From the Heart – The Inside Job of Living a Life of Purpose, Creativity, and Impact

It's a cultural value system that when things "go wrong" we perceive them as "bad." It's a paradigm to expect life to go smoothly and successfully all of the time. Perhaps it does for some people. For many, it's riddled with grief, trauma, difficulty, broken relationships. It's a painful paradigm to carry of constantly broken expectations. Looking at the world as a series of experiences from which to grow, learn, and evolve from. It's a different way to interpret the world. Things go wrong sometimes and "wrong" is just a lens - it's a filter and a judgment. How does everything change when you see each event as a lesson or as a calling? 

Big goals aren't always a good idea. Tiny habits are better. In this episode, I talk through the power of small daily habits that grow into substantial changes over years. Stuff takes time. It takes lots and lots of time. There is great power to adopting a single small daily habit that accrues into the sort of person you want to be. Commit to the habit and let God and the habit forge the way. 

There's one school of thought to structure, grit, and grind to achieve anything. Then there's another which calls us to surrender to this grasping and then surrender some more. It beckons us to sit in presence, in being, in connection with the energy around us and let whatever flows, to flow. 

In this episode, I talk through stories of authors that were taken over a kind of spiritual flow state who all have a similar claim - that they were not the ones who wrote their books. The book took no effort, as though the pen in their hand was moved by another force. They all say "the book wrote itself." Each of these books is an international bestseller.

I think it's a fascinating concept to let go and get carried by the spirit. There's a constant tension between the grind to work, and the letting go and flow. I'm trying to do less grit and grind, and instead, meditate on being in connection with the Earth and universe, and let my work and inspiration flow from this. 

There is only one thing you need to get right - knowing that YOU like it. Do you like it? Or are you always asking everyone else if THEY like it? 

That's how you lead and not follow. Stop asking people if they like it. Ask yourself. 

In late 2019, I started eating every other day. At the time, I just wanted to lose weight. But as I googled it, I discovered intermittent fasting and the striking testimonials and scientific research that came with it. It had given me nearly instantaneous changes in my health while being unexpectedly "easy" to stick to - as I was never sticking to any hunger-crazy sprint for that long - just a few hours of struggle. Then it was over. In this episode, I talked through my two-year journey of intermittent fasting, the health benefits I've gotten out of it, how I stick to it, the mental landscape of it, and what it means to practice consuming less in an over-fed nation. 

Stop getting so caught up in a single idea. An idea is just a hypothesis. You need to have lots of ideas and rapidly iterate them. You need to test them and discover the causal mechanism of what works on people. The faster you can test and iterate, the faster you can get to the mechanisms of what people love and why they change. 

We can get better at telling the story of sustainability, climate, and greener futures. I wrote down these 23 evocative words, backed by science to motivate people, and riffed on ideas of how you use each of them to tell better stories to get people to join your environmental project. We need to be able to inspire epic feelings in people. Here are some examples of how you can do it. 

People come to me with all sorts of elaborate ideas to "change the world."  Usually, these ideas have little connection or thought gone into how they will actually make a real change happen on the ground once people have "experienced" the idea. 

This entrepreneurship model is back-to-front. If you have an idea to make an impact, you need to forget your crazy idea and go straight to a real human being and get them to make the change you are hoping your idea will get them to make for you. Talk to ten people on your street. Call every person you went to school with. Ask so talk to your dad's golf buddies. I'm calling it the action design threshold. Pass it before you write a bunch of code or spend money on your idea - or before you even have an idea it all. Do it using Slack, Google list servers, Zoom, Instagram, Canva, Figma, and Discord. Do it using your own email and your own phone number. 

Just get a real human to do a real thing. You can do this with a conversation, host a party, make a poster or a wall sticker. Create a 21-day challenge. Offer free consulting calls. Start a group. Just get out there into the world and practice making the change happen by you talking to another human in real life. 

Once you've succeeded with getting your first real human to take on a the action, then try and replicated it with two humans. Then try and get ten humans to do it.  What will it take to scale your actions from ten humans to one-hundred humans? Now you should see a pattern and an opportunity. What kind of actions do you need to design this scaling for? This is your idea that will work.

People often ask me why we should practice individual environmental behavior change when what we really need is "systems change." It's not an easy question to give a thorough answer to. We do need "systems change," but the truth is that all systems are made up of individual people who are allowed individual freedoms. The two cannot be separated.

It's a cultural value system that when things "go wrong" we perceive them as "bad." It's a paradigm to expect life to go smoothly and successfully all of the time. Perhaps it does for some people. For many, it's riddled with grief, trauma, difficulty, broken relationships. It's a painful paradigm to carry of constantly broken expectations. Looking at the world as a series of experiences from which to grow, learn, and evolve from. It's a different way to interpret the world. Things go wrong sometimes and "wrong" is just a lens - it's a filter and a judgment. How does everything change when you see each event as a lesson or as a calling?