Ever had the kind of day where you just collapse face-first into the couch, pull a blanket over yourself, and cry?

I was having that kind of day. A nine-hour workday including four hours of meetings, a half-hour gap, and then a two-hour meeting for my volunteer commitment. So tired I couldn’t see straight. I couldn’t get warm and my hand tremors were back, one of the lingering after-effects of COVID.

I had hit the wall.

It’s the same thing in marathon training. You hit your physical limits, and just when you’re already exhausted and in pain, a whole new set of fun symptoms pops out of the closet. Oh, you thought that was a wall? Nope, it turns out it there’s an entire room on the other side!

There I lay, trying to will myself to get up and get camera-ready (which did not, in the end, happen. Take me as I am). My hubby came over and started rubbing my back.

“It’s only Wednesday!” I wailed.

I’m not a crier, as a rule, unless I’m running a distance race. For some reason, running sets off all my emotions. I cry because I love my friends so much, I cry because the weather is so beautiful, I cry because I just set a PR, I cry because I can already imagine the giant meal I’m going to eat at the finish line. None of that bothers me.

Crying when I’m ill, though, is something I find humiliating and pathetic. One more thing that makes me feel worse when I really don’t need anything else.

I got up after ten minutes - which feels like a long time when you’re bottoming out - and started getting my equipment set up. I was so tired I kept forgetting stuff. “I just made eight trips back and forth for four things!”

Then I logged on to my meeting, and everything changed.

There were the faces of my friends, colleagues, and companions. This is what gets me through, the same as it does on the race course. Connecting with people I care about somehow taps into a well of energy, even when I’m at my lowest physical ebb.

This was a transition meeting, a sort of farewell to the previous year, passing the torch to the new team. Everything is a relay when you think about it.

I didn’t feel like I had anything to offer that night. What advice did I have? Uh, try not to die in office? Don’t be me? I felt like I had failed at every single one of the big plans I had at the beginning of the program year. I had campaigned on a platform, and I hadn’t made progress on any of the grand plans I had, nary a one.

When I looked back over the past year, I didn’t know how to avoid cataloguing my woes and tribulations:

“Let’s see, I started this journey with a root canal and sutures in my mouth, we moved, our dog died, I had an antibiotic-resistant staph infection, had surgery and four stitches in my midsection, was on four separate courses of antibiotics, my husband almost went blind in one eye, and then I almost died of COVID-19. Any questions?”

(You’d never guess from looking at me that I recently developed the medical file of an elderly person)

But then we went into discussion, and here were the new recruits, so bright and ambitious and excited about the year before them. I welcomed them to start asking questions, and that’s when it turned around for me.

Because it wasn’t about me.

I never had to rattle off my piteous tale because it was irrelevant to the discussion. Nobody was asking me to explain myself or make excuses for why I didn’t reach all my personal goals. Nobody likely even remembered my platform from last year.

What mattered was that somehow or other, we made it. We made it as a team. We kept things together well enough to pass them on to a new group, a new group who wanted only one thing from us: information.

Well, actually something more, something that a new group never really realizes they are asking for, which is encouragement. This is one thing I can claim about my leadership skills, that I work hard to make an emotional connection with my team and help reinforce their confidence in their own intuition, their own judgment, their right to lead in their own style.

It helps to start out with the assumption that the people you are leading are smarter and more talented than you are, that they’ll surpass you, and that when they inevitably have your job they’ll do it better than you do. If any of that is true, it will mean that you’ve done the most you can do, which is to make others stronger and better than they started.

At the beginning of the year, I probably would have pictured myself in full makeup, dazzling everyone with a packet of materials and a carefully polished inspirational speech. Instead I sat at my dining table, wrapped in an old afghan. It was fine.

It turns out that what inspires people, one way or another, is all the parts of your personal example that you can’t control. People will form impressions of your behavior that you may never know. (And may prefer not to find out!) What my team shared about working with me was how lucky they felt to be a part of a tight-knit group. In my mind, they built that, and in their minds, I did.

Looking back, I have to remind myself of how far I’ve come in four years. I started out so afraid to stand up and speak that my whole body would shake - and now I’m worried about a little hand tremor? I had never even heard of any of the offices I wound up holding or any of the awards I would go on to win. I never dreamed I would serve in a leadership role at all, much less one during a time of such turbulence.

I’m still tired, about as tired as I’ve ever been. I still doubt myself and whether I can handle whatever it is I’m currently trying to handle, just as much as I’ve ever doubted myself. Somehow, though, it seems that I keep feeling tired and doubting myself after bigger and bigger accomplishments.

