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  • How to get business ideas

    It’s true: having a good business idea is a tiny part of success in business. Much more important elements of start-up success are finding a sustainable and scalable business model and execution, together with a superior strategy, resilience, building a winning team and so on. Nevertheless, a good business idea presents the beginning of everything. It’s the first step you make. It’s the spark that ignites your fire and fuels your vision and everything that enables you to engage other people and resources.

    Getting a good business idea is also usually a process, not a single event. That’s where most people make the wrong assumption. Ideas are rarely a one time “aha” moment. In most cases, it takes a lot of testing, experimenting, thinking, changing, reshaping, pivoting etc. of the initial idea to get a really good business idea. The event we want is always preceded by a process. Today, the process of developing a business idea is usually done using the Business Model Canvas or Running Lean Canvas.

    But still, you have to start somewhere. You need an initial business idea, an idea that draws you in so much that you’re prepared to work hard on it and test different assumptions to see if you’re really on to something. Thus let’s look at different ways of how to get an initial business idea.

    Industry insights

    The important fact is that you usually don’t come up with a good business idea. You notice a good business idea. And the best way to notice a business idea is at your daily work in your industry, where your domain expertise lies. You can identify problems your company’s business partners have, from suppliers to distributors and customers. Many new businesses start when someone proposes an idea to their boss and the boss rejects it. The person knows it’s a good idea, and so they open their own business.

    • Think about how the company you work for could be 100 times better
    • Think about the new things that customers want in the industry you work in
    • Think about problems in your industry
    • Think about trends and the next big thing in your industry

    Choose an industry and do research

    If you don’t like the industry you currently work in, go through a list of all potential industries and find the one you could add most value to. Select the industry for which you know you’d be most passionate about. Do research on the chosen industry. Brainstorm ideas. Maybe change your job and start working for a successful company in the chosen industry to learn and collect industry insights. There’s usually a big gap between how you think an industry works and how it really works. Thus real life experiences are always very important.

    Your current network

    Analyse your social and professional network to come up with a business idea. Your network is the most valuable capital you have when starting a new business. So maybe your idea should come from your network. The contacts in your rolodex are your potential business partners and clients.

    • To whom in your network would you sell what the easiest?
    • Who could you invite to become your business partner?
    • Who in your network has really good ideas; who is creative and ambitious?

    Build your network

    If you don’t have any friends, coworkers or acquaintances to start a business with, it’s maybe time to expand your social network. New beginnings in life usually also mean new people. Thus don’t be afraid to open yourself up to new social connections and new opportunities. With positive vibrations and the right attitude, the right people will come into your life. Go to Meetup and find the next event you can join and network.

    • Go to business events and meet new people
    • Go to tech events and meet new people
    • Go to industry or other events and meet new people

    Your personal problems

    Think about the personal problems you’re facing in life. Good business ideas are usually solutions to real life problems. The idea behind business ideas is to make our life easier. To make us more productive and connected and safe.

    The good or bad part of everything, depending on how you look at it, is that every new product on the market usually not only solves a problem but also brings a new set of problems. Think of the personal computer. It brought many advantages into our lives, but also many new problems. Thus the problems will never end, neither yours nor those of other people.

    • Think of problems you’re currently facing and what product would solve them
    • What problems were you facing in the past that were hard to solve?
    • Which products or services would make your life much easier and cosier?
    • How could you use new technologies to solve your personal problems?

    Your personal sins

    As you’ve probably figured out already, we don’t buy products only to fix our problems. We also buy products because of many other needs we have, many of them only psychological. We could also say that we buy our products because of our sins. If we look at the seven deadly sins, you can see the correlation very fast.

    Pride forces us to buy a fancy car, envy to buy the same outfit that a Hollywood star has, wrath to buy a violent video game, sloth to buy a sauna belt instead of going jogging, greed to buy a lottery ticket, gluttony to eat everything on the menu in a cheap fast food restaurant and lust to pay for dating sites.

    Good companies are supposed to get you laid (sex/socializing), made (power/reputation) or paid (saving/earning money). You can see that this concept is very closely connected to our sins. To sum up, we buy many products because of our irrational needs. The fact is that we live in a very materialistic world.

    The third angle of how you can look at this is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is portrayed as a pyramid with the largest, most fundamental levels of needs at the bottom and the need for self-actualization at the top. Pyramid has six different types of needs. The most basic ones are physiological needs, such as air, water and sex. Then we have safety needs, such as personal and financial security. Next ones are needs of love and belonging to family, friends and spouse. Then self-esteem needs come into play, giving a sense of contribution and value. The last one are self-actualization needs.

    • Think about which products you buy because of your sins
    • Think about which products you’d you because of your sins if they were available
    • What do your body and emotions need the most and doesn’t exist yet?

    Problem solution

    Other people’s problems and sins

    If you don’t have any real problems or sins that could be good grounds for finding a new business idea, help yourself with other people in your life – from closest friends to strangers you observe in the cafeteria. The idea is to notice something that nobody has really noticed before from the business idea angle. You have one mouth and two ears for a reason: to listen to people and come up with the next big thing.

    • Be curious
    • Ask Questions
    • Listen
    • Observe
    • Be emphatic

    Products and services that suck

    As any human being, you also probably use many products and services. And you’re unsatisfied with many of them or they even piss you off. You see many ways for how you could improve things and make the world a better place to live. One way to come up with a business idea is to find a product you like but you see many improvements that would make the product 10 times better. Don’t ignore the fact that established businesses usually win in the saturated market, but there are also always newcomers who shake things up a little bit. Maybe it’s time for you to shake up a chosen market.

    • Which product or service could you do 10 times or even 100 times better?
    • Could you make something cheaper, smaller, larger, quicker, longer, more attractive …?
    • Could you make something available to more people?
    • Could you make a high-end product affordable for mass market?
    • Could you combine two products together?

    The skills and talents you have

    Think about the special skills and talents you have. Maybe you could build your business idea on that. Maybe you have really good consulting skills and you can start a consulting business. Maybe you are a very sporty type of person and you could do a personal training or fitness app or something similar. Many people start their business based on their skills, special talents or educational background.

    • What are currently the best opportunities in the field you studied in?
    • Do a personal SWOT analysis and think about the skills you could build your business on.
    • Do you really excel at something that’s sellable?
    • Can you make any awesome products with your talents?

    Merging experiences from different industries

    If you have many skills or experience form various industries, what you can do is take a solution from one industry and carry it over into a new industry. Or, for example, if you have #-shaped skills, you can join two of your skills together to come up with a new idea. You know, if you’re bodybuilding in your free time and coding is your occupation, you can make a fitness app and so on.

    • Is there an idea you can take from one industry and implement it in another?
    • Do you have two totally different areas of expertise you could join into one idea?

    Hobbies

    Same as for your skills and talents goes for your hobbies. Many people get business ideas from their hobbies and things they love to do in their free time. Make a list ofyour hobbies or hobbies you think you’d like and analyze if there are any business opportunities.

    Just be careful, because real monetization potential must exist. Many business that are treated like hobbies pay like hobbies. That means nothing or close to nothing. Make sure there’s a very strict distinction between your hobby and business if you build your business based on a hobby.

    Research work

    Many new business ideas come out of research work. Google, for example. It’s not easy to find an idea with strong core competency and an unfair advantage. Years of research and development with commercial potential can be a great intellectual property to build business on. Of course there are other challenges, like how to do technology transfer etc. But more and more research institutions have technology transfer offices that make sure that transfer is legal and fair.

    • Could you develop a business idea with the research you did for your Bachelors/Masters thesis or doctoral dissertation?
    • Do you know anybody at research institutions you could connect with?
    • Do you know any scientists doing research that could be commercialized (professionally in cooperation with technology transfer offices)?

    Evolution and thinking about the future

    Close your eyes and imagine how the world will look in 10, 20, 50 and 100 years. The gadgets you will have at home, the transport you will use, how you will work etc. Try to imagine all different details and things that currently aren’t possible.

    Think about evolutionary (linear) changes that will happen and how things will get better step by step (super smartphones for example) and about revolutionary (rapid) changes that will completely reshape the world (for example a phone integrated in your pinky finger).

    • The best way to predict the future is to create it. What products do you imagine in the future?

