Brian Tracey wrote the book “Eat That Frog.” The book focuses upon 21 ways to defeat procrastination. Basic idea: If the worst thing you have to do in a day is eat a frog, and you eat
that frog first thing in the morning, the rest of your day goes downhill. Right?

Putting a positive spin on it, if you’ve decided what your MOST IMPORTANT thing is and you do THAT first thing in the day, it’s really hard to have a bad day.

Which is why I’m so adamant about keeping our wi-fi unplugged in the morning and starting our days (all 365 of them per year) being CREATIVE before we’re REACTIVE.

Every. Single. Day.

Accrete a little more Deep Work mojo.

Every. Single. Day.

Eat the frog.

First thing. Every. Single. Day.

Enjoy your frog today!

if I had to summarize my entire philosophy in one sentence, one of Abraham Maslow’s gems coupled with The Apostle Paul would probably do the trick.

Maslow tells us: “What one can be, one must be.” The Apostle Paul tells us: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”This need to self-actualize is as real as our need to breathe.

Twenty-five hundred years earlier, Aristotle talked about the same idea. He actually coined a word for that force that’s driving us to actualize our innate potential. He called it “entelechy.”

Entelechy is made up of three little Greek words: en- ‘within’ + telos‘end, perfection’ + ekhein ‘be in a certain state.’

Entelechy. Literally: To be moving toward perfection.

Fast forward back to the 21st century and we have another preeminent psychologist chipping in to the discussion. Rollo May described the same force, only he made an important distinction in The Courage to Create where he tells us: “The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.” 

Back in the first century, entelechy  was not used in scripture but it certainly influenced spiritual debate.                1 Corinthians 15:36-38 certainly adds to the discussion of what is in the seed becomes actual when it is planted and produces its fruit with little to no thought of its’ on. Author May suggests that human fullness of life is experience by means of our choices. I would suggest that fullness of life is experienced when we address the God-shaped vacuum” that is within all of us.

Your full potential can be achieved by the choices you make every day. What is one choice that you need to make now!

Sean Young got his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford. He’s now a Professor at UCLA’s medical school and wrote a great book called Stick With It in which he walks us through the science of making behavioral changes stick.

He tells us that we need to work with seven psychological forces if we want to master the process of changing our behavior. And, he boils them down into the handy-dandy acronym: SCIENCE.

Stepladders + Community + Important + Easy + Neurohacks + Captivating + Engrained.

Let’s take a quick look.

• Stepladders. Sean tells us that we need to break our Dreams down into Goals and then break those Goals down into Steps. The simpler and smaller the steps the better. Climb up your stepladder!
• Community. The science is unequivocal. One of the fastest ways to change your behavior is to surround yourself with people who’re supporting you in your behavioral change.
• Important. You’ve gotta really want to change. Your why needs to be strong. Changing a certain behavior needs to be, of course, truly important.
• Easy. And, it needs to be EASY! Like, super easy. Sean tells us: “People often think they understand easy, but they actually don’t.” And, he tells us there are three ways to make it easier: Control your environment  + limit choice + make a plan.
• Neurohacks. Sean tells us that most of us get it backwards. We think we need to change how we think to change our behaviors. He says it’s more like the As If Principle. “People need to change their actions and their minds will follow. What you’re doing is ‘tricking’ the brain into realizing that change is possible.” ← That’s a “neurohack.”
• Captivating. Gamification and rewards are nice. But the key is to make your rewards “captivating.”
• Engrained. How do you make a new habit engrained? Habits 101 style: Use your finite willpower to program your basal ganglia to make things run on autopilot. How? Repetition. Repetition. Repetition.

Stepladders + Community + Important + Easy + Neurohacks + Captivating + Engrained.

What is one behavior that you are attempting to modify or break all together? Remember from the Judaeo=Christian position, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

Jim Rohn tells us in his book, Leading An Inspired Life, that integrating life-changing ideas into your life is a bit like figuring out a combination lock.

He tells us: “Ideas can change your life. And sometimes all you need is just one more good idea in a series of good ideas. It’s like dialing the numbers of a combination lock. After you’ve dialed five or six numbers, the lock may not come open. But you probably don’t need five or six more numbers. Maybe you need just one more number, one more idea. Maybe a seminar, scriptures or a sermon can provide it. The lyrics from a song could do it. The dialogue from a movie could do it. Conversation with a friend might do it. If you keep your eyes and ears open, you’ll find that one last idea you need.

Once you find that idea, the lock comes open, and there’s the door for you to walk through. Just one more idea, no matter where you get it, may be all you need to open that door of opportunity.”

I love that.

It captures the essence of what we’re doing with these +1s.

Let’s open some locks.

And step into the doorways of our infinite potential.

In our last Blog Article we took a quick look at Warren Buffett’s three-step goal setting process and then chatted about how it fits into our Big 3: Energy + Family + Service.

First, pop quiz: Did you do that exercise? If not, all good but…

If we want to move from theory to practice and from merely consuming these ideas to actually deeply thinking about and LIVING these ideas, we’ve gotta do the work.

The image that comes to mind for me is a stonecutter.

Imagine a guy (or gal) banging away at a HUGE rock with a sledgehammer. He pounds and pounds and pounds at that rock with his sledgehammer again and again and again.

And absolutely nothing happens.

Just a big rock. And a sweaty sledgehammer guy.

Then, apparently out of nowhere, on the next strike the rock splits. YAYUH!!!

Now, if you happened to be walking by that guy right when he made the swing that cracked open the rock you might think that a) the guy was super strong and/or b) splitting rocks is easy.

Moral of the story: We’ve gotta show up and hit the rock. Every day. If we want to make sure our ladder is leaning up against the right wall and that we’re living a life of deep, authentic purpose and meaning, we NEED to show up and do the work.

