All parents want their children to have the wisdom they have without having to experience the pain and struggle that they’ve had to endure to gain that knowledge.

I’ve known many successful and accomplished people. Almost all of them have hard-won wisdom that they’ve acquired through experience and struggles. I’ve never heard any successful person say that their journey was easy. They’ve all encountered periods in their lives with challenging circumstances, uncertainties, doubts, and times where they didn’t know how to continue. But through all the difficulties and obstacles, they were able to show an enormous of grit and emotional fortitude. They persevered, continuously learning from their mistakes and were able to adjust, tweak, or completely change their paths.

Experience is the ultimate teacher and there is a tremendous amount of wisdom to be gained through it. Yet, as parents we want to spare our children the pain and difficulties that we’ve endured to gain that wisdom. Building grit, resiliency, emotional strength, and obtaining wisdom are difficult and take hard work. I don’t know that it is possible to do without experiencing it.

I don’t believe every generation has to start at 0, but I have a young family, so this is something I think about frequently and have significantly more questions than answers. Questions like:

1. How do you balance the interdependence of being part of family while still encouraging independence? This sounds like a contradictory statement, but it’s important for a person’s own self worth and strength to be self-sufficient and recognize that they are their own unique individual who is also a part of the larger collective family.

2. How do you balance between being supportive and loving while encouraging your children to grow into emotionally strong people who can handle and tackle complex problems that life throws at them? As much we want to handle things for our kids, life is going present difficulties we cannot protect them from such as: an unexpected death, professional challenges, relationship and marital issues…ect. So how do we make sure they are equipped to handle the tough times they will face?

Because I do not have the perfect answer, here’s what I’m going to acknowledge. Parenting is complex and a challenge. But it’s the most important thing I will ever do. As much as possible I want my children to feel loved and supported while still encouraging them to embrace and deal with difficulty. While I’d like spare them the pain, mistakes, and challenges; I understand that the only way to acquire hard-won wisdom is when it is HARD-WON.

A small mind shift can change a pattern of drooping and fading to one of rising and surpassing.

What Do You Expect?

Muhammad Ali called himself “The Best Ever” before he became that. He told an interviewer, “Once belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen, and more opportunities appear.”

Noble laureate Daniel Kahneman showed that from a neuroscience perspective, the wholehearted embrace of higher expectations does indeed ignite the senses, heart, and nervous system to subconsciously elevate performance in pursuit of these potential outcomes.

In essence, the rising story we tell ourselves about the pursuit of what is possible in our lives and work will raise the odds that it will become the story of our lives and work.

Just as powerfully, the brain develops an aversion to failing to achieve such higher outcomes, and that desire not to fall short is even stronger inside the brain and nervous system for igniting more of the necessary elevations in curiosity, learning, ingenuity, and growth.

What new multisensory visualizations and related brief stories about such expectations this month would strike the deepest chord in you?

The language we choose to use, and the feelings and images associated with it, grow us in unexpectedly powerful new ways.

Few of the “best” ever keep getting better. Their hard-wired brains settle in and repeat what got them here. That rut is never going to be enough to fend off the rising stars who are inspired to reach for what is possible—far beyond today’s norm or best.

On the intense journey to one of their many rugby world championships, the New Zealand All Blacks set themselves an internal challenge to embrace higher expectations: “To set higher records than we ever have before or that anyone else believes we can achieve.”

They posted their own ancient quote on the locker room wall:

Aim for the highest clouds, so that if you miss them, you will hit the peak of a higher mountain than ever before.

If you expect more from yourself and you let that expectation sink in and guide you, you can set records. How can you use opportunities today and tomorrow to personally elevate, visualize, feel, and embrace higher expectations in your life and work than you ever have before?

“Cutting Through the Noise” has always been the biggest driver of Exclusivia. However, the temptation is not to cut through the noise, it’s to escape the noise.

“If I climb a mountain and sit by myself for a week, I will be able to find peace, think clearly and rationally.” This is a very common ideology and it’s not entirely wrong. Being in a peaceful, quiet location will definitely inspire more of these tranquil thoughts. But the biggest challenge is how we recreate those feelings of peace and clarity in a busy, ever-changing world that is constantly pulling at us? How do we maintain our composure with chaos all around us?

When we find people who mastered this concept, they make things look easy. They accomplish difficult situations and complicated goals seemingly effortlessly. The more we study these people, it seems that they build in strategies to ground themselves with intense prioritization. It may be pattern recognition, prayer, meditation, intense preparation, but whatever strategies they are using allow them to maintain their composure when things appear out of control. The noise still exists, they just don’t spend energy or energy to let it affect them.

“The game just slowed down for them.” This is a common phrase in athletics when describing an athlete who makes it look easy. Perhaps we need to prioritize slowing down our minds and try to be present when life is moving too fast.

When we look at many of the mistake we make in life, personal and profession, it’s almost always because we reach for something short-term. Let’s look at some examples.

