core values

Life as a narrative driven by dominant thoughts

When I first encountered cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) along with concepts like cognitive distortions, mental biofeedback and emotional accounting, I started to pay really close attention to all my beliefs, thoughts and everything else that was happening in my mind.

By paying close attention to my thoughts I finally saw the main connections. Your thoughts really are closely connected to your emotions. The more distorted and weak your thoughts are, the more you must deal with self-sabotage, negative feelings and low self-worth.

Your thoughts also greatly influence your future. They’re kind of small instructions or commands for who to become. They impact your selection of words, phrases, responses and finally actions. That’s where the wisdom that you become what you think comes from.

By being more attentive to my own thoughts, I became also attentive to the (expressed) mindset and thinking of other people – the people I coach, people I have intriguing discussions with or even my close friends.

Asking them thousands of questions helped me identify their core beliefs, values and dominant thoughts. Two very interesting patterns emerged.

Dominant negative thoughts

As a rule, people who experienced any kind of severe negative emotions for a longer period of time (anger, sadness, anxiety, greed etc.), also had a very strong inner critic together with impossible standards, and very convincing cognitive distortions supported by false beliefs (and contamination narrative as we’ll see).

Consequently, all the distorted thoughts and impossible standards towards yourself make reality appear much darker than it is. There’s always something that isn’t good enough, no matter how favorable life is. You are constantly at war with yourself.

But over time, I noticed one even more interesting pattern. You have probably heard of the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule. The rule states that for many events, roughly 80 % of the effects come from 20 % of the causes.

Practical examples of the Pareto principle are: 80 % of your sales come from 20 % of your clients, fixing top 20 % of the most reported bugs also eliminates 80 % of related errors and crashes, you wear 20 % of your clothes 80 % of the time.

I noticed that the Pareto principle also rules cognitive distortions (or negative thoughts). There are a few negative thoughts that people think over and over again in a specific time frame.

Some more permanent cognitive distortions are connected to identity (negative self-labeling, for example), other more fluid negative thoughts to specific negative life situations. But even fluid negative thoughts find a way to persist – when one negative situation passes, there is always something new that the negative mind fixates on.

There are negative thoughts that you’re repeating in your head over and over again, every single day. These are your dominant negative thoughts that support your core harmful beliefs. Even more, they often keep you caught in a constant negative emotional state and feeling of low self‑worth.

Beliefs thoughts habits

How to identify your dominant thoughts

Our brains love patterns (we see them even where there none) and negative thoughts are no exception to that. Your brain loves to repeat negative (or positive) thoughts.

The big irony is that even if you think the same thoughts over and over again, you are often not even aware of them. They are just present in your head, they stir your life in a negative direction, but you are rarely consciously aware of them.

Dominant thoughts are the ones that shape your life the most. Positive thoughts in a positive way, negative thoughts in a negative one. Consequently, identifying your thinking patterns can be extremely beneficial. And it’s actually quite easy to identify them. Here are a few suggestions how to achieve that:

Every day, write down your first thoughts when you wake up
Observe your thoughts when you’re alone or when you’re driving in a car
What are your thoughts before you enter the office
Write down your most frequent words and phrases in discussion with people
Identify your thinking patterns when you’re experiencing negative emotions
What are your thoughts when mini frustrations happen – somebody cuts you off on the road, you wait in line for a longer period than others, your computer freezes etc.
What are your thoughts when you meet a person you know
What are you thinking about most of the time

You usually have the same debates with the same people. It can be business, kids, sports, whatever. You talk about 20 % of things, 80 % of the time. People usually complain about the same things over and over again. A job they hate, kids that take too much energy, a lack of money etc.

Every single time you meet them, they bring up the same or very similar complaints. The same goes for you, just from other people’s perspective.

Here are some examples how to identify thinking patterns:

Event trigger	Thinking pattern (automatic thought)	Underlying belief
Somebody cuts you off	What an asshole	I’m being treated unfairly
You see your boss	What an asshole	Nobody respects me
You wake up	Not another day	Life is dull and boring
You make a mistake	How could I have made such a mistake?	I never do things right

After a few conversations with a person, you can quickly identify their main thinking patterns (or your own). Then you can analyze how distorted their thoughts really are, what kind of beliefs they support, and how they drive values and actions. The 5 Whys technique can help you to easily find a connection between automatic thought and underlying belief.

Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next. – Robert Ford, The Westworld

Identifying the main thinking patterns quickly exposes personality chunks like:

Identity – How you see yourself
Beliefs – Main ideas about life that you agree with and validate.
Values – All the ideas that are important to you, things you like or those you tend to avoid
Attention – What you focus your limited mental resources on the most
Behavioral habits – Behaviors that you repeatedly perform
Thinking habits (thinking patterns) – Repeating thoughts that go through your head most of the time
Emotional habits (emotional states) – Dominant emotional states you are experiencing most days

Now do a simple analysis. Write down 2 – 3 things you think and talk about with other people most of the time (career, money, sports etc.) – that’s where most of your attention is. Why are these things important to you? What are the thoughts that you think about these things over and over again? Are they negative or positive? What kind of beliefs and values do these thoughts support?

Then analyze how your actions are congruent with your words. Things that you mention in conversation are always somehow important to you. Find out why. And there is always some gap between your words and actions.

What you talk about is who you ought to be, and what you do is who you currently are.

My thinking patterns are shaped more or less around proving myself with intellectual creating. I constantly ask myself how I can be more productive, which new things I will create, and so on. There’s nothing wrong with that, until it escalates to the point where I forget to enjoy life, or when my self-worth suffers because I don’t get enough praise and admiration.

Understanding what your mind is focused on and what your dominant thinking patterns are can reveal a lot about how your mind is programmed; and that gives you a chance to reprogram yourself. But let’s take everything even a step further. Let’s look at how your dominant thoughts shape your life narrative and your life story.

Life as a narrative

Life as a narrative is shaped mostly by your dominant thoughts

I’m a big fan of the TV show called Westworld. If you don’t know the show, the scene is set in a Wild West themed futuristic amusement park populated by androids called hosts. The park is meant for rich paying customers to live out their fantasies without any consequences. It’s a brilliant conjunction of the past, future, human nature, and technology.

One very intriguing part of the show is how hosts are designed. At first glance, it seems that hosts (AI robots) follow their daily lives in interaction with real people more or less by following carefully prepared scripts with little to no improvisation.

They’re repeating behavioral patterns (or loops) based on the dedicated role in a specific park’s story. But there is much more to the host’s roles, which gives them more human nature. These human elements also help them to slowly develop self-consciousness during the show’s episodes.

Here are the human elements I have in mind:

Purpose: Each host is driven by something particular, something that gives it a purpose. That which gives the hosts purpose, can also drive them mad, if they don’t find a way to fulfill it.
Backstory: The hosts are always given a backstory, with cornerstone memories that anchor their lives. These backstories are usually tragic and painful events. They provide obstacles and the host’s job is to overcome them. These backstories support the fact that a little trauma can be illuminating.
Identity layers: The rest of their identity is built around the backstory, layer by layer. It influences all other aspects of their lives – from beliefs to values, understandings and decision making.
Thinking and behavioral loops: They repeat very similar phrases, react in the same way to similar life situations, and they have a default outlook on life that defines their main emotional states.
Awakening: The main thing that led the hosts to their awakening was suffering explicitly – the central trauma caused by the pain that the world is not as they want it to be.

The dialogues in the show, especially when the park’s creator Dr. Ford is involved, extensively discuss the basics of human nature, especially in relation to droids and how they’re built.

Understanding basic human nature is a very important puzzle of the show’s story, since hosts are slowly developing consciousness and becoming more human-like. Namely, with consciousness comes free will and that also brings the additional burden of primal human instincts.

In summary, these main human instincts presented in the show are:

The will to survive and dominate others: We humans are alone in this world for a reason. We murdered and butchered anything that challenged our primacy.
The urge to be attractive and reproduce: The human intellect was like peacock feathers. Just an extravagant display intended to attract a mate.
The desire to transcend death by creating: An old friend once told me something that gave me great comfort. Something he had read. He said that Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin never died. They simply became music.
Dealing with internal and external conflicts: I have come to think of so much of consciousness as a burden, a weight, and we have spared them [droids] that. Anxiety, self-loathing, guilt. The hosts are the ones who are free.
Character weaknesses: Never place your trust in us. We’re only human. Inevitably, we’ll only disappoint you.

Now let’s explore how these android behavioral designs can help you explore and understand your own life. Seeing yourself as an android (or an AI robot with your body as an avatar) can give you a unique perspective and help you analyze your beliefs, thinking patterns and even more importantly understand yourself better.

Westworld host

Around which things is your identity shaped?

