Blaz Kos

kaizen & growth mindset

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  • Reading challenge – The best way to fall and stay in love with reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Reading Challenge

    The process that will help you fall in love with reading

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

    It’s not really that hard to become a bookworm. I followed a very simple strategy:

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

    If you follow these five rules, you will sooner or later read your first book, and then the second one and the third one and so on. Once you witness how your love for reading grows, you will face a new challenge – how to read as much as possible.

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

    Reading challenges can greatly accelerate your reading motivation

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

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

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

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

    Popular reading challenges

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

    Most reading challenges are based on one of the following frameworks or reading strategies:

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

    Not to talk only about theory, here are some popular annual reading challenges:

    If you need a good idea for which book to read, Goodread’s Listopedia is a very good start. Then don’t forget to check Goodreads reviews and Amazon reviews for every book before you read it, and you can also find a good summary or read a few free pages on Amazon Preview to get a feeling about the author’s style.

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

    Reading challenge list - Example

    My summer reading challenge

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

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

    Here are the bottom lines of my current situation, when it comes to reading and writing:

    • I’m putting together a book (“blog to book” with a few extras). But that means it’s hard to simultaneously produce quality content for the blog and putting together a book.
    • I have been writing new blog posts for more than a year and a half now. I strive to make every blog post an outstanding piece of content. That takes hard work. A short break from putting together my own quality content would be nice.
    • I have a real desire to dramatically build up my knowledge about psychology. I feel like a vessel that needs to be filled with new knowledge. Thus, I currently strongly prefer reading than writing my own content. I want to take advantage of that feeling.

    These are the three facts, I decided to build my reading challenge on. What I decided to do in particular is to read 10 books on psychologyuntil the end of the summer (5 traditional authors like Freud, Ericson, Rogers and 5 contemporary authors) and, of course, write really extensive summaries of the books.

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

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

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

    And if you already love reading, why not challenge yourself in some innovative ways, like reading books on subjects you never read before, or test your limits when it comes to reading; you know, just for fun.

  • The one change that matters and the one metric that matters

    Corporate finances for established companies and innovation accounting for startups are extremely wide‑ranging and quite complicated topics. You have to be really good with numbers and understand different business concepts well to properly measure the performance of a company.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    OMTM – The one metric that matters

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

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

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

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

    The one metric that matters
    What is stopping you in life?

    OCTM – The one change that matters

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

    We all have it. Usually people know what it is. Sometimes they don’t. But we all have it. If you know it, good. If you don’t, take a few minutes to self-reflect and analyze what it could be. Most often it comes down to stupid beliefs and bad habits like:

    • One big destructive personality character
    • Extremely poor money management
    • Being drawn to shady people and environments
    • Eating an extremely poor diet
    • Being awfully unfit
    • Going from one abusive relationship to another
    • Working for a boss who is an asshole
    • Being too ambitious or not ambitious at all
    • Not believing in yourself
    • Being sure you aren’t good with technology
    • That one fear that’s holding you back
    • Too many negative thoughts and emotions
    • Extremely poor time management
    • Scarcity mindset
    • Other similar toxic beliefs or behavioral patterns

    What is that one thing that’s holding you back? We all have strengths and we all have weaknesses. You can analyze all of them by performing a personal SWOT analysis. Furthermore, we can divide weaknesses into two categories:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The one change that matters

    Focus on the one change that matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    When it comes to dealing with the one change that matters, there are only two rules – (1) face it ASAP and (2) never retreat, never surrender.

  • Learning is useless, validated learning is everything

    Knowledge is not power. Applying knowledge is power. Learning is useless. Validated learning is everything. If there is a single skill you have to learn to be massively successful in the 21st century, it’s validated learning. It’s the only way to build a superior life strategy.

    The concept of validated learning comes from the lean startup. The validated learning loop helps quickly validate or reject core business hypotheses. Instead of blindly trusting your business idea, you build a minimum viable product and then use a special set of metrics to validate the effect. You build a feature, you measure the results and so you learn what to do next – persevere or pivot.

    The same process of learning can be extremely useful in personal life. I use it all the time, to learn extremely fast and to get insights into what works for me and what doesn’t.

    Validated learning

    Validated learning in personal life

    Validated learning in personal life is a process of acquiring a new chunk of knowledge, immediately putting it into practice and then measuring results to validate the effects – if there is any value or not.

    What you learn in the process should also lead you to the next step, to the next chunk of knowledge to acquire and test. It’s a loop that enables you extremely fast personal growth and progress towards your goals.

    The process or the personal validated learning loop consists of three steps:

    1. Acquiring knowledge chunks
    2. Immediate implementation
    3. Validated learning based on metrics

    Here’s a table defining all three categories in more detail (with examples):

    Knowledge chunks Immediate implementation Validated learning
    Creative ideas Self-reflection and analysis Life metrics
    Listening to lectures Engaging discussion Superior insights
    Listening to audio books Scenario-based thinking Works
    Reading Changing behavior Doesn’t work
    Watching educational videos Performing an experiment Makes me happy
    Witnessing a demonstration Trying something new Doesn’t make me happy
    Observing Changing values or angle Leads me towards my goals
    Doing research Teaching others Distracts me from my goals

    Now let’s dive deeper into each of the three categories to explore why they’re important.

    Acquiring knowledge chunks

    The scientifically proven best way to learn is to use the chunking strategy. Chunks are small units of knowledge that go logically together and that you can easily practice, revise and remember. You break larger pieces of knowledge you want to learn into small chunks.

    By mastering each chunk separately, you can effectively learn the whole body of knowledge without feeling overwhelmed or losing comprehension.

    There are many ways how you can acquire knowledge chunks. I often call this “downloading” knowledge. You can listen to lectures or audio books, you can read books or articles, you might watch educational videos or even be present at a live demonstration of how to do something. You can also gain knowledge by observing, doing research and let’s add your own creative ideas into the knowledge chunks family.

    Here’s the important part. If you stop at this point, you only learn. And that’s more or less useless. You have to take a step further to turn knowledge into real power. You have to implement it and measure where the new knowledge is leading you.

    Immediate implementation

    When you acquire a new chuck of knowledge, you want to put it to the test as quickly as possible. But you want to do implementation in a smart way. Thus the first next step after “downloading” knowledge is to process it.

    You process knowledge by connecting a new chunk to whatever you already know, with self-reflection, by starting a discussion, analyzing how the new knowledge can be used or applied, and so on. The bottom line of processing knowledge is the strategy of how to best put the knowledge to practice.

    Then comes the most important part – actually applying knowledge to practice. When it comes to applying knowledge to practice, there is a simple rule. If you don’t change your thoughts, words and actions or, in other words, behavior, you haven’t learned anything new.

    If you don’t change your behavior, you haven’t learned anything new.

    Well, I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself, because you should permanently change your behavior only after validated learning. First you have to see if the new chunk of knowledge is useful in any way.

    You put new knowledge to the test by conducting controllable experiments. You try a new behavior, a way to look at things or you put knowledge to practice and then observe and measure the results. You gather internal and external feedback. Let’s look at a few examples (from my own life).

    Practical examples
    • You read an article on how to write effective headlines. You immediately apply it to your articles and measure click-through rates.
    • In a psychology book, you read about an exercise on how to talk back to your inner critic. You immediately take a piece of paper and do the exercise. Then you measure how good do you feel.
    • You learn a new coding thing you can do in CSS or Python and you immediately try it on one of your landing pages. You brainstorm where and when you can use the same feature.
    • You get an idea for how to improve your relationship with your spouse with an active constrictive response and you immediately start practicing it in communication and measure the relationship index.
    • You read relationship advice that when meeting new people “there is no ice to break”, we’re all already connected, and so you never look at unknown people the same again. You immediately see every person like there is already an existing connection so you can easily talk to them.
    • You do research on intermittent fasting and how it can help you lose weight, and you immediately try it for 14 days to see the results. You measure your body fat percentage etc.
    • You read an idea about how to measure relationship drama and immediately develop the idea much further in a blog post. You do an immediate assessment for your key relationships.

