habits

Reading challenge – The best way to fall and stay in love with reading
There are three types of people in the world. (1) People who seldom read a book in their lifetime, especially after the end of their formal education. (2) People who have loved reading as long as they can remember. (3) And then there are people who slowly grow fond of reading with time.

I belong to this third group. I always loved playing with technology and hated books. Until I stumbled upon an interesting thought: “A good book is definitely the best bargain you’ll ever get in your life”. I love good bargains and a book is definitely the best one.

You pay somewhere between $3 and $30 for a book. The same price as a latte. But unlike sugared coffee, the book stays with you forever.

After you buy a book, you have to invest around 7 – 10 hours to read it (this is the most important part when we talk about books), which is quite a big investment, but please mind all the benefits.

First of all, the author had to spend months and months writing down their thoughts, life experiences or materializing their imagination. By reading the book, you get an opportunity to enter someone else’s mind, find out how they think and perceive the world.

You get a chance to see the world through different eyes.

By reading a book you automatically expand your mind, improve your vocabulary, train your creative potential and analytical skills, improve empathy and much more. You do a brain workout while disengaging from everyday worries.

The benefits of reading a book are completely unfair compared to the investment.

The gains of reading are a no-brainer. But how to grow fond of reading? Actually, you are only around 30 days away from being indifferent about books to falling in love with reading. And it’s the habit that can change your life forever.

The process that will help you fall in love with reading

As I mentioned, I used to hate reading. Now I love reading. It’s the number one activity on my enjoyment list. But how did such a transformation happen?

It’s not really that hard to become a bookworm. I followed a very simple strategy:
1. Find the right topic. In the beginning, it’s essential to find a topic you’re really passionate about. The more passionate you are, the easier it will be to stay with a good book; or several of them. I started with books about ancient Roman Emperors, then startups, and today my passion is psychology. Just go to the library or browse book categories on Amazon until you find something that really fits your interest well. Alternatively, you can ask yourself: if you were a teacher what topic would you teach others?
2. Carefully choose the book. There are more than 1 million new published (300,000) and self‑published books (700,000) each year only in the English language. That’s more than 2,500 new books every single day. You can choose from among more than 130 million books that have already been published. If you don’t put the effort into choosing a really interesting one, you’ll lose interest. Go for the best books on the chosen topic and take some time to do the research, read a free chapter, reviews, forum discussions, quotes and comments.
3. The cat rule. When a cat bears her young ones, she carries them around wherever she goes. You should do the same with your book. Resting on a couch. Have a book with you. Doing the number two. Have a book with you. Enjoying lunch break at your job. Have a book with you. Wherever you go, make sure that the book is with you. Sooner or later, you’ll open it and start reading. And you will absolutely stand out in crowds, in a very positive way.
4. Don’t go to sleep if you don’t read at least one page. Set a goal to read at least 30 minutes every day. Sometimes you’ll manage it, other times it will be too exhausting. You will be too tired, too busy or completely unmotivated. It doesn’t matter. The only rule to really follow is to never go to sleep if you haven’t read at least one page of the book. One page. It takes 2 – 5 minutes. Come on.
5. Think with your own head. You can be a passive or an active reader. Being an active reader is so much more interesting and fun. So, while you read, force yourself to think a little bit; or rather think hard. Vividly imagine the scenes, the plot, the characters or whatever the content is about. Connect explanations in the book with your own life experience. Consider where you agree with the author and where you don’t. Look up new words and try to memorize them.
If you follow these five rules, you will sooner or later read your first book, and then the second one and the third one and so on. Once you witness how your love for reading grows, you will face a new challenge – how to read as much as possible.

There are many tricks to make more time to read, but one of the best way to push yourself into reading more is to join or create a reading challenge for yourself.

Reading challenges can greatly accelerate your reading motivation

Challenging yourself is always a good way to develop a new habit or to complete a very demanding task. That’s why 30-day challenges are a very popular concept in new habit development theory.

In the past, I’ve completed several different 30-day challenges, among others the challenge to write and publish a blog post every day.

A 30-day challenge to read every single day might be a good start at the very beginning, if you are really not fond of reading. But once you are a pretty regular reader, such a challenge is easy-peasy.

Luckily there are many tougher reading challenges to undertake. Let’s look at the concept of real reading challenges.

Popular reading challenges

There are communities all over the world that organize all kinds of reading challenges. Joining such a challenge not only motivates you to read more frequently, but you also get a chance to meet new people, share opinions and perspectives on books, and engage in interesting discussions.

Most reading challenges are based on one of the following frameworks or reading strategies:
1. The “tutti frutti” challenge – Tutti frutti stands for “all fruits” in Italian. It’s usually associated with gelato (ice cream) that’s made of mixed fruits. I use the same term for reading challenges where you read all kinds of different books, from poetry to classic literature and non-fiction. Participating in such a challenge will greatly broaden your horizons in a very short time frame.
2. Deep dive into one topic – If you read three to five books on a selected topic, you’ll know more about the topic than 90% of the people. Find one topic you are really or just a little bit interested in and start learning. Not only will you become a much more interesting person, soon you will find out that knowledge is real power.
3. Genre or author specific – The third kind of challenges are genre‑specific. The selected genre can be anything from business to personal development or psychological thrillers. The books can also be related to a specific author, topic or even a fictional character such as Sherlock Holmes.
4. Book Club challenges – Many book clubs organize different types of reading challenges. You can find online and real-life book clubs, supported by meetups, forums, real life chats or professionally organized events where you can ask authors anything you want.
5. Summer reading challenges – Christmas is usually associated with deepening personal relationships. And summer always seems like a relaxing period of the year, perfect for reading a good book or several of them. Thus, you can find many different summer reading challenges together with book recommendations.
Not to talk only about theory, here are some popular annual reading challenges:
If you need a good idea for which book to read, Goodread’s Listopedia is a very good start. Then don’t forget to check Goodreads reviews and Amazon reviews for every book before you read it, and you can also find a good summary or read a few free pages on Amazon Preview to get a feeling about the author’s style.

Research is really important before you buy and start reading a book. And if you are looking for a real-life book club, try to find one on the Meetup Platform or contact your local library.

My summer reading challenge

For years now, I’ve been reading on a daily basis. Besides regular exercise it’s probably one of the most beneficial habits I acquired. Since I always love challenging myself, not doing a reading challenge would almost be a sin.

Rather than joining a formal reading challenge, I decided to build one for myself. I like to stay flexible and adjust my life settings and goals to situational circumstances; what and how I read is no exception in that.

Here are the bottom lines of my current situation, when it comes to reading and writing:
- I’m putting together a book (“blog to book” with a few extras). But that means it’s hard to simultaneously produce quality content for the blog and putting together a book.
- I have been writing new blog posts for more than a year and a half now. I strive to make every blog post an outstanding piece of content. That takes hard work. A short break from putting together my own quality content would be nice.
- I have a real desire to dramatically build up my knowledge about psychology. I feel like a vessel that needs to be filled with new knowledge. Thus, I currently strongly prefer reading than writing my own content. I want to take advantage of that feeling.
These are the three facts, I decided to build my reading challenge on. What I decided to do in particular is to read 10 books on psychologyuntil the end of the summer (5 traditional authors like Freud, Ericson, Rogers and 5 contemporary authors) and, of course, write really extensive summaries of the books.

