Many consultants, coaches, and LinkedIn personalities advocate publicly for their approach to life and work. By tying their daily schedules, fitness routines, writing templates, or marketing frameworks to their own accomplishments, potential clients will be more likely to pay them to learn the secrets of their success.
Maybe the road to personal and professional fulfillment does in fact require waking up at 4AM every day, never touching a drop of beer or a grain of refined sugar, and certainly never skipping a leg day. Perhaps the best way to sell more is in a 5-step process for writing the perfect outreach email, or the way to build a personal brand is to follow a 10-point plan for getting 10,000 followers in 10 days.
For me, and I’m betting for many people, I am never able to stick to somebody else’s routine. I have tried numerous tips, tricks, and tactics for freeing up my calendar or finding ways to streamline work tasks, only to eventually default back to my baseline after a few weeks.
Similarly, I have implemented some of the numerous how-to guides, step-by-step plans, and playbooks for getting better email response rates or a higher ROI on ad campaigns. In each case, the scripted plan never quite worked as promised for me in my particular circumstances.
Every week I see some moving post or watch some inspiring video and momentarily resolve to heed its guidance before going about my usual life. As someone who is always striving to grow and improve, and as a coach and consultant who works with other people to help them achieve their goals, I am deeply curious about how people make enduring positive changes.
Can we emulate other successful people, following their paths to achieve our own goals? If not, how can we all discover our unique way to achieve our own version of success? What is the role of learning from others’ successes in charting our own course to achievement?
The answer to how to create lasting improvement is simple, but not simple in the way that a one-size-fits-all approach claims to be. It is simple in the way that it takes a moment to understand and a lifetime to master.
The mind is the key to transforming the self.
Radical stuff, right? The ‘secret formula’ for personal and professional growth is to think for ourselves, internalizing and assimilating new information to make it our own. Through thinking deeply, relating what we hear to our own inner voice and establishing the truth or falsehood of something for ourselves - in our own words and through the lens of our own experience - we can generate sustained inspiration for daily action that leads to lasting change.
A parable from the Talmud: the short and long way vs. the long and short way
The Talmud (a canonical work of Jewish law, philosophy, and mysticism) tells a parable of a man traveling to a city. Along the way, he encounters a child at a crossroads, and asks the child which direction leads to his destination. The child replies that both routes lead to the same place, where one path is short and long and the other is long and short. When the man opts for the first, short and long path that quickly leads straight to where he wants to go, he finds numerous obstacles blocking his way and no direct entrance into the city.
The man then retraces his steps, going back to the crossroads. There, he asks the child, “did you not tell me that this was the short way?” The child reminds him that he also said it was long. The man, realizing the lesson he received, then takes the longer, more meandering path which takes more time to traverse but does eventually lead into the city.
A classic interpretation of this story is to be wary of shortcuts. On the road to achieving our goals, we may be tempted to employ “growth hacks,” or to follow the footsteps of a person who somehow managed - through skill or luck or a combination of both - to get rich quick or to beat the odds. The teaching of the parable is to remember that the long way of persistent daily effort is ultimately shorter, and to not fall into the trap of believing in the promise of a seemingly shorter route that in the end is actually longer.
This understanding does not sufficiently address how all the numerous frameworks, plans, and guides for personal or professional development fail to create lasting change. Most of the creators of this content are well-intentioned; they aren’t selling snake oil but offering guidance and advice based on their own experiences. More importantly, many of these personalities specifically emphasize that a critical factor for achievement is consistent effort and a daily grind.
The reason why we so often struggle to stay on these paths is because they are not our own. The roads of expert guidance are shorter because they are paved by someone else, but they’re also longer because we’re likely to run out of gas along the way.
A deeper, more mystical interpretation of the parable differentiates the short and long path from the long and short path based on whether we are led down the path by our heart or our mind.
The short and long way is the way of following the heart - of external inspiration driving action. When we are led by our hearts, we immediately resonate with the intuitiveness of a particular plan or are drawn towards the promises of a given framework. In that moment, our resolve to follow through with the suggested guidance or to commit to specific actions is strongest, and we may very well keep it up for a time. Eventually, the enthusiasm either fades or is challenged by the heart being aroused to a different path, and we end up continuously changing directions as we pursue the high that comes from feeling inspired.