Let’s start with a simple exercise. Take a 3^rd person perspective and imagine yourself as a droid. Imagine that you are a robot, imagine that your body is nothing but a piece of mechanical equipment.

Your current environment is the amusement park where you play a very particular role dedicated only to you. Imagine that someone wrote the code for how you behave and respond, who you encounter and what you experience in life. Nothing is random and everything is carefully scripted.

Now comes the main question – what is your identity shaped around? Especially think about the purpose that is driving your “android” and the backstory around which your identity is built. Take a piece of paper and write down the main narrative, as if you were describing yourself as a droid in the modern Westworld.

You could go very broadly in this analytical exercise. You could list down your main beliefs, the hierarchy of values, cognitive strategy, strengths and weaknesses, list of knowledge and skills and other competences, and so on.

But that is not the point of this exercise, since those are very common self-analytical exercises. You want to discover something new, something that is very focused on how your life is unfolding and towards what your thinking patterns incline.

Thus, focus only on the following:

Your purpose – what drives you through life the most but also sometimes drives you insane
Your backstory – which past tragic or painful situations marked your life the most
Your life narrative – how is your life narrative shaped around the backstory and how are your personality layers built around the events that marked your life the most
Your repeating thoughts, patterns and emotions – what kind of thoughts, responses, habits and emotional states do you repeat throughout the day
Awakening – based on your painful backstory, what do you have to learn about life, which obstacles must you overcome and what kind of wisdom can you develop

Focus exclusively on these five elements. Describe every bullet point in one or two sentences, not more. Try to focus on the main idea of your life’s narrative.

My big realization when I did this exercise was that my childhood was shaped extensively by different kinds of psychological suffering – I witnessed severe versions of all four types of unhealthy psychological coping mechanisms (fight, flight, freeze, fawn), unhealthy attachments and toxic systems.

The backstory is painful, as it ought to be, but it also represents the way to salvation and illumination. It gives me a chance for a unique contribution to the world.

[As humans we can be caught in] A prison of our own sins. ‘Cause you don’t want to change, or cannot change. Because you’re only human after all.

Past and future

The contamination and redemptive narrative

I was struggling to end this article in a more practical way, until an email with a link to “The two kinds of stories we tell ourselves” from the TED blog landed in my inbox at that very moment.

Reading the TED blog post showed me a very solid connection between Westworld sci-fi and a very practical use of life narrative and stories. It’s very surprising how well droid design fits with real life.

Psychological research (or more exactly the research of Daniel McAdams) shows that with storytelling, we make sense of our identities. We put different stories from our life into a narrative, which enables us to understand our lives as a coherent whole. And coherence gives meaning to life.

The coherent story you’re telling yourself about your life is called the “narrative identity”. Like every good story, the “narrative identity” also has positive and negative events that determine the plot, challenges that need to be overcome, people who help and block efforts, and the denouement of some form of pain, conflict and struggle.

Understanding “narrative identity” and stories plays a key role when it comes to human empathy. We share parts of our life stories with others when we want to be understood, and to better understand others, we need to know their life stories. Life stories and identity narrative help you better understand yourself and others.

Even more importantly, your life narrative is not a sum of everything that happened to you in the past. You tend to focus on a few extraordinary events, positive or negative ones.

These are the experiences that shape your personality the most. But a very important difference is how you interpret these life events. That makes the key distinction of how your identity, beliefs, values and life narrative are shaped.

In general, based on Daniel McAdams’ research, your life narrative can unfold in two different ways:

Redemptive narrative: The redemptive narrative tells the story of a life where tragic events brought something good with time. For example, how poverty brought a family closer together. In other words, the suffering and pain bring awakening and redemption.
Contamination narrative: In the contamination narrative, people see tragic events as a turning point where their life went from good to bad. They tend to end the stories with a negative connotation and don’t see the awakening potential in tragic events.

Logically, people who tell themselves a redemptive narrative about their life stories tend to have a stronger meaning (purpose). Even more, their lives are defined by growth, they contribute more to the society, and they are generally more proactive. They are also less prone to anxiety and depression.

The more aware we are of the story we want to tell with our lives, the clearer our choices for the future can be. – Dan McAdams

The best news is that your interpretations of your life stories and narrative (or frame) are not fixed. With cognitive reframing and other cognitive exercises, you can find more positive interpretations of your life stories. You can make small edits that will have a great impact on your life. If you read my life narrative, you can see that it goes from bad to good, it’s focused on redemption.

You have the power to edit, revise and find more positive interpretations of your life stories (in other words re-frame them), while still being constrained by the reality and facts of the past. You can always rewrite your life stories, including tragedies, in a more meaningful and positive way. In the center of everything is finding meaning in your hardships by adopting a positive identity.

Maybe we weren’t talking only about fiction after all?

Contamination or redemptive narrative

Homework

Rewrite your thinking patterns and reframe your life narrative

It’s time for me to share concluding thoughts and for you to do the exercises. First, describe your life narrative, purpose and backstory as if you were a droid; then identify your thinking patterns (negative and positive) that you repeat over and over again. When it comes to negative thinking patterns, you can help yourself with the categorization of cognitive distortions.

After the analysis, it’s time to rewrite your thinking patterns and reframe your life narrative:

With emotional accounting, make sure to turn your negative thinking patterns into positive ones
With cognitive reframing, find a more positive note to your life stories
Finally, make sure that your life narrative is a redemptive one, and that tragic (or positive) events that shaped your life the most lead you towards wisdom and awakening

Remember, your thoughts and interpretations of life events shape your past, present and future. You repeat 20 % of the thoughts (when you are alone, in discussions etc.) approximately 80 % of the time. You can see your extraordinary life events as either positive or negative.

That is driving your life in a certain direction. With different cognitive exercises, you can make sure that the direction is a positive one and that your life is full of meaning.

The best tools for successful conflict resolution in personal relationships
Every single relationship is also a bit of a power struggle. Most often the struggle is very subtle and goes unnoticed. These are all the times when you’re making small compromises, looking for common ground, gently testing the boundaries and exchanging superficial thoughts and opinions – selecting a place to eat, a movie to watch or gossiping about a third person.

But from time to time, the power struggle escalates. At the end of the day, you can’t agree with everyone on everything and you can’t always find common ground. The bigger the differences in goals, opinions, beliefs, interests, values, ideas, motivations or desires, especially the ones that are very important to you, the fiercer the conflict usually is. Conflicts become especially strong when you take something personally or when relationship boundaries are seriously breached.

If that happens to you often, don’t assume you are the unlucky exception. Conflicts, big or small, are a normal part of every healthy relationship. If there are no (properly managed) conflicts in a relationship, the relationship is definitely a superficial or toxic one.

So thinking about how to avoid or run away from every single conflict isn’t the right strategy. It not only prevents a relationship from developing more dimensions, it also hinders your relationship assertiveness and proactivity. It makes you a coward.

The right direction is to develop superior conflict resolution skills instead. It’s one of the best skills to have to enjoy healthy relationships. If you have no such skills, a conflict can quickly be mismanaged, and a relationship can get seriously damaged.

On the other hand, if you develop good conflict resolutions skills, every conflict becomes an opportunity for strengthening the bond between two people and making the relationship even deeper; because you open up. Think about how unique and deep make-up sex can be.

My whole life has been spinning around conflicts and power struggle. In my family home, when I was managing a VC fund, dealing with politicians and in numerous cases when I decided to kick things out of the status quo a little bit (I love to do that a lot).

So I’ve learned a lot about conflict resolution and in this blog post, I want to share with you my thoughts and experiences that may help you improve your conflict resolution skills as well and consequently develop deeper bonds with the key people in your life. Because I may deal with conflicts a lot, but I also always enjoyed really deep relationships in my life.

Your options after a fight are quite limited

After a big fight, you don’t have many options. Actually, there are only five options to choose from:
1. You can decide to terminate the relationship or at least put it on hold (termination)
2. You can pretend that there is no conflict and become more and more passive-aggressive (lying to yourself and others)
3. You can openly punish the person and pour gasoline on fire (competition, fight, avoidance, ignorance)
4. You can fawn and yield to the other person and betray yourself
5. You can try to fix the relationship as soon as possible (collaboration, compromise, negotiation)
If the fight was too big, if someone violated the relationship boundaries really bad, you have every right to terminate the relationship. Sometimes that’s the best thing to do, especially in cases of toxic relationships where the same damaging patterns are repeating themselves.

You have every right to terminate a relationship that isn’t working. If you do that, there is no need for conflict resolution. Just don’t confuse avoidance and ignorance with terminating a relationship and letting things go.

The second thing you can do is to fight. You can decide to compete, to overpower and go for a win-lose situation. Sometimes that is necessary. Sometimes going for a fight is what you have to do.