I will try to publish a new summary every 7 to 10 days from end of June to end of September.

That’s the reading challenge I will do this summer. The next summer, I will probably read 10 books from one single author. And the summer after that, I might do the “tutti frutti” reading challenge. And then who knows what I might come up with.

If you like a good challenge, why not try the reading challenge. If you are not that fond of reading, it can be one of the toughest challenges you could undertake. But tough builds character.

And if you already love reading, why not challenge yourself in some innovative ways, like reading books on subjects you never read before, or test your limits when it comes to reading; you know, just for fun.
How to become the best version of yourself
You are here on this world for three main reasons. The first one is to experience as many different things as possible and enjoy life to the full. The second one is to create, contribute, share, and leave a positive legacy behind.

And the third reason why you’re here on this planet is to improve, evolve, grow and become the best version of yourself. So the question is: what can you do to make sure you become the best version of yourself?

The initial step towards becoming the best version of yourself is knowing your ideal self very well. The best way to do that is to make a persona of your ideal self (mind-map, notebook with pictures, etc.).

In general, personas are used in marketing for fictional characters representing the ideal customer or a typical representative of a user segment, but they can easily be used to clarify who you want to become.

The more exactly, accurately and sooner you know your ideal self, the easier you’ll get there. When you are clarifying and brainstorming your ideal self (the best version of yourself), there are 7 areas of life where you have to determine your realistic potential and your goals, including metrics of your progress and the strategy of how you will get there.

The 7 areas of life where you have to constantly improve to become the best version of yourself and should be part of your ideal self are:
- Body
- Mind
- Emotions
- Spirit
- Relationships
- Assets
- Career & Legacy
Before we continue to examine each of the life areas in detail, there is one more important fact to note. When you’re setting your goals, it’s extremely important that you consider your starting point.

And when you’re measuring your progress, you should compare yourself only to yourself. Well, to your previous self to be more exact. Other people can be your reference point, but what’s important is that you compete with your status in the past first and foremost.

Now, let’s go into detail of the 7 areas you have to pay attention to if you want to become the best version of yourself.

1. Take outstanding care of your body

Your body is the most amazing thing you will ever own, and without a healthy and firm body, it’s hard to become the best version of yourself. So the first thing you should do in order to achieve your maximum potential and peak performance is to take outstanding care of your body.

For outstanding care of your body, you have to pay attention to three fundamental areas of health:
- Exercise routine
- Healthy diet (minimizing sugar intake, maximizing green food intake, eating healthy fats etc.)
- Following general health principles (getting enough sleep, avoiding stress, loving your body)
- We can add managing any illnesses or weak body points to the list (we all have them)
The good news is that there are very actionable metrics you can use to follow progress regarding your health and how well you’re taking care of your body. So you can have a very clear picture of whether you’re improving your body capabilities and becoming the best version of yourself.

Here are a few core metrics you can measure:
- Calorie intake (macros, type of food etc.)
- Body composition (fat %, muscle size etc.)
- Aerobic endurance (VO2max, how fast you can run a mile)
- Muscular endurance (push-up test, plank test)
- Muscular endurance (one-rep max)
- Flexibility, mobility, stability (yoga poses you can do)
2. Take outstanding care of your mind

The next thing you have to take good care of is your mind. We live in the knowledge society and taking care of your mind is extremely important.

Your mind is the greatest asset to create, deliver and capture as much value as possible on the markets; and you should also take care of your mind to make good life decisions.

To become the best version of yourself, there are a few aspects to taking proper care of your mind. Here are the main ones:
- Make sure you control your mind and that your mind doesn’t control you
- Minimize cognitive distortions with emotional accounting
- Regularly update your brain’s “software” or reprogram your bad habits
- Brainstorm ideas on a daily basis
- Always try new things in life
If you want to achieve your peak potential, you have to take control of your mind; otherwise your mind will hinder your potential instead of supporting you in achieving your peak performance.

If you don’t take over the control of your mind, the mind will instead focus on negative thinking, cognitive distortions and mental masturbation (entertainment).

The best way to take control of your mind is to practice meditation, focus on gratitude and what you already have in life, develop the abundance mindset, become aware of your dominant cognitive distortions and eliminate them with emotional accounting, and take regular updates of your brain’s “software”.

Yes, even if the brain is a remarkably powerful organ, the software it runs among neurons is quite buggy. Extremely buggy, actually. By reading, listening to lectures, talking to people, observing different situations, reflecting and other similar situations, you can update your software to be less buggy.

You also want to regularly improve your creative potential. We can all be creative; you just have to practice. There are two easy ways of developing your creative potential, without becoming an artist or something. Write down new ideas every day and constantly try new things in life.

To sum up, here are some very actionable things you can do to develop your mind to the maximum and become the best version of yourself in this aspect:
- Meditate
- Eliminate cognitive distortions one by one with emotional accounting
- Write down one thing you are grateful for every day
- Be a lifelong learner – constantly develop your competences, read and read a lot, go to lectures and seminars, take online courses, respect knowledge and make sure you acquire a lot of it.
- Did I mention that you should read every day and that you should read a lot?
- Limit mental masturbation activities like watching TV, reading the daily news, spending time on social networks, participating in useless meetings etc. Make sure you become the master of the time management.
- Every day, write down at least 50 ideas. Just open a notebook and brainstorm.
- Always try new things in life – take a new route home, try a new sport or a hobby, brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand, do the opposite of what you usually do, travel, learn a new language, play mind-development games etc. There are so many things you can do and try.
3. Take outstanding care of your emotions

Taking care of your mind already has a very positive influence on your emotions. By focusing on the positive and extensively dealing with your cognitive distortions, your emotions will also become much more positive. But that isn’t enough for you to achieve your peak performance.

Your ideal self is kind of a vision of who you want to become. But vision without emotional backup and strong will to act is just an illusion.

That’s why you also need a strong why; strong emotional reason or life mission, why do you want to become the best version of yourself. You have to act out of a sense of mission and inspiration if you want to constantly improve yourself.

You want to have a mission that is bigger than any life problems and obstacles you will meet on your way to becoming the best version of yourself. Only if you have a strong emotional why, a strong sense of personal mission, can you enjoy the benefits listed below.

Benefits that are a must if you want to achieve your peak performance:
- You feel more alive and valuable
- You have no problem with prioritizing tasks
- You can connect more easily and communicate with people much more passionately
- You enjoy the work you do
- You can innovate and be creative much more easily
- You can really have impact on the world and change it
- You can inspire other people to work with you
- You are a more charismatic and energetic person and probably happier as well
Personally, I call acting out of a powerful why transcendence. If you want to achieve that kind of a transcendent state, you have to take outstanding care of your emotions.

Your emotions are the ones fulling your motivation and willpower, not logic. So you must employ your emotions as fuel that drives your improvements.

