Blaz Kos

creativity & innovation

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  • Innovate your way out

    A very important fact of problem solving is that we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them, as Albert Einstein’s famous quote goes. In life, you will definitely face many problems and sometimes even severe setbacks. From time to time, life will seem totally unfair, hard and burdensome. Sometimes you may even feel like there is no solution to your problems. But in fact, there is always a step you can take towards a better life.

    Many situations in life demand from you to be creative and find an innovative solution. Proactively looking for new ways is the opposite of feeling sorry for yourself and giving up. Everyone can be creative and innovation is the essence of progress, including in your own life, especially if you find yourself in tough situations or want massive success. Thus when facing problems, think hard on how you could innovate your way out.

    Let’s look at an example now.

    A few years ago I started going to the gym. I never did any sports before in my life and thus I didn’t have really strong muscular foundations. After a few visits to the gym, I got pretty enthusiastic and started to increase the weight I lifted very fast. Legal supplements like creatine gave me extra power and enabled me to lift even more. But because I had no strong foundations, I of course hurt myself. I damaged my shoulder blades, elbow and wrist of my right arm – joints and ulnar nerve.

    After the injury, it was obvious that going to the gym and working hard on my muscles was not an option anymore. I felt really depressed. Truly depressed. For the first time in my life, I got enthusiastic about a sport, I could see my progress well, but now such a setback. I never thought that I’d feel depressed about not doing sports.

    In the beginning, I was stubborn, of course. “No pain, no gain”, as I’ve read in many articles and magazines. Thus I went to the gym a few times just right after my arm felt a little bit better. With this kind of thinking, I damaged my arm even more. I tried to solve the problem with the same kind of thinking that created it. “If I train harder, it will stop hurting,” I said to myself. How stupid.

    Path to success

    I needed to innovate my way out of the situation. I wanted to stay active and improve my fitness level. On the other hand, going to the gym wasn’t an option anymore. Thus I had entered the search mode, looking for sports I could do without hurting my arm. Along the way, it also became more than obvious that I’d have to strengthen my core muscles and improve flexibility if I wanted to do any sports seriously again in my life.

    I’ve tried many different sports and found a few that I can do without my arm hurting that much. Hiking (without hiking sticks), swimming, a few exercises like squats, etc. In addition to that, I’ve also found out that yoga, stretching and doing core exercises (planking, resistance band training etc.) really helps me a lot. Massages are a bonus on top of that. My progress is slower, of course, but the foundations will be much stronger in the long term for sure.

    Sometimes you have to take one step back in order to take two steps further. Sometimes your foundations are not strong enough for the masterpiece you want to build. Sometimes you push yourself too hard in the wrong kind of way and experience a severe setback. Just pushing forward with something that doesn’t work makes no sense. The definition of insanity is repeating the same behaviors and expecting a different outcome, if we go back to Einstein’s quotes. You have to stop and think. In that kind of a situation, you have to innovate your way out.

    path_to_success3

    There is always a step that can take you closer to your goal. It may not be a linear step, but life is never a linear path. It’s full of ups and downs, rights and lefts, sprints and stops. Life is supposed to be a daring adventure taking you to different places you’ve never even imagined; nice ones and difficult ones. That is how you grow.

    You will face challenges in all areas of life. When you face a challenge, don’t rush and don’t panic. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Start thinking. Start looking for new ways of getting out of the hole. Start being creative. Start innovating. Regardless of the area of life you’re facing challenges in.

    You can fire off your creative potential by asking yourself the right questions. Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, find a quiet place, take a piece of paper and a pen, and start thinking. Start analysing, start reflecting, think about new ways for improving and taking a step further in life. Start asking yourself difficult questions and look for unconventional solutions.

    Ask yourself questions like:

    • What are 20 things I can do and haven’t thought about yet to improve my situation?
    • What will happen if I go into the opposite direction?
    • Which are the best books that deal with my kind of situation and propose solutions? (read them)
    • Which negative behavioural patterns led me to where I am now?
    • How can I start doing things differently?
    • Which effort will bring the best results the fastest?
    • Who can help me – a friend, formal institution etc.?
    • What are the resources I can engage to get out of the situation faster?
    • What is optimal thinking in this kind of situations?
    • What would [x] do? Where [x] can be Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michel Jordan or whoever your role model is.
    • Why should I fight?

    Innovating your way out is not about getting rid of hardship and burden. It’s not about finding an easy way out (maybe only sometimes). It’s not about a miraculous solution that will easily solve your problems and take your life into a totally different direction. It’s about finding hope that it can be done. It’s about finding a path that encourages you and gives you strength and willpower to move forward. Innovating your way out is about striking an early win that motivates you to stand up and start walking.

    There’s one more catch when it comes to innovating your way out. Every innovation usually brings a decrease in short-term productivity and an increase in long term-productivity. Thus innovating your way out is the harder step in the beginning. It takes additional courage and effort to do it. But with time, the hard road becomes easy and the easy road becomes hard.

    Innovating your way out doesn’t mean doing anything stupid. It doesn’t mean finding a way to put out all of your aggression and dissatisfaction. It means finding a smarter way to get out of your situation. It means leveling up your skills, your thinking, and your beliefs. It means looking at the problem from a different angle and building a superior strategy with an adequate solution based on that angle.

    Have you found yourself having money problems? Tackle your money beliefs, educate yourself about money and investing, find a way to save one dollar a day, look for ways to earn some extra bucks, come up with a crazy business idea, become really good at something etc. Innovate your way out of money problems. It’s not easy, but it can be done.

    Are you facing a setback in your career? Innovate you way out. Change the industry, start blogging, take a new course, level up your skills with massive online open courses, write 1000 e-mails to people for new opportunities, do something that’s totally different from your previous behavioural patterns.

    Do you feel trapped in negative thinking and negative emotions? Don’t stay locked in an emotional cage. Innovate your way out. Read all the available books about psychoanalysis and cognitive distortions. Go see a therapist. Start meditating. Innovate your way out.

    Regardless of the life area, there is always something you can do. Be creative. Innovate. Find a new and better way to do things. Win.

  • Different speeds in life

    A very useful concept in life to understand is that you don’t have to do everything with the same speed. Sometimes going fast means being the least productive at all. Knowing how to slow down enables you to enjoy life more, build a better life strategy and, in the long run, allows you to be even more productive. The concept of using different speeds in life is important in personal as well as business life.

    Different speeds in your personal life

    There are things in life that you should do extremely slowly and there are things you should do extremely fast. The measurement for that is pretty simple. The more enjoyable an activity or a person is, the more your senses are engaged, the slower your pace should be. In situations like that, we’re unproductive if we rush, because we’re simply missing life. Stopping in the moment, engaging all the senses and enjoying life to the full is the most productive thing we can do sometimes.

    You can throw a tasty meal into yourself, just to make sure you’ve eaten something, or you can slow down, be grateful for the food, taste every bite and enjoy your meal to the full. You can just spend some time with your kid/spouse because it’s expected of you, or you can slow down and really pay full attention to a person with your body, mind, emotions and soul. You can just climb the mountain to conquer it or you can stop at the top and really enjoy the view.

    There are also things in life that you should do extremely fast. There are things in life you should automate. There are things in life you shouldn’t give any attention to at all. You should still do everything professionally and as it should be done, but you should make sure that it takes a minimal amount of your time, money and effort. Things like cleaning, bureaucracy, worrying, procrastinating etc.

    We also shouldn’t forget about things that you should sometimes do fast and sometimes slowly, depending on the situation. For example, having sex or doing sports. Doing it at different paces brings a whole different life experience. Maybe you should introduce a day into your life when you perform things that you usually do fast slowly and vice versa, just to be creative and to experience life in a new way.

    It’s not easy to slow down, especially if you were just doing something with maximum speed. Usually, you have to first consciously decide that you’ll slow down. It helps if you have, for example, a thing that you do as a signal to your body and mind to slow down, like taking five deep breaths. The second thing you usually have to do is unplug yourself from all communication devices and distractions. And thirdly, you have to trust yourself that everything will be okay, even if you slow down. You are not missing anything if you slow down when necessary – you start missing things if you don’t.

    Different speeds in your professional life

    Using different speeds is also very important in the business world. First of all, the concept of time management doesn’t only deal with managing your time, but also your energy. Thus it’s very important to adjust your speed to the energy level you have on a specific day.

    Sometimes you have a day when you’re extremely productive, other days it simply doesn’t work. Forcing yourself to work at your maximum speed when your energy levels are low only means hurting and doing damage to yourself. In the long run, your productivity decreases if you push yourself too hard. You have to sharpen the saw from time to time.

    It’s definitely true that it’s almost impossible to be successful and respected if you aren’t hard-working, fast, productive and you don’t deliver results. Execution skills, efficiency and speed are an important part of success in today’s fast moving and constantly changing world. But it’s also true that it’s not the hardest-working people who are at the top. A lot of research has shown that success doesn’t come only from being competent and hard-working.

    You also need to work smart. If you want superior results in life, you need a superior strategy. But to build a superior strategy, you need to slow down, you need to take time, you need to think, you need to self-reflect on your actions. In situations like this, slowing down means going the fastest possible. What good is it if you are rushing in the wrong direction?

    An important part of a superior strategy and success are also innovation and creativity. If you want to be successful, you have to be different and better. Creativity rarely happens when you’re rushing or you’re tense and in an anxious state. Creativity happens when you’re in the flow. Again, slowing down when you need to be creative may be the best move that brings you to the optimal speed.

    Going slow in the search mode

    When you’re in the search mode, you should definitely slow down. The search mode is about trying new things and reflecting on whether something works for you or not. To reflect well on something, you need to be in touch with yourself, you need to listen to your inner voice and to your emotions. You have to understand what a true part of you is and what inherited or social bullshit is. To do that, you have to go as slowly as possible. In the search mode, you play and you usually play relaxed and slow.

    But when you find your fit and start executing, you must accelerate. Speed is very important for winning, if you use it at the right time. Nevertheless, when it’s time to go fast, you should also constantly have a feedback mechanism that tells you if you’re going into the right direction. When the feedback tells you that you aren’t going in the right direction, you need to slow down and go back to the search mode to do reflection, build a new strategy and adapt. You should be prepared to speed up and slow down as many times as necessary in life.

    Driving through a day with different speeds

    The most important part of everything we’ve talked about is becoming aware that going through a day is like driving, in professional as well as private life. There are moments when you have to drive fast because you are on a highway, there are moments when you have to wait in a traffic jam, there are moments when you have to refill the gas tank and there are moments when you have to stop, just to take in the amazing view or have a chat with an awesome person.

    Don’t do everything in life fast or slowly. Don’t do everything in life with the same speed. Accelerate when necessary, or slow down. It will enable you to be much more productive, happy and successful. Different situations, different activities, different speed. Life is not a marathon or a sprint. Life is a combination of all kinds of running as well as taking a rest. For every activity you do, ask yourself: what is the optimal speed I should be going with?

  • Your life strategy

    The key to a more successful life is having a superior strategy for living it. Hoping that everything turns out okay is not a strategy.

    Your life strategy is especially shaped by your beliefs, values, personal management system, and thus by your decisions about spending your time, energy, money, skills and other resources. After setting your life vision, you should think carefully over your life strategy and the direction it’s taking you in. This blog post will help you with that.

    For extraordinary results, you need an extraordinary approach. For extraordinary life, you need an extraordinary strategy.

    Even if you don’t have a specific strategy, you do have at least some sort of a strategy. It’s usually a combination of what you’ve learned through primary and secondary socialization, especially from your parents, grandparents, other people who raised you and the schooling system, and later in your life of what is expected from you by social norms in your country, dominating religion etc.

