Hey! Greetings from Charlotte 👋
These are my friends Annie and Lane.
We’ve been playing copious amounts of ping pong lately. Seriously out of control. Can’t recommend ping pong enough as an after work hobby.
But anyways, I have an important idea to share with you today:
Today’s Big Idea
You know the feeling when every thing is going great until you get in your own way?
Well today, I wanna share with you a framework for identifying and overcoming this. It’s called the upper limit problem. And my coach Scott, who sold his start up to SalesForce and then decided to study consciousness, introduced it to me.
It kinda looks like this:
You can imagine the upper limit problem as follows:
You have an average/baseline, an upper limit and a lower limit.
And within life, there seems to be a tendency to return to the mean level of wellbeing / fulfillment (obviously, it’s the average).
But what if it didn’t have to be that way?
I stumbled onto this idea with Scott because I realized nearly every time my life gets better on one vertical and I approach the overall upper limit, I seem to pull myself down. Almost like there’s an average internal thermometer that gets uncomfortable with the temperature increasing.
Tripling my income (the first time)
For example, in 2022, I landed my first ghostwriting client.
She instantly tripled my income- and paid in full before I wrote a single word! It was amazing, I still remember getting a beer with my friend Maggie afterwards and not really believing what just happened.
But I panicked!
The engagement went fine, we worked together for 10 months. But it was the most stressful 10 months of my life!!! Literally overthought everything, just felt like a zebra on my shoulders and chest. And my romantic relationship began to suffer as well.
It was kinda like this:
It feels like if one vertical rises some others feel a need to fall to get back to equilibrium.
It’s not just me
A month ago, I went to this men’s retreat in Austin from this guy Danny Miranda:
It was world class!
Everyone there had massive breakthroughs and I learned a ton about myself and my intimate relationships. I was euphoric in the airport going home.
But a funny thing happened…
I returned home and immediately returned to a vice that had been dormant for a long time. And a couple people who I reconnected with afterwards reported the exact same.
Bizarre!
I’ve seen it time and again.
Over the past year I tripled my income again.
But this time, I completely blew up my relationship (it’s over now) and even had a month where my net worth stayed completely flat because I didn’t save a single cent.
Or I’ll close 57% of calls in the first 2 weeks of a month (March) only to end the last two weeks around 25% so that my monthly is closer to baseline.
Why can’t I just be at 57% all the time?
I’m not saying life needs to be perfect, or that goal is realistic. But I am saying it’s perfectly reasonable that your current “best” could easily be your current “baseline” or “worse.” It’s completely plausible.
So this is the question I’ve been wondering:
What if everything could just go up and to the right? And the only reason it’s not is because I get uncomfortable with that idea and self sabotage?
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Feel free to let me know what you think:
Thanks for reading.
Interesting idea! I’m wondering about the idea of steps as opposed to rises and falls. What if you improve in some area and strive to say at that level like a step, garner confidence, keep it , and then move up to the next step. The reason I say this is because it feels like that type of wisdom comes with age and you are certainly someone who has learned quite a bit in just a few years. I’m wondering what it would be like you saw yourself on steps instead of rising and falling.😉