Before a road trip on Friday, I opened Spotify, pulled up The Knowledge Project, and found an episode with performance psychologist Dr. Gio Valiante. He's spent decades working with elite performers, from professional golfers to hedge fund managers.
I was eager to hear him because my older brother Jon had worked with him several years ago. We talked about his experience with Gio more than once while catching up on work, so I trusted Jon's judgment and hit download.
About six minutes into the conversation, I pulled up to a stop sign just as Gio quoted the philosopher John Dewey. I hit rewind several times to hear it again:
“We don't think our way into a pattern of living. We live our way into a pattern of thought.”
I've spent most of my life believing that insight leads to change. If I could just understand myself a little better, the behavior would eventually follow. So I kept chasing breakthroughs through therapy, retreats, and books.
But understanding something and changing my behavior turned out to be two very different things. I could explain my patterns in great detail while continuing to repeat them. Eliza had been telling me the same thing for years: "I'm sick of hearing about all the work you're doing. Don't tell me about the change. I want to see it here at home."
Listening to Gio unpack Dewey's idea, I finally understood where I was getting it wrong. I had the order backwards.
I know this because I've lived it before. When my last venture, Downshift, got hard, I hit the eject button. The story I told myself was that I wasn't a builder, that I wasn't cut out to build a company at this stage of my life. I believed it completely at the time. Now I think I believed that story because I stopped doing the work.
Three months into building our new venture, some mornings I wake up frustrated and overwhelmed, and there's not a single part of me that wants to work. Slack messages piling up. Back-to-back Zoom meetings. An operating agreement to review. Website copy to wrestle with.
The urge to hit eject returns, but my response has changed. I don't give in to the resistance anymore, and I don't wait for it to pass. I feel it, honor it, and start anyway.
What I've noticed is that the more I do the work, the more I see that I actually am a builder at heart. I'm having a blast. None of that came from thinking about it.