    you have to try

    Validated learning based on metrics

    The process doesn’t yet end with applying knowledge. When you change your behavior, you have to measure if applying knowledge makes sense and if it works for you as a unique individual. Be aware that many times it doesn’t and you have to revert back to old patterns or try new things.

    There’s nothing wrong if things don’t work as planned, that’s also part of validated learning. Every small failure leads you one step closer to success. Actually you never fail, you just find a way that doesn’t work. That means you’re a step closer to the right solution that will work.

    The point is, if you want to do validated learning, you have to measure where applying new knowledge is leading you. Based on that, you decide whether to pivot or not. There are two types of feedback you can lean on:

    • External feedback
    • Internal feedback

    Internal feedback is all the feedback that you gather with self-reflection and it comes from within, from yourself. These are metrics that show your happiness levels (happiness index, for example), your changes in competence levels, whether you’re getting closer to your personal goals, and we can also include feedback from your body and many other personal life metrics.

    External feedback is all the feedback you gather from your environment; from the people you work with to how your changes are related to environmental paradigms. You want to make sure that your environment supports you and that you adjust your strategy and tactics to the point where they enable you to achieve your goals as smoothly as possible.

    You measure your feedback based on different metrics. Metrics can be qualitative or quantitative, but they show you real progress and the direction you’re going to. Below are some examples of life metrics you can measure. The best way is to analyze all the feedback you gather regularly during bi-weekly self-reflection intervals.

    Health Money
    • Exercise frequency
    • Potential progress of illness
    • Managing your body weak points
    • Regular blood test
    • Body composition (% of fat, muscle size)
    • Aerobic endurance (run a mile, VO2 max)
    • Muscular endurance (push-up test, plank test)
    • Muscular strength (one-rep max)
    • Flexibility (yoga poses)
    • Personal income statement
      • Earned income
      • Passive income
      • Portfolio income
    • Expenses
    • Taxes
    • Monthly plus/minus
    • Net-worth
      • Assets
      • Doodads
      • Liabilities (Debt)
    Career Relationships
    • Your company position (employment contract vs. organizational chart)
    • Public influence (number of interviews, public ratings)
    • Social media influence (Klout score)
    • Work enjoyment (from 1 to 10)
    • Professional connections
    • Your legacy (number of positive ideas that influenced local/global society)
    • Number of close friends you have
    • Time spent with the people you love
    • How much you do for your partner (massage, dinner, etc.)
    • How much you get out of a relationship (giving and receiving must be in balance)
    • How often you say I love you
    • How often you give a compliment to your partner
    • How often you make love
    Competences Mind/Emotions
    • Number of books you read
    • Number of seminars you visit
    • Domain knowledge you possess
    • Number of skills you master
    • Number of tech skills
    • Number of creative ideas you have
    • Your IQ
    • Your EQ
    • How well you are able to control your mind (your maximum meditating time)
    • Your daily Happiness index
    • Number of negative thoughts daily (with use of emotional accounting)
    • Dominating cognitive distortions
    • Number of new things you tried in life
    • Number of breathtaking experiences you have encountered etc.
    • Other metrics as part of your life strategy (countries you traveled to, number of languages you speak etc.)

    How you should measure your success in life? Compare…

    • Your current metrics on different life areas
    • Your past metrics on different life areas (past month, year etc.)
    • Don’t compare yourself to others too much (only healthy competition is okay I guess)

    Besides gaining superior insights about yourself and your environment, effective learning also has to always result in permanent changes in your behavior; of course if the new change works for you and you don’t decide to revert or pivot.

