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  • God mode and the perfect human state

    The god mode is a type of cheat in video games that makes your character invulnerable and invincible. The idea is not used only in games – even in Windows, you can create a god mode icon to access the system’s different control panels in the same place to customize and maximize the performance of your computer. You can find a similar concept on Mac as well as different apps and services like Netflix.

    The god mode is quite popular in the computer world. But what about real life, what would be the god mode in real life? Well, it’s pretty much the same idea.

    God mode in real life is the feeling that you can achieve everything, going straight forward to your goals without a single millisecond of a doubt.

    From time to time, I’m able to achieve that kind of a state. It’s not something unique that works only for me, because I know a few other people who do it as well. Unfortunately, it takes iron discipline and many other conditions need to be fulfilled for you to get yourself into god mode. Thus it’s usually a temporary state.

    To be honest, it makes sense that you can’t feel like you’re in god mode all the time. That would make you kind of divine or maybe your life would even be boring. Like in games, if you play in god mode all the time, the game soon becomes no fun at all. Nevertheless, most people never experience that kind of a state and even if they do, they are able to play life in such a mode for an extremely short period of time. Too short.

    For example, I put a lot of effort into designing my life to spend as much time as possible in god mode. I currently manage to spend 4 – 5 weeks per year in such a mode, which accounts to around 10%. And I put a lot of effort into achieving that. In the future, I want to increase that percentage to at least 30%.

    In this blog post, I will share what I’ve learned so far about how to achieve god mode. But before I do that, let me describe how it feels to be in such a superior mode; so you can analyze whether you’ve experienced anything similar before.

    How does it really feel to be in god mode

    Being in god mode, hmm? You know, it gives you kind of god-like feelings, being able to seize life to the full, achieve everything you ever wanted and believe deep down without a doubt that life has prepared many exciting adventures for you to undertake.

    You see yourself as an übermensch. Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, socially and morally strong. You feel powerful, assertive, you feel extremely good in your own skin, you know exactly what you want, you have a strong sense of self and autonomy, and you go straight after your goals and needs in a respectful manner.

    You have your inner smile reflected on your face, shining eyes full of passion and you cherish the day given to you with a strong will to create, enjoy life and grow. In god mode, you feel super confident, sharp, decisive, but also deeply connected to other people. You know that you are just the right distance away from your comfort zone – you’re in the learning zone, where you can learn, innovate and create value.

    Being in god mode means that you are growth-oriented, you see all the abundance the world has to offer to you, you are positive, happy, problem-solving oriented, proactive, and conquer one goal after the other. You are disciplined, consistent, but also curious and playful.

    The god mode is the perfect human state, something everyone should strive to achieve in life as many times as possible for as long as possible. There is one more important detail. You can only enter the god mode if you know that you achieved that kind of a state with your own hard work (no drugs can help).

    The god mode

    How to get yourself into the God mode

    First of all, it’s important for you to know that the god mode state for humans exists in real life. Now, the second question is how to achieve such a state. To be honest, the way to achieve god mode greatly depends on every individual, from your genes to where you live and many other conditions. So you must search – experiment and test how to get yourself into the god mode.

    It took me a decade of hard work and personal development to achieve that kind of a state for the first time. And as I mentioned, I can achieve it for a short period of time with a lot of effort. But it’s definitely worth it. It’s one of the best feelings ever.

    Below are the conditions I know I have to meet to enter the god mode. There are probably more I haven’t discovered yet, since the state is so hard to achieve, so if I identify any new condition I will, of course, add it to the list. Even though achieving the god mode depends on every individual, I think many of the conditions below are universal.

    Here they are (I know the list isn’t short):

    • Having full control over life
    • Following True North
    • Being healthy assertive
    • Getting enough sleep
    • The power of the sun
    • Spending time in nature
    • Regular exercise
    • Following a strict diet
    • Taking food supplements
    • Having enough material resources
    • Doing meaningful and creative work
    • Enjoying deep relationships
    • Sex can definitely help
    • Having strong faith

    Full control over life

    I think that the underlying condition for achieving god mode is to have full control over your life. That means having the right optimal mindset by focusing on the positive, managing your time as it suits you best, being aware of the power you always have in the present moment, and so on.

    It definitely helps if you are your own boss, but it’s probably not mandatory, as long as you have a job you love and enough personal and creative freedom. But like in Windows god mode, you must be in a position to tweak your lifestyle and design your life as it really suits you best.

    And you must experiment a lot to know what the real fits for you are in different life areas. You must know that there’s a difference between what you think will bring value to your life (assumptions) and what really does. Only with real life experience can you know how to design your life perfectly.

    An important part of control is keeping all the flexibility about where you will go next. Your needs, goals and optimal life settings change all the time (also together with your environment), and you must keep the control to find the optimal setup for your life in every specific moment (in the lean and agile way).

    For example, the perfect setup for you at some point may be to work from home, at another to get work done in a co-working office and then a period may come when having an office full of people you work with is the perfect environment for you. You can’t be in god mode without the perfect setup.

    Following your True North

    There are only two options in life, either you follow your True North or you don’t. You can’t be approximately on the right path. The answer can only be yes or no. Deep down, you always know very well if you are on the right path or not.

    It’s impossible to enter god mode if you aren’t doing the things you were born to do. Every god in Greek or Roman mythology was born for certain responsibilities (for example, Poseidon to master the waters). In the same way, you were born to master a certain kind of work, practice a certain kind of sport, eat a certain kind of diet, and so on.

    In life, I often followed my True North, I followed my heart and my calling and the things I was born to do, but I also often got scared and chose the safer or more conservative path that wasn’t meant for me. Whenever I wasn’t following my True North, no matter the money I earned and the cool people I worked with, I felt a little bit dead and very sad inside. I knew there was some place else where I should be. It’s a feeling far removed from the god mode.

    There are zero chances for me or you to enter god mode if you are doing a job you hate or perform work you aren’t good at, if you spend time with wrong people who don’t support you, and if you aren’t following your life vision and mission.

    Your True North, vision and mission aren’t written in stone, you must create them by yourself to a certain extent by searching and innovating; but deep down, you always know if you’re creating the right life masterpiece or not. You can’t fake it until you make it.

    Being assertive

    Right next to having full control over your life and following your True North, I would add being healthy assertive. You can’t be in god mode if your heart is filled with fear, if you’re scared to go after your goals and if you’re afraid of everyone and everything you meet on your journey. Gods aren’t hiding behind closed doors being afraid of everything.

    In god mode, you are confident, you know you deserve to take up space under the sun and you walk boldly towards your goals, with straight posture and every step of yours is self-assured. You have no problem talking to people, forging new relationships, expressing your thoughts and feelings, and you see yourself as a highly valuable individual.

    Nevertheless, you have to be assertive in a healthy way, not a greedy one. If you constantly get into quarrels or fights, if you see everyone as your competitor and you want to trample them down or control them, you aren’t in god mode, but more like an emotionally damaged and scared animal that wants to overpower everyone to not feel threatened.

    When you are in god mode, you are high on testosterone (strength), but low on cortisol (stress). That means you go after your goals (testosterone), but in a calm, wise and integrative manner (low cortisol). Powerful and calm.

    Enough sleep

    It’s impossible to be in god mode if you aren’t well-rested and if you don’t get enough sleep. For me, that’s eight hours. Not eight and a half, not seven and a half, but exactly eight hours. I experimented a lot with different amounts of sleep and to enter god mode, I need eight hours of sleep many days in a row, so I’m really well-rested.

    Whether I have the goal to get myself into god mode or not, I always make sure to get enough sleep. I’m much more productive throughout a day, I can think much more clearly, and it’s the only way for me to be really creative, calm and make good decisions. A lack of sleep always leads to being confused, operating on low energy levels and having a hard time expressing yourself.

    Sun

    One big condition for achieving god mode that’s unfortunately out of my control unless I change my location, is sunny weather. It seems like the sun can give special positive shades to the colors of life.

    Sun is the one giving Superman power, and I guess it’s no different with me if I want to enter god mode.

    That means achieving god mode during the summer is much easier than in winter. There are probably exceptions outside of summer time, but rare ones. I don’t ski, but I assume that skiing on a sunny day in the mountains can get you close to the god mode. But I was never able to achieve god mode when it was cloudy or raining for longer periods of time.

    It would be awesome to surpass this limitation somehow.

    Nature

    Like I need sun to be in god mode, in the same way I must feel connected to nature. Spending time in nature is like a trigger for entering god mode. A walk in the woods, a swim in the sea, a morning climb to a hill or even doing a few body-weight exercises on a meadow is my trigger of god mode for me.

    And it must be done daily. As soon as I lose connection with nature, I lose the god mode state. I can work for hours and hours afterwards using technology or doing any other work, but I need that initial trigger that gets me into the god mode. That’s done only by nature.

    Well, even if you aren’t searching for your own way to god mode, spending time in nature is always very beneficial for you, so do it anyway.

    Exercise

    Exercising and spending time in nature go hand-in-hand for me. To enter the god mode, you have to feel physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually strong. If one of these is absent, you can forget about the god mode. And everything starts with you feeling physically strong. A healthy spirit can only reside in a healthy body.

    I never ever entered full god mode when I was extremely overweight. If you are overweight, I guess you can achieve a partial god mode, but it’s far from the full god mode. You don’t have to be already ultra-fit to achieve the god mode, but I think you definitely have to exercise regularly, and feel your physical power is increasing. On the other hand, you also have to be very careful not to overtrain.

    Pushing yourself too far or injuring yourself is definitely a way to get yourself straight out of god mode. Any extreme for a longer period of time is toxic, and any toxicity or extreme for a longer period of time is the enemy of wellbeing.

    The idea of god mode is to be in the perfect state of wellbeing.

    Diet

    Some of the things that kick me straight out of god mode are sugars, unhealthy fats, alcohol and overeating. That is probably 100% valid for everyone. Too much unhealthy food destroys the God mode.

