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  • Push yourself

    Your body is wired to save as much energy as possible. You’re wired to be afraid of the unknown and resist changes at all cost. You, just as everyone else, like safety and easiness. To survive. But you’re also a curious being. It’s in your nature to strive for progress and personal development. To thrive. Much like staying in your comfort zone is programmed in your genes, so is your desire to achieve your peak performance and experience new things.

    Thus you have to keep pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. You always have to push yourself through your doubts and insecurities. You have to constantly push yourself to focus more and remove waste from your life. The moment you stop pushing yourself is the moment you stop growing. You should constantly improve yourself. You should always challenge yourself. You should always push yourself to become the best version of yourself.

    To push yourself is one of the secrets of success

    You have to choose between the easier and the harder way many times in life. In this context, Nike still has the best slogan: just do it, choose the hardest way, because with time, the hard way usually becomes easy and the easy way usually becomes hard. There is a simple reason why that is so; because by pushing yourself and constantly growing, you are becoming a better master of life.

    Life rewards those who master its rules and know how to play the game.

    The challenge

    When it comes to pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, the biggest challenge is that with every push, you usually experience immediate (personal growth) pain and your desired results only come in the long term.

    That is mentally very hard, especially compared to not pushing yourself. Not pushing yourself provides immediate pleasure and the punishment only comes in the long term. And we all somehow care much more about now than about what will happen in the long term.

    Practical examples

    Let’s look at some practical examples:

    • Eating a doughnut gives you immediate pleasure. Extra weight comes sometime in the future, if you eat too much doughnuts on a day to day basis.
    • Going to the gym requires discipline and a lack of comfort now at this very moment. But results only come later. There’s the immediate result of feeling better after a workout, but real fitness progress and a better body image come in months.
    • Spending money on a gadget you want gives you immediate pleasure. Peeling off the plastic film of a new gadget. Mmm. You can deal with debt sometime in the future.
    • Saving money means immediate renouncement for you. But pleasure from having savings and receiving yields only comes sometime in the future.
    • Giving your kid a computer tablet instead of playing with them gives you more free time immediately. Your kid ignoring you only comes years later.
    • Spending time and talking to your kid demands an immediate energy investment. A good relationship and bond only come later, over the years.
    • Smoking a cigarette gives immediate pleasure. It takes years for cancer to come.

    PushIf you want to really push yourself, you need to have a long-term perspective. You have to see all the rewards you will enjoy later in life if you sacrifice a little bit today. All the little sacrifices you make today, and aren’t really that hard, add up in the long term and bring a great difference.

    Little everyday sacrifices (which aren’t even sacrifices anymore after a while, but become habits) are the ones that bring about the difference between average and successful at the end.

    Pushing yourself

    Never forget that self-doubt and insecurities kill more dreams than failure ever will. You need to constantly push yourself through self-doubt and insecurities. You have to push yourself through shyness and laziness and fear. You have to push yourself when you feel like giving up.

    Pushing yourself is not easy at all. Being out of your comfort zone is hard. As Richard St. John defines it, you have to face C.R.A.P. You have to face:

    • Criticism
    • Rejections
    • Assholes
    • Pressure

    You have to be proactive out of your comfort zone, you have to take responsibilities, you need to have the courage to constantly manage fear – fear of failure, fear of success, fear of public humiliation; there are so many fears you have to manage.

    But dear reader, life starts at the end of your comfort zone. Out of the comfort zone is the place where magic happens. Playing it safe is similar to locking yourself in a safe. And that’s not what you want.

    Comfort zone

    Your deep desire to experience life to the full should be much greater than any obstacle preventing you from going out of your comfort zone. You should see the world as an endless playground full of possibilities, where you can experience and enjoy things. Most of them out of your comfort zone.

    Here are some general rules to help you push yourself out of your comfort zone slightly more easily:

    • In life, fears show you what you have to face, where you have to challenge yourself and where you can really grow.
    • Surround yourself with the right people, from friends to business partners. Don’t surround yourself with people who go easy on you, but with people who are honest with you and push you to achieve your greater potential. Surround yourself with people who are a role model to you. Your key relationships are the ones that should push you the most to be successful.
    • Be a problem solver not a victim. Think proactively not reactively.
    • Ask yourself: “What would [x] do?”, where x can be Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, Elon Musk or anyone you admire.
    • Ask yourself: Am I thinking optimally in this situation? Am I doing the optimal thing and making the optimal decision regarding a specific situation? What is the optimal thinking and the optimal action in this situation? Thinking like that will open up a new possibility you should probably follow.
    • Be aware that many fears and obstacles are just in your head. Most of them are just illusions stopping you due to bad past experience. It’s like having a bug in your brain’s “software”. Fix it.

    Your life vision and mission must be greater than any problems you face. You’re born to do great things in life. Period.

    Surround yourself with people who push you

    Pushing yourself is hard sometimes. That’s why you need other people. That’s why you need the right surroundings and an environment that supports your potential, not letting you waste your life.

    Remember, if you’re the smartest and the most capable person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. Surrounding yourself with the right people is the best way to grow.

    The general rule concerning people you should surround yourself with is:

    • 33 % of people who are less capable than you, and push them and coach them
    • 33 % of people who are on the same level as you, and push each other
    • 33 % of people who are more capable than you, and make sure that they push you hard. You can call them your mastermind group.

    Healthy relationships

    People who should love you, support you and push you most in life

    Don’t push too hard

    We know three zones. The first one is your comfort zone. The second one is the learning zone. And the third one is the panic zone. By stepping out of your comfort zone into the learning zone, you learn, you grow, you evolve. By spending time in your learning zone, your comfort zone expands. That is how you become more competent and capable. You master life more.

    Stepping too far out of your comfort zone and biting off more than you can chew is sometimes even more dangerous than being in the comfort zone. Being way out of your learning zone brings anxiety, stress and negative feelings. You enter the panic zone and the panic zone isn’t anything good.

    In the panic zone, you wire your brains with a new stopping mechanism that sees everything out of your comfort zone as a big danger; it wants to make sure you don’t hurt yourself. If you go too far and suffer, next time you won’t go out of your comfort zone at all. Neither to the panic zone, nor to the learning zone. Your brain will make sure of that. You basically block yourself with new fears.

    Comfort zone

    It kind of makes sense. If you take the wrong thing too far, you can even hurt yourself (physically, mentally) and find yourself experiencing a great setback. Speed kills, and it can kill your potential as well. So be smart. And that rule doesn’t apply only to extreme situations that put your life in danger, but to all different kinds of situations.

    Taking on too much debt or too big business risks, investing in things you don’t understand, pushing yourself too hard in the gym when you are risking injury, travelling to an unsafe country without having enough travelling experience etc. There are numerous options that could put you in the panic zone if you don’t play it smart. Even being too busy at something can be a form of laziness.

    Thus you have to be smart about going out of your comfort zone. You have to take it step by step. You have to be gentle with yourself and proud of every small progress. If you improve yourself for 1 % every day, that’s a lot. In a decade, that’s an enormous progress. That’s the long term view.

    Therefore don’t be afraid of progressing slowly, only be afraid of completely stopping. If you aren’t growing, you are declining and that is such a waste. That shouldn’t be an option for you. But also don’t go to the other extreme. Think about the middle path. It’s a path between the comfort zone and the panic zone.

    Being in the flow
    Find just the right amount of challenge to enter the flow state.

    Being in your learning zone also enables you to be in the flow. If the challenge you face is too big relative to your skills, you experience only anxiety and thus no flow at all. And if the challenge is too small relative to your skills, you get bored. You can’t be in the flow if you’re bored.

