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  • How to automate good decisions

    In some way, living a good quality life is not rocket science. With time, good decisions lead you to a good life and poor decisions lead you to a crappy, stressful low quality life. The better decisions you make, big or small, the better off you are. Good decisions accumulate, and with time they bring great yields.

    Examples of good decisions are saving money, not overeating, exercising a few times per day, investing into your knowledge, brainstorming ideas, finding and doing a job you love, and so on. Examples of bad decisions are smoking, drinking excessively, eating too much sugar, getting uncontrollably into debt, buying things you don’t need and staying in an abusive relationship, just to name a few.

    On a logical level, it’s pretty simple to understand that but in real life, it’s quite hard to follow good smart decisions; simply because you weren’t programmed to make smart long-term decisions.

    You were initially programmed for life in a jungle, which means instant gratification (life was short), laziness (energy needed to be saved), overeating (food was rare) and any kind of domination – material, physical, intellectual (the alpha male/female got it all).

    That’s why it’s hard to make smart decisions.

    The intellectual, conscious, creative and planning part of you has to override the animal instinct that ruled decision-making for millions of years in our ancestors. And it has to do it over and over again, it never stops.

    That’s an extremely hard thing to do. It takes a lot of cognitive power and severe self-control, together with constant curbing of primal needs, and never letting the benefits of reinvesting into your tomorrow out of your sight.

    Rare are the people who are mentally so strong that they can follow smart decisions in all different areas of life all the time. That’s why I wouldn’t count on self-discipline too much. In reality, counting solely on your self-discipline is not a superior life strategy.

    Sooner or later, you kneel down in front of the laws of nature and genes. That’s why you have to be much smarter than relying on your self-discipline. You always have to be one step ahead of life.

    Automate good decisions

    Don’t use cognitive power for good decisions if you don’t have to

    One way to be smarter than life is to automate good decisions. The idea behind this is pretty simple. No matter if a decision or a habit is hard or easy to follow, automate it if possible.

    If you can’t completely automate it, semi-automate it. Make sure it takes zero cognitive effort, or almost zero, to do something smart. Take transaction costs all the way down, as low as possible. Let it happen automatically.

    Make sure you don’t have to think about it, make sure that it takes zero discipline and that smart decisions just happen by themselves. Put good decisions on autopilot. You have to be a little bit creative, but let’s look at few examples of how you can do that.

    Money

    The easiest way to automate good decisions is with money management. That’s because nowadays, money is nothing but some numbers in an online app, and you can do all kinds of transactions and functions simply by using your computer.

    Practical examples

    Here are examples of good decisions you can automate:

    • Automate transactions to your savings account every time you get a paycheck.
    • Make sure you need to get an approval for all costs higher than a certain amount (from your spouse or CFO), especially if you like to overspend.
    • As an alternative, you may have a rule that you aren’t allowed to make any big purchases if you don’t sleep it over (for 14 days).
    • Don’t have a credit card with you, but only enough money to buy yourself lunch and a healthy snack.

    That way, you don’t have to struggle with decision-making, good decisions are already made for you. Every week, money gets transferred to the savings account and you live with the rest. You can’t do impulse purchases, because you need approval or wait long enough for your emotions to stabilize. If you only have enough money for lunch with you, you can’t do small unnecessary purchases that sum up in high amounts of wasted money with time.

    Here’s an article that gives a lot of detail about how to make good automatic money decisions. With money, you can really automate being smart. All other areas can be more or less only semi-automated, still following the basic rules of positive automation – meaning that something good happens with the least effort possible.

    Health

    You can (semi-)automate good decisions in all three areas of health – diet, exercise and lifestyle. Now let’s not pretend and exaggerate: doing one hour of exercise as part of your morning routine is extremely good for you, but it takes effort and years before the habit becomes such a strong part of you that we could call it automation.

    Practical examples

    Nevertheless, there are many small things you can do for your health that are pretty much semi-automated and easy to follow:

    • Subscribe to a weekly fresh delivery of organic vegetables and fruits to your home, and then put it in a visible place. You can also standardize the typical daily meals you like the most.
    • Eat a salad for one of your main meals. Don’t think about it, don’t decide about anything, for one of your main meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), just order or make yourself a salad. All the effort it takes is for you to say: “And one salad please” to the waiter. You can do the same with one piece of fruit.
    • Have a strict deadline for the hour after which you don’t eat anymore. “You don’t have to decide about anything, you simply don’t eat anymore. (after 6pm, for example). It’s how intermittent fasting works and it can really do wonders for your health. You can do the same by not eating dessert at all. If you don’t eat dessert at all, there is nothing to decide about.
    • Every night, prepare your sports bag and take it with you. Just put it in your car. Now, the training bag won’t force you to go to the gym, but it will put additional pressure on you. It’s simple and easy to pack your exercising clothes every night and take them with you. You can automate that. Let’s hope that the rest will follow.
    • You can automate for all electronic devices to go into sleep mode at a certain hour, let’s say 9pm. Then you can take a book, read for a while and go to bed early.

    There are many decisions regarding your health that you can automate. Yes, they are called healthy habits, but the idea is to take transaction costs as low as possible, so that it takes almost zero effort to follow. At the end of the day, the best habits are the ones with which you can follow through in the long term.

    Relationships

    An important part of quality relationships is putting in all the necessary effort. You have to water a relationship like a flower, otherwise it starts to wither.

    You water relationships with attention, love, affection, understanding, care, good communication, by providing value, mutual support and with many other contributions on a physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, material and social level.

    It’s not easy to be consistent in relationships and make sure that your investment levels stay the same all the time or even get stronger. You get drained, you have bad days, and your affection may fluctuate.

    That’s why you should try to automate some good relationship decisions. Not to make the relationship mechanic, but to protect yourself from your own weaknesses.

    Practical examples

    Examples of automating good decisions:

    • If you get upset with something, you tell it to the other person immediately and start looking for a solution.
    • You never go to sleep on bad terms with your spouse. You always work things out before going to bed. You don’t even think about whether to talk or not, you don’t hold a grudge, you automatically solve the problem before going to sleep.
    • Every day when your spouse comes from work, you put away all electronic devices, you stop doing whatever you were doing (no matter how important it is), and you talk for a while about your day – fully present.
    • You book a date with your spouse every first Wednesday of the month. It’s in the calendar, it’s automated, there is no rescheduling and you go someplace nice, just the two of you, without any distractions. In the same way, you can automate lunch with your best friend in regular terms.
    • You send a creative love message every day to your spouse. Every day, one message, with no exceptions. Get a reminder or alarm saying it’s time to get romantic and creative.
    • If you get a message from somebody, you reply immediately in an active constructive way.

    There are many ways how you can automate good gestures in a relationship. Yes, you have to make sure things don’t get mechanic and that you really do it because you want to. It’s good to keep a creative component or some kind of effort, even if you automate part of a decision. And at the end of a day, if you don’t want to do it, you can stop at any moment. You have to stay agile.

    But the idea is to free yourself from cognitive burden and not to rely solely on your self-discipline. Even more, you don’t want to get indulgent and sloppy in relationships with time, when you settle. You want to invest more and more in quality relationships not less, and automation and semi-automaton can help you with that.