    I’m on a carb-cycling high protein diet, which suits me best for entering god mode, but every time I cross the limits with sugar intake (non-complex carbs), I come straight out of god mode right after the initial sugar spike. After the spike, I feel like I was hit by a train and not in any superior kind of state.

    In the same way, I very quickly get kicked out of god mode if I eat fried food, unhealthy snacks or anything else that messes with my insulin levels or clogs up my body. Overeating, as one of my biggest weaknesses, is no different. It’s impossible to feel like you’re in a god-like state, if you have a completely full stomach and the only thing on your mind is to lie down and rest.

    Alcohol (or any kind of drugs) is a tricky thing with god mode. It may give you a fake feeling of being in the god mode for a very short period of time. I guess that’s why people love alcohol and drugs so much. But despite this, the drug state a very different kind of state from the real god mode. As I mentioned, you can’t fake it until you make it.

    The drug state compared with god mode doesn’t feel natural, it’s usually connected with partying, not following your True North, you know you’re doing damage to your body and you have to pay a big price after the high goes away, from hangover to addiction.

    Food supplements

    As an honest fact, it’s really hard for me to enter god mode if I’m not taking basic food supplements. In general, I follow an extremely healthy diet, eating more or less organic products, but I guess today’s food is just too impoverished to meet all the nutritional needs.

    Here are the food supplements I take daily to enter god mode more easily:

    • Green smoothie (avocado, spinach, asparagus, etc.) with Ashwagandha and Curcumin
    • Green drink (blended green grasses)
    • Green tea
    • Omega-3 fatty acids with vitamin D
    • B-complex
    • Magnesium
    • Whey protein (after exercise)

    I also take a few other supplements, but the ones listed above are mandatory for me to achieve the perfect state of wellbeing.

    Enough material resources

    In games where you’re playing in god mode, you usually also get access to unlimited resources – money, tools, technology etc. In real life, you don’t need unlimited resources, but I never achieved god mode, when I was drowning in debt or living from month to month.

    The best financial advice, right next to spending less than you earn, is to have an emergency savings account for 6 – 12 of your monthly costs; it’s for emergency cases if any unexpected misfortune occurs that especially kicks you below the belt financially (like job loss).

    Financial safety net relieves a lot of pressure, at least for me, and I assume it’s no different for many other people. And if you want to be in god mode, you mustn’t have any really severe and unhealthy pressure.

    Meaningful and creative work

    Work and creating are a big part of my personal identity, so there is no god mode for me without working on something meaningful, creating something awesome and being proud of my work. And again, I think that this isn’t valid only for me, but for all human beings.

    We are here to grow, create and enjoy life, and I achieved god mode only when I was doing all three things as part of my ideal day. I was never in god mode while on a beach, playing volleyball and drinking beer.

    But you can achieve that in many different forms. I was never in god mode wasting time on a beach, but I was in god mode while traveling far away from home, discovering interesting places with the person I love and mentally outlining the next article to be written. Love and work, work and love, that is all there is, as Freud said, and thus work is simply an important part of being in god mode.

    A mandatory condition for entering god mode is definitely to do a job you’re good at, proud of and that you enjoy. You can’t be in god mode if you’re doing a job you hate or work you despise. You have to see and feel how you’re creating value for other people and are respected for it.

    Deep relationships

    Good relationships lead to heaven on Earth. Toxic relationships mean hell on Earth. If you want to be in god mode, you have to live heaven on Earth, of course. That means many healthy, supportive and encouraging relationships.

    You need to have the best possible relationships with your primary family, with your spouse and your friends on the personal side of life. And you need encouraging and stable relationships with your boss, coworkers and mentors on the professional side.

    Even a single toxic relationship can put you straight out of god mode.

    It’s not about relationships being perfect (because relationships are never perfect) or not having any problems in relationships; it’s about relationships not being toxic, abusive and one-sided. There is a big difference between working with someone on constructively solving relationship problems with the goal of deepening a relationship, and suffering and torturing yourself in a toxic relationship.

    Sex

    You probably know the actual summary of Greek mythology and how the god of gods behaved. It goes something along the lines of: Zeus: I’m going to put my penis in it. Everyone: Don’t do it. Zeus: Too late.

    Well, I’m just kidding a little bit, but passionate sex and intimacy can definitely help you enter god mode in a similar way like nature does.

    Faith

    The last condition for entering god mode for me is having extraordinary faith in myself and life. The god mode is not about a complete absence of problems and challenges and everything miraculously solving itself. I never entered god mode when there was no real challenge waiting for me, a challenge that was slightly more demanding than my abilities.

    That’s the big difference between the god mode in games and the god mode in real life. To be in god mode in real life, you need a challenge – a challenge just big enough to enable you to grow personally. And you definitely need it too. Nevertheless, facing challenges and personal growth must be driven by strong faith.

    It’s about believing that you’re able to conquer all the challenges, creatively solve all the problems thrown at you, and that all things will turn out okay for you.

    Without extraordinary faith there is no god, and there is no god mode for you, whether you are religious or not (btw, having extraordinary faith in yourself doesn’t conflict with believing in god). Faith gives you the power to face all the challenges of life, no matter how difficult they are.

    If you want to do extraordinary things in life, you have to extraordinarily believe in yourself.

    Get yourself in the god mode

    As you can see, I do have a rough idea of how to get myself into the god mode. My current challenge is to increase the amount of time I spend in the god mode from 10% to 15% and then all the way up to around 30% or even more. Being in god mode is really one of the best feelings ever. You want to really live life, not only exist. You want your life to be a daring adventure, you don’t want to only work to pay your bills and then die. You don’t want to be a zombie.

    Homework

    Thus I encourage you to sit down and brainstorm all the conditions you assume you have to meet to enter god mode. Then start experimenting, adding and taking things off your list, until you finally achieve god mode, even if only for a short period of time. Then try to replicate it over and over again, and experiment even further until you really understand what rockets you straight into this superior feeling of living.

    Enter your combination for the god mode and start really living your life!

  • The hard road becomes easy with time

    I talk so much about the easy and hard roads in my blog posts (the exact quote: the easy road becomes hard with time and the hard road becomes easy) that it’s time for me to clarify what exactly I mean with it. It’s one of the most important lessons of life, illustrating why it’s so important to always make smart decisions, big or small.

    In this article you will learn:

    – Why you are programmed to constantly make the worst decisions possible
    – What is the number one thing you have to do to start making better decisions in life
    – That beginnings are the hardest. Once you develop a new habit, hard becomes easy
    – Smart decisions accumulate and they lead to a high quality of life
    – It’s so hard to save 100$, and so easy to spend it. But it’s so good to have full bank account. :)

    Every day, you take hundreds of small decisions, like what to eat, what to do with your money, how long to sleep, which tasks to do and how well to perform them, and so on. All these small decisions slowly accumulate into different outputs over time – positive or negative ones.

    On the other hand, from time to time you have to make big life decisions, like what to do with larger sums of money you inherit, who to marry or start a family with, whether you should start your own business or change a job, should you drive home drunk or call a cab, and so on. These big decisions immediately have a big impact on your life – a positive or a negative one.

    No matter if we talk about big or small decisions, there are different levels of how wise/smart the decisions are. You can make a somehow okay, good, better or the best possible decision. On the other hand, you can make a not-so-good, bad, worse or even the worst possible decision. The better the decisions you are making on this scale and as often as possible, the better the quality of life that awaits you in the future.

    Failing at doing

    You aren’t programmed to make good decisions

    But here’s the big catch. Unfortunately, you aren’t programmed to make good decisions. Your biology isn’t wired in a way to come even close to good decisions. Ever since the jungle times, you have been programmed to make the worst decisions ever.

    You are programmed to rest a lot (to be lazy, in other words) and to save as much energy as possible – physical, mental and emotional one. You are programmed to eat everything that tastes sweet, stock fat instead of muscles, because muscles are big energy consumers and own as much clutter as possible in your home for eventual hard times in the future.

    You are wired to buy status symbols to rank better on social hierarchy and you are programmed to be attracted to other people, even if you are in a relationship (at least after infatuation fades away).

    You have been programmed for instant gratification since the jungle times, because back then it was hard to find something sweet, if you didn’t immediately eat all the food that you caught a tiger ate it (and you along with it) and you had to be lightweight to be able to climb trees. In addition to that, you were programmed to be afraid of the unknown and changes, because everything new was a matter of life and death back then.

    The list of instincts from jungle times that drive you to make stupid decisions is endless.

    Thus your natural tendency is to make stupid decisions. To watch TV at least five hours per day, eat high sugar food, stare at other booties (or even slap one from time to time) despite being in a serious relationship, buy as many things as possible for the tough times and for a higher social status (you know, to attract a potential mate), and to be afraid of everyone who is different than you.

    But as we will see, the road of instant gratification is the easy road. Unfortunately, it is programmed in your DNA to choose the easy road, over and over again. But you don’t live in a jungle anymore, where life expectancy was 30 years at the most and every single thing that moved tried to kill you. You live in much nicer times now, in times where you need a significantly different life strategy.

    To undertake the hard road, you need the long-term view

    Besides all the instincts that are driving you towards instant gratification, there is another bunch of things given to you. Important things that can help you shape the life strategy you need for today’s time – curiosity, the will to create and discover new things and an ability to plan your future.

    I can also add organizational skills with which you can highly structure and organize your life, the opportunity to grow and improve, and not to mention the most capable computer ever called the brain and the most remarkable device ever called the body.

    All these capabilities given to you are the opposite of primal instincts leading you to make better, healthier decisions in life. But in order to put these capabilities to work, you need to have a long-term perspective. You must see how curbing instant gratification leads to more enjoyment in the future. And that means taking the hard road.

