Creating Your Best Life

That’s from chapter #2: “What’s All the Fuss About Happiness, Anyway?”

The answer to that rhetorical question? Happiness matters. In fact, Caroline tells us that learning how to become “even a little bit happier can have a massive impact on your success.”

Here’s a SUPER quick look at how to dial in each of the “Big Four”...

Optimize your Optimism with Ideas from Learned Optimism and this +1 on Failure Is a L-I-E.

Take your Self-Confidence to the next level by watching Confidence 101 and Antifragility 101 and have fun with all our mental toughness books.

Optimize your Extroversion by knowing that you don’t need to be an “extrovert” per se but YOU DO need to know that happy people have great relationships. So... Get out there and invest in those relationships!

And... Optimize your Self-Efficacy with this +1 on The Science of Self-Efficacy and rewatch Confidence 101 and Antifragility 101 for bonus points. :)

The “Big Four”: Optimism. Self-Confidence. Extroversion. Self-Efficacy.

What’s working and what needs a little work? And, most importantly (as always!), what’s ONE THING you know you can do to optimize one of those qualities TODAY?

That’s from chapter #6: “Willpower: Why You Must Say No Sometimes.”

Willpower. As we’ve discussed many times, it’s one of THE greatest predictors of success.

In Flourish, Martin Seligman tells us: “Self-discipline outpredicts IQ for academic success by a factor of 2.”

In Willpower, Roy Baumeister tells us: “Improving willpower is the surest way to a better life.”

Then there’s Walter Mischel. He’s the guy who ran the famous “Marshmallow Test” (check out the Notes on his book) in which he offered little kids the choice to have ONE marshmallow now or TWO marshmallows later if they could just wait 15 minutes.

The kids who could delay their gratification in that simple little experiment, outperformed the kids who *couldn’t* on the SAT a decade later and on basically EVERY OTHER measure in the decades that followed.

Here’s how Mischel puts it: “The more seconds they waited at age four or five, the higher their SAT scores and the better their rated social and cognitive functioning in adolescence. At age 27-32, those who had waited longer during the Marshmallow Test in preschool had a lower body mass index and a better sense of self-worth, pursued their goals more effectively, and coped more adaptively with frustration and stress. At midlife, those who could consistently wait (‘high delay’), versus those who couldn’t (‘low delay’), were characterized by distinctively different brain scans in areas linked to addictions and obesity.”

Good news: You CAN improve your willpower/self-discipline/self-control.

Check out the Notes on each of those books I referenced above along with our Willpower 101 and Habits 101 classes for more. And... We have a ton of other Notes in both our “Willpower” and “Habits” categories in our Heroic app.

For now... What’s ONE THING you KNOW you could start doing TODAY that would most help you move from Theory to Practice to Mastery?

Get on that, Hero!

That’s from a chapter called “Life-Changing Goals” in which Caroline challenges some of the accepted wisdom around “SMART” goals and backs up her challenges with the SCIENCE that tells us how to set the most powerful (life-changing!) goals.

She follows that passage up with “a story about a goal that appeared to be unrealistic, but that simply turned out to be ‘challenging and specific’:

When Michael Phelps, one of the greatest swimmers in history, was just a tadpole, his coach, Bob Bowman, called his parents into his office for a goal-setting session. Bowman outlined an audacious training plan for the next few years that eventually resulted in the attainment of an Olympic medal in Phelps’s teen years. Phelps was only eleven at the time of the goal-setting conversation, however, so his astonished parents just looked at the coach and openly questioned his sanity. Bowman, who had a history of recognizing excellence, said that his goals might seem unrealistic at the moment, but that they were definitely something he felt would guide the talented young boy, and not intimidate him. To his credit, the young Phelps adopted these goals as his own, and actually accomplished all of them before Bowman’s predicted timeline, proving that some goals that appear to be unrealistic are simply challenging goals that demand that we give them everything we’ve got.”

As I read that I thought of a few things and people...

First, I thought of Michael Phelps and his book No Limits in which he walks us through HOW he achieved all the things he achieved with his Heroic coach, Bob Bowman.

Phelps tells us: “Bob is exquisitely demanding. But it is with him that I learned this essential truth: Nothing is impossible.”

