Have you gotten to consider and tackle the important things in your life? Do some important issues still elude you? Do you still spend time in the unimportant parts of life? Or even when on the important parts, do the urgent fires take more of your time than you want?

Today’s belief helps you get to those topics.

A model to think more deeply: You think on the time scale of what distracts you.

When you’re thinking about an idea that takes five minutes to understand it but something distracts you every two minutes, you’ll never fully get that idea. The distractions could be email, kids, colleagues, or anything. Most television shows keep you from thinking about anything at all.

The most important distraction is how much your mind wanders. If you can’t keep your mind still for more than a few minutes, the most complex ideas you’ll be able to understand will be few-minute ideas.

Distractions aren’t always a problem. When you’re riding a roller coaster or playing sports you’re living in the moment and probably don’t want to think about complex ideas. No problem.

But if you never take any time to free yourself from distractions and slow your mind down, you’ll never tackle or even understand some important issues. Your life will lack richness and complexity.

Can you sit still without any distraction for ten minutes? Five?

Strategy

This belief leads you to realize how distractions and an unfocused mind limits you from understanding important things. It leads you to

Identify and limit your distractions. Then learn to slow your mind down.

Meditation, yoga, rock climbing, hiking, walking, and things like that give you the chance to think beyond few-minute ideas.

When I use this belief

I use this belief when I realize I haven’t thought about rich, complex ideas in a while. If my schedule feels busy and I feel like I’m doing a lot of work but not getting a lot done, it usually means I’ve gotten distracted from important things by unimportant things.

What this belief replaces

This belief replaces distraction with focus, unimportant things with important things, reactivity with leadership, and busy-ness with relaxation and flow.

Where this belief leads

This belief leads to a life with more meaning, value, importance, and purpose (MVIP).

I’m experimenting as four three-hour evening sessions

• Session 1: Monday, June 17
• Session 2: Wednesday, June 19
• Session 3: Monday, June 24
• Session 4: Wednesday, June 26

I’ll give the same full attention I do for a weekend session.

Sign up here. Here’s the course description:

What You’ll Learn

If you don’t know how to lead, you can only do what you can do yourself. If you can lead, you can achieve anything anyone else did with a team. Even if you want only to live a quiet, happy, rewarding life you still have to lead yourself.

The more you know how to lead, the more you are in control of your life, career, and relationships. The less you know how to lead, the more your life, career, and relationships are out of control or controlled by others.

Whether you want to lead only yourself to an authentic life of integrity by your values or teams of others to great things, you need to know how to lead yourself first. When this book talks about leadership it always includes leading yourself – that is, choosing and creating your life consciously and intentionally through self-knowledge.

In a four-session seminar, learn how to develop your personal leadership skills, self-awareness and emotional intelligence using the latest advances in cognitive behavioral science, evolutionary psychology, and positive psychology.

The instructor has taught this course at the Columbia Business School, NYU-Stern, Parsons The New School, INSEAD, the New York Academy of Science, London, Shanghai, and elsewhere.

What is Modern Leadership?

Top universities, business schools and corporations are increasingly focusing on personal leadership, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence as foundations for leading others. Few have had the opportunity to take a formal course in personal leadership since they tend to be available only through corporate training, business schools, through personal coaches, and similarly limited and expensive places.

Joshua Spodek, MBA, PhD, has developed an independent, experiential course combining advances in cognitive behavioral science, evolutionary psychology, and positive psychology with successful business leadership practices.

Takeaways

Benefits of the course include improved:

• Personal leadership skills, particularly self-awareness and emotional intelligence
• Interpersonal skills of a business school leadership class, such as decision-making, negotiation, perceiving others, influence, motivating others, and teamwork
• Ability to transform your greatest challenges into both professional and personal growth
• Awareness of your values and what brings you meaning, purpose, importance, and happiness, both professionally and personally
• Ability to focus on what is important, professionally and personally, decreasing time and resources wasted on unimportant things
• Ability to experience reward from your efforts
• Calmness, patience, and understanding

You will leave the course with tools to continue your development on your own as well as a network of like-minded people, both as resources and for accountability. The course also makes all other leadership resources – books, videos, seminars, etc – more valuable through better understanding their foundations.

Most people I share today’s belief with seem surprised or even shocked when I express it. Probably because the way I say it — that I don’t like traveling — seems contrary to something nearly everyone values. Also, I travel a lot and talk about how much I get out of it.

If I have to travel, I’ll find ways to make it amazing, but if I don’t travel I can make staying home just as amazing. The best way I know to put it is through one of my favorite passages of the Tao Te Ching, which describes how the opposite of traveling opens opportunities unavailable to those who don’t learn to stand still.

