Uppercase Life

You're listening to The Uppercase Life where we're taking care of ourselves so we can take care of others. Stress is a part of life. If you're trying to do difficult things, or really if you're just trying to stay alive for any length of time, you should expect to experience stress. All those stress itself is normal, and it's nothing to be ashamed of.
Unmanaged stress can really become dangerous to your health. It can also affect your relationship tips and just your overall quality of life. And, you know, if we're honest, we are living in a fairly stressful time, it seems, and a lot of us are living with more stress than we realize due to multiple what are called stressors. Studies have found that right now in 2022, Americans in particular are dealing with an elevated level or reported stress due to some global external circumstances.
And you can probably think of these off the top of your head. I mean, we've been through a COVID 19 pandemic. We've seen political unrest, we've dealt with wars and Ukraine and the cost of living and access to goods has become higher and more challenging. So when you're experiencing stress, it's the result of what doctors call stressors, the things that are stressing you out.
And when you experience a stressor, what happens in your head is your amygdala sends a signal to your hypothalamus. It goes through your nervous system and it prepares your body for fight or flight. You know what that feels like, right? The stress response is meant to provide a short burst of energy, and it's supposed to help you address the stressor.
You know, like fight it or fly it from it. Run away from it, and your cortisol levels elevate while your body and your brain is readying itself for action. And, you know, most stress just ends up being what is called acute stress, which is a fairly short period of time, and it's based around a particular incident. So, for example, you get cut off in traffic, you can feel that physical response as you feel stressed out about the fact that this person cut you off, you were in danger.
You might feel angry. Also, something like giving a public speech or asking someone out on a date, being called into your supervisor's office, or maybe having to talk to somebody about something that is sensitive in this type of stress. It's really normal, but it may cause irritability, anxiety, sweating, headaches, and sometimes you'll experience stomach pains or you can even feel your heart beating fast, or depending on how you're feeling about the thing that is stressing you out.
But then, apart from acute stress, there's something called chronic stress. It's a more prolonged and dangerous version of stress. Chronic stress, maybe because of ongoing financial struggles. Or maybe you're having health issues over a long period of time. And it's not really self contained. Small acute moment. Maybe you've been abused or maybe you're just in a dysfunctional relationship or they're other things that are causing long term stress.
And for that you may start feeling fatigue. A lot of times people experience a loss of appetite or changes in their appetite. It'll affect your sleep headaches, perhaps. Maybe you have difficulty concentrating. And if chronic stress gets left untreated for a long time, it can really have serious consequences. It can lead to problems that are going to put you in the doctor's office.
Things like insomnia or even obesity and heart disease, diabetes, hypertension. These are all things that we've linked to chronic stress. And ironically, studies are showing that chronic stress can actually make your brain more receptive to more stress later on. So I read this quote from Christopher Berglund in Psychology Today. He said, Cortisol is believed to create this domino effect that hard hardwired pathways in your brain and might create a vicious cycle by making a brain that becomes more predisposed to be in a constant state of fight or flight.
So essentially, the more often and the longer period of time your stress, the more easily you may get stressed in the future. And some of you are hearing me say this and you are probably nodding your head and saying, yes, I just live in a constant state of stress. I am stressed out so much that I'm used to being stressed out.
And so I just live in a stressed out world. I want to tell you that is going to cause you long term problems. And you probably already know that that isn't something that is good for you or even manageable. So what do we do when we endure stress and we should be enduring stress? You should be experiencing some stress because you are trying to do difficult things.
You're endeavoring to accomplish things that maybe other people aren't willing to try, which means that you're going to experience pushback and resistance that other people don't. So if stress is part of life and it can help strengthen us if we respond to it correctly or weakness if we, you know, fail to manage it in a healthy way, how can we manage stress?
So as I was looking into this, I had some things planned for this part of the episode, but actually I stumbled onto the CDC website, the Center for Disease Control, and they have a page on stress management. It was very straightforward word and very intuitive. And I just want to read you what the CDC recommends for stress management, because I think it's something that everyone should read and it's something that you probably haven't ever seen before.
So according to the CDC, here are ways that we can manage stress. They say take a break from watching, reading or listening to news stories, including on social media. It's good to be informed, but hearing about traumatic events constantly can be upsetting. Consider limiting news and social media. I read that on the top of the CDC's list and thought to myself, How many times have either told a friend this or maybe even told myself this?
We know this. We know that spending extended amounts of time on social media or watching, reading or listening to stories about stressful things induce stress in us. And yet sometimes we have that addiction to the drama and it's like we can't stay away. So managing stress, one of the best things you can do is take a break from these things, step back, put some positive things into your mind.
Read, listen to and interact with encouraging, uplifting things. The second thing on their list is take care of yourself. And this should be on all of our lists for anything we're trying to do. But they say, remember to eat healthy exercise is get a lot of sleep. Give yourself a break if you're starting to feel stressed out. Take care of your body.
Stretch, meditate, eat well, balanced meals, exercise regularly. I just want to point out to you that on the CDC website, they have two different bullet points on this page reminding you to exercise regularly. It is the only thing on this list of recommendations that is repeated. I think there's a reason for that. You may feel like stress is a mental thing and the physical reactions that you're feeling are just a side effect of what's going on in your brain.
However, the way you treat your physical body makes a huge difference in how you can handle stress. So make sure you exercise regularly. Do get sleep. Avoid excessive alcohol, tobacco, substance use. I know none of you would use alcohol, tobacco or anything like that to manage your stress. Right? But if you're doing that, that is not a healthy way to manage your stress.
Make time to unwind. Try to do some activities that you enjoy. Have some fun in your life. Talk to others. This one's really important, and probably on this list is the hardest one for me because I am more of a private person. I feel guilty when I express my stress to other people. I feel like I'm by default, going to stress them out.
But it's actually very healthy to talk to others. And most of the time, if you're talking to someone who is not di...

Welcome to The Uppercase Life, where we're learning to identify where the highest value lies. I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. 

