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  • Don’t worry about failure, because you only have to be right once

    In almost every blog post, I emphasize that you have to search for your personal fits before you commit to or brutally focus on anything.

    The reason for that is to not set your life strategy based on naivety and wrong assumptions, but to really get to know yourself and your environment with mini experiments, which enables you to shape your life strategy based on superior insights, immediate feedback and actionable metrics.

    Consequently, you can adjust more quickly and focus on what really brings progress, success and happiness.

    It’s very well proven that agile and lean strategy works not only in the startup world, but also among big brands, non-profit organizations and other business entities as well as in personal life as this blog teaches you. And we must not forget that the agile and lean methodologies are taught at the best business schools in the World.

    There is only one huge problem with this strategy.

    You must have the guts to experiment, you must have the courage to try hundreds of different things and you must be prepared to fail. You must be prepared to learn through failure and put your ego aside. You have to admit to yourself that you’re wrong, that you don’t know anything. At least in the beginning.

    In addition to that, you also need a little bit of scientific nature. You must be curious, you need the desire to try different things, to understand the world as well as possible, and you must be eager to gain superior insights about yourself and what you want out of life. You also need a set of metrics and a framework to decide when to persevere and when to pivot.

    You almost always have to face some kind of apathy before you find your fit, which means that following the AgileLeanLife strategy requires quite a lot of resilience, persistence and faith in the process. But there is some very good news when we talk about apathy.

    Much like there’s the rule that you are always wrong before you are right, in the same way there is a rule that you only have to be right once. Once you find your fit, you definitely still face different problems and challenges, but your life gets much easier. You know why and for what to fight. Your life mission becomes more important and huge than anything else in life.

    Let’s go step by step and build the case for why you only have to be right once.

    Why does finding the right fit matter so much?

    The only way to be really successful in any area of life is first finding your own fit. Some people are lucky enough that their parents, teachers or mentors see their potential and orientate them onto the right path towards their fit, but in most cases you have to find it once you enter the adult life.

    Values, which show what’s important to you and what you value, are what determines whether you fit with something or not. And your talents and other personality traits also play a big role. Anyway, when you find the right fit, you just know it.

    When you find it, passion awakens in you. You find yourself in something. You know that you can be successful in this. You see potential. You start to flourish and consider yourself lucky.

    I’ve seen people working in companies where they fit in and where they don’t. The difference in their level of happiness, productivity, motivation etc. is like night and day. I’ve seen people struggle with a sport just because it was supposed to help them lose weight the fastest, and people who were doing a sport they’re talented for and really like. The first ones gave up very soon, the second ones made real lifestyle changes.

    I’ve seen people who settled for the first partner they dated as well as people who made up their minds about what kind of a partner they want and then started searching until they found someone close to that. The probability of long-term happiness is much higher for the latter. That’s why finding your personal fit is so important.

    So here’s the first rule of success in life and the road to living a good quality life.

    Find the right person to build an intimate relationship with. Find a person for whom all the struggle is really worth it; and it will be worth it. Find a career that really suits you best, one that you’re passionate about and where you can really deliver the value added. In the same way, find your perfect diet, a sport you like, a group of people who support you and where you fit in, and so on.

    In every single life area put in the effort to find your perfect fit, the thing that is part of your DNA and on which you can build a successful life. Successful people find their fits, unsuccessful people are trying to be something they’re not or do things that lie far away from their talents.

    Hitting target

    You find your fit through the search mode

    I hope finding your fits makes sense to you. But how do you do that? You find your fit using the search mode.

    The idea of the search mode is that you consciously prepare yourself through a series of failures that will hurt a lot, but will open to you the path to validated learning about yourself and your environment. The search mode represents a mindset and a somewhat scientific and systematic approach to finding your fit.

    • You go to a several dates that don’t work out
    • You work at a few companies that just aren’t for you
    • You try a few different occupations and suck at them
    • You buy yourself a thing in hope that will make you happy but it doesn’t
    • All these things hurt, but they enable you to learn about yourself

    The first characteristic of the search mode is a special mindset. In the search mode, you shouldn’t have any expectations, you shouldn’t make any commitments and you shouldn’t do any hard work.

    In the search phase, you just try, experiment, observe, reflect and learn about yourself and the world. The most important thing in this phase is to have no fixed ideas and no expectations at all. The key thing is to not to get too ego invested.

    The second special characteristic of the search mode is the approach. Your only job in the search mode is to test the assumptions you’ve written down, correct them, and try different things. The key is to stay 100 % flexible and open-minded and, as mentioned, not invested in anything. Because the more you get invested, the more inflexible you become.

    In practical terms, that means you should have a spreadsheet or a list of paper, where you write down:

    • What your assumption about yourself or the world is (I think the vegetarian diet would work for me)
    • How you will put your assumption to the test (I won’t eat meat for 3 months.)
    • How you will measure results (blood test, happiness index, energy levels etc.)
    • In which case you will decide to persevere and in which to pivot
    • A list of additional experiments you can make after you finish this one

    The key thing you have to do is to do regular reflections when you’re performing the experiments. That is the most valuable part of the process.

    Before marking a hypothesis as validated or rejected, you should ask yourself what you’ve learned, what you’ll test next, how you’ll change your plans, and so on. A search mode without deep and systematic reflection has very little value.

    Again, if you don’t have a piece of paper with the key findings and insights, and if you don’t write down what you’ve learnt, you’re missing the point of the search mode.

    Only after you find your fit in the search phase do you start executing. Sometimes it may take a few months to find you fit, sometimes a few years. After you find your fit, you go from the search mode to the execution mode. You set strong foundations, have laser focus, commit fully, start working hard and achieving your goals. You optimize, improve, and measure your progress with very detailed and execution type of metrics.

    There are five big problems you have to face in the search mode:

    • You can easily get stuck in the analysis-paralysis.
    • You see learning only as a good excuse and thus there is no real validated learning.
    • You have emotional problems dealing with uncertainty, because you don’t trust the process, yourself or others enough.
    • You stick to things that don’t work, because your mind is not flexible enough or you get tired.
    • You expect short-term results that are rarely achievable.

    All these five problems aren’t easy to deal with. But by far the hardest thing you have to face is the apathy before finding your fit.

    In the search mode you really have to face apathy

    The process before you find your fit is really painful and psychologically demanding. It’s called the apathy before finding your fit. Here are the main reasons that cause apathy:

    • You try a new thing and it doesn’t work. You try a new one, failure again.
    • Then you think you’ve found something good, but in the next step, you realize you haven’t.
    • From time to time, you realize how delusional and wrong you were and your ego suffers.
    • It almost always takes longer than expected and it costs more than you plan.
    • You need to sit down, analyze and be very systematic. Not to mention all the rejections you have to face.

    This search phase really is best described with the quote that success is going from failure to failure without giving up. The whole process before finding your fit sucks even more in the beginning; because in the beginning, you’re a newbie and your competences and skills aren’t that good.

    For example, you’ve just gathered the courage to start dating, but your dating skills suck, so you get rejected again and again.

    But apathy is the necessary part. It’s the life test of whether you really want something and whether you’re prepared to fight for it. It’s a test of whether you’re able to get out of the Valley of Death or not. The alternative is not good.

    If you don’t manage to get out of the Valley of Death, you turn into a zombie and your life turns to shit. On a more positive note, the apathy phase is also the part of the process where you learn and grow the most.

    One more thing you must keep in mind. The worse that your starting position is, the more time it’ll take to find your fit. The worse that your starting position is, the longer the apathy will probably last.

    A worse position simply means that you don’t yet know yourself and what you really want, that you lack resources, competences, leverages, and so on. In other words, you have to work harder for success if your starting point sucks.

    The best news and a motivational thought to deal with apathy is the fact that you only have to be right once.

    You only have to be right once

    But you only have to be right once

    You need to develop ONE competence based on your talents that is in high demand and low supply. You need to find ONE spouse who fits you perfectly and you can build a dream life together. You need to find ONE sport that you don’t dislike and have no troubles doing daily. You have to find ONE diet that enables you to maintain weight and feel energized. You need ONE business idea that works.

    When you find your fit, you have something you can build your success on, which can last for years or even a lifetime. In addition to that, when you find your perfect fit, there is more room for common human errors (well, some of them). The perfect fit is the best cure for your mistakes.

    Don’t worry about failure; you only have to be right once.” – Drew Houston, Dropbox founder and CEO

    But here’s the thing. The moment you’re right, all the bitter past failures turn into a winning strategy. You finally manage to climb to the top of the world.

    Other people see you as lucky, but you know that finding your fit was a very carefully orchestrated process. You know you deserve it, because you put in all the hard and smart work. You know you succeeded because you joined the club of people who are willing to go through the apathy of the search mode.

    Apathy and failure aren’t something that lasts forever. It’s something you pass by, if you learn quickly enough. You are wrong and wrong until you are right. Then you become a true winner. Luckily, you only have to be right once.

  • Wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups

    One day, I was hiking in the mountains with my girlfriend. On the way back, we got a little bit lost and I decided to put my survival skills to work. It didn’t take long for me to find the trail. I assumed that this was the trail we followed to get up to the summit. I was sure of it. I remembered. I saw the same trees. Of course the trail wasn’t the right one and we got even more lost. It took us hours to get back on the right track.

    Almost a decade ago, I spent a few months in California. I saw that every elite university has an alumni club and graduates are its proud members. When I returned home, I decided to found an alumni club of my high school, since it was an elite one. I strongly assumed that the school will see the benefits, people will love it and everybody will be happy. The school blocked it, people ignored it and it became one of my failed projects.

    A few years back, I decided to get fit. I never did any sports, and healthy living was something alien to me. On top of that I was super fat. It made complete logical sense to me that to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, you only have to go to the gym a few times and mind your food a little bit. Maybe you eat a cup of protein powder from time to time. Now more than three years have passed and I still don’t look anywhere near like Schwarzenegger.

    In all three stories, I was operating based on wrong assumptions. I was 100 % sure that I knew what I was doing, but I was wrong. Meeting reality wasn’t easy. And you have to meet it sooner or later in one way or another.

    Life works in a way that in many cases, you have no other choice but to rely on your assumptions. But it helps a lot if you know that they are nothing but assumptions that need to be tested as quickly as possible. Because wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups.

    Don’t doubt yourself, but absolutely doubt everything you assume.

    Subjective objective reality

    Two realities

    We know two types of reality – the objective and subjective one. The objective reality isn’t accessible to any living being. The objective reality is how things really are in the world. We try to come as close to it as possible, especially with science.

    Nevertheless, complete objective reality will probably still be inaccessible for a long period of time, because there are always things for which we don’t know that we don’t know them. Artificial intelligence may be the first one to come as close to objective reality as possible.

    Here is an example of how complicated it may be to get to the bottom of objective truth:

    • People used to believe that you got ill because you became possessed by evil spirits.
    • Then doctors believed that illness was caused by an imbalance of the four humors.
    • Now we “know” that viruses and bacteria cause a big portion of diseases, but the question is if maybe there even exists something else that we don’t know yet and that causes real illness? In hundred years, will a pill be seen as a primitive solution, like a herbal potion mixture is seen today?
    • And many times, the placebo effect can help you get better, so it’s not only about drugs.

    The second type of reality is your subjective reality. The subjective reality is your own interpretation of the world. It’s the lens through which you see the world, the frame in which you operate.

    The lenses of how you interpret the world are created by your beliefs, values, past experiences, upbringing, environment and other similar factors, including your assumptions. These lenses are the primary source of how you make your decisions in life.

    As we’ve learnt, there are many errors in your subjective reality. Your senses have a limited capacity for capturing information, your brains have a limited ability for processing information, there are many things you don’t know or lack experience, everyone has many cognitive distortions and there are numerous other sources of errors in the subjective reality map.

    One big family of errors in the subjective map of reality are cognitive biases. It’s something you can’t avoid, but you can become aware that they’re part of your thinking. From stereotyping, conformation bias and anchoring to projection, transference and the halo effect. The list of cognitive biases is very long.

    Ironically, many of the cognitive biases exist to support your survival. They serve to help you protect your self-image, to deal with optimization, to help you make complex decisions, judge probabilities and avoid danger.

    They may often provide you with psychological safety and protection, but they also often help you hide behind lies or drive you to make stupid decisions.

    The other big family of errors in the subjective map of reality are wrong assumptions. You assume something will happen, but it doesn’t. You assume you know something, but you don’t. You take action, but you get a different reaction than you expected.

    That’s because the objective world is always different from your subjective representations and unique interpretations. Because of this gap, expecting anything leads to a very high probability of disappointment.

    Wrong assumptions

    The world of wrong assumptions

    You make assumptions all the time, you can’t avoid this phenomenon. It’s the way we humans operate, it’s how our brains function. Therefore, it’s impossible not to make any assumptions. The problem arises when you believe that your assumptions are the truth. But they are not, they’re only assumptions.

    It’s impossible not to make assumptions, but you can become aware that they are only assumptions, not the truth.

    There are so many different types of assumptions you make. Let’s look at just a few of them.

    Practical examples

    You assume you communicated something clearly, but maybe you haven’t. You assume other people know what you want or that they have the same values as you. But they probably don’t. You make different assumptions about what might work and what might not. In reality, you never know.

    You make assumptions about what other people think and what will they probably do. You even make assumptions about what other people think of you. You make assumptions about which ideas will work and which ones won’t, how it would be like to live in another country and so on, you make assumptions practically about everything.

    The key question is: if you can’t avoid making assumptions, what can you do about it? First of all, as we said, don’t mistake assumptions for the truth.

    Be aware that you are making nothing but assumptions. Then put assumptions to the test as soon as possible. Do a series of actions and experiments that will get you closer to the objective truth.

    Put your assumptions to the test

    The best cure for those errors in your subjective map of reality that you make because you assume things is to put assumptions to the test. You conduct a series of small actions and experiments that slowly lead you to a better understanding of the objective reality.

    You will never completely reach the objective truth, but you don’t have to. All you need is a superior understanding and key insights on which you can set your actions.

    There are many ways how you can do that. Before we dive into different approaches to testing assumptions, or hypotheses to sound more scientific, you must make sure that you become aware of the assumptions you’re making. You do that in two simple steps:

    • You say to yourself: I am only making an assumption, I don’t know the truth.
    • Then you ask yourself: how can I validate or reject my assumptions, how can I put them to the test?

    After becoming aware of the assumptions you’re making, there are several ways how you can test them. Here are a few most common approaches:

    1. Ask questions and get educated
    2. Get out and gain experience
    3. Search before you execute
    4. Actionable metrics
    5. Random experiences
    6. Research techniques

    Ask questions and get educated

    The first thing you can do to put certain types of assumptions to the test is to ask questions. Don’t be shy, just ask.

    You assume s/he doesn’t feel the way you feel? Ask. You assume a person doesn’t like you? Ask if that’s true and why. You don’t understand something? Ask. When you’re in a dilemma and you can ask a person to give a clarification, do it, don’t hesitate.

    A quick important note, when you ask people about clarifications make sure you also observe their behavior, not only listen to what they have to say. What people do is often more important than what they say. Because everyone lives in their own subjective reality, where we don’t even know the truth about ourselves.

    The second thing you can do is to get educated. Read books on the topic. Talk to people who have already achieved what you want to achieve. Subscribe to an online course. Model other people.

    Knowledge is not as valuable as real-life experience, but it absolutely makes sense to get very well-educated first and then you immediately apply knowledge to practice.

    There are always “aha” moments when you start educating yourself. You say to yourself many times, oh I didn’t know that is so, I imagined it (assumed) a lot differently. Ask questions, get educated, doubt every statement; but believe in yourself.

    Go out and gain first-hand experience

    First-hand experience acquired by small carefully set experiments is definitely a very good way to test the majority of assumptions. There is no better teacher than reality.

    Meeting reality can be harsh, but it really enables you to understand the world and yourself better. That’s why you have to do small manageable experiments. In other words, you have to be constantly in the learning, not the panic zone.

    There is a saying that you make good decisions based on experience and you gain experience based on bad decisions. That saying exposes very well how gaining real-life experience works. You’re always wrong before you’re right. You take a small step, you fail, you learn, you stand up again and then you continue in a new direction; you go from failure to failure until you succeed.