A model for traveling: You can learn as much from your next-door neighbor as anyone else.

From the Tao Te Ching:

Learn how to stand still
if you want to go places.
Get on your knees
if you want to stand tall.
If you want wisdom,
empty your mind.
If you want the world,
renounce your riches.
Push yourself until you’re exhausted,
and then you’ll find your strength.

You can go far
if you don’t have anything to carry.
The more you acquire,
the less you can really see.

Most people view traveling as an unqualified good. You learn about the world, other cultures, other people, other food; you learn about yourself, your culture, and so on.

I agree you can get these things while traveling, but I believe you can learn as much from your next-door neighbor as from anyone else in the world — whether from Paris, in Machu Picchu, on the pyramids, in the jungle, or anywhere. People are people around the world. No matter where you go, you’ll always find certain similarities. Likewise, between any two people you’ll always find differences. No matter how similar your next-door neighbor is to your, and their background to yours, they’ll always have differences you can learn from.

Sure you can find differences between foreigners and you, but those differences are harder to find when there’s an Eiffel Tower in the background. Most people go to where famous sites are, which means they’re interacting less with what might be different. I believe that if people go to where famous sites aren’t, they’ll find people more like the people back home.

If you think you can learn more from people in different cultures than you can from your neighbor, I believe you haven’t learned how to learn from your neighbor yet. Which means you aren’t getting as much out of travel as you could.

That said, I recognize some things only travel can bring you. Travel exposes you to different parts of nature — different plants, animals, geology, climate, and so on.

Also, if you do learn to stand still, you can get things out of traveling you can’t from staying in one place, though while traveling you don’t get what you could from staying in one place. Again, I don’t see traveling is an unqualified benefit. The only way I can is if I devalue what I get from staying in one place. Maybe I spoiled myself living in as diverse a place as New York City, but then I value diversity. I figure someone who doesn’t would get as much from where they chose to live. Unless they chose a place to live they don’t like. In which case traveling will cover up and possibly extend the misery they’ve inflicted on themselves for choosing to live in a place they don’t like. Again, I think they would do better for themselves by staying in one place, realizing they don’t like it there, and moving.

In today’s world, traveling usually involves putting a lot of jet fuel or gasoline into the environment. I don’t like polluting. Also, coincidence or not, when I leave New York City, I almost always get invitations to awesome parties I miss for leaving.

When I travel, I tend to travel for work, when someone wants me to, pays for it, and gives me time to explore while I’m there, not just work.

When I use this belief

I use this belief when deciding if I should travel or not.

When I travel, I use this belief to get more out of the experience.

When I don’t travel, I use this belief to get more out of staying where I am, generally as much as I would get from traveling.

What this belief replaces

This belief replaces feeling compelled to travel with the freedom not to travel, knowing you can improve your life just as much without it. It replaces feeling like you lose out when you don’t travel with the opportunity to benefit from your neighbors.

Where this belief leads

This belief leads to traveling more purposefully, learning more from your neighbors, and getting more out of your travels.

Today’s belief counteracts a common trend I see about exercise. I forget if I’ve written about my impressions of seeing five-kilometer walks in Central Park with water stations and ambulances. While I support being prepared, I can’t help but wonder if the suggestion that a five-kilometer walk could be a health risk might stop more people from exercising than these walks promote.

I’m sure there are people for whom walking five kilometers could be a risk, but I imagine they would know it enough not to try. Humans lived before cars and I can’t help but imagine there used to be a time when nearly everyone walked more than five kilometers daily.

Today’s belief comes from the many times when I’ve felt sick, sore, tired, hungry, depressed, or in any way less than enthusiastic and happy and still managed to exercise. Or times it’s been raining, too hot, too cold, too far, too early in the morning, too late in the evening, too anything less than totally convenient.

I don’t remember ever regretting exercising. However hard to motivate before, I’m always glad I did after. However physical the activity, I’ve never permanently injured myself. I’ve never hurt myself more exercising as much as I hurt myself sitting on the couch.

I should note I didn’t always feel this way. Growing up I didn’t exercise much. I was chubby. My parents didn’t promote sports much. I was scared to go to the gym until I started getting good at Ultimate because I though people would make fun of me. My sisters and I watched a lot of television after school growing up.

Strategy

Find reasons to exercise. Could this be simpler?

A model to help get you in better shape: Exercise never hurts one’s life and it usually helps.

Whenever I’m trying to decide if I should exercise or not, I know I’ll never regret choosing to exercise. I always feel better after I exercise. It’s almost an unqualified good in my life.

