Art of Accomplishment

Authenticity Over Improvement

46 min read

Summary

Joe and Brett explore the distinction between self-improvement and authenticity. Improvement is conditional—“if I get X, then I’ll be Y”—while authenticity is a process of self-discovery that naturally creates growth without forcing it. Like a river that finds its own course, authenticity is constantly changing but has a natural flow.

Joe tells the story of the musk deer that spends its life searching for a beautiful scent, only to discover at the moment of death that the scent emanated from itself. This is the movement of self-realization: what we’re looking for through all our self-improvement is actually ourselves. He shares his own journey from smoking (which he tried to “improve” away for years) to hacky sacking (which his nature drew him to), only to discover decades later that hacky sacking was the precise neurological therapy he needed.

The episode extends into business, describing how companies that hook into authentic human desires (like a Dutch nursing company focused on patient self-reliance rather than efficiency metrics) massively outperform improvement-driven cultures. The fear of stagnation—the worry that without improvement we’ll stop growing—actually invites the very stagnation it fears. Life can’t stop moving.

Key Concepts

Key Quotes

“We think that there’s an authentic self and it is the solid thing, but it’s not. It’s as we discover ourselves there’s always more to discover and as we discover ourselves we transform. So authenticity is really a path more than a destination.”

“All the ways we think we need to improve is all the ways that we don’t love ourselves just as we are.”

“The fear of stagnation invites stagnation. The fear of loss invites loss. The fear of abandonment invites abandonment.”

“Try to not improve for a week. Go take two weeks and do your best to not improve. Don’t learn anything, don’t grow, don’t have any realizations… like I told someone to do that once and they were like, oh my God, so many recognitions, so much realization, because they stopped trying.”

“Wanting is critical. What you want is really inconsequential.”

“It feels like faith until you get used to reading the river.”

Transcript

I will watch people and they if they’re just following their intuition man they will just pick the next thing and this is what we do when we’re when we’re just following our nature my nature my authenticity improved me in ways that I didn’t even know were happening welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease I’m Brett kler here today with my co-host Joe h

when we consider how we want life to be in the future we often create a list of things that we have to improve about ourselves yet we rarely consider that we could succeed in improving every aspect of our lives and by doing so completely lose touch with who we are and what we want what if learning who we are creates a future far better than what we think we want What If it creates a future better than what we could imagine today’s episode is about valuing authenticity over Improvement

so Joe let’s talk about authenticity what is authenticity authenticity is it’s an endless spiral in in one way in the fact that it’s like it is evolutionary by Nature we think that there’s an authentic self and it is the solid thing but it’s not it’s like it’s as we discover ourselves there’s always more to discover and as we discover ourselves we transform so authenticity is really a path more than a destination and and the way that you can identify when you’re on that path of authenticity is it’s always about the process it’s never about the reward and it’s never like a means to an end it’s like a river it’s it’s a it’s very much like a river in the fact that there’s a way that a river wants to run and that’s the natural flow of the river and next year you’ll come back and that River will run a different way so authenticity is constantly changing but there’s just this natural flow to it you know da ISM they call it the way um it’s just this very it’s the very natural course and they call it self-discovery they don’t call it like self like building you know we’re not building ourselves we’re discovering ourselves and and that’s why ultimately the path of authenticity is a path of self-realization it is finding out the truth of who you are and somehow for some reason the more we discover who we are the more that we evolve the more that we we change the more that we show up in a way that is um far more gentle or loving and confident and capable and strong can you talk a little bit more about self-realization

yeah self-realization there’s there’s a story of um there’s this I think it’s in like the aaads I think um I can’t remember which tradition so many times Traditions have really similar Parables there’s a another Parable very much like this about a tiger um but this one’s about a musk deer and this musk deer is like moving along one day and they and it smells it smells and there’s a smell and it’s like what is that smell and it just feels like a memory it feels like a calling it’s like something gets opened up in this muster and this impulse is like I need to follow this thing I need to follow it and it goes searching for the place the where the scent emerges it wants to find the that scent and the origin of that scent and so it looks and looks and looks and looks and it’s like almost upon its death still looking for the scent and falls off of a cliff and punctures it stomach and it realizes at the moment of death that oh the thing that I’ve been searching for comes from me that scent emanates from me and that is the the movement of self-realization is that the thing that we’re looking for in all the self-improvement what we’re actually looking for is ourselves so how how can you relate the uh the story of the deer following and so and scent to our path of self-realization the search of the deer looking for the scent is is the self-improvement it’s like once I eat the right diet then I’ll be good enough or I’ll be awake or then I’ll be loved or once I look pretty then I’ll be good enough and then I’ll be loved once I lose enough weight once I um you know meditate enough once I um have no more negative thoughts whatever the hell once I stop thinking whatever it is that you think you have to do you know become rich enough and then you’ll then you’ll have it and you’ll you’ll find the scent that you’re looking for but the scent you’re actually looking for is you it is to understand yourself and it’s the only thing that really solves the issue and it’s why you see so many Executives and I’ve worked with so many Executives who are at the top of their game they’ve made this successful billion dollar company and they’re miserable and they they they did everything that they thought they needed to do to improve themselves so that they will be loved or that they would accept themselves and nothing’s really changed and as soon as they start on that path of selfrealization as soon as they are looking for their own authenticity and they no longer are willing to sell that authenticity or bargain that authenticity for a result is when it stops becoming a means to an end and it just is like this is my authentic expression then their life starts unfolding in happiness and joy

right so let’s talk a little bit more about that that scent Trail then what how would you define Improvement yeah Improvement is basically if this than this right like it’s in in terms of the self so it’s like if I get sexy enough then I will have the lover that I want if I lose enough weight then people will like me if I have enough money then I’ll feel secure it’s anything that is Improvement is like thinking that you’re going to get a result from it and authenticity is the opposite so it’s this is what I’m going to do despite the consequences because it’s my authentic truth so that’s that’s basically what Improvement comes and it and it comes from the idea of ways that we don’t want to be who we are right it’s it’s the other way to look at all the ways we think we need to improve is all the ways that we don’t love ourselves just as we are and any point where you can’t Unconditionally Love Yourself whether that is because you yell because you don’t work hard enough because you’re lazy because you’re a pessimist whatever it is that you are telling yourself that you have to change it they’re just ways that you’re not loving yourself and they don’t typically change and we just keep on telling ourselves that we don’t love that about ourselves and we keep on telling ourselves that we have to improve it um but when we actually accept our authenticity those things just naturally move they just shift reminds me of a quote that I’ve heard before where like a kid’s asking or like speaking to somebody as though we’re a child and it’s like well there’s a big there’s a question what do you want to be when you grow up um and instead thinking to ask that like how do you want to be yeah when you grow up yeah that’s I have never heard that that’s beautiful yeah how do you want to be when you grow up that’s the the other the other way to think about self-realization is I think it’s a pemma sh quote and she it’s basically constantly offer yourself up to Annihilation so you can find out what’s the part of you that can’t be annihilated and what are we annihilating these these uh like builtup ideas of who we are exactly that’s exactly it the things that we think we are that we have to defend you can tell them because you’re defending them it’s like when someone’s like well you didn’t do that very well and you go then you are defining yourself as somebody who’s competent and you’re not able to love the incompetent part of yourself and authenticity is you know this is what’s this is how I’m competent this is how I’m incompetent and being able to own that and then in the owning of the lack of competence becomes more competence you know it’s like this thing where often times with Executives I’m helplessness is this big thing where they feel it authentically they feel helpless but to allow themselves to feel helpless is incredibly difficult because the fear is if I allow myself to feel helpless then I will become more helpless but if they authentically if they authentically own their helplessness then they become less helpless I think there’s also a fear of being seen as help then too that’s right fearing that there will be consequences to that that’s how you know also that part of yourself that needs needs wants to be destroyed it’s the part of yourself that doesn’t want to be seen in that way whatever that way is I don’t want to be seen as blank a hypocrite I don’t want to be seen as a as helpless I don’t want to be seen as greedy whatever it is that you don’t want to be seen I don’t want to be seen as weak

so how how would you separate improvement from from growth because even even this process of finding our authenticity you can get better at it what is that if not Improvement and don’t we kind of need some some form of improvement like whether we’re tracking our growth in some way to see what the trajectory is going yeah the question is like what would make you need it like like what will happen if you don’t have it I think that’s where the the key is the key is you know does growth happen absolutely like if I look at I always use this metaphor of an oak tree because when I look out my window there’s an oak tree and and the it’s like the oak tree grows the growth happens does it need to no is it looking to improve itself no it’s just it’s nature our authenticity another way to think of our authenticity is our nature and our nature is to grow our nature is to improve our nature is to learn if you take a little kid when they’re like just really when they’re babies they can’t even walk one of the things that they smile most at is when a face comes at them sideways not when a face comes at them straight up and down straight up and down face is the face that they see right before they feed and that doesn’t make them smile as much as a sideways face which means oh we’re here to play and play for a kid is learning and we have this natural desire to learn it is authentic in us we have a natural desire to grow it’s authentic in us and it so it just all happens very very naturally but it’s when you think you have to improve to be good enough for when it’s not just the nature of your life and you look at a six-year-old kid they’re constantly wanting to learn and grow like and it doesn’t stop it doesn’t stop unless someone has kicked the love of learning out of us it just keeps going so I don’t think we have a need to do it I think the the thing is is that Improvement is Just Happening happening naturally and that’s authenticity but if you are looking to improve yourself then you are you know putting the breakes on the process and you’re often going in the the opposite direction of the river

how do we address the that fear of becoming stagnant if we don’t improve yeah or just to to be measuring you know measuring where we’re at and then you know measuring that according to some scale of value that we’ve created yeah that’s a great question oh first of all question your scale that’s the ultimate thing is like like it’s it’s easy to play a game when you have a measurement and it’s hard to play a game when you don’t so if your measurement is for life is how much money I have in the bank well then you can play and if the measurement is how kind I am to people then you can play and then you have something to measure to but if you start really questioning those measurements like what do you mean by kind do you mean having the most positive impact how do you measure positive impact what’s the difference between kind and nice and what if I was you know deeply truthful but I was and kind and why is kind more important than truth so these questions as soon as you start really looking at the the end if you really deeply look at the end then it gets really scary that’s when the stagnation fear really shows up it really shows up when you’re like oh all the progress that I thought I was making might not have been to the right end or maybe there’s no end and this fear sets in like and it’s almost like this fear like it’s going to be nihilistic or something like that but even the idea that it’s nihilistic is just another um it’s like just another way of trying to create meaning out of a situation but the nature of life doesn’t really require meaning there’s no other part of life that requires meaning except for humans so life wants to evolve it wants to grow it wants to improve and it seems as it turns out most humans when they understand themselves more and more there’s a deeper and deeper compassion that shows up there’s a deeper deeper amount of empowerment that shows up and and what you find is the things that you think are opposite such as love and and being empowered they turn out to be the same thing at the Pinnacle of loving is empowerment at the Pinnacle of empowerment is loving and so and you can feel this like if you just stop for a second and close your eyes and you feel what it would be like to Unconditionally Love the world and you just let that settle in your body for a moment and your love is so big and so great that it expands everywhere and it’s not weak love it’s not love like I’m going to let people abuse me it is the kind of love that a mother has that’s a great mother they have boundaries and then you let that go for a second and then feel what it’s like to be completely empowered feel what it would be like to not have to worry at all about the future to not have to prepare to not have to plan to just know that you are capable of handling any situation it be like Superman on a Mountaintop with no Kryptonite in the world or Superwoman on a mountain top with no cryptonite in the world nothing can touch you that feeling of empowerment and then just feel the two next to each other like how are they different if at all this full empowerment and this full love so that’s how it moves and so the stagnation the fear of stagnation the fear of like oh there’s no meaning or there’s no like there’s no place to go and therefore I’ll stop moving it’s it hits the human psyche for sure it’s it’s definitely part of this human psyche at least in the modern world but life doesn’t require any of that stuff life Can’t Stop Moving see I mean just try just try um try to not improve for a week to go take two weeks and do your best to not improve don’t learn anything don’t grow don’t have any realizations don’t have any recognitions like try that for two weeks like I told someone to do that once and they were like oh my God so many recognition so much realization because they stopped trying and and we hear we feel this all the time when we’re on holiday you have two to two weeks off and then you come back and you’re just you perform better it’s smoother the whole thing works better like you make better calls because you you you didn’t improve for two you know because you weren’t actively trying to improve for two weeks this is it’s just the nature of life we we by our nature learn and want to want to grow