    But how can you develop the capability to possess the long-term view? It’s simple. Even though the future starts sometime later (in the future, obviously), the way to use capabilities that lead to making better life decisions is to make the future feel connected to the present. If you see the future as part of your current self, you can clearly see the requirement for immediate and persistent action in the present moment that leads to the future you want.

    What you need to make better decisions in the present and to keep going in the face of tough life situations and adversity is to make your future self feel like it is in the here-and-now, connected rather than irrelevant to the present self. It may sound slightly confusing, so let me explain with simple examples.

    Psychology and problems

    How do biology and psychology mess with you

    As we now know, making the future self part of your current self is the key. That’s because our natural tendency is to only care about what’s happening here and now, and not where we will be in 3 to 5 or even 10 years. That’s just too far away. The now is much more important than the future, and consequently the pressure of instant gratification is so much higher.

    If you eat a cookie, your enjoyment comes immediately, but the fat comes only after months of eating one cookie too much a day. If you smoke a cigarette, the relaxation benefit is immediate, and it’s probably going to take decades before you develop cancer. Who cares about what will happen in decades, right?

    Not so fast. Bad decisions accumulate into bad outcomes and sooner or later, you have to pay the price. On the other hand, good decisions lead to more enjoyment in the future and a small sacrifice in the present. When you make the future self a part of your now, you can see how enjoyment in the future is much greater than a small sacrifice in the present. And that’s the key to having a long-term view.

    Of course, you have to find the right balance between investing into your future and instant gratification, you aren’t a robot, and you have to constantly fulfill your needs to be a psychologically healthy and assertive person. However, the vast majority of your decisions should be towards your better tomorrow.

    Fortunately, there is a simple life truth that shows where you’re going in life with your current decisions. Short-term history is the best predictor of short-term future. So take your body fat percentage, net worth or any other kind of success metrics and analyze what’s been happening with those metrics in the past few months – is the trend negative or positive? It’s very easy to get a good sense of where you’re going.

    With every next decision you make, ask yourself where that decision is going to lead you – tomorrow, and in 6 months, and in 3 years and even in 10 years.

    Make sure you count your future self into the decisions you are making today. That’s how you always keep the long term-view.

    If you aren’t completely convinced yet, let’s look at different life areas and see where does the road of instant gratification, the easy road, lead and where does the hard road, the road of keeping the long-term view, usually take you.

    Practical examples

    Competences and knowledge

    The easy road is to stop reading this article because it’s too long. The easy road is turning on the TV and watching a stupid reality show, laughing at other people how they could be such fools; but are you that different from them, wasting your precious life in front of the TV? The easy road is watching or listening to depressing and negative radio and TV news every day. Because your mind likes it, and it likes it a lot.

    The easy road is spending hours on social networks and stalking other people to know what they are doing. Not far from that is posting rare highlights of your life on social networks, hoping that many people will like your new status. You are getting nowhere in life; you’re only wasting precious seconds, hoping to get a little bit of attention from folks who barely know you.

    The hard road is reading a book instead of watching TV. The hard road is reading one book per week, and only books with high valuable knowledge. The hard road is reading for one hour every single day no matter what, or even reading at least one page of a book every day despite being tired like hell.

    The hard road is taking a massive online open course and actually finishing it. Not only subscribing to it because it’s free. The hard road is finding people you can learn from, convincing someone highly successful to mentor you, and constantly improving yourself.

    The hard road is always acquiring new competences, being curious and constantly trying new things. The hard road is committing yourself to lifelong learning. The easy road is to stop educating yourself and reading right after you finish high school or college. The easy road is forgetting about your brain and skills right after you end with formal education.

    The hardest road possible is not only developing reading discipline, but also applying all the newly acquired knowledge. The hardest road is to change your behavioral patterns, meaning that you stop doing some things and start doing new things. That’s a really hard road. It’s equally hard and tough to think, analyze and strategically develop a competence that is in rare supply on the markets and in great demand (to make lots of money). That’s hard.

    • Where does the hard road lead? Being able to provide all sorts of value to the markets and people.
    • Where does the easy road lead? Having zero job opportunities in life and becoming a boring person.

    Hard Road vs. Easy Road - Money

    Wealth

    It’s so hard to save 100$. And it’s so easy to spend 100$. Saving 100$ is the hard road. Spending 100$ is the easy road. Saving 10% of your paycheck every time the day for your salary payout comes is the hard road. And keeping the discipline that you never ever spend the saved money is as well. Signing mortgage on a house you can’t afford or indebting yourself to buy a new fancy car is the easy road.

    Actually, today saving 10% of your income and investing it in a mutual fund is the easy road. The salesman who has to convince you to sign the investment agreement was on the hard road. You were on the naïve easy road, thinking that people who sell financial products really care about your money. They care about their fees.

    Spending less than you earn is definitely the hard road, but I must also add getting yourself financially educated, knowing different types of investments, making good investment decisions, optimizing your taxes, legally protecting yourself and paying daily or weekly very close attention to what’s happening to your assets and net worth. That’s the hard road.

    • Where does the hard road lead? Having a full bank account, not drowning in debt, having zero financial worries and being able to do so much good with your money.
    • Where does the easy road lead? Drowning in debt and living from paycheck to paycheck.

    Health

    The easy road is sitting on your couch in front of the TV and watching reality shows while eating a bag of potato chips. The easy road is putting a frozen dinner in a microwave instead of cooking a healthy meal. The easy road is eating too much chocolate and blaming your genes for being fat.

    Just bought a magic weight-loss pills? Or a sauna belt to melt your fat while watching TV? You’re on the easiest road possible. It’s not going to work.

    The hard road is calculating the macronutrients you need, planning and preparing your meals in advance, being in a caloric deficit day after day when you are cutting fat, eating no junk food at all, eating not so tasty (compared to chips) green veggies every day, and not overeating even when you’re emotionally stressed.

    The hard road is doing something for your health every day. And it’s not only about your diet, but also about regularly exercising or doing other beneficial things for your body, be it going to the gym, doing a sport you like, stretching, getting a massage, meditating, doing yoga, and so on. Every single day, no matter what.

    The hard road means having a mentality that nothing will come between you and your goals. Nothing!

    The hard road is going to sleep early and making sure you get enough rest. The hard road is continuing on your healthy lifestyle journey even when you feel like shit, even when you injure yourself or hit a plateau. The hard road is finding new exercises that enable you additional fitness progress, constantly improving your diet and listening to your body about when to stop in order to not overtrain.

    • Where does the hard road lead? Feeling good in your own skin, having a six-pack and high levels of energy to enjoy life, living a longer life and suffering from fewer diseases.
    • Where does the easy road lead? A fat body, a hospital bad and low levels of energy.

    Hard Road vs. Easy Road Relationships

    Relationships

    It’s so hard to build up quality relationships and so easy to start abusing them. It’s so easy to emotionally break your kid over and over again. It’s so easy to come home after a hard working day and start nagging to your partner. It’s so easy to go out to a club and cheat. It’s so easy to flirt with others or gossip about them.

    It’s so easy to get into a relationship and stay with the person even if you are miserable, just because you’re scared of being alone. It’s so easy to blame love for bringing wrong people into your life, and it’s so easy to bitch to others about how they should change instead of accepting them as they are and changing yourself.

    It’s so easy to be intolerant towards others, their beliefs and values. It’s easy to judge and despise others. It’s easy to make yourself feel better and superior and it’s so easy to be narrow-minded. Yes, it’s very easy to feel superior because of your color, religion or membership in a social group. It’s so easy to be an asshole boss and so hard to be an exceptional leader.

    It’s the hard road to never stop investing into a relationship dear to you, even after decades. It’s hard to remember all the anniversaries, be attentive and romantic and nurture sexual attraction. It’s very hard become the best version of yourself in order to maximize the value you can offer in relationships. And it’s hard to develop extraordinary communication skills and regularly put them to use.

    It’s the hard road to clean toxic relationships in your life, to make peace with your past and your parents. It’s the hard road to spend time with the people who push you and are better than you and, on the other hand, also mentoring others and sharing your knowledge. That’s really hard, it’s much easier to sit on a beach and watch the waves.

    It’s hard to constantly forge new relationships, search for new people who can enrich your life or build additional dimensions with the people you love in your life. It’s hard to end a relationship when the time for that comes and it’s hard to move on when life wants you to.

    It’s so easy to let relationships just happen, and so hard to be superproactive in relationships, forging the ones that you really need in life. It’s hard to respect different kinds of people and their values.

    • Where does the hard road lead? Deep and healthy relationships, the best thing that can happen to you on this beautiful planet.
    • Where does the easy road lead? To many relationSHITS.

    Career and achievements

    It’s easy to just send out 30 CVs and hoping that someone will reply. It’s so easy to be quiet at a business meeting. It’s so easy to see an employer as someone who abuses you and out of whom you must get the maximum paycheck for the smallest possible investment. It’s so easy to hope that there won’t be much to do in a working day, so you can browse social networks and play games instead.

    It’s so easy to blame your boss for the miserable career. It’s so easy to gossip about other coworkers and being jealous, trying to block their promotion. It’s so easy to do a job you hate, only bitching, whining, complaining and doing nothing. It’s so easy to hope that better career opportunities will fall from the sky right on your head.

    It’s hard to write down 50 ideas every day and share them with your boss or founders, ideas about how the company you work for can improve. It’s hard to bring additional sales into the house. It’s hard to promote your company wherever you go. It’s hard to accelerate your learning when you are new at the company and it’s hard to learn everything about products, industry and key people.

    It’s extremely hard to proactively do an analysis of the companies with which you would fit in best (make a list), and then develop the competences they need and look for, prepare outstanding personal presentation materials (much more than just a standardized CV), start networking with the key employees at different business events and, in the last step, proactively convince them that they simply have to hire you, because you will do anything to help the company grow.

    It’s easy to find a job and it’s easy to write down something as your life mission. The hard road is staying true to your mission and staying motivated at your job even in the hard times.

