It's nearly midnight tonight, and I just spent three hours driving back to Providence from Maine, after the end of our vacation, and here I am sitting at my desk writing.

I haven't had any time to think today, so I don't have any brilliant insights to share (or perhaps I am merely more conscious of that fact just now than I normally am).

Nonetheless, I'm writing.

In part, I'm writing because writing every day is a standard I've set for myself. I'm not writing in order to always share useful, actionable information.

Go read other writers who post but rarely if you want to find useful information, not here.

Here, all you will find are the humble daily thoughts of a man trying to make his way in the world starting from scratch (though I will admit that "scratch" means one thing to an American and quite another for most other inhabitants of the world).

I write every day in order to write every day. If I miss a day of writing, why should I write tomorrow? Or the day after that? Or the day on which I do truly have a valuable thought that I would otherwise lose if I didn't set it down?

I'm writing even when I have nothing to say, because if I don't write every day, I won't write any day. It's how I am.

They solved one side and were proud of figuring that out, but my cousin pointed out that solving just one side wasn't enough to solve the whole thing.

"It's not just about solving one side, it's about using systems and algorithms."

Naively solving one side of a Rubiks cube can leave you stranded, without a way forward.

Instead, establishing and following systems is critical for ultimate success.

The main takeaway? Nobody wants to read your sh*t.

So, starting with this post, I'm going to edit all my posts down to half length (yes, half) after I finish writing them.

I expect this to achieve three things.

1. My writing will deliver more value in return for time spent reading it.
2. My first drafts will become more concise.
3. I'll think about my topics more in the process of deciding what to cut.

I stated earlier in this blog that the point of this blog is to learn to think better. And that's still true. But if I'm going to spend so much time writing, I might as well try to get better at that too!

I named my car Success several years ago. That way, I nearly always have the keys to success in my pocket.

On a more serious note, we all have goals, individually and shared. For a while, I had no idea how to accomplish mine, but I've recently learned that there are a few tools we can pack to make our journey towards success more likely to succeed.

I wrote about them several times over the past week, but I figured I'd jam them all into one post and throw in some quotes and saccharine, empty proverbs for good measure and future reference. Also for generative learning.

Writing your goals down

You know what they say... writing goals down makes you 40% more likely to achieve them. Or something.

Maybe it's just that the people that bother to write their goals down are the ones serious enough to do something else about them too, and it's just correlation – not causation.

Either way, there's just one way to be certain you're the kind of person that's likely to achieve their goals: write 'em down.

Build systems and standards

“We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” – Archilochus

Setting a goal is not enough to accomplish it: rather, it is merely the determination of a destination.

The next step we must take is to figure out the path the journey to that destination must take us on. This path is made up of our systems and our standards.

A standard is something we must consistently do in order to achieve our goal. The system is the means we use to accomplish that standard.

Without them, we won't take a single step in the right direction, and it's all just wishful thinking. So we need to build them and adhere to them.

But how do we figure out what these systems and standards are? Simple: we use...

Reverse engineering and inversion

"Avoiding stupidity is easier than trying to be brilliant." – David Perell

Reverse engineering goals into plans is a form of inversion operating at a macro level. It's where you start with the end point and work the steps out backwards until you arrive at the present moment, coming up with standards and systems to support those standards by asking what will prevent you from achieving our goals until you've come up with every blocker and a means around it.

I picked this up from David Perell in his post 50 Ideas That Changed My Life.

Okay, great. We know what we have to do. But is that enough?

No, of course not. How can we know where we are on our journey if we have no clue where we were yesterday or where we're going to be tomorrow?

Tracking

"You can't manage what you can't measure." – Peter Drucker

Tracking is how it's possible to know whether or not you're, well, on track to achieve your goals.

The simplest, most effective tracking system is a simple spreadsheet: seven columns, one for each day of the week, and a row for each goal.

As you go through the week, mark each day in your spreadsheet when you meet your standard for that day.

At the end of the week, count how many points you got out of the maximum possible. Divide the actual score by the potential score, and this is your success percentage.

Your entire goal in life is to raise this score. Success is when that score is at 100% all the time.

If you want to succeed, you must get deadly serious about meeting 100% every single week. Unless you're at 100%, if you're not getting better, you're getting worse. Only dead fish go with the flow.

That's assuming you track everything, of course – if you don't, you can be almost certain you won't improve.

Bonus tip: improving is as much about removing unrealistic goals as it is about meeting realistic ones.

Momentum

"An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force." – Sir Isaac Newton

Sometimes success is simply a matter of building momentum. This is what the vast majority of goal achieving and habit building consists of: slowly picking up the plates from where they got knocked down by the last thing life throws at you.

