🖊️ I've done more than I remember

A neighbor knocked on my door a few weeks back, wanting help getting into her energy account. We sat at her kitchen table for twenty minutes. Reset the password, waited for the code to come through on her phone, found the bill she was after. Walking home, it struck me that three years ago I'd have been the one doing the knocking. I can't tell you when that changed. There wasn't a day it happened.

Last week I asked what helps a new thing stick once you've tried it. Four people answered, one vote on each of the four options. Thank you to those four. But that's not a result, and I'd rather tell you it means nothing than dress up four votes as a finding. Which lands close to what I want to talk about today, because reading your own progress off a small, noisy signal is something we all do, most days, without noticing.

By the end of this you will:

Most of us judge how we're doing online by how it feels. That feeling is the instrument, and the instrument is faulty in a specific, well-documented way.

Psychologists call it rosy retrospection: we remember past experiences more favorably than we rated them at the time. Applied here, it means the version of you from two years ago, the one who wouldn't go near the self-service machine or kept putting off the online form, gets remembered as more capable than you actually felt. The gap between then and now quietly closes in memory. Real progress gets edited down to "I was always more or less fine."

There's a second half. Teresa Amabile studied the daily diaries of a few hundred working professionals and found the biggest day-to-day motivator wasn't recognition, and it wasn't reward. It was the sense of making progress on work that mattered. So the thing that keeps a person going is the very thing they are worst at seeing.

Put those together and you get a common, unhappy shape: somebody doing perfectly well, feeling stuck, and concluding they aren't cut out for this.

The fix isn't clever. Stop asking the feeling. Write it down instead.

→ Tonight, get a sheet of paper and list everything you handled online in the last month without asking anyone for help.

Three rules:

There's good reasoning behind writing it rather than thinking it. Concrete evidence of progress holds people to a goal better than encouragement does. It isn't being told you're doing well that keeps somebody going. It's seeing, with some precision, that you are. Julia Dhar walks through all of this in Psychology Today if you want the longer version.

Nobody else sees this list. It isn't for showing anyone.

Do it, and you'll have something this evening you didn't have this morning: evidence. Next time you hesitate over something on a screen, there's a page in your own handwriting listing the things you already handled last month without help. That's a very different conversation to have with yourself than "I'm no good at this."

Don't do it, and nothing bad happens. You'll keep using the instrument that under-reports, and it will keep telling you you're standing still while you quietly aren't.

When I mentioned this last week, the ticket was $37. It's $9 now. They rebuilt the whole offer over the weekend and cut every price in it. I don't know why, and I'd be guessing if I told you.

A price dropping in the middle of a launch usually makes me suspicious, so let me say the obvious thing out loud: it doesn't change what you get. Same three days in October, same two people running it, same sales sequence afterwards. The only thing that changed is what it costs to sit in the room.

The ClickBank Profit Challenge is a live three-day training on building a small online income. Their page says $9 holds until September 14th, and that it more than doubles after that. There's a $47 All-Access upgrade offered on top at checkout, and more offered later. My write-up names all of it before you'd pay a penny.

Skip it if you want money in the next few weeks, or if three afternoons in October aren't realistic. It's neither of those things, and the write-up says so plainly.

Here is my honest write-up.

I earn a commission if you join through my link, and more if you take the upgrades I tell you to be careful about. It costs you nothing extra – the price is the same either way.

When you write the list, the interesting part usually isn't how long it is. It's finding one thing on it you'd have called impossible a year ago and had completely forgotten doing.

If one of those turns up, hit reply and send me that single line. One line is plenty. I read every one, and nothing gets sold to you for answering.

One tap again this week:

I know, I've just spent a page arguing that feelings make poor instruments, and here I am asking you for one. Fair enough. It's still a reasonable place to start from, and I'd rather know where you're standing than guess.

Talk soon,
Bob

A short, no-pitch tip from my place – a two-minute way to quiet the clutter on your phone.