I’ve noticed a particular pattern of behavior that seems to trap a lot of people.

Many people seem to treat deliberating as a distinct action. You meet someone who’s a recent graduate and ask what they’re doing now that they have their degree, and they say “I haven’t decided yet.”

Okay… but what are you doing? Right now?

Deliberating isn’t discrete. It’s fine to take a reasonable amount of time to gather information and make a subsequently informed choice, but while that’s happening, you should absolutely be doing literally anything that develops yourself.

Consider two recent graduates, Goofus and Gallant. Both graduated the same year from the same school, and both are unsure of what they want to pursue with their degree. Both initially feel pretty lost.

So Goofus does very little. He lives with his parents or with friends so his costs are low, but he subsequently makes as little money as possible. He considers lots of jobs “beneath him” and therefore doesn’t work much. The problem gets worse over time, because every year he compares himself to peers that have been advancing in their careers, and thus puts even more jobs in the “beneath him” category. Five years after graduation, he has virtually nothing to show for it, no return on the investment he made in his degree.

Gallant also feels lost and unsure, but he took some good advice from someone and figures that while he’s figuring out his ultimate goal, he can commit his life to being in service of the day he figures it out. He doesn’t consider any work beneath him; money is money, and he wants to have a lot of it saved. He also keeps his costs low by living with parents or friends, but he makes as much money as he can and squirrels it away. He waits tables, drives for a rideshare service, picks up entry-level work in other fields if they’ll have him. In his spare time, he teaches himself new skills (he doesn’t worry about what, just learns!) and makes sure to meet new people. Chances are very good that Gallant doesn’t go anywhere near five years without deciding what to do, but let’s say he does.

So now we have Goofus and Gallant, both five years out, and on the same day they both suddenly come to the decision about what it is they ultimately want to do. Look how far ahead Gallant is! He has money saved, so he can be mobile – he can move to a new city that’s a hub for his chosen field, or he can buy a certification course, or even just live off his savings while he interns or apprentices. He’s valuable to employers because he’s kept his skills up to date and kept himself in the active workforce. He knows a lot of people so he can network his way towards his goal. In short, even though he didn’t know what he’d end up wanting to do, he was preparing anyway.

Goofus, on the other hand, is in bad shape. He found out what he wants to do, but he’s wasted years of his life. Whatever he wants to be, he’s now at square one – and actually, he’s worse than that because he has five years of bad habits weighing him down.

That’s the obvious benefit of this style of thinking. But there are at least two other major benefits:

1. The more proactive you are, the less time it will actually take you to decide what to do. Goofus and Gallant wouldn’t have taken an equal time to make their decision in reality. On average, the more stuff you do, the more likely you are to get the insight, information and inspiration you need to find your calling. It’s not inside your head – it’s out there, in the world.
2. There is at least some chance that you never decide what your “purpose in life” is. Instead of five years, it could be eighty. If that were the case, would you rather spend those eighty years like Goofus or like Gallant?

While you’re “deciding what to do with your life,” focus on other goals. Make money. Stay healthy. Keep your costs low. Stay mobile. Learn like a sponge. Be devoted to self-improvement and open to the world. Don’t sweat the details; don’t worry if you’re learning the “right” thing or improving in the “right” way. You can change course a thousand times if you want. In fact, that might not be so bad.

And if you’re saying to yourself, “this is great advice… five years ago. I wish I’d done it, but now I haven’t. I’m a total Goofus, so what do I do?”

It’s never too late.

What do you do when you can’t stop deliberating?

Most people have been in this situation. You’ve got too many choices. Any of them could be good, but you don’t know which one. You’re going around in circles because you don’t have any new information – nor do you need any. You have every fact you need, you just can’t decide.

How do you get around it?

How do you decide between two job offers? Between three different restaurants for dinner? Between four vacation destinations?

I have a process for you. If you stick to it, these decisions will get a lot easier, regardless of what they are.

Step 1: Eliminate any that are absolute “no” answers. You probably already did this, but I don’t want to assume. Make sure all your choices are things you theoretically would be okay with if they were the only option.

Step 2: Pick one of the options at random to be your “doomsday option.” It’s important you pick at random – names in a hat, or roll dice, or something.

Step 3: Pick a reasonable amount of time to think about the decision. For restaurants, that might be 15 minutes. For job offers, three days. For vacation destinations, 2 weeks. You get it.

Step 4: Say, out loud, “If at the end of [reasonable time frame] I haven’t decided otherwise, we’re going with the doomsday option.” Even if no one is in the room, but especially if someone is.

