Habits

“It was the wont of the immortal gods sometimes to grant prosperity and long impunity to men whose crimes they were minded to punish in order that a complete reverse of fortune might make them suffer more bitterly.” – Julius Caesar

Trying too hard to get what you want in life—like love, respect, and happiness—often has the opposite effect: you end up lonely, dejected, and miserable. I have realised that the universe has a way of doing things in reverse. For the simple reason, that reverse works.

Navy SEAL training has a bit called “drown-proofing” where they bind your hands behind your back, tie your feet together, and dump you into a 9-foot-deep pool. Your job is to survive for five minutes. Like most of the SEAL training, the vast majority of candidates who attempt drown-proofing fail. Upon being tossed into the water, many panic and scream to be lifted out. Some struggle until they slip underwater where they proceed to lose consciousness and have to be fished out and resuscitated. Over the years, a number of trainees have even died during the exercise.

But some people make it. And they do so because they understand two counterintuitive lessons. The first lesson of drown-proofing is paradoxical: the more you struggle to keep your head above water, the more likely you are to sink.

With your arms and legs tied, it’s impossible to maintain yourself at the surface for a full five minutes. Even worse, your limited attempts to keep your body afloat will only cause you to sink faster. The trick to drown-proofing is to actually let yourself sink to the bottom of the pool. From there, you lightly push yourself off the pool floor and let your momentum carry you back to the surface. Once there, you can grab a quick breath of air and start the whole process over again.

Strangely, surviving drown-proofing requires no superhuman strength or endurance. It doesn’t even require that you know how to swim. On the contrary, it requires the ability to not swim. Instead of resisting the physics that would normally kill you, you must surrender to them and use them to save your own life.

The second lesson of drown-proofing is a bit more obvious, but also paradoxical: the more you panic, the more oxygen you will burn and the more likely you are to fall unconscious and drown. In a sick and twisted way, the exercise turns your survival instinct against you: the more intense your desire to breathe, the less you will be able to breathe. The more intense your will to live, the greater the chance you will die.

More than a test of physical will, drown-proofing is a test of each candidate’s emotional self-control in situations of extreme danger. Can they control their own impulses? Are they able to relax in the face of potential death? Can they willingly risk their lives in the service of some higher value or goal?

These skills are far more important than any candidate’s ability to swim. They’re more important than his resilience, his physical toughness, or his ambition. More important than how smart he is, what school he went to, or how damn good he looks in a crisp Italian suit.

This skill—the ability to let go of control when one wants it most—is one of the most important skills anyone can develop. And not just for SEAL training. For life. Most people assume the relationship between effort and reward is one-to-one. We think that working twice as long will produce twice the results. That caring about a relationship twice as much will make everyone feel twice as loved. Or yelling your point twice as loud will make you twice as right.

The assumption here is that most of life exists on a linear curve, that there’s a one-to-one ratio between effort and reward with everything. But allow me to inform you—as someone who just tried drinking twice the normal amount of Red Bull so he could finish writing this post—this is almost never true. Most of the world does not exist on a linear curve. Linear relationships only exist for mindless, rote, repetitive tasks—driving a car, filling out reams of paperwork, cleaning the bathroom, etc. In all of these cases, doing something for two hours will double the output of doing it for one hour. But that’s simply because they require no thought or ingenuity.

Most activities in life do not operate along the linear effort/reward curve because most activities in life are not basic nor mindless. Most activities are complex, mentally and/or emotionally taxing, and require adaptation. Therefore, most activities produce a diminishing returns curve… Diminishing returns means that the more you experience something, the less rewarding it becomes.

The concept of diminishing returns applies to most experiences that are complex and novel, and even many of the mundane ones. The number of showers you take in a day, the number of chicken wings you inhale during happy hour, the number of trips home to visit your mother in a year—these are all experiences that start out highly valuable at first but then diminish in value the more frequently you do them.

Friendships operate on a diminishing returns curve. Having one friend is crucial. Having two is clearly better than one. But having 10 instead of 9 changes little in your life. And having 21 instead of 20 just makes remembering people’s names that much more difficult aye. Sex has diminishing returns, as does eating, sleeping, drinking alcohol, working out at the gym, reading books, consuming caffeine, scheduling business meetings, studying for an exam, staying up late to play video games—the examples are endless. All these give back less the more you do them, the more you try, or the more you have. All operate on a diminishing returns curve.

But there’s another curve, one that you’ve probably never seen or heard of before—and that’s largely because I make a lot of this up, just kidding. That’s the inverted curve. The inverted curve is what I call the “Twilight Zone” curve, where effort and reward have a negative correlation. That is, the more effort you put into doing something, the more you will fail to do it. Drown-proofing exists on an inverted curve. The more effort you put into rising to the surface, the more likely you will be to fail at it. Similarly, the more you want to breathe, the more likely you are to choke on chlorinated water.

Very few things in life function on an inverted curve. But the few things that do are extremely important. In fact, I will argue that the most important experiences and goals in life all exist on an inverted curve. Effort and reward have a linear relationship when the action is mindless and simple. Effort and reward have a diminishing return relationship when the action is complex and multivariate.

But when the action becomes purely psychological—an experience that exists solely within our own consciousness—the relationship between effort and reward becomes inverted. 

Pursuing happiness takes you further away from it. Attempts at greater emotional control only remove us from it. The desire for greater freedom is often what causes us to feel trapped. The need to be loved and accepted prevents us from loving and accepting ourselves.

Aldous Huxley once wrote, “The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed. Proficiency and results come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, or combining relaxation with activity”.

The most fundamental components of our psychology are paradoxical (i have overused this word today, sorry). This is because when we consciously try to create a state of mind, the desire for that state of mind creates a different and often opposite state of mind from the one we’re trying to create. “The Backwards Law” in Chapter 1 of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck says: desiring a positive experience is itself a negative experience; accepting a negative experience is a positive experience.