yeah something that came up for me in the the exercise that we just did um was that both in the like unconditionally loving the world State and the feeling fully empowered State there wasn’t any fear but the concern of stagnating is just fear and the fear of stagnating is the thing that you know I know for me in my life I’ve spent a lot of time in the fear of stagnation and that has constricted me in those times right and led to stagnation stagnation exactly that’s how it works yeah we invite the things that we’re scared of like that’s that our nature our nature is to invite um if we have a fear of something we’re inviting it in because we want to we want to learn and grow from that experience we want to face that fear so the fear of stagnation invites stagnation the fear of loss invites loss the fear of Abandonment invites abandonment

so let’s let’s try to bring this back into more uh concrete examples to make this real yeah yeah let’s I’ll do a couple of them um let’s take like one one way to look at it is like kids and their learning so kids like we were just talking about their nature is to learn they’re curious that’s what they’re like genetically programmed to do all humans are and somehow or another we can put them into a school system tell them that they have to improve and get A’s and then they stop wanting to learn and then yeah exactly it’s it’s actually happens to some like 47% of like highly int kids they fail High School yeah I did I did like really great in school up until I got an IQ test that told me I was smart and then I got my first B+ and this was like fourth grade and then it was just like you stopped trying to hell with this whole thing yeah there’s a there’s some great psychological tests on this that basically if you tell a kid they’re smart and then they try and they don’t succeed they’ll stop trying because then they will prove that they’re not smart so they’ll just stop trying so they can maintain the identity of smart it’s it’s some fascinating work but yeah that’s an example of it and but now if you take kids who’ve been unschooled there I think it’s called non-schooling or unschooling or something like that where the you know kids have been somewhat traumatized in their school situation so their parents pull them out and they say you know you can’t watch television you can’t you know do things that are destructive but you can not do any work until you’re ready they often times don’t do any work for three months or six months and then all of a sudden they’re like okay I want to work and those kids when they want to learn math they can learn basically fractions to calculus and it’s something insane like three months or like five months or something like that you can read the studies on it because they want to learn because it is their desire to learn in that direction and they want to do it and they will do it so it’s it’s like one is moving with the authenticity of the situation and one is telling the kids that they have to improve to be good enough and and it’s like a punishment and reward situation

so that’s one aspect another another way is like a personal story from my life to think about it is I was in high school and I started smoking cigarettes and I was kind of socially awkward at the time and you know I had issues you know my upbringing was had some turmoil in it and and so I was constantly telling myself I should improve by not smoking I was constantly telling myself that was something that I needed to improve in and then just by Nature you know I got drawn into hacky sacking and I just started to hacky sack all the time and I just really enjoyed hacky sacking and it just kind of became this thing and then about I it’s 10 years ago I was with one of my daughters my daughter’s having some problems in schools and this occupational therapist came to us and they said like oh your daughter has something called like sensory processing disorder and it just basically means that the neurology isn’t really melding the way it it it it would with other kids and it makes you very sensitive to um stimulus through your senses and I said oh how do we solve this thing and she was like oh the way you solve it is through doing um exercises across the midline that require coordination etc etc and hacky would have been a perfect example of that and if you look at me before hacky sacking and after hacky sacking I became socially more fluid I became less sensitive um I you know when you have sensory processing it’s it’s kind of like a a bit of like a nerds disease is like you know more likely to wear glasses you know you you’re kind of awkward and clumsy you don’t do as well socially it’s like that kind of stuff and all that changed with me hacky sacking so my knew what I needed knew what was needed next and did it without anybody telling me to without anything happening and I watch this happen all the time with clients I watch clients all the time like I know basically the dance steps of transformation and there everybody does them a little bit differently and you know sometimes chapter 3 comes before chapter one or whatever but I will watch people and they if they’re following if they’re just following their intuition man and they will just pick the next thing and it’ll it’ll it be like oh my God they picked it perfectly again and this is what we do when we’re when we’re just following our nature and then you know smoking for me on the other hand lasted until I was like 30s you know so you know as a Perpetual habit into my 30s so and that was all the ways I was supposed to improve but my nature my authenticity improved me in ways that I didn’t even know were happening