    In the comfort zone, you can only be lazy and bored. Again, there’s a sweet spot somewhere in the middle, where the challenge is just big enough that it enables you to grow and still doesn’t scare you. Then you are in the flow, then you are in the right learning zone.

    It’s better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. One way of conquering yourself is by pushing yourself. Push harder, but not too hard. Make sure that you’re in the flow and in the learning zone. Now start pushing!

  • 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.

  • Success brings success and failure brings failure, but…

    Let’s start with the statement that life isn’t fair. I think almost everybody would agree on that. But if life isn’t fair to everybody, then it somehow is fair to everyone?

    Well, not so fast, this is just a little mind game to open your mind. Now let’s try to really analyze whether or not life isn’t fair.

    On the micro-level (everyday life) we really could say that life is fair. We all have our struggles, we all have to face obstacles, unfulfilled desires and disappointments.

    The extent of the challenges we have to face is very different for each of us, but we all lose some and win some. Nobody can live on this planet without having problems and facing obstacles.

    No matter the goals that you have in life, if you lose it hurts and if you win it feels good. Losing is a bitch but you have to face it from time to time.

    We can also say that the harder you work, the more that you invest into achieving your goals, the higher is the probability of achieving those goals. Reward comes to those who work the hardest (and smartest). And all of that is quite fair.

    The story is completely different on the macro-level. When I say “macro-level” I mean the environment you were born in (your country, your family etc.). That is the level where life isn’t as fair and you have to deal with it somehow.

    I am talking about:

    • Genetic lottery (your DNA)
    • Your parents or people who raised you
    • The country you were born in and its cultural legacy
    • The social system you are functioning in
    • Market trends and geographic trends

    The biggest advantage you can have in life is where and to whom you are born.

    On this “macro-level”, the sad general statistic is that success brings even more success and failure brings even more failure.

    There are exceptions, of course, but they’re pretty rare. It’s quite obvious where the problem lies. You have zero or very little influence on these “macro” factors but they have a great influence on your life. You can influence some of them to some extent later in life, but only with extremely strong willpower.

    We can say that all of these factors working to your advantage are simply privilege and luck. And not all people have that.

    These factors are basically the starting point in your life. The worse the starting point and the greater the goals, the smarter and harder you have to work. Let’s see why.

    Positive and negative spiral

    Very important phenomena in life are concentration, acceleration and leverage. These phenomena are the reason why success brings even more success and failure brings more failure.

    Advantage accumulates. That is to say concentration, acceleration and leverage lead to either a positive or a negative spiral in life.

    Based on your genes, markets and your primary and secondary socialization and other factors, you find yourself on either an upwards or a downwards spiral in different areas of life. Turning the course from down to up is quite hard, sometimes almost impossible.

    I don’ want this to sound so negative, since there are many things you CAN DO to change the course of your life – but sometimes it takes super human effort.

    We will look at some ideas how to do that soon but before that, let’s take a look at some practical examples, very stereotypical and extreme, just to very clearly show the point I am trying to make with the downward/upward spiral.

    If you are born in a rich family with supportive and loving parents who do sports with their kids, the following will happen. From a young age onwards your parents will encourage you to do sports, eat healthy, they will stimulate you to develop your talents, they will pay for the best schooling, help you with connections, mentor you etc.

    Even more than that, having access to funds and having a good relationship with your parents also helps you develop good self-esteem, self-image and self-worth. Parents encourage you to blossom in life, they prepare you for challenges. I know that there is no such thing as a perfect family, but generally speaking successful parents also try to raise their kids into successful individuals.

    On the other hand if you are born in a poor family, with bad health habits, a lack of knowledge and resources, and maybe even constant pressure and fighting, your starting point is very different. Bad health habits and the fighting lead to a weak immune system, poverty usually prevents you from investing into long-term skills, your access to the best education is very limited, and so on.

    You have zero guidance in life, since your parents have no experience in how it feels to be successful and how to prosper. Sooner or later you start to lag behind other people who are in a much better position. Bad environment also brings additional psychological challenges and other factors that hold you back.

    In the first case, success concentrates in all areas, there are many leverages available to the individual and the speed of achieving new goals is extremely high. In the second case, problems accumulate in all areas of life, there are no leverages available to the individual and achieving goals is slow and gradual.

    • Money accumulates
    • Attention accumulates (fame, power, etc.)
    • Love accumulates

    Also, only at much slower rates:

    • Health accumulates
    • Knowledge accumulates
    • Everything else accumulates

    Everything accumulates when you reach a certain point (the tipping point) in your life.

    How hard it is to reach that point depends on your starting point and the leverages available to you. The better the starting point and the more leverages you have at your disposal, the faster your progress and the sooner the concentration can take place.

    That’s definitely not fair. But there is also good news in all that. The world is not designed to be fair.

    The world is not designed to be fair. The world is designed to reward those who master its rules.

    Now let’s look what to do:

    • If you have a good starting point in life
    • If you have a bad starting point in life

    What to do if you have a good starting point

    A study has shown that people who are exposed to privilege and luck in life usually aren’t even aware of it. They attribute their success much more to themselves and their competences than circumstances. If the success is pretty massive, people can even become cocky and conceited.

    If you’ve had a good starting point in life, be very grateful and appreciate it. Be aware of it. If you were born in a well-developed and stable country, if you have loving and supportive parents, if you received good education, if you have a supportive environment, good genes etc. be aware of that and don’t take it for granted.

    After being aware of it and grateful for it, the second step concerns what you’re going to do about it. The reason for a good starting point is not that you can lay back and enjoy it more than others. The privileged situation was entrusted to you so you could achieve even more than others in a certain way.

    You are in a position to create much more value and while doing that, helping the world become a better place. You shouldn’t waste any of your talents or leverages.

    You should also know that resting on your laurels means nothing but slowly losing your starting position. If you only fool around and don’t take your life seriously, you will sooner or later come face to face with the proverb that wealth (or success) doesn’t last more than three generations.

    Wealth (or success or any advantage) doesn’t last more than three generations.

    No matter how many times you succeed and win, stay as humble as possible and never get cocky. In the business world, it oftentimes happens that a businessperson uses the same winning formula over and over again.

    They become so confident using this particular formula that they don’t see the changes in the environment and circumstances that occur sooner or later. At some point, the formula doesn’t work anymore.

    You can find numerous cases in which a businessperson bet everything they have on a formula even after several cases of success and consequently lost everything. Don’t let success cloud your judgment.

    That’s why you need to do regular reflections on your actions. That’s why you need to stay humble. Definitely self-confident, but humble.

    What to do if you have a bad starting point

    The story is a little bit different if you don’t have such a good starting point. The worse the starting point, the more you have to play life in the hard mode.

    The greater your goals, the smarter and harder you have to work. You somehow also have to make up for starting behind others.

    The good news is that easy times very much soften people up, while on the other hand tougher situations can build up your character.

    Tough life situations build up character.

    A tougher situation can really develop your character, if the situations aren’t too tough, like war for example, and if you keep fighting and never give up. But trust me, I have seen many people whom life killed inside with challenges that were just too much. That is topic for another post.

    I only have some ideas for what to do if you want to be really successful and your starting point was not so good: you should keep fighting and make up in the areas. Here is how:

    Excel at something

    Life gave us all talents and gifts. That’s quite fair. You have to find your talents and develop them. The talents aren’t something miraculous.

    They’re not something that you discover and soon afterwards, your life becomes a success story. There are no shortcuts.