Then I thought of Heidi Grant Halvorson and wisdom from her great book on the science of goal setting called Succeed.

I also thought of the #1 thing she says the most successful people in the world do differently. In THE most popular blog post in Harvard Business Review’s history (see 9 Things Successful People Do Differently), she tells us that THE #1 thing they do is set SPECIFIC goals. (Do you?)

btw: In her great book by the same name, she summarizes all NINE things by telling us: “Successful people set very specific goals and seize opportunities to act on them (using strategies like if-then planning). They always know how far they have to go and stay focused on what still needs to be done. They believe they will succeed, but embrace the fact that success will not come easily. They remember that it’s about making progress, rather than doing everything perfectly right out the gate. They believe that they can develop their abilities through effort, which makes them gritty in the face of setbacks and challenges. They build their willpower through frequent exercise, make plans for how to cope when willpower is low, and try not to put themselves in situations where temptations abound. They focus on what they will do, rather than what they won’t do.”

Finally, I thought of the great peak performance guru, Dr. Bob Rotella. In How Champions Think, he echoes this wisdom when he tells us that one of the biggest challenges he faces is getting people to THINK AND DREAM BIGGER.

Here’s how Rotella puts it: “The average person won’t set a goal unless he thinks, and people close to him think, that he has at least a fifty-fifty chance of reaching it. That’s what the average person considers a realistic goal.”

And: “The exceptional person, the person who does great things, doesn’t see things that way. The exceptional person has a vision—of great performances, of a great career, of a great something—and doesn’t care about what others might say or think. He ignores information that suggests his dream is unrealistic. He just sets about making that vision a reality.”

Spotlight on YOU! What do you REALLY REALLY REALLY want in your life? Remember that science says we want to set “CHALLENGING” and “SPECIFIC” goals for yourself. Then we want to WOOP it... Know the price you’ll need to pay. Then get busy paying it. TODAY.

Want to TRIPLE your success? Use “if-then” statements.

Scientists call these “implementation intentions.” A guy named Peter Gollwitzer came up with them. He’s married to my friend Gabriele Oettingen who wrote another one of my favorite positive psychology books called Rethinking Positive Thinking.

Implementation intentions are, essentially, the ‘P = Plan” in Gabriele’s brilliant WOOP model that has been scientifically shown to help us make our dreams a reality.

To recap: We start with a Wish. Then we think about the Outcome (or benefits). Then we see the potential Obstacles. THEN we create a Plan with “if-then” statements to dominate the obstacles.

Note: We have an entire class called “Algorithms 101” and we spend a TON (!!!) of time in our 300-day Heroic Coach certification program on helping you master the process of writing these if-then statement-algorithms to help you change your life and... TRIPLE your success.

That’s from a chapter called “You Gotta Have Grit.”

Quick story... I can vividly remember when I was first introduced to Caroline and her work. It was a few days after the Thomas Fire in December 2017. That fire forced us to evacuate our home in Ojai, California for a few weeks and it would have completely wiped out that great little town if it wasn’t for the Heroic efforts of the fire crews that stepped up to save the day.

Emerson was 5 years old. Eleanor was almost 2 years old. I saw Caroline’s book Getting Grit on the stand in the spa at the hotel we were staying/living at. I figured the time was right to get some grit (it always is but... hah!) and LOVED IT. Check out the Notes on that book for more.

And, of course, check out our Notes on Angela Duckworth’s great book, Grit. btw: Angela says: “I don’t know anybody who has thought more than Caroline Miller about how to apply the scientific research on grit and achievement to our own lives.”

For now, know that, as Caroline says in *this* book: “There are many ways you can build grit. Here are some of the best ideas from top researchers in the field: Don’t be a quitter, be around gritty people, work on optimism, read biographies or stories about gritty people, pursue something with passion, don’t shrink from challenges, and don’t allow failure or criticism to define you.”

Note: As I read that list, I thought of a chat I had with Tal Ben-Shahar in which he told me that he thinks BIOGRAPHIES are the best self-development books you can read!

With that super-quick look at a great book, I say... Here’s to creating our best lives as we optimize our Big Four (optimism, self-confidence, extroversion, and self-efficacy!), cultivate our willpower, set some life-changing goals (specific and challenging!), and triple our success with if-then implementation intentions as we get our grit on... TODAY!