Big Problem With Your List: You Ain't on It

Last Thursday I spent an hour and forty minutes stuck on the road from Banani to Mirpur, and I used every minute of it to build a case. The traffic was exhibit one. Then the dollar rate. Then a client who has been "processing" an invoice for six weeks. Then the internet, which died twice during a deploy that morning. By the time I got home I had a complete, airtight explanation for why this year wasn't moving the way I wanted. None of the items on it were me.

That night YouTube autoplayed a grainy Jim Rohn seminar from the eighties, the kind with an overhead projector and a live audience in blazers. Twenty minutes in, he described my exact evening, forty years early.

The list

Rohn had his own list, and it was better than mine. The government was at the top. Then taxes: look what you have left after they take everything, and they still expect you to do well. Then prices. Twenty dollars into the supermarket, half a bag out. The weather made his list. The traffic. His car. The company. Company policy. The training program. Negative relatives who kept putting him down. Cynical neighbors who wouldn't loan him money. The economy. The community.

A pretty good list for not doing well, isn't it? He thought so too. Then one day his mentor, Earl Shoaff, asked him a simple question: "Jim, just out of curiosity, how come you haven't done well up until now?"

Rohn went through the whole list. Shoaff listened patiently, looked it over carefully, and said:

"Mr. Rohn, big problem with your list. You ain't on it."

Rohn tore the list up, took a fresh piece of paper, and wrote one word on it: Me.

He later called that the day he passed from childhood to adulthood, because accepting full responsibility for what happens to you is one of the highest forms of human maturity. There's an old spiritual he liked to quote: it's not my mother, not my father, not my brother, not my sister, but it's me, oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer.

It's not what happens

Here is the whole philosophy in one line: it is not what happens that determines the quality of your life. It's what you do.

The reasoning is hard to argue with. What happens, happens to roughly everybody. The sun went down on all of us last night. The same event can hit two different people, and one gets rich while the other stays poor, so the event itself can't be the explanation. Disappointments are not special gifts reserved for the poor; everybody gets a share. Even the weather excuse falls apart, because it rains on the rich too.

Rohn's example was two salesmen waking up to the same rainstorm. The first looks out the window and says, "With weather like this, nobody can expect you to go out and make sales," and stays home. The second looks at the very same storm and says, "What a great day to sell. Everybody will be home, especially the salesmen."

                 The same storm hits everybody
                              |
              +---------------+---------------+
              |                               |
              v                               v
       Salesman A:                     Salesman B:
  "Nobody can sell in             "Everybody's home today.
   weather like this."             Perfect day to sell."
              |                               |
              v                               v
         Stays home                     Goes to work
              |                               |
              v                               v
     Next 5 years look              Next 5 years look
     like the last 5                like nothing before

Same storm. Two different lives. I've watched the exact same split in tech. Two developers get caught in the same round of layoffs. One spends six months refreshing LinkedIn and explaining the market to anyone who'll listen. The other treats the same market as a reason to ship: side projects, blog posts, open source, cold emails. A year later they are not in the same place, and the market didn't do that. The doing did.

Which sets up the question Rohn asks his audience, and the one I couldn't shake at one in the morning: starting tomorrow, what are you going to do that will change your life's direction? Because if the answer is nothing, the forecast is easy. The next five years will look like the last five. And if you don't like how things are, his advice was blunt: change it. You're not a tree.

Three steps that actually change things

Slogans don't change anything, so Rohn gave three practical steps. They map surprisingly well onto how I think about engineering, which is probably why they stuck.

1. Find out how things work

The first key to doing better is to find out. To change your life you need ideas, and there isn't much an idea can't change. When Rohn told Shoaff he had no money, Shoaff refused to accept it as a problem: the real problem was the lack of an idea on how to create money. Get the idea and everything downstream changes.

His word for this was study. If you want to be successful, study success. If you want to be happy, study happiness. If you want to be wealthy, study wealth. Don't cross your fingers and hope; make it a study, the way you'd study a new codebase before touching it.

And when you find something that works, write it down. Don't use your head for a filing cabinet. Put it in a journal so you can do the next best thing: repetition, repetition, repetition. Go over it enough times and one day the idea takes root and starts showing up in your bank account, your personality, your lifestyle. This blog is basically my version of that journal.

The best tool for finding out is childish curiosity, the kind that asks a thousand questions and then a thousand more. Rohn said to be like a child in four ways: curious, excited, full of faith, and trusting. Adults are too skeptical. One caution he added: you may not be able to do everything you find out, but you should find out everything you can do. You don't want to reach the end of your life having lived one tenth of it, with the other nine tenths lost not for lack of opportunity but for lack of information.

2. Go to work, massively

Finding out is worthless without action, and action needs a game plan. On paper, not in your head. Don't operate out of your mind; operate from paper. When someone told Rohn their plans for the next six months, he'd cut them off: don't tell me, show me. Show me the written game plan and maybe I can help.

Then he attached one word to action: massive. Massive action is the cure-all. Going to make calls? Make a few thousand. Knocking on doors? Knock on a few thousand. Compare that with what he called the language of the poor: "I'll try it a time or two and see what happens." Or, "I'll give it thirty days." Thirty days. You could guess that person's bank balance.

The formula is short: pick up a good idea, take heavy action. But don't wait until you've learned three thousand things first, or you'll burn all your time and end up smart and broke. Dumb and broke is okay, he said, but smart and broke is pitiful. Don't let learning lead only to knowledge; let it lead to action. It's the same trap as the developer with forty bookmarked tutorials and zero deployed projects. I've been that developer.

3. Don't try to beat the system

The last step is a caution. Find out how the system works, then work it, but don't try to beat it. Some people learn just enough to start cutting corners and hunting for cheap answers, and they end up with a cheap life. Find out how it works best and do it that way, even when it's slower. Do it right. Don't compromise with right.

Two small keys live under this one. Be a quick learner: Rohn told of a man who broke his nose seven times in the same place, and the obvious lesson is to stay out of that place. And don't be stubborn: some people won't change even when a better way shows up, because "I've been doing it this way thirty years." If a better way comes, take it.

He closed with the man in Las Vegas who didn't want to risk his cash, so he invented a mental gambling game: pick a number, bet an imaginary amount, track the wins and losses in a little notepad. He kept his money. He was betting with his mind instead. And he lost his mind. Don't try to beat the system.

One word on a fresh page

I still think about that hour and forty minutes on the road. The traffic was real. The dollar rate is real. The late invoice is very real. But none of them explain the next five years, because they're happening to a few million other people in this city at the same time, and some of those people are going to have a very different five years than the rest.

So I did the corny thing. I opened a fresh note and wrote one word at the top.

Me.

Starting tomorrow, what are you going to do that will make a difference?