    Talents are simply the things that you are naturally good at (numbers, words, talking, building …). After knowing where your talents lie, you have to work hard to develop them.

    Developing your talents to the point where you really excel at something is the best way to start turning a downwards spiral upwards. Because if you excel at something, two things happen.

    The first one is called the “halo effect”. The halo effect means that if you’re really good at something, people attribute you better qualities and assume that you’re good at other things as well. Thus you are exposed to more opportunities.

    The other thing that happens is that exceling at something has a good positive influence on your self-confidence and all other areas of life. Basically success starts bringing success.

    Therefore the first thing to do is to find you talents and start exceling at something. It may even take you a few years to excel at something, but it doesn’t matter.

    Focus yourself and start building up your character and skills. Level up your game. You should also very carefully consider where you will apply your talents. You want to apply them to markets that are growing and rising.

    Start with small wins

    A person who wins one challenge has a greater probability of winning the next one. A win leads to better self-confidence, better body chemistry and higher motivation as well as to better readiness for the next challenge.

    It’s better to win small ten times than to lose big one time. Thus you have to be aware of your bad starting point and not try to compete with people who have a much better starting point right at the very beginning. You have to be smarter than that and make progress step by step.

    We know three zones in life. One is called the “comfort zone”. It’s the zone where you have mastered everything and there are no challenges at all. The second one is called the “learning zone”. It’s the zone with challenges that are just big enough to allow you to make progress and grow. The more you are active in the learning zone, the more your comfort zone expands.

    The third zone is called the “panic zone”. If you go from the comfort zone straight into the panic zone, you will burn yourself out. You could easily lose, damage your self-confidence and you could subconsciously start giving a negative connotation to a specific challenge, meaning you will not try next time, even in a smaller dimension.

    Thus you have to be much smarter. You have to know you starting point, and where your learning and panic zones begin. You want to take small steps and win them one by one, slowly improving your skills.

    Your wins will start to accumulate, your comfort zone will start to broaden, and over the years you will be able to catch up to most other people who had had a better starting point.

    Measure your progress exclusively to your past self.

    The more wins that you accumulate, the bigger the risks that you can afford. You still have to be careful to not take risks that are so big they can completely ruin you. And it can happen.

    For every success story you see in the media, there are thousands of people who failed really badly. Some of them so badly that they won’t be able to rise up ever again. You don’t want to do that to yourself.

    Increase your chances of getting lucky

    You have to be very assertive when increasing your chances of getting lucky. The more targets you want to hit, the more shooting you will have to do.

    Keep developing your inner resources, learn sales, learn marketing, build up your personal brand, network as much as possible, leverage social networks, expose yourself, stand for something, integrate yourself into the community of successful people, and so on. Innovate your way out of shitty situations.

    Many studies have shown the importance of the so-called hubs, where concentration and acceleration take place. In the start-up world we call these hubs incubators, start-up accelerators and technology parks.

    These are the points where talented people, information, resources, technology, good energy and the right values are concentrated. It’s the same in all other areas of life. You have clubs, associations and institutes for nearly everything, from business to health and hobbies.

    You want to put yourself in the centre of such hubs and then start shooting for your first wins. While doing that, you have to remember that marketing is everything and that whatever you’re doing in life, whatever your goals are, good sales and marketing will always accelerate your way to success.

    Under the condition that the product you’re selling (you) is the real deal. Otherwise marketing can kill you really fast. There is no fake it ‘til you make it.

    Here’s another trick. If you want to succeed faster, you also have to fail faster. Going from failure to failure without losing motivation until you succeed is supposed to be the formula for success. But we have very clearly seen that losing doesn’t bring you anything good. That’s why you need to introduce the search mode into your life.

    If you do the search mode correctly, there is no failure, just validated learning. Consequently there are no bad influences on your self-confidence and other success factors. And as said before, the more successes that you accumulate and the better position that you are in, the bigger the risks you can take and the more you can learn.

    Spiral Stairs to Light

    Get to know yourself and get rid of negative behavioral patterns

    An important part of getting to know yourself is identifying your negative behavioral patterns. If you were not brought up in a loving, supportive environment and weren’t raised by model parents, you probably have many destructive negative behavioral patterns.

    Here are the ten most popular ones:

    • Negative thinking
    • Self-criticism and self-labeling
    • Low self-confidence and passive obedience
    • Hopelessness and helplessness (not being aware of your personal power)
    • Overwhelming yourself and burning yourself out
    • Perfectionism
    • Fear of failure and fear of success
    • Fear of criticism and disapproval (looking for outside confirmation and being spineless)
    • Low frustration tolerance
    • Guilt and self-blame
    • Scarcity mindset

    All this sh*t is dragging you down, again clearly demonstrating how bad brings more bad. The bad environment you were brought up in (I hope not) results in bad behavioral patterns which then further result in bad life situations.

    Thus you want to deal with your inner negative psychological state. In adulthood, your outer world is merely a reflection of your inner world and vice versa.

    Read personal development books, schedule a consultation with a cognitive therapist, identify your negative behavioral patterns and start working on them. Otherwise your life can become a negative self-fulfilling prophecy.

    Now you probably understand why the greatest battles won are not those won over physical enemies but over ourselves. You can be your own worst enemy. Don’t let that happen. It’s not fair but you have to deal with it.

    Never go to war, especially with yourself.

    Start changing your environment

    At some point in life, you have to start creating an environment that supports you. What really sucks is that if you hadn’t had a supportive environment at home, you will probably subconsciously look for the same unsupportive environment in all areas of life.

    Simply because it’s the environment most familiar to you and you know how to survive it. It’s the same situation when people look for abusive relationships because they had that kind of a relationship at home. That sucks big time and again it clearly shows how bad brings more bad.

    You have to become conscious of that fact and first work hard on your personal development and your subconscious tendencies. You need to build your first mutually supportive relationship, learn how to handle that kind of positive relationships and then work further on the next one and the one after that.

    That is how you change the spiral. It may take you years to completely change your environment, but that is the only way if you want to make positive changes in your life.

    It’s the same with other elements of your surroundings. People are the most important factor but they aren’t the only important one. Find market trends that will support you. Find countries where you function best.

    Nevertheless, the world has become a global village and the internet is opening up many possibilities for you to work internationally. Decorate your home so it supports you in the process of achieving your goals. Use apps on your phone and computer that support you etc.

    Actively construct your environment step by step and make it as supportive as possible.

    Rituals Celebration

    Rituals

    There is one more thing you can do that will help you on the difficult path to a more positive course in your life. Studies have shown that nations that go through traumatic experiences heal faster if they have strong rituals that help them go through this tough situation and any others that might be coming.

    It’s not always the case, but it quite often is. You have to find out for yourself. The key point is that rituals make you calmer and more stable. If they have that kind of effect on you, practice them and it will help you a lot.

    Here are ten ideas for that sort of rituals:

    • Being grateful and thankful for what you have
    • Celebrating every small win with people who also fight challenging situations in life
    • Spending time with people you love and knowing what you are fighting for
    • Helping other, less fortunate people, since there is always someone who is in an even worse position than you are
    • Meditating
    • Reflecting on your life
    • Believing in a higher power
    • Regularly reviewing your past victories
    • Taking time off after intense periods of time
    • Saying “fuck it” and surrendering to life

    Conclusion

    Knowing and understanding are the first steps towards a better life. We have analyzed why success brings more success and inequality brings more inequality.

    The bad news is that all that is unfortunately true to some extent. The good news is that you have the personal power to change the course of your life. You can change a negative spiral into a positive one. It’s not easy, but it can be done.

