Good Life Project - The Killer App Is You: A Good Life Riff

Episode Date: April 1, 2015

This episode is a Good Life Project "Riff."What's that? A short, punchy riff on one particular topic that matters to a life well lived. Generally no more than 5 to 10 minutes.As always, these won't replace our weekly in-depth conversations, but if you like them, we may produce more and add them in as supplements to the weekly conversations. So let us know if you want more over on Facebook or Twitter.This week's Good Life Riff is entitled - The Killer App is You. It's about the mistake we've all made when we try to make a mad grab at success by doing the wrong things and relying on delusion and illusion.Here's a quick excerpt:The best of the best, the people who are now and will in the future eat you for lunch, build themselves, through fierce effort and expert guidance, into unstoppable human engines of intelligence, creativity, intuition, compassion, service, expression and heart. Then, they build a culture that empowers the people they bring into their endeavors to do the same.They exalt self-knowledge, personal growth and meaningful expression as the heartbeat of success.And they are hyper-aware that they, on an individual level, are both the keys to the castle and the sand in the machine. Equally capable of fueling acceleration and impact or delusion and collapse."If you really want to invest in something, invest in you."If you'd like to read the entire essay, the story was originally told on Jonathan's blog. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So we're continuing to experiment with some kind of fun different formats. This is the first we're going to call a good life riff. This is a shorter format, kind of a spoken word, just me thinking, telling a story and talking about one particular topic. And as always, it doesn't replace the in-depth conversations that we'll be sharing with you every week. We're just looking for ways to share a little bit more with you and potentially go to a more frequent format in a way that's totally digestible for you and that gives you great value and doesn't leave you feeling overwhelmed like you have to catch up at any

time. So our first good life riff is something called The Killer App Is You. And it's a bit of a spoken word piece. So here we go. The ad said something like, this ride will very likely kill you or at least seriously injure you and your ego. The ride described it was a week-long guided mountain bike trek. And it started with the famed Kokopelli Trail from Grand Junction, Colorado to Moab, Utah. And then it took you along the razor edge of elevated moonscapes and mesas. It was massively technical, physically grueling, and there were points where one wrong move would have led to pretty perilous outcomes. So there were six

of us that came together for the first time at the trailhead and we're, you know, sizing each other up and we did the usual how do you do's. But the question on everybody's mind was, well, who can actually ride and who's most likely to get us killed? And there's a lot that you can tell just by looking at a rider, you know, sort of like the first impressions thing. And I kept things pretty low, mounting a pretty beat up specialized hardtail. And that's kind pretty low, mounting a pretty beat-up specialized hardtail. And that's kind of an old school version of a mountain bike that didn't absorb bumps that well, but it gave me pretty pinpoint control and hyper-efficient power. And that's what I liked.

It was stripped down, bare minimum, nothing flashy, and pretty much the same from my garb. You know, ratty old bandana, beat-up helmet, threadbare t-shirt, and pretty broken in riding shorts and very battle-tested shoes. And on the other end of the spectrum was a part of the crew named Ed, and I actually changed Ed's name to Protect the Innocent, as you'll soon see why. So he was sporting about a week-old $4,000, totally spit-shined, full suspension, mountain bike ride, and his body totally festooned with a festival, skin-tight neon lycra, spanking new gloves and helmet and near patent leather shiny shoes and high-tech wraparound shades. And he was completely styling.

And I'd ridden with enough Eds to know that there were really only two options here. He was either a gobsmackingly good rider, or he was delusional and possibly about to die. Two hours later, Ed was gone. Literally gone. Vanished. For the next 24 hours, we actually thought he was dead. Without permission, on this monstrously dangerous and challenging trail,

he sprinted ahead of the pack. And building on a foundation of arrogance and enough high-end gear to just totally delude him into thinking he knew what he was doing, he ignored warnings and his own complete lack of skill took a wrong turn and didn't look back for hours. So search and rescue had four people looking for him all night, two in ATVs, two more motorbikes,

risking their lives in the dark to find him. And he wasn't found until the following day, physically battered a bit, but okay. His bike was a bit of another story. When he finally made it back, his first move was to take a swing at the group leader, blaming him for abandoning him to die in the desert. And in fact, he'd actually heard the rescuers looking for him, but didn't flag them down because he was angry at us for leaving him. The absolute height of denial and arrogance. This is, it's also a story of instead of, rather than in addition to. So what do I mean by that? Well, before committing to this, of a lifetime ride, Ed spent weeks researching

