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A Question to Reframe Your Thinking

I have been experimenting with a new mental trick lately, one that has been dramatically improving my life. It has to do with that little voice in your head, you know the one that is constantly talking to you, telling you what to do or not, and forecasting how you are going to feel.

I don’t know about you all but mine is one incredibly unreliable character. For all the things it says I should do—i.e. to drink that extra glass of wine or avoid the uncomfortable conversation that needs to happen or to sleep-in and skip the workout…—and all the things it says I shouldn’t do—i.e. face my fears, work really hard…—it is, basically, always wrong!

What the heck? Why is that internal voice such an unreliable messenger? 

I have no idea, obviously! But, fortunately, I think I’ve figured out a way to deal more effectively with it. Rather than listening to and following whatever it says—because there’s a clearly a lot of terrible advice there—when considering taking an action, the thing to do is to pause and ask yourself a question:

How am I going to feel after this?

Ask this question of yourself seriously and before you do anything, give yourself enough time to actually reason through to an answer. Consider what’s really likely to happen here. Remember how this has made you feel in the past. In other words, use all the wisdom you’ve gained from your years of living—yes, you have some!—to really assess, in an honest way, what’s about to happen if you make that choice. Interestingly, however bad the automatic mind may be at forecasting how we are going to feel, as soon as you bring a little reason to the table, you can easily dismantle whatever false arguments the mind has been drawing from to make you feel anxious or gluttonous or whatever. 

How am I going to feel after my workout? Great! How am I going to feel after I drink that extra glass of wine? Terrible. How am I going to feel after I face my fear? Amazing!  

You see the pattern.

Turns out, asking yourself this simple question can help you overcome a lot of the unreliable tendencies of your inner voice. I’ve been experimenting with this for a few months now and not only have I been making better life decisions but also, a lot of unnecessary negativity and anxiousness has disappeared from my life. More importantly, asking this question has made me more likely to try new things, which always produces good results. Just in the last month or two, I’ve added swimming to my weekly fitness program and gotten back into Muay Thai sparring. 

If you experiment with this idea yourself, I’d love to hear how it goes!

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Service as a Competitive Advantage

Travelling to Hawaii has made me realize something really important about business and work. These days, some basic, decent, customer-service can be a tremendous competitive advantage. 

For whatever reason, the pandemic has absolutely wrecked service-culture in large parts of the world. Whether you are at a restaurant, or shopping at a store, or dealing with the TSA, employees are so disgruntled that they are either unwilling to or, perhaps, psychologically unable to give customers that high-quality service that used to proliferate in our society. 

Thankfully, here in Hawaii service-culture has survived! The contrast between our airport security process at LAX and our various encounters here on the island couldn’t be starker—The one filled with an indifference and contempt so extreme it felt like a kind of hate—the kind of interaction where you feel like your mere existence is making other people ill or angry—the other pleasant and uplifting, where people seem happy to go above and beyond to make sure you are enjoying whatever it is you happen to be paying for. 

I’m convinced that if you took this attitude and approach to business and work environments where service-culture has been destroyed, you would have an instant competitive advantage. And it wouldn’t be hard at all. Even some basic human decency—i.e. looking people in the eye, “Hi I’m Nick. Welcome in. How can I help you today?”—would go a long way. Give this a try and let me know what happens!  

A Different Way to Elect the President

I discovered this week that there’s a serious bipartisan political effort to make the 2028 Presidential election the first where the President would be determined by the popular vote rather than the Electoral College. My friend, Isaac Saul from Tangle, has the story here. 

Two high-level political strategists—Democrat Alyssa Cass and Republican Pat Rosenstiel—are leading an effort called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. To make a long story short, because the US Constitution very clearly delegates power to state legislatures to determine how electors are chosen for the Electoral College, Cass and Rosenstiel are collecting pledges from States around the country to agree to award all electors to whoever wins the popular vote in the 2028 election. And they are making great progress. States with a total of 209 electors have already signed-on to the compact! Remember, you only need 270 to win. 

While the Electoral College has long ceased to function as intended by the Founders, I’m not so sure that moving completely to popular elections is where we want to go. The Founders very deliberately set-up a Republic rather than a straight direct democracy because they were particularly concerned with the problems they saw in the history of Ancient Athens. At the Constitutional Convention, there was a strong consensus that the Roman Republican system, which involved more layers of government, checks and balances, and the separation and sharing of power, was better than a pure democracy at protecting against the rise of demagogues and tyrants.

That being said, modern democracy is a completely different animal than that of the ancient world. Plus, the Electoral College isn’t really functioning as intended and has already produced outcomes where the winner of the popular vote does not become President. Is that really what we want?

While the Founders clearly favored the Roman Republican system, it’s important to remember that, ultimately, democracy in both Athens and Rome failed. For the Athenians, their democracy devolved into a kind of mob rule under the immense pressure of the Peloponnesian War, similar to the reign of terror period during the French Revolution. For Rome, their system became so corrupt and economically stratified, that it fell to the ambitions of a rather charismatic and powerful military leader. 

If we are honest with ourselves about America today, we can see a little bit of both the end of Athens and Rome here. There’s a thin line between things like cancel culture and mob rule and what was January 6^th if not a test run for how a would-be Caesar could take over America? Our system is wildly economically stratified and corrupt. Our government is frequently inept and mostly inefficient. We are under tremendous financial strain because of our debts and promises…. 

Would a move further in the direction of direct democracy be a good idea for the American Republic? It’s hard to say. 

This is something I’d love to get your take on, so, let’s do a little poll:

PS. In a world where there are over 40M people in the US on food stamps, how does an airline for dogs make any sense?

This week’s Profit+ edition might feel a little different as I’m in Hawaii with the family for a wedding—I know, not bad, right!?

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