    It’s hard to find a good cause to fight for and stay true to it. It’s the hard road to motivate your coworkers when they are acting dull, bring solutions to the table and not only point out problems, and show real commitment to help the company grow while also you’re also personally growing.

    • Where does the hard road lead? Self-actualization and respect from professional social circles.
    • Where does the easy road lead? Wasting 1/3 of your life.

    Emotions

    It’s so easy to lose your temper. It’s so easy to feel angry or drown in depression. It’s so easy to not show your emotions or even suppress them. It’s so easy to keep bad body posture and frown all the time. It’s so easy to give in to your fears, not saying hi to a stranger you like or climbing a mountain because you are afraid of heights.

    It’s so easy to lock yourself into a mental and emotional cage, play safe and be scared of everything. It’s so easy to not really live a life, but only exist, making sure you feel as numb as possible, just to avoid any kind of challenge. It’s the easy road, the road on which you just wait for life to pass by. It’s easy to be a zombie.

    Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there. – W. Rogers

    It’s hard to mark your emotional levels on a happiness index every day and analyze them. It’s extremely hard to start disciplining your mind to manage your emotions better. It’s hard to sit down, take a piece of paper and do emotional accounting or cognitive reframing. It’s extremely hard to become better at managing your emotions.

    It’s very hard to express feelings sometimes, but you do it anyway in a respectful manner. That’s the hard road. It’s hard to take the risks of being rejected or failing. It’s hard to be honest with yourself about what you want from life and assert yourself in a healthy way. Going to a therapy if you have issues with depression or any other severe negative feeling is not an easy road. Who likes to admit they need therapy?

    • Where does the hard road lead? Happiness and living life to the full.
    • Where does the easy road lead? Being a zombie, not really living but only existing.

    Kaizen Rules

    The hard road becomes easy with time and the easy road becomes hard

    I saved the best for last. Because only people who read the whole article deserve to know this life secret. Just kidding, but anyway. Even though you have to stand strong against your primal nature and instincts if you want to undertake the hard road in order to live a better life in the future, really hard are only the beginnings.

    It’s true that nature programmed you for life in a jungle, but fortunately you can reprogram yourself to live a happy and successful life in contemporary times – times very different from the jungle era. What am I talking about?

    After forcing yourself to make good choices for only a short period of time, they slowly become routines and routines slowly turn into habits.

    It’s how the hard road is slowly turning into the easy one. We know this concept as developing a new habit. Developing a new (healthier) habit simply means that after performing repetitions for a certain period of time (usually for 30 days), you slowly begin to perform new desired behavior subconsciously, without any effort. That is when a hard road becomes the easy one.

    It may be hard to exercise the first few times, but then you get addicted to it. It may be hard to start reading books instead of watching TV, but I guarantee you that after the first few months you would never go back to it.

    It may be hard to save money, because there’s never enough of it, but when you start and you see that you can survive on 90% income and how good it feels to have money in the bank account, you will definitely love to stick to your new habit.

    That’s why I love to repeat over and over again that the hard road becomes easy with time, and the easy road becomes hard. In the beginning, you have to put in the effort, the hard work, you need self-discipline and win battles against yourself over and over again.

    But with time, making good, healthy decisions becomes much easier. They become part of who you are and how you live your life. You reprogram yourself to live a completely new lifestyle. And then the good life, the successful life, is right at your hands.

    Choose the hard road, you’ll never regret it.

  • Life without a mobile phone

    I have to be completely honest. I still own a mobile phone. I just don’t use it in the traditional way anymore. I turned my mobile phone into a superior portable educational device. It’s my omni-university that enables me to learn wherever I go; and to create whenever I want. But what’s really important is this…

    I deleted all distraction apps from my mobile phone. I deleted the email app, all social networking apps, instant messaging services and basically all other things that are nothing but constant distractions (you can probably see the pattern that they’re all communication apps). I even changed my phone number and only a few people have it (my mom and my girlfriend).

    I did it as an experiment. I’m a big fan of technology, but also an equally big fan of technology detox and regularly taking time away from screens. Too much of anything becomes toxic, and today you can find screens shining some kind of a distraction at you on every single step you take.

    I was very careful with mobile distractions before. I made sure not to use too many IM apps, to have all notifications turned off, I scheduled daily do not disturb hours, especially when working in the flow, I tried to turn my social networks into an interesting news flow and I made sure I had educational apps on the first screen.

    Every month or so, I also did a revision of which apps I was using and which ones I wasn’t, reorganized my screen, cleared the digital clutter, and always tried to make sure that I use the mobile phone to my advantage, not as a burden preventing me from thinking and creating in peace. After every such reorganization, there were fewer and fewer apps that presented distractions.

    But now I decided to take everything a step further. As an experiment. Like Louis C.K. did.

    What happens when you live without a mobile phone?

    The first few days after I deleted all communication apps, I was very confused. I felt kind of lost. I unlocked my phone, but there were no notifications, no communication apps to open, nothing to kill 2 minutes on just to see what’s happening, no one to connect to.

    The urge to reinstall the apps was huge. For the first few days, I hated the experience. I felt like an addict without his shot. Even though it wasn’t easy, I decided to persist with my decision, as crazy as it sounds.

    And after the first few days, on the fourth day, to be more exact, something magical happened. I got more relaxed. Some of the tension was driven away. A very subjective assessment would be that I got 20 % more relaxed, which is a lot.

    After a few days without my phone, I suddenly started to feel much more relaxed.

    There was no need anymore for me to look at the phone every 3 minutes and check if there is anything new. Unlock the phone, open apps one by one – mail, Facebook, LinkedIn etc., spend a few minutes on every app, lock the phone. A few minutes passed, repeat the loop, unlock the phone, open the first app, and so on. Like a robot.

    Suddenly I didn’t care about the notifications anymore. Suddenly there was no need to start the unproductive activity loop around 300 times per day. Yes, 300 times per day is the number of times that the average smartphone owner looks at the screen.

    By ditching the phone, a big part of the brain fog also went away. I could feel more connected to myself. I gained the ability to think better and more clearly. Creating in the flow, knowing that nothing could really disturb me, and that there was no need to check for new notifications led me to a whole new level of focus and creativity.

    It’s magic, I tell you. It’s the real life. It’s the good life. You probably heard the expression that no one on their deathbed ever said “I wish I’d spent more time at the office”. I think this has become completely outdated. Now the saying should be:

    No one on their deathbed ever said, “I wish I’d spent more time checking notifications on my mobile phone”.

    Feeling connected to other people

    The primal human need is to feel connected to others. Ironically, the most distracting apps are communication apps. You have a need to feel connected to people, but on the other hand, apps that enable you to be connected with people from all over the world are the biggest distraction.

    Well, to be honest, many times these apps are also real work. Email can be real work. Slack can be real work. To get anything done, you have to communicate with other people, from teammates to all the stakeholders. No one can succeed alone on this planet and most things you’re trying to achieve in life include dealing with people. No piece of art can thrive without a proper network.

    You must be in touch with other people to be happy. And you must be in touch with other people to get work done. And technology is a great tool helping you with that. That’s a fact. But the problem is that only with self-discipline, it’s hard to set limits for when and how to use technology.

    Imagine yourself sitting in an office, working on something important. You know you do the most productive work without any distractions. You may even tolerate a distraction or two doing a few hours of work, either someone calling you or stopping by in your office.

    Now imagine someone stopping by in your office every 5 minutes. You’d go nuts. But that’s what technology does in your life. As a leverage and accelerator, it multiplies the number of distractions. There are no real-life limits in the technology world. And because you have to feel connected to other people, it’s addictive as hell, and there is no way you can manage all this only with self-discipline.

    Without a mobile phone

    Being one step ahead of technology

    You definitely want to use technology to your advantage. And you definitely want to live real life, not a fake digital life full of distractions. You surely want to be connected with people, professionally and personally, but you also want the time to think, reflect and create. You want to be and feel alive.

    As mentioned, it’s almost impossible to achieve that with self-discipline. The drug is just too addictive. Thus the only sound solution is to have a set strategy and system that enable you to enjoy the best from both worlds – real life and digital life.

    I need email to get work done. I need the IM app to chat with people from all over the world. I need social networks to distribute my content and feel the pulse of the world. But I don’t need to check my email every 5 minutes. I don’t need 10 different mobile apps blinking notifications all the time.

    To set a proper system and have the best from both worlds, you have to know yourself well, especially when you can stay disciplined and what are your weak spots. You can’t just be reactive and hope for the best.

    You have to be proactive, you have to be one step ahead of technology. You have to constantly improve the system, and experiment with new ideas, setups and ways to organize yourself. Kaizen (philosophy of constant improvements) is endless. There is always a way you can improve your productivity, happiness and how you use technology.

    Here is how I am one step ahead of technology

    My current system is that I check email and social networks only twice a day (on my desktop computer). Once in the morning and once in the afternoon. I reply to every email with the shortest response possible. I also follow all other top email productivity tips. That’s just enough so I don’t lose the world’s pulse, can use all the benefits of technology, and don’t get distracted too many times.

    I turned my smartphone into an educational device. I read books on it, blog posts, listen to audio books and podcasts, use Lynda and different MOOC apps like Udemy. I also have a few apps for creating and writing and managing my blog. It’s my real productivity and educational device.

    I know that I have the advantage of being in monk mode, so I can experiment a lot and I don’t need that much communication with people. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t improve the way you use technology and set a superior management system and some strict limits to also live the real life, not just the digital one.

    That’s what’s best in life at the end of the day. Listening to yourself, your thoughts and your needs. Creating in the flow. Meeting with someone you want to deepen the relationship with and actually talk without looking at your mobile phone a dozen times. All these things make you alive, and stop you from being a zombie.

    And technology is only a tool, leverage to help you with that. It’s up to you if you’re the master of technology or technology is mastering you. When on your deathbed, you definitely won’t regret not hitting one more like. But you might regret not putting down your phone and living the real life.

