Controlling Insights – Silver Bullets that lead to Results

By
Stephen Choo Quan
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✅ Improved Structure Of Success Framework

🏆 Definition of Success

Success = Lasting, Significant Impact > Original Expectations

Success isn’t just about hitting a target—it’s about exceeding it. The wider the gap between what was expected and what you delivered, the more meaningful the outcome. The goal is sustainable excellence, over time.

🔍 Controlling Insights (The 20% That Drives the 80%)

These are leverage points. They apply across life domains, multiply results, and directly influence action.

💪 HEALTH (Physical Intelligence)

Controlling Insight: “You don’t rise to your level of motivation—you fall to your level of rest.”

Top Habits to Track:

  • Sleep before midnight, wake at a consistent time

  • Fasted morning walks; walk 7k–10k daily

  • Eat fresh superfoods, reduce sugar, hydrate (48–64 oz water/day)

  • Prioritize Range of Motion (ROM): spine, hips, shoulders

  • Balance 2 of 3 daily: clean eating, exercise, quality sleep

⚙️ GROWTH + LEARNING (Systems Intelligence)

Controlling Insight: “Write it down. What you write improves.”

Daily Habit Tracker:

Growth Action Completed?
Did I Compete or Push to Level Up? ✅
Did I Write or Reflect Today? ✅
Did I Ask for Feedback? ✅
Did I Analyze a Loss? ✅
Did I Apply Feedback Today? ✅
Did I Do Perfect Practice Today? ✅

🧠 CRITICAL THINKING & DECISION-MAKING

Controlling Insight: “Ask better questions. The answers are downstream.”

  • Listen fully before reacting

  • Avoid emotional hijacks (seek signal, not noise)

  • Evaluate arguments, evidence, alternatives

  • Test assumptions; be curious, not certain

💼 PRODUCTIVITY & PERFORMANCE

Controlling Insight: “You can’t improve what you don’t measure. You can’t measure what you don’t define.”

  • Timebox deep work (90-min sessions + breaks)

  • Identify the 1–3 high-leverage tasks only you can do

  • Partner to extend impact (who, not how)

  • Performance = Expectations – Perceived Delivery

  • Measure your real performance, not just your effort

🎯 COMPETITION & WINNING

Controlling Insight: “Don’t lower the bar as success rises. Reset it.”

  • Compete with your last best self

  • Know what “winning” looks like for this task

  • Start fast, stay cool in crunch time

  • Use feedback loops to constantly evolve

  • Peak strategically—don’t burn out on unimportant rounds

💡 LEARNING CYCLE

  1. Clarify the reason for learning

  2. Consume quality sources

  3. Quiz/Test yourself (simulate pressure)

  4. Review weak areas

  5. Peak with preparation (rituals, gameday state)

💰 MONEY & RESOURCES

Controlling Insight: “You don’t earn your way to wealth. You compound and tollgate.”

  • Create income-producing assets (rent > salary)

  • Manage expenses with intention

  • Track your monthly net worth

  • Spend on leverage (health, tools, coaches)

🤝 RELATIONSHIPS

Controlling Insight: “Connection beats correction.”

  • Ping someone weekly: personal or professional

  • Attend meaningful events by tags (city, occasion, domain)

  • Give real compliments. Celebrate wins.

  • Ask: “How can I help you win this quarter?”

❤️ MARRIAGE / PARTNERSHIP

  • See your partner more positively than reality

  • Understand before being understood

  • Default to empathy, not logic

  • Invite joy and shared experiences

🔥 LEADERSHIP

Controlling Insight: “Be watchable. People are always taking notes.”

  • Set priorities, then model them

  • Act with integrity—be who you say you are

  • Teach, mentor, and grow people constantly

  • Lead through service and personal mastery

⛔ PITFALLS TO AVOID

  • ❌ Burning out: sleep <6 hrs regularly

  • ❌ Choosing Performance over people

  • ❌ Mistaking planning for productivity

  • ❌ Stacking mismatched tasks (poor sequencing)

🧭 The Core Summary:

“The quality of your outcomes = Your habits × Your awareness × Time.”

Your mission is to maximize your range of excellence, stay healthy enough to keep doing what you love, build trust and compound value in relationships, and show up at your peak when it counts most.

Success

One way to broadly define success is to have the most significant impact over an extended period. The effect of the outcome being more significant than the original expectation—the wider the variance between the anticipation and the result, the more influential the impact.

Controlling Insights has three features:

  1. Multiplying effect that has x10 Influence on excellence
  2. This applies to a wide range of cases
  3. Guides Action

Controlling Insights can be equated to the Pareto principle. It is the limited 20% of activities that gives 80% of the results. Let us explore some controlling insights.

Controlling Insights

on Health

The principles of health are sleep, nutrients (Detoxing or preventing toxic substances), exercise, and positive thoughts.