There. Now you’ve taken the pressure off. The decision is made. You can change it, but if you choose to just not expend the mental energy on the decision-making process, a choice is presented. This will feel fundamentally different than committing to just taking the random option, because the ability to choose isn’t removed from you. You still could exercise your free will and avert the doomsday option, but if you choose to just shrug and say “screw it,” then at least there’s a plan in place.

Most of the time, that’s probably what you’ll do anyway. If you couldn’t decide between options because any of them were fine, then you were wasting juice deliberating anyway. And once you have the option to free yourself, you’ll probably do so unless you have a strong preference – and if you have a strong (but previously hidden) preference, this is a great way to reveal it.

By the way, if the choice you’re having difficulty making is the choice between one “active” option and one “inactive” one – say, the choice between whether you should quit your job or not – make the “doomsday option” the active choice; the one that disrupts the status quo. Say, “If I don’t think of a good reason to stay within 30 days, I’m quitting.” Trust me, your life will be better in the long run.

Being a hyper-competitive, has-to-be-the-best kind of person can really kill you.

If you pride yourself on always winning, you’ll gravitate towards things you know you can crush. Over time, that will build some pretty steep walls around your comfort zone.

Once you get really good at something, you get used to that feeling of easy victory. You get bored and lose motivation, but you also fear not being as good as you’re used to. So you end up trapped.

Make your personality traits work for you. If you have to be the best, make yourself the best at trying new things and failing. Be the best failure in the world.

Define yourself by how often and how far you step out of your comfort zone. Make that the competition. Don’t let your trophies become a ball and chain.

I discovered that Spotify has a “sleep timer,” letting me put music on while I fall asleep without it playing all night. While this hasn’t completely cured my inability to sleep well, it’s certainly helped.

I had been using a workout routine that I remembered from a while ago. I did a little research and found a few improvements, some nice new instructional videos, and they’ve helped a bit both in terms of the effectiveness of the workout and my enjoyment of it.

I made a small tweak to my work schedule recently that has both reduced work-related stress and given me more creative/learning time to re-invest in being a better professional.

None of these changes cost me any money or even much time, and none of them involved any real sacrifices or trade-offs elsewhere. In other words, they were low-cost in terms of juice, and while there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, there are definitely snacks that are so low-cost you’d barely notice, but that have a huge benefit.

I tweeted yesterday about the benefit of lowering transaction costs, but you can apply that to transaction costs between your past and future self, too. Your future self wants to buy a healthier body or more money or a higher degree of happiness from your past self, and your past self wants to deliver. Making it easier for Past You to deliver to Future You is essentially the job of Present You.

Look for those small miracles to help you. They add up.

In an effort to change my reading habits for the better (which has been going great this month, by the way – one week in and I haven’t missed a day!), I’ve been doing more critical thinking about what I read.

Here’s what I’ve realized: My “reading bubble” was pretty thick. I love reading, but I’ve broadly read things by people I already agree with. I follow some smart, smart people and the stuff they write is brilliant. But the marginal benefit for reading things from people you already follow, agree with, and interact with regularly is fairly low.

Recently I picked up a book by a brilliant thinker whose work I’m very familiar with. The book is good! It’s well-written and well-researched. But since I already agreed with the premise, it’s not doing much heavy lifting in my brain. Very little about my life is going to change as a result of reading this book. I don’t mean to disparage it – and I certainly don’t mean to indicate that I “already know” everything in it or anything silly like that. Rather, to the extent that the author of this book wants to move its readers to a certain position, I’m already in that position, so the book doesn’t have much to do.

Reading those kinds of books can be really beneficial if you regularly debate that topic with others who don’t agree with the position that you and the author share. One thing that should absolutely be true in your life is this: How diligently you argue about a topic should be directly proportional to how much you know about that topic. So if you’re the kind of person that debates frequently, it’s important to stay educated on your chosen battlefields.

However, I’m not one of those people. I rarely argue. So I don’t necessarily need the book as “argument ammo.” So while the book is great, it’s just not serving my needs in terms of personal growth.

I picked up another book, however. Right from the get-go, I expected to be in disagreement with the author about a number of things. I was dreading reading it, for that reason. I don’t like to argue, even with imaginary people in my head. But in this case, the book is part of research – I am going to write a book on this topic, and you’ve got to read in order to write! Part of why I’m writing this book in the first place is that I think the existing literature on the topic is severely lacking, but you’ve got to be able to back that up – see my point above about arguing only what you know really well.

