Let me confess something.
I’m the kind of person who has his morning routine laid out across multiple Google Sheets. I have a 22-point checklist of things I “have to” accomplish every day. And I’m not talking about drinking water, take supplements.
I’m doing pull-ups. Push-ups. 50 minutes of meditation.
All of it designed to make me better, sharper, more awesome.
And yet — on most days — it makes me feel like I’m failing.
If you’re an overachiever, you know exactly what I mean. You set the goal to hit the gym four times a week. You miss it twice. And instead of celebrating the two, you flog yourself over the two you missed.
Here’s what I’ve learned after years of doing this to myself: high-achievers don’t get stuck because they’re lazy or undisciplined. They get stuck because of three mental traps that quietly sabotage them — and almost nobody talks about them.
I broke all three down in a new 8-minute video. But let me give you a taste right here.
Trap #1: You build your days for peaks instead of baselines
Olympic swimmers don’t try to break their world record every single morning. That’s a peak. You can’t live at your peak — it’s not sustainable, and chasing it daily is how you burn out.
I used to set a goal to meditate one hour a day. Want to guess how many days a week I actually hit it? Zero. I felt like a fraud as a meditation teacher.
Then I dropped the bar to 15 minutes — a baseline — and something strange happened. I strung together a 100-day streak. And here’s the counterintuitive part that surprised even me: when I lowered the standard, my actual average went up.
(I explain exactly why that works in the video. It flips everything you’ve been taught about discipline.)
Trap #2: You chase perfection when you should be chasing direction
So many brilliant people stay frozen — never launching the project, never writing the book, never giving the talk — because they’re waiting for it to be perfect.
But the best writers I know don’t wait for perfection. They sit down for 20 minutes a day, and some days the writing is garbage. It doesn’t matter. It’s the direction that matters.
As Rumi said: “When you stop on the way, the way reveals itself.”
Stop — don’t wait. (There’s a distinction between those two that changes everything. More in the video.)
Trap #3: You judge yourself instead of correcting yourself
This is the big one — and the one almost nobody escapes on their own.
Here’s a quick experiment. Imagine you’re hiking with a friend and she trips on a tree root and scrapes her knee. Would you snap, “Why are you so clumsy? I told you to be careful!”
Of course not. You’d be kind. You’d help her up.
But when you trip? That nasty little voice in your head goes off instantly. Gosh, I’m so clumsy. I should’ve known. Why didn’t I pay attention?
There’s actually a study on where that voice comes from — and the answer traces back to something that happened before you were five years old. 😳
Most of us never learned how to quiet it. In the video, I share the three simple words that completely transform how you talk to yourself when you mess up. Once you have them, mistakes stop wrecking your nervous system — and getting unstuck becomes almost effortless.
When you put all three of these together, your days get easier, not harder. Your averages climb. And you finally stop measuring your worth by impossible peaks.
Watch it, and then ask yourself the three questions I leave you with at the end. They take 30 seconds — and they might change how you chase everything.
And if it lands for you, hit subscribe while you’re there. I’m putting a lot of these out, and the next one — on a hidden subconscious block that keeps people from ever sharing their gifts — is one I really want you to see.
Give yourself permission to be human.
With love,
P.S. That 22-point checklist? I still have it. But now I build it for baselines, not peaks. Funny thing — I hit way more of it now that I’m not trying to be perfect.
