part0007

There’s a good chance that you’ve seen the gap between the work you’re currently doing and the best work you’re yearning to do. There’s also a really good chance that you’ve tried to start doing more of your best work before. One of the first things you probably encountered is that, after a few hours or days of doing it, the commitments, expectations, and challenges of your normal life rudely disrupted your best intentions and took back over.

If your best work was like everything else you’re doing, you could just write it off as something you didn’t really want to do. But what makes it your best work is that, deep down, you actually want to do it. And, even more, you need to do it and the world needs you to do it. So it’s more than just a matter of finding the motivation or drive to do your best work — you have to address the parts of your life that are keeping you from doing it.

What’s even more challenging is that some of our operative priorities aren’t even ours or are nearly invisible to us. For instance, we prioritize keeping up with the Joneses unconsciously, and parents will sometimes discount how high a priority raising their children is when they examine why other things aren’t happening. So, on the one hand, we’re herding goats that don’t belong to us, and, on the other hand, we’re not counting some of the goats that we should be counting.

While it’s true that much of this head trash is formed from our childhood experiences and families of origin, we also pick up new trash as adults. For instance, after a long string of not being able to create plans that work, we may tell ourselves that we’re either not good at planning or we’re “creative” — that is, not the type of person who can create and follow a plan. Thus when it comes time to do something big that requires planning, we can’t finish it, and we may end up creating another story about our not being able to do those best-work projects.

MARC AND ANGEL CHERNOFF WHAT ELSE COULD THIS MEAN?

“What else could this mean?” That’s a simple question we need to ask ourselves more often. A practical way to apply such a question to our lives is by using a reframing tool we initially picked up from research professor Brené Brown, which we then tailored through our coaching work with students. We call the tool The story I’m telling myself. Although asking the question itself — “What else could this mean?” — can help reframe our thoughts and broaden our perspectives, using the phrase “The story I’m telling myself” as a prefix to troubling thoughts can provide an even greater dose of healthy perspective.

Here’s how it works: Let’s pretend one of your recent goals didn’t work out as planned and essentially backfired, and now a few days have passed and you’re still feeling upset because you’re obviously not capable of achieving anything worthwhile, ever. When you catch yourself feeling this way, use the phrase: The story I’m telling myself is that I was unable to achieve my goal because I’m completely incapable of ever getting worthwhile, positive results in life.

Then ask yourself:

Can I be absolutely certain this story is true? (Is there proof? Is there proof to the contrary?)

What’s one other (more constructive) possibility that might also make the ending to this story true?

Give yourself the space to think it through carefully. Challenge yourself to think differently! Use The story I’m telling myself to do a reality check with a more constructive mindset.

Marc and Angel Chernoff are New York Times bestselling authors of Getting Back to Happy: Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Reality, and Turn Your Trials into Triumphs and the creators of Marc & Angel Hack Life , which was recognized by Forbes as “one of the most popular personal development blogs.” Through their writing, coaching, and live events, they’ve spent the past decade sharing proven strategies for getting unstuck in order to find lasting happiness and success.

For instance, because we’ve “learned” that we’re not the planning type (head trash), we have no realistic plan for how to do that big best-work project. Thus we don’t realize that there are small ways to get started (too few resources), and those around us who could help, don’t (poor team alignment). Or because we’re torn between wanting to travel or keeping our kids in a stable school environment (competing priorities), we don’t see that we can plan travel trips around school breaks (no realistic plan) and don’t save to do it (too few resources).

While “one thing at a time” is usually a prudent guideline, it doesn’t apply in addressing these five challenges. We can work on all of them at once in the sense that by intentionally working on one, we can address the others. To take the first example above, as soon as we embrace that there’s no such thing as a “planning type” (or that we can be one), we can start to create a realistic plan that uses the resources we have available and ask people to help us. Of course, asking people to help us may trigger more head trash about needing to ask for help, but we’re at least one step closer to making our days match the vision of our lives.

When we have the urge to address the air sandwich, we naturally reach for to-do lists, plans, apps, and books, but that often fails because, at best, those tools address top-level issues. The challenges filling the air sandwich rest a level below those issues. For instance, there’s nothing intellectually difficult about planning our day; the challenge lies in following that plan, and there’s no killer app, system, or big idea that’s going to help us do that.

These keys are a modern-day synthesis of Aristotelian virtues and habits. I’m using virtue in the same way that Aristotle used it, in the sense that it’s a practiced behavior that we can over- or undercultivate. Either cultivation extreme leads to diminished thriving; the goal is to find the middle way between these extremes. The millennia-old challenge of applying the right key in the right amount remains just as challenging as it’s always been, but if the air sandwich shows us which doors need to be unlocked, we at least have five keys that can unlock any of those doors.

Undercultivation of intention is easier to grasp and see in ourselves and others than overcultivation of intention, at least at first blush. But when we look around and see how stricken with anxiety people are because they’re so focused on achieving certain goals by certain times by certain ways, it’s easy to see how much people’s suffering comes from being attached to the world matching their intention. The world has an annoying way of not doing what we want it to, but as the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi said, “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” 3

Awareness is required to know what your best work is and to notice how your emotions and presence shift when you’re doing your best work. A rare few of us seem to know exactly what our best work is, whereas many of us have to pay attention to whispers in our minds and light touches in our hearts to find our way to it. Cultivating the awareness to pay attention to when we’re lit up, wondrous, and in flow, or when we’re stifled, numb, and full of dread, is critical to growth.

Most conversations on boundaries discuss them in the context of social boundaries. Those conversations typically focus on the importance of limiting what behavior you’ll accept from others and how you’ll respond to create space away from them and those behaviors. While that’s important, it’s a very limiting view of boundaries that often leads to people not wanting to discuss boundaries; they see them as being about pushing people out or opening the door for them to be pushed away from other people.

We can take a more expansive view of boundaries, though. There are positive and negative boundaries, with positive boundaries creating space for something and negative boundaries creating space from something. The aforementioned social boundaries are negative boundaries. A positive social boundary would be the space we might create for our kids, partner, or friends. While it’s true that we often have to push something away to create space for something — that is, to create a positive boundary, we often have to simultaneously create a negative boundary — it’s the intention that matters here. Many people’s negative boundaries collapse because they aren’t clear what they’ve made that space for.

Every day that you make a choice to do your best work is a day you practice being courageous. Every day that you initiate or participate in a hard conversation or maintain a boundary is a day you practice being courageous. Every day that you dare to share your best work with someone is a day you practice being courageous. Every day that you lean into a “stuck and not getting anywhere” phase of work rather than run from it is a day you practiced courage.

When we properly identify lack of courage as what’s keeping us from doing our best work and thriving, it allows us to ask more powerful and pointed questions about how to go forward. For instance, when we mistakenly believe we have a knowledge gap, we put research on our action list. But when it comes to our best work, there will always be a chasm between the information we’d like to have and the information we can acquire, for both the inputs and outcomes of our best work are uncertain. Our best work changes us and the world in ways that no present information can fully capture.

In a similar vein, if we think we have a competency or talent gap — which we more often articulate as not being good enough — then it’s really easy to spend time in safe learning environments that more often reinforce that we’re not good enough than push us to grow in ways that propel our best work forward. Years and scores of thousands of dollars are spent getting degrees and certificates that fundamentally don’t cultivate people’s courage such that they can thrive in the professional world.

That a disciplined person with much less talent and experience can brute-force their way into success inspires no end of frustration for us creatives. While we’re quarter-working on the ideas and interests that we absolutely can’t let go of, they have advanced their “too narrow,” “too specific,” “too unoriginal” (by our evaluation) work a few steps forward. In response, we go back to not working even harder during the day and eating more ice cream in the evenings.

At a deep level we know our frustration isn’t really about the disciplined folks grinding their way to success but rather our own discipline. We know how much more we’d thrive and be happy if we were disciplined. Yet we often feel constitutionally wired to not be disciplined, so much so that even the word discipline is something that provokes a visceral reaction for many of us. (I suspect that you’re only still reading this section because your curiosity and self-awareness has overruled the grimacing and urge to skip on to something more comfortable.)

A major part of our resistance to discipline is that we more often associate discipline with punishment or pain than with freedom or happiness. This association is understandable since, as children, for a lot of us, discipline very often meant punishment or pain. Those experiences aren’t the totality of discipline, though. The reality is that the happiest and most successful of the creatives among us are often the most disciplined. For instance, a near-universal practice among the titans and mentors that bestselling self-help author Tim Ferriss has interviewed is either a meditation practice or an exercise regimen. I’ve seen the same patterns among my high-achieving friends, colleagues, and clients as well. Discipline undergirds those practices and regimens, and most people report that it’s those practices and regimens that prepare them to do their best work.

JAMES CLEAR THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PROFESSIONALS AND AMATEURS

There’s one skill that’s so valuable that it will make you a standout in any area of life, no matter what kind of competition you face: discipline.

The discipline to show up every day, stick to the schedule, and do the work — especially when you don’t feel like it — is so valuable that it’s literally all you need to become better 99 percent of the time.

But what does a disciplined life actually look like?

Being disciplined means committing to what is important to you instead of merely saying something is important to you. It’s about starting when you feel like stopping, not because you want to work more but rather your goal is important enough to you that you don’t simply work on it when it’s convenient. It’s about making your priorities a reality.

Being disciplined doesn’t mean you’re a workaholic. It means that you’re good at making time for what matters to you — especially when you don’t feel like it — instead of playing the victim role and letting life happen to you.

When you start a business, there will be days when you don’t feel like showing up. When you’re at the gym, there will be sets that you don’t feel like finishing. When it’s time to write, there will be days that you don’t feel like typing. But stepping up when it’s annoying or painful or draining to do so, that’s what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur.

Professionals have the discipline to stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.

James Clear is a habits researcher, creator of the Habits Academy, and the author of the no. 1 New York Times bestseller Atomic Habits.

In an ideal world, each of the obstacles in the air sandwich would have one and only one key that solved it. In that same ideal world, we’d only have one obstacle at a time in front of us. In this world, though, we often have multiple dominant obstacles applied to different projects, and we must use multiple keys to work through them. At the same time, you’ll rarely be in a situation where the lack of one key will prevent you from getting some headway when working through a project.

Awareness. Be aware of when self-defeating beliefs and patterns are present, and discern what’s real and what’s simply absorbed bullshit.

Courage. Have the backbone to challenge those beliefs, design experiments that mitigate the patterns, and accept the reality that your choices and responses have been cocreating whatever you’re experiencing.

Discipline. Stick with challenging beliefs, experimenting, and taking responsibility to change; courage without discipline leads to fits and starts rather than deep change.

Before we dive into the keys that will help create realistic plans, remember that plans only create clarity, not certainty. Many people make plans and feel unsatisfied because they know what they need to do but aren’t sure that it will lead to success. Or they create a realistic plan and are scared they won’t be able to muster their resources to do what needs to be done, so then they try to walk backward toward the project so they don’t have to see what’s ahead.

Awareness. Be aware of where you’ll fall down, where you’ll shine, and where you’re likely to bail on the project. We’ll address this in chapter 7 .

Discipline. Stick with the plan when bright, shiny objects (BSOs) inevitably appear. I use “bright, shiny objects” as a shorthand for random and seemingly unlimited distractions we can spot and pounce on.

Intention. Have a clear, unmixed, and as-specific-as-useful goal or destination. As the novelist and philosopher Lewis Carroll said, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” We love to canvas all the roads in lieu of walking down one.

Awareness. Focus on who and what you do have more than what you don’t have. Ask yourself, “How can I do this project without X?” and “What do I have that I’m not using to complete this project?”

Discipline. Efficiency requires discipline, and many of us aren’t using what we have efficiently. How might you better use the resources you already have?

Courage. Be courageous enough to commit more fully to fewer projects. We often don’t focus our resources on fewer goals and projects because we’re not sure that we’ll be successful with those projects and thus want to hedge our bets. The result is that we invest too little into projects to make them successful and we’re perennially scattered. How would you use your resources if you weren’t hedging bets?

ISHITA GUPTA BUILD YOUR COURAGE MUSCLE

Courage. Fear. Failure. Confidence.

Our lives revolve around these words, but we have no idea what they mean.

You don’t know. I don’t know.

Here’s a new definition for all four, one that will give you way more relief and hope and — bonus — a better future: practice .

The problem isn’t just that our self-talk sucks.

The real problem is we practice “I’m not good enough.” “Who am I to do this?” “I can’t do this.” We do this a thousand times a day, every day.

One day turns into three. Ten. Six weeks.

Soon we’re someone who just does that ; we think things are impossible. Our brain knows and sets its needle to No Risk.

Of course we don’t send the email. Or speak at the meeting. Or pitch our idea.

How can we? All we do is practice telling ourselves stories about ourselves.

Dishonest stories that make us feel small and dead inside.

That’s the muscle we’re choosing to build every day.

What if instead of wondering if we had courage, we just practiced it instead?

Instead of worrying if we’d fail, we just exercised our mind to take the risk anyway?

What if all day, every day — one day, three days, ten days — all we did was take our brain to the gym? The mental gym. Work out how we’ll take risks. Burn our take-action muscles, not our shame muscles. Rack up reps on confidence and positive self-talk.

Make the ask. Send the email. Get scared. Screw it up. Do it again. And again and again. Until that becomes your brain’s new default.

What if we got our mind in shape for the race we want to run, not the one we’re running right now?

An unconventional storyteller and brand builder, Ishita Gupta pushes levers in media, business, and publishing to connect high performers to brands and resources. As head of hoopla for Seth Godin, Ishita helped launch five bestselling books for Seth, Steven Pressfield, Derek Sivers, and more and sold the first ebook sponsorship for Al Pittampalli’s Read This Before Our Next Meeting. Ishita founded Fear.less magazine, profiling leading authors, thinkers, and entrepreneurs on overcoming fear. She speaks around the United States on risk-taking, leadership, mindset, performance, and confidence.

Your upbringing, education, experiences, choices, and preferences heavily influence which keys you cultivate and which could use some more practice. You may undercultivate or overcultivate a particular key in some areas over others. For instance, in a lot of areas, discipline is easy for me, but I’ve always struggled to build a running habit or avoid potatoes. Similarly, I have no problem mustering the courage for public speaking, sales, or sharing my work in public, but I’ll only sing and play guitar in front of people I really trust to see me when I’m that vulnerable despite getting enough feedback that I’m good enough to not be embarrassed.

CHAPTER 2 TAKEAWAYS

The air sandwich is the gap between your big picture and your day-to-day reality.

The air in the sandwich is actually filled by five challenges that keep you from doing your best work: competing priorities, head trash, no realistic plan, too few resources, and poor team alignment.

The five challenges work in concert and can show up in different ways in different projects.

There are five keys to doing your best work: intention, awareness, boundaries, courage, and discipline (mnemonic: IABCD).

Some keys are more effective at overcoming specific challenges than others.

The five keys are practices that can be cultivated, and we’re often well cultivated in some but not others.