So I was recently reading an article about astronauts in space, and I found this fact really intriguing. So living and working in space is really mentally strenuous for an astronaut, as you can imagine, all kinds of things that are very unlike living on the Earth.
But the absence of gravity actually makes working in a spacecraft very physically undemanding. So even though you're thinking hard, you've got this high stress job, you really don't have to use your body that much because you're not dealing with gravity. So gravity isn't pushing against your muscles. And they were saying that based on studies they've done with astronauts, if they don't regularly exercise in space, they lose muscle mass at a very high rate.
So the studies were showing that astronauts were experiencing up to 20% loss of muscle just over the course of like a five to ten day space flight. So around a week and they were losing 20% of muscle mass in their bodies because they just weren't experiencing that pressure of gravity and they weren't working out. So if you're listening to this, it's likely that you have a mentally demanding role.
You know, maybe there are areas of your life that you would consider really important to you. You want to be able to use them later like an astronaut would want to be able to return to Earth and be able to walk around without falling over and having, you know, proper muscle mass when they get back. But if you're going to do that, you're going to have to maintain it.
And I was thinking as I was reading this, what is an area of my life that is atrophying that I'm allowing to decrease in mass or in strength because I'm not using it or working it out. And, you know, sometimes we build a skill and then we find seasons in our life where we're not using it and we still identify with that skill.
We consider it vital to our self, our person, but we really don't invest any time into it. So my question to you is, what is something you feel is atrophying in your life? How can you institute small and consistent exercises for skills you want to retain? So here's a good example for me. I grew up drawing. I love art.
I never wanted to be a professional artist as a kid because I didn't think artists made money. And I honestly didn't want anyone to tell me what to draw But as I got older, I was involved in leading organizations. I worked in nonprofits for ten years. They didn't need me to draw anything. Art was not at all a part of my regular work schedule.
But at the same time, it was really important to me. It was vital to who I felt like I identified as. And so I made an effort over those years to find ways to continue to keep those muscles, if you will, moving in myself. That art I continued to produce So I would spend a little bit of time at night or during my breaks during the day, drawing, sketching, writing, engaging in that creative side of me so that I could keep those muscles limber.
I didn't know if I would ever use them, but I knew I didn't want to lose them. And, you know, what ended up happening is after I finished that decade, in nonprofits, I ended up being a designer and I ended up using those skills all the time. And the only reason I could do that is because over the period of time, I was not needing them, I continued to exercise and to practice them.
So what if you dedicated 15 minutes a day to improving and retaining one's skill, which is really important to you? Just 15 minutes a day. I mean, I think you could probably do it with even less. But I would challenge you for 15 because I feel like 15 is good, a good number. But you could probably do 5 minutes a day and it's still better than nothing.
But what is something that you could invest 15 minutes a day in to improve and retain so that you don't lose that? Because you're going to want it in the future. You've probably heard the saying the grass is always greener on the other side. And in a very young age, I remember hearing push back on that and somebody saying, Well, the grass is always greener where you water it.
And I love that. I don't know who coined that comeback, but I feel like that's a classic comeback. Yeah, the grass is greener where you water it. So you're on your side feeling like, Well, I'm not good at this or I'm not good at that, but look at that person over there and how great they're doing. And I think, well, yeah, but that person's watering their grass.
That person's exercising their muscles. Of course, they have bigger muscles than you. You don't work out. Or of course they have greener grass than you. What is your muscle? Where is your line that you should be watering? Make sure you're taking care of that. Don't allow important things to atrophy just because you might be in a season in your life right now.
That doesn't necessarily require them. Just because no one's asking you to do it doesn't mean it's not something you really should do. 15 minutes a day what could you do with 15 minutes a day? I'd love to hear your comments, your criticisms, your feedback. I'd love to hear what it is in your life right now that you feel like maybe atrophying because you haven't needed it, maybe for the job that you're doing or the phase of life that you're in.
But it's something you really care about and you love. How are you going to maintain that? How are you going to encourage that skill within yourself? What's your plan? Send me your comments, criticisms, critiques. I'd love to hear anything you have to say. You can get a hold of me at [email protected], and I'll see you next.

You're listening to the upper case life, where we look for joy in the little things. And I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. 
Recently, I was talking with young men about his daily routine and his work schedule. And he said something that stood out to me that I thought was very relatable for a lot of people. He said, I live by my inbox, which I thought was a very honest and interesting statement.
He went on to talk about the fact that his daily to do list, his calendar, pretty much everything about the actions that he takes on a daily basis relate to the emails that he receives. And I could relate a lot to this because I've struggled at various times in my professional career with living according to my inbox. And for our purposes, today, I'm going to categorize the inbox as an extrinsic motivating force.
It's just one of many kinds that you could have. Maybe you work a retail job. In that case, you're probably not motivated by your inbox. You're probably motivated by your supervisor or your manager. But there's some sort of external force to which you are looking Asking, What should I be doing with my time, with my day? And for some of us who run our own businesses, who are entrepreneurs or freelancers that inbox is kind of like our supervisor.
And we start looking at those incoming messages as dictators over our daily schedule. Now, I would encourage you not to do that. And as he was saying this, I think that he was acknowledging he knew that this was not really the way he wanted his day to function. But that he was aware of the fact that the inbox pretty much dictated his to do list and his schedule.
So how can we stop our inbox from becoming a tyrant that just rules our day and takes over our to do list? Well, here are a few things that I've implemented through the years that have really helped me tame the control that the inbox has over my daily life. One of the first things in the biggest thing is just enter it intentionally.
I think sometimes one of the reasons the inbox controls our day is because we give it unlimited access to our attention. So we are constantly in the inbox. Maybe you have it up in a tab and you're looking at it all the time. And so when you get to a point where you're done with a task or you start and you're wondering, what should I do next?
You just automatically check the inbox, but maybe you should be entering that inbox intentionally, making sure you do it at a time that you can really pay attention. And then when you're in the inbox looking at messages now you can process that and put those that information into the right categories and plan your day accordingly. And then leave the inbox.
You're going to have to leave the inbox at some time during the day. You can't live in the inbox. It will distract you all day long. So make sure you enter your inbox intentionally. And here's something that I do viciously. I archive and I delete emails like crazy. I have not had more than one page of emails for a good, solid eight years.
And I work really hard to make sure that my inbox is clean so that when I open it up in the morning, I'm not seeing a thousand messages. And when I do see them, I make sure that I do the right thing with them, that I don't just let them sit I would consider this kind of the equivalent of just cleaning your room, getting the laundry off the floor so that mentally when you show up in that inbox, it doesn't stress you out.
Like, Oh my gosh. Because if you look at that little number, how many emails are there in your inbox? If that thing is up in the hundreds and possibly thousands, which it was for me at one point in my life, That number itself is just anxiety inducing, like, oh, my God. Well, I am constantly archiving conversations that I've already replied to so that they leave my inbox and I won't see them again until that person replies.
And then I'm deleting other things that I just don't need. I don't need them to ever come back. Why would I? So archive and delete. And then here's one filter your inbox depending on the inbox you're using. But I really think pretty much every inbox software has an ability to do this. You can filter where emails go when they come into your email.
So in other words, in Google, if you're using Google business suites or even the free versions, I believe you can create tabs at the top so that you can route all incoming social media automated emails or updates from companies whose mailing lists run. They go into different tabs and they don't come into your primary top importance inbox. Tab.
And I've done that for years. That is great because if you've signed up for anything, you're going to get all these newsletters, and I don't need those to be in the same priority list inbox as client information. So I keep them separate. But also you can filter out particular email addresses. You can block particular addresses, use filters to your advantage when you notice time wastes inside of your inbox.
Ask yourself, Could I build a filter in here to make sure that all the emails from these people go over to one section and then I can just click on that folder and find all of their emails. What can you do to filter and improve the experience of being in your inbox? And then here's the last thing is protect your focus.
And I was talking about having it up in another tab earlier. But for me, here's something that I did a long, long time ago, is I have turned all notifications off for my inbox. And depending on what industry you're in, you might be like, That's crazy. I can't do that. But let me ask you something. Should your email constantly have access to you?
I mean, is that really what email as a transmission method is meant to be? My opinion is no. And I know that this might be controversial. Different people have different opinions but so my email notifications have been off on my phone for years. The only time I will see an email if I am not sitting at my computer is I will have to open that app intentionally and go in there, look at it because I got things that I'm doing.
And even if I'm not going to stop and I'm not going to address the email right, then if I see that email come in, even if I just see the subject line of that email, it'll be in my head, right? Like I might not stop and open it and reply right then, but it just pulled my focus away from whatever the other thing was I'm doing.
And you've probably had that experience where you're like, Oh no, but it's not the moment where you can respond to it, but you already saw and you can't unsee it. So make sure that you protect your focus by not looking at things when you don't need to. And then might come back again to just making sure that you're entering that inbox intentionally.
Because here's the thing, the inbox is a tool for you. It's it's not your boss. You shouldn't be looking at that inbox to tell you what you should be doing with your day. You should be planning your day, and then you should look in your inbox and then take the information in your inbox and see how you can apply that in your day.
But the truth is, there's probably going to be a lot of instances where someone's going to send you something in your inbox and you're going to have to tell them. I can do that, but not today because I already have plans for today. Here's the truth. If you don't plan your time somebody else is going to somebody else will, and it'll probably come from your inbox if you're anything like me.
So be careful and protect your focus. Don't let your inbox rule you. Your inbox is an awesome tool and a great form of communication, but it can also be really stressful if you don't manage it well. So what sort of techniques do you use to manage your inbox? Any tools, any ideas, any cool apps that you use for making sure that you're employing your emails as efficiently as possible?
I'd love to hear your comments, your feedback. You can email me at theupperca...