We’ve gotta turn off the entertainment at night so our brains can relax and we can get a good night of sleep. Then wake up early, feeling energized as we choose to go Deep into Creative work before we splash around in the Shallow side of the Reactive pool of life.

Over. And over. And over again.

Rick Snyder was the founder of research into the science of hope. And, he was one of the pioneers of the positive psychology movement. In fact, he literally wrote the textbook on “Positive Psychology.”

He documented just how important hope is to our overall well-being and tells us that there are three primary components to having high hope: Goals + Willpower + Waypower.

It all starts with a Goal. Happy people have projects. And, happy, hopeful people have GOALS! They have a future they’re excited about.

Then we have what Rick calls “Willpower.” In this context, Rick tells us that Willpower is that spark of determination that says, “We’ve got this!!” It needs to be there in the beginning AND it needs be there after you get knocked down a few times. (Rick’s protege Shane Lopez described this as “Agency” — a sense of personal power that we have what it takes to make our dreams a reality.)

Then we have what Rick calls “Waypower.” Waypower is all about mapping out the plans for how you will attain your goal along with the wisdom to know that your first plan probably won’t work out perfectly — requiring you to continue optimizing your strategy while pursuing different routes to your goal. (Shane Lopez called this “Pathways.”)

However, we are overlooking one significant element to these thoughts about Hope! The Biblical perspective states, “If I have HOPE only in this life, I am among all people most miserable.” This is not an indictment against our human dreams and hopes that we all have. However, it is to say that our hopes and dreams when infused with an eternal perspective as a Christ-follower, you SUPER-CHARGE your hopes and dreams with purposefulness beyond self-aggrandizement. That is called LEGACY LIVING!

There are three reasons why we err: necessary fallibility (we’re not omniscient and some things are outside of our human capacity; therefore, we err), ignorance (we may not know what to do; therefore, we err), and ineptitude (we know what to do but we don’t do it; therefore we err).

Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto is a powerful read. Atul is a world-class surgeon and public health researcher. In his book, he walks us through the astonishing power of astonishingly simple checklists. Teresa Amabile, a researcher at Harvard and author of Progress Principle states that she measured Gawande’s research in a three-month experiment. In this three-month experiment in eight different hospitals around the world, the rate of serious complications for surgical patients fell by 36 percent after introduction of the checklist, and deaths fell by 47 percent. Even Gawande himself, a highly trained surgeon with years of operating experience, found that his own performance improved notably after he started using the checklist. His point is that surgery, like any complex task, requires a regular check of all the fundamentals—to liberate the team to focus on the work and any unexpected circumstances that may arise.”

That surgical checklist was crazy simple. So simple that many surgeons (who have trained for decades to do what they do) thought it was laughably useless. It included very basic things like each member of the surgical team introducing themselves and confirming which side of the body the surgery would be performed on.

But the results from that super simple checklist were astonishing. Mortality fell by 47%.

FORTY-SEVEN PERCENT!!!

SO…how does this apply to you and I. First of all a checklist should be extremely simple. I have my “Daily Five,”(1.Read, 2. Write, 3. Reflective Thinking, 4. Who Can I impact Today, and 5. Exercise). Next, once you develop your list practice it everyday. YES, you heard me correctly – EVERYDAY! This is not a someday-maybe idea. This is an everyday idea so that I give myself the chance to make everyday a Masterpiece day!

Nobel Prize-winning Herbert Simon’s wisdom that says that, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” It’s easy to read that and say, “Yah! So true…” and then do nothing about it — continuing to destroy our attention with an onslaught of meaningless incoming information. And, continuing to err.

Writers, Samuel Gorovitz and Alasdair MacIntyre who tell us that there are three primary reasons why we err.

The first is “necessary fallibility.” Some things are just outside the realm of human capacity. Alas, we’re not all powerful and omniscient.

But, some things ARE within our capacity and yet we still fall short of our potential. There are two reasons for these types of failures: ignorance and ineptitude.

Ignorance means we don’t know what we need to know to perform at our best. Ineptitude means we KNOW but we don’t actually DO what we know.

Here’s the good news: If we simply applied more of what we ALREADY know, we’d be doing really, really, really well. (Right?)

What is ONE THING that you can do this very minute that you can maximize your abilities? Optimization is about moving from theory to practice! In other words we make small advancements daily to improve our lives regarding the things that we know is healthy for us mind, body, and spirit!

TODAY, it is time to say good-bye to ineptitude and hello to MASTERY!

Herbert Simon won the Nobel Prize in Economics. He was one of the early thought leaders in the field of “attention economics.”

In 1971, he told us: “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

(This is worth a re-read and memorization: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”)

He also told us that all that information creates “a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

Now, again, Simon told us that in 1971.

1971!! We were decades away from the internet and smartphone technology. What were you doing in 1971 beside protesting the Vietnam War? I wonder what Simon would say today? “Double-down on your effort” is probably what he would say. In case you are not in touch with this subject, have you noticed how distracted we are these days?

Now, here’s the thing. It’s easy to read Simon’s quote and say, “Wow. Yah. That guy was wise. So true.” And then go on utterly destroying our attention as we indiscriminately consume an astonishing amount of meaningless incoming data.

In the book, The Checklist Manifesto, there are three reasons we err; 1. Necessary fallibility: Some things are just beyond our capacity; 2. Ignorance: Some times we just don’t know how to do something; and, 3. Ineptitude: Some times we KNOW what to do, we just don’t do it.

Authors Cal Newport and Eric Barker say that being able to focus your attention and go deep is the superpower of the 21st century. Why? Because when nearly everyone is allowing their attention to get destroyed, those few of us who go in the opposite direction look like superheroes.