Achieve Your Goals with Less Grinding

Hey all — Dan here. I'm incredibly excited to announce that Michael Ashcroft is joining Every to write a monthly column called Expanding Awareness. It's about unlocking a greater sense of agency, ease and aliveness in your business and in your life by learning to explore and control your awareness.

At Every, we believe that if you want to upgrade your performance you have to start by upgrading yourself. Learning how your brain and body work—what is underneath productivity—is one of the most important steps you can take to reach your goals. That's what Michael will be covering in this column, and it's why I'm so excited to have him join.

What follows is his first article in this new column, I hope you take as much away from it as I did.

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A few years ago I accidentally drove a rental car across the state of Vermont with the parking brake engaged the whole time.

As I drove, I found the steering was heavy and the engine was working harder than before. But instead of trying to find what was causing the problem, I pushed down harder on the accelerator. When I arrived, the burning smell was bad enough to make me think there was a fire in the area. That’s when I noticed the brake engaged in the “on” position and I realized why my drive had been such a grind.

I used the word 'grind' on purpose. I was literally grinding down the brake pads on that innocent car. We also use the word to describe what it can feel like to work towards our goals—and we usually use the same grind-it-out approach. When things get tough in our lives it's tempting to just lean a little harder on that figurative gas pedal. This works, in the same way that I was able to push the car harder to overcome the resistance of the brake, but in both cases, grinding  creates inefficiency and even damage.

It doesn’t have to be this way. When it comes to pursuing goals, you can learn to notice when you’re grinding, and instead of leaning harder on the accelerator you can opt to disengage the parking brake. The feeling is incredible: suddenly you can go faster, turn more easily, and set your sights on more distant destinations without worrying whether you’ll make it. 

My aim with this essay is to help you learn how to do this.

You don’t control your behavior, you control your perceptions

If you want to learn how to grind less, the first step is to notice that you already know how to do it. The exciting truth is that you accomplish most goals in life automatically and effortlessly. 

Think of something like grabbing a drink of water. You realize you’re thirsty, you set an intention to drink something, and your body organizes itself to get a drink. You quench your thirst without much thought or effort on how you do it.

Grabbing water is almost never a grind, but this mechanism doesn’t always work so easily when we work towards our higher level goals. What’s going on here?

One framework to start to unpack this is Perceptual Control Theory, which states that we bring about changes in the world by contrasting the perception we want to have with the perception we currently have. Our mind and body then work together to bring the world into a state that aligns with our desired perception.