You're listening to the Uppercase Life, where we work hard, play hard and chill hard. Also, I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. 

I'm going to give you two words, and I want you to think of what comes to your mind when you hear them. The first word is engaged, and the second word is autopilot. If these two words were in a fight to the death in a duel, which one of them would you see as the villain and which one would be the hero?
I mean, if you're thinking of these two states of being, which one seems intuitively the better option to you? And full disclosure, that was a trick question. But I bet if one seemed more like the hero in your mind, it was probably the word engaged, because we think of being engaged as being on an active and connected and alive.
And we think of autopilot as being repetitive, mundane, probably boring and mechanical. And surely a really meaningful life is an engaged life that's better and more desirable than being on autopilot. Right. But it's wait, Engagement, it is vital to a productive and fulfilling life. I mean, nobody wants to be the lifeless automation trudging to work every day and performing the same mindless tasks and just coming home to some bland way of life.
However, when we talk about living life full throttle, always on, totally engaged, sharp focus. Is that really what you want? I mean, actually, for me, no, I it exhausts me just to say that. And I think, well, that's OK sometimes, but I can't live like that. 24, seven. That's just not healthy. And it would probably drive my family crazy.
So a demanding life and a productive habit every day is going to require you to automate some things. I mean, seriously. Automation will save your time, save your energy. And if you don't have some automated behaviors that make sure things go well, even when you're really not able to fully engage, then you're going to be in for this rollercoaster ride of existence.
And it's not not in a fun way. What's going to happen is that you're going to engage, you're going to burn out, you're going to crash. And when you do, nothing will get done because you have to be all on all the time in order to do anything. So how can we differentiate between when we should be engaged and when we should be on autopilot?
Well, there's probably a lot of good answers for this, but I want to give you three scenarios in which I want to encourage you to think of being engaged in autopilot in different ways. So I want you to think about engaging experiences and automating your maintenance, because the world is full of incredible and really novel things. You're going to pass them every day and maybe you're missing them because your brain is so distracted by maintenance mode.
And I would define maintenance as being these tasks that are they are crucial, but they are also repetitive. And you can put systems in place to accomplish these tasks without giving them your full attention. They're going to happen over and over again, usually in a timely manner. So take the time to set up less hassle ways of doing repetitive type tasks so that later you can spend less time overseeing them.
Anything from haircuts, all changes to weekly lunch schedules. I mean, all of these things are recurring and set. So why not automate them? You know, here's one great example. It always humors me when it's coming holiday time in America and we're nearing Christmas and suddenly you have all these adults acting like, who would have thought it's Christmas already, you know, as if Christmas doesn't come every stinkin year.
But these people are so, you know, engaged in other things that they haven't even thought about Christmas. And then they feel, you know, behind on that task when you could you could really mostly plan for Christmas, like six months out. Come on, you know, it's coming. Just get it done. And then when the time comes, you'll be mostly prepared.
So engaging experience is automating maintenance tasks so you can have really novel and cool experiences on a daily basis. If you're perceptive and being present for them. So make sure that you're delegating, you're automating these things that you don't need to put a ton of attention into, but they still need to get done. So you can't not do them, but then participate.
Look around you today. What do you see? Be open to new experiences, sights and smells. I mean, these are vital to our creative thinking and our overall interest in just staying alive, which I'm sure you can relate to. That idea is that sometimes our life feels so stressful and overwhelming, trying to be engaged all the time that, you know, we just want to check out and stay in bed all day.
So the second thing is engage with people and automate the things. So look at it as the value, the really high value things that you're going to participate in life relate to people in some way. And there's going to be a person on the other side of it, even if that person is not standing in front of you and staring you in the face, but make sure that you are engaging with the humans in your life, the people that you say you love, and you're automating the things, the tasks.
Sometimes people even though we would say, you know, somebody ask us which are greater, we'd be like, well, people, of course people are. But sometimes we let the things crowd in on the people and then we find that we're spending our high value mental energy on tough thing tasks. And then we have to suffer through social times, like we end up with people with family.
Family gets the worst of it, right? Because you come home to them whether you want to or not every night and you're tired and you spend all your mental energy on maybe on a computer or on a spreadsheet and then you got these beautiful humans there and you don't have anything to give them. So engage with the people, automate the things, look into people's eyes.
Check in with them, make sure you're using the right tools in your daily work and life flow to automate things. There's usually an app for that. Can you get an app that will take some of that time away from what you spend on the thing and allow you to have a little more time with the people? And then here's the last.
I engage with dreams. And automate drudgery is we all have stuff we don't want to do. And that could range anywhere from, you know, doing your taxes, taking out the trash to paying off your student loans or whatever it is in your life, which is something you can't simply stop doing. But their drudgery is we have them. We got to do them.
But let's engage with the things that we're dreaming of we feel called to do. We have a vision for doing and make sure we automate those drudgery. Because let's face it, usually when a thing is a drudgery, usually there is someone else out there that is better at that task than we are anyways. Somewhere in the world, there's probably somebody that that really sparks them to do that thing.
They love it. And here you are trying to do it and you hate it, and it's taking you so long when you could just engage someone else to do it. And you might say, Yeah, but you know, I've got to spend money. I don't feel like I should, or I'm going to tell you, you know, wait, look at this stuff.
You spend money on every day. Wouldn't it be worth it to take some of these drudgery off your plate and engage in dreams? Your boss is not going to put that on your desk. Your clients are not going to call you and ask you to do your dreams. You got to do them yourself. What are the things that you're worst at you absolutely hate?
How can you offload those things and think of yourself as a steward of that task who needs to see to it that the task is done, but you don't have to be the one that directly does it. Can you steward those tasks while still stepping away from them? And then what would it take to pour some quality time into a vision project?
For yourself, something that is closely alig...