So the goal is to take your mind—a wonderful thing that has spent its life learning to chase various creatures—and teach it to stop chasing its own tail. To stop chasing meaning and freedom and happiness because those only serve to move it further away from itself. To teach it to achieve what it desires by giving up what it desires. And show it how the only way to reach the surface is to let itself sink.

And how do we do this? By letting go, giving up, and surrendering. Not out of weakness. But out of respect that the world is beyond our grasp. By recognising that we are fragile and limited and but temporary specks in the infinite reaches of time. You do it by relinquishing control, not because you feel powerless, but because you are powerful. Because you decide to let go of things that are beyond your control. You decide to accept that sometimes, people won’t like you, that often you will fail, that usually you have no clue what you’re doing.

You lean into the fear and uncertainty, and just when you think you’re going to drown, just as you reach the bottom, it will launch you back to your salvation. These are the lessons I have learned in the past few days. You cannot fix everything, the more you try to fix the more you mess up. Ask the barber who tries to straighten your lineup…

As always, hope you and yours are safe. This week do something you wouldn’t normally do, relax and let life happen to you. Hit us up in the comments and email and tell us how that is going.

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“The oldest, shortest words – ‘yes’ and ‘no’ – are those which require the most thought.”- Pythagoras

I was taught that serenity comes from the ability to say yes to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say no to the wrong choices made by others. Yet in life, I have realised that either one of these two words is difficult to say at the time it is needed.

For a lot of people, the most daunting task has been knowing when to say yes or to say no. This frees us to focus and concentrate on the things that really matter in our lives. In this quick post, we will look at why this decision is so important to our day-to-day life and ultimately our purpose. So when can you say yes or say no?

1. Say “yes” until you have to say “no” – Early in your career, you need to jump into every opportunity you can get, so you say yes to everything. Even the things that seem kinda dumb or pointless or weird or inconvenient. You say yes and do them anyway. Because you never know what doors they will open. 

Then, as you start building your skills and reputation, you begin to find yourself in situations where you have more opportunities than you need. This is when you begin to strategically start saying “no.” 

By saying “no,” you’re able to focus on the opportunities that present the biggest upside and you get even further, faster. Eventually, you arrive at a point where you are forced to say “no” to almost every opportunity. Congratulations. You have now “made it.” 

The “say yes until you have to say no” principle doesn’t just work in business, but in many areas of life:

• If you move to a new city and want to make friends, say yes to everything until you’re so popular you can start saying no to invitations to the lamer parties. 
• You want to find a relationship, say yes to meeting everyone until you find people you like enough to say no to people with terrible Tinder profiles. 
• If you’re trying to figure out what you’re good at or what you love to do, say yes to everything until you’re forced to start saying no. Eventually, you’ll be left with what matters most to you.

2. The skills of saying “yes” and “no” – I’ve found that most people tend to naturally be good at saying “yes” or saying “no” but few people are naturally good at saying both. 

Those who struggle to say “no” turn into people-pleasers. They will have a busy social life and lots of career opportunities, but because they can’t cut out what isn’t important to them and they’re unwilling to disappoint others, they often feel “trapped” in a life they didn’t choose or want. 

People who struggle to say “yes” are contrarians and loners. They often feel smart and superior because they are correctly able to spot bullshit. But because they’re unable to fully trust and commit, they struggle to build something they’re proud of. These are the hipsters and has-beens of the world. 

Being unable to say “no” will give you plenty of short-term opportunities but gradually wear you down in the long run. Being unable to say “yes” will eliminate most short-term opportunities, but it occasionally pays off by allowing you to spot something everyone else missed. The secret sauce is knowing when and how to say (and hear) both. 

3. Too much awareness or not enough? – I believe that we’ve become too aware of all of the problems in the world and this has generated widespread feelings of guilt and self-righteous moralising. At some point, we’re too aware of all that is awful in the world. However, the problem isn’t that we’re too aware of the problems in the world—the problem is that we’re too unaware of all of the great solutions also happening in the world. 
Put another way: our awareness of problems has compounded, whereas our awareness of solutions has not. Perhaps we can make an effort to focus more on the latter. 

It’s no wonder a lot of us find it hard to say no. From an early age, we are conditioned to say yes. We said yes probably hundreds of times in order to graduate from high school and then get into college. Or said yes to find work, to get a promotion, to find love and then yes again to stay in a relationship. Maybe also said yes to find and keep friends.

We say yes because we feel good when we help someone, because it can seem like the right thing to do. We think that is key to success, and because the request might come from someone who is hard to resist. And that’s not all. The pressure to say yes doesn’t just come from others. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves. The message, no matter where we turn, is nearly always, “You really could be doing more.” The result? When people ask us for our time, we are heavily conditioned to say yes.

Yet the solution to most of the world’s problems is probably saying no. Deciding to add the word “no” to your vocab is no small thing. Perhaps you already say no, but not as much as you would like. Maybe you have an instinct that if you were to learn the art of no that you could finally create more time for things you care about. But let’s be honest, using the word “no” doesn’t come easily for many people.

3 Rules of Thumbs for Saying No

1. You Need to Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

Let’s face it. It is hard to say no. Setting boundaries around your time, especially if you haven’t done it much in the past, you will feel awkward. Your comfort zone is “yes,” so it’s time to challenge that and step outside that. If you need help getting out of your comfort zone, check out this article.

2. You Are the Air Traffic Controller of Your Time

When you want to learn how to say no, remember that you are the only one who understands the demands for your time. Think about it: who else knows about all of the demands in your life? No one. Only you are at the center of all of these requests. You are the only one that understands what time you really have.

3. Saying No Means Saying Yes to Something That Matters

When we decide not to do something, it means we can say yes to something else that we may care more about. You have a unique opportunity to decide how you spend your precious time.

Until next week, begin to flex your yes and no muscle and see how it goes for you. Share with us your thoughts in the comments section or via email. As always, hope you and yours are safe.