yeah that’s fascinating I can think of a lot of experiences in my life that are a lot like that you know one of them being joining your 18mth course where I just kind of felt like an intuition it was a you know felt like a lot of money at the time in retrospect it was very little um um but it was just like man I don’t know like this kind of seems like my kind of thing I don’t even know what it is and I didn’t when I got there I was like wait this isn’t really all that business is it yeah and yet it trans formed your business too right which is the insane part yeah that’s the other thing yeah but more than that my wife exactly I mean that’s the insane part like that’s a great example of it as well which is like people come because they often come to me because they want to transform their business and and we transform their life by them taking their natural steps in their business naturally transforms if they would have just focused on their Improvement their business may or may not have transformed and in this way the reason I use this methodology of working on the personal stuff is because that always transforms the business it it has 100% success rate as the person transforms their attitude towards their business will transform and so will their business

so let’s relate all this back into that uh the concept you were talking earlier about self-realization and self-discovery yeah that’s all right so back to my journey let’s let’s do it from my journey for a second so for the early part I got really deeply into Awakening enlightenment in the non-d sense of the word not like woke culture but I’m talking about like the Christ Consciousness um or Enlightenment how how however religious tradition you have has a word for it and at the beginning of that Journey it was I thought it was Improvement that would get me there you know once I was ate the right diet or once I um you know did the right exercises or once I meditated hard enough or blah blah blah I would become enlightened and so that was the Improvement side of things and that is it’s a slow arduous painful process um and it luckily moved enough for me to realize that it wasn’t about Improvement it was just about the recognition of who I am and and when that happened this question appeared to me is what am I was the question I asked that question for 10 years maybe 10 times a day I would ask that question and that is really what transformed everything for me that just being in that question for that long with that level of Wonder transformed everything and it was funny it was a I was seeing a guy at the time one of the I was like reading every non-el teacher I could find as but the only guy that I had met personally who I thought wow this is a person I would want to learn from was a guy named Adia Shante and I got up and asked him a question once in front of this big Auditorium of people and I said I keep on asking this question what am I and all I get is silence and some dude in the back just started laughing and and I was like what why would that’s not funny and AIA smiled and can’t remember what else happened but I remember about like 3 years later I was at a Meditation Retreat when that question what am I faded away and like the question never gets answered it just expires and it expires in a like like a firecracker um but it EXP s and and I was in the back and somebody got up on the front and said you know I asked that question what am I and and nothing and I just started laughing hysterically as if the nothing wasn’t the answer you know and and that’s what it turns into it it it that recognition of self is is something that just unfolds into nothingness and that nothingness is incredibly free and Incredibly potent and capable so who are you now oh yeah that question has expired yeah that’s um there’s a there’ll be an exercise there’s an exercise on this just to like go back and forth and ask somebody what are you over and over again what are you what are you what are you and see what happens is all your answers expire all your answers you know um but if I had to put what am I in words right now which is exciting an exciting thought process um I would say what am I I am infinitely you I am everything and nothing and the silent vastness that everything arises in and so are you

okay so then then what happens once that question exp sounds like there could be a trap here in thinking that this question of who I am has expired and now I don’t have to improve myself and there’s just nothing to do what am I goingon to do just sit in a cave and meditate until yeah yeah there’s a thought that says that that might be the case um you know and in fact some people go through that for a while I think it’s because they they’re like those kids who you know needed to be unschooled for a while when they have that recognition of their their essential self in that way that um that there is this need to just sit there for a while and do nothing um but it becomes a bit disassociative and and eventually um it’s no longer satisfying and and so it just turns out to be we just become more and more human we like to play We like to learn we like to grow it’s our nature it’s our authenticity and so once we have been let out of school and we realize there’s nothing that we have to do to improve ourselves because our Essence is unbelievably beautiful miraculous a dream that we never thought even possible coming true that we couldn’t even have thought of coming true then yeah there’s there’s this natural desire to rest for a while potentially um but eventually you you just you know you want to move you want to dance you want to play you want to be alive and then the journey turns into how do I be alive how does my authenticity really want to be alive how fully can I embrace this life

how you know there’s a book called The unbearable lightness of being which I don’t even know what it’s about but the title is amazing and that’s what it is life becomes how do I allow myself to be more and more vulnerable to the unbearable lightness of being I love that both of us are the kind of person who would recommend a book or reference a book that we haven’t read just ofle title yeah I re I highly recommend that title the title