    Convergence

    When thinking about the future, think about the devices that will merge together. Like ten years ago, you had a mobile phone, a camera, a compass etc. Today you have everything in a smartphone. More and more devices are converging. In the future, we will have smart watches, smart clothes, smart everything that will be connected to the internet. This kind of thinking may inspire you for a new kind of device or service.

    • What devices or services or other ideas could you merge together into a new idea?

    Brainstorming

    Brainstorming

    Your potential to create new ideas is like a muscle. The more you train it, the more ideas you will have. First you need to keep your mind open. You know, because a mind is like a parachute, it only works when it’s open. You need to be focused on new opportunities. After having an open mind, you need to constantly brainstorm new ideas. You will become better and better with time.

    But no matter how good you become, there will always be dozens of shitty ideas when you brainstorm; yet among the shitty ones, a golden one will be listed sooner or later.

    • Always have a pen and paper with you. Brainstorm at least 20 ideas every day.

    Piggyback

    Maybe coming up with your own idea is not really your forte, but you still have the potential to be a good business person. An important part of success is to be honest with yourself and know what strengths and weaknesses you have. Today, it’s business teams that win, not individuals. Thus nothing is wrong if you start searching for people who have good ideas and partner up with them.

    • Do you have any friends that can come up with a business idea and you could join them?
    • Could you join any groups for meeting meet people with good business ideas?

    Get inspired

    Another thing you can do is to look for inspiration. Good ideas mean nothing but making new connections or finding better ways to do things. Below you can find ten different types of sources that can inspire you to come up with a good idea. You can also find many links to help you out. Start browsing, researching and brainstorming. Sooner or later, you will come up with something that will set you on your new course in life. Because if you’re reading this blog, you are a winner.

    Trends

    Future trends are especially important for inspiration. By knowing the trends, you can also analytically decide for the most perspective industries. Here are some sites that analyse trends and predict the future:

    Social trends

    With all the social networks, social trends are becoming more and more important, especially for ideas in culture, media and everything that’s built for the masses. Thus you can get easily inspired by browsing different social trends.

    Magazines and articles

    Magazines can be a good source of inspiration. Articles, ads, interviews, you can find a lot of content that can spark your new business idea. Specialized and hobby magazines can especially be a great help. On top of that, browsing magazines is also relaxing and fun.

    Business idea lists

    You can find many business idea lists online. They’re usually not revolutionary business ideas, but definitely something you can start with. Especially if you aren’t looking for hi-tech ideas, but something you can start cheaply, easily and quickly.

    Product sites and lists

    One thing you can do is browse different product sites and lists and think about how you could improve products. It’s a great way to brainstorm. You can also brainstorm on how to merge two products, how a product could be used in a totally different industry and so on. You just have to keep your mind open.

    Product inspiration sites

    It’s the same with product inspiration sites. The listings on product inspiration sites are only more diverse and you can find many products that aren’t on the market yet or never will be. Product inspiration sites are not only good for triggering your thinking about the future. Many unconventional products can also force you to think more outside the box.

    Affiliate and CPA networks may also be a source for inspiration:

    Copycats

    Much like you can copy products, so you can copy start-up ideas. It’s not the best way to start a business, but it is one possible way. Many European entrepreneurs copy American start-ups in their own country. For example, you now have numerous Groupon clones in every country. Other start-ups may also be a good inspiration for you to improve something, merge something or do it even better in a different kind of way.

    Franchises

    Franchises are a very popular way of opening your own business if you don’t have your own business idea. Franchises can also be a great source of inspiration for starting a business. You can look at successful franchises and think of the ways you could also start a similar business, not necessarily your own franchise, but the business as business.

    Patents

    You can also browse patents to get good business ideas. Patents are, of course, protected intellectual property, so you risk a lawsuit by copying them. The idea is not to copy patents but to ask yourself about the kind of problems the patents are solving and then finding new, better solutions for them. Patents can be a good source of inspiration.

    Groups and forums

    Last but not least, one thing you can do is to browse online groups and forums. The idea is to identify problems people are facing, services they’re not satisfied with and so on. If you have an online group of people with a problem and you come up with a good solution, you can very quickly test your idea. The best ideas are the ones solving real problems. You can find many people complaining on the internet. Present them with a solution. Maybe that’s a good start for you.

    I wish you all the luck and creativity possible to come up with the next big thing. I hope you have found many useful resources in this article that will help you to get business ideas. And don’t forget: ideas are a mere beginning. Building a scalable business model and executing it are much more important and harder things to do. Nevertheless, you have to start with a good (or even bad) business idea. It’s the first step towards your more creative and exciting future.

  • Your life strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The elements of your life strategy

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

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

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

    Now let’s break down one by one.

    Your mindset and your personality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Take care of your body

    Taking care of your physical body and physical appearance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Formal education

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Informal education and developing competences and skills

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

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

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

    Information intake

    Information intake and communicating strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Your past and relationships with your primary family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Intimate relationships and your secondary family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Intimate relationships

    Your sex life

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

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

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

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

    Relationship with your kids

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

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

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

    Money and investment strategy

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

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

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

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

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

    Career strategy

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

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

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

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

    Your social strategy

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

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

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

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

    Hobbies and having fun strategy

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

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

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

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

    Travel

    Travel and transportation strategy

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

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

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

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

    Home and your surroundings strategy

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

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

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

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

    Strategy toward animals and nature

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

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

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

    Art and culture

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

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

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

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

    Technology

    Using technology and your digital trail strategy

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

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

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

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

    Your nation, country and political system

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

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

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

    Spirituality, religion and asking for help

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Taking care of your emotional body

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

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

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

    Evil

    Dealing with enemies, bad and evil in the world

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

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

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

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

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

    Your legacy and giving back strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    When do you want to give up?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Homework
    Template

    Do the exercise

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

    [sociallocker]

    AgileLeanLife – Life Strategy Template (xls)

    [/sociallocker]

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

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

    Happy thinking and analyzing.

  • A personal SWOT analysis

    One of the tools you can use when analyzing and getting to know yourself is a so-called SWOT analysis. The SWOT analysis is a structured planning method that had been used in management for decades before agile and lean entrepreneurship was even invented.

    This is to say, I just want to emphasize that this blog is not only about applying agile and lean methods to personal lives, but also about applying all other business methods that prove to be valuable. It’s not like traditional tools are always outdated and the new ones are magical solutions. You just have to know which tools to use when.

    When analyzing and getting to know yourself, the SWOT analysis can help you a lot. In business, the SWOT analysis is used to evaluate strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats involved in a project or a business venture.

    It can be applied to the level of a selected product, place, industry, entire organization or many other dimensions. As mentioned before, it can also be applied to a personal level, and it’s especially frequently used as a career-planning and decision-making tool.

    • Strengths and weaknesses are considered as internal factors on which you have a direct influence and which you can change (or influence) by investing your time and energy.
    • On the other hand, opportunities and threats are considered as external factors you have less influence on or maybe even none. Nevertheless, it’s also very important to consider external factors when preparing your strategy.

    It’s very obvious that strengths and opportunities are favorable factors, and weaknesses and threats are unfavorable factors in terms of achieving your objectives.

    Internal and external factors

    When analyzing strengths and weaknesses, you are analyzing internal personal factors such as personal traits, competences, financial situation, knowledge, skills, personal network and so on. It’s the area that you have influence on, and you should act as proactively as possible, not reactively.

    You should be aware of your strengths and act out of power. You should also be aware of your weaknesses and have an action plan concerning what do to about them.

    Strengths

    Strengths are internal factors that positively influence your ability to achieve your objectives. It’s the area of your life where you are strong, where you are better than the competition and where your forte lies. It’s important to further develop your key strengths and make sure that they stay your strengths in the long term.

    It’s easy to forget to constantly keep developing your strengths, but that’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make. If you aren’t progressing in life, you are going backwards and your strengths are no exception here.

    While you are relying on your strengths and aren’t developing them further, there are many people out there who are working hard to enhance their strengths and who outwork you.

    Some questions that can help you identify your personal strengths:

    • What are your talents and which things are you naturally good at?
    • Which knowledge and skills have you developed over the years and are really good at?
    • What are your positive personality traits?
    • What are you much better at than other people?
    • Where do other people see your strengths and what are the qualities that people admire you for?
    • What resources do you have at your disposal?
    • Which subjects did you excel in during formal education?
    • What contributed the most to your past victories?