You're listening to the upper case life where we are actualizing our potential. I'm your host, Joseph Brewster.
Now I have a confession to make that surprises people sometimes because of how passionate I am about productivity and about the efficient use of your time. I don't use to do lists I quit using to do lists years ago. And maybe you can relate with some of the experiences I've had with to do lists.
I had experiences where I was very well intentioned and I would start my day out and put a bunch of really good things on my to do list that I would do for the day. Maybe I had ten things on my list, and then the day doesn't go quite like I thought it would. So I get three of the ten done or for the ten done.
So now I've got six things on the to do list, and then tomorrow morning I'm starting my day with a to do list that already has things left over from yesterday. And I'm adding more to it. So now I got the six things from yesterday and I put five more things on. So now my to do list is that 11 things and then over the course of a couple of days, you'll find that there are a few things on that list that just keep falling off down to the bottom and they never come off that to do list.
And you start looking at it like, Oh my God, this thing's been on my to do list since last week. I still haven't gotten this thing done. And I just found that to do lists were not an efficient way for me to manage the tasks that I was working on my day. Now, this is controversial and different people have different opinions on this.
I have a lot of friends who used to do lists, and it seems to work fine for them. But here is my experience. So what I started realizing is if something was on a to do list, I really could only do three things with it. I could do it now. I could assign a time to it to do it at a different time.
Or I could delete it. So I can do one of three things with it now, later, or just ax it entirely. And you know, what I found is people feel guilty about deleting things from To-Do List. So what happens is you have all these clinging on baggage in your to do list. It just gets bloated. You're not getting it done.
And now you're feeling guilty like, oh, I'm just not very good at being productive. But, you know, the second thing there was really key to me. You can do it now. Are you going to assign a time to it? What I've found is that usually doing it now isn't the best option unless this is a really simple and fast task.
If this is something you do in 5 minutes, definitely just do it now. Let's get it out of the way. But if this is a legitimate, large scale task, doing it now is probably not going to be the way you can approach your to do list. So you're going to have to assign a time to it. And when you do that, you're going to have to calendar it.
So here's where calendaring becomes more powerful to me than a to do list is because a to do list doesn't give it a time. And if it doesn't have a time, the odds of me getting it done are lower. So if I move it from A to do list on to a calendar and I know when I'm going to actually engage in that task, the odds of me getting it done have substantially increased.
So now I just really don't need it on the to do list anymore. Well, what happened for me was I found that I started moving things off the to do list on to the calendar, and then I stopped using it entirely. And what would happen is when a task would come up and I would know I needed to plug that in instead of going to the to do list and then the calendar, I just skipped straight to the calendar I would just put it in to my day tomorrow or later in the week and be like, OK, now I don't need it on a to do list.
I'm going to look at my schedule tomorrow and I will see when this thing is going to happen for me that all but eliminated the need for using a to do list. And I would encourage you that if you're not giving time to the task, the odds of you getting it done are very low. And the odds of you finishing everything on a to do list is very low, which means that you'll start feeling demotivated by the clutter of your to do list.
So move it over to a calendar that we can spread it out over the course of weeks. Months, and you still have the confidence of knowing that that task has a home in your schedule and you will get it done. But maybe you're not like me. Maybe you love your to do list. Maybe you find that they're more efficient for you than calendaring.
I would love to hear your thoughts, your comments, your feedback, and you can email me at: [email protected] 
I'll see you next time.

You're listening to the upper case life, where we are always in pursuit of the most useful truth. And I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. 