  1. Social Interaction
  2. Eating fresh superfoods and drinking pure water.
  3. Balance Sleep, Exercise, and Clean Eating. Get at least 2 out of 3 daily.
  4. Exercise is a keystone habit that makes the others naturally happen.
  5. In a pinch, if tired, choose sleep over exercise.
  6. Testing Range of Motion

on Physical Energy

  1. Sleep early and wake early
  2. Have a consistent daily wake-up time
  3. Drink 48-64 ounces of pure water daily
  4. Fasted Walk, Walk More over the day
  5. Consistent breakfast on time and Nutrition
  6. Consistent lunchtimes and dinner times (last meal 3 hours before bed)
  7. Get balanced Nutrition from superfoods. 
  8. Minimize simple sugar.
  9. Take breaks every 90 minutes during work.
  10. Do Your Workout: Daily physical activity with breathing and water.
  11. At least two cardio and three strength-training workouts per week
  12. Write Down Your Weekly Fitness Goals Every Sunday Evening

🧠on Growth Habit Tracker

💡 Growth Principle

🛠️ Daily Action to Track

✅ Completed? (✓)

🏆 Compete to Win

Did I challenge myself or others today with the intent to win or level up?

  

📝 Record the Outcome

Did I write down the result of today’s performance or competition?

  

💬 Get Feedback

Did I ask for feedback from a peer, mentor, or coach today?

  

🔍 Analyze Losses as Opportunities

Did I reflect on what didn’t work and identify one improvement today?

  

📚 Apply Feedback & Practice Consistently

Did I deliberately practice based on the feedback I’ve received this week?

  

🎯 Perfect Practice

Did I focus on quality reps and simulate real scenarios during practice today?

  

🔁 Repeat Growth Cycle

Did I start another improvement loop based on today’s lessons or outcomes?

  
  1. Compete to win,
  2. Record the outcome
  3. Get lots of feedback to acquire the best technique
  4. See losses as growing opportunities. A competitive streak that evaluates losses for improvement. 
  5. Learn
  6. Be consistent in incorporating feedback and practicing the best technique. 
  7. Perfect Practice: you cannot pull something out on game day that you never put in. Get the volume in.
  8. Repeat from point 1.

on Competing (Personal Performance)

  1. Never lose sight of the goal of being #1.
  2. Strives to win every time
  3. Peaking when it counts most
  4. Never get complacent with success, never lower the bar as success comes, and aim higher with each hit.

on Winning

  1. Know the definition of a win
  2. Winning Strategy for that definition,
  3. See other winning strategies that dominate, compare your strategy
  4. Align the people with standards
  5. Start fast, with action
  6. Timing
  7. Managing crunch time and keeping cool

on Critical Thinking (CT)

  1. Apply the skills regularly
  2. Understand the blocks to CT and avoid them (CT traits: curiosity, intellectual flexibility, reasonably skeptical, independent-minded and willingness to explore)
  3. Listen for and understand arguments.
  4. Evaluate the legitimacy of the evidence
  5. Evaluate the case

on Problem Solving

https://www.designandexecute.com/designs/problem-solving-framework/

on Learning/Practice

  1. Stage 1 – clarify why the reason for the study and whether it will be used in the new project.
  2. Is it SMART and impactful?
  3. Seek high-quality study information. What new things have you learned?
  4. Stage 2 – Cover all the materials
  5. Stage 3 – Test and Quiz, compete
  6. Stage 4 – Second pass material focusing on failed areas, and start to create a warm-up routine for Gameday.
  7. Stretch Challenge yourself to do something never done before
  8. Stage 5 – Peaking at the right time with a warm-up on the day

on Habits

  1. Cue Craving: Tend to the flames of Desire, wrap faith in strong emotion, feed into the subconscious with autosuggestions – I AM identity.
  2. Specialized knowledge, mind stimulant to awaken imagination to form organized plans of actions
  3. Decide, Be persistent in action and have your mastermind team.

on Productivity

  1. Effective partnering is energy—and time-efficient. Find subject matter experts to reduce effort and long-term cost while focusing on maximizing results. It is less about what you can do, but who do you know that can do it best? Stick to things that you are the only one who can do best with your limited time.
  2. Timeboxing.  If we take all the tasks to be done and estimate the number of hours to get all done, we can see if we need to eliminate some jobs to get our time back.  Many teams overestimate the importance of most things; to be wise is to know what to overlook.  

on Managing

  1. Care for team members. Understanding is a feeling. No matter how smart or insightful people are, we are all prone to being hijacked by unsaid or symbolic language, especially the unsaid about which people are unaware.
  2. Lead by example and is Competent. This means communicating by modeling clear instructions and clear outcomes if things are to be done correctly. It also helps to articulate it as well. It is the only way to unite diverse talents toward a common goal.
  3. Have Integrity. Knows what you stand for and does so even with opposition.

