by Oto | Jul 16, 2026 | Creativity, Design, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Personal Development, Productivity
AI didn't make me lazy. It handed me my own subconscious.
Right now I’m eating turkey pepper soup at my work desk, and I have multiple jobs running with AI.
One agent is taking a client project from brief to restructured profile to redesign, start to finish. First time I’ve ever let it run the whole thing. I don’t know if it will work. Another is deploying new functionality to one of my platforms. And in Obsidian, I’m voice-dumping to a third one, playing with an idea I want to post tonight. The post you’re reading now.
For the past year I’ve been all the way into AI. Like, REALLY into it. Last year, I was very skeptical. This year I had my road to Damascus moment, and I wrote about what I saw back in April, after building eight apps in six weeks without knowing how to code.
I said work was no longer about doing the work but directing it. That you need a meta approach: understand the work, its value, the systems and workflows around it, not just the task in front of you. I said AI was a motorbike for the mind, but it still needs a mind to steer it.
It’s hard to explain sometimes, but something in my mind shifted. I felt the shape of something, innately, and I’ve been chasing it ever since. The months since have been me living inside that idea. Pushing it to new and strange places.
Hold on. My agent just sent back design references. I’m laughing. Goddamn, that actually looks pretty good. Okay. Wow.
Where was I...
Oh yes, I’m always thinking about the work, not just the task.
What does it actually take to do the thing? What are the systems around it, what is the workflow, how does the work get done? Because once you can see that clearly, then you can abstract it. And once you can abstract it, you can encode it. And that is a profound thing.
If you can encode the work then you can manipulate it, engage with it in different modes. You can switch things around. You can add force multipliers at different points. You don’t just know what you are doing, you have a sense of how, and it can live outside your head and talk back to you.
I’ve spent months encoding ideas into software. I built a brand operating platform that walks you from audit all the way to growth. It’s built on my methodology, prompts, sequence, step by step. I found the methodology as I built the different parts, intuitively, in the dark it seemed half the time, with moments of radiant brilliant recognition.
That’s an idea encoded into a framework. It works.
Earlier this week I wrote a book about that methodology in five minutes. Assembled it, really. Five minutes of assembly, sitting on a vault full of notes, a pile of blog posts, months of conversations with my agents, and ten years of doing the work. First the idea lived in chat. Then it became software. Then content. Then the book. And halfway through restructuring the book I realised part of my software was wrong, and now I have to go fix it. That is what it looks like to attack an idea from every side.
Each medium teaching you something new about the whole thing.
Moving at this speed poses some questions. After months of it, “can I do it” is not the question anymore. It’s more like...okay, where are my leverage points? How do I stay sharp, hone my true unfair advantage, and not succumb to outsourcing the real thing to the machine?
My intuition points me to the loops. With these tools, the loops are faster. Iteration, feedback, build, review. That is the defining feature. When you can move from idea to software to content to book to corrected software in a week, what would take months, decades even, to surface and refine can come out much faster. The sheer speed of the loop makes you better faster...I think...It is a lot. The brain is still adjusting.
Now on to design...taste. That has always been the tricky part. That’s the piece I wrote off in April as the untemplatable part. And even as I push further into AI (I’ve moved from working in Claude chat, to cowork, to code, to terminal, and now my own agentic dashboard, in months), lately I’ve been circling back to doing more design, more writing, more directing. I have a clearer sense of what can be reliably delegated and what can’t. For now.
I’ve been seeing a lot of things as code lately. By that I mean breaking everything into its component parts and seeing how they relate, how they combine. I have been thinking about brand design the same way.
Here’s the workflow I’ve been running for a few weeks. Point the AI at a reference, or an old document, and have it extract everything, the ideas, the layouts, the type, the colour, the textures, the imagery, into a structured brand guide template that I can parse and it can understand.
Then we work. Sometimes twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours straight on one guide. Tweaking, tweaking, tweaking. I still work very hard. More now, I think. But every time I work hard now, the payoff is more than the thing. The payoff is the lesson. The payoff is me understanding my own process and learning how to communicate it to the machine. The work deposits something now, where it used to just get lost to the subconscious.
People say AI makes you lazy. I don’t know, not really my experience man. I think it is the most incredible extraction tool for everything you’ve been doing for years, for better or worse. All that subconscious knowledge, the stuff you were just good at without knowing why, for the first time you can extract it, name it, use it, tweak it. Being good at it becomes knowing why you’re good at it, becomes being able to hand it over. Conscious competency, then conscious delegation.