    Weaknesses

    Weaknesses, on the other hand, represent all the areas where you are lagging behind, where you have shortcomings and gaps in skills. Some of your weaknesses are easily seen while others are not.

    You have to know that your enemies or competition will probably exploit your most obvious weaknesses.

    Nevertheless, you should compile weaknesses into three categories:

    1. Critical weaknesses that you have to get rid of or convert into strengths. These are the weaknesses that prevent you from achieving your objectives or will maybe cause that kind of a situation in the future.
    2. Weaknesses that you have to at least neutralize if you want to achieve your goals and objectives.
    3. Weaknesses that are not a real problem and you should not bother with or those weaknesses that are part of your personal uniqueness and it is to your advantage to have to work around them (more about that later).

    Some questions that can help you identify your personal weaknesses:

    • Where could you improve? (You can do and look at your Kaizen list of potential improvements)
    • Where are you not talented enough?
    • Where in life have you struggled the most?
    • Which things are you avoiding and are afraid of?
    • Where do other people see possible space for improvement?
    • Which resources are you lacking?
    • Can you do anything better?
    • Do you do anything badly?

    Let’s now move on to external factors, threats and opportunities. When analyzing threats and opportunities, you are analyzing external factors such as market trends, labor market trends, macroeconomic stability and changes in your country, technological and legislation changes, promotion options, changes in the company you work for, people who have influence over your life etc.

    You’re analyzing all the environmental factors in your life that affect you. It’s the area on which you have less influence and you should be as flexible as possible.

    SWOT Analysis

    Opportunities

    Opportunities are external factors that have a positive influence on you achieving your goals. It’s all about the environment’s paradigms and flows that help you achieve your objectives and accelerate your execution process. Opportunities are where you can go with the flow of the environment based on your strengths.

    Understanding trends and opportunities is a big leverage you have to count into your life strategy. Markets and trends always win and you should never go against the market.

    Going together with the market, preferably with one that’s in the phase of high growth, is the biggest opportunity in the environment there is. It’s essential to identify such opportunities for your success.

    Questions to identify opportunities:

    • Which are the biggest changes that are occurring in your current environment?
    • Which opportunities are you not exploiting at the moment?
    • Where do you see the biggest favorable circumstances for achieving your objectives?
    • Do you know people who can help you achieve your objectives?
    • What kind of moments do you hope for? Are they actually happening?

    Threats

    Last but not least, threats are external factors that have a negative influence and can prevent you from achieving your goals. It’s about analyzing external factors on which you don’t have much influence and which can prevent you from going forward.

    When analyzing threats, you should think about possible alternatives and how to stay as flexible as possible. Being aware of potential threats even before they actually come to existence is very helpful, since you can react much more rationally when the threat actually occurs.

    When analyzing threats, you also have to identify whether you are potentially going against the markets and what level of a challenge that really brings.

    And some questions to identify threats:

    • Which are the biggest changes that are occurring in your current environment?
    • Which obstacles are you facing at the moment and why?
    • Which is the biggest external danger to your goals?
    • Which factors beyond your control can prevent you from achieving your goals?
    • Which negative market trends are you facing at the moment?
    • What are the biggest risks you are facing?

    Building up a strategy

    Conducting a personal SWOT analysis is a fun way of getting to know yourself and analyzing your situation all in itself. But what counts much more is building a life strategy and a decision-making system based on the conducted SWOT analysis.

    There are two basic ways of building a strategy after doing a SWOT analysis: one is called matching and the other one converting.

    Matching

    Matching simply means connecting internal strengths with opportunities. You look at your strong points and the ways you can take advantage of them based on the opportunities that are given in the environment in which you function.

    This is your main forte and the point where you have to build a strong competitive advantage. Matching your strengths to the opportunities is also where you should be very aggressive and take offensive action.

    On the other hand, matching your weaknesses to threats can show your biggest vulnerabilities. You’re always only strong in a specific context and you have to be aware of that context and which situations cause you to step out of it.

    If you are strong in an unfavorable situation, you can at least fight and regroup and rethink and change your moves. But if you are weak in an unfavorable situation, your personal power becomes very limited and you are left to the mercy of the environment. These are the situations you should definitely avoid in life.

    In situations where your weaknesses are matched to threats, you should act much more defensively. Nevertheless, if you don’t find being defensive is an adequate strategy, there is an alternative strategy available, called “converting”.

    Converting

    Converting simply means transforming weaknesses into strengths and transforming threats into opportunities. It’s easy to write that down, but it’s much harder to do in real life. The key is to understand what converting really means.

    The first approach is to really convert your weakness into a strength. For example, if you aren’t very creative at the moment, you decide you’ll become creative no matter what. Creativity is nothing but a skill and based on the growth mindset, you know you can cultivate it.

    You start going to art classes, you do daily brainstorming sessions etc. You put so much more effort into it, even more so than talented people, that you become really good at it, therefore surely converting a weakness into a strength.

    The second option is that you find a different context for your weakness and you try to see it as a feature. For example, a manager who has a hard time staying focused can be a really successful entrepreneur.

    The best way for converting a weakness into a strength in this kind of way is explained by Marty Neumeier in the book The 46 Rules of Genius:

    A good personal style will mostly come from your limitations, not your strengths. It’s the result of working around your shortcomings, using all the skills you can muster. Since your limitations are unique to you, your style will also be unique.

    And that is how you convert weaknesses into strengths.

    Of course, there is also a third option, in case a weakness cannot be converted. In that case you should try to minimize weaknesses or avoid them. The idea is that you neutralize your weaknesses to the point at which your strengths can be unfettered. .

    After conducting the SWOT analysis, you can define four different strategies, while also keeping converting and matching in mind:

    • Opportunity – Strength strategies: Obvious natural forte where you can use your strengths to exploit opportunities.
    • Threat – Strength strategies: Easy to defend, where you want to exploit your strengths to wipe out threats.
    • Opportunity – Weakness strategies: Potentially attractive options with which you want to overcome your weaknesses to exploit new opportunities.
    • Threat – Weakness strategies: Your personal very high risk where you want to apply a defensive strategy to prevent threats from turning up because of your weaknesses.

    Traps of the SWOT analysis

    As everywhere else, there are also a few traps when it comes to conducting a SWOT analysis. The first trap is quite obvious. There is always a big gap between what you think is true (the subjective reality) and what actually is true (the objective reality).

    And wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups, as said many times before. Thus it’s really necessary that you implement agile and lean practices when building your life strategy based on the SWOT analysis.

    You have to realize that some of the elements of your SWOT analysis are nothing but hypotheses that you have to test in order to see whether they are true. The best way is to only use the SWOT analysis to help yourself define detailed hypotheses of your superior life strategy. You have to regularly update the analysis based on feedback from the environment.

    The second trap is seeing weaknesses as a balanced antagonist to strengths. Of course we all have our strengths and weaknesses. But there’s no balancing act or “life fairness”. It’s necessary for you to build on your strengths, convert some weaknesses into strengths, put other weaknesses into a different context and then minimize, avoid or neutralize the rest of them.

    You also have to be aware of the fact that the final goal of your personal SWOT analysis is to help you build a superior life strategy and consequently help you make better decisions, big ones as well as smaller ones, in everyday life. Thus the most important items of your SWOT analysis are those that produce valuable strategies.

    As mentioned before, a SWOT analysis should be an input to your AgileLeanLife superior productivity strategy and, even more importantly, it has to be updated regularly, based on the feedback you get from executing.

    For the conclusion, let’s look at some additional guidelines for conducting a personal SWOT analysis. Be as realistic as possible when writing down your strengths and weaknesses. Also be as specific as possible and avoid abstract definitions and grey areas.

    Try to avoid complexity and don’t overanalyze things. It’s good to keep your SWOT analysis short and simple. Definitely build different strategies and options based on your SWOT analysis.

    See the SWOT analysis as an input to your superior life strategy. It will help you come up with better insights, analyze your current position, brainstorm possible directions, highlight opportunities and flag possible threats.

    Know that you have to test some assumptions and do regular updates. A SWOT analysis should help you get to know yourself, but conducting only a SWOT analysis is not real progress in life. Building a superior strategy and executing it is.

