life skills

Top 10 ways to learn or improve any skill fast

If it’s knowledge, it can be acquired. If it’s a skill, it can be learned or improved. Period. Even if you don’t have the talent or IQ of a genius, you can get dramatically better at almost anything you want in life.

It might take a lot of willpower, persistence and deliberate practice, but you can do it. There’s nothing that can stop you, if you’re determined enough.

A tremendous help when it comes to knowledge and skills acquisition is to do it the right way. You want to shorten the learning curve as much as possible.

When you’re going for new knowledge, it’s good to know the best learning practices; and when it comes to skills, you want to know the best tips and tricks for learning and improving any skill fast. In this article, you will learn exactly that.

Let’s start with the initial and hardest requirement for acquiring any new skill.

Learn or improve any skill

1. Get emotionally, financially and timewise invested in the skill

For every single thing you want to achieve in life, first ask yourself why. Always start with why.

Because only when you have a strong why (the emotional drive to improve yourself) can you conquer all the obstacles on the way to your goal. Skills are no exception to that. Imagine your emotional drive like an elephant that can’t be stopped when properly directed.

There are many different “whys” that can drive you when it comes to acquiring new skills. Here are a few most common ones:

With every new skill, you double your odds of success.
Most skills bring better earning potential.
You make sure your talents don’t go to waste.
To keep you mind, body and soul sharp.
To enter a new industry.
To be more respected.
New skills bring more ways to create.
Life is much more fulfilling and interesting.
It’s fun to master many things, and so on.
Find your why first!

Sometimes you can have a strong why, but somehow still lie on the couch and feel sorry for yourself. In practical terms, that means you have to direct your why into concrete action, not towards self-pity. The best thing you can do is to schedule (or timebox) regular weekly practice session. If it’s not on your calendar, you probably won’t do it.

For many people, putting money where their mouth is helps a lot. I’m not one of them. I can buy an online course and forget about it if I’m not strategically and emotionally engaged.

But for many people, buying something leads to solid commitment. If you’re one of them, enroll in that class, buy that online course or book, get a coach or make any other type of serious financial commitment.

Everything that gets in the way of focused, deliberate practice is an enemy that needs to be crushed completely and destroyed forever.

Talent is overrated

2. Make sure a lack of talent isn’t your excuse

Talent absolutely helps. It can help a lot. But you can’t be talented for everything. Even more importantly, talent is not an “all-or-nothing” game.

If you don’t have the talent, it doesn’t mean you can’t get better at something. So make sure a lack of talent isn’t your excuse for not getting better at something or acquiring a completely new skillset.

Let me give you a few examples from my life.

I’m very talented for everything analytical. My analytical skills are really strong. I can structure an article, a presentation or a mind map at the drop of a hat. Self-reflection is instinctive. Through conversation, I can understand people really quickly, and so on. Improving my analytical skills is a breeze. When it comes to applying analytical skills to new domains, I can learn it lightning fast. Business planning, life strategizing, process optimization, market analysis, stock analysis, book summaries, it all comes naturally to me.
I’m very untalented for grammar. In high school when it came to language subjects, I was extremely good at writing essays, expressing my opinions or extracting the main points out of literature. But I really sucked at grammar. I barely passed grammar exams. That didn’t stop me from writing and publishing more than 2,000 pages of text in my life. I’ve been very slowly improving my grammar throughout the years. I’m still struggling to understand many grammatical concepts, but that doesn’t stop me. My improvements are slow, but I’m not standing still. That’s what matters.
There is one thing I’m even more untalented for than grammar. That’s sports. Again, in primary school and high school I was the one who couldn’t catch the ball. So instead I skipped gym classes. But for the last three years or so, I’ve been heavily investing into my motor and sports skills. It often sucks that most people can do some exercises by default, while I’m struggling. But that never stopped me. I’m getting better, I’m catching up. Comparing myself three years ago and today … what a difference in mastering athletic moves.

Thus, having double standards when it comes to talent makes sense. If you don’t have the talent for a skill you want to learn, think of talent as being overrated. Hard work beats talent every time. With all the hard work, you’ll develop more stamina, willpower and persistence. Lucky you.

There is one big value added if you don’t have a skill. You understand how life looks like when you’re not talented for something and you know what it takes to learn it the hard way. People who are talented for something usually don’t have that unique perspective. By possessing a unique perspective, you can always write a book or become a teacher or a coach.

How to find a mentor

3. The best advice ever is to get a mentor or a coach

I experimented with dozens of different tips, tricks and recommendations when it comes to learning and acquiring a new skill. There is one pattern that stands out. It’s the most important recommendation when it comes to learning a new skill – get a mentor or a coach.

But don’t get just anybody. Get somebody who is really good at coaching – the best you can afford. Make sure that the person you choose for coaching acquired their skills the hard way. Even more importantly, analyze their track record, make sure that in the past the coach successfully taught several people the same thing you’re trying to achieve.

My personal trainer is the most talented guy for sports and training other people. He sees every detail when it comes to performing exercises the correct way. He knows which weak points needs to be abolished, he can properly direct my practice and improvement etc.
Each of my published articles in English is copyedited. But it’s not just copyedited. My proofreader writes me comments, warning me about the common mistakes that I make, expressions that can be improved, and so on.
I recently just started working with a pronunciation coach. In a few lessons, I learned more than in weeks of doing research by myself. What also happened to me was that I practiced things the wrong way, reinforcing wrong pronunciation. What a waste.

These are just three examples from my life. I had many mentors before that taught me many different skills – from sales to innovative thinking.

If you hire a professional coach, it can be quite expensive, but most often definitely worth the investment. At least if you know why you’re doing it and if you find the right coach. The only investments I never regret are investments in myself.

There are many benefits when it comes to coaching:

You usually progress based on a carefully prepared plan that already worked for others.
They immediately see poor or wrong execution. Practicing the wrong way is the worst thing you can do.
A good coach makes sure you’re always at the edge of your abilities.
They know how to interleave practice correctly.
You get immediate feedback on your performance and improvement.
They can always push you in the right direction.
You can model the coach.

Last but not least, having a coach is a solid financial and time investment. You strictly set the dates when you’ll have practicing sessions. You have to pay for those sessions. All that gives you additional motivation. It’s hard to say to your coach: “I will give up now”.

Role models can also be a great help

Besides getting a coach, finding a few role models can help a lot. You can model the success of people who have already achieved what you want to achieve, at least to a certain extent. Finding role models is not only excellent way for speeding up the skill acquisition process, it’s also very motivating.

Thus, find a few people you admire and respect who have mastered the skill that you want to master – read interviews with them, watch videos of how they perform, examine their road to success, read about their (humble) beginnings, and so on.

Skill improvement chart

4. Have realistic expectations when learning a new skill

There’s nothing that will stop you from acquiring a new skill faster than big disappointments. If you have unrealistic expectations of how fast you can learn a new skill, you’ll start falling behind your expectations sooner or later, and then you’ll quit. I had such unrealistic expectations for learning how to code.

If you don’t manage expectations properly, the excitement of skill acquisition can quickly turn into bitterness. But what are realistic expectations? There is no one right answer. Even performance psychology researchers have different opinions.

But we can definitely set some soft limits and hard facts about the investment needed for new skill acquisition:

You can master the pure basics of any skill in around 25 – 30 hours of deliberate practice. That’s enough to orientate yourself and execute a few basic moves.
To reach the global mastery level, approximately 10,000 hours of practice is the big investment needed. But the hours invested account only for around 10-20 % difference in performance. Only practice isn’t a sufficient condition for mastery.
There are many other factors that determine how far you’ll get. Talent, quality of practice, stability of the curriculum structure, possible shortcuts (like participating in reality shows) and other similar leverages have a big influence on how quickly you can become good at something. But you don’t need to be a global master, all you need to do is become so good that they can’t ignore you.
The time it will take you to become good enough at something is somewhere between 25 and 10,000 hours. By respecting the best learning practices, you can get much closer to 25 than 10,000.
The beginnings are slow and very frustrating with every skill. After initial frustrations, steep learning acceleration takes place. Then at some point, you reach a plateau and it’s harder to get better and better. When it comes to skill acquisition, getting through conscious incompetence and plateaus is the hardest. That’s where your willpower, stamina, determination and “whys” come into play.

These are the facts you must consider when managing your expectations. The beginnings are always hard and frustrating. The first few hours of deliberate practice suck when you realize how incompetent you really are at that particular initial moment.

But then the next 25 – 50 hours are extremely important. If you have the right plan in place and if you practice the right way, you can progress extremely fast.

Make sure that 25 – 50 hours is the minimum commitment you’re prepared to invest in acquiring a new skill. If you do the math, that’s not that little. You must practice between 45 and 90 minutes, 3 times per week for 3 months. That’s the investment needed for mastering the basics.

If you don’t know where and how to start or how to organize yourself, do the following: Combine the 30-day challenge and Hour of power concepts. For the next 30 days, commit to practicing 1 hour per day. If you’re not prepared to make such a commitment, forget about acquiring any new skill.

Practical examples

My personal experience is in line with that. With any new skill, making the first step and orientating myself is always extremely frustrating. We live in the post-information age and the body of knowledge for any skill is huge, complex and comprehensive. You must push yourself to focus on the best information and it takes time to separate the wheat from the chaff. It took me 6 months to orientate myself when it came to internet marketing.

Then in 30 hours of deliberate practice, you can understand the basics. Photoshop, blogging, SEO, HTML, CSS, cognitive behavioral therapy, psychoanalysis, the lean startup, proper exercise form etc., it took me around 30 – 50 hours to understand the basics of these skills (or knowledge). With an online course, books, personal coach or YouTube tutorials, that was an investment needed for understanding the skill and properly executing the basics.

But when it comes to mastering something, we can definitely talk in years. It took me 5 years to become a master of lean startup methodologies. It took me 5 years in venture capital to really understand what makes a good startup investment, term sheets, and so on.

It goes the same for my friends who excel at specific skills. The best programmers have been writing lines of code since they were 10. The best athletes have been doing sports from when they could walk. Any kind of mastery requires years of hard work. There are exceptions, but they prove the rule.

5. Set very specific goals for what you want to master

For every new skill you want to master, you can find hundreds of books, online courses, coaches and other resources. That can be very intimidating. In a tyranny of choices and options, we tend to do nothing in the end. That’s something you want to avoid.

One good way to avoid the tyranny of choice is to define what kind of a skill you want to acquire very narrowly and in detail; and then find the best resources for that. Additionally, defining practical value is a big plus. Make sure there is always a problem you’re trying to solve by acquiring a new skill. Let me give you a few examples.

