The 365 Commitment

I have been thinking about something that sounds a little strange. What if one of the most valuable skills you could develop is getting good at failing?

Not at accepting defeat. Not at lowering your expectations. I mean getting good at the actual process of failure.

You set an objective. You push hard. You put yourself in a position where the outcome matters. Then you come up short. It hurts. Maybe you are embarrassed. Maybe the result costs you something. That part never becomes particularly enjoyable.

But something interesting can happen next.

My wife and I went to lunch today. We found a quiet corner in an outdoor seating area. The air was calm. The temperature was perfect. Everything around us seemed unusually beautiful.

We did not have much to say. We ate our lunch, took a deep breath, and were simply glad to be there. No agenda. No problem to solve. No plan to make. Just a few minutes together on a beautiful afternoon.

Across from us sat another couple who could not stop laughing. I have no idea what started it, but they were fighting...

For many years I had focused on making sure that I got "the minimum" accomplished each day. The concept was that by the end of the day, no matter what, I would get certain things done each day. That would help me feel better and ultimately make sure that I was putting my commitments and priorities first. The challenge with this idea is that often I find myself at the end of the day, tired, grumpy, and just going through the motions to do the bare minimum so that I can go to bed saying that my commitment was...

I have been struggling with mental fatigue for the last few days. That has made me more annoyed with things around me than usual. Because I am always looking for things to write about, I decided to take a pause and consciously try to figure out what was causing me to react this way. Is it that I find people annoying to deal with, or is something else going on?

I think I finally figured it out. I have a low tolerance for friction. Let's see if this rings true for you as well.

Suppose...

I asked the question today, "Why did that person make me so mad?" They did not really do anything that egregious or irksome, but I was upset and seething after my interaction with them. What is going on?

If you are like me, I have a few social gifts that I have leaned on over the years. The problem is that social interaction wears me out and causes me to want to retreat into solitude. I have often thought that I am an introvert who was forced into being an extrovert against my will.

However...

I have come to realize that some of the most important things in life cannot be discovered quickly. We live in a world where we are encouraged to make selections based on a list of attributes. We interview people for jobs, evaluate potential business partners, choose friends, and sometimes even select romantic relationships based on a collection of characteristics that we believe are important. We create our list, compare the options, and make our decision. The problem is that the qualities that matter most rarely appear on that list.

Consider character, for example. How do you really...

I recognized something about myself recently. I get annoyed when people take too long to make decisions. Not when the decision is genuinely difficult, but when we have discussed the problem, considered the options, understood the consequences, and still nobody is willing to make a call. I can feel my patience disappearing. This got me wondering whether I am simply impatient or whether there is something important about the cost of indecision.

I recently read an interview with Jon McNeill, a former Tesla executive who worked with Elon Musk. He described an environment where decision speed was...

I have learned to appreciate the comfort of a familiar route. When I go out for a run, I like knowing where I am headed, how far I intend to go, and what I hope to accomplish before I get home. There is something satisfying about following through on a commitment made before the day has a chance to interfere.

But imagine if I refused to ever turn down a different street.

Eventually, I would know every crack in the sidewalk, every turn, and every obstacle along the way. I might become exceptionally good at...

Look at your desk right now. The one you work at, if you have one. You are not just looking at your desk; you're looking at your brain. Is it messy, chaotic, and disorganized? Perhaps it is structured and clean with everything in the proper place? Are there doodles everywhere, discarded candy wrappers perhaps? Are there notes of things that were really important to remember from months ago? What you are looking at is not just a messy desk, you are looking at a snapshot of what your brain looks like as well.

Now, I am not...

You cannot recover yesterday's investment by wasting tomorrow's energy. This is an important life lesson that I learned after spending way too much time chasing a losing proposition, thinking that I could not stop because of everything that I had already put in. This is the sunk cost fallacy. A sunk cost is something you have already spent and cannot recover. It might be money, time, effort, or emotional investment. The fallacy occurs when you allow that unrecoverable investment to influence what you decide to do next, rather than evaluating whether continuing makes sense.

This is a...