    If not any of that, your default strategy is usually what happens to you by chance. For example you end up in an industry where you’ve landed your first job after having sent CVs to numerous companies in different industries.

    Having no strategy as a child is a fact, but later on it’s your personal decision. As a child, you can’t take any decisions for yourself. All you can do is observe, learn and try to function in completely dependent relationships. The healthier the environment that you’re raised in, the better off you usually are regarding your life strategy and the better your starting point is when taking complete control over your life.

    But even if you were raised in a perfect environment, no one is completely the same as their parents and nor they should be. There’s also the additional fact that times change (your environment), thus sooner or later you have to shape your own life strategy if you want to be happy and successful. Modeling as a life strategy works only to a certain extent.

    Your personal power is the key in consciously shaping your life strategy

    The more personal power you develop over the years (mastering yourself), the greater the influence you have on how your life will turn out. Somewhere in adolescence, you start to take over the power in different areas of life and soon it’s totally up to you how you will live it.

    At the end of the day, you only have two choices – either you follow your own goals or the goals of other people; either you are the pilot of your life or other people are, from your past and your present.

    The most important thing you have to be aware of is that you always have a choice. If you don’t like something, there is always a move you can make towards a better life. You don’t betray anyone if you change your beliefs or your values over time.

    There’s nothing wrong with choosing to look at the world through different lenses, lenses that suit you better. It’s your life and you should live it completely true to yourself. You have to be yourself since everyone else is taken; you have to be yourself if you want to be happy.

    But just being yourself isn’t enough, not even close. You also have to be smart. You want to be happy and successful as well. You want to be different and better. You want to shape a life strategy that will take you to your goals and enable you to experience as much of your life vision as possible.

    “I am who I am” should not be an excuse for not playing the game of life smartly, dedicatedly and masterfully. You don’t get a second chance so it’s really important that you regularly think through how you will play the game of life.

    Saying that you always have a choice may sound easy, but it’s not. Every change means that you want to achieve a state that’s different from the default; and changing things takes courage, effort, investments etc. The greater the change you want to make in life, the more effort it will take.

    The worse your starting position is and the more ambitious goals you have, the more effort it will take to change the course of your life. Your strategy will have to be more superior, you will have to play smarter and work harder.

    The world is designed to reward those who master its rules.

    The elements of your life strategy

    Of course you constantly change your life strategy over the course of your life, especially when you experience new things and epiphanies. Thus you should regularly update your life strategy by having your end goals and your life vision in mind.

    Nevertheless your life strategy mainly consists of the following decisions you have to make sooner or later:

    • Your mindset and your personality
    • Taking care of your physical body and physical appearance
    • Formal education
    • Informal education and developing competences and skills
    • Information intake and communicating strategy
    • Your past and relationships with your primary family
    • Intimate relationships and your secondary family
    • Your sex life
    • Relationship with your kids
    • Money and investment strategy
    • Career strategy
    • Your social strategy
    • Hobbies and having fun strategy
    • Travel and transportation strategy
    • Home and your surroundings strategy
    • Strategy toward animals and nature
    • Art and culture
    • Using technology and your digital trail strategy
    • Your nation, country and political system
    • Spirituality, religion and asking for help
    • Taking care of your emotional body
    • Dealing with enemies, bad and evil in the world
    • Your legacy and social engagement strategy
    • When do you want to give up?

    Now let’s break down one by one.

    Your mindset and your personality

    The first and most important part of your life strategy is you. You have to make a choice of how much you will bother with yourself and your goals and how much you will just go with the flow. It’s your choice whether you will live your life with the growth mindset or the fixed mindset and that’s probably the key decision you have to make in your life.

    I am of course biased towards the growth mindset, but there are definitely many people who live a good life with a fixed mindset as well. The question is what works best for you.

    After choosing the growth or fixed mindset, you have to decide how much and when you will compete, and when and where you will cooperate. Cooperating is usually a part of the prestige mindset and competing a part of the dominating mindset. We all have and live both mindsets, the only question is when do we chose one over the other. It’s an important part of your life strategy. For example in sports, you may brutally compete, while at your job you help all your coworkers.

    The next decision you’ll have to make is where your mind focus will be, in your past, present or future, and what kind of an outlook you will have to each time frame. For your past, you can focus on negative or positive events. For your present, you can be more hedonistic or more fatalistic. And for your future, you can be goal oriented or surrender yourself to a greater power and posthumous life.

    Let’s continue with your personal level of ethics and morality. It doesn’t matter whether your actions lean on the prestige or the dominating mindset, you always have to choose where to draw a morality and ethics line. You may, for example, brutally compete but never take illegal performance enhancing drugs. On the other hand, you may help people in your class to study, but cheat on your test nonetheless.

    We have laws that forbid harmful behavior, especially on the physical and material level, meaning they provide security to your body and personal property. But there are still many gray areas and harmful things that are allowed, especially on the emotional level, and different ways of unethically gaining new material things.

    You have to decide for yourself what’s right and what’s wrong after the law stops working.

    Another important decision is whether you will be more flexible or stubborn in your life. Will you push things to go your way no matter what or will you adapt to different circumstances? It’s a totally different life if you choose one or the other.

    There are several other things you have to decide about yourself, like how organized you will be, whether you will be more unique or follow trends, the level of your privacy, how you will deal with obstacles and so on.

    Take care of your body

    Taking care of your physical body and physical appearance

    Your body is like your digital avatar, a vessel carrying your soul so you can experience the material world. An important part of your life strategy is how well you will take care of your vessel/avatar (or body, if you want).

    The formula is very simple. The more you take care of your body, the better you look, the more energy you have, the longer you will probably live and so on. Taking care of your body is probably one of the best investments in your life strategy. And we all know that.

    Why don’t we all do it then? Because it’s not easy. Our body is a very complex mechanism and our mind even more so. Not taking care of your body gives you immediate gratification and consequences are seen only over the years.

    Eating that hamburger in front of the TV relaxes you immediately, but you only gain weight over time. Regularly taking care of your body has the opposite mental effect and take real effort. You have to invest and work hard and make sacrifices now at this moment, only to get results somewhere in the future.

    Therefore it’s not easy to take care of your body. Anyway, you do have to make a decision of how well and how regularly you will maintain your body. What will be your healthy living strategy? That includes everything from your diet, exercise and hygiene to choosing your personal style and appearance. To be even more specific, as part of your life strategy regarding your body, you have to at least make decisions about:

    • Your sleep schedule (how much you sleep, when do you go to sleep)
    • Your hygiene level
    • Your personal style
    • Your posture and body language
    • Your exercising strategy
    • Your relationship with food (diet)
    • Dealing with daily anxiety
    • Taking breaks and holidays (rest)
    • How often and regularly will you go to a doctor
    • Taking medicine and vaccination
    • Smoking / drinking / drugs
    • Detoxing yourself (fasting, technology detox)

    One more thing to mention here is your personal clothing style. Clothes are an important part of communicating who you are. Again it’s your choice how much you will emphasize your uniqueness. It’s on you to decide whether fashion and style will be a part of your life or not.

    Formal education

    At first, your formal education is strongly determined by your parents and the place where you live. The material status of your family also has a great influence on the quality of the formal schooling that you can get (private schools etc.). But sometime after high school, the level of formal education you will receive is, in most cases, completely up to you. Probably an even more important decision is which field you will choose.

    The more traditional that the career you want is, the more important is a high level of education. If you want to be a doctor, lawyer, scientist etc. formal education is very important. On the other side of the coin, many contemporary jobs don’t even demand high levels of formal education if you are good at a specific skill, like digital design or programming.

    Decisions about formal education are tough and many factors are involved. You should consider them all and then make the best decision that’s available to you. When making decisions about the level of your formal education, you should consider at least the following:

    • Market trends for different jobs
    • Importance of formal education in your chosen career
    • The field of study and subjects you will take and why
    • The college you will choose and in which state/country
    • Grades you will aim at
    • Scholarships, taking debt and total financial costs of schooling
    • Opportunity-cost of schooling (you could work, earn money and gain experience…)
    • Your payoff for investing into a higher level of formal education
    • How you will spend your free time outside the formal education process (partying, working, traveling, doing pro bono work…)

    You know that the costs of good formal education are getting higher and higher, while on the other hand, formal education is not a guarantee for getting a job anymore. You can find many different opinions and views on importance of formal education, especially if you should get yourself in debt to get a good formal education or not, but at the end of the day, it’s totally up to you.

    It depends on your life situation, your goals, the career you aim at, your strategy etc. You should systematically analyze it, think different scenarios over and then make a sound decision.

    Informal education and developing competences and skills

    We all know now that formal education is not enough to develop your competences and skills and thus achieve your maximum potential. You have to achieve your peak performance on your own. An important part of your life strategy is how much you will invest in acquiring knowledge and developing skills in addition to formal education.

    This one’s not about reading books and having meaningful conversations and so on, but about developing hard core knowledge and skills that can help you provide value to the market. It’s about knowledge, skills and talents you can sell on the market. It’s about certified or systematic courses you take that take a longer time to develop.

    • To what extent you will develop your competence level
    • Talents you have and will exploit
    • Knowledge you’ll acquire
    • Skills you’ll develop (programming, accounting, cooking…)
    • Soft skills you’ll develop (teamwork, leadership, sales, organization, EQ, SQ…)
    • Levels of creativity you will employ
    • Languages you’ll learn etc.

    Information intake

    Information intake and communicating strategy

    Besides formal and informal education, you constantly intake information and communicate. As the saying goes: you should watch what goes in and comes out of your mouth.

    In addition to that, there is another important fact and that is garbage in, garbage out. Therefore your information intake strategy is a very important part of your life. Things that you focus on grow, so you must be very careful on which information you will focus.

    The second thing is that as much as you have your personal fashion style, so you have your personal communication style. You should be aware of it and decide where you should make improvements and how to develop it to the full.

    Communication is a very important part of life and the better you are at communicating, the more you can achieve and the better you can resolve conflicts. Thus you should carefully consider how much you will invest in your own effective communication style.

    There is one more important thing you have to consider when it comes to your communication style. You may be shy and it probably has to do something with your past. Nevertheless when you are an adult and aware of it, shyness becomes your choice and can burden your life progress. Deal with it if necessary.

    • Level of listening to others
    • Books you read and how much you read
    • Personal infostructure: Media you consume – what and how much (TV, news, blogs, movies…)
    • Your communication style
    • The level to which you will develop your communication skills
    • Level of shyness / openness and how it goes together you being introvert or extrovert
    • Complimenting and criticizing others
    • Swearing and gossiping – yes or no and how much

    Your past and relationships with your primary family

    As mentioned before, you have to deal with your past to some extent and dealing with your primary family (meaning your mother, father, brother and sisters and even your grandparents) is also a part of this. If you had a loving home and you have the same values as your parents, then this may not be a big deal. It’s good if family really feels like family, the safest and the most loving environment.

    But that’s often not the case. In some cases the worst things that can happen to people are their parents. Families can be dysfunctional, love can be replaced with abuse and the values you have can be a complete opposite to those of your parents and siblings, from politics and religion to discipline and all other areas of life.

    In those cases, it’s very difficult to make a decision of how much and in what kind of a relationship you will be with your parents. Still, you have to decide.

    Another important part of your life strategy is how much you will lean on your long-time past, family history and bloodline. Well, if you are of royal blood, that’s definitely an important part of your life.

    If your ancestors came from another, completely different country or even continent, it can also be an important part of your life. Many people decide to explore their history and roots and look for strong history traits to lean on. How important your family history is to you is your choice.

    Every one of us has also experienced more or less shocking events in the past that can become a burden in our lives. Mistakes your parents made, accidents that happen, unfortunate events etc. We all have such shocking events in life and have to deal with them somehow. How we will deal with the negative situations of our past is a part of our life strategy.