on Influence

  1. Trust and Belief in me: Trust is declaring something and then following through. Consistently say what you will do and then do what you say. Reliability and consistency are good in most things except negotiations. Ideally, you want to be predictable. Embody the virtue of Integrity, a facet of moral character. It connotes attributes such as honesty, truthfulness, straightforwardness, and forthrightness. People want to be able to predict the outcome of your commentary.
  2. History of Production Results: show many failures and the clever actions that turned things around.

on Leadership (uttermost Influence)

  1. Setting Priorities
  2. Has Integrity (character)
  3. Makes positive Changes
  4. Good Problem Solver (Critical Thinking)
  5. Has a positive Attitude
  6. Is a Servant Leader
  7. Has Vision
  8. Is Disciplined
  9. Never-ending Growth
  10. Constantly Teaching and Mentoring

on Relationships

  1. Keep reaching out: ping, email, text, and convert into meaningful conversations. Connect for all occasions, from birthdays to tragedies and everything in between. Be there.
  2. Have a good taste and invite others along.
  3. Be Empathy.

on Marriage

  1. Have a more positive view of your partner than reality itself.
  2. Understand before being understood

Caveats

Performance and Risks are the two sides of the same coin. The hardest thing about Performance is knowing what you need to measure to be tied back to your mission statement.

Management is practice; it is not knowing but doing. The test is not logic but results; its only authority is Performance. A manager has got to remember that he is on stage every day. His people are watching him. Everything he does, everything he says, and the way he says it sends off clues to his employees. These clues affect Performance. Be first-class in performance; people are taking notes. Clients are taking notes.

Managers convert talent into Performance and deliver value. Talent is the IT factor that one is born by the values that make it reoccurring, something you naturally want to do and love to do. You cannot teach talent. It has to be naturally selected and makes the variance and range in Performance.

on Performance

  1. It is about action, just start, and the next step will be revealed
  2. Get feedback
  3. See the gap between your current position and the goal, take action, repeat

3 elements of personal Performance:

  1. Never lose sight of being number 1, even as success begins to happen,
  2. Knowing when to peak in performance and when to throttle up and down will contribute to your life span and Performance. Taking a breath gives you fresh energy to create
  3. Never becomes complacent with success but seeks to go higher than it has ever been before. One day of practice missed, I see it, two days missed in practice, the critics see it, three days missed, and the patrons see it that Performance has dropped.

The customer experience does not end in a purchase, but they will review Performance and create perception. The quality of this perception can be mathematically represented as Quality = Performance – Expectations, the wider that gap, the more the quality.

PITFALLS

  1. Sleeping too little
  2. Planning only affects 15% of performance, so it is better to measure than to estimate.
  3. Picking Performance over people is just a poor choice.
  4. Wrong timing in Stacking tasks

3 ACTIONS THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE

  1. Going to bed early, then exercise 1st thing. It helps summon peak performance, especially when accompanied by positive emotional feelings. Waking early and immediately running hard to help optimize Performance
  2. Have good intentions and smile: Always choose Connection over Perfection. Commonality impacts performance, so refrain from correcting others, especially over semantics. Connect with clients, connect with managers, and connect with team members.
  3. Compete Daily: Immediate Feedback and Implementation based on failed performance, not the person. Beat your last personal best; that is progress. The effort is different from the Performance outcome, but I appreciate it.

Refactored

✅ 1. Master Your Mornings: Sleep Early + Move Early

Refined Suggestion:
Protect your evening, dominate your morning. Prioritize 7–8 hours of quality sleep, then wake early and engage in fasted movement (e.g., running, walking, mobility). Doing this with intentional emotion (gratitude, ambition, clarity) shifts your entire neurochemical state — creating natural dopamine, cortisol alignment, and cognitive clarity.

🔁 Enhancer:
Create a consistent “Sleep-Prime-Wake” routine. Wind down with no screens, 10-minute journaling, and breathwork the night before — this protects your mornings by design, not willpower.

✅ 2. Lead With Connection, Not Correction

Refined Suggestion:
Choose empathy before expertise. In every interaction, lead with warmth, curiosity, and shared purpose. Smiling and showing goodwill triggers psychological safety and improves team resilience. Don’t chase being right — chase being in sync.

🔁 Enhancer:
Adopt the “Connect First, Teach Later” mindset. Feedback is received more effectively in a supportive environment. If correction is needed, mirror what’s right first, then co-create the solution.

✅ 3. Compete with Yesterday, Not Others

Refined Suggestion:
Performance is feedback, not identity. Compete daily with your own last best — with implementation loops, not judgment. Separate the person from the result. Celebrate effort, but refine strategy.