    At the end of the day, you can come out of difficult situations much smarter, stronger, wiser and with a much bigger capacity for creating value and making the world a better place to live. Because you understand good as well as bad situations in life.

    For the conclusion, let me give you an example that shows a pretty similar thing:

    If you look at the list of the most economically successful countries in the world, you can see that there are two types of countries at the top. The first type are countries with many natural resources, especially oil.

    These are the countries with a head start. It’s the same if you are born extremely beautiful, smart or with many resources.

    The second type are countries with much less natural resources that had innovated their way to the top. They are more creative, more cunning, more organized, more assertive, more connected, more supportive towards talented people, more hard-working and so on.

    Their success is not based on outer resources but on inner ones. The good news is that with inner resources, you can always make more of the outer ones.

    So who do you think will be in the better position when natural resources run out? Of course those countries that have invested natural resources really smartly into other assets like knowledge, innovation, talent etc.

    And those countries without natural resources that didn’t settle for an inferior situation but rather decided to fight and come out of the situation stronger than ever. You should do the same, no matter your starting point.

    I hope these articles gave you some good ideas how you can change your life direction, enter the positive spiral of life and accelerate your way to success.

    It’s not easy, but it can be done. Success brings success and failure brings failure, but there are many things you can do to turn a failure into a success. I wish you all the luck possible.

  • 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.

  • What I wish I truly knew in my twenties

    You can find many articles and posts written on the topic What I wish I truly knew when I was young, but most of them are about the universal life truths that are true no matter the age, and which we frequently remember, but are at the same time somewhat too lazy to follow. Whether this is; travel as much as possible, save some money, enjoy the moment, you can learn something from anyone in life, take care of your health, make a good first impression, spend as much time as possible with the people you love, love is the most important thing in life, and so on.

    All that advises are nice, important and true, but there are much more dirty secrets about life. I am talking about harder life discoveries and lessons that are those most primal experiences, sometimes making us stronger, while at other times unrelentingly killing our dreams and potentials, and leading us to disappointments in life. Let’s look at some of the most difficult discoveries about the world and life; those realizations that would’ve been truly useful if I had already known them in my early twenties.

    • Being good means being good and nothing more.
    • The role of biology is much stronger than we’d care to admit.
    • Soft and naïve aren’t qualities that this world is looking for.
    • Politics are a large component of life.
    • Accept people for who they are, or find new ones.
    • Always be honest with yourself.
    • Environment and trends have an incredible influence on our life.
    • Reflection and strategy before actions.
    • Different doesn’t always mean better.
    • It’s easy to stand out, it’s incredibly hard to truly succeed.

    1. Being good means being good and nothing more

    Be a good person and you’ll get good things in return. It’s true. But people often confuse and simplify this; to their own benefit, of course. And this later leads to disappointments. I am talking about the mentality that goes along the lines of: Be a good person and life will reward you with a good job, a lot of money, luck in love, and so on. Not true.

    Be a good person and you’ll get good things in return; yes, in the same context of life. People will mostly act nicer towards to you (not all of them). You’ll feel better in your own skin. Your world will be calmer. You will also obtain some social capital. You will be rewarded with additional spiritual/karma points. But all this has minimal correlation to the amount of money you earn, luck in love and a good job.

    Both bad and good people can have a lot of money. The amount of money is mostly connected to skills that are connected to money, if we dismiss lottery and inheritance. Luck in love depends more on our personal relationship skills and commitment to partnership, and beforehand the effort we put into searching for the most suitable partner (perfect fit), than on whether we are generally a good person (except if this is a value that’s important to our partner). Sometimes being good can even be counter-productive. For example, it has been psychologically proven that being only nice (niceness falls in the category of being good) isn’t the smartest male seduction strategy, while if women are nice, this can quickly give false signals to men.

    It’s absolutely must that we are a good person in life – that we have integrity, are nice, compassionate, don’t harm others, help, connect, collaborate, and so on. However, what’s wrong is the expectation that life will reward us all by itself and that this is why we don’t have to make an effort in other areas of life.

    2. The role of biology is much stronger than we’d care to admit

    We are animals and we are spiritual beings. To deny one world or the other can be very painful. The fact that a part of us is animal means that we are partially acting from an entirely biological impulse written in our genes – one that is completely direct and clear: spread our genes as far as we can and with the best possible combination for our offspring. Nature (biology) knows two mechanisms for the purpose of reaching these two goals: the first one is lust and the second one love. The role of the former is quantity (everything that suits our genetic/psychological code) and the latter quality (cohabitation until producing offspring and raising it). It’s clear from this alone that we aren’t fundamentally monogamous beings, but that monogamy is definitely a sensible social innovation that can bring a lot of good into our lives; if we have realistic expectations and are prepared to keep investing into a relationship.

    What’s even more important is that both mechanisms (lust, love) play an important role in finding true love, in the first place; before love, sexual attraction is needed in most cases and infatuation oftentimes as well, especially in the younger years.

    The sexual force is, besides the wish for survival, one of the strongest forces of humanity; based on this force, each individual actually possesses a certain sexual capital. One part of our sexual capital is given, namely looks and the general quality of genes, while a large part of sexual capital is also obtained. The bigger the sexual capital, the larger the choice of potential partners, while our relationship can also have higher quality.

    Sexual capital can be obtained in three different ways: the biological, sociological or psychological one. The first, biological one simply means being fit. The most visible way of being not-fit is being overweight. Not only does excessive body weight lower our sexual capital, it also brings many other inconveniences and potential complications. Thus being fit and taking care of your health is incredibly important, not only from the aspect of energy and physical performance, but also the (sexual) status in society. We can also put neatness, well-groomed appearance, care for oneself, motoric abilities and other things under the biological aspect of sexual capital.

    We can also increase our sexual capital with a sociological and psychological approach. This includes everything from material status, social skills, individual’s values, diversity, self-confidence etc. All things listed increase either the individual’s social capital or their psychological one, and consequently also their sexual one. So even if we weren’t born to be models, we have quite a few options for increasing our sexual capital.

    If we go one step further, to the level of biology and sociology, there are generally two ways for climbing the social ladder (and consequently increase our sexual capital too). The first one is based on dominance in the broadest possible sense, including intimidation, domination of other people, aggression and dictatorship. This strategy mostly works in a crisis or in battle times and survival situations; sadly, those situations make up the biggest part of the known history of humanity. Others follow in hopes that with an aggressive approach, resources will be guaranteed for them as well. It’s upon these foundations that the concept of an “alpha male” is built, as is the path to a bigger sexual capital based on physical/biological dominance (being fit, having muscles, good athletic abilities etc.).

    Nowadays, in increasingly less violent times, this strategy is subsequently also less and less effective. Namely being an alpha male is always possible only in a certain context and in a certain situation. In another situation and another context, even an alpha male can become a beta male (e.g. an esteemed professor who’d find himself in prison). Since there are fewer and fewer life and death violent situations, there are also fewer and fewer contexts and opportunities for the success of the dominance strategy. The access to resources is also increasingly more frequently connected to creating value rather than taking things by force.

    Thus another path to the top of the social ladder has come to exist – one not based on dominance but rather on the prestige of an individual. This one still encompasses several qualities of an “alpha male”, namely a high level of self-confidence, ambition and strength, but in a combination with compassion, care for others, empathy, niceness and an easy-going nature. Such a strategy is effective in significantly more social situations than dominance. If dominance is effective in battle situations and competitions, then the strategy of prestige is effective in most aspects of life, including society management. But this doesn’t mean that dominance is bad and that prestige is a good approach.

