If you want to get better at anything it is important to understand the self-improvement process. Like a week, and a house full of dwarfs, it is made of 7 parts.
1. Desire is the root of all self-improvement.
If you have no desires you have no life force pushing you to improve or achieve. Or reproduce. So make sure you have a desire. Like U2. Or that streetcar in New Orleans.
2. Your desire leads to goals.
Goals are your wants clearly stated. This gives you a target. Which provides focus and direction. Or obsession. Like Calvin Klein.
3. Goals lead to plans.
Plans define a course of action to bridge the gap between you and your goals. The plan declares how you will get to your goal. It determines how you will change yourself or the world to obtain your goal. So make sure you plan, Stan.
4. Plans drive your calendar.
Your calendar determines what you need to do and when. The when, or the time you carve out to act, is critical. Time is the stage for change. You must first find and protect the time needed to act. Just like an Under Armor athlete must protect this house.
5. Your calendar drives your actions.
Action is the key ingredient of progress. It is the doing. Action is the step on the 1000-mile journey. Repeated actions create habits. Habits create more action. And more action and more action, Jackson.
6. Your actions drive your results.
Your actions create progress and momentum. Actions build the bridge. As you build the bridge you reduce the gap between you and your desire.
7. Your results deliver your desires.
Performing the right actions for long enough will create the results needed to attain the things you desire. Keep going. And keep investing your time until you get what you want.
Key Takeaway
Desire –> Goal –> Plan –> Calendar –> Action –> Result –> Attainment
Remember, the process is simple. Not easy.
If you know someone who could benefit from this formula, please share it with them.
When I was a kid there was a lot of motivational material around our home. Most of it was in the form of cross-stitch art. Because during my childhood cross-stitch was a popular form of philosophical expression. And my home was a hotbed of the cross-stitch movement.
Over the past several weeks one of those pieces of cross-stitch motivation has been sparkling my brain again. Here’s the memorable and rhymey message:
Progress by the yard is hard. But by the inch, it’s a cinch.
As an entrepreneur, I love this message, because it reminds me that we can build a successful business brick-by-brick, action-by-action, and day-by-day. As long as we bring the IRS along for the ride.
As a writer, it reminds me that my books and blog posts are created word-by-word. Even my 290-page book What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? was created one word at a time. (Ok, so it was actually written one letter at a time, but that would be measured in fractions of an inch, and that makes for a clunky cross-stitch message. So we will stick with words.)
As a coach, this message reminds me that great performances are built on tiny improvements in technique, strength, explosiveness, speed, endurance, focus and mental toughness. These are almost imperceptible individual improvements, that add up, in aggregate.
As a discus thrower in high school, I improved by 30 feet each year. When you convert 30 feet into inches you get 360. Which is an inch of progress every day for 1 year. (While also allowing a day off for Christmas, New Year’s Day, My Birthday, Thanksgiving, and Tubestock on the Connecticut River.)
As a person who wants to lose weight, the inch-by-inch approach translates to an ounce-by-ounce approach. This mindset has made it fairly easy for me to lose 20 pounds in the past 11 months. I’ll be sharing more about what I’ve done to accomplish this as I reach the 12-month mark of my weight-eviction plan. (Unless I accidentally lose all of my weight and have nothing left to type with.)
As parents, my wife and I teach the progress-by-the-inch mindset to our children. It has helped them excel in academics, athletics, music and hair growing.
Key Takeaway
Set long-term goals. And create a long-term, inch-by-inch action plan. Small gains made day after day add up to big differences over time. Because the easiest way to make great gains is simply by focusing on the smallest increments of progress.
If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.
Careers are journeys. They have a starting point, a middle, and an end. Which direction you travel, and how far you go are up to you. But setting your career goals is important because it tells you how quickly you need to paddle and which turns to make.
But if you’ve never been in a canoe, think of your career like an airplane flight. That flight starts with an origination and a destination. The interesting thing about commercial flights is that they are off-course for 95% of the flight. This is because of the air highways that pilots follow, weather, traffic, the fact that the runways are not lined up like Evil Knievel ramps, and occasionally because the pilot didn’t ask for directions and took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.
But knowing where you want to end up paints a vision of your ideal carer path and allows for a constant set of adjustments that allow you to reach your destination. And with that in place, you can use it to make the following 2 valuable career decisions.
1.Opportunity Evaluation
Opportunities of all shapes and sizes will come your way. You need to decide which ones are right for you. But how do you know? The career goals tell you if the next opportunity is aligned or misaligned with your goals. It is like choosing rocks to step on as you try to cross a stream.* Does the rock opportunity take you in the right direction? Your path doesn’t need to be a straight line. It just needs to add to your skills, knowledge or experience in a way that will serve you on your journey to your goal. (*If you are not hunting ghosts it’s okay to cross streams.)