But true excellence comes when we are able to keep the plates spinning long enough, to keep building momentum, because then compound interest comes into play.

“Compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it.” – Albert Einstein

The best way to become successful is to preserve your momentum at all costs.

Realize that the journey is all there is

With all that said, there is no true destination when it comes to achieving our goals, even when it seems like there is.

The moment we reach the end of one journey, we discover a new destination and must begin again.

It's important to realize that, because if we don't we risk becoming like the many men and women, who, upon having reached their goals, realize that what they have striven for does not satisfy them, and all they have sacrificed to reach that point seems to be more desirable than what they have attained.

So it really is important to enjoy the journey along the way. To stop and smell the roses. To be satisfied with where we are, where we're going, and what we're doing right now.

In every moment that we do not try to improve, we have lost. In every moment that we do try to improve, we have won.

Unfortunately, I'm not too sure what to write about still, because it's been a busy day of goal setting and visualization and that all doesn't leave an awful lot of room for thinking about what post I could write.

So by this point I'm a little empty of ideas. I think it's also interesting to note that I didn't find much time to sit and think, or engage in reading about where I want to end up, so I don't have a lot of new thoughts at the end of the day.

I think one thing I need to make sure I get is time every day to just sit and think and read. I've been writing my posts in the evening every day after the bulk of the day has passed, but I'm moving towards writing earlier in the day.

This is probably just part of the pain of adjusting my schedule – being in between having cut time from doing things at the end of the day, while not yet carving out that time at the beginning of the day.

One thing that does come to mind as I sit here writing, though, is intentionality.

I've written about it before and I'll write about it again, but the power of intentionality is definitely showing up over and over again in my sphere of consciousness.

That is, before I do something, considering why I might or might not succeed, then comparing the results with my prediction after the fact. It seems like this is the only true way to get better at things, because the alternative is mindlessly moving forward.

It's the difference between 10,000 hours and 10,000 reps that gets talked about online sometimes: mindless repetition does not a master make.

The most recent time I heard about it was in Bigger Pockets podcast 432 (released January 7th, 2021) where they talked about four qualities or traits that the hundreds of millionaires they've interviewed all share: decisiveness, momentum, tracking, and mastery.

Decisiveness is being able to make decisions quickly; momentum is what comes from making a series of decisions quickly and taking action on them; tracking is how you know you have momentum – and how you improve on things, and mastery is the result of being very intentional with those many decisions made close together.

The net product of these four traits is getting very good at what you're applying them to, and when that thing is making money, you end up a millionaire.

This is a long and rambling post; as Mark Twain said...:

“I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.”

P.S. This post is 473 words long (less this message), and I wrote it in nine minutes.

I say a couple, because I keep letting the fire we light in the morning die out by not feeding it more big logs once it's burnt through the first few that I started with.

When that happens, I'll usually wait until it's night and then light another one at night to keep the place warm and cozy.

The trick with starting a fire is, you have to start small. You can't just light a big log on fire with the starter blocks. It's too big to catch by itself, and when I try the starter block flames up big at first, but then burns out. It doesn't last long enough to catch the bigger logs on fire by itself.

So what I have to do is go outside and take the hatchet and split up one of the bigger logs into smaller pieces.

It's cold out there, and there's a lot of leaning over and effort involved, because the wood they provided out here is hard to split and the hatchet is pretty small.

But if I put in that effort consistently at first, then baby the fire while it's getting started, eventually it'll get big enough and hot enough from the smaller pieces that I can start adding larger logs.

After that, I can leave it alone and not really worry about it too much, and it'll keep me warm and cozy for a while without any input or effort.

The trick is all in starting small and letting the fire build up slowly. Only once it gets going can I sit back and relax and let it take care of me.

From what I've seen, this is all true of businesses, too.

There are two tools which make up this alchemy of achievement: reverse engineering and inversion.

Reverse engineering lets us derive simple, actionable, low-level goals from our high-level abstract goals (which are in turn more or less accurate representations of our even higher-level abstract desires).

It's the process of looking at our end state and figuring out what must be done and where we must move from to get there by asking the question "what must occur before this can happen?" It's looking at step Z and figuring out what step Y is, rather than trying to guess what step A must be.

But reverse engineering is difficult to do well in a vacuum. It's one thing to say "I want financial independence," and another to figure out what the action to take that leads to it is.

That's where inversion comes in. Inversion is the process of asking questions about how to reach the goal, where the goal, the question, or something about the context is entirely flipped.