Vague skill acquisition goal	Smart skill acquisition goal
I want to learn how to program	I want to learn HTML/CSS and basic JavaScript so I can build landing pages for my products.
	I want to learn one of the backend languages that is in high demand so I can easily get a job.
I want to learn how to sell	I want to be able to confidently and clearly present our company’s products to the target market, manage main objectives and close sales.
I want to be better at sports	I want to learn the proper form of the main complex fitness exercises, like squats, pull-ups and deadlifts.

Once you master one narrow definition of a skill, you can of course add a new one. The only point of this approach is to not get overwhelmed. Besides having no emotional drive and unrealistic expectations, being overwhelmed and lost in the information overflow is the biggest danger that can stop you on your way to acquiring a new skill.

6. Preliminary research and a skill acquisition plan

Once you have a specific goal for which skill exactly you want to learn, it’s time for preliminary research and a skill acquisition plan. Preliminary research is about finding the best resources.

For every skill, if you invest several hours into research, you can find the best books, tutorials, online courses, coaches (and interviews with them) and other resources. You can drown in resources, so make sure you go to the best knowledge and find the resources that fit your character and the narrow definition of what you want to master.

Then you want to make a skill acquisition plan. Every skill usually consists of several sub-skills, which are the core building blocks for performing that skill.

Thus, the first step is to parse every skill into small manageable sub-skills. Again, the main point of deconstructing a skill is to make learning manageable and to not feel overwhelmed. Deconstructing a skill can also help you identify and focus on the most important sub-skills.

At this point, you should have everything necessary for preparing a skill acquisition plan:

A very exact definition of what you want to learn and why
An overview of what mastering a certain skill really means (a semantic map with a list of sub‑skills)
The best resources for learning a new skill or, even better, a coach
Scheduled weekly practice for several months with enough space between practicing sessions for the new skills to sink in
A few role models for additional motivation and for modelling them

An example of a skill acquisition plan

To get more practical, here is how a simple skill acquisition plan would look like:

Category	Description
What?	I want to master HTML/CSS to build my own landing pages for infoproducts and consulting services.
Why?	To present my products exactly as I want them, experiment with new landing page building blocks quickly (A/B testing) and make money blogging.
Time commitment	One month, three hours per day.
Sub-skills	Coding editor (Sublime Text 3) Hosting, FTP and uploading files Git & Github HTML Syntax and elements HTML Page structure and grouping content HTML Formatting page content HTML Links, images, tables, links, forms CSS Syntax CSS Selectors CSS Box Model CSS Cascade and inheritance CSS Formatting CSS Transforms, transitions and animations CSS Page layout, grid system and flexbox Sass & Post CSS Bootstrap WordPress & Plugins
Resources	Lynda Photoshop/HTML/CSS/JS courses Head First HTML/CSS book The missing manual HTML, CSS W3School WordPress plugins for landing pages (as an alternative)
Coach	A friend who mastered these languages and builds landing pages. Front-end development meetup group.
Practical application	I will build two landing pages, one for my coaching sessions and one for an online course.
Models	Examples of the best landing pages for infoproducts.
Financial investment	$100

Supportive environment for skill acquisition

7. Build yourself a supportive environment

You can’t succeed in anything alone. You always need strong support from your environment. Acquiring a new skill is no exception.

You need to organize your environment in a way that supports your training, and you need to surround yourself with people who believe in you and know how to motivate you when thoughts of giving up pop up in your head.

The best approach when organizing your environment is to assume the worst about your self‑discipline. Assume that at some point you’ll be lazy, unmotivated and ignorant.

At that point, you’ll need a supportive system that pushes you back on the right track. Here are a few examples of what you can do:

Set up a series of reminders for a timeboxed practice session (on your desktop, phone etc.).
Put books and other resources at the reach of your hand (desktop table, your bed etc.).
Change your desktop wallpaper into one big motivational reminder.
Rearrange your software icons and bookmarks to support skill learning (bookmark the resources, if you’re using an app for skill acquisition make it easily accessible etc.).
Join meetups, make new friends, make sure you’re surrounded by people who want to achieve the same thing as you or who have already achieved it.
Reward yourself with something small every time you perform the practice.
Get a client or commit to a project at your job, so you will have a deadline to really master the skill. But make sure you have realistic expectations. Always under promise and over deliver.

Don’t rely solely on self-discipline. Build yourself a supportive environment. That’s really important, it’s half of the success equation.

Feedback system

8. Immediate implementation and feedback system

You can read 100 books about swimming and it can’t compare to jumping into water once.

You absolutely want to do research, prepare a learning plan and understand the skillset from a logical perspective, but it’s even more important that you simultaneously put the skill into practice as soon as possible. That’s how you learn the most. A practical project will also help you not get stuck in the analysis-paralysis.

The good news is that most skills are about solving practical problems. That also means that most skills are in high demand. Consequently, it’s really easy to join different projects and slowly brush up on your skills with practical work. The simple rule is to practice your skills wherever possible.

If you want to improve your writing skills, open a blog and start writing, if you want to learn web design, design a blog, if you want to learn how to sell, open a lemonade stand.

Working on practical projects has another additional benefit. You get immediate feedback on your work and new ideas on how to improve. You can always engage experts and peers to show you how to do things better and give you additional recommendations.

As additional help, you can get valuable feedback in other ways:

Record yourself
Observe yourself in the mirror
Benchmark your performance to the performance of your models
Crowdsource improvement ideas, and so on

When it comes to skill acquisition, make sure you have a really good feedback system.

Best learning practices - skills

9. Respect the best learning practices

When it comes to acquiring a new skill, the same rules apply as they do for acquiring new knowledge. The problem is that the best learning practices are most often counterintuitive.

We assume that crammed learning sessions where we repeat the same thing over and over again and practice in the same way work best. But that’s not true. That kind of an approach is the least effective.

In summary, the best learning practices are:

Chunking strategy: Break down the learning material into manageable chunks (sub-skills in this case).
Focused attention: Have zero distractions when you’re learning something new and be completely focused. Your working memory must be focused on learning.
Take breaks: After a session of 45 – 60 minutes, take a small break to restore your attention.
Spaced repetition: It’s better to practice for 1 hour 5 times than for 5 hours 1 time.
Deliberate practice: Do focused drills and exercises until you get better at a particular chunk.
Interleaved practice: Use different concepts, approaches and techniques in the same learning session, mix your practice – speed up, slow down learning, take tests, practice different things, and so on.
Get out of your comfort zone: Don’t practice the thing you already mastered, practice things that are a little bit out of your comfort zone. Always be at the edge of your abilities.
The point where you master a chunk: You master something when practice turns to boredom. Practice a chunk until you get bored.
Rest: If you want to improve, you need to get enough sleep and you must rest between the practicing sessions. There is no improvement without rest. When acquiring knowledge or skills, you’re making changes to your brain. That requires time and rest.

Four stages of learning a new skill — Noel Burch – Four stages for learning any new skill, graphics GWS Media

Four stages of the learning process and the dip

Another very useful thing to know when it comes to learning are the four stages of the learning process. The first stage is unconscious competence, where you don’t even know what you’re doing wrong. That’s the calm before the storm, where you can have unrealistic expectations and self‑assessment.

Then comes conscious incompetence and big frustrations with it. It’s the hardest stage that you have to persist through, as we’ve talked about. The next level is conscious competence. At this stage, you are aware of your mastery level, you know what you’re doing well but you also know how you can improve.

The last stage is unconscious competence. You achieve this final stage when you can perform a skill without thinking. That’s where the mastery level resides.

Seth Godin - The dip

When you enter the conscious incompetence you have to face the dip. There are five main reasons why you might quit when you find yourself deep in the dip:

You run out of time
You run out of money
You get scared
You’re not serious about it
You lose interest

Make sure that doesn’t happen to you.

10. List the skills you want to master and rank them properly

Sit down, take a piece of paper, and list all the skills you would currently like to master. You can probably easily list 10 – 15 skills. Logically, you can’t master all of them at once. At best, you can learn 2 – 3 skills simultaneously, one or two at your job and one or two in your free time. Which skills to pursue first

So, the final question is how to prioritize the skills you want to master. There are several criteria that can help you do that:

Point of the skill: Firstly, there are several categories that skills can fall into. The point of acquiring a new skill can be to increase your earning potential, have a hobby (something you like but won’t be paid for) or improve your overall quality of life (relationship skills, fitness etc.).
Supply and demand: When it comes to the skills’ market value, you want to develop skills that are in high demand and low supply. These are the skills that will dramatically increase your earning potential. Hobbies, on the other hand, usually have zero market value.
Talent: Your talents must not go to waste. That’s a lesson that was already written in the Bible. Categorize skills into those for which you’re talented, neutral and untalented.
Your goals and yearly focus: Your skills acquisition plan must be part of the long-term goals you’re trying to achieve. For example, changing a job or improving your health can be connected to specific skill acquisition.
Current opportunities: Assess the current opportunities you have in your environment. Can the company you work for pay for your skill acquisition? Do you have a friend or a spouse that mastered something and they are prepared to coach you? Can you easily join a paid project?
Resources you have: As we’ve seen, every skill acquisition requires emotional, financial and time commitment. Skills that are harder to acquire demand more resources. Realistically assess what kind of skill acquisition you can currently afford.
Life situation: Sometimes life forces you into a situation where you must acquire new skills. An injury, job loss, breakups, promotions, migrations, these are all situations that usually require and push you into developing new skills. When it happens, accept that, don’t resist, and improve yourself.

Build an array of skills you want to acquire and all the mentioned criteria. Then rank the skills from the best ones to acquire at the moment to the least attractive ones. After that, it’s time to put everything you learned about skill acquisition into practice.

From unqualified to qualified

In summary – the best tips, tricks and recommendations to learn or improve any skill fast

In summary, the best tips, tricks and recommendations for learning any new skill are:

Find a strong emotional reason why you want to learn a new skill.
Timebox regular practice sessions in your calendar and don’t miss them no matter what. Start with a 30-day challenge where you practice a skill one hour every day for a month.
Have double standards when it comes to skill acquisition. When you’re not really talented for something, see talent as overrated.
Have realistic expectations. Beginnings always suck big time and the hardest thing to do is to pass the conscious incompetence stage. But you can master the basics of every skill if you invest around 20 – 50 hours. Then things get a lot easier, until you reach a plateau.
If possible get a mentor or a coach or at least find a few role models you can model and look up to.
Very narrowly define what you want to master, parse the skill into small manageable chunks (sub-skills), prepare a learning plan for yourself, and go straight to the best resources.
Practice at the edge of your abilities. Do spaced repetition. Focus your working memory (or attention) with deliberate practice with zero distractions. Interleave practice. Rest.
Build yourself a strong supportive environment (people, habit triggers), apply for practical projects and have many feedback loops. With feedback loops, you will make sure you’re not reinforcing wrong execution.
Develop highly valuable skills that are in high demand but short supply. Make sure none of your talents go to waste.
Finally, enjoy the learning process!