    You assume you have a good business idea? Build a landing page and send some traffic to it. It costs you a weekend of work and a few hundred dollars. You assume you don’t like to travel? Try it. You assume you’re a bad lecturer? Give it a shot. Today, you can luckily test almost everything, quickly and inexpensively.

    Experiments in life

    The search mode

    The search mode is nothing but a systematical series of experiments for finding your perfect fit in a specific area of life. You consciously decide that you will search for a thing that works for you and you don’t stop until you find it.

    In the search mode, you shouldn’t have any expectations, you shouldn’t make any commitments and you shouldn’t do any hard work. Expectations lead to disappointments and before you understand something, your expectations are definitely completely wrong. In the search phase, you just try, experiment, observe, reflect and learn about yourself and the world.

    The most important thing in this phase is to have no fixed ideas and no expectations at all. Your only job is to test the assumptions you’ve written down, correct them, and try different things in order to find out what suits you best.

    This phase is only about learning, nothing else. No goals. Just learning and playing. After every experiment you conduct, you decide whether to persevere or pivot.

    If you want to be in the search mode, you have to meet the following criteria:

    • You consciously decide that you will enter the search mode
    • You write down what kind of experiments you will make
    • You set “search mode” metrics and define very well how you will measure your progress
    • Every experiment needs to be validated or rejected based on the set metrics
    • You write down what you’ve learnt after every experiment
    • You make a decision whether you will pivot or preserve
    • Everything needs to be written down, otherwise you can quickly forget what you’ve learnt

    Use actionable metrics

    Science conducts a carefully orchestrated set of experiments to better understand how the world works. In order for the experiments to be as accurate as possible, there are many different rules to follow – deduction, induction, hypotheses, variables, control groups etc.

    In most cases, some kind of metrics are involved – you have to measure to either validate or reject your assumptions.

    That’s why metrics go hand in hand with experiments. Metrics, at the end of the day, are the best indicator of how accurate your assumptions are. Thus you have to base most of your agency and learning on life metrics.

    You have to measure when you’re right and when you’re wrong. You have to measure when you’re progressing and when you’re lying to yourself with the fake feeling of progress.

    There are many ways how you can measure things. From your physical responses and emotions, to the feedback you get from your environment and the monetary value you create.

    So first become aware when you’re making assumptions, then brainstorm what would be the most appropriate experiment to put assumptions to the test and in the end, have a set of metrics that will guide you into the right direction.

    Examples of actionable metrics in a personal life:

    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)

    Random experiences

    From time to time, it makes sense to go for a random experience, especially for things where you assume you’ve found the fit that work best for you. Because sometimes a completely new experience opens a whole new world to you, a world you didn’t know even existed.

    What you think you like and what you actually like are two different things. That’s why it always makes sense to go for a rich life experience and try new things when you get the opportunity to do so.

    An example would be considering your favorite dish. You’ve tried many different foods in the past and now you know that you like pasta Bolognese the most. Then you travel to a completely new place and they have your favorite dish on the menu and a dish you’ve never eaten before, but it’s their bestseller.

    In the same way, I encourage you to try different sports, investments, get to know different cultures, life settings, read things you never read before, try new hobbies, and so on. Sometimes do it strategically by employing the search mode, other times do it when the opportunity pops up, and sometimes just go proactively for a random experience.

    You will never know until you try and you will never know if you always stick to the same things.

    Research techniques

    For some of your assumptions, especially in business, you may need a professional scientific approach to testing assumptions and employing different research techniques like interviews, surveys, split testing, card sorting, contextual inquiry, mental models, different types of analysis and many other similar research techniques.

    Scientists use these techniques in their daily work to better understand the world, and there is no reason why you wouldn’t use them in your personal life while keeping the same goal in mind.

    You can use these techniques to test your (business) ideas, assess different investment opportunities, when you analyze your environment and its paradigms, when you study people’s behavior and in many other cases. Keep your mind open and use different tools at your disposal when an assumption needs to be tested.

    Tech changes

    Life changes and so testing assumptions never ends

    No matter how experienced you get, there are always errors in your subjective interpretation of reality. The fast-changing world contributes to that even more. Even if you could reach objective reality in a certain moment, an error would occur the next second. Because the world is constantly changing. And it’s changing faster and faster.

    Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

    That’s why you constantly need to keep testing your assumptions. You have to see life as a playground, where you have to test what works and what doesn’t. Based on your findings, you have to constantly adjust your life strategy and actions.

    That’s why the search mode is so important. That’s why regular reflections are mandatory. That’s why you have to adjust your course of action and how you will get to your goal on a bi-weekly basis, if not even more frequently. That’s how you stay lean and agile.

    Don’t just assume. Experiment and validate. Only then take action.

  • Anti-Kaizen

    You can find a lot of information about Kaizen, the basic Kaizen rules as well as more specialized Kaizen rules for teams on this blog. Now let’s look at the same topic from a slightly different perspective. Let’s talk about the so-called Anti-Kaizen. It’s a toxic mindset and includes all the limited beliefs that prevent any kind of improvement and progress.

    Before we go to Anti-Kaizen, make sure you remember all the Kaizen rules. The best thing you can do is to download and print the rules and stick them to a visible place in your home or your office. When stuck, look at the list, read the rules, and you will refocus your brain on the path towards the solution, and hopefully stop feeling sorry for yourself. It’s the best way to avoid any kind of Anti-Kaizen behaviour.

    You can download the documents here:

    [sociallocker]

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    Now let’s go to the most frequent Anti-Kaizen beliefs.

    Negative beliefs that prevent any improvements

    There are 13 quite frequent beliefs and toxic behaviors that prevent any kind of progress and improvement. You’ll find that kind of behavior in many toxic and unproductive environments, where the status quo is the only constant; and most people in an organization like that are nothing but zombies. Well, even the status quo is only a mirage, because if you aren’t going forwards, you’re going backwards. There is no status quo in the long run.

    Here they are, Anti-Kaizen beliefs and situations:

    1. Lying to yourself
    2. Victim mindset and being stuck in an emotional cage
    3. “There’s no need for improvement” mindset
    4. Lack of time
    5. Firefighting and enjoying adrenalin rushes and dramas
    6. Lack of confidence in self and others and lack of courage
    7. You want to change others, not yourself
    8. Getting in trouble for failing or pointing out the problems
    9. Not following up on ideas
    10. Giving up too quickly
    11. Solving problems with additional administration
    12. Hoping that others will do it for you and waiting for better times
    13. Jumping to solutions too quickly

    Lying to yourself

    If you lie to yourself about where you are, there is no need for improvement. Many times, we like to picture ourselves or even the world as a whole in a much more beautiful scenario than it actually is (or, in some cases, much worse than it is, if the necessary improvement is to relax, for example). But in general, people are very indulgent towards themselves, lying where they really stand, and great critics towards others.

    • You can lie to yourself that you live healthy just because you regularly use olive oil
    • You can easily lie to yourself by only looking rich and not really being rich
    • You can lie to yourself about how productive you are every day, but in reality only work a few hours on the things that matter most
    • You can lie to yourself that your job is pretty okay, but in reality you suffer a lot and so on

    If you want to make any improvements in your life or in any organization, you first have to know where you are. And be extremely honest about it. Today, that’s quite simple with all the data available. Never lie to yourself. Always be honest and seek the truth. Know where you are and where you want to go. Then start improving yourself or an organization step by step. For example, don’t only look rich, actually be rich.

    Don't Lie To Yourself

    Victim mindset and being stuck in an emotional cage

    The victim mindset is one of the most common reasons why people get stuck and never start improving themselves, their life situation and the environment around them. It’s very easy to blame others, from your parents to the government, market trends, life in general, and so on. And many times, you have every right to do so.

    But it doesn’t help anyone. Whining, bitching, complaining and feeling sorry for yourself never bring results, improvements or more happiness, only more sorrow. You only live once and if being stuck in an emotional cage is preventing you from improving and growing, start dealing with your past, your emotions and all the cognitive distortions. It’s the best option you have, no matter how difficult your past was.

