Go Back to the Future
Let’s do a quick, one-question quiz. Which activity would be easier for you? Describe the best life you could achieve over the next twenty years. Describe the best things that have happened to you over the last twenty years. One is fantasy; the other is history. One requires the courage to push through every fear, the vision-casting ability of Warren Buffett, the future-shaping creativity of Elon Musk, the unbridled positivity of Oprah, and the grit, persistence, and patience of a Navy SEAL. The other requires a pen and a piece of paper.
Self-awareness is like when you hand a pair of full-spectrum glasses to someone who has been color-blind their entire life, or when you turn on cochlear implants and a toddler finally hears their mother’s voice for the first time. Look at all the colors I can see! Listen to all the sounds I can hear! Check out the moments of life that make me come alive!
You can’t tap into your potential if you don’t know what you really care about. Guess what happens when you make a list of what you personally consider the best moments? You instantly figure out what you care about. The list is a fast pass to self-awareness. We all want to be more present. We want to live in the moment, right? Do you know the easiest way to do that? Start paying attention to the things that are lighting you up. Being present is just learning to be nostalgic about the moment you’re still in.
If you tell your head and your heart to look for awesome moments in your past, they naturally start looking for them in your present. As it’s happening, you find yourself saying, “Oh, this moment is awesome, I should add that to my list!” You become present.
Trick the Hardest Person to Change
Dara Schuler’s kids don’t want to do chores and schoolwork. Dara could lean into discipline with her kids: “You have to clean up your room as a member of this family.” Dara could appeal to their sense of duty: “School is your job, and homework is part of doing that job well.” Dara could even use a little bit of guilt to see if that helped: “I work all day and make dinner every night—all I’m asking is that you tidy up the bathroom a little bit.” She could try all of those approaches, but none of them will work long-term.
So instead, she tricks her kids with the greatest, most effective trick for improvement that’s ever been invented: a game. “On a giant flip chart piece of paper, I write various chores, schoolwork, and fun activities. Then I cover each one with a Post-it. The kids then uncover one and go do the item, not knowing which category it will be. Sometimes it’s two chores in a row, sometimes it’s two fun things.” The items on the sheet are random. “I would even throw in ‘give mom a high five’ and ‘do twenty jumping jacks.’ They loved it AND it kept me from being the bad guy because I wasn’t giving directions, rather the paper told them what to do next.”
Dara might describe her chart as a craft project, but it’s actually a brilliant game. It’s visual, simple, and surprising. There’s an element of chance to it that the brain loves. Dopamine is often misidentified as the “happiness hormone,” as if you get more of it when something good happens to you. But that’s not how it really works. “Dopamine activity is not a marker of pleasure. It is a reaction to the unexpected—to possibility and anticipation.”
This always happens when you tap into more of your potential. Why? Because the outcome is never exactly what you expected it would be. When you work at your potential, there are always surprises. “That happy error is what launches dopamine into action. It’s not the extra time or the extra money themselves. It’s the thrill of the unexpected good news.” It’s the joy of playing a game instead of doing a chore, and it works for kids and adults.
Plan a Calendar Heist
Susan Robertson recently finished her degree online. That’s a fantastic accomplishment! Do you know where she worked on it? “I utilized the car pickup lane for school!” Not all at once, mind you. That would be the world’s longest car pickup lane. Bit by bit, ride by ride, Susan knocked out her degree.
Jason Daily built his entire company while waiting on flights in Atlanta. That airport is bursting with frustration or potential. You can rage against the injustice of a delayed flight to Kansas City, or you can steal an hour back for a new company.
Valerie Richter’s life is also full of waiting, but she focuses her time on a health game. “I like to work out while waiting,” she says. “When I throw something in the microwave or oven, I do wall push-ups or squats or jog in place while waiting.”
Each of those people has the same calendar you and I have, but they learned something that took me decades to figure out. Minutes matter. Stealing back minutes from activities that don’t deserve them and applying them to intentional actions feels amazing. It will also change much more than just how you think about distractions like social media.
When you start to value your time, you’ll realize that stress and worry don’t deserve it either. When stress says, “Hey, let’s spend an hour focusing on something dumb you said last week,” you’ll think, “No thanks. I could really do something amazing with that hour.” When you’re in the pursuit of your potential, stress won’t seem like the kind of action that’s worthy of your time.
