Hustle Culture Cycle:
Get super motivated → work really hard → sacrifice everything → crash → recover for weeks → beat yourself up for not being productive → search for the next boost of motivation.
Calm Ambition:
Select a few projects → work on them for a sprint → rest for a week → review and adjust your plan and your system → work for another sprint.
You waste less time with the calm ambition model. There are no burnouts to recover from. You don’t need to seek extreme levels of rah-rah-rah motivation; you simply make progress toward your goals without all that drama.
Long-term planning is merely a collection of untested assumptions about how every condition will develop over time. The probability that all these assumptions will hold true is extremely low.
On Day 0 of any project we know the least about the project yet we try to map out our entire journey to the end. It makes sense to always plan from the place of most knowledge and up-to-date information.
These planning sessions take a lot of time and the reality never goes according to plan. I figured that it’s ok to have a long-term vision for your life but building elaborate long-term plans to achieve this vision is an inefficient use of my time. Short-term planning and experimental mindset is what keeps is manageable, fun and sustainable.
Our psyche needs contrasts. Every emotional meltdown is preceded by a prolonged period of extreme tension and stress. To avoid burnout, it’s important to take regular breaks from being disciplined, organized, overachieving, and on top of everything. Having a cool-off week after every sprint is how you avoid building up emotion tension that might burst at any point.
It will never be perfect, and the conditions will never be just right. But it sure feels nice to daydream about the day when everything will align perfectly.
Make resourcefulness cool again.
Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
There are examples of people who made it work with even fewer resources than you have.
You already have everything you need to start.
When you don’t let your ideas age and reveal their true value, you end up running in a hundred different directions. When you are spread too thin, you never make substantial progress in any direction.
If you ignore the few business unicorns (outliers), the vast majority of success stories can be boiled down to one simple truth: outlasting everyone else.
Always optimize for longevity. The goal is not to finish for good; the goal is to keep going. When creating a personal productivity system, the objective is not to accomplish as many goals as possible in a short amount of time. The goal is to continue using this system for as long as possible.
The smartest people I know are often the most paralyzed by indecision, cynicism, and perfectionism. Your brain is a powerful machine, but it often uses all that power to work against you.
When it comes to execution, being less smart can often be more effective than being overly clever.
No one knows you and your life circumstances better than you do.
Take charge of creating your own systems and methods.
Opportunity lies in review and revision, not in starting something new.
People will calm down if you remain calm.
It works with toddlers, spouses and difficult strangers.
A+ work is a result of first shipping the B- work and then improving on it one iteration at a time.
Be ok with shipping the B- work. A lot of people can benefit from it.
Most of our ideas suck, and we can see this if we let them age. A lot of time is saved if we stop reacting to every cool idea we have. Not all opportunities, ideas, and experiments are created equal. Waiting is the ultimate time saver.
People who have adventurous lives rarely produce something great.
People who produce something great rarely have adventurous lives.
Treat your mission as a full-time job. Show up for work as you would for a regular 9-to-5 job. You’ll be surprised by how much progress you can make when you stop pursuing the exciting.
Perfectionism thrives on ambiguity. There is always more to improve, beautify, and optimize. Defining what done means ahead of time allows us to move to the next thing guilt-free.
A whale cannot teach a goldfish much.
The problems you need to solve to get your first 10 customers are different from the problems you’ll encounter when acquiring your 1,000th customer.
Don’t shop for the perfect version of yourself, your project, or your business.
Focus on building things up in 10s. And plan your course of action accordingly.
You can either be employed by a company or by a big idea. They are both demanding. And you can treat them both the same.
Show up for work on time.
Do your work.
Go home and spend time with family and friends.
An entrepreneurial life becomes much less stressful when you treat the big idea as your employer.
We all have flawed assumptions when setting goals. We assume that we’ll be at our best every single day. By assuming that you won’t have as much time and that you’ll be tired , you can set realistic goals for the sprint.
Think for a day, then stop thinking for 3 weeks. Don’t be smart about it. You’ve had your thinking time. Now you are in the doing stage. Thinking and doing conflict with each other. If you are thinking too much, you are not doing enough.
You can join the Focus Room where we follow this rhythm throughout the year.
Go for a walk. And pay attention how things are done. Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
Hard should be followed by soft. Time-blocked weeks should be followed by unstructured, free-spirited days. An intense sprint should be followed by a cool-off week. Activities that rely on willpower should be balanced with activities you love.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
It’s not about adding more strong links (habits, goals, activities, commitments). It’s about stopping something you’re doing that causes a disproportionate amount of harm.
Have you ever been able to build a habit following the traditional habit building advice (21 days, trigger, rewards, checking off boxes, all that stuff)? Do you know anyone who has? I’m yet to meet to person who has done it.
You can accomplish a lot by focusing on short-term, finite projects. Seriously. There is a serious cost to adding another checkbox to your to-do list. You don’t need to build new habits all the time; you can focus on finite, project-based goals and still see substantial progress in your life.
