The Pool Cleaning Secret That Changed How I Chase Every Goal I Have

There's a particular kind of magic that happens in Wisconsin the moment the temperature hits 70 and the sun actually shows up. If you've lived here, you know. It's not just nice weather — it's an event. Suddenly everyone is outside. Suddenly the above-ground pool that's been sitting dormant all winter becomes the center of family life. We get in every single chance we get. Sunny and warm? We're in the water.

But here's the thing I didn't expect to discover about myself during all those Wisconsin summers: I love cleaning the pool.

Not "tolerate." Not "don't mind." I genuinely love it. I get almost obsessive about it. And for a long time, I didn't think much about why — I just knew that skimming the surface, looking down through the water, hunting for the stray leaf or the tiny bug or the speck of something floating near the drain, felt like one of my favorite parts of summer.

It wasn't until I started really paying attention to why I loved it so much that I realized I'd stumbled onto something much bigger than pool maintenance. I'd stumbled onto a completely different way of relating to goals.

The Realization: It's Not About the Clean Pool

Here's the key detail. Our pool does not have to be the cleanest pool in the neighborhood. Nobody is judging it. Nobody is grading it. There's no contest, no deadline, no version of success or failure attached to how many leaves are floating in it on any given day.

And that absence of pressure is exactly why cleaning it is so much fun.

Because I don't need the pool to be perfect, I get to approach it with total curiosity instead of obligation. I'm not gritting my teeth and making myself do a chore. I'm hunting. My eyes scan the water like I'm looking for treasure. When I spot something — got it. What's next? There's a small thrill every single time, and that thrill is available to me precisely because nothing is riding on the outcome.

Compare that to the way most of us — especially entrepreneurs, especially people building something — relate to our goals.

Ask yourself honestly: when you think about your biggest goal right now, your revenue target, your launch, your next milestone... how does your body feel? For most people, if they're being truthful, the answer is something like tight. Heavy. Like I'm dragging myself toward it instead of moving toward it with any kind of joy.

That tightness has a name. It's attachment. It's the energy of needing something to happen on a specific timeline, in a specific way, for very specific reasons tied up in how we feel about ourselves. And here's the part that nobody tells you, because it sounds counterintuitive:

Needing it to work is the very thing that makes it harder to get there.

Why Attachment Backfires

When you're desperately attached to an outcome, something predictable happens in your nervous system and in your decision-making. You contract instead of expand. You start second-guessing every move. You over-control situations that would actually benefit from some flexibility. You stop being creative, because creativity requires a kind of relaxed, exploratory mental state — and you start being careful instead, which is a much smaller, more rigid way of operating.

You also stop being present. This is the part that really got me thinking about the pool analogy. When I'm cleaning the pool, I am entirely present. I'm not thinking about yesterday's mess or worrying about tomorrow's weather. I'm just scanning the water, right now, curious about what I'll find. That presence is what makes the activity feel light instead of heavy.

When you're gripping a business goal too tightly, presence becomes almost impossible. You're either replaying what went wrong last quarter or spiraling about what might go wrong next quarter. You're rarely just here, doing the next right thing with curiosity and openness.

And the cruel irony is that presence, curiosity, and a relaxed nervous system are exactly the conditions under which your best ideas, your best decisions, and your most magnetic energy tend to show up. Inspired action — the kind that flows out of genuine interest and engagement — almost always outperforms desperate action, the kind that comes from gripping too hard.

I call this the Pool Cleaning Revelation: the best results tend to show up not when you need them to, but when you're having so much fun in the pursuit that the results almost feel like a bonus on top of an already worthwhile experience.

It's a Hunt, Not a Chore

Once I started noticing this pattern in the pool, I started noticing it everywhere in my business too.

There's a specific feeling that comes with genuine curiosity — leaning in, eyes a little wider, wondering what's going to happen next. It's the opposite of the head-down, grinding, just-get-through-the-to-do-list energy that so many of us default to when we're building something.

And the wild part is that curiosity isn't just more pleasant. It's more effective. When you're curious, you notice things — opportunities, patterns in what your clients are actually telling you, signals about what the market wants that you'd otherwise miss because you're moving too fast and too anxiously to see them. Chore energy narrows your focus down to survival mode. Hunt energy opens you up to possibility.