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“If your inner life is not producing what you would like on the outside, don’t be discouraged… just be willing to change.” – Joyce Meyer

Have you ever had a season where you just felt lost? Like you’re working so hard, but you’re not sure what for? You’re frustrated because you aren’t yet where you want to be, yet you don’t know how to get there? You’re starting to resent your effort, even though deep down you know you love it? You feel discouraged and beat down.

That’s where I have been the last weeks. Defeated. Utterly discouraged. Questioning my purpose. Carrying so much on my shoulders and wanting help but unsure how to ask for it. I felt like elastic, stretched so thin trying to give my time and energy to so many things that I wasn’t really giving anything to anyone at all.

And you know what made it even worse? Right in the middle of my pity party, I had to comfort family going through their own season of pain. Who wants to do that when you’re feeling the lowest of low? I knew my energy would set the tone for this season, and I wanted it to be amazing, not discouraging. So I had two choices: Hide my feelings and fake a smile, or be honest and have the right conversations. I chose the second.

Here’s a fact: Being discouraged happens to everyone. We all feel lost. And we all have our moments. It’s what we do when we feel these things that make all the difference. So, while it’s fresh, here’s what I learned in the past weeks about how to get out of a discouraged funk when you find yourself in one:

• Write in a journal: Journaling is a good habit, and I can’t believe it took me long to jump on the bandwagon. Each morning when I wake up, I write a reflection of how I’m feeling and why. Doing so has made me more in tune with my emotions than I’ve ever been in my life and is the reason I was able to pinpoint how I was feeling the past weeks and what was causing it.

• Be honest with yourself and others: When you feel something, the worst thing you can do is minimise it. If you pretend your feelings don’t exist and sweep them under the rug, they’ll continue to build and build and build. Eventually, you’ll explode, and when you do, it won’t be pretty. Be honest about how you feel. Both to yourself and to those who are affected by your feelings. Don’t sugarcoat. Don’t feel the need to put a positive spin on it. Just say it out loud. All of it. (But there’s a right way to do it! Check out this post about understanding your emotions and some tips on sharing your thoughts and feelings in a constructive, supportive way.) No one can help you if they don’t understand how you’re truly feeling in the first place.

• Ask for help: Once you admit how you feel, now something can be done about it. However, you might not be the best person to do that. When we’re emotional, we’re usually not logical. When we’re too close to the problem, we’re usually not able to see a clear path forward. After telling someone how you are feeling, tell them you need them to lead you. You invite people in, you give them a chance to make a difference, and you build trust by showing that you’re human. Asking for help is courageous.

• Reprioritise: One of the reasons you might be in a discouraged funk is that you’re overstretched. Maybe you’re giving everything you have to everyone else and not giving anything to yourself. Maybe you’re spending tons of time on things that don’t make a big impact and you’re neglecting the things that actually move the needle. Look at your to-do list. Identify what’s crucial and pause (or cancel) everything else. Cancel a few meetings. Extend a few projects past the deadline. Do this in order to get back to feeling your best, and there isn’t anything wrong with that.

• Practice gratitude: It’s so easy to get discouraged and want to be further along than you are, but why is it so hard to stop and reflect on how far you’ve come? Another daily practice I have is gratitude. I think about ten things I’m thankful for before I start my day. It helps me put things into perspective and have a positive mindset. I’m always reminded that there were days I wished for the life I have now. But you know what? During this “funk” that I had, I wasn’t keeping up with my gratitude practice. I’m sure that played a part.

• Refuel: What things energise you? What are the things you love to do that make you the best? For me, it’s writing, reading, watching movies to disconnect, and spending time alone. I usually make time for all of these things, but lately, I’ve been putting other priorities before my own. When we do that for so long, we begin to resent our efforts to others because it takes us away from doing the things we love. It’s so important to make time for you first. You can’t serve others unless you’re serving yourself. In the past days, I have made time for a few of the things I’ve been neglecting and it’s making all the difference in the world.

If you’re in a discouraged funk, know that it will pass as long as you do something about it. I hope the tips above will help you and remember—we’re all in this together! If you have any other tips to help out others that are feeling discouraged please share with us in the comments section or via email.

Big hugs.

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“Nothing is easy, and life can be extremely tough, but there’s always a yin to the yang, so to speak. It’s up to you to seek it out, embrace it, and live happily ever after. No matter how bad the hand you’ve been dealt may seem, there’s always a way to play it.” – Alex Gaskarth

Author P.G. Wodehouse once wrote, “Everything that’s fun in life is either immoral, illegal, or will make you fat.” I reckon the inversion of this is also true—that is, everything moral, legal, and non-fattening is, by definition, probably boring. As a willingness to suffer will lead one to greater freedom, success, and meaning. I want to argue that the ability to sustain boredom constitutes a sort of modern virtue that would enrich your life far more than whatever your now is. Nothing good in life is easy, delayed gratification is the way.

Everything good in life seems to arise from, well, our ability to delay everything good in life. In the psychological literature. Delayed gratification has been linked to pretty much anything any of us could ever consider “good“. Better health, more money, better jobs, higher life satisfaction, better relationships etc. 

While we’re on this “everything good in life is unenjoyable” trip. Let’s take it a step further and implicate a group of people that surely won’t send hate mail: teachers. Some new research looks at how friendly teachers were with their students and compared that to the students’ academic performance in later years. What’s important to note here is that the researchers didn’t look at academic performance in the teacher’s class itself because—surprise, surprise—friendly teachers tend to give higher grades for bad work. Instead, the researchers focused on how the students did the following academic years. 

Allow me to spoil the pool party and say that, basically, the nicer the teachers, the worse off the students were in the following years. Now, I’m not suggesting that we bring back corporal punishment or hire drill sergeants to teach multiplication tables. But once again, we find that the most important things in life (in this case, being highly educated and understanding a subject) require some unpleasant experiences. 