    IFTTT Recipes
    Examples of IFTTT Recipes for automating good decisions

    Endless options for smart decision automation

    Much like we’ve seen for the core life areas (health, wealth and relationships), you can use the same principle in other life areas. There are numerous ways how you can automate and semi-automate good decisions, not only to make sure that you’re going in the right direction and to save your cognitive capabilities for other life matters, but also to simplify your life and make more room for being relaxed and happy.

    Practical examples

    Here are some additional examples for automating good decisions:

    • Read every day before you go to sleep, and make sure you don’t fall asleep if you haven’t read at least one page of a book.
    • Have a few standard outfits for different occasions and put them in a queue. You pick the one that’s waiting first in the queue. Or you can wear the same outfit every day, like Mark Zuckerberg does.
    • You check email 30 minutes before your work ends and you reply or delete all emails in these 30 minutes. You don’t check your email otherwise.
    • You simply don’t do meetings. When something needs to be communicated, you use your phone or go for lunch with that person, and when something needs to be solved, you organize a workshop with a strict deadline and a goal to be met.
    • Every 14 days, you have a planning sprint for the next two weeks. It’s in your calendar, it’s fixed and nothing can get between you and strategic planning of your future.
    • Put a web nanny to stop you after an hour on social networks and make sure your computer won’t even start before you watch an online course for 30 minutes.
    • Automatically get the things you regularly buy in the same intervals from Amazon Subscribe

    Your plan to automate good decisions

    The easiest way to automate parts of your life (smart decisions) is to start with money. Log into your bank account and simply set a weekly transaction to a savings account on the day you receive a paycheck.

    Then make sure you don’t spend that money, and watch your savings account grow. Doing automation with money is the easiest because it’s purely based on technology. Starting to automate good money decisions should motivate you to do automation in other areas of life as well.

    In fact, you can easily do 100 % automation with all other tech stuff. There are two very popular web apps called IFTTT and Zappier that can automate many of your computer tasks and save you tons of time. With one app or the other you can automate things like:

    • Save any email attachment I receive to Dropbox or Google Drive
    • If I star an email, remind me to take care of it
    • When I’m in a meeting for more than 60 minutes, schedule a phone call to myself and run
    • Log my working hours automatically in a Google Spreadsheet
    • Back up Facebook photos I’m tagged in to Dropbox

    IFFT has something called individual automation functions recipes. If you check their site, you can find hundreds of them. I really like that name. An automation recipe. It’s time for you to get creative and cook up a few good automation recipes, besides tech and money stuff.

    I encourage you to take a piece of paper and outline a few automation recipes you can do in your life. Start with the easy things and ideas you can do immediately. You can use the IF – THEN model and sketch out your ideas for automation.

    Homework

    Make your fist recipe, and then add new recipes as quickly as you feel comfortable following through with them. The lower the transaction costs and the more you can really automate, the less willpower and discipline you need. If complete automation is possible, it takes almost zero effort to introduce a new habit in life. Look for such opportunities. Be smart and automate good decisions.

  • Attention span – the ultimate advantage today

    A big disadvantage of today’s time is the so-called “fast food” characteristic of the society. You can see it in almost every aspect of life. Not only are fast food restaurant chains thriving, people want to get rich overnight, relationships that last years are a weird thing, and the average person unlocks their mobile phone around 200 times per day and locks it back the next second.

    We could describe the elements of the “fast food” disease that people suffer from as the following:

    • I’m a special snowflake; things should come to me easily without any real effort
    • I want things now and I definitely don’t want to wait
    • I want to experience everything very quickly and move on to the next thing as soon as possible
    • I easily get bored or irritated, that’s why I constantly need new stimuli
    • Everything that distracts me helps me keep busy and feel alive

    Fast to get, easy to consume and constantly providing something new together with aggressive distracting notifications is what people are addicted to today. Severely addicted. That’s why reality shows, get-rich-quick schemes and mental masturbation articles are thriving.

    The “fast food” society brings many problems – from overspending and overeating to shallow relationships and high anxiety levels. But the mother of those problems is absolutely the shortened attention span.

    The vicious circle behind it is quite simple. People consume products or do activities that require almost zero effort, including only a short attention span. Not training the discipline muscle and attention span leads to even shorter attention and general low cognitive performance capabilities. Soon you aren’t capable of reading 5 pages of a book without wanting to go to the toilet or checking the fridge.

    Attention span is the length of time during which a person is able to concentrate or remain interested in a task or an activity.

    Without proactively directed attention for a longer period of time, you can’t do a single thing that really matters in life. You can’t learn new things, you can’t create in the flow, you can’t form deep relationships, you can’t grow and improve, you can’t choose what to focus on, you can’t complete complex projects and you can’t even follow your own goals, nothing.

    You can only react to what’s happening in your environment. You can’t be really proactive. That’s why you should go into the opposite direction of the fast food society.

    Attention span

    Producers have an extremely long attention span

    In today’s society, we know two types of people – consumers and producers. Consumers only consume, nothing else. They do the easy things. They spend (borrowed) money, play lottery, entertain themselves on social networks and in clubs, go to a job they hate and hope for better times. They do all the tasks and activities that require a short attention span (or a passive attention span, as we will see).

    Consumers and short attention span people have no problem:

    • Talking to a friend over coffee and constantly checking their mobile phone
    • Working for 15 minutes and then starting to gossip
    • Visiting a nice tourist destination, but first taking a selfie
    • Reading an interesting article on the internet and already browsing photos of funny cats
    • Changing partners faster than underwear
    • Buying more and more new products (clothes, cars etc.) because they get bored by the old ones
    • Eating too expensively, daintily, too much or too soon

    The average attention span of a human today is 8 seconds. A goldfish has the attention span of 9 seconds.

    Producers, on the other hand, are building products, providing services, creating things, forging relationships, innovating, thinking, strategizing, growing, learning, putting together new concepts and providing value to different markets. Producers do all the things that require a long attention span and strong focus. That’s why consumers are getting (mentally) poor and producers are getting rich.

    Not to get confused, you have to understand the word producer in a broader sense. Producing is every task that leads to a positive outcome of creating something valuable or beautiful. Producers with a long attention span have no problem:

    • Talking to a person for hours without checking their mobile phone to forge a multidimensional relationship and to really understand the person they’re talking to.
    • Working straight for hours or even days in a flow to create a product, service, piece of art or any other valuable thing.
    • Reading for hours and learning new things and developing their competences.
    • Building strong and everlasting key personal relationships that get deeper and deeper with years.
    • Resisting compulsive buying or emotional eating and instead following their own health, wealth and other goals they have in life.

    Producers usually live a happy, fulfilling and rich life. Because they put in the effort. They don’t go for the average and they don’t want to become passive zombies with the attention span of a goldfish.

    That’s why you have to become a producer and you have to make sure that you can hold your attention on a single thing for a very long period of time. An extremely strong, focused and long attention span will bring miracles into your life. So let’s look at how to do that.

    Passive and active attention span

    Have you ever wondered how come you can watch TV, browse the Internet or lie on a beach for hours, but you can’t do the same when you’re working, reading or learning something new? How you can focus all your attention with ease when it’s time to binge watch a TV show, but when you are reading a book you get lost on the second page?

    Why is it easy to spend hours in front of the TV, completely focused? It’s because we know two kinds of attention – a passive and an active one. Your attention is always directed onto something, except when you’re sleeping (and even that can be discussed). And you’re always doing something when you’re awake, merely by existing.

