Good Life Project - Are You Measuring Your Success With the Wrong Metric?

Episode Date: November 3, 2016

Are you measuring your success by the wrong metric? It’s so easy to get caught up in vanity metrics. To measure how full your Good Life Buckets are with the wrong metrics. Funny enough, I got caught in this trap. And, the irony is, it was all in the process of measuring my success with […]The post Are You Measuring Your Success With the Wrong Metric? appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So what if you could take the wisdom from years of conversations like this, distill it into a single short and sweet operating manual that gave you something to do every day in order to move from where you are to living a lit up life. That's what I've created with my new book, How to Live a Good Life, appropriately titled I hope. It's really, it's an operating manual that draws from literally thousands of hours of research, hundreds, actually, maybe even thousands now of hours of learning and sitting at the feet of astonishing teachers and traveling the world to create something simple, a beautiful, simple model

and something to do every single day for you to make a really big difference in your lives. If you want to check it out, go to goodlifeproject.com slash book, you can read the first chapter completely for free. And then it is available for purchase at booksellers all over the place. You can find a link in the show notes as well. On to our show. Hey there, it's Jonathan, and I'm here with you for The Good Life Project Riff. If you're new to the podcast, welcome, welcome, welcome. These are short and sweet episodes that we add in generally on a Thursday to just kind of talk about one particular topic for anywhere from five to ten minutes. Today, I got to come clean about something. As I sit here, I'm sitting in my home studio in New York City where we record the podcast,

and we've had an astonishing run of guests, deeply soulful, revealing, revelational, powerful conversations that have made me look inside a lot. And it's kind of interesting for me because as I sit here, the day that I'm recording this is also just a couple of weeks after the release of my new book, How to Live a Good Life, which I know you've all heard about because I've talked about and it's kind of been all over the place, which I'm incredibly blessed for. But I got caught up. I got caught up in trying to measure the success of this opening window with the wrong metric. And I'm the guy who actually said to my team that we're going to measure this. We're going to measure the success over the long term. I'm in this for the long game. You know, I feel like I've written

something that was my best work, that was deeply meaningful, that will move the needle in people's lives. And this is all about getting into people's hands so they can do it and so that they can start to experience change and they can share it and share change in other people's lives and go along this journey together and tell new stories together. That's the metric. That is the thing that matters most to me. Part of why I write is because I want to make meaning. I want to make meaning in being able to contribute to the world from a place of strength, meaning my strengths feel like they're being fully tapped with what I do. And when I write, when I really devote myself to writing, I do feel that way. I want to feel like my quote killer app being leveraged, whatever natural gift I may have

is really being leveraged. And that I'm fully expressed, that there is no voice or bit of potential that's just kind of being stifled. And with this book, I felt that way. And I still feel that way. And the flip side is that I want to make meaning for others. And that's less up to me and more about how the book lands. It's about how when it moves out into the world, other people receive it. And will they find it inspiring? Will they find it meaningful? Will they find it entertaining?

But more than anything else, will they do the book? Will they pick it up and actually do what's in it? That is, for me, that is the metric that I've been trying to measure this book's quote success by, is can we make meaning by putting this book in hopefully thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people's hands, and then inspiring them to do the work. And we've been doing that, and the reception has been stunning. But along the way, there's this little thing in the back of my head. As an author, there's something that almost every author yearns for. It is nearly 100% ego-driven, but it's there, and it's always there. And that's what's known inside the industry as the

quote, the list. And what that means is the New York Times bestseller list. And when you're bringing a book to the world, you generally have to make decisions about whether you're going to do things that exalt long-term sustained getting the book out there in the world or trying to make a go at the list, which generally measures your volume of sales over a one-week window of time. And I would be lying if I said that didn't matter to me. As a writer, as somebody who's on a third book, as somebody who's got a mom and a dad who would love to wake up and one day shoot them a text or just pick up the phone and say, Mom, open the times today. That would be pretty awesome. And I know that that would be awesome. And I know at the same time that it's trivial and it's ego driven. And it really doesn't matter to

me. It doesn't matter to what I'm doing. It doesn't matter to why I wrote this and what I hope this book does in the world. Yet it was there. And I got caught up in it, not in a way that changed my decision making at all. But I latched on to it and thought that I had hope. And in fact, we did come really close. But we didn't make it, at least the first week out. Who knows what will happen down the road. And I found myself, having worked so hard for so many months to bring this to the world, getting trapped, getting trapped in a bit of a downward spiral. You know, here I am bringing something I believe profoundly into the world. The reception is magical. Thousands of people are seeing it, reading it, and what I

hoped would happen, they're actually doing it and sharing this, is happening. And at the same time, I'm having trouble letting go of this completely egoic metric that is utterly meaningless in the long term to me. And it took a little while to snap out of that. And, you know, so it's interesting. And I felt like I kind of had to share that with you guys because I'm somebody who explores deeply what it means to live a good life. I'm somebody who's just ridiculously fortunate to be in a position to be speaking to you right now, to be building a company and a community and make my living the exploration of what it means to live

well and give well in the world. And yet I still stumble. I still fall. I still get trapped. And I find my ego wandering into measuring life by meaningless metrics. And sometimes you just need to hit reset and say, dude, you don't have to say dude. That's what I say to myself. What are you doing? What are you doing? You've got something great going on here.

You've got so much good in your life. Be with that. Be with that. Yes, there was something that would have been really cool that didn't happen. It may still happen down the road, but it didn't happen the first shout out. Yes, it would be fun. It would be cool. It would be a nice stroke to your ego here, would feed your identity. But in the long run, it's the wrong metric, you know, and hanging onto grasping to that as the primary metric of success for any particular project. For me, it's this book. It not only causes suffering, but it uses a bandwidth that could and should be much better allocated towards gratitude, towards connection, towards

kindness, towards creativity, towards service, towards art expression, all these other things that move you closer, not to ego gratification, but to grace. And grace, grace, that's the metric. That is what I aspire to. So just sharing that with you on a couple weeks after something momentous. And by the way, of course, if this magical other metric happens, awesome, it would be great. And at the same time, it was and still is sort of time for me to hit reset and recommit to elevating grace as a primary metric and letting go of the ego trappings that might stop me from seeing that I don't have to seek it. It's actually already here. Something to think about. I can't wait to jam with you guys again next week. I'm Jonathan Fields,

signing off for Good Life Project.