    From the aspect of the social ladder and the probability of it working, the optimal strategy is a combination of building on prestige that shows care for a group, while using dominance only in situations when this is absolutely necessary. It’s written in our genes that such individuals have an advantage in the society, and with this, access to more resources, power and potential partners.

    In short, I definitely don’t want to stamp all over the meaning of true love and nice ideals. But the fact remains that sexual capital stemming from biological and sociological dispositions is an important category besides the intellectual, spiritual and emotional capital. It leads to more choices when choosing potential partners, to a higher status in the society, and may consequently also lead to a more suitable partner.

    The main lesson is that hoping for true love means giving power from one’s own hands. And that is never good. The bigger our sexual capital is, the bigger is the possibility of finding the right partner. This is why it’s right that we focus on our sexual capital and its development, not only for the purpose of finding a partnership, but also for developing our power, improving our social standing and potentially having a (positive) influence on the environment.

    On the other hand you should definitely not glorify sexual capital or go too far in developing it; even it has its boundaries, especially when focusing on partnership. After all, people with low sexual capital find their partner as well. Why? Because another category exists, and that is the uniqueness of an individual.

    Sexual capital plays an important role in first impressions, at the beginning, with the general social standing, but in the long run, in the context of searching for an ideal partner, sexual capital loses value and the uniqueness of an individual starts gaining value. At that time, infatuation also plays its role; we go from quantity to quality.

    However we have to realize that it’s much easier to work on our uniqueness, as it is largely already given. Each and every one of us is unique and we only have to sharpen our traits. Meanwhile it requires a lot more effort to develop sexual capital, but the latter is so very important in youth and later. More possibilities, more freedom.

    • Don’t forget to take care of your sexual capital (be fit, work on your self-confidence,…).
    • Use prestige as a path to the top of the social ladder.
    • Use dominance only in situations when it is absolutely necessary, meaning step up for yourself if needed.
    • Don’t glorify sexual capital, you are also unique. Sharpen your personality traits.

    3. Soft and naïve aren’t qualities that this world is looking for

    Naivety is probably the most painfully marked quality of youth. Life is incredibly beautiful and full of adventures, but also very demanding and hard; the most difficult lessons are sadly most often hiding precisely in relationships with other people.

    Naivety most often stems from the belief that 1) relationships aren’t exclusively due to exchanging benefits, while the second source of naivety is that 2) our benefit in a relationship is so big that people will always behave according to our expectations.

    With most people, temptation, mostly originating from biological (survival, reproduction) forces, quickly beats the value added of any relationship. If we add to this equation that our value added changes (seems low to someone at a certain moment) and that grass is always greener on the other side, we simply come to a situation where husband did stupid things on a business trip he went on after a fight with his wife; or a family arguing over a division of assets.

    This of course doesn’t excuse their actions, neither am I claiming that this happens in relationships every time, however it is very important to understand human nature – without naively believing in relationships, no matter their type. We can definitely have healthy, loving and good relationships in life, but we have to try incredibly hard for them and even then there’s no guarantee – neither on our side or the other. Extremely good or bad times are especially big tests of every relationship.

    The lesson of this discovery is that we have to have realistic expectations for people and understand humanity’s temptations. We also have to be aware that not all that glitters is gold, and that people often show us things to be nicer than the truth actually is.

    Sooner or later someone will rob us, lie to us, cheat on us, take advantage of us, take it out on us or do any other negative action. This is more a rule in relationships rather than an exception. Thus it’s incredibly important that we set realistic expectations for people as soon as possible in life, but especially develop our social skills to such an extent that we successfully manage relationships even when things don’t go as planned. And, of course, that we have a firm core in our life and don’t live in a bubble of naivety.

    4. Politics are a large component of life

    What happens in a situation when someone wishes to position themselves on the social/material ladder, but isn’t prepared to invest energy into ensuring the right real value added, a fair competition or maybe doesn’t even have the opportunity for it due an underprivileged situation?

    This leads to politics (the negative connotation of the word), manipulation and exploitation, while in the more extreme cases, it can also end in violence or even wars for natural resources. Politics, manipulation and exploitation are a large part of our world, often already ingrained in the educational and financial system, healthcare, religious institutions and everywhere else. People wish to ensure that their positions are as monopolistic as possible at all levels.

    It’s worth to note that the above-written words don’t only concern politicians but rather the human nature in general. Politics is just the most illustrative example of this part of human nature. Discrediting the opponent, false promises, misleading, exploitation, corruption, manipulation and so on – all of this can be found anywhere, in all industries of humankind, but is most obviously expressed in politics; most such “political” actions simply bring voting points, and who allocates the points other than people. Leadership is always merely a reflection of the people.

    And there is only one reason why there’s so much politics in the world. It’s because it actually works to a great extent. Don’t put too much hope into friends, learn how to take advantage of enemies. Never show your true intentions. Others should work, you take the credit. Avoid miserable people. See to it that people are dependent on you and come to you on their own. Completely destroy your enemy. Make it look like you are stringing up achievements without any special effort. Play on people’s feelings, conjure false promises. And we could go on. Sad but part of real life.

    I see this type of behaviour at every step, and the sooner we resign ourselves to the fact that life isn’t fair and that politics are also a vital part of the human nature, the sooner we can start making better decisions by taking this part of the equation into account. It would be ideal if politics were truly there for managing social situations for the common good, but sadly politics are far too often used for manipulation and gaining benefits without creating any real value added.

    The question that arises with this is whether such an amoral strategy is a sensible survival strategy. It depends on our values, our goals and environment. The more value added that we can create, the more we will be valued in the environments that acknowledge value added and healthy competition. Those are the systems that are striving towards transparency, integrity, healthy competition and collaboration. In a system like this, there is no place for corruption, exploitation etc. However, this doesn’t mean that the human nature is any different in such a system. There’s just systematic effort for trying to direct it onto a more productive path – progress.

    In such a context, it’s also right that we are honest with ourselves and know how much of a politician lies in us or, alternatively, to what extent we are disgusted by political behaviour. But it’s definitely impossible to escape politics in life, neither at a workplace nor in the family or amongst friends (gossiping, for example, is one of the most basic political actions in groups of friends).

    Questioning life

    5. Accept people for who they are, or find new ones

    Changing oneself is incredibly hard; the hardest thing in the world. And each individual has plenty of positive and negative behavioural patterns in their life. Changing a behavioural pattern is nearly impossible. Up until now, I’ve met only a handful of people with enough self-awareness, self-criticism and will to change one of their behavioural pattern.

    Let’s look at a banal stereotypical example, a bit upside down. A young couple. The boyfriend is extremely upset if the girl leaves the toilet seat down; since this had already annoyed his father with his mother. Now three scenarios are possible: 1) boyfriend explains to the girlfriend how vitally important this is for him and asks her to change her behavioural pattern. 2) Boyfriend confronts himself and realizes it’s not a big deal and that he can simply put the seat up, therefore changing his own emotional reaction to the situation. 3) There are daily fights about the toilet seat.

    And sadly 99 % of people will stay with the last scenario, be it in a personal or a business relationship. People change with much difficulty, if we even do at all. We definitely develop, acquire knowledge and experience, but we rarely change in our essence and our habits. Besides this, we humans are often incredibly uncritical towards ourselves, full of ego and thus very easily point fingers at someone else.

    The basic rule of each relationship is that we first take enough time, without prejudice and expectations, to get to know the person. Then we accept each person fully for the way they are. If we are bothered by something in that person to the extent that it’s a deal-breaker, then we don’t count on the person to ever change. It’s simply a deal-breaker. An exception are smaller things, whereby even for a small change, a lot of communication, tolerance and understanding are needed. Even with these smaller matters, it’s better and fairer if we first try to change ourselves, and only then the other person.

