🕒 Improve Your Life in 5 Minutes, ⛏️ Creating Discomfort, 📈 High vs. Low Performers

PROGRESSION: 2025, Volume 14

We’ve just passed the midway point of 2025. You may be thinking that you’ve crushed all your professional and personal goals. Or you may feel like you’ve fallen behind. Maybe it’s somewhere in between.

Regardless, July is a great time to pause and take stock. How are you doing? No, seriously. How are you really doing? Your answer to this question may not be crystal clear. You know you want to make progress. But maybe you don’t know where to start. You need a game plan.

No, I’m not about to sell you on my coaching services (though we can certainly have that conversation ). I want to share a simple tool that will jumpstart your progress.

Take a Snapshot of Your Life

The Life Snapshot is a quick exercise to help you take—yep, you guessed it—a snapshot of where you’re at in life. There are 10 short questions to answer:

1. Career: How do you feel about your job and career?

2. Family: How do you feel about your family?

3. Friends: How do you feel about your social life / friendships?

4. Significant Other / Romance: How do you feel about love and intimacy?

5. Health: How does your body and mind feel?

6. Money: How do you feel about money and finances?

7. Spirituality: How do you feel about your connection to something bigger?

8. Fun and Recreation: How do you feel about your level of leisure and play?

9. Personal Growth: How do you feel about your personal growth and development?

10. Physical Environment: How do you feel about your surroundings at home, work, and play?

Step 1: Rank yourself across each dimension on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being extremely satisfied in that part of your life, and 1 being extremely dissatisfied. Be honest. No one else will see this but you!

Step 2: Review each question and answer:

• Why did I pick the number I chose?

• What would it take to get that number just one point higher?

Finally: Identify 2-3 dimensions you want to improve. Which ones resonate most with you? Is it your career? Your relationship with your partner? Your health? If you made progress in one aspect of your life, how would that positively impact the rest?

To quote Zig Ziglar, “You cannot solve a problem until you acknowledge that you have one and accept responsibility for solving it.”

Complete the Life Snapshot. Identify what’s holding you back. Then commit to taking action.

What I’m Learning

• I sent this piece to my clients last week—The Discomfort of Building: Lessons from DoorDash.

  • In it, my friend and former VP of Customer Ops, Steve Kenning, shares what made DoorDash's culture special.

  • Specifically, companies slide into dysfunction by allowing comfort to take over. This leads to avoiding risk, conflict, and accountability.

    • Steve contrasts this with DoorDash’s early culture, which deliberately engineered discomfort—through massive goals, clear ownership, and weekly accountability.

    • The discomfort was essential to surviving and scaling a low margin, operationally intensive business.

• This quote from Sterling Snow hit hard: “When you give criticism to a group: The low performers assume you’re talking about someone else. The high performers assume you’re talking about them. So you’ve demoralized the people crushing and not helped the under performers.”

  • Snow makes the case for not giving criticism to a group, which I agree with. But I think there’s a deeper lesson.

  • When I was an HR exec, I saw a big gap between how high and low performers operated:

    • High performers want an environment where they can do great work and have impact.

    • Low performers want to cut corners and get by with the least amount of effort/work possible.

  • Inevitably, when some low performer would do something dumb, execs would want to create a policy to ensure that dumb thing never happened again.

    • But it’s unwise to create policies for the lowest common denominator. Doing so irks high performers and low performers just find a different way to cause problems.

  • My main point: Optimize for high performers, not low performers.

• This post is good reminder that the safe path is often the riskiest one.

  • Great story from Kanye’s cousin who took the safe accounting job only to get laid off six months later.

Gratitudes

I’ve found power in regularly expressing gratitude so I’ll continue the habit. I’m grateful for the challenges my kids face. This past week my son’s All-Star baseball team played for a chance to represent Utah in the Little League World Series. After an early loss, they won three straight games to make it to Saturday’s winner-take-all championship game. Local firemen threw out the ceremonial first pitch. An American flag hung over the field.

Winning this game meant everything to my son. He and his teammates had talked about it all year. They practiced hard for weeks. They left everything on the field. Ultimately they came up short. My son had a great tournament but was the last out of the game. The other team celebrated. He and his teammates cried. When he got in the car, he cried some more.

I wanted to help him. I wanted to make it go away, but I knew he needed to sit with the pain. It hurts when you fall short of a goal you’ve worked hard to achieve. But that’s where growth happens. Better to be in the arena and fall short than avoid these moments altogether. I’m grateful for the challenges my kids face.

If I can do anything to help you, please reach out. As always, thank you for reading.

All the best,

Nathan

Read my book, The Unconquerable Leader | Learn about coaching

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