The Formula
This article is one part of a three part “Formula” that can be used separately or combined in any order. Each part is broken down into three sub-parts that can also be used independently. “Belief, Values, and Action” & “Happiness, Gratitude, and Routine” are the other two parts of the formula. This “Formula” when worked in its entirety can lead to profound effects on your life.
As you work through these exercises, things will start to become clearer and clearer. The more overlap you can create from each part, the stronger your vision will become. That strength of purpose comes from clarity. The clarity comes from the self-awareness you create by working the parts of the “Formula.”
In “Belief, Value, and Action” you learn how you came to be who you are today and release yourself from the things holding you back. In “Happiness, Gratitude, and Routine” you will discover what truly makes you happy and how to make that happen each and every day. Last but not least, “Goals, Failure, and Learning” will give you the ability to handle anything the world can throw at you and use it to accelerate life.
Goals
Goals are a tricky thing. We have all heard write them down and read them out loud every day. That’s good advice and is an effective strategy. How do you actually achieve your goals? How do you know what your goals should be? This is easier than you think. I taught the strategy I will explain below to my son when he was 11 years old. After a few micro goals to learn the process of choosing a goal, writing out an action plan, and tracking his progress, he quickly became a master of his own destiny. At the time of writing this he is 13 years old and he no longer thinks to himself if he can achieve something. It only comes down to if he’s willing to do the work to get what he is after. My point is, if a preteen can master this strategy in just a few months and put it to practical use on his own ever since, you’re capable of doing this too.
Let’s talk about types of goals. This is not goal setting in the traditional sense. I do use elements of traditional goal setting, but I start with different questions. If you have a small or short-term goal for a small material achievement, it won’t require much reflection or thought. For example, let’s say you want to buy a something in the next six months that cost $600. You look at your budget and to save $100 per month for the next six months you have to skip the designer coffee every day and stop eating out as much. This is an easy mechanical switch. What I mean is, you’re not going without coffee or food, you’re just making your own instead of purchasing it as often. Nothing about you had to change to make this goal a reality. The goals that require major change need more upfront work to make them a reality, and this is where most people fail. Not only in the choice of goals, but in the execution of achieving them.
Ask the Right Questions
If your goals don’t excite you more than your lizard brain wants to just chill, you will fail. Motivation and willpower are a real thing and can be strengthened with practice, but if that’s all you are relying on to achieve a big goal, the odds are stack heavily against you. Using the right questions to align your goals with what you really want out of life will reduce and even eliminate the need for motivation and willpower. Motivation and willpower are emotions, and all emotions are fleeting. By asking the right questions and creating new behaviors around the answers to those questions will solidify your resolve to achieve what you are aiming for.
The Questions
1. What experiences do I want to have?
2. To have these experiences, how do I have to grow?
3. How do I give back after I have achieved?
Will Smith famously said “Set a goal so big that you can’t achieve it until you grow into the person who can.” I’m not suggestion huge ambitions are the only thing worth go after. With that said, you owe it to yourself to really think about what kind of life you want. This is a very personal journey. Some people want to experience living on a yacht and traveling the world. Some people want to grow their own food, and some others might want to experience their children having success. The point is, goals don’t have to be these wildly ambitious endeavors. They have to be true to what you want to experience in your life, and that will be different for everyone. It’s also important to think about how you can give back because eventually you will achieve what you set out for. You’ll be at the top of your mountain and say to yourself, “Shit, what now.” If you can figure out a way to use what you love to help others, you can have the experiences you want over and over until you decide you have had enough.
The Process
Your beliefs and values create your identity, and identity drives behavior. If you are going after a goal, it will require new behavior. Connecting your goal to your beliefs and values will help you cement a new behavior, causing the identity shift that will make the behavior automatic. Once the behavior is a habit that is re-enforced by your beliefs and values which provides you with the identity of the person who does the thing, motivation and willpower become irrelevant. Your goal changes from a want to a need. Your goal is now inevitable and just becomes a matter of how fast will you achieve it.
First, you need to get very specific. You can’t hit a target you can’t see. You need to be very clear on what you want. Second, you must believe you can figure it out. Remember, everything is figure-out-able! It’s a goal because you don’t have it yet, which means there are things you need to do and learn to achieve the thing. If you don’t believe you can learn what’s necessary you won’t get started, or worse, you’ll tell yourself you can do it but you truly don’t believe in yourself so as soon as it gets hard you use the obstacle as proof your goal isn’t possible. This is confirming your belief that you aren’t capable of your goal, feeding the negative mental feedback loop that has kept you stuck for who knows how long. If you don’t know how to change your beliefs, read “Belief, Value, and Action” to learn how to change your beliefs.