    At the end, it absolutely makes more sense to find someone with whom you are more compatible than to change someone. Thus it’s right that we accept people for the way they are and then decide whether they fit into our lives. We patiently communicate on the matter of some trivialities that truly bother us, while we try to changes ourselves for others.

    6. Always be honest with yourself

    The biggest harm we can do to ourselves (and others) is by not being honest with ourselves. When you don’t listen to yourself, you insist on a path that leads to long-term personal dissatisfaction and unhappiness in relationships. The problem of course lies in the fact that our deepest desires are usually inconsistent with society’s expectations or with expectations of people in our life. The second problem is that the path of honesty is usually a much harder path.

    Dissatisfaction in the job. Dissatisfaction with the partner. A new business opportunity. Be it whatever. The larger the change in life or the decision we have to make (marriage, changing jobs, the type of study, longer journeys…), the more we have to be honest with ourselves, the more we have to listen to the voice inside us. Before every important decision, we have to take time for ourselves and see whether this is something that we truly want, truly desire? Do we see ourselves doing this in five years? Is this something that is a part of us and our nature?

    Whenever we feel that something isn’t right for us deep down inside, yet still let ourselves be convinced, a much more difficult situation in the future follows. Dissatisfaction and doubt keep growing. Each time we are dissatisfied, dishonest with ourselves, this has to surface sometime. If we repress these feelings, they fester in us that much more and have to come out somewhere; be it in our health, dissatisfaction, but also in our relationships.

    Adhering to ourselves and the voice inside us is often accompanied by social pressures and pressures that come from expectations of people we are in relationships with; by choosing the right path for us, we often disappoint people and don’t fulfill their expectations. But the only right thing is being honest with oneself. However, we should also expect and understand the same thing with others.

    The sincere path is often also the harder path. This can mean searching for a new partner, new job, developing new skills for switching industries, or for whatever else. Despite all this, it’s right to fight for what we truly want and feel is our real path, while at the same time knowing how to say no.

    The compass is simple. A longer period of positive emotions shows that you are going in the right direction, while negative emotions (anger, dissatisfaction, sadness…), maybe even forcibly repressed ones, warn you that you aren’t on the right path; negative feelings are a signpost that you aren’t on the path that’s meant for you. If you are accompanied by negative emotions, this means that your soul is suffering. The exception is (non life threatening) fear, which is an indicator of what you still have to face in your life.

    7. Environment, trends and macro changes have an incredible influence on our life

    People are much more a product of the environment than we’d dare to admit. It’s scientifically proven that the most successful people on this planet, in any life discipline (sports, business, art…), don’t only have talent and do hard/smart work, but also benefit from an enormous support in the environment. The government, family, religion, school system etc., they all strongly influence our potential and the extent to which we can realize it. But trends and planned structural changes are the ones that influence this the most.

    What presents an incredibly important insight into an individual’s optimal performance is a bird’s view on how the society functions, where we are located, what our starting point is, the forecast of trends, and which environment will be the best for the realization of our goals. This is a discovery I most wish I had understood in my younger years.

    You can’t piss against the wind, no matter how far it carries. The more your values are incompatible with the environment, the more that trends are turned against you and macroeconomic changes are making your life difficult, the harder it is to reach your goals. While it’s true that good times soften the character to a large extent and create naïve people, the range of an individual’s success is significantly limited without the help of the environment.

    Of course despite all this, we mustn’t search for excuses for not working just because the trends aren’t in our favour. However we do have to constantly keep asking ourselves how we can turn the trends and structural changes to our own advantage.

    To everyone in their early twenties (and even later on), I would thus strongly advise to research trends, predictions, structural changes and how they will influence their career development – positively or negatively. It’s important that we’re mobile and set ourselves in an environment where our values and goals can prosper the most.

    8. Reflection and strategy before actions

    Few people read. Even fewer people write something. And even fewer people invest energy into truly thinking before doing. This is especially hard when we’re young, because we don’t have enough experience or a sufficient amount of coordinates to design a more sensible strategy for our actions.

    The most frequent strategy in youth is thus incredibly simple: a dash of inspiration, then onwards without a break. But today, in a creative knowledge-based society, smart work is much more important than hard work. Smart work requires a bit of inspiration, a lot of reflection, some action, reflection again, a bit of action again etc.

    Designing a sensible strategy can save years of work, but what’s much more important is that it can lead us to significantly bigger potential. Oftentimes doing things of the top of one’s head or following emotional impulses without thinking can lead to a situation that’s worse than if we did nothing and indulged in laziness. Regretfully. And the more complex that our environment becomes, the bigger need there is for strategy and profound reflection, if we wish to reach our goals.

    This mostly means three things. The first is that we have to take enough time for an analysis, without doing anything or making any decisions. Getting to know the environment, connections between people, their motivations, the key stakeholders, the decision makers, the trends and everything that goes with it is as important as the actions themselves. Analysing and planning can take weeks, or even months, but they also have their own importance, if they head us into the right direction. By analysing the market I don’t mean only doing research behind the desk, but also doing small experiments that gives us real insights into something (testing our hypotheses).

    Secondly, when it comes to analysis, it is crucial we take a sheet of paper, a pencil and think about our strategy, as well as answer some key questions, such as what is the final goal that we wish to achieve, how will our actions affect others in the environment, what if we don’t succeed etc. On the basis of analysis and consideration, we set clear assumptions about the environment, which we can later correct and adjust based on our actions. The clearer our thoughts are about what we want as the output, the more clearly we can set a strategy.

    And thirdly, talking with the right person can save us years of work, which is why in life, surrounding ourselves with mentors who help us in different fields of life presents an incredible value added.

    Deliberation and strategy are a step further from setting goals. They include the external environment, small steps that confirm or refute our assumptions, engaging the environment in the sense of mentors, and finding alternative paths or goals if our assumptions were incorrect. It’s the hardest to sit down and thoroughly think about something; and yet it’s so important.

    9. Different doesn’t always mean better

    At every turn we can find the underlying philosophy of “be different”. Difference certainly presents an important advantage in a lot of cases, but not always. In reality, being different isn’t even that hard. What’s incredibly difficult is being different and better at the same time. This is an important lesson, since it’s easy to accept the philosophy of being different in one’s younger years, but it’s much harder to understand that you have to be better at the same time.

    The average and generally recommended guidelines for life have their own certain meaning. They suit the majority and guarantee the safety of the entire society. An average diet is the most sensible diet for the majority of people. An average savings plan is the most reasonable for most people. Finishing university makes sense for the majority of people, especially if education isn’t excessively expensive. I’m not saying that this is an optimal way, nor am I saying that it’s the best path for an individual, but it’s the most sensible for the majority. Why?

    Any deviation from the average requires risk, an enormous amount of knowledge, experimentation, trying, falling and also failures that can hurt us significantly more than benefit us at the end. We don’t only need a different approach, we also have to find a better system by trying; namely a system that brings us better results than the one that is generally suggested.

    Let’s look at a concrete example. We have a standardly recommended diet; at the same time, it is common knowledge that such a diet includes too much sugar and that you should add more fruit, vegetables and wholegrain foods into your daily life. Up to here, we are still in the safe and somewhat above-average zone from the aspect of quality of the diet. But we can claim with certainty that such a diet will ensure survival, satisfy the nutritional needs of the body and provide a certain level of health for the average lifestyle.

