Josh Allred's Blog

Recently, a parent ask me How do you recognize when you are becoming prideful?

It’s important to see that with every interaction our status is always moving up or down.

How we choose to play those status roles is based on the internal dialogue we have of ourselves and others.

We are amplifying a story.

Shame sounds something like, “I am a mistake” or “I am a failure”. When we receive a compliment, we immediately put ourselves down.

While pride, subtly discounts the efforts of others while lifting our own. “It’s no big deal” and “It’s just one time”.

It’s everywhere.

The question isn’t How do you recognize when you are too prideful? No, the question is, How are you keeping score?

Did you help someone do something they could never do on their own?

What kind of important, scary work are you doing that might fail?

What are you doing to matter?

In other words, are you playing the infinite game?

Because if you are playing for awards, accolades, recognition, reassurance, title, paycheck, artifacts…you are playing the wrong game.

If the foundation is off, everything else is out of order.

The mistake isn’t when we spill milk.

Everyone spills milk.

The mistake is when we choose not to do anything about it.

(Of course, I am not talking about spilling actual milk on the floor.)

When you have to make a lot of decisions, the ability to make decisions goes down.

The harder the decisions you have to make, the amount of decisions you can make goes down too.

This is the crux for anyone challenging their status quo.

The good news is, that when you have to make fewer decisions (that are particularly easier to make), you keep enough willpower in reserve to change things.

[I often talk about investing in freeing up time but what I am really talking about is freeing up cognitive load to unlock more willpower to do important work you were meant to do.]

When the system is not working, are you willing to abandon it?

Unfortunately, most of us choose to resuscitate it before completely abandoning the path we have chosen.

Why?

Because sunk costs are hard to confront.

We’ve spent so much time, energy, money into a project, we’ve grown so attached to a specific outcome.

When the system isn’t working, it’s worth asking:

Does putting in more time/energy/resources/capitol make this better?

It’s cheaper to recognize when you are defeated.

In 1987, Ellen Langer published a research study about the power of the word “because”.

That simply using the word because dramatically improves compliance.

“Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the xerox machine?” (60% compliance)

“Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the xerox machine, because I have to make copies?” (93% compliance)

“Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?” (94% compliance)

This is what 200 years of the industrial education complex has created—compliant cogs to fit into a system.

Interchangeable parts and interchangeable people.

Why do you think there are so many self-help books on the subject of finding your passion?

It’s because (see I just used it there) we are not used to leading. We are used to asking, “Will this be on the test?”

And so, when we leave school many are left asking, “Where should I go? What should I do?”

There are many answers. Waiting to be told what to do next isn’t going to help us get to the places we want to go.

Is working through this false notion that we are all static.

The fact is, people are much more elastic than they think.

We can adapt, we can grow, we can stretch beyond what we can imagine.

Change is possible.

We lack so much faith, but it’s possible for ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

When you can’t decide what to order for lunch, you don’t sit there and mull over it for hours on end. You don’t order two entrees, you don’t hesitate or freeze.

You just pick.

And yet, this is so difficult to do on the more meaningful parts of our lives.

Should I start a business? Look for a new job? Go back to school? Start a blog?

Simply pick.

Pick something and see what happens.

Choose your love and love your choice.

A checklist is a game.

A game that we all play and try to manipulate to win.

We start the day off with a list of things to do and with roughly 16 to 18 hours to do it.

The funny thing is, that tomorrow that checklist of things to do fills back up again.

You will never win the game by doing more.

But perhaps, you can win by doing less.

That by doing less you don’t immediately fill it back up.

By doing less sends the signal that you are not filling your list of things to do with urgent emergencies but with important work that takes time to complete.

Less is more.

Finish high school. Check.

Go to college. Check.

Graduate college. Check.

Find a job. Check.

Be happy? …

Achieving goals doesn’t equate to happiness.

We have become so goal-oriented, checkbox focused, that we forget that the goal isn’t what this journey is all about.

Yes, you should set goals. But we shouldn’t get sucked into thinking that by completing the next thing on our to-do list that we will somehow be fulfilled.

Focus on performance, not the goal.

200 years ago, if you lived in Sweden one and four of the children you had were likely to die before the age of five.

Globally, at the time, that was actually low. In fact, 43% of the world’s newborns died before their fifth birthday.

Fast forward to today, having a child die before the age of five is very rare.

This is just one of the great byproducts that industrialism has brought to the table—massive amounts of technology, innovation and wealth that has created prosperity.

We are all benefitting from it. So much so, we forget how harsh this world really was before it.

Industrialism is the closest shot we have to tame this world.

Despite the problems that industrialism has created in our time, I wouldn’t trade them for any other time period. If we are virtually going to rid of fatalities before the age of five in our lifetime, what else could we do?

We have all the tools and we are quite capable of solving complex challenges going forward.