    Depending on the task you do, you can be physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually or socially actively or passively involved in a task. Being passively involved means that you are only witnessing something, you don’t play a very active role. Your effort in the activity, your contribution is low. You are either hibernating while things are happening around you or you are repeating something that is very familiar to you.

    Active attention, on the other hand, requires a lot of effort. It requires focus, presence, involvement, discipline, consistency, activation of all senses, engaging your mental capabilities, and so on. Active attention takes place when you consciously put effort into achieving something meaningful.

    Something meaningful means everything that’s connected to why we are here on this planet – to grow (personal improvement), to contribute (create value) and to enjoy life and connect with other people. To grow takes effort, to create takes effort, to connect with people takes effort and to be really happy with yourself and enjoy life takes effort; not only effort, but also a long attention span.

    Passive attention – Low effort Active attention – High effort
    Low physical, analytical, creative or communicational effort High physical, analytical, creative or communicational effort
    • Procrastinating
    • Repeating routine tasks
    • Small talk
    • Watching TV
    • Reading news
    • Playing video games (not all of them)
    • Participating in a low-quality meeting
    • Feeling sorry for yourself
    • Complaining
    • Being indecisive
    • Checking social media
    • Listening to music
    • Gossiping
    • Small talk
    • Eating quickly prepared low-quality food
    • Browsing the internet
    • Playing email ping pong
    • Instant messaging
    • Playing lotto
    • Spending money
    • Going on a miracle diet
    • Setting and following your own goals
    • Brainstorming and analyzing ideas
    • Creating in the flow
    • Learning new things
    • Developing competences
    • Writing, drawing, programming
    • Organizing & leading a productive meeting
    • Upgrading your mindset
    • Thinking of a solution & following through
    • Making a proactive decision
    • Sharing quality ideas on social media
    • Listening to online courses
    • Really getting to know a person
    • Building a deep and quality relationship
    • Cooking a healthy meal
    • Using the internet to learn new things
    • Replying to an email in the shortest way
    • Meeting new people in real life
    • Starting your own business
    • Saving money
    • Changing your health lifestyle
    Consumers Producers

    Doing things that require a short attention span is the easy road. Doing things that require a long attention span means undertaking the hard road. And with time, the hard road becomes easy and the easy road becomes hard. That’s why you have to take the hard road and strengthen your attention span.

    It may be true that it’s in our genes to do all the things with the short attention span. Nonetheless, easy cognitive activities often bring instant gratification. For example, easy cognitive activities can bring you short-term benefits like:

    • Constant happening that’s driving you away from yourself and the pain of life (constantly checking the mobile phone, gossiping etc.)
    • Instant excess of calories (eating a bag of chips in front of TV)
    • Saving energy – physical, mental (with zero body or brain exercise)
    • Fake feeling of connectedness (having 1000 Facebook friends but no real friends)
    • Getting something for nothing (playing lotto, going on a “miracle” diet)
    • Zero effort fun (playing video games instead of doing sports etc.)

    That may all sound like a good deal. But it’s not. It may have been a good deal back in the jungle (where food, people and distractions were rare), but today it’s nothing but a series of bad decisions that lead to a poor quality of life in the long term.

    Doing only activities that require a short attention span leads to being broke, fat, doing a job you hate and spending time with people you don’t like. It may be bearable as long as you have enough distractions, but it’s far from the good life you deserve.

    The zombie life is bearable as long as you have enough distractions that help you forget about it. That’s why with time, you need more and more activities that require a short attention span.

    That’s why you need to slowly move away from activities that require a passive and short attention span to the ones that require a long active attention span. You need to start building up your focusing capabilities. It may be hard at the beginning, but in the long term it will bring you a whole new level of quality of life.

    Training your attention span will slowly lead you to easily do things like:

    • Not giving up easily and becoming more resilient
    • Saying no and avoiding any kind of distractions
    • Strategically planning and setting goals with the long-term view
    • Increasing your competence level
    • Brainstorming hundreds of ideas
    • Creating different kinds of products and art
    • Working in a flow for hours day by day, even for weeks on a single task
    • Slicing, managing and finishing complex tasks
    • Better observing what is happening with you (body, mind, emotions, spirit)
    • Better observing what is happening in your environment (trends, people etc.)
    • Making better decisions about your wealth and health
    • Many other benefits

    Building up your attention span and doing activities that matter is a good deal today. The best deal you can go for. That’s the deal you should go after. So let’s look at some practical advice on how to build up your attention span.

    There is no person in the world with a short attention span who can successfully deal with life challenges that await us all on the life path.

    Training focus

    How to build your attention span

    Now that we know how important attention span is, let’s look at a few core techniques for how to improve it. As long as you’re at least a bit motivated to improve your concentration, it’s not hard to do it. The techniques to build up your attention span fall into one of the following categories:

    1. Get the experience of how awesome it is to be focused and how good results it brings
    2. Make room in your life and get rid of things that are corrupting your attention span
    3. Deliberately practice your concentration abilities with different exercises
    4. Use things that help with concentration

    The best advice is to build up attention span naturally with small additions to your life. Start a new hobby you’re obsessed with. Turn off all notifications on your mobile phone. Try to meditate for a few minutes or challenge yourself with a brain game. Add almonds to your snacks.

    By doing small activities like these and consequently building up your attention span bit by bit every day, results will accumulate and you will soon become scary focused superhuman. Now let’s dive deeper into these ideas.

    1. Find one productive thing you are obsessed with

    If you don’t have the experience (or you had it long time ago) of being concentrated and focused and you’re not aware of what magical results an unbreakable attention span can bring, you won’t see any sense in it. You have to feel it in your bones and see concrete results that come with the ability to focus.

    That’s why the number one thing I recommend if you suffer from a short attention span in general is to enter the search mode. Try dozens and dozens of different things (that require active attention), including sports, arts, hobbies etc., and find that one thing (the so-called fit) that will ignite a spark in you. Find that one thing that will awaken passion and utter obsession in you.

    Because when you find that one thing, your fit, something magical happens. You become more focused and concentrated without even trying to be focused. You just don’t think about it. You want to do it over and over again. Like a video game or watching TV, only that you are actively present.

    For example, if you find a hobby you like, you can devote hours and hours of your free time in the afternoons and weekends to it. You don’t have to struggle. You just do it and get lost in the flow. And as you have probably figure it out, watching TV doesn’t count.

    Try as many things as possible and don’t give up until you find that one thing that will change your life forever and naturally teach you how to be more focused. Here are some ideas for what to try:

    • Try 10 different sports and find the one that fits you best and you want to do it every day
    • Find a list online of all the hobbies and try a few of them
    • Create something – an article, a poem, a computer program, anything you like and then do it over and over again, day by day
    • Go to a public library and scan all the sections and books until something really draws your attention (it must feel like a magnet) and then read everything on that topic
    • Start an online course on something that has always interested you

    The catch is that when you have an experience of being utterly focused on something, you will not only train your attention span, your brain will get a model and an experience that can be transferred to other areas of life. You won’t struggle to focus anymore, but will have an easy time devoting your attention to things for as long as you want.

    2. Unplug yourself and simplify your life

    A very sad truth is that mobile phones are the number one attention span killers, together with other electronic devices. Technology is like fire. You can cook yourself dinner with it or burn yourself. You want to use technology to your advantage. You have to be smarter than the average user.

    How to be smarter than a person with an 8-second attention span?