1. Diet- Dopamine rush from sugar or fatty food today vs living healthier for longer in the future. Sugar and fat taste good in the short term, but increases chances for diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

2. Exercise- Exercise today to perform at higher levels and live longer in the future.

3. Business- The fast money with shortcuts or building the trust of your customers and employees over the long term.

4. Smoking-short term high, but increased risk of cancer, heart disease, and other health problems.

5. Other Vices- Alcohol, Drug Use, Poor Sexual Decisions could all lead to adverse consequences.

6. Spend Money Now or Save for the Future

7. Investing behavior-the overwhelming habit of people in the stock market is trade to try to make short term or fast money. Leads to all kind of risky behaviors such as speculation, leverage, Fear of Missing Out, Panic Selling, Ect.

“Temporary Inconvenience for Permanent Improvement” is a motto we believe in deeply. It is difficult and requires a lot of emotional strength and discipline. It can sometimes even be painful, but if we can hold on, the future payoff will almost always be worth it.

“I would rather step over a 1 foot hurdle than climb an 8 foot fence.”

I’ve heard Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger say something to this logic many times when it comes to business and investments. This is a great lesson for running a business or buying a business.

The research in Neuroscience says our brains are going to be attracted to complex and difficult things. It’s our brains’ way of constantly being distracted and therefore never having to work. However, in business we don’t get extra rewards for the complexity or difficulty of the problem.. So we must fight this urge.

In math or engineering problems, more complexity and variables make it difficult to get consistently get the correct answer. If a business requires too many complex and difficult decisions then it’s a bad business. Complex decisions have too many variables and too many question marks. This makes it feel like the stars must align absolutely perfectly for the business to be successful. Is it possible? Yes, but why would anyone want a business like that? It’s difficult, exhausting, and the probabilities of sustained success are very low. A complex business has too many 8 footers to climb.

Great businesses are easy to understand and the decision making becomes increasingly simplified. Stop climbing 8 foot fences, seek out more 1 footers.

At key times across each busy year, we each need to re-evaluate and then purposefully elevate our energy and mindset—by sharpening focus and drive despite the neuroscience revelations that most people are unwittingly and unconsciously lowering theirs.

The gift in this is that it gives you a fresh chance to break away from the norm as you gauge where you really are today in your perspective, vision, and actions, versus where you want to be in all the key areas of your life and work.

Devote some brief but deep reflective time to honestly assess how you approach the challenges and opportunities of life and work. There are three possible mindsets that deeply affect those things.

 A “Fixed Mindset,” which is a mental vantage point or lens that limits you to polishing the past, resisting change, and clutching routines, and where possibility and achievement are immediately and automatically resisted or blocked.
Typical phrases used by those with a Fixed Mindset include “That’s just the way I am” and “That’s not how we do it [or have always done it] here…”
 A “Growth Mindset,” which is where you are instinctively curious and open to growth and change, especially incremental changes. The problem—according to Stanford scientist Carol Dweck, who pioneered this research—is that a surprising majority of the people who self-rate as having a growth mindset, don’t—in reality, they are fixed in their past-based attitudes, reactions, and approaches to life and work. (Dweck calls this a “False Growth Mindset”).
If you truly believe you have a growth mindset, list the specific array of improvements over the past days and weeks in your life and work that measurably confirm it.
 A “Leading-Edge Mindset” is exemplified by the disciplined daring and experiences of the highest tier of performers. It’s a mindset where you continually question yesterday’s assumptions, habits, attitudes, and routines, asking “What is truly possible?” and refusing to accept the norm or industry-best practices as “as good as it gets.” You seek out insights, discoveries, and data that enable you to learn, test, and tailor ever more of the right improvements and breakthroughs as you drive toward the outer edges of what is possible, even when others believe it’s “impossible.”

The reason a mindset is so powerful is that it is the lens through which you see yourself and the world around you, and a Leading-Edge Mindset becomes the instinctive way you learn to override your hard-wired brain’s clutching of comfort and routine and the past, and instead you elevate your ongoing vantage point and learn to embrace being constructively discontented and productively uncomfortable as you contrast what is common or normal versus what may be—and almost always is—possible.
More and more of today’s record-setting leaders, professionals, and teams are studying and adopting a Leading-Edge Mindset, and they strive day after day to keep making it more effective and successful in outcomes created, not just in effort expended or time spent.

You can choose your mindset. So be sure you and everyone on your team commits to live and lead from the leading edge. All day, every day. Doing that changes how you and they sense and seize more of the right opportunities. It ignites initiative and helps everyone provide more of the right encouragement, touch points, and nudges to those around them.
It becomes second nature—and creates a more open mind and discovery-oriented attitude about the things that matter most.

“Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, he believes to be true.”
-Demosthenes

Desire, similar to fear can cloud our rational thinking and is equally as dangerous. It’s important that when we’re making decisions and evaluating that we try to understand our own biases. When we want something so badly to be true, we can consciously and subconsciously seek out information that impacts our thinking to support the outcome we desire.

Most people spend their time and energy seeking out materials that validate and confirm what they already believe.

