I've gone through a lot of cycles of expansion and consolidation. I make a ton of progress, but then I circle back and solidify it, making sure that the gains will stay with me and that I'm unencumbered enough to do the next thing.

Now I'm in the curious position of having reached all of the goals that actually matter to me. Sure it would be great to have more money or to visit more countries or have more adventures, but I'm self-aware enough to know that each of those areas will produce diminishing returns.

My ongoing campaigns like coaching, writing, and CruiseSheet don't require huge amounts of effort. I could certainly spend a lot more time on CruiseSheet, and I do plan on ramping up to some extent, but it doesn't seem clear that I can fruitfully fill up months with CruiseSheet work.

So I'm thinking about doing something totally new. Here are my two ideas and why I am considering. I may do one or both of them, something totally different, or nothing new at all. I often consider things with no pressure or prejudice, just to think about what it would be like.

Recently I've had a lot of friends going through hard times. Not terrible times like great illness or financial loss, but times of growth like going through big life changes or breaking up with a significant other who you know isn't the right one.

It's nice to be able to provide some comfort or advice for a friend going through these sorts of things. If you don't know how, or aren't sure that you're particularly great at it, here are some ideas on how to improve.

Listen to your friend. Most people have the need to be heard, and it tends to be very important. Most people know the answers to their problems, if there's even a question at stake at all, and they just want to be heard. In other words, one of the greatest skills needed for supporting your friends is just shutting up and letting them talk.

This conveys to them that they're important and that their concern is valid.

I've now been coaching many people one on one for over 2 years. In that time all of them have had major positive life changes and a huge portion have already achieved goals that they had set for much longer time horizons. In some ways each person is totally different, but I've noticed some very strong trends in what causes people to have success.

The first thing I always try to find is the person's real goal. People usually know what their top goals are, but sometimes it takes a little bit of refining to get to the core of what's going on.

But the most important thing about their goal is that they have to really want it. This sounds obvious, but sometimes people have goals that they think they should want rather than goals they actually want. Thinking about why a goal is important and why you really want it is an important part of the process. Writing down a goal isn't enough.

Once a good important goal is set, I design a habit or process which will all but ensure success if they follow it. In designing these habits, I've found that by far the most important factor is that it is easy enough that they will follow it consistently. As long as the habit is on the path towards the goal, there is no difficulty level that is too easy. Start very easy and focus on perfect consistency, increasing difficulty only once perfect consistency is reached. As soon as someone is consistently following the habit or process for a couple months, I know that they are probably going to reach their goal faster than they think.

Since a few years ago, when I realized that I vastly preferred traveling with my friends versus traveling solo, almost all of my travel has been with other people. I'm fortunate to have a group of friends who are really good travelers, but that's not always the case.

If you aren't sure whether you're good at traveling with others or not, here are some guidelines that you can use.

Make sure that your goals for the trip are the same as the other person's. One of the times I felt I wasn't a great travel companion was when I went to Morocco with a good friend of mine. He had a normal job and was taking vacation, but for me it was part of my normal life. So when we got there he wanted to go out and do fun things, but I wanted to spend half the time working.

I felt bad because I knew I was putting a damper on his trip. We had a good trip overall, but in retrospect I think I should have set expecations before agreeing to the trip or cleared my schedule.

I have to admit, I was a little bit nervous about hosting the Budapest event, moreso even than when I hosted the very first event in Vegas. Vegas events are simple by design. I rent a really nice space, bring together some great people who are motivated to make their lives even better, and we work. A trip in a foreign city that involves walking, training, and even boating across the city has a lot more moving parts with a lot more things that can go wrong.

Luckily everything went off with out a hitch (ok, maybe we did lose a wheel briefly on a pedal-cart that we rented, but through the power of teamwork we fixed it with no tools).

First, I want to extend a huge public thank you to the seven people who came to Budapest 1. It's a long way to travel for an event with a very vague description and promise, but everyone showed up ready and participated fully. Like the other events I've done, our group spanned a large age range and scope of professions and life-situations, but each person was a genuinely good human being who was authentic, open to the process, and contributed to a group that was greater than the sum of its parts.

We went to my favorite tea place twice, went to four of my favorite restaurants, saw some of my very favorite sights, went to two bath houses, and failed to find the elusive bat-house at the zoo. During tea, meals, and even in the baths I worked one-on-one with people to help them figure out how to excel at the next phases of their lives.