I have always been a person who likes to think things through. Give me a difficult problem and I will carry it around for days. I will think about it when I am walking, driving, or trying to sleep. Sometimes something useful emerges. Other times I realize I have spent hours circling the same thought without moving an inch.

That is the danger of random pondering. We confuse the amount of time spent thinking with the quality of the thinking. They are not the same thing.

I have been trying to approach pondering more like...

I have been an impostor my entire life. I suppose that is a rather strange thing to admit, but it is true. I have spent a considerable amount of my life pretending that I knew how to do things when, in fact, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

I developed this particular skill when I was young. I wanted to participate in conversations with adults, and I discovered that if I acted like I knew what they were talking about, they would include me. I learned to nod at the appropriate moments, ask intelligent-sounding...

I have been in a lot of meetings in my life. Some have been incredibly productive, others have been a complete waste of time. I have noticed something interesting about the difference between the two. The productive meetings almost always involved someone getting uncomfortable. Sometimes that person was me.

We have developed a strange expectation in our professional lives that meetings should be pleasant experiences. Everyone should get along, everyone should feel heard, and nobody should leave feeling upset. We have become so concerned about making people uncomfortable that we have forgotten the entire reason we bring...

I was thinking recently about how much attention we give to the things we believe we need to change in our lives. We decide we need more protein, so we start drinking a protein shake every morning. We recognize that we consume too much caffeine, so we make a deliberate effort to cut back. Perhaps we need more exercise, better sleep, or less sugar in our diet. Whatever the concern, we identify a problem and then focus our attention on doing something about it.

This seems perfectly reasonable. After all, how else are we supposed to improve...

We have a new tradition brewing in our family kitchen. Every Halloween, we make a giant pot of gumbo. It sits there simmering away while the house fills with the excitement of the evening, costumes are being prepared, candy is being distributed, and the sounds of Halloween begin to fill the neighborhood. Somewhere in the middle of all this activity, there is that wonderful smell coming from the kitchen.

Now, what exactly goes into a good gumbo? Is it seafood, chicken, sausage, or some combination of all three? Certainly, we need the holy trinity of Cajun cooking...

If you have ever wondered whether spending time setting up your environment so that you can effectively do the things you want to accomplish is worth it, I have an answer for you. It is.

I have spent years writing about personal discipline, accountability, and the importance of making and keeping commitments. I believe strongly that we are responsible for our own choices and that developing the ability to do difficult things, especially when we do not feel like doing them, is an essential part of personal growth. However, I have learned that willpower needs a lot...

As you go through life, what books have you collected along the way? Which ones sit on your shelf? Is this an accidental collection process or a deliberate one? An even more thought-provoking question: When you die, and someone is left with the job of cleaning out your room or office where you keep your books, what are they going to be looking at? Would they know why these are important?

A common thing for ancestry researchers to do is to look for old family Bibles. The reason is that inevitably people place precious things within them...

Genetics actually works for us and against us in an invisible pattern that we still have little understanding of. Only recently have we started discovering that there are certain genetic patterns that will give us a certain predisposition or propensity for physical and mental illness. This can feel a bit overwhelming as you ponder the accumulation of potential stacked issues you might have accumulated since before you were even conceived. However, you also might have good genetic markers as well, so perhaps they wash out.

Anyway, there has been recent scientific evidence that we can do certain...

Big moments come and go. Sometimes they are rather fleeting at the time but turn out to be major events later in our recollection. We are only saddened that we did not cherish them when they happened. Take, for instance, the first real date with my wife. It was not technically a date, at least I played it off that way. However, I was taking her somewhere, and we would be able to spend several hours together, which now that I look back on it was a significant development in our relationship. This was a big moment, and I...

Years ago, I attempted to memorize the first 1000 digits of Pi. I was mostly successful. I could easily recite the first 500 digits and most of my way through the rest, although I would occasionally get tripped up. If I had kept going, then I probably could have gotten it down reliably. After spending a year training for this, I decided that the only thing I had really accomplished was a great party trick.

I did learn a few important concepts along the way. I now understood how the brain could memorize things and that the human mind...