    Life experiment ideas

    Here is some simple homework I suggest you do. Spend one weekend completely without a mobile phone or any other screen. And if you’re quite a nervous and anxious person, consider if you could live without a smartphone. What do you say to being 20%+ more calm every day?

  • How to simplify your life to make room for the important things

    You should be super happy and grateful; you live in the best times ever. Violence levels are the lowest in history, poverty is declining fast, you’re free to design your life completely tailored to your needs, and the average person today owns more cool stuff than a king or a queen did a few hundred years ago.

    But there are also a few big downsides in today’s world. Information overload. Uncertainty. Market complexity. Unrealistic expectations towards life and the tyranny of choice, to name but a few.

    There are so many things to choose from, there are so many things to do, own and experience, that you can quickly get carried away by wanting too much at the same time. You know, much like if you eat too much chocolate at once and then your stomach suffers.

    As I teach in my blog posts, you always have to be one step ahead of life. You always need to have a superior life strategy in place. The solution for the tyranny of choice in today’s times is to simplify your life. It’s one of the most freeing things you can do. Subtracting instead of adding things into your life.

    The best cure for the tyranny of choice in today’s times is to simplify your life.

    By simplifying life, you make more room for the really important things (health, relationships, wealth, a smile …), you increase your margin (the space between your work capacity and workload) to not drown in work, and life in general becomes so much easier. Even more importantly, by simplifying your life you can finally make room for happiness.

    By being exposed to all the ads, technology, numerous distractions, possibilities, options, products and changes, you can quickly start feeling overwhelmed. We all do. And it’s time for you to get ahead of this downside.

    In this blog post, you will learn how to simplify your life, so that you can get back the freedom, time, energy and other resources you need to live a happy and really productive life by being focused on the things that really matter.

    So let’s start exploring the options you have for simplifying your life.

    Less is more

    How you can simplify your life

    There are several ways of how you can simplify your life. They aren’t rocket science and they aren’t hard to do – rationally. You see, simplifying your life is an emotional challenge, not a rational one. The two strongest emotional challenges you have to face are the fear of missing out and the fear of losing something valuable to you.

    Simplifying your life is an emotional challenge, not a rational one.

    Because it’s an emotional challenge, you have to start with small steps and see that you can survive with one project less or by throwing away that thing you haven’t used for months. Things will get much easier when you simplify your life and doing it will make room for the important things.

    I was scared like a little puppy when I sold my car and when I ditched my mobile phone. But after experiencing all the benefits a few days later, all the fear was gone, and the benefits were so huge I was just asking myself why I hadn’t tried it earlier.

    Knowing that to simplify your life, you will have to deal primarily with your negative emotions and fears, here are a few options you have to start simplifying:

    • Automate – social media marketing, tasks, production …
    • Cancel – subscription, event, appearance, travel, visit, meeting …
    • Delegate – tasks, commitments, chores …
    • Delete – task, functionality, files, online account …
    • Donate – clothes, money, things you don’t need anymore …
    • Downsize – company, number of relationships, car, house …
    • Forget about it – issue, problem, person …
    • Let it go – emotional problem, emotional issue …
    • Minimize – workload, number of daily decisions, options …
    • Optimize – chores, processes, decision-making …
    • Opt out – newsletters, projects, commitments, meetings …
    • Refocus – reset priorities, define your True north …
    • Remove – people from your life, functionalities, options …
    • Set limits – for mental masturbation, TV watching, the number of things you do simultaneously …
    • Throw away – clutter, things you don’t use…

    Above are listed 15 ways of how you can simplify your life, and I definitely haven’t listed all of them. It’s up to you to decide which option is the best for the different situations you have in life. The important fact is that if you don’t systematically and strategically simplify your life with all the options you have, you’re going to stay right where you are.

    Now let’s dive deeper into a few best options of how you can simplify your life fast by using above mentioned tools.

    1. Simplify your schedule
    2. Simplify your meals
    3. Simplify your style
    4. Simplify your relationships
    5. Commit to the minimalistic lifestyle
    6. Cancel projects you aren’t really committed to
    7. Use fewer apps
    8. Simplify your goals
    9. Simplify your soul
    10. Other ideas for simplifying your life

    Simplify your schedule

    You probably know very well that meetings, excessive socializing and spending too much time on email are the biggest time wasters for most people. Email can be real work, but only for rare occupations. For the majority, email and meetings are great ways to kill time and feel productive, even if you aren’t.

    Meetings, emails and urgent tasks are also a great way to make your calendar and working day super complex and super unproductive. Having hundreds of items in your calendar every week can make you feel like you’re a super busy person, but the feeling is often fake.

    It’s shocking how many people are lying to themselves with a fake feeling of progress, doing tasks that are urgent, but not important.

    To avoid a fake feeling of progress, you need to set clear outputs and metrics for your work and then make sure you’re really getting the important things done. In more than 90 % of cases, that means you have to simplify your working day and make room to work in the flow on the things that really matter.

    Simplifying your calendar can be really life-changing for your productivity and happiness levels at work. The tools for simplifying your calendar are timeboxing and setting strict limits.

    Timeboxing is a way to proactively set what you’ll spend your working time on in advance, while limits help you set strict boundaries to make sure that distractions and “urgent” tasks don’t make you stray from your plan.

    For example, you can simplify your calendar with a framework where you timebox two working flows per day, you plan to check email only once a day and you have a maximum of two 30-minutes meetings. An exception is Friday, when you may have more and longer meetings as well as spend more time on email.

    You may also have a no-interruptions Tuesday, when you do 4 working flows with zero distractions, no email and no meetings. In that way, you finish 10 working flows and focus on what’s really important. A strict schedule framework helps you more easily make decisions on when and how to spend your time. You can take everything even further by having no schedule at all.

    Here is one more alternative suggestion how to organize your calendar with timeboxing:

    Example of Highly Productive Calendar
    Here is an example how your calendar should be organized for maximum performance.
    Life experiment ideas

    Simplify your calendar by:

    Simplify your meals

    Food is an important part of life. You probably eat 3 to 5 times per day and it takes you between 20 – 60 minutes on average to prepare the meal and eat it (or even more). That sums up to 2 – 3 hours of eating every day.

    There’s nothing wrong with that. As I mentioned, food is an important part of life. Who doesn’t love food and eating. Not only do you need it for survival, it also gives you a feeling of safety, pleasure, and sharing a dish can be a great social experience.

    But it doesn’t have to get more complicated than that. In fact, there are many ways of simplifying your eating habits and still fulfilling all your nutritional and foodie needs. You can prepare a standard weekly shopping list. You can simplify the meals you cook. You can optimize how many dishes you use. You can standardize the types of meals you eat at different times of day.

    I have a few standard options for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. I try to keep my meals standardized, simple and within the caloric limits that fit my macro-nutrition plan. At first, I put some effort into experimenting with different options and finding the optimal meals for me (taste, preparation time, nutritional values etc.).

    Now, I update and add new options every quarter or so, just to make sure that my diet is constantly improving and things don’t get too boring. But I try not to spend hours and hours thinking about what should I eat for my next meal.

    Well, simplifying your meals doesn’t mean that you don’t try new dishes from time to time. It doesn’t mean that you don’t go to a restaurant and order something different and non-standard from time to time. You don’t want to deprive yourself of pleasures in life.

    Simplifying your meals only means that you decide to have the best of both worlds. On the one hand, you try to simply, standardize and optimize your life and on the other hand, you’re constantly experimenting with new things. Keeping the balance between the one and the other is usually more art than science, but with time and by listening to yourself, you start making the right choices.

    Life experiment ideas

    When it comes to food, here are some suggestions for how to simplify your life:

    • Standardize your weekly shopping list and have groceries delivered to your home.
    • Plan a standard weekly eating schedule and update it from time to time.
    • Eat meals more or less at the same time every day.
    • Have 5 – 10 favorite types of breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks that fit your macro-nutritional needs.
    • In each of your favorite restaurants, have a dish or two you always order.
    • Simplify your meals with fewer different types of food. You will consume less calories and food will digest more easily.
    • Optimize food preparation and how many dishes you use.
    • Constantly improve your diet and try new things from time to time.
    • Have healthy snack options when emotional hunger hits you.
    • Absolutely enjoy food, but try not to complicate your life too much with meal choices.

    Simplify your style

    Personal style is very important, it’s one of the power signs and the handiest option to express your taste, values and uniqueness. Nevertheless, having and managing good style takes time, effort and mental bandwidth. That’s why Steve Jobs wore the same clothes most of the time and why Mark Zuckerberg does it nowadays.

    On the one hand, expressing personal style is important, but on the other, it doesn’t make sense to spend hours and hours in front of the mirror and an open closet, choosing what to wear. Obviously it’s a lot harder for women and many professions (like modeling) to not invest heavily into a unique and impressive personal style, but there are definitely some limits you can set.

    What to wear

    Life experiment ideas

    Here are a few ideas for how you can simplify your style:

    • Find a few clothing brands that fit you well and shop only there.
    • Regularly take one day per month to update your wardrobe or do it only twice a year (like I do), but then make more purchases.
    • Get a stylist if necessary, to unburden your mind over whether you fit the new fashion trends.
    • Donate clothes you don’t wear. It’s probably half of your wardrobe.
    • Buy seven pairs of the same jeans, t-shirts and hoodies, and forget about your style.

    Simplify your relationships

    I’m a strong believer that you must have complex, multidimensional, deep and diversified relationships in order to grow and experience the richest life possible. At the end of the day, close relationships matter most.

    Simple relationships are definitely helpful when you want to relax and enjoy life, but they rarely bring out the best in you and push you to new levels of awareness.

    But there are definitely many ways of simplifying relationships in your life. First of all, if you follow the “no assholes, no bozos, no crappy people and no haters” rule, you’ll clean up your life in terms of relationships to a great extent. You can simply decide not to deal with that kind of people at all.

