Stop asking why. Ask what it is designed for.

the ball goes exactly where you hit it. every single time.

A golf course, twenty years ago

Robindra tells this story often, and I love watching people's faces when he does. Twenty years ago he was on a golf course hitting what golfers call a wicked slice, the ball curving hard off its line every time he swung. And every time, he got psychological about it. He felt terrible. He went looking for the flaw in himself.

Then, standing on the grass, something in him went quiet. "That ball goes exactly where I hit it every time," he realised. "That has nothing to do with psychology."

It was not a character problem. It was physics. The angle of the club, the line of the swing. Change the design and the ball changes its path. That one moment rearranged how he looks at everything, and over the years it has rearranged how I look at everything too.

The question with no bottom

Most of us run our lives and our businesses on why. Why do I procrastinate. Why do I keep sabotaging myself. Why does the money always stall at the same place. I have asked every one of those questions, usually at two in the morning.

Why has no bottom. Each answer opens another, and the explanation becomes a little home you can live in for years while nothing in your actual life moves.

There is a better question, and it is the one we teach in the third session of On Purpose: what is this design perfect for?

A business that has broken even for four years is not cursed. It is perfectly designed to break even. A calendar with no room for you is perfectly designed to keep you too busy to take a risk. A cluttered desk is perfectly designed to keep the excuse alive. The moment you look at your life this way, the shame leaves the room and the real work can begin.

Willpower is the expensive way

Willpower feels noble, and it is exhausting. It sounds like this: I should work out. I really have to go to the gym today. That conversation in your head burns the very energy you needed to go.

Years ago, in a company Robindra ran with his business partner, they stopped having that conversation altogether. They bought gym memberships for the whole team and put one block on the company calendar: 4pm, gym. At four o'clock, everyone got in the car. Nobody needed motivating. The outcome was built into the day.

Think of how a church feels. Nobody stands at the door asking you to be quiet. The height of the ceiling, the light and the stillness do it for you. An environment either calls a behaviour out of you or shuts it down. Trying to grow a new habit inside an old environment is like planting carrot seeds in concrete.

Design before you build

Robindra also tells a story about two firms hired to build the same enormous port. One started digging on the first day. The other spent months on an empty site doing nothing anyone could see, and everyone assumed they were falling behind. They were designing the build. When they finally began, they put the whole thing up in a fraction of the time and on budget, while the firm that started digging ran late and over.

Hours spent in design make the building fast and clean. Force and long lists are usually a sign that the design is missing.

Start from a blank slate

Most planning is renovation. We take the life we built to feel safe, our Plan B, and we try to improve it. The trouble with a Plan B that works is that it becomes a very comfortable room you cannot leave.

So we ask a different question. If you had a completely blank slate today, with nothing already underway, what would you design to live your calling?

Then we turn the answer into bricks. A skyscraper is not something you can do on a Tuesday. A brick is. We break the vision down, again and again, until it becomes three to five physical actions you can take today.

In our home this sits right beside the practice. Kundalini gives me a settled body to design from, because a design made in panic is still a panic design.

Three places to begin

• Choose one stuck place in your life, your bank statement, your calendar, a promise you keep breaking, and ask only this: what is it perfect for?
• Change one thing in your environment instead of one thing in your character. A calendar block. A cleared desk. A practice mat left unrolled beside the bed.
• Give design its own time. We teach a protected window every week for working on your life and your business rather than in them. Even one hour, kept like a ceremony, is a beginning.

Come and design with us

This is the heart of Designing vs Doing, the third session of On Purpose: The Radiant Entrepreneur Method, on Saturday 5 December at 5pm Pacific and 8pm Eastern, which is 9am Sunday here in Bali. Every session holds an hour and a half of Kundalini with me and an hour and a half of the complete download with Robindra.

Our early bird runs until 15 November: join by then and we return $1,000 to you as store credit for the collection. Everything is on the On Purpose page. Read it slowly, and if something in you leans forward, trust that.

With love from Bali,
Myrah