    • Turn on “do not disturb” when creating in the flow or spending time with other people
    • Turn off notifications on your mobile phone
    • Don’t look at your mobile phone the first and last 60 minutes of your day
    • Delete all mental masturbation apps
    • Check email and social networks only twice a day in bulk
    • Get rid of the mobile phone, like I did
    • Go to regular technology detox sessions

    The second biggest executioners of attention span are stress, anxiety and overload. You need to do fewer things and do them in higher quality. No matter how much you train your attention span, it’s still limited. That’s why you have to treat it as a very precious resource. You have to simplify your life and focus on only a few important goals that will really make you successful and happy.

    Here are a few ideas for what to do, all leading to increasing your margin in life:

    • Commit to fewer projects and obligations
    • Get rid of toxic people in your life and have a few really quality relationships
    • Cancel unproductive meetings and send fewer emails
    • Use fewer apps, watch fewer TV shows
    • Sell things you don’t use, spend less and disinvest

    Build up your attention span

    3. Deliberately build up your cognitive endurance and attention span

    It’s very easy to deliberately build up your cognitive endurance. You do it with gradual progress. Pick an active attention task you like. If you don’t know which one to do, use the search mode as we discussed. Perform it every day. Make sure you do it for 1 – 10 minutes longer every day. Repeat, and in a few weeks you will be impressed with your progress.

    Your attention span is like a muscle. You train it and it gets stronger with time. In the beginning, progress is fast, then it slows down and at some point you reach a plateau.

    The good news is that the plateau can be doing a thing from the moment you wake up until late hours for weeks or even months in a row. But you don’t need that. If you learn to concentrate for a few hours daily, you are already 10 – 30 times more capable than the average person.

    There are so many ways how you can train attention span muscle. Here are only the most popular ones, you can try to:

    • Read or listen to books
    • Play brain games or chess
    • Perform a new cognitive demanding skill (programming, writing, designing etc.)
    • Meditate
    • Play an instrument
    • Practice yoga
    • Practice observing or mindfulness skills
    • Cook healthy meals

    4. Other things that will help you with your attention span

    Things that hinder your cognitive abilities also hinder your attention span. Not taking good care of your body and brain hinders your cognitive abilities and consequently your attention span. So take good care of your body and mind, and you will be rewarded with a better ability to focus.

    • Learn to manage your emotions better
    • Use a timer for starting and stopping a certain task
    • Get enough sleep
    • Regularly exercise
    • Drink enough water, at least 2 – 3 liters per day
    • Make sure you don’t get sugar crashes (by overeating sugar or not eating food at all too long)
    • Eat brain foods like nuts, berries, eggs, spinach, salmon and oatmeal
    • Research supplements like Omega 3 Fatty Acid, Ginkgo Biloba and others
    • Have no-interruption days in your calendar

    Now, these things are only aids, they won’t do miracles for you, but they absolutely help. They are like food supplements in general, they can’t save a poor diet, but they are a valuable addition to a healthy diet. The good news is that not only your attention span will get better if you follow these suggestions, your overall health and productivity levels will improve as well.

    Homework

    Commit to building the longest attention span in the world

    Go into a different direction than everyone else. When people are getting more and more lost in distractions and can’t read or create for 8 minutes straight, do the opposite. Be smarter, work smarter and don’t get seduced by the “fast food” paradigm. It doesn’t do any good with years.

    • Train your attention span so you can easily read a book in a day. And do that several days in a row if necessary. Make sure you have no problem reading a 20-minute article on the internet, like this.
    • Train your attention span so you can work in the flow on a complex task for days or even weeks from early morning until you go to sleep.
    • Train your attention span so you can easily put effort into learning a new skill, even if it takes months of daily hard work and practice.
    • Train your attention span to the point of meditating as long as you want, being completely focused on your body when training and being aware of your emotions all the time.
    • Train your attention span to the point where you can easily talk with a person for hours, completely aware of their words, feelings, movements, actions and other body language responses. Communicate with people not to respond, but to understand.

    Commit to building the longest and the strongest attention span of all humans in the world. Regularly train your discipline and regularly train your attention span. Constantly improve. Make sure you can focus proactively on different tasks and activities for as long as you want; all the way until you earn some rest and you can go into a passive mode for a while. But not for too long.

    You aren’t a special snowflake. Work hard if you want results in life. And it all starts with the ability to focus.

  • Curiosity is the number one trait of awesome people

    Ever since I remember, I’ve been an extremely curious person. I do mean extremely curious. Pain-in-the-ass curious. Even if I knew my parents would be furious that I was demolishing something to learn how it works or what its characteristics are, that never stopped me from feeding my curious mind.

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

    Replace the fear of unknown with curiosity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Curiosity

    Everybody wants to kill your curiosity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Practical examples
    • If a system doesn’t allow you to be curious, be curious out of the system. Have many hobbies, join debate groups, spend more time in a library researching, watch MOOCs, whatever.
    • If people are fed up with you constantly asking questions, find more people who are willing to share their knowledge. At the end of the day, it’s better to seek wisdom of several people than the knowledge of just one.
    • If you still have questions after a lecture or a seminar, agree with the lecturer to send him or her questions by e-mail or to meet individually.
    • Question everything, dig deeper, try to understand the context, origin and history of things, put them into a new perspective, brainstorm new angles, play with ideas, make ideas have sex. There are numerous ways how you can stay hungry and stay foolish.

    When it comes to curiosity and many other uncommon positive values and personality traits, you must never give up or take ugly compromises to fit in with the society’s rules. You have to innovate your way out to get what you want.

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

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

    The more curious you are, the more interesting life becomes. Below are only a few most important things why you will enjoy life much more by increasing your curiosity levels.

    • You can never get bored
    • People admire curiosity
    • Curiosity helps you to forge deep relationships
    • You become smarter
    • You become more persistent

    You can never ever get bored

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

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

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

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

    Outstanding communication

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

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

    When you are curious about someone:

    • You want to know everything about them. I mean really everything. Their life story, how they achieved what they achieved, how they think, their values, what they love most in life, and numerous other things.
    • You want to talk with them again and again. When you meet them you are excited about getting to know them even better, what happened to them etc. You don’t give a f*ck about notifications on your mobile phone. You are completely focused on learning about that person.

    As Dale Carnegie said, you can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. When you show curiosity about somebody, you get emotionally invested in them; because as we said, curiosity takes energy, time, effort and dedication.

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

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

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

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

    Practical examples

    If you have a problem grasping the curiosity concept when interacting with other people, here are examples of questions a curious person would start asking themselves when they meet somebody different from them or somebody they dislike:

    • How are we different?
    • Why are we different and why are we alike?
    • Why does that bother me?
    • What can I learn from that person?
    • How do different views lead to misunderstandings in communication?
    • How are we alike?
    • How can we efficiently work together, knowing our differences and similarities?
    • How can I improve communication with the person?

    I hope you see where the mental direction and effort are going. Now you know what to do the next time you meet somebody you can’t immediately connect with.

    Becoming smarter and more persistent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    NASA's Curiosity Rover

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

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

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

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

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

    So stay hungry and stay foolish. If you are asking yourself how to nurture curiosity, there are only a few things you have to do:

    1. Ask questions and question everything
    2. Show genuine interest in people
    3. Always go for new experiences (use the search mode for it)
    4. Read, read, read
    5. Spend time with geeks. Smart is the new sexy.
    6. Step back and ask yourself what others are missing
    7. Commit to become the best in the world in one thing
    8. Go on an adventure
    9. Learn more about yourself (if you become curious about yourself, you can be curious about anything)
    10. Expose yourself to more uncertainty (that will lead you to natural exploration)

    But probably the most you can do to nurture your curiosity is to rebuild the connection with your inner child. You were once curious, until your curiosity was systematically killed. Even though it was killed, you have the power to bring it back to life.

