Escape From Your Old Self
[Author’s note: This post is a chapter of my forthcoming book
RESET: Building Purpose in the Age of Digital Distraction]
Chapter Fourteen: Train
What will it take for a reset to transform my life?
“Continuous effort, not strength or intelligence, is the key to unlocking one’s potential.”
Sir Winston Churchill, British Politician and Author
Living with purpose is the best possible gift to give yourself. Hopefully you are now know why, and are starting to see how. Living with purpose requires the integration of everything we’ve learned into a framework you can apply to your life.
Every. Single. Day.
Supercharging works because we inspire ourselves and others when we play to our strengths. Rallying works because we push ourselves harder and longer when our daily efforts involve other people. Launching works because we need to build momentum toward our goals. Dodging works because we need avoid the friction that threatens to stall our progress.
What else do we need? We need to train. Why? Because we live our lives one day at a time.
The most fundamental changes — the most powerful changes — in our lives are the ones we make in our routines. Daily routines are where the rubber meets the road. And this is where things will start to get hard.
We start to feel the pain of sacrificing the comfortable and familiar. It’s immediate. Yet the rewards from the changes are still a long way off. We get frustrated, stumble, then struggle to get back on track. And each time we’re a little less likely to stick with the changes.
Our old self beckons to us. Stop trying. Give up. And so we often do. We didn’t want to change as much as we wanted to be comfortable. We didn’t want to train.
To be blunt, if you don’t see the value of training, you will probably not make the necessary adjustments to your daily routine. You must embrace training as a way — the way — to help you construct a purposeful and fulfilling life.
Remember that success is something that we earn slowly. It is built on the accumulated value of our behavior, not the photoshopped lies you see online. Success is not winning the lottery. Success is a grind. And that is why it requires dedication.
Climb The Mountain
One of my friends Gunnar — besides having the coolest name in the world — runs a startup called Fidelis Education. For the logo he chose a profile shot of K2, the most dangerous mountain in the world. For every four people who make it to the top, one person dies trying. Climbing a mountain is Gunnar’s metaphor for life and for business. And it perfectly captures the rationale for training.
Climbing is tough work. You can plan all you want but there is no replacement for practical experience. Other people can try to help you deal with it, but at the end of the day it’s going to be you who is cold, tired, and hungry. You will be the one slogging through the switchbacks and false peaks along the way. And you will be the one knowing that each step you take brings you a small but meaningful distance toward the top.
Peaking a mountain can be even more challenging psychologically than it is physically. You don’t know you’re at the top until you’re there. You could be just a few hundred feet from the end and not know it. That’s why you need to keep pushing forward even if there isn’t a direct line of sight to the end.
Daily Grind
Training is similar to climbing a mountain. We need daily discipline because it takes us closer and closer to our goals, even when we can’t clearly see the progress. A powerful combination of the push — our willpower and bias toward action — and the pull — our mission and success structure — propels us forward.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you consider the long and difficult journeys that stand between you and your goals. Whatever dreams are locked inside you, though, can become a reality. One day at a time. Once you embrace that truth, then it cannot scare you or take away your motivation. And then you can conquer the grind.
When you finally reach the peak of a mountain and look down, you can see your trail as a distinct line. That’s your journey, laid out behind you in a way that makes it seem simple and clear. But it only looks like that once you’re done.
The path emerges upon completion. You have to get to the top through daily effort, not by wishing for the perfect set of directions and someone to carry all your stuff.
Steve Jobs, the legendary entrepreneur and creative force behind Apple’s incredible success, believed in this approach. “You can’t connect the dots looking forward” he said, “you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
All we need to do is start.
Train To Grow
The entrepreneurs in Stanford’s SVIA program also have to train. Instead of their body and mind, though, it’s their business. But the same rules apply. These folks also have to embrace and conquer their own unique grind.
Each entrepreneur starts with a concept for a business and a few other people who believe that this is valuable enough to work on. What they have is actually nothing more than a loose collection of guesses. As described in Chapter 6, we spend the summer showing them how to systematically replace those guesses with facts by getting outside the building and talking to people about their idea. Lots and lots of people, including plenty who disagree with them and slam the door in their face.
Here’s how it works. Each team writes out their guesses on the Business Model Canvas, a tool developed specifically to help entrepreneurs capture their guesses about a business and then systematically record their learnings over time. They write out all their assumptions during the first week, then start talking to the people who will pay them. Or more accurately, the teams start talking to the people they think will pay them.
Everyone quickly learns that their idea needs a lot of work. The customers are different than they guessed. The problem is different than they guessed. The price is different than they guessed. Everything seems to be falling apart.
At first this seems bad. Their beautiful idea is being torn to shreds! But they quickly realize how important it is to keep talking to potential customers every day, to improve their idea and deepen their understanding of the context around the customer’s problem.
Eventually the dynamic changes for the entrepreneurs. They start to recognize trends. They develop empathy for their customers. They believe they can find a good opportunity, even if it doesn’t look anything like the original idea.