    • How much you will keep in touch with your parents
    • How close you will be to your parents
    • How much you will keep in touch with your siblings / grandparents / relatives
    • How close you will be to your siblings / grandparents / relatives
    • The level of leaning on your family history, ancestors and bloodline
    • Dealing with unfortunate events from your childhood and youth
    • Which family patterns you will strengthen and which demolish
    • Making a decision about when you will move out of your primary home

    Intimate relationships and your secondary family

    The spouse you will choose to spend the rest of your life with will have the biggest influence on your life. You are very much shaped by people who surround you and your intimate partner is number one in this regard.

    There are also many things you have to decide before and after committing to one person. Before that you have to decide how serious you will be about relationships, to what extent does finding the right partner lie in your hands and to what extent is this the domain of a “higher power” and so on. What qualities will you look for in your partner, how much emphasis will you give to physical looks, what are the deal breakers, how long will you stay in dysfunctional relationships and so on.

    The clearer the picture that you have about what you want, the easier it will be to make decisions. But of course if you believe that a greater power must take care of your love life, you will be much less proactive. Tough decisions never end.

    Even after getting into a relationship, you again have certain behavioral patterns and decisions you have to make and be aware of. How you see traditional gender roles, how much you will invest into a partnership, what you want to get out of it, is marriage important to you and so on.

    Your attitude towards cheating and missteps is also an important part of intimate relationships. It’s not easy to spend decades with the same person and you have to decide if it’s worth it and what kind of mistakes you’re willing to tolerate.

    Together with your partner you will have to decide what kind of a family you want to create. You have to decide how organized, loving, safe, caring etc. your family will be. You have to choose what kind of a home you will create, how you will decorate it, which rituals you will celebrate, who will do which chores and so on. If you didn’t have a choice with how your primary home looked, now you have it.

    • Is love in your hands or in the hands of a greater power?
    • Your dating strategy
    • Qualities you look for in your partner (personality traits, common hobbies…)
    • Is a partnership fixed or can it grow?
    • The extent of traditional gender roles and gender equality at home
    • Home chores
    • The importance of a formal marriage
    • Breaking-up attitude in partnership and ending marriage if necessary
    • Morality in partnership
    • Your personal life and privacy in relationships (will you share everything to your partner…)
    • The financial aspect of a household
    • Sex life

    Intimate relationships

    Your sex life

    Right after your intimate relationships, it makes sense to mention your sex life as well. I know sex is a very primary force and we act on instinct, but we can still control a big part of our sex life with the decisions we make.

    If we listen only to our instinct, we are on autopilot that’s maybe not even leading us to our true goals. As mentioned, even if we don’t have a strategy, we have some sort of a strategy. In this case having no strategy means yielding to our urges. But to have the best sex of your life, you have to do much more than that.

    Regarding your sex life, you will have to make the following decisions:

    • Satisfaction with your own body and your attitude towards nudity
    • Openness about your sexual orientation
    • Approximate number of sex partners you want to have
    • How regularly you want to have sex in your life
    • How well you have to know a person to have sex with them
    • How much effort you will put into pleasing your partner and how much you want to receive
    • How much is sex a part of love and how much it can be only fun
    • Kinks you have and want to make happen
    • All the things you want to experience and try in your sex life
    • Tools and techniques you will use to spice up your sex life (toys, poses…)
    • Dealing with negative emotions regarding your sex life (guilt, shame…)
    • Your attitude towards pornography
    • Your attitude towards prostitution

    Relationship with your kids

    The relationship you have with your kids is probably the most sensitive and responsible part of your life strategy. You create a new life and you have the power to break or make an innocent person. Nobody lives an easy life, but you can make a decision of how much love and support you will offer to your kids and how you will make their life more beautiful and fulfilling; or not.

    Thus an important part of your life strategy is choosing why you will have kids, how many of them you will have and how you will raise them. Some people have kids for the economic benefit (poorer countries), some to fill their emotional gaps, others to create a loving family and pass on what they’ve learned in life and prepare kids for their own challenges. There are many reasons why to have kids and you will have to find your own. Both having kids and not having them can be the most selfish thing you do in life, depending on your why’s and how’s.

    • The number of kids you want to have in life
    • Reasons to have kids in life
    • How will you raise your kids (and how you will not raise them)
    • The amount of time you spent with your kids
    • Financial and other support you will offer to your kids
    • How well will you prepare your kids for life challenges
    • What will you do if for some reason you can’t have kids (adoption etc.)
    • Helping and empowering misfortune children

    Money and investment strategy

    I probably don’t have to emphasize that being able to acquire and keep assets is one of key skills in life and everybody has to deal with it, whether you want to or not. Some people love it, others hate it. It’s pretty much the same with money as it is with diet and health. Instant gratification messes up our rationality and plans.

    The wealth of your primary family and the money blueprint you’ve inherited have an important influence on how you will shape your strategy for dealing with money. But at the end of the day, it’s once again a question of mastering yourself and making choices.

    First you have to decide how you will make your income by providing value. You can either be employed, self-employed, a business owner or an investor.

    You have to decide how much money you will spend and how much money you will invest in order to gain passive and portfolio income. To do that, you need a savings and investment strategy. You have to deal with debt, curb your buying decisions and much more. If you are born poor, it’s not your fault, but if you die poor, it probably is your fault. If you decide for the latter, be aware that you’ve chosen it yourself.

    • How will you make money (employed, self-employed, business owner, investor)
    • Types of earnings (active income, passive income, portfolio income)
    • Will your income come from wealth creation or welath extortion or both
    • The balance between monetary and social value created
    • Insurance strategy
    • Saving strategy
    • Investment strategy
    • Debt strategy
    • Donating
    • Buying / Renting home
    • Luxuries you will afford
    • How long you will keep things (living minimalist life or not)
    • Inheritance strategy (receiving from your parents and giving to your kids)
    • Joint assets with your partner (to what extent)
    • Attitude towards government and taxes (optimizing taxes etc.)

    Career strategy

    Your money and earning potential are very much connected to your career, achievements and social status. First of all, your career strategy depends on your ambitions. The more ambitious you are, the more sound and superior a strategy you need in terms of career and in all other areas of life.

    You have to decide whether you will be a leader or a follower. You have to decide about the industries you want to contribute to and work in, the type of organizations you want to function in, whether you want to start your own business, whether you’d like to have business partners and so on.

    Your career also strongly depends on your execution and political skills. The bigger the organization you work for and the closer to the government you are, the more political skills you need. And you can either use political skills to do good or to manipulate for personal gain only. Again, it’s a part of your strategy and choice. Your advancement in career is also very much connected to your personal marketing and sales strategy.

    • Level of your ambitions
    • Leader or follower
    • Industries you want to work in
    • Type of organizations you want to work for (size, type, profit/non-profit…)
    • Starting your own business – yes or no
    • Business partner strategy
    • Relationships with authorities
    • Political skills
    • Execution skills
    • Personal marketing strategy – how aggressive you will be with personal marketing

    Your social strategy

    We are social animals. We cannot survive without other people. Relationships fulfill us and make us happy. Nevertheless some people are introverts, others are extroverts. Some people prefer business relationships, others personal. Some people like to do sports with friends, others like to only have fun.

    You need to know what social relationships mean to you, how much you are prepared to invest into relationships and what do you want to get out of them.

    It’s also no secret that you can benefit from having good social skills and developing strong social connections. It’s called acquiring social capital and it’s a part of your social strategy. The people you want to get to know, how you will make sure that people hear about you, who will you spend time with, who are you going to call when you’re in trouble and need something, all these are important questions you should find an answer to for yourself.

    • Introvert / Extrovert
    • Business / Personal Relationships
    • When and why to socialize
    • People you will spend most of your time with (who, their character, deal breakers…)
    • How often you will change your friends and social circles
    • Social intelligence and social skills
    • Social capital and networking strategy
    • Your social life online
    • Who will you call in times of trouble
    • Who can help you in different areas of life
    • How much you will invest into helping your friends

    Hobbies and having fun strategy

    According to my beliefs, we are here on this planet to (1) create, (2) learn and (3) have fun. Therefore hobbies, relaxation and having fun are also a part of your life strategy. Decisions on this area of life should be easy since we all love to have fun, but they are not always.

    You have to make important decision, how much time will you spend on your hobbies and having fun and how much on developing your career and being responsible adult dealing with all important obligations.

    The line between how much you should invest into your future and how much fun you want to have is conflicting, especially in your youth. In my opinion it should be “and” not “or” and while doing that, keeping the balance. But again, you have to find the right answer for yourself.

    • What relaxes you and how often you will relax
    • How much free time will you have in life? (work – life balance)
    • How do you spend your free time?
    • Hobbies you are going to try and do in life
    • Alcohol, drugs and other substances use / abuse
    • Games and gambling affinity
    • How much you smile

    Travel

    Travel and transportation strategy

    First of all, you need all kinds of transport in your life, moving from home to work and vice versa, traveling to different destinations and so on. You have to decide whether you will own a car or not, how safe your driving style will be, how much you will spend on your car, whether you will have one or two cars in your household and so on.

    Car is usually the second biggest expense besides your home. If you decide not to own a car, you need to have a transportation strategy, especially how to use public transport and how much money to spend on it.

    The desire to travel around the world is also a part of human nature. You have to decide where you want to travel, which countries you want to see and why. Whether it’s because of the culture, the nature or everything. Maybe you have a limited budget but if the desire is strong enough, you will find a way. In my youth, I never had a budget to travel personally, so I combined travelling for business with pleasure.

    • Car decisions (number of cars in household, how much to spend on car etc.)
    • Is car a status symbol for you or not
    • Your driving style
    • Use of public transportation
    • Countries you want to travel to
    • How much to travel, travel budget, with whom to travel
    • Why you want to travel
    • How you will finance your travels
    • Business / personal travels

    Home and your surroundings strategy

    One of the biggest costs in your life will be buying/renting and arranging your home. Thus it’s not only a tough decision to make, but also a very expensive one. Nevertheless you have to choose where you want to live sooner or later in your life, from which country and which city to choosing between a house and a flat or maybe even a boat if you prefer living on the sea.

    After choosing your home, you also have to decide how you will decorate it. It’s part of a creative process, where you of course want to make your surroundings to your liking. You should feel as good as possible in your home.

    You also have some influence on how your office will look. Thus you have to make a decision of how will you decorate it and maybe even install some elements to support you at your goals, like a Kanban board or something.

    • Where do you want to live (county, state, countryside, city…)?
    • House / Flat and size of your home
    • City / Countryside
    • Your home and its interior design
    • Your office design
    • Tidiness and cleanliness of your surroundings (order, creative chaos,…)

    Strategy toward animals and nature

    We are a part of nature, the planet Earth is basically a symbolical mother of us all. And we share this world with animals. Therefore you have to decide on your standpoint towards nature and animals.

    There are some very tough decisions to make and there are no easy answers, especially when it comes to global warming, waste and other damage we do to our planet. To balance that, you have to make more pleasant decisions in life as well, like whether you want to own pets, how nature relaxes you the most and so on.

    • Owning pets
    • Eating animals and animal products – yes or no
    • Keeping animals in captivity (circus, zoo etc.)
    • Supporting animals in shelters and issues regarding animals close to extinction
    • Dealing with dangerous or annoying animals (beasts, insects…)
    • Global warming and other related issues
    • Using or overusing natural resources (electricity, water…)
    • Personal waste management and level of tidiness
    • Relaxing in nature (where, how, do you prefer mountains, forests…)

    Art and culture

    Culture and art have a great influence on our lives, even if it’s not that obvious anymore, especially due to all the instant pop culture. Nevertheless, art and culture fulfill our lives, make us more human, creative, understanding and civilized.