    There is always a move you can make in your life towards a better position. After you stop being a victim and take full responsibility for your future, you will easily find a move you can make. Don’t be a victim, take control over your life once and for all, and start improving. If you focus on problems, you’ll only get more problems in life, and if you focus on solutions, positive things will start happening to you.

    “There is no need for improvement” mindset

    You can have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. If you have a fixed mindset, you assume things are as they are and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you believe that there’s no need or no room for improvement, you won’t improve. Why would you?

    Nevertheless, studies show that a growth mindset is one of the top personality traits of successful people. The most successful people constantly improve, even when they’re on top; because there is no top. In addition to that, the organizations that constantly learn and improve are the ones that are winning in business.

    The conclusion is therefore pretty simple. If you want to be successful in life, you need to grow, you need to evolve and you need to constantly improve. It’s one of the reasons why you’re here on this planet.

    “I/We have always done it like that” is the most evil sentence ever.

    Lack of time

    Many times, people work so hard that they don’t even take the time to look around and analyze if they’re digging the right hole. Until it’s too late. A lack of time should never be an excuse for not brainstorming and implementing improvements. You always have to work smart as well.

    Therefore, the AgileLeanLife Productivity Framework has three levels of planning – the strategic, tactical and operational level. You have to see the woods and you have to see all the trees. You must always take enough time to plan and make improvements in where you go and how you do things on all three levels.

    There is a very simple test that shows your speed of improvement. How many things are you doing differently now than you did six months ago? If the answer is none and you’re only working hard the same way you did half a year ago, because you don’t have the time to improve your working methods, it’s time to change something.

    If necessary, make sure that your first improvement is that you start dealing with improvements at all.

    Firefighting and enjoying adrenalin rushes and dramas

    People who are prone to deadline adrenaline rushes and dramas in relationships rarely take the time to stop and analyze how to improve. The frequent reason for that is the existence of an internal conflict. Improvements take away the drama, unproductive adrenaline rushes and other toxic behaviors. And you simply can’t focus on improvements if you need to feed your emotional monsters.

    An important part of improving yourself is to become happier and more satisfied, productive, relaxed etc. Firefighting and playing a drama queen means going in the opposite direction. The solution is simple. If there is any kind of drama, anxiety and constantly chasing deadlines in your personal or company culture, it’s time to start improving fast.

    Not to be too extreme, everyone finds themselves in such a situation from time to time, but if it’s a part of the culture or how a person operates and it happens more often than not, then that is big Anti-Kaizen behavior.

    Lack of confidence in self and others and lack of courage

    As I mentioned many times, it’s not easy to implement new changes, even if they are positive ones. We are all afraid of change on the biological level. Nevertheless, you simply need the courage to face your fears and start improving. The first step is to have more confidence in self and others.

    Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will. In the same way, doubt kills more improvements than failure ever will. Skepticism, cynicism, excessive sarcasm, drama, negativity, indecisiveness etc., they all kill creativity and potential for improvements. Believe in yourself and believe in people around you. There is nothing to doubt about, to be honest. Your growth and personal improvements (or the improvements of family or company culture) are the best possible investments.

    Improve Or Not To Improve
    To improve or not to improve?

    You want to change others, not yourself

    As cliché as it sounds, change always begins with you. First you have to understand (system, process, environment, relationships, history etc.), then you have to ignite the spark in yourself with a great vision and a powerful mission and only then change and adjust yourself to the right vibration in coherence with the system to start influencing other people and implementing change.

    Implementing change is always a carefully and surgically orchestrated process that starts with changing yourself and adjusting your actions to face the least resistance from environmental forces.

    Why do you have to change yourself first? Well, it’s easy to blame others. It’s easy to see flaws. It’s much harder to come up with good solutions. It’s even harder to analyze the system and pull the right moves to implement a change step by step in a very non-invasive way. Everyone wants to change the environment, shape it more to their liking, but nobody wants to change themselves first. But that’s the only place where the change really begins.

    Before you can start implementing change, you have to find common ground with the environment and then build on it. To find the common ground, you have to first change yourself.

    Getting in trouble for failing or pointing out the problems

    If you judge others when they fail or make a mistake, you’re doing a very Anti-Kaizen thing. But there’s a catch. Usually people never openly criticize failure, of course. They do it with gossip, silence, sarcasm, mockery or some other type of intolerant emotional behavior. That kind of behavior means people get in trouble for failing and making mistakes.

    A whole different thing is if you show curiosity for why something didn’t work, if you’re interested in what has been learnt and in the new ideas for how improvements could be made. Because Kaizen people have to feel emotionally secure and not be afraid to fail and make mistakes. You show people that it’s okay to fail with words and emotions.

    Make sure people don’t get in trouble if they show you the problems or if they fail when trying something new. It means they care and that they have the willpower and probably many good additional ideas for what to try.

    If you get in trouble for failing or showing the problems, explain to your boss what the Kaizen philosophy is and how it can help the organization. Try to find a way for moving the system towards the philosophy of constant improvement. But if it’s not worth your energy, if you don’t care enough, find a different system that will appreciate your ideas and suggestions, and vice-versa, a system where you will really care and have the power to test and implement new ideas.

    Not following up on ideas

    Ideas are a dime a dozen. Testing ideas and executing the best ones is pure gold. For implementing change, you simply have to be a doer, not only a talker. You must have a culture of immediate implementation and execution. Not following up on ideas is one of the most Anti-Kaizen things you can do besides having a victim mindset.

    There are several reasons why there’s usually no follow up on ideas. Either the ideas are too complex or completely unreachable, or there are strong emotional issues that block the implementation. Going back to basic Kaizen rules and having an honest conversation is the best cure for a situation like that.

    Giving up too quickly

    Implementing change is no easy task. It not only takes motivation and creativity, but also a lot of patience and a long-term view. Changing the culture of an organization can take years, for example. In reality, implementing change is not very different from going on a diet. You have to work hard and make sacrifices now, for benefits that are far far away; while eating sweets gives you instant gratification and the punishment in excessive fat and bad health seems far away. That’s why it’s so hard to go on a diet.

    The reason why it’s so hard to implement any change is the same. Because you have to put in the effort now for results and benefits you will enjoy sometime in the future. But if you stay in the status quo, you don’t have to put in any effort and the punishment comes sometime in the far-away future.

    With time, the hard road becomes easy and the easy road becomes hard. So you must have a long-term view for every change you plan to implement. Never give up too quickly. Even when you lose motivation, remember that tomorrow is a new day to start over. And don’t overestimate what you can achieve in a few months and don’t underestimate what you can achieve in a few years.

    Solving problems with additional administration

    Many times, when we identify the root problem, additional administration in the process seems like the right solution; but in reality, it rarely is. If you take that kind of an approach, you can soon find yourself drowning in paperwork and everything becomes counterproductive. Never let additional administration be your best solution, you can always find better solutions than additional paperwork.

    Let’s get back to a practical example of the 5 Whys technique and how it can help you focus on the process that was presented in the Kaizen rules for teams. It’s very simple: you describe the problem and start asking yourself “why”.

    • The vehicle will not start. (the problem)
    • Why? The battery is dead. (first why)
    • Why? The alternator is not functioning. (second why)
    • Why? The alternator belt has broken. (third why)
    • Why? – The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and not replaced. (fourth why)
    • Why? – The vehicle was not maintained according to the recommended service schedule. (fifth why, the root cause)

    After the last “why” and discovering core problem, one of your first solution may be, let’s add a checklist or some other form of paper to the process. Or an engineer should sign dozens of forms on what s(he) has done, and so on. Many times, our initial ideas include additional bureaucracy, who knows why. But that’s rarely the right solution.

    Hoping that others will do it for you or waiting for better times

    An interesting thing can happen. When markets go up, they can solve many problems so you don’t have to improve at all. Or sometimes you get a rock star in your team who solves many of your problems and, again, you don’t have to improve. Sometimes a few problems die on their own. It can happen, problems can be magically solved without you making any improvements.

    But hoping that others will implement changes and improvements instead of you, or waiting for better times that will take care of everything makes no sense at all. Because sooner or later, new challenges will come and afterwards, you may be in an even worse position. The main idea of improvements is that you become better and more competent and capable. You want to develop abilities to tackle problems better, provide more value, and so on. Inner assets or competence, if you want, are one of the most powerful securities you can have in life.