In business, we want to be successful so badly that we make reckless decisions based on poor facts. In investing we fall into speculative behaviors because we want to be wealthy. We justify a partner’s poor behavior because we deeply desire love. We like drinking alcohol, so we search out the scientific studies that say drinking wine or alcohol is good for us. The list could go on, but this is a dangerous line of thinking and behavior.

A couple things I am trying to do more of:
1. Ask myself, are my desires are clouding my thoughts and affecting my decision making. Am I thinking rationally based on fact or hope because I want something so badly?
2. Surrounding myself with a couple people who will speak candidly with me about my thought processes. This doesn’t mean I listen to everything they say, but it’s important for me to have a sounding board that will question my thought processes.

We need to be careful how we choose our confidants and their motivations. Many people seek advice from people that work for them or who are reliant on them for money, promotions, or even social advancement. This can create an echo chamber of people amplifying what we already believe. Essentially supporting our biases, whether rational or not.

It is healthy to challenge our ideas and thinking. Rational thinking is very difficult because we’re humans with real emotions, fears, and desires. But if we’re at least aware that our desires can affect our thought process, perhaps we set up some processes to make better decisions.

I shared an earlier wisdom entry titled, “A Complicated Business is a Bad Business”. I strongly believe this, and shortly after sharing that idea, I realized the concept applies to life as well as business. The more that I’ve learned in my life, the more I recognize that finding simple principles and sticking to them can make for a happier, more successful, and fulfilling life.

From a neuroscience perspective our brains are attracted to complexity and difficulty. Logically this makes very little sense to me, but it’s true. Life is complex and hard enough, so why seek out more complications? Yet if we are not careful we will find ourselves busy, overwhelmed, and missing what matters most.

Look at the core of every major religion, they are incredibly simple and many of the teachings are very similar. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Be grateful. Don’t steal, Don’t lie… ect. If every person in society followed these simple principles. There would be no need for additional rules. Life would be more simple and more fulfilling.

The natural tendency in our lives is to accumulate possessions. More possessions however mean more responsibility and headaches we have in maintaining these possessions. Do we own our property or does it own us? How many people if they had unlimited wealth would move out of the city to a beautiful, peaceful location? Perhaps a farm, or the mountains, or the beach? Some place where life is simple.

What about our time? Do we control the time in our lives or do we fall victim to busyness, with time slipping away to tasks that are probably not very important? Missing family events for work? Answering email and texts while ignoring the people we are with even when they are the people who mean the most to us.

There are countless other examples, but my overall point is that we need to continuously guard our life from complexity. Complexity will quietly rob us everything if we’re not careful.

“Caring is taking the time, indifference is making excuses.”

A basketball coach I used to work with, Tom Desotell, used to always say this to our staff and players. He was adamant that if something was truly important to a person, it had to be prioritized and given the time and energy that it deserved.

How often does this happen in our lives? We have good intentions for the things that are important to us. I want to be a good parent, but I have to work. I want to improve my health, but I don’t have the time. This happens to all of us.

We have to make sure our most important priorities line up with where we spend our time and energy. Otherwise we will look back on our lives with enormous regret wondering how we missed so much of what matters most.

One of the challenges that we all face is that the world is chaotic and increasing complex to the point where our minds simply cannot process or make sense of all the information and stimulation that is coming our way. So our brains take care of it for us. We unknowingly use of strategies to organize the world around us.

Why Do We Do This? Our Brains are naturally lazy and pre-conditioned to conserve energy so they’re constantly looking for short-cuts. These short-cuts are helpful as well, it saves us from having to completely de-code all the information in the world from scratch.

What are some examples? (These are not the technical terms)
1. Pattern Recognition- Our brains naturally seek out information that are already familiar with. The challenge is we might miss important information because we’re not familiar with it, so our brain does not actively look for it.

2. Associations- We look for information that resembles previous information that we’ve seen. This isn’t that different that pattern recognition, but the brain takes the liberty of making assumptions with this little bit of information. Again helpful in certain circumstances, if sharp things are dangerous, I can make the assumption that knife is dangerous without actually needing to be cut myself. The problem is it can also lead us to make assumptions that just aren’t true. We may presume to know or understand things about other people based on quick judgments.

3. Grouping- our brains organize items, people, and information into groups to help us make sense of the world. Example: instead of having millions of different individuals with their own needs, we group based on a shared fact pattern, sort of like their brain’s filing system. A great time and energy saver. Sometimes its helpful, other times it leaves gaps or misunderstandings.

There are countless more and the point of sharing this is that our brain can miraculous things but it can also go on autopilot very quickly and easily. With our team at Exclusivia, we try to make sure we are aware of the fact that our brain will leave us prone to gaps. But hopefully because we’re aware of our brain’s hardwiring, we can be a bit more proactive in questioning it collectively. We try to ask simple but helpful questions to the group such as:
“What are we missing?”
“Why are we making this assumption?”

While this does not mean that we never miss anything or make any mistakes, we believe that being aware of some of the brain’s shortcomings has been helpful in collectively serving Exclusivia’s mission as well as living our own best lives.