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

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

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

    Homework

    If you don’t get lost in a flow of curiosity at least a few times per week, you are definitely not curious enough. If you don’t know where to start, here are a few ideas:

    • Buy yourself a Kindle and start reading eBooks
    • Find a free Massive Online Open Course (MOOC), subscribe to it and finish it
    • Subscribe to educational YouTube Channels
    • Download an app that enables you to learn something new every day
    • Develop a new skill, knowledge domain or develop some other new competence
    • Join a meet-up on a topic you’re interested in or start a new hobby
    • Reframe a boring situation and find something interesting about it

    Curiosity is the one important thing that makes life so much more interesting. Curiosity is what led mankind into the deepest oceans, highest mountains and even space. Curiosity is what leads to major scientific discoveries, deepest relationships and the most awesome products.

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

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

  • The proactive way to taking breaks throughout the day

    Your approach to life must always be proactive. You always have to be one step ahead of life and even of yourself – or, to be more exact, your instinctive behavior. You should never do things only because you are used to doing them or other people are doing them, but always ask yourself why you are doing certain things and where does that lead you.

    Proactive living also includes planning how many breaks you take during the day and what kind of activities you do when you have the time off.

    You aren’t only more productive during working hours if you plan your brakes in a smart way. Even more importantly, if you learn how to proactively take breaks throughout a day, it makes the off-time and your life in general so much more enjoyable and fun. It may sound easy to proactively plan breaks, but in reality it’s not. That’s why most people aren’t doing it. We have to even put together a few core concepts to understand what proactive breaks really are.

    In this article, you will learn everything necessary to really max out every single break you take. As you’ve probably figured out, taking a proactive break doesn’t mean checking social networks, but doing completely different things.

    It may not be easy to switch to proactive breaks, but it’s definitely worth it. If you follow the advice in this article, the final result won’t only be in your much higher productivity, but also in a big increase in your happiness levels.

    Refresh recharge

    The reactive way to taking your breaks

    If we want to understand what it means to proactively take a break, we must first look at the opposite – reactive breaks. Taking a break reactively means that you don’t really take a break, but switch to an activity of the least physical or mental effort that you think is relaxing you, but most often is putting additional emotional stress on you.

    When the break time comes, you only react to your environment and start doing something that feels the easiest and most convenient thing to do. Much like reactive reading means that you only read stuff that lands in your social networks’ newsfeed and never really consciously decide what book to read. You only instinctively react to outside stimuli; you aren’t really in charge.

    Examples of reactive breaks are all the things that more than 80 % of people do when they take a break:

    • Checking social networks
    • Going to the company’s kitchen and gossiping a little bit
    • Eating an unhealthy snack and reading a trashy magazine or webpage
    • Reading newspapers and similar

    It may seem that those kinds of things relax you, but in reality they do not. Much like it may feel that you sleep better if you drink a little bit of alcohol before sleep, but in reality you aren’t, proven by science.

    In the same way, checking social networks only puts additional social stress on you (how others are maybe enjoying life more than you), gossiping is destroying your key relationships, checking way too negative newspapers feeds your mind with nothing but crap.

    The solution to better breaks is simple. You must plan your daily breaks smarter. What you want to achieve by planning proactive breaks is to do the activities that really relax you, make you happier and recharge your batteries.

    You want to deeply and honestly look forward to your breaks. You want to be in charge of your breaks, not your instincts.

    The puzzles of proactively taking a break

    Now we know that checking social network feeds or gossiping aren’t very smart ways of taking a break. But what else could you do?

    Well, let’s put together a few puzzle pieces to build an adequate solution. When we put together the puzzle pieces, you will get many good ideas on how to proactively take a break.

    Sharpening the saw and putting down the saw

    There are two ways of how you can take a break – an active one and a passive one. A passive smart break equals to putting down the saw. In other words, doing nothing that takes any effort. You hibernate in a way and recharge your batteries.

    Examples of passive breaks are taking a nap, sitting in a chair and enjoying rays of sunlight on your face, talking a really easy walk, and so on.Sharpen the saw

    The second way to take a break is a more active one. An active smart break equals sharpening your saw in one way or another. You exploit breaks to be more productive during your work time.

    Examples of active breaks are reading a book, going for a more intense walk, watching an online course, brainstorming ideas, stretching, cooking yourself a healthy meal, and so on.

    When you are proactively planning your breaks, you decide how many active and how many passive breaks you will have. You can decide that based on how mentally or physically demanding your daily tasks are, based on the current goals you have in your life and other key factors.

    Systematically planning the number of breaks

    Even more important is that you do take regular breaks and that you systematically plan them. You can set alarms for breaks if necessary. Because the worst thing you can do is to take no breaks at all. If you don’t take breaks, your saw sooner or later gets used up and your work is not as productive anymore as it could be.

    That’s also where the term comes from. To cut a long story short, two foresters are cutting down trees and the one who takes the time to sharpen his saw regularly does it much faster, even if sharpening the saw takes away some working time.

    Taking breaks throughout the day

    So lesson number one: take regular breaks – passive and active ones. There are many systems for how frequently you can plan breaks. Test and see what works best for you.

    The list of things you enjoy in life

    I haven’t heard a single person say that they really enjoy checking social network feeds during their breaks; that checking their social network feeds is their dream life. Or gossiping or reading news or doing any other kind of mental masturbation.

    It doesn’t make sense to take a well-deserved break and then do activities with which you are basically wasting your life away.

    That is why you need to make a list of all the things you enjoy in life. From the big things that may take days and are more expensive (like travelling) to all the small things that are free and only take minutes (like hugging someone). When you become consciously aware of all the things you really enjoy in life, well yes, you can systematically plan to do them in your break time. It makes complete sense, so I’m not sure why more people aren’t doing it.

    In addition, planning to do things you enjoy in the break time can also be a form of rewarding yourself for successfully completing a certain task during the work time. That will additionally motivate you to do good work, which is a total win-win.

    The list of things you look forward to

    The third important concept is that you always have to look forward to something in life. Again, that can be big or small things. When you look forward to things in life, your hope is much stronger, you are dramatically happier and life becomes so precious. People who are successful and happy in life always have things to look forward to.

    Planning something to look forward to during the break is thus the winning combination. Your day gets much closer to your ideal day, you do more of the things you enjoy and you are constantly under mild positive expectation of what comes next, which makes you be more present in the moment and life as a whole becomes that more beautiful.

    It absolutely makes sense that you also find a work you enjoy doing and then your life is nothing but going from one activity you enjoy to the other. You work on a project that’s important and dear to you with people you like, but deep down you are also already looking forward to the break time where you will do something else you enjoy. And when you are at your break time, you’re already excited to go back to your work. That’s the best way that leads to a high quality of life.

    Your break list

    Let’s now put all the puzzle pieces together. Your breaks must be activities during which you either sharpen the saw or put down the saw. But no matter which type of an activity it is, your breaks must always be something you look forward to and during which you perform things you really enjoy.