yeah so it seems like there could be another trap here where like we have these we have somewhere where where we want to go and we’re like oh okay so maybe like improving myself along the you know the particular metrics that I have in mind right now maybe that’s not the best way to get there because authenticity is the best way to get there so if I just get more authentic then I’ll become this thing that I want to be and get to where I want to go yeah that’s right that’s that that is a real trap right so it’s like you’ll see this happen often time in tools you know you get this this tool that you start working with in in the realm of self-discovery and you get this tool and it works really well for a while and then it stops working and some of the times it stops working because you are no you’re using the tool to change yourself instead of love yourself so it stops working and some of the time the rule the tool stops working because you’ve co-opted it into Improvement instead of recognition and it’s really the same thing to improve yourself isn’t to love yourself as you are and to find the authentic expression of you is to love yourself as you are and to know that that authentic expression will naturally change you just like it the natural flow of a river changes the river

and that could mean your goals will shift will shift yeah I I’ve never I’ve seen a lot of things not change as people go through this journey and I’ve seen a lot of things change but I’ve never seen the goals of a person not change through the Journey that always changes and what’s often interesting is the goals that they used to have just get met naturally without any even effort or thought process because they become just a step in in what’s necessary for them to evolve into their authenticity I had a goal for years of having enough money to blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and you know somewhere along the line that I just didn’t care at all about money and then money just started rushing in and that’s a really typical story not always but it’s a very very typical story

so you know we we’ve talked about how having goals is wanting something is is good we just had a whole episode on how what you want how wanting itself is critical but then we’re just talking now about how wanting something from ourselves or wanting something in our future can lead towards this constant improvement process and away from our authenticity what’s you have to say about that yeah yeah so wanting is critical what you want is really inconsequential you know what you want is like directionally correct but it is not the the end all be all of anything so it’s like that wanting is the is what pulls you that wanting is the natural pull of evolution of authenticity that’s what it is what you want is a strategy to get there and there’s 10 or 20 strategies so the the what you want is inconsequential and there’s no reason to attach to it but it is to follow your wanting and then to watch how your wanting changes and H watch how what you want changes

what happens if uh if you’re if you’re going through this process and you’re the things that you want just change so rapidly that your life starts to feel disconnected or disorienting you’re very fortunate you’re G you might feel Disturbed depending on your personality type you know some folks will find that to be a beautiful free ride and some people um will feel like there’s that quote on the song Sometimes falling feels like flying for a little while um and so people will be like Oh I’m flying which means I must be falling but in actuality there’s the the the as they say the good the bad news is you’re falling the good news is there’s no bottom so yeah that that is part of it or roomie called it um a Sufi poet he calls it like a holy confusion that not knowing it’s called the mystery for a reason and so it’s absolutely what happens and the goals shift and then the goals disappear and then there’s like no goals for a while and then after there’s no goals for a while there’s very specific goals and then there’s just like this movement that’s like how do I describe it it’s like the goal is to live principled because you know that living princip lead will make you happier than any goal that you could ever achieve and that’s something that’s entirely within your power too yeah yeah well yeah it it becomes choiceless at a point it becomes outside of your power at some point it’s like I just can’t not live principally because it’s too damn painful