    Homework

    Sit down right away and do your own personal SWOT analysis. Happy analyzing. Here you can also find an example of my own personal swot analysis.

  • The ways of getting to know yourself

    You become a successful entrepreneur not because you know how to build a company, but because you have a superior understanding of the customers and their needs. You can simply hire people for everything else (very simplified). It’s the same in your personal life. If you want to be really successful and happy in life, you have to know who you are and what you want very clearly and also understand your environment in order to build the superior strategy for achieving your life vision.

    Knowing yourself is one of the most important things in life. It’s the first step. It’s also the most important foundation of the AgileLeanLife lifestyle. In life, you either follow your own goals or goals of other people. But if you want to follow your own goals, you must first know what you truly want and how you function as a person.

    Most really successful people had known what they wanted to become from a very young age. They discovered what they’re good at early in their lives and devoted their life to that one thing with all their passion and focus. Well, even if it doesn’t happen early in life, it happens at some point. When the right opportunity comes, you simply know you were born to do that with your life.

    You can unlock your true potential when you get the insights in your true self: not only into what you want, but also into how you function, what your psychological survival mechanisms are, your desires and fears, strengths and weaknesses and other personality traits, how the environment works, what are the upcoming trends and paradigms, then you can unlock your true potential. If you want to transcend, you have to first understand yourself.

    There are several ways for getting to know yourself. Let’s look at them.

    People and activities you like

    The first one is very obvious. People with the same values always group together. People who surround you and you like to hang out with usually have the same beliefs, values, likes and hobbies as you do.

    We all know that, but what you can do to systematically get to know yourself is to carefully analyze who are the people you like and what activities do you do together. Same goes for the activities you like to do alone. Think of your hobbies and why you like them. Ask yourself what topic you would like to teach if you had an opportunity or what you would love to blog about.

    You are and become more and more similar to the people you are spending your time with. Analyze the people who surround you.

    Your values

    Your values very clearly show what’s important to you in life. But here’s the trick. Your values are not what you say is important to you, but how you allocate your time, money and energy. For example, if you have to decide between working out and going to the pub and you choose the latter, socializing is more important to you than health. If you have to decide between spending time with your spouse or friends and you choose the former, your partnership is more important to you than your friends. And so on.

    Carefully analyze how you’re spending your time, money, energy and other resources. When do you say no and to whom, and how do you make a choice between two different activities. Analyzing that will clearly show you your personal values. You can also help yourself with this value list and then prioritize chosen values based on your decision-making system.

    You may find out one very painful thing, namely the inconsistency of what you say you value and what you actually do. But don’t torture yourself. There are no wrongs and rights. It’s about really knowing yourself and living life true to yourself. That kind of exercise helps you develop integrity and honesty.

    Your talents and fields of interest

    When you are analyzing yourself, a very pleasant part of it is analyzing your talents and fields of interest. Every single one of us has talents, things that we are naturally good at, and so do you. May it be sports, mathematics, some sort of arts or anything else. Each of us has special talents and gifts. This is also where one of your greatest potentials lies, be it financially or in self-actualization terms.

    Think about the subjects you liked when attending school, which activities were natural to you and you had to put in much less effort than other people, which activities make you lose sense of time and you simply enjoy them, what are your hobbies and so on. But also go one step further with your analysis. Think about all different kinds of strengths that accompany your talents.

    A good tool to do that kind of analysis is the so-called SWOT analysis. You analyze your strengths on the one hand and weaknesses on the other. You also analyze opportunities and threats as outside factors that can influence your ability to achieve your goals and desires. Much as you have to be aware of your advantages, so you have to be aware of your disadvantages as well.

    People you hate

    It may not seem that obvious, but we can really learn a lot from people we hate or dislike. We always dislike people who have personality traits that are a part of our character yet unresolved (we deny them) or that remind us of a bad experience we had had in our past. Additionally, we usually also have values very different from those of people we don’t like.

    Nevertheless, there are two different states or situations. We can have different beliefs and values from people and have neutral feelings about it. That is what we call rational behavior. People have different views on life and there is nothing wrong with it. Every one of us has the right to live life as they want, as long as they cause no harm to other people. But when we are not neutral in this kind of a situation and we get negative feelings about a person that simply means we have some internal issues that are not being solved. We can learn a lot about ourselves by observing who we hate or dislike.

    Thoroughly asking ourselves why we hate or dislike someone can tell us a lot about ourselves. Are we envious (of what and what our desires are), did somebody in the past treat us the same way etc.

    5 Whys

    5 Whys is a simple technique also used in business to identify the cause and not only deal with the effects. If you want to get rid of the consequences for good, you have to get to the root of the matter. You can identify the real cause by asking yourself “why” several times in a row. It’s a way of identifying your deeper volitions and why you behave in a certain way.

    Let me give you an example. I like geeky superhero movies. Why? Because the good always wins despite the inoperative formal protective and legal system. Why? Because there is “someone” more competent to protect the victim from the bad. Why? Because no one deserves to be a victim and bullied by others. Why? Because I know how awful it feels. Why? Because I experienced domestic violence as a child.

    Getting to know yourself

    Self-reflection

    There is also a big systematic step further you can do to analyze yourself. Psychoanalysis, the psychological technique popularized by Sigmund Freud, is based on you reflecting on your behavior, talking about yourself and coming to small epiphanies and insights into why you are behaving in a certain way and what drives you. It’s especially based on free associations, fantasies and dreams. And you don’t need a therapist for that.

    Explained in a very simplified way, self-reflection means that once per week, you take an hour or more to reflect on your goals, behavioral patterns, negative and positive emotions and everything else that is happening in your life. It’s even better to do this daily, by writing a journal, but you need a lot of time for that, of course. Nevertheless, you can have great breakthroughs by knowing yourself.

    Reflecting is also an integral part of agile software development (SCRUM), where the team reflects on how they work and where they can improve regularly on a weekly basis. I do self-reflection at least two times per week and I come to a small insight about myself every time.

    Having a persona coach is also a viable option to help you with self-reflection. You are always very biased when judging yourself and others. It’s a no-brainer that you judge others much more strictly and that you are indulgent towards yourself. An honest and tough, but fair, coach could greatly contribute towards more realistic reflection.

    Search mode

    A much more fun way to get to know yourself is testing and trying different things in life. Based on the AgileLeanLife principles, I call that the search mode. You may assume what you like and dislike in life but you don’t really know until you try it. Besides developing yourself (personal evolution) and providing value to the world (creating), another important purpose of your life is to be happy and experience as much as possible.

    Why not try as many things as imaginable. You can then do the ones you like over and over again, and simply discard the ones you don’t. But at least you know you’ve tried. You should always be in the search mode in your life – testing, trying and experimenting new things. New travel destinations, new meals, new people, new sex poses, you name it.

    Routine is a much more popular approach to life, but only because it’s easy and safe. Nevertheless, routine is a partly wasted life. There are so many things to do in life, so many things to try. Never settle for a routine just because it’s easy. Your life starts at the end of your comfort zone.

    Personality tests

    Another approach for getting to know yourself are personality tests. There are many different personality tests you can take. You can find many of them on the internet, some of them you can even take for free, but they are not usually the best.

    Investing into knowing yourself is one of the best investments you can make, so spending some money on that kind of a test should not sound like a waste of money to you. Maybe you can also contact one of the HR agencies or personal coaches to help you choose the right tests and give you additional directions. Well, even if you didn’t like tests in school, these tests should be fun.

    Here is an example of really good personality test.

    Primary and secondary socialization

    A good way to see some parts of yourself is to analyze your parents and their personalities and behavior, your family history, schooling process, your nation’s history and current state, culture and so on. The less you know yourself, the less you are determined to live your own life, the more you are only a product of the environment.

    Nevertheless, whether you want it or not, most parts of your personality are not chosen by you but are rather inherited and imparted. Understanding your roots, history and especially your parents can help you a lot in understanding yourself and becoming closer to your real self, in knowing which parts to keep and which parts to discard.

    Analyzing these factors can really help you understand who you really are, what are your inherited positive and negative behavioral patterns, what kind of stuff was imposed on you, how you are similar or different from your parents, what they did right and wrong when raising you and so on.