There is an important distinction between thinking and creating. This is important to recognize, or at least it has been for me. Each of these are two completely different modes that I can be in, and when I have been in one for too long, I need to transition to the other before I get overstimulated. The most important one is that of rumination; this one especially needs to get interrupted, or I should say disrupted.

Rumination is repetitive thinking that often returns to the same unresolved concerns. You can spend hours considering a difficult situation without...

If you have not caught on to this yet, I thought I would dedicate some thoughts to this topic. Learning has completely changed in the last year. The traditional learning model has been, for the last several centuries, curriculum to lessons to exercises and then tests. Or more commonly, the explain, demonstrate, practice, and evaluate paradigm in more practical environments. This has fundamentally shifted now, and in dramatic ways.

We all now have the ability, using any number of LLM-based tools, to create our own generative learning experiences on the fly. The new paradigm is shifting to...

I am always on a quest to improve my health. I am not that good at it, but nonetheless, I am always trying to figure out new and improved ways to get stronger and healthier. I would love to be able to stay fit in my old age and increase my longevity. I have tried everything under the sun. Some are more fun, playing a sport for example, or more physically demanding, like a weightlifting program. These are all good and highly recommended, but after all is said and done, the best mechanism for maintaining my health has been...

Years ago, I read a funny Mark Twain quote: "If you eat a live frog for breakfast, everything else will seem easy that day." This is a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that if you do the hardest thing first, everything else that follows will seem easier. This is a fun, absurd way to represent a powerful life principle that, used well, can spark significant improvement in our lives.

Recently, I started to view this same concept as "going downhill." If you quickly ascend the difficult part of the mountain early on, then the rest of the day...

I have had limited exposure to a real scientific lab environment, but I've worked with enough clients in this space to understand some of their approaches. In one instance, I heard a researcher describe a single-subject experimental design he called an N-of-1. In this design, you track a baseline using a standard protocol, then make one modification and track the results over time. This design is particularly useful for studying individual responses to an intervention, especially when you can repeat it over an extended period.

I highly recommend trying this type of experiment on yourself. To do...

When I was a young boy, I was worried about the uncertainty of things going on around me. We would go to the store, and I would be intensely focused on making sure my mom never left my sight. I would think, if I lost her, I might never get back home. I would worry that I would not be able to find food or a place to sleep. My sister would be running around, hiding, laughing, and playing like no care in the world, and I would be evaluating all possible threats and looking for ways to escape...

This next week, I am going to try to focus on coming to grips with anxiety that is caused when you are faced with uncertainty. Anxiety can come from many sources, but this source is, in particular, quite troublesome. When the outcome is uncertain, your brain becomes highly active, and when that pairs with the anxiety of not knowing the result, it can become an emotional burden. I think my first breakthrough on this topic came when I recognized that a thought about a possible future isn't evidence that it will happen.

When an important outcome is...

I am always experimenting with the best questions to ask myself or to ask during early-morning prayer or meditation: questions that provoke thought, questions that stimulate me to focus on my best efforts, questions that remind me of what is important. I have learned that the best combination of questions focuses on achievement and contribution. Currently, the two questions I like to ask myself every morning are:

“What should I be doing with this day?” and "What can I do for someone else today?"

Science has not yet determined whether God hears prayer. That's a theo...

To put this into a phrase, there is a fundamental need to learn to build failure into the system without allowing failure to terminate the system. See if this rings true with you. You spend days, perhaps weeks, building the perfect system. You are finally done, and you are excited to begin following your new system. Day 1 is great; you are so pleased. Day 2 might go well, and then on Day 3, you hit a snag, something you did not account for. You fail, and as a consequence, you throw out all of your planning and kill the system. Later...

We spend a lot of time and money trying to improve. We listen to books, podcasts, videos, and spend countless dollars on ways to improve ourselves. However, the single greatest thing that we can do to improve anything we are working on is deliberate reflection. This is rarely done, yet it is provided by many behavioral psychologists as one of the foundational methods for improving subsequent learning. It is clear that reflecting on your previous experience produces far greater improvement than just accumulating experience alone.

