“Just do the next right thing” - Princess Anna of Arendelle
Future Guardian,
I have an affliction.
The only salve to this affliction is awareness.
It starts with the simple fact that I love a good grand idea.
In fact, I think one of my strengths - a place where I play my best game - involves coming up with good grand ideas and then implementing the strategy/structure for executing on those ideas ...
(And after I've solved that puzzle, I get bored and disinterested really fast ... classic Quick Start here)
Some time ago, after joining The Guardian Academy and having all these concepts floating around in my head (letting them Open Loop1), I realized something critical about myself.
It's this affliction I'm talking about.
This affliction on the surface looks like a good thing.
In our hustle culture, our big dream culture, our "all you have to do is work hard to get what you want" culture, it seems like a huge asset.
But this affliction has largely contributed to what one of my best friends called "being one day away" for the past 10 years.
I remember this feeling with my last business.
I could see the whole thing. I could see all that was capable.
I had strategically, intentionally selected and built that business in that market specifically because I believed that there was a huge well of potential related to my interest.
When I started, the initial flood of activity and customers confirmed it.
And I quickly developed this sense that all the gold I was after was mere inches beneath my feet. I just had to keep digging. Or figure out a better place to dig to get everything I wanted.
I didn't go out much. I didn't date much.
I avoided other things I enjoyed because I thought they were a waste of time and money when I was so close.
I was just "one day away."
For 10 years.
How did I get stuck being "one day away" for so long?
Was it bad luck?
Was it bad partnerships?
Was it poor decision making?
Was it shifting market conditions keeping me not quite able to hit that major growth success?
I blamed so many other things before I blamed myself. And when I accepted my responsibility in the entire outcome, it still took me open looping for awhile to realize my affliction.
There's an action you take every single day, multiple times a day.
Within this action lies a hidden power.
An ageless, invisible power which can grant you all the riches in the land. The keys to the kingdom.
All it takes to unlock that hidden power with intention, is a simple yet terrifyingly vulnerable perspective.
It starts with the next decision you make.
And it starts by letting go of everything after that decision ...
How do we decide what to do every day?
We have the ability to come up with big grand visions for our life. We can say I want $10 million and then we can "solve" that equation and know with a high degree of certainty we'll get there.
But you can't have $10 million tomorrow.
Something has to happen in between.
A lot of somethings.
Every day you have 'choice' in front of you. Choice of actions to take or not take.
And though you may be clear on the end result you want to achieve ...
How do you make decisions well in the present NOW? For today? For tomorrow?
Decision making is a curious thing - it's heavily influenced (perhaps even entirely controlled by) the emotional part of your brain.
"We have dog brains, basically, with a human cortex stuck on top, a veneer of civilization. This cortex is an evolutionarily recent invention that plans, deliberates, and decides. But not a second goes by that our ancient dog brains aren’t conferring with our modern cortexes to influence their choices—for better and for worse—and without us even knowing it."2
Most of us are taught to make decisions with good reason.
Use logic, reason, and evidence to make a decision, and make it well. But if a decision is made in the emotional part of our brain, how can we do that?
Do we wrestle our emotions under control, become disconnected from our emotional state when we make those decisions to ensure they are good?
That doesn't make sense. How can we inform our decision making with desire and interest if we disconnect it from emotion. After all, how we feel about the choices we make is important. It's perhaps one of the key things that makes us human.
If you strip away the "stuff" layers of The Guardian Academy - stuff about business, stuff about money - what you discover is that everything we do here is about embracing the emotional part of ourselves in a way that contributes to good decision making (ideally so each of us can uniquely get what we really want in life).
So,
What does that look like with the decisions we make every single day?
If you don't connect the dots, you make yourself vulnerable to "emotional decision making." After all, our decisions happen in emotion whether we like it or not.
What happens when you say "heck with it I'm eating the donut" isn't a product of what happened in that moment ... it's a product of what didn't happen in the many moments leading up to it.
In order for your emotional decisions to align well as "good decision making" for you, long before you make the decision you need to use your rational thinking to reframe how you look at and experience the world.
Just because it's emotional doesn't mean it's bad.
Our emotions can be very accurate and useful ... IF we understand ourselves, what we really want, and the world around us.
I think it's fair to say that our emotions are always true.
What they MEAN to us requires a deeper understanding of self.
Our emotional decisions look irrational and "emotional" when we haven't done the self work necessary to have frameworks which allow "good decision making."
When something doesn't go the way you expect or hope it to go, if you haven't done the work to understand yourself, and how to live in a constantly shifting world, you'll be at the mercy of those emotions.
To take crypto as an example ...