This simple tactic — customer interviews — practiced over and over is getting them closer to something that is the foundation of a great business. One foot in front of the other, slowly but surely. Day after day after day. They are climbing the mountain!
Little by Little
Kaizen is a powerful Japanese concept. The word can be loosely translated as “change for better”, and it has come to mean a particular kind of continuous improvement that has been adopted by businesses and even people with remarkable results.
The core concept is we can unlock gigantic improvements by focusing on tiny changes over a long period of time. That can mean doing something better or getting rid of something that doesn’t work. A little bit at a time. Again and again and again.
Productivity and behavior expert James Clear wrote about the British national cycling team and how their coach Dave Brailsford used kaizen to take the team from an also-ran to winning their first-ever Tour de France in just three years.
Tiny improvements, day after day. That’s the power of kaizen.
Small Changes = Big Rewards
This concept has many applications for us in our daily behaviors. Imagine a scenario where you spend hours every day glued to your phone, scrolling through social media feeds. You feel trapped by this compulsive behavior, but you know it would make a huge difference if you could control it.
An unhelpful strategy would be trying to cut out social media entirely. We both know that won’t work. Instead focus on the small changes. Take your time progressing toward the ultimate objective rather than being overwhelmed by it. A good place to start would be noticing how much time you spent choking.
Note the length of time. Let’s say it’s twenty minutes at a time. Could you reduce the amount of time you spend on social media by five minutes each time? Maybe. What about just one minute per day? Certainly. So set your timer for nineteen minutes this week, and start the clock each time you go online. Then reduce that time to eighteen minutes per day next week, and seventeen the week after that.
One minute per day. A steady erosion of this bad habit. And yet, magically, five months later you would be down to zero minutes of compulsive time on social media.
Another kaizen approach would be cutting out just one social media feed. You could try uninstalling Instagram for a week. If that felt like too much, you could just change the notifications setting — here’s the Android version and the Apple version — so you didn’t get an alert every time your friends posted anything.
Simple, and not too painful. But it’s a start.
Training Day
Contrast kaizen with the way we tend to approach big changes in our life. A New Year’s resolution to get in better shape, for example. We want to make progress as soon as possible while our enthusiasm is high. We punish ourselves mercilessly. We cut out all fatty foods, or simple carbohydrates, or both. We spend hours in the gym. We are up for jogs at 5:00 AM every morning.
At least that’s what we do in early January. By the end of the month we are back on the couch eating Pringles.
Kaizen training to get in better shape would look very different. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. So we can start small by scheduling a time every day when you want to be more active. Ideally we would associate the activity with something that we consistently do, like brushing our teeth or having lunch.
Set a baseline the first time. Try doing squats without any weight, noting how many you can do. Then try to do one more repetition each successive day, taking a break on the weekends: 10 on Monday, 11 on Tuesday, 12 on Wednesday, 13 on Thursday, 14 on Friday, then 15 the following Monday, and so on.
That’s it.
Here’s another example that involves both physical and social kaizen. Schedule a long walk with your spouse or a friend once a week when you know you will both be available. Start with one mile, then do a mile and a quarter. Then a mile and a half. Keep increasing the distance, slowly but surely. Let the conversation distract you from the exercise. Focus on consistency and iterative improvement.
You could also apply the training mindset to nutrition. Do you eat dessert five times a week? Try to cut down four times in January by replacing the dessert with another activity that also satisfies you, such as watching your favorite TV show or FaceTiming a close friend.
You could reduce dessert intake to three times a week in February. Then drop it again to twice a week in March, and then focus on having a special dessert night once a week starting in April. No need to cut it out entirely unless that’s something you decide to do when you get to that point.
Training every day should not scare you. It should inspire you. When you train correctly, you are doing simple things a little bit better, over and over. That is the reason why Gunnar chose K2 as his company’s logo. To climb a mountain, all you need to take is take a lot of little steps. Of course the journey can be difficult, but that’s not the same thing as impossible. Not if you keep going.
So train. Today. Tomorrow. The resulting confidence will seep into your soul and never go away.
What to remember about “Train”
- Training is the daily methodology that takes us to our goals
- Small tweaks will lead to massive improvements over time
- Stay simple because complex systems are hard to follow
Actions that require under 30 minutes
- Go back to the environments that distract you from “Dodge”. Write down an easy first step you could take to reduce the time you spend in each environment. Then identify the incremental steps that will take you toward your ultimate goal of minimizing distractions.
- Go back to your areas of potential mastery from “Supercharge”. Write down the fundamental skills that you need to develop, and the daily actions that will let you build that skill. Schedule a time to set a baseline for yourself on each action so you know where you’re starting. Commit to a small daily improvement to the baseline.
- Reflect on the last few times you have tried to make big changes in your life. Write down the goal that you had, what you did, and why you think it didn’t work. Below that, write down a daily action that is related to these goals. Identify a small improvement to that action, how much time it would take to practice this action each day, and the practical benefits to your daily life.
