Seeing what others can’t see – as a means to achieve unusual success

Many of the successes I’ve had in my life have been due in part to my ability to “see” things that others could not see. And likewise, many of the opportunities that I’ve missed in life have been missed due to my lack of ability to “see” things that others could see.

My situation is far from unique. In fact, many of the world’s great success stories are grounded in someone having had the ability to “see” huge opportunities that nearly everyone else missed. Examples from the business world include: George Soros and the impending devaluation of the English Pound that he capitalized on; Bill Gates and the future strategic importance (and value) of operating systems that he capitalized on; Google’s founders and the importance of organizing the internet which they continue to capitalize on.

I’ll share two (smaller scale) stories with you from my own business career about this phenomenon:

A time that I saw something: In late 2007, I was able to “see” the impending stock market collapse quite clearly. In particular, the (now widely appreciated) unsustainable private sector debt bubble that was building and about to pop, along with its implications, were both somehow clearly visible to me. Now, the truth is that, having been regularly informed by many experienced investors that I didn’t know what I was talking about, it would probably be more accurate to say that, at year-end 2007 I was more “fearful” of a stock market collapse than confident. As such, rather than actively betting on the stock market collapse (which I now wish I had done), instead I just bought gold and cash equivalents – thus generating a modest profit for my family in 2008 while the financial gurus who thought I was stupid lost their shirts. Needless to say, this one thing I saw saved me a lot of money in 2008.

A time that I missed something: About 8 months ago I was presented with an investment opportunity in a company that sells a very cool product to health insurance companies. (I can’t tell you more about this company because I signed a confidentiality agreement with them.) During his fund-raising presentation to me, the CEO of the company mentioned that he thought his product might be sellable in the hospital sector. I decided to pass on the investment opportunity, with almost no consideration, because: (a) I believed the selling price for stock in the company was too high, and (b) I and my partners would not have been able to take a controlling position in the company (which was a deal breaker for us). Four months later a friend of mine (another seasoned entrepreneur) called me up to tell me about this deal (which I, of course, recognized). My friend, having heard the same presentation as I also declined to make the investment – but instead of walking away, he offered the CEO a proposition where they would do a joint venture in which my friend would get an exclusive right to distribute the company’s product to hospitals in exchange for a percentage of the sales he generated. When I heard this idea my immediate thought was “Oh Shit,” because (understanding the product’s strong marketability to hospitals) I could immediately see that my friend was likely about to make millions of dollars with essentially no work or capital investment (because he will be outsourcing the hospital sales function to others) – and that I could have easily done the same thing four months earlier had I simply been able to see the opportunity in front of me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this phenomenon of “seeing” lately and, in particular, I’ve been wondering how you and I can train ourselves to enhance our seeing ability. Regrettably I don’t have a good answer to this question (and if you do, I’d love it if you could write to me or post a comment.) With this said, let me please direct you to a terrific (now ancient) blog entry from Phillip Eby called “A Spooky Mind Hack” in which my sense is that there might be a very good clue available to us, addressing this very important question, if we can only “see” it.

How to walk on ice – as a metaphor for living

There is sheer ice on the sidewalk outside my house today. I love walking on that ice – especially when I’m able to really glide.

Other people in my neighborhood are terrified when they walk on the ice – and thus approach it fearfully, with tension in their bodies.

I grew up in Wisconsin where we had a lot of snow and ice. So, as a child, I spent many hours walking and running on ice without much fear. What I learned then (and remember to this day) is that you can’t fight the ice when you’re walking or running on it; you need to pay attention to your feet, but also understand that you’re in a dance with the ice and that it’s going to make you slip, whether you like it or not.

I also learned as a child is that it’s a lot of fun to enjoy (rather than resist) the ride on the ice, and that, as long as I go with the flow, it’s not that hard to navigate.

Many branches of Eastern philosophy (including the martial arts) describe an idealized mind-state characterized by relaxed attention. Here, for example, is a quote from the Buddhist Kindred Sayings in which the Buddha describes, in characteristically cryptic language, how he crossed a flood:

“When tarrying, friend, I sank, and when struggling, I was swept away. So, friend, it is by not tarrying and not struggling that I have crossed the flood.”

By virtue of my snow-filled childhood, I’ve learned how to achieve a joyful and effective state of relaxed attention when walking on ice. I continue trying to learn to do that same thing when navigating my way through the rest of my daily life. It’s not a bad way to live.

The puppy and the jaundiced woman: a parable

Our family got a new puppy yesterday afternoon. We call him Simba. Isn't he cute?

I got up with Simba at 5 this morning, and played with him. While we played, I disappeared into the experience, completely let go, had a great time, and felt like a kid again. And, as a result of our play, I felt quite connected to Simba, as if I, too, were a puppy.

It’s completely understandable that this happened to me with Simba. He’s adorable, filled with positive puppy energy, and completely loving and engaging.

Yesterday, when walking along the street in my neighborhood, I passed by an elderly, hunched, deeply jaundiced woman whom I had never seen before. My immediate thoughts, when noticing her, were of death and decay. I felt repulsed and averted my eyes when we passed one another.

Oddly enough, I passed by that same woman this afternoon. However, when I saw her this time, instead of seeing death and decay in her face, I somehow saw her humanity – and maybe even a little of my puppy in her face. So I looked right at her and smiled … and then she smiled back, quite warmly. I felt connected to her, and nourished by the encounter.

I far preferred today’s interaction with this woman today to the one I had yesterday. I’m grateful to my new puppy for reminding me about the connectedness we all share, and how much nicer life is when I can be aware of that connectedness.

Leveraging the 80/20 rule; the power of focus

We all know about the “80/20” rule. This rule – also known as the “Pareto Principle” (named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto), and the “Law of the Vital Few” says that, for many life situations, 80% of the value is generated from 20% of the effort.

In organization after organization, I’ve witnessed this easily measurable phenomenon, even in well-managed places … i.e., where 80% (or more) of the profits (or sales, or whatever) was generated by: 20% of the customers; or 20% of the employees; or 20% of the operating divisions; or 20% of the products; or 20% of the effort; or whatever.

Similarly I’ve seen this math apply (vividly and equally strongly) in my own life and that of a number of my friends and colleagues – where 80% or more of the “good stuff” in our lives (whether measured in dollars, or pleasure, or relationships) is a product of no more than 20% of our productive efforts.

Think about this rule for a second. It offers a huge clue about how to become happy and productive. Here’s a mathematical corollary to the Pareto Principle:

If you and I were to double our focus on the 20% of activities that generate value in our lives … and substantially reduce our focus on the other 80%, we’d work a lot less, and generate a lot more value in our lives.

I have dozens stories to share about mind-blowing business and life situations I’ve witnessed where the obvious “answer” to a business or personal struggle was simply that the person (or organization) had to re-focus their efforts on the vital 20%. My guess is that you have as well.

The amazing thing here is that, when presented with tangible evidence of the Pareto Principle at work, it’s somehow nearly impossible for most of us to internalize the obvious implications of what we’re seeing and focus our attention on the vital few. Rather, we all seem to gravitate toward focusing our efforts on problem areas that are time-consuming and useless. And for the several people I know who live their lives feeling overwhelmed, this situation seems to compound itself, amplifying their sense of being overwhelmed.

I’ll share several life examples with you:

• A venture capitalist, who has a portfolio of 10 companies where two of the companies are clear winners and two have serious problems is devoting most of his time to putting out fires for the two loser companies. He “doesn’t have time” to focus on the winners right now, but if he “weren’t so busy,” there would be several things he could do to fuel the growth of the winner companies.
• A non-profit organization which is having fundraising challenges in today’s economy, has a list of 50 activities they are theoretically pursuing to raise money, but 3/4ths of their efforts are being directed toward three financially useless activities (e.g., an auction that has never generated meaningful dollars), and meanwhile, the two things they should clearly be working on (including Board development) are getting no attention right now because their staff is “too busy.”
• Hospitals (which are having financial difficulties right now) have been laying off collection agents in their finance departments lately due to budget constraints despite the fact that the average collection agent collects 5x their salary in incremental revenues for the hospitals per year.
• For the past six months, I’ve had it on my “to do” list that I should get Google Voice to transcribe my voicemails. I haven’t gotten around to this 5 minute task (so I can read my voicemails on my blackberry), and meanwhile, I bet I’ve lost 20 hours going through the painful and unnecessary voicemail-checking process that my phone requires.
• My son devotes 3 times as much of his time to resisting homework as he does to doing the homework.
• An ASP I know provider generates $5 in sales for every dollar they spend on telemarketing, but they don’t have the budget to increase the size of their telemarketing efforts.
• And I have so many more examples…

When training as a doctor in emergency rooms, one of the mantras they taught us was: “when 6 people in life-threatening situations arrive all at once, the first thing to do is to take your pulse.” Basically the message here was that, when you feel overwhelmed and panicked, take a breath, think through the 80/20 rule, and then focus on the vital 20%. When I’ve been able to remember this lesson, it has served me quite well.

So … here are my words of wisdom for the day – directed (as usual) to me as well as you.

David’s words of wisdom for the day:

Please respond intelligently to the Pareto principle’s impact on your life.

To be specific, let's all take 5 minutes to ask ourselves:

• What are the “vital few” activities I’m doing in my life right now that generate most of the value even though they don’t take much time?
• And what are the few time sink activities I’m pursuing right now that generate no value for me, but take a lot of effort?

Then, let's all try to avoid our normal human impulse to focus on the fires in our lives, and see if, instead, we might be able to double our time or effort devoted to the vital few and halve our time on the useless many. This little change will make a huge impact; I promise.

Ohm

I just had a delicious dinner with a lovely glass of wine … after having had a really productive and engaging day … and now, I feel happy, content and peaceful. Sitting at this computer, as I attempt to figure out what I should blog about, the only thing that comes up in my mind (when I try to think up a topic) is an enveloping sense of peace, openness and connection with the universe.

I’ve worked for many years to learn how to be happy and successful, and sometimes, like right now, as a result of my years of effort, I just get overtaken by bliss. This state doesn’t happen to me that often, but when it does occur (like right now), it definitely doesn’t suck.

My hope, with this blog, is that by sharing my journey with you, I will be able to help you accelerate your own path toward continually expanding bliss and power. To that end, in future blog entries, I’ll go into detail about what, specifically, has helped me traverse the distance between pretty intense and continuous unhappiness (and a sense of powerlessness) ten years ago to the blissful place I often inhabit today. In the meantime, though, I think I’d like to return to my “ohm,” at least for now.

Acting “as if”

A couple weekends ago, I was speaking at a seminar designed to help entrepreneurs.

At the beginning of the seminar (well before my speech was scheduled), I had the opportunity to participate in an “icebreaker” exercise led by a different speaker, which exercise the speaker credited to Tony Robbins. In this exercise, we were instructed to go up to strangers in the room and introduce ourselves three times in succession but in accordance with changing instructions. The first time, we were told to introduce ourselves to people normally. The second time, we were asked to walk up to people as if we already knew them. And by the third go-around, we were told to approach people as if they were long-lost friends.

The results of this exercise amazed me. The way that I felt and the intensity of connections that I formed in these three situations were extraordinarily different. The first time, I felt “OK,” and formed no connections whatsoever. The third experience, by contrast, energized me (a lot) and, more importantly, generated a fairly intense, instantaneous connection with the people with whom I spoke.

Since that weekend, having been blown away by the effectiveness of the exercise I learned at the seminar, I have been toying with the question of whether or not I can train myself to apply the technique I learned during that exercise more broadly in my day-to-day life. My goal here is not only to learn to connect more intensely with other people (although that’s a worthwhile goal in itself), but also, to learn how to use the technique I learned there to become happier and more effective in general.

To accomplish this goal, I’ve been trying to follow a three step process:

1. Train myself to identify and characterize, in detail, what I specifically do and feel, e.g., what I’m thinking, how I breathe, how I hold my body, etc. when I am happy and effective (let’s call this my “optimal state”) vs. unhappy and ineffective (my “sub-optimal state”)
2. Train myself to reproduce my optimal state at will – basically by having my body and mind reproduce the actions that I’ve memorized during step 1 above
3. When I notice myself being in my sub-optimal state, consciously attempt to shift myself over to my optimal state by: (a) acting “as if” I’m already in my optimal state, and (b) simultaneously attempting to reproduce my optimal state based on what I’d been learning during steps 1 and 2 above.

To date, I’ve had a few, small successes with this strategy, but the going has been slow. Nonetheless, my sense (based on my experience during the seminar as well as success stories I’ve heard from others using this technique) is that I’m on to something here and that, with practice, this strategy will prove to be a valuable addition to my self-improvement arsenal.

If anyone reading this blog has had experience trying this technique on their own, I’d love to hear about it.

Being there while getting there

After a very long day of work today, I finally got home (around 10:30), and then I took my dog out for a walk.

During the first half of my walk with the dog, my mind was buzzing with dozens of thoughts and feelings … residue from the day … things I felt excited or disappointment about … thoughts about what on earth I would write about in this blog … and much much more.

About halfway into the walk, something snapped. Perhaps my fatigue got the better of me, or perhaps I just learned a lesson by watching how my dog was conducting the walk. In any case, at that point, I suddenly became aware of my experience of the present moment … how beautiful the sky looked … how fresh the cold air tasted … how much I enjoyed being with my dog … and even how nice it felt to just walk. And that experience in the second half of my walk, in turn, reminded me of something I “know” but usually forget (e.g., during the first half of my walk), namely that to really feel alive and joyful, I need to be out of my head enough to notice what I’m experiencing in the moment. True to form, the second half of my walk was far more enjoyable and rewarding than the first half.

Perhaps like you, I am a very goal-oriented person. Goal-orientation has served me well in life in many ways. In fact, one of my goals has been to learn how to be happy, and, with diligent effort over the past several years, I’ve even been quite successful at achieving that goal. With this said, one of the down-sides of my goal-oriented personality is that it’s very easy for me to become so consumed by thoughts (as I did during the first half of my walk) that I miss my life as it is passing me by; as such, some of my “efforts” to be happy actually end up being counter-productive.

The Zen guys talk about the notion of “being there while getting there,” which basically means living deeply in the moment (and understanding that there is nothing more than the moment available to us), even while working toward future-based goals.

This blog is devoted to helping you and me become deeply joyful, healthy and successful and we’ll continue to work together to learn how to achieve this goal. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with our effort to get somewhere together, as long as we remember during this process that there’s really nowhere to for us to get to besides this moment. If we miss out on our moments (e.g., this moment) while working together toward future-based happiness - for example, when we become consumed by our thoughts - we miss out on the whole ball of wax.

How to form deep connections with other people

For most of my life I have felt really lonely and isolated. Even while I was in social situations (or business meetings, or lots of other places where I was with other people), I felt really alone.

It didn’t take me long in therapy to develop “explanations” for why I isolated myself; at least part of the issue was that, as a child, I learned to wall myself off from others as an unconscious defense mechanism to protect myself from anticipated pain.

Figuring out why I isolated myself didn’t really help me that much; I could explain why I felt isolated, but I still felt lonely. But it was a good start.

Lately, though, I’ve been focusing my attention what I need to do to stop feeling lonely … and instead, experience a sense of real connectedness with other people. The answer for me has been learning to open up my heart or my emotional “truth” to other people when I'm scared to do so.

The process for me works something like this:

• When I’m with someone with whom I want to feel connected (and I don’t), I ask myself if I’m feeling or thinking something that I want to share with them ... that I’m afraid of sharing (e.g., because I’m scared they’ll dislike me, or that they’ll get angry, or that they’ll think poorly of me, or something like that)
• Then, I tell the person the thing I’m afraid to tell them - directly and without sugar-coating my words
• Then, I watch what happens

What I’ve discovered – to my absolute amazement – is that, after doing this process well over 100 times with dozens of people in the last several months:

• People’s reactions to me are almost always the opposite of what I expect; mostly, people are really grateful when I share my “truth”
• This process usually creates an immediate sense of connectedness with the other person
• This process has, to date, never backfired on me; i.e., I’ve never regretted it – at least so far

More to the point, what I’ve also discovered is that most people respond very favorably when I am honest and open about my “truth” – especially when the thing I’m sharing is something that seems embarrassing or bad. And, on the flip side, I’ve also discovered that when people are open with me, it makes me feel connected to them.

Given the positive feedback I’ve gotten from this process so far, I’m getting braver every day in terms of what truths I’m willing to reveal – and to whom. And, given that every new step I’ve taken to open my heart further has created so much good stuff, I have no intention of stopping my progress down this path.

If you haven’t gone down this path as well, perhaps you would find this journey of opening your heart to people when it’s scary to do so equally rewarding.

Just do it … and ideally, find someone to help you do so

As a few of you know, I haven’t blogged in about a week, despite my initial plan to blog on a regular basis.

The primary thing that stopped me from writing during these last several days was classic resistance patterns of mine – including a whole host of thoughts that seemed quite rational (at the time) as valid reasons for why I shouldn’t make any blog entries during these past several days, including the thought "no one's reading this anyway."

I’m not honestly sure about what finally pushed me over the edge to start writing again today after my week-long hiatus. One of the primary contributing factors motivating me to start writing again, though, was that one of you (you know who you are) wrote me an email a couple days ago saying that you were following my blog, and that you wanted me to make a new entry. That note provided real inspiration to me.

Today, now that I have (finally) returned to my computer, ready to create a new blog entry, I feel really happy to be back … and remember why I wanted to blog in the first place … and realize that my resistance during these past several days was counter-productive, stopping me from doing what I really wanted to do.

In my initial blog entries, I wasn’t sure that people would be able to relate to the stories I was telling. That is not true today. I know that each of you experiences resistance like what I just went through last week all the time … and that, like me, your resistance regularly stops you from doing what you truly want to do … and that (unless you are far more enlightened than I am) you probably hate your resistance as much as I hate mine.

I wish that I could write something really insightful here about how you and I can consistently overcome our resistance and live the life of our dreams.

Perhaps the following story, quoted from The War of Art, my favorite book on the subject of resistance, will help all of us a bit:

Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” he replied. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

As this story suggests, at some level, there’s not much to say about how to overcome resistance beyond Nike’s adage that we should “just do it.”

The flip side of this coin, though, is that it is MUCH easier for any of us to overcome resistance when we have support structures in place that help us do what we want. So, for example: I had someone out there in the blogosphere who cares about me who wanted me to write – and that person’s support helped me to return to this computer; alcoholics will tell you that their AA groups save their lives; serious meditators join a “sangha” to deepen their practice; and people who hire personal trainers work out more than those who don’t.

So guys, my message for today – which (as with all my blog entries) is being told to myself as much as you – is that, when it comes to that set of things that we need to do to take care of ourselves but that we resist, we need to “just do it” … but, just in case that strategy proves limiting, we’d also be well advised to build ourselves dependable support structures made up of other people around ourselves who will help us remember why we committed to our goals in the first place.

The real secret to health, wealth and happiness – Part 1

I recently read two fascinating books detailing current academic thinking on how greatness is achieved.

These books (Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin and The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle) present compelling academic data that “talent” plays a smaller role in making people successful (or great) than we typically believe. Rather, the research the books describe demonstrates that much of what we consider to be greatness is learnable by almost any of us – if we know how to acquire needed information and if we are willing to work hard enough at acquiring that information.

So, if you or I want to become great at a particular skill, what we really need to do is two things:

1. Practice it a lot
2. Practice it correctly – so we keep improving at a rapid pace

The core insight in these books is not in the first point. Everyone knows that if you want to get to Carnegie Hall, you need to practice.

The insights here are that:

1. HOW we practice has as much to do with being successful as HOW MUCH we practice
2. Most of us practice skills very poorly, and thus we learn more poorly and slowly than we need to

Two equally talented people can play tennis for five hours a week, or run five hours a week, or play chess five hours a week --- and what you invariably find is that, after a while, the one of those people who practices correctly advances far more quickly than the other.

You may ask, what does all of this have to do with health, wealth and happiness (which is the subject of this posting)? I would propose that the answer is … a lot.

Let’s begin with health. To keep our discussion simple, we’ll start by focusing on one small aspect of health … your diet. This is an important topic to me personally as I have struggled for years to eat healthily ... and, up until recently, had little success in doing so.

The majority of people I know say they “want” to eat better. As far as I’m concerned, “eating well” is nothing more than a skill you learn via deliberate and consistent practice. All the people I know who eat a healthy diet trained themselves in how to do so.

As such, if you or I want to eat a healthy diet, all we need to do is what Roger Federer did to become great at tennis: (1) work at it, and (2) work at it correctly.

Obviously, if you never take step 1 – by attempting to eat better, you will never improve your diet. That’s obvious.

What’s more interesting to me is that of the people who take step 1, often working very hard at eating better, many consistently fail. Are you one of those people – constantly on a diet, but somehow never achieving your goals? That was basically my story until recently. Common wisdom in our country suggests that our problem was simply a lack of willpower.

From my perspective and based on my recent personal experiences, common wisdom is totally wrong here. Instead, the issue here – which almost no diet books talk about – is that we were probably practicing the skill of healthy eating incorrectly. Going on a new hardcore diet for 30 days – powered by willpower, even if you lose 30 pounds in those 30 days, is a guaranteed-to-fail strategy if you wish to learn how to eat healthily in a consistent way.

Look carefully at the people you know who have mastered the art of eating well. The core difference between them and most of us really has much less to do with WHAT they eat than HOW they eat. For example, all the people I know who eat really healthy diets have cultivated in themselves an ability to be far more aware of how individual foods affect their bodies, even as the food is being digested, than average people. The fact is that, in the same way that Roger Federer taught himself to play tennis, these master-eaters have slowly and diligently taught themselves a wholly different approach to eating than most people. And that is the real secret to their success.

So … if you want to learn to eat healthily, please don’t go out and buy another diet book. Instead, buy one of the two books listed earlier in this blog – and start dedicating your energy to teaching yourself to eat in a different way. This is not easy work; it can be slow and painful. Nonetheless, if you really want to succeed at eating well, the approach I’m describing here (unlike those in most diet books) will absolutely work.

In upcoming postings, we’ll continue this dialogue, getting into more detail about the real secret to health, wealth and happiness.

How to eat a raisin

The first time that I went to a mindfulness meditation retreat, after several days had gone by, our teacher took us through a very cool mindfulness exercise entitled “meditation on a raisin.” In this exercise, you are given a raisin and asked to eat it as mindfully as possible.

The process here begins long before you taste the raisin. As a starting point, after you have been handed the raisin, before you eat it, you are instructed to carefully notice how the raisin looks, and the feeling that it generates as you hold it in your hand.

Only after this initial observation process feels complete should you even think about bringing the raisin up toward your mouth. But, during this step, you are to slowly and mindfully experience the process of moving your hand and arm and the sensation of holding the raisin in your hand during this. (Actually, as I write this, I’m realizing that these initial steps in the process are vaguely reminiscent of foreplay; did you notice that too?)

Then, when the raisin first touches your tongue, you are instructed to notice the vast world of sensations generated by the raisin on your tongue. You really don’t want to start chewing here right away, because there is so much pleasure and life available simply by noticing what the folds of the raisin feel like on your tongue, and you really don’t want to miss out on that.

Only when you feel complete with this prior step should you begin chewing. Here too, you want to go slowly – fully experiencing every moment and fully appreciating the beauty of the moment.

There are several more steps here before the raisin is fully consumed, but I’m imagining you have the idea of how the process works by now, so I’ll stop here.

You might want to try this exercise some time. When done correctly, it takes about 10 or 15 minutes to eat a single raisin. More importantly, though, if you’re like me, you might want to try to use this process as a metaphor for how every moment of your life can be lived. What this exercise clearly illustrates is that there’s a universe of sensations and life available in every moment if we just slow down enough to notice it.

Today I plan to try and live all my moments in the same way that I learned to eat a raisin; I hope that you do so as well.

Leveraging the magic of compounding to turbo-charge personal and professional growth

I learned the math behind compounding as a little kid, and I have seen it in action over and over, in multiple settings, since then, but it never ceases to amaze me with its power or applicability to a broad range of situations.

My belief is that, when you are able to see – with certainty – where and how compounding is occurring in your life, this insight can be transformative. My hope is that, after you read this blog entry, you will see compounding’s immediate applicability to your own life – and where it can make an impact.

I was reminded about the value of compounding when reading the book The Snowball, Warren Buffett’s recently published biography. According to this book, Buffett internalized the power of compounding as a little kid (in this case, as applied to money) and designed much of his investing life to capitalize on this principle. Here’s a quote from page 60 of the book:

“[Buffett] could picture the numbers compounding as vividly as the way a snowball grew when he rolled it across the lawn. Warren began to think about time in a different way. Compounding married the present to the future. If a dollar today was going to be worth ten some years from now, then in his mind the two were the same.”

Now in this blog entry, I’m not going to write about the power of compounding regarding money. Instead, I’m going to write about its equally potent applicability in other areas of life – and show how it can offer you practical help.

To start, let me remind you about the classic compounding story – the widely told fable about the man who invented chess:

The King, for whom chess was invented, was so pleased with the invention that he offered the inventor a large pile of gold. The inventor suggested an alternative reward: he would get grains of wheat, as follows: one grain of wheat on the first square of the chess board, two grains on the second square, four on the third, eight on the fourth, etc., doubling the number of grains each time. The King saw that this must be a much better deal for him than the gold pile, and accepted. Of course, when you do the math, you realize that the inventor suckered the King here because the amount of wheat on the 64th square (18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains) is worth far more than all the gold in the kingdom.

The reason that this story is cool, I believe, is the mathematical mind-fuck it creates. It’s really hard for a normal human to comprehend how a grain of wheat, then two and then four – seemingly nothing growing at a seemingly infinitesimal pace, can magically turn into a vast fortune only a few steps later on in its evolution.

Next, let me please tell you about a personal life-experience where I learned about the power of compounding applied to a very different situation:

• I started going to therapy when I was 40 years old. When I started, I was unhappy, lonely, and feeling like a total failure.
• After two years of diligently going to therapy, I really felt no better than I felt when I started, and my career and relationships, if anything, had gotten worse. I told my therapist about how discouraged I felt at that point, and she responded by saying that I was actually making huge progress – pointing out that I had had several very important insights during those past two years.
• Another two years went by, and after that point, I started to feel a little happier every once in a while, but I was still quite unhappy and lonely most of the time. Furthermore, I remained quite discouraged about my future prospects. When the subject of my discouragement came up again, my therapist repeated her mantra about how much I had grown.
• Another two years went by, and by this time, I was happy pretty frequently, well on my way to being a multi-millionaire, and starting to feel pretty good about myself. By this point, I was no longer discouraged, but I couldn’t make sense of what was happening, and I felt sure that my progress would fall apart any day.
• Another two years went by (which brings me to the end of last year), and by that point, I was happy almost all the time, frequently blissful, financially secure for the remainder of my life, and starting to recognize that my internal changes were securely in place and dependable.

So, do you recognize the mathematical pattern here? We’re on the chessboard again. The fact is that I’ve been growing at a constant logarithmic pace for the past eight years, I just didn’t recognize the mathematical pattern ‘til recently.

And, guess what else. I’m not going to stop growing at this pace – so you (and I) can rest assured that my life will be exponentially more amazing only two more years from now.

So, how does this obscure mathematical principle apply to your life? To answer that question, please try the following exercise:

Today: Take a goal that you really want that seems unreachable to you. I don’t care what the goal is as long as you really want to achieve it. And then, put into place one very small AND SUSTAINABLE building block right now to get you a millimeter closer to your goal. I don’t care how little progress you make here; you just need to make progress and put something sustainable (and easily do-able) in place. One common error here is that, when working toward a goal, we often make changes that create apparent short-term progress, but create no lasting value. Remember, your goal is several squares down the road here.

One week from today: Acknowledge the progress you made in the first week of your project, remind yourself about the power of compounding, and put a second small building block in place toward your goal. Again, the building block needs to be sustainable and easily implemented. If you’re like I was eight years ago, you’ll be totally discouraged after this point because you still won’t see any progress. But please, don’t give up at this point.

Two weeks from today: Again acknowledge your progress and take another step. You’ll find that you can take a slightly bigger step at that point than you took the first week, but it’ll still seem like you're going nowhere. Don’t worry, the compounding will work.

And so on…

After several weeks (or maybe months or maybe years) of diligent seemingly slow progress, you will start to feel like you’re getting a bit of traction, and you might see the outlines of solid ground emerging. This is the point where you will be most at risk – not at risk of quitting, but rather, at risk of resting on your laurels. Please, don’t quit the process at this point. That’s when it gets fun, and really rewarding. Here, you need to keep building, systematically putting new building blocks into place every week that continue to solidify and further your progress.

Now, if you like this exercise and want to tell me about your journey, I’d love you to post a comment. With only two people following my blog as of today, I’m still on square 1 of my blogging journey (so I’m not yet deluged with an impossibly large following). Get your feedback in now, though, because once I have 10,000 people following my blog (which is a short journey from here after I double my number of visitors every week), it’ll be a lot harder for you to get my attention then.

Why I’m writing a blog

Almost every time I think about starting a new project I experience a few hours of excitement … and then a wave of internal resistance that internally tries to stop me from undertaking the project.

True to form, shortly after I started thinking about writing this blog, my mind became filled with thoughts about why this blog is a really bad idea. Here are my three favorite resistance-linked thoughts that are making their presence felt in this arena:

My Top Three Resistance-Linked Thoughts About Writing This Blog

• "I have nothing new to offer." The internal dialogue here is as follows: thousands of self-help books have been written, many by people who are far more enlightened than I am, and it’s very unlikely that I will have any ideas to offer about happiness or success that are either new or better stated than what others have put out.


• "This endeavor will be a failure." My fear here is that almost no one will read this blog, and that the few people who do will hate it. This thought is closely linked to an emotional experience where I feel ashamed in anticipation of my imagined failure. Believe it or not, I’m feeling that shame right now – even as I type this idea down.


• "I have nothing worthwhile to say." After all, what do I know about personal growth?

So, Why Am I Writing This Blog?

The bottom line is that I'm writing this blog because, deep in my heart - and despite the thoughts listed above, I know that I want to and that it excites me. I know that I want to put my own voice out into the world to share what I have learned ... and I also know that I want to touch and inspire other people with my voice.

Now, as for the resistant thoughts listed above, my life experience has taught me that the fact that I’m experiencing resistance to this idea is probably a clue that it’s a very good thing to do for me.

There's one final point to this story. After seven years of intensive therapy ... and spending hundreds of hours dispassionately observing my thoughts ... and meditating ... and yoga ... and all sorts of other growth activities, I have now nurtured and supported the development of a wholly different identity inside my head than the one that says all the mean things to me described above. And this other identity has a very different perspective on the value of my blog than what is described above. This evolving identity strongly disagrees with all of the bullshit that is listed above, and in fact, gets angry when it hears the above-listed thoughts in my head. This evolving identity looks at the facts - and knows that I do, at this point, have something worthwhile to say which will touch people ... and that I am not the kind of guy who fails at things when he takes them on ... and most importantly, that when my heart is strongly drawn to something, it’s usually a good idea for me to pursue … no matter what my mind may say. And that, my friends, is why I'm writing this blog.

How to achieve effortless power

There is an approach used in some martial arts schools in which you learn to use to use an opponent's strength against them. When this technique is used effectively, an almost imperceptible movement on a practitioner's part can cause an opponent to literally fly across a room.

I had the privilege of studying t'ai chi as a martial art a few years ago from a great master named John Salgado - and had the very weird opportunity of experiencing the type of effortless power I'm describing in action. When I was on the winning side of an interaction, what felt so bizarre was the sense that there was no effort involved in my actions, but yet I had done something quite powerful. When I was (more frequently) on the losing side, the experience was equally bizarre, because I would find myself flying through the air (or on the ground) without knowing what had happened to me.

Once I discovered the secret to effortless power in the martial arts arena, it started to have almost mystical impact on my outside life. I found myself closing multi-million dollar deals effortlessly, solving problems effortlessly, even finding parking spots in New York City effortlessly. The practical result here was that my stress levels dropped while my productivity, effectiveness and happiness grew.

Effortless power has to be experienced to be truly appreciated. To realize it, the great martial artists achieve a state-of-being characterized by being: calm while alert; grounded while light, and flowing while deeply focused. Personally, I am still far from realizing the type of transcendent power that you can read about in the martial arts classics, but at the same I am improving at this every day – and I already have achieved a level of personal power and ease that surpasses anything I ever imagined would be possible for me.

Today I have entered a new phase of my professional life – dedicated to giving back, and using what I have learned in the past 49 years to help others define and achieve their own life dreams.

Much of what I hope to offer (through both my coaching and this blog) is the value available to you from learning to harness your ability to generate effortless power.