    You don’t think about them, you don’t talk about them, you don’t gossip about them, they just don’t exist for you. What a simple and effective solution.

    The second thing you can do is to choose your battles very carefully. Even by ignoring all the shitty people, relationships are often battles, because of a lack of outstanding communication, clashes of interest or many other things.

    Never go to war, not with others, but especially not with yourself.

    But there are battles that are important in your life, and others you often engage in only because of your ego. So simplify your life by choosing your battles very carefully. There are many battles you don’t have to engage in; you can simply smile or move on.

    In the same way, you can simplify your most precious relationships by initiating honest communication as soon as a problem appears. As soon as there is bad energy present, you can take a step towards transforming it into a positive one.

    A hug, a compliment, a nice word, sitting down and starting to communicate is always a good first step towards switching from the negative to the positive. By being proactive in relationships, you can simplify your life to a great extent.

    Life experiment ideas

    To sum up, here are the ideas for how to simplify your relationships:

    • Have fewer relationships and those ones really deep. There are six extremely important relationships to nurture in your life – spouse, family, friends, boss, coworkers, mentors. Put quality over quantity in these relationships.
    • Follow the “no assholes, no bozos, no crappy people and no haters” rule.
    • Don’t engage in battle with every person who doesn’t agree with you, has a different opinion or doesn’t know how to drive. Instead observe, listen and learn. Choose your battles very carefully.
    • Don’t have unrealistic expectations about relationships. Relationships are like glass, but the glass is already broken.
    • Be proactive in relationships. When a problem appears, solve it immediately, especially with honest communication. When engaging with people, always respond active-constructively.
    • Always be yourself and don’t lie at all.

    Simplify your life

    Commit to the minimalistic lifestyle

    The more stuff you own; the more stuff owns you. Every item in your life takes up place, time and energy. Having less of quality stuff is some of the best advice for simplifying life. A lot has been written about minimalism, so I won’t go deep into it, but there are a few key important points I have to emphasize when writing about simplifying life.

    You don’t want to go into the extreme of living an ascetic life, owning almost nothing. That’s often a sign that it’s too painful for you to deal with the material world. Don’t try to escape from reality. You need to be constantly fulfilling your needs to be happy and that also includes fulfilling materialistic needs.

    But that doesn’t mean you need to have a cellar full of junk, hundreds of clothes you don’t ever wear, dozens of clutter drawers, three cars, two TVs, five tablets and hundreds of souvenirs catching dust on your shelves. Be an emotionally healthy minimalist.

    The second important point is that the best way to live a minimalistic lifestyle is not to buy stuff in the first place. Wait a few days before making minor purchases and a few weeks for bigger purchases. You’ll be surprised at how often you change your mind and foresee that at the end of the day, maybe you don’t need that thing that you wished for so much.

    To simplify your life with a minimalistic lifestyle, it’s also very important to do regular cleanings, at least twice per year. Sell stuff, donate stuff, throw stuff away. For every item that you haven’t used for a month or so, ask yourself if you really need it. If you don’t, get rid of it.

    Life experiment ideas

    The main ideas for how to simplify your life with the minimalistic lifestyle:

    • Do regular cleanings every 6 months or so. Know that being a minimalist and throwing stuff away is more an emotional challenge than a rational one.
    • Avoid emotional buying. Wait a few days for minor purchases and a few weeks for the bigger ones, and observe if the emotional pressure to buy that things fades away.
    • Everything you want to buy, multiply the price 7 – 10x. That’s the real price, considering the opportunity-cost in 10 years if you had invested the money in an EFT with average market return.
    • By owning less, there are fewer items to use, fewer items to move, take care of, clean, do software updates or whatever. Remember, you don’t own stuff, stuff owns you.

    Always have the key objects in the same place

    Key holderThere’s a part of your brain called the hippocampus and it’s dedicated to remembering the location of things, if they are consistently in the same place. That leads to a simple tip for productivity and simplifying your life.

    Always have the things you own in the same place. Your keys, glasses, perfumes, whatever. This life hack will save you a lot of time and brainpower.

    Cancel the projects you aren’t really committed to

    Every year, there are probably a few projects in your professional or even personal life (redecorating the bathroom etc.) that you said yes to, but only because you somehow didn’t have the courage to say no. And now you aren’t meeting your commitments and you probably never will or you’ll just deliver a half-finished output.

    Gather the courage and be honest with yourself and others, and cancel all the commitments that you know you won’t deliver or will perform poorly; or that aren’t projects with the highest impact in your life or projects where your contribution is irreplaceable.

    Life experiment ideas
    • Simplify your life by not having too many projects, too many activities and too many commitments.
    • Work only on projects where your value added is high and you personally grow and learn.
    • Free yourself of the emotional burden, where you committed to something you will never deliver.
    • Simplifying life is always about saying no. Learn how to say no.

    Use fewer apps

    One of the best ways to really simplify your life is to use fewer applications – on your computer, tablet and mobile phone. There are so many applications to install and it’s so easy to do it, all you need is one click or touch of a screen. It takes a few clicks and you can have hundreds of apps on your devices.

    From 10+ chatting apps to 10+ news apps and then you have all the productivity apps, entertainment apps, the list is endless. Every app takes up space, time, energy and adds complexity to your life. And new popular apps are being released every single day, just begging you to install them.

    Instead of installing one more app, go into the opposite direction instead.

    Life experiment ideas
    • Limit yourself strictly to 30 or something apps. If you want to install a new app, you have to delete one that you’re currently using. It’s a tricky rule, you’ll see.
    • Have one app for chatting, zero apps for news, maybe one or two productivity apps and one to relax you.
    • Delete all the apps you haven’t used for more than a few weeks.
    • But digitalize as many things as possible. You can simplify your life to a great extent by organizing a digital brain for yourself.

    Simplify your goals

    If you’re trying to achieve too many goals at the same time or trying to implement too many changes at once, you usually implement none. Thus you can greatly simplify your life by reducing the number of goals and improvements you want to achieve in a specific time period.

    You absolutely need to have a life vision, you absolutely need a list of what you want to experience in life, what you will create and what an awesome person you will become – the best version of yourself.

    But not everything can be achieved at once. You have to strictly limit your work in progress (WIP) if you don’t want to overwhelm yourself.

    Limiting work in progress is one of the best ways to simplify your life.

    One big improvement and one big goal, together with a few small goals and improvements is probably the upper limit. Or here’s an even better idea – one of the best ways to focus yourself is to choose one life area you want to dramatically improve in one year and then work every day hard to really improve that area. Only one area, nothing more.

    In five to seven years, you can completely change your life with that kind of an approach. One year, one area. Just don’t try to follow too many goals at once. You have enough time, all you have to do is to be patient and work steadily on your priorities every day. Very limited priorities.

    Life experiment ideas

    Here are a few ideas for how to simplify your life regarding goals:

    • Have only one big goal and one big improvement you want to achieve at once.
    • Even better: make it a New Year’s resolution to take one life area to a whole new level and then focus on that area 100 %.
    • Don’t overestimate what you can achieve in a month and underestimate what you can achieve in a few years.
    • Limit the number of goals, work in progress, and don’t forget to enjoy life.

    Simplify your soul

    The last thing you can do is to simplify your character. I call it simplifying your soul, but that includes everything around you as a person. You can simplify your emotions by smiling most of the time; by enjoying the present moment and flowing through life like a river, calmly facing every obstacle on the way.

    To stop resisting and being flexible means greatly simplifying life.

    It’s easier said than done, but it’s definitely the most rewarding simplification.

    You can simplify your character if you stop being a perfectionist and start accepting a good enough state. You can simplify your soul if you stop being greedy, needy or stuck in any other negative emotion or excessive need. You can greatly simplify your life by focusing on what you have and not on what you lack.

    You can simplify your life if you stop torturing your soul, stop doing things that aren’t your true north, things that you don’t enjoy and got somehow stuck in. You can simplify your life by facing your irrational fears and making more room for love. You can simplify your life by accepting the truth no matter how hurtful it is and having realistic expectations towards life.

    Here is how you can simplify your life by simplifying your character:

    • It doesn’t have to be perfect, good enough is just good enough.
    • Keep the (inner) smile as your default emotion 80 % of the time.
    • Don’t overanalyze and overthink things, learn to live in the present moment.
    • Deal with negative thoughts and cognitive distortions with emotional accounting and cognitive reframing.
    • Stay lean and agile on how you will achieve your goals, stop resisting life.
    • Focus yourself on what you have in life, not on what you lack.
    • Accept the truth and stop asking yourself why life is as it is, instead learn to master it.
    • Face your fears and make room for love instead. There are many types of fears, but there is only one love.

    Keep it simple

    Other ideas for simplifying your life

    I think you got many ideas for simplifying your life. You know it’s better to implement one thing than to only read about 50 recommendations. So choose a few of your favorite life simplifications and make sure you really implement them.

    Life experiment ideas

    But if you’re really enthusiastic about simplifying your life to the full, you can find additional ideas below.

    1. Limit different communication channels you use (IM, paper mail etc.)
    2. Don’t read news at all
    3. Don’t go to conferences
    4. Rent instead of own
    5. Simplify the furniture in your rooms
    6. Have one day when you spend time all alone
    7. Don’t own a car
    8. Downsize a car or a home
    9. Create a system (for mail, paperwork, chores)
    10. Have fewer drawers
    11. Clean your desk
    12. Don’t multitask
    13. Don’t use your phone when you’re talking to other people
    14. Create a not-to-do list
    15. Every day, have three tasks you must do, forget the rest
    16. Enjoy doing nothing
    17. Simplify your RSS feed
    18. Move closer to your office
    19. Never be late
    20. Use email templates
    21. Use fewer words
    22. Take time away from technology
    23. Prepare yourself for a new day a day before
    24. Always go to sleep early
    25. Create more white space
    26. Slow down
    27. Don’t bitch, whine and complain at all
    28. Consolidate bank accounts
    29. Shop only once per week
    30. Work from home when possible
    31. Automate administration (bill paying, savings, etc.)
    32. Rearrange your browser’s bookmark bar (delete bookmarks)
    33. Mind your own business
    34. Don’t be overly sensitive
    35. Forgive
    36. Drink only water, tea and the green drink
    37. Ask for help when you need it
    38. Eat only healthy food
    39. Don’t act out of ego, search and mind the environment’s feedback
    40. Always tell the truth

    As you will see, by simplifying your life you’ll finally make room for the important things. And your stress levels will drop dramatically. You’ll finally get the opportunity to really live life.