And once you have it named, and in your hand, it is a very powerful tool.
When you know the pieces, you know what to tweak. I understand the visual side of branding differently now. A component is no longer there because I like it. It is there because it makes sense for what the brand is supposed to be. Every tweak points at the concept. Naming my own process made me better at the process. The extraction improves the thing it extracts from.
Which brings me to tonight’s test. I’m tired. It’s been a heavy week, two days straight deep in platform UI, and a client needs this thing. And I’ve been wrestling my way to a simple admission: it is time to let go more. To embrace the leverage I’ve been building.
Sometimes you hold the AI’s hand all the way, step by step. But after you’ve done that long enough, like training a junior, there comes a day when you say: just do this. And what comes back is decent.
Tonight is that day. That’s the agent running the client project while I chop pepper soup.
And maybe there’s one more step. Maybe the agent that knows me, that has my context, my workflow, my biases, all the things in my head I usually have to connect myself, maybe at the end of the day I can jam with it the way I always tear the workday down, and out of that comes a blog post. In my voice. Edited by me. Fueled by my flow, by what happened today.
Tonight is the first time I’m fully embracing that as a valid part of my process. Dump to draft to posted, tonight. Because honestly, I’ve been having ideas and documenting concepts and lessons faster than I can deploy them, and I’ve been deploying fast.
So this is another experiment: what happens when I post the ideas as I have them, instead of sitting on them until they’re perfect. I want to join the conversation. I want to hear what you’re learning and trying, because some of what I’ve found is genuinely interesting, and I suspect some of what you’ve found is too.
That’s what this is. The same creative flow. With the brush, with the mouse, with the pen.
I am pouring my heart and mind out, the way I always did with a piece of paper in front of me. The way I always did with the blank Notion page.
The surface just thinks now.
The tools got smarter.
The hand is still mine.
by Oto | Mar 16, 2026 | Branding, Personal, Personal Development
I have always lived with this tension between honesty and performance. To an extent, we all do.
I don't know exactly when it started, but it has always been there subconsciously, colouring my work and my lived experience. I think it comes from my experience growing up in the church environment, as the first born son of pastors.
There was a lot that was great about that and I wouldn't change it for anything. The community, the camaraderie with friends at Youth Group. But there is an insidious side effect that I've had to wrestle for years. That tension between honesty and performance.
But it's not just church, it is everything - society, school, work, culture. There are the unspoken rules, the expectations, the structures. The systems that punish you for stepping out of line, for daring to be different, to be you.
The Nigerian cultural context I grew up in was one that emphasised a deference to authority, a respect for elders, a sometimes hyper-conservatism.
So I learned to perform. I learned to fear being seen.
I learned to act a certain way to get along, get approving smiles and nods. I shared enough to seem open, but not the dangerous truth, the one that could get me in trouble. I desperately tried to be who I thought I should be. Who they want me to be.
I wore masks hoping that one day they would become my face.
…
I started blogging about 16 years ago. Fresh out of college, burnt out from a lifetime of trying to perform and conform to expectations that were literally killing me - I was depressed and suicidal - I was finally learning to radically accept myself, to break the rules. To embrace my sincerity and truth, wherever it might lead me. I had rebelled against this perpetual pressure to perform, and I was drunk on the freedom of saying exactly what I thought.
I wrote about life, and philosophy, and ways of being. It was a raw freeform exploration of ideas, sometimes universal, sometimes personal, sometimes taboo. I wanted to discover and document.
Who I was. What the meaning of life was. How I should live.
I have always loved self-help. There is definitely a through-line from preachers to motivational speakers. So, naturally I gravitated towards writing that sort of content. And I thoroughly enjoyed writing about that. I was learning, applying and sharing.
Even though I started with a raw honest voice, the need for performance crept back in, this time wearing secular clothes.
I wanted to sound credible. I wanted to grow. I hoped to become a name in the space. So I muted my voice, I conformed. I wrote like 2017 Medium (it was 2017 and Medium was all the rage). I wrote in numbered lists, with the motivational closings, in a voice that made it seem like I had it all figured out.
I lost the spark that made me unique.
And soon, I burnt out, running out of things to say, feeling trapped by this narrow niche I had chosen for myself.