The long and short way is the way of the mind - of creating our own sustained source of inspiration through conviction. There is no way to fast-track this approach, and we’re much less likely to experience the same intensity of excitement that comes from the heart. The way to follow the path of the mind is to think for ourselves, continuously cross-referencing new information with our sense of self and the knowledge of our particular situation. When we can reconcile the new and the old, and thereby truly internalize information, we chart our own path forward on our terms within the context of our lives, leading to steady and stable growth.
The allure of the shorter longer way - it is easier to react than to think
If you’ve read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, you are familiar with the idea that the slower, more logical and deliberative faculty of the mind is naturally quite lazy and prefers to take a back seat to its faster, more instinctual and emotional counterpart. The development of this dynamic makes sense; the super computer of our rational human brain is far more energy intensive than the primordial operating system that works reflexively.
We are wired to set as much of our minds to autopilot as possible to conserve energy. Once we think through something and come to a conclusion once, we instinctively create a scripted program that can then function more or less autonomously without any input from our conscious mind. As we age and gain experience that eventually replaces our childhood curiosity, more and more of our life becomes routine that we can do without thinking. Our reptilian brain becomes judge, jury, and executioner without any judicial oversight by the power that makes us human.
While this innate compulsion to conserve energy-intensive thinking may have served our prehistoric ancestors, even ancient civilizations recognized the pitfalls of our nature. Philosophy, mindfulness, meditation, and spirituality grew out of the awareness of how much we do without awareness. Socrates taught that the unexamined life is not worth living. Plato’s famous cave metaphor warns us not to trust our initial perceptions, instead questioning our senses and striving to turn around to face the light. Other cultures speak of the need to wake from our sleep.
The plethora of guidance and advice for personal and professional development on social media insidiously poses as a path to that awakening. People who expose themselves to this content have made active choices to hear voices preaching self-improvement; they are looking to make a change and to grow. Yet the format and medium of this information contradicts its purported ends; the posts that most people see are those that they are more likely to instinctually be drawn towards by their heart rather than those that engage the mind.
Purveyors of professional advice on social media usually deliver that advice in a way that is optimized for superficial engagement that will expand its reach. Whether it is click-bait article titles, promises that this is the only template for _____ that you’ll ever need, or the 25 lessons you should learn before 25, even the most valuable guidance ends up couched in terms that appeal to our emotions instead of our intellect. When we engage with something by following our heart instead of our mind - more interested in the results than the process - our absorption of the material is limited to the fleeting attention span of our emotional state.
Let me be clear that I am not judging either the creators or consumers of any of this content. I deleted all of my personal social media accounts except LinkedIn with the intention of spending less time in my day mindlessly scrolling, only to spend more time mindlessly scrolling through LinkedIn. At first, I convinced myself that this was more valuable and meaningful information that was worth consuming. I eventually realized that swiping through carousels and liking posts created the same dopamine-triggered feedback loop of feeling a sense of reward for having read about self improvement without taking any steps towards making those improvements.
Even if someone does occasionally have such a strong attraction to the promises of a given path that they end up dedicating themselves to implementing it, it is still a shorter, longer path. The allure of following a scripted plan is strong because, even if that plan is ultimately more stringent or exacting than what we would have come up with ourselves, it takes less mental energy. It is easier to adopt hard and fast rules than it is to adjudicate situations on a case by case basis. Following a prescribed plan or copying a prefabricated template doesn’t require that we really think about what we’re doing, or why.
I am not saying that committing to a strict routine or working through a 15-step plan to find product-market fit is easy. Waking up at the crack of dawn everyday or putting in the hours to follow each step of a detailed framework takes grit and discipline. However, when we establish rules for ourselves, putting up boundaries and defining our new limitations, we are letting the mind abdicate its responsibility to consider nuance and context.
As someone who actually does get up before 5AM most mornings, I can say that it is in fact easier to just say ‘no’ to all evening plans than it is to make the occasional exception. Having a rule to fall back on requires less thinking than evaluating whether a particular dinner with friends or colleagues is worth sleeping in the next day and breaking routine.