Achieve the Best Kind of Accomplishment
You don’t have to raise $700 million to change the world. Sometimes all you have to do is send a text message. If you want to change the world, encourage one person today. Every day, text something encouraging to one person. Out of the blue, send a text like, “Was just thinking today about how amazingly creative you are. Whenever I talk with anyone about art or innovation, you’re the example I use!”
A text that costs you sixty seconds and thirty words can make someone’s day. Impact usually has a 100× ROI. You get so much more back than you put in. Whether you’re fighting for clean water for the masses, or texting one friend, or something between those two extreme ends of the impact spectrum, if you can see the difference your goal is making, you’ll work on it longer.
Getting in shape impacts your family. Paying off your credit card debt impacts your community. Starting a podcast will impact someone in a country you’ve never been to because you were brave enough to share the story about your parents’ divorce on an episode. Every time you dare to step into your potential, you cause a bigger impact than you can possibly imagine.
If you ever feel like you’re running on fumes, spend a few minutes and reconnect with it. Somebody’s life is better for the work you’re doing. If you can’t find a single example of that, it might be time to get on a boat headed for Africa—or at least send one friend an encouraging text.
Find Your People, Find Your Potential
The feeling of separation has only increased as we’ve sacrificed community at the altar of convenience. Services like DoorDash and Uber Eats are amazing, but they effectively eliminate your ability to be known by someone at your local restaurant.
You didn’t have to work as hard to build community twenty years ago because life naturally provided it. You ran into neighbors at the grocery store. You interacted with a dozen coworkers in the breakroom. You knew the manager of your local restaurant because you came in at least a few times a year for an hour-long meal with your family. You saw the same people at the six a.m. aerobics class, and if you missed a few times, they might even reach out to you.
But accidental community is over. The future is intentional. We just haven’t realized it yet. In 2000, renowned leadership expert Peter Drucker made a prediction that grows truer every day: In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time—literally—substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.
Technology offers us the choice to either isolate or congregate. Never before have we had to manage that choice like we do today. If you feel isolated, make a different choice. If you feel disconnected, make a different choice. If you feel that you’ve reached the edge of your abilities and you need a fresh set of eyes on what you’re working on, make a different choice. Invest in community.
Turn Fears into Goals and Watch Them Fall
Frogs jump out of boiling water, even if it starts out cold. If you put a frog in lukewarm water and slowly increase the temperature, the frog hops out. Doug Melton from the Harvard University biology department put it even more bluntly than that: “If you put a frog in boiling water, it won’t jump out. It will die. If you put it in cold water, it will jump before it gets hot—they don’t sit still for you.”
Instead of regaling you with the thousandth incorrect story about a frog in boiling water, the author is not going to ask you what water in your life is slowly getting hotter. Instead, he asks: What games are you avoiding?
Which of the five big games are you refusing to even make eye contact with right now? Which one are you putting off until tomorrow? Which one has your significant other tapped you on the shoulder about once or twice or a million times?
The law of cause and effect is your best friend or your worst enemy depending on what you do with it. If you refuse to admit that your actions have results, you suffer consequences. If I exercise less, I end up in worse shape. If I’m casual about brushing my teeth, I get more cavities. If I watch TV instead of writing my book, I don’t get to publish a book.
If you embrace the law of cause and effect, however, you don’t get consequences; you get compound interest. If I exercise more, I get in better shape. If I brush my teeth more, I have fewer cavities. If I write more, I publish more books. Those little actions I commit to again and again build up over time like compound interest. I might not see the effects quickly, but I’ll definitely see them eventually. That’s just how cause and effect works.
Create a Scorecard to Know That You’re Winning
We know scorecards work for kids, but for some reason we think adults don’t need them. When the author asked hundreds of people if they’d ever used scorecards for their goals, Rebecca Williams summed up the most typical response: “With the kids, yeah . . . but haven’t thought about doing it with myself.” From chore charts to reading lessons to potty training, we scorecard every part of childhood, but then at age eighteen we decide we no longer need them because life is easy now.
Has that been your experience with adulthood? Is it easier than childhood? Or is there a chance we need scorecards more than ever? At the end of the day, the end of the week, the end of the year, or even the end of your life, the author wants you to have a really easy answer to the question, “Did I live up to my potential?” “Yes, I did,” you’ll say, pointing to the fun scorecards you relied on to stay motivated. Goals. “There’s the proof.”