    Your environment

    Your outer world is merely a reflection of your inner world. At some point, when becoming an adult, you choose almost all elements of your environment. Besides analyzing people, analyzing your environment can reveal a lot about your personality and who you are.

    Is your desk tidy or not, where do you live, which applications are you using on your computer and mobile phone, do you have animals or plants at home, the culture of the company you work for, the places you choose to travel to or visit etc. Everything reveals small parts of your character and who you are. Analyze it carefully. You can help yourself with all the elements of life strategy.

    Ask other people

    The next technique for getting to know yourself better is simply asking other people. There is one simple trick to doing that. We all love praise and hate criticism. Thus we have to prepare ourselves for good and bad feedback, as long as it’s constructive and fair. The good thing is that we can usually learn much more from the negative than the positive feedback. Ask people to give you feedback.

    In business and human resources, there is a very well-known evaluation method called the 360-degree feedback. The main point of this analysis and reflection is to include direct feedback from all the different stakeholders – an employee’s subordinates, peers and supervisor(s), but a self-evaluation is also included. In some cases, it also includes feedback from external sources, such as customers and suppliers or other interested stakeholders. The more feedback, the more angles, the more ways to improve.

    Thus you can ask your friends, coworkers, spouse, parents, kids etc. for feedback about yourself.

    Alternative methods

    There are also some alternative methods you can use, like astrology (a natal chart) or other spiritual techniques (numerology and hundreds of others). I don’t see any arguments against that kind of tools and techniques if they work for you. And if you think they are useless, ignore it.

    That is the basis of the AgileLeanLife and I don’t want to go against it in any kind of situation. Choose the tools and things that work for you personally as an idividual. Having an open mind is essential in life. As the famous quote goes: your mind is like a parachute, it only works when it’s open.

    Listen to your inner voice

    If you really want to be happy and successful you always have to be in touch with your true self and your inner voice.

    The first problem is that you already somehow lose touch with yourself through primary and secondary socialization. The less your desires are listened to, the less you get heard and valued and loved at a young age, from your parents, teachers and other people, the more you start suppressing your desires and living to expectations of others and the society.

    The second problem is that there is too much noise out there because of all the interactive devices, advertising billboards, chores, tasks and other activities. Rather than listening to ourselves and our true desires, we tend to behave according to the society’s expectations.

    Don’t do that to yourself, your life is just too precious. Get to know yourself, always do regular reflections and stay connected to your inner voice and true self. It will do miracles for the quality of your life.

    You can help yourself perform self-analysis with the template below. Download it for free.

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    At the end, here are some additional ideas for what you should clearly know about yourself:

    • What you want to experience in life and making the list of it as a life vision
    • How you learn best – look at the different types of learning and think about which method usually helps you learn a specific topic the fastest
    • Environment in which you function the best – is it stressful, calm, organized, creative etc. How big of an organization suits you best etc.
    • What are your main talents, values, beliefs, hobbies etc.
    • How you can contribute to the world and make it a better place.
    • In which environments, organizations and with whom do you really blossom and can really be yourself.
    • Who you were, who you are and who you want to become (your ideal self).
    • What are the things that you would regret in life
    Homework

    Your homework

    Here is the homework you should do to really get to know yourself better:

    1. Analyze the people who surround you. What kind of people do you like and what kind of acitivites you do together.
    2. Make your personal enjoyment list, the list of activities you like, your hobbies etc.
    3. Carefully analyze how you’re spending your time, money, energy and other resources.
    4. Perform a personal SWOT analysis.
    5. Analyze what kind of people do you dislike and why.
    6. Learn to analyze your dreams and fantasies.
    7. Consider having a mentor or a coach.
    8. Try as many things as possible to figure out what you really like and what you don’t.
    9. Do the 16personalities or any other personality test.
    10. Analyze your parents and their personalities and behavior, your family and nation’s history and culture etc.
    11. Analyze environment you currently operate in.
    12. Go through the life strategy template to become aware of your different beliefs and behavior patterns (here it is).
    13. Ask your friends, coworkers, spouse, parents, kids etc. for feedback about yourself.
    14. Do your ideal-self persona.
    15. Think of all the things you would regret in life if not trying them. Ask yourself why.

     

  • Personas – Know what you want

    One thing in life is sure. The more exactly, accurately and the sooner you know what you want from life, the easier your will get it. Usually the most successful people in the world are the ones who know what they want to do in life from a very young age, and have the talent to really do it.

    The best programmers, athletes, businessmen and so on, they all know that they were born to excel at exactly one thing. Knowing what you want in life allows you to focus on that thing only. If you are lucky and the environment supports you to the point where you can invest 10,000 hours into your talent development, then you can become a real Outlier.

    I very well remember one sentence from the movie Limitless, where Bradly Cooper gets the special brain enhancement pills, becomes super smart and goes from rags to riches. When he takes the pill, only one magical thing happens – quoting him: “I wasn’t high, I wasn’t wired. Just clear. I knew what I needed to do and how to do it.”

    Well, that is the secret to a much better quality of life – be clear about what you want and make the strategy for how you will get it. You must know what you want as clearly as possible. You have to see the final outcome you want. Just saying to yourself “I want to be rich” or “I want to have a cute girl/boyfriend” is not enough. You have to be more specific. That is the rule for every aspect in your life. Even for relationships.

    And you don’t need any pills for that. Let’s look at a better technique for being more proactive at choosing your personal and professional relationships – personas.

    Personas in business

    In internet user-experience and marketing expertise, personas are used to represent different user types that might use the product in a similar way. Personas are fictional characters representing the ideal customer or a typical character for a user segment. They are hypothetical users. It is also a very popular method used in lean start-up marketing to help you focus your efforts. You try to imagine everyone who could potentially use your product (customer segments) and then you create fictional characters for either every segment or for the priority ones.

    In user experience, the purpose of defining personas is to more easily make decisions about product features, interaction, architecture and design of the website. A persona is nothing but a substitute for a target user. You create as realistic and reliable representation of the user segment as possible.

    When you are defining a typical persona for a selected customer segment, you are defining their goals, desires, behavioral patterns, buying triggers, limitations and other elements, such as demographics, biographics, geographic and psychographic attributes, and so on.

    Hubspot Personas
    Personas Example. Source: Hubspot

    The most frequently used parameters for defining personas are especially based on what they want to do, how they behave, what motivates them, how they think and what they want to accomplish.

    To be more exact: for every persona, you should define the elements listed below, if you have enough data to back them up. The list is meant to help you with ideas for defining personas in your personal life later on.

    • Fictional name, photo, representative quotes for a better notion of the potential user
    • Demographic and geographic features
    • Professional background, responsibilities and skills
    • Context or a narrative story
    • Behavioral patterns and key characteristics
    • Values, attitudes and beliefs
    • Environment
    • User goals, desires and expectations
      • Life goals
      • Product experience goals
      • End goal of using the product
    • User tasks, activities and workflow
    • Limitations and accessibility issues
    • Buying triggers
    • Needs and pain points
    • Use cases or specific usage pattern
    • Interaction, information, sensory, emotional aspects
    • Typical day in a life
    • Potential customer journey
    • Empathy map

    The biggest benefit of creating personas is personalizing abstract data and therefore better understanding different customer segments and their goals. You “materialize” your assumptions and much more clearly define who your potential customer could be.

    Creating personas helps the product development team to:

    1. focus on creating value,
    2. user experience experts to prevent common (design) pitfalls, thus avoiding “self-referential design” creation which means subconsciously projecting your own mental models on the product.
    3. With personas, you can more easily (3) evaluate product feature ideas, develop wireframes and site architecture, design the overall look,
    4. and of course copywriters can write a better (4) targeted copy.

    Here is a good presentation about personas:

    Before defining the persona, you should also do user research and gather as much data as possible about the selected segment. Data can be gathered by interviews, surveys, different testing methods (A/B), user observations, field studies, and so on. In reality, personas are only as good as the research behind them. The best research is usually based on ethnographic data – ethnography being the systematic study of people and culture. The purpose of research is to find what people do, what frustrates them and what gives them satisfaction. After conducting adequate research, you should be able to identify their behavioral patterns. One technique to do that is user mapping by behavioral variables.