Instead of asking "how can I succeed?" inversion suggests that we ask "how can I not fail?"

It's much easier to answer that question than it is to come with a strategy for succeeding.

By way of a practical example, my wife and I were talking about bedtimes and getting up earlier today, because we both agreed that I get my best work done in the mornings, and so I need more of them.

The conversation went like this:

My wife: "How can we get up earlier?"

Me: "I don't know. What's preventing us from getting up earlier?"

Her: "Well... going to bed late, I suppose. We'd get up earlier if it wasn't so hard. And it's hard because we don't get enough sleep."

Me: "Good point. So how can we go to bed earlier? We've been trying for a while and we're still not there. It's not just a matter of trying harder: we've been trying plenty."

Her: "Hmm, not sure. Well... what's preventing us from going to bed earlier?"

Me: "If we ate dinner earlier we wouldn't stay up as late, because we'll get our relaxing time and our dinner time in by earlier in the day."

Her: "So it sounds like we should pick a time to be done with work by every day, so we can focus on dinner and recreation for the rest of the evening."

Me: "You're right. Let's focus on finishing work by 4pm every day so we can work on dinner after that. And instead of trying to stay up as late as we can get away with, let's focus on going to bed as early as we can. That's a total paradigm shift for me – I've never thought like that before."

And just like that, we had created a standard, a habit we could work on, from our goal: by reverse engineering from our desired end state of getting up earlier to the needed actions, using inversion.

By focusing on what could cause us to fail (having a late dinner, focusing on staying up as late as we can rather than going to bed as early as we can), we came up with a series of steps we could take to avoid falling into those traps.

Those steps can now become standards and systems, which are what truly lead to success.

It's a process of transforming something useless, yet concrete, like lead, into something useful and desirable, like gold: the alchemy of achievement.

I jumped in the river this morning for about half a second (though I did go all the way under!) and it was great, despite the 15° F temp. I came up with every excuse under the sun not to get out there and do it, but I eventually got it over with, and I'm glad I did.

Also, I started and got about a third of the way through Millionaire Real Estate Investor by Gary Keller, and was really inspired. Lots of great advice and mindset in there so far.

I was suggested to start reading the book by my cousin, who's also into real estate investing. Incidentally, I had a long phone call slash interrogation with him today about what he's doing for real estate investing now, since he seems to be doing pretty well for himself and is on the track I'd like to be on, though a little further ahead.

But what really hit different was episode 433 of the Bigger Pockets podcast. They had on a guy named Ed Mylett. I'd never heard of him before, but he was a awesome speaker with some fantastic points. He's also started a bunch of different businesses and done really well for himself as a business founder, a performance coach, and a real estate investor.

I wanted to note down a few things from the podcast that stood out and were really inspiring and relevant.

You don't rise to your goals, you fall to your standards.

It's easy to set goals. In fact, that's what I'm hoping to do this week. But his point, and it's a point I've heard elsewhere, is that you don't rise to the level of your goals: you fall to the level of your standards.

Or as the old quote goes...

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

One of the other things I'll work on this week is deciding on some new standards and habits to put into place. I don't want to just make goals and then wait for them to happen; I want to go get them.

Getting serious about getting what you want

Beyond setting and adhering to standards, the overarching lesson that Ed shared on the podcast is about identity – it's a big touchstone of his talks, and something that a lot of performance and life coaches talk about a lot.

Anyway, he shared a story about his son, who was losing golf tournament after golf tournament – badly. Not only was his son losing consistently, he was coming in last every time.

Eventually, his son becomes motivated to win by having his playing skills insulted. Ed and his son decide to win, and Ed helps him do this by applying his performance coaching (especially as it relates to identity) to his son – something he hadn't been doing up to that point with golfing.

After he and his son get serious about winning, not only do they go on to win that tournament... but the next sixteen. And then his son gets a full ride golf scholarship (I didn't even know those existed).

One of the key things they did was have his son put on a different shirt that he'd never worn before while golfing. They called it his "winning shirt," and he only put it on after he got serious.

That shirt and the accompanying mindset shift were enough to propel his son from last to first – literally. It represented a shift from just playing around to being serious about winning. Obviously, his son learned a lot from playing in a more relaxed way, but only started winning once he decided to really go fo rit.

I'm afraid I've butchered the story – but you can listen to it at the end of Bigger Pockets episode 433, and I'd highly suggest doing so.

The point is, his son underwent an identity shift the moment he decided to get serious about winning, and it had a powerful result.

I want to do the same thing.

I also have my own little anecdote that relates to this – playing pool with a friend of mine this past Saturday. While we played he was telling me about how it's important to make note of where you think the ball is going to go before it does, so that when you strike it you know how to improve in the future.

He smoked me that first game, but towards the end of it I started paying really close attention to where I thought the ball was going to go, and playing seriously – intentionally.

Playing seriously, and with intentionality, wasn't enough to carry that first game, but the next one around, I beat him for the first time ever. It was very satisfying, and I don't think I would have if not for playing intentionally, getting serious about winning, and trying very hard to.

This touches on something I've talked about in the past that Ed's story on the podcast today also touches on – intentionality. Being serious. Playing to win.

Accepting yourself

The thing about playing to win is that before you can get serious, you have to admit the possibility of losing, and losing because of your own fault.

One of the reasons I don't always play serious is that I'm afraid of losing. I'm not afraid of losing if I'm not trying, because that doesn't reflect on my abilities and aptitudes. If I don't care about something, it doesn't matter if I fail.

On the other hand, if I really care about something and I fail miserably at it while trying my best, then the loss is clearly on me.

It's my inadequacy, my failure, my not being good enough.

And that is really difficult to accept. That's why I often want to pretend that I'm not actually trying, which is what leads to me not actually trying.

Funny how that works, isn't it? You spend long enough pretending to do or be something, and eventually you become that thing – whether it's what you want or not.

I can only get serious about succeeding once I accept that I might lose, even when I give it my best shot. It's that fear of losing when I'm trying my best that keeps me motivated to learn and to try even harder.

There's something different that happens when you say "I tried really hard – I gave it my best shot – and I failed," compared to when you say "Eh, I wasn't really trying anyway."

You can only improve yourself once you accept that you're lacking, and to do that means accepting yourself, shortcomings and all.

After all, if you're "good enough" as it is, why would you try to get better?

I'm getting serious

This is one of my goals for 2021: to accept myself, including where I'm lacking, and genuinely get serious.

As of now, I'm getting serious about making a living from passive income. If I fail from here on out, it's because I wasn't good enough, or I did something stupid, or I was lazy, or I didn't know something. But I'm going to learn from my mistakes and become stronger from them.

I am trying my very hardest from now on.

P.S. Yes, that is scary to post publicly – and probably comes off a bit, well, try-hard... but what's so bad about that? Honestly, I'm more scared of never getting where I want to go.

P.P.S. It sure does seem like our society rewards people who don't try hard, so much that try-hard is actually an insult, rather than a compliment. I should probably be more careful about judging others for trying hard (though it's interesting to note that I rarely do so, despite my personal fear of judgement).

Everything is so much more complicated with a baby involved! Bringing his swing, play mat, clothes, changing station, etc. added a lot to our luggage, and he definitely took top priority as soon as we got in the door. He needed to be seen to, settled, fed, and kept from getting too bored while we were trying to unpack, and only now has he settled down.

With that said, I was still able to get the Bluetooth surround sound set up and a fire in the fireplace, and some stew we made last week thawed for a (very) late dinner, and my wife was able to get a load of laundry in (which has proved to be a bit loud, unfortunately – but we shouldn't have to do much of it while we're here).

The cabin sits right on a river in Maine, and is gorgeous. We're super happy with it. We have everything we need, and everything seems quite functional (in stark contrast to some of the other airbnbs we've stayed in). There are some foodstuffs, spices and things leftover in the fridge and cabinets, and we brought a cooler full of food too. We're set for eating for a couple of days, but we'll have to venture out shopping before too long.

With that all said, I'm planning on going to bed early, then getting up bright and early tomorrow morning for a quick dip in the river – never mind that it's going to be 14° F! I'm just going to jump in then run back to the cabin for a hot shower. Just want to get the blood flowing for a week of thinking.

I've found that doing hard things helps me think more clearly. Whenever I take a cold shower in the morning, my thought processes are clarified for a little while, and I make decisions that I'm happier about long term.

This might be entirely due to placebo effect, but I'm not sure. I don't know who said it, but there's a good quote:

Do hard things, and life will be easy. Do easy things, and life will be hard.

Doing a hard thing like getting into freezing cold water does a couple of things, physiologically and mentally.

First, there's the adrenaline and dopamines that flood your system from the temperature shock. You just feel great physically (well, after you warm up again) – and you want to do it again.

Then there's also the satisfaction that comes from having done something challenging. Once so rewarded, my brain is primed to make additional difficult, yet also rewarding decisions.

After all, that's how habits work on a long-term scale: trigger, action, reward. Set up a trigger for an action, take that action, and then fulfill the reward center in the brain.

Don't quote me on this, but I'm willing to bet that reminding your brain how rewarding it is to do something hard on a shorter timescale like a few hours or less helps it see more clearly what lays on the other side of longer-term hard decisions.

I don't want to try to break it down too much, though. I'm not a neuroscientist or a psychologist. All I know is that if I do hard stuff, especially getting in cold water, I'm happier with the decisions I make afterward.

We'll, uh, see if I stick with it the whole week, though. I already jumped into the ocean yesterday, which is what inspired me to try going in the river this week.

Anyway, with that all said, I'm going to spend the week visualizing our goals for our twenty year, ten year, five year, and finally one year plans, a la The ONE Thing (of which I brought a hard copy with me, along with a pen and a highlighter).

I hope to emerge at the end of the week with a renewed sense of clarity and vision, a set of goals (both personal and for the family), and steps to take immediately to reach those goals.

Another deliverable for this week is a good budget that will help us reach those goals. We really fell off of the budgeting bandwagon when Quinn was born, and haven't had time to set it up again.

We're here until the 16th, so we'll spend a couple of days doing some self-authoring and writing down where we are presently (writing things down is a critical part of the curriculum), and where we hope to reach. Then we'll spend another day revisiting our long term goals and evaluating where we are in relation to them right now.

Finally, we'll spend a couple of days breaking down the difference between our current state and our long-term goals into steps we can take to reduce that difference, reverse-engineering things from our desired end state as suggested in The ONE Thing.

By the end of the week, I'll know exactly where I want to go in 2021, and what I have to do to get there, starting next week and month.

Looking forward to it.

Many of my business ideas so far have been really big.

They've been things that I could easily picture scaling to my ultimate goal of total passive income without changing or pivoting at all. I thought it made sense to avoid starting things that wouldn't get me to where I wanted to go.

Well, I've been thinking about that a lot lately, and I'm coming to the conclusion that this approach is very naive. A more sophisticated approach is to start small (or perhaps a better word is certain), and scale up once I have something working.

The subject of this post was inspired by a post from Pat Walls of StarterStory.com titled "Your business idea is embarrassing, and that's a good thing."

In the article, he writes about why small business ideas are great by pointing out how many of the businesses that are big today started out as very small ideas, executed well, that achieved initial traction and then scaled from there.

Everything grows from a simple idea.

Something else I'm reading right now is Rework, on Daniel Vassallo's advice. It contains a couple of different sections (the book is uniquely organized into unrelated, concisely stated insights rather than long chapters) that are very relevant.

The first section is this:

Learning from mistakes is overrated.

What do you really learn from mistakes? You might learn what not to do again, but how valuable is that? You still don't know what you should do next.

If failure isn't valuable, then failing at something really big is much more expensive than I've been thinking. At least if you fail at something small, you haven't lost a big investment.

I've always justified these bigger ideas by saying that even if I don't succeed, at least I'll learn a lot from my failure that will inform my next idea.

This justification is backed up by the classic Silicon Valley startup-mentality quote "Fail fast", at least in my mind. An alternate interpretation of this quote might be "ship early and ship often, even at risk of failure," but it's not my primary reading.

My mindset here was first challenged by a chance encounter with a software salesman from out West who'd moved back to Boston to launch a startup in the construction and renovation space. He was interviewing me for a CTO role, and when I suggested "fail fast" as a good modus operandi, he got ticked and shot it down angrily.

"'Fail, fail, fail,' is wrong! It's 'win, win, win big'!"

I didn't have enough context to understand it at the time, but he was right.

The other quote from Rework is this:

Planning is guessing.

Unless you're a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too many factors that are out of your hands.

...

Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can't actually control.

...

Plans are inconsistent with improvisation.

...

Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier.

What does this idea that planning is bad have to do with "start small"?

Every big idea I've had has been backed up by a big plan to scale to exactly where I want to go. But I know so little about each idea here in the present that it's really all just guesswork based on a little research.

If I accept that I can't "plan" my way to massive success, that leaves me free for improvisation – in other words, for dealing with reality as it comes.

It also means I must necessarily start small.

With all that said, it doesn't mean that I should start with ideas that must always remain small. It wouldn't make sense for me to try to build out fully passive income from a business that won't scale (running a small cafe, for example).

It just means that I shouldn't try to build something too big from the very beginning, because those plans probably don't have much in common with reality, I'll get nothing from them if I fail, and even more, failure is very expensive.

That final thought reminds me of a relevant tweet from Daniel Vassallo (who's been really on point lately!):