But how do you do that? Here are a few things you can do:
- Become aware of your emotions with practicing mindfulness
- Employ visual representations (Kanban philosophy)
- The “True North” test
The first step you have to make is to pay close attention to your emotions. You can easily do that by introducing the Happiness index into your life.

Every day (or, even better, twice a day) you mark how you feel on a scale from 1 to 10 (1 – negative emotions, 10 – positive emotions), and then analyze exactly what kind of negative or positive feelings you’re experiencing and why you are feeling that way. Try to ask yourself “why” at least 5 times to get to the core of the problem (the 5-whys technique).

By doing such an exercise, you’ll gain much better understanding of your feelings, what motivates you and what takes motivation right out of your heart. Right after taking a note on the Happiness index chart, you can do the true north test.

Simply ask yourself: are you doing all the things you were born to do? Are you fighting for what you want in life or are you just going where life kicks you (usually those aren’t very nice places called average life or even zombie life).

If you want to achieve the best version of yourself, you have to follow your heart and listen to your gut instinct. You have to gather the courage to start following your true north. You have to start doing things you were born to do (work, love, creating, hobbies etc.).

One more thing that helps with emotional empowerment are visual representations. You’ll react a lot differently if I describe a snake to you or if I show you one on a picture or if you actually encounter one in nature.

Visual elements can motivate you extensively. So visualize, have a vision board, have a Kanban board, go for a “test drive” of what you want out of life. That will help you achieve your peak performance.

It also helps a lot to be emotionally motivated if you:
- Make peace with your past and
- learn to live in the present moment.
4. Take outstanding care of your spirit

Taking care of your spirit means that you have strong faith in life. There are many different ways of taking care of your spirit and all of them are okay, if they help you become the best version of yourself and if you aren’t hurting others with any radical beliefs.

Here are a few ways of how you can take care of your spirit:
- Having extraordinary faith in yourself
- Religion
- Spirituality
If you aren’t a religious or spiritual person, taking care of your spirit can come only from extraordinary belief in yourself.

If you want to do extraordinary things in life, if you want to become the best version of yourself, you must have extraordinary faith in yourself and life.

There are a few signs that show very well that you have extraordinary faith in yourself:
- Putting yourself first (but not in an egocentric way)
- Developing high levels of self-confidence and self-worth
- Having rituals in your life (for example a morning kick-off routine)
- Rewarding yourself even for the small wins
- Forgiving yourself for the mistakes you make
- Regularly celebrating life and being grateful for every day
- Having integrity and making sure you are a good person
- Building your success based on prestige, not dominance
The other two ways to take care for your spirit are religion and spirituality. Praying, doing good, having faith in God, being thankful, helping people and the society, these are all things that bring peace, karma points and general good into your life.

This is how you take care of your spirit and it’s a very important part of your personality and becoming the best version of yourself. You can only become the best version of yourself if you also make this place just a little better to live for generations to come.

Remember, legacy is always greater than currency.

5. Take outstanding care of your relationships

It’s impossible to live a quality and happy life without many healthy and deep relationships; and it’s impossible to become the best version of yourself without having outstanding relationships in life and taking good care of them.

People can make you or break you. People can bring out the worst in you, or people can bring out the best in you. In addition to that, nobody can succeed alone. You need a dream team of people in your personal life and you need a dream team of people in your professional life.

You need a dream team of people in your personal life and you need a dream team of people in your professional life.

Therefore, if you want to achieve your peak performance, you have to strategically build relationships. You have to meet many different people and keep the ones that give you the most in your life. Once you’re an adult, the choice of who you’ll spend time with is completely yours, and you must choose wisely.

In your personal relationships, you have three pillars of love, support and empowerment:
- Spouse
- Family (primary, secondary)
- Friends
Who you choose for your spouse is, in many ways, the most important choice in your life. It’s extremely hard to be happy, successful and achieve your peak performance and ideal self if you fight at home all the time and if there is no love, understanding and tolerance.

Besides your spouse, having a happy family also gives strong emotional foundations and feelings of belonging. And strong foundations give you wings to fly high to your peak potential.

If you don’t have a good connection with your primary family (you haven’t chosen it), make sure you build a loving and caring secondary family.

To feel emotionally secure, take risks and be happy in life, you also need friends and the feeling that the people closest to you will help you if and when things go wrong. Without strong emotional support, you can never take risks to really become the best version of yourself.

In your professional life, you also have three important pillars:
- Boss / Stakeholders
- Coworkers / Cofounders
- Mentors / Mastermind group
You spent almost 1/3 of your time at work. Thus professional relationships can either make your life miserable or encourage you to become the best version of yourself in work-, career- and money-related things.

The first rule is to never work for a boss that you don’t respect and can’t learn from. Then you need many coworkers or cofounders if you have your own business and they should always push you towards new challenges and professional personal improvement.

You need to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you, who you can learn from and with whom you can do real team work. Last but not least, having mentors or building a mastermind group can help you a lot in becoming the best version of yourself.

6. Take outstanding care of your assets

The last thing you have to take care of if you want to become the best version of yourself are your assets. Assets are what can leverage and accelerate your success and help you to achieve your peak performance on all levels of life more quickly and efficiently.

Assets are divided into two general categories:
- Inner assets
- Outer assets
Inner assets are all the assets that are a part of your personality, who you are and what you’re capable of doing. Examples of inner assets are knowledge, skills, experiences, creativity, self-discipline, values, beliefs, intelligence, passion, your life strategy etc.

The good news is that with inner assets, you can always create, better manipulate or acquire more of the outer assets.

You can easily measure progress and acquirement of your inner assets on the road to becoming the best version of yourself. Here are a few core metrics:
- Domain knowledge you master (number of areas)
- Number of skills you have
- Number of tech skills you have
- How long you can do focused work etc.
Outer assets are all the things that aren’t a part of your personality, but that you can possess and that bring advantages and material comfort into your life. Examples of outer assets are wealth, power, fame, social network, status, contracts, land, goods, technology etc.

The good news is that unlike inner assets, which are limited with biological bounds, outer assets can grow much faster. You can’t read 100x faster in one year, but you can have 100x more money.

It’s even easier to measure progress and acquirement of your outer assets:
- Personal income statement (Income – Expenses)
- Net worth (Assets – Liabilities)
- Your position in the company
- Number of professional connections
- Public and social media influence etc.
Knowing how to properly deal with the inner and outer assets is actually the main secret how people achieve massive success in life.

Now, in order to achieve your peak performance you have to constantly be acquiring new inner assets with everything mentioned previously in this post – taking good care of your mind, body, emotions and spirit. The more you take care of these things, the more inner assets you have.

But it’s not only about acquiring inner assets, it’s also about managing them properly. A ton of theory can’t compare with a gram of practice and real life experience.

To manage your inner assets properly, you have to be aware of them (listing your competences, past accomplishments, performing a personal SWOT analysis etc.), and then put them to good use by creating (innovating), delivering (marketing) and capturing value (getting paid).