    It’s also one of the reasons why you’re here on this planet. You don’t want to be deprived of the feeling of satisfaction when you win a battle with yourself and change to a better version of you. The feeling is awesome.

    Jumping to solutions too quickly

    Jumping to conclusions without any real proof is one of the cognitive distortions that happens to people very often. Jumping to solutions too quickly, without any testing, experimenting and measuring, is what often prevents real change to the better. It’s not that hard to come up with a solution or ideas for what to do. But it’s usually quite hard to come up with a solution that works and can be realistically implemented with sustainable effects.

    You need a systematic and scientific approach to implementing improvements. You need to measure your progress. You need to use real data, not just your hunches and intuition. Just coming up quickly with a solution and thinking that you’ve done your job is definitely an Anti-Kaizen approach; after all, you’re breaking rule number one of not lying to yourself.

    You must not wait for the perfect timing or the perfect solution when implementing improvements, but on the other hand, acting without thinking is damaging as well.

    The key takeaway

    The roots of Anti-Kaizen behavior lie in either the wrong mindset or toxic emotional behavior. Therefore, you have to deal with both of them – mindset and emotions. Rationally, you have to see constant improvement as the common sense you simply have to follow in order to achieve your peak performance. That’s usually the easy part of the equation.

    The emotional part is much harder. But there is no other way than to work on more self-confidence, facing your fears with courage and dealing with laziness and procrastination or whatever holds you back from becoming the best version of yourself. Sometimes playing it safe is no different from being locked in a safe. Upgrade your mindset, face your fears and start improving yourself.

    Kaizen rules!

  • Markets always win

    In capitalism, there’s only one really important rule. Markets always win. You stand zero chances if you go against the market. Markets determine a big part of your life. If you choose the right markets, things will go well for you; if not, you’ll experience only struggle, pain and failure. You may fight against the market for years and at the end, you’ll probably be brutally knocked out to the floor, no matter how competent you are. You may lose everything and markets will laugh right in your face.

    The brutal thing is that even if you don’t want to play the game, you’re playing the game.

    In love life, your sexual market value more or less determines the quality of the partner you can attract. It’s usually someone in your range of sexual market value. It’s like you have a number on your forehead. Trends on the job market have a big influence on whether you’ll be employed or not, how much you’ll earn and how quickly you’ll get promoted. You can be the best in something no one wants to buy and you’ll be poor. If you’re an entrepreneur and don’t have customers who want to buy your products, there is no market and there is no business. Most startups fail because there’s no market.

    A market is not a nice thing. It’s like a moody, perpetually dissatisfied cruel person leaving no room for negotiations, no room for discussions or compromises. Either you hit the spot and make the market happy or you’re out of the game. You can even make the market happy several times in a row and then fail it, and yet the market won’t spare you any pain. Markets are copy-cats of nature; and nature can be the most beautiful experience in the world or the cruelest one. That’s also why so many people criticize capitalism.

    Let’s take a step back now. What is a market, really? Well, it’s nothing but supply and demand. Markets are nothing but people voting with their resources, be it with money, attention, love, sex or anything else.

    Supply and Demand

    If you can provide something in great demand and of scarce supply, you’ve hit the spot. If you supply something that’s in big supply and short demand, markets will ignore you and you’ll be poor. Offer something people want, but not many can do, and you shall prosper; offer something anyone can offer, and few people want, and you shall be one of many waiting in a long line, hoping that maybe someone spots you; and they probably won’t.

    There’s a good story representing this connection between creating, delivering and capturing value, and markets. An old couple is walking in the park. The grandpa gets a heart attack and collapses on the floor. A young person passes by. Grandma, completely panicked, asks the person if they know CPR. The person responds: “I’m a really good person.” Grandma says that she doesn’t care about that, she only wants to know if the person knows CPR. The person responds again: “I’ve also finished college and work really hard.” That’s nice and all, but can you do CPR?

    The point of the story is that markets only care about the things you can supply. Money knows no racism, no borders and don’t care about your history. Markets don’t care if you’re a good person, in love or not, the only thing that the markets care about is the value you can provide.

    The formula is simple: no value, no money. Well, it’s not that simple, of course. There are many different types of value a person can produce. It can be social value, attraction value or whatever. For example, a good teacher produces a great social value, but not that much of a financial value, because supply of teachers is quite bigger than demand.

    I’m definitely encouraging you to find the right balance between market value and social value, but you should never leave market value out of the equation. When we speak in terms of business (financial markets, career markets, startups etc.), “no unique value proposition, no money” is the golden rule.

    The biggest problem with markets is that it’s not easy to be in a position where the demand is great and the supply falls short. It’s one of the toughest things in the world. Most people who hit the sweet spot do it based on pure luck. Others struggle for years before hitting it, after putting huge effort into strategizing, innovating, analyzing and failure; and even then you need to have a lot of luck. The good news is that you have to be right only once, the bad news is that it’s extremely hard to be right even once. But understanding markets can help you a lot to progress faster in life.

    Everyone’s dream should be to have a monopoly in some niche market for a short period of time. A monopoly is definitely not good for the general society, but it gives a great advantage to an individual, even if only for a short period of time. Everyone would like to have a monopoly, everyone would like to be on top, maybe just to taste it, even if they don’t admit it to themselves. Monopoly is how you get on the top.

    Monopoly game

    There’s even more. We want to control the markets, not only as individuals but as a society as well. In the same way as we try to control nature. Nature and markets, they both make us feel insecure. That’s why we have the government and government interventions. To control the markets and to control nature (with all its resources, threats, borders etc.).

    The sad thing is that most interventions bring a new set of problems, like inefficiency and corruption. Controlling the beast is no easy task, and people more often hurt themselves than not. Going against the markets is hard, controlling them is even harder. Sooner or later, market meltdowns and scandals happen. But that’s how we organized the world.

    Now let’s look at the markets from a brighter perspective. What can you do to understand markets more? The first thing you have to do is un-ego yourself. We all have assumptions about the markets. We think other people want what we want, like and dislike the same things, use technology in the same way etc. In most cases, we have wrong assumptions and wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. That’s the main point of the lean startup theory and its first phase of building a startup, which is empathy.

    When you un-ego yourself, you become empathetic, you listen to the voices on the market, you observe what people respond to, you search for what people are prepared to pay for.

    In the second step, you should stop following your passion and start following your effort. Rather than idealizing life, you look at the hard facts. What markets really want that you can actually provide. There is no place for romance, idealism or egoistic behavior towards the markets. Only supply and demand. The good news is that with time following your effort and seeing all the results passion will also develop. But…

    If you ignore the market, the market will ignore you. As already mentioned, you have to be aware that even if you don’t want to compete, you are competing. You’re voting with your resources and other people use their resources to vote on how much value you can provide for them. There’s no escape.

    With your birth, you were put on different markets and dealt different cards. Talents, family money, beauty, intelligence, and your hard work, they’re all building blocks of your capacity to prove your value on the market. The more of them you’re born with, the better position you are in. That’s definitely a big advantage in the short term, but not necessarily in the long term. That is to say, good times make soft people, and things like the Dutch disease can happen. And hard and smart work always put talent (or other given things) to shame. It’s up to you how you’ll play game of life.

    No matter what, you should respect the markets, learn its rules and play the best game possible. When thinking about markets (financial markets, job markets, consumer markets etc.), you should analyze short-term and long-term trends, you should always stay empathetic, constantly acquire new market insights and quickly adapt to changes. You must know how to manage your ego and your false assumptions by constantly, testing, experimenting and innovating.

    Go with the markets, make the markets your best friends and you shall prosper; put ego before the markets and you’ll stay alone and miserable. It’s that simple. Your competences are your downside protection. If you’re very competent, you’ll always make something out of your life. Markets define your upside potential. If you hit the right market at the right time, you can win big. But if you’re competent and hit the right market, something magical can happen.