    For every product, more personas are usually created, specific to every customer segment. But even the same customer segment can be represented with more than one persona, for example if there are gender specific roles and use cases. When you create a persona, you also try to imagine a typical day in the life of that persona and, of course, how and when they would use or buy your product.

    All information about the persona should lead to some decisions. In the next step, you can also make scenarios describing a persona trying to do a specific task in a specific environment or context. This is the so called scenario-based design.

    If you don’t have enough research information to create real personas, you can create provisional personas. They are not that detailed and are based on a few best guesses of their needs and characteristics. That is still better than having no personas.

    When creating your personas you can mark different assumptions as:

    • Validated hypothesis (what you already know, is confirmed)
    • To be tested hypothesis (what still needs to be tested)

    Without doing personas, you have the so called “elastic user”. An elastic user can be anyone and therefore no one. The consequence of an undefined user is usually unfocused design with too many features.

    Bad userinterface
    When having an elastic user and not knowing what a customer wants

    Personas tell stories, spark ideas and ignite action. They are the in-put information for marketing and selling activities (sales funnel, customer segmentation…).

    Using Personas in your personal life

    Let’s build a use case based on those two understandings – (1) the first one, that the clearer picture you have of what you want in life, the easier you will get it, and the second that (2) the user experience experts use personas as a tool for visualizing probable users of the product in order to make the best possible user experience.

    The idea behind using personas in personal life is very simple. Based on knowing yourself and your assumptions about yourself, you can make personas for people and organizations you want to interact with in your personal or professional life. Starting with the most important person in your life, your spouse. After making a persona for your spouse, you can also make a persona for your perfect boss, the company you would like to work for (there should be different name for that, since a company is not a person, but that is okay), friends and business partners.

    Benefits of creating personas
    Benefits of creating personas

    Having this kind of personas will help you attract or select only quality relationships and improve the current relationships you have.

    Well, at this point I know exactly what you’re thinking and I totally agree with you. How can this make sense, especially for your personal relationships, if …?

    Attraction isn’t a choice. You are simply attracted to someone before really knowing them. It’s true nonetheless… Maybe you cannot choose who you fall in love with, but you can definitely choose who you will stay in a relationship with and devote your life to. Choosing the right partner is probably the most important decision of your life. You don’t want to make the choice based only on your animal instinct.

    It goes the same for the company you (will) work for, as the second most important decision of your life. You are going to spend approximately one third of your life at the workplace. You don’t want to spend your life working only for those companies that first replied to your received CV or that give you the biggest paycheck. You want to work for the companies that make you feel good, with which you share the same values and where you can blossom.

    Personas can help you with that. Personas can help you move from lottery to strategy.

    With personas, you are more proactive and growth-oriented

    You have two options for how to interact with life. The first one is the reactive way and the second one is the proactive way. Being reactive means that you simply react to things that happen to you in your environment based on your (subconscious) behavioral patterns. You assume that your personal power is quite limited. You are how you were born to be and you live life that was given to you. That is also called a fixed mindset.

    In personal relationships, that means falling in love because of the “greater power”, usually physical attraction. You try to stay together with someone without thinking of how good you two fit together. But if there is no other fit except physical attraction (emotional, spiritual, intellectual, social attractions, sharing the same values…), relationships often become sour and there are many disappointments for both partners.

    In business life, being reactive means sending your CV to hundreds of companies and hoping that one of them will invite you to an interview. In the second step, you hope that at the interview, someone will recognize you as a fit for the company and hire you. In this kind of thinking, people usually don’t even know much about the company. They are only focused (reacting) on being invited to the interview.

    In both cases of reactive thinking, what usually happens is that business and personal relationships can very quickly become relationsh*ts. You expected more, you had the wrong assumptions, you find out that maybe there is no real fit after a big struggle. And remember:

    The hottest hell on Earth is when you are forced to work or live with people who have totally different values than you, with no common ground to build on.

    The solution is pretty simple. You have to know yourself better, you must know better what you want in life and you must be much more proactive. Steven Covey, author of the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People defines proactivity as the act of taking charge of your life. Proactivity means being responsible for your life and taking actions to master it.

    One of the most fun and quick solutions for being more proactive is making a persona – of your perfect spouse, the company you would like to work for, and so on.

    Creating your own personas will help you:

    • Have better focus for who to meet and spend time with, in business as well as in private life
    • Know immediately which relationships you have to discard
    • Decrease the number of pitfalls in relationships (wrong expectations…)
    • Do a quick benchmark of how big the potential of the relationship is when you meet and interact with someone new
    • Be more honest in relationships and avoid many disappointments, like hoping that people will change
    • Quickly identify what you can learn from the other person and where the relationship needs to grow
    • “Market” yourself better, know what to look for and where
    Know what you want
    Be proactive. Go for what you want. Have a strategy , don’t play a lottery.

    In order to use personas in your personal life, for business and pleasure relationships, you should especially define (the brackets contain an example from business as well as personal life):

    • Basic demographics (age of potential partner, size of the company)
    • Must-have values and traits (intelligence, technological company)
    • Key characteristics (company culture, hobbies)
    • Deal breakers (smoking, industries not to work for)
    • Goals (building a family, becoming number one in the industry)
    • Other

    It may sound extremely dull, so let’s look at all the benefits of going from reactive to proactive behavior when creating personas in both cases.

    If you do a persona for your perfect spouse, you can:

    • Know yourself much better, and be more aware of what you want out of the personal relationship
    • Get new ideas for where and how to meet a potential spouse (hobbies, online dating…)
    • Make a better personal “sales pitch”
    • Evaluate the potential of the relationship really quickly (common goals…)
    • Know what the deal breakers for you are
    • Be honest about the potential, avoid hurting yourself and others (we can just be friends…)
    • Talk about what you like or dislike in other people and what the deal breakers are
    • See what you can work on in your personal relationship to make it even better
    • Identify common hobbies and start doing things together
    • Based on all the facts above, you can more easily “attract” someone that fits you better

    If you do a persona for the perfect company to work for, you can:

    • Know better where you would like to work (size of the company, culture…)
    • Prepare a list of companies you would like to work for
    • Do detailed research for your targeted companies (company goals, board members…)
    • Better customize your CV and personal presentations
    • Think of ideas for selling yourself to the companies, bypassing traditional approaches such as sending a CV and hoping they will invite you for an interview
    • Write down numerous ideas for how you can add value to the company
    • Develop new skills you know the companies you are targeting are looking for
    • Monitor all new information about the targeted companies via Google Alerts and so on

    As mentioned before, you can do the same for other relationships in your life (friends, boss, business partners…).

    The more experience you have in life and the more often you reflect on your past choices the more clear picture you should have what you want in your life. Thus more persona assumptions should be marked as validated, not to be tested.

    There is no perfect match in life

    Of course even if you do make your perfect personas, you will never find a perfect match. If there were a perfect match for you, then there would be no room for growth and learning. And life would be very boring without any challenges. But you can definitely find a close fit to your likings.

    There is no straight lines in nature or life.
    There is no straight lines in nature or life.

    On the other hand, you also shouldn’t fear that there is no close fit for you. There are more than 3 billion people of the opposite sex living in this world, and we have more than 100 million companies. Statistically, it is very probable that you can find your fit, a place or a person where you feel extremely good and you can blossom.

    The only thing holding you back is not knowing what you want, a lack of strategy, and fear. Life is too short and too precious for that kind of nonsense.

    And last but not least: personas should be dynamic. Your preferences and values do change throughout life and therefore your personas can become outdated. The expiration date of your personas usually depends on how fast you grow in life and how fast people in your life grow with you.

    Thus you should regularly update your personas. A good compass for when to do it is when you feel that it’s time for a change in life, when you want something new or you are very frustrated with current relationships. Extremely good times or extremely bad times usually accelerate even more relationship transitions and are real relationships tests.

    The more you want to experience in life, the more you change and grow, the faster your environment is changing, including people you are spending your time with. Thus you will have to update your personas more often. But it doesn’t take long. It’s just a short exercise to clear your mind, define what you want and focus yourself.

    Your ideal self-persona

    There are some relationships in your life that you cannot choose by yourself – especially your kids, your mother and your father. Making a persona for them should be done from a different perspective. You should move from what kind of relationships you want in life to how you can help them and empower them to become what they really want.