By exercise I don’t necessarily mean changing clothes and going somewhere. It could mean walking somewhere instead of taking the subway. Or taking the stairs instead of an elevator.

I don’t even exercise that much. I do burpees twice daily, but I think of that as a part of regular life, not exercise. I don’t belong to a gym. My running shoes are barefoot style, not fancy. I don’t have much workout clothing.

I just find getting my heart pumping improves my mood. And I like how my body feels when not covered with fat. And I like participating in sports with others. Those are the only reasons I exercise. But mostly because it makes me feel good.

Oh, and when I’m in shape I feel more free to eat whatever I want.

Oh, and I think it keeps me from getting sick. Or rather, when I have a cold, allergies, fatigue, or other things that keep me from homeostasis, exercise always helps restore it. And if I have a cold, upset stomach, or something annoying or painful that takes time for my body to overcome, it never hurts while I exercise and I recover faster. I haven’t found lying in bed as effective in overcoming sickness as getting my heart pumping.

When I use this belief

I use this belief when I’m deciding between exercising or not.

What this belief replaces

This belief replaces not exercising with exercising. It replaces indecision with surety.

Where this belief leads

This belief leads to feeling better, eating better, and living healthier.

EDIT: I just did fifteen push-ups just for the fun of it.

Do you want to get more sales? Even if you don’t sell anything, you probably propose things, pitch things, apply for things, and so forth. Do you want to be more successful there and to close more?

I learned today’s model in sales class in business school, but it applies to many cases — nearly any situation where you try to persuade someone of something nontrivial they have to agree to.

Think of anything you bought for more than pocket change. Take the clothes you’re wearing now, for example. I bet for at least a couple of the items after you were pretty sure you would buy them but before you did, you had objections. Maybe you wanted to make sure the price was right, or the fit, color, or whatever. But you still bought it.

When you’re selling, pitching, or influencing, objections near or after you thought the deal closed can be incredibly frustrating. Losing your composure then can lose you the sale.

Today’s model helps you keep cool at times like that.

A model to get more sales and stay calm under pressure: An objection is a statement of an unmet need.

People buy things to meet their needs. A big part of sales is communicating that what you’re selling meets their needs. An inevitable part of any sale is that, no matter how much you think you covered everything, before signing they will always object about something.

Many people get frustrated. “How could they not understand?” “I already explained that to them!” “Why didn’t they mention that before?!”

Today’s belief overcomes this frustration. It says that

An objection is a statement of an unmet need.

Instead of being frustrated, this belief tells you they are still interested (they wouldn’t have objected if they didn’t care). It doesn’t mean they disagree. If you listen and follow-up right, you have a good chance at getting the sale. They want you to get the sale.

When I use this belief

I use this belief when I’m in sales mode and somebody objects to whatever I’m selling. I also use this belief when preparing my presentation. Since I know they’ll object with something at the end, I don’t have to get every last thing in the presentation. I know they’ll ask me if I miss anything.

What this belief replaces

This belief replaces the frustration of thinking the objections criticize my product with the expectation that addressing unmet needs at the end is part of the sales process.

Where this belief leads

This belief leads to greater sales and increased ability to influence and persuade.

Do you get in more arguments than you’d like? Do you feel like people don’t understand you and you have to explain yourself a lot in these arguments?

I can’t stop all your arguments, but today’s belief and strategy will cut down on them.

It will also increase your ability to influence.

A model to argue less and influence more: No two people completely agree on what’s right, wrong, good, or bad and they resist when you try to get them to agree with you

People intellectually get that others have different values, but they often forget when they want someone to agree with them. They often find conflict when one want to help the other person. Trying to help often deepens the conflict, despite their best intentions.

Some people condemn the belief that morality is not absolute, pejoratively labeling it “moral relativism.” Yet I’ve never found two people who agree on all issues of what is right, wrong, good, bad, or evil. Even people who agree on some tradition or book as the source of what they consider right, wrong, good, bad, or evil still disagree on major points.

People seem comfortable with moral absolutes on issues others agree with them on. They seem to want others to change, but not themselves.

When we lead or even just work in teams, we have to face others’ values and recognize they disagree.

Strategy

Whatever system you have of right, wrong, good, bad, or evil, nobody seems to mind as long as you keep it to yourself.

So what do you do when you have to communicate your ideas?

An exercise I made up for fun once helped me a lot. Before doing it I thought it was too superficial to make a difference, but it ended up influencing me a lot.

The exercise is simply not to use judgmental language. Why not try it for a week? I started by avoiding the words good, bad, right, wrong, and evil. I later included should, ought to, balance, better, worse, improve, and some other words.