    After every experiment, you have to consciously decide and draw the bottom line of validated learning in terms like: it works for me, it doesn’t work, it makes me happy, it doesn’t make me happy, it leads me towards my goals, it distracts me from my goals, it’s something I really want, it’s something that I only thought I will like but I don’t, it gives results, it doesn’t give results.

    You can make these final bottom line decisions on the “knowledge chunk” retrospection when you do self-reflections. You answer a few basic, but very hard questions:

    • What can I do or what do I know that I didn’t know before and what was the best way to apply it?
    • What went well using the new chunk of knowledge?
    • What didn’t go as well as expected?
    • What is the next thing I have to learn or how should I improve my “knowledge chunk”?

    Based on that, you should make three final decisions and stick to them:

    • What will I start doing based on the new knowledge acquired?
    • What will I stop doing based on the new knowledge acquired?
    • What will I continue doing based on the new knowledge acquired?

    You can do this really fast in a few minutes, you don’t have to do a whole dissertation out of every small new thing that you learn. The whole point is to apply knowledge as quickly as possible and then measure its effect and analyze if the change works for you or not.

    If we go to the cases I previously mentioned, I kept the exercise of how to talk to the inner critic and I do it on a regular basis, I always immediately use new coding knowledge (and forget what I don’t reuse), I’ve been doing intermittent fasting for months now, and I broke off all relationships with too much drama.

    The “there is no ice” thing only works for me in certain situations, since I’m an introvert and mostly prefer to spend time alone or with carefully selected people. So I often prefer to shy away rather than open a conversation with a stranger.

    And I still have a problem with headlines, because there are competing commitments (two contrary goals you want to achieve) behind, so I have to resolve some emotional issues before permanently implementing the knowledge.

    You learn so much about yourself, the world and how to use new knowledge if you do regular reflections and commit to validated learning.

    Theory into practice

    Implementing effective validated learning and a learning queue

    I’ve mentioned chunking as an important learning strategy. When you do validated learning, you want to make sure you’re learning as effectively as possible.

    You want to learn fast, but you also want to make sure that you really acquire knowledge and put it to the test, that you don’t lose comprehension when you are learning, and that you strategically decide what to learn next. You have to be a proactive learner with a strong attention span, not a reactive one.

    Skimming articles, superficial speed reading and being anxious when learning are the opposite of what you want to achieve with validated learning.

    In the same way, you don’t want to use learning as a handy excuse for failing. Oh I failed, but I learned a lot. Really, what did you learn? I don’t know. You want to be a really good strategic learner that knows how to transform knowledge into power. You want to learn from your failures and wrong assumptions. You want to be an effective validated learner.

    There are many concepts that can help you with that. From employing different learning styles and challenging yourself with tests to preparing a very well prioritized learning queue, using the just-in-time learning concept, helping yourself with flash cards and much more. We’ll talk about all these different learning techniques in the following blog posts.

    Until then make sure you are constantly improving and learning. Just make sure you aren’t only learning, but that you are really doing validated learning. Now you know how!

    Homework

    By reading this article you downloaded a new chunk of knowledge, so the next step you must take is to process it, apply it and then measure the results.

  • Your mind is like a garden that needs a good daily care

    Your body is a vessel that carries your soul, so you must take good care of it. That’s a concept easy to grasp. Everybody knows how important it is to take good care of the body with regular exercise, a healthy diet and moderate lifestyle; and it makes complete sense to go to the doctor when you get sick.

    Everybody knows and agrees with the importance of the healthy living, but sticking to it is completely another story.

    On the other hand, taking good care of your mind is not perceived as common sense as taking care of your body; even though it’s sometimes even more important.

    Psychological pain is often much harder on you than physical pain. At the very least, a poor mindset leads to being constantly trapped in negative emotions, making bad life decisions, self-sabotage, several severe diseases (mind has a great influence on the body), an unhappy life in general and many other negative behaviors and outcomes.

    Scars on a body are well seen, but wounds of a soul are sometimes permanently hidden.