In the year before I met the woman who is now my wife, I was dating with purpose. I didn't necessarily aim to find a wife, but I was pretty intentional about what I was doing. And since I ended up finding an amazing woman and marrying her, I figured I'd share what I learned from it to help men and women looking for something similar.

The biggest mistake I made by far was traveling so much. I wouldn't do it any differently, but huge gaps between the first few dates torpedoed a lot of relationships that may have otherwise worked. In fact, if it weren't for my friend Todd pushing me to fly to visit, I probably wouldn't be married. ("You never like a girl this much. You are an idiot if you don't see her before your next trip")

Despite your best efforts, a lot of it will come down to random chance. My wife told me that she only swiped right on me because I mentioned cruises in my profile and she figured we'd have something to talk about since she liked cruising too. There was another girl I was dating earlier with whom it may have worked out if her ex-boyfriend didn't show up in her life between our first few dates. You just never know.

That said, the key is just maximizing surface area. Figure out what it is you want and spend as much time as possible with potential partners. That also means spending as little time as possible with those who don't fit. One thing I think I did really well was stop seeing girls once incompatibilities surfaced, even if it was going really well.

I used to be neutral, or maybe slightly negative on museums. There was something pleasant about being in them, but I didn't really know what I was supposed to do there, and always felt like I was doing it wrong.

And it turned out I was doing them wrong. I was introduced to a guy who is now one of my close friends, Nick Gray, who hosted guided tours of the Met. I actually delayed meeting him for a while, because a tour of the museum sounded very boring to me.

When I did, though, I saw the museum through a different lens. It didn't matter what I was supposed to do at a museum. It was a public resource that I could use in any way I wanted. Nick's Museum Hack tours were irreverent and fun, and focused on the less famous pieces of art in the museum, but gave a lot more context on them.

Now I have my own way to enjoy museums, which is heavily influenced from what I've learned through Nick (I thought it was exactly the same, but now I find that when we go to museums we do it differently).

To be honest, I don't read a ton anymore. I had a couple years where I read 50-100 books per year and that had the effect of exposing me to just about every book anyone had ever recommended to me and burning me out a little bit. I still read a bit, but not like before.

Of the hundreds of books I've ever read, a few stand out as being so excellent that they're in a league of their own. I recommend them all the time to friends and to coaching clients, and have probably recommended all three somewhere in this blog before, too.

1. Difficult Conversations

There are very few books that I can say really changed me and how I interact with the world, but this one very obviously did. Nearly every person I've recommended it to has told me that they loved it and it had a big effect on them as well. I know of several relationships that it saved directly.

A friend of mine was telling me about how she struggled with regret, specifically around cryptocurrency. Why hadn't she sold at the top? Why hadn't she bought more when it was lower? The questions nagged at her and she would beat herself up about it.

Like her, I didn't sell at the top or buy more at the bottom. It doesn't bother me at all, though. What's the difference?

I think that she and I have different definition of what a mistake is. In any given day there are thousands of publicly traded equities, assets, and commodities. Nearly each one has gone up or down in the past 24 hours, so by her definition, all of us have made thousands of mistakes because we would have been better off buying or shorting them all.

If you are going to count those as mistakes, though, you must count everything else as a triumph. Each breath that kept you alive, each car you passed that you did not accidentally step in front of, each glass of water you drank.

Two years ago CruiseSheet didn't have individual informational pages for each cruise. Cruises are large purchases, though, so I thought that it would be much better if I could have a lot of written information, graphs, and pictures. With around 12,000 cruises on offer at any time, the selection changing every day, writing them individually would be impossible. What would it take to automatically generate an actually useful page for every single cruise? It would be a garguantuan task.

While much of our days is filled with small tasks, emails, course corrections, and tweaks, these sorts of activities merely keep us on track or trend us towards progress. To move forward in big steps, we must give ourselves huge tasks and power through them. How do you do that, feel good about it, and still produce top quality?

There would be no way to incrementally get this feature built. It would require a massive multi-disciplinary overhaul involving weeks of work and a lot of learning. And quality mattered a lot. If the pages were too similar, Google would ding me and people wouldn't want to read them. Each page needed to share a ton of useful information and present it in an inviting way.

When I first approach a task like this, I revel in the possibility of the outcome. I imagined looking at a full sales page for each cruise and how much better that experience would be. I got excited.