The Five Major Pieces to the Life Puzzle

What’s your life philosophy? What are your guiding principles by which you navigate your life?

That’s the first key: “Becoming the master of our ship and the captain of our soul by developing a sound personal philosophy.”

Reminds me of Pete Carroll, Coach of the Seattle Seahawks. His big breakthrough came after being fired by the Patriots when he was reading John Wooden’s book and realized it took Wooden 16 (!) years of coaching at UCLA before he won his first championship. But, once he figured it out, Wooden was nearly unbeatable—winning 10 national championships in the next 12 years.

So, what was the “it” that Wooden figured out?

His winning philosophy.

Realizing this, Carroll IMMEDIATELY threw himself into articulating HIS winning philosophy—cataloging all the lessons he’d learned and seeing the keys to his prior success that became his “Win Forever” philosophy. With that philosophy clearly articulated, he proceeded to *crush* it at USC and then at Seattle—taking a team that had won a total of 9 games in the 2 seasons before he arrived and leading them to the Super Bowl a few seasons later. (= awesome)

So, back to YOU.

What’s YOUR winning philosophy?

What do you believe?

What do you do when you’re most on? What are you committed to in your life?

Craft your winning philosophy. And live it!

24 hours.

1,440 minutes.

86,400 ticks of the clock.

= One precious day.

How are you using each moment of each day?

As Aristotle tells us: “We live in deeds, not years; In thoughts not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs.”

And Benjamin Franklin reminds us: “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that’s the stuff life is made of.”

So…

Do YOU love life?

If so, then don’t squander your time—that’s the very stuff life’s made of!!

Let’s do a quick inventory: Where are you wasting time? Is it online? Watching TV? Checking your iPhone 100 times a day? (Just learned that’s literally the average for most people. WOW.)

Those moments and minutes and hours add up. Fast.

One of the keys to optimizing our lives (and solving life’s puzzle!) is to STOP wasting those moments and apply them to constructive behaviors like reading (Rohn asks a bunch of times: How many books have you read over the last 90 days?!), journaling, exercising, meditating and all that other goodness.

Here’s a fun game I like to play. It’s based on Stephen Covey’s four quadrants of time management. Here’s a super quick overview (see this video + Notes on 7 Habits for more).

First, let’s start with a look at Covey’s handy-dandy four quadrant model for time management:

As you can see, Covey organizes things by whether they are urgent or not urgent and important or not important. Quadrants I, II, III and IV.

Here’s the game I like to play.

Start by documenting the things you do in Quadrants II and IV.

First, Quadrant II stuff: What are your deeply restorative (Not Urgent but super (!) Important) things you do to keep you plugged in? This is stuff like exercise, meditation, journaling, reading, quiet time with the family, etc. These are YOUR KEYS to optimal living. The fundamentals of your life philosophy.

Now, Quadrant IV. These things are not urgent nor are they important. When you engage in these activities you are WASTING TIME. Period. For me, that’s stuff like checking ESPN or Google news x times a days, constantly looking at my email or social feeds, etc. Not urgent. Not important. WASTED time. What are your Quadrant IV activities? Know them.

OK. Got your two lists? Quadrant II goodness and Quadrant IV lameness?

Sweet. Now, here’s the key to the game: See if you can SWAP your soul-killing time-wasting activities for soul-nourishing awesomeness. It’s simple. But HUGE.

Every time you feel tempted to waste time on say, checking.your.social.feed.yet.again, can you step away from your computer and take 10 deep breaths? Every time you find yourself going to look at the news again can you decide to go for a walk (or workout or whatever) instead?

This may sound simple (and it is) but it’s RIDICULOUSLY powerful.

Swap your time wasting activities for soul-nourishing ones and your life will explode in awesomeness. Try it. :)

P.S. This might be a solid Idea in your life philosophy. It is in mine.

Amen. As Rohn says, “All things must be finished before they can be started.”

Stephen Covey agrees. He made it his second habit: “Begin with the End in Mind.”

Robin Sharma also agrees. He calls it “Blueprinting” and says: “All I’m saying is that to liberate the potential of your mind, body and soul, you must first expand your imagination. You see, things are always created twice: first in the workshop of the mind and then, and only then, in reality. I call this process ‘blueprinting’ because anything you create in your outer world began as a simple blueprint in your inner world.”

