Dear Cruz -

A few reminders:

• Stop taking yourself so seriously

• Don’t dwell on mistakes - learn and move on

For a laugh at my own expense, a quick story from last week. I received a few replies to my Welcome letter that I originally set up to be automated to send when a new subscriber comes in. It was the first piece of content I wrote for the newsletter, the first week I got things started.

I was excited and moving fast at the beginning, and once I completed this step, I had honestly forgot about the opening letter, or even thinking about editing it. I was laying in bed responding to a reply when I realized that the second paragraph had a typo (I had used “though” instead of “through”).

I beat myself up internally for a couple of minutes. How could I have missed that? The first thing people open up from my pursuit of getting them engaged and motivated to stay subscribed, and I can’t even spell right? I need to get up now and fix it before anyone else subscribes!

Luckily I quickly checked myself. It’s one word, some people probably didn’t notice, and others probably did. So what? What are the lasting repercussions of the mistake? The reality is nothing.

It was a good reminder to stop taking myself (ourselves) so seriously. Mistakes are made when you are taking action. If you want to avoid mistakes, the easy path is to do nothing.

If you’ve experienced something embarrassing recently, gut-check yourself and give yourself permission to learn and move on. My lesson here, which I have already implemented, is using Grammarly to check my work. I am no professional writer, but I do want to improve and become a great writer. I choose to focus more on that aspiration than the mistakes made in the process. Let’s all do the same this week.

Brain - Just Get Started *Compound Effect*

We as humans are conditioned to begin things with the end in mind. Start your career - where do you want to end up professionally? Save for retirement - what do you want retirement to look like? Start dating to get married and have a family. For most of us, the end goal comes before the first action.

For planning purposes, having a picture of the end and working your way backward to identify what actions can be taken in the short term is an effective strategy. It’s how I approach almost all of my goal-setting. The problem arises when we let the gravity and size of the end goal almost paralyze us from taking that first action.

It’s hard to conceptualize retiring with millions of dollars in savings when you are looking at only being able to save a couple hundred bucks a month in your early 20s. It’s hard to envision yourself running a marathon when you are winded after running a mile. It’s hard to imagine yourself as a capable father when you haven’t even gone on a date in 2 years.

We are required in these situations to just start. There’s a great book by Darren Hardy around the concept of the “Compound Effect” that will help reinforce the idea of just getting started.

The title image for this section is an example of beginning investing with 1 penny, and then doubling that investment every day. Day 2 is 2 cents, Day 5 is 16 cents. Day 11 is $10. Seemingly negligible increases right? Well if you see the process out through 30 days, that “doubling” of 1 single penny to start ends up as $5,368,709.12.

So many of the goals we have sitting in the back of our mind just require us to put that first penny down and let the compound effect work in our favor. Invest $50 a week into your savings. Run one mile 3 days a week. Read 10 pages a day.

These seemingly small increments don’t appear to have a large impact in the moment, but as they stack over time, we gain momentum and begin to make drastic strides toward the end result.

Take your most pressing goal you have been deliberating taking action on. What would the smallest step look like for you to make today? What’s in your way of taking this step?

Stop saying tomorrow - stop minimizing the impact even a small step could have on your path. Just get the wheels rolling. It’s downhill - you’ll gain speed as you go.

Body - Drink More Water

Did you know that your body is 60% water? And that losing 1 - 3 % of that volume can result in dehydration strong enough to impair energy levels, impact your mood, and have cognitive downsides as extreme as reductions in memory?

Drinking water is one of the easiest health-improving controllables we have in our daily lives, yet with so many different fluid options at our fingertips, it often becomes one of the most neglected steps in our routine.

Drinking an adequate amount of water can help flush muscle soreness, improve blood flow, manage hunger levels, prevent headaches, and so much more.

Our body challenge of the week is to audit how much water we are consuming daily. Shoot for at least 1 gallon a day. A few tips for increasing water consumption:

• The completely out-of-hand water bottle community is going to love this, but get a bottle / container you can have access to at all times. It doesn’t have to be a $100 red Stanley, but anything that can pack more than the standard 16 - 20 ounces of a water bottle will eliminate the friction of needing to constantly refill

• Drink one glass of water before every meal. This will do two things - 1) You will get in 8-10 ounces of water 2) it will help control your hunger as you begin to eat your meal

• Drink a glass of water first thing when you wake up, especially before any caffeine

• I am a compulsive consumer of zero-calorie water additives. My favorites:

  • Crystal Light Raspberry Lemonade

  • Mio Lemonade

  • Grape Kool-Aid Liquid Additive

Book - A New Addition to the Cal Newport Collection

A new book from one of my favorite thought-provoking authors dropped this week. I have 2 -3 books I need to get through (See, look at me using through instead of though already 🙂 ) before I get to this one. I thought it would be fun to share a book in advance of me reading and summarizing, so maybe some of us can read it together?

Cal Newport’s books in my collection to date for those interested:

• Deep Work - Rules for focused success in a distracted world

• Digital Minimalism - Choosing a focused life in a noisy world

• A World Without Email - Reimagining work in an age of communication overload

The common theme around these titles is an observative approach to root problems in focus and productivity, with actionable thought processes and steps to take.

I am fired up to read the new title, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, and would love if you joined along. A quick excerpt from the inside cover:

“From the aggressive rethinking of workload management, to introducing seasonal variation, to shifting your performance toward long-term quality, Slow Productivity provides a roadmap for escaping overload and arriving instead at a more timeless approach to pursuing meaningful accomplishment. The world of work is due for a new revolution. Slow productivity is exactly what we need.”