2.Pace Evaluation
Your career won’t last forever. This is true of your work career, athletic career, music career or whatever other career you may have in high school, college, or after graduation. Although if you are sentenced to life in prison, that career will last as long as you do.
Because you have a finite amount of time to reach your goals, you need to keep yourself moving and progressing at a minimum pace. Unless you are a monk you can’t sit in any one position too long, or you won’t be able to make it to your goal before the career buzzer sounds.
Size Matters
Don’t set your goals too small or you won’t challenge yourself enough. Don’t let anyone tell you not to set your goals too big. Because big goals help you grow. And even if you don’t reach them, they will push you to go as far as you can. Which is the goal of an aggressive goal. Which is totally meta.
Key Takeaway
Establish your goals. They will keep you moving in the right direction. They will force you to think about your pace and progress. They will force you to think about the skill development work, self-education, and training you will need. And goals provide a scorecard and progress indicator that make your career a fun and interesting game to play.
*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.
I am a big believer in beliefs. I like a good framework to guide my actions and behaviors. And as I wrap up the last few weeks of my 40s, I have been planning for a great new decade ahead. Heck, AARP has already invited me to the party.
I am wiser than I have ever been. The important things in life keep getting clearer. That’s why I approach my next decade with a new funeral mindset.
In this mindset, I regularly imagine the sanctuary where my bon voyage service will be held. No sound. So commentary. Just the attendance.
I am focused on who and how many people will show up. And who will shake the pews for me. (I come from a family of pew shakers who laugh silently at everything we find funny in church.)
I have always been concerned that I wouldn’t have many people show up for my last shindig. It’s a healthy concern about what happens if you do the wrong things in life. When I was in college Jeffrey Dahmer’s funeral was at my church in Madison, Wisconsin. I planned to go because I thought that would have been an interesting life experience. And it would have been. But I had a class at that time and decided not to skip it. I read in the paper that only 26 people attended the service. I expect most of them were there to confirm he was really dead. And to finish the job if he wasn’t.
Dahmer did bad things that left him with a lonely funeral.
I want to live each day in the opposite way. Which means collecting as many friends as possible. Maintaining and strengthening my relationships with my friends, and family. Conducting business in a fair and honorable way. And having a strong positive impact on my communities. I want to have a positive impact on people in both my innermost circle and my outermost rings of influence. And I want to remember not to eat anyone.
I want to be known as a listener. And as someone who shows up to help. I want to be known as a friend. I want to be enjoyable to be around. I want to share my time and knowledge with other people to have a positive impact on their lives. If I do all those things, at the end of it all, I hope people will dress up and come shake a pew with me for an hour. But just to be safe, I’m going to insist on serving delicious ham sandwiches afterward. And maybe free beer.
Key Takeaway
Always keep your funeral attendance in mind. Live in a way that will pack that house with those you have positively impacted. Put effort and care into your relationships. Build bridges. Mend fences. Share your gifts and lessons. Create great memories. And set a strong example for others to follow. Be a positive force in your communities. And the community will show up to confirm your contribution.
*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.
I don’t have any tattoos. At least none that I know of. But I like to think about what I would get inked in my epidermis if I was into such things. This little exercise keeps me looking for significant words, images and icons with the potential to provide a powerful, positive and long-lasting impact on my life. Yet, because I only think about it, I save money on both the inking and the laser removal cost when I realize the tattoo artists I hired didn’t use spellcheck on their work.
If you asked me today what tattoo I would get, I have a quick answer. There are 3 words that I would have written under my eyelids so I could still see them when I am wearing a turtleneck or asleep.
The 3 Words:
Opportunities Never Cease
I love this phrase. It is the optimist’s motto. It is the pessimist’s hope. It is the entrepreneur’s crack. It is the start of every great story.
This phrase is a great reminder that you can change the trajectory of your life at any point. You can improve. You can reinvent. You can shed your skin. Heck, you can even shed your backyard. Or your aquarium.
There are always great new opportunities:
To create new things.
To develop new relationships and improve or repair old ones.
To learn, grow and transform.
To establish a great habit.
To create wealth and prosperity.
To improve your attitude and outlook.
Create your legacy.
To have a positive impact on others.
To make minds sparkle.
To take control of your health.
To apologize.
To randomly write the word fart just to make people laugh.
To salvage a bad day.
To take the first step.
To drop the weight you have carried. (Both literally and figuratively.)
To discover how much you are capable of.