give us give us a another concrete example of how that works when you know what you want is inconsequential but the wanting itself is important yeah I can I can give you a funny one so I’m sitting with um my godson and his father and Father’s been a friend for like since high school and and this story is going to be one of those stories that lets you know like maybe you don’t want to have me as a friend and um so we’re sitting there and we’re having uh lunch together in this restaurant and my friend tells me about how his son stole $50 from him bought a vape pen and was vaping in in a classroom and I I’m just listening and Sons you know in those teenage years and and then all of a sudden um you know five minutes later he says how he’s like the problem you know with my son is that he just doesn’t have you know ambition he just doesn’t want to do anything and I was like what of course he wants to do something do you know how hard it is to do what he did I mean stealing $50 like where like he planned that stuff out that’s ambition then he went did it and then like with the knowledge that he could have gotten caught which is total ambition and then he figured out a way to go buy the vape pen and then he had so much ambition to do it that he did it in a classroom and got caught like you know that is like some CEO level ambition that’s not that like what are you talking about like the the you know you know at this point my friend is looking at me like shut up Joe shut up the son’s looking at me like a smile like oh wow I didn’t know I should have visited my godfather more often and and then I was I was just saying yeah there’s I mean there’s clearly ambition it’s just that you’re want him to be ambitious in one way but he’s ambitious in another let’s look at how he’s ambitious and so started talking to him and well what is it that you want to do and he wants to play this particular kind of sport that requires some money and then you got to like get these guns or whatever it’s like it’s like a laser tag type thing the next version of a laser tag and he’s telling me about it and I’m getting into it with him them and then I’m like well how are you going to afford this and he’s like you know well maybe I have to get a job all right well what kind of job do you want to get or this kind well you don’t make a lot of money and like how and then how are you going to get there and we just went through this whole thing and he was like clearly eager to do all this stuff so that he could so that he could do the thing that he wanted to do and I was like well how can your dad help and then he is telling his father what his father can do to help him being ambitious and get things done and that’s the difference that’s the difference between you should improve to what is the authentic expression and and the thing is that we do that we do that internally as well as externally meaning we’re usually like the father in that story rather than the Godfather in that story to ourselves right we’re we’re telling ourselves what we how to improve what we need to do blah blah blah blah blah instead of just paying attention to what the natural thing is and if we if we follow that thread far enough down it it it has far better results it moves much quicker

yeah it’s fascinating by by that measure I was extremely ambitious in barely passing any any of my primary school exactly yeah yeah I mean it’s because they couldn’t hook on to you the authentic you’re most schooling doesn’t hook on on to a child’s authentic desire to learn yeah in my case they presented a lot of different tracks and opportunities that all of which just didn’t quite hook yeah well it’s really hard to hook when you’re telling somebody when you’re grading people and say you need to improve that’s that’s not that’s not hook worthy and it’s it’s like a a culture of constant Improvement we we don’t we don’t listen to songs that tell us that we need to improve we know you know wow triple platinum song by Jay-Z called boy you better work out more doesn’t happen you know yeah right right

so so let’s talk a little bit more about how this works in companies and you know in in more more General sense in cultures of self-improvement or just not even self-improvement just cultures of everybody needs to improve the constant Improvement culture or yeah exactly see it’s again it’s not assuming that people want to improve by nature is what happens here so a great example of this is in that book Reinventing organizations there’s a n nursing company in there called Herzog I’m I’m bad at pronouncing these things and basically what had happened it was in Holland and what’s happened is there’s these Community nurses and they got privatized and and it just became all about efficiency it all became improve improve improve improve and it was like this is how long it should take you to get there this is how long it should take you to administer the the shot this is how long it should take you to get back that’s how much time you have that’s how much payment you’re going to get and everybody was going for the improved nursing efficiency and this company came along and it did a lot of really cool things but one of the things it did is it said you know what our job isn’t to be as quick as possible what our job it’s not to improve our process in that way it’s to make it so that we help people become self-reliant and through figuring out how to get to that home and make the person self-reliant instead of administer the shot they became 60% more efficient than their competition or something like that maybe it was 40% I don’t remember the numbers exactly but it was a tremendous amount more efficient and so one had that natural hook because what we naturally want we naturally want to help people that is part of our nature all mammals that are community- based mammals have altruism as part of us and so they hooked on to that natural thing and and then that led to Natural Improvement but they weren’t trying to improve in some unnatural way

and the interesting thing is what you know as soon as I say we’re it’s our nature to be altruistic somebody will say something like well it’s our nature to be self-interested and I say I agree it is it’s our nature to be altruistic and it’s our nature to be self-interested and it’s our nature to want to be rewarded and it’s our nature to want our team to win and it’s in our nature for us to win and companies that are really becoming the most efficient companies are hooking on to all of that right and if you think about that nursing company their team W they had individual reward for the performance they that as it turned out people got to decide their own reward and also they got to help so they they’re hooking on to all of these Natural Things in us and if you look at the great products of our day and the great nonprofits of our day they hook into a natural authentic desire in people and sometimes it’s a drug like like a Facebook or coffee and sometimes it is not drug likee right sometimes it is just our our nature to want to communicate so so that’s that’s what it means and so it’s not only does your product but your culture needs to if you want to be highly efficient it needs to hook into that nature of people our authenticity