This is why it’s important to acknowledge the wall. There is definitely a wall and it definitely feels as materially tangible as any other physical object. Walls, though, can be climbed. They can be toppled. They can serve as infrastructure and you can paint them and grow vines on them.

I hit a wall, because I was worn out and feeling sorry for myself. Connecting with other people helped remind me that sometimes we wear ourselves out for good reasons. Just because I’m tired doesn’t mean it’s time to quit, or that I have nothing left.

The next time I hit the wall, I wonder where I’ll be and what I’ll be doing?

This book is a gem by one of the all-time greatest motivational speakers and writers, the inimitable Mel Robbins. It’s more than inspirational, though. It provokes insight and emotional breakthroughs that are impossible to forget or ignore. Usually we know what we ought to be doing to move toward our dreams, so the question is, Why aren’t we? Stop Saying You’re Fine helps to answer that.

A key point to the book is that we already have all the information we need. Almost every dream is a dream that someone else has, too, and chances are that millions of people have done it before. That’s what I told myself when I was training for my marathon. If millions of people have done it, then surely I can, and I did, even when I was being passed by various para-athletes such as a blind runner with a seeing eye dog. The instructions are there, the workbooks are there, the teachers and coaches are there. When we finally decide to move forward, we will do it surrounded by resources, information, and support.

The problem is what we call Resistance. It’s the feeling of not wanting to do something, even though you believe you should. Resistance comes up in different forms for everyone. For instance, I feel it most when I have to make a business call. I’ll happily wash someone’s sink full of dishes or fold all the laundry on their couch if only they’ll make calls for me. Once we start recognizing the feeling of Resistance for what it is, it becomes easier to call it out and to catch ourselves acting out boring old patterns.

The solution that Mel Robbins teaches is to figure out a bunch of small steps toward your goal, pick one, and then TAKE ACTION within five seconds. This trains the impulse and strengthens the connection between thought and implementation. If I think, I should call my friend, and I do it, then I’ve done something positive. If instead I let that impulse slip away without calling, I may start to replace my positive feeling with guilt. I’ll then waste the time I could have been chatting with someone I like, and the exact same minutes could go toward reinforcing a negative impression of myself. When I do something within those five seconds, I get two rewards, the satisfaction of doing the thing and the freedom from beating myself up after procrastinating.

Mel Robbins is a coach, and this book comes from years of working with individuals and conducting workshops. This stuff works. I even used it to get this review written. If you have a tendency to procrastinate or you feel stuck on something, please treat yourself to the delightful and transformational experience of reading this book - Stop Saying You’re Fine.

Favorite quotes:

Everything you could ever need to live the life you want is right there at your fingertips.

You are very powerful when you put your mind to it.

The snooze button is the perfect symbol of human resistance, and the emblem of anyone who feels stuck.

If you hear yourself ever saying “It is what it is,” that’s not the powerful you talking.

We are all stuck in some area of our life, pretending it’s not that bad so we can justify doing nothing.

If your mind can kill a great idea by dampening it with emotional turmoil, it will.

In any area of your life that you want to change, adopt this rule. Just do the things that you don’t want to do.

You need to hear this loud and clear: No one is coming. It is up to you.

Recognizing and seizing these moments is like opening a doorway into an alternate universe where your life is not governed by routine.

If there’s a way to avoid doing anything, you’ll do it, even though it won’t make you happy.

You’re actively trying to convince yourself that it’s okay to feel disappointed with yourself on a regular basis.

You will never just wake up with the motivation and fortitude that you’ve been missing for years.

The only choice you have is to force yourself to change whether you feel like it or not.

The only wrong choice is to do nothing.

The Third Door is an incredibly entertaining book. It’s also a story about how to create your own luck. Alex Banayan set out on a self-created quest to interview a series of famously successful people, even though he knew no one and came from a family of immigrants. What follows is The Third Door, Banayan’s account of blind optimism, persistence, doubt, failure, awkwardness, and, of course, dizzying success.

That’s what makes this book destined to be a classic, and guarantees that “the third door” will become a common catchphrase in entrepreneurial circles.

“The third door” is the one that geniuses create for themselves by bypassing the ordinary way of doing things. Most of us get the first door, the main entrance. Those born to wealth and privilege get the second door. During his interviews, Alex Banayan discovered that what the most interesting people had in common, even though they didn’t know it, was the initiative they took in making their own door.