    Thus you must regularly take care of your mind.

    Much like you can do many things for your physical health to avoid any serious illness or injury that needs to be cured by a doctor, so you can take many precautions to take good care of your mind, in order to not find yourself in depression, social anxiety, severe stress, eating disorder, procrastination, cognitive distortions or any personality disorder.

    We don’t even need to go that far.

    Being unhappy or unsatisfied in life or living a zombie life wasting your potentials is certainly a big enough reason to start taking better care of your life by upgrading the way you think. It may help if you imagine your mind like a garden that you have to take care of regularly.

    Your mind is like a garden

    Your mind is like a garden and you are the gardener general

    Even though nothing lasts forever, you can extend the longevity of things with positive actions, regular maintenance, and constant growth and improvement. Your body and mind are no exceptions to that. With regular maintenance, they both last longer and function better. That’s exactly what you want.

    If you want to have a beautiful garden, you have to take care of it regularly; on a daily basis. And if you want to have a beautiful mind, you have to take care of it regularly; also on a daily basis.

    There are several ways how you can take good care of your mind garden:

    1. Plant the right seeds and regularly wipe out the weeds
    2. Make sure that other people aren’t throwing rotten seeds on your soil
    3. Take good care of the soil

    Plant the right seeds

    The seeds in the garden of mind are constantly being planted. The seeds in the garden of mind are your thoughts, opinions and concepts.

    The right seeds, the beautiful seeds from which a nice flower will grow, are all the thoughts that bring the positive into your life. The right seeds are tender thoughts of sharing, connecting and loving – yourself, people, things and ideas.

    Examples of the right seeds to plant in your garden of mind are:

    On the other hand, harmful seeds or weeds are all the thoughts that bring the negative into your life. Negative thoughts or seeds are rough mental energies of excluding, disconnecting and hating – yourself, people, things and ideas.

    Examples of negative seeds being planted in your mind:

    • Minimizing your accomplishments
    • Comparing yourself to others and being jealous
    • Fantasizing about revenge or misfortune happening to other people
    • Labeling yourself and others in a negative way
    • Drowning in self-pity and a victim mindset
    • Being a perfectionist and always wanting more and more
    • Other cognitive distortions

    When we talk about rotten seeds, the most important fact is that by thinking the same negative thought over and over again, you give rotten seeds the power to grow and spoil your garden.

    They can completely overtake it. They can completely destroy your mind and your life. So you want to pull out the weeds while they’re still small and manageable. Stop feeding the monster. Starve it.

    By thinking the same negative thought over and over again, you give rotten seeds the power to grow.

    On a more positive note, by thinking the same positive thought over and over again, you give healthy seeds the power to grow. So think positive thoughts repeatedly. Enjoy them.

    With your actions, you give additional power to your rotten or healthy seeds to grow. That means you have to be careful how you think, what you say and especially how you act.

    Poor seeds of mind

    Wipe out the weeds

    In the garden of mind, it’s impossible to plant only the good seeds. Weeds grow in every single garden of mind. There’s no way to avoid it.

    But there are two things you can do regularly to properly maintain your mind:

    • You can observe what’s happening with your mind and learn to recognize a bad seed from a good one. You do that with meditation, by counting negative thoughts, writing and categorizing them, and many other mind exercises. Here are all potential toxic thoughts that you need to learn to identify and categorize.
    • You can pull out the weeds while they’re still small and manageable. Not only do you have to throw away the bad seeds, you also have to cut down the ones that start to grow. You can do that with emotional accounting, cognitive reframing, positive affirmations and many other mind tools.

    You either control your mind or your mind controls you.

    Controlling your mind doesn’t mean that a negative thought never appears in your mind. It only means that you learn to recognize what’s happening in your garden of mind and bring attention to the positive things.

    Watch what other people are throwing on your soil

    Other people are constantly throwing seeds on your mind soil. When you watch the news, what you read, when you talk to other people, it all represents seeds being thrown on your garden of mind. You want to make sure that as few rotten seeds as possible are thrown at you.