    Simple living, high thinking.

  • From proactive and reactive behavior to superproactivity

    I’m sure that the difference between proactive and reactive behavior isn’t completely new to you. It’s a concept presented by Stephen Covey and greatly popularized in management and personal development practices.

    Switching from being reactive to being proactive makes a really big difference in life. Much less firefighting, stress, anxiety and fewer unexpected situations. Even though proactive thinking takes the quality of life to a completely new level, it’s often not enough to really live the good life.

    If you want the best life possible, you have to take proactive behavior one step further. I call it superproactivity. In this blog post, I will teach you how to be superproactive in life, to get to the best that life has to offer to you. It’s crazy how good the results that superproactive thinking brings are, so bear with me.

    Proactive and reactive behavior

    To refresh your memory, being reactive means that you don’t take any initiative or make strategic decisions in life, you just go where life kicks you; and then you react to what happens to you, sometimes with positive, but more often with negative feelings.

    On the other hand, the main idea of being proactive is that you ask yourself what’s likely to happen and you act accordingly to get the best possible outcome. You act before a situation becomes a source of frustration or crisis.

    “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” – Wayne Gretzky

    A very important difference between being reactive or proactive is also if you act out of the victim mindset or out of optimal thinking, if your actions are based on fixed or growth mindset, and the most importantly if you are prepared to take full responsibility for your life.

    When you stop playing the victim and take full responsibility for your life, and when you clearly see all the options you have with the abundance mindset, you become much more proactive, which naturally leads to making more strategic and smarter decisions about your life and future.

    Making more strategic decisions about your life includes at least setting goals, creating opportunities for yourself instead of just waiting for them to appear, applying personal core values in making decisions, and being aware that you always have a choice and that you’re the one choosing your own unique response.

    With proactive behavior, you become aware that life doesn’t just happen, but that you’re the one who designs your life, you’re the one making choices. With proactive thinking, you focus on things you can change, you make a plan of how you’ll really change them and then go after your goals, while at the same time accepting the things you can’t change.

    Reactive language Proactive language
    I need I want
    I must I prefer
    I can’t I can
    I have to I choose
    If only I will

    A proactive person is a person who gets things done.

    The most reactive life situations

    Recommendations and examples of proactive behavior are especially focused on setting goals, getting things done at work, and managing your life and career.. But there are situations in life where we tend to be exponentially more reactive. There are the areas of life where we simply expect “greater forces” to do the hard work instead of us.

    In these situations, we all tend to be behave super reactively. What am I talking about? Here are the big two:

    • Intimate relationships: You wait to fall in love
    • Career: You want to do something that you’re passionate about

    And here are a few other things I can add to the list:

    • Raising children: Everyone has kids, so we all just know how to raise kids
    • Information consumption: You read what appears on your social network timelines
    • Pension: You hope the government will take care of your pension
    • Sex: Nature took care of everything, you just have to put it/get it in
    • Job security: Diploma and a job contract with a strong union backup is what I need

    To go into details, these are quite popular unrealistic expectations that people have in life:

    You expect to randomly meet someone new and then the magic will start to happen. They’re smart, beautiful, charismatic, you could eat them alive. It’s love at first sight, you go on the first date, everything works perfectly and then you live happily ever after.

    You expect to be naturally good at the work you do, that you’re talented for it and are thus something special. When you do this kind of work, you’re consequently of course passionate, happy, it’s easy to get a job, everybody admires you and all you get are successes and promotions. Like it is in love, so it must be at work.

    You expect the government to take care of your financial future. And your insurance and mutual fund management company. You’re saving money in 401k and in a mutual fund, and your financial advisor showed you the graph of how you’re going to have millions when you retire. The government will take care of stable financial markets and everything will go perfectly.

    Nature made sure you instinctively know how to have sex as well as how to raise children. It’s already taken care of, the only thing you have to do is to enjoy and behave naturally. Everyone does it relatively okay, so why put in any additional effort.

    And for your education and lifelong learning, your friends recommending articles on social networks can take care of it. They surely know what kind of information consumption is best for you.

    As far as things that matter most in life are concerned, you expect someone else to take care of them. That is the most reactive behavior ever.

    You give your personal power away to:

    • Talent
    • Nature
    • Love
    • Government
    • Religion
    • Acquaintances on social networks etc.

    You expect to have natural talents, so you don’t have to work hard for your success. You expect to naturally know how to have good sex and how to raise kids, because it’s something you should enjoy in life and not put in any effort.

    You expect your government and your financial consultant will take care of your money. At the end of the day, you even pay them to do it. You expect love to take care of your intimate relationships, you just want to enjoy them. And why do you have so many friends on social networks if it isn’t for spying on what they’re doing and reading what they’re reading.

    Do you really think this is a smart strategy? It’s not. But what is an alternative? Well, it’s time for superproactivity!

    Proactive and reactive or superproactive

    Superproactivity

    Superproactivity means taking full and complete responsibility for your life, including the areas where you expect nature, love, government, church or whoever to take care of things instead of you. You take responsibility for your own life in the hardest areas ever. To do that, you have to first accept the truth.

    Hollywood movies lie to you. There is no love at first sight that lives happily ever after without any effort. Love at first sight only means that you biologically and genetically fit with someone, to have offspring, of course. It’s nothing special, it happens to every living being on the planet. But it’s your job to figure out if there is also an intellectual, emotional, spiritual, social, practical fit. And if doesn’t, you have every right to end the relationship.

    There is no such thing as the one. There is only the question of making the right choice or the wrong one. You have to honestly ask yourself if you’re prepared to suffer years and years of your life with the wrong person, because you fell in love and it lasted for a few months. You can’t blame love, only yourself. You are the one who makes the choice.

    Media and successful people lie to you. It’s not about having talent and passion for something and then easily becoming successful and rich. Passion comes with effort, with becoming good at something. Becoming good at something takes years and years of hard work, and many ups and downs.

    You can’t just sit and hope that maybe your boss will give you a task where your passion will magically awaken and your work will become more meaningful. That’s the easy way that doesn’t happen in real life. What you really need is to have a rough idea of what you’re good at. And then become really good at it. You need to level up your game. And go through all the crap (Criticism, Rejections, Assholes, Pressure) while doing it.

    The crap of first being a newbie, when everything sucks and you are confused and nothing works as you’d like it to. The crap of failing again and again. You have to put in at least 10,000 hours of hard work. Slowly, you will become a master and then the passion will awaken. Success is hard work, not only having talent and passion and hoping that your boss will notice it.

    I don’t even want to mention the financial industry and government. They don’t care about your financial future. They care about theirs. Nobody knows what will happen with markets in 5, 10 or 15 years nor what will happen with the governments. But they get their fees now and that’s what matters to them.

    Remember, only one thing grows when handled by other people. It’s not your money. It’s a penis, no matter how stupid it sounds. The only way for you to have sound financial future is to get financially educated, care about every dollar you earn and carefully pay attention to every dollar you invest. You have to do the hard work.

    It’s the same with getting educated and following lifelong learning. Your diploma won’t take care of your job security. Unions and employment contracts won’t do it. Only skills, competences and providing value to markets will. You’ll have to do all the hard work (and smart work), you’ll have to become the best version of yourself.

    It goes completely the same for the most basic human things like raising kids and having sex. Nature didn’t take care of either of them. Bad sex exists. And messed-up kids exist. Both happen more often than you think. You can’t just assume things will go okay by themselves, because nature took care of it. “Sex is like pizza. Even if it’s bad, it’s still good” is one of the worst quotes ever.

    You want to get educated, you want to talk to people and share experiences, you want to level up your game, you want to become an expert in fundamental things in life, you can’t just hope that someone else or something else will take care of it. That’s looking for the easy way. And the easy way always gets hard with time.

    Hope is not a strategy.

    Go beyond proactive and reactive, become a superproactive person

    Yes, with time, the easy road becomes hard and the hard road becomes easy. That’s why you want to choose the hard road. Choosing the hard road means taking power away from nature, love, government, religion and social networks into your own hands.

    It means that you don’t fall in love and marry the first person you meet, but that you date, get to know your preferences and search until you find your fit. It means that you don’t hope for a spark of passion at work, but that you follow your effort, become a master of something that markets want and strategically find the best option to provide value, either at a company that’s your perfect fit or as a freelancer and entrepreneur. You can do both things in the AARRR way.

    Being superproactive means that you strategically decide what you will read and you read a lot, always keep educating yourself and constantly strive to become the best version of yourself. You definitely also educate yourself in the areas where average people assume that nature, religion, government or whoever took care of things.

    As a superproactive person, you become financially educated and pay very close attention to every dollar that comes into your life. As a superproactive person, you aren’t just a parent, you make sure you become an extraordinary parent.

    These are all the things that lead to a really good life, to the best life possible. Taking responsibility for your own life, where the default expectation of an average person is for someone else to take care of it.

    There are three kinds of people: those who make things happen, those who watch what happens, and those who wonder what happened.

    Putting yourself in a position of many options

    To be really superproactive in life, you have to put yourself in the position of having many options. That is a difficult, but very rewarding thing to do.