    So start learning about the markets. Here’s a nice set of videos with all the basic information: https://wetheeconomy.com/films/cave-o-nomics/

  • Minimum Viable Experience

    In the lean start-up theory, there’s a very popular concept called Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The idea is that you don’t build the whole shiny expensive product and then launch it on the market and see the market response (because maybe nobody will buy it and the investment for doing that is big), instead you build the minimum set of features needed to start learning about what the market really wants. The MVP is the smallest thing you can build that tests the value you’ve promised to the market. You build an MVP to start learning about market needs and getting customer insights; or, if you want a fancier definition, a minimum viable product is the product with the highest return on investment versus risk.

    An important part of the MVP concept is that you stop thinking about the big picture and about your desired final outcome, and start thinking about immediately creating value and learning about your potential customers. You’ve probably heard Mike Tyson’s quote that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. That’s why you have to test all the small parts of your plan, regularly getting feedback and constantly adjusting. In the lean startup philosophy, that’s also called testing your hypothesis with an MVP (validated learning).

    The important emphasis is also that the MVP is not only a crappy or minimal version of your final product, but a strategy and process aimed towards making and selling a product to customers. It’s a process of idea generation, prototyping, presentation, data collection, analysis and learning.

    In the startup world, you learn the most when you have direct contact with a market – with your potential clients or customers, everything else before are nothing but your personal assumptions and assumptions from your team; and as you know, wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups and you’re usually wrong before you’re right. When you have the MVP and are in contact with your market, you can engage in the build-measure-learn feedback loop. You can test and add or remove feature by feature of your product by building it, measuring results with carefully chosen metrics and learning about market response.

    MVPs in business can be landing pages (smoke test), explainer videos, e-mail tests, crowdfunding campaigns, concierge MVPs (manual service instead of a product) and so on. A popular method is also called a Wizard of Oz MVP (or Flinstoning), where you put up a front of the webpage that looks like a real working product, but you carry out product functions manually. There are many ideas for testing and comparing your assumptions (subjective reality) to actual market needs (objective realities); the point is that you don’t fully commit and put all eggs in one basket based just on your ego and what you believe is true. Because at the end, the market always wins in business, no matter what your beliefs are.

    To summarize, the purpose of an MVP is to accelerate learning about the customers and the market, to be able to test hypotheses (your assumptions) with minimal resources, to reduce waste such as engineering hours and financial resources, to get the product to early customers as soon as possible and to have really good customer insight into which features you should actually build. An MVP is also the basis for the final product.
    How to build a minimum viable product An MVP doesn’t only save you a lot of money and energy before getting a market response and prevents you from failing big, it can also help you avoid becoming a zombie company. A zombie company is a company that finds itself in a situation where there’s no death, no growth, no progress and no moving ahead. It’s consuming an enormous amount of resources and is a terrible drain on human energy. A zombie company is a company stuck in the land of the living dead.

    It’s no different in your personal life. You don’t want to fail big in any area of life after a big investment, and you want to become a zombie even less. The MVP concept from the lean startup philosophy can help you with that. Let’s see how.

    Using the MVP concept in your personal life

    One of the biggest mistakes you can make in life is committing to something that isn’t really you, investing your whole self into something that isn’t your perfect fit. One of the biggest wastes in life is doing something you don’t really want, something that you don’t really enjoy. And people do a lot of that shit. They commit to wrong jobs, wrong people, wrong diets and wrong investments.

    In order to not fail yourself and your needs, you must first know yourself and all the options you have in life really well. If you want to be successful in life, you have to know yourself and what you want out of life very clearly, and the best way to get to know yourself and your environment is by experimenting, reflecting and learning. The best way to do personal validated learning is introducing the so-called search mode into your life, testing what your best fits are by using the MVP concept.

    The core idea is that when you’re in the search mode, you shouldn’t have any expectations, you shouldn’t have any commitments and you shouldn’t do any hard work. Expectations lead to disappointments and before you understand something, you definitely have expectations that are completely wrong. Commitments lead to heavy energy investments, and you shouldn’t be investing before you know what you’re truly investing into and whether the investment really fits your character. Hard work should always also be smart work, but you can’t work smartly if you don’t have the right map and coordinates.

    In the search phase, using the MVP concept, you just try, experiment, observe, reflect and learn about yourself and the world. The most important thing is to have no fixed ideas and no expectations at all in this phase. Your only job is to test the assumptions you’ve written down, correct them, and try different things to find out what suits you best. Your only job is to learn about yourself and the world. No goals. No measurement of progress. Just learning and playing.

    To do that, you need MVPs. The idea of MVPs is to not only talk about things (what you should try, what you think you may like etc.), but to go and try them. You don’t assume, you go out and test. Testing and trying is the best way to gain firsthand knowledge about yourself and the world. For every new experience you get, you should decide whether to keep it in your life or not (pivot or presevere). Every new experience should also give you ideas and insights into what to try next. The difference between what you think is valuable to you and what really is valuable for your life creates waste.

    Don’t assume anything, try and test everything.

    The best thing ever is that today, it’s so easy to test and try everything. You have so many options, access to knowledge and many different disciplines in sports, arts, business and other areas in life you can try and test. You can really have a lot of fun testing and trying in today’s times. The world is basically an endless pool of possibilities.

    At the end of the day, you must find your best fits and have your dream life composed like a beautiful mosaic – perfect diet, best exercise, best-fitting career, investments best suited to your character, perfect partner etc. The problem, of course, is that you only have one life and every experiment takes quite a lot of time. That’s why you need to use the MVP philosophy. You need to invest the minimum amount of effort possible into learning if something is your fit or not.

    MVE Concept

    Minimum viable experience and emotional accounting

    Instead of calling it Minimum Viable Product, let’s call it Minimum Viable Experience. The idea is that you try as many things as possible in life (your vision list), and based on your physical, emotional and intellectual response, you decide whether you should keep something in your life or pivot to something else.

    To really use the MVP or MVE concept, you of course need to try something new in life, but you also need a system to measure feedback. The system for measuring feedback and your progress is called emotional accounting. The simple metric is that if you like something, if you enjoy a thing, activity or person, then keep it. If you like and enjoy something, then that thing probably fits you well. You can also set more complex metrics based on your goals, values and what matters to you.

    Here are two examples from the Agile and Lean Life Manifesto:

    There’s plenty of advice on fitness and diet. You can even find contradictory advice. But you can test what works and what doesn’t work for you as an individual. For someone, being vegetarian is the optimal diet. For others, far from it. There is no single formula for success. You can only try vegetarian, vegan, fruitarian, paleo and other verified diets until you find the one that suits you best. It doesn’t make sense to only read about it or argue about it, you have to try it for yourself and see. With no expectations and by keeping an open mind. After the search phase and finding what works for you best, you can execute (keep, set goals, measurements…) by optimizing details.

    In this case, an MVP would be the new diet plan that you stick to for a few weeks. In addition to that, you also need a measuring system. That can be your weight, fat percentage, energy level and so on. Smart scale can be a great help with that. You can record what you eat, how you feel after a certain food and the kind of results you’re getting. You must also take into account that every change brings new stress into your life, so the first few days shouldn’t count as relevant feedback; but after a few months, you should definitely have a clear picture of what works for you and what doesn’t, where to persevere and where to pivot.

    The second example would be looking for a new career. Your emotions mirror your complete dissatisfaction in your current career. Here’s how you would tackle this challenge in the first phase of an Agile and Lean Life. In your free time, you write down assumptions for careers you think you could blossom in. You start testing how much passion awakens in you when reading about specific industries, you join forums and attend online courses etc. You take some part-time projects, even for no payment, just to see how engaged you become. You continue experimenting until you find the new perfect fit for you. Then you go into the execution phase. At the end, you may find that design is your thing after trying to prepare an outstanding CV for a completely different industry.

    An MVP in this case would be to execute a small project in your free time or do some additional work as a sole proprietor or whatever, just to learn about the industry and the new career you want to undertake. First you have to learn and only then can you fully commit.

    Here are some other ideas and examples:

    • You can try dozens of sports before you commit to any of them.
    • You can do the same to discover your perfect investment profile, the competences you should develop, the things you enjoy in life, the technology you should use and maybe even a religion or life philosophy you should follow.