To start your winning streak.
To do something new for the first time.
To discover a new favorite.
To forgive yourself.
To reprioritize.
Key Takeaway
Opportunities never cease. Discover the opportunities all around you. They are gateways to growth and happiness. And they are the blank pages for you to fill with the great stories and successes of your life.
*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.
I recently had a talk with someone who had made a mistake. They didn’t break any rules or laws. The mistake was more of a personal accountability issue. It was like a failure on a mental fortitude challenge. The kind of mistake that won’t get you in trouble with the law, but it could get you voted off an island.
After discussing the mistake I shared 2 simple lessons with this person. Because there are lessons in everything. Kind of like high fructose corn syrup.
The 2 lessons:
Know how The Ideal You would handle this type of situation. The Ideal You provides a north star for navigating all decisions.
Allow this experience to help your self-confidence, not hurt it. This is the key difference between a learning and a losing situation.
When you identify a mistake and can quickly learn and adjust from it, the mistake is a win. A positive. A way to quickly get better. You fail fast, learn, and improve. It’s a basic success formula for startups and sitcoms with teenage casts.
When you make a mistake don’t continue to beat yourself up over it. Because then you deal with both the mistake and the loss of self-confidence. Which is a lose-lose proposition.
Mistake identification and correction should always lead to both growth and an increase in confidence. After all, you have just learned how to avoid the same mistake in the future. You are better equipped. You have more experience. And more knowledge. All of which should make you feel more confident. Like Demi Lovato. Or like you used Sure deodorant.
Pay careful attention to your mental trajectory when you leave a mistake. If you are still pointing down, you are mistaking wrong. You have already made your error. You have learned your lesson. You already know what to do better next time. So point your attitude arrow up and to the right. It is time for growth and improvement. Time to rise and shine.
Key Takeaway
When you make a mistake learn from it. Let the learning add to your confidence. Emerge from a mistake better and more prepared for whatever comes your way next. Give yourself permission to be an amateur at everything. Then just keep getting better with every mistake you make.
*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.
When I was in high school I participated in track and field each spring. It was the perfect sport for someone like me who lives at the Venn diagram intersection of interested-in-self-improvement and terrible-at-baseball.
Track & field is simple to understand. It provides clear and immediate feedback on both your performance and your improvement. If your times go down, or your distances go up, you improved. If your measures go backward, you are going backward. As Jerry Reed sang, ‘When you’re hot you’re hot. When you’re not you’re not.’ Nothing is subjective.
However, at the end of each season, there was one subjective element: The Awards Banquet.
At Hanover High School in Hanover, New Hampshire, there were 4 awards handed out at the Track & Field Team banquet.
1. Freshman Of The Year.
2. Most improved.
3. MVP
4 The Samuelson Award for Oustanding Athlete (The award was named after the Samuelson family that Olympic gold medal marathoner Joan Benoit Samuelson married into. Her husband Scott has now held our high school’s pole vault record for 47 years.)
During my 4-year high school track and field career, I won 3 out of 4 of our school’s awards. But there was only one of them that I really wanted.
Freshman Year
I was totally forgettable my first year. While I scored enough points at meets that season to earn a varsity letter I wasn’t turning any heads. My good friend Ben Soderholm was the Freshman Of The Year. No contest. Ben was special right out of the blocks. Looking back now I figure that God knew that his life would be a sprint and he better get started fast to get as much in as he could during his relatively short life. (I miss you bro. Also, I realize that you probably don’t read my blog posts anymore. Or do you…)
Sophomore Year
My sophomore year I improved 30 feet in the discus and 7 feet in the shot put. I placed well in our conference meet and in the state championship meet in the discus. At the banquet, I was named the Most Improved Athlete.
Junior Year
My junior year I improved another 31 feet in the discus, and another 6 feet in the shot put. I was the state champion, New England Champion, and broke our school record in the discus. I also ran some hurdles, sprints and high jumped too. None of those performances would have won me any awards other than Most Willing To Be Vulnerable. At the banquet, I was named the team MVP.
Senior Year
My senior year I won a state championship, repeated as the New England champion, and set a state record that would stand for 12 years. At the banquet, I won the Samuelson Award as the Outstanding Athlete (male or female).
Me and my Mom and Dad after my last high school track meet in East Hartford, CT where I defended my New England title in the discus and broke the state record.
While I was certainly honored to win the Samuelson Award, I was envious of my teammate who won Most Improved. I was obsessed with that award. It was my personal quirk. But that quirk served me well. And the obsession with the MIA award is what won me the other 2 awards.