In my work, the same tension exists. There is the work I think they would like. The design they have conditioned me to make. The one they usually emphatically accept. And then there's the work I want to do, the things that call to me. The level of design I want to make, the concepts I want to explore. The ones they usually reject, the ones they don't understand.
So over and over, I am pulled between both poles. I create from a place of honesty, then retreat to the safety of conformity.
…
There is something I always say to my friends (more a reminder to myself) - 'be yourself, and your people will find you'. It is always easier said than done.
The core of my writing and thinking is about knowing yourself and being yourself. How to create a life that is true to you, how to live intentionally, how to create a life by design.
How to become fully yourself when the world - family, friends, society, culture, the church, the business world, the creative industry, the social media algorithms - keeps offering you masks that almost fit.
The core of my work is helping clients understand themselves, understand what they are really trying to do with their brands and helping them express that truth - in identity, in web environments, in content.
How to create a brand identity that resonates with themselves as founders and with their customers.
I have always kept these two things separate. Writing on life and the process of becoming, on one platform and branding and design on another. But they are all really about the same thing - discovery of a core truth and the courage to express it.
Understanding yourself, expressing yourself. Understanding your brand, and expressing it. Honestly, boldly. A person is only as authentic and magnetic as the extent to which they live their truth. A brand is only as authentic and compelling as the extent to which it embraces and delivers on its truth.
Whenever we get stuck in performance over creative honesty, we deny our lives and our work the richness of the fullness of our being. This tension, this cycle of creative honesty and retreat, has made me brilliant sometimes and meh other times. It has helped me create many remarkable things that never saw the light of day.
I'm kind of over it.
…
I have a fear of being seen. I think it's because it feels a bit cringe. Also, it does not feel nice to be seen and then misunderstood, or seen and rejected. It is safer to create from truth in private if lucky, but most likely, just in our minds. Our dreams buried in a sea of 'what-ifs'. It is harder to create honestly in public, in the stream of the algorithm.
But I want to create, and I want to succeed doing it, from a place of truth.
To create and share the way I see it, instead of performing towards some external idea of success.
I will allow myself to be seen for better or worse.
I am not hiding anymore.
…
I started this Substack to start afresh on a new platform. To share my writing with an audience, and hopefully as a funnel to my branding studio.
But all I've posted is what I thought I should be posting - things I am learning and working through, but in a voice that is not quite my own. And it has held it back.
So now, I am just going to write… like my life depends on it.
Not how I think I should sound, like a 'professional' studio, or a guru, or an expert. I will write as I think. I'm just a person, living, grinding, creating, trying to figure this thing out.
This is my space to think aloud, about the intersections between life, authenticity, identity, creativity, communication, business, systems, design. It will be a bit messy and chaotic sometimes, highly structured and precise other times. It will be profoundly deep sometimes and profoundly dumb (in the dad joke kinda way). It will be about anything and everything. It will be me.
I'll write about my experiences in business, about my clients and what I am learning from them, about philosophy and concepts I am pondering. I'll write about Jujutsu Kaisen if it's the burning thing on my mind when I sit to write.
Maybe that will make me seem less professional, or all over the place. I doubt that though. We'll see.
It's been 16 years of thinking and creating, designing my life, helping others design theirs. I am not where I want to be yet. I am not an expert, not an authority. I am a very keen student, a practitioner, an operator, a seeker, and I have some things to say.
So, if you are out there, like me - cooking, striving, somewhere between the life you are in and the one you want. If you are on the journey to being and creating something that feels authentic to you, this is a space for you.
Let's walk, think and create together.
by Oto | Feb 2, 2026 | Inspiration, Personal Development
The faster you do the hard things you want to avoid, the faster you will receive the good things you actually want.
Do you ever get that thing where you are conversing with friends and suddenly a word or phrase jumps out and sticks with you and you can just feel that that word was a message for you from the ether, universe, God?
I had that in the final days of 2025. A rambunctious conversation with friends and family left me with a phrase that stayed with me since - Divine Acceleration.
And I have been thinking about it a lot.
After months of feeling somewhat stuck, of feeling constantly busy but with no real movement, I find myself in a phase where things are happening fast, and so I have to move fast.
Exponential growth is something I have pondered and desired for a long time. It is an experience I am eager to embrace. So the questions become…
How do you grapple with speed?
How do you harness the pressure of a fast moving life. How do you stay intentional and move through that effectively.
How fast can you move? How fast can you grow and change without feeling overwhelmed?