another one of our ESF group um was recently telling me about a company that they’re applying for it’s a that collections agency that operates on transparency and um like in instead of trying to be as efficient as they can and milking the most money from people as possible and buying the debt for the cheapest as possible whatever um they’re optimizing for really being in connection with people so they they purchase debt and then they they’re transparent they’re like hey okay so we bought your debt for this much we have this much of it we expect to get you know a certain percentage of it paid back from various places and you know what can we do to get this paid off and they end up getting with with that transparency and working closer to to their I guess their customers their debtors um they actually get across this sense of actually caring and they’re able to come up with much more Creative Solutions which actually results in I mean this is new company but it seems like it’s resulting in getting much better results for them and also they’re getting just sads of testimonials from um from customers that like wow I wish all of my debt had been bought by this company this is amazing they’re actually people and they talk to me yeah like a human yeah that I mean we see this all that you can see this in sales processes are more effective when there’s a real relationship real connection going on and that authenticity is there people think they have to compartmentalize themselves to do business and that compartmentalization that inauthenticity it absolutely makes you less efficient it might make things easier to do in the short term but absolutely harder to do in the long term and it makes you less efficient because you’re basically asking anybody you interact with to compartmentalize themselves that same way so a debt collector compartmentalizes their heart and they go in hard then their customer compartmentalizes their heart and they respond hard or they respond like a victim or whatever it is but they’re going to they’re going to match that more on average

so if we if we focus on finding the authentic movement then how do I collect debt in a way that feels good in my system how do I nurse in a way that feels good in my system how do I produce a social media app that feels good in my system all of those will be a more efficient product and then with that continual asking what am I like what am I am I any ient collector or am I right yeah if I am them and they are me then how do I want to behave here if I feel my natural authenticity my desire to learn and my desire to be of service to people how do I collect debt in a way that’s of service to people and you know it it feels horrible to not pay your debt so to help people feel like that they are standing on their own two feet and have achieved pay off debt I mean that’s a that’s a can be a real deep service for humans

yeah I wonder how many other Industries can be rethought every one of there’s it’s endless it’s just like there’s always more money to be made there’s always a way to become more authentic and each one is an efficiency sounds like there’s a there’s a lot of faith in this process because with each layer of authenticity you find you really have to let go of what you valued or what you thought was important important entirely for to find what’s beneath it that’s true yeah um you know it it feels like Faith it’s like it feels like Faith until you get used to like reading the river in some way it’s it’s the same kind of faith that maybe a basketball player would have that’s going into a game is like you can’t plan out the whole game you can’t plan out everything and um so you’re basically choos I am going to plan out my entire basketball game or I am going to learn how to read a river and learn how to read the field learn how to read my opponents and so that I am competent in every situation where I’m in that basketball game and then you start having faith in your capacity to handle situations and you become excited where you can’t handle them because it means you’ve learn you’re getting to learn something and it makes you more capable next time and so it’s the same thing it’s like if you’ve learned to read a river to go down that River and get to the mouth of the river is it’s not an Act of Faith anymore it’s just it’s just what you do um and you’re watching other people like build canals so and that they that makes them feel secure like I will just take a canal the whole way but I have to build the whole Canal it’s a lot more effort so it’s it’s very much like that once you start realizing that your authenticity naturally brings you to the next level over and over again and that improving yourself is like building a canal it’s like this idea of safety that takes a tremendous amount of effort and is really not that safe because lots of people die building canals that’s how it works and so it feels constantly like you’re taking Faith or that you’re taking a risk and then at some point you’re like oh no it’s more risky to do the other thing it’s more risky to be 60 years old and have you know all my dreams have come true and I am miserable which is where that typically leads

yeah I think we we often over index on the cost the perceived cost of stopping doing things the way that we’re doing them but forget about the opportunity cost of continuing to do the same thing yeah that’s yeah that’s what’s interesting is that’s also part of our nature right it’s also part of our nature to stay with something that feels safe so and predictable is safe that’s right that’s right yeah that’s exactly right and luckily as authenticity matures us as we evolve being authentic we become more and more sensitive and that stuff becomes more and more painful where we’re naturally kicked out of those Cycles because we just can’t handle them anymore cuz they’re just too painful thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US in your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at artof accomplishment.

Graph View

Backlinks