Twenty Twenty-Four

Level 4: Serious Player

Future Guardian,

It’s Friday, which means it’s paid post day and it’s the last official post of the year. 2024 creeped up on us quickly and now it’s right around the corner.

A new year means a flood of new people jumping on bandwagons they are are doomed to fall off of in short order. Rushing to the gym, starting to new diets, opening new businesses…

…as if the completely arbitrary date of Jan. 1 has somehow changed everything - as if they have a higher probability of succeeding by starting now than they would have starting any other time of the year.

If that’s you, more power to you and we truly hope you reach your goals.

Most won’t.

Every New Year millions of people swing from a life of “chaos” to a plan of extreme “rigidity” over night. When the rigidity becomes too much handle, they rebel against their own plan and swing back into chaos - because they’ve never developed the skills, habit or expectations to sustain anything they are attempting to accomplish.

It looks like a version of this:

1. No time to follow a process, look for shortcuts

2. Arbitrary date arrives (New Year, Birthday, Family vacation)

3. Choose an arbitrary, rigid strategy out of desperation

4. Follow the strategy until it becomes maddeningly frustrating, throw up your hands, say F*ck and and go the extreme other direction (many pizza’s, drinks, and tubs of ice cream have been devoured in this stage)

5. Repeat

This is yo-yo dieting…in all areas of life.

The bad news is most humans will continue to do this for the rest of time.

The good news is that you have a choice. You can slowly, methodically and intentionally opt out of being most humans if you decide to do so. But deciding to do so it only the first step. It’s the easiest one. Once you’ve made the decision, you have to do the work - the boring, not-so-sexy, fundamental and mundane work.

If you can master the mundane, a whole new world opens up and expands - as long as you continue to maintain the mundane.

Many Guardians have broken the yo-yo life cycle, and we’re lookin forward to seeing many more do the same.

To celebrate the end of 2023 and the beginning of a brand new year… we’re going to put the fundamentals back in front of you - the top of the inbox. Below are the reminders and accompanying resources we find to be the most helpful for mastering the mundane and breaking the cycle.

A bunch of them are above the paid line ’tis the season.

1. “The Process Is The Shortcut” - Nic Peterson
   The process is the process because it is the shortcut. If and when more reliable way, faster or cheaper to achieve an outcome is proven, it will become the process. Falling in love with the process will consistently yield better results than falling in love with the idea of the results.

   1. The Process is the Shortcut - TGA Article

   2. Growing Trees - Nic Peterson Article

2. Open Loops, Learning and Intelligence:
   Remember that our definition of learning is: “same circumstance, different behavior” and our definition of intelligence is: “The ability to get what you want”. If it doesn’t change your behavior in a way that increases your ability to get what you want - it hasn’t made you more intelligent - you haven’t learned. As you approach new things in 2024, it might be helpful to pay attention to and think about how your behavior must change under what circumstances to get the benefit you are seeking.

   1. Open Loops and Learning

   2. The Guardian Academy Structure

3. Frequency, Intensity, Purpose
   Learning something new is hard. You’re not going to be good at it for a while. It’s all part of the process - staying motivated and learning to find “flow” is a skill you can develop. Here’s a short [6:14] video breaking down our process:

4. Thinking About Setting Sustainable Goals (A Process)
   Nic has a simple process for reaching goals in a sustainable way. It’s a behavir modification model, and it’s broken down in the replay below:

Now what?

It won’t take you long to get through all the content above.

But…

“Finishing” the content doesn’t do anything for you. Knowing about it, being able to quote it, agree with, disagree with or test well in it will. not. change. a. single thing. for you.

We encourage you to take what is useful and apply it to the things that are most important to you.

Disregard the rest. You can always come back later and revisit.

Now… we’re going to go a little deeper.

Below is an excerpt from the V3 Letter (plus a printable version) and a mind boggling training from Dr Jeff Spencer. We got permission to share the excerpt and video below, but The Letter is $147 a month, so we can’t share the entire thing…

Behavior Modification Deep Dive