I saw that numerous times when the second or third employee in a business left the company and started a competing business. Again in such cases, there is no need for conflict resolution, you just have to make sure that you win. It’s kind of a similar situation if you decide to yield and kneel, you just don’t fight but submit and so there is no need for conflict resolution.

But cases where terminations, submissions and fights are the only options are quite rare. They do happen, people can do all kinds of unbelievably damaging things, like cheating, stealing, being abusive etc. (actually, we all behave stupid from time to time), but they aren’t a part of everyday life; as long as you aren’t living in a war-zone, prison, toxic family or any other kind of hostile environment and if your relationships are healthy at least to a certain extent.

The most often scenario in interpersonal conflicts is the one, where you should successfully solve the conflict as soon as possible, but you rather play power struggle games. Punishment games.

That’s when conflict resolution skills are really needed, because any kind of punishment destroys trust in relationships. It’s the opposite of successful conflict resolution. It’s a big waste of time, energy and it destroys the relationship’s “wealth” or value. So the best option you have, when there is no need to fight or terminate a relationship, is to try to resolve the conflict as soon as possible.

Any kind of punishment destroys everything you’ve built in a relationship

Every relationship is like a mutual bank account. By doing something good for a relationship, you put money into the bank account. By doing something bad for a relationship, you withdraw money from the relationship bank account.

Every relationship bank account can be full of money, barely above water, in negative numbers or even bankrupt. A lot of “money” or “wealth” means relationship happiness, low numbers lead to low quality of the relationship.

Examples of investments in the relationship bank account are spending time with somebody, going on a nice trip together, doing somebody a favor etc. Examples of withdrawals from the relationship bank account are all the things like cheating, lying, not keeping your promises etc.

Even if it might seem so on the first glance, conflicts aren’t withdrawals yet. Mismanaged conflicts turn into withdrawals from the relationship bank account. Properly managed conflicts can be an investment, assuming that relationship boundaries weren’t seriously breached.

That’s because properly managed conflicts can deepen the relationship bond. They present an opportunity to open up and forge a deeper bond. And conflicts that get out of hand (aka when severe punishment is happening) always cause destruction in relationships.
Here are examples of the most frequent punishments that lead to mishandled conflicts:

Aggressive reactions – physical or verbal abuse, explosiveness, loss of temper

Passive-aggressive reactions – silence, creating distance, becoming unreliable, rejection, isolation

Devaluing relationship – sarcasm, cynicism, criticizing, shaming, focusing only on the negative

Revenge, eye-for-an-eye thinking and similar destructive behaviors
Here is the thing. In the relationship bank account, the same rule applies as it does to the money one – it’s so easy to spend money and it’s so hard to save it. It’s so easy to punish someone or lose temper and so hard to invest energy into successful conflict resolution. But at the end of the day, that’s what makes the difference between wealthy and poor people in whichever context, the money or the relationship one. Wealthy people do the hard things.

So when you want to do additional damage in a relationship with punishment after a fight, ask yourself, why would you further destroy something you’ve been building (for months or years), why would you destroy the key wealth and value you have in your life? Relationships are one important part of the wealth you have, so chose the hard path, the asap resolution path.

You don’t just throw the computer out of the window when an error occurs; because you know it has value. The most important relationships in your life are even more valuable. So do the opposite from any kind of punishment. Decide to resolve a conflict as quickly as possible.

Well, fast doesn’t necessary means too fast. Resolving a conflict as quickly as possible has certain limitations, because you don’t want to do it superficially. Here are the exact steps to follow, which will absolutely lead you to successfully resolving a conflict:
1. Avoid all-or-nothing thinking
2. Wait for the emotional charge to neutralize
3. Really understand what’s happening behind the scenes
4. Forget mind reading, honest communication is the key
5. Decide to show respect to the other person
6. Don’t preach and make sure that the conversation is balanced
7. Focus on a specific behavior that bothers you and your feelings
8. Take a timeout if things get heated again
9. Sometimes you have to agree to disagree
10. Some conflicts simply can’t be resolved
Avoid all-or-nothing thinking at all costs

My personal biggest obstacle in successful conflict resolution in close relationships was always all‑or‑nothing thinking. For me, relationships were either perfect or nothing.

I was so happy and thankful for having someone in my life when things were perfect, and then after a small quarrel, the value of the relationship went straight to zero. Then things went back to perfect again after the conflict passed and soon back to zero, and so I was oscillating on an emotionally heavy roller coaster.

It took me quite a while to understand that life is never black and white. That all-or-nothing thinking is a very toxic cognitive distortion. There is no perfect relationship. If you want to have a healthy relationship with anyone, you have to accept turbulent times as well as happy times.

There is, of course, a line to draw where there is no going back or when there is just too much drama, but you still have to make sure that your emotional reaction in a quarrel is not out of proportion and that it doesn’t lead you to damaging the relationship even further.

Therefore, before we even go to successful conflict resolution, have realistic expectations regarding relationships. You can’t properly manage conflicts if every disagreement you have in life takes a relationship from everything to nothing.

Neutralize the emotional charge

If you want to successfully resolve a conflict, you have to first neutralize the emotional charge – on your side. Actually, it has to be neutralized on both sides. Take your time to calm down. Go for a walk. Take a few deep breaths. But that doesn’t mean you can’t immediately mitigate potential damage.

Agree with the other person to take time for emotions to calm down, but also agree to meet and resolve the conflict as soon as possible. Show your good intentions that you want to keep the relationship alive and that everything will be okay, things just need to calm down and then you’ll talk about it.

Humor is a good way to neutralize the emotional charge. Try to squeeze a small smile out of yourself, even though you are drowning in negative feelings, and explain the plan – let’s take a day or two for things to calm down and then we’ll have an honest talk. If you don’t do that, mind reading will come into play on both sides, and mind reading usually makes things much worse.

Forget about any mind reading

If you don’t immediately agree that you will both put the energy into resolving a conflict, mind reading games will take place. And trust me, your mind can take you to some very dark places – from fantasies about worst case scenarios and exaggerating about how the other person is feeling, to dreaming about potential revenge options and magnifying all the negatives and minimizing the positive aspects of the relationship.

You don’t know how the other person feels and what the other person thinks. Don’t try to be a fortuneteller and read minds. It doesn’t work. You are only assuming and you can be assuming wrong.

So you want to open honest communication as soon as possible, not base your actions purely on your assumptions. Wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups and if you act based on them, you can only make everything worse.

When you immediately agree to resolve the conflict somewhere in the nearby future, there is nothing to fantasize about, because you already know what the next step will be – finding a solution and getting back on good terms. If you manage to do that (and it does take some guts) the conflict already hit the bottom and things can only go upwards after that.

Really understand what’s happening behind the scenes

There are two types of conflicts –intellectual and emotional. Intellectual conflicts almost always have an obvious root cause. One person thinks A and the other person thinks the opposite or sees things differently in some way. Then you have to make compromises, find out-of-the-box win-win scenarios and new solutions, or at least develop empathy towards different opinions.

Emotional conflicts almost always have a deeper meaning. Usually you are fighting about one thing, but the root cause of the problem is something completely else. For example, in an intimate relationship you are fighting over whether the toilet seat should be up or down, but that is rarely the true reason for the conflict. Usually the real reason is that somebody feels neglected or some other deeper needs aren’t being met.

You can analyze with 5 Whys what really upset you or the other person so much, and make sure that you really understand what’s happening behind the curtains of the conflict. Look for changes in relationship patterns, like:
- What could be the person afraid of or angry about?
- Is there any big change that is causing stress (moving to a new place or offices, changing a job, illnesses, changes in market trends etc.)?
- Which things are different in a relationship than they were a week or month ago and how (how much quality time you spend together, are there new people present in social circles, are there new interests and desires that you are aware of etc.)?
- Are there changes in how much you or the other person is investing into the relationship?
- Were there any wrong assumptions present in the relationship from one side or the other or was something not communicated clearly?
- Is there a transference, projection or emotional flashback happening?
The first step is to take the time for an emotional charge to lose its power. Then you analyze what could be the real issue and what the fight is all about, while you avoid any mind reading. Please be careful about the difference. Mind reading is your mind going crazy and acting purely out of your ego assumptions.

A thorough analysis is something completely different. It’s a reflection about potential issues that are causing the conflict, while being aware of which parts of the analysis are only your assumptions and what are the facts. And even more, an analysis is about finding the right starting points for an honest talk. Following up on the honest talk should be your next step. But there are a few rules of how to have an honest talk.

Always show respect to the other person

The emotional charge should be gone by now, but you still might be a little bit angry, sorrowful, upset or hostile. Thus you have to consciously agree with yourself that you will show respect to the other person no matter what.