    So to proactively plan your daily breaks, I suggest you make a short list of what activities you will enjoy during breaks on certain days. Like you have a to-do list, not-to-do list and many other lists. It shouldn’t take you more than 2 minutes to write that down and if you don’t want to have another to-do list, you can simply do it in your head.

    Consciously decide on the number of breaks you will take on a certain day and proactively plan which enjoyable things you’ll do during the time off – make sure you look forward to your break time from early morning.

    Practical examples

    Let’s look at a practical example.

    Here is the summary of my working plan today:

    • 3 x 2 hour flows – Completing two articles and my diploma thesis
    • 1 hour of exercise
    • 1 hour of reading a book
    • 1 hour of doing smaller tasks (email, promoting articles, doing blog updates etc.)

    During the day and while performing all these tasks, I will take 6 breaks that last from 5 minutes to 45 minutes. During these breaks, I will do several things I really enjoy:

    • Stretching and doing a few core exercises (active)
    • Reading 3 – 5 quality articles (active)
    • Preparing a healthy lunch and watching a Lynda course (main break, active)
    • Hugging and talking to my girlfriend when she comes home from work (active)
    • Eating a healthy fit cheesecake and a few blueberries, and doing nothing (passive)
    • Taking a short walk (active)

    I make sure I always proactively plan my breaks and do things I really enjoy during my time off. In the morning, I take a moment and think of all the things I’m looking forward to – during the breaks and during work. There are so many possibilities for what you can plan during breaks, life never gets boring and every day becomes a special gift to you.

    Life experiment ideas

    Smart things you can do during your breaks

    Here are all the ideas what to do during breaks instead of mental masturbation and other reactive things that the majority of people are doing:

    1. Stretch or do a few yoga poses
    2. Go for a walk or do a few exercises
    3. Walk up and down the stairs in your office a few times
    4. Take 10 deep breaths and practice breathing properly
    5. Take a quick power nap
    6. Learn something from somebody
    7. Read, read, read
    8. Do brain exercises
    9. Watch a documentary
    10. Prepare yourself a healthy meal
    11. Eat a very healthy snack, like almonds and blueberries
    12. Make a new entry in your journal
    13. Draw something or do some other type of art
    14. Learn a few new words in another language
    15. Organize or clean something
    16. Have a deep and interesting conversation with someone
    17. Meet somebody new
    18. Call somebody you haven’t talked to in ages
    19. Write down the things you are grateful for that day
    20. Plan your next trip
    21. Update your vision list
    22. Watch an inspiring video on YouTube
    23. Do an online open course
    24. Organize your computer files and folders
    25. Declutter your mail inbox
    26. Build your vision board on Pinterest
    27. Visualize your goals
    28. Meditate for 15 minutes
    29. Read inspirational quotes
    30. Listen to music
    31. Do a few eye exercises, especially if you work with a computer a lot
    Homework

    Your plan to taking breaks throughout the day in the smart way

    Never ever open a social network again during your breaks, start gossiping or read news. Rather plan your breaks proactively. Now list down all the smart ways you can take breaks.

  • When you need to reprogram yourself and fix brain bugs

    Besides developing my blog, I’m also teaching myself how to code. Learning how to code is not easy and it takes a lot of time and hard work, but I think it’s worth it. I’m not doing it to be a programmer someday, but more as an intellectual challenge and to better understand what’s happening with my blog behind the scenes (technology aspect) and, most importantly, I think programming will be the best way to talk to our “servants” in the future – robots.

    Writing a piece of code that does exactly what you wanted it to do is an awesome feeling. While entering a few lines of code in the code editor a few days ago, an interesting thought came to me. I’ve actually been programming for decades, just not machines to do all different useful kinds of stuff. I’ve been programming or, to be more exact, reprogramming myself: to be more productive, more efficient, wiser, happier and to ultimately make smarter decisions.

    When your code is buggy

    Your body is the hardware and your brain is the piece of hardware that runs the code (software). You’ve inherited and acquired your code with genes, primary and secondary socialization, through main authoritative relationships in your youth, different early life experiences, trends in your environment, culture, friends, and so on.

    Most of the code (your character) that defines how you operate in your adult life was written in the first 7 years of your life.

    In a healthy environment, with many healthy relationships and positive behavioral patterns, you take over lines of biological code that are positive, productive, assertive. Well, the code you inherit always has some errors, there is no perfect environment. And it’s supposed to be like that. Because errors in the code bring the desire and motivation for progress and growth. Friction drives you.

    Nevertheless, there is a limit when too many errors in the environment lead to a very buggy code. If you are raised in a very toxic environment, your code can be seriously malfunctioning and damaged. That kind of a malfunctioning code leads to developing personality traits that are harmful to you and even others. It leads to things like severe negative thinking, shaping a poor life strategy, making bad life decisions, unhappiness, self-sabotage, poor relationships, and so on.

    That’s what we call a negative spiral, the double knockdown of life. First you are put in a toxic environment, where you suffer for sure, and then you suffer even more in your adult life because you make bad decisions that are a result of having been raised in a toxic environment. That’s the bad news in the whole story.

    But there is also some good news, of course. The good news is that you have the power to reprogram yourself, to fix the buggy code and thus change the course of your life to a more positive one.

    Searching for bugs

    It doesn’t take a lot of analytical effort to figure out the quality of the code that runs in your brain. Here are a few methods that can help you with such a task:

    • The parents test
    • Pinpointing toxic behavior
    • Short-term future predictions
    • The happiness index
    • The life satisfaction test
    • Gap to ideal self

    The parents test

    Like father like sonIf you aren’t doing anything about your personal growth and personal development, you are slowly turning into your parents, especially when it comes to the things you hate about them the most; they only appear in a slightly different way. One of your parents may be financially greedy and you are intellectual greedy, for example.

    The older you are, the more you realize that you’re turning into your old folks. If you don’t do anything about it.

    The test is very simple. Look at your parents, where they are, what they’ve achieved in their life, the quality of their code, and ask yourself if that’s what you want. You inherited many lines of code from your parents, so it’s logical that your destiny doesn’t lie far away from theirs. The more different destiny you want, the more work you’ll have to put into reprogramming yourself.

    Pinpointing toxic behavior

    A very good exercise for getting to know yourself better is to perform a personal SWOT analysis. You list all your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. One big segment of your weaknesses are the so-called toxic behavioral patterns. These are the behaviors that lead you to cause harm to yourself, other people and the environment in general.

    Many times, we see ourselves in a much better light than we actually are, so while doing such an exercise It may help to ask other people for an honest opinion or to perform a few personality tests. Or give yourself a goal to find at least 10 toxic behavioral patterns and then rank them. If you’re out of ideas, you can help yourself with things like:

    When you pinpoint a toxic behavioral pattern, your job is to of course rewrite it with a healthier one.

    Short-term future predictions

    Short-term past is a great predictor of short-term future. Take different life metrics like body fat percentage, net worth, the number of books you read etc. and analyze them for the past 3 – 9 months. Analyze the trends and where you’re headed. Are your metrics improving or not, are you advancing, declining or standing still?

    If your metrics are slowly getting worse, it means that you’re running a buggy code. You’re making bad decisions and executing bad habits. The rational conclusion is that in the future, your life situation will only get worse and that it’s time that you start working on a better code. Otherwise things will only get much harder for you. Instead make sure your life metrics are improving every month, just a little bit.

    The happiness index

    You’re here on this planet to grow, create, enjoy life and connect with other people. If you do all four, you open the potential to real happiness.