When the price of Bitcoin "tanks" and you haven't done the work to figure out your solvable problem and establish your base case, you're operating in a world where anything that happens beyond your limited expectation (Bitcoin going "up") presents shadows that could be nasty beasts behind the rocks ... your primitive brain wants to protect you and get the hell out of there.
Your actions aren't figuring out the next best step to take to get you closer to what you want.
They are defaulting to primitive survival.
This brings us to My Affliction
When I have a big grand idea,
I want it NOW.
I can quickly see the entire thing, how it can all come together, the big huge impact it can have, the magical connections between all the pieces.
I'll have this big grand idea and I'll be buzzing with the potential. This invisible energy saying YES GO DO IT.
And then because I know what is possible, the fact that I don't immediately have it makes me feel like I am failing.
"Why don't I have a million dollar business yet, all the pieces are there!"
I WANT IT NOW!
Like a child who's only frame of operation is entitlement.
The expectation that because I could possibly make the thing, I should have it now, butting up against the adult in me who knows the work needs to be done to get there.
Emotion drives the ship. I zero in my vision on the big idea and try to make it, try to have it now.
I overload.
I spin my wheels without realizing it.
And spend 10 years "being one day away."
How I avoid this problem now involves letting go of everything past a certain point.
The Next Best Step
When I first saw the concept "next best step" it made perfect sense, especially in the context of chess, which I am all too familiar with.
Interesting thing about chess - after each player has made 5 moves, there are over 69 TRILLION different possible games that can be played.
(Heck, even after each player has made 1 move there are 400 possibilities, which is more than overwhelming)
You don't go into a chess game thinking "I'm going to make each and every one of these moves up to checkmate" knowing exactly what the moves are going to be.
No, you start with an opener to set up the game, and then ...
You make your next best step.
Because the only thing you ever really have clarity on is the next best step right in front of you.
It's the only thing you can know and see to be true.
See? Intellectually that makes a whole lot of sense.
Let's see if we can make it click deeper.
It's not "Take Smaller Steps" to your goal
This frame isn't about "taking smaller steps" to get where you're going. Oh no. It looks like that. But we aren't taking smaller steps so that we can be more certain of getting where we're going.
The entire operating system IS about the certainty of getting closer, but that's not what "the next best step" is about.
We're taking smaller steps because of this one simple truth:
Every step you take will reveal new information.
Like in chess. I can guess what’s going to happen after a few moves, but each move (by myself and my opponent) reveals new information.
It took me years of playing chess itself to even come to that conclusion. I can look back and see my behavior with that game mirrored life. I knew many of the moves, I knew my opponents, and I enjoyed thinking all the way through the conclusion of the game.
But I did not value the simple fact that every single move I made and my opponent made revealed new information.
In life you are not competing head to head (it's an infinite game, not a finite one), but every time you make a move, thousands, perhaps millions, or uncountable numbers of interactions are set in motion which you can't even see.
Many of those are internal.
Every decision you make or don't make. Every change you make or don't make.
They all have incomprehensible levels of possible outcomes. Some of them are immediate. Some of them take years.
You do not have a crystal ball. You cannot predict the future.
And so all you are left with is this simple framework:
Where do you want to go (understanding the deep why of it), and where are you now.
Then you figure out the next best step that's going to take you closer to where you want to go.
After taking that step, you look around again. Do you still want to go where you're going? What has changed? Maybe that step taught you something significant which leads to you changing where you want to go, or why you want to get there.
And that in turn changes what your next step is going to be.
We're not automatons. We don't say "I'm going to drive from LA to Boston" and then 2 days later when we determine what we actually want is in San Francisco, we don't keep going to Boston.
It's important to have the awareness that every single day you awake is a new day. Every time you make a choice it's a new choice.
Your goals may not often change. But, to think they always will or never will are two extremes that we must be wary of. 3
This Simple Trick Lowers Anxiety (doctors hate him)
The Next Best Step alleviates the anxiety around the actions you are taking in the moment.
From Dan Nicholson4, anxiety = uncertainty x powerlessness
This is a multiplicative equation. We gain certainty through our good decision making processes, through figuring out our solvable problem, through deeply understanding what we want in life.
(A great tool for flipping uncertainty is the Clarity Compass)5
We lower powerlessness by feeling like the actions we are going to take are getting us closer to what we want. This is never a definitive answer because ...
Every time you make a move, the board changes.
But we regain our power by understanding, with clarity and certainty, that the next best step can take us closer to what we want.
The Next Best Step embraces our emotional power.
Remember how we, as humans, are emotionally driven creatures. Even when framed with logic, we still choose with emotion.
It has to be, if you think about it, because the best we can ever do is be as clear as possible on where we are and where we want to go, and throughout all of this decision making process in the moment we never have absolute perfect information.