You must have an active constructive approach to the honest talk. That means no name‑calling, sarcasm, cynicism or labeling. You have to follow the basic rules of good communication. There is no quality relationship without mutual respect. That’s your start.

Always respect basic human rights. Everybody has the right to be treated with respect, to make autonomous decisions and to not listen to your advice or overtake your values. Everyone has the right to their own beliefs, values, opinions, preferences and feelings. As do you. Be tolerant and respect that.

Challenge yourself to find the good and beautiful thing inside of everyone. It’s there. It’s your job to find it. Not their job to show you. Mark Manson

Don’t preach, let the conversation be balanced

I love to preach. I love to judge, aggressively explain my convictions for hours and argue how I am right (fortunately, I’m doing that less and less). But here’s the thing. Nobody likes to be preached to. Even if people pretend that they are listening and agreeing with you, they are usually not. That was a big epiphany for me one day, and you won’t believe where – in a church.

I was raised as a catholic. And I always loved reading and listening to different views and opinions. So I always listened to priests preaching and then thought about what they were saying, why they were saying it and if it made any sense.

After the mass, I always wanted to debate with people what was the sermon all about. And I figured out that nobody really listened. Nobody had a clue or they had at most a vague idea of what the priest was talking about. I provoked dozens of people, young and old. Same response. Huh?

People don’t like to be preached to. So explain your view, emphasize especially how you feel and why you feel like you do (explain your values), make sure you are understood and then listen. The conversation must always be balanced. Don’t preach and don’t interrupt the other person.

When solving a conflict, focus on behaviors, feelings, values and solutions

During the honest recovery talk, don’t criticize the person and avoid “you” statements. Successful conflict resolution is not about playing the blame game, but about directing energy towards potential solutions. So focus on a specific behavior that bothers you and explain your feelings and experience connected to it.

Show your vulnerability. That’s how you create a safe zone for an honest talk. Explain your view through values and have radical candor. Suggest a few solutions and keep your mind open. That is the recipe for having a successful and honest talk that leads to conflict resolution.

It’s hard to achieve that. You have to open up and constantly keep your feelings in check. Your mind will try to slip back into the blame game, protecting your ego and minimize the value of the relationship. But you are stronger, you are smarter.
- You can turn anytime again against the other person (expressing your feelings in an unhealthy way)
- You can turn anytime against yourself (stifling your negative feelings)
- You can express your feelings in a healthy way and find a solution. Which one will it be?
The timeout

Since it’s not easy to always keep your feelings in check, there is one more tool you need. The timeout. In case a discussion gets too heated, agree that anyone can call a timeout. When someone calls the timeout, you just have to agree when to continue with the conversation.

My girlfriend and I always use the timeout strategy when the negative emotional charge gets too strong. When one of us calls a timeout, we immediately stop with any kind of action, words or unproductive non-verbal communication. We wait for things to calm down and then we continue with conflict resolution.

If every sports game has a timeout to cool down the heat, you deserve to have a timeout in your relationships when communication isn’t going in the right direction.

Sometimes it’s okay to agree to disagree

Much like you shouldn’t have unrealistic expectations that relationships are only a bed of roses, so you shouldn’t have wrong expectations that after a conflict, you always have to find a position where you both completely agree with the new common perspective.

Sometimes you just have to agree to disagree. If that’s emotionally okay with both parties, it can be a “win-win” situation.

It’s not like one person is always right and the other person is wrong. You can both be right, or you can even both be wrong. Thus it’s sometimes completely okay to agree to disagree. The main point of conflict resolution is that the trust doesn’t get damaged and that there are no heavy emotional knots in the relationship, growing into big emotional balloons that burst sooner or later.

Some conflicts simply can’t be resolved

Last but not least, some relationship conflicts can’t be resolved; or it doesn’t make sense to resolve them. It takes around 90 – 120 days for a relationship culture to get established; assuming that two individuals spend enough time together in person. After that, every relationship unfolds more or less by specific patterns.

The longer a certain pattern lasts, the harder it is to change it. And in every relationship, there are healthy and unhealthy patterns. We can further divide unhealthy patterns into tolerable and intolerable ones. The main idea of a pattern is its repetition. So if an intolerable pattern starts to occur and can’t be stopped, any further investment in a relationship is probably futile or leads to even more damage.

Cheating, physical violence, verbal abuse, threats, drugs and many similar extreme toxic behaviors have a tendency to repeat themselves (much like good relationship patterns do). So you must be extremely careful to set very straight and strict boundaries in relationships.

Once they are crossed, or the second time they happen at most, think twice before resolving the conflict and repeating the same scenario again from the beginning. You aren’t here to save people in relationships, you are here to enjoy relationships.

Your toolbox for successful conflict resolution

Now you have the toolbox to successfully resolve conflicts. I’m completely sure that you already intuitively knew 90 % of the things discussed in this article; or even more. But it’s not about knowing it, it’s about practicing it.

If you are currently in the middle of a conflict with anyone, you know what to do. Send a message, drop an e-mail or call the person to set a date to have an honest resolution talk. Assuming that deep down, you hope to resolve the conflict.

And if you aren’t currently in any conflict, you know what to do the next time you encounter one. Commit yourself to handle a conflict at least a bit differently, slightly more constructive than how you usually handle it.

Homework

There are many options how you can do that. To repeat them:
- Do the opposite from the aggressive, passive-aggressive or any other type of toxic action after a conflict occurs.
- Immediately agree to solve the conflict somewhere in the nearby future (it takes guts to do that, but it feels good) and take time for the negative emotional charge to pass.
- Don’t let your mind take you into dark places with all-or-nothing thinking or fortunetelling.
- Practice empathy and try to analyze what’s happening behind the scenes. Use the 5 Whys technique, self-reflection, and analyze if you or the other person might be in an emotional flashback.
- Always show respect. That is your starting point. In intimate relationships, love is lust and respect.
- Let the conversation be balanced, don’t preach, and focus on behaviors, values and solutions.
- If the conversation gets too heated, call a timeout. Also use the same tool the first time a conflict occurs, if things are going completely in the wrong direction.
- Look for win-win solutions, find new creative standpoints. If you don’t find any of that, agree to disagree and continue to enjoy the relationship. The key thing is not to damage the trust, to open yourself, show your vulnerability and see a conflict as an opportunity to deepen any relationship.
Curiosity is the number one trait of awesome people
Ever since I remember, I’ve been an extremely curious person. I do mean extremely curious. Pain-in-the-ass curious. Even if I knew my parents would be furious that I was demolishing something to learn how it works or what its characteristics are, that never stopped me from feeding my curious mind.

I wanted to learn how to drive a car before I could even ride a small bicycle. Therefore, I nagged until I was allowed to steer the wheel in my father’s lap. I was more interested in math than toys (and later started to hate it, but that’s another story). When I got my fist computer, I reassembled it over and over again, until it got broken.

Replace the fear of unknown with curiosity.

Not to mention the fact that I was torturing myself with stupid questions like “if god is almighty can s/he create a rock so heavy that s/he can’t lift it?”. I wanted to know and understand everything. As a romantic naïve soul, I still do. Google would definitely be my best friend if it existed back then, like it is now. Oh, that might just sound like I don’t have a life, so just for the record, I do also have real friends.

Curiosity is something I nurture very carefully, even if it’s annoying from time to time, at least for other people. For example, if I meet a person who’s good at something I just ask them 1,000 questions, which sooner or later leads to a feeling of being interrogated.

But it’s also kind of fun, because conversations never get boring. And yes, I’m the one asking “just one more question” at a lecture, when everyone else is already rolling their eyes. It just happened a few days ago when I was a student in a coding class.

Other people may find it annoying from time to time, but I think that curiosity is my number one personality characteristic that helped me achieve a few successes that I had in my life so far.

The main reason for that is because with curiosity, you can easily get engaged, commit to understanding, acquire new knowledge and deliver results (without real effort), and people see that very quickly, love it and want to be a part of it. Not many people are utterly obsessed to understand something and then use it in some productive new way. That’s probably what makes curious people so special.

Endlessly asking myself and others different questions opened many doors and opportunities to me, helped me forge many deep relationships (there is nothing more important for building a quality relationship than being genuinely interested in somebody) but even more, it makes life that more interesting and fulfilling.

So I want to talk about the reasons why I think curiosity is one of the most important values you have to develop and nurture carefully. But first, let’s look at why everybody also wants to kill your curiosity.

Everybody wants to kill your curiosity

From a young age, everybody and everything wants to kill your curiosity and creativity. At least that goes for the most of us. Parents want you to stop asking questions at some point, because they don’t know all the answers and it’s hard to keep Santa alive if you want to know everything about him.

School wants you to obey rules and memorize things more than it wants you to be really curious and open-minded. You are not yet even a teenager when you start hating books, because they are nothing but holders of boring material that you have to memorize and rewrite on tests.

It’s easy to see why curiosity must be killed in a larger system. A larger (social) system is set for masses and if you want to have a working system for a large number of people, there is no room for deviations, curiosity and individualization.

Everybody must follow strict rules or the system would stop working. That means that if you want to stay curious, you have to nurture it outside typical social systems.

Secondly, curiosity is not a piece of cake to deal with. It takes energy, dedication, intellectual effort and potential embarrassment of not knowing the answers to all questions. It forces everyone involved from a passive mental state to an active one. And our brain loves to rest and save energy. So many people and almost all social systems purposely stifle curiosity. Because it’s easier.

Curiosity pushes you from a passive to an active mental state.

If you aren’t a curious person anymore, it’s not completely your fault. At least not until you read to the end of this article. I know, that was a little bit evil.

But you simply have to be really stubborn when it comes to nurturing the right values and not giving in to social pressure. You have to be one step ahead of social systems, an average life strategy and all kinds of expectations of other people about what you should be doing.

When you find yourself stuck in a situation where your curiosity gets stifled, you have to become creative and make sure you feed your curious mind one way or another. There is always a way to nurture your curiosity, no matter how rigid and narrow-minded the people and systems around you are.

Practical examples
- If a system doesn’t allow you to be curious, be curious out of the system. Have many hobbies, join debate groups, spend more time in a library researching, watch MOOCs, whatever.
- If people are fed up with you constantly asking questions, find more people who are willing to share their knowledge. At the end of the day, it’s better to seek wisdom of several people than the knowledge of just one.
- If you still have questions after a lecture or a seminar, agree with the lecturer to send him or her questions by e-mail or to meet individually.
- Question everything, dig deeper, try to understand the context, origin and history of things, put them into a new perspective, brainstorm new angles, play with ideas, make ideas have sex. There are numerous ways how you can stay hungry and stay foolish.
When it comes to curiosity and many other uncommon positive values and personality traits, you must never give up or take ugly compromises to fit in with the society’s rules. You have to innovate your way out to get what you want.

If there is a strong enough will, there is always a way. Luckily today in the information age, it’s very easy to find a way to satisfy a thirsty mind – you have access to all of humanity’s knowledge and billions of people with a single click on a mouse.

You have to be a little bit rebellious if you want to nurture your curiosity and creativity.

The more curious you are, the more interesting life becomes. Below are only a few most important things why you will enjoy life much more by increasing your curiosity levels.
- You can never get bored
- People admire curiosity
- Curiosity helps you to forge deep relationships
- You become smarter
- You become more persistent
You can never ever get bored

The moment you decide to be a really curious person, boredom simply doesn’t exist anymore. You face the opposite problem instead. There are always too many things to do and to get familiar with.

When you are curious, there are so many books to read, so many different topics to study, so many items to analyze, so many people to talk to and so many different questions to ask. Wherever you go, there is always something to observe, study or experience.

Not only can you not get bored when you are curious, you constantly want to learn and experience new things. Your levels of understanding, empathy, emotional intelligence, knowledge and general competence level skyrocket.

Soon you can see how you are becoming a wiser and more interesting person. And life gets so much more exciting. The fact is that you don’t have to be extremely smart, all you have to be is curious enough. If you are bored in life, that only means you aren’t curious enough.

People admire curiosity and it can really help you build deep relationships

As I mentioned, nothing works better in forging new deep and quality relationships than showing genuine interest in somebody. It’s extremely obvious when you’re really interested in forging a connection with someone and when you aren’t.

When you are curious about someone:
- You want to know everything about them. I mean really everything. Their life story, how they achieved what they achieved, how they think, their values, what they love most in life, and numerous other things.
- You want to talk with them again and again. When you meet them you are excited about getting to know them even better, what happened to them etc. You don’t give a f*ck about notifications on your mobile phone. You are completely focused on learning about that person.
As Dale Carnegie said, you can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. When you show curiosity about somebody, you get emotionally invested in them; because as we said, curiosity takes energy, time, effort and dedication.

That leads to people loving to spend time with you, you forge deep multidimensional connections, you learn many new things and perspectives, and people love to work with other people who are curious, committed, dedicated and focused. There is nothing more awesome than to work with a curious person who shows commitment in achieving a specific output.

1 in 100 people is really focused, curious and dedicated to learning more about you. That makes them really special. That’s how curiosity opens hearts.

Not to mention that by being curious about people, you gain many different life insights, perspectives and angles, you build your tolerance level and much more. So never put your ego before learning something new about a person you like.

And never have a problem with being wrong. That’s probably one of the biggest benefits of curiosity. If you are a curious person, you have no problem with being wrong and putting learning before your ego. That’s how curiosity helps you to stay tolerant, agile and continuously get better.

Practical examples

If you have a problem grasping the curiosity concept when interacting with other people, here are examples of questions a curious person would start asking themselves when they meet somebody different from them or somebody they dislike:
- How are we different?
- Why are we different and why are we alike?
- Why does that bother me?
- What can I learn from that person?
- How do different views lead to misunderstandings in communication?
- How are we alike?
- How can we efficiently work together, knowing our differences and similarities?
- How can I improve communication with the person?
I hope you see where the mental direction and effort are going. Now you know what to do the next time you meet somebody you can’t immediately connect with.

Becoming smarter and more persistent

Maybe you can’t increase your IQ, but you can definitely become smarter, wiser and more educated. You can train your brain to think better, you can increase your competence level, and you can train your creative and analytical mind to give you better results. All that with the help of curiosity.

If you are a curious person, you read and you learn how to read a lot, you love deep engaging debates, you go to seminars, watch online courses, documentaries, question things and try to acquire new knowledge in many different ways at every single opportunity. That means you know a lot and that you can talk about many different topics. It makes you smarter.

Knowing many different things enables you to connect hidden patterns and generate new ideas. That means curiosity leads to better creativity. You can use ideas from one field and transfer it to another, you can merge ideas from many different fields (convergence), you can more easily steal ideas from other people and make them much better, and so on.

When you are a curious being, you always want to generate and play with ideas, constantly try new things and acquire new experiences, you want to meet and talk to many different people, and that gives you a very unique advantage to be more creative, tolerant and connect patterns that other people can’t see.

You can never be overdressed, overpaid or overeducated; or too curious.

On top of that, curiosity also makes you much more persistent; because you want to get to the bottom of things. Curiosity drives you, it gives you a sense of mission, purpose and meaning.

You can much more easily learn new things, even boring things, if you are curious and with curiosity you get a memory boost (proven by science). Even Einstein said that he had no special talents, that he was only passionately curious. Not to mention that curiosity contributes greatly to better brain health.

It’s the best time in history to be a curious person

You own one of the most capable computers in your head available for use, a product of billions of years of evolution (your brain). Next to that, you have most of the knowledge ever created by humankind available only with a single click on the mouse.

Only that statement makes it obvious that it’s the best time in history to be a curious person. So here’s the question:

Why would you use your brain and the internet for browsing funny pictures of cats?

Actually, I’m not kidding. We have no idea how privileged are the times we live in. Inexpensive transport options, numerous ways to communicate and connect, free access to knowledge etc., it all makes the life of a curious person that more worthwhile. As a curious person today, you can so easily learn, connect, travel, share and create. It’s such a waste to not take advantage of it.
So stay hungry and stay foolish. If you are asking yourself how to nurture curiosity, there are only a few things you have to do:

Ask questions and question everything

Show genuine interest in people

Always go for new experiences (use the search mode for it)

Read, read, read

Spend time with geeks. Smart is the new sexy.

Step back and ask yourself what others are missing

Commit to become the best in the world in one thing

Go on an adventure

Learn more about yourself (if you become curious about yourself, you can be curious about anything)

Expose yourself to more uncertainty (that will lead you to natural exploration)
But probably the most you can do to nurture your curiosity is to rebuild the connection with your inner child. You were once curious, until your curiosity was systematically killed. Even though it was killed, you have the power to bring it back to life.

You just have to see that it’s not painful to be curious, it’s not wrong, other people just don’t know how to deal with extreme curiosity (but you can teach them). Now you are an adult, now you understand that, so you can bring out your curious inner child again and start playing. You can start exploring and discovering again.

More than any other kind of knowledge we fear knowledge of ourselves, knowledge that might transform our self-esteem and our self-image. – Maslow

When you awaken your curiosity, just make sure that you point it in the right direction. You want to focus your curiosity and direct it towards your goal. The second step when you become a curious being again is making sure that your curiosity is not distracting and unfocused. Checking Facebook statuses is not the right kind of curiosity.