🔁 Enhancer:
Track performance visibly. Use a whiteboard, dashboard, or habit tracker to gamify progress. Feedback hits deeper when it’s seen, not just felt.

🔁 Optional Fourth Action:

✅ 4. Create Feedback Loops You Can’t Ignore

New Suggestion:
Success flows where feedback is fast and frictionless. Talk to clients weekly. Ask your team what could be better. Run retros for yourself. Use journaling and voice notes to review patterns.

🔁 Enhancer:
Build a “Rhythm of Review” ritual. 5 minutes each evening, 20 minutes weekly. Reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and one thing to improve. Without reflection, iteration dies.

TL;DR: Here’s the 3+1 Life-Changing Actions

  1. Sleep early, move early — prime your brain and body daily

  2. Connect before you correct — relationships amplify performance

  3. Compete with your past self’s performance ≠ identity

  4. (Optional) Make feedback a system, not a feeling

3 powerful actions that can genuinely change your life if done consistently:

✅ 1. Wake Early and Move First Thing (Before Input)

Why it matters:
Early rising creates time for intentional living. Morning movement (walk, stretch, run) without screen input resets your body’s rhythm, boosts dopamine naturally, and builds momentum.

Action:

  • Wake up by 6am

  • Do 20+ mins of movement before checking your phone

  • Pair it with intention (e.g. gratitude or visualization)

✅ 2. Build One Deep, Authentic Connection per Week

Why it matters:
Your life changes through people — relationships drive opportunities, growth, and joy. One meaningful conversation can do more than a hundred shallow ones.

Action:

  • Call, meet, or write to 1 person weekly

  • Ask: “How can I support you right now?”

  • Log who you spoke to, what you learned, and the vibe

✅ 3. Track and Review One Key Metric Daily

Why it matters:
“What gets measured gets improved.” Whether it’s health, money, mood, or habits, tracking makes your progress tangible and visible, turning reflection into a superpower.

Action:

  • Choose 1 core metric (e.g. sleep hours, net calories, daily wins, $ earned, time focused)

  • Track it nightly + write 1 sentence review

  • Weekly: Ask, What worked? What didn’t? What’s next?

Bonus: If you do these for 30 days, you’ll…

  • Own your mornings

  • Build real relationships

  • Run your days with clarity instead of chaos

🧭 Personal Manifesto: Built by Wisdom, Lived with Intention

🔁 Core Beliefs

Health before Wealth — Without a healthy body and a clear mind, there is no wealth worth having.
Only God can lead man. My compass is spiritual. Guidance flows from above, not from status or noise.
You cannot earn your way to wealth — Paychecks don’t build empires. Resource mastery, compounding, and ownership do.

🔐 Internal Operating System

I believe in balance — contraction and expansion, fasting and fueling, logic and intuition.
I prioritize timing and sequence. Winning is not just what you do, but when.
My life improves when my words improve. So I write. Clearly. Courageously. Daily.
Emotions crave acknowledgment. I name what I feel, so I can guide how I act.
I don’t just react — I reflect. When my head is in the lion’s mouth, I ease it out.
Range of motion is my vital sign. My spine, my breath, and my rhythm come first.
I refine my energy like it’s a rare resource — because it is.

🔗 Relationships & Interpersonal Code

If I live with rats, I love like one.
If I roll with money, it rubs off.

Community is the kingdom.
To stay top of mind, I show up every 90 days — not to impress, but to invest.

I know that you need more than competence to rise — you need the handshake.
I don’t play politics; I understand power.

Speak up to move up. Language is a lever, and I pull it with purpose.
I choose learning conversations, not winning arguments.
When you meet me, you’ll see it: the fire in the eyes, the laugh that doesn’t beg.

🧠 Systems & Strategy

I live by Pareto’s Law.
20% of actions yield 80% of results — I focus there.
Technique beats force. Strategy beats speed.

Mastery = Feedback x Sequencing x Timing.
I optimize not by doing more, but by doing less — better.
When the moment arrives, I am already ready.

I don’t chase trends — I anticipate patterns.
Music is an algorithm. Life has rhythm. Timing is everything.

🎯 Execution Principles

You don’t get what you want — you get what you negotiate.
Results are not about effort alone, but about leverage and upfront clarity.
I don’t wait to be chosen — I make the first ask.
Looking the part can do 80% of the work in the first 10 seconds.

I build for both results and resonance.
I stay healthy, stylish, sharp. Every day.
This isn’t discipline. It’s identity.

🏁 Closing Commitment

I do not waste time chasing things I’ve already outgrown.
I compound what works. I release what doesn’t.
I do what matters, when it matters, how it matters.

My life is not reactive — it’s engineered.

I’m not just alive — I’m aligned.
And every move I make echoes that truth.

Here is the tracking Document

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