You have to SEE where you’re headed.

We don’t need *absolute* clarity on every single detail and the perfect, precise plan to get there (that’s just a perfectionist’s excuse for never doing anything). But we do need to work out our imagination muscles and get fired up about where we’re headed!

That’s a key part of the second puzzle piece: ATTITUDE.

How’s yours? What’s your vision for your life? You excited/hopeful/optimistic/etc.?!

What’s your ideal future look like?

In 1 year?

In 3 years?

In 5 years?

In 10 years?

In xx years as you look back over your life with your last breath?

We need to dream. We need to believe we can bring those dreams to life. And we need to get EXCITED about all that’s in store for us as we optimize and actualize.

So, what fires you up?!

Get clear on that. And ROCK IT.

P.S. If you draw a blank when you look into the future and try to see all the goodness that’s in store, fear not! Your imagineering muscles are just a little out of shape. Don’t go numb yourself with another glass of wine or TV show or whatever. Just hit the vision gym. Work out your imagination muscles. You WILL get stronger.

Fun story: The very first person I coached (in 2001 shortly after selling my first business) was my childhood friend Dan Keller. (To put it in perspective, Dan’s 2-year old brother, Kev-dog spent the night at my house the night Dan was born.)

Dan was an All-American baseball player at UCLA. (Go Bruins!) He worked for me at my first biz, eteamz. After selling eteamz to The Active Network, he moved to San Diego with me and helped me transition the company. After awhile, he was ready to transition to his next thing. I can vividly remember our first “coaching” session at a Taco Bell. (HAH!) I gave him some journal exercises to crystallize his vision for the future. (A eulogy exercise and other goodness.)

Long story a little shorter, Dan showed up at our next session saying that the journal exercises I gave him were among the hardest things he’d ever done. (HAH!) He’d simply never tried to imagine his future like that. But he kept at it, strengthening his vision muscles and going on to take the steps in creating the next version of his optimal life.

(Thanks for all your inspiration and incredible support over the decades, Dan. I appreciate you!)

This is one of Jim Rohn’s most classic gems.

“We will all experience one pain or the other—the pain of discipline or the pain of regret—but the difference is that the pain of discipline weighs only ounces while the pain of regret weighs tons.”

It’s not always *fun* to do the right thing moment.to.moment. In fact, there’s often a bit of what one may call “pain” in disciplining ourselves to DO THE RIGHT THING RIGHT NOW.

But guess what?

You’re going to need to pay the price at some point. We can either choose to pay it ounces at a time—with the discipline to do the right thing moment to moment to moment. OR, we can pay the price in TONS as we look back at our life with a deep regret (and despair!) that WE COULD HAVE been awesome if we’d only had a little more discipline in those micro moments.

Now, this isn’t depressing. It’s EXCITING news.

Our destiny is shaped one micro decision at a time. No one decision to live in integrity with our highest ideals is *that* big of a deal. We just need to get better and better doing the right thing moment to moment. So, let’s!!!!

86,400 ticks of the clock.

Every.single.day.

Shhhhhh…. Can you hear them?

Pay attention. Because the number of ticks we’re each blessed to have is finite.

As Rohn advises, living in our comfort zone seems to create some hearing loss. We forget that we (NEWSFLASH!) will not live forever. Each moment is PRECIOUS.

Rohn tells some great stories about the two-minute warning in football and how a team that’s behind will suddenly CRUSH IT—bringing a *ton* of energy and vitality and urgency to their offense and often do amazing things.

We need to bring that level of hustle and mojo to our lives. NOW. Like TODAY. Every day.

The Tools guys (see Notes) tell us the same thing. Their fifth tool is called “Jeopardy” and its intention is to help us exercise our Willpower to DO WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE NOW.

Think of the music that plays during the final Jeopardy question—letting the contestants know that their time is limited. (Listen to it here now.)

That music is ALWAYS playing. We want to hear it, reminding us that THIS MOMENT is the time to live fully.

Can you hear the music? The clock ticking? Those are the precious moments of your life.

Here’s to living them fully!!