You have to strategically offer your inner assets on the markets, be it as an employee, self-employed individual or business owner.

The last step to becoming the best version of yourself is to strategically start acquiring and managing outer assets. In other words, you have to start thinking and acting as an investor.

If you want to be really successful in life, get to your peak performance and achieve massive success, you have to employ outer resources as your leverage, because they can grow much faster than your inner assets.

The main problem is, of course, that acquiring inner assets is already damn hard. But acquiring and managing outer assets is even harder. You need to better understand markets, media, people, money management, and you need to know how to create things that people want. And the competition is crazy.

But that’s what you have to do to become the best version of yourself.

Because only by having enough outer resources, you can invest so much more back into yourself and the people around you. And you actually have enough power to change the world and make it a better place and thus leave a visible legacy behind.

It’s not easy to become the best version of yourself, but it’s definitely worth it. And if everything sounds like too much, here’s where you can start easily – start by taking care of your body and the rest will follow.
Short-term past is the best predictor of short-term future
You can go to the best fortuneteller in the world, and it’s still impossible to predict the long-term future. Nobody knows what will happen in 10 years’ time, even less what life has prepared for you or for anyone else for that matter.

There are just too many variables. Your values change over time, you have no idea where the global flows will turn and what kind of life opportunities or tragedies will test your character.

That’s why long-term planning is very ineffective. Any detailed planning for more than a year ahead is useless in most cases. You can’t predict where you’ll be in 5 years, 10 years and even less so in 30 years.

The more fixed your mindset is about how your life should unfold, the more disappointed you will probably be. And big disappointments lead to big pain. That’s why the best approach to the future is to trust yourself that you’ll adjust accordingly to whatever happens.

Consequently, the more reasonable approach to long-term planning is to have a life vision – you have a list of things you want to experience in life, but at the same time stay very flexible about when and how you will experience those things.

And if you manage to bring more than half of the things on your vision list to life, that’s more than enough. In the end, there are so many different experiences that life offers.

You mustn’t be too egotistic and stubborn about your future, but instead constantly adjust bit by bit to the external forces and find a way to surrender to the river of life, while still following your true north.

Surrendering is not about being indifferent or passive, far from it. It’s about maximizing your current life quality and happiness. There’s always a way to find an intersection between your goals and what life has to offer. That’s always a move forward you can make.

The long-term future is a complete mystery. But with short-term planning and predicting, we can definitely be more confident and optimistic.

You can play a fortuneteller at least to some extent when it comes to the near future. Are you wondering how? The best way to predict the short-term future is to look at your (or anyone else’s) short-term history.

How people thought future will look like

Analyze your short-term past and you’ll know more than any fortuneteller

Take a pen and a piece of paper, choose a few core life areas (health, wealth, relationships etc.) along with a few life metrics (net worth, savings, body fat percentage, number of close friends etc.) and analyze them for the past 2 – 3 months.

What kind of decisions did you make, big or small, and what kind of behavioral patterns did you follow?

That’s the closest prediction you’ll get for your next 2 – 3 months. Here are a few examples of questions you can use for the exercise:
- Did you save any money in the past 2 – 3 months?
- Did your fat percentage go up or down?
- How many times per week did you exercise on average in the past few months?
- How much time did you spend with the people you love?
- How many books have you read in the past 3 months?
- How many times did you smile?
- What kind of posture did you have most of the time?
- How many hours per week did you watch TV?
Now you probably know where this is going. If you made zero trips to the gym in the past 3 months, you’re probably not going to go to the gym in the next three months. If you’re getting fat, you’ll probably continue to get fatter in the time to come. If you haven’t saved any money in the past few months, there is only a small probability you’ll save it in the near future.

Short-term behavioral patterns and near-past decisions are the best predictors for the short-term future. And it’s quite simple.

Stupid decisions and bad habits lead to a poor future. Smart decisions and healthy habits lead to a bright future.

There are always trends present for all areas of your life, and you must fight to make sure the trends are going in the right direction most of the time.

Old habits die hard, that’s why short-term can predict short-term future

As we said, the only way you can predict anything with a relatively high accuracy is if you have a long and stable history. But there is one more very important element.

The longer and the more stable the history, the more accurately can you forecast the short-term future; and you can also have a better general sense of how the long-term future could look like, unless some disruptive changes happen.

That’s why big established companies have a much easier job preparing short-term and long‑term plans than startups do. But don’t be fooled, even big companies are not immune to wrong long-term predictions.

Like Nokia, most established companies sooner or later experience big setbacks, crashes and with them unexpected market trends and new enemies. That happens especially when big corporations don’t know how to adjust. And trust me, it’s hard to be big and flexible at the same time.

It’s very similar in personal life. The longer and more stable the history, the easier it is to predict the short-term future.

If somebody never ever exercised in their life, there’s a big probability they won’t start tomorrow. If a person never saved a penny in their lifetime, you can have great doubts that they will in the future. And if somebody cheated on all their previous partners, why would you be the exception?

In the same way, you can play with seasonal predictions.

For example, I exercise outdoors much more in the summer than in the winter. I tend to gain some fat during the winter. There is a minimum amount of income I have to earn to save money. And with age, human needs tend to change.

But in general, things stay the same in a short time period. You probably know the saying that old habits die hard or that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. These proverbs do hold great life wisdom.

Look at someone’s past and the more obvious and stable it is, the more confident you can be about their future; and the same goes for your future.

Nevertheless, you have to make sure you don’t get too confident in your predictions. Because people can change or, even more often, life kicks them in the butt and they are forced to adopt new behavioral patterns (people usually out of inspiration or desperation) .

History repeats itself, unless you do something

Behavioral patterns have the tendency to repeat themselves, and consequently they have a great influence on one’s destiny. But luckily you have the power to change your behavioral patterns at any time.

You can start making smarter decisions with your next one. And you can do it out of inspiration, desperation or purely by growing tired of a life strategy that doesn’t bring you any results.

That’s the greatest personal power you have, now and forever. At any time, you can stop with negative habits or reinforce the healthy ones. At any time, you can start making better decisions. That’s the personal power you possess to make history.

From tomorrow on you can:
- Start saving 10 % of your income every month
- Keep your food intake in a moderate caloric deficit
- Take enough time for yourself and exercise two or three times per week
- Spend an hour or two with people you love every day, without any distractions
- Read at least one page of a book before you go to sleep
- Smile at every person you meet
If you’re not doing these things yet, that’s how you’ll turn your life around. You have the power to make sure your short-term future doesn’t look like your short-term past, if it’s a negative one.

Remember that the hard road gets easy with time, and the easy road gets hard. That’s the surest long-term prediction that can ever be made.

Unpredictable external forces

You have the power to change your habits and thus reshape your destiny. But at the same time, you’re also greatly influenced by all the external forces – your environment.

