Patrick Mosher shares a reflection practice for accelerating growth: identify three major learnings from the past year, then track daily wins and weekly reviews in a custom planner. He emphasizes emotional oases as safe spaces amid constant novelty, and offers maxims like "difficulties are logs to burn on the fire of your ambition" and "negative emotions leak personal power."
Chapters
our human species loves security and novelty. And that's a paradox, right? It's just like, you know, uh, uh, uh. And things, when things get a little too novel, we're like, I wish I could just be at home. And then the pandemic hits and we go like, oh my God, I wish I could go anywhere but home. You know, so, so we, we crave that security, but then we crave the novelty. And, and so that's kind of how we look at our lives. Just looking around our panels here, We're all leaning into a lot of novelty, which is great. And also, I think all of us here should or do have what I call emotional oases as well, places that we can go to and feel safe and secure and quiet and serene. And we need those places too when we have so much novelty in our world. Okay, so major first, so good. All right, the next one. 3 major learnings from this past year. And again, afterwards, when you do this, spend some time on this one. What are 3 major learnings for the year? And they can be things like, I learned this. And then it can also be like, I'll never do that again. Those, both sides of that are both sides of learnings. That are there. Oh, Nate, I know you got a, a running list of these. This is, this is good. Um, all right, 3 major learnings. All right, I'm gonna give you a little bit of my process and my cheat sheet for doing these every year. I have my, my annual or my daily plan. I've customized my own planner, so I don't have a planner that I use. Early in Brendon's world, before he had launched a planner, he walked through with his mastermind how he was building his planner. So then I customized it based on what he was saying. And then when he came out with his planner, I was like, I'm not gonna use yours because you made me create mine and I like mine a lot better. So, so I have my planner. And the front page is how I plan the day, but the back is at the end of the day, here's the things, and here's the 10 things that I ask myself at the end of every day, and I rate those. And as you all know, I'm a geek, so I have a spreadsheet. I transfer these to a spreadsheet, and I got those all on there for a few years now. But also at the bottom, I have 3 things that made me feel good today. And I ask myself that every day. And what I have down there is also my learnings for that day. And then also at the end of every week during my weekly review, I look at every day and I write down the highlights of my, the things that I learned that week and the things that made me feel good that week. And at the end of the month, I look at the 4 or 5 weekly things. I go like, oh, here's the things every month. So at the end of the year when I do this exercise, I'm only looking at 12 sheets of the highest level stuff that I learned every month. And then these are like the 5 or 6 major things. And so I did that exercise before today's call, and I just wanted to share a couple of these with you because some of them are pretty funny. So one of them was when I was in South Dakota, a friend of mine was describing her, a boyfriend from decades ago that we all knew that was kind of an off kind of guy. And she said, yeah, what she told him was absence makes the heart grow fonder. So go away. I thought that was great, great advice, you know, for— so I was like, yeah, I want to be kind to you, so just go away and I'll be much better. Um, it's like, yikes. That was— I thought that was— that— I love that. Um, another one that I learned this year is the term FIRE from my Zoomies that I teach, the sophomores: financially independent and retire early. They have this desire to have fire. But also, that's what I was like, oh, that's interesting that 19-year-olds are talking about retiring early. I'm like, do you know, like, I'm going to be on calls with like you all, go like, you all want to retire early. They don't know the work it takes to be able to retire early. They just think, well, you know, I'll just do something big on Instagram and then I'll make a million dollars and I'll be fine. It's like, um, Another one that I learned this year and I wanted to share with you is, how do you want people to feel at the end of your story? So we tell stories and we think about what the outcomes for that story are, you know, we want those to be. But an important one is, how do you want people to feel at the end of the story? I taught a story crafting class at Purdue this past semester, and I taught that one pretty heavily. Like, what do you— at the end of your story, how do you want people to feel? And I think that's true when you tell a story from stage, tell a story to your team, but also at the end of your life. What's the story at the end of your life that people— how do you want people to feel when you're, you're gone? And that's kind of a legacy that you leave behind too. This is good too. Difficulties are logs to burn on the fire of your ambition. Difficulties are logs that you burn on the fire of your ambition. And that's one of Brendan's. He mentioned that on one of the calls. This is so good one too. Nate, this is great for you. Committees should always be an odd number, and 3 is too many. I thought that was great too. That's from the president of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels. He said that from stage. That is so good. So anyway, love that. You can't lead from the middle of the pack. That's one of mine. You just can't lead from the middle of the pack. That's why we are deviants, because we're out in front in some way. And Keziah, this one's good for you. Kids always expect good things to happen. I mean, they just wake up and they're like, oh, we're going to do this thing. I mean, maybe not school, but they always expect good things to happen. And it's like, We need to remind ourselves that they expect those good things. And then the last one I'll put out here is negative emotions leak personal power. When you have a negative emotion, and particularly if it's towards somebody, you're giving that person power. And then I have to ask myself, do I really want to give this person my emotions right now? And that helps me just go like, turn it, turn that spigot off. I, I know I don't want to be doing that right now with this person. So negative emotions leave personal power. Were these helpful? Just— these are some of mine.