    If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint (or do any other kind of art). E. Hopper

    Art is a way of reaching our hearts and expressing ourselves in both ways, be it as creators of art or consumers. Still we have to make a decision about the extent to which we will let culture and art influence our lives.

    • Subcultures you decide to belong to
    • Cultural rituals you decide to follow
    • Values you take from your culture (religious, national…)
    • Using symbols in your personal and professional life
    • Music you listen to
    • Expressing yourself in artistic ways (drawing, painting, sculpting, dancing…)
    • Traditions you will strengthen and traditions you will demolish
    • Your personal style

    Technology

    Using technology and your digital trail strategy

    In the last century, technology has become an important part of our lives and it will have an even bigger influence in the future. Technology is a tool like fire: you can cook a meal with it or you can burn yourself.

    In much the same way some people see technology as the biggest enemy of humanity and others see it as the biggest savior. The fact is that technology is here and you will have to decide how big of an affinity you will have for it and how you will benefit from using it.

    The second fact is that the more you use technology, the more of a digital trail you leave. It seems like you are living two lives, the real one and the digital one. Most people can be googled and “facebooked”. Digital life will stay online even after you die. Therefore you’ll have to decide what kind of a digital trail you’ll leave behind you.

    • Your attitude towards technology
    • Technology skills you will develop and invest into
    • Applications you will use in your everyday life
    • How often you will unplug yourself from the online world (digital detox)
    • Your digital life strategy and management
    • Your attitude towards artificial intelligence
    • Convergence of human tissue and technology
    • Using robots to do work

    Your nation, country and political system

    Virtual lines drawn on the map were an important part of life for the past three millennia. Now the world is becoming more and more flat and connected. You will have to decide how loyal you want to be to your country and which political system you see as the best option.

    You have to decide how much of government intervention you think is adequate, whether you are pro military or against it, what your opinion about taxes is and how much you will optimize your government contributions (your taxes).

    • Belonging to your country
    • Political issues (capitalism, socialism…)
    • Racial issues
    • Military issues
    • Taxes and government intervention
    • Economic inequality
    • Conspiracy theories

    Spirituality, religion and asking for help

    Religion is maybe even one of taboo topics, especially because you could feel guilty if you have different religious beliefs than your parents or the majority of people in your country/area do.

    But again, at the end of the day, it’s about your life and you will have to decide if you believe in god and how strict you will be at following your god’s word and religious rules.

    You can be a good person and atheist and you can be very religious and do harm to others for personal gain (think Italian mafia). What you believe is actually a part of your reality and your right. In my view the only important thing is that you aren’t doing any harm to other people and breaking any laws, no matter what your religious beliefs are.

    While people more or less do respect religious beliefs, it’s a little bit different with spirituality. Maybe yoga and meditation have quite a good reputation, but you have many practices that are considered strange and fake. At the end of the day, it’s again up to you what you believe and if it helps you to live a better life, why not.

    You have to decide about your attitude towards spiritual things, from astrology and bioenergy to fortune telling and even ghosts. As mentioned before, if you believe in it, it’s probably a part of your reality and you have a complete right to it.

    Here is one more important thing I have to mention and you have to decide on. An important part of your strategy is whether you will ask for help, who you will ask for help and when and how comfortable do you feel that other people do work instead of you.

    Never forget that if you don’t create value, someone else has to create it for you; how acceptable is that to you? How much do you think you have to care for yourself and how much you think your parents, government or even God should help you? Are you prepared to go begging if necessary? How difficult does your situation have to be in order for you to ask other people for help and is your honour in conflict with asking for help?

    • Believing in god
    • Your religious beliefs (belonging to a religion, changing family religion…)
    • Are we alone in the universe?
    • Believing in supernatural forces
    • Engaging in spiritual activities (meditation, fortunetelling, astrology, ghost calling…)
    • When will you ask other people for help?
    • How much will you depend on others and how much will you rely on yourself?
    • How do you feel about other people doing work instead of you or to serve you?

    Taking care of your emotional body

    There is a special reason why I’ve dedicated an entire headline to an emotional body. It’s because emotions color our lives. Emotions drive and fuel our passions. Emotions take us to life’s highs and lows. Emotions are the main reason why we can inspire and lead other people. Still we usually understand our physical body and our mind much better than our emotional body, especially men.

    A part of your life strategy is how good your connection with emotions will be and whether you’ll use emotions as positive guidelines in life or you will see them as a burden. How much you will show your emotions and how well you will engage the emotions of other people is a part of your life strategy.

    • Being connected to your emotions
    • Expressing your emotions
    • Emotional intelligence
    • Confronting with your fears (being courageous or living a life in an emotional cage)

    Evil

    Dealing with enemies, bad and evil in the world

    Evil is the saddest but very realistic part of our world. There is evil in all of us, but since times are becoming more and more transparent and survivable, we also tend to curb the evil in us. Nevertheless, there are still horror stories that are happening daily, terrible things like war, rape, abuse, murder, terrorism and so on.

    It’s a part of life we cannot deny, no matter how much we want to. Maybe (I hope not) you’ll even have to deal with some of these horror stories at some point in your life. And it’s not only about you. Will you, for example, stand up for people who are going through hell at this very moment?

    There are also lighter negative aspects of this world you have to face more often. People you love will die, you may have an accident or face other types of burden and sorrow. Besides that, everyone has enemies, you have people in your life who are prepared to argue with you and if not that, negotiate with you or sue you.

    A part of your life strategy is how you will protect yourself and how much you will fight, run or let things go. Which battles do you plan to choose? It’s not easy but it’s also worth to consider how you will deal with tougher situations that can or will happen in your life (loss, failures…). Think about how you will handle them.

    • Dealing with your inner evil
    • Dealing with personal tragedies
    • Dealing with evil in the world
    • Strategy for owning arms
    • Negative attitudes and opinions from others
    • Your negotiation strategy
    • Your arguing level strategy (how far will you go, how much will you quarrel etc.)
    • Your personal legal protection

    Your legacy and giving back strategy

    We’ve talked about asking for help, but you should also consider giving help. You have to decide how altruistic you will be and how much of your resources you will invest into making the world a better place to live for all of us.

    You have to decide what causes you will fight for and how you want to influence the world in a positive way. A part of your life strategy is to choose whether you will donate money or not and whether you will spend your free time volunteering or not.

    Politics is also a part of your social engagement and legacy. Maybe going into politics is actually even the best way, besides donating money, to influence the quality of life on this planet in the future.

    When we talk about politics, it all starts with voting and continues with supporting different political parties or even joining them or running for different functions. In this case, it’s not so much about career advancement as it is about sincere interest to do good and leave the generations to come a better place to live.

    The third thing you have to consider is your life legacy. One legacy that you’ll leave behind is your digital footprint, but is that enough? Do you want to make any bigger contributions to art, science, sports or any other area or life?

    Do you want to change the course of your family or maybe fight passionately for a specific cause that will make the world a better place? There are many problems in this world you can fight against, from poverty, famine, child abuse to deadly diseases etc.

    Do you want to be an example of a successful person in business? What do you want to be remembered for the most? Answering this question is also a very important part of your life strategy.

    • Your contribution to art, science, sports, business and other areas
    • Social and service organizations
    • Donating money and time to charity
    • Involvement in politics (voting, running)
    • Attitude toward world problems
    • Things you want to leave behind and how you want to be remembered the most
    • Thing you will create and fight for

    When do you want to give up?

    The final thing you have to decide on in the course of your life is when you want to give up. Some people never want to stop working, others dream about retiring from day one at the job. Again, it’s about you, your values and your decisions.

    In addition to that, the older you are, the more health issues and risks you have to face. At the end you have to decide how long you will try to prolong your life and what your attitude towards death will be.

    How afraid are you and what are your beliefs concerning what happens after death? Is it all over, do you reincarnate, do you go to heaven or hell or something else? Maybe it’s part of your religion, maybe what you feel happens after death is completely your personal decision, but you have to believe something, there is no other way.

    Your attitude towards death and the afterlife is a very important belief and a part of your life strategy, since it can influence all other decisions you make in different areas of life. Nevertheless it’s quite obvious that all religious belief systems as well as non-religious systems try to influence you to be as good of a person as possible, despite the fact that life is neither easy nor fair.

    • Retiring from work
    • Trying to prolong your life
    • Your attitude toward death
    • Beliefs about afterlife
    • How good a person you will be in life

    We’ve looked at 24 different elements of your life strategy. I am sure there are still some minor things I’ve forgotten about. Still, if you analyze your beliefs and build a strong and superior life strategy for all the mentioned areas of life, I’m sure you’ll be very well off.

    Knowing who you are and clearly knowing what you want out of life is an integral part and the first step towards a superior life strategy.

    But it’s not an easy task. If it were easy, everyone would live a happy and successful life. Knowing who you are and clearly knowing what you want out of life is an integral part and the first step towards a superior life strategy.

    The main purpose of this 24-areas framework is to help you shape your own superior life strategy that will lead you towards experiencing as much as possible in your written life vision.

    Homework
    Template

    Do the exercise

    Below you can find a spreadsheet with all the bullet point from this article. It will help you systematically analyze your beliefs, your life strategy, show you where you are missing information and which areas you are strong in. You should write down your thoughts, goals and intentions at the end of every row.

    [sociallocker]

    AgileLeanLife – Life Strategy Template (xls)

    [/sociallocker]

    In the second step ask yourself the following for every single thing that you have written down: why?

    • Why do I believe that?
    • Why do I want to live my life like that?
    • Where does that come from?
    • Is that truly me?
    • Do I know enough about it or should I read more before I make my final decision?
    • Does it lead me towards my goals?
    • Am I doing something good for myself, the people I love and humanity in general as well as for nature and maybe even other living beings?
    • How would my life look like with a different kind of belief and strategy?
    • Where could I make improvements?

    Happy thinking and analyzing.

  • Do the opposite

    Sometimes the best approach to start improving your life is doing the exact opposite from what other people are doing or what have you been doing in the past. Especially when the expectations of the society and the behavioral patterns are so extreme that nearly everyone is doing the same thing. Like every December. Sometimes the best cure is to take a totally different step from expected when the social pressure is the strongest.

    DoTheOpposite

    Here are some ideas how.

    Life experiment ideas
    Practical examples

    Instead of stuffing yourself, gaining weight and feeling fatigued throughout all December and half of January, do the opposite – exercise every day and eat super healthy. Bring your own carrots and bananas to parties. No, I’m just kidding, don’t do the latter, but you get the point.

    Instead of buying yourself expensive gifts, because you deserve them for having worked so hard all year, do the opposite – save some money, pay off some debt or invest into your future. Trust me, there will be moments when you will need your money much more than you want to spend it on luxuries now.

    Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on expensive gifts, write a personal thank you note to all the people that really matter to you and donate some money or buy gifts for poor kids. Don’t let Santa be a scumbag who buys rich kids more gifts than the poor ones.

    Instead of writing down goals for next year, plan two agile sprints that you will do in December, and actually come closer to your goals. While everybody eats, parties, drinks alcohol and forgets their daily life for a second, you should fight hard for what you really want in life.

    Instead of decorating a Christmas tree, get rid of all the filth, dirt and clutter as well as all other things you don’t use, and make room in your life. Sell some of the things, give away others, throw away the rest of them. Make your surroundings and consequently your mind super clean. You don’t need a nicely decorated tree for good family spirit; just tell your spouse and your kids that you love them more than anything in the world and spend twice as much quality time with them, without the TV and other distractions. Well, some minimalistic Christmas decorations are acceptable for the spirit. :)

    Instead of partying and socializing too much, decide that you will find a connection with your true self. Decide to reconnect with your inner voice and your true desires. Instead of torturing your body and living a “YOLO” life, decide to be gentle to yourself and to feel good in your skin. Without any alcohol and being a party animal.