    Constantly improving yourself gives you faith in your abilities and competences, creating value gives you a sense of being valuable to the society and having an important life mission on this planet, and enjoying life is the cherry on top that makes life really worth living . And of course you can’t be happy and successful alone, you need to connect with other people, you need quality relationships in your life to really flourish.

    The happier you are in general, the better core code you are running.

    All that leads to real happiness in life. Under one big condition. If you were programmed to be happy. If you were not programmed to be happy, there is no relationship, achievement or material possession that could bring happiness into your life. Even if you follow the “grow, create, enjoy, connect” formula, you can be very unhappy if you’re hindered by too many cognitive distortions, high emotional lability, suboptimal thinking or any other type of weak thinking.

    So if you want to be truly happy, you must first deal with your core code (kernel) and then build the right kind of actions and behavior on top of that. That leads to a simple conclusion. The happier you are in general, the better core code you are running.

    Happiness Index
    Happiness Index, Source: Agile trail

    There is a simple exercise that will show how good your kernel code is. All you need to do then is to figure out how happy you really are on your average day, and you will know the quality of your code. The best way to do that is to introduce the happiness index into your life.

    Every day, you mark how happy you are on a scale from 1 to 10 on a chart. After doing that for a few weeks, you can quickly see your general level of happiness and the quality of the code you’re running in your brains. Everything from 8 – 10 means your kernel is running the right code, everything below 4 means that it’s supper buggy, turning you into a zombie. Even if you’re somewhere between 5 and 7, that’s not good enough for a quality and happy life.

    The life satisfaction test

    The happiness index shows how happy and satisfied you are with your life in general. You can do a very similar exercise, only that you dive a little bit deeper and estimate how good your code is for specific life areas. You expand the table with a few new columns and build your life-satisfaction chart.

    First you draw a scale from 1 to 10 horizontally, like with the happiness index, while vertically you 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. Below, you can find an example of that kind of a life-assessment chart.

    1 2 3 8 9 10
    Health X
    Relationships X
    Money X
    Career X
    Emotions X
    Competences X
    Fun X
    Spirituality X
    Technology skills X

    Made-up case as an example

    Then there is the second step. In the second step, you take another look at all the life areas you assessed with marks 4, 5, 6 or 7. These are all the life areas where you’re averagely satisfied. But average satisfaction doesn’t tell us if you’re running good code in your brains or not. The truth is that life areas either work or they don’t, you’re either satisfied or you aren’t, there is no middle ground. You’re either super healthy or not, you either have enough of money or you lack it.

    That is also known as the possibility to have only two different kinds of problems in life. You either rock or you suck in different areas of life. Therefore, in the second step you assess life areas again, but now only by using the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 8, 9, 10. You must take more time to really think about the areas you’re satisfied with and the ones you aren’t.

    Then you can make a simplified conclusion to further analyze your life and its quality. For the life areas rated from 1 – 3, you’re probably running very buggy software. And for the life areas rated 8 – 10, your software is working fine or even super great.

    That kind of an analysis can help you a lot with determining which parts of your brain code you have to work on the most. You often see that we only have parts and pieces of code that are broken and need an update. For example, you are doing well financially, but aren’t taking care of your health. It’s obvious where you need an update.

    Gap to ideal self

    The last test I call the ideal self gap. You have your actual self, who you are at this moment, and you have an ideal self, representing who you would like to become. Not many people are aware that they have an ideal self, so the best way to become aware of it in a very detailed way is to make a persona of your ideal self. Once you make that, you can easily compare your actual self to your ideal self.

    In the next step, you can analyze how far your ideal self is from your actual self. How fast are you approaching your ideal self? In the past year, how many personality characteristic, behavioral patterns and competences have you changed or improved to come closer to your ideal self? The greater the gap, the more recoding you need to do. The faster you want to approach your ideal self, the faster you have to write new lines of code.

    Reprogram yourself

    Reprogram yourself

    A few simple tests can very quickly tell you how much reprogramming you have to do and the quality of the code you’re running in your brain. The good news is that you can reprogram almost everything about yourself. I mean really everything. It’s impressive how you’re nothing more than a lot of lines of biological code you can rewrite. It’s often not very easy to do that, but it can be done.

    Practical examples

    I used to hate exercise, now I simply love it. There is no perfect day without doing something for my body. I am currently reprogramming myself for a better posture. It’s hard work, but I can already see the new code giving me better results.

    My favorite dish used to be the Wiener Schnitzel (fried veal) with French fries. Back then I was extremely fat. Now my favorite food is broccoli. I used to hate olives and flicked them off a pizza. Now I love olives. I just forced myself a little bit to eat them for a few weeks, and then they became tasty. I now eat pizza maybe twice a year. Yes, you can even reprogram your taste.

    I used to have huge problems with my temper. I reprogrammed myself to be calmer and wiser. I used to hate reading and books, even though I was an extraordinary pupil in primary school. Now I love reading, I never go to sleep without reading at least one page in a book.

    In primary school, my favorite subject was math. Then I unfortunately reprogrammed myself somewhere on the way to hate math (I suppressed some negative painful experiences). Now I want to reprogram myself back to loving math again.

    You can basically reprogram yourself for anything. From how your body operates to what foods you like, the habits you follow, how you think and behave, what are your emotional reactions, how happy you are in life, what kind of relationships you forge and how healthy you are, how good you are at acquiring and managing money, and everything else you can think off.

    There are some limits, of course, you can’t reprogram yourself to be taller, but there are so many things you can do. All you need is a little bit of courage, motivation and awareness that you only live once, so you want to make the most out of it.

    How to reprogram yourself?

    The last question is, of course, how to reprogram yourself. There are many ways to reprogram yourself and new ways are constantly being invented.

    From cognitive conditioning to behavioral conditioning, changing your environment and building relationships with people who have the personality traits you want, getting a mentor, strategically developing healthier habits, modeling, going to therapy, meditation, reading, cognitive reframing, refocusing your mind on gratefulness and positives, visualization, the search mode, and so on.

    Much like there is no one best programming language and one best code environment, there is also no one ultimate technique for reprograming yourself. You must test, experiment and find the ones that work best for you.

    So the first way you must reprogram yourself is to keep an open mind, always try new things to see if they work well for you, and to always stay curios together with nurturing the will to constantly improve yourself.

    You already are a programmer

    You don’t have to learn how to code to be a programmer. And you don’t have to learn Photoshop to be a designer and user experience expert. You see, you are already a designer of your own life.

    You are already running code in your brain that shapes your life strategy and consequently your destiny. Your life code and your life design dictate whether your life will be a daring adventure or nothing.

    BTW, code is what runs behind a program, and the user experience and design are how you see and use the program. The same way as your brain runs the code with which you make decisions and that gives you a certain life experience and design (style, functionality etc.).

    Homework

    bug featureNever ever take the code in your brains as it is, especially if it’s not leading you in a positive direction. Instead become a programmer of your life and reprogram yourself to a better version.

    Reprogram yourself to become the best version of yourself. Start by updating your brain code now and write the lines that will lead you to the best life possible, the good life.

    Don’t get too frustrated in the beginning. Beginnings are the hardest. And don’t get demotivated if you fail from time to time. The new code can’t always work as you hoped it will. You usually have to rewrite your code several times (the search mode) to find the one that works best for you (your fit). For example, you may have to try several different diets to find the one that works best for you.