This is the place most people feel overwhelmed and give up. How do you eat an elephant? Answer: One bite at a time. Break it up into steps. For example, let’s say in one year you want to be able to XYZ. You start with the goal and you list all the things you will need to learn and be able to do to make XYZ a reality. Let’s say you have to learn 12 things. That means each month you have to learn one of the 12 things. Now you have a monthly goal. You take that monthly goal and figure out what you have to do every week to hit your monthly goal. This becomes your weekly goal. Now, what do you have to do every day or Monday-Friday, every other day, etc, to ensure you hit your weekly goal? Now you have bite size daily goals. If you hold yourself accountable and achieve your daily goals consistently, then you automatically hit your weekly goals. If you hit your weekly goals, the monthly goals take care of themselves. You hit your monthly goals, your big goal that seemed to be overwhelming is now inevitable. Now that you know it’s just a matter of time, the fear of starting goes away. Instead of it being a question of if you can, it now becomes a question of how fast can I do it.
Speak them out loud. By stating your intentions, you will help codify your identity with the intention to complete the task. Your mind will start to organize your thoughts to align with your intentions. People have a need to fall in line with their identity, by speaking your intentions out loud you are telling yourself “This is who I am” “I am the person who _____.” You will start thinking and acting in accordance with your intentions. This is why writing out your goals and the steps to achieving them is so powerful. By writing it all out and reading it to yourself out loud, once in the morning and once before you go to bed will not only help hold yourself accountable, but will help shape your identity.
Don’t be afraid to tell others what you are doing. If you get push back or negativity from someone, question their intentions. People believe that their limitations are true. They will argue for their limitation by trying to convince you they are your limitations as well. People usually aren’t trying to intentionally hurt you. In fact, most will put their limitations on you with the intention of trying to help you. People simply cannot see their limitation as anything other than objective truth that not only holds them back, but will hold back anyone who tries to challenge that limitation. We all have people like this in our lives just don’t let their limitations become your limitations. When I encounter this from someone, I meet the adversity with compassion. I usually say something like, “I understand what you mean, thanks for the advice.” I quickly think through what they said to see if anything they said can be useful in helping get to my goal faster and then disregard the rest. The bottom line is this. You already have a daily step-by-step plan to achieving your goal. You know it possible and it’s not a matter of “if you can” it a matter of “how fast.” So don’t let someone else’s limiting beliefs get in the way of your life. Thank them for their concern and move forward.
Speaking of forward, let’s talk momentum. One of the best ways to becoming unstoppable is momentum. The more momentum you build, the faster you get to your goal and the harder it will be to stop moving towards your goal. At first this can be hard to generate, but once it starts to build it can be like a freight train. A quick little personal truth about me, I use the image of an old school steam engine pulling freight uphill around a mountain to help me get my mental momentum started. Once I feel the momentum shift in my favor after days or weeks of hard work I change the image in my head to the train barreling down the mountain gaining more and more speed as I try to figure out more efficient ways to get to my goal. Ok, personal head trip aside, nothing kills more dreams than tomorrow. Do not put things off. If it can be done today, do it today. If you lined up your goals with your true desires, you will want to keep doing things that move you toward your goal because it’s exciting for you. Inevitably, you will face times when things get tough or boring and you just need to keep going. Do not stop and if you can help it don’t even slow down. Practice grit and push yourself. Do this enough and you will be amazed at how far you can reach. I’m not advocating you should burn yourself out. I’m say don’t let yourself be lazy because that urge to be lazy is in all of us. The more you practice pushing it away, the better you will become at it.
When it comes to creating the life you want, FUCK PATIENCE! Yes, patience is a virtue, great things come to thoughts who wait, and whatever other over used platitude you can think of. I’m not saying patience doesn’t have a place in your life. I am saying if you starting thinking you need to be patient when it comes to your goals, you’re in trouble. That is the beginning of the end. You are starting to talk yourself out of what you already decided you wanted. FUCK That! Don’t let patience rob you of your life. Time doesn’t care about you. Too many people think there’s always tomorrow, or that can wait until later, tomorrow’s another day. You should not be patient about building the best you and the life you want. You owe it to yourself and the ones you love to be the best you.
Failure
We have all heard “fail fast, fail forward, you never fail, you learn” and many other useful platitudes. They are all trying to do the same thing. Make you reframe, or perceive failure differently. They are catchy phrases but aren’t much use if you don’t know how to turn failure into success. Make no mistake about it, there will be failure in your life. How you handle that failure determines your trajectory in life.
No matter how you slice it, failure sucks. It stings to know you aren’t capable of something yet. Key word “yet” because if you put in the work to learn something, you will eventually succeed. The trick is to not perceive failure as a negative thing. This is easy to say, but not easy to do. It will require many, many repetition’s of consciously reframing your perceptions. A lifetime of brainwashing has to be unraveled and rewired to accomplish this.
