Extraordinary Stress Practice

Below are a number of different techniques I use periodically to solve different problems. Keep the toolbox in mind.

Fear Setting: How to Conquer Fear and Reduce Overwhelm

Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty. But what if you can add some certainty where you are afraid? This works with anything (work, adventure activity, moving to a new place, asking somebody out, etc.) Get a pen and take 20 minutes to really think through and define the questions below:

What are you afraid of and why? Define your nightmare — the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you are considering. What doubt, fears, and “what-ifs” pop up as you consider the big changes you can — or need to — make? Envision them in painstaking detail. Would it be the end of your life? What would be the permanent impact, if any, on a scale of 1 to 10? Are these things really permanent? How likely do you think it is that they would actually happen?

What steps could you take to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing, even if temporarily? Chances are, it’s easier than you imagine. How could you get things back under control?

What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more probable scenarios? Now that you’ve defined the nightmare, what are the more probable or definite positive outcomes, whether internal (confidence, self-esteem, etc.) or external?

How likely is it that you could produce at least a moderately good outcome? Have less intelligent people done this before and pulled it off?

What are you putting off out of fear? Usually, what we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear. What is it costing you — financially, emotionally, and physically — to postpone action? Don’t only evaluate the potential downside of action. It is equally important to measure the atrocious cost of inaction. If you don’t pursue those things that excite you, where will you be in 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years?

An example from Tim Ferriss on quitting his Company to Travel: “As soon as I cut through the vague unease and ambiguous anxiety by defining nightmare, the worst-case scenario, I wasn’t as worried. Suddenly, I started thinking of simple steps I could take to salvage my remaining resources and get back on track if all hell struck at once. I realized that on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being nothing and 10 being permanently life-changing, my so-called worst-case scenario might have a temporary impact of 3 or 4. I believe this is true of most people and most would-be “holy sh* t, my life is over” disasters. Keep in mind that this is the one-in-a-million disaster nightmare. On the other hand, if I realized my best-case scenario, or even a probable-case scenario, it would easily have a permanent 9 or 10 positive life-changing effect.”

Once, you have completed the “Fear Setting” exercise, you can even rehearse the “worse-case” scenario to further reduce fear. For example, some athletes will do training runs in the rain and cold, as they know their competition is probably opting out. This builds resilience. If you’re afraid of poverty — live a week in a sleeping bag eating only a single meal etc.

Building your Idea Muscle — James Altrucher

James recommends the habit of writing down 10 ideas each morning in a waiter’s pad or tiny notebook. This exercise is for developing your “idea muscle” and confidence for creativity on demand, so regular practice is more important than the topics:

“Divide your paper into two columns. On one column is the list of ideas. On the other column is the list of FIRST STEPS. Remember, only the first step. Because you have no idea where that first step will take you. One of my favorite examples: Richard Branson didn’t like the service on airlines he was flying, so he had an idea: ‘I’m going to start a new airline.’ How the heck can a magazine publisher start an airline from scratch with no money? His first step: He called Boeing to see if they had an airplane he could lease. No idea is so big that you can’t take the first step. If the first step seems too hard, make it simpler. And don’t worry again if the idea is bad. This is all practice.”

• 10 things I learned yesterday 10 things I can do differently today
• 10 ways I can save time
• 10 things I learned from X, where X is someone I’ve recently spoken with or read a book by or about. I’ve written posts on this about the Beatles, Mick Jagger, Steve Jobs, Charles Bukowski, the Dalai Lama, Superman, Freakonomics, etc.
• 10 things I’m interested in getting better at (and then 10 ways I can get better at each one)
• 10 things I was interested in as a kid that might be fun to explore now
• 10 ways I might try to solve a problem I have
• 10 old ideas I can make new
• 10 ridiculous things I would invent (e.g., the smart toilet)
• 10 books I can write (The Choose Yourself Guide to an Alternative Education, etc).
• 10 business ideas for Google/ Amazon/ Twitter/ etc.
• 10 people I can send ideas to
• 10 podcast ideas or videos I can shoot (e.g., Lunch with James, a video podcast where I just have lunch with people over Skype and we chat)
• 10 things I disagree with that everyone else assumes is religion (college, home ownership, voting, doctors, etc.)
• 10 people I want to be friends with (then figure out the first step to contact them)
• 10 industries where I can remove the middleman

The Dickens Process: Letting Go of Limiting Beliefs — How to Break Bad Habits

This is a process to identify your weaknesses and work on allowing your mind to let go. Maybe you’re addicted to smoking, have trouble committing to diet and exercise, get nervous to be assertive at work…

“When we feel pain in one time zone — meaning past, present, or future — we just switch to another time zone rather than change the habit (ie. meaning if we are smoking — I smoked for years and it wasn’t a problem or I will quit in the future = we convince ourselves things will be okay), because change brings so much uncertainty and so much instability and so much fear to people.”