    You can do the same for yourself. If you don’t like spreadsheets and the personal Kaizen table (a list of personal improvements you have to make), you can make a persona of your ideal self. In psychology, the self-discrepancy theory talks about how everyone has an ideal self and that is what usually motivates you to change, improve and achieve more. Having a clear picture of your ideal self will definitely help you focus, set the right priorities and grow faster.

    For your Ideal self-persona you can make a mind map, a list, a Pinterest board or a notebook with pictures, quotes and attributes for the direction you wish to grow in. You can expand the context of what kind of person you would like to become, what kind of skills you would like to develop, what you would like to have, in what environment you would wish to create and so on.

    Homework

    The first three steps you can make for creating Personas as a technique to help you know better what you want in life is concretizing and visualizing:

    1. the ideal spouse you would like to have in life and,
    2. the ideal company you would like to work for (or what kind of business would you like to have) and of course,
    3. you should make a Persona for your ideal self (if you don’t already have your Kaizen list).
    Practical examples

    My example

    Here are two examples from my life as guidance to help you with the whole process. I have used the mind-mapping technique in order to create Personas.

    Company Persona Me Example

    Below you can download two files, one for my ideal spouse and one for my ideal company.

    [sociallocker]

    Persona of my ideal spouse

    Persona of my ideal company

    In user experience, personas should often tell stories, which means you can make a life or relationship story instead of a mind map or list. Be creative and use the tools in a way that inspires you the most.

    [/sociallocker]

    Enjoy playing and creating your personas!

  • Fit

    The magical word in lean start-up entrepreneurship is product/market fit. When starting a new company, you may have the most competent people, the best management in the world, enough capital, the best business plan, the right market trend etc., but if you don’t have the product/market fit, none of the things listed above can really help you.

    Product/market fit means that you have the right product for the right market. It means that you are solving a problem that people are willing to pay for, or that you are satisfying a certain segment of customers with a very specific need. All this in a way that’s different to the competition. It means that you have good knowledge of the market needs and are flexible enough that when it comes to your business idea, you can adjust it according to the customer’s demands.

    As an entrepreneur you know very well when the product/market fit is achieved in the phase of development of your business idea. Namely, it’s when you stop needing to ask yourself whether you have a product/market fit. On the right market, customers themselves are the ones to help you find the right solution. When you are facing all other problems except for a lack of inquiries, you have found the right product/market fit.

    Find your personal fit

    Personal life is no different. In my younger years, I visited a fortune-teller as a joke, and asked if I’m dating the true love of my life. She had answered that if the love were true, I would know and wouldn’t be asking her that. Of course, this is an extreme example, since life isn’t entirely black and white, but it’s not that far off from the truth either. When you find the right fit for you, you don’t need to question yourself about meaning anymore (“Is this the one?”).

    Practical examples

    A prerequisite for a successful partnership is simply a partner/partner fit. It starts with a physical fit, just being unable to keep your hands off each other (and having extraordinary sex). It continues with an emotional, intellectual, spiritual one; that is to say, with conversations and tenderness late into the night. Well, it can also be the other way around or in any other order (physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual matching). Then it of course further continues with joint activities, sharing views on life, family goals, organizing household chores…

    You can wish for a relationship to succeed as much as you’d like, you can try to “fix” stuff, but if two people don’t belong to/with each other, there are no basic foundations for building a successful relationship.

    Same goes for work. You can work for one of the most respected companies in the world, are the best in your field, get paid well and enjoy many benefits, but if you don’t fit into the organization (in the company’s culture), you will be miserable and won’t feel good deep down inside. No matter how strongly you are trying to convince yourself otherwise.

    You want to get rich? Find a cash flow that’s most suitable to your character and competences. This can be entrepreneurship, the stock market, network marketing, show business, sports… When you find the right cash flow fit and combine it with hard work, focus, new ideas and perseverance, then success happens.

    Being physically fit is also incredibly important for the quality of your life and your potential. If you want to have more energy, enjoy the best sex of your life, feel well, have the ability to withstand more stress and pressure, be more attractive, feel better in your skin, you have to be fit. You have to find a sport that’s perfect for you.

    Feeling good
    You feel good and happy when you find your perfect fit.

    Same goes for all other areas of your life. The prerequisite for being successful, no matter the field, is finding your own fit. Values (what you find important) are those that determine whether you fit with something or not. When you find the right fit, passion awakens in you. You find yourself in something. You know that you can be successful in this. You see potential.

    You can easily hear something about a person who had found their fit. They were the right person at the right place at the right time. They were born to be a salesman. They’re really good at math. They hold the crowd’s attention with their sexuality and voice. They’re an excellent politician. They wield the racket extremely well. If only I knew how to do that…

    Searching and trying is what causes you to fit with something. Once again: searching and trying (in start-up lingo we know the so called “search phase” or “the search mode”).

    This brings about a lot of situations in which you don’t feel fit and have to go away – from people, organizations and situations. You have to admit a small failures to yourself over and over again. And each time you have to move on, it means pain. But this is only a step towards success; a step to the right fit. Finding your fit is a process. The cure for that kind of pain is appreciation – appreciation for having been able to try something and realize it’s not right for you.

    One more important thing. The saying to fit in is mostly said with a negative connotation. Because it primarily concerns situations in which you are trying to be a part of a group, but wherein you still have your own values, inconsistent with those of the group. Think about the stereotypical situation of a high school girl trying to fit in with cheerleaders club and she is unhappy until she finds where she really belongs; and that is usually not the cheerleaders club.

    When you think of fit in as negative (“I am really trying to fit in”), you aren’t honest with yourself what you really want in life and there will be no light at the end of the tunnel, meaning you will feel worse and worse over time among this specific group of people. In that case you definitely hadn’t found your fit. But when you feel extremely good saying it loud and clear, that you have found your fit, you are on the right track.

    You have to search for it

    Things used to be more or less obligatory, commanded – by the country, parents, the local church and whoever else (your environment). A larger part of our destiny had been defined, no matter the fit level. Once, it was expected from you to suffer, even though you weren’t fit for something. You simply didn’t have many options.

    “The non-believer who will go to hell” – in case of being more interested in a different religion than your local community. “The betrayer of the country and the nation” – if you moved to a different country liking it much more than the country where you were born. “The unreliable individual who changes jobs without a reason” – if you simply didn’t want to do the same job as your parents or didn’t feel good in a series of companies. “The neighbor who got divorced” – my parents got divorced in the 80s and it was perceived as a very negative event. But in reality if they didn’t they would probably kill each other. And so on. I am exaggerating of course, but just to make a point.

    Today, it’s clear that it’s not right for you to suffer. The other side (partner, company, country…) is suffering as well if you are suffering. The whole world is suffering. There is no combination for a positive result.

    Let me give you an example. If you work for a company where you don’t fit in, what will happen? You won’t be motivated to work hard, you will be talking negative about the company to your colleagues and other people, and you won’t like and encourage coworkers, you will hate your boss and so on. The company will be suffering as well as you. It’s a clear lose – lose situation that doesn’t make any sense.

    Today, in the world of many options, you yourself is often the only reason for suffering the non-fit. Your character. Your decisions. Your lack of adaptability. Your stubbornness. Your fears. Your infatuation with the fact that the world should change right where you are standing, instead of you finding those parts that fit you best.

    When you find your fit, this doesn’t mean that all your problems are solved. Finding your fit isn’t a miracle solution. Far from it. It only means that you have found something that holds true potential. You find something you can build upon and look forward to it. It is then that you pass on from searching to hard work.

    There’s also never a one true fit, regardless of all Hollywood movies and the promised shortcuts that appeal to our laziness. There are always parts where frictions exists, and that’s good. These small bumps that don’t fit are an opportunity for growth.

    But if you are somewhere where you totally don’t fit in, this is slowly killing you inside, until you become a zombie and kill your own dreams, ambitions, motivations, energy, and potential inside you. Then you are in a situation when you die before you are actually dead. You become bitter, tired and search for a way out. And that’s something you don’t want, trust me.

    Search for your perfect fit
    Search and you will find. Conquer your fears.

    This is why life has equipped you with a compass that shows you whether you are on the right path. Life gave you a sensor that tells you whether you fit in and you have only to work hard to reach your goals, or whether there is no fit and you will remain miserable and dissatisfied no matter how much you try, regardless of all your moves; if you don’t invest your energy into finding the better fit of course.