Life will always throw circumstances at us which will make us break from our routines or fall short of the standards we set for ourselves. Unless that routine was the result of years of iterative refinement and practice to find something that works for you, and unless those standards were arrived at through careful contemplation of your own values and a sober assessment of your own character, those stumbling blocks will make us revert back to our normal mode. When inspiration is externally derived, it is susceptible to challenge from other external circumstances.
Making things personal - the mind as the key to sustainable growth
The guidance, frameworks, and action plans on the internet most likely did work for the people who created them, and they might also work for you. The only way they can affect real improvement for a given individual is if that person does the hard work of making the recommendations their own.
On the longer, shorter path of the mind, convictions come from experience instead of belief and analysis instead of intuition. Stable growth is achieved by assimilating, rather than accepting external guidance. This leads to sustained inspiration that is generated by our identification with those convictions and has the power to overcome the temptation of external factors pulling on our heartstrings.
The way to do this is frustratingly simple: slow down, and think.
By thinking, I mean ruminating on a concept. A ruminant animal (like a cow), chews its cud, bringing back up what it has already eaten and partially digested so that it can chew on it some more and swallow it again. Each time this process repeats, the food becomes progressively more broken down, exposing more surface area, until the nutrients are eventually able to be absorbed and become the flesh and blood of the grazer. This is what thinking looks like - living with an idea, revisiting it regularly, bringing it up again and again (and again) until it becomes a part of us.
So much of the content I see shared every day has nuggets of wisdom that can serve as legitimate thought-starters. I am not advocating for not consuming this content, I am suggesting that you take the step of synthesizing and personalizing it. After you have read all of the 5, 10, or 15 point plans for how to design an ideal ad campaign or craft the perfect positioning statement, consider what you’ve learned. Think it over. Ask questions. Pressure-test the ideas.
How does this advice compare to your prior experience? Do any of the promises for following a certain plan seem too good to be true, or do any of the steps seem overly simplified? What details of your unique situation, in terms of your company, your product, or your clients, may make one piece of advice more applicable than another in places where they differ?
If you are looking to commit to certain habits or routines in service of meeting your ambitious goals, ask yourself whether you are really likely to stay committed to them. There’s no shame in recognizing where you may have failed to stay the course in the past, or anticipating any real world factors in your life that may impede your success. Assessing your own state and likelihood of following through with a given plan will make you more likely to modify that plan in a way that is more reasonable and realistic for you to actually stick with it.
There is no perfect outbound email. There is no perfect way to schedule a workday. There is no diet or workout plan that works for everybody. The hard and simple truth of the longer, shorter way is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for anything in life.
Abraham Lincoln famously said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.” The best tool in our arsenal to face whatever challenge we’re up against is our mind, thinking deeply about a course of action before committing to a path. This is definitely less sexy and exciting; it feels better to just feel inspired. But longer is really shorter, and slower is actually faster, because the path to sustained success is through the stable growth that comes from the way of the mind.
The Tiferet Approach
The purpose of life, according to Judaism, is to create a home in our hearts for the truth that all things are one. It is incumbent upon each of us to build our own unique internal temple to house this divine energy.
If our hearts are the material of these sacred structures, our minds are the crafters. Each person’s heart is unique, so each person’s sacred structure will reflect their individual nature.
Tradition teaches that each of us has a unique mission, that we are each created and sustained for a specific purpose that only we can achieve. Everyone is perfectly suited to their individual task, no one has a more important role than anyone else, and the greatest sin we can commit is following another’s person’s path and neglecting our own.
We are all meant to first come to know ourselves and then, each person in their own way, to infuse that self with a higher consciousness on its own terms. The goal is to strive to be the best version of ourselves, not to emulate someone else. Each of us, with all of our messy flaws and contradictions, has a specific journey that we must discover on our own.
The mind is the mechanism for navigating this journey successfully. While it may initially seem shorter to follow our heart’s desire for some desirable end, that road is longer in that we lose ourselves along the way. Holding both our current state and a desired future state together in the mind, wrestling with this conflict, is the longer path that in the end is shorter because it leads to self-realization.
My approach to coaching and consulting is to work with clients where they are, helping them to craft custom growth plans for themselves and their businesses. While I may have some practical suggestions and advice from past experience or other client work, the best path for each of my clients is unique to them. It is my job to help them discover that path for themselves and to remind them to stick to it, not following the allure of so-called shortcuts. It isn’t easy - it is the hard work of therapy for your business.