    It’s hard, beginnings are the hardest, but it’s definitely worth it. And it can be a lot of fun. Okay, now I have to go back to improving my knowledge on coding. You know, to efficiently communicate with robots soon. Good luck with reprogramming yourself.

  • Always have something to look forward to

    I am a man of potentials. I never look at things as how they are, but as how they could be. The thing I dislike the most is wasted potential, especially wasted talents. It’s kind of a gift and a curse for me. It’s a curse because potential is endless. There are no limits to improvements and advancements (it’s one of the basic Kaizen rules). So you can easily lose yourself in perfectionism and greed, in a “there is never enough” mentality.

    It’s also a gift, because by seeing potential everywhere, you push yourself and other people to become the best versions of themselves. You never see people as they are, but everything they still can achieve in life with their abilities. That’s why you push them, mentor them and try to inspire them. And when laziness stifles potential in someone, there’s a special type of sadness in your heart.

    An even more relevant reason why seeing potential is a gift is because you always have something to look forward to – a relationship that can go even deeper, thinking that can be bigger and even more creative, a business than can grow higher, a more challenging mountain to climb, a party that you can make wilder (I mean wiser), sex more passionate, and so on.

    When you see potential in everything, you can very easily find things to look forward to. There is always something new to discover, something new to build. Life can never get boring.

    Believing, hoping and trusting

    If you want to go after the potential you see, you must first believe it can be done. You must hope. You must have a deep feeling of expectation and desire for a particular potential to be realized. You need a strong feeling of trust that it can be done. Without hope, it’s hard to go forward, especially when you are faced with adversity. Potential and hope are your two best friends.

    But even though you hope for the best, you have to prepare for the worst. Hope is not a strategy. Only hoping that things will miraculously solve themselves or that something will happen because of a higher force, be it love, market trends or anything else, is a very very bad strategy. Unfortunately, it’s a strategy many people turn to.

    Hope is a feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen. Hope is a feeling of trust.

    Right on top of hope, you need a plan. You need a strategy – a superior life strategy, business strategy, project strategy, relationship strategy or whatever your goal in life is. You need to pause for a moment, analyze the environment, set clear outcomes you want, set metrics, follow a carefully orchestrated process towards your goals, and constantly adjust your actions based on the feedback you get from interactions.

    And you need to innovate. You need to think big, optimally and superproactively. You need to be different and better than your competition. It’s easy to be only different, you have to find a way to be different and better. By combining hope and a superior strategy, you can win big, then you can massively succeed.

    Potential, hope and a superior strategy are really your best friends and a winning combo.

    First hope, then always have something to look forward to

    Fighting for your goals and dream life is not easy. You have to put an enormous amount of hard and smart work to be slowly moving in a direction you want.

    Even when you have a superior plan, you keep everything agile and you carefully follow the process stages, you are often knocked out by failing and collapses. Adversity and unexpected breakdowns can take all your passion and life energy in a single second. Without strong hope, you will definitely give up on life sooner or later.

    Without an unbreakable spirit filled with hope and without seeing potential that you can go after, you stop fighting. You stop going forward, you stop innovating and improving yourself. You resign yourself to an average life and you slowly start turning into a zombie. When you stop fighting, life only hits harder and your situation only gets worse. The easy road, represented by giving up, always turns into a hard road.

    Make sure you never lose hope. Never ever. No matter how difficult your situation is, no matter how hard life knocked you down, never give up. Never stop hoping for a better future. There is always a way to go forward, there is always a step to make towards a better life, there is always something to look forward to.

    In the darkest hours, stars shine the brightest.

    Instead of drowning in misery and cursing life, take a piece of paper and list all the things you can look forward to. People to meet, things to read, a new project to initiate or things to create, the sun on your face, a tasty meal, a visit to the gym or a cup of coffee. List at least 50 things; or rather 100. There are so many big and small things you can look forward to. Every day, without exceptions.

    Here are a few additional ideas for how to use to your advantage the power to look forward to life events:

    • In people (their character), find something you’re looking forward to experiencing again.
    • Set a reward for yourself for finishing a demanding task or performing a new habit.
    • List all the small (free) things that you can look forward to every day (sun, meals etc.).
    • Have a list of things you really enjoy and make sure you regularly plan them in your schedule.
    • Practice seeing potential everywhere, from places to people and businesses.

    Always have something to look forward to

    The psychology behind hope and a few additional tricks to develop it

    According to Erickson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development, hope is the first stage that develops between 0 and 18 months of a child’s upbringing. It’s a positive resolution between an internal conflict of trust and mistrust.

    Stage Age Conflict / Crisis Resolution / Virtue
    1 Infant – 18 months Basic trust vs. Mistrust Hope
    2 18 m. – 3 years Autonomy vs. Shame Will
    3 3 – 5 years Initiative vs. Guilt and Doubt Purpose
    4 5 – 13 years Industry vs. Inferiority Competence
    5 13 – 21 years Identity vs. Confusion Fidelity
    6 21 – 39 years Intimacy vs. Isolation Love
    7 40 – 65 years Generativity vs. Stagnation Care
    8 65 and older Integrity vs. Despair Wisdom

    When you are born, you are uncertain about life, and the only way to develop hope is to get consistent, predictable and reliable care from your parents (or a non-parent caretaker). To be even more exact, three conditions have to be fulfilled in order to develop trust and hope: A caretaker has to:

    1. provide physical and emotional care,
    2. show continuity or consistency in the child’s life, and
    3. must have an emotional investment in the child.

    Yes, developing hope is all about consistency in taking care of a child’s needs, the stability of the environment, developing a relationship with a child with positive energies and communicating a sense of purpose to the child that parents are driven by.

    It’s about developing positive relationships with a child without being depressed, feeling severe guilt, being messy and inconsistent or hindered and absent because of any other negative emotions. It’s about trying to empathically understand what a baby wants when crying, and responding in a healthy and fast enough manner by being purposefully and emotionally invested.

    Now, I’m not highlighting this psychological background to point fingers and find a way to blame others if you can’t find hope in your life to lean on. You can’t go back to being an infant, but you can work hard on personal development to develop deeper levels of trust in yourself, others and life in general. It’s not like everything is lost. The first step you can do is to take better care of yourself and your environment.

    According to the three conditions that have to be met in order for an infant to develop trust, make sure you have such a relationship with yourself and others in your adult life, and that you organize your environment in a way that provides such stability. Here are a few ideas how:

    • Take good care of your body and health (exercise, eat healthy, get enough sleep etc.).
    • Pay very close attention to your emotions and express them. Use the happiness index.
    • Learn to love yourself and put yourself in the first place.
    • Be assertive and regularly meet your needs in a healthy manner.
    • Introduce regular rituals into your life that provide consistency and look forward to them.
    • Develop stable and deep relationships, especially the six key ones (family, spouse, friends, boss, coworkers, mentor).
    • Define a clear life vision and mission that inspire you and are greater than any obstacle you meet on the road towards your goal.
    • And as we’ve talked about, always have something to look forward to.

    Success in life is not doing something remarkable. Success in life is doing everyday ordinary things in a remarkably consistent and disciplined way. It’s called following and trusting the process.

    Things to look forward to will definitely strengthen your hope in life.

    If you manage to make yourself look forward to and anticipate doing these everyday small and “boring” things (talking to someone, creating something new, solving a problem, cleaning home etc.), your life will be much more successful and happy. Hope and never ever give up.