The fact is, throughout your life, society will often force you into situations where being a bit of an idiot is necessary to make sure you and everyone else is treated fairly. In these situations, if you’re unwilling or unable to summon your inner idiot, then you are doing everyone involved a disservice. 

Of course, dozens of people will complain that they would never condone being an idiot and how dare I suggest that it was okay to be one to anyone, ever. Fortunately, like any good teacher, I have no qualms with these people thinking I am an idiot.

Have you ever wondered how convenience can backfire? That it’s often the inefficient friction in life that slows us down long enough to actually forge meaningful connections. For example, instead of ordering your favorite meal on uber eats, being forced to walk down to the restaurant each week and chat to the staff about weather and business and sports week after week, month after month. Well, it’s the aggregation of all of these little “inefficient” experiences that generate a sense of community and rootedness in one’s life. By introducing widespread “convenience,” at scale, you remove people’s opportunities to serendipitously engage with the people in their communities. 

Obviously, there’s a fine line between the argument against convenience and being that old man shaking his fist at a cloud. But I think there’s something to it. And while I wouldn’t necessarily give up my Uber Eats or Amazon Prime memberships any time soon, it did make me stop and think that perhaps by obsessively optimising our lives for 30 extra seconds here, two extra minutes there, we’re making subtle and intangible sacrifices without even realising it. 

So having to wait for the right time, be it in a relationship, a business opportunity or a career is paramount. Being able to delay gratification until the seasons align is key to having what you truly deserve but there is a glitch here too.

The inability to delay gratification is most commonly thought of as a self-control problem. And, unfortunately, we tend to morally judge self-control problems. You can’t resist the temptation of that chocolate cake? “Interesting,” people think, “You must definitely suck at life.”

Though self-control certainly plays a part in delaying gratification, using it to completely explain why people can’t stop themselves from face-planting into chocolate fun-time is both misguided and unhelpful.

For example, researchers found that if you broke children’s trust—i.e., promised something and then didn’t follow through—the kids were far less likely to wait for the second promise.

This makes sense: it’s only rational to delay gratification if and only if you believe you will receive that long-term reward. When you’re unsure of getting the results you’re holding out for, it can be rational to not wait and instead indulge. In these cases, immediate gratification isn’t so much a failure of willpower, it can also be a calculated choice—habituated over years and years of dealing with crappy, lying adults.

If you lived in a country like Zimbabwe with 500% inflation, would you save for your nest egg or go for the tequila fountain instead.  If you lived in a downtrodden neighborhood with druggies threatening you at every street corner, would it be easier or harder to say “no” to a free hit?

Having self-control helps, but in these situations where your environment threatens you and causes you to feel insecure or uncertain, most of us go YOLO. But there are other factors that fuck with delayed gratification. Emotions, as you might expect, can do a number on our ability to resist temptation.

Research shows that when in emotional distress, our desire to feel better overrides our decision-making, resulting in immediate gratification and engaging in dumb shit, like calling your ex-girlfriend at 3 AM or buying a Maserati on credit. This is why I have long argued that developing strong self-discipline is less a question of willpower and more about developing the ability to manage our own emotions.

Believing the ability to delay gratification is all about self-control is misguided. It ignores the powerful roles of situational context and emotions which are often the ones responsible for our choice.

But worse, ascribing the failure to delay gratification to self-control is unhelpful. It leads us to point the finger and blame the individual for their apparent failure. You have poor self-control. You are at fault.  And You are bad. Most people will internalise this narrative. Then they will come to believe that they are somehow inherently deficient and messed up and, oh, what’s the point?

If people who succumb to their emotions tend to indulge in the moment, then it makes sense that developing the ability to identify and manage our emotions will help prevent that indulgence. I believe that if self-discipline is difficult then you must be doing it wrong. (We can argue this in the comments section)

However, ultimately nothing worth having comes easy. You are going to have fight and persevere in order to attain it. You will have to jump through hoops and do cartwheels, it will require you to do somethings you never thought you would do. The key word here is sacrifice. In order to gain what you need, are you willing to give up what you want?

Hope you and yours are safe, as always get in touch via email or the comments section and lets chop it up.

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“We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies.” 
― John Marsden

Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves. The English philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”Perhaps what’s even more amazing is that he said this long before the advent of the internet.

Today, due to the joys of social media, we are regularly exposed to legions of people who believe they know what they are talking about when they do not. And, indeed, as Russell pointed out, the more clueless these people are, the more confident in their pronouncements they seem to be.

It turns out that Russell’s axiom has been studied and the data backs it up. People who are bad at something do believe they are good at it, and people who are good at it do believe they are bad at it. Amateurs are overconfident and experts are underconfident. Newbies believe they’ve got it all figured out and the weathered veterans understand that nothing is really known for sure.

In psychology, this is known as the “Dunning-Kruger Effect.” It’s a psychological tendency named after the two researchers who initially measured it. And it’s surprising how wide its applications are in our lives.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Ignorance of Ignorance

There are four types of information:

• Known knowns – Information you know and you understand. (e.g., how to ride a bike.)
• Known unknowns – Information you know and you don’t understand. (e.g., quantum physics.)
• Unknown knowns – Information that you know, but you didn’t realise that you knew it. Bonus! (e.g., we didn’t realise we instinctively knew how to be a parent until it happened.)
• Unknown unknowns – Information that you’re completely oblivious to. Not only do you not know it, you don’t even know that you don’t know it. LoL

The unknown unknowns are where the Dunning-Kruger effect comes into play in the worst way. It’s our tendency to overestimate our own knowledge/skills/competence and underestimate our own ignorance.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect goes beyond ignorance. It presents a meta-layer of ignorance—the ignorance of our own ignorance. It’s one thing to make a mistake and then realise you did so because you just didn’t know any better. But it’s next-level crazy to make a mistake and not even know it and then continue to believe you never made a mistake because you’re awesome.