What made a big difference in this exercise for me was finding I could substitute “I agree” and “I disagree” for “right” and “wrong” and “I like” and “I don’t like” for “good” and “bad.”

This seemingly small change in language had a few big effects:

1. I realized communicating opinion communicated values better than communicating judgment.
2. I got in fewer arguments.
3. People communicated more openly with me when I used non-judgmental language.
4. Judgmental words seem to imply absoluteness that opinion doesn’t.
5. I realized how often people impose their values on each other, often without meaning to or realizing it.

When I use this belief

I use this belief when I find myself imposing my values on others — that is, judging them.

What this belief replaces

This belief replaces judgment with opinion, argument with seeking understanding, imposition with consideration, and push-back with discussion.

Where this belief leads

This belief leads to fewer arguments, greater understanding and empathy, and more effective influence.

Do you find yourself feeling sorry for yourself and not like feeling that way? Do you get depressed or feel helpless when things don’t go your way?

Do you wish you could take things in stride better so you could move on from or solve problems and get on to better times?

A model to help accept things without judgment or feeling sorry for yourself: “Good thing bad thing, who knows?”

Here’s an old story that comes in many versions (here are seven, dating back to before most existing religions), but I learned from Srikumar Rao‘s book Are You Ready to Succeed (text edited from this blog).

An old man lived happily with his son. One day, the old man used all his savings to buy a young wild stallion, a beautiful horse for breeding. The day he bought it, the horse jumped the fence and ran off. The neighbors sympathized. “How terrible!” they said.

“Good thing? Bad thing? Who knows?” said the old man.

Ten days later the stallion returned. It came with a whole herd of wild horses that the old man was able to corral. “What good fortune!” the neighbors said.

“Good thing? Bad thing? Who knows?” said the old man.

His son started to train them. One threw him and stomped on his leg. It healed crookedly and left him with a permanent limp and pain. “Such misfortune,” said the neighbors.

“Good thing? Bad thing? Who knows?” said the old man.

The next summer, the King declared war, forcing all the young men from the village into the army. They spared the old man’s son because of his injured leg. “Truly, you are a lucky man,” exclaimed the neighbors who cried over the loss of their own sons.

“Good thing? Bad thing? Who knows?” said the old man.

I come back to this story and its lessons all the time. I can’t change what happened in the past. Calling a past event good or bad doesn’t change it. The model that we can’t tell if something is good or bad serves me better than labeling things I can’t change. It brings me freedom to live my life rather than categorizing or labeling things.

I find accepting (or celebrating) things without judgment and moving ahead with the situation as-is more productive.

Alternative perspective

Imagine you’re a pianist, conductor, actor, or some other performance artist. You’re performing in front of an audience. If you prefer, imagine you’re giving a business presentation. While playing, acting, presenting, or performing you make a mistake. You play the wrong note, miss a cue, … whatever.

You know you did something you consider wrong or bad. What do you do?

For the audience and probably yourself, the worst thing you can do is stop or call out that you made a mistake. In most cases, the best you can do is recognize it’s in the past, you can’t change it, you have other notes to play, continue in the moment you’re in now, and keep playing.

The same follows for the rest of life. Whatever happened that you didn’t like, once it’s in the past you can’t change it. It exists in the present only in people’s memories, all the more so for the more you dwell on it.

When I use this belief

I use this belief when something happens a way I don’t like. Instead of categorizing it as right, wrong, good, or bad, I skip judging it. It happened and I can’t change the past. All I can do is act in the present.

What this belief replaces

This belief replaces judging and evaluating the past, dwelling in it instead of figuring out what to do in the present, and disagreeing with people over how to label events of the past.

It replaces feeling sorry for myself with living my life.

Where this belief leads

This belief leads to freedom from past events weighing you down.

People commonly believe that beautiful women have better lives than everybody else and that they have access to more valuable things. I came across that belief a lot when I used to go out dancing a lot. The evidence seemed overwhelming — they automatically get invited to the best parties, they get past the doorpeople, men buy them drinks if the club doesn’t already give them, and so on. In regular life, studies show attractive people get paid more, get promoted more, and so on.

Sounds great if you’re a beautiful woman, but what if you aren’t?

Before today’s belief shows you what you can get, let me first poke a few holes in the old belief.

Interlude: Beauty alone doesn’t make life rewarding. Everyone gets emotional reward the same way, and it requires effort.

First, I’m not so sure how much the free drinks and invitations improve their lives. Sure, they get the pleasure of luxury and maybe even some happiness, but getting something through something you were born with and didn’t put your own effort into deprives you of the chance to feel emotional reward for it.