Here’s the wondrous thing I found, though – I am engaged as heck! I love reading this book! Every new thing I disagree with gives me inspiration; my mind is racing with action. I’m taking notes, looking stuff up, researching my own points in order to challenge the ones in the book, etc. In other words, I am having a blast!

I haven’t been this engaged, excited and active while reading a book in a long time. I largely read for pleasure, so I’ve made the mistake of picking books in my comfort zone. Familiar things. But as far as pleasure goes, I’m having way more fun reading a book I disagree with than I ever did reading books I agree with.

I’ll still read things I agree with, I’m sure. Some books are too good not to read, even if I agree with the conclusion already. But since my reading time is limited, there’s an opportunity cost to every page, and I think that’s going to raise the bar for books I know are already in my comfort zone; fewer will pass the cost/benefit test.

Meanwhile, I can’t wait to read more stuff I think I’ll hate. Besides, it’s always good to challenge your own beliefs and change your mind when the data calls for it, so let’s pop this bubble!

I am a changed man. My life now exists in two distinct phases; the life I lived before today, and the life I shall live after.

The momentous occasions in my own life are paltry and small in comparison. The birth of three wonderful children pales in comparison to the masterpieces of experience that the world can offer you.

I speak often about how important it is to experience the wider world, to open yourself to all the amazing different facets of human life that can be found if you look outside your own bubble.

I don’t have to speak about that any more. I have found the most perfect example. By showing this, I can simply proclaim: “Behold! This is what lies beyond your doorstep if you only go and look. How can you close your eyes to life, when this is what you may experience if you open them?”

Every second of every day, the world grows in two ways.

First, it actually grows. More people are born, more words are written, more things are built and invented. We, collectively, get better at everything and invent new things to get better at. It’s amazing.

But the world grows in another way, too. It grows for you, specifically, you learn more about it.

You see, that huge enormous world out there is far too large for you to ever learn even a fraction of what it contains. No one would argue this, but few really appreciate the scope of what I’m saying. People hear me say stuff like that and think, “yeah, it’s true, I’ll never learn all the works of ancient Chinese literature.” But that’s being way too generous.

If the entire universe contained only the area within one mile from where you’re currently sitting, this would still be true. You don’t know a percent of a percent of a percent of everything that’s out there.

Want to try something? Name every job in existence. Go ahead, name as many as you can. By the time you hit a brick wall around 150 or so, you won’t even have named the tiniest fraction.

There are millions.

You’ve never heard of most of them.

Have you ever seen a ten-year-old get frustrated on a rainy day and say “there’s nothing to do” as they flop on the floor? The adult equivalent is saying that there’s no job that they feel passionate about. Or saying “there are no good men/women out there to date” when you’ve met what, 50? 100? Out of how many hundreds of thousands in your back yard?

Your choices in life are wildly less constrained than you think they are. It’s easy to swing and miss a few times and then think that’s all there is, but that’s ridiculous. I promise you, the wide wide world is absolutely overflowing with bounty. No matter what piece of life satisfaction you want, it’s out there if you chase it.

Every new door you open widens the world that you can search. When most people say they can’t find Thing X, whether it’s a meaningful job, a compatible partner, etc. – it’s because they’ve artificially narrowed their search in some way. They’re looking for jobs in the same mental space they’ve always occupied; their known industries, cities, roles. Or they keep looking for a partner in the same local bar and coming up empty.

Go somewhere new. As you get older, the walls close in on you. You have to constantly fight against that. Go new places, join new clubs, meet new people for no reason.

The world keeps growing, with or without you. Go grow with it.

I’m going to write a book!

I’ve never written a book before. I’ve written lots of other stuff, often in a professional context, though I’ve never “written professionally.” So this is very new to me. I’m going to do a quick SWOT analysis and then lay out my plan.

STRENGTHS

• I’m not going far outside my wheelhouse – this is a topic that’s close to my heart and that I have a lot of expertise in.
• I know how to plan and organize a project like this.
• I generally have pretty strong writing chops.
• I know a lot of published authors, which means I have a lot of contacts to ask questions about that when I’m ready.

WEAKNESSES

• I’ve never written a book before. I’ll make plenty of missteps.
• I don’t have a huge amount of extra time laying around, so carving out the hours in the week to tackle this project will be a challenge.
• The book will involve a lot of research on my part, and I may be underestimating just how much. It might be more intense than I anticipate.

OPPORTUNITIES

• There do not appear to be any widely-read or -circulated books on this topic. I think it’s an important topic that not enough people are talking about.
• Self-publishing these days is easy if I decide to go that route!