This is also why I think so many entrepreneurs get stuck chasing the same strategies over and over without examining whether those strategies still feel alive. They've stopped asking "what am I going to discover today?" and started only asking "did I hit my numbers?" One of those questions opens you up. The other one closes you down.

The Pool Doesn't Have to Be the Cleanest

There's a second layer to this lesson, and it might be the most liberating one: your pool does not have to be the cleanest pool in the neighborhood.

I think about how easy it would be to ruin pool cleaning for myself. All I'd have to do is start comparing our pool to the neighbor's pool. Start deciding that ours isn't good enough until it's flawless. Start waiting to invite people over until everything is absolutely perfect.

Sound familiar? Because that is exactly what so many of us do with our businesses.

We don't launch the offer because the website isn't ready. The website isn't ready because the branding isn't perfect. The branding isn't perfect because we're still comparing ourselves to ten other people in our industry instead of paying attention to our own yard. Meanwhile, nobody is being served. Nobody is being transformed. The pool just sits there, technically pristine and completely unused.

Perfectionism likes to dress up as high standards. It tells you it's responsible, conscientious, careful. But underneath that costume is fear — fear of being judged, fear of not being enough, fear of putting something imperfect into the world and having it not land.

The truth is simpler and a lot more freeing: your pool just has to be clean enough to swim in. Good enough to move. Not sloppy, not careless — but free from the impossible, moving-target standard of "perfect," which never actually existed in the first place.

Staying in the Water Without Burning Out

Here's something I've never once had to do with my pool: force myself to clean it. Not one single time have I stood at the edge with my arms crossed, giving myself a pep talk about how I really need to get out there and do this thing I don't want to do.

That's because I'm not relying on willpower. I'm relying on genuine enjoyment.

Willpower is a finite resource. It runs out. Every time you force yourself through a task you resent, you're making a withdrawal from an account that has a real limit — and when that account runs dry, you don't just stop working, you start questioning whether you're even cut out for this whole thing.

Consistency built on enjoyment is a completely different model. It doesn't mean every day feels easy — running a business still means doing hard things, having uncomfortable conversations, showing up when you don't feel like it. But when the foundation underneath all of it is genuine love for what you're building and who you're building it for, the hard days are just hard days. They're not identity crises. They're just the occasional leaf floating in an otherwise beautiful pool. You fish it out, and you keep going.

The Game Never Ends — And That's the Point

Maybe the biggest mindset shift in all of this is letting go of the idea of a finish line.

So many of us treat goals like destinations: hit the number, land the launch, reach the milestone — and then what? If we don't hit it, we feel like failures. If we do hit it, we often feel a strange emptiness, a "now what?" feeling, and we go looking for the next finish line to chase. It's a race that never actually feels won.

But your goals aren't destinations. They're waypoints. They're the next interesting thing to hunt for in the water. When you reach one, the game doesn't end — it just gets more interesting, because now you can see further and there's always something else worth discovering.

The entrepreneurs who build something that lasts aren't usually the ones who wanted it the most. They're the ones who loved the game the most — who found a way to stay present, playful, and a little unattached, on the ordinary days and the hard days alike.

Play Your Path

If any of this resonated with you — if you recognized that tight, gripping energy in your own relationship with your goals, or noticed how perfectionism or willpower-burnout has been quietly running the show in your business — I built something for exactly this moment.

Play Your Path is a five-module, fully self-directed video course designed to help you completely shift how you relate to your goals, so that pursuing them feels like a game you love instead of a finish line you're sprinting toward in dread.

Across five recorded modules, you'll work through:

• The Pool Cleaning Revelation — releasing the grip of attachment and discovering why inspired action consistently outperforms desperate action

• It's a Hunt, Not a Chore — bringing genuine curiosity into your daily business actions, so you start noticing opportunities you've been moving too fast to see

• Your Pool Doesn't Have to Be the Cleanest — letting go of perfectionism and comparison so you can actually move, launch, and grow

• Stay in the Water — building real, sustainable consistency through enjoyment instead of burning out on willpower

• The Game Never Ends — And That's the Point — releasing the finish-line mentality so you can build something you genuinely love showing up for, indefinitely

Each module comes with reflection questions designed to help you apply these shifts directly to whatever you're building right now — at your own pace, on your own schedule, whenever you need a reset.

You don't need a cleaner pool. You don't need a more impressive goal. You just need to remember how to play.

[Enroll in Play Your Path]