Let's talk about chess. One of the most important ingredients to getting...

One of the most underestimated concepts, in my opinion, is what is known as a feedback loop. It is a highly effective mechanism, and despite that fact, we tend to dismiss or ignore the concept in planning business and personal projects. So what exactly is a feedback loop?

Simple concept, rarely implemented. For illustration, I will tell you a short story. When I was a child, I would go with my mom to Weight Watchers meetings. If you do not know what this is, it was a fad in the 70s and 80s in which women all...

A core principle to consider in daily living is to get control of what you spend your attention on before the world does it for you. I do this with a morning ritual. Every morning I like to ask myself the question, what is the most important thing that I should accomplish today? Many times I draw a blank when asking this question, so I go back and look at the 12 goals I have set for myself. Armed with that, I decide what is going to get most of my attention that day.

Now things will come...

Have you heard this phrase, Get while the getting’s good? It has been a while since I have heard someone say that, but I do remember when this was a common phrase. I am not sure where this came from, and after doing a bit of research, I do not think anyone does. This is a phrase used in Midwestern areas in the USA that basically means take advantage of favorable circumstances before they change. Interestingly enough, this phrase is backed by most scientific studies in the area of human goal setting and accomplishment.

As it tu...

We all have good intentions. If there were a reward for what we intend to do, then some of us would be highly decorated. Yet, unfortunately, many of our large aspirations never see the light of day. They lay dormant, quiet, with nothing but our own internal hopes and dreams to keep them company. Our most noble of intentions are just goals that are psychologically weak because they remain abstract, distant, and fleeting.

So how do you close this intention-to-action gap? How do you move from merely being aspirational to an actual practice? The first step is...

I sat down this morning and had a long debate with myself. I have decided to start numbering my 365 commitment blog by the number of consecutive days rather than by the 365-day cycle. So whereas today is technically Day 1 of my next 365 commitment, it is really Day 3,199. That is what sealed it for me, one day away from 3,200. My goal is to keep this up until I hit 20,000 or die.

So I keep going; I will hit 10,000 consecutive posts on May 24th, 2045. I will be 72 years old. To hit my goal of 20,000, then I would need to...

You might have seen the movie Obsession recently. I will not spoil it for you, but it is a classic story of a young man using a talisman to get a wish granted, and he wished for a girl to be obsessed with him. Of course, this backfires, and he gets what he wanted, but the mechanism by which he gets it is at a terrible price. I was reading about the creation of this movie and the director acknowledged that the idea came from a Simpson's episode called the Treehouse of Horror. I do not remember seeing that...

We all can recall with trepidation the last question on the math test; it was always the dreaded word problem. Most of us just immediately folded. The one brainiac smart girl in class had learned how to convert key phrases back into the required equation and found the word problem to actually be really easy. The one recluse kid in the back corner of the classroom could solve that problem without even writing anything down and, in fact, would refuse to do so because it was boring. So, out of a class of 25, two kids could solve the problem...

I have noticed that one of the things that creates the most stress for me is simply thinking about everything I have to do. It is not necessarily that any one of those things is overwhelming. The problem is that when I think about all of them together, they begin to feel like one enormous responsibility that I am somehow supposed to be managing all at the same time.

There is work that needs to be done, people I need to talk to, family things I am thinking about, decisions I need to make, unfinished projects and...

I came across an article today by Susan Emerson talking about the difficulties of being a new mother. This can be an incredibly trying time for a young woman who is suddenly put in a situation where coping skills are highly valuable. The premise of this article is that it is wrong to believe people either have this skill or do not; that it is a trait. So to say, I just do not have the ability to cope, or I just cannot handle this, is incorrect.

When we had our first child, I was an absentee...

When I was younger, I had a steel-trap brain. I was wickedly smart and remembered every little detail. This superpower came in handy. Everything from system admin command-line details to the day's grocery list. Now that I am getting older, that trusty recall capability has started to fail me. It is unsettling to suddenly realize that I cannot remember every detail. I have to write things down or find a way to keep track so I don't find myself drawing blanks at the wrong time. So is my brain just getting old?

Recent studies suggest it's less...