Buckle up, because today we're going to talk about something big, something I think is potentially life changing if you can grasp it and practice it. In the 2015 Journal of Experimental Psychology, there was a paper published called Knowledge Doesn't Protect Against Illusory Truth, and they use this term illusory truth throughout the paper.
And in the summary, they say this In daily life, we encounter false claims in the form of consumer advertisements political propaganda and rumors. Repetition may be one way that insidious misconceptions enter our knowledge base. The research on this illusory truth effect demonstrates that repeated statements are easier to process and subsequently are perceived to be more truthful than new statements.
The prevailing assumption in the literature had been that knowledge would constrain this effect, but what they found in their research was that contrary to prior suppositions, this occurred even when participants knew better. So in other words, if you hear it often enough, you start to believe it, even if you know better even if you have already encountered the correct information, the frequency at which you hear a thing will indoctrinate you and this is something we've known for a very long time.
In fact, this is a technique that's been used in brainwashing, indoctrination, and torture during times of war. We know that if something is repeated over and over again to you, eventually it will start to feel like truth. I don't want to talk about political agendas. I don't want to talk about consumerism. I want to talk about your language.
I want to talk about the words that come out of your mouth every day. I believe that your words really matter. I believe that the frequency of your statements matter. And I believe that we often employ a language of helplessness when we speak about our life and our experiences. I want you to think of the following statements and ask yourself, what do they all have in common?
I don't have enough time for that. I can't afford to buy that. I couldn't run as fast as that guy does. I can't hang out with my friends tonight. I have to work. I'll never make my boss happy. This this is the language of helplessness. What do you see in common in those statements? In common in those statements is this idea of what you are not able to do, your incapability, your helplessness.
It's the language of someone who would prefer things possibly to be otherwise. But does it have the power to change them? And when we use this language day after day, we are brainwashing ourselves and we're brain washing those around us to believe that there is no choice, that there are no options. And this is just how things are going to be.
This language of helplessness is, I think, probably the most prominent thing I hear when I talk to people about their struggles in life, whether they're talking about trying to start a business or chase a dream, build a healthy relationship, raise a child. I hear this kind of language all the time. I hear more often than not the statement.
I don't have the time when people are talking about their schedules, when they're talking about what they would like to do with their life. And this language of helplessness is almost always, almost without exception, a lie, an exaggeration. And not only that is a transfer all of responsibility off of ourselves. And it's an acceptance of slavery within our own mind.
Here is where I'm at. I cannot change it. I cannot escape it. So what can we do about this? What can we do about indoctrinating our self with this illusory truth, with this repetition in this propaganda that we are actually telling ourselves? I think this is one of the biggest things that you can do just in general in your mindset, is to change your language and adopt a language of agency.
Adopt a language of agency, because the truth is we cannot control everything, but we do have a lot of agency and agency, as Merriam-Webster defines it, is the capacity condition or the state of acting or of exerting power. You see, we are making choices on a daily basis. We are using our agency every single day, but taking responsibility for those choices, especially when things just don't feel like they're going the way that we prefer.
That's really challenging and honestly, it's a bit humbling. It is much easier to use a language of helplessness. So when we use a language of helplessness, I'm the prisoner, I am the victim. You should feel sorry for me, but when I use the language of agency, I am a potential source of change. I am a participant and I have power.
So let's look at those statements I made earlier and let's say them again in a language of agency. I don't have enough time for that. I would say I'm choosing to do something else with that. Time, because honestly, you can do a lot of things with your time. You have the same amount of time as anyone on the planet.
What are you doing with it? So saying I don't have enough time for that is just telling yourself you're helpless. So I am choosing to do something else with that time. I do have the time to do that. I'm just not going to or I can't afford to buy that. You know what I think I'm not interested in going into debt for that thing.
It's just not that important to me. I'm going to use my money in other ways. Maybe you're looking at someone else's skill and you're saying, I couldn't do that. I couldn't run as fast as that person does. You know what the truth is? You haven't trained hard enough to run that fast. That's what the truth is. As someone who grew up as an artist, I can't tell you the amount of times somebody has said to me, I could never do that when I was drawing or painting or something to that effect.
And not only is that not true, it's really insulting to the other people who are doing the thing. It's almost as if implying it wasn't your effort that allowed you to do this. You were just somehow magically born with a skill to do something I will never have the ability to do. And I've always thought, Sure, you could everybody could.
All you got to do is what I did. So please don't diminish the effort other people have put into things by saying I could never do that. Yes, you could. You are not dedicating yourself to do that, and it's OK to acknowledge that. And it's also important for you to note that there is potential for you to improve that skill and do what they're doing.
Acknowledge that it's not like you are inferior to everyone else. Now, here's where I want to pause and I do want to acknowledge the fact that we do have limitations, right? Having a language of agency isn't about fooling ourselves. Maybe you are a quadriplegic listening to this. Maybe you are somebody with health conditions that legitimately prevent you from doing a thing and you say to yourself, I should not be doing that.
Thing. Given my circumstances, I completely understand that there are going to be times where saying that is not something I can physically do. Is going to be a true statement. Those situations will be rare for most people, but if you have those limitations, understand them don't focus on them, focus on the things you have the agency in and the choices you can make.
Here's one I can't hang out with friends tonight. I have to work. Here's where we get mixed up. You think, Well, I have a job, I have a boss, I have a responsibility. This is true. But you can quit any time when you tell yourself, I can't quit because I've got to pay the bills. That is a lie.
You're choosing not to quit because you really want to pay the bills, but at any time you can absolutely walk away from everything. And I'm not saying that you should. I'm not saying that it is the right move to make. What I'm saying is that it is freeing in your mind to acknowl...

You're listening to the uppercase life where we are notable people doing notable things. I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. And today we are talking about notes. Notes. 