Reflection
I wanted to improve so much each year that I would be the obvious and undisputed Most Improved Athlete each year, no matter how good I became. It was a healthy obsession. (Not a case of possession obsession.) I loved the work. I loved the sacrifice. I loved the process. And I loved the results like Joan Jett loves rock n’ roll.
Looking back several decades later, I also loved what the process of improvement in track and field taught me about improvement in the rest of my life. The desire to greet each day a little better than the day before is core to my mission and my self-image.
Today, I am focused on self-improvement in various roles including:
Husband
Father
Friend
Entrepreneur
Marketer
Investor
Coach
Author
Speaker
Person who has a body. (I am focused on improving my fitness. But this construct made it awkward to state that. Sorry.)
List maker
Today, much of my self-improvement comes from reading, studying, and reflecting on what works and what doesn’t. It comes through listening to the wisdom of others. And through trial and error. It is a product of accumulating knowledge. As a result, I get better at things slowly, but steadily.
The most encouraging part of my journey is that I can feel the improvement. Just as I could tell that I was improving as an athlete thanks to the tape measure, I can tell that I am better at the 10 roles listed above. And as I get better at these, other people inquire about my approach to each of these roles. I have found that the simplest measure of your improvement in any area is whether or not people are asking you for insights and advice on that topic.
Key Takeaway
Life is one long self-improvement journey. Take what you learned about self-improvement through athletics, music, dance, acting, scouts, or any other childhood activity and apply it to your adult roles. Get a little bit better every day. The compounding effect of your improvements will change your life in ways that you can’t even imagine.
*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.
Think about your work, your school, or your primary non-cinnamon role.
Ask yourself:
‘Is this the thing I am destined to do?’
‘Is this what I have been working towards?’
‘Have I arrived?’
‘Or is this simply leading me to where I am going?’
It is easy to think that where you are right nowis your story, role, or great achievement.
But if you are growing, there is always more. Like the sizes at a Big and Tall clothing store.
There are new chapters. New challenges. New knowledge. New capabilities. And new identities. And if you are Mork from Ork, there is Nanu Nanu.
I have been surprised by how many doors I have passed through at the back of wardrobes. But instead of finding lions, and witches, I keep finding new opportunities and perspectives.
These doors have led me to great new experiences that I didn’t realize were coming. But now I expect more incredible things ahead. Which is probably how Dave Grohl feels.
It is a beautiful place to be in your life, career, or avocation when you expect more and better roles in your future because growth and transformation have become the rule, not the exception.
Key Takeaway
Keep going. Keep Growing. There is more and better ahead.
*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.
Before I launched the advertising and ideas agency, The Weaponry, I read an article about Pharrell Williams in Fast Company. In the article, the famously happy singer, songwriter, and producer talked about his success and inspirations that have helped him along the way. He didn’t mention the Arby’s hat.
Williams raved about the book The AlchemistbyPaulo Coelho. In fact, he claimed that this book was like his Bible. And since The Bible is my Bible, I figured The Alchemist was probably also worth reading. So I bought a used copy. And I devoured it. (In a literary way, not a digestive track-way.)
The book helped me think about the story of my life and my personal legend. It made me start paying attention to all the signs the universe was sending me, encouraging me to follow my own path. This was highly valuable because at the time the universe started putting up neon signs everywhere. Like Reno.
Those signs were telling me that I should launch a new ad agency. So I did, in part because The Alchemist helped me recognize the signs, and taught me that when you want something enough the whole universe conspires to help you get it. (Except maybe for short sellers. Those people love a good dumpster fire.)
Shortly after reading The Alchemist, I started my entrepreneurial adventure. That was 7 years ago. Entrepreneurship led me to blog. Which led me to write my first book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? Which has led me to amazing speaking opportunities. Which has made me think a lot about what’s next for me and my personal story.
So I recently picked up The Alchemist again. I eagerly read through it in 3 days. But I also recently read a quote (or maybe it was a fortune cookie) that said You never read the same book twice. That was definitely true of my reread of The Alchemist.
This time around I didn’t feel like I was just starting my journey. I felt like I was in the thick of writing my story every day, with the universe as my co-author. And the story keeps getting better. Today I feel a little like Clark Kent or Bruce Banner must have felt once they began understanding their superpowers. Except my superpowers are more like smiling, offering encouragement, and dropping random pop culture references. But I’ll take what I can get, yes I’ll take what I can get. (And then she looked at me with big brown eyes and said…)
Key Takeaway:
Read The Alchemist. Or re-read it if you have read it before. You will find something new and inspiring. I am sure there are signs the universe is giving you right now that you don’t recognize. This book will help you see.
*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.
Adam Albrecht Blog 