My new commute affords me more time to post on this blog. Hurray!

Challenging myself to write the entirety of a post on a short subway ride.

So what’s up with me?

Still working toward the goals outlined in the New Year’s post. (Post belonging to the new year.) Location independence. Smaller mental footprint at my day job. Mandarin. It’s important to “restate your assumptions,” as Max Cohen, the hero of Darren Aronofsky’s Pi so often does.

And just to get meta for a second, that’s why I’ve decided ultimately that writing this “personal journey” blog is beneficial, in spite of some thinkers who caution entrepreneurs to conserve their “sweet glucose” for their business. Well, I think I’ve been doing that. I created a reality show and am launching a coaching course with the help of my customers. I think I can spare some glucose for a Breaking Ferriss post.

Besides, the “conserve the glucose” canard underestimates the importance of Restating your Assumptions. Which is important to staying on target and avoiding “mission creep”. My goal is not to build a multimillion dollar enterprise to pump up my ego. It’s to free myself from location dependency and money worries, and to take action on the central premise of Four Hour Work Week, which is the insight that you can be the architect of your life. That you don’t need to take opportunities that are dangled in front of you just because they’re dangled. You can create your own opportunities.

So my business is in motion. It’s making progress toward being an earning machine, and as I make that progress I’m learning ever more about the leverage points where value is created. The apex of the Value Chain.

But the wonkier I get the less relevant this blog will be for the average reader. So I’m choosing to ruminate on some life lessons. My cognitive bias is my Fear of Standing still. The force that motivated me to leave Montana at age 18, and move to a similarly sized town to attend college at a university of similar caliber (and higher price tag). My central insight of this week? The paradox of progress is that it often requires a deep and profound acceptance of who you are at the present moment. Otherwise you’d be stuck in the trap of trying to define your identity by your progress or lack thereof, and be far more susceptible to those classic cognitive biases like loss aversion, which might cause you to miss opportunities and avoid worthwhile risks.

Make progress by accepting the present? It doesn’t seem to jibe. But consider the alternative: “I need to achieve success so I can define myself as successful.” Sure, that’s a motivator of sorts, and to a degree none of us can avoid it.

But isn’t “I accept and love myself, I’m deeply engaged in the present, and I’m taking action to set myself up for ‘success’, remembering to enjoy the journey” a lot better?

Even if it sounds like some Burning Man houey? (Never seen that word written – made a stab.)

Anyway, time’s up.

Back at you next time.