That is the Dunning-Kruger Effect. And that is what Russell says is so wrong with the world. The fact that we all do this. That we predictably overestimate our knowledge and abilities in a way that causes more errors and graver mistakes.

For example:

• Gun owners who think they’re highly knowledgeable about gun safety score the lowest on tests of gun safety.
• Medical lab workers—the people who process samples for medical test results—who rate themselves as highly competent in their jobs are actually the worst at their jobs.
• Elderly people who think they’re better drivers than most are actually four times more likely to make unsafe driving errors.
• The lowest performing college students dramatically overestimate their performance on exams and their general knowledge in their area of study.
• The lowest performers in a debate competition wildly overestimated how well they did. They thought they’d won 59% of their contests when they actually only won 22% of them.

Now, I know what you probably did when you read through that list. It’s probably the same thing I did.

“Psh, those other people are soooo dumb. Good thing I know about all of the ways I’m terrible at things… which means that the things I’m amazing at, I actually am pretty amazing.” 

We read things like this and at no point do we stop to consider the areas where we think we are great are also delusional. We fail to consider that we also fall victim to this blindspot. That list is based on years of research but we will browse through it as opinion.

Just one example: we have blind spots when it comes to our emotional awareness. We might project our own crap onto other people, misplace our anger and judgment, shut down when we get uncomfortable, overcompensate for feelings of inferiority, let our jealousy get the best of us, be an insensitive prick without even realising we’re being an insensitive prick, and so on. We all do it. All of us.

But some of us think we don’t do it nearly as much or as poorly as others. And yet, studies have shown that people who rank lowest on objective emotional intelligence tests think they’re far more emotionally aware than others. And it gets worse. These same people were more reluctant to listen to feedback about their scores and—AND—were much less likely to express interest in resources that would help them improve their emotional intelligence. Go figure.

And it’s not just with emotions, it’s with… well, everything. People with the unhealthiest lifestyle habits rate themselves as comparatively healthier than they actually are. People who score poorly on cognitive reasoning and analytical thinking tests severely overestimate their cognitive and analytical abilities. Meanwhile, the people who score highly underestimate their performance.

People who hold the most politically biased views also hold the most inaccurate “factual” beliefs. They wildly over or underestimate numbers related to things like welfare participation and government budget expenditures, look at Zimbabwe and ZANU-PF supporters.

So here we are, trapped in a universe where the people who need the most help not only refuse it, they refuse to even believe they need help in the first place.

The Paradox of Overcoming Ignorance

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the Dunning-Kruger effect is that it’s incredibly difficult to overcome. And that’s because it’s wrapped in contradiction. How do you get someone—or yourself—to look for something they can’t even see? How do you correct an error if you don’t even know you made one?

This is the paradox of trying to overcome our own ignorance: The very thing that would help us see our mistakes is the same thing that would keep us from making them in the first place.

You can’t reason with a conspiracy theorist precisely because they didn’t form their beliefs with reason. Had they the ability to change their beliefs based on reason and evidence, they wouldn’t have believed in wild conspiracy theories in the first place. In fact, they think they’re the only ones being reasonable to begin with.

Part of the problem is that there is comfort in the feeling of knowing. People don’t like uncertainty. And so settling on a belief helps us feel like we’ve made more sense of the world. When we can make sense of the world, we feel safe. Whether that belief is true or not doesn’t matter—it just has to give us some relief from the anxiety of not knowing.

Maybe there’s a backdoor way to infiltrate our stuck minds and deconstruct them somehow. Research suggests it’s sorta-kinda-maybe possible. Getting people to focus on developing related skills, rather than assessing their own abilities, seems to have some effect in reducing the Dunning-Kruger effect in task performance.

For example, if someone is terrible at accounting but doesn’t realise it, perhaps you teach them organisation skills so that in the process of learning how to better organise paperwork and transactions, they come to realise that they are the world’s worst accountant.

It also might be effective to simply teach people about the concept of blindspots and the Dunning-Kruger Effect to begin with and then let the idea percolate in their minds for a while until they start questioning their own assumptions.

Also, as much as you’d like to be a prick to some of these people, it turns out it’s not helpful to ridicule them for how stupid they are. Ridiculing people simply causes them to become more defensive and double-down on their challenged beliefs, not relinquish them.

That said, you can gently peer pressure someone into seeing their ignorance. Try showing them examples of top performers in whatever field they’re so overly confident about. This might or might not work depending on how delusional the person is, but it’s worth a shot. I have a mate, we will call him Eddy, he thinks he is amazing at his job but the contrary is true. Telling him he sucks will not work, but putting him around people that actually kickass might help him realise his flaws.

In the end, though, I think the only way to ward off our own ignorance is by choosing to have fewer opinions and more loosely held beliefs.

Humility is an important value. In fact, the Dunning-Kruger Effect suggests that humility can be highly practical. By intentionally underestimating our understanding of things, not only do we open up more opportunities to learn and grow, but we also foster a more realistic view of ourselves, and prevent ourselves from looking like a narcissistic person around others.

That is… until we decide that we are the most humble person you’ve ever met. Nobody is more humble than me. I’m so much more humble than everybody else…

…and now we’re back to square one.

As always, hope you and yours are safe.

Photo Credit: Photo by Mohamed Khaled from Pexels

“When you see a new year, see realities and limit fantasies!” 
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

It’s the new year, and most people have resolutions. Yet what I have learned from 2020 is that nothing is guaranteed. Now, most will think what I am saying is do not plan but that isn’t what I am saying. What I am saying is to plan for the worst and hope for the best, quit fantasising about a new you but rather work toward a better you.

I was talking to a mate who said to me his 2021 resolutions include getting rich, surprisingly quoting the 50cent album “Get Rich Or Die Tryn”. Whatever the reasoning is, it’s the new year and he has decided that the new him is going to be a Rolls-Royce-driving, bikini-pool-party throwing, Moet chugging Zimbo.