The environment is a very important part of your destiny’s equation. And you (or anyone else for that matter) have a somewhat limited influence on the environment. That’s why it’s so hard to predict the long-term future.
- You might meet an old buddy who will convince you to start going to the gym tomorrow
- You might get ill, and then take extraordinary care of your health
- Someone in your life might die and the experience might completely reshape your values
- There might be a raise waiting for you at your job, and then you decide to save the surplus, even though you might never have done that before
- Or you might lose a job and start your own business
There are so many forces beyond your control, it’s impossible to know what will happen in the long-term future. You know the saying: if you want to make God laugh, make a (long-term) plan.

Life has so many tools for changing your life path. You can get inspired, experience a life collapse, find yourself in a completely new environment, get an unexpected offer, experience unexpected loss or even meet the love of your life on the other side of the planet.

You aren’t completely powerless in these kind of situations, but your power is limited. With hard and smart work, you can increase the number of good things that can happen to you.

You always have the power to let unexpected positive influences into your life and to reject all the bad forces. And in the end, you can always adjust and find your next best move.

Resistance means being inflexible by default. So, don’t resist, but rather adjust. And when life gives you a hard time, you can always reframe it in a more positive way or find a more redemptive narrative.

Your greatest power is to always look at things from the bright side, to find the positive in the negative. That’s how you can deal with unexpected external forces. Don’t try to predict them, adjust to them.

Where is your personal history leading you?

As we said, short-term history is a very good predictor of short-term future. Do a very extensive analysis of how your past decisions and behavioral patterns led you to the point in your life where you are at this particular moment.

Then ask yourself where your current behavioral patterns and decisions are going to lead you in a month, a few months’ time, one year’s time or even further ahead.

The choices you make today have an impact on your life for years. Thus, make sure you make the right choices, make sure your short-term history is leading you into a bright short-term future.

And in the long term you’ll do just fine if you live by a smart life strategy, follow healthy habits, make smart decisions and last, but not least, if you properly adjust to all the experiences that life has prepared for you.
All the major reasons why you should eat slowly
Barry Allen (or The Flash) might be the fastest human alive, but I can definitely eat faster than he ever will. There are many potential explanations why I eat that fast.

It might be because my parents ate fast. It might be because the oldest 0-type blood runs through my veins, remembering the ancient times when fridges hadn’t been invented yet and you had to immediately eat your whole catch. Or it might just be gluttony. It’s probably a combination of all those things.

There’s one thing that could put me in the Guinness book of world records (I can eat 4 bananas under 1 minute), yet eating slowly is some of the best health advice ever when it comes to diet and nutrition. How unfair can life be?

I must put tremendous effort into eating slowly; and to be completely honest with you, I manage to do it approximately half of the time. To stay optimistic, that means I’m halfway there.

Based on my own observations and some research, let’s look at the main reasons why you should eat slowly; or at least torture yourself to do so.

Why to eat slowly?

You will eat less food

It takes around 15 to 20 minutes for your brain to become aware that your stomach is taking in food. If you eat the whole plate in like 5 minutes, you still feel hungry. Your brain assumes that your stomach is still empty. Try it.

I did it several times, and it’s true. When I eat slowly, namely for more than 20 minutes, the feeling of being fed kicks in. And eating any food in less than 20 minutes keeps me hungry. I’m like: I just ate, what the heck is going on with my appetite?

A trick you can do is to start with a hot soup or a salad. It’s impossible to eat salad fast. You need to chew all the leaves. A cow has four stomachs, and still needs to chew grass for a long period of time. You only have one stomach. That means even more chewing.

It’s similar with a hot soup. You need to eat it very slowly, waiting for every spoonful to cool down; or else you burn your tongue. In summary, eating slowly is the best advice when it comes to portion control. And portion control leads to losing weight.

You don’t overclock your stomach

I have very sensitive stomach acid. If I eat very fast, my stomach acid gets irritated immediately. Too much food at once keeps you bloated, clogged, tired and with too much stomach fluid. If you eat slowly, on the other hand, you give your stomach a manageable workload. That has several side benefits.

First of all, with slow eating you properly chew the food. Since digestion already starts in your mouth with saliva, that saves additional work for your stomach. Secondly, with slow eating all the food gets properly digested, which leads to fewer digestive problems. And you avoid burping, which is very nice, especially if you’re in public.

You can enjoy the food and practice mindfulness

Pay attention to food!

There are at least two aspects to food. One is to survive and the other is to enjoy it. Food has always had an important role in all kinds of pleasurable and social activities.

But here’s the thing. If you eat quickly, it’s kind of impossible to really enjoy food; or your company. Only eating slowly gives you the chance to dedicate part of your attention to the food – taste, texture, mixture of tastes, decoration, and so on.

There’s also a thing called mindful eating. You strive to be completely present in the moment, with your attention completely focused on every bite that you take in your mouth. You try to observe and sense as many things about the food as possible.

That way you practice being present in the moment, you train your attention span and, of course, you eat slowly, which brings many other health benefits we mentioned above.

Taking slow bites calms you down and makes you be present in the moment.

Surround yourself with slow eaters

In my country, we have this stupid game for kids, in which the one who finishes the meal first is called “the golden bird”. The competition forces kids to eat quickly from a young age.

I’ve been raised in a fast-eating family, so we all competed to see who the golden bird would be. I always won, of course, so no wonder that I was extremely obese when young.

Today, the situation is quite different. My girlfriend is an extremely slow eater. When I’ve already finished the whole meal, she’s still chewing her first bite. And then I feel kind of awkward.

Watching her eat slowly absolutely has a positive influence on me eating slowly. And if I’m in a fast-eating mood, I take longer breaks between the dishes, waiting for her to “catch up”.

As always, your environment has a great influence on your habits and who you become. Surrounding yourself with slow eaters will force you to eat more slowly.

It’s the ultimate training for self-discipline

We all need food to survive. Food is something very primal that plays a central role in our lives. That’s why it’s so hard to be disciplined when it comes to eating habits, especially to your sugar intake. No wonder the world is getting more and more obese.

Consequently, fasting and slow eating are the ultimate exercises of self-discipline. If you can train yourself to go without food for a longer period of time (with a healthy limit) and if you can train yourself to eat slowly, you can achieve anything in life.

The whole world lies in front of a person who is disciplined, persistent and focused. Luckily, you can start training your self-discipline with your next meal.

Trick yourself into eating slowly

In the fast food society, slow food is absolutely the way to go. Your digestion will improve, you’ll eat smaller portions, you’ll do your digestive track and overall health a great favor and in the end, you might even lose a few pounds of fat. And let’s not forget that you’ll also enjoy life more.

What more can you ask for?

But if you are like me, eating slowly is not something that comes naturally to you. So, it makes sense to trick yourself into lazy chewing. Here are a few ideas how:
- Count to 20 chews every time you take a bite (it won’t work with soup)
- Practice mindful eating (you know, observing every possible detail of every single bite)
- Set a timer to 21 minutes and adjust the eating pace accordingly
- Drink a glass of water before you start eating
- Don’t eat in front of the TV
- Take 10 very deep breaths before you start with your meal
- Use several smaller plates
- Always sit down behind a table to eat
- Eat more foods that are high in fiber or protein (salads etc.)
- Put the fork down in between bites
- Use small spoons or chopsticks
- Avoid sugar to prevent insulin spikes
Your stomach pays more attention to the food’s volume than calories.

