Penning versus life e execution. There's a really important distinction to be made between designing or planning your life and actually executing that plan. Your life plan is a self imposed contract. What that means is you're the one who wrote it and you have full authority to change it any time you
want. This is immensely empowering because you're free to do whatever you choose. But it can also be a trap because as you're executing that plan, you're going to continuously be faced with difficult and unpleasant situations where you say, well, I said I wanted to go down this road, but now that I'm
here, it's kind of nasty. What you need to do is make sure you keep these two things separate. They're modes, you have an execution mode and you have a planning and design mode. You flip the switch. When you have sufficient information, you do not flip the switch because it's hard or unpleasant. It's
very important to understand this. This is one of the great powers of this paradigm for life. When you're in a nasty situation, being in an execution mode can empower you to get through it by focusing on the fact that when you were in a clear state of mind, an objective and detached rational state thinking
about why this would be worth it. You figured that it was worth it, you, you believe that so clearly that you wrote it down into your plan and now you need to stick to that, you need to get through what you said you were gonna do because you believe in your own capability of discerning whether it's worth
it. But you don't discern whether it's worth it. When you're in the mix of the muck, you just have to turn off that part of your brain and to execute like a robot. Now, when I think about this, I can't help but think about this super cheesy movie from long ago called Over The Top and that's Sylvester
Stallone there in case you can't tell this is an actual line from the movie. But to give you just a brief background, he's a truck driver that has to win an arm wrestling competition. I'm not making this up in order to get his son back. And so he's just an everyman kind of person and he's facing these
gargantuan dudes and it, I guess they tried to make Rocky, but as a truck driving arm wrestling champion, it didn't really work out. But this one line is really great in the movie, what he does is every time he's got a match, he flips his hat around and this is the line. He says, when he's explaining
this to someone, he says, what I do is I just try to take my hat and I turn it around and it's like a switch that goes on. And when the switch goes on, I feel like another person, he says, I feel, I don't know, I feel like like a truck, like a machine. And so when he gets in these arm wrestling competitions
, he switches off all the, the equipment in his body that he would use to plan and he just becomes a machine and he gets done what he said he figured was worth doing. Now, I've been in so many situations where, where I've done this and where I've had to do this and sometimes it's in a moment and I've
had situations to stretch over years where I had to flip the switch and just act like a machine to accomplish what I knew I needed to do. As you feel this way, as you act this way, you will derive all the benefits from that. So I don't have a good analogy to share for the planning and design mode. Maybe
the matrix is the best one, although I don't know what particular scene from the movie would be best for this, but you flip the switch and you just see everything that underlies everything you question everything you look at every detail of everything you completely detached from how things really are
, right. Now and you fully live in how they could be. You don't think about the cost yet. You just think about what's the best possible outcomes. You don't think about the probability. Nothing just raw, what is possible and then from there not even what is possible. What is best, just raw? What is best
as if there were no cost to anything. If anything you ever tried would, would succeed if every person in the world was as reliable as God himself and you are as good and tough as he is tenacious. What would it be like? And then after you figure all that out, you backtrack into. Ok. Now what would it
cost and is it worth it and enumerate all of that? So these are two separate modes, the execution mode and the planning and design, design mode. You only go into planning and design mode in specific times and places that you intentionally enter into. You never go there out of fear, out of doubt or difficulty
. You only go back into that process when there's new information that you hadn't previously considered. And that's how you, you exercise the power of all of this. Ok? So some examples of what's sufficient to trigger the swap when you activate planning mode again, maybe you find information that suggests
that what you thought, you know what you had enumerated as the tasks to achieve your goal is not gonna be sufficient. The most common way that happens is you do those tasks and you don't achieve your goal. You say, well, I really thought I'm a sales person. I really thought if I did 100 contacts, I'd
meet my sales goal. I'd make X dollars in Y amount of time. But I've made those contacts and I haven't made the sale. Great. Go back into planning and design mode and ask yourself what more you could do. Or maybe you decide this is at the top level, maybe you decide that transcendent purpose isn't really
what you want. You thought more than anything you wanted to have tons of time with your family. I'm just pulling this out of thin air and now that you're spending tons of time with your family, you decide that's not as great as you thought it was gonna be. Hopefully not. But, you know, just plucking
this out of thin air. Um Maybe as you're going through it and you're revising your goals or your tasks, you say, you know, this is going to cost me a lot more than I thought it was going to, you know, say you start a business and I think this happens for everyone that starts a business and you get down
the road a little bit and you're, you say, wow, this is going to cost me so much more than I thought it was. Do I really wanna do this? And the answer might be no, and that's fine. And now you go pick what you do wanna do but you don't slip into that just because it's hard or unpleasant or whatever.