    For intimate relationships, you have to develop dating skills, you have to risk rejections, increase your sexual market value, and so on. To some people it comes naturally, for others it takes years of hard work. But when you’re in a position of many options, you can easily choose the best fit for you.

    For your career, you have to strategically develop your competences, build your network, prepare a list of business ideas or companies you want to work for, become extremely good at marketing and reaching out to people and convincing them that you can provide value.

    For developing your competences, you have to build yourself superior infostructure, you have to watch MOOCs instead of TV, unsubscribe from distractions on social networks, become a proactive reader, and so on. By doing that, you can develop many different skills that you can offer on the markets, and that gives you many options for when and how to advance your career.

    To have a sound financial future, you have to take full responsibility for your money. Being superproactive, you know that nobody will take care of your financial future, so you make sure you save money, know different types of investments, manage every dollar you earn, become tough on your advisors, pay attention to the financial market pulse, and so on.

    People who save money are people who have options. People in debt are people with almost zero options.

    You want to make the right choices in life that lead you to having more options. That brings freedom and that brings the ability to be superproactive in your life. All you need for superproactivity is a superior life strategy, smart work and a little bit of courage. At the end of the day, it’s super fun to be superproactive and it gives you great results.

    Homework

    In which areas of life are you giving away your personal power?

    Reading my blog, you’ve probably already developed the growth mindset, abundance mindset and optimal thinking. You’ve also probably heard of proactive behavior. Now it’s time for you to become a superproactive person.

    The first step is to have all ten different life areas in mind:

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

    Now here is the list of “greater powers” that we usually hope will take care of things in our lives so that we can just lay back and relax:

    • Talent
    • Advisers
    • Beauty
    • Boss
    • Formal education
    • Good genes
    • Government
    • Intelligence
    • Love
    • Markets
    • Nature
    • Parents
    • Religion / God
    • Spouse

    Now think of the three most critical areas where you’re really taking the easy road, hoping that somebody or something else will do all the hard work for you.

    Outline a plan and a strategy of how you could take the power back into your hands step by step, by getting educated, proactive, and making choices and decisions by yourself. Then, taking back the power area by area, become a superproactive person and reap all the rewards.

    Never be inactive or reactive when it comes to your life strategy. You can’t trust your life strategy to inherited behavior patterns.

  • A day without a screen

    I’m a big fan of technology. Technology is a big productivity leverage and general contributor to a much higher quality of life. But as any leverage, it’s a double-edged sword. Technology is like fire, you can cook yourself a meal with it or you can burn yourself. How you burn yourself with technology is pretty simple.

    It’s when you stop using technology to your advantage and start abusing it instead. There are two pretty common ways how people start abusing technology. The first one is about quality and the second one is about quantity.

    In this blog, we will talk about how large quantities lead to abuse, but before we get there let’s just scratch the other type – the so-called quality abuse. It’s pretty simple. You have one of the most capable computers in your head available for use, a product of billions of years of evolution.

    Next to that, you have most of the knowledge ever created by humankind available everywhere you go on your mobile phone. This is so revolutionary, so groundbreaking, and we’re often not even aware of it.

    If you tried to explain to someone from 200 years ago that they would be able to carry all humankind knowledge on a small device in their pocket, they’d think you were nuts.

    But here comes the important question: Why would you use your brain and the internet for browsing funny pictures of cats?

    That’s what 90 % of people do, and with that kind of actions they’re on the wrong side of the double-edged sword. Make sure you’re on the right side by setting up a proper infostructure.

    Now let’s move to quantity.

    Technology detox

    As mentioned I’m a big fan of technology, but I’m an even bigger fan of regular technology detox. The average person checks their smartphone a few hundred times a day. A few hundred times. Doing that continuously day by day, week by week, month by month and even year after year, of course, leaves negative consequences.

    Too much of anything, even good things, becomes toxic.

    There are many negative consequences of abusing technology:

    • Being unable to focus and concentrate
    • Reducing the ability to live in the present moment
    • Stifling your creative potential
    • Losing connection with yourself
    • Running away from real-life problems
    • Damaging your posture
    • Hurting your eyesight, etc.

    The only way to make sure you don’t abuse technology is to set very strict and hard limits, when and how often to take time completely off and away from technology.

    Here are the suggested minimums for technology detox, how often you should turn off all devices that need electricity:

    • A few hours before you go to sleep, if you want to get quality sleep
    • One whole day every two weeks (two days a month, basically)
    • One extended weekend every quarter (3 – 4 days)
    • One or two whole weeks during the summer vacation

    The main catch is that it may sound much easier than it really is.

    Don’t just agree, really try it for yourself

    One thing is to read about “a day without screen” concept and somehow agree with it, it’s a completely different thing to really implement it. We’ve become so addicted to technology that it takes severe discipline and preparation to really follow this trough.

    If you think having a day without a screen is easy, it’s not. There are screens everywhere.

    First of all, you have screens everywhere. In most cases that includes your:

    • Mobile phone
    • Tablet
    • Computer
    • Laptop
    • TV
    • Smartwatch (if you don’t have it, it will probably be your next one)
    • VR headset (if you don’t have it yet, you’ll have it soon)
    • Kindle (discussable whether it’s a screen or not)
    • And probably another device or two

    Now when you wake up, you probably look at your smartwatch, especially to see how many people liked your statuses on social networks. Then you take your smartphone to the toilet and check all the emails. And this is only the beginning of a day.

    Then you spend the whole working day behind a computer or a laptop. And before you go to sleep, you browse news on your tablet and then watch a bit of TV, just to relax and forget about the daily worries.

    Even if it’s weekend, you may not work that much on your computer, but you definitely play a game or two or watch new funny vines or try to relax in some other way (by staring at a screen).

    It may not look 100 % exactly like that – funny vines may be replaced by the daily news, TV with Netflix, playing games with a VR headset, but anyway, you get the picture. There are screens everywhere in your life, and there’s going to be even more screens in your life in the future.

    Fridge, car, closets, clothes, glasses, windows, mirrors, you name it. Everything will have a screen, everything will be connected to the internet and interact with you, which is awesome. But only if you have the discipline and the will to manage all this technology and not let the technology manage you and dictate your life.

    A day without a screen

    With a day without a screen, something magical will happen to you

    Instead of just agreeing with how abuse of technology can be toxic, really try to have one day without a single look at any screen. Because it’s hard, you have to strategically prepare yourself for that kind of radical action. The best way to do it is to dramatically increase the transaction costs for starting to use any type of screen.

    That means completely unplugging your TV, locking all the devices in a safe and making sure you don’t know the unlock code, but only someone you trust who won’t give it to you for that day. You have to drain batteries from all your devices, make sure there are no “urgent” emails to answer, and so on.

    You have to do it the day before, and you have to make sure that every single electronic device is dead and locked away. It may sound silly, but you’ll see how hard it is.

    But even more importantly, you will see that without any screen something magical will happen.

    You may get confused the moment you wake up. There is no watch, smartphone or whatever to get distracted. What to do? Hug your spouse. Be grateful that you are alive. Stretch a little bit. Pay attention to your body and how you feel.

    If nothing else, you’ll probably have to go to the toilet. Sitting on the toilet, you may again get confused. There is no email or 9gag. Should you read labels on shampoos? Should you think about the meaning of life? Or maybe about what you should do through the day.

    But what should you really do throughout the day? Remember, no TV, no computer, no tablet. It’s really confusing. Since you aren’t a robot and can’t just shut down, this is the point where the magic will start to happen. You will naturally and slowly get drawn to really interesting and inspiring primal human activities.

    You may actually go out into the nature and play. You may start talking to your spouse and reconnect. You may pick up a book and start reading. You may take a notebook and start brainstorming or planning your future.

    Confusion will slowly start turning into clarity. You will become more relaxed. You will be more present. You will start feeling more connected to yourself. You will become more alert to your surroundings and how you interact with the world.

    You’ll be able to think better and more creatively, connect with people on a deeper level, and you will start to feel your batteries recharging. You will feel FUCKING ALIVE. The electronic devices’ batteries will be empty, but yours will be full.

    Here are a few ideas for what you can do when you decide to have a day without a screen:

    And what not to do:

    The first few hours may be very confusing and alien to you. But after a few hours, oh boy. You will completely forget about email. You won’t care about all the likes and messages anymore. You won’t care what will happen in the next episode of your favorite show.

    Because suddenly, you’ll realize what you’ve been missing out on. Real life. Being really connected to yourself, nature and other people is what makes you feel alive. And it’s so awesome. Just try it for one day, as an experiment.

    Nevertheless, it might be a good idea to relay on some old tech, such as a mechanical watch. You still want to know what time it is. There are many options for superwatches, that are mechanical, not digital type.

    Have the best of both worlds

    I see many parents who forbid their kids from using technology. I think that’s silly. Because mastering technology is a really big advantage in life and an important competence. Technology helped me so much in my life advancement and following my goals, and it’ll be even more important in the future.

    Technical literacy has become as important as general literacy. So, you shouldn’t be afraid of technology, avoid it at all costs or see it as a bad thing. Technology is not good or bad. It all depends on how you use it. If you ignore it, it’s definitely bad. And if you abuse it, it’s also definitely bad.

    Mind the quality and the quantity and you’ll be okay.

    All you have to do is set healthy limits. Like with everything in life. You shouldn’t deprive yourself of anything. You should have the best of everything life has to offer.

    Having the best of both worlds means being connected to yourself, nature and other people, and using technology to your advantage – to be more productive, to learn faster and to have fun from time to time. And to communicate with people on the other side of the world.

    The best way to meet healthy limits regarding technology is to set daily limits of technology usage and to plan a day without a screen from time to time.

    As an experiment, open your calendar and select the most appropriate day, when you’ll give priority to the people you love instead of emails, enjoy life in nature instead of watch TV, and listen more to yourself than poke people on social networks.

    Make sure technology isn’t turning you into a zombie. Use technology to your advantage, don’t abuse it.