Since you were born, you have been taught mistakes are bad. Nothing got quit as much attention from adults as mistakes you made as you navigated your childhood. Children make mistakes, and adults correct the mistakes to the best of their ability. That’s the role of adults is to teach children how to do things. Everything from academic skills to behaviors and even how a child should feel about something. This is the natural order of things, children are naturally curious and as we get older, the curiosity dwindles. Largely in part because we are taught that mistakes are bad and should be avoided at all costs. Since our brains are hard-wired to protect us even from a perceived threat, we learned to be less and less curious as we grew. Think about it. Fear of mistakes is the biggest enemy of curiosity, and the idea that mistakes are bad was confirmed at first by others, then eventually by our own thoughts. You’re subconsciously playing this negative feedback loop that causes this fear of mistakes. That belief gets reaffirmed every day.
You have a lifetime of confirming a belief that is not true. You can repeat those mantras the self-help community touts every day but if you don’t put in the work to actually change your thought processes. To interrupt that negative feedback loop holding down your curiosity. To interrupt a subconscious pattern, you have to get good at recognizing it, stopping its influence on your thoughts and emotions and then you will be able to teach yourself how to reframe your perceptions of failure to be a positive instead of a negative.
This process I’m about to share with you can be uses for any perception you wish to change. Our context for this article is failure, but the process is the same for any perception you would like to change.
Before we get to the tactics, I want to explain a good mental framework to operate from. We associate mistakes with pain. We will instinctively avoid pain and in doing so also avoid what we need to know about ourselves to interact more effectively in similar circumstances in the future. To evolve beyond pain and our fear of mistakes, our mistakes have to be resolved. This is where most people fail simply because they are not willing to be aware of their inadequacies. The solution is simple but not easy. You need to create a mental framework in which you define experiences as valid and have meaning, and, as such, mistakes are not bad, they just point the way. The obstacle becomes the way. When you start acting from a perspective that mistakes don’t define you, they show you what or how you need to adapt, you will be amazed at the sense of freedom you will feel. You will know that by accepting your results as a reflection of who you are in that moment, not forever, which then allows you to determine what you need to learn to get better.
Stay focused on learning. What do I need to learn, or how will I have to adapt myself to interact more successfully? Stay focused on mastering the steps to achieving your goal and not the end result, knowing that the end result will be a by-product of what you know and how well you can act on what you know. This perspective causes you to focus your attention on your abilities and makes you assume all responsibility for your success. You don’t get to feel the intense pleasure of your success until you have felt the sharp sting of failure. Success doesn’t make us better. Success is a byproduct of the lessons you have learned and their efficient use resulting in a favorable outcome. Overcoming adversity is what makes you better.
What did I fail at today? The purpose is to learn failure isn’t a bad thing. Being able to say with complete indifference “I failed.” To be able to look at your inadequacies and not let it negatively affect you. To uncover the emotions and thoughts that keep you stuck, you have to ask the right questions in the right way. Objectively look at what’s causing you to act or behave in a certain way without judging yourself. The idea is to uncover what’s holding you back and replace or add something that will move you towards success.
If you have children, this is a very important lesson for them. By adding a simple daily or weekly discussion you can lift the negative stigma off mistakes and failure. Whenever you have a few minutes with your child simply ask “what mistakes did you make today? I made fill-in-the-blank mistake, or I failed at fill-in-the-blank. I learned fill-in-the-blank. Did you learn something new today?” The point of this is to get yourself and your children comfortable making mistakes and failing. If we show them you don’t react negatively to them, they will adopt that mental framework as well. So, it’s important you don’t react negatively to their mistake or your explanation of your own mistake. The reaction should be kept short, simple and with curiosity. Think or say out loud, “I wonder what I can learn from that.” Never respond negativity, don’t even let it show on your face. The practice with your children works two-fold. It helps them avoid falling into the negativity trap of mistakes and failures as well as helping you rewire the way you think and feel about mistakes and failures.
Get Good at Learning
Once you push your ego aside and seek out your weakness with the intent to overcome. Obstacles or pain points become just another way to make you better. For me, the skills of learning I developed from childhood were slowing me down. My ability to synthesize information in an effective way was filled with bad habits. How quickly a person can process and apply new information will dictate their trajectory in life. Learning is a skill and can be improved upon. The skill of learning has a compounding effect just like compound interest and will help you in every area of life. It sounds corny, but when you have proven to yourself, you can learn you realize the possibilities are endless. The self-talk changes from “can I do it” to “do I want to do it”. I’m still not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I know on a long enough timeline I can do anything I decide to do because I’m confident in my ability to learn. Dropping my ego and getting good at the skill of learning is one of the most impactful lessons I have learned and wish I had figured out at a younger age. In fact when I finally realized the impact getting good at learning had I started teaching my son the mechanics of learning. He was in third grade at the time, so please don’t think this is too complicated for children. Teaching them effective ways to learn will make everything in their lives easier.
Why do you learn? To get good at something. The act of getting good at something is skill building. I once learned a formula for building skills and it goes like this:
SK (P + ER +FL + H) =SB
At the beginning of the formula is SK, it stands for Specialized Knowledge. Without knowledge that is specific to the endeavor, you are and will remain incompetent and unable to achieve the goals (the results) that you seek. This specialized knowledge becomes a multiplier of the variables in the parenthesis, the first of which is P.
P stands for Protocols. A protocol is a series of sequentially ordered steps toward an aim or a goal. The sequence here is very important, and it involves the procedure, rules and stages that are necessary for reaching the objectives.
Next, we add the ER or Effective Routines. Routines are the things you do to maximize the protocols impact in getting the results you want. They are called Effective because they are well chosen, written down, prioritized and used as a checklist. When you employ effective routines, you take the thought process out of the equation for moving forward. This is important because thinking is fraught with danger, as errant thoughts can distract and distort your perceptions of what you are trying to gleam from the data your practice gives you. Also, ER supports your behaviors to become consistent. You do not want to be inconsistent and/or errant in what you do. You want your behaviors to be methodical.
Then there is the FL or Feedback Loop. Feedback is a part of any behavior, but first you must pay attention to the outcome so you can use this data as feedback. Here is where you verify, measure, and document the data to tease out what is not working against what is. The feedback information is used to identify and track the patterns of thinking, feeling and doing that highly impact your ability, or lack thereof, to achieve the results you want.
The last variable in this formula the H which stands for both Habituation and Habit Formation. Habituation is what happens when you both mentally and physiologically acclimate to a situation or set of circumstances. An example of this is when you do something repeatedly or are stimulated over and over in the same way, causing your system to set up internal loops to handle the stimuli without thinking. The result is that you become less and less sensitive to it; it has become habituated.
Additionally, repetition causes the actions to drop into unconscious control. This is also called a habit. In fact, the habit that is formed in this type of condition not only is positive, productive and powerful, it is also how you can re-program to go from doing those things that are not in the interests of your highest and best self to doing those things that are. If you follow this formula in earnest, you will experience a substantive increase in your skill building capacity which will positively affect ever area of your life.
Trading is a process-oriented endeavor for those who are serious about becoming and remaining a consistently successful trader. In any one trade it is not about the outcome, it’s about how well you implement and execute. You must reserve all your focus to be honed on what you are doing and how you are doing it
SK (P + ER + FL + H) =SB
SK – Specialized Knowledge: Knowledge specific to the endeavor.
P – Protocols: Ordered Steps towards an aim or goal.
ER – Effective Routines: Well chosen, written down, prioritized checklist.
FL – Feedback Loop: Verify, measure, and document data.
H – Habituation / Habit Formation: Above dropped into unconscious control.
SB – Skill Building: Each step of this process needs to be evaluated regularly to avoid becoming calcified as dogma.
Learning is a system. Any system can be improved upon. Whether or not you realize it, you have a system in your mind right now that dictates how you learn. By identifying patterns in your failure in your current system, you can identify weak points in your learning system. The more efficient your learning system, the faster you learn. This is slow at first, but over time the compounding effect of improving your system far outweighs the effort it takes to improve it.
Real-life story time. I mentioned that I started teaching my son how to learn in the third grade. I didn’t hit him with the formula, I just explained. I started with identifying his learning process failures. As he completed his homework, I would have him teach it to me. Letting your children teach you is great for many reasons, but I will stay on topic. In becoming the student, I’m watching for mistakes or inefficiencies in his learning process. Everyone makes mistakes. I wasn’t standing over him waiting to pounce on his mistakes. When he got something wrong, or I knew a better way of doing something, I would ask how he got to that answer. I wouldn’t even tell him the answer was wrong. Failure is never treated negatively in my house but that will be covered later. As he’s explaining to me how he came to that conclusion, I’m looking for where his logic steered him in the wrong direction. I focus on correcting the learning process, not the answer. Over time, I saw patterns in his learning process. Because I have put in the work to become good at learning, I slowly changed the logic he was using that steered him in the wrong direction and replaced it with a more efficient logic that would get him to the right answer.
Over time, he dropped all the logic that was leading him the wrong way and we started increasing his learning skills by teaching him more and more advanced learning strategies. It became a game of how fast can he complete a task with a perfect score and complete comprehension. School is no longer intimidating because he knows he can learn anything they are teaching him. It just comes down to how long it will take to learn and complete the task. That is a huge confidence booster as he navigates the adolescent world of hormones and social awkwardness.
Imagine if you had that kind of confidence. How it would feel to know you could handle any task your boss or the world handed you. How much more valuable would you be to your company? What impact would it have on your family if your ability to problem solve increased 5 or 10 fold? Getting good at learning has an immediate and permanent positive impact across all areas of your life.