“We are all the heroes in our own story.”

There’s a lot of truth and wisdom behind this phrase and it impacts many facets of our lives. In some way or another we all view ourselves as the hero who is living out an incredibly important journey. We are striving, seeking to overcome the odds and slay the hypothetical mythical dragon in our life’s quest. Our hypothetical dragons might be raising a great family, building a business, reaching new heights academically, or any number of things that are important to us individually.

While this type of thinking is completely normal, we should remember that everyone in the world perceives themselves as the heroes in their own story, whatever that story might be. Once we’ve come to that understanding, we can take a step back and recognize that while we may be the heroes in our stories, we are not the heroes in everyone else’s story. We are not the knights in shining armor to them, but a healthier approach might be to think of ourselves as man who gives them their own sword or tools so they can “slay their own dragon” and accomplish their own hero story. This is a powerful motivation thought process that applies to any number of situations.

1. Employees or Co-workers- each one of them have their own dreams and destinations. What tools, steps, or help can you offer them on their own hero journey?

2. Parenting- While our children our young they depend on us for everything. But as they grow, how can we empower them so they can live out their hero story?

We often reference sports metaphors and examples because they are easy to point to and understand, but a great one in this example is Nick Saban. It’s amazing the amount of head coaching successes that have emerged from working under Coach Saban at Alabama. When he hires his assistant coaches, he knows that most of them dream of being their own head coach someday. He doesn’t hold back this dream for fear of losing a good coach. Instead, he empowers them, challenges them, and if the Alabama football team succeeds it gives them the opportunity to live out their own hero story of being a head coach somewhere.

At Exclusivia, this is a core value that we apply to our members, our employees, and our partners. Everyone in our ecosystem has their own unique goals, needs, and mission in life. They are the hero in their own story. So the role of Exclusivia is not to be the hero and try to save the day, but instead to empower and provide the “sword” so they can slay their own mythical dragon.

“We tend to measure what is easily measurable instead of what is truly important to measure.”

We recently heard Charles Koch the CEO of Koch Industries in an interview talk about his company, their philsophies, and how they want to seek mutually beneficial relationships with their shareholders, customers, employees, suppliers, and partners. This mutual good and interdependecy throughout the ecosystem creates a “rising tide, lifts all ships” that creates loyalty, strength, and lasting power for everyone.

Mr Koch revealed how he the team spend an enormous amount of time designing the compensation packages of their people. They look at all kind of measurement metrics to incentivize the type of behavior and actions that promote the overall goodwill and strength of the company. When he spoke about this, he acknowledged how hard it was to design these metrics because so many of the behaviors they are incentivizing are not strictly about maximizing profits, revenues, costs or other qualitative measures but instead qualatative attributes that lead to good will across the entire ecosystem. “The Problem is, We tend to measure what is easily measurable instead of what is truly important to measure.”

The significance of those words stuck in our minds. How often do we seek simple and easy measurements when we are looking at Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)? Short term revenue, sales and profitability at all costs, cost of production, user acquisition, might all be examples. While we shouldn’t discount measuring these items, perhaps we should dive deeper into the measurements and analysis.
For example: Is it beneficial to increase profitability by squeezing our suppliers making them unhappy to do business with us, decreasing their loyalty for the future? Or would we be better served taking less profits in the short term, but ensuring that when we hit a difficult with supplies that they take care of us in turn? Is it beneficial to acquire customers at all costs, even those customers do not align with your values and will most likely cause problems for your organization, or would you be better served seeking out customers appreciate your services and worth the future investment of your company? There are countless more examples that we could identify, but the main point is it’s difficult and requires hard work to look deeper at the intagibles that should be measured.

Innovation, fortitude, trust, commitment, creativity, consistency, and looking after the long term value of the company and all it’s members are just a few examples of other items that are difficult to measure but might be invaluable. To dive deeper and identify what matters most then try to measure that, requires a leader or organization to have courage and to think long term about what adds value and strength to the organization and it’s entire ecosystem.

While business is the easy example to point to, this idea could most likely be extrapolated and applied to many areas as we pursue our best lives.