I wrote recently about the difference between pleasure, happiness, and reward. Living a life without reward turns pleasure and happiness into distraction from the lack of meaning, value, importance, and purpose (MVIP) from lack of reward.

Second, most of the models, dancers, and other beautiful women I met worked hard for what they got too, and they felt reward from their efforts, so beauty doesn’t prevent you from feeling reward. Not contributing your own effort does. Nor does being beautiful mean that’s what got you what you got.

Anyway, today’s belief is not about beauty. It’s about how anyone can get what the mainstream believes beautiful women get.

A model to live like beautiful people do: Charisma gets you everything beauty could, and you can develop as much charisma as you want.

I noticed when I went out that my guy friends could get more people past doorpeople than beautiful women could. And those guys weren’t beautiful women.

So what got them in?

My friends weren’t rich. They didn’t come from special families.

They had charisma. They had social skills. I didn’t, but I found I could copy them and, with practice, get better. The most common searches to my site are to my social skills exercises so people know they can improve.

Two experiences that drove this belief home for me were

1. When using the skills I learned from my charismatic friends helped get me into business school.
2. One time when a bouncer told me to go inside and have fun, almost pushing me in, despite not being on any list nor knowing anyone and there being a long line. I had just been having fun with him and he decided the place would be better with me in it than not. I’m far from a beautiful woman myself.

When I use this belief

I use this belief when I think anyone anywhere has an easier time than me, or that anyone has life handed to them on a silver platter. I don’t begrudge anyone any so-called “privilege” that I don’t have because things like money you didn’t earn, connections your family got you, beauty you were born, or whatever with may get someone pleasure or even some happiness, but rich, complex emotional reward still requires your effort.

And that’s where MVIP comes from.

What this belief replaces

This belief replaces enviously wishing I was somebody else, powerlessly feeling like a victim of fate, with the ability to do something about it. It reinforces the importance of social skills and responsibility.

Where this belief leads

This belief leads to learning charisma and other social skills, which brings better relationships, better business, more fun, more ability to do complex things that require teams, and so on.

It also gets you into clubs.

People will call you beautiful too, appreciating that you helped them remember beauty isn’t purely visual.

Do you have trouble keeping a habit going?

Today’s model is my model for maintaining my daily habits.

A model for consistency: If you miss one day you can miss two. If you miss two it’s over.

My friend who set this blog up for me told me this belief when I asked him how often he posted — a few days a week, every weekday, or what. He said he posted every day and that if you miss one day, you can miss two. If you miss two, it’s all over. It might not end there, but the countdown to missing more and more until you’ve dropped the habit has begun.

Since then I haven’t missed a day writing here, doing my burpees, nor flossing.

I’m surprised at how much easier keeping up a habit is when you don’t introduce choice into it all the time. You just choose to do it regularly and then you’ve done the mental effort. From then on you just do it. They physical work may burn more calories but it takes less mental effort.

When I use this belief

I use this belief when I’m doing something I want to do but takes effort. You can also apply it to other types of consistency than daily habits, of course.

What this belief replaces

This belief replaces starting a habit and then absent-mindedly letting it go with keeping it up.

Where this belief leads

This belief leads to maintaining daily habits and living more consistently.

Have you ever been scammed into buying something that didn’t work? Has anyone ever tried to sell you something too good to be true? Have you lost money gambling you wish you hadn’t?

Do you not like that happening?

A model to keep from being scammed: The laws of physics, science, math, and logic.

Some scams are cons based on abusing trust, but a lot of them are based on things that aren’t possible — perpetual motion devices, fake controversy about the planet’s climate, fake controversy about the health effects of smoking or sugar, and so on.

When you don’t understand nature, causality, and logic, people can persuade you about things easily.

Our understanding of science changes all the time, but some things don’t change — like causality, logic, and the conservation of energy.

I won’t explain how much people miss these effects. Like when they think they can turn on the air conditioner without causing pollution or don’t understand how their diets affect their fitness. It’s frustrating when people miss this stuff when you understand it.

The funny thing is that science isn’t something that happens in a lab. It’s the study of nature — literally everything in the universe.

Of course I include chemistry, biology, and other branches of science. Evolutionary psychology forms the foundation of much of this web page.

When I use this belief

I use this belief all the time, since I’m always interacting with nature. And by nature, I don’t just mean forest streams and clouds. I mean everything.

What this belief replaces

This belief replaces taking someone’s word for something with testing and reporting one’s results.

Where this belief leads

This belief leads to a greater respect for nature, observation, experiment, and honest reporting of the results.

It leads to more consistent and rational understanding of and communication about the world.

It leads to seeing more beauty in the world.