Now, if you approached trying to get rich as most people do, here’s how you would conceptualise it:

• Start out by making $100.
• OK, great, now let’s try to make $1,000.
• Snap, that was hard, but now let’s try to make it $10,000.
• You eventually get there. But now it’s three years later and the mere thought of working until you have $100,000 in the bank makes you want to give up all your possessions and go live in a monastery.
• You say “stuff it” and buy a 70-inch flat-screen TV. Ahh, that feels better.
• Dreams of bikini parties on your yacht evaporate. Along with most of your savings.

That’s how most people try to do it. And if you haven’t noticed, most people aren’t rich. In fact, most people are quite the opposite. This is not a coincidence. In case you haven’t read a few books on wealth accumulation, this is how people who actually get rich do it (and not end up in bankruptcy court like good ol’ Fiddy):

• Start out making $100.
• Invest that $100 in skills/training/assets that will eventually net you $1,000.
• Then, invest that $1000 in skills/training/assets that will eventually net you $10,000.
• Invest that $10,000 in skills/training/assets that will eventually net you $100,000.
• Invest that $100,000 until you’re balling on your yacht like a sheik from Qatar.

These are the two mindsets of building wealth. People who stay poor or middle class see money as something to be spent. People who become rich see money as something to be invested. You can call it the “spending mindset” versus the “investing mindset.” One gets you rich and one keeps you treading water, always fighting to keep your face above the surface.

So why am I going over all of this when the post is about resolutions? Because it applies to creating habits and achieving resolutions in life as well. In fact, it’s the exact same concept.

Resolutions vs Habits

Let’s take the most cliche and universal New Year’s Resolution of the bunch: “I want to lose weight and look sexy for summer.”

I think almost everyone has had this resolution at some point. In most cases, you recover from your New Year’s Eve binge on January 1st, sign up for the gym on January 2nd, force yourself to go 5-6 times over the ensuing months mostly out of guilt because you spent so much damn money and you feel like you should use it. But you have no idea what you’re doing. And my god, look at all of the skinny sweaty people here. Wow, I feel so lazy just watching them. Can this treadmill go any slower? I’m tired. I want a burger. Or maybe ice cream. Or maybe an ice cream burger.

And it’s February 1st and you’re back to body-melding yourself into the fabric of your sofa, watching awful Netflix reruns, and wondering how is it that all of your clothes seem to be shrinking at the same time. Yes. The struggle is real.

The problems with the conventional pursuit of goals in life (i.e. new year’s resolutions) are well-documented at this point.

People tend to rely too much on self-discipline and neglect forming useful habits. They tend to bite off more than they can chew, so to speak, setting goals that are far above their ability or knowledge level and then becoming frustrated when they make little to no progress towards them. People are tempted to take “shortcuts” to achieve a goal that may actually sabotage them in the long-run, like starving yourself to lose weight or cheating to get a good grade on a test.

That’s all true. But I’m here to suggest something else.

“Lose 20kg by summer” is a crazy goal to begin with. That’s because it’s borne from the same spending mindset that keeps people broke — or in this case, keeps them overweight. They view life in the overly-simplistic terms of “Do a lot of X, eventually get Y.” Just like forcing yourself to work and save for 20 years is unlikely to get you rich, forcing yourself to go to the gym dozens of times is unlikely to make you lose much weight and keep it off. Goals like these require an intense amount of effort, yet they never seem to “stick.” Eventually, your energy and discipline run out and you fall right back to the same person you were, except now you feel defeated.

That’s because it’s better to invest your limited focus and energy on building habits rather than specific resolutions. Just like you want to take the money you earn and put it to work for you, you want to take the effort you expend in changing yourself and put it to work changing you as well.

People usually don’t focus on habits because goals sound much sexier in our minds. They feel more motivating at the moment when we think about them. There’s a clear image of a certain result in our head and that gets us excited.

Habits, on the other hand, don’t sound as sexy in our heads. They’re long-term and repetitive, which makes them seem boring. And there’s no clear image one can imagine for “going to the gym every morning for a year” or “only drinking alcohol on weekends.” You don’t get this rush of inspiration imagining yourself eating salad for lunch every day. You don’t lay in bed at night fantasising about flossing every morning.

Resolutions are a one-time bargain. They are the spending mindset. “I will spend X amount of energy to receive Y reward.” Habits are an investing mindset. Habits require one to invest one’s efforts for a little while. And then take the rewards of that effort and re-invest them in a greater effort to form even better habits.

This is why so many people who lose weight end up gaining it back (and then some). They focus on singular goals in life rather than developing underlying habits. So when their energy and discipline runs out (and it always does because self-discipline is limited) they balloon back to their original selves.

With habits, on the other hand, there’s no single endpoint that must be reached. The only goal of habits is that the goal is never over. It’s a simple repetition that one does until muscle memory and brain chemistry kick in. And you’re now performing the desired action on autopilot. With goals, every day you go back to the gym feels harder. With habits, after a while, it feels harder to not go to the gym than it does to go.

Therefore, it is a better investment of one’s finite energy and discipline to focus on building habits. It’s fine to still have goals. Hell, I’d like to lose a few kgs by summer. But that’s not what my mind will focus on this year. Instead, I will look at the habits that underlie that goal. That would make that goal an inevitability. Like eating better, walking more often instead of taking an Uber, developing a workout plan — and then focus on those. The weight loss then naturally occurs as a side effect.

The Art of Compounding Habits

But here’s the kicker. Some habits are better than other habits because some habits, once acquired, make other positive habits much easier to acquire as well. For instance, quitting smoking is hard. But some data suggests that taking up some form of exercises such as jogging or biking can make it easier for someone to quit (probably because they’re hacking up a lung the whole time).

These are sometimes referred to as “keystone habits.” They are habits that, once adopted, will reverberate into other areas of your life, which makes acquiring other desirable habits more natural and require less effort. Unfortunately, researchers haven’t been so great at saying exactly which habits give the best returns and so you see a lot of moronic articles out there citing things like “just have more willpower!” because they heard this guy say it once and it sounded smart.

