Hey Cal, this is Adam again. My question is related to others about strategic planning, which for me is kind of the last component to my system that I'm trying to get going. Long story short, I'm sitting in a big chair the other night with my favorite ambient music and an oil burning lamp, and I start to list the values that are important to my personal and professional lives.

And then things get out of hand. Perfectionism takes over, and I'm looking at a crazy long list of values that seems impossible to wrangle into the projects I have going already. I know you've addressed perfectionism and personal/strategic planning separately, but do you have any recommendations for not overloading my first value plan and strategic plans?

Thanks. Well, Adam, I appreciate the oil burning lamp. I think we need one right behind me in the HQ. I should do all of my recording. I think we made a mistake with black curtains. I should be in a leather chair, in a smoking jacket, with a pipe, with like a gas lamp or oil burning lamp.

And also, and Jesse, this is just what's called good production values, right? Because every time we start a new clip, I should look up and say, "Oh, I didn't notice you walk in there. Welcome." Just again and again. This is going to be our signature piece. I'll be like typing on a typewriter or something and look over and look, "Oh, I didn't see you come in there.

Welcome." It'll be great. This is all just about production values. So, Adam, here's what I'm going to recommend. I have the same issue, first of all. I can get in my head in the planning, and I have an obsessive brain. You might have this too, Adam. It serves me well in my career as a writer, but it can be pretty torturous in my everyday life.

My brain has a very sharp, instinctual feel about whether what I'm thinking about clicks or if something's not quite right. And so it's really useful, right? Like if I'm doing math proofs, it's really useful. It's like this isn't quite right. It's an instinctual feeling of disgust or dislike, and so I can feel when things click.

And same thing with my writing is why I have this kind of crystal clear underlying structure to my writing is because if it's not, I feel literally sick. And so I can get here with my planning where I'm like, "This isn't quite right," and I can get obsessive. Here's my recommendation.

First of all, tame your values in your value plan with roles. It's an idea I stole from Stephen Covey. Here are the roles in my life. I am a writer. I am a father and husband. I am a community member, whatever it is. Here are my main roles in life.

And describe for each role, like what am I aiming for here? And I actually will have an expository little description of what it would mean to run this role successfully that captures the values inside of it, or you can list values under it. But now you're confining values to roles.

You have some more structure to it. As a father, here's what I'm looking for. As a thinker and public intellectual, here's what I really value. That's going to help. And then two, I'm a believer in trying to translate these into strategic plans. Do the birthday challenge. I talked about this before.

I like to have every year on my birthday a collection of changes, goals, projects, or behavioral upgrades that I want to complete by my birthday. And I usually will start about six months before my birthday thinking about these things. And I'll typically try to have one thing I'm doing in each of those roles to upgrade that.

So it could be a one-time thing I'm doing, like a goal I'm accomplishing, or a behavioral upgrade I'm trying to ingrain. And that makes it tractable. So I'm not trying to overhaul my life all at once. I want to be living the perfect life where I'm perfectly expressing each of these roles.

I want each year at my birthday incrementally to have improved something about each of those roles. That makes it tractable too. So I'll summarize. Tame your values within roles so you don't just have a long list. And then two, six months before each birthday, give yourself a challenge that does an incremental improvement in moving your life closer to your values in each role.

Do this enough times, and overall I think you're going to find that you feel aligned with your values, and you feel like that's getting better. And those would be the two main things I would suggest, along with buy more oil lamps. I really do appreciate that particular visual. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)