad outcome1. We treat ourselves more harshly—scolding ourselves like we should have known—even though we couldn't have known at the time.

Based on your experience, you made the best decision you could. The subsequent outcome was out of your control. You can regret careless decisions, but not considered ones.

After realizing the part in your control—the decision—was executed to the best of your ability, there's no reason to feel angry or to feel bad for yourself. You simply tell yourself, "Alright, I was careful in my decision and this is how it shook out this time. I accept that. Let’s see what I can learn to do better next time."

And that's the only game we can ever effectively play. The game where we look for the highest probability decisions and make them.

What if we don't learn to do this?

What happens if we don't learn to judge the quality of our decisions by only our knowledge at the time of the decision?

We prime ourselves for a life of inefficient learning. A life where we have to be slapped with the same feedback ten times before we learn the right thing and get better. 

It’s like you’re navigating a ship. You have a far off destination, and want to arrive there as fast as possible. With only a map and the stars, you course correct every so often as you reorient yourself. However, the exhilaration of sailing quickly with the ocean current and wind blinds you to the fact that you’re headed far off course. You get caught up in the result of getting there quickly, and forget to learn and adjust course.

If we don’t learn how to adjust our heading based on what our guideposts—the stars and map—tell us, we have little hope of reaching our destination. We have to sense and properly interpret what feedback we’re getting so we can change directions and reach the destination we’ve set for ourselves.

It's up to you to track what you know at the time of your decisions and base a judgment of quality on that. You’ll sidestep unnecessary inefficiency and reach your destination faster. Your future self will thank you.

When I pulled up to that middle parking lot exit, I immediately thought I had made a terrible mistake. A few years ago, I would have stewed in my annoyance while I waited for the traffic to clear. But this time I caught myself. I realized that I made my decision—which exit to use—based on data I had at the time. I could not have known that this would be the busiest exit now. I couldn't have made a better decision.

So instead of sitting there upset, I leaned back in my chair and sat there peacefully. No regrets. I even noticed the freshly planted pink flowers on the median beside me and smiled, considering what else I miss when I regret things I shouldn't. When it was my turn, I pulled onto the road and made my way home, my blood pressure a little lower than it would have been a few years before.

Thanks to Compound Writing members Ryan Williams, Halle Kaplan-Allen and Chris Angelis for reading drafts of this.

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My scream echoed off the outer brick wall of my high school as the hot, August, Indiana sun beat down on me.

I had just lost a set at a critical juncture in a match. I needed to pull myself together and close out this next set to win it for my team.

My coach called me over to the fence to talk. He said, "Grant, I know it's hot, I know you're tired. But as long as you're focused and mentally resilient, the human body is capable of incredible feats. You can do this." I walked back to my bench, and considered these words. I wouldn't understand their implications for my everyday life until several years later.

It turned out, my mental toughness was failing me up to that point in the match. I didn’t encourage myself as well I could have under pressure, and as a result found myself in a difficult spot.

Mental toughness is something that can affect every area of our lives. Training your immediate response—your mental reflexes—in a high-intensity, low-risk environment (such as sports) enhances your ability to handle whatever life throws at you when you’re in an intense, higher-risk environment like an interview for your dream job or a high-stakes presentation at work.

Physical reflexes vs mental reflexes

Consider first our physical reflexes. When someone throws a ball at you from close range, you don't have time to think about where it's going, calculate it's likely final position and move your hand there to catch it. You just react. Your body's reflexes act before you can think and your hand suddenly moves to try and grab the ball mid-air. These physical reflexes can be trained and improved over time. You can practice to get better at catching point-blank pitches.

Your mental reflexes work the same way. When something happens to you—your buttons are pushed—you have a knee-jerk mental response. In those moments, do you beat yourself up? Or do you encourage yourself? You would never (I hope!) call it acceptable to verbally kick someone else while they're down, so why is it acceptable to do that to yourself?

My time with tennis

My 18-year journey playing and watching tennis has taught me the importance of developing these mental reflexes.

I began playing tennis when I was in third grade. I practiced diligently, playing weekly into my middle school years, with tournaments on the weekends. I went on to play on my high school team, with daily practices and frequent matches in the fall semester.

Through this practice, I developed the physical skill necessary to compete at a high level, but hadn't quite cultivated the mental skill that was the hallmark of the best players in high school tennis. I was easily upset during matches and would sometimes let those minor mess-ups derail the rest of my match. Some of my opponents even knew this about me and would use it against me.

The match was no longer me against them. It became me against me. I began battling myself.

If exploited in a match-up with even physical skill, I would often lose. When I lost a critical point in the match, you wouldn't just see it in my face, you would hear it 50 yards away. Eventually, I figured out (a little late according to my coach) that this habit of mentally derailing was holding me back from reaching my potential. I just needed to learn from someone better than me. And why not learn from the best? I soon realized a certain Swiss tennis player was a shining example of peak mental skill.