You know, “Hey Kool-Aid!” *crash*

(If you’re too young to get that joke, congratulations! You have more time than you think and your whole life is ahead of you).

The Third Door could have been a compilation of interviews, and it would have been a good one, or maybe just an ordinary, mainstream one. Instead Banayan structures it around his quest, focusing on all the stumbles and bumbles and what it took every time he had an inspired moment or gained an ally. This book is about the thought process. It’s also about the emotional reality of committing to something big, a public quest, and how scary it can get every time it isn’t easy, which is most of the time.

Banayan’s process would probably work for anyone who is genuinely trying to create a third door of their own. Get an Inside Man, someone who will help you to connect with the person you want to talk to. Be grateful and polite. Stay in touch with and befriend the various people you meet. Be likable. Have people check your work and edit your cover letters. Get a mentor and pay close attention to their advice.

Perhaps most of all, do your research. Banayan’s biggest score came after an enormous amount of research to find someone he wanted for a mentor. He made several guesses as to the person’s email address, got a two-line response, and dropped everything to accommodate that person’s schedule. He trusted his gut, but only because he had done so much research beforehand.

Banayan had a lot to overcome. Shyness and stage fright, social awkwardness, lack of resources. Really a boy like him had no business even thinking about this project, much less attempting it. He did it anyway, figuring out the rules as he went along.

I loved The Third Door as an example of possibility thinking. I also loved it as a madcap adventure story. It’s a fun book that would make a perfect gift for a young graduate.

The Achievement Habit is a completely amazing book with the potential to change lives. It joins the exalted ranks of Books I’ve Followed My Husband Around Reading From. There is so much here about creativity, fixing persistent problems, fighting procrastination, and developing a bias toward action.

Bernard Roth is my new favorite professor-I-never-had. His book arises from decades of teaching experience. While technically his field is design, there is no limit to the applicability of the ideas here. What he considers ‘design thinking’ is a way of adopting a completely new perspective.

The first assignment Roth would give his students is to find something in their life that bothers them and fix it. I can’t emphasize enough how important this is, and how very, very few people are actually willing to live this way. My clients will tolerate persistent problems the likes of which an ordinary person can barely imagine: Living for years among a rat infestation, sleeping on a tiny strip of a mattress that is piled with clutter and food waste, breathing black mold, horrors beyond description. They will hear “do something about this” from literally every person who knows the truth, and they won’t. They always have their reasons, chief amongst which is not knowing where to start.

“Reasons” are a pet peeve of Roth’s, and they get their own entire chapter. The reason we claim for doing or not doing something is only a surface level reason, not the deeper, true reason. For instance, I have a serious phone reception issue everywhere in my apartment complex except for a small area near the entrance to the gym, and thus my voicemail asks people to text or email me because there’s no way I’ll know if they called me. My “reason” for being inaccessible is technological. A deeper reason is that while I might be able to find a fix, considering how many engineers I know, as a writer I am strongly invested in preventing interruptions while I work. “Fixing” my phone problem with additional money, devices, or software, or relocating, would give me an entire new problem. The real reason I can’t get phone calls at home is because I don’t believe I am obligated to. Right now, if someone wants to talk to me on the phone, they send me an invite and we schedule it. This is not wrong. Roth’s advice here is to use reasons externally but not internally, making sure that we are honest with ourselves about why we do or don’t do things.

The Achievement Habit is ultimately a book about high-agency thinking. We have the ability to live better than we do and we have the imagination to fix any problem, if only we decide for ourselves. Now I’m going to go look for a problem and fix it, just to keep my edge sharp.

Favorite quotes:

In life, typically, the only one keeping a scorecard of your successes and failures is you, and there are ample opportunities to learn the lessons you need to learn, even if you didn’t get it right the first—or fifth—time.

It’s incredibly empowering to realize that you have the power to change your attitude toward anything.

Many reasons are simply excuses to hide the fact that we are not willing to give something a high enough priority in our lives.

You can’t know the reason for anyone’s behavior.

The best way forward is embedded in the design thinking methodology: manifest a bias toward action, and don’t be afraid of failure.

When something is a priority in your life, you have to be willing to walk away from anything that’s standing in its way.

...it is better to start to do something and fail than it is to do nothing and wait for the correct path of action to appear.

Be honest and notice the differences between your self-image and the ways you actually act.

You can make a decision right now to see yourself differently, and then to become different.

It’s a declaration of choice: instead of playing the role of passive protagonist in your life, choose to take charge of your future. Resolve to get things done, whatever it takes, and no matter how many valid “reasons” pop up.