Some of you out there are thinking, well, I already take notes. And others are thinking, I hate taking notes. But what I can tell you for a fact is that all of you have a notes app already.
If you're listening to this, you have a notes app built in to whatever device it is that you use on a daily basis. Just about every computer phone tablet in the world all come preinstalled with the notes app. They assume you were going to need to take notes. But in what ways do you use your notes app? I want to challenge you with a couple of ways that I use mine, and I would love to hear your feedback on the ways that you employ a notes app to help you on a daily basis achieve your goals, your ambitions, and just be more productive in general.
So I personally am an iPhone user, but the principles I'm going to talk about in this, I have used in Evernote across multiple kinds of devices, including PCs. So it works in any notes app that I've ever used. I use notes in folder based segmentation, and so I will create folders for my notes and then have my notes under that folder.
And I'll tell you some of the folders that I currently have in my notes at the first folder and the one that I use the most often is called conversations. Inside of this folder is a note for every conversation, including phone call and sometimes in person, depending on the nature of the conversation that I'm having on a daily basis.
And this is a great record for me to go back and look at some of the important things that were said in conversations. Now I deal with client calls throughout the day and also with personal calls. And so it's important to me to not have to remember all of this stuff in my head. As soon as I'm given important information, I want to dump it somewhere so that I mitigate the risk of it just draining out of my phone ahead during the day.
So I want to dump it directly into my notes app and maybe from there it goes somewhere else, like into a project management tool. But first, it can go right into my notes app during the conversation, and I do this simply with a bullet list. I start a bullet list, and throughout the conversation I will mark out bulleted important things that I note.
And then if it's a client, I will take that note, copy and paste it into an email and just give them a summary of the conversation to clarify what it was that we discussed. Now, if it's a friend, they will not know. I'm taking this note, except they might know that I remember next time I see them, the information they gave me about the fact that their grandmother was sick or whatever.
Well, because I took the time to note it. I care about it. I want to be able to follow up on that. But I don't tell my friends and taking notes what we're talking on the phone. And I usually will not take notes if I'm somewhere in-person unless we're discussing a project because I do not want to have my phone out when I am face to face with a human being and having a conversation.
However, I may, when I leave that coffee meeting or whatever, pull out my notes app and take a minute before I drive away to note some of the things that they said so that I don't forget them. So, first of all, do I have conversations? And I use that when just about every single day. Another really useful folder I have is called Books.
Now I hope that you engage in reading books, whether it's through audio or just looking at or maybe you engage in reading articles, blog posts, something like that. In any case, if you're listening to this, there's a high chance that you are interested in bettering yourself. So you're probably looking at information about it. And the thing is, we get a lot of really good information coming into our head, through our eyes and our ears and whatnot.
But it's really hard to retain all of that. So if you have a note for each book that you read, you can mark down some of the high points, some of the things that struck you, whether it's notes to yourself about what you want to do based on what you read, or for me, a lot of times I just like to write down the really impactful things that I found in that book, things that really stuck out to me that I want to implement.
I'll put them into a bullet list in a note that has the title of that book and author, so that I can go back and find it at any time. And you can do this without even owning the book. You could just walk into a bookstore, sit down and with a notes app in a few minutes time, you can scan a book and really glean some important information.
You can take that note away with you and then you'll be able to reference where you found that. Who said that? Who was this quote from? And it's really nice to be able to do that. It also makes that reading process. It makes the retention of the information higher in your mind because you were writing it down. I personally have a poetry folder in my notes app I like to create and creating with words is important to me as an artist.
I create in many different ways, most of them visual, but sometimes I just want to write something interesting. Not boring, not commercial. I just want to sit down and write something that is creative. So I have a folder for myself to write poetry, to write stories, lyrics, anything that's coming to my mind that allows me to put my feelings and my experiences into a creative style note.
I have a folder in my notes app called Goals, and in this one I will create a note. Periodically. Sometimes I'll do this more than others depends on the phase I'm going through. In that moment, I will create a note that is simply the date of the time I'm making the note. So it just has the day, month, year of the note.
And then inside of that note I will put a very, very quick 5 to 10 bullet list of goals I have in that moment. And it's important to me not to think this through very hard. So what I do is just off the top of my head as quickly as possible. I put the five things that are the most important to me that day, and some of them may end up being long term, maybe that day I've been thinking about, you know, really in the long term, I want to, you know, write a book about this idea or maybe I'm thinking very short term, like I just really need to get this crack in the
windshield fixed for the car. I mean, anything from the very mundane to the big legacy building things, I will write them down just rapidly via bang, bang, bang in usually no more than five bullet lists. The thing that I find helpful about this is you can go back and you can track the things you're interested in and you know what you'll do over time.
If you start opening back up those goals notes and seeing what was it last year that was really important to me and that was consuming my thoughts in terms of goals. Did I forget all about that? Have I completely changed course? It gives yourself a self-assessment of sorts. And also, sometimes you can look back and just chuckle about it like, Oh yeah, that was apparently a really big deal to me there.
And it was I got it done. It wasn't that big of a deal, but that day just felt like it was the whole world. I think being able to see your goals over time, how they progressed, whether you've been pursuing them, is sometimes a good metric to help you evaluate your progress over time and the focus that you have on the things that really matter to you.
I also have a folder called People and in this folder I collect names of people. Names and helpful descriptions for me. So every day I'm meeting people, right? And you probably have this experience too. We get introduced to a lot of people and personally I am part of multiple organizations, either where I volunteer or maybe client organizations that I work with, or maybe just in the office space where I wo...

You're listening to the uppercase life where even when we procrastinate, we do it on purpose. I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. 

I want to talk about procrastination today, but I've been putting it off for weeks. No, I'm just kidding. You know, procrastination is usually a negative word. It gets a bad rap and quite honestly, for good reason. A lot of times we associate procrastination with being lazy or maybe being hesitant to do a thing and willing to jump in and commit.
But procrastination and the act of putting something off from its intended timing isn't always bad. And I want to talk about three cases in which I think it's okay and even good to purposefully procrastinate. So let's get started. The first thing is impact timing. Now, I call this impact timing because sometimes we are trying to accomplish something or we have an action planned and we get more information after we've planned it about how the timing of that action is going to affect the project or the desired outcome.
For example, let's say that you had a gift for somebody that you really cared about. You know, just thinking of you and wanting to get you something and you were going to give it to them at a particular time. But then you notice that they're preoccupied and busy and you think, you know, I'd rather give this to you and we have a minute and you can really enjoy it.
I think in a case where the impact will be greater at a different time, you want to be intuitive and time that impact to where it gets the desired results. So you may want to procrastinate the action of that thing until you can have the greatest impact, which is what I would call impact timing. So look for the timing of that impact and ask yourself, is now the best time?
And if not, maybe I can choose a better time later and I will get more for the effort. The second thing is what I'm going to call priority spotting. Now, this is really important, and if you're not familiar with the idea of priority, go back and listen to our episode on priority. I think it's really important for you to be aware of what your priority is in your day and your action.
And it doesn't matter if well, today you're working on a project that is very high priority. Or maybe you want to say today, you know, I'm with my family or and my family is high priority. You want to identify what is the priority in this scenario and say sometimes you can replace the current plan or the current action with something that's even higher priority.
Now, don't confuse this with something that feels more urgent. This is a really important distinction because sometimes we make our decisions based on that outside pressure to do a thing. That is not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is to look at what you have on your schedule and maybe you receive new information that indicates to you that there is a higher priority objective you could be putting your time into.
And these other things you had initially planned, they really could wait. Maybe they're not time sensitive and maybe they're not as important as the thing which has just come up in an easy example of that is, you know, if you were forced into a situation where there was an emergency, let's say you get a call and someone you really cared about had been in an accident, you might suddenly in your mind be able to re categorize your priorities in that moment and say, Well, I thought I had important work to do today, but I am not going to do that.
I'm going to go and be with this person. I care about. That is when our brain just kicks in for us and automatically reprioritize. But on a smaller and less urgent scale, I think there are ways you can be doing that on a daily basis to identify the really high value things, the things you care about, the things that impact your life the most, and sometimes procrastinate those lower value things that could be done any time they don't have to be right now.
And then the third thing is contemplating commitment. Now, I'm going to do something that might sound a little weird right off the bat. I'm going to tell you commitment. Maybe you should be a little hesitant on the commitment in some cases. So, for example, if you go shopping for a car, you know, historically, the classic idea of a car salesman is this person who is there on the lot to high pressure you into a purchase you're going to make today.
And maybe you've gone into this thinking, well, I really do need to make a purchase today. You know, I need to get this thing and maybe you're set to do it. But I would say contemplate your commitments if the thing you're about to do is going to engage you in some sort of a long term or high risk endeavor.
You may put that decision off for a little bit. And here is why. Just based on your mood, your activities, the information you have in that moment, maybe you don't have all the right data or maybe you're really not in a good headspace to be making this big life decision yet maybe somebody just proposed you or, you know, handed you a ring, or maybe you've been given a job offer.
And at first glance you think, absolutely, that's what I want to do. I would say maybe stop for a second, put that off for a minute. Let that commitment percolate in your mind. If that is something that you can do, maybe there's a deadline. But I would say for commitments, sometimes procrastinating, the decisions will help. Things bubbled to the surface that make better decision making.
So, for example, we might rethink how much money do I have in the bank? Maybe I don't need to make that purchase. How much do I really want to do this thing? Maybe that's not where I should be spending my time. Now, again, I want to caution you this can very easily be confused with overthinking, and that's not what I'm encouraging you to do.
I'm not encouraging you to sit around all day and not do things because you're thinking too hard about how important they might be in the long term. You want to be able to do things right. You want to be able to do things. We just don't want to jump in blind into big commitments. So when we are encouraged to do a thing, think about a salesman coming in, knocking on your door with a product.
You're probably not going to buy that right away. And that's a good thing because you don't know this person. You don't understand the product. When you have limited information and you're contemplating a big commitment, I think it's okay in most cases to procrastinate that decision and try to accumulate more information and maybe you can think of other really useful places you could procrastinate.