I’m not a fan of habits. I’m a fan of making strong decisions that lead to consistent change without all that inner drama.
When designing a personal productivity system, it’s helpful to physically separate strategically important projects and goals from mundane administrative tasks. A good way to do this is to use a scrum board for the important.
You are already smart, energetic, and motivated. All you need to do is remove the digital distractions and see the magic that is about to happen. Viva la low-tech life!
You achieve more by continuously improving on your previous efforts rather than starting something new.
Read my most recent take on New Year’s Resolutions here.
It pays to be on a different schedule than everyone else.
When looking to improve things in one industry, pay attention to how they are done in another. We all face similar problems.
That’s exactly how I started using Agile in my personal life. After trying nearly every personal productivity tool under the sun, I looked outside the personal development space. I asked myself, “How is the startup I’m working at making progress on building their product?” Agile philosophy was the answer.
Productivity apps often lead to an endless pit of frustration, overwhelm, and procrastination.
A simple analog scrum board is the only tool I use to track my goals.
Life is much better when you put your screen down. I invite you to genuinely question the so-called benefits of social media. If you find one, please send me a note.
That’s the secret to happiness, wealth, and great relationships. It’s also a way to break the cycle of binge-watching YouTube.
The outside world can be harsh—cold, rude, obnoxious, and stinky. Your home is the only place where you can truly be yourself. Create a utopia that recharges your batteries. Go bold. Be unique. Don’t play it safe. Paint your walls in bold colors. Make it fun. Make it soft. Embrace a vintage style if you need to. Make it as much you as possible. Transform it into your own utopia.
Whenever you struggle with overconsumption, focus on increasing the quality of what you consume. You’ll be surprised but it’s really hard to overconsume high quality.
It’s okay to be selective about what you consume.
You might be young, and someone is willing to give up everything they have to be young again.
You might be living in a prosperous and safe country—something that wealthy people in other countries truly envy.
You might have children, and someone who can’t have kids would give everything up for the chance to have them.
You might have both of your parents and your spouse alive, while someone would give up all their fortune for just one more conversation with their loved ones.
Successful entrepreneurs often wish they could go back to the good old days when they were just starting out.
You already have something that others would trade their fortunes for.
So make sure you enjoy the fortunes you already have.
Convincing people is exhausting. Oftentimes, it’s faster and easier to just do the thing and provide proof than to try to win in the mental battle of assumptions. Let your work do the talking.
Don’t should all over people or the world. The only message that is loud enough is your own life and the way you live it. Everything else is noise.
Whenever you start something, it’s hard. But the good news is that it’s the hardest it’ll ever be. If you stick with it, it’ll get easier. So this is the worst it’ll ever be.
You love your child and want the best for them. You can see the long-term versus short-term benefits for your child. You can handle a little tantrum if you know they will benefit from your actions. When in doubt, imagine you are making a decision for your child; it will likely be the right thing for you as well.
A business is considered successful when it has healthy profit margins built in. We should treat our schedules the same way. Build enough margin so that unexpected events don’t cause mental panic.
It’s easy to be cynical about the current state of the world. But…
We are always pulling a certain type of future into today through our actions. The present state of the world is the result of actions we, as a society, took years ago.
If we don’t like how huge companies are overtaking local economy, we should ask ourselves, “Do we buy local products? Support local farmers?”
Do we choose to buy fewer, higher-quality items, or do we fall for low-sale items and the cheapest prices?
Do we pay for thoughtful, non-clickbait journalism? When was the last time we paid for a newspaper?
When was the last time we supported an online creator whose free work we enjoyed, allowing them to make a living without seeking questionable sponsorships or creating scandalous videos to get more views?
Where is our attention going? Are we creating something useful in our community, or supporting the attention-farming advertising machine called social media?
Do we support and spread the word about someone doing something awesome in our community?
What do we do in our free time? Do we volunteer for good cause? Or spend time scrolling and consuming advertising for some new useless gadget?
We can complain, or we can identify cause-and-effect relationships and start contributing to a different cause for a different future outcome.
Great things are rarely done alone. I created the Focus Room for that exact reason. It’s the place we do our life works together, live, on the same schedule. We inspire each other through our perfectly imperfect work every sprint.
Also, if you’d like to keep in touch with me, my writing, and all my future projects dedicated to helping people build a calmly ambitious life, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.
I help you tailor the Monthly Method into your life and business, so that you can see meaningful progress in the next 4 weeks.
After you’ve learned the steps, find the place where the music of calm ambition plays on. Join the club where dancing is not about moving faster, but about crafting work that matters — slow, steady, and full of meaning.
We’re not just here to snap pretty pictures or hit record — Sunday Muse is about capturing the feeling behind the moment. Every brand, every person, every story is different, and we believe your visuals should reflect that. With a laid-back yet intentional approach, we create imagery that feels true to you.
Founded on the belief that creativity flows best when there’s trust and connection, we take time to understand your vibe and vision.
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I’m based in Toronto, Canada but work with clients around the globe.
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This is the exact system I use every single month to get clear on my own goals.
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