Learn how to model successful people to accelerate your own success
I was a fashion model for Calvin Klein for more than 10 years. In those 10 years, the most important things about modeling that I learned was … Stop there, I’m just kidding.

I don’t have the looks to be a model and I certainly have zero advice or experience on how to become a successful fashion model. Today, we’re going to talk about a different kind of modeling.

Modeling is one of neuro-linguistic programming techniques designed to recreate excellence that only the best people reach. With modeling, you want to duplicate extraordinary results of high achievers by mirroring their conscious and unconscious behavior.

The main principle and idea behind modeling is that if you overtake the behaviors, strategies, beliefs, language (words, phrases, questions), emotional states and other traits of successful people, you will also become more successful.

By having access to someone who achieved exactly what you want to achieve, you could simply ask him or her: “Teach me how to do that!”.

The second best thing you can do, if somebody isn’t prepared to coach you in person, is to study them through all the public materials available. The latter is not as effective as full in-person access to the exemplar (the person you want to model), but indirect modeling can still prove to be valuable.

If we take a step back and go to the definition, a model is a simplified description of a complex entity or process – in our case, a model is a simplified version of the whole system and process that lead the person (exemplar) to the desired outcome.

A psychological model carefully describes a method, form, ways of doing, customs and styles. It kind of gives you a step-by-step formula to replicate the success as much as possible.

Nevertheless, every psychological model is still a very simplified version of a real-life success scenario, with many limitations. In modeling, we tend to focus only on the main variables that lead to success. We try to slice the success into small chunks, identify the biggest contributors to the success, and build them into a replicable model.

In the end, modeling is successful when you manage to achieve more or less the same behavioral outcome as the person you are modeling. You achieve that by mirroring the main “psychological personality chunks” or contributors to the success.

In this article, you will learn all these things, like:
- The mindset you need to successfully apply modeling
- The detailed process of how to use modeling in everyday life
- The limitations of modeling
- The questions that can help you build a successful psychological model
- The most practical approach to modeling
- Practical examples of how to use modeling in your personal life
By the way, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) modeling is a very complex and detailed subject, way beyond the scope of this article. If you are interested in NLP modeling in particular, I suggest you read the book Modeling with NLP written by Robert Dilts.

I will rather describe a simplified version of modeling that you can quickly and practically use in everyday life. I will also give many examples on how I use modeling to achieve my goals faster.

I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me. – Virginia Satir

Modeling others comes naturally to human beings

A child doesn’t pay as much attention to what their parents say or command as s/he does to what they do. A very big part of a child’s personality development is modeling their role models – they want to be like them; in the early age, that means especially their parents and other caretakers.

That’s why we say that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

A little bit out of the context, but an extremely useful exercise when it comes to choosing a spouse to start a family with is the following: ask yourself if you want your child to be the same as your spouse (especially the child of the same gender)?

If the answer is yes, you clearly respect the personality traits your spouse possesses. If the answer is no or you don’t have a clear opinion, you should probably reconsider if you are with the right person.

You might tell a child to clean their room a thousand times, but if your room is messy, there’s a high probability that the child’s room will also be messy.

Now let’s get back to modeling. With age, the interest to model other successful people and have role models declines in most people, as does the interest to learn new things.

There are many reasons for that, from ego defense to a lack of curiosity, fixed mindset, intellectual sublimity, general laziness, and so on. Much like people stop reading books, exploring the world and acquiring new competences, so they stop mirroring their role models.

But here’s the trick. Even if you stop looking up to your role models, you’re still influenced by the people who surround you. That’s why you can hear over and over again that you are the average of the 5 people you spend most time with.

Whether you want to or not, you are overtaking the mindset, behavior, values, beliefs and actions of people you spend the most time with. You are unconsciously modeling them, because no matter age you never stop modeling others. Slowly, you overtake other’s people attitudes and behaviors.

You maybe didn’t have a choice about who to model when you were a child. But you can absolutely choose who your role models and people who surround you will be in your adult age.

People who surround you are the people that you will sooner or later consciously or subconsciously model. Thus, make sure you use your modeling capabilities to your advantage. Carefully choose with whom you spend time with.

Try to be positive among 10 grumblers. It’s impossible, and sooner or later you also start to whine, bitch and complain.

Practical use of modeling in everyday life

If you’re going to model anyway, make sure you are modeling the right kind of people. Below are a few very practical ideas for how to use modeling to your advantage, from the simplest forms of modeling to the most complex ones:
1. Read biographies of successful people to get inspired when you feel down.
2. Never put your ego in front of learning something new, there is always something to learn or model from other people. Find that one thing in which the person is better than you are.
3. Spend time with people who have personality traits and skills you want to develop. Make sure you are never the smartest person in the room. You will slowly assimilate their characteristics. And you will learn the most when you spend time with smart people.
4. Study people you admire. Read their biographies, interviews and other articles. Read and watch everything that exists about them. Ask yourself: what would [an extremely successful person] do in the same situation as you are facing?
5. Find a person who has achieved exactly the same thing as you want to achieve. Ask them to coach you and based on regular interactions, build yourself a model of how you can apply their behavior in your life to become more successful. That is real modeling.
6. Model your previous successful self. There are times when you’re feeling up and there are times when you’re feeling desperate. Just thinking about your thoughts, beliefs, actions and decisions when you were feeling assertive and ambitious can motivate you to take action.
I use all six ways of modeling in my personal life. Besides reading books and regularly experimenting with new things in my life, modeling is one of the fastest ways how I learn about life and develop new skills. Let me give you a few examples:

Practical examples
1. I regularly read biographies and watch documentaries about successful people I admire. From Siddhartha Gautama, Alexander the Great, Marcus Aurelius to Sigmund Freud, Richard Branson, Elon Musk and others. It always greatly motivates and inspires me.
2. Whoever I meet, I usually ask them many different questions to understand them and learn from them. I really get interested in a person’s life – how they think, experience reality, where they blossom and what are their struggles. And people love to talk about these things.
3. I always surrounded myself with people who are more successful than I am. With investors, scholars, entrepreneurs, scientists, and so on. There are so many clubs, meetups, communities, associations and co-working places you can join and meet people smarter than you.
4. At the moment, I am studying the most successful personal development bloggers that I like the most – Tim Urban, Tim Ferris, Tai Lopez, Ramit Sethi, Mark Manson, James Clear, James Altucher, Steve Pavlina, Barrie Davenport, Derek Sivers, Cal Newport and Steve Scott. I read their blogs and books, watch or listen to interviews with them, and want to learn everything about their strategy, mindset, skills and daily habits. I already see some patterns in their success (every one of them innovated a distribution channel, they all have a few simple ideas that they repeat over and over again, and so on).
5. I always learned the most with a personal coach, either a hired one or people who were willing to be my mentor because we worked together. I learned the most and the fastest when I spent several hours over the course of a year with people who mastered the skills or possessed the knowledge that I wanted to learn. From selling skills to athletic moves, in-person coaching or real modeling is how I learned the most.
6. Last but not least, when I’m feeling down or my spirits are dampened for whatever reason, I vividly visualize a particular situation in my past when I was highly motivated, determined, had a clear goal that I assertively pursued and felt mentally strong. I transfer the past positive feelings and thoughts into the moment when I’m feeling down and it always helps motivate my spirit.
No matter how smart we are, on the basic level we are still monkeys. Monkey see, monkey do. Thus, make sure you choose your role models and people you spend time with very carefully.

You are modeling people around you, whether you want to or not, even in your adult years. Make sure modeling is working to your advantage and accelerates your personal growth.

Your role models play a huge role in how you pick your vocation and make other important decisions in life. If someone looks like you, has had a similar upbringing, belongs to the same religion order, has attended a similar school, and is making a good living, it naturally has a huge impact when you’re trying to decide your calling in life. [Thus, ask yourself:] Where will your life lead you if you follow the path laid out by your parents, peers and other role models? – Mohnish Pabrai, Dhnadho Investor

Limitations of modeling and why modeling is not copy-pasting

You can absolutely progress faster in life with the use of modeling, but there are still big limitations. First of all, the less frequently you personally interact with an exemplar, the harder it is to build a model that you can replicate in your own life.

You would get the best modeling results if you were able to do a “shadow experience” with an exemplar. That means you would spend hours observing them in action every day.

In-person modeling is most effective because it gives you the opportunity to model the same way you did as a child. By observing, you get a chance to mirror and match the behavior of the other person – their conscious and unconscious parts.

You don’t try to merely understand and rationalize what the exemplar is doing, you employ your unconscious resources to exactly mimic the behavioral patterns.
Here is the hierarchy of the information quality you can gather when it comes to modeling:

Consistent live observation or shadow experience

Watching video or audio material

Interviews in person

Role-playing

Questionnaires

Reading biographies, articles and written interviews
Secondly, no success can be completely replicated. You have your own set of talents, your environment is different and there are always “blind spots” – things that contributed to the success that neither the exemplar nor the modeler know about.

If success were that easily replicated, everybody would be successful. That means you have to always account for an individual’s specifics in every model and must keep realistic expectations about the extent to which the success can be modeled. Real modeling takes a lot of hard work.

Last but not least, modeling does not equal copy-pasting other people’s personalities. You don’t want to lose yourself by trying to be someone else.

That might not be a problem when you try to model skills and habits, but it can present a huge challenge when it comes to beliefs, values and personality traits. You can’t just change your personality like underwear.

But there are two core things you can do that will protect your true self:
1. You can find a healthy intersection between you and the exemplar you’re modeling. If there are parts of the exemplar’s character that don’t fit your ideal self, there is no point in modeling them.
2. You can only temporarily take over different beliefs, values and personality traits to find a balance that works better for you. For example, if you are always giving yourself away to other people and consequently they take advantage of you, you might temporarily model someone who gives nothing, and then in the following step find the right balance between giving and taking.
Your current self Your ideal self

Modeling >>

You must use common sense when it comes to modeling. It’s not a miraculous solution, it has many limitations, but it can absolutely help you progress faster in life towards your ideal-self. Now let’s move to a more practical level of how to use modeling in everyday life.