The 10X Rule is the kind of motivational book to be read in cases of extreme reluctance and procrastination. It is the kind of book that can turn around someone’s entire philosophy of life. It is the kind of book to keep on your desk and flip open for a dose of tough talk on demand. You may not agree with everything Grant Cardone says, but it’s hard to argue with his overall message of dedication and drive.

Myself? I find myself nodding along with most of Cardone’s books, taking notes on certain outrageous yet wildly original ideas, and disagreeing with only a few very provocative assertions that I think he puts out there mainly to mess with people. An example of this would be Chapter 6, which I think is an extreme position that is not necessary if the goal is to teach the concept of high agency. (Read it and you’ll see what I mean). There is a difference between responsibility and accountability, and the latter is enough to get the job done.

Okay, what is the 10X Rule? Make your goals ten times bigger and go after them with ten times as much determination and energy. This is along the same lines as Peter Thiel’s statement that most ten-year goals can be completed in six months. It’s true! Why drag out the process of big goals like paying off debt, clearing clutter, or losing weight, when with intensive focus you can get it out of the way quickly and never think about it again?

(Why? Because most people aren’t very clear on what they want, they don’t have major goals, and thus they can’t summon up the fervent desire to push forward as fast as possible).

Competing is for sissies. Did you know this? This is one of Cardone’s contrarian ideas with which I agree. What would make someone want to target another person’s performance as their main goal? Why limit yourself? It makes me think of focusing on someone else’s head in yoga class for balance, only to have that person tip sideways. Better to focus over their head at a point farther across the room. Choose your own goal and keep plugging away at it. Choose something that is more worthy of obsessing over than what some other person might or might not be doing.

Cardone has a bone to pick with a lot of common ideas like “work-life balance” and “satisfaction.” He claims that the middle class isn’t all that middling, that most people’s financial goals are nowhere near sufficient to take care of themselves or their families. I only entered the middle class at age 32, and I’ve noticed that the “middle class” are the only people who rely on a single source of income, i.e. wages. Both poor people and wealthy people have multiple streams of income, the first out of sheer necessity and the second because they know how. The difference is desperation versus abundance.

The 10X Rule is already a classic of the motivational genre. That’s for good reason. Something in this book will reach out and grab someone, and it might be something different for each person. There are a couple of chapters that I feel I should have printed up as posters and hung around my apartment. I’ll definitely read this book again, so if you pick it up, let me know and we can read it together.

Favorite quotes:

Almost every problem people face in their careers and other aspects of their lives—such as failed diets, marriages, and financial problems—are all the result of not taking enough action.

Average marriages, bank accounts, weight, health, businesses, products, and the like are just that—average.

No one will benefit from your failure.

Success Is Your Duty

To the degree that electing to do our personal best each and every day is ethical, then failing to do so is a violation of ethics.

Your four choices are:
1. Do nothing.
2. Retreat.
3. Take normal levels of action.
4. Take massive action.

“Small” thinking has and always will be punished in one way or another.

What are some ways you can expand that only require energy and creativity, not money?

People give their fears much more time than they deserve.

Most people have no clue what they are doing with their time but still complain that they don't have enough.

This post is a favor.

Someone tracked me down somehow and pitched for me to be her accountability coach. I’m not in that business anymore, and I posted on this blog about a year ago why I quit. It’s not for lack of clients; I believe that accountability coaching doesn’t scale. I also believe it doesn’t work. I believe it’s nothing more than a frustrating dead end, an illusion that will discourage the client and burn through money with no results.

That’s why I’m writing about accountability again, in hopes that it can help more than my personalized handholding might.

Now, I coach people every single day. I even do it for free! I hold a volunteer leadership position that includes six clubs, thirty-five officers, over a hundred members, and four protégés. I have absolutely no shame or guilt about how much of my high-value time I give away. I’ve always worked with pro bono clients as well.

I don’t use “accountability” to do it, though.

What I do is to help people tap into what they want and then help them refine their vision of what success looks and feels like. Sometimes they discover that they aren’t really as into that particular goal as they had thought. For instance, I dropped my goal of owning an electric vehicle when I realized how much I despise driving. I also dropped my goal of learning to play guitar when I realized my real problem was being a terrible singer, a situation too hopeless to resolve. A lot of people believe they have a goal when it’s really just one possibility among many.