I would love to hear your comments on where do you think it's okay to procrastinate and win? On the other hand, do you think procrastination is really hurting your daily productivity or your your intentional time? I'd love to hear your feedback, your comments or criticisms. You can email me at [email protected] and I'll see you next time.

You're listening to the Uppercase Life or we don't wait for greatness we created. And I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. 

Some of you out there are listening to this right now and are in a state of feeling overwhelmed. And I'm going to define overwhelmed by the feeling that you are in over your head and you don't have the ability to rescue yourself in this moment.
Overwhelmed comes from a nautical idea. If you can just make a mental picture of high waves and rough seas and being stranded out there in the water with no sight of land and feeling as though each new wave is just coming over your head. You can't stay above the water. You can't catch your breath, and there's just no way out of this.
That is the summary of where we came up with this word and this idea of being overwhelmed. The end result of being overwhelmed for too long is that you just drowned in a very realistic sense. And I think when we're in the middle of trying something difficult or in a task or an endeavor that we feel incapable of completing, it does feel in a way like we are drowning in our life.
So I want to talk about what do you do when you recognize that feeling of being overwhelmed? How do you identify it and what steps do you take once you've identified it? In research, we've determined that, you know, some of the prolonged states of being overwhelmed come with just high anxiety, with being agitated or angry for reasons you don't know why, we're feeling extremely lethargic, like you don't want to get out of your house or you don't want to wake up in the morning.
Maybe it just feels like everything is too much. These are some signs that maybe you're dealing with this sense of being overwhelmed. So what do you do? What can we do when we are overwhelmed by the situations we face in life? Well, first thing I want to encourage you to do is pause. Pause. Now, this might seem elementary, but look, when you identify that there is a problem, let's say that you were driving a vehicle and suddenly you heard a very disturbing sound coming from your car and you don't know what it is.
We don't want to continue working on it as if everything is fine. We want to acknowledge something is not right here and we need to stop for a second and we need to assess the situation. So when you realize I am feeling overwhelmed, take a short pause, because if you determine you are just going to plow through that moment, what you may do is inadvertently go further down the wrong path.
Maybe you were doing something which is causing damage to your situation, and this feeling of being overwhelmed is an indicator of that. So take a pause and don't stop everything you're doing in life necessarily. But you need to take at least a few minutes out and assess the situation. In addition to pausing, the first thing I would tell you is you need to check your perspective.
Now, if you look up advice on being overwhelmed, the first thing you're going to see is people telling you, Well, you're doing too much and you need to say no to more things. And I'm going to tell you, I disagree with that. I don't think that that is always the case. I think that sometimes we are not overwhelmed because actually the waves in life are too high for us.
Sometimes we are overwhelmed because of our perspective. So you've paused. Now I want you to check your perspective. I want you to see what is it that I'm feeling? What am I thinking of this situation right now? And is my perspective accurate? And in order to assess that realistically, you might need to bring someone else into the situation who does not share your perspective.
Someone who can look at it, listen to your explanation in the way that you're feeling about it, and who can give you feedback realistically. The reason this is important is because overwhelmed is a feeling. It may be an indication that you are doing too much. It may be, but it may not be because it is a feeling and not a fact.
And so we want to check that feeling against reality and see, is our perspective accurate in this scenario? So you've pause. You're looking at your perspective. The next thing I want you to do is look at your plan, and this might be a good time to ask. You do have a plan, right? Because the fastest way to feeling overwhelmed is to not have a plan, to not have any idea of what it takes to accomplish this.
How long it requires and how you're going to go about doing that. So make sure you do have a plan in place. You've got things that you're working towards and hopefully you understand what they are and how you're hoping to achieve them in your plan might need to change. If you're feeling overwhelmed, maybe after pausing and reflecting a little bit, you realize things are not going according to plan.
Something is flawed in the plan here, and maybe we need to rethink the plan. If I just plow on down this path of doing what I'm doing while feeling overwhelmed, maybe what I'm doing is ineffective and my plan requires some tweaking. So look at your plan. Are you following the plan? Is the plan a good plan? Is it still working?
Does it need some change? Your plan is going to be the number one thing that helps keep that anxiety away. Because, look, if you know the direction you're going, you might be further away than you want to be from the destination. But at least you have an idea of how to get there. If you were out in the middle of that ocean of whatever your task is and you don't know how to get out of it and you don't have a plan, you have to make one.
Otherwise, you could be going in circles out there and you could be spending a lot of energy and not getting a lot of return on that energy to make sure that your plan is good. And there again, you might want to bring someone else in to look at it and give you their opinion to make sure that that plan is going to be effective.
So we've paused. We've checked our perspective. We've checked the plan. Now I want to check our performance. And here's where I'm going to challenge you when you talk about being overwhelmed and you express the difficulties of life, a lot of times what's going to happen is people are going to relate to that. They're going to encourage you to get out of that.
They're going to encourage you to relax more. And maybe those are good suggestions. But let's just be honest. Sometimes we don't want to have to do the hard thing. Sometimes we get into something and we really want the end results of it, but we don't want the actual sweat and the difficulty involved with accomplishing it. And we got to be realistic.
If we're not performing well, then we're not going to be able to efficiently account the things in our plan, and we're going to start feeling behind. We're going to start feeling overwhelmed. And the truth is, we just need to perform at a higher level. Now, that doesn't mean that you just take things as they are and you try harder.
I wouldn't say that that's the best way to go about it. I would say that you want to check what is your body feeling? What is your brain feeling? Are you operating at peak performance levels? You're going to try to do something hard here. Are you functioning well? Are you drinking enough water? Are you eating at the proper times every day?
Are you getting proper nutrition into your body? Are you getting out? Are you getting sunshine? Fresh air? Are you moving? Are you exercising? All of these things. Even if your job is in front of a computer for 6 to 8 hours a day, all of these things are really vital to helping your body and your mind perform at peak levels.
If you're not doing these things, if you're eating a bunch of junk food, if you're sleep, schedule is way off. If you are not taking care of the resources inside of your body, your performance is going to drop. And then in a in a sort of weird cycle, you're going to be pushed into more of those bad habits.
You're going to feel like, well, I'm really busy now...