    The compass is your feelings. Positive feelings mean that you are going in the right direction, regardless of the difficulty of the challenges, the amount of demanded input, the obstacles in front of you and possible failures. Negative feelings, such as sadness, depression, apathy, unhappiness, ignorance, lack of motivation, all show you that you aren’t in the right place. Behavioral patterns such as procrastination, indecisiveness etc. also indicate the same.

    Fear shows that you have to face something in life, envy shows what you potentially want and where you potentially fit in, and anger can either show that you aren’t in the right place, aren’t doing what you want (anger at yourself), or that you have to try harder and find a new path (anger at others). If you listen to your heart and carefully observe your feelings, you know. The best way to observe your feelings is with the happiness chart.

    Be proactive and find your fit

    When you come to a point in your life where you realize all this, you are often already caught, stuck to certain parts, people and situations that don’t belong in your life.

    The only employer who answered your request for work. The first partner you fell in love with or the first one who talked to you. The industry in which you have landed completely by accident. The first investor who offered you money for your business opportunity.

    But the first options are rarely the right ones. The idea of love at first sight is a shortcut that appeals to human laziness, fear, comfort zone, and robs you of dignity to try for something better. You also want different things throughout your lifetime, thus no fit lasts forever. Every time you are dishonest with yourself or choose the easier path, negative feelings are waiting for you. Separation is never easy, but it is sometimes necessary and part of life.

    You only have four options in a non-fit situations.

    1. The first and the hardest one is nirvana. The state in which all wishes and self-awareness disappear. You love everything the way it is, and feel perfect. But so far, 150 billion people have lived on our planet and only a handful reached nirvana. Maybe two, three. Good luck. Although the Zen mindset can help you a lot in everyday life.
    2. The second option is reactive behavior – staying where you are and suffering. You can decide to die before actually being dead, and resign to living like zombies; settle for what “you are given”, for what happened to you. But at the same time, point fingers at life and everyone else, saying how they are at fault for your misfortune because they aren’t the very thing that you want them to be.
    3. The third option is as popular as the second one. You naively hope that other people will change. You hope that the boss will be nicer. You hope that your partner will be more attentive to you and stop cheating, and that this weird period of theirs will end. You hope that your parents will understand you better. You hope that you will spontaneously find yourself in a better situation; because you deserve it, since you have such a good heart.

    And yet. People don’t change. An organization’s values don’t change. Countries don’t change. The world doesn’t change. Situations don’t change by themselves. It’s ironic that the only constant of the world are changes, but in its essence, everything stays exactly the same. Only the mask is different. We advance, but we don’t change. People don’t like real authentic change.

    It’s true that we all are equipped with more and more knowledge. It is true that we try to tame the human nature into an increasingly more positive direction, with laws, transparency etc. It’s true that we have more and more advanced methods of communication, living, transport etc. But the foundations of humanity remain the same.

    Let’s look at example. What used to be smoke turned to a letter, then IRC, then Messenger, is today Facebook and will be something else tomorrow. But in fact, all of these cases are actually ways of communication, only increasingly better and more efficient. Same goes for an individual’s character, which mostly stays the same in its essence. Rarely do individuals realize that they have to change something with themselves.

    Just really think deeply of what it takes for someone to change. Usually a life or death experience. Maybe prison. Managers needs years of work and inhuman efforts to just slightly change the values of an organization. In countries, use of force, implementation of new laws or even a war are necessary for changes or new patterns of behavior. Internet has shown the biggest technological progress in the history of mankind. Millions of people contributed to its development, and yet more than 30 years were needed for it to reach the level it is at now.

    If you are hoping that someone will change soon, and will be more to your liking – good luck with that. If you live with the conviction that you will change someone by nagging, badgering, whining, binding, fretting, dominating, and simultaneously achieve a positive relationship result, you are very wrong. It’s much more likely that people will push you away or start hating you. So you make even a step further away from the right or better fit.

    4. The best and most sensible option is proactivity – finding a better fit. Sadly, or luckily, the case remains that the younger you are, the less locked into your life, the easier it is. It is also true that the more financial, intellectual, psychological, sexual and any other capital you have, the easier it is.

    But regardless of everything, you always have a choice, you can always make a decision, there is always a move you can make to find things and people in your life that are a better fit.

    Courage is needed for this. Willingness to face small failures. Readiness to survive disappointments. Preparedness for a broken heart. Again and again. You have to be willing to sail away from your comfort zone into the ocean of possibilities and opportunities. You have to be prepared for the adventure of life. Seek and you shall find. Where there is a strong enough will, there is always a way.

    Practical examples

    Your personal values aren’t (any longer) consistent with those of your partner, company you are working for, or your country. The voice inside you is telling you that this isn’t it. You experience negative emotions when you think of doing the same thing you are doing today, or being in the same situation in ten years. There is no interest for development by the other party.

    You have four options, as described previously:

    • Meditate away (change your view of the world and yourself)
    • Suffer (and point fingers)
    • Hope for others to change (suffer and prepare for a big disappointment)
    • Try to change others by nagging and fretting (double the disappointment above)
    • Find a better fit and distance yourself where that isn’t possible

    But when you are making big changes like that do them as fair as possible for all the parties. Nevertheless if something isn’t your fit, pivot!

    What if there is no fit for me?

    At the end one more question appears: what if there is no right fit for me? Oh well. The world has about 3.5 billion people of the opposite gender, millions of organizations that are employing, dozens of religions, sports, subcultures, industries, diets, possibilities for income etc. The only obstacle preventing you from finding the right fit for yourself is usually only laziness, fear, comfort zone, a lack of resources at a given moment, and other similar reasons.

    Have faith
    Yes, there is fit for you too! On all areas of your life.

    Basically you transfer the power (and decisions) from your hands into those of a higher power, the country, parents, boss or whoever else there might be. You put yourself in the position of a helpless victim. Don’t do that, keep all your personal power.

    Experience the wide variety of options

    Don’t hope for others to change. Don’t hope that the world will change to be more to your liking just because of your ego. Don’t suffer deep down inside, and don’t blame others for situations that don’t meet your standards. You have decided for this yourself. A big exception are children in dysfunctional families, people living in poverty, and people who suffered from accidents. In these cases, the task for all of us is to give opportunities and options; offer support to all those who find themselves in such a situation and don’t have the possibility of choice.

    In short, for everyone else – gather courage and embark on an adventure. Systematically, gradually, without compromise. Find a better fit in all areas of life. And then build an even better one.

    Build something you will admire and be proud of. But in the meantime, prepare for searching, trying and of course, a disappointment here and there. Maybe even a lot of disappointments. Nevertheless, this is the only path to the dream partner, dream job, the perfect environment and fulfilment in life.

    Look at the world as an infinite varied palette of possibilities; as a park or a playing field where all of us can connect, create, contribute, learn, experience, meet, change. Especially with those people who have similar values, with those people who share your vision, who are prepared to grow and try new things.

    Fit in is paradise and non-fit is hell on Earth.

    First fit in. Then stand out.

    Finally, you find yourself wondering whether it is not more sensible to stand out than to try to belong with a group. It’s absolutely not right to try to conform to a group. As said before, you have to find something that’s close to you and then build on it. By adding value, you essentially have to stand out, create something new.

    It used to be that an individual was simply able to step away from “average” by being different from something that was commanded or expected. Today, no things are specifically expected or commanded like that. Today, the developed world already has diversity.

    Today you stand out by piecing your life together completely individually, like a puzzle, from all that fits best for you. And on top of that, you add value with your innovativeness, unique outlook and hard work.

    Homework

    Here is a homework you should do. Analyze if you have found your fit on the all areas of life listed below. As we mentioned in the beginning, you can always feel when fit isn’t happening on a certain area of your life.

    1. Your environment – country, city, home, office etc.
    2. Your diet
    3. The sports you do
    4. Your spouse
    5. Your friends
    6. Your coworkers
    7. Your career
    8. The way you earn money
    9. Your investments
    10. Your competences
    11. Things you do to enjoy life
    12. Your religion or spirituality
    13. Technology you use
    14. Other areas important to you

    First fit in. Then stand out.