The Dickens Process doesn’t allow you to dodge any time zones. It makes you feel the acute pain of your current handicapping beliefs. You then formulate 2 to 3 replacement beliefs to use moving forward. This is done so that “you are not pulled back into [old beliefs] by old language patterns.” Think of a “limiting belief”. To do this, think about something that you want to improve but have struggled with. For me, a limiting belief was that I couldn’t start a Company/didn’t have a good skill set because I hadn’t worked at a big Company (Goldman Sachs, Google, Amazon, etc.). As a result, I devalued my skills in interviews and was often afraid to be aggressive in networking or targeting a bold role. Pick your belief and start with the questions below (take this seriously and give it some thought — you can do as many as you want):

• What is your belief costing you?
• What has each belief cost you in the past, and what has it cost people you’ve loved in the past?
• What have you lost because of this belief?
• Close your eyes — See it, hear it, feel it.
• What is each costing you and people you care about in the present? See it, hear it, feel it.
• What will each cost you and people you care about 1, 3, 5, and 10 years from now. See it, hear it, feel it.

Again from Tim Ferris: One of my top 3 limiting beliefs was “I’m not hardwired for happiness,” which I replaced with “Happiness is my natural state.” Post-event, I used a daily affirmation approach in the mornings to reinforce it.

Productivity Exercise: Managing Your Schedule to Reduce Stress

Beating Procrastination: Write down 3 to 5 outstanding tasks — and no more — that are making you the most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually equals most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict. For each item, ask yourself: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?” “Will moving this forward make all the other to-dos unimportant or easier to knock off later?” Put another way: “What, if done, will make all of the rest easier or irrelevant?”

Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions. Block out 2 to 3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow. TO BE CLEAR: Block out 2 to 3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work. No phone calls or social media allowed. If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward-spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do. What you do is more important than how you do everything else, and doing something well does not make it important. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.

Finding Time: Schedule everything. Slot time in your day — put it in your calendar (gym, meditation, travel time, creative time, etc.). If something is in your calendar, people are more likely to follow routine. A switch flips in your brain.

Getting Better In Your Career: Simple Principles

Go to all the meetings you can: Even if you’re not invited to them, and figure out how to be helpful. If people wonder why you’re there, just start taking notes. Read all the other notes you can find on the company, and gain a general knowledge that your very limited job function may not offer you. Just make yourself useful and helpful by doing so.

Talk to people who are currently where you want to be: Ask them about pro’s / con’s. Find out if that’s what you want.

Keep a running list of three people that you’re always watching. Take note of their habits, tools and processes—

• Someone senior to you that you want to emulate
• A peer who you think is better at the job than you are and who you respect, and
• Someone subordinate who’s doing the job you did — one, two, or three years ago — better than you did it.

The Canvas Strategy — Ryan Holiday: The angry, unappreciated genius is forced to do stuff she doesn’t like, for people she doesn’t respect, as she makes her way in the world. It’s a common attitude that transcends generations and societies. We see it in an inability to meet anyone else on their terms, an unwillingness to take a step back in order to potentially take several steps forward. I will not let them get one over on me. I’d rather we both have nothing instead. Make other people look good and you will do well. When you’re just starting out: (1) You’re not nearly as good or as important as you think you are; 2) you have an attitude that needs to be readjusted; 3) most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in books or in school is out of date or wrong.

One fabulous way to work that out of your system — Attach yourself to people and organizations who are already successful, subsume your identity into theirs, and move both forward simultaneously. This attitude reduces your ego at a critical time in your career, letting you absorb everything you can. There is a constant benefit in making other people look good and letting them take credit for your ideas — this was evident for Ben Franklin and also Bill Belicheck. He thrived on what was considered grunt work, asked for it, and strove to become the best at precisely what others thought they were too good for. If he wanted to give his coach feedback or question a decision, he needed to do it in private and self-effacingly so as not to offend his superior. He learned how to be a rising star without threatening or alienating. Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means you’re the least important person in the room — until you change that with results.

Imagine if for every person you met, you thought of some way to help them, something you could do for them? And you looked at it in a way that entirely benefited them and not you? The cumulative effect this would have over time would be profound: You’d learn a great deal by solving diverse problems. You’d develop a reputation for being indispensable. You’d have countless new relationships. You’d have an enormous bank of favors to call upon down the road. Maybe it’s coming up with ideas to hand over to your boss. Find people, thinkers, up-and-comers to introduce to each other. Cross wires to create new sparks. Find what nobody else wants to do and do it. Find inefficiencies and waste and redundancies. Identify leaks and patches to free up resources for new areas. Produce more than everyone else and give your ideas away.

Red Teaming:

Red teaming is used to test a hypothesis/idea in a hyper critical environment: You take people who aren’t wedded to the plan and [ask them,] ‘How would you disrupt this plan or how would you defeat this plan?’ If you have a very thoughtful red team, you’ll produce stunning results.” This tool is also used to build consensus and allows for criticism in an environment where it is encouraged (takes any personal bias/emotion out of the equation).

Take the Coffee Challenge

Ask for 10% off your next coffee — to be an entrepreneur you need to be able to put yourself out there and ask for things. This is a form of rejection therapy and is helpful for anybody to get over personal fear and take themselves less seriously.

Build an Action Plan for Learning: The Fastest Way Possible

Find an expert in the field and start with the following questions:

• Who is good at [X] despite being poorly built for it?
• Who’s good at this who shouldn’t be? Who are the most controversial or unorthodox athletes or trainers/workers in [X]? Why?
• What do you think of them? Who are the most impressive lesser-known teachers? What makes you different? Who trained you or influenced you?
• Have you trained others to do this? Have they replicated your results? What are the biggest mistakes and myths you see in [X] training? What are the biggest wastes of time?
• What are your favorite instructional books or resources on the subject? If people had to teach themselves, what would you suggest they use?
• If you were to train me for 12 weeks for a [FILL IN THE BLANK] competition and had a million dollars on the line, what would the training look like? What if I trained for 8 weeks?

These questions are used to determine a plan of action… who to speak to, how to prioritize your time and resources and to then determine a training schedule. Armed with this knowledge, you can often cut a lot of time out of the learning process and optimize for your strengths (the above is geared towards athletics, but this can be done for any skill/industry/knowledge).

Spatial Perspective: How to Think Differently About Something From Your Own Mind

Goethe wrote an incredible book by locking himself in a hotel room for 3 months, imagining his five best friends on different chairs, and then discussing with his imaginary friends different possibilities of plot and so on and so forth. This is an example of spatial separation — use this to give yourself different perspectives when creating or stuck. This can work with any type of decision (work, fitness, goal setting, design, etc.).. Think from somebody else’s perspective in a specific location = ie. what would “Steve Jobs do, my Dad do, my first grade teacher do, my mentor do, etc.”

Enterprise Efficiency Tools (Ignore if not relevant for you)

There are wonderful books on this topic, and I’m slightly obsessed with productivity tools, but below are some of the good ones for managing internal communication / scheduling / processes.

• P2 Wordpress for email replacement: Have all employees post topics on P2 Wordpress instead of internal emails (these look like blog posts where any employees can go back and review — makes Company completely transparent) and encourages feedback. Excellent for weekly reports, status updates, projects.
• Slack for Messaging: Great for sharing Core Values
• Wunderlist / Trello (To-Do MGMT using Kanban type method): Not just a To-Do List but allows you to see state of each “To-Do”. Helps to avoid WIP inventory.
• ScheduleOnce / Calendly / x.AI: This can eliminate the never-ending “How about next Tuesday or Thursday at 10 a.m.?” back-and-forth that eats your life. x.AI is a full AI based assistant that takes control of your calendar.
• FollowUp.cc / Nudgemail/ Boomerang: For automating email follow-ups and reminders. You’ll never have to remember to follow up with anyone ever again.