THREATS

• It’s entirely possible that no one will care about this topic, or they’ll care about the topic but I won’t have the background to sell it. However, I don’t particularly care about that; just like this blog, I’m primarily writing this book because I want to.

The Plan!

I’m going to dedicate a four-hour block of time once per week in September to write an outline that will include the subjects I need to research. By the end of the 4th block I’ll have a complete outline, including estimated lengths of time to do both research and actual writing. When I write I usually write quickly, but I think the research portion may take upwards of 6 months total. Hopefully less, but I also anticipate making a lot of mistakes that will cause setbacks, and I want to plan my failures in advance.

I’ve been looking for a good reason to learn Evernote better, and this sounds like a great one. I’ll plan to use that as my primary memory bank.

Once I have the outline done, I’ll come back to the planning stage and schedule out blocks of time to write each part and do the research I need done. Then I’ll tackle editing and layout. Then I’ll learn about publishing.

This article was incredibly helpful (even though the site had about every possible chatbot plugin you can stick on a website, ugh), so I’m sure I’ll be returning to it often.

Part of the process of outlining and writing over the next several months will also include budgeting for some things like an editor/proofreader, artist/graphic designer, and quite possibly a (minor) advertising budget. I’m not sure how much of a budget to plan for, but it seems like I could easily spend a few thousand dollars on this (and I’m pretty much planning on not making any actual money back – I want to write because I want to write, not because I expect a huge ROI), so I’ll be setting aside money with that in mind.

I’ll keep you posted as I go!

I’ve often received questions regarding advice for professional emails. It’s easy to craft an email that’s perfectly professional – what’s not as intuitive is how to do that in a way that’s also effective. Perfectly professional emails are boring, and if you’re trying to pitch something, boring = death. So whether you’re doing a cold outreach for a product or sending your value proposal to a prospective employer, here are my tips for crushing the email game.

How do you craft the perfect email? The four “E’s” – Excitement, Empathy, Effort, Execution!

First, show Excitement. If you want to capture someone’s attention, you want them to feel like you’re excited to talk to them specifically. It can’t sound like a form email you send to everyone.

• Bad: “I am writing you today to inquire about a role at your company.”
• Good: “Hello! While searching for opportunities, I saw this amazing one with your company [link]. I was really excited to see this because it’s such a perfect opportunity to create real value for your team. I couldn’t wait to write to you!”

Second, show Empathy. Any time a company is hiring for a position, what they’re really trying to do is solve a problem. If you’re insightful enough to see what that problem is, you can shift the whole conversation, and that always reflects well on you! Don’t talk about the role in terms of how much you’d like it – why should they care? Patients don’t care about the doctor’s job satisfaction, they care about getting well. Make this about them. This is true when selling a product or even asking for a donation – solve a problem!

• Bad: “I have always wanted to be in sales for a company like yours.”
• Good: “I can see from the job listing and from recent news about your company that you’re launching a West Coast team for the first time. Creating a presence in a new market has lots of challenges, and I know making the right hires for that team is one of them.”

Third, show Effort. You’ve got to put some work in early, but you already know how to do that. Imagine a race where you’re actually allowed to start 30 meters ahead of the starting line, but no one does it. Putting in the early effort is like starting farther ahead! But you have to show, not tell. Giving away (a little) free work puts you so far ahead of your competitors in any realm that the ROI is enormous, and you’re crazy if you don’t do it.

• Bad: “If you hired me, I’d be able to help break into that market, because I’m a great prospector.”
• Good: “In order to hit the ground running on a West Coast expansion, I’ve created this list of 30 leads for potential users of your service. These are all companies very similar to those on the East Coast that are already clients of yours, so they fit your demographic. I’ve included contact information for the CEOs on each one, and I’ve checked the sites for your primary competitors to see if any of them are listed as clients, and marked whether or not they were on the list. I hope that’s helpful to you!”

Lastly (and probably most important!) – you have to Execute on all that awesome work you did! Don’t just hand it over and then walk away. Be bold and ask for the connection!

• Bad: “Thanks for reading this, and I hope to hear from you. Have a great day.”
• Good: “I’d love to talk about how this can fit in with your existing sales and marketing plan, and discuss other ways I can add value to your sales team. When is a good time to talk about this role further with you?”

Don’t make it overly long or overly stuffy. “Professional” just means “polite & positive,” so keep that in mind and don’t be afraid to show your character. Keep it short and to the point. I promise you’ll get better results.