You're listening to the uppercase life where we are doing our best to be doing our best. And I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. 

You know, for a lot of what we do in life, there are definite start and end moments. And you have a task list. You check things off the projects. Eventually close and you shut everything down. But then there are some really long term endeavors.
There are some big commitments that you make in life that may not have such a neat ending. Maybe they have no foreseeable ending, and they are just what appears to be indefinite. And when you hear that you may have a resistance in your mind and think, well, I don't want any indefinite obligations, I wouldn't take those on. That just sounds like a bad idea.
And I think well, for most things, that's true. And if you were just signing up for something with no intent of ever finishing it for a lot of things, that would be a bad situation. But there are other other things in your life that require that long term commitment and thinking of things like family, things like careers, things like roads to recovery.
If you're struggling with addiction and these things don't really have a foreseeable expiration date, you're just jumping into this and you're planning to do this for the foreseeable future. If you have ever stood at the altar and gotten married to a significant other, you probably made some sort of really long term commitment. And I bet you didn't put a time on it.
Right. And you probably didn't say for the next five years at least. And then after that, we'll see. No, we commit to these things long term, but then sometimes we get into them and we think, wow. Forever is a long is a long time. So how do you stay motivated? How do you stay everyday really invested in enjoying long term commitments?
Here are some ways. I think you can do that. These are attitudes you can take that will help you in these long term commitments to not lose joy over time and also help you to just continue to be invested and not be bored. We have a pretty short attention span these days and we like to be jumping on to the next thing as soon as possible, and it's only getting more and more that way.
The more that our media and the things that we intake are very fast and rapid paced, and yet there are still some long term commitments we're taking in. It's it feels harder now to do them. So here are a couple of thoughts for you. First of all, and this might sound weird, but wear it like a badge. And here's what I mean by that.
And I'm going to draw for this one off of the recovery community. So when you are a struggling addict and you're recovering, you might go to a group, you might be acknowledged in that group, and you might start on a journey of saying, I'm going to be sober from whatever. The thing was that you were struggling with addiction from.
And you're going to identify as an addict who is now going to be sober. Now, when does sobriety end? Well, hypothetically, never. Right. You're constantly on that journey for the rest of your life, which is a really long time. But you aren't encouraged to disguise that fact. In fact, part of being able to see the journey through is acknowledging it and saying, Yeah, that's me.
This is what I'm doing. I'm not ashamed of it. I'm not trying to hide it from the world. This is a part of my experience and this is a part of my identity where it's like a badge. And I think when you when you do that, say you stand up in front of an altar and you get married.
You put it on your finger. Most of the time, you literally wear it like a badge so that you can show people here, look, I've made a long term commitment to somebody. I'm no longer on the market. I'm not available anymore. I think wearing it like a badge is very important. It ties it in to our identity and it says to the world, I'm not ashamed of this, and maybe this isn't the choice that you guys have made, but I've made it, and I'm seeing this through and I'm actually quite happy about it.
I think that that self-talk and saying this is something I am proud of, I want people to see this about me is really important because it ties it into your identity and makes you feel a sense of pride for what you're trying to accomplish. And then the second thing, learn to level it up. I mean, nobody wants to play a game in which you never improve.
If you're playing a video game or if you're playing a board game, you constantly want something else, right? You want to get to the next level. You want to get more coins or something like that. So how can you level up in your long term endeavors? And I think this is where in particular when I think about marriage, this hits me.
I think a lot of times people are trying to level it up to find a partner and then they get married and they stop trying to level it up because they think, well, it's over, game's over. But I think what a sad way to look at your life, right? Like, game's not over now. You got to level it up from here.
So that doesn't mean sit on a couch and get fat because there's nothing left to do. It means, how can I take this endeavor to the next level? How can I make this even more awesome? Which for me, isn't that hard to do because I know more today than I did yesterday, so I should be able to improve it, right?
In what ways can you level up some of your long term endeavors, maybe in your career path? You're looking ahead and thinking this career is going to see me through the rest of my life. Perhaps. How can you learn a new skill? How can you take the skills you have to the next level? How can you use them creatively to enhance that vocational realm and just benefit everyone involved?
Level it up. All right. Number three. Recognize the mile markers? I've been on some really long road trips. We traveled a lot when I was a kid. And as a kid, you just think that the trip will never end. And, you know, there's that cliche of the kids always asking, how much longer are we there yet? And I think as a kid, I recall that we didn't have GPS, but my dad taught me how to read mile markers.
And so if I knew where we were on the highway, I could calculate how far we'd already gone by the mile markers, and then I could see where we were to the next place that we were going. Now, the journey never really ends, right? You're always driving somewhere new the next day, but in this way, watching the mile markers, there's this sense of motion, motion, motion, motion, motion and movement where I just sort of squish those two words together.
And it came out as motion. I'm going to use that. So you have motion and movement that you can sense by the mile markers, which is vital in a long term endeavor, because sometimes, man, you get on that highway and you're driving and you have 400 miles to go and it feels like hours have passed and all you see is the same highway.
But if you're watching those mile markers, you know, I'm a little further down this road. I am making progress and that's really vital. So how can you look for mile markers in your long term endeavors? And it might be different depending on what endeavor we're talking about, but make sure that you can find and identify ways to show how far you've gone.
Maybe they're natural. Maybe you just have reoccurring reminders of how far you've gone. I have been trying to learn a language and have been using the Duolingo app along with YouTube and everything else. But the app tracks how many days in a row I have been learning in, and so I can see that number of days and it makes me feel a sense of accomplishment and it reminds me how much effort and time I put into this.
I also use habit trackers so I can go in at the end of the day and track my habits for the day to just see how frequently I'm doing these things in. Man, when you go back and you look at a tracked series of habits over the course of two, three, four years, that is really revealing. And it'...