I like to think of keystone habits as “compounding habits” because, much like compounding returns on an investment, over a long enough period of time, they can increase the richness of your life exponentially. Goals, by themselves, generate linear growth and change. Habits are capable of generating exponential growth and change.

And in case you were bad at maths, here’s a quick example of the difference between linear gains and exponential gains over the long-run: Different habits have higher or lower interest rates, therefore making some habits far better initial investments of your energy and discipline than others.

The One Word Factor

Another reason why typical New Year’s Resolutions suck is because of the time horizon. If I say something like, “I want to write another book this year,” it becomes that much easier for me to put off starting the goal until June, July, or whenever, at which point it becomes almost entirely unfeasible.

Research shows that habits only need about 30 days of consistent effort to install themselves into our brains. At that point, they begin to become automatic. So screw New Year’s resolutions because they are restricting and constricting. One year is too short to build life skills that actually change you but one word can do more for you. Words such as PURPOSE, SURRENDER, SERVE, PRAY, RISE, FORGIVE, LEARN, ROUTINE, CONNECT, GROUNDED, and EXPAND. These words will shape and mould you into a better individual than any goal can.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be something I have mentioned but it has to be something that resonates with you. Instead of saying ” I want to lose 20kgs for summer” you would rather say my word of the year is HEALTHY. This means even if gyms close, or even if you do not lose the 20kilos you are not going to feel defeated because the goal was to be healthy and not a number.

To help you get started ask yourself a few questions. What do you want to focus on this year? Or what’s in the way? What do you need more or less of? 9 out of 10 people will fail with their resolutions. 50% of resolution makers will fail by the end of January. But One Word sticks! There’s no number to it, it’s an investment to the future you and it will compound in a way resolutions cannot.

Hopefully, by now, you’re starting to see the matrix. And you’re starting to understand why you’ve failed to achieve so many goals you’ve set for yourself in the past.

Setting a goal like, “I want to lose 20kg for my wedding” or “I want to get a promotion this year,” and then forcing yourself to just do a bunch of things until it happens is akin to saying, “I want a million dollars,” and then deciding to work 120 hour work weeks until you get there. It is almost certainly going to make you miserable and burn you out. And even if you do get there, like a person who wins the lottery and immediately spends it all, you’re guaranteed to lose it soon after.

The correct way to make a million dollars, as we discussed, is to start small and then intelligently re-invest what you’ve earned, so stop trying to scale linearly and instead scale exponentially.

We’ve also seen that some habits scale more exponentially than others — i.e., some habits provide higher rates of return because they provide benefits that then make adopting subsequent habits easier. Therefore, it makes sense to use your energy to develop habits with the highest rate of return first, and then move on to other desired habits later.

There seems to be a bias in the world that underestimates what it takes to accomplish really big goals in life and overestimates the effort required to take on a series of small goals. In my experience, it’s the regular heartbeat of pursuing and nailing small wins that eventually leads to the big ones. In fact, I’ve often found that becoming so intent on the small simple daily victories often causes one to not even realise one of the big goals has occurred until it’s already passed you by. This, too, is a habit. And I would argue it’s an incredibly compounding one at that.

My word for 2021 is SERVE… In whatever capacity, in whatever way I see necessary I shall serve. And this doesn’t mean spreading myself too thin. It means putting my talent and creativity to make my sphere of influence and environment better.

What is your word for 2021? Share it with us in the comments section or email us, we would love to hear from you. As always, hope you and yours are safe. Let’s Go!

Photo Credit: Photo by Breakingpic from Pexels

“We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honour the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.” – Brené Brown

“Vulnerability” has become a bit of a buzzword in pop culture and as such, often gets distorted into something it’s not. Here’s what vulnerability really is and what it can and can’t do for you. Maybe you’re one of those people who cringe when they hear the word “vulnerability.” Maybe the very thought of being more vulnerable nauseates you, conjuring up images of holding hands around the campfire while you cry over how your best friend doesn’t love you as you love him, or whatever.

Well, I’m here to tell you that vulnerability is far simpler, more mundane, and yet way more powerful than all of the preconceived, wishy-washy notions you might have.

Humour me for a moment—read through this list and tell me if any of it applies to you:

• You consistently fall into boring conversation topics because they’re “safe” and shallow and you don’t have to risk offending or inciting anyone with them.
• You’re stuck in a job or lifestyle you don’t truly enjoy because other people always told you that it was a good idea and you didn’t want to upset or disappoint others.
• You haven’t exercised or groomed yourself to the extent that you could because you didn’t want to stand out too much.
• Dressing extremely well makes you feel uncomfortable.
• Smiling at strangers makes you feel creepy.
• The idea of asking someone out openly scares you because of the possible rejection.

All of these are symptoms of a root problem: an inability to make yourself vulnerable.

Many of us weren’t taught how to express our emotions freely. For whatever reason—maybe our home situation, maybe childhood trauma. Maybe our parents didn’t ever express their emotions either—we’ve grown up with habits embedded deeply into us to keep us stifled and bottled up.

Don’t be controversial. Try not to be unique. Don’t do anything “crazy” or “stupid” or “selfish.”

I was the same way. My entire young life I was terrified of anyone not liking me. The mere thought of someone hating me, girl or guy, would literally keep me up at night. As a result, every aspect of my life revolved around people-pleasing, hiding my faults, covering my tracks, blaming others. This all may sound hokey and new-agey. Trust me, it’s not.

Connecting with others in this way by being vulnerable—as opposed to overcompensating and trying to get everyone to like you—will result in some of the best interactions and relationships of your life.

Vulnerability is a cornerstone concept in pretty much all of my writing, from life and purpose to finding a career you enjoy, to connecting with the world around you—all of it.