At this time, a couple of thoughts come to mind.
Like
Staying alert.
If you are going to move at high speeds, then you have to be focused and dialled in. Otherwise you will lose control and crash. You can’t fall asleep at the wheel.
Life is always trying to hypnotise you, with work, with temptation, with pressures and demands. You have to stay awake alert, on top of the things you need to do and what action you need to take.
You stay awake by having a purpose and holding on to it. And purpose will tether you to the important things so you don’t drift off being busy but ineffective.
That is a crucial second point - focusing on the most important things. If you want to move fast, you can’t do everything at once. You have to prioritise and combine things effectively.
You have to do the highest leverage thing.
Usually it’s something important but not urgent, something a little harder to do than the quick wins. But it is the thing that unlocks incredible value down the line, or that makes everything so much easier and streamlined.
Improve your systems
To move faster, you also need to improve your systems and optimise them for speed. Ironically you might have to slow down at first to do that. To sit and build the engine and loops to ensure you are robust enough to move quickly and grow. If you wanted to move fast on the road, you would choose a super car designed for that purpose, not an old piece of junk falling apart.
You are the car. Fine tune yourself and your systems to move fast.
This was something I really struggled with last year being so busy, so intense all the time. Always working, always pushing my body to the limit. Feeling both overwhelmed with all the things I needed to do, and at the same time stuck like I wasn’t really going anywhere. I had a lot of noise and little signal.
I did dabble and explore a lot - I explored creativity, videos, photography, painting, design, and so on. That was my aim for the year. It also showed me that my systems at the time could not handle the nature, volume and variety of things that I needed to do. So, coming into the new year, systems have become incredibly important to me as force and speed multipliers.
Embrace the discomfort
Then there is all the things that happen internally when you increase speed drastically.
Moving fast will mean changing fast. You have to ignore your fear and focus entirely on your goal.
You have to be willing to shed identities easily and make decisions fast. You have to be more attached to the thing you are chasing more than the person you have been. You have to embrace discomfort, embrace the pain.
The discomfort is temporary, soon this will become your new normal.
The one thing that can provide you with enough fuel to drive you past your discomfort and keep you laser focused is to use your environment.
Burn the boats, put your back against the wall and let that force a response. Commit. Get around fast movers, and people of action, change your perception of what is possible. That pressure will be incredible fuel in increasing your speed.
To move fast, take a breath and focus.
Pause and decide what the true goal is. What are you trying to accomplish and how quickly.
Pick the highest leverage thing and do that, and then the next highest leverage thing, and do that. Rinse and repeat.
If you do this while improving and streamlining your systems with an insane bias for action, you will move faster than you ever thought possible.
You will grow farther than you ever imagined.
by Oto | Jul 2, 2025 | Inspiration, Musings, Personal, Personal Development, Spirituality, Uncategorized
The magic you’re looking for is in the work you are avoiding - Joseph Campbell.
I have been thinking quite a bit about caves in narratives.
I recently rewatched ‘Dracula Untold’, a movie where the protagonist, Vladmir has to venture into a dark mountain and confront the Master Vampire to obtain power to protect his kingdom and family. I also think of the cave Luke Skywalker had to enter in ‘Empire Strikes Back’ to confront his dark self and emerge with new understanding. The caves of the video game, Elden Ring come to mind as well, the dark gauntlets that you as the player must enter into and fight through, until you defeat the boss and return stronger, with a new item, talisman, or weapon to boot.
Many times in life, we have to plunge into the depths, go into the scary places, to wrestle with our demons and fears, so that we can learn, grow, and return stronger.
These unknown depths are the caves we fear to tread, the work we refuse to do.
The doors to our breakthroughs, the paths to the fulfilment of our deepest desires lie in those areas, those tasks, in the work we don’t do, in the caves we refuse to enter.
We have to learn to embrace the difficulty of going into these dark places.
What are these caves?
They are the tasks that linger on our todo lists for years, the things we want to learn but never get around to, the areas of our lives that we know we should get fixed. They are the difficult conversations that need to be had, but which somehow always end up pushed to the side to preserve the peace. They are the important and crucial things we need to do that we avoid, choosing instead to do the more urgent or expedient things.
Why do we do this, how do we end up in this trap time and time again?
We fear what we will find
We do not enter the caves because we are scared of facing the truth. That maybe we are not good enough, that maybe we have messed up, that things are not working. Sometimes its easier to stick our heads in the sand and live in delusion, than really take a hard look at things and truly observe reality.