Pay attention to the “fast food” triggers

Pay attention to the situations in which you repeatedly eat really quickly. I noticed there are some situations that trigger in me the need for eating speed. Examples of my triggers are:
- If my blood sugar drops after not eating for a longer period of time
- When I get emotionally upset, which leads to emotional eating
- If I have a really busy day and I try to be very productive
- When I don’t pay enough attention to my basic needs, because of “higher goals”
- If I’m really excited about something
Some triggers can be easily removed. In my case, a good example would be the sugar spikes. If I follow a consistent eating schedule, I can easily avoid any extreme hunger. Sometimes when I’m busy, working in the flow, I simply forget to eat. So, I aim for 80 % perfection. That’s a good enough goal for me.

And some triggers, like emotional hunger, can’t be easily removed. I have no idea who or what will piss me off tomorrow. In such cases, I either find a healthy surrogate for food or sometimes I just eat fast, forgive myself, and make sure that I eat my next 20 meals or so very slowly.

It’s much better to forgive yourself than burdening myself with additional guilt. Just don’t forgive yourself every single meal.

Knowing yourself is the best way to teach yourself slow and mindful eating. If you aim for 80 % perfection, you’ll be just fine. Your next meal is a great opportunity to start practicing slow eating. All hail slow food!
The one change that matters and the one metric that matters
Corporate finances for established companies and innovation accounting for startups are extremely wide‑ranging and quite complicated topics. You have to be really good with numbers and understand different business concepts well to properly measure the performance of a company.

In corporate finance, we know financial accounting, performance reports (balance sheet, income statement, cash flow), ratios (profitability, leverage, liquidity, efficiency), financing structure, tax optimization, working capital management, and so on. It takes months, if not years to understand everything, especially in practice. But in the end, it all comes down to one thing – cash flow.

There are only two types of businesses – the ones that are making money and the ones that are losing money. The startup phase is one big exception. Almost all businesses lose money in the startup phase.

That’s why we measure startup progress differently, with innovation accounting. The core question in the startup phase is whether there is anyone out there willing to use the product and then pay for it.

Innovation accounting is also quite complicated. In innovation accounting, we know many different types of metrics, funnels, progress analyses (like cohort analysis), and methods of testing what works best. But in the end, it all comes down to one thing – the one metric that matters or OMTM.

It’s absolutely important that a company operates on high moral ground, builds quality and valuable products, takes good care of employees, other stakeholders and community, respects the environment etc., but if the company isn’t making money, there is soon no company at all. And if a startup isn’t focused and progresses fast enough in OMTM, it will never grow into a successful company.

In the end, it all comes down to one thing in business – cash flow or OMTM.

OMTM – The one metric that matters

The one metric that matters in the startup world shows if a company is building something that people want to use and pay for or not. It answers if there is any value in the product or points in the right direction of how to build it. Together with other metrics, it helps company management build a sustainable business model around the product.

The one metric that matters is always simple, actionable, you can easily compare it with the past results, and it answers the most important questions related to the progress of the company.

It forces you to draw a line in the sand, it completely focuses you actions and inspires a culture of experimentation and innovation (source: Lean Analytics). It’s a goal you hang on the main wall in the company and then everybody is fighting for.

We can, of course, use the concept of OMTM pretty well in personal life.

What is stopping you in life?

OCTM – The one change that matters

Ask yourself: What is the one change, one single change that would really completely transform the quality of your life? What is that one thing that’s dragging you down? One thing that is just too painful to deal with? What is your characteristic drawback that is fu*king with the quality of your life the most?

We all have it. Usually people know what it is. Sometimes they don’t. But we all have it. If you know it, good. If you don’t, take a few minutes to self-reflect and analyze what it could be. Most often it comes down to stupid beliefs and bad habits like:
- One big destructive personality character
- Extremely poor money management
- Being drawn to shady people and environments
- Eating an extremely poor diet
- Being awfully unfit
- Going from one abusive relationship to another
- Working for a boss who is an asshole
- Being too ambitious or not ambitious at all
- Not believing in yourself
- Being sure you aren’t good with technology
- That one fear that’s holding you back
- Too many negative thoughts and emotions
- Extremely poor time management
- Scarcity mindset
- Other similar toxic beliefs or behavioral patterns
What is that one thing that’s holding you back? We all have strengths and we all have weaknesses. You can analyze all of them by performing a personal SWOT analysis. Furthermore, we can divide weaknesses into two categories:

The ones that matter and the ones that don’t. Among the ones that matter, there is one weakness that matters most. That should be your focus. That’s the change that can bring the biggest positive impact to your life.

For example, I am really good with all analytical things. That’s one of my strengths. But I am really bad at all sports that involve a ball. I just can’t catch a ball. But that is currently an unimportant weakness, because there are many other sports I can do. I’m not and don’t want to be a professional tennis player.

At the moment, my biggest weakness that matters is that I’m too critical (especially the outer critic is working overtime). That’s the weakness that greatly hinders the quality of my life. A quote from Mark Manson points to the solution for my outer critic: “Challenge yourself to find the good and beautiful thing inside of everyone. It’s there. It’s your job to find it. Not their job to show you.”

Now the time has come for me to deal with it. My OCTM at the moment is – when I interact with a person do I find something I like about them or something that bothers me? One or another, there is no third option.

Dig deep to find the reason why it’s so hard to change and then act

There are two ways how you can change yourself and deal with the one change that matters. One way is the behavioral approach, which means that you go straight to changing your behavioral patterns, without paying any attention to your thoughts and other inner processes. You kind of force yourself to act different than usual.

The second approach is the cognitive approach, which states that you have to first change your thoughts and the behavior will follow. You have to first understand what’s going on with you, and then the change comes from within. You feel how you change yourself in your bones. The cognitive-behavioral approach, a mix of both, works best. You can read more about it in the article on how to upgrade your brain.

Behavioral-cognitive approach to change is the toolbox we all have at disposal to deal with the one change that matters. OCTM is usually such a painful and hard change to implement that you must attack it from all sides. You have to understand why you’re sabotaging yourself and then change how you think, talk and act.

The one change that matters most always has a deep toxic underlying belief, and you have to dig deep to find it. Only by digging deep can you understand why you are as you are and then change it. Self-reflection and the 5-whys analysis are great tools for that. Sit down, take a piece of paper, and start asking yourself all the tough questions.

Why are you as you are? Who was like that in your family? Who was labeling you so you really started to believe that way? Is there any evidence that your beliefs are false? Where does the real pain come from? With what kind of a cognitive distortion do you have to deal with? How would you feel if you did the opposite? Why does it hurt so much? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

If we go back to my example, my inner and outer critic are so strong because I was always criticized. The outer critic helps me create distance in relationships and protects me from getting hurt.

When you dig dep into your big drawback, you’ll find very similar reasons. Your parents were bad with money, they labeled you as non-practical, you were never allowed to do something, and so on. You can help yourself with the list of the ways how not to raise a child.