    Making sure that the healthy seeds of other people land on your mind soul isn’t rocket science:

    • Don’t spend time with bozos, zombies, and ignore the haters
    • Read useful and positive material, and read a lot
    • Don’t watch TV at all
    • Don’t read the news and trashy magazines
    • Don’t let social networks be the main source of information for you
    • Browse educational not mental masturbation internet sites
    • Listen to positive music and different audio books
    • Go to seminars, lectures, subscribe to MOOCS and never stop learning
    • Get yourself a mentor

    All these things are part of your personal infostructure. Your personal infostructure is like a sieve that separates healthy seeds from the rotten ones so that they don’t even have a chance to reach you. Build yourself an outstanding infostructure and your garden of mind will start to blossom.

    But even if you build yourself an outstanding infostructure, a few rotten seeds will still land in your mind. Luckily, you can only be infected with a negative idea if your mind is fertile ground for such negative words and ideas. Make sure you’re simply not sensible to anything negative, because you know very well that you can’t live a positive life with a negative mind.

    You can only be infected with a negative idea if your mind is fertile ground for such negative words and ideas.

    Take good care of the soil

    Last but not least, make sure you take good care of the soil. That brings us back to the body. A healthy mind can only reside in a healthy body. So make sure you’re taking good care of your body, especially your brain. It’s actually not that hard to do that.

    There are only five major things you must do to take good care of the soil:

    • A healthy diet means a healthier brain. Eat a lot of green veggies and fruit in moderation, a high amount of healthy fats, low amounts of sugar, and consume low amounts of alcohol.
    • Exercise at least three times a week. Go for a 30-minute walk if nothing else. Exercising in nature is much better than being a gym rat.
    • Get enough sleep every night. It’s the number one thing for keeping your brain healthy and making sound decisions. If you’re sleepy, you don’t act as rationally as you should.
    • Reduce the amount of stress in your life. Stress slowly kills you and it also kills your brain and the ability to take good care of your garden. Increase your margins, simplify your life and learn to manage stress properly.
    • Constantly try new things, challenge yourself, travel, talk to new people, never get bored. Do a creative task every day – do art, brainstorm ideas, write etc. You can do brain teasers, games and different puzzles. You can play challenging video games. Constantly try new things.

    Your mind is like a garden. Make sure it’s a unique and beautiful garden. You will be rewarded with a happy and high-quality life, and people will love to spend time with you.

    There is no wiser life advice than: take good care of your body and take good care of your mind.

  • Curiosity is the number one trait of awesome people

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

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

    Replace the fear of unknown with curiosity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Curiosity

    Everybody wants to kill your curiosity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    You can never ever get bored

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

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

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

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

    Outstanding communication

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

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

    When you are curious about someone:

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Practical examples

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

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

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

    Becoming smarter and more persistent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    NASA's Curiosity Rover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Homework

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

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

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

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

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

  • When you need to reprogram yourself and fix brain bugs

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

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

    When your code is buggy

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Searching for bugs

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

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

    The parents test

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

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

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

    Pinpointing toxic behavior

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

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

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

    Short-term future predictions

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

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

    The happiness index

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

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

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

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

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

    Happiness Index
    Happiness Index, Source: Agile trail

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

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

    The life satisfaction test

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

    First you draw a scale from 1 to 10 horizontally, like with the happiness index, while vertically you list the key areas of life or the areas you’ve chosen to assess. You assess every area or category of life from 1 to 10. Below, you can find an example of that kind of a life-assessment chart.

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

    Made-up case as an example

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

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

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

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

    Gap to ideal self

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

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

    Reprogram yourself

    Reprogram yourself

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

    Practical examples

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

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

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

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

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

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

    How to reprogram yourself?

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

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

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

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

    You already are a programmer

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

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

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

    Homework

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

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

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

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