1. The best way to experience unexpected good things (e.g., positive business and personal outcomes) is to allow yourself to be the quintessential version of you. As much you as you can be. By being yourself and finding the intersections of how you can support other people, you will draw in the people who want to work with you for being you.
2. Most people use being yourself as an excuse to be lazy or impulsive, to do the easiest and most obvious things that come to their mind without consideration for other people. That’s not what this is a call to action for. Being the quintessential version of you means doing the hard work of discovering your personality, understanding your past, and cultivating opinions about what you stand for.
3. You start by getting really familiar with your own backstory up to this point. You want to be as familiar with it as you are with the lore of your favorite TV show, video game, sports team, or artist. Investigate yourself and explore your story. Know why you do things. Know yourself like your favorite character’s or hero’s story arc, your strengths, and your personality. Know what your true passions were at the age of 8–15, what you spent your time doing for fun without much care for external results.
4. Ask yourself how you started what you’re doing now, who has impacted you along the way, what you’re most proud of, what challenges you’ve faced and how you’ve gotten around that. What did you learn from these challenges, and how are you overcoming them? What does your current experience mean to you now, and where are you trying to go from here? What opinions do you have? Another way to approach this is to step outside of yourself and ask, “What’s the most awesome thing that I’ve done that is quintessential me?” How would a bystander describe you? What mistakes have you made, do you feel remorse and new understanding, and how can you express it? If you experience exhaustion after a session like this, you’re probably doing it right.
5. From this deep understanding, your values emerge. You start to figure out the missions that resonate with you. You also see your path forward to where you want to go, and what you would like to accomplish in the time you have. You’ll start noticing tendencies, sensibilities, and experiences that come naturally to you that are incredibly difficult for other people—traits and assets you had that you never noticed about yourself before.
6. Only after you’ve looked inwards and focused on pursuing your own curiosities and hunches, and chosen one of the things that you would want to do for the rest of your life, should you look outwards and focus on making external results happen. Tell your stories. Write them down and publish them. Share them. If someone is interested, speak to them about it. Take responsibility for these internal and external outcomes.
Inspired by Obama money, quintessence, self-actualization, small b blogging, personal monopoly, category of one, techniques, digital gardens, and treating life like a game.