Different stages of modeling successful people

These are four very simple and logical steps when it comes to modeling:
1. Choosing a person to model – In the first step, you must find a person worth modeling. It must be someone you respect, who already possesses a skill or personality trait that you want to acquire. The best scenario is if you have access to spend a lot of time with the person. You can also choose several people to model (that’s often an even better approach).
2. Observing and mirroring – When you have your model chosen, the analytical part comes into play. It is a combination of mirroring exactly what a person does (unconscious mirroring) and employing questions that can accelerate learning (logical modeling). You want to understand in detail what the person regularly does, how they do it and why they do it.
3. Finding similarities and differences – By mirroring, spending time with people and asking questions, you want to find which behavioral differences are present. You want to list all the small personality chunks (traits, behaviors etc.) and understand how they contribute to success.
4. Designing a model – In the last step, you try to build a model that can be replicated. The model is like a manual that can be presented to other people so they can improve their skills. It describes all the important pieces together with the sequence, system and process.
Things you must pay attention to when modeling other people

In a way, we could call modeling reverse-engineering psychology. The idea is to find as many factors as possible that lead to a specific successful outcome in someone’s life, and rank their influence. From the macro perspective, you are interested in three different types of information when you are modeling:
1. External behavior – habits, responses, words, phrases, skills, competence etc.
2. Internal states and processes – values, beliefs, emotions etc.
3. Environment – social circles, trends, support etc.
Here’s the big catch. When you are listing elements, you must pay attention to those that the person you’re modeling is aware of as well as those they aren’t aware of. Many times, people have no clue why they are really successful. They just are.

It’s because they possess a competence or a personality trait they aren’t even aware of. It’s called an unconscious skill and competence.

Very similarly, we know universal success principles and situation-specific success contributors. Many people are successful merely because they were lucky. There was no skill involved. You probably wouldn’t try modeling a lottery winner.

Thus, you must make sure you’re not fooled by random success factors, like being born in the right family, being in the right industry by accident, or being one of the first employees in a high-growth company.

These factors don’t mean that there is nothing to model per se, you just have to make sure there are really strong personality traits or skills present that contributed to the success and outcome that you’re trying to model.

If we go back to the three macro factors – external behavior, internal states and processes, and environment – you are interested in questions that help identify cause (activity) and effect (outcome):
What exactly do they do? – A precise description of an activity that leads to the desired result.

How do they do it? – Detailed description of how they perform an activity.

When and where do they do it? – What triggers the behavior and how often.

Why do they do it? – What is the motivation behind their actions.

What kind of support do they have? – How the environment influences their actions and outcomes.
Personality chunks and dimensions

We can parse the question further into different personality dimensions. Only understanding all these dimensions (“personality chunks”) really well gives you all the necessity input to build yourselves a viable model:
1. Purpose and intention – That’s the big question why, consisting of motives, desires and wants.
2. Identity – How the person sees themselves.
3. Outcomes – What are their ideas about goals, what exactly do they tend to achieve.
4. Strategies – What does the person do to achieve a particular outcome, what procedure and methods do they follow.
5. Beliefs – The main ideas about life that they agree with and validate. Beliefs are philosophies and attitudes that lead to a specific heuristic and cognitive strategy.
6. Values – All the ideas that are important to the person, things they like or tend to avoid; values expose how they decide to invest their resources, and they’re tied to emotional aspects of life.
7. Representations, submodalities and meta-programs – How the elements of the environment are identified, interpreted and reacted to.
8. Understandings – All the mental support of the inner world (subjective interpretations of reality). Personal interpretations of how the world works, supporting individual beliefs, values and representations. Understandings are realizations about what kind of actions will lead to a specific outcome.
9. Heuristic – How evaluations and judgements are made in problem solving.
10. Attention – What the person focuses their limited mental resources on and what do they think most of the time.
11. Cognitive strategy – Proactive response to the environment based on representations; mental syntax and sequence involved in performing a specific action or behavior.
12. Behaviors and habits – Behaviors that are repeatedly performed, usually based on triggers.
13. Emotional states – What is the dominant emotional state when the person performs specific activity or behavior.
14. Conscious and unconscious knowledge and skills – What kind of competences are present that enable successful execution of an activity. They can be simple or complex behavioral, cognitive or linguistic skills.
15. Physical (somatic) skills and physiology – Particularly body (or motor) skills and what kind of a connection between the mind and the body (posture, muscle tones, balance etc.) is present when the activity is executed.
16. Language, communication style and non-linguistic symbols – What are the dominant words, phrases and questions used and other non-verbal cues.
17. Peer group and environment – What kind of people surround the exemplar most frequently, what kind of support do they have, what are the industry trends and other environmental variables.
18. How exactly everything ties together – Prioritizing elements that contribute to the success.
Perspectives and questions that can help you accelerate the modeling process

Before we go to specific questions, there is one more useful trick that can help you build the model you want to replicate. In the process of modeling, you can play with four different perspectives:
- 1^st person perspective – Analyzing how you’re currently performing an action, how it’s different from the exemplar and experimenting on your own with the exemplar’s behavior.
- 2^nd person perspective – Empathically putting yourself in the exemplar’s shoes and trying to understand completely why they do things as they do, together with mimicking their thoughts, feelings, actions and other personality characteristics.
- 3^rd person perspective – Observing at a distance as an uninvolved witness how the modeled person is behaving and what are their actions. Acting like a scientist that tries to analyze a specific person and situation.
- 4^th person perspective – Trying to understand a situation from the perspective of the whole system, from the environment to the individuals involved.
It’s extremely important that you first mirror the person’s behavior and only then try to logically parse and understand it. That will give you the greatest insight and benchmark with your current situation. Then you can start logically building the model while playing with different perspectives.

Questions to ask successful people worth modeling

You can accelerate your learning and model building with the right questions. Below are examples of the questions to use when you’re modeling successful people – some questions are meant for asking the exemplar directly, others you can answer by yourself with observation:

Purpose, identity, beliefs and values
- How do you see yourself? What do you believe about yourself when you perform a specific action?
- What is driving you to do this, what is your mission, vision or why do you do it?
- What do you believe about yourself, the world and your life circumstances?
- What are your beliefs that support your doing when it comes to that particular goal you’re trying to achieve?
- How do you express your beliefs on a daily level – through thoughts, words, actions etc.?
- What kind of expectations do you have towards yourself and others?
- What kind of standards do you follow? Which standards must be met no matter what?
- What rules do you tend to live by and why are these rules important to you?
- How would you describe the hierarchy of your values? How do you satisfy these values?
- How do you make decisions when you have to choose between two things in your schedule?
- How do you respond when things don’t go as you planned?
- What kind of gains you tend to enjoy with achieving the goal and what kind of pain are you trying to avoid?
- What do you focus on for most of your day?
- How do you make decisions and what criteria do you use when making decisions?
Habits and patterns
- What patterns do you easily recognize and why are these patterns important to you?
- What are the dominant thoughts you repeatedly have? What do you think about most of the time?
- What kind of emotions do you experience on a daily basis? Why are these emotions important to you?
- What do you do when things go wrong or when you experience severe negative emotions?
- Which are your dominant personality traits and what strengths do you have?
- What kind of habits do you follow on a daily basis? What kind of activities do you not do at all?
Competences – skills and knowledge
- What kind of skills have you mastered and how are these skills helping you in life?
- What skill helped you the most in achieving that particular outcome?
- How and when did you acquire this skill or knowledge?
- How often do you practice this particular skill? What is your learning style?
- If you were going to teach me to do it, how should I approach it? What would you ask me to do?
- What do you pay most attention to when you’re performing that specific skill?
- How do you know you’re really good at these things?
- How do you feel when you perform that specific action? What kind of an emotional and physical state are you in?
- What kind of a situation happened in your life that led to you being good at this particular skill?
Environment
- In which places do you spend the most of your time? With which people?
- Can you describe the main characteristics of your environment – industry, market trends, target markets, people that surround you etc.? Did you consciously choose them?
- What kind of an infostructure do you have – what do you read, watch, which apps do you use?
- How do you acquire the knowledge and information that you need in order to be successful?
- Which are the main social groups in your opinion, where and how do you network?
- Do you have any role models that you tend to model?
Language and non-verbal behavior
- What were the main words used in the conversation with the exemplar?
- What is their dominant body language, what part of their physiology stands out?
- How do they use body language when interacting with other people?
- How do they tend to speak to themselves and others? Which words do they mainly use?
Trust me, if you have answers to these 40+ questions, you understand the person extremely well and you have all the input needed to build a model to replicate their success. These questions are also very useful when it comes to practicing empathy or developing new perspectives. Last but not least, these questions can also help you better understand yourself.

Flexibility comes from having multiple choices; wisdom comes from having multiple perspectives. – Robert Dilts

The final stage of modeling – implementation of the model in your own life

We have come to the final stage of modeling. Implementing everything that you’ve learned about the chosen model in your own life.

The very good news is that you have the ability to think about your thinking. You can perform self-reflection and find the differences between your strategies, behaviors and thoughts and those of the people who are more successful, those you want to model.

Before implementing anything, you must first analyze all the gathered data:
1. How exactly did you feel when you mirrored the model – what felt right and what felt wrong?
2. Which things did you notice when you spent time with your exemplar?
3. List of all “personality chunks” you gathered through observations and asking questions
4. List of all other insights you have gathered by analyzing interviews, videos etc.
5. Analysis of all other data that you managed to gather (interviewing other people etc.)
Based on the data, you should build a model – a prioritized “personality chunk” list that explains all the main external behaviors, internal processes and environmental variables that led to a specific outcome.

In the next step, you can analyze how the model differentiates from your particular situation as well as which differences are aligned with your ideal self and which aren’t. That should help you make a solid decision about which behavior you will continue to mirror, and which “personality chunks” are not part of your authentic self.

NLP offers many tools that can help you permanently implement the “personality chunks” that you intend to keep in your life and that represent a way of personal improvement – from anchoring and mental rehearsal to game playing and visualization.

But more about that in one of the next articles. Until then, find a person worth modeling and parse their personality down to the smallest chunk. Play with mirroring their activity and ask them thousands of questions that will help you better understand their motives, behaviors, languages and other personality traits. It’s a very fun exercise to do.
Different types of intelligence and why your IQ is not fixed
One of the greatest assets you can have in today’s post-information society is being smart.

Intelligence is an important resource that can bring you status, respect, academic and career advancements, better earning potential, new ways to create and contribute to the world and let’s not forget the capacity to forge better strategies and make smarter decisions.

Being intelligent doesn’t guarantee these things and it’s sometimes not even a mandatory factor, but it absolutely does help.

In general, intelligence refers to the ability to learn new things quickly, solve logical problems, think abstractly, comprehend new ideas, learn from experience, and even to the overall mental adaptability to new situations.

Components of intelligence are at least the following:
- Curiosity – the desire to know various phenomena
- Depth of mind – the ability to separate the important from the secondary
- Flexibility and mobility of mind – the ability to use experience widely in different situations
- Logicality of thinking – the ability to follow a strict sequence of reasoning
- Conclusiveness of thinking – the ability to use facts, regularities and correct judgment
- Criticality of thinking – the ability to discard incorrect judgements
- Breadth of thinking – the ability to comprehend the whole coverage of intellectual activity
Since intelligence is an extremely important asset, there is always one question in the forefront – is intelligence inherited and fixed, or can it somehow be improved with the right resources and environment, even when you’re older? As we will see, there is no simple answer to that, and the truth probably lies somewhere in between.

