Weekly Question & Framework: September 6, 2024

Hello and welcome to the Curiosity Chronicle Weekly Question and Framework in three minutes or less, I'll give you one question and one framework to get you thinking going into the weekend. Without further ado, let's dive right into it. A question to achieve your big goals. What are the lesser goals keeping you from your real goals? I recently came across a quote that hit me hard. We are kept from our goals not by obstacles, but by a clear path to lesser goals. Robert Brault it's easy to blame external factors for our failure to achieve our goals. It's much harder to turn inward to reflect on whether the accessibility of lesser goals is really what holds us back. Here's an example from a recent experience in my own life. Over the last few months, I've been training for a marathon, which I'm running this weekend. I ran 2 hours, 57 minutes and 31 seconds in my first marathon last fall, but have set an ambitious goal of running sub 250 in this one. During every race and difficult workout, I've noticed there is an internal conversation that starts as soon as it gets hard. This is hard. Why am I doing this? This is stupid. The goal time is too ambitious. I don't need to hit that. It's still an improvement if I slow down to an easier pace. The internal dialogue is the greatest risk to you achieving your big goals in life. When things get hard, the mental gymnastics start. You start convincing yourself that it's okay to ease up, that the clear path to your lesser goals looks pretty darn good. Your success in life will be determined by your ability to push back on that internal dialogue. Next time you find yourself hearing that naysayer in your head, try responding with yes, this is hard because it's supposed to be hard. That's what makes it worth doing. I love hard. I'm built for this. It's okay to fall short of your ambitious goals if you gave it your all. But it's not okay to fall short of those goals because you let yourself off the hook. This is supposed to be hard. Embrace it. A framework for navigating life's chaos the riptide mentality Here's a powerful idea I've been thinking about. A riptide is a strong ocean current that flows directly away from the shore. A swimmer caught in a riptide is pulled out into the open water. The obvious instinct is to fight the current, but it's entirely wrong. Even the best swimmers are unable to fight against that current. In fact, last year almost 100 people died in riptides in the US alone. The recommended course of action when you're caught in a riptide is to relax and let it take you out into the open water. Once the current dissipates, you swim parallel to the shore and then in, you conserve energy by not fighting the riptide and then use your energy to return to shore once outside its grasp. This is what I call the riptide mentality. At certain times in your life, there are going to be subtle, hidden forces conspiring against you, pulling you further away from your desired destination. In these moments, your instincts will tell you to fight back against those forces. You'll breathe faster, push harder and strain against them. But these instincts may lead you astray. You may be caught in a riptide, and in a riptide, the best course of action is to the opposite of what your instincts tell you. In these moments, when you feel the currents are too strong to resist, allow yourself the freedom to relax and let it take you. Once it inevitably dissipates, you will have the energy and fortitude to safely navigate to your destination. So the next time you feel those intense forces conspiring against you and your instincts tell you to strain and fight back, consider the riptide mentality. Perhaps the best course of action is to conserve energy now and deploy it more effectively later. That's all for today's piece. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned something and I hope you'll share it with others. If you enjoyed this, you're going to love my first book, the Five Types of Wealth. You can join thousands who have pre ordered it at the five types of wealth.com or anywhere books are sold. That's all for today and as always, until next time, stay curious, friends.