If you dig deep enough, you will find the underlying reason. It will hurt, it won’t be pleasant, but it’s the first step towards change. Nevertheless, knowing the underlying cause solves one part of the equation. Knowing why is not the final solution yet. The other part of the equation is actually changing your strategy, goals, vocabulary, behavioral patterns and actions.

You do that by consciously deciding and making a new agreement with yourself – from now on, I will do things differently. Then you consistently do things differently day by day. When you fail, and you will fail, you correct your behavior next time. You do it differently again and again until you change yourself and you are finally able to follow a sounder and more rational life strategy.

You finally start saving money. You go to a technology course. You stop losing your temper. You build yourself a motivational environment. You terminate abusive relationships. You start taking care of your health. You raise your ambitions or, on the other hand, start being satisfied with good enough. You face your fears. And so on.

Focus on the one change that matters

Close your eyes and try to imagine how life would be different if you could finally face that one change that matters. How would the quality of your life be better? Would you finally enjoy a full bank account, healthy relationships or high energy levels? Would you finally work on something that is thrilling and exciting? Would you finally start living up to your full potential?

People change because of inspiration or desperation. They either get inspired to change their lives or they are forced to do it. Don’t wait until you’re completely desperate. Don’t wait until the pain is too much to bear or you’re too deep in shit so your only option is to get yourself out of it.

Instead act out of inspiration. The sooner you face the painful reality, the sooner you face that one personality characteristic that’s dragging you down, the sooner a better life will begin.

Since it’s so hard to deal with that one change that matters most, it often makes sense to completely focus on changing that one thing. Like successful startup companies and businesses do. That’s why we call it the one thing.

The best way to face it is to forget about any other change or improvement, any additional project or investment, and concentrate all your effort, stamina, resilience, resources, creative and analytical potential and cunningness to deal with that one change that matters.

Stop running away, stop hiding, and face the one change that maters.

If there is something that’s really dragging you down, if it’s obvious how your life will soon collapse under too much debt, fat, abusive relationships, negative thoughts or anything similar, drop everything and focus on changing that one thing.

Prepare a Goal Journey Map for yourself, build a superior change strategy, choose the right one life metric to measure your progress, dig deep, reprogram yourself, change your behavior, monitor your progress daily, and don’t stop until you become a better version of yourself.

When it comes to dealing with the one change that matters, there are only two rules – (1) face it ASAP and (2) never retreat, never surrender.
30 Day Challenge – One of the best ways to develop new habits
A 30 Day Challenge is a proven strategy for implementing new healthy habits in life. It’s a great way to try new things, keep life variety high and undertake new challenges without putting too much pressure on yourself.

People do all kinds of challenges, for taking better care of their health, doing various type of art or pushing themselves through fears that always hindered their life. You can find many success stories online in different blog posts and forums.

If you’ve never done any 30 Day Challenge, you absolutely have to try one. There is no completely fulfilled life without at least one successfully performed 30 Day Challenge.

You have to know the extraordinary feeling of being proud of yourself on the last day, right after you complete the 30^th repetition; and then you might even stick to the new behavioral pattern, who knows.

In this article, you will learn everything you need to know about 30 Day Challenges, including:
- How 30 Day Challenges nicely take away self-doubt and pressure from changing yourself
- Why 30 days is a period just long enough to assess if it’s worth it to stick to a new habit
- My personal experience with the last 30 Day Challenge I performed
- More than 70 ideas for what you can do as your first or next 30 Day Challenge
- Other interesting insights and facts
Limited time commitment releases the pressure

Every desire to permanently change yourself is filled with at least a little pressure and self-doubt. The problem is that doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.

It’s hard to change yourself. It’s extremely hard to start with a completely new lifestyle and do it forever. Forever! Who can be disciplined forever? That brings a huge pressure into your life. Consequently, you may do nothing instead.

30 Day Challenges remove the doubts over whether you have the stamina to persist at something new forever. You have to persist only for 30 days, no longer. 30 days is nothing compared to forever. Anyone can persist for 30 days.

You can absolutely persist for 30 days at any reasonable challenge you set for yourself.

Great way to experiment with what works and what doesn’t

30 Day Challenges are an excellent way to do experiments in personal life and test if something works for you as an individual or not.

Persisting at something for 30 days is a period just long enough for you to get the whole picture of how the change affects your life – physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, socially and materially. It’s like testing a shareware software for 30 days and then deciding if you buy it or not.

Here’s the thing. Usually when you implement a new change, the following happens. The first two to three days you ride the motivation wave, you’re proud of yourself and your discipline muscle is still functioning. After the first few days, the crisis occurs. The motivation perishes and the only thing left is willpower. You feel more tired, exhausted and emotionally irritated by the change. The crisis can last from one to two weeks.

Somewhere in the third week, things get stabilized and the crisis goes away. You know that more than half of the challenge is behind you, so you don’t have to persevere for much longer. Somehow you need less and less discipline every day. Your body, emotions, mind, spirit and people in your life get used to the new behavioral pattern. You can start measuring if you are getting the results and changes you want or not.

At the end of a 30 Day Challenge, you most often have a very clear picture of how good the change is for you. Doing something new for 30 days is usually enough to see the changes on your body, blood, moods, emotional health, social life, financial statement or whichever life metric you want to improve.

If things go in the direction that you want, you can keep the change in your life, if not, you can simply pivot to something new, for example a new 30 Day Challenge.

Consistency is the key to developing new habits

The good news is that it takes around 30 – 60 days to develop a new habit. After performing a 30 Day Challenge, it’s much easier to persist, towards 100 days, 365 days and then for however long you want to do something new.

Beginnings are always the hardest. If you slice and dice forever into small 30 Day Challenges and then 1 Year Challenges, you may even get to forever one step at a time.

The best way to keep consistency and really do a 30 Day Challenge is to visualize it on a calendar (Kanban principle). Stick a really big calendar on a wall in your home, with 30 boxes, one box for every day. Then draw a red cross in a box each day right after you complete the new desired action.

At the end, you want to have 30 crosses on your calendar. Having such a calendar helps a lot. The moment you wake up and see the calendar you’ll be ultra-motivated to perform the new habit.

Practical examples

I just completed a 30 Day Challenge and learned so much

In August, I decided to write and publish a blog post every day.

The reason behind it was pretty simple. August is always the worst month in terms of traffic, since people are enjoying their holidays and spending more time outside. I wanted to meet my monthly traffic growth goals, and posting more content was my strategy to achieve that.

Besides that, it was a great exercise to train my writing attention span. The rules for my 30 Day Challenge were pretty simple. I only followed two: (1) Wake up early and write until you’re spent. (2) Publish a new blog post every day. That’s it. I successfully completed the challenge, and the findings and results were quite interesting.

I wrote around 150 letter pages. That’s basically a whole book. I successfully published a blog post every day. That was 31 blog posts, one extra since August has 31 days. I had the all-time most successful month regarding traffic to my blog. I definitely strengthened my writing muscle and enjoyed the challenge, but there were also a few downsides.