I’ve heard two investors, Guy Spier and Nick Sleep, use the term destination analysis in regard to their evaluation process for making an investment. In this context, these investors look at the current company and are trying to envision where the company is going into the future. In summary, is it clear that the company be a larger, stronger, and be serving more customers than it is today? Nothing is certain but if they feel that they have very clear idea of the company’s future destination it helps make their decision-making process significantly easier. On the flipside, if the future of the company’s destination is cloudy or there are too many unknowns affecting the destination, they most likely will not proceed.

Investing is a bit different than life, because in investing if you don’t like the destination of the investment, you can simply walk away and find something else to invest in, whereas you cannot walk away from your life. However, this idea of destination analysis is something that can extrapolated across all areas of our best lives.

Dr. Robert Cooper frequently uses the term “glance ahead, then look back.” The future destination is made by intentionally looking at where we want to be, then reverse engineering that process to do the action steps required to get there.

Have we done a destination analysis of your family’s happiness? Our health? Business? If so what does the future destination look like with the road we are currently on? Does it align with where we want to be?

There are many unknowns in life and many things that will unfold that are outside of our control. It is very easy to get lost in the noise and chaos of the present, but if we are not careful our lives will unfold almost by accident, and we can miss our best lives. Life is not something that just happens to us, we must be active participants.

We have found this exercise of destination analysis incredibly helpful with our team at Exclusivia in building the company as well as helping each other intentionally pursue our own most amazing futures.

The ability to think, plan, and execute for the long term is one of the hardest skills to master but if you can it’s one of the largest advantages a person can have.

Today’s world is increasing complex and based upon instant gratification. Technology has made it so we never have to wait anymore. We have instant access to the entire world through our smart phones and devices. Instant news, instant email access, instant food delivery, instant updates, and instant communication all leads to short term dopamine rushes. It’s created a world that is constantly rushing and full of short-term incentives, short term thinkers, and a lot of short-term activity.
Here’s the secret to it. If the vast majority of the world is competing with the short-term goals in mind, you will be competing with essentially everyone. Those are nearly impossible odds to overcome. However, if you can recognize this, you can play a different game than everyone else and dramatically improve your chances of success.

Some examples:
1. Business- Companies that are pressured and incentivized to think quarterly or even yearly are not going to be able to make the long, term strategic decisions that position their company to be stronger and more healthy 10, 20, 30 years from today.

2. Investing- almost all hedge funds, mutual funds, private equity investors are paid to deploy capital whether the right opportunity exists of not. They are also tracked on a quarterly or yearly basis for results. This incentive system encourages short term, speculative thinking and gives the patient investor with patient capital a huge advantage.

3. Health- Committing to sleeping, exercising, and eating will give you more years to live and function at high level allowing to continuously improve the other areas of your life. The short term temptation is to neglect this when you’re tired or busy.

4. Family- giving energy and time to your family continuously, greatly improves the chances that your family relationships will be deeper and more meaningful.

Long-term thinking and execution require rejecting what is normal in today’s society and approaching your life with an emotional discipline that most people do not possess nor are they willing to do. Many may talk about the long term. But when they’re under stress or they’re ideas are not working out, most people will cave and embrace the short-term fix.

One of the most important tips on how to play the long game is you to set up your environment to do so. If you’re relying on your own discipline, will power, and emotions to play the long game you’re most likely going to fail. But if you structure your life so that everything encourages long term behavior you’ll be able to calmly make difficult decisions that will give you an advantage.

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?

A priest, friend of mine, always used to say, “God doesn’t punish us, we punish ourselves.”

While I don’t know if God directly punishes us or not, we certainly do punish ourselves. We are human and will make mistakes and fall short. Most likely, we’ve done things we’d be ashamed of others to know about. We said words that hurt people we care about when we’re angry. We have been selfish, unkind, petty, resentful, and all other kinds of actions we don’t want to be.

But how long do we hold onto these mistakes? It’s human nature to feel guilty, ashamed, embarrassed, and angry with ourselves for the things we’ve done. I find myself often falling short of the standards I set for myself. I’ve held on and dwelled on my mistakes. Yet, I cannot change the mistakes I’ve made so the only thing to do is to humbly take responsibility and try to do better. I wasn’t the husband, father, leader, or person I wanted to be today but tomorrow I’m going to try to be better.

I make mistakes, we all will make mistakes. Give yourself permission to forgive yourself and move forward with the goal of being better.

“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.

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.