It’s also probably one of the most misunderstood concepts I write about. So I’m here to try to fix that.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you sit around the campfire with me and sing songs about how great we all are deep down inside…although, it might be just as uncomfortable at times.

But I promise you this: it’s worth it in the end. Trust me.

What Vulnerability Really Is

A lot of people—especially those who’ve spent their entire lives covering up their emotions—have a hard time knowing exactly what vulnerability is.

It’s understandable. A lot of behaviours that might look like displays of vulnerability on the surface are actually incredibly manipulative and/or needy; i.e., the opposite of being vulnerable.

We’ll get to those soon, but first, I want to be clear about what genuine vulnerability is:

Vulnerability is consciously choosing NOT to hide your emotions or desires from others.

That’s it. You just freely express your thoughts, feelings, desires, and opinions regardless of what others might think of you.

This can be as simple as complimenting someone on how good they look. Approaching an attractive stranger you don’t know. Establishing clear and strong boundaries, or expressing your undying love to someone.

It can mean putting yourself in a position where you can be rejected. Saying a joke that might not be funny. Asserting an opinion that may offend others. Joining a table of people you don’t know, telling someone you’re attracted to them.

Practising vulnerability really is as simple as just doing these things. But while being more vulnerable is simple, it’s not always easy.

That’s because all of these things require you to stick your neck out emotionally in some way. It’s risky and there are often real consequences to being vulnerable.

But the key to true vulnerability is that you are willing to accept the consequences no matter what.

You will offend some people. And you will turn some people off. You might lose a friend or a client or a romantic partner.

But vulnerability is the path to true human connection. As Robert Glover said in No More Mr. Nice Guy, “Humans are attracted to each other’s rough edges.”

Show your rough edges. Stop trying to be perfect. Expose your true self and share yourself without inhibition. Take the rejections and lumps and move on because you’re the bigger, stronger person.

Examples of Genuine Vulnerability

I really want to hammer on what true vulnerability looks like, so I’ll give some more concrete examples here. Hopefully, this will help you see the subtleties—and the beauty—of being more vulnerable in your life.

Admitting you suck at something

Think about it: if someone is obviously bad at something—whether it’s their golf swing or high-stakes business negotiations—there’s probably nothing more cringe-worthy than when they openly brag about how good they are at it.

On the other hand, when someone openly admits they really suck at something. You’ll probably end up respecting them more for it (as long as they’re not too desperate about it, of course).

If you suck at dating, tell a friend about it and ask for feedback on what you can do about it.

If you’re not good at connecting with people at work and you think it’s affecting your job performance, tell some of your coworkers you’re having a hard time and see if they have any advice for you. I struggle with receiving compliments, I literally “twitch”. But I am learning how to accept this and the few people I have mentioned this to actually help me overcome this.

The point is that you’re not trying to be something that you’re not. You accept who you are, faults and all. People will see this as incredibly confident behaviour and respond in kind.

Taking responsibility instead of blaming others

We all know someone who always seems to blame someone else (or everyone else) for their problems:

• The man who blames his “lying ex” for all of his current relationship problems. He’d be a lot better off if he’d just acknowledge that things didn’t work out and that he was a bad partner at times and then work to address that.
• The coworker who constantly falls short of their performance goals and blames the culture in the office, or the economy, or basically anything but their incompetence. Just admit when you need help with something and find someone who can help you get better.
• The woman who blames all men—not just one man, but all men—for her terrible dating life. As a general rule, if you’re trying to figure out if it’s between half of the population all having the exact same problem or if it’s, perhaps, just you—well, I have some bad news: I did the math and it’s extremely likely that it’s you. So start there.

The reason for taking responsibility for your problems is so powerful because it puts you in control of the solution. When you blame others, you’re handing over control to everyone and everything around you and—SPOILER ALERT—you can’t control everyone and everything around you.

You may not be to blame for your current bad situation, but stepping up and saying that you’re going to take care of it is a power move. A power move.

It shows you’re not fazed by external pressures to look, act, or feel a certain way—that instead you accept reality for what it is and set out to work with what you have.

And it’s a shining example of vulnerability because you’re saying “I have a problem. I’m not perfect, but that’s okay. I can deal with it.”

Power In Vulnerability

If you’ve been paying close attention, you’ve noticed that real, genuine vulnerability represents a form of power—a deep and subtle form of power.

Brene Brown talks about this in her book, Daring Greatly. A person who can make themselves vulnerable, exposing their weaknesses without any regard to what others will think, is saying to the world, “I don’t care what you think of me; this is who I am, and I refuse to be anyone else.”

It’s the backwards law in action: in order to become more resilient, more formidable, you must first bare your flaws and weaknesses for the world to see. In doing so, they lose their power over you, allowing you to live your life with more honesty and intention.

Opening oneself up to vulnerability, training oneself to become comfortable with your emotions, with your faults, and with expressing oneself without inhibitions doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process. A gruelling one at times.

But I can assure you if you put in the work—if you have the difficult conversations; if you express yourself honestly even when it’s risky to do so; if you tell the world “this is who I am and I refuse to be anything else”—you’ll find new depth in your relationships. All of your relationships.

And you’ll come out the other side unashamed of your flaws and who you are.

In closing I will say, there’s a difference between emotional vomit and vulnerability. Emotional vomit is when you suddenly unload an inappropriate amount of emotions and personal history onto a conversation, usually to the utter horror of the person listening. That is repellant and unattractive. In effect, you’re being open and authentic about how needy and pathetic you are. And whether hidden or apparent, neediness is never attractive.

The mistake people make with emotional vomit is that they expect the simple act of vomiting it out to suddenly fix their issues. But the point of emotional vomit is to make you aware of your issues, so you can fix them.

Choose vulnerability to strengthen your relationships but do not emotionally vomit. People respond better when you own your flaws. As always hope you and yours are safe. Share with us your thoughts in the comments section or shoot us an email. Let’s Go!

Photo Credit: Photo by Fillipe Gomes from Pexels