"When it comes to building great habits and ditching lame ones, your commitment to staying focused on who you're becoming regardless of where you are/who you are right now is the mightiest power you've got". - Jen Sincero

In short, it begins inside. It starts with your mindset. A favorite topic of mind. Cultivate the right mindset and you can literally achieve what you set out to do. No, really.

Let’s get into some badassery

I clicked into a podcast last week with Jen Sincero, author of "You are a badass." That bright yellow book I see at my local grocery store and elsewhere with curvy type. It always struck me as another fluffy self-help book. Which don't actually help. Another book on a subject I'd smugly thought I read enough about between "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg and "Tiny Habits" by BJ Fogg.

The reason I clicked? Chase Jarvis made it sound like an interesting listen. Since I didn't have a better option in the moment while walking the dog, I bit on his intro:

"Jen’s approach to forming habits is unique in that she places extra focus on identity and setting boundaries. We humans crave certainty, and we love to be right, even when it means holding ourselves back or experiencing failure and discomfort." - Chase Jarvis

Maybe I haven't learned as much as I could.

Jen resonated because she is living proof of going from broke to successful by reinventing herself. She was broke in Venice at age 40 and knew she had to do something different. She's unabashed at sharing the ups and downs of her trajectory.

Unlike the silliness of The Secret, which was a rip off of Napolean Hill's Think and Grow Rich, Jen doesn't just say believe something and it'll happen. You have to have the mindset you can do it. And then DO THE WORK! It's your thoughts plus action that translates into achievement. Just thinking and then binging Netflix won't produce squat.

Note on Napolean Hill, and Think and Grow Rich.

I was listening to Alan Weiss talk about how Napolean Hill was broke. Turns out he was quite a fraud as this lengthy read outlines.

Between ourselves and the self-help industry, we like to think things are harder than they need to be. It's quite simple: you need to be motivated to change. Do the work or do the thing. If you're not motivated, forget it.

The other piece is shifting your identity around a thing, which is what Jen did. Instead of thinking she was always broke and couldn't afford anything, she thought of herself as someone who made money and took the action around that. Like when she tried to quit smoking, she changed her identity from that of a smoker trying to quit to a non smoker.

When she considered herself a non-smoker, it made her shift her actions and made not smoking a part of who she was. It sounds woo. It sounds too easy. But that's why it can work. But only if you have the right mindset around it. To be repetitive, do the work. Believe it. Live it.

Getting into the right mindset shifts your behavior.

It shifts your energy. It shifts your outcomes because you know what success looks like and feels like. And therefore you perform better.

If this is still too woo for you, try this:

• Imagine yourself happy. Smile. Change your posture. Visualize your vacation. Or whatever triumph that comes to mind. Notice how you feel.

• Now, put a scowl on your face. Imagine yourself in traffic. Running late to an appointment. Or getting rear-ended. Did you notice a difference?

Think about a good day you've had. And then a bad day. On the bad day did it seem like everything and everyone was out to get you? Were you edgy? I bet on those days it was harder to have difficult conversations with difficult people. That's the power of mindset.

Good to Great author Jim Collins rates every day from -2 to +2. These represent the worst and best days. A 0 rating is a neutral day. And there's -1 and +1 too. He looks back to spot trends on what might cause the -2 days and vice versa. He then seeks to create more +2 days. He knows that his mindset has a big impact on his days. This is likely more than most of you care to do - it takes a lot of discipline. Discipline that I don't have. But I appreciate the thinking around everything begins inside of you. And it's yours to control.

If you take nothing else from Own The Cow, it should be this: Your mindset is essential. It begins inside. You absolutely have to do the work. And make sure the work aligns with what you're good at and what the world needs. It sounds so simple. But it's hard in practice.

May have your attention please?

How often have you heard this phrase in your life? I bet it's a lot. Did you know how valuable your attention is? Facebook sure does. 3 Billion people help them generate over $70 Billion in revenue.

As a brand builder I think a lot about how to earn attention of the right people. It's something that consumes every marketer. I also think about where to focus myself. What books to read. What content to consume. There's far more I want to absorb than I can. Just like you.

Over 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Think about that for a minute! By the time you watch an hour of your favorite YouTube channel, 6,000 more hours are waiting for you.

Via Valeria Maltoni, who writes one of the best newsletters around on conversation, community and so much more mentioned a new book on attention: The World after Capital. Author Albert Wenger talks about how capital is no longer scarce in big picture terms and how the new scarcity is attention.

He talks at length about the limits of capitalism to solve this as it relies on prices for allocation. And you can't put a price on spending time with your kids, family and friends.

Albert writes:

"Attention is to time as velocity is to speed. If I tell you that I’m driving at a speed of 55 miles per hour, that does not tell you anything about where I am going, because you do not know my direction. Velocity is speed plus direction."

Companies are incentivized to take as much attention as they can:

"Capturing attention is much more easily accomplished by appealing to the parts of our brain that find kittens cute and react with outrage to perceived offenses. Conversely, the companies responsible for these systems are not incentivized to recommend to you to close your computer, to put down your smartphone and spend more time with friends or to go outdoors and clean up the environment.”

The financial markets closely track metrics such as number of users and time spent, which are predictors of future growth in advertising revenue. Put differently, the markets that drive the predominant way we use digital technology to allocate attention reflect the interests of investors and advertisers, which are often orthogonal to individual and community interests.

Knowledge is power. It's freely available to anyone with an internet connection. It's made the life you live possible. It's the source of progress:

"Knowledge has already made possible something extraordinary: by means of the innovations of the Industrial Age we can, in principle, meet everyone’s needs. But we need to generate additional knowledge to solve the problems we have introduced along the way, such as the climate crisis. New knowledge does not spring forth from a vacuum; instead it emerges from what I call ‘the knowledge loop’, in which someone learns something and creates something new, which is then shared and in turn is the basis for more learning."

The marginal cost of digital technology has enabled infinite sharing of knowledge. Think about how during this pandemic, you can learn from the best thinkers and the best universities without leaving your home. Obviously impossible in 1918, it's now possible for you become an expert in almost any subject you want. Sure, you're not going to master a physical sport without practicing it - to a point!

There's a University of Chicago study on basketball free throws that showed how those who visualized themselves doing successful free throws improved by 23% compared with a 24% improvement in those that practiced an hour per day for 30 days. Those that did neither didn't improve.

The comments here question the study, and I'm no basketball player. It's outside my circle of competence. If I wanted to play basketball, I believe would need to invest the time physically practicing AND then visualize a successful free throw.

Trust and Trustworthy

For you to earn someone's attention requires trust. And that must be earned too. Although not necessarily as limited as attention, it can't be bought. Just a quickly as you earn it, you can lose it too. Also via Jim Collins, he talks about how his mentor Bill Lazier starts out by trusting someone. He assumes a person is trustworthy as that provided more upside than assuming someone wasn't. He also made sure he never left himself exposed by trusting someone should they prove otherwise.

The clincher here is that it was shown how by trusting someone upfront, they wanted to show they were trustworthy. It had the potential of making them more trustworthy than if you didn't trust them at the outset. People don't want to let you down. Trust them, and they're likely to rise to the occasion. A win-win.

Let's put a bow on this letter so you can take action.

Your success or failure starts with how you see yourself. Change your mindset and you can change your outcomes because of the actions you take. Your success hinges on gaining the attention and trust of the right people at the right time. Knowledge has made your life possible and with a vision and a belief in where you want to go, you literally have the keys at your fingertips. It's on you to take advantage of the opportunity. Where will your mind take you this week?