(We also sometimes need very quick decision making for survival, in moments where there is no time for rational thinking)
We use our best decision making process to allow ourselves to choose the next best step in as close alignment with ourselves as possible.
The alternative is chaos, with our decisions completely made by our emotions. Little logic, reason, or evidence to surround the choice of our actions.
We can't (and don't want to) eliminate our emotion because it's a key part of who we are.
But instead of letting it not only pick the destination but also slam its foot on the gas AND steer the wheel, we can harness that deep emotional power with clarity.
We actually embrace and fully utilize the emotional parts of ourselves in our decision making, rather than fight it, with "The Next Best Step."
Because "The Next Best Step" lets you LET GO of being correct about the choice.
It's not about GETTING what you want, It's about getting better at moving closer to the thing.
It's not about control over the outcome.
The Next Best Step is the key movement in The Process.6
The Process which is ever evolving as we grow as people. It needs an accompanying action which also evolves and changes both logically and emotionally so that we can continue to have good decision making surrounding our goals and desires.
That's The Next Best Step in a nutshell.
It's A Tactic for implementing The Strategy (The Process) which is how we live our Principles and Philosophies.
Let's get Woo Woo.
There's an inexplicable power in fully embracing The Process, in fully embracing "The Next Best Step."
Imagine for a moment you are an old timey traveler. You're on a dirt road. You've a cloak and a pack and a staff.
In the distance you know there is a grand mountain range. You know "The Peak" of the mountain you are headed toward. You know that you're headed to that mountain because all the secrets to life are there. All you have to do is reach The Peak.
Yet.
That mountain is a long long way off.
You can imagine it.
You've seen the maps.
You've read the tales.
You believe in everything that the path you are on is going to take you there and that's where you need to go.
But if you spend every moment of every day dreaming of that mountain, and wishing you are there ...
You'll miss the path in front of you. You'll miss the forest around you. The streams around you. The magic of the life unfolding around you.
While you believe deep in your heart that The Peak you walk towards is where you need to go, you don't know what you're going to discover on the other side of the next hill until you get there.
Every step you take on this journey reveals new things, teaches you new things. About yourself. About the world around you. About the people around you.
If you walk that path head down thinking only of The Peak, you might miss the love of your life tending flowers on the side of the road as you trudge past. You may never discover that your true gift is not in climbing The Peak, but rather in growing a garden of life in the quaint little valley you are currently walking through.
These things only reveal themselves if you take each step with awareness to your present life, with awareness of who you are and always discovering and welcoming a deeper understanding of who you are.
With awareness that what you are on is not a straight shot to your end goal, but a path of life.
A process of living.
And each time you move forward you take your next best step.
Yes that's towards the thing you believe you wish to head to ... but if you don't have the awareness of self to allow the emergence of the magical connection of humanity and life to happen, then you won't see when your end goal changes.
Ultimately that Peak you are headed to, that mythical mountain in the distance, that end goal is not what you THINK you want, it's what you discover through walking the path that you NEED in order to be really living life.
That need grows from the deeper connection you make with yourself, the deeper understanding of who you truly are, the deeper willingness to embrace and fully live that.
Don't fear what you might discover.
I think it may be the case that many people keep their head down trudging toward the peak because they are afraid of what they will discover if they slow down and get that self awareness.
They are afraid that they'll discover they don't actually want to go to the peak.
They get messages in life and society and people around them that the key is focusing and go go going to that peak and if they get distracted they'll lose out on their opportunity and then they'll look back on their death bed and wish they had done more.
But that's not life.
That's the opposite of life.
If The Peak is where you truly are best "destined" to be - if that's where you will play your game best and be happiest - then growing awareness of every step you take of every present moment of every valley you walk through of every tree you pass of every flower you appreciate will only AFFIRM the decision to keep making the steps towards The Peak.
Slowing down, having this self awareness, and making the next best step each and every day doesn't threaten to derail you towards your ideal solvable problem, it ENHANCES your ability to not only get there, but make sure the end point is indeed exactly what you want.
The danger in life is NOT failing to achieve the big goals you set out ...
It's failing to get what you deeply truly want, it's failing to live your own game and honor the gifts that life has given you.
There is only one way to understand what that all means to YOU.
Living life is not an understanding that can be fully disseminated through words.
It must be experienced.
And it can only be experienced through the path. Through The Process.
The real power comes when you let go of the big end vision, when you trust that you are on the right path and then turn your focus to the present.
When you trust your own ability to embrace present awareness and allow the future to change based on what you discover within yourself and the life around you ...
By taking The Next Best Step.
Be Useful. Be Present. Love the Journey.
Joseph Robertson , CMO The Guardian Academy
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