    Now we wish to go a step further, be it from a health, ethical or aesthetical aspect. Vegetarianism. Veganism. Macrobiotics. High-protein diet. Cabbage diet or whatever else there is.

    Most of these approaches demand almost entirely removing one group of foodstuffs (hydrates, proteins, fat) from the diet. And here is where suddenly appears a certain risk that we won’t be getting all the necessary nutritional substances. This is why more knowledge is necessary for correctly combining foodstuffs, changing our lifestyle etc. With vegetarianism, for example, we can do more harm than good if we don’t possess enough knowledge, and substitute the lack of meat with a larger intake of simple sugars. The more we deviate from the average, the more knowledge we need.

    With this, I am not claiming that vegetarianism isn’t a good diet. I am only saying that if you really wish to benefit from the real value added of this diet, you must have enough knowledge to substitute the loss of animal protein with a suitable combination of plant protein, mustn’t significantly increase the intake of simple sugars, somewhat change your lifestyle at the same time and we could go on. There’s also a question of whether vegetarianism truly suits everyone, as it probably suits someone more and the other less. In short, the purpose isn’t to find reasons for or against vegetarianism, the purpose is to emphasise that each deviation from the recommended is accompanied by a risk.

    It’s exactly the same with career – entrepreneurship, as an alternative to a job; money – investing instead of saving; partnership – polygamy instead of monogamy; sleep – polyphasic sleep instead of eight hours in one piece, and we could go on. Smaller life decisions are no different, for example when it comes to arguments. It’s simple to not agree with someone, we are already different by doing it, we have a different point of view. Justifying it with arguments, however, explaining why our viewpoint is better and maybe even making a synthesis of both viewpoints and slightly changing our perspective is much harder. Despite everything, conflicts are a source of progress if the synthesis of differences leads to something new; different again, but better.

    A big trap also lies in the thousands of books, blogs and other authorial self-help contents that offer shortcuts to success, no matter which area of life you look for. The formula that led somebody to success won’t necessarily do the same for everyone else, including yourself.

    This is why being different doesn’t only mean standing out or taking an approach different to the one of the majority, but rather means that we are prepared to invest drastically more energy into trying, gaining knowledge, failures etc. with the purpose of finding a way that’s perfect for us and allows us a high quality of life, including feeling good in our skin and achieving personal goals.

    If we are prepared to invest all this effort, we can of course strongly benefit from the investment (more energy, more money, more happiness, more whatever else), but the path to a different and better alternative isn’t simple. We oftentimes come to the conclusion that we are most suited by what suits others as well; and we mustn’t close our eyes to this. Being different has no value added if we harm ourselves.

    10. It’s easy to stand out, it’s incredibly hard to truly succeed

    It’s incredibly easy to stand out from the average, as this only requires a bit more work than others invest. If we generalize a bit: all we have to do is go a step or two further than the average person is prepared to.

    But it’s incredibly hard to truly succeed. It demands careful strategic reflection, dedication, focus, help from the environment, hard work, luck and a lot more.

    Being somewhat fitter than an average person isn’t all that hard. If we run a couple of times per week or go to fitness, we are already standing out from the average. However, having a fit and muscly body means doing an extreme diet, long years of training a couple of times per week, a lot of knowledge, food additives, listening to your own body, giving up things, resting etc. Having a fit and muscly body means being completely devoted to health; it’s a way of life. This is why the majority of muscled people are coaches, athletes or training is somehow a part of their professional work.

    Having a bit more knowledge than an average person isn’t hard if we highlight the fact that an average person reads a few books per year. If we want to know a bit more about, for example, sales, then we simply read one book per month for a couple of years in a row, and we will already have more knowledge than an average person, if not maybe even more knowledge than an average salesman. But in case you wish to become an excellent salesman, this requires complete devotion to the occupation, an incredible amount of practice, constant education, improvement etc.

    Earning a bit more than average isn’t hard. We invest into a good education, develop a very sought-after skill and get an afternoon job if necessary. But becoming rich demands a completely different approach, owning resources or a high managerial/professional position, being at the very top of a certain industry, be it entertainment, art or anything else. Becoming rich is practically a lifetime project that demands strategy, knowledge, the right trends, bravery, luck and many other things.

    In short, being better than average requires a bit more effort and invested work; but to truly succeed in life, no matter the field, is a lifetime project that demands total commitment of the individual and using levers of the environment (market, social, financial…). So if we wish to truly massively succeed, it’s incredibly important that we don’t only have lifetime commitment and hard work, but also incorporate all the previously written life discoveries into our decision.

    11. Techniques of an Agile and Lean Life

    And finally, I wish I had known the techniques of the Agile and Lean life, which would’ve enabled me to be more productive, more focused and play the game of life even more smartly ten years ago. Well, today these techniques are available to the entire world.

    These are the eleven things I wish I truly knew in my twenties. And what are yours?

  • Zombie life

    The opposite of a successful startup is a zombie company. The opposite of the Agile and Lean Life is a Zombie Life. Zombie life is being stuck in the land of the living dead. You don’t actually live, you just exist. On the one hand, there is no death, but on the other, there is no growth or moving ahead either. It’s just a terrible drain of human energy, only waiting for life to pass by. I know it sounds horrible, but unfortunately many people are living such a zombie life.

    There are ten areas you have to manage in life (yourself, health, relationships, money, career, emotions, competences, fun, spirituality and technology) and if you neglect any of the ten areas or even several of them, you can get stuck in the land of the living dead very quickly. If you don’t fight and push yourself to make progress in all areas of your life, life itself will transform you into a zombie. Use it or lose it. Up or out.

    Practical examples

    If you work a job you hate, you are already living one third of your life as a zombie. Going to work with resistance, hating your boss, trying to do as little as possible, gossiping and complaining about your job to all of your friends is definitely a zombie life. It’s a waste of your talents, your precious time and your energy. There is a perfect career for you, you just have to find it first. You just have to first invest your energy into finding the right fit.

    If you don’t take care of your health, you land in the zombie land sooner or later. Your health is the most precious thing you have. Good health is a must-have condition for working, enjoying life, feeling good about yourself and having good relationships. In my youth, I was extremely overweight. Now I am trying to take care of my health as much as possible. I still have much work to do but hey – I know very well how it feels to be overweight and I know how horrible of a zombie life that is. No great mountain views, no team sports, a worse sex life and so on.

    If you don’t earn enough money, or if you are in a big debt, the quality of your life is also damaged. There is a lot of arguing over whether money really does bring happiness. Well, it has been scientifically proven that it does. When earning less than 75,000 USD per year, money has a big contribution to your happiness. The less you earn, the more every additional dollar means to you. Of course money doesn’t bring happiness if you earn more than 75,000 USD per year, but have crappy relationships and bad health. You have to optimize your life as a whole. But when considering money, you should fight to earn at least 75,000 USD per year. It greatly contributes to your happiness.

    Your spouse has a great contribution to the quality of your life. As the saying goes: happy wife, happy life. And vice versa. It’s totally unreasonable to be married to someone with whom you constantly argue, you don’t want to make passionate love before going to bed and you are not a good team in handling the household and chores. That is a real zombie life: being surrounded with people who don’t make you happy, don’t contribute to your growth and don’t support you or empower you. And vice versa.

    Same goes for your friends, coworkers and all other relationships in your life. The more shitty relationships you have in your life, the more of a zombie life you live. In movies, I haven’t seen any zombies that would have good relationships.

    Good relationships, stable health, purposeful work, a positive outlook and a full bank account are the foundations for your long-term happiness. You and your competences are the enablers to achieve all that. You need to work on your knowledge, skills, intelligence, emotions, the social network, your mindset and so on. When you stop improving and developing, you start becoming a zombie.