    Here, you can find many ideas for the areas you should test and experiment in: Your life strategy

    Minimum Viable Partner

    Minimum viable partner

    The same concept also applies to relationships. You can’t just commit forever when you meet someone for the first time. It should be a process of milestones and small commitments that get bigger with time, much like the definition of an MVP states that it’s not about the product, but about the process.

    There are around 7 billion people in the world. Most of them aren’t even close to being your fit, but a few are – in business and personal life. And you have to find them. Of course people who fit you best are people who have values and beliefs similar to yours, but are at the same time different enough that they can enable you to grow and learn. But how can you find them?

    The key idea is that you first know what you want in relationships. Making personas and then testing your assumptions can help you with that a lot. Soon after experiencing a few relationships, you should know very well what your minimum viable partner is like, what are the mandatory characteristics a person must have in order for you to have a deep relationship with them.

    When you know what you like and what you don’t, and what the deal breakers are, you can further explore what the purpose of every relationship in your life is, which relationships you should persevere in and which people you should remove from your life. You should date, meet and engage with as many people as possible. Again, you should have personal metrics to measure whether a relationship is giving you what you expect, be it emotionally, time-wise or however.

    Another key point is to commit to relationships gradually. You don’t get married after the first date and you don’t form a joint venture after the first meeting. You can perform little relationship tests to see if a relationship is something you want. Usually that happens spontaneously (talking, first kiss, sex, taking a trip together etc.), but people often commit themselves to relationships too soon; and even more often, people stay stuck in relationships they don’t like (forever).

    Since you don’t want to become a zombie, you have to constantly measure the quality of your relationships – what you give and what you get. Even after passing all the minimum viable experiences and fully committing to someone, you should somehow measure if you’re surrounded by people who empower you and make you happy. If not, you’re doing big damage to yourself and others.

    Interested versus committed

    Being interested in something definitely doesn’t mean being committed. Although interested isn’t being committed, you should only be interested at first. You should be curious, playful, and eager to discover. You should not think about commitment, but only learn and try new things.

    But at one point, when you find the right thing, the right person, when you find your fit, you should commit. Really commit; and it shouldn’t be hard. Because when you find your fit, you know that this is exactly what you want and if you really want something, you’ll find a way; if you don’t, you’ll find an excuse. Now go play with the MVEs in your life.

  • Pivots in personal life

    To really understand pivots in personal life, we first have to define and understand what pivots in business are or, to be even more exact, what they are in the startup world. In the lean startup methodology, “pivot” is defined as a fundamental change in a business strategy. The idea of a pivot is changing the direction of your startup while staying grounded in your vision and learned facts. It’s very important to understand that a pivot doesn’t only mean a change or a shift to a new business idea, but a systematic change in strategy while deeply considering all the facts that you’ve learned along the way, especially those about markets, and keeping your business vision as a compass.

    When leading a startup, the most important question in this context is when you should make a pivot. A little complicated scientific answer is that you should make a pivot when each additional experiment you do leads to less progress. That basically means that you hit a local maximum. If you aren’t satisfied with the local maximum, you have to pivot to find a new, higher maximum; the highest possible maximum is called the global maximum and if you manage to hit that, you usually become one of the market leaders.

    Even if you don’t hit the global maximum, you can probably be satisfied with one of the local maximums. There are many companies that aren’t global market leaders and are doing just fine. If you’re making enough money and you enjoy the kind of business you have, the local maximum is okay.

    Nevertheless, there is one more angle to consider as a phenomenon of creative capitalism. In many cases, there’s no normal distribution on the market, but a distribution based on the Pareto principle where a few players take the majority of the rewards. In the past decade, we’ve been able to see an even more tense concentration. It’s basically that 10 % or even fewer players take 90 % or even more rewards. You can see that kind of concentration in almost every industry, from technology to arts and sports. That’s why your ambition must be to hit the global maximum. You will see later why this concept is important for pivots in personal life.

    Local maximum
    Achieving local maximum. But is there a higher hill to climb?

    However, there’s a situation much worse than not hitting a global maximum that can happen in the business world and is actually often even worse than going bankrupt (as the other extreme to hitting a global maximum). It’s called becoming a zombie company. A zombie company is a company that finds itself in a situation where there’s no death, no growth, no progress and no moving ahead. It’s consuming an enormous amount of resources and is a terrible drain on human energy. A zombie company is a company stuck in the land of the living death, a company stuck in some very low local maximum that’s far from the company’s vision, but the founders don’t want to pivot because of fear, ego or whichever reason.

    To be fair, it’s not easy to pivot in business or in personal life. It means that you were wrong and it hurts. It means that you have to make a change and we all genetically hate changes. But being agile and lean is about being wrong before you are right.

    Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from bad decisions.

    To continue, there must be several factors fulfilled to make a successful pivot in business. You need to stay faithful and passionate about your vision. You need to have a deep understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve with your business idea, especially based on past validated learning. You need to know your wrong assumptions, actual falsifiable hypotheses and, on the other hand, you of course need new metrics and targets. Last but not least, you also need resources, energy and passion to make a pivot.

    There are ten potential pivots you can make as a startup:

    1. Zoom-in pivot
    2. Zoom-out pivot
    3. Customer segment pivot
    4. Customer need pivot
    5. Platform pivot
    6. Business architecture pivot
    7. Value capture pivot
    8. Engine of growth pivot
    9. Channel pivot
    10. Technology pivot

    Most successful startups today pivoted a few times (Dropbox, Groupon, AirBnB etc.) before finding the right product/market fit. They started with the initial idea, created a vision, built several minimum viable products, and then gathered feedback from the market. They made a pivot in their business strategy (or several of them) with superior market insights while keeping the vision and staying passionate about it. They pivoted all the way to product/market fit and customer validation. Afterwards, they started scaling their business. Pivoting in personal life is basically no different.

    Pivots in personal life

    Much like there’s almost no startup today that didn’t make a pivot or two or even dozens (if founders were passionate enough) before really succeeding, so you have to make pivots in different areas of your personal life sooner or later. Making a pivot in your personal life is basically no different from making a pivot in business. In personal life, you often don’t even have a choice and are forced to make a pivot (your partner breaks up with you, you get fired etc.).

    To go back to basics: a pivot in personal life is a fundamental change in your life strategy. You change your direction in life, but you still keep the same life vision and you consider the facts you learned about yourself and your environment. The time for a pivot in personal life comes when you hit the local maximum and aren’t satisfied with the result. You try harder to improve and in different ways, but none of the experiments and new ideas lead to any progress. You feel like you’re emotionally stuck.

    Basically the solution (that in reality isn’t easy at all) is to make pivots as many times as necessary until you find the perfectly right fit for you. That’s how you get unstuck. The only downside of an action like this is that it gets worse before it gets better. You must go through a before finding fit apathy.

    Potential pivots in your personal life

    Few people in this world are lucky enough to find their perfect fit right away. They marry and live happily ever after with their first love. They practice a sport that’s written in their genes from a very young age or whatever. Even when that happens, it’s usually only in one or, if you’re super lucky, in a few areas of life. But to live a happy and successful life, you must manage and juggle several areas of life, so nobody is spared changes in life. The point I am trying to make is that all of us have to make a pivot in our personal lives sooner or later.

    Here are some major potential pivots you can make (or are forced to make) in your personal life:

    • Your mindset, beliefs and values
    • Your spouse
    • How often you see your family
    • Relationships with your kids, if you have them, and how you bring them up (but that is the one you should not fu*k up in the first place)
    • Your social circles and friends
    • The type of sports you do regularly and your diet
    • Your career and industry
    • Revenue sources and investment strategy
    • Formal education and skill development
    • Your sex life
    • Country and home and other environments you operate in
    • The technology you use
    • Religion etc.

    The important thing is that you try to make a pivot as scientifically as possible, with the purpose of getting to your perfect fit as fast as possible. That means that no matter how hard a pivot is, you consider what you’ve learned about yourself and your environment. Before making a pivot and starting to look for a new fit, you should carefully analyze all the learned facts. You must be very well aware of how you know yourself better and what you want and you must have superior insights into your environment and what your wrong assumptions were. Every pivot should be a conscious and proactive change in your life strategy.

    Your life strategy – read this blog post to get many new ideas for potential pivots in personal life.

    How do you know it’s time to pivot in personal life?