"Golf is a game of inches. The most important are the six inches between your ears." - Arnold Palmer

As a kid, I would start playing a sport for a variety of reasons. My siblings may have played it, I may have thought it looked fun, or I may have admired the professionals in the game. In tennis, Roger Federer is fun to watch because he puts together combinations of shots that mock the laws of physics. He is the Michelangelo of the court, and his racquet is his paint brush. He floats around the court during points and after them rarely seems to need to catch his breath. In spite of the spectacle of his game, it's what you don't see that stands out most—his mental skill.

Federer remains in complete control of his emotions and attitude throughout 5-set marathon matches, even under the dazzling lights of a grand-slam final. He can lose a critical point in the match and by the look on his face, you'd guess he was casually thinking about what to order for dinner later that night. Zoom out, however, and consider his current context—defending a major grand-slam title—and you realize the enormity of what's on the line for him. All-time records, millions of dollars, the expectations of his family, friends, fans and the piercing scrutiny of the media.

It's a huge weight to manage. But he does it with grace, and I believe it's a key reason for his long-term success.

Fast-forward 5 years in my (amateur) tennis career, when I began playing recreational tennis after college. I decided to play it not just because I enjoyed the game (I did), but also to sharpen habits of mind that I realized had significant implications for other areas of my life.

Hopefully, most of the time life isn't intensely stressful. But there are times when something comes up out of nowhere and pointedly presses a button you didn't want pressed. Your reflex here, what happens the instant after this button is mashed, can have a direct impact on your success going forward. And that reflex can be nurtured in sports or other activities that simulate an intense environment without the risk many real-life situations carry.

In order to stop reacting as I did in high school and before (loud as I was!), I needed to sharpen my mental reflexes.

It can be easy to get derailed into a spiral of distracting, negative thoughts. If you can sidestep those periods of unproductive thoughts, you can get back to contribution and happiness more quickly. And it isn't just naively telling yourself everything is going to be sunshine and roses. It's you telling yourself: "you can do this. It may be tough. You may have to change directions. But you will figure it out and make it through." Exactly what you would tell a close friend.

Just like my high school tennis match, you can begin to battle yourself in these situations. However, this is where you most need to call a truce and default to kindness.

So be kind to yourself. You will make mistakes. Everyone does, and it does no good to spend energy lingering on them. If you can learn from it, do so quickly, incorporate the lesson into your habits, and move on.

It's inevitable that something will go against you in a tennis match, so I began using tennis to sharpen my mental reflexes. There can be over 200 points played in a close, 3-set match. There will be times when a break doesn't go your way. I decided that my goal for the match would not necessarily be to win, but to win as long as I kept my cool even in the points that I lost from purely bad luck. Winning with negative self-talk or while making a fool of myself would not count on my personal scorecard.

So what did I do to improve? I cultivated my awareness of how I felt after a bad point. I would notice the feeling, try and delay a response, and gradually get better at responding to myself with encouragement.

It started out not working very well. I would still get upset and lose focus for several points. But over time, I noticed improvement in my ability to respond positively to setbacks right away. Another example is when I'm exhausted at the end of a long run and want to slow down. That's when my mental reflexes matter to help me encourage myself and push through. When it becomes second nature to respond with encouragement, you've created a massive advantage for yourself.

Josh Waitzkin, a chess GrandMaster and World Champion martial artist, discusses this in his book, The Art of Learning:

In every discipline, the ability to be clear headed, present, cool under fire is much of what separates the best from the mediocre. In competition, the dynamic is often painfully transparent. If one player is serenely present while the other is being ripped apart by internal issues, the outcome is already clear. The prey is no longer objective, makes compounding mistakes, and the predator moves in for the kill. (Waitzkin 172)

It has reached the point that I now look forward to playing any sport not just for the fun and exercise it provides, but for the opportunity to strengthen my mental reflexes. I'm now grateful for the opportunity to practice extreme patience and mental toughness in an environment with nothing critical at stake (I know, I know, bragging rights are nice sometimes).

Whatever your field of endeavor (non-sport included), train yourself to notice what feelings come up the instant after you realize you’ve made a mistake. Are they feelings of shame and disgust? Or of acceptance, compassion for yourself and determination to improve next time? Practice delaying or eliminating your negative reactions and accelerating the encouraging ones.

This strengthened mental reflex can spill over into every area of your life that has a potential source of stress. We use mental reflexes far more than our physical ones, so why don't we give them more attention? When something goes wrong at work or an endeavor you care about, you can immediately pivot to focus on what's within your control instead of worrying about what's not.

Don’t work out just to train your body. Use it as an opportunity to train your mental reflexes. Once you break through mental barriers in sport, you start to question yourself: in what other realms of life do I have imaginary mental barriers that are keeping me from my potential?

I ended up narrowly losing that match back in high school, but what I learned from it has helped me ever since.

Thanks to Compound Writing members David Burt and Steven Ovadia for reading drafts of this.

What's an area of your life where your mental reflexes serve you well? Where do they get in the way? How else do you think we can practice improving our mental reflexes? Let me know in the comments below!

It turns out, it was your first time in an American restaurant, and you had no idea that tipping was customary. Menu price was not the actual cost. You beg your waiter's forgiveness, ask your friend to bail you out this one time, and escape the barricade, head hung low.

The problem is, in life, menu price is rarely the actual cost. But we stroll along believing it is. This applies to countless—equally in non-financial—areas of our lives, where if we planned ahead, we could avoid "barricaded-restaurant-exit" situations.

What we need are better buffers. A buffer is simply slack, the amount of room you have to mess up before reaching an undesired consequence. A better buffer comes from designing the appropriate amount of efficiency into our plans, based on the situation.

Why it matters

We need better buffers because too much efficiency is dangerous. 

Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman talks about how creating a buffer for error is the appropriate response to crises, not just maximizing efficiency around the diagnosed problem. Here is a quote from Kahneman in an interview on the Masters in Business podcast a few years ago:

Hindsight is a big deal. It allows us to keep a coherent view of the world, [but] it blinds us to surprises, it prevents us from learning the right thing, it allows us to learn the wrong thing — that is whenever we’re surprised by something, even if we do admit that we’ve made a mistake or [you say] ‘I’ll never make that mistake again.’ In fact, what you should learn when you make a mistake because you did not anticipate something is that the world is difficult to anticipate. That’s the correct lesson to learn from surprises — that the world is surprising.

The problem is, the range of possible outcomes is almost always wider than we can account for.

If we decide to not add buffers to our lives, what are we implicitly saying about the situation? Could it be a) I know everything is going to go perfectly, so I don't need to allow for even an inch of flexibility because I won't need it, or b) I have so little clue of how this realm of activity actually works, that I'm effectively blindly throwing a dart at a distant target. (Ok, yes you could add a third category of predictable events: the physical world, well understood scientific phenomena, etc. There is very little uncertainty there. For this discussion, I want to think about the big, meaningful, complex issues out there: relationships, dynamic work environments, cultures, engineering problems, and others.) It would be an act of hubris to assume perfect outcomes. Some things, you just can’t know.

Planning for the Unplannable

When I was in middle school, I played a lot of tennis, and my older brother would practice with me sometimes. When you warm up in tennis you usually start from the baseline at the far end of the court, and after a few minutes one of the players will come to the net to practice volleys while the other remains at the baseline. I was feeling aggressive that day, and wanted to "win the warmup," so I decided to get as close to the net as I could and cut off my brother's shots. The only problem is that by getting closer to the other player, you lose time to react to the ball coming at you.

My clever tactic backfired as he crushed a ball right at me. I couldn't react in time, and the ball hit me squarely in the nose. There was blood everywhere. (For those less familiar with tennis, amateurs aren't good enough at aiming to pick off peoples' noses. No suspected malice here.) You can imagine the look on my mom's face when we walked up to her and said we were ready to go! That day, I learned a lot about the risks of standing too close to the net (and a tiny bit about pain).

What could I have done differently? I could have stepped back from the net. Because I had no idea how hard he was going to hit it, I could have allowed myself the room and time I needed to properly react to his shot. I could have given myself a better buffer to help plan for the unplannable. Too much efficiency became dangerous.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” - Benjamin Franklin

The size of the buffer depends on the situation. Different situations call for different amounts of buffer. Appropriate efficiency is key. Whether you’re in a situation with no time to react or you have no emergency savings fund and you're one car breakdown away from a personal finance crisis, not designing appropriate efficiency into different areas of your life can bite you when you least expect it. 

I know, sometimes buffers are a luxury we can't afford. We're forced into a corner and it's do or die. That's reality. But if at all possible, try and consider clever ways to build buffers into your plans. Remember, menu price is rarely the actual cost.

Appropriate amounts of buffer enable us to perform our best and direct all our focus toward our goals and highest point of contribution. Our brains aren’t distracted by the looming prospect of failure and we can enjoy the present. So, how can we be intentional in building buffer into the important areas of our lives so that we can thrive in them? Through practice. 

Here’s a quick way to do this. Right at the beginning of a plan, ask yourself these three things:

1. First, what’s the obvious, first-glance menu price of this action? 

2. Second, what costs beyond that could I be missing? 

3. And third, who knows more about this topic than I do and can advise me? 

This 30-second, top-of-mind habit can help you build better buffers and save you from trouble down the road. If we add even a small amount of buffer in areas where we need it, we would stay in the game long enough to learn to become great.

We want to keep playing the game. To have endurance over perfect efficiency.

And if we trained ourselves to use better buffers?

Maybe then we could leave a restaurant in peace, no barricades needed.

What buffers do you use in your life? Let me know in the comments below! If you enjoyed this, please like and share!

Thanks to Compound Writing, Chris Harvey, Yishi Zuo, Ergest Xheblati and Steven Ovadia for their help with drafts of this.

As I was thinking about goal-setting recently, it struck me that the cold water on hot ceramic is a helpful analogy for setting goals that maximize our achievement without discouraging us. Here's what I mean.

What actually happens that causes the ceramic dish to shatter? When the ceramic heats up in the oven, it expands ever so slightly. It's not noticeable to the naked eye. When the dish is back on the counter cooling down, it slowly, imperceptibly shrinks back to its previous size. When I put the hot dish in the sink and ran cool water over it, I fast-forwarded the cooling process. But only on one side. That one side cools quickly and contracts, while the other side stays hot. This stress between the slightly expanded and slightly contracted sides of the dish increases enough that it cracks into a mini-mosaic in the sink. Who knew breaking my parents' dishes could be artistic?

When you set overly ambitious goals, you’re—perhaps unintentionally—trying to fast forward to the results. But we know you can't do that. Without the diligent work required to accomplish something meaningful, you can't get there. The question becomes, how do you set goals that cause you to grow?

We've all set goals that seem super exciting, but when we actually try to figure out a plan to achieve them, we're overwhelmed. They're so far beyond what we think we can do that we end up discouraged and don't make the effort required to achieve them.

In 2013, I worked on the staff at Keewaydin Camp for boys in Salisbury, Vermont. The leader for my camper age-group was studying for his master's degree in Mind, Brain and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education at the time. He shared the following idea about how to help our campers grow:

Anyone can grow to meet a challenge as long as their perceived support structure and resources are greater than their perception of the difficulty of the challenge ahead.

This was a precious mental model when designing programs to help young boys grow into mature young men. It also has a lot to offer someone wanting to grow in any area of life. Let's see how we can use it.

There are two main dials to turn up or down.

The first dial is the perception of the difficulty of the goal. The second dial is the perception of the resources available to you.

Perceived Difficulty

First, the perceived difficulty. If we think something's too easy, we won't be motivated to stretch ourselves to grow. No new skills are needed, so we'll jump into solving it, none the stronger on the other side. If we think it's too hard in the time we have, we'll be discouraged from trying because we don't see a path to success.

Challenge comes from deadlines. If you want to build a great business, the difficulty changes dramatically when you give yourself ten years instead of ten days. Your deadline must be realistic to be helpful.

Notice that I say perception of resources and challenge, not the actual resources and challenge. We don't experience the world as it is. We experience the world according to our senses, our experience, our expertise. Just like a child may see wind as mysterious, cooling gusts, a meteorologist sees wind as a series of constantly fluctuating pressure gradients. We're looking at and experiencing the same thing, but perceiving it far differently. These lenses inevitably color our view of the world. Take time to understand yourself, then leverage that knowledge to set achievable goals with the time you have.

Perceived Resources

The second dial governs the perceived resources available. These are the mentors, books, articles, and people cheering you along in your pursuit of the goal. If you sense you have a network of support, you're much more likely to try something that requires you to venture beyond your existing expertise.

Think about a time someone expressed their belief in you. Belief that you could accomplish more than you thought you could. In that moment, it's possible you felt a surge of belief in your ability to reach a goal. But you didn't suddenly transform into Einstein or Michael Jordan. The hidden paths available to you were simply illuminated. Your perceived set of resources expanded, and therefore increased your ability to achieve your current goal or an even more ambitious one.

Understanding reality helps us accurately identify obstacles to success and deftly avoid them. However, once we learn a lot about something, including the base rates of success, it may show that our chances of success are low. So why do we continue? We continue because we care. [1]

And a dash of delusion [2], driven by our desire to serve, is sometimes needed to pursue an endeavor with uninviting base rates of success.

Properly set goals can be catalysts for personal growth. Design them improperly though, and you may be discouraged (the ceramic may crack) or not challenged enough to evolve. To find the right challenge, you need to know yourself well. To dial in your perceived resources, learn from as many people (including their writing) as you can.

Here's to setting goals that make us better, and to keeping our parents’ dishes intact.

Notes:

• [1] I will write more about this in the future.

• [2] Optimists (those who pursue ambitious dreams in spite of the base rates and naysayers) play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. They're the ones willing to take risks to innovate. Idea from Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. By delusion I mean the act of ignoring base rates. Choosing to not see probabilities quite as they are.

Thanks to my amazing wife Abby Nice, Abram El-Sabagh, and Steven Ovadia for reading drafts of this.

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