    Do The Opposite Be Different
    What would be the outcome if you did the opposite?

    Don’t get me wrong. Rituals are very important in life. They remind us of what’s really important and they have a critical role in making us feel connected to other people. That’s perfectly okay. But you can do this in a healthy, economical, environment-friendly and really loving way. Not at all like it’s promoted in the ads. You should increase your margin on holidays, not decreasing it.

    It’s also the way to opening a creativity door

    Asking yourself what end result you would achieve and what would happen if you did things the opposite way from what you were doing in the past or from what other people are doing is a great way to open the doors to creativity.

    It’s not like the opposite way is always better. But merely asking yourself this question makes you challenge yourself, your beliefs and your actions. You open your mind to new possibilities. It’s your new starting point from which you can brainstorm alternative options.

    Sometimes asking yourself about the opposite way releases you of mental limitations. It puts you into the realm of out-of-the-box thinking. Improving yourself means nothing but finding new and better ways to do things. Thus you always have to challenge yourself and question everything, from why you are doing something in a specific kind of way to whether there are any other, better ways to do it.

    Maybe the opposite way is a much better way, or there is another better way that’s very close to the opposite. Try it.

  • The key principles of the Agile and Lean Life – Have it ALL Manifesto

    This blog post is the Agile and Lean Life Manifesto, setting the foundations and key principles for living the Agile and Lean life. The twelve principles introduced in the manifesto are based on best business practices like “lean manufacturing”, “lean start-up”, “agile development” and other advanced business strategies, transformed so they can be used for managing personal life. In addition to that, a few best personal development practices and my own, already tested, ideas are also included.

    The five most important goals of living an Agile and Lean life are to:

    • Acquire inner assets faster (knowledge, skills, decision-making power …)
    • Create more external assets (time, money, revenue streams, status, energy, relationships…)
    • Have the tools to tackle the biggest challenges in life, such as career change
    • Successfully manage negative situations like anxiety, information overload and indecision
    • Blossom in all areas of life and thus live a more happy and quality life

    The key philosophy behind achieving these five goals is to eliminate waste from your life. Everything you do and have in life (decisions, material things, relationships etc.) either adds value to your life or drags you down. There is no third option. You can either make a return or loss on your every investment.

    Things that add value to your life are the things filled with positive energy and emotions. That means:

    • doing various different things that make you happy and self-confident,
    • doing things that lead to creativity and greatness,
    • having loving and empowering relationships,
    • being a part of a group in which you fit in and prosper,
    • doing things that make you healthier and more energetic,
    • doing things that lead to building up your inner assets and external assets by providing real value to the world, developing your talents and using prestige – a non-dominant approach.

    A very important task for all of you who want to live a more quality life is to eliminate as much waste as possible, with the end goal of making room for things that really matter to you – bring value. Unfortunately today, it is very easy to get distracted by waste, having wrong assumptions about life.

    If nothing else, you are exposed to thousands of ads that are fighting for your attention and assets on a daily basis. As the famous quote goes (and is sadly not far from the truth), before you know it, you can find yourself working a job you hate, buying things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like. This is all a big waste of life that you should totally avoid. That kind of a situation is the opposite of the Agile and Lean Life.

    Eliminating waste is an endless process and, in addition to that, it’s also not an easy task to carry out. But it’s very worth it in the long run. Eliminating waste is an important step towards personal freedom and genuine self-actualization, no matter where your starting point is. The Agile and Lean manifesto sets the foundations and key principles for doing it.

    Too long read for now? Download the PDF file!

    The Agile Lean Life Manifesto Banner

     

    Life can be managed even in today’s complex and turbulent world

    Before we go to the key principles, you have to be aware that it can be done, that there is a way.

    It’s true, life is not always easy. In life, you have to face big challenges, a lack of resources, negative emotional states and disappointments sooner or later. The new digital era has added additional pressure on top of that, with challenges like having too many options and unrealistic expectations, dealing with information overload, extreme market complexity and hardly bearable uncertainty, like no job security.

    But as you know, the world isn’t that dark. We live in the best times ever. Life can be an awesome and beautiful experience. But only if you manage it correctly. Only if you have the formula for facing life challenges and turning today’s disadvantages into advantages; and deep down inside you know that the formula is not posting your happy pictures on social media, no matter the short-term satisfaction you get.

    And don’t forget. There are no second chances in life. You have to get it right the first time.

    But what is the formula? In school, they teach you everything from mathematics and chemistry to history and geography, but almost nothing is said about life management. There are thousands of books written about personal development, but most of them are either too superficial or only offer small insights on how to improve some areas of your life. That may have sounded arrogant, but it is not meant that way.

    Yes, you should definitely read as much as possible in order to gain new insights on life, and there are many great books, but what you also need and is missing out there is a systematic and structured manual for how to live and manage life in today’s turbulent and complex world.

    Life is too short and you want to figure out the formula for success as soon as possible, and then live life to the full. You don’t want to bother with how to live life all the time, making and correcting big mistakes, feeling sorry for yourself while life passes by. You want to achieve as much as possible, have as many good moments as possible, acquire enough assets to fulfill your desires, have deep and empowering relationships and so on – as soon as possible in life.

    It’s true that everything takes time to be achieved, but the Agile and Lean life is about speed. It’s about the formula for accelerating your success. It’s about doing it as fast as possible in the right kind of way, meaning not being an asshole.

    There was a pretty good formula for living life that worked very well two decades ago. The formula was: get a good education, find a safe job, get married with your first love, live by the values of the local church, write down your goals and try to achieve a few of them, and live happily ever after. Jobs were available, markets were booming, education was cheap. The formula worked.

    Unfortunately the formula doesn’t work anymore. The times have changed too much. In 50 years, the world has been turned upside down.

    The businesses were the first ones to be dramatically affected by the new digital age and struck with all the new challenges, from market saturation and globalization to new internet competition and financial markets’ meltdown. They had to adapt, there was no other choice. Adapt or die. Many manuals have been written on how to do it, about running a company successfully in the new digital age. For example, two very popular new age manuals are the “lean production” and “agile development”, while the “lean startup” philosophy offers a new formula for success in business today.

    There is no reason why you shouldn’t use similar techniques for managing your personal life. More on that is written in the About this blog section. This gives hope that it can be done. By adapting the agile and lean philosophy to your personal life, you have access to a new formula for living life and being successful.

    The measurement of success according to the Agile and Lean Life formula is very simple. On your death bed, looking back on your life, you want to say to yourself: “Life was an awesome experience and a daring adventure. I have faced many difficult challenges but I have played the game right. I have made the right moves and have taken the right decisions. It was worth it. And I have contributed to making the world a better place to live in for generations to come.”

    The Agile and Lean Life Manifesto will show you how. You can become happy and successful in life no matter how difficult your life situation is – as long as you have access to the internet and possess sufficient intelligence to comprehend this text. For the rest of the world, we must all work hard so that they will have the same options. By living the Agile and Lean life you may not become the next Bill Gates, but you can definitely make a move towards a better and happier life.

    Before we go to the key principles, you should be aware that:

    • We all have to face many (old and new) life challenges that are not easy at all
    • We all deserve to live a quality life with adequate resources, self-actualization and happiness
    • Life can be systematically and scientifically managed in order to achieve these goals
    • You can do it as well, no matter where your starting point is. You can live a better life.

    The Agile and Lean Life Manifesto is based on twelve principles that successfully replace old life management techniques like setting goals, looking for job security and giving personal power for the important life decisions to other people (formal systems, bosses etc.).

    The twelve principle of an Agile and Lean Life

    1. Search before you execute: Experiment – Reflect – Learn – Execute
    2. Go out and see for yourself, see in order to compose your dream life
    3. Optimize your entire life, not only parts of it
    4. Visualize, simplify and make a move
    5. Move fast and with focus in the execution phase by using the flow
    6. Plan regular intervals with reflections and adjustments
    7. Believe in yourself over looking for outside safety
    8. Relationships and environment over work and tasks
    9. Continuously improve yourself and your environment
    10. Create value, be flexible and modest over having an ego
    11. Life Accounting – measure everything
    12. Live life with love and respect

    1. Search before you execute: Experiment – Reflect – Learn – Execute

    The key to a more successful life is having a superior strategy for how to live it. Your life strategy is shaped especially by your values, beliefs, personal management system, and thus by your decisions about spending your time, energy, money, skills and other resources.

    The Agile and Lean life strategy begins with the old Ancient Greek aphorism “Know thyself”. If you want to be successful in life, you have to know yourself and what you want out of life very clearly.

    But how? The best way to get to know yourself and World is by experimenting, reflecting and learning (here you can find all the techniques how to get to know yourself better). The best way is to introduce a new search mode in life, the phase you should be performing every time before you do any kind of real execution.

    If you execute before you search, you could be climbing a ladder that’s leaned against the wrong wall. Somewhere midway or at the top, you can discover that this is not you, it’s not something you want. The higher you are, the more difficult it is to climb down. Most people never climb down, and instead start living a “zombie life” – a life of constantly running away from reality.

    Therefore in an Agile and Lean Life, you have to divide all activities of all areas of life into two groups:

    In the search mode, you shouldn’t have any expectations, you shouldn’t have any commitments and you shouldn’t do any hard work. Expectations lead to disappointments and before you understand something, you definitely have expectations that are completely wrong. Commitments lead to heavy energy investments, and you shouldn’t be investing before you know what you are truly investing in and whether the investment really fits your character. Hard work should always also be smart work, but you can’t work smartly if you don’t have the right map and coordinates.

    In the search phase you just try, experiment, observe, reflect and learn about yourself and the world. The most important thing is to have no fixed ideas and no expectations at all in this phase. Your job is only to test the assumptions you have written down, correct them, and try different things to find out what suits you best. Your only job is to learn about yourself and the world. No goals. No measurement of progress. Just learning and playing.

    After you find your fit in the search phase, you start executing. You set strong foundations, have laser focus, commit fully, start working hard and achieving your goals. You optimize, improve, and measure your progress. But first, you have to find the right thing. You must put the ladder against the right wall before you start climbing.

    After every experiment (action) you do in the search phase, you have to make a reflection. You learn about yourself by reflecting on your actions. Reflection is an insight into knowing yourself and life better. Reflection is an insight into how to do things in a better way.

    Why you need a search phase before execution:

    • To do adequate research and form first assumptions about yourself and life (for example you can write down your assumptions using the persona technique for people and organizations you interact with or you can just write down your assumptions on the spreadsheet)
    • To conduct small experiments and figure out what your best personal fits are
    • To not put pressure on yourself to achieve and do something that is not really you
    • To have fun and try as many things as possible in life and stay open minded
    • To set a realistic execution strategy that you can follow and really implement
    Practical examples

    Let’s look at an example. The old strategy was to write down a goal in a smart way (SMART = Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic, Time-bound). OK. You then write down something like: “I want to lose 10 kg by exercising and dieting in one year.” What usually follows is that after a few months, you look at your goal paper, you step on the scale and feel even worse. No progress at all.

    In the Agile and Lean Life Search phase, there are no goals yet and no pressure at all. The first phase is driven by curiosity. You know that you want to lose weight and you know that you lose weight by exercising and dieting. But instead of setting goals, you ask yourself: Is there a sport that I would really enjoy and wouldn’t even be hard exercise? Is there a diet for me that is tasty, healthy and makes me more energetic? With whom can I try the first sport I think I might like? Then you continue reading, trying and researching. In the first phase, you put no pressure on yourself, you just experiment.

