The Dote 7: Mexico and a writing course

Hey friends,

Been a minute! Life gets crazy. Last weekend I had a blast up at Bear Lake for a Nerd’s Weekend. There were 26 guys staying between Travis and his cousin’s houses that are right across the street from each other. Isaac and T flew out, and we all had a great weekend filled with poker, pickleball, cornhole, spikeball, video games, Magic the Gathering, hot tubbing, football, and a little bit of running (that part was the worst).

This week I’m in Mexico! Han and I are staying at an Airbnb in Puerto Vallarta while our kids are staying with her parents in California. It’s our 10-year anniversary trip, one year late. That being said, I won’t be long on this Dote, but I committed to publishing an article for my writing class and this is the only place I post my writing publicly so…you’re in luck.

I wrote an article about a meaningful experience I went through earlier this year. So meaningful, in fact, that it’s shaping what my career is going to be starting very soon. I’ll write another post about that change, soon, but in the meantime, here’s my essay about finding the one word that defines what motivates and fulfills me in life.

Hope you enjoy it and I’d love your feedback!

How dropping a bowl of salad helped me discover my core value

My parents always told me I could do anything I put my mind to and I took that to heart. So when my mom asked me to carry a bowl of salad up the street to a neighborhood party, I was confident my seven years on earth had prepared me for the moment. 

Our street block was lined with oak trees planted every thirty feet. They were tall and beautiful with huge roots that pushed up the sidewalk and made the cracks uneven. Great for jumping my bike off of. Not great for walking with a large salad bowl. I caught my toe on a crack and tripped. The bowl turned perfectly upside down as I fell forward and the salad spilled all over the ground.

I was devastated. I had been entrusted with a simple task and I had ruined it. I felt completely incompetent.

I didn’t think about this experience for another 25 years until I found myself trying to decide if I should quit my job. My position as a sales manager for a tech company was safe, prestigious, and paid me well. It was also sucking my soul. I struggled to think that my life purpose was to just sell software, write follow up emails, and “work cross functionally across teams.” I wanted to do something that would fulfill me and bring me joy.

I studied all the common advice: Talk with friends, think about what makes you happy, find what you’re truly passionate about. Not wrong, but also too broad to be helpful. 

That’s when I happened across a simple thought exercise that suggested something bold. Using nothing but a few stories from your past, capture everything you stand for in one single word.

Does it sound corny? Absolutely it does. But think about some of the world’s greatest thinkers and activists. What they stand for can often be summarized in one word. Steve Jobs → Impact. Martin Luther King → Equality. Albert Einstein → Curiosity. 

Did I think the exercise would work for me? No. But I was desperate for something to help me make a decision, so I did it anyway. To my surprise, I came away with one word that encapsulates everything I value and stand for: Confidence.

How to find your one Word

The thought exercise is to find your Word by giving yourself an origin story. Just like superheroes have origin stories that illustrate where their values come from (Batman→Justice, Spiderman→Responsibility), everyone has past experiences that point to a core value. 

To find your Origin Story, think of three painful experiences from your past. One from childhood, one from adolescence, and one from adulthood. It is important that you use the first experiences that come to mind. Don’t overthink it. You don’t need to pick the most significant or the most painful memories—my memories were about dropping salad, a bad haircut, and shattering a fridge magnet. Talk about insignificant. 

Write a summary of each experience or describe it out loud to someone, then answer the questions

• What role did you play in the experience?

• How did you feel?

• What did you believe about yourself in that moment?

• What did you believe about the situation?

After answering the questions for each specific experience, then ask questions about the similarities across all of them. 

• What are the commonalities in these stories?

• What are the common feelings?

• What are the common beliefs about yourself?

Don’t skip any questions! Your experiences might not seem related at first, but keep digging.

My adolescent memory was of me crying in the backseat of a car after getting a bad haircut in junior high, convinced that everyone would mock me for the rest of my life if I showed up at school the next day.

My adult experience was when I broke a fridge magnet in half. My wife had bought the magnet to use in her elementary school classroom and I carelessly tossed it at the fridge, thinking it would stick. Instead, the magnet broke in half and I felt like a complete idiot, incapable of anticipating the consequences of my actions. 

Once you find the common feelings and beliefs about yourself, your one word will begin to manifest as the antithesis of those feelings. Across each of my experiences, my strongest feelings were incompetence, vulnerability, and uncertainty in myself. In each moment I believed that I was incapable or insecure about something, like helping my mom, overcoming the perception of my appearance, or anticipating consequences. The reason these experiences surfaced as significant is because they each represented a time when I lacked confidence. As the antithesis to that, I discovered that my one word is Confidence. 

Using your Word

Like a seed that grows into a tree, my Word has become the core that everything else in my life grows from. Because I value confidence, I strive to earn it through practice and effort (because I believe unearned confidence is just ego), and I’m most fulfilled when I help others find confidence in themselves.

Finding my Word led me to start a new business coaching athletes. Watching them develop confidence reignited my passion for teaching and serving others. For you, finding your Word might give you the courage to try something new or focus more on what makes you happy.

Whatever your Word is, I believe finding it will make you more fulfilled. I just hope you don’t have to drop too many salads to figure it out.