The 1 Life-Changing Thing I Learned from the Kolbe Assessment: a Story Mostly About Beverages

I’m sure I am completely alone in this, but since the start of the new year, I’ve been trying to be more healthy.

Shocking, I know.

My Kolbe score is 4393.

If you have no idea what that means, it boils down to great at fast, innovation and ideation and terrible at following routine processes.

If you know me at all this should be similarly shocking.

Ever since I took the Kolbe assessment (thanks @eosworldwide) a few weeks ago, I have been noticing how incredibly accurate it is, and my latest “Let’s get healthy!” kick may be the best evidence yet.

There are only a few non-businessy podcasts I listen to, and dominant among them is Dax Shepard and Monica Padman’s Armchair Expert. Though I like to think my many years in the ad industry have made me resilient to the power of marketing, I recently (finally) fell victim to one of their ad reads for Athletic Greens. Getting healthy, right?

As a side note, if you are ever wondering why your marketing doesn’t seem to be working immediately, know that I had to sit through like 200 Athletic Greens ads before I handed over the credit card. Just give it time.

While waiting for my new super juice powder stuff to come in the mail, I started, at the recommendation of a friend, Born to Run, on audible.

“I’ll listen to this while I run and get inspired!” I said

It’s a book about the extreme edges of ultramarathon running.

I don’t run much.

Regardless, I listened anyway, and one thing caught my attention. The Taruamara people (I have no idea how to spell that… audiobook problems. Google says Tarahumara. Thanks.) down in the mountains of Mexico rely on chia seeds as an essential fuel during their runs.

Naturally, I bought some chia seeds.

Clearly, it wasn’t a lack of road time that hampered my runs but a lack of chia seeds.

About 18 months ago, my (lovely, perfect, wonderful) wife convinced me to buy a Tonal. If you aren’t familiar, it’s a wall-mounted workout weight-lifting magnetic cable system thing. We had a Peloton (aka dusty clothes rack), and it seemed like the perfect companion to balance out the cardio with some weights.

With my new health kick as fuel, I dusted off the Tonal and started moving some long-hibernated muscle groups. Nice.

Cut to a few days later, and I found myself standing in the aisle of Costco, searching reddit for a recommendation on protein powder.

I’ve never been one to drink protein powder, but you’ve gotta fuel like a winner, right?

One GIANT Costco thing of overpriced Nesquik later, I was ready to go.

As I said, the rambling above is a perfect example of how my brain works.

I get too excited about eight solutions to a problem that wasn’t that important in the first place and end up 1/8th-assing every option instead of sticking with one.

New things are exciting.

It’s terribly inefficient.

For about a week, my morning consisted of a glass of Athletic Greens, a glass of protein powder, a glass of chia (in liquid-chia pudding style), a cup of coffee, and a banana or similar healthy morning food.

That’s a lot of liquid first thing in the morning.

One morning I was annoyed by the concept of drinking 114 beverages, and instead, I dumped them all into a blender. Athletic greens, protein powder, water, ice, banana, coffee, chia, and some of that PB2 powdered peanut butter stuff for fun.

I know this is a total surprise, but something about a sludge of brown and green powders blended together doesn’t look very appetizing.

Regardless, I bravely trudged forward, hoping for a miracle.

Not bad.

Would I recommend it? Nah.

Did I do it again? Yep.

This path is all too familiar.

An initial surge of motivation, followed by a series of attempted solutions to find efficiency, and an eventual lapse of the entire project when the motivation for something else comes storming in.

This path drives me crazy. Or it did, anyway.

I don’t know if it’s better than the battery of assessments I have taken in the past or just good timing, but the Kolbe assessment seems to have created some clarity around how I operate.

It gave me justification that the way I work is valid, and even if it can be incredibly inefficient at times, I need to let my brain work in the way it wants if I am ever to be fulfilled, happy, and healthy.

Here’s a snippet of my results I found interesting:

The point of this long rambling post is not to talk about beverages or to shill the Kolbe assessment.

It’s to remind you to be who you are.

Whoever that is.

However your brain works.

Know that there is someone else out there whose brain works the same way.

Who also wants to try a million things.

Or who wants to stick with one forever.

Who wants to know how it will turn out before dipping a toe in.

Or who wants to dive in blind and see.

There is so much information flying around about hacks, routines, schedules, creativity boosters, and how to maximize everything in life.

But the great caveat is that every single tip, trick, and framework is only what worked for the author.

If it doesn’t work for you, that doesn’t mean you failed.

It means you’re different.

And that’s the most human thing there is.

PS. If the above wasn’t evidence enough of how my brain wants to operate, please know that this morning, instead of just taking 10 minutes to think of a blog post idea, I pulled an ideation framework from The Art and Business of Online Writing (great book btw), and spent an hour writing a javascript program that would write a ChatGPT prompt using that framework to generate hundreds of blog ideas. I didn’t use any of them. Instead, I learned how import/export works in javascript. I’ll call that a win.

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