Homework

If you don’t get lost in a flow of curiosity at least a few times per week, you are definitely not curious enough. If you don’t know where to start, here are a few ideas:
- Buy yourself a Kindle and start reading eBooks
- Find a free Massive Online Open Course (MOOC), subscribe to it and finish it
- Subscribe to educational YouTube Channels
- Download an app that enables you to learn something new every day
- Develop a new skill, knowledge domain or develop some other new competence
- Join a meet-up on a topic you’re interested in or start a new hobby
- Reframe a boring situation and find something interesting about it
Curiosity is the one important thing that makes life so much more interesting. Curiosity is what led mankind into the deepest oceans, highest mountains and even space. Curiosity is what leads to major scientific discoveries, deepest relationships and the most awesome products.

Curiosity is what will lead you to evolve as an individual and become the best version of yourself. Your curiosity is as unique as you, and it ignites your creativity, imagination and the desire for adventure and discovery. Curiosity helps you learn the most important life lessons, act out of a sense of mission and in the end, curiosity helps you develop wisdom.

So in order to live a great life, awaken the curiosity in you again and always stay hungry, always stay foolish.
Your competence level

Your competence level is basically an accumulation of internal resources in your past. The more internal resources that you accumulated in the past, the more competent you are. The good thing is that competences accumulate over time, and thus a potential for exponent growth and compounding exists.

Today, in the creative society, competence is the biggest safety and advantage you can really have, and the main source of self-actualization, meaning doing work you really enjoy; and it doesn’t matter if you’re starting your journey as independent entrepreneur, freelancer or are employed.

The higher your competence level is, the more you should be capable of converting internal resources into external resources (money, status…) and consequently you should be more successful in your personal and business life. The bottom lines of a higher competence level should be your better performance in order to create, deliver and capture value.

The best news ever is that inner resources can’t be spent like outer resources. You can always spend money and it’s gone, but once you acquire a skill, you know it forever. That’s why inner resources are that much safer than outer resources.

Inner Resources: Competences à Outer Resources

Knowledge Money

Skills Status

Experiences Contracts

… …

Your competence level (inner resources) consists of the following elements:

Psychological capital

The pure basis of your competence level is psychological capital. In today’s turbulent world, that’s the foundation of your potential capabilities. The ability to adapt quickly, constantly overcome obstacles, stay ambitious, have a wish for developing and acquiring knowledge, have courage, break out of your comfort zone, being resilient, persistent, focused, constantly pushing yourself etc. are all important parts of psychological capital. Without a suitable measure of psychological capital, all other elements of competence are significantly less useful to you and the world.

Possessing some knowledge or having a talent or acquiring a skill doesn’t mean anything if you don’t put it to good use. When you put your competences to use, you face obstacles, resistance, pressure, assholes, etc. and those are the real life situations where psychological capital makes the difference between you making it or not.

Talent

Talent means that you have a natural competence for a certain mental or physical activity. With talent, you’re gifted for a certain activity. It means that you learn and master it a lot more easily than others and you are significantly more skilful at it than your competition if you practice enough. We all have our own talents as well as areas we aren’t talented in.

You can diligently analyse your talents by doing a personal SWOT analysis. Talents are an important part of your competence, if not even the most important part, but only if you also develop and capitalize on them. Otherwise talent is practically thrown away. The formula is simple: Use your talents. That’s why the key factor before that is psychological capital. Talented or not, you have to fight and work hard.

Knowledge and IQ

Knowledge means knowing a certain field. It means you have a complete set of information that you imprint into your consciousness by learning, studying, observing or in any other way. It’s about understanding information about a subject that you get by experience or study. Knowledge represents the most basic skillset and qualification for a certain activity.

The rarer and the more sought-after your knowledge is, the more you are competent and the bigger is your value on the job market. For example, everyone knows how to make photocopies, but there are significantly fewer independent accountants, and even fewer accounting software programmers. The accumulated knowledge can be a consequence of formal or informal education. Formal education brings an additional paper that holds important value added in certain sectors, especially if this paper is stamped by the best universities in the world.

When we talk about knowledge, we should also mention the intelligence quotient as an important part of competence. IQ significantly contributes to competence, but only to a certain extent. As the book Outliers describes: if your intelligence quotient is below a certain number, you have a much more difficult time succeeding.

But someone who is a genius and someone who reaches a point that is a little higher than the average of intelligence quotient have completely the same chances of success. Of course intelligence, much like talent, doesn’t mean anything on its own. What’s crucial is the use.

In today’s society of information overload, there’s another important component of knowledge. It doesn’t so much encompass the ability of memorizing anymore, since information is easily accessible, but rather how quickly you can find information, analyse it and use it practically.

Skills

Skills are your abilities to do an activity well or in a practical manner. The more skills you have and the more they’re developed, the bigger is your competence level. The skills important for the creative society are mostly visionary and creative skills, skills of out-of-the-box thinking, leadership, sales, teamwork, fast learning and negotiation.

For example, if you’re a good negotiator, you can definitely make sure that you get a significantly better payment for the job you do. And the skill of selling yourself perfectly can definitely make this payment even bigger.

Emotional and social intelligence

As part of skills, we should especially highlight emotional (EQ) and social intelligence (SQ). In the creative society, it’s these two types of intelligence that contribute to an individual’s competence as much as the intelligence quotient (IQ). Working with people is very difficult, and if you have a good sense for people and know how to work with them, that’s the basis for the development of many key skills for success. You can easily increase these two types of intelligence on your own, by being proactive (reading the books and applying knowledge).

Experience (to a certain extent)

Experience is the process of getting knowledge or skill from doing, seeing, or feeling things. You gain experience based on an activity, on doing, not reading or talking about something. Experiences are findings that you figure out on the basis of things you go through. Experience allows you to make better decisions.

The more experience that you have, the more correct is probably your subjective reality map compared to the objective reality. And that’s the basis for good decisions. We could also say that experiences are your scars from different battles, helping you to make better decisions in the future. Good decisions are a consequence of experience. Experience is a consequence of bad decisions. Thus there is no experience without scars.

There is another thing called too much experience. Too much experience sometimes leads to the phenomenon of paralysis. When you gain too much experience, you start avoiding sometimes even reasonable risks without being aware of it. This is why when gaining experience, it’s crucial that it doesn’t paralyse you.

Values

Your personal value system is the basis for your decision-making – what you’ll give priority to and spend time on in your life. Together with psychological capital and personal talents, values are those factors that define your potential for accumulating competences. You can be as talented and ambitious as can be, but if you don’t focus on your goals and thus suitably allocate your time, you’ll have a lot of difficulty in realizing your goals, no matter how competent you are.

For example, if partying is higher on your value list than career, you probably won’t allocate much time to progress your career. Consequently, it doesn’t matter how competent you are.

When it comes to the value system, it’s also important that these values are healthy and include a long-term view. If someone is a con artist, for example, they’ll have a hard time being successful in the long run. That’s why integrity also has to be a key part of your values.

Views and beliefs

But we can even take one step back. Your values and decision-making system are the consequences of your views and beliefs. The latter construct your subjective reality map (how you personally see reality) that you’re creating up to the beginning of puberty through primary and secondary socialization. After that, we need a lot of energy to even be able to suitably adjust this map.

Narrow-minded beliefs can have an incredibly negative influence on you capitalizing on your competence, no matter how big or unique it is. For example, if you have the narrow‑minded belief that money corrupts people and you don’t want to be “corrupt”, it will be extremely difficult for you to get rich, even though you might have all the competences for it. But you just won’t go after money.

Consequently, an important part of your competence level are your views and beliefs, which also make a great starting point for your personal growth. Analyse which toxic beliefs are holding you back. The good news is that cleaning up views and beliefs lasts throughout the entire life.

Social capital

Social capital are invisible bonds between individuals, built on the basis of previous collaboration and including the key component called trust. Even though social capital is already somewhat of an internal-external resource, it’s still an important component of your competence.

The more people that you know (or who know you), the more you’re worth, we could say simply. In this, the social capital can be given or inherited or deliberately built. You should definitely work hard on developing networking skills and building your social capital, because it’s no secret that knowing the right people can definitely help you progress much faster in life.

Personal brand

All the things listed above are reflected in your personal brand. It’s generally true that the more competent that you are, the bigger is supposedly the power of your personal brand. Accumulation of your inner resources reflects in your personal brand, which are your name and surname. In today’s world, the biggest part of your personal brand is seen online on all the social networks.

However, it’s not necessary that your competence level can always help you, at least not from the beginning, when you start building your name. There are a few studies that concluded that being too competent compared to others may even decrease your performance level. But in the long run, if you have a high enough psychological capital and emotional intelligence, even this isn’t an obstacle. When you prove yourself that you are the next Bill Gates, everyone will want to network with you.

A brand can also have more power than your actual competence level if you excel at personal marketing. We could say that empty vessels make most noise in the short-term. But in the long run, the brand evens out with actual competence sooner or later. Thus the best combination is to really have a high competence level, including you being good at marketing and selling yourself. At the end of the day, to be really successful, you have to create value (innovate, possess knowledge or skills), deliver (marketing and performing) and capture value (negotiating price).

The conclusion

You, and only you, are the biggest, most important, safest, most reasonable and potentially the most lucrative investment in your life. So invest into yourself and your competence. The investment will definitely pay off and you can’t lose in any way. You’ll always be able to create external resources from internal resources. In order to succeed, you only need one person to believe in you. It’s best if that person is you. So be good and thorough when investing into yourself and your competence!
Be more of a producer than a consumer
Today, we live in an extremely materialistic world, where we are programed to be a subconsciously obedient consumer from a young age onwards. You’re exposed to a few hundred marketing messages on average each day, and most advertisers try to convince you to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like with hard-earned money from a job you may even not like.

But there’s more than that. Productivity has risen dramatically in the past two decades. An average worker creates more value than ever. Nevertheless, wages aren’t going up, they are remaining steady or even decreasing. All of the benefit (or extra profit, if you want) goes to employers or business owners. That’s why rich people are getting richer, and poor people are getting poorer.

It’s true that an average inhabitant of the world can afford more and more material things. The material abundance has never been as high as it is today. But the profoundly sad truth is that the material status isn’t improving because wages and productivity are higher, but because it’s much easier to access debt. People enslave themselves to debt more and more, just to afford another thing they probably don’t even need.

Being an obedient consumer

There are many reasons and motivators why you should buy something new. Because you get the instant good feeling of gratification, because you deserve it since you work hard, because you’ll feel a little bit better about yourself or other people will notice you more, because a new thing will bring short-lived excitement into your life, and so on.

It’s so easy to spend money. Your hard earned money is just an electronic figure. Your fastest connection to that figure is a piece of plastic; doesn’t even feel like a real money. Just some numbers. You see something you like. You just swipe your plastic and you feel a little better for whatever reason.

You don’t have enough of your own money? No problem. You have a few more decades to live and you’re going to work hard, for sure, and earn some money. Lenders know that, and they want a piece of your future earnings. That’s why it’s so easy to borrow money and just buy something you want. With a single signature.

A big screen TV you can’t actually afford. A fancy nice car. A big modern home. Dozens of shoes and coats and other clothes. Vacations you haven’t taken for so long and you definitely deserve. A big expensive latte. Restaurants and drinks and parties. There are so many options to spend money, and it doesn’t matter whether you actually have it or not.

You can swipe credit cards and take more and more debt until reality kicks in. The easier road sooner becomes hard. The good short-lived feeling of owning something new becomes a long-term catastrophe; because debt means slavery. Possessions you cannot afford destroy your freedom and your potential, and sooner or later your health and relationships as well, because of all the stress. The more things you buy that you cannot really afford, the longer your jail sentence is, the more enslaved you are.

One of the problems is that things are rarely as they seem. Maybe your neighbor has a bigger house than you, drives an expensive car, wears expensive clothes, has a nice motorbike and I don’t know what else, but in reality, he may be an enslaved person working a job he hates just to pay the debt he owes. The material things are just his short escape from reality.

Having material things in life doesn’t really mean neither wealth nor happiness. Almost anyone can go to a bank for a consumer loan to buy a few fancy things and enslave their own future. But sooner or later, you don’t own things anymore. They own you. Your freedom goes away, your happiness goes away, and all you do is work hard to pay off the debt. Everybody earned money except you. Remember: if you don’t know who the fool in the room is, you’re probably that fool.

The easiest way people see for getting out of a financial hole is by earning more money. But sooner or later, they realize that more money is rarely a solution for poor financial management. You just can’t buy more financial discipline. That’s why most lottery winners go broke soon after winning the money. You must financially discipline yourself, no matter how much you earn. Because money follows management.

Don’t try to only look rich, work hard and be disciplined to really become rich. Buying stuff on credit means slavery. Living a modest and frugal life and not spending money like crazy, especially not by taking debt, means freedom. You have more choices and more choices mean more freedom. You have more options to pursue your dreams and the things you really want in life.

The opposite is also true. The hard road becomes much easier with time. If you save money, you’ll become a winner sooner or later. Because a free cash flow will allow you to become an investor, a business owner or lender. Cash in your bank account will give you more options and possibilities.

Being an innovative producer

The large majority of people are consumers. Most of them afford their lifestyle by taking debt. They enslave themselves and limit their options. But logically, this planet has another type of people – the ones who are selling the products to this majority. These are the people with a completely different mindset. They’re called producers. They’re driven by the force to innovate, to produce to solve problems and to create beautiful shiny products and services that provide value.

Every one of us has the capacity to innovate, create something new, provide value and produce different products and services. Every one of us has a much greater potential than to just go to work, take debt and spend money as the easiest way to escape reality and its challenges. Not everyone is made to become an entrepreneur, but you can also become an investor, sole proprietor, freelancer, you can produce and sell stuff in your free time, partner up etc. There are numerous ways of becoming a producer.

You can break free from being only a consumer by becoming a producer as well. The sooner you switch sides, the sooner life becomes easier. You get more ideas, you see more opportunities, you’re more immune to all the advertising messages, and even more importantly: the will to create and contribute awakens in you. Switching from a consumer to a producer mindset can be one of the greatest things you do in life. First you produce and provide value, which makes you rich, and then you consume. Producers get rich and consumers go poor. That’s a fact.

Think about providing value to the world. See yourself as an innovator, entrepreneur, businessperson, visionary, creator and producer of added value. See yourself as an investor and business owner. Instead of spending money, invest money, save money and produce.

You can even take being a producer to a totally new level. If you have a consumer mindset, you only think about what you’ll buy for your spouse on Valentine’s Day. Producers prefer to think about what they can sell on Valentine’s Day. They see millions of spenders who just want to buy stuff as proof of their love.

Consumers buy things in shopping centers, producers sell them. Consumers buy products on TV, producers sell them. Consumers borrow money to buy stuff, producers lend money. Consumers buy things for every holiday and special occasion, producers see special occasions as opportunities to sell things to needy people.

Think about all the needs people have. Think about how you can provide value to the world. Think about how you can solve problems for people. Think about all the business ideas you have; and if you don’t have them, brainstorm. Think about your dreams and talents, and how you can monetize them. Think like a producer and a creator of value.

“You look at the world, when you buy a sandwich or a beer; you are a consumer where you trade money for a certain type of good. I think money is fundamentally an exchange of value. So, how can you be the guy that produces the value so that people can use that to give you the money? When you see that way, then you kinda see the matrix. That’s the biggest switch you probably have to make.” Terry Lin, Baller Leather, Your Own Way Out Interview

Changing from a consumer to a producer mindset

Changing your mindset from being a consumer to being a producer is not an easy job, but it can be done. Here are some tricks that are going to help you change perspective.

Whenever you want to be an obedient consumer, do the following:
- Whatever you buy, multiply the price by ten. That’s the actual cost of your purchase. If you were to invest that money, that is approximately how much money you’d make in twenty-five years with an average return on your investment.
- Everything you buy doesn’t only cost money. It also costs you your freedom, your space in life, your future and the number of your choices. See how you’re enslaving yourself with every purchase, especially if you’re buying things on debt.
- Whenever you get a paycheck, Pay yourself first. Have a savings account and put some money aside for your future. See it as part of your expenditures and consumption. Feel instant gratification when you save money. Whenever you see your neighbor’s fancy car and feel bad, look at your savings account and it’ll make you feel better instantly.
- For bigger purchases, wait two to three months, don’t make impulsive decisions, especially not for big purchases. If you still need the new thing, maybe you should buy it, but rather not. Time will curb your consumption desires.
- Rather than buying things you won’t use in a few weeks’ time and that only start collecting dust, live a minimalistic life. Remove all waste from your life.
- If you really have problems controlling your expenditures, find a spouse with better money management habits than you. It will be a good influence on you and you’ll be able to save much more money.
Tricks to acquiring a producer mindset:
- Become a smarter consumer, educate yourself, compare prices, understand taxes and the monetary system, read financial statements, become financially educated. Try to see everything you buy as a business deal with room to negotiate.
- Read investing and business books, as this will motivate you to save more and to produce more value for the world; besides learning new things.
- Spend more time with investors and producers. Join business or investor clubs, make new friends, and go to conferences.
- Invest in yourself, unless you don’t think you’re a good investment. But you are. Leveling up your skills, upgrading you mindset and having a better life strategy is the best investment you can make.
- Have a long-term approach. It takes years to change your mindset, to learn new skills and to really become a producer and then produce something of real value. The good news is that you only have to be right once with the right product (to get rich), but you can’t just switch sides, it’s not that easy. You must learn about the markets, you must develop new skills, expand your social network, and so on. The learning curve is long and takes a lot of effort, years of hard work, but it’s worth it. Not only because of a better earning potential, but also because of the feeling that you created something and contributed to the world.
- Start creating something small and try to sell it. Maybe you can start with selling things you don’t need at home. Try to identify small opportunities for making some money. Make your first dollar, then ten dollars and continue like that.
- Go to the Arab part of the world and practice bargaining and negotiating. Most people feel uncomfortable negotiating and getting the best possible price. If you can’t do it, partner up with someone who can.
- Make sure your spouse understands your goals and supports them. If you try to save, invest and produce, and your spouse only wants to spend and consume, things will not work out very well. Besides investing into yourself (you), your spouse is the most important choice you make in your life.
- Think about what else you consume that’s unnecessary, like news, TV, unhealthy food etc. Try to see your time and energy as precious resources you can either waste or invest wisely.
- Try to think about how to create products with real value. If you want long-term success, you need to create value that people really need and respect. Try to build products you’d proudly put your name on. Don’t try to just to make a quick buck or scam people.
My friend Robert Rolih wrote two reports that are great if you are new to investing:

That’s also what I do. I’m not rich (yet) but my material status is improving every year. I drive an average car (which I even downgraded a few years ago) and I live in a small but cute flat I can afford. I spend as little as possible on clothes. I don’t buy any unnecessary stuff. I try to live as minimalistic of a life as possible.

I have a spouse who knows how to save money and she motivates me to spend even less. She is a really good influence when it comes to money. My major expenditures are investments into myself (books, seminars, MOOCs…), healthy food, technology and sports. All that I see more as investments than costs.

Seven years ago, I wasn’t even close to being careful with my money, because of my false mindset. That’s changing for the better every year; especially by reading books and socializing with the right people, and it feels so much better. Still, I’m not obsessed with money and I value relationships and doing good much more than financial benefit.

I see myself much more as a producer than a consumer. I produce things I’m good at, things like writing articles, doing workshops, managing complex projects and delivering consulting work. I’m just in the process of switching from producing value for the local to the global market, while my plan is to also create some products so I can progress from only trading my time for money to also having some passive and portfolio income.

It may take me the next decade to really do it, but I have no problem investing into the process and trusting it. Despite all that, I really enjoy what I’m doing. It’s not only about the final event, the path alone pretty much has the same value and importance.
Expectations, standards and assumptions
For a long time, the difference between expectations, standards and assumptions was quite confusing to me. On the one hand, great expectations lead to big disappointments, but on the other, if you don’t aim big you can’t win big. It took me quite some time to figure things out. Read more in this blog post why you should have no expectations in life, but also high standards and always be testing your assumptions.

Expectations

Big expectations really do lead towards big disappointments. That’s why you should be as lean and agile as possible. You can’t have control over people and situations, you can only have control over yourself (and even control over yourself is sometimes very limited). That means that things will definitely go into a different direction than you expect, the only question is when.
- People of whom you expect the least may disappoint you
- Situations where you expect the biggest benefits may turn out to be big disappointments
- You will expect life to reward you, just because you exist, and you may be disappointed once again
- Gurus will teach you how to live, you’ll follow their wisdom and may be disappointed, before finally figuring out that you must find your own way towards success and happiness.
The power you have is within you, not in controlling the outer world. Rather than having big expectations, you should stay flexible. You should be aware of your desires, goals and things you want to experience in life, and fight for them, but have no expectations when and how this will happen. You should have your endgame in mind, but don’t have any expectations for when and how you’ll get there; because you will bump into obstacles and dead-end roads where least expected.

You make a plan, but your plan will stop working after the first contact with reality. You should still have a plan, but adapt it regularly, based on the feedback you’re getting from your environment, based on the experiments you make (more about that later).

And the best way to manage your expectations is to live in the present moment more. Trust the process of getting to the desired event, trust yourself more and regularly reflect to make the necessary adjustments.

If you have expectations to marry someone and live happily ever after right after the first date, there’s a very high probability that you’ll be disappointed. But if you trust the process of dating until you find the best person and then investing all of yourself into keeping a good relationship, the magical relationship experience you desire in life may happen; or it may not, but the probability is much higher.

Why we are unhappy – The expectation gap

Don’t expect that life will reward you. Life owes you nothing. Life rewards those who master its rules. Life rewards those who invest and trust the process leading to the event they desire. So have no expectations at all, but rather have a superior but very flexible life strategy and give your best in every single moment. Who knows where life will lead you and what your path will be. Enjoy the trip as much as possible.

Let go of any expectations towards people and situations, and life won’t disappoint you anymore. Expectations equal predicting future based on your desires (how you want thing to happen) and you simply can’t predict the future.

Standards

Having no expectations towards life doesn’t mean that you just give up and don’t fight for your goals. It only means that you stay flexible and regularly adapt based on what’s happening in your environment. It simply means that you aren’t cocky, don’t see yourself as a big visionary, knowing what and how things will happen (you expecting something means predicting future based on your desires). Because you simply can’t. The world has become too complex, turbulent and changes too fast. As the philosophy of the lean startup goes: you have to give up the notion that you can accurately describe the past, accurately predict the future and manufacture it. All you can do is to have a deep understanding of how the world works.

But on the other hand, you need high standards in life. You must not be a perfectionist, which is one of the cognitive distortions, but you need to have high standards for yourself and others. You have to improve, you have to fight and struggle, you need passions in life, you need to see and feel your progress and personal evolution. You must never take things for granted and you must never stop trying.

In order to raise your standards in the long run, you have to do an identity shift. First, you do a few linear improvements until your identity shifts, and that leads to rapid improvements in your life. You see yourself differently and so your standards are higher; then you set them even higher.
- You will take much better care of your health if you see yourself as an athlete
- You will take much better care of your money if you see yourself as an investor
- You will take much better care of your career if you see yourself as a businessperson
- You will be a much better partner if you see yourself as a valuable and giving person
- You will be much happier if you also see enjoying life as one of the purposes of living
- You will take much better care of your skills if you know your strengths and see yourself as a competent person with a growth mind-set
You have to constantly raise the bar, you have to constantly improve, try to achieve your peak performance. You must become the best possible version of yourself in this life. You must never settle.

Assumptions

You should have no expectations towards life and other people. You should have high standards and then set the standards even higher by improving yourself constantly. You should start with an endgame in mind, you should raise your standards and improve yourself to achieve your endgame more easily, but as mentioned before, you should also be aware that the road to your endgame will be much different from what you expect.

The reason for that are your assumptions. We know two types of realities. One is the objective reality that isn’t accessible to any living being. The objective reality is how things really are in the world. The second reality is your subjective reality. The subjective reality is your own interpretation of the world.

There are many errors in your subjective reality. Your senses have a limited capacity for capturing information, your brains have a limited ability for processing information, everyone has many cognitive distortions and other errors on the subjective reality map, for example generalization, framing and other biases. Here is a long list of cognitive biases.

Don’t assume anything. Test everything and who knows where life will take you.

Assumptions

Errors in your subjective map of the world lead to wrong assumptions. And wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. You assume something will happen, but it doesn’t. You take action, but you get a different reaction than expected. That’s because the objective world is different from your subjective representation and individual interpretation. Because of this gap, expecting anything leads to a very high probability of disappointment.

Of course the more experience you have in life, the better assumptions and assumption-based decisions you can make. Life experiences lead to making better decisions, but you get life experiences from making bad decisions. Your subjective map of the world gets closer to objective reality with experiences. But no matter how experienced you get in life, there are always errors in your subjective interpretation of reality. The fast-changing world contributes to that even more. Even if you could reach objective reality in a certain moment, an error would occur the next second. Because the world is constantly changing.

That’s why you need to constantly keep testing your assumptions. You have to see life as a playground, where you have to test what works and what doesn’t. Based on your findings, you have to constantly adjust your strategy and actions. That’s why the search mode is so important. Don’t just assume, experiment and validate. Then take action.
- Have no expectations towards life and people, stay flexible in how you will achieve your endgame.
- Have high standards towards yourself and others, and constantly improve, as that will help you to become the best version of yourself and achieve your endgame more easily.
- In order to find the right way that leads to your desired endgame, don’t act based on your assumptions, but do experiments and test. Validate your assumptions and constantly adjust your life strategy based on validated learning and the feedback you’re getting from your environment.