    Let’s look at another example. In every company that hires you, you are usually on a trial period for a few months. They want to know if you and your skills are actually what you have presented in your CV. It makes complete sense and you should have the same approach towards the company. It’s not enough to just have a job. You must find out for yourself if you really fit in the company culture, if you like the work, if you can develop your talents further and so on. Only then you can decide if you really want to fully commit.

    2. Go out and see for yourself, see in order to compose your dream life

    The second principle of an Agile and Lean life is based on the “genchi gembutsu” philosophy, which means go and see for yourself in Japanese. It is an important concept in the Toyota production system, and is also known as “Go out of the building” in the lean start-up philosophy. The “go out and see” principle is an important part of the search phase.

    It’s a very simple rule in the Agile and Lean Life. Don’t talk about things, but go and try them.Don’t assume, go out and test. Testing and trying is the best way to gain firsthand knowledge about yourself and the world. For every new experience you get, you should decide whether to preserve it in your life or not (pivot). Every new experience should also give your ideas and insights into what to try next. The best way to test and try new things is with minimum viable experience concept. The idea is that you try as many things as possible in life (your vision list), and based on your physical, emotional and intellectual response, you decide whether you should keep something in your life or pivot to something else.

    The difference between what you think is valuable to you and what is really valuable for your life creates waste. Don’t assume anything, try and test everything.

    Let’s look again at the previous two examples to prevent things from sounding too abstract.

    There is plenty of advice on fitness and diet. You can even find contradictory advice. But you can test what works and what doesn’t work for you as an individual. For someone, being vegetarian is the optimal diet. For others, far from it. There is no single formula for success. You can only try vegetarian, vegan, fruitarian, paleo and other verified diets until you find the one that suits you best. It doesn’t make sense to only read about it or argue about it, you have to try it for yourself and see. With no expectations and by keeping an open mind. After the search phase and finding what works for you best, you can execute (keep, set goals, measurements…) by optimizing details.

    While experimenting, you must be careful you don’t do anything that would really damage you. If necessary, you should consult specialists.

    The second example would be looking for a new career. Your emotions show you complete dissatisfaction in your current career. Here is how you would tackle this challenge in the first phase of an Agile and Lean Life. In your free time, you write down assumptions for careers you think you could blossom in. You start testing how much passion awakens in you when reading about specific industries, join forums and attend online courses etc. You take some part time projects, even for no payment, just to see how engaged you become. You continue experimenting until you find the new perfect fit for you. Then you go into the execution phase. At the end, you may find that design is your thing after trying to prepare an outstanding CV for a completely different industry.

    These are two very simplified examples. This phase must be done scientifically and systematically, and on this blog, we will talk a lot about how to do it and which tools to use.

    Your task in an Agile and Lean Life is to find your perfect fits in all areas of life by searching and experimenting. Trying completely different things, hanging out with different kinds of people and so on.

    At the end of the day, you must find your best fits and have your dream life composed like a beautiful mosaic – perfect diet, best exercise, best fitting career, investments best suited to your character, perfect partner etc.

    If we have started with the Agile and Lean Life rule that you have to search before you execute, this rule is all about you searching for your perfect fits by performing experiments in real life – actually doing and trying, not only talking about it. Talk is cheap and gives zero insight into you and life.

    3. Optimize your entire life, not only parts of it

    You can’t run a successful business if your marketing or cash flow management or any other key business functions suck. You have to optimize the entire business, not only a few business functions. In the same way, you can’t have a happy and successful life if you only focus on some parts of your life and forget about the others. There is no running away from any area of your life. You have to look at your life as a whole, and optimize it on the macro level.

    If one of the life areas collapses, everything else can collapse as well. Your health greatly affects your earning potential and the quality of your relationships. Your income level has a big influence on all other areas of life. There are some periods in life when you have to put more focus on a single area (e.g. when getting a baby), but you should never let the bigger picture out of your sight.

    Ten key areas of life

    You have ten key areas of life you have to juggle:

    1. You
      1. Your personality – knowing yourself, your beliefs, values, behavioral patterns, daily habits, your ideal-self etc.
      2. Your environment – country, city, home, office etc.
    2. Health and primary needs (body)
      1. Diet
      2. Fitness / Sports
      3. Other (sleep, sex, breathing…)
    3. Relationships and people skills (love and belonging)
      1. Spouse
      2. Family (primary, secondary)
      3. Friends
      4. Coworkers
      5. Others
    4. Money and wealth
    5. Career, achievements and respect
    6. Emotions (your emotional body)
    7. Competences – Intelligence, knowledge and skills (your intellectual body)
      1. Formal education (degree, certificates…)
      2. Informal education
    8. Fun, creativity and travel
    9. Spirituality, self-actualization and giving back to the world (your spiritual body)
    10. Technology as a leverage for being more productive on all areas of life

    The Agile and Lean Life formula for managing life at a macro level is pretty simple. You should do constant linear improvements (kaizen) in certain chosen areas of your life, and one big rapid improvement (kaikaku) in one area of your life, when the time is ripe. At the same time, you should maintain all areas that are currently not your priority.

    Out of the ten life areas, you should choose, best in one year time frame:

    • One area where you plan to do a rapid improvement (that is your focus area for the time being)
    • Two to three areas where you will implement a few linear improvements
    • In all other areas, you try to maintain the current level (of course improvements on other levels will, in most cases, also positively affect the areas you are maintaining)

    You cannot implement too many changes in your life at once. You only have a strong enough will to do a few linear changes, and you can only implement one really big change in your life at a time, provided there are foundations strong enough for it. Therefore you should do only a single rapid improvement at a time.

    If you want to live a happy and successful life, you have to optimize your life from all ten perspectives. Of course all the areas are interconnected and consequently improving one area leads to improvements in other areas. The important thing, however, is to not only think about money, sex, fun, career or any other isolated area, but rather look at your life as a whole. First see the woods, then go and cut down trees.

    You should always thoroughly think about how every major decision influences all ten areas of your life. That is the principle number three, and the additional thing you should find out in the search phase.

    You can decrease the quality of your life or even destroy it with:

    • One or several big wrong decisions (for example choosing your spouse, industry, career…)
    • A series of small wrong decisions (unhealthy diet…)

    For every big decision you make, and for all the small decisions you are making almost every day, you should ask yourself where they are leading you and how they impact all ten areas of your life. Short-term history is a good predictor for short-term future. Ask yourself where your past decisions and current behavioral patterns are going to lead you in one year’s time in all ten areas of your life. That is the best technique to use for determining priority areas of your life: where you should be doing rapid changes and linear improvements.

    4. Visualize, simplify and make a move

    Brain neurons for our visual perception account for approximately 30 % of brain’s grey matter. When we look at pictures, our brain can process several pieces of information simultaneously, which means it is processing around 60,000 times faster than when reading a text.

    Therefore you first have to “see” what you want from life before you can have it.

    A very important rule of an Agile and Lean Life is to visualize everything. In the future, we will talk a lot about the fact that in an Agile and Lean Life, you have to do all kinds of creative stuff, from Kanban boards, “want-to-have experience” boards and master list visualizations to outlining mind maps and constantly drawing, sketching and sticking pictures together. Even if you suck at it, like I am.

    Much like the business model canvas is a much more fun experience in the business planning phase compared to a dull business plan, boards and visual materials are similarly a much better and more fun tool in a personal life compared to writing down goals. And they work so much better.

    This rule of an Agile and Lean Life is pretty simple. You must have extreme fun when outlining your life and designing what you want to experience.

    For your better performance you have to visualize everything.

    Besides better clarity and comprehension, you should get two more answers by visualizing and sketching your desired life experiences:

    • Scenario-based thinking: What are all the potential moves I can make and which ones will I try first? With more options, you get a feeling of more freedom and personal power.
    • Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication: What is the simplest thing that would work for every move I can make? You can take action only if you don’t feel overwhelmed.

    Having everything visualized and outlined makes it become obvious to you. There is always a move to make towards a better life. There is always a way to live a better life by implementing simpler and faster solutions. That should give you a feeling of inner security.

    Let’s review

    The next, fifth, principle is a step further from the search mode to the first execution step. So let’s look back at the first four principles we had covered so far:

    1. Get to know yourself by searching, experimenting and trying. Don’t execute and invest yourself strongly before you find your perfect fit. Don’t have any commitments and expectations in the search phase. There is no failure in the search mode. Only playing. That should free your mind of pressure. You should do regular reflections in order to acquire knowledge about yourself and the World.
    2. You have to go out and see for yourself. You have to try things and experience them in order to gain knowledge. Don’t talk about it, experience it. Don’t judge if you haven’t tried it for yourself, don’t assume if you don’t know how it feels. You are here on Earth to experience as much as possible. Do it. Test, try and experiment.
    3. Think about how every action you plan to do influences all ten areas of your life. You have to optimize your whole life to be happy and successful, not just a few isolated parts.
    4. Visualize everything you are doing or planning to do in your life and want to experience. Pictures, sketches, mind maps, boards and so on are the best tools for our brain. Use them and have as much fun as possible while visualizing it.

    5. Move fast and with focus in the execution phase by using the flow

    In the Agile and Lean Life, interested does not equal committed. “Interested” and “interesting” are the two main enemies of real progress in the execution mode, after you have conducted the search mode. No. Try not. Do or do not. There is no try. After the search mode.

    When you find your fit, you have to make more than a hundred percent commitment. You have to move fast, be focused and learn more about which innovations work and which don’t. The more energy you put into a few of your key goals (one major, a few minor ones) the faster your progress will be. In the execution mode it’s all about speed.

    In the Agile and Lean Life, the following is strictly forbidden in the execution phase:

    • Multitasking and other bad time management practices (read The best time management guide ever)
    • Doing too many things and having too many goals at once
    • Not having a place where you can work without any distractions and be in the flow at least once a day for a few hours (you can help yourself to achieve that with No interruptions day)
    • Losing focus because of distractions and urgent tasks, instead of working on the important ones
    • Not working on your goals on a daily basis
    • Not regularly measuring your progress in the intervals you have set with visual elements

    The key point in the execution phase is to work on your goals on a daily basis, and measure progress at regular intervals. An example of the right mindset would be: if your goal is to live a healthier life, there is nothing that can get in the way of me doing my daily exercise.

    Most of the work should be achieved in the flow. The flow is a superior creative and execution phases. The flow is a divine experience that enables you to create, deliver and capture real value added quickly and efficiently. The biggest killers of the workflow, the most productive state for a human being, are distractions. Therefore you need a place for yourself where you can get real work done.

    Laser focus by eliminating all distractions and being in the flow as much time as possible is the formula for good execution results. Use it.

    It’s also very important to break down your “life vision” with all the desired experiments into small steps you can easily take. You should break down all the goals to extremely small tasks that you can perform immediately, and gather feedback to do reflections.

    6. Plan regular intervals for reflections and adjustments

    When living an Agile and Lean Life you don’t just do work and execute tasks. You have to think regularly about why you are doing it and how you are doing it, and whether you are making real progress – the progress that brings value to your life. Being strong and passionate about the reason why is the best motivator you can have in life, and there is always a way to do things better.

    You need regularly planned introspection intervals for:

    • Reviewing the tasks done in the previous interval
    • Connecting with yourself and straightening out your life vision (and whys)
    • Measuring your real progress
    • Adjusting the strategy and plan
    • Reflecting on new things that were learned
    • Gathering new ideas
    • Identifying potential improvements
    • Setting new tasks for the upcoming interval

    First of all, in life things will never go as you assume, think and plan. Even less so in the future, since the environment is becoming even more complex, turbulent and unpredictable. Be prepared to change your strategy frequently and constantly. Your goals will be constantly changing in the Agile and Lean Life. You have to constantly adapt to the fast changing environment.

    The best way is to have reflection days at 14-day intervals. Every two weeks, you take two hours to reflect on your life. You look at all ten areas of life, determine your progress and do strategy and goal adjustments.

    In the 14-day reflection intervals, you also set tasks for the following two weeks (the so called sprint) based on your strategy adjustments. You should visualize your two-week execution sprint on the Kanban board.

    • In the Agile in Lean Life you have so called Sprints – 14-day intervals
    • Every single working day within a Sprint you should be working in the flow as much time as possible
    • You start your working day with a short morning meeting with yourself

    The sprint and the flow are your execution techniques in the Agile and Lean Life.

    Let’s review

    After the search phase, you enter the execution mode. We have looked at two principles you have to follow in the Agile and Lean Life execution phase:

    1. In the execution phase, you fully commit. You laser focus yourself. No excuses are acceptable. Most of the work you do is in the state of flow.
    2. You set 14-day intervals in your calendar. Every two weeks, you take two hours to reflect, adjust your strategy and set activities for the upcoming two weeks (sprint). You use visualization tools to have a clear picture of your progress during every sprint.

    Now let’s look at some other important rules that aren’t in the scope of search and execution, but are very important for living a happy and successful Agile and Lean life.

    7. Believe in yourself over looking for outside safety

    If you want to live an extraordinary life, you have to do extraordinary things. If you want to do extraordinary things, you have to extraordinary believe in yourself. You must find your inner security and be aware of your personal power. You must find safety in knowing that there is always a move you can make towards a better life, no matter what kind of a situation you find yourself in.

    The path to an extraordinary and awesome life is full of little risks, experiments and failures. If you cling to your current relationships, especially the bad ones, if you seek job security, if you are not willing to try new things, you will get what most people get: an average life. An average job, an average paycheck, an average relationships. But being average is not awesome, it’s boring and dull. You may even become a zombie.

    Don’t get me wrong. There is a big difference between stupidity and doing extraordinary things. Being certain that you are more productive if you are texting while driving is completely stupid. The probability of causing an accident if texting while driving is pretty similar to the probability of causing one if you were driving drunk. The latter is also very stupid. And you don’t want to do stupid things that can ruin your life. That is forbidden in the Agile and Lean Lifestyle.

    What you want to do is firmly believe in yourself by developing and executing a superior life strategy, as well as taking smart risks (opportunities with low risk and massive potential reward). For that, you need courage, self-esteem and knowledge for mitigating risks and scientifically measuring progress.

    For example, you must have the courage (trust yourself enough) to speak the truth, regardless of how unpleasant it is. Honest communication builds trust. That doesn’t apply only for communication with others, but also with yourself. Lying to yourself and making compromises merely brings hardship in life later on. There are many cases like that in Agile and Lean Life where you need courage and where you have to believe in yourself.

    If you don’t believe in yourself, you will never make a move towards a truly better life. You may make small linear improvements, but you will never gather enough courage to make a quantum leap in the quality of your life. Doubt kills more dreams than failure. Therefore the rule of the Agile and Lean Life is to look for safety in yourself (your inner assets like knowledge, skills, competences…) and not in external things, like relationships, money and contracts.

    In an Agile and Lean Life, there is no external security (although it’s of course good to have safety nets in assets, loving relationships etc.). There’s only the World you must experience to the full. For that, you need to free yourself by believing in yourself. It’s the key enabler for executing a superior strategy for better life quality. Forget about social pressure. Forget about expectations of other people. Forget about rotten compromises. Live life true to yourself.

    Two important mindsets that can help you to believe in yourself better are:

    8. Relationships and environment over work and tasks or money

    The two most powerful influencing factors on your life are your relationships and the environment you work in. They can either drag you down or empower you, thus helping you achieve your goals. The more ambitious your goals are, the more empowering relationships you need, with less room for compromises.

    You can have ambitious goals and high expectations for life, but if you are not in an environment that supports you, you will never thrive. You will never achieve your goals without an adequate support system. You are more a product of the environment than you might think.

    The rule of an Agile and Lean life is to surround yourself with motivated individuals who have goals similar to yours. People you spend time with, including your spouse, are the most important decision in your life. Choose your environment very carefully. Much like your mindset should not be fixed, your environment should not be fixed either. You are the one who chooses your own environment.

    Make sure that the following environmental elements are supporting you in achieving your goals:

    • Market (chosen industry trends, occupation potential, structural changes, market size…)
    • Country (political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental factors)
    • City (logistics, culture, fun, nature, food, education, kids…)
    • Office (possibility of working with no distractions, no need for a long commute…)
    • Home (quality of sleep, room for visualization of goals…)

    Look for environments with 5T: Talent, Technology, Tolerance, Transparency, Transcendence.

    Make sure that the following relationships support you in achieving your goals:

    • Spouse
    • Friends
    • Family
    • Acquaintances
    • Coworkers
    • Business partners
    • Other people in your life

    There are two important things regarding relationships that are a part of an Agile and Lean Life.

    • The basic foundation for good relationships is outstanding communication. You have to communicate honestly, frequently and deeply with people you want to have good relationships with. You need to learn how to be a good communicator. It’s an enabler for the Agile and Lean Life.
    • Coaches and mentors, because no one can succeed alone. You need other people who empower you and help you. One segment are people who surround you, and another are people whom you hire to help you or who you have mentoring exchanges with. In an Agile and Lean Life, you accelerate your progress with your personal mastermind group and coaches for different life areas.

    9. Continuously improve yourself and your environment

    You must never forget that there is always room for improvement, there is always a way to do it better. You should always look to improve yourself and grow. The foundation for an Agile and Lean Life is the growth mindset. You can always change yourself and by changing yourself, you can change your environment and the situations you are facing.

    Don’t be afraid of problems and challenges. Problems and challenges only present opportunities to learn and change. Don’t try to hide your mistakes. Expose them, talk about them and learn from them. But don’t make the same mistake twice. That is a big waste in life. Make sure you learn from mistakes the first time you make them.

    When making changes, knowledge and insights are your greatest assets. You can learn from your own past experiences and experiences of other people by reading, talking, watching, observing, listening etc. When using knowledge and insights of other people, go straight to the best knowledge and learn directly from the best people who achieved what you want to achieve. With the information overload, there is just too much crappy information and too many cheap copies. It’s better to read one really good book than 1000 average blog posts.

    To get the best out of life, you have to learn from the best or in other words learn from the best, forget the rest.

    Linear and rapid improvement

    You change yourself when you find a way to do something better. Self-improvement in your life can be either linear or rapid. When there is no more room for linear improvement, rapid improvement takes place, if the foundations are strong enough and if big enough motivation is present.

    You can only improve your current practice to a certain point. You can optimize your current behavioral patterns only to a certain level. Your current actions will only lead you to a specific level of success (it’s called a local maximum). You know you have reached a plateau when every new improvement experiment leads to an inferior performance.

    If you want to achieve more in that kind of situation, you have to do a dramatic (rapid) improvement. Painful situations and setbacks usually lead you to these kinds of more dramatic changes in life.

    The key questions to ask yourself when doing linear improvements:

    • What are my current values and behavioral patterns?
    • How can I make things faster or better?
    • How can I get the same result by using less resources (money, materials…)?
    • How can I make things simpler?
    • How are other people doing it more efficiently?

    The key questions to ask yourself when it’s time for a rapid improvement in your life:

    • What are my current values and behavioral patterns?
    • What is the best result that this kind of behavior can get me? Is it enough for me?
    • Why do I work like that? How should I work to achieve a quantum leap in productivity?
    • What is really holding me back from changing dramatically? Which values are holding me back?
    • How are other people doing it differently and being much more efficient than me?
    • What knowledge and skills am I lacking to do rapid improvement?
    • How and what would you work if you were totally free of your problems?

    You should also use the 5 Whys Technique when doing a specific linear or rapid improvement. It’s a technique where you ask yourself “why” five times, with the final goal of tackling the cause not the effect. Describe the situation you are facing. And then ask yourself five times: why?

    Question everything. There is always a way to do it better. Constantly push yourself to improve. Try new ideas. Never stop.

    There’s one more important thing for an Agile and Lean Life, regarding improvement and trying new things. It’s easy to be different. But it’s hard to be different and better. Different doesn’t always mean better. Try all the options, even the mainstream ones, and find the ones best suitable to you.

    10. Create value, be flexible and modest over having an ego

    In the Agile and Lean Lifestyle, your ego is the biggest obstacle on your path to a better and more successful life and personal growth. If you don’t believe that you can improve yourself and achieve your goals in a smarter and better way, you are driven by your ego. If you are driven by your ego, you are drawn towards exploitation and dominance. Both principles are short-term survival strategies, which are forbidden in the Agile and Lean Lifestyle.

    There are two options for how to act in life:

    1. You create, deliver and capture value, by serving and solving people’s problems (people pay you for solutions, skills, creativity etc.)
    2. You exploit, meaning that someone else has to create value for you (you take by fraud or force)

    There are two approaches for achieving social status in life:

    1. Prestige, meaning sharing expertise and knowing how to gain respect
    2. Dominance, which encompasses using force and fear over others

    The Agile and Lean Life is about creating value and achieving social status with prestige. You need to have a modest ego and trust yourself to live that way. You should never try to look superior in favor of learning something new and doing well. You must create value for people by using prestige.

    It is also very important that when you are creating value, you are market-centric not ego-centric. Markets always win, therefore you always have to count market structure and trends into your decisions (choosing a career, investing money etc.). You have to be flexible and not fixed in your assumptions about markets.

    The world will not change to be more to your liking. You have to be flexible and change to the point where you find common ground with markets, and then start making the world a better place.

    11. Life Accounting – measure everything

    On the one hand, the Agile and Lean life is all about creating, visualizing, testing and playing, but on the other, it’s life in spreadsheets. You have to very carefully and closely measure the progress you make in all areas of life.

    The most important thing is to avoid vanity metrics and the fake feeling of progress. If you are using olive oil, that doesn’t yet mean that you are living a healthy lifestyle. If you are driving a good car on a lease, that doesn’t mean that you are financially prospering. You want to be rich in life, not only look rich.

    There’s a simple reason behind the need for metrics. Numbers don’t lie and you can manage only what you measure. You should not talk about your progress in life at all, if you don’t have the metrics to show it.

    In the search mode, you should have sufficient insight and gather enough Intel and knowledge to set up basic metrics that need to be monitored. You should also know a few priority metrics and one metric you should focus on the most (the metric that matters). In the execution mode, the more experience you have, the more advanced and detailed metrics you can set and follow.

    12. Live life with love and respect

    The final foundation and the last principle of an Agile and Lean Life are respect and love. Respect yourself by believing in yourself. Respect other people you have chosen to be with or work with by empowering them and learning from them. Be humble and grateful for the relationships you have chosen in your life after the “cleaning” had been done. Lead, follow or just go away.

    Respect Mother Nature. Respect markets. Respect the global flow. Don’t expect them to change. You will have to change yourself first. You can change the world only after changing yourself. Never get cocky, never get full of yourself no matter how well are you doing.

    Besides respect, never forget about love, as it is the strongest force in the universe. The opposite of fear is not courage, but love and understanding. Courage is just a tool for managing fear. You cannot have positive and negative emotions at the same time. You cannot live a positive life with a negative mind. Life and happiness can’t occur where death and sorrow take place. Therefore do all things with love and respect. Love is the most powerful positive emotion in life.

    The moments you most remember in life are the moments filled with love and passion.

    It’s not about being happy at every single moment, but about doing things in a positive way for a positive cause. For yourself and for others. Do no evil. Be a good person. Create value. Share. However don’t expect that just because you’re a good person, life owes you something. You will still have to fight for a better career, a deeper relationship, a pay raise or anything else you want in life. Love doesn’t mean being soft and naïve.