    You can also add fun, spirituality and technology on top of all that. Fun is about enjoying life and “putting down the saw”, spirituality about a more purposeful life, and technology a leverage to achieve more with a greater pace. All three help you not live a zombie life or encounter situations such as experiencing burnout or questioning the purpose of life. Whether you want it or not, you have to manage all ten areas of your life in order to live a happy life.

    Broke vs. Poor

    Being broke is a temporary situation. Being poor is a state of mind. Same goes for living a zombie life. Your current situation in some areas of your life may be a disaster; you may have experienced a big obstacle, a colossal setback or a real downfall. But what counts is a positive outlook and superior strategic plan. If you see the light at the end of the tunnel, if you see the next small step you can make towards a better life (and actually do it), then you are not a zombie. You are a fighter.

    But if you have given up, if there is no desire to grow, no desire to experience life and to achieve, then you have become a zombie. When you settle for the average, you start becoming a zombie, just waiting for life to pass you by.

    You can easily realize you are becoming a zombie when you are escaping from your life into the TV world, the bad parts of the internet or various other addictions, but also situations when you are “helping others” instead of yourself (dealing with problems of other people when you still have so much cleaning to do in your own life) or when you have many other distractions that distance you from your true purpose. You are on your way to becoming a zombie when you are more and more bitter, ignorant, lazy and bored. Bitching, whining, complaining, blaming others and doing nothing.

    Yes, there will be times in your life, when you will be broke. Your relationships will end. You will lose a job you love. You can get a serious health issue. Life is not easy. There are constant challenges and obstacles and changes. But you have to fight. Your duty is to fight. Your duty is to equip yourself with knowledge, people who empower you, design a superior strategy, and start making steps towards improvements and your ideal self.

    Zombie Tools
    Contemporary Zombie Life.

    You have to escape a zombie life no matter what. Because living a zombie life is a waste of the most precious thing ever – life. Even if you are currently broke, never go poor. Always find a positive outlook you can fight for. There is always a move you can make towards a better life.

    Frogs and zombies

    You become a zombie more or less the same way as you would “cook a frog.” You either make sure that (1) the water temperature is so high that when you throw the frog into the water it will perish in a second, before it can jump out, or you (2) cook it very slowly, increasing the water temperature level bit by bit, making sure the frog isn’t even aware it’s being cooked. The same goes for zombies.

    You can become zombie by making:

    • One or several very big wrong decisions (for example choosing the wrong spouse, industry, career, company, driving drunk and causing an accident…)
    • A series of small wrong decisions (unhealthy diet, not saving any money…)

    Most people become zombies without even being aware of it. They live life as they were taught by the primary and secondary socialization (parents, teachers, television, society…), not even questioning whether it makes sense. But an average diet, an average job, average relationships, average education all bring you a very average life. And in reality, an average life is very close to a zombie life. You don’t want to live an average life. You want to live an extraordinary life.

    The solution is simple, but not easy. You have to set higher standards, you need a superior life strategy and you need to start fighting for your goals and dreams. You need to make extraordinary decisions about how you spend your energy, time, money and talent. You definitely need different strategy than an average person. One of the guidelines for a better than average life is an Agile and Lean Life philosophy. Implement it in your life.

    The second path to a zombie life is making one or several wrong big decisions (for example choosing the wrong spouse, industry, career, company, driving drunk and cause an accident…). The setbacks in this case could be so big that you just give up or don’t find the motivation to go on. When making that kind of wrong decisions, it can take years to correct them.

    Going through divorce, declaring personal bankruptcy, trying to change careers and similar challenges are so demanding that most people just can’t cope with them. Sometimes even external factors cause that kind of a situation and we had nothing to do with it (war, markets meltdown…). Life isn’t fair.

    The solution is, once again, logical but not easy. It’s extremely hard but necessary to avoid a zombie life if you find yourself in a big setback. You need to find a positive outlook, you need to have a superior strategy how to get out of your situation, you have to see the first step you can make and then you need to start fighting. You have to cut your losses and turn a new chapter of your life. Some of the Agile and Lean Life techniques can help you to get easier out of these kind of situations.

    Zombie-land

    Your environment can greatly contribute to your potential zombie life – from the macro level, like your country and the industry you work in, to micro elements, like your relationship, diet and the company’s culture where you work. Among all that there are several factors that you cannot chose completely by yourself, especially at a young age. Some of them not even later in life. For example, for most people changing a country is very hard or even impossible.

    Nevertheless, the brutal fact remains that if you want to make progress in your life, you need an environment and relationships that empower you. Yes, there are always some limitations but there are also always steps towards a healthier environment and relationships. At some point you have to make the changes if the environment doesn’t support you enough. You always have to look for improvements, there is always some optimization you can make.

    The fact is:

    • If you spend most of your time with zombies, you will become a zombie
    • If you work in a zombie environment (country, office, family…), you will also become a zombie, if not completely, then to some extent

    You have to find a way to isolate yourself from negative influences if you don’t have the option of switching to a more positive environment. You have to innovate your way out of the Zombie-land. Maybe by changing your office, maybe by living most of your life in the virtual space (aka on the internet) or in creative co-working spaces, maybe by changing your job, friends, spouse or any other relationship. You know very well what drags you down, you know very well what makes you a zombie.

    What you really need in order to not become a zombie is a positive outlook and a superior strategic plan. Your superior strategic plan should consist of linear and rapid improvments, actions, decisions and moves you will make towards your goals.

    Usually, when implementing improvements, you try to find the local maximum with your current settings, and when you face a real setback but you know that there is still greater potential, you try to find a rapid improvement in a completely new kind of settings.

    When you do a rapid improvement in your life you don’t just do things faster or cheaper, you start doing things in a totally different way. That is how you grow. You grow by finding better ways to do things.

    Whatever happens in your life, never stop growing. Whatever happens in your life, never give up. Whatever happens in your life, remember that there is always a move you can make towards a better and happier life. No matter how difficult your situation is.

    Homework

    There’s a very easy exercise that can be an indicator of whether you are becoming a zombie and you should maybe do a pivot in your personal life and find a better fit. You make a life-satisfaction chart and assess all the chosen areas of life. All you have to do is first draw a scale from 1 to 10 horizontally, and vertically list the key areas of life or the areas you’ve chosen to assess. You assess every area or category of life from 1 to 10. In the second step, you take another look at all areas you assessed with 4, 5, 6 or 7. These are the areas where you’re averagely satisfied, are indecisive about or for which you haven’t taken enough time to make a sound assessment.

    Not knowing where you are and what you want does no good. The average is no good. The truth is that life areas either work or they don’t, you’re either satisfied or you aren’t, there are no middle paths. You either rock or you suck in different areas of life. Therefore, assess life areas again, but now by using only the numbers 1, 2, 3, 8, 9 and 10. In the last step, highlight every 1, 2 and 3 with red, and every 8, 9 and 10 with green. Now you have a clearer picture of the areas of life you should potentially make a pivot. Below, you can find an example of the chart.

    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
    Health X
    Friends X
    Spouse X
    Money X
    Career X
    Emotions X
    Competences X
    Fun X
    Spirituality X
    Technology skills X
    Download a free template of the life-satisfaction chart (table above) that will help you to analyze and assess all the key areas of your life. With performing this exercise you will be able to decide easier on which areas to pivot and also to make sure you don’t become a zombie.
    Download

    Don’t be a zombie. Live your life in the Agile and Lean way.

    Read our manifesto on how to do it.