    There’s a very easy exercise that can be an indicator of whether you should maybe do a pivot in your personal life. The exercise is also a very good way to start with self-reflection. The idea is to make a life-satisfaction chart and assess all the chosen areas of life. All you have to do is first draw a scale from 1 to 10 horizontally, and vertically 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 the chart.

    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 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, Part I

    In the second step, you take another look at all areas you assessed with 4, 5, 6 or 7. These are the areas where you’re averagely satisfied, are indecisive about or for which you haven’t taken enough time to make a sound assessment. Not knowing where you are and what you want does no good. The truth is that life areas either work or they don’t, you’re either satisfied or you aren’t, there are no middle paths.

    Remember the Pareto principle and concentration I mentioned in the beginning. It applies to this very well. Averages don’t help you in managing life much, same as markets don’t acknowledge average. You want to really excel in as many areas of life as possible. You want to be in the top 20 % (shape, for example) to reap all 80 % of the rewards (energy, good looks, positive self-image, stamina etc.). Your ambition must be to hit your global maximum and nothing less.

    You can’t be in good and bad shape at the same time. You can’t follow an average diet and the perfect diet for you specifically at the same time. You can’t have money problems and be happy with your financial situation. You can’t be depressed and positive at the same time. The idea is that you deserve the best in all areas of life.

    You either rock or you suck in different areas of life. Therefore, assess life areas again, but now by using only the numbers 1, 2, 3, 8, 9 and 10. Take more time to really think about the areas you’re satisfied with and the ones you aren’t. Dedicate a few minutes to every area of life, analyze it extensively and then do a realistic evaluation. Listen to your inner voice and facts, but also pay attention to your emotions when deciding on the number to assign to a specific area of life.

    Also be careful about cognitive distortions when making an assessment of your life areas. If you’re a perfectionist and aren’t satisfied with anything and have impossible standards, it may look like all your areas of life are miserable. If you put 1 – 3 to most of the areas of life, change your perspective. Rate how much you’ve improved since last year. It may help you to see progress in your life and get a more realistic evaluation compared to your impossible standards. In the same way, your assessment should be adjusted to your starting point in life and the fact that you compete with yourself, not others.

    In the last step, highlight every 1, 2 and 3 with red, and every 8, 9 and 10 with green. Now you have a clearer picture of the areas of life you should potentially make a pivot in and make priorities for personal improvement.

    • Career
    • Emotions
    • Technology

    The second, superior way to make a pivot is to go immediately from observation to action. You constantly gather feedback from yourself (body, emotions and mind) and your environment (social circles), and adjust your life strategy accordingly. That means that you’re really lean and agile.

    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, Part II

    Download a free template of the life-satisfaction chart (table above) that will help you to analyze and assess all the key areas of your life. With performing this exercise you will be able to decide easier on which areas to pivot and also to make sure you don’t become a zombie.
    Download

    Making a pivot

    If you’re very unsatisfied with a certain area of your life, things will probably only get worse with time. Problems only grow if you ignore them. You really can get stuck in the land of the living dead, being completely unhappy and miserable, it doesn’t only happen in horror movies. The sad thing is that in most cases, being miserable in one area of life negatively influences all other areas. Being a zombie is a terrible drain on your life energy, with no personal growth, no end to the agony, consuming your emotional, mental and physical resources without moving ahead. You’re stuck and it sucks.

    To make a successful pivot in personal life, several factors must be present, same as in a startup company. You need to be passionate about the pivot, there must be a strong and deep desire to make a change in your life. You need metrics and targets, what you really want. You need to have a strong vision that fuels your passion or vice versa. You must be able to answer your why really passionately. You need to really know yourself and your environment based on your previous actions and you have to be aware of what you have done wrong, what your wrong assumptions were. There must be validated learning and you have to see your current situation as only a temporary state – that you’re wrong before you’re right and that you’ll find a new fit for you. It’s the same like being broke is a temporary financial situation, but being poor is a state of mind.

    Let’s say you decided to make a pivot in your career– you decided to change your job or even industry. First you must have the passion to make a change, no matter how miserable your situation is. You can’t change things with a victim mindset and by feeling sorry for yourself. Then you need a deep understanding of the problem – yourself and your environment. Do you work at a company and your values mismatch, are industry trends going down, maybe your attitude and competences aren’t sufficient or there’s a complex combination of factors.

    Based on your past actions and happenings in your environment, you have to know what you’ve learned. Maybe you’ve realized that working in a startup company is not for you. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe your assumption was that it’s going to be cool and exciting, but you were dead wrong. Maybe you learned that you need a more stable environment – in a corporation or an NGO. Good. Now you need a new set of assumptions, metrics and targets. You need a list of companies you want to work in, you need an outstanding CV, maybe develop some of your competences etc.

    It’s just an example. There can be a thousand reasons why you’re unhappy in your career, and you have to know what it is in order to make a successful pivot. Just changing your job won’t do it. You have to do it more systematically and scientifically, by analytically considering all the facts.

    Pivot to antoher man

     

    Much like there are several different types of pivots you can make in business, so there are different types of pivots you can make in personal life:

    • A zoom-in pivot would mean dedicating yourself more to something or approaching it from a different angle. Maybe you take more time for your kids or sports, and cancel some other activities and commitments in your life on the other hand.
    • A zoom-out pivot would mean doing exactly the opposite, for example including new social circles in your life and disinvesting from some other relationships and activities. Here’s another example for both pivots: focusing more on one type of investments (technology stocks) would be a zoom-in pivot, diversifying your personal portfolio would be a zoom-out pivot.
    • A relationship pivot would mean changing your spouse or business partner or any other important relationship in your life that you can change. This pivot also includes changing your diet or a sport you do. If you believe it or not, you also have some kind of relationship attitude towards food and your body.
    • A personal need pivot could mean starting to dedicate your time to something new that’s important to you, but that you were neglecting or weren’t even aware you needed until you had an epiphany. It could be hobbies, social causes, travel, sexual needs or whatever. Another fact is that by growing up and getting old, our needs change and so we have to pivot.
    • A life architecture pivot could mean a change in your beliefs and values, be it setting new priorities or changing religions, political or any other beliefs.
    • A platform pivot could mean changing your country, the industry you work in, your home or any other of your environemnts.
    • An engine of personal growth pivot would mean changing the things you read and listen to, your role-models and everything else that has an influence on your personal growth and who you ideally want to become.
    • A value-capture pivot would mean changing your mindset, going from employed to self-employed or from employed to entrepreneur or investor.
    • A technology pivot could be changing the hardware and software you’re using, or developing new technological skills. Maybe you could start using or discard different social networks and so on.

    There are definitely many other pivots you can make in life, the ones listed above are just ideas and examples so you can get a clearer picture of what a pivot really means. What’s important, one more time, is that you consider the learned facts before making a pivot. If you decide to pivot to another spouse, make sure you know what you liked and what the deal-breakers of your relationship were. Doing a change without any validated learning is not a pivot, but just a shift or a change. Without doing it systematically, it may take decades before you really find your fit or you may even never will.

    The emotional challenges of a pivot

    The hardest part of any pivot is usually of an emotional nature. First of all, when you’re in the position to make a pivot, you probably had great expectations for something, you were sure of something beautiful that would have happened in your life, but it went rough. It’s not easy when your dreams collapse. The second thing that hurts, besides the painful gap between expectations and reality, is that you were wrong. Ego gets damaged when you’re wrong. It’s not easy to be wrong. Last but not least, if there are relationships involved, which there usually are, there’s additional pain from a breakup that’s always present, no matter how tough you are. Pain, pain and pain.

    No matter how painful the situation, there’s a positive side to it and usually you only see that positive side with time. Time heals emotional pain and when the pain goes away, you have to take a few things out of that pain. You have to become aware of what you learned about yourself, what you really want, how the world and the environment you operate in work. You’re always wrong before you’re right. The idea of several pivots is to really find your perfect fit so you can be happy and shine bright like a diamond. If it’s time for a pivot, you aren’t sticking to the right thing or its expiration date has come. Nothing in life lasts forever, everything changes, and that’s why you have to stay lean and agile.

    Pivot or persevere, that is the question?

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