    The final question at the end of this manifesto is how to start living an Agile and Lean Life. You simply start with your “life vision” – a list of everything you want to experience in your life. Continue now to the Agile and Lean Life productivity framework.

    Too long read for now? Download the PDF file!

    The Agile Lean Life Manifesto Banner

    Reference:

    • Liker, J. 2004. The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from Toyota. New York: McGraw-Hill.
    • Blank, S. 2013. The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Second Edition. Amazon Kindle Books.
    • Ries, E. 2011. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. New York: Crown Publishing Group, Inc.
    • Cheng JT, 2013. Two ways to the top: evidence that dominance and prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to social rank and influence. J Pers Soc Psychol
    • Dweck, C. 2006. Mindset: The new Psychology of Success. Random House.
    • Agilemanifesto.org

  • Big changes, the new age and new challenges

    Big changes, the new age and new challenges

    It’s no news that the World has changed/been turned upside down in the past few decades, but we are often not even aware of all the changes in our lives. Therefore it is extremely important that we stop for a moment, take a deep breath and try to figure out the global currents, as well as the phenomena of change as the drive of these currents. After a short analysis of the world’s paradigms and the nature of change, it will be crystal clear why we need to apply new life management techniques to our lives.

    Every change, no matter how big or small, brings new positive things and opportunities to us, along with new challenges and concerns. There is no solution (change) without a new set of problems. As the Taoist rule goes, there is no ultimate good or bad/no ultimate good or bad exists. Everything has its positive and negative side. Change is no exception here. The bigger the change, the bigger the impact with all its positives and negatives. What we have to remember is that the change is an opportunity for some and a burden for others.

    Let’s go on. We know two different kinds of changes. The first one is a linear, step-by-step change, also known as an evolution. In business, it’s called the “sustaining innovation”. After every “linear” change (innovation), we are a little bit better – as a person, company, product or society. Because of competition, all organisms and entities have to get better through existence, even if just by a little bit.

    This “linear” or “evolutionary” kind of change is usually very defined, narrow and predictable. So are the new set of problems and the opportunities it brings. We all expect our next mobile phone to be a more capable machine (advantage) and we all know that we will have to learn (disadvantage) a few new tricks in order to use it.

    That is also why we humans don’t like change. Every change brings uncertainty and demands our effort to adapt or learn new things. We are more prepared to deal with change when the award (advantage) is much bigger than our struggle to adapt (disadvantage). That usually isn’t a problem with linear change, because we know the upcoming struggle and reward pretty well.

    The second kind of change is called a revolution. In business we know it as “disruptive innovation”. The quake in this case is incomparably stronger. Such revolutionary change usually happens in two cases – (1) either there is no more room for evolutionary progress or (2) a new radical technology has been invented.

    When it comes to disruptive innovations (or the business revolution), the business ecosystem landscape is unrecognizably changed. Revolutionary change means total damnation for some, and an opportunity to rise for others. The change is so big that the old players find it too difficult to adapt to the new circumstances. But no matter how much we resist, revolutionary change is a part of our lives.

    Singularity Six Epochs
    Source: Cosmic evolution, Kurzweil 2005

    But there is more. From time to time, many disruptive innovations come to life at once and cause a quantum leap in humankind’s mindset, the technology development level and world order. That is the real global revolution that changes lives and industries from every single aspect.

    In the past few millennia, humankind has lived through three social and technological revolutions that big. The first one was the agricultural revolution. There was not enough food hanging from the trees for the entire population and consequently, it was time to grow food more systematically and become more organized.

    The agricultural revolution slowly led to the second one, the industrial revolution in 1800s. New cultivation technologies and higher food production meant dramatic population growth and less work opportunities for people in the fields. People flocked to the cities, providing labor supply to the first factories. With the invention of the steam engine, a whole new world was born.

    Most of us were born in the middle of the third revolution. It took a century and a half for the early primitive engines and machines to be improved to the point of the first computer being born and commoditized. The digital age had begun and in the last 20 years, it has revolutionized all parts of the World, from every industry to the way most people are living their daily lives.

    It’s very easy to see all the positive elements of the new digital world that was shaped after the third world revolution (also called creative capitalism, the knowledge society, post-information age etc.). Let’s look at some of them:

    Access to information

    We can access most of the knowledge and information known to mankind. Knowledge is power and all information (assets) are just one click away.

    Ease of communication

    We have numerous options to communicate and connect, even with people who are on the other side of the globe. On top of that we have many options for entertainment and fun.

    Material status and shopping

    Shelves in stores are filled with an unlimited amount of different kinds of products that we can (easily) afford to buy. If we don’t have enough money, we can borrow it very fast. The number of people living in poverty is decreasing very fast as well.

    Mobility

    Travelling has never been so cheap and easy. The world has become a global village. If we cannot visit a specific piece of land in this planet, we can “go” there with a single click – to look at pictures, videos etc. More and more jobs can be performed remotely.

    Safety and longevity

    Statistically, there has been a big decrease in violence and poverty. Medical and pharmaceutical inventions contribute to longer life expectancy.

    Power

    You have the power to create your life as you desire. If you know how to do it correctly.

    Evolution and revolution
    Pros and cons of today’s Digital World

    Fact is, we live in the best times ever. But as we mentioned before, there is no absolute good or bad that comes with every change. The positives of the new digital world are big, as are the new challenges.

    Here are the biggest personal challenges everyone is facing in the digital world (the new age):

    Too many options

    The world today is filled with options and alternatives. You can buy millions of different products, choose from numerous religions, sports, hobbies, occupations and investment opportunities. On the one hand, this is great, because it allows you to adjust your lifestyle completely according to your personality (what to wear, eat, do etc.). You have the power to build your life as you want it. But on the other hand, all the options also bring a big psychological burden.

    It is easy to choose from a restaurant menu with three options. It is extremely hard to decide when you have twenty pages of different meals. If you know yourself really well and have a good decision making system, having many options is a big advantage; because options mean freedom. But if you don’t have a good decision-making system, all the options take a lot of our cognitive fuel. Freedom becomes burden.

    And guess what, all of us have life situations or areas where we can decide fast and others where we are totally indecisive, because we lack a decision support system. For example, one can be brutally decisive when it comes to deciding on what to eat, and the biggest ditherer when it comes to making a decision about a career change.

    Before: You could buy few types of diapers in a store nearby.

    Now: You can choose among hundreds of different types of diapers on numerous websites. Each one is much better than the rest, according to their marketing.

    Unrealistic expectations

    The new digital world doesn’t stop at the unreasonable number of options. Every product is accompanied by extremely aggressive marketing. It comes with a strong pushy message appealing to our emotions, ego and life goals and, even more importantly, it impacts our perception of the World. Every product comes with an ad showing beautiful, happy, rich and perfect people.

    We are exposed to thousands of ads every day, everywhere. Everybody wants a piece of our lives, let it be money, attention, time or some other form of currency. The goal of all the ads is to take as much as possible from us and in return, give us a short-lived feeling of material satisfaction, which also builds up unrealistic expectations that life is a bed of roses. It’s very easy to associate consumerism with happiness. The belief that buying things will make us happy in the long term largely contributes to ruining the quality of life.

    Don’t get me wrong, money is very important and it does solve many problems. When we earn less than 80,000 € annually, the added value of every new dollar to our happiness is that much bigger. But having dozens of pairs of shoes in the closet or believing an ad claiming that if we buy a specific product our lives will miraculously change for the better, is a whole other story. It doesn’t matter which cookies we buy for our kids; if we don’t build a relationship with them (love = quality time), cookies won’t help.

    Why we are unhappy – The expectation gap

    What’s even more frightening is the psychological effect that the thousands of happy people in ads have on all of us. We start equating happy ad people with real people and mix those two up. We start assuming that everyone around us is more beautiful, happier, richer… more everything compared to us.

    It consequently makes sense that Hollywood and YouTube stars are the main role models of the today’s society. Because it seems that most of them are living the happy lives of people in ads. They have the looks, the money, they enjoy life, have fun etc. without any struggle. If we add the halo effect to the equation (“halo effect” being the cognitive bias of thinking that people who excel at one thing are more perfect than they really are) there really is room for envy, depression and low self-esteem.

    To make our expectations even more unrealistic, we are surrounded by social networks showing only the best parts of our friends’ and acquaintances’ lives – partying, hanging out with friends, travelling – all happy. They live a dream life while we have to struggle. It seems totally unfair. The reality is of course totally different. We all have our fights, struggles and obstacles to overcome. Nobody on this planet is living a perfect life. But it appears otherwise at the first glance.

    Before: It wasn’t at all odd if you smiled and you were missing one or more of your teeth.

    Now: It seems like everybody is perfect, with perfect bodies, spouses and dream jobs… in ads and on social networks. Everybody seems to be living a better life than us.
    AgileLeanLife Change

    Information overload

    The agrarian revolution was a little bit about the brains (innovation), but mostly about the muscle (field labor). The industrial age was already a little bit more about the brains, since the machines took over the part of the labor. Management (organizational innovations) and other (technological) innovations were becoming more and more important. Today’s information age and creative economy is all about the brains. Knowledge, creativity, information, innovation.

    Information as the king currency in a creative economy leads to everybody wanting to trade with this currency. With 7 billion people living on planet Earth, this surly brings us information overload/leads us to an information overload. Every two days, we create more information than we did to up to 2013 altogether. More than 2 million blog posts are written every day. Since quality and quantity rarely go hand in hand, the quality of the information is dropping very fast. It’s easy to get lost in useless content on a day to day basis.

    Having access to so much information can be a positive or a negative thing, depending on our self-discipline and our decision-making support system. It’s a big disadvantage if we are easily distracted and can’t separate the wheat from the chaff. If we don’t have a personal system for organizing, analyzing and structuring information, the overload is a big burden. The same situation arises if we have low technological literacy.

    On the other hand, knowledge is power. To be even more precise: applying knowledge is power. Every one of us who has access to the Internet has access to the mighty source of power; the power to live an abundant full and creative life. But only if one has an agile and lean approach to handling information and developing personal competences.

    Before: You finished formal education, watched news and read a book from time to time.

    Now: You can read 2 million blog posts at any given time of the day using your mobile phone.

    Market complexity

    With information overload, global competition and rapid innovation, markets have become extremely complex. It doesn’t matter which market or industry we look at, they’re all becoming more and more complex and unpredictable.

    Financial markets are volatile, having thousands of different products to choose from. You need to be extremely well financially educated to make a good return on investment. There are less and less safe jobs on the market and many people are questioning the value of formal education. New occupations are appearing every year and it’s hard to tell where in the future the demand will become greater than supply.

    Same goes for small business owners. The markets are changing fast and the average lifetime of companies is rapidly shortening. Even big companies can go out of business in a second if they are not innovative enough. Consider Nokia and other giants that have quickly disappeared when Apple and Google presented new disruptive mobile technology.

    Markets demand constant innovation, but constant innovating leads to more complex markets. Yes, it’s a magic circle and life it’s not going to become any easier.

    Before: You finished formal education, got a job for life and invested surplus in one of the mutual funds.

    Today: You can invest in crypto currencies, CFDs, ETFs, yourself, or crowd fund some cool product. There are almost no safe jobs anymore. You are on your own.

    A hardly bearable uncertainty

    All previously stated paradigms of the new digital world have brought a very demanding psychological uncertainty to our lives. On the one hand, we expect great things from our lives and have an unlimited amount of opportunities all over the world, but on the other hand, there is no real systematic knowledge on how to not get stuck in all the complexity and fast change.

    All that can lead to a mediocre productivity, because of indecisiveness, anxiety, not setting the priorities, numbness, escaping real life, shallow relationships and so on. That is why we need new approaches and techniques to life management, such as agile and lean life management principles.