There are two types of goals, prevention-focused and promotion-focused. Either someone is trying to avoid or stop doing something, or they’re trying to start or initiate something. Examples in the first group include quitting smoking, getting off medication, clearing clutter, paying off debt, losing weight, or getting out of a toxic relationship. Examples in the second group include getting fit, going back to school, changing careers, buying a new home, finding love, or starting a family.

What I’ve found through coaching is that people have a much easier time achieving promotion-focused goals. It’s quick and easy to let go of what isn’t serving you if it gets in the way of something you want.

When a recruiter calls you about your dream job, it’s easier to let go of office gossip.

When you have ten days to relocate to your dream home, it’s easier to clear your clutter.

When you fall in love with distance running, it’s easier to drop smoking.

When you fall in love with your life, it’s easier to let go of anything that doesn’t serve you.

My dog has a bit of trouble with this, though: If you give him a ball, he’ll hold it in his mouth. If you give him a second ball, he’ll continue to hold the first ball while trying to control the second ball. When the third ball comes out, he runs outside, catastrophically overwhelmed. Too many choices!

He’ll drop all the balls in a hot second if he is instead offered a dog treat.

Another example of this comes from Sesame Street: You gotta put down the ducky if you want to play the saxophone.

What happens with most people, though, is that they lack a compelling enough vision to step out of their comfort zone. They see the things they do as treats, rather than specific obstacles that hold them back. They see their default as juicier and more valuable than any of the alternatives.

They don’t want “it” enough because they aren’t even sure exactly what “it” is. Or getting “it” is too hard, and they aren’t willing to do what “it” takes.

I can share about my life, and see if you agree with what I mean:

I’m married to my dream man, who travels half-time. We’ve relocated to new cities four times in ten years, starting over each time.

I live at the beach, in a studio apartment with no washer or dryer.

We save half our income, and we don’t have a car.

We go on a pretty fabulous vacation every year, paid for by almost never dining out or shopping.

I wear a “size two” and I never drink alcohol or soda, or eat dairy products, breakfast cereal, or fast food. I virtually never eat chips, crackers, pizza, or desserts. Instead I eat a lot of cabbage, kale, cauliflower, and collard greens. BECAUSE I LIKE TO so sue me.

See what I mean?

It’s not zero-sum. Anyone can save tons of money, eat tons of vegetables, or make drastic changes toward the benefit of a goal. Plenty of people have lost a hundred pounds in a year, paid off $100,000 in debt, or cleared out their entire house over a busy, sweaty weekend. Basically any goal you can think of is a standard goal, a catalogue goal that millions of people have done, and continue to do every day.

They want to, and they know how.

It’s not accountability that gets things done. Accountability means abdicating your responsibilities to someone, anyone else. It means “I know I will never, ever, never never do this alone.” So why is it someone else’s job? How is any other person going to make you want something you don’t want? How is any other person going to make you do something that you won’t make yourself do?

Just admit that if there are no consequences to your not achieving your goal, then it literally does not matter to you or to anyone whether you do or don’t.

Just admit that you don’t really want it and you won’t ever do it.

Sometimes that moment can provoke a crisis. I have walked my students through this. Imagine that you ARE NOT ALLOWED to do this or to reach this goal. It’s illegal. Now how do you feel? A lot of people are relieved that they no longer feel pressured to do something that wasn’t their idea. Others feel a wash of regret or frustration. It helps to clarify, is this a heck yes or a heck no?

A “meh” is not a goal. A “whatever” is not a goal. If it doesn’t spark massive emotion inside of you, then the goal is not going to be enough to motivate you.

I have a “heck no” about surfing. I have a “meh” about learning to bake bread. I have a “heck yes” about getting more sleep.

Sometimes the problem with lack of accountability is general lack of energy. Anyone who is in poor health, who is not staying hydrated or eating well or getting enough sleep or exercise, is simply not going to be able to drum up enough energy to move forward. On the other hand, a magnetically attractive major goal will pull someone forward even in spite of exhaustion, debt, or illness! I’ve limped my way to the finish line enough times, and seen enough other people do the same, to know that this is true.

It’s not you, it’s not the goal, it’s how much YOU WANT that goal that matters.

You’d move awfully fast if the building was on fire.

You’d move awfully fast if your favorite celebrity was outside right now.

You’d move awfully fast to grab a $100 bill blowing past you.

Can you make yourself move that fast for anything else? Anything less tangible, anything currently invisible?

Can you tell yourself a story that makes your own goal more valuable and interesting to you?

You can, if you want to. I have great faith in you. Now get out there and impress me.

^^^ copy and paste into a text bubble and pretend you paid me to say that ^^^