One big downside is that I was hurrying all the time to write as much as possible. Style and clarity began to suffer. I don’t like putting quantity over quality, no matter what I do in life.

Next to that, if you do too much of anything that you love, you start hating it. In the end, I couldn’t wait for August to end, so I could take a break. You can definitely get fatigued if you exaggerate with anything, and it takes all the enjoyment away from the activity. Nevertheless, it was definitely worth it. I only had to do it for 30 days, and that’s always manageable.

Here are the blog posts I published as my 30 Day Challenge:
1. Timing is everything – here is how to hit the perfect timing
2. The 5 Whys technique – dig deep to find the root cause of any problem
3. Emotional flashbacks – when your emotional response is out of proportion
4. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving – Book Summary
5. The execution mode – without execution skills everything is futile
6. Learning is useless, validated learning is everything
7. Rapid prototyping for designing a superior life strategy
8. This is how to do experiments in your personal life (outside the bedroom)
9. Business Model You – Book Summary – Reinvent your career
10. Regular daily reflections will change the quality of your life forever
11. You know nothing, so always put data before rhetoric
12. Branching and forking – the ultimate way to stay agile in life
13. Goal journey mapping – The superior strategy to achieve any goal
14. Short life stories – clear goals with a powerful why
15. Vision list prioritization or which goals to pursue first
16. The only goal setting strategy that really works in the 21st century
17. Immediately stop wasting your life
18. How much relationship drama is just too much?
19. Finding the balance between doing and being for all the workaholic
20. Stupid decisions that can ruin your whole life in a second
21. Don’t worry about failure, because you only have to be right once
22. Life is just a dream – not really, but the idea can be useful
23. A place to escape everyday life and reconnect with yourself
24. Super healthy foods you simply must eat every day
25. Hour of power – take one hour daily to invest into your future
26. Wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups
27. The proven ways to stop taking things personally
28. Your mind is like a garden that needs a good daily care
29. How long you should practice when you’re learning something new
30. Daily cold showers will make you healthy, attractive and sharp
31. Optimize your life for productivity and flexibility
That was a lot of work done.

I did several other 30 Day Challenges in the past (and even 365 Day Challenges). Some of them ended successfully with me implementing a new habit into my life, others gave me mixed feelings, like the writing challenge did. For example, I didn’t drink alcohol for one year. Nothing, not even a sip at big celebrations. It felt great. Then I decided to do something for my body every day for 30 days and it also felt great.

Once, I also decided to brainstorm business ideas every day for a month. It was an extremely good experience and I found many great ideas. On the other hand, I ate only raw food for a year which ended awfully, and also completed some other challenges that didn’t end so well.

At the end, it’s all about experimenting and finding what works for you and what doesn’t, where is the limit when you still enjoy the activity and where too much good turns into bad. It’s about finding the right balance between trying new things, being persistent and listening to yourself.

There are so many ideas for a 30 Day Challenge

There are so many different types of challenges you can do. One thing you can do is to pick one of your behaviors that you don’t like about yourself and do the opposite for the next 30 days.

You always leave a tip for a waiter, even if they don’t deserve it? Leave no tip to anyone for a month (as a side note, a tip is not a mandatory or always expected thing here in Europe as it is in US). You always listen to your friend complaining? Listen to no zombie for a month. You never initiate a conversation with a stranger? Initiate a conversation every day.

Life experiment ideas

Well, you can even do a 30 Day Challenge to try something new every day, then pick the thing you liked the most and do it for the next 30 days. The only thing 30 Day Challenges require is a little bit of boldness, curiosity and creativity.

They are simple, straightforward and they work. Below you can find 70+ additional ideas for what to try as your first or next 30 Day Challenge.

Body level 30 Day Challenges
- Take a cold shower
- Get up early
- Get 8 hours of sleep
- Don’t drink alcohol
- Don’t smoke
- Don’t eat anything sweet
- Go for a walk
- Run
- Do squats
- Do 100 pushups
- Pick any of the 30 day exercising programs
- Do yoga
- Do intermittent fasting
- Don’t eat meat
- Take stairs
- No coffee
- Gluten-free food
- Try polyphasic sleep
- Take bike to work and back
- Cook healthy dishes
- Cook with no repeating dishes
- Sup, skate, longboard
- Learn to dance
- No masturbation
- Drink only water
Emotional level 30 Day Challenges
- Smile 10 times per day
- Hug somebody
- Make love
- Keep a journal
- Do something that scares you at least a little bit
- Don’t complain
- No swearing
- No porn
- Write a love poem
- Don’t get mad
Mind level 30 Day Challenges
- Read for one hour
- Read a book summary
- Write a book (you can do it with joining National Novel Writing Month)
- Write a blog post every day
- Upload a YouTube video
- Draw or create any kind of art
- Take a photo
- Meditate
- Learn a new language
- Learn interesting facts about one country per day
- Learn something completely new
- Go on technology detox
- Don’t use your mobile phone
- Don’t watch TV
- Don’t read any news
- Watch a documentary
- Practice a skill
- Use a new software
- Write down all of your business ideas
- Play an instrument
- Memorize as many Pi decimals as possible
- Solve IQ tests
- Study a chosen topic
- Write with your left hand
- Use only the keyboard on your computer without a mouse
Soul level 30 Day Challenges
- Write down something you are grateful for
- Write down one thing you like about yourself
- Pray
- Read the Bible
- Do one random act of kindness
Social level 30 Day Challenges
- Make your spouse breakfast
- Learn a new board game (poker, chess …)
- Call an old friend
- Meet someone new
- Ask someone out on a date
- Don’t lie no matter what
- Go to a meetup
Resource management 30 Day Challenges
- Have no calendar
- Sell one of your items on eBay
- Clean something
- Devote only 10 minutes to e-mail
- Have no meetings
- Don’t use your credit card, operate only with cash
- Use a virtual assistant for 2 hours
- Say no to everything and everybody
- Say yes to everything and everybody (just don’t tell people about your challenge)
- Use only reusable packaging
- Use only green energy
- Rent a car you’ve always dreamed about
- Work on your additional income in the afternoons
- Take 30 days of vacation
Homework

Choose your next 30 Day Challenge and start now

It’s time for action. One big mental shift you can do is not to be frustrated by obstacles, changes and problems in life, but to see them as challenges you can’t wait to undertake.

You should love all the challenges that pop up in your life; and you should constantly challenge yourself to grow, create, love and connect with new people. One great way to do that is by regularly doing 30 Day Challenges.

To sum things up, 30 Day Challenges remove the pressure of being forever disciplined, they’re a great way to experiment in personal life and get first-hand insights into whether something works for you as an individual or not, and they’re also great for tricking yourself into developing new habits. And on top of that, life never gets boring.

Now you know the concept, you have more than 70 ideas for what to do as your first or next 30 Day Challenge, so the only thing left is to just do it. Don’t wait for the new month to begin.

Hang a calendar on your wall today, pick the challenge you want or like the most, and draw the first cross on the calendar. Then do it again tomorrow and the day after, all the way until you finish the challenge. Ready, steady, go!