and then buying the lightest bike frame in a quest to get a slight performance edge instead of, rather than in addition to, focusing on the monumentally larger edge that would have come from riding more, riding more often, and losing even a portion of the 40 plus extra pounds on his personal frame. And no, it wasn't just that he was a bigger guy, but had put in the time and was super fit in his larger frame. That would have been totally awesome. He hadn't. If anything, he was recklessly physically unprepared for what we were about to do. He bought the most expensive, fastest shifting gear system instead of, rather than in addition to spending thousands of hours riding, wiping out, grinding up mountains and down trails, developing the ability to intuitively forecast and make those split second shifts that drive

epic performance, even on the crappiest equipment. He bought the most expensive, plushest suspension instead of, rather than in addition to, learning how to feel the billions of data points that scream from the dirt up through the tires, the spokes, the frame, the seat, and the handlebars into your body with a firmer ride and give you the information needed to understand traction and power and leverage, impact, force, acceleration, speed, steering, and control on an embodied expert level. He'd invested all of his money in the external stuff instead of, rather than in addition

to, owning the fact that you can strap a true rider, someone who has done the work, onto a 1983 Schwinn Stingray Clunker and she will destroy the arrogance-driven, gear-deluded newbie who thought winning was more about window dressing than going deep and working your ass off. Thing is, this story is not about mountain biking. It's about life. And it's also about business. It's about you. It's about your career. And if you aspire to build something great, it's about that vision. I see this all the time in the world of aspiring or new entrepreneurs and established business builders. It's so much easier to just buy better stuff, build a better app, use a better platform, install a better system, build a flashier

marketing funnel, write more compelling copy, wrap your product in better packaging. You look outside your own personal, emotional, and cognitive ecosystem for, quote, the big leap forward. And all those external tools and systems and strategies and platforms, the bells and whistles, they actually do matter. They can make a difference when they exist in addition to, not instead of, a fully optimized, aligned, and utterly lit up you. In that case, they become complementary vehicles of growth, but alone, they don't fix the biggest problem. The thing that's really holding you back because the single biggest simultaneous fail point and success catalyst is you, not your gear, your platform, your system or technology. Technology didn't

make Steve Jobs better. Steve's voracious mind made technology better. Stop looking outside yourself for the big win. You want to grow faster, know yourself better. You want to make more money, be a better problem solver. You want to attract better talent, build a stunning culture of one. You want to make a bigger difference, train in empathy and intuition and compassion. You want to leave a legacy that matters. Be a better human and leave people profoundly changed. You want to live a better life before anything else. Invest in a ruthless self-knowledge, then build every effort, every action, every element of your vision around the fiber of your being. You are the killer app. The ultimate yet most ignored technology lies in the space between your left and right ear.

Bake a profoundly better human cake. Everything else is frosting. So why don't we do this? Because it's hard. And with rare exception, we're wired for the easy win. It's the same reason you go for the pill from your doctor instead of changing the way you eat and move and live, because it's easier. On occasion, it's truly necessary. But whenever it's taken instead of, rather than in addition to the behavior change, that's often the root cause and lifetime fix. It also serves as both an illusion and a panacea. Something that like, you know, Ed's zillion dollar gear deludes you into thinking you're doing what you need to do to be the best you can be and build what you want to build, but it's a lie. And it will come back to haunt you. Always does, always will. The best of the best, the people who are now and will in the future eat you for lunch,

build themselves through fierce effort and expert guidance into unstoppable human engines of intelligence and creativity, intuition, compassion, service, expression, and heart. Then they build a culture that empowers the people they bring into their endeavors to do the same. They exalt self-knowledge, personal growth, meaningful expression as the heartbeat of success. And they are hyper aware that on an individual level, they're both the keys to the castle and the sand in the machine, equally capable of fueling acceleration and impact or delusion and collapse. So when you look at the year to come, when you look at what you want to do in the next few months do in the next few months, in the next few years in your life, my question to you is this, which will you choose?

Delusion or determination? Ownership and effort or glitz and blame? If you really want to invest in something, make it you. So I hope you enjoyed this first Good Life riff. If you want to actually see and read the text of that, you can find it on actually my personal blog, where I'll often actually share the full text of these shorter riffs. That's just at jonathanfields.com. And the name of it over there is The Killer App Is You. As always, if you've enjoyed this, feel free to pass it along, jump over to iTunes and share your thoughtful review only if it feels right to you. And if

you want to find out what's going on with Good Life Project, you can always check it out at goodlifeproject.com. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.