Sometimes we have let things fester so long, we fear to see what this thing has turned into, how far the cancer of our neglect has metastasised.
We fear our shame
One of the big reasons we do not enter the caves is because of our shame and embarrassment. We know we should have been practicing healthier habits, so we are embarrassed to go for a checkup. We know we should manage our finances better, so we avoid looking at our bank accounts or tracking our expenses. We know we should have been investing in our education, so we avoid looking up schools or applying for courses. We also fear looking bad in front of others, so we avoid our caves, bluster with our strengths and comfort zones, and act like everything is okay.
We fear the work it will take
Conquering our caves requires us to face our issues squarely and do the work to resolve them.
And that work can be intimidating. Facing the emotional struggle and friction in the first place, and then doing the actual work, to learn, to fix, to resolve. It is all hard work. But the good news is that as we tackle our caves, we get better, stronger and more capable and eventually, it becomes a cake walk.
We fear the time it will take
This ties into our fear of shame as well. We are embarrassed that we have waited so long and let things get so bad. We become afraid that fixing things will take even longer. But the time is going to pass anyway. Won’t we rather tackle the caves now and in time conquer them?
Now if these are some reasons why we do not do the things we know we ought to. How then can we counter these issues, face our fears and tackle our caves?
- With courage: There’s no two ways about it. Sometimes we just have to buck up, grit our teeth and get right into it. Into the muck and mess, and work our way through until we solve the issues. We have to trust in our capacity to rise up to the challenge of our situation.
- Embrace failure: Failure is part of the process. We are already in the red, things are already messed up. We have to embrace that things suck, that we have failed presently. But understanding that failure is part of the process, then we can learn what we don’t know and make adjustments until we start to win.
- Tackle one big cave at a time: If you have multiple caves to conquer, multiple issues to resolve, then don’t overwhelm yourself and try tackle all of them at once. Pick one major one issue and stick with it until it is resolved, and then move on to the next one.
- Commit and persist: In all of this, keep this mantra in mind - commit and persist. You have to commit to the task, to the process. You have to commit to doing the work, engaging with the cave, facing the truth, pushing past the fear and taking concrete action. It will be tough, it will be hard but if you persist, if you keep going, eventually you will succeed, you will emerge from the cave stronger and better for it.
by Oto | Mar 5, 2025 | Creativity, Design, Inspiration, Personal Development
I have always wanted to lead a creative life. The idea of spending most of my time immersed in the art, act and process of making sounds like the most appealing life to me.
Not fame or incredible wealth, but creativity.
I always thought that if I was able to sort out everything I needed to, and had enough to live off without thinking of money, I would spend all my time exploring and making stuff. That’s what I’ve always thought.
But actually making the time to do that, is a challenge.
One thing that stuck with me in my earlier years studying architecture, was the sense of a dedication to the aesthetic. And when I say that, I don’t just mean the surface look of things, I mean the philosophy and essence of thinking and making, of moulding artefacts and spaces. In this time, I was exposed to so many interesting things, and concepts. Many of which went over my head at the time, but few definitely struck a chord.
In my autodidactic journey since, I have carried that sense with me.
One thing I loved about the experience was the time in studio. We had this big open plan space where we all worked and made our models and worked on our designs. There was a compelling energy about the whole thing. And as I have delved into the lives and inspirations of artists and creators over time, I have enjoyed catching glimpses into their studios, spaces and processes.
I have always wanted a studio of my own.
It is why I call my company a studio, and not an agency.
For me the studio is a place of learning, experimenting and creating, and I think that is a beautiful thing. Creativity that is not just at the service of commerce, but a tool, a practice for being, for discovery, for evolving, for making oneself.
In trying to bring that to life, I have always had to balance this deep desire against economic realities. Most of my time and energy was held up in hustling and making money. And sure, the thing I do, my career is a creative one, so yes, I create all the time and I have grown and learned from that.
But it is my belief that creativity should exist unshackled by commerce, powered by pure soul. Which is why I have always written here, since 2010. Whether there was one person reading or a hundred.
And even when people advised me to monetise this in different ways, I always pushed back, feeling it would dilute the spirit of it. Imagine throwing ads all over this site to get ad money. Or tailoring my content to meet some algorithm instead of writing from my soul. What sin!
So today…some 14 years later, I feel ready to embrace cultivating a creative lifestyle on a deeper level. Sure, I do still need to work and spin my gears in the machine of commerce. But I am able to balance things a bit better. I want to focus on carving and cultivating a creative life.
I am a good creative. I am also a lazy one. I take a lot of shortcuts. And in the fast paced world of design and business, speed is prioritised over craft many times. I hardly have the space and time to really craft something special. In embracing a creative life and devoting time to it, I am hoping to study, to get better, to improve, to pick up new skills, to be able to do more. To learn myself, to create myself, to connect with others like me. To create cool things for you.
That is one of my personal themes for the year.
So, how does that work?
For me, it means creating all the time, in any medium.
They say you should niche down, find one thing and get really good at it.
I’m not doing that.
Personally, I want to try everything. I want to draw, and paint, write, take photos, shoot videos, design a space, design a building. I want to cook, d-jay, edit, design posters. I want to make books, and pulpy magazines. I want to work on a movie, help design a set, create in 3D and play with animation. I just want to make cool things.
When I think about cultivating a creative life, a few ideas come to mind.
Reclaim lost time
The first major challenge in living a more creative life is allocating the time to it. Making time from all the other things that demand my attention, and choosing to invest it instead in making, studying, and experimenting. What lost time can I reclaim for this purpose? What can I let go off to free up the space to create more?
Instead of scrolling, I could paint. Instead of obsessing over some client project, I could write. I could make quick sketches during my breaks. The point is learning to tuck away pockets of creativity into the mundane.
Always seek inspiration
To approach day to day life in a deeper way, to pay more attention. To not merely see things, but to really look at them, to study them, to sketch them, to research about them. To look at the mundane around you and discover the magic.
Make it easy to create all the time
I want to always be creating, with whatever time or resources I may have on hand. In compressed times, to make sketches, take notes, make snippets, make prototypes. And when able to dedicate more time, to go deeper and develop those into full works. To have the tools and set spaces available to begin creating at any time.
Watch and absorb the greats
It is important to look at what others have done. To be inspired and see ways, techniques and ideas that we can adopt into our own processes and style.
Embrace process
To be systematic in the ways that call for it, so I can be messy in execution. Being able to spread out the creative process, and do different bits at different times. To have systems, tools and processes, to capture ideas and bring them up when needed.
Embrace the discipline of practice
It does take some effort, to sit down and create, or study, or experiment, especially when you are not used to doing so regularly. But that is the point of cultivating a creative life, is to get more disciplined, to invest more time in slowing down, and engaging deeply, with art, with life.
This is my present intention, to lead a more creative life, to cultivate more of that energy, and these ideas may or may not survive contact with reality, but being creative is about sailing into the unknown and evolving into new modes of being and birthing new things.
Are you trying to cultivate more creativity in your life? What obstacles are you facing and what ideas can you share?
by Oto | Jan 9, 2025 | Inspiration, Musings, Personal Development
How to Achieve Anything You Want in 2025.
It is the start of a fresh new year and if you are like me, you are probably eager to get things started. You have the goals you want to tackle, obstacles to face and problems to solve.
It is a new year full of promise and potential.
And it could be your best year yet
…if you locked in.
What does it mean to lock in?
It means being tapped in, being connected, being committed. It means choosing a course of action and being completely committed to it.
And right there is our first condition for locking in - knowing what you want, what you are locking in for.
If you have been finding it hard to lock in, to really focus and put all your energy towards something, it could be just because you haven’t found or decided on something you truly and really want.
But if you already have that thing in mind, then you are in the right place. Even more so if you have tried multiple times and failed. You started that diet and exercise regime this time last year, and by February, they were long forgotten. You stated all those plans for your career and business, and by the time you got to December, you found yourself miles away from your intention, mired and busy with the agendas of others.
I know this well…because that has been me many times.
The good news about trying and failing to make things fit is that you are trying, trying to make something work, and that can be frustrating, but if you keep at it long enough, eventually something clicks…and then you lock in.
systems. kaizen. environment. seasons.
systems
The thing about making real and lasting change is that it has to be sustainable. Your tactics have to simple enough to manage over time.
And your biggest levers, the things you need to pay attention to are your systems and environment. Everything, every goal has to break down into its systems
The art of chasing a goal in a way that helps you not burnout is to take a lifestyle approach to it. Instead of just focusing on the goal and trying our best to follow the needed actions with willpower, we do something different.
We ask ourselves what we need to do consistently to reach that goal. Then we incorporate those actions into our regular lives and over time shift into the kind of person that naturally achieves their goals.
If for instance, we wanted to be healthier and fitter, we know what we have to do is eat better, exercise more and rest properly. We would probably need to stop ordering so much takeout and cook more. We would need to make the time to workout and move our bodies. We would need to respect our down time and make sure we get proper sleep.
Depending on who you are and what your life is, your answers to these issues would be different. And they probably are not very easy fixes. You might not even be able to do the thing you need to do yet.
You might need to cook, but maybe you don’t even know how to cook or what to cook. You might need to workout, but now you have to decide, do you go to the gym, or do you work out at home. Each component becomes a mini projects on its own.
But if we can keep with the process, not being so stringent on ourselves and prescribing what exact actions and roads we should take to our goal, then we can be creative and evolve ways of being that work for us.
kaizen
You need to think of these areas of your life as systems. Then you need to design and improve them to align to what they need to be. So sure, go ahead, take massive action.
Try to make the overhauls and effect the changes in your life with willpower, but as they fail, observe the points of failure and make corrections. As you fall back to your usual baseline of activity, look at ways to subtly improve and change small aspects of it.
Maybe instead of cooking every single day, you commit to just one meal a week. Thats tackling the issue from an action and habit point of view.
You could also get inspiration and flood your mind by watching cooking content, see how people make their meals and tackle managing their kitchens. Over time, you will change things. Maybe it starts with the things you buy for groceries, and as you get more comfortable with cooking, you are able to average 2-3 meals in some weeks.
And as you keep doing this, sooner or later you become a decent and regular cook and are on your way to being a more healthy person in a natural and more sustainable way.
That is the idea of this approach - to be natural and sustainable, to tackle issues from a root cause, to actually evolve and grow into this new person. It might take a while, but it is a stronger way to make that change and lock into your goal.
environment
The other massive lever in locking in, is your environment. A lot of how we operate and move as humans is on instinct, subconsciously. And your environment is the biggest influence on your choices and your actions.
The things around us can trigger a response before we even really think about it. Trying to quit sugar is much harder if you always have sweets hanging around. If you don’t make your environment an ally in your transformation, you will never change.
Do you want to give that project more time this year, then make a dedicated space for it in your apartment. Leave the tools lying around. The more you see them, the more you will be reminded of and inspired to take action.
You want to cook more? Make it easier to see and access your groceries and cooking gear. Invest in your kitchen and make it a pleasant place for you to make food.
You want to reduce friction, and reduce the steps you need to take to take the action you need to. You want good cues, triggers that will inspire you to do the right thing.
Remove distractions. Design your space and curate your environment to reflect the person you want to be.
seasons
So far I have discussed taking the easy and relaxed approach towards your goals. Slow changes in your habits and environment to help you evolve. I advocate that because it is easier than what we usually tend to do sometimes - go all out.
More often than not, you will always return to your baseline - your average performance, actions and habits. But now and again you do need to push past that and create a new baseline.
There are times you need to make a strong push. A full frontal assault on your dreams.Sometimes you do need to burn everything down and build it up again. Sometimes you need to put in a lot of effort and embrace difficult new practices and habits.
These seasons are important to push you over your present comfort zone and break you through to new experience and results. These are strong bursts and can’t be maintained for long, but they are important to do because the experience exposes us to new lifestyles and ways of being. With regular exposure, we can acclimatise to them.
After these strong bursts, As we tire and life gets in the way, we return down to a new baseline and focus on maintenance until we get to the next push season. From this new baseline, we can continue to move forward at a leisurely pace, as long as we keep moving and improving
Now what happens when you have been approaching multiple parts of your life with this sort of framework. Let’s say you have been messing around with content for a few years, having on and off seasons. Let’s say you have been refining and improving the business behind the scenes. Let’s say you have been maintaining a decent health baseline. Let’s say now you’ve got enough practice in all these different aspects of life, and now you have everything you need.
It opens up these seasons of time where the potential output of a lock-in season can be massive. Where all these different parts can coalesce to exponential growth and change.
That is the season I sense now, that with all of the small changes, all these improvements to the different systems that run my life, I can do some really interesting things.
For me, locking in means, doing what needs to be done, pushing each system as high performance as it could go and allowing them all work together to set a new baseline and to produce substantial results.
A whole year of locking in…that could be something spectacular.