The most popular test of intelligence is the IQ test, which measures the ability to solve problems, reason logically and use the vocabulary. IQ tests are strongly connected to the g factor, which measures general intelligence. And the g factor is hard to improve, especially when tests are focused on fluid intelligence. But that’s only one part of the story.

Your genes and early development did have a huge influence on your general intelligence development that’s hard to improve in the adult age. At most it can be fine-tuned. But that doesn’t mean you are completely limited at becoming smarter. There are many ways you can maximize your intellectual potential.

Is IQ really fixed or can you become smarter somehow?

Let’s go straight to the main question – is IQ fixed or not? The answer is unfortunately not very straightforward, but more like yes and no. Studies show that people who are at the top of intelligence tests when young, stay at the top in their adult and senior age. But … (you see, there is a but).

Overall, people show a higher IQ with age. That means, your IQ improves (linearly) with age when you learn new things and improve your skills. It can also start to decline fast in the old age. Thus, your IQ is a relative measure that represents your standing among your peers at a certain age.

You absolutely have some influence on how big your improvement will be. If you take good care of your brain, deliberately practice and learn a lot, you might progress faster than average. And if you don’t take care of your smarts at all, you might decline much faster than average.

The test showed that there are outliers when it comes to IQ tests. Much like some people lost their cognitive abilities (due to a mental illness, for example), so did a few people show greater improvement than average.

Changes in intelligence can be very big, especially at a young age and in adolescence when brain’s plasticity is not yet reduced. That’s why babies can learn languages faster than adults.

On the other hand, regular learning and brain training can prevent cognitive decline in the old age. And you can at least fine-tune biological intelligence that is limited by the neural efficiency of your brains.
What we do know for sure when it comes to intelligence is the following:

At a young age (up to the age of 16) the environment has a great influence on the development of intelligence. IQ can be increased or decreased during childhood. What happens during pregnancy and afterwards (diet, stress) also has a great influence on child’s intellectual development.

If you practice a particular intellectual skill you get better at that skill, even if your overall intelligence doesn’t improve. In the same way, you can develop crystalized intelligence (knowledge) faster than your peers at any point in your life if you devote yourself to regular learning.

Most people don’t reach their intellectual potential. That means they don’t use all the intellectual capacity they possess. Curiosity, good learning skills, applying knowledge in new situations, developing new competences, seeking complex intellectual environments, all that leads to reaching intellectual potential.

The fluid intelligence and working memory can be improved at least in the short term with different brain games, exercises and learning. Even in the adult age you can develop new brain synapses, but it’s much harder than at a young age. In the old age, intellectual effort and different brain games can prevent cognitive decline.

People with the growth mindset don’t limit themselves with a fixed IQ, but rather accept the fact that they can grow and improve in any skill. With that attitude, they often overcome the limits of average general intelligence and become more successful and even smarter.

Children without an extremely high IQ that are exposed to certain knowledge domains (and practice that domain regularly from a young age on, for about “10,000 hours”) in combination with encouraged creativity can become geniuses.
Here is the most important fact – we do know for sure that most people don’t reach their intellectual potential.

What an individual can achieve with a combination of practice, hard work, assets and savviness, is completely different from what most people do achieve. Most people prefer to settle in a certain intellectual standing backed by the fixed mindset and stay in that intellectual comfort zone for the rest of their lives.

That kind of thinking absolutely leads to cognitive decline and loss of IQ points (they don’t catch up with their peers), and especially slow development of crystalized intelligence. Thus, a much better question rather than if the IQ is fixed or not is: how can you make sure that you employ all of your brain potential and maximize your smarts?

If you are mentally active, your cognitive abilities improve, and if you neglect your smarts, you are in cognitive decline. You lose what you don’t use.

How improving your intelligence might work

Taking care of your health and body is a very good analogy for becoming smarter. How you look is very much determined by your genes and early development. Like with intelligence, the inheritance and early environmental factor is very strong.

Nevertheless, there is a big difference between maximizing your looks with a good diet, regular exercise and taking good care of yourself (grooming, outfit etc.) and being careless about your body and appearance and becoming slovenly. I’m sure you saw many before and after photos, where people decided to take better care of their body and health. It’s like looking at a completely different person.

No fat and full face with double chin, better skin, more charming energies and better self-confidence, a whole new person. The beauty of an individual is still somehow fixed, but taking good care of yourself does make a huge difference.

It’s the same with intelligence. There are definitely biological limits you can’t cross. But the difference between maximizing your intelligence and neglecting your potential can be colossal; like on those before and after photos.

The problem in both cases (becoming fit or maximizing intellectual potential) is that it takes a lot of hard work and dedication. There must be a growth mindset present backed by persistence and regular deliberate practice.

If you want to improve your smarts, here are the things you can do:
- The brain manual: The first thing you can do is to know how your brains work and treat them according to what works best proved by science. From improving your learning style to regularly developing creative and analytical skills, maintaining your brain cells with proper brain diet and regular physical exercise.
- Optimizing working memory: A very important part of the brain’s operational manual is understanding how the working memory works. Smarter people usually have a greater working memory capacity or know how to use it better. There are several things you can do to improve your working memory – from learning to manage negative thoughts to training your attention span and practicing a dual n-back game.
- Crystalized intelligence: If you practice a particular skill (or knowledge domain), your overall intelligence might not improve, but you definitely become better at that particular skill. But that’s the only thing that really matters. You can improve the intellectual skills that you can use in everyday life. In the end, nobody will ask you what your IQ score is, but what kind of skills do you possess.
- A smart attitude: You can always develop the right attitude to maximize your intellectual potential. Curiosity, growth mindset, seeking complex environments, practicing knowledge transference, applying knowledge in new situations, learning new languages, these are all the things that help you achieve your intellectual potential and prevent cognitive decline.
As you can see, there absolutely are ways to improve your smarts. If you practice certain types of intellectual tasks, you become better at those tasks. Similarly, when you learn something new, it takes up less of your working memory when recalled, so you can manipulate more information at the same time. And if you know how to learn properly, you can learn more things in a shorter time.

Good genes and general intelligence might be given. But that shouldn’t be your excuse. Richard Feynman, theoretical physicist most known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics (whatever that means) wore his low IQ test result of 125 as a badge of honor. He wanted everyone to know about it as a sign that showed how absurd the notion of an IQ test is.

How improving your IQ absolutely doesn’t work and what hinders your intelligence

Before we go to different types of intelligence, a word of caution. Knowing different types of intelligence might quickly give you an excuse to be intellectually lazy. You know, you find a type of intelligence that you know you’re good at and then you say to yourself that you are obviously smart enough and life goes on.

It’s appealing to think that everybody is smart in a certain way. While we all do have different abilities, being strong in one ability shouldn’t give you an excuse to not work hard on all different types of intelligence, maximize your intellectual potential or accept some of your intellectual limitations (overall intelligence or some domains where you have to work harder) and make the most from your individual situation.

A unique personal style always comes out of limitations, thus you have to use them to your advantage.

We also know many factors that hinder your intelligence. Stress is one of them. Stress kills your working and long-term memory. Stress can wipe out your brain cells, wither the connection between neurons, and by changing the blood flow in your brain the emphasis is more on animal instincts (4F response) than on being a reasonable empathic human being. A lack of sleep has the same negative effect on your smarts.
- Head injuries
- Traumatic situations
- PTSD
- Regular drug use
- Bad diet
- Dehydration
- Too much alcohol
- Having a stroke
- Avoiding exercise
- Chronical negative thinking
- Smoking
- Taking steroids
- Extreme anxiety and panic
- Exposure to toxic elements and pesticides
- Air pollution
- Too high sugar consumption
- Isolation
- Depression
- Multitasking
- Obesity
- Burnouts
They all have a very negative effect on your brain performance.

Nine independent and different types of intelligence

The idea of one general intelligence that is inherited and fixed was always challenged. One of the first people to challenge it was Robert J. Sternberg who developed the triarchic theory of intelligence.

He argued that there are three important parts of intelligence – analytical or componential, creative or experimental, and contextual or practical.

Howard Gardner took a step further and developed the theory of multiple intelligences. In the theory, he presented the idea that there are nine independent types of intelligence and argued that people who fall short in some of the types might excel at others.

He also argued that schools focus on logical and linguistic abilities and neglect other types of intelligence. The nine types of intelligence are:
- Naturalist Intelligence (“Nature Smart”) – understanding how nature works, together with materials, plants and animals.
- Musical Intelligence (“Musical Smart”) – recognizing, creating, reproducing and reflecting on everything connected to tones and music.
- Logical-Mathematical Intelligence (“Number/Reasoning Smart”) – it’s the ability to do mathematical operations, perform experiments, think in abstract and symbolic dimensions, identify patterns, categories and relationships.
- Existential Intelligence (“Spiritual Smart”) – the capacity to tackle questions about the human existence, the meaning of life, why we die and what happens after life.
- Interpersonal Intelligence (“People Smart”) – all the skills related to understanding and interacting with other people, from verbal and non-verbal communication, showing sympathy and empathy, to motivating and leading others.
- Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence (“Body Smart”) –physical and sports capabilities together with the ability to manipulate objects and to apply a variety of physical skills. It also includes the sense of timing and strength of the connection between mind and body.
- Linguistic Intelligence (“Word Smart”) – the ability to express complex meaning with words and applying meta-linguistic skills to reflect on the use of language.
- Intrapersonal Intelligence (“Self Smart”) – the capacity to understand yourself, together with all the thoughts and feelings, and use of that knowledge to plan your life’s direction.
- Spatial Intelligence (“Picture Smart”) – the ability to think in three dimensions, together with spatial recognition, image manipulation, artistic skills and active imagination.
The idea that everybody is smart in some way is very attractive. But research shows that supposedly independent domains are highly correlated. As we said, there might be a type of intelligence where you really excel, but we must not neglect the empirical evidence on general and fluid intelligence.

Source: Wikipedia

The g factor and ten different intelligence domains

We know a term for general intelligence – the controversial g factor, which is supposed to be more or less fixed (scientists are not uniform on that). You can’t influence it with education, brain games, diet or by any other means.

The g factor is your biological limit in intelligence, especially fixed in the adult age. It’s the general intelligence on top of all the cognitive abilities. Full scale IQ scores show the general intelligence.

The g factor was developed by Charles Spearman in the early years of the 20th century. His observation was that children’s performance across different unrelated subjects was positively correlated.

The underlying mental ability, or the g factor, has an influence on how you do on most intellectual tests. In other words, individuals who tend to do well at one type of tests, tend to excel at other types of tests as well. The influence of the general intelligence on performing a cognitive task is around 50 %.

Interestingly, genes contribute 20-40 % of the variance in intelligence in childhood and about 80 % in the old age. The older you are, the more difficult it is to improve your g factor. A complex intellectual environment that encourages brain activity has a great influence on brain development and intelligence until the age of 16 and then declines fast.

CHC model of intelligence

The Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory is today the most widely accepted theory of cognitive abilities that is also supported by empirical evidence. It supports and integrates everything we’ve talked about intelligence until now. It’s a very complex theory that incorporates the g factor and different types of intelligence.

The g factor consists of 10 broad intelligences that are further divided into narrow intellectual abilities. Here are all the broad and narrow intellectual abilities that are measured in the CHC model:
- Fluid intelligence – broad ability to reason, form concepts, and solve unique problems using new information and novel procedures
  
  Deductive reasoning – solving a problem by going from general knowledge to specifics
  
  Induction – reasoning from specific cases to general knowledge
  
  Piagetian reasoning – seriation, conservation and classification
  
  Speed of reasoning – speed or fluency in performing reasoning tasks in a limited time
- Crystalized intelligence – Acquired knowledge with the ability to communicate that knowledge and the ability to reason using previous abilities and knowledge
  
  Language development – general understanding and application of words and sentences
  
  Lexical knowledge – extent of vocabulary
  
  Listening ability – the ability to receive and understand spoken information
  
  General information – general stored knowledge
  
  Information about culture – general stored cultural knowledge (music, art etc.)
  
  Communication ability – the ability to speak in everyday life situations
  
  Oral production and fluency – specific and narrow oral communication skills
  
  Grammatical sensitivity – proper construction of words and sentences
  
  Foreign language proficiency – language development for foreign languages
  
  Foreign language aptitude – rate and ease of learning a new language
- Quantitative reasoning – the ability to comprehend quantitative concepts and relationships and the ability to manipulate numeric symbols
  
  Mathematical knowledge – range of general knowledge about mathematics
  
  Mathematical achievement – tested mathematical achievement
- Reading and writing ability – basic reading and writing skills
  
  Reading decoding – the ability to recognize and decode words or pseudowords in reading
  
  Reading comprehension – the ability to attain meaning during reading
  
  Verbal language comprehension – general development or the understanding of words, sentences, and paragraphs measured by reading vocabulary and comprehension
  
  Cloze ability – the ability to read and supply missing words from prose passages
  
  Spelling ability – the ability to form words with the correct letters in accepted order
  
  Writing ability – the ability to communicate information and ideas in written form
  
  Language usage knowledge – knowledge of language mechanics such as capitalization, punctuation, usage, and spelling
  
  Reading speed – the ability to silently read and comprehend connected text
  
  Writing speed – the ability to copy words or sentences repeatedly, or writing words, sentences, or paragraphs, as quickly as possible
- Short-term memory – the ability to hold information in immediate awareness, and then use it within a few seconds
  
  Memory span – the ability to attend to, register, and immediately recall temporally ordered elements and then reproduce the series of elements in correct order
  
  Working memory – the ability to temporarily store and perform a set of cognitive operations on information that requires divided attention
- Long-term storage and retrieval – the ability to store information and retrieve it later in the process of thinking
  
  Associative memory – the ability to recall one part of a previously learned but unrelated pair of items when the other part is presented
  
  Meaning memory – the ability to note, retain, and recall information where there is a meaningful relation between bits of information
  
  Free recall memory – the ability to recall as many unrelated items as possible
  
  Ideational fluency – the ability to rapidly produce a series of ideas, words, or phrases related to a specific condition or object
  
  Associational fluency – a specific ability to rapidly produce a series of words or phrases associated in meaning when given a word or concept with a restricted area of meaning
  
  Expressional fluency – the ability to rapidly think of and organize words or phrases into meaningful complex ideas under general or more specific cued conditions
  
  Naming facility – the ability to rapidly produce accepted names for concepts or things when presented with the thing itself or a picture of it
  
  Word fluency – the ability to rapidly produce isolated words that have specific phonemic, structural, or orthographic characteristics
  
  Figural fluency – the ability to rapidly draw or sketch as many things as possible when presented with a non-meaningful visual stimulus
  
  Figural flexibility – the ability to rapidly change set and try out a variety of approaches to solutions for figural problems that have several stated criteria
  
  Sensitivity to problems – the ability to rapidly think of a number of alternative solutions to practical problems
  
  Originality and creativity – the ability to rapidly produce unusual, original, clever, divergent, or uncommon responses to a given topic, situation, or task
  
  Learning abilities – general learning ability rate
- Visual processing – the ability to perceive, analyze, synthesize and think with visual patterns
  
  Visualization – the ability to mentally imagine, manipulate or transform objects
  
  Spatial relations – the ability to perceive and manipulate patterns and maintain orientation
  
  Closure speed – the ability to identify a familiar visual object from an incomplete representation
  
  Flexibility of closure – the ability to identify a visual figure or pattern embedded in a complex distracting array
  
  Visual memory – the ability to form and store a mental representation or image of a visual shape
  
  Spatial scanning – the ability to quickly and accurately survey a wide or complicated spatial field or pattern and identify a particular configuration through the visual field
  
  Serial perpetual integration – the ability to identify a pictorial or visual pattern when parts of the pattern are presented rapidly in serial order
  
  Length estimation – the ability to accurately estimate or compare visual lengths or distances
  
  Perceptual illusions – the ability to resist being affected by the illusory perceptual aspects of geometric figures
  
  Perceptual alternations – consistency in the rate of alternating between different visual perceptions
  
  Imagery – the ability to mentally encode and manipulate an object, idea, event or impression in the form of an abstract spatial form
- Auditory processing – the ability to perceive, analyze, synthesize and discriminate auditory stimuli
  
  Phonetic coding – the ability to code, process, and be sensitive to nuances in phonemic information in short-term memory
  
  Speech sound discrimination – the ability to detect and discriminate differences in phonemes or speech sounds under conditions of little or no distraction or distortion
  
  Resistance to auditory stimulus distortion – the ability to overcome the effects of distortion or distraction when listening to and understanding speech and language
  
  Memory for sound patterns – the ability to retain auditory events such as tones, tonal patterns, and voices
  
  General sound discrimination – the ability to discriminate tones, tone patterns, or musical materials regarding their fundamental attributes
  
  Temporal tracking – the ability to mentally track auditory sequential events to be able to count, anticipate or rearrange them
  
  Musical discrimination and judgment – the ability to discriminate and judge tonal patterns in music
  
  Maintaining and judging rhythm – the ability to recognize and maintain a musical beat in the short-term time period
  
  Sound-Intensity and duration discrimination – the ability to discriminate sound intensities and to be sensitive to the rhythmic aspects of tonal patterns
  
  Sound-Frequency discrimination – the ability to discriminate frequency attributes of tones
  
  Hearing and speech threshold factor – the ability to hear pitch and varying sound frequencies
  
  Absolute pitch – the ability to perfectly identify the pitch of tones
  
  Sound localization – the ability to localize heard sounds in space
- Processing speed – the ability to perform automatic cognitive tasks, especially under pressure
  
  Perceptual speed – the ability to rapidly and accurately search, compare and identify visual elements presented side-by- side or separated in a visual field
  
  Rate of test taking – the ability to rapidly perform tests which are relatively easy or over‑learned
  
  Number facility – the ability to rapidly perform basic arithmetic and accurately manipulate numbers quickly
  
  Speed of reasoning – speed or fluency in performing reasoning tasks in a limited time
  
  Reading speed – the ability to silently read and comprehend connected text rapidly and automatically
  
  Writing speed – the ability to correctly copy words or sentences repeatedly, or writing words, sentences, or paragraphs, as quickly as possible
- Decision speed and reaction time – how fast can an individual react to stimuli or task
  
  Simple reaction time – reaction time to the onset of a single stimulus that is presented at a particular point of time
  
  Choice reaction time – reaction time to the onset of one of two or more alternative stimuli, depending on which alternative is signaled
  
  Semantic processing speed – reaction time when a decision requires some encoding and mental manipulation of the stimulus content
  
  Mental comparison speed – reaction time where stimuli must be compared for a characteristic or attribute
  
  Inspection time – the ability to quickly detect change or discriminate between alternatives in a very briefly displayed stimulus
Besides mental intelligence, we also know body intelligence (independent or connected to cognitive abilities) that includes:
- Psychomotor speed – the ability to rapidly and fluently perform physical body motor movements largely independent of cognitive control
  
  Speed of limb movement – the ability to make rapid specific or discrete motor movements of the arms or legs
  
  Writing speed – the ability to correctly copy words or sentences repeatedly, or writing words, sentences, or paragraphs, as quickly as possible
Speed of articulation – the ability to rapidly perform successive articulations with the speech musculature
- Movement time – the time taken to physically move a body part to make the required response
- Psychomotor abilities – the ability to perform physical body motor movements with precision, coordination or strength
  
  Static strength – the ability to exert muscular force to move (push, lift, pull) a relatively heavy or immobile object
  
  Multi-limb coordination – the ability to make quick specific or discrete motor movements of the arms or legs
  
  Finger dexterity – the ability to make precisely coordinated movements of the fingers
  
  Manual dexterity – the ability to make precisely coordinated movements of a hand, or a hand and the attached arm
  
  Arm-hand steadiness – the ability to precisely and skillfully coordinate arm-hand positioning in space
  
  Control precision – the ability to exert precise control over muscle movements, typically in response to environmental feedback
  
  Aiming – the ability to precisely and fluently execute a sequence of eye-hand coordination movements for positioning purposes
  
  Gross body equilibrium – the ability to maintain the body in an upright position in space or regain balance after balance has been disturbed
- Olfactory abilities – the abilities that depend on sensory receptors of the olfactory system
  
  Olfactory memory – memory for smells
  
  Olfactory sensitivity – sensitivity to different smells
- Tactile abilities – the abilities involved in the perception and judging of sensations that are received through touch sensory receptors
  
  Tactile sensitivity – the ability to detect and make fine discriminations of pressure on the surface of the skim
- Kinesthetic abilities – the abilities that depend on sensory receptors that detect bodily position, weight, or movement of the muscles, tendons, and joints
  
  Kinesthetic sensitivity – the ability to detect, or be aware, of movements of the body or body parts
Source: Wikipedia and CHC – Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) Broad and Narrow Cognitive Ability Definitions

As you can see, there are many different types of intelligence. There are absolutely certain areas where you excel. But even though the g factor on top is more or less fixed, there are several ways how you can transcend this limitation at least to a certain extent (probably enough to be successful in any field in life):
1. Building up crystalized intelligence
2. Leveraging the power of a motivational environment
3. Possessing the growth mindset
Fluid and crystallized intelligence – that’s what really matters

As we have seen, many researchers reject the idea of a single measurement of intelligence such as the g factor. They argue that there are at least there two independent domains of cognitive performance of an individual – crystalized and fluid intelligence. And crystalized intelligence has its own important place in the CHC model.

Fluid intelligence is the capacity to figure out novel problems, and it’s more or less fixed. It’s limited by the brain’s biological traits. Crystallized intelligence is, on the other hand, defined by how much you know, by your knowledge and experience. It’s influenced by education and acculturation. Crystalized intelligence is the knowledge and skills that you possess. It’s what matters at the end of the day.

While crystalized and fluid intelligence are correlated, they change at different levels when you age. Fluid intelligence tends to peak at 20 and then slowly decline after. On the other hand, crystalized intelligence is stable and increases over your lifetime; and you have a huge influence on how your crystalized intelligence will advance.

The more you study, learn and expose yourself to new things, the smarter you become by increasing your crystalized intelligence.

There is also a possibility that acquiring additional knowledge can fine-tune your fluid intelligence by using your working memory better.

When you bring something from the long-term memory into the working memory (by bringing something to mind), it occupies fewer working memory slots than it did initially when you were trying to memorize it. It gets kind of compact (like zipping a file), and that enables you to play with more ideas at once and connect knowledge in new ways.

Smooth physical repetition creates muscle memory, and smooth mental repetition creates knowledge chunks that take up less working memory; you don’t have to relearn or re-explain pieces of information to yourself. You just know it and can intuitively do it; you know it from memory. And that’s how you become smarter by knowing more.

Environmental influences

Your development, actions and intelligence are always a product of your genes and your environment. Your genes activate or react differently in various environments. In other words, every inherited trait, even intelligence, can be enhanced, decreased, woken up or eliminated by repeating life experiences or functioning in a specific environment.

When it comes to intelligence development, the environment is especially important in the pre-natal period and in youth all the way up to the end of adolescence. But it can have a positive influence on your smarts even later.

When it comes to intelligence, the following elemental variables are important:
- Family – home resources, parents’ use of language, birth order, amount of praise etc.
- Peer group – stereotypes, complex intellectual environments etc.
- Education – in general, IQ decreases during summer breaks, children with delayed schooling and dropouts have lower IQ, less schooling usually equals lower IQ.
- Training – fluid intelligence can be increased through training, at least in the short-term, by improving the working memory. The growth mindset also has a great influence on intellectual abilities.
- Environmental enrichment – more stimulating environments can increase the number of synapses in the brain, especially at a young age, but also later.
- Nutrition – nutrition has an effect on intelligence even before birth, as well as afterwards, where sufficient protein intake is especially important.
- Stress – maternal stress, traumatic life situations and constant pressure have a negative influence on intelligence.
- Exposure to toxic chemicals – exposure to some toxic chemicals can reduce mental abilities of a child during pregnancy and at a young age. Similarly, alcohol, drugs and tobacco can have a negative influence on the child’s intellectual development.
- Perinatal factors – complications at birth or low birth weight can have serious implications on the child’s intellectual development.
- Environmental exposure – if a child is exposed to a specific knowledge domain and creativity is encouraged at the same time, the child can develop exceptional understanding of that field. That’s how geniuses are born, even if they don’t have a really high IQ.
With age, the potential positive influence of the environment declines, but an influence still exists. It’s been proven that your brain synapses can grow in the older age as well.

Thus, seeking complex intellectual environments, lifelong learning, regular reading and developing competences, proper nutrition, building yourself a motivational environment and avoiding severe stress does have a positive influence on your cognitive abilities.

Graph content: Carol Dweck, Image: Nigel Holmes

If you can influence your intelligence, that means only one thing – grow

I’m pretty sure you don’t like the idea that the IQ is completely fixed. Neither do I. A fixed IQ would be a very unfair thing. While biology and primary socialization absolutely impose limits on us, as we’ve seen, you can fine-tune your overall intelligence, and even more dramatically improve your crystalized intelligence.

Actually, only being able to improve your crystalized intelligence and optimizing your working memory is not enough. You must constantly improve both, otherwise you are falling behind. If you’re not going forward, you’re going backwards. And you’re wasting your potential and resources. That’s where the right attitude and the growth mindset come into play.

Stanford professor Dr. Carol Dweck has found out that the biggest difference between successful and unsuccessful people lies in their mindset. The right mindset is more important than IQ.

You can either have a fixed mindset or a growth one. If you have a fixed mindset, you believe that your character and potential are unchangeable, have been “written in stone” since birth. You assume that they cannot be modified or improved in a meaningful way.

The second option is a growth mindset. It means that you believe that you can improve your character by working on yourself. If you have a growth mindset, you see yourself as being at a specific starting point with the option to improve yourself through hard work – your skills, beliefs, competences and intelligence.

The fixed mindset leads to hiding your flaws, doing only things that you are naturally good at, feeling defined by failures, being unwilling to improve your relationships, and feeling bad if everything doesn’t go as planned, even if you’ve learned something new.

On the other hand, with a growth mindset, flaws and problems are only opportunities to improve. The new and the unknown bring learning opportunities, mastery leads to passion and purpose, and every failure is only a temporary setback. Nothing is given and everything can be improved.

When it comes to intelligence, you can at least fine-tune your fluid intelligence, dramatically develop your crystalized intelligence over the years, excel at specific cognitive tasks (that other people will pay you for), make sure you reach your intellectual maximum, apply your skills in various life situations, and prevent your cognitive decline.

You can achieve all that with the right attitude powered by the growth mindset, curiosity, deliberate practice and hard work.

Your current self	Your ideal self
Modeling >>

A year in review – 50+ questions for annual reflection

I’m a big fan of performing regular self-reflections. Self-reflections are about systematically asking yourself thought-provoking questions to develop a deeper level of understanding yourself (thoughts, feelings, visions, goals etc.) and your environment (relationships, trends, opportunities etc.).

Not to sound too abstract, performing self-reflection means that you take some alone time, grab a pen and a piece of paper, and reflect on your goals, beliefs, behavioral patterns, emotional knots, changes in your environment, and everything else that’s happening in your life.

The biggest benefit of self-reflection is that you gain a better overview of your life – you better understand yourself and your life situations (and other people), and thus you can directly impact how you think and feel about certain events in your life; and most importantly, in the end you can act more wisely.

New understandings lead to new thoughts, new thoughts lead to new emotions and consequently to new actions. But there’s even more. With regular self-reflections, you can act smarter, you can make sure that your goals and environmental forces are aligned.

One big part of self-reflection is to analyze as much information as possible that can help you shape a superior life strategy, progress towards your goals faster and, in the end, live a better life. The good life.

Self-reflections are about becoming a wiser person and acting smarter.

To really enjoy all the benefits of self-reflection, you have to perform it on a weekly, if not daily basis. My daily reflections don’t take me more than 20 minutes, and sometimes I do longer ones that take up to an hour; especially when I’m stressed out or severe negative feelings concentrate.

These are usually the best spent minutes in a day, because I gain so many insights about myself, life and others.

But at the end of the year comes the time for a special type of reflection – annual reflection. I call it a year in review. The end of the year is always a great opportunity to do extensive analysis of where you are, how satisfied you are with your life, and where to go next.

A year in review

Christmas holidays are ideal for a big annual reflection

I’m always surprised how full gyms are in January. I guess entering a new year does motivate us all to go after new goals. And it makes sense.

Life slows down in Christmas time, relationships and celebrations come before hard work, and usually we are all surprised at how quickly another year has passed us by and start wondering what we’ve really achieved in the past 12 months.

Well, if Christmas holidays are ideal for a bigger self-reflection and setting new goals, it makes sense to do it in a very structured and systematic way.

That’s why I prepared a framework with a bunch of questions that will help you perform the year-in-review in a very professional way. You know, according to the mantra that whatever you do, give it 110 %.

Before we go to specific questions and exercises, the goals you want to achieve by performing the annual reflection or the year in review are:

Assess where you have been in the beginning of the year and where you are now
Update your life vision and set new priorities
Make sure you are going in the right direction (following your True North)
Carefully plan the next year together with specific goals (prepare new Goal Journey Maps)
Think of all the ways you can adjust to achieve your goals faster or with fewer resources
Analyze all the changes in your environment to make sure you properly adjust
Brainstorm new ideas you have about your life and what you would like to experience
Update your life strategy if necessary
Systematically go through all the new things that you learned
Reestablish the connection with yourself

AgileLeanLife - a Year In Review - Cover As I mentioned, the best way to perform annual self-reflection is by doing a set of analytical exercises and answering several questions about your past, present and future. I have prepared the framework and questions for you. You can either download the free PDF below or read the rest of the blog post.

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A Year in Review – Annual reflection – PDF Template (with input fields)

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Life satisfaction chart and one priority area for the next year

The best way to start the year in review is with a life satisfaction chart. The life satisfaction chart shows how satisfied you are with different core life areas. If you are doing such self-assessment for the first time, you need to make two charts:

Life satisfaction in the beginning of the year
Life satisfaction at the end of the year

Building a life satisfaction chart is really easy. You draw a scale from 1 to 10 horizontally and list all ten areas of life vertically:

Health
Relationships
Money
Career
Emotions
Competences
Fun
Spirituality
Technology

You assess every area of life from 1 to 10. In the second step, you take another look at all the areas you assessed with 4, 5, 6 or 7. These are the areas where you’re averagely satisfied.

It’s much easier to reflect and draw conclusions if you have a more shaped and clearer view of whether you’re satisfied with a specific area of life or not. So, assess life areas again, but now by using only the numbers 1, 2, 3, 8, 9 and 10. Highlight every 1, 2 and 3 with red, and every 8, 9 and 10 with green.

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

An example of the life satisfaction (assessment) chart

After completing the assessment for both points in time (beginning and end of the year), you should make several conclusions:

In which life areas have you progressed or declined the most? Why?
Which life areas are currently in the red and which ones in the green? Why?
What is the one life area you want to improve the most in the next year?

The core bottom-line of this exercise is to get a general overview of what happened with your life in the past year and even more, to select one life area on which you will primarily focus all of your improvement efforts in the upcoming year.

A Year in Review: Analysis of the past year with proper closure

Once you have a general overview, it’s time to dive deep into the past year. You want to gain as many insights as possible from the past 12 months. These insights must then be an important input when planning the next year. Here are the questions to answer:

Learning from success

What were your 3 – 5 biggest accomplishments in the past year?
What contributed the most to these accomplishments (new knowledge, a coach, focused effort etc.)?
Which other goals have you achieved in the past year and which new things are you proud of?
Which healthy habits have you followed the past year?
What were the smartest decisions you took?
Which new competences (knowledge, skills) and strengths have you developed?
What were 2 – 3 greatest lessons that you learned?
Which risks did you take and how did they pay off?

Learning from failure

What were your biggest failures in the past year?
How did you grow as a person and what have you really learned from failure?
What contributed the most to the desired results not happening?
What other goals did you not meet in the past 12 months?
Which unhealthy habits did you follow in the past year?
What were your worst decisions of the year? Why did you make them?
What is the biggest “unfinished business” of the year and what can you do about that?
What do you wish you had done differently in the past year? How could you have done things better?
What risks did you take that didn’t pay off? What were your wrong assumptions?

Relationships

Did you make any new relationships that enriched your life? Who and why?
Which relationships improved the most in your life and why?
Which relationships took a downturn and why?
Who had the biggest impact on your life in the past year? Positive or negative?

Other

Select 3 – 5 keywords for the past year (use free associations)
Which new things did you discover about yourself?
What were the biggest resource wasters (time, money, energy) in the past year?
What were the best resource investments (time, money, energy) in the past year?

Answer all of the questions and then carefully review them. Try to gain as many insights and draw as many bottom-lines from the previous year as possible.

Firm decisions for the upcoming year

At this point, you should have a good picture of where you currently are in life and about the core events that had an influence on your life in the past year.

The next step is about making firm decisions on how you will improve yourself in the future and what goals you will follow. Here are the questions to answer:

Behavioral patterns

What are 3 – 4 things that you will stop doing in the next 12 months?
What are 3 – 4 things that you will start doing in the next 12 months?
What are 3 – 4 things that you will continue doing in the next 12 months?
What other new healthy habits will you start following and which bad habits will you ditch? How?
Name one personality trait you want to get rid of to become a better person next year

Personal growth and competences

Which new competences do you plan to develop in the next year?
What is the one skill you already possess and haven’t been using that you will put to hard work?
What is the biggest step out of your comfort zone that you will take or which fears will you face?
Which completely new things will you try in the coming year?
How do you intend to be different at the end of next year?

Relationships

Which existing relationship in your life deserves more attention?
Which new relationships do you plan to forge in the upcoming year?
What kind of help will you seek from current and new people in your life?
Who will you help to progress in life in the next year? Who will you mentor?

Environment and trends

What are currently the greatest opportunities in your environment?
Which environmental trends and forces are supporting your goals and which ones are blocking you?
Which people are supporting your efforts and which people are playing against you?
What obstacles are you facing and how will you overcome them to accomplish your goals?
How can you improve your environment so that it’s more encouraging and motivating?

Goals

On which life area will you focus your efforts the most (from the life assessment table)?
What are 3 – 5 things you must accomplish in the next year, no matter what? Why?
List all the goals from your life vision you want to achieve for different life areas (approximately 10 goals).
- Define for which goals using the search mode makes sense and for which the execution mode
What is the next planning step? For which goals will you build Goal Journey Maps?

Annual-reflection

I hope you answered all the questions. It’s not that hard, right? The main point of such an introspection is to change your behavior and your actions. You have to do things differently.

You have to improve and grow. You have to start doing certain things and stop doing others. You have to start making wiser decisions. If you don’t, the introspection was useless. Changes and adjustments are the whole point of it.

Reflection also doesn’t equal goal setting. It just gives you a general overview of your past journey, where you currently are, and where you want to go. It’s only the first step in goal setting. It’s about understanding how you can do things better, setting priorities, and defining the next execution steps.

The wisest next step is making Goal Journey Maps or any other kind of a detailed flexible plan for the area you want to improve the most and for a few goals that are your priorities.

Just writing down your goals is never enough. You have to live your goals every single day with proper execution. I hope you had a great year and that the next one is even more successful. Happy New Year!

How to generate great ideas that everybody will envy you

If you want to have a successful career in today’s creative society, you must have a constant flow of great ideas. You must become an idea person with an execution-oriented mindset.

When a new problem appears, you must have the skills to come up with unique solutions and bring them to life.
At every step, you have to see the potential for how things could be improved.
Even more, from time to time you should “live in the future” and then help build what’s missing.

And you know what, achieving all that is actually pretty easy. Having great ideas is a personality characteristic that can be developed. If you become the right sort of person, you will have the right sort of hunches; you will get the right type of brilliant ideas that everybody will love.

The secret to becoming the right sort of person is by looking at the world slightly differently and having a bulletproof idea generation system.

In this blog post, you will learn exactly how to achieve that. You will learn things like:

How to do an identity shift if you think you can’t come up with greati ideas
The difference between organic and made-up ideas
What really makes ideas great
20 creativity triggers
30 techniques to use when you are brainstorming ideas
How to protect your ideas from idea murderers
Why changes are great opportunities to come up with great ideas
How to cherry-pick the best ideas
How to bring ideas to life as fast as possible

A personal idea generation system

After spending time with hundreds of people who most often have the problem of having too many great ideas (entrepreneurs, innovators etc.), I noticed three main differences in their thinking that stand out from the rest of population.

Firstly, they see themselves as individuals who have great ideas. They know that doubt is the number one idea killer. Thus, instead of doubting their creativity, they just pay attention to every single idea they get.

Secondly, they look at the world slightly differently. They see problems as opportunities, people’s needs as something that should be satisfied, future as their mission to co-build and a potential something that needs to be brought to life. They focus their mind on solutions.

But most importantly, people who have many brilliant ideas always have some kind of a framework in their mind that helps them come up with great ideas – a system for generating and prioritizing ideas.

The thing is, they might not even be aware of it, but they always have it. It’s a certain type of mindset and process that they follow, even if they don’t really know it (because it’s part of who they are, their unconscious self).

You can only have two problems in your life – a lack of brilliant ideas or too many brilliant ideas. Which will be yours?

If we take a step back, a system is nothing but a set of rules and processes that you follow to get a predictable outcome. The output we want in our case are, of course, brilliant ideas.

The best way to achieve such a creative output is to follow a carefully orchestrated idea generation process. In practical terms that means the following:

Identity shift – seeing yourself as a creative person with unique ideas
Idea generation – the secrets of actually coming up with good ideas
Creativity triggers – tricks that can open your mind and help improve ideas even further
Idea prioritization – a valuation system for deciding which of the generated ideas are the best and have the most potential
Development of ideas – a set of steps for developing ideas into feasible and tangible solutions that everybody will love and understand.

As you can see, coming up with good ideas is a process, not a one-time event. The goal of the first three phases of the process (1-3) is to generate as many ideas as possible. They are called the input ideas. The goal is to have many crazy, stupid, bad, random and unrealistic input ideas.

And the goal of the last two phases (4-5) is to select the best ideas. They are called the output ideas. At the end of the process, there should be a few new, different, brilliant, out-of-the-box and feasible ideas.

The best news is that after following the idea generation process a few times, your mind assimilates it and you follow it intuitively. It becomes a natural way how you think, you become an idea person.

Excited? Now let’s dive deep into each of these phases.

How to generate great ideas

Identity shift – everybody can have outstanding ideas

You have 100 billion neurons in your brain. You are a product of billions of years of evolution. And then you think you aren’t a creative being? Don’t fool yourself.

Among your brain cells, creative juices are absolutely flowing. You are no exception. You just have to let it out on the surface. How? With the right system, of course.

But first, there is a big issue. If you don’t do an identity shift first, you will never ever come forth with your ideas – in business or personal life. You will sabotage yourself in every possible way instead. If you don’t see yourself as an idea person, you murder every single one of your (brilliant) ideas; even before you become aware of them.

If you don’t see yourself as an idea person, you still come up with great ideas – but you either instantly and intentionally forget them or you let them slowly die by doing nothing. What a brutal self-sabotage.

I’ve seen it hundreds of times in startup teams. There is always one person who is shy, doesn’t see themselves as creative, but you can see from a distance that there are ideas flowing in their brain. All you have to do is to encourage such a person to share their thoughts, and ideas start flowing. Be such encouragement to yourself.

But why don’t I see myself as an idea person?

There are many potential reasons why you don’t see yourself as an idea person.

Maybe your creativity was never encouraged, maybe somebody shamelessly laughed at one of your ideas when you were young, or maybe you are an unrealistic perfectionist who only sees “cancer cures” as ideas that are good enough.

Here are the most probable reasons why you don’t see yourself as an idea person:

You stifled your creative juice with doubt; but that only means a flow of ideas is boiling under the hood
You are afraid of being rejected; but being rejected usually drives you to be even more creative
Nobody asked you about your ideas; but it’s your duty to be proactive and come forth with ideas
You have an unrealistic view on great ideas; they aren’t really rocket science ideas
You never really put an effort into systematically generating ideas; build yourself a system

Whatever your reason is, stop it. Everybody can be creative. Everybody can have brilliant ideas. So, close your eyes, imagine life is only a dream, and see yourself as the most creative person alive. Don’t doubt yourself for a second.

When your mind tries to serve you all the lies why you might not be an idea person, use the thought-stopping tool. Just say to your mind: shut up, I am the most creative person alive. Period.

Only doing the identity shift is far from enough to have brilliant ideas; but it’s a necessary start if you want to come up with them at all.

Thus, consciously decide that you will kick yourself out of the comfort zone and leverage creative juice that flows between your brain cells to advance your career and live a more creative fulfilling life.

Idea generation

Idea generation phase – the secrets that will help you generate thousands of brilliant ideas

There are two general ways to come up with great ideas – you either notice an idea or you deliberately come up with it.

To notice great ideas (the so-called organic ideas), you have to start paying attention to what is happening in your environment. You have to pay attention to problems, needs and challenges.

To deliberately come up with good ideas (the so-called made-up ideas), you need the self-discipline to sit down and brainstorm. You need to know a few good creative tricks that will ignite your creative mind; and you have to do it often enough to make sure your creative juice stays fresh.

Combine both ways and you will become a living idea generation machine.

Organic ideas – Start noticing ideas based on observing what is happening around you

The most often way how ideas are born is the organic way. You notice, not think of, an idea. You notice that something is missing. But next second after you notice an idea, there is a big risk of forgetting it.

The solution for that is very simple. Always have a place to write down your ideas when you notice that something is missing in this world. A physical notepad. An app. Your hand. Wherever.

Just don’t be lazy, and write down every single idea that comes up to your mind during the day. The most brilliant ideas are usually noticed, not deliberately brainstormed! You observe something, see something missing and spontaneously get an idea.

Basically that means you have to do almost nothing to come up with brilliant ideas. You just have to be a little bit more observant of your environment, mindful of your thoughts, and disciplined enough to write down ideas that you get during the day.

Start with the goal of noticing five ideas during the day. Every single day for a month, write down at least five ideas that spontaneously come to your mind.

Pay attention to your thoughts and ideas that randomly come up, from the moment you sit on the toilet, take a shower and prepare yourself a breakