#62 Productive vs prolific

With how (online) education and teaching are done nowadays, most people give up long before they get real results. Let’s fix that with this counterintuitive 3-step approach to skill-building: 👇

1️⃣ Step 1: Intent Builder.

Before you start, you must light a fire under yourself.

Why is this important to you?

What do you stand to gain?

Also (especially), what do you stand to lose?

(❗️I guarantee that at some point, you’ll forget what you’re doing it all for. So make your Intent strong and remind yourself every day; otherwise, you’ll always let life get in the way.)

2️⃣ Step 2: Trust Builder.

In the first 14-21 days, there’s only one thing that matters:

Can you prove to yourself that your Intent is strong enough to show up and take action daily?

Or are you derailed by the slightest setback or the lack of quick results?

Most people don’t have that trust in themselves yet. So you must build it up by taking small, daily actions completely decoupled from “quick wins” (I call them Tiny Trust Builders).

This is counterintuitive because people crave instant results, which means most course creators try to build them in their programs.

But the harsh truth is, only when you can show up without getting instant results are you ready to get real results.

3️⃣ Step 3: Skill Builder.

Once you’ve built the trust that you’ll show up, you can focus on skills, progress, and results. Here are two valuable mechanisms that take you from Trust-Building to Skill-Building:

👉 Make things a little harder every day or week
👉 Implement feedback loops: ask for coach feedback, talk about what you’re doing, show your work,…

Bottom line:

Learning something new is easier if you’re already in the habit of showing up every day.

It’s also easier to get through a bad day if you’re already in the habit of showing up every day – after all, you know that tomorrow, you’ll be there to take action again.

My journey to overcoming self-doubt as a writer:

• I write every day, even when I didn’t feel inspired.
• I publish imperfect work every day, and saw nothing bad happened.
• I publish frequently to reduce the “burden of quality” on each piece (if I publish every day, it doesn’t matter if some posts don’t do so well, because I’ll post again tomorrow anyway.

In short: write and publish to overcome the fear of writing and publishing. Yes, it can be as simple as that.

Experience can make you better at performing an activity but also blind you from what you could do differently (and better).

Sometimes, the only way to innovate, see, and be free, is to take your experience goggles off.

Am I doing this because of who I want to be? Or in spite of who I want to be?

Do I act a certain way automatically?

Who or what made me believe it’s a necessity?

Do I even know who I want to be?

Questions that lead to intentional living.

I can worry a thousand times until my worries come true.

I can envision my dreams a thousand times until my dreams come true.

Not because of the act of worrying or the dreaming itself.

But because my worries or dreams will incite different present actions taking me down different paths.

Whatever future I focus on a thousand times, I’ll be drawn towards.

Choose wisely.