You Know Exactly What to do With Your Life

You have to stop pretending like you don’t know exactly:

• What’s wrong

• What needs to be fixed

• And how much responsibility you have for the outcomes you’re getting in your life

You know you’re in a relationship you’re settling for.

You know you need to stop eating cheeseburgers and go to the gym.

You know you could have a better job or start a business to fix your financial situation.

These are just examples, but there’s a specific issue going on in your life that you know needs to be fixed, yet you are gaslighting yourself into thinking you somehow don’t know what the problem is.

The reason why you can’t make changes in your life is simple — you don’t actually want to change. You want your life to stay the same because you’re benefiting from it staying the same.

These are called present goals. You have a present goal to stick to what’s familiar to you that sits underneath your conscious awareness. It’s running you without you knowing it, and you convince yourself you want to change when you don’t.

Your life changes when you stop trying to just force yourself to change by trying to lock in or grind your way to success.

It doesn’t work because you’re swimming up against the tide of your present goals that will keep dragging you backward until you make them conscious, re-frame them, and act on the new goals you set for yourself.

So, this time, instead of asking yourself ‘what do I need to do to change?’ ask yourself ‘how am I benefiting from staying the same?’

A classic example here: A lot of people, myself included more times than I can count, will self-sabotage some aspect of their business. They won’t post enough of their writing to get attention, they don’t promote themselves enough, or they won’t make enough invitations to work with them.

They’re sabotaging their businesses because they want to avoid the weight and responsibility of having to perform and deliver for their clients.

Having to do the work and deliver for clients calls into question things about yourself that you might not want to be called into question — your skill level, your diligence, and whether or not you’re cut out for running the business at all.

So you sabotage before it ever gets there so that you can keep telling yourself the story that, if only you had tried and done your best, things would have worked out, but since you didn’t, there’s that little mental escape valve that helps you feel better about yourself.

All sorts of examples fall into place here:

You say you’re sick of being lonely and want to put yourself out there, but your goal is avoiding rejection.

You say you’re tired of being invisible online and want to put your name out there, but your goal is to stay invisble to you can avoid being called out for looking cringe.

You say you’re tired of living your current life, but your goal is to stay the same because you’re afraid of trying your best only to find out you’re not actually cut out for what you want.

Your present goals help manage the dose of pain you feel because you more or less know what to expect — low-grade anxiety over your inaction gnaws at you, but you can bear it.

You don’t know how much pain is on the other side of uncertainty, so you’d rather not face it at all.

This is a tough nut to crack, though, right? You’ve probably tried different ways to solve this already that haven’t worked, like saying affirmations or reading a self-help book that told you to think positive.

Here are some techniques you might not have tried before that can legitimately get you to rethink what your future might hold for you in a way that actually makes the pain of staying the same more than the pain of changing.

Anxiety about the future comes from vagueness.

You have this vague idea about some uncertain future you’re worried about happening, but you haven’t actually articulated the scenario you’re afraid of.

If you did, you might not feel so afraid of it.

I learned this concept called Fear Setting from Tim Ferriss, where you spell out what the legitimate worst-case scenario lies ahead of you and just decide whether or not you’d be OK with it.

You want to build an online business. OK, what are you actually afraid of happening?

What are some of the worst-case scenarios?

Here are a bunch of things that can and will happen to you if you run an online business and put your words on the internet to do it:

• Someone will leave a mean comment on your posts and call your credibility into question. There is a 100% chance this will happen multiple times.

• You will put together a product, ask people to buy it, and nobody will. This happened to me before. It hurt for a couple of days. I got over it.

• You will pour time, money, and energy into strategies that won’t work.

• You’ll underdeliver for a client, and they’ll ask for a refund

The more specific you are, the better. I remember watching this video once where Alex Hormozi said that you’re not afraid of everyone in your life finding out about your writing, your business, or your personal brand. You’re worried about a small handful of specific people finding out.

Then, gotta ask yourself: will you survive if your Aunt Linda finds out you’re posting content online and thinks it’s weird? Run the scenario in your mind, and if you can bear, it’s time to hit post.

So now you have decided that the pain of this new future is actually bearable because, after taking the time to deeply articulate it, you realize it wasn’t as bad as you thought.

What next?

Two things: you come up with a new set of change-based goals that replace your staying-the-same goals and come up with a system that makes change possible.

The new goals you set for yourself can’t be based on outcomes that you can’t control.

If you set them that way, you are at the mercy of luck, the opinions of others, algorithms, and a bunch of other factors you can’t control.

You have to set new goals that are based on inputs.

• Your goal isn’t to get likes on your newsletter, it’s to publish your newsletter.

• Your goal isn’t to make sales, it’s to come up with an offer and put it in front of people.

• Your goal isn’t to get people to like you, it’s to be your unapologetic self more often.

All of these goals are tied to the inputs of the person you’d like to become. And the person you’d like to become isn’t a set of accomplishments and validations from others. It’s a state of mind, and a way of being that isn’t based on anything but the way you’d like to show up.

Not for others, but for yourself. Just becoming the you that is stripped of all of those unnecessary layers of your personality that you add to keep people from seeing the real you, the version of you who stops pretending to like stuff they don’t like and want stuff they don’t want, the version of you that isn’t constantly pinging off the environment to figure out what’s cool and interesting.

This process is like applying a What Would Jesus Do mentality to your own life.

What would the version of yourself who you’d like to be do in the situation right now?

You want to build a newsletter business based on your skills and interests? Cool.

What are the qualities of someone who has a newsletter business?

• They publish prolifically

• They come up with offer ideas and ship them

• They have a set of content pillars that match what the market wants

OK, cool, now we have to ask yourself: what would the business owner a year from now do in the present moment to get where they want to be?

Let’s take something like putting together an offer and selling it. Putting together a big, complicated program or 19-day challenge is a lot to take on if you don’t have the experience.

So, what’s the smallest, minimum viable dose of a strategy like that?

You could put together an offer for a $99 Zoom call, write up an email about it, and send it to your list.

This is exactly what I did on the advice of a friend who noticed I was procrastinating on putting the offer out there.

She forced me to put the offer together, write the email, and hit send, all while we were chatting about it live.

• I created a rule for my writing students that they had no more than 3 edits on their posts before they hit publish, so they had to ship their work.

• I taught them outlines that constrained their ideas so they were easier to articulate.

• I’d get them to commit to content pillars for 90 days instead of 9 years to give them enough time to make progress without feeling overly committed

I’m using business examples here, but all of this boils down to gradual behavior change theory, which is scientifically rigorous and useful for change.

Take the new behavior you want to adopt, shrink it down to an atomic level, execute on it, go up a tiny bit higher, repeat until you’ve rewired your personality.

You learned how to become who you are today.

This idea that you’re just the type of person who does or doesn’t behave a certain way?

It’s not true.

You’re just the accumulation of the reference experiences you’ve had over the years that turned into beliefs about who you are. And all of it can change.

This starts where we began.

The key to all of this is abandoning the idea that this is all some mystery to you.

You know what you want.

You know who you want to become.

You know what needs to be done.

Admit those first, but then go a level deeper than just ‘trying to lock in,’ which doesn’t work, and instead start to ponder this.

What conditions could you create that would give you the maximum possible odds of turning into who you’d like to become?

Those conditions can engineer you into a version of yourself that previously escaped you. The loop can be broken. Things can one day click for you. Never doom. Never give up. Never stop believing change is possible for you.

This publication is dedicated to three topics:

• Mindset advice to help you become the person you’re meant to be

• Writing advice to help you attract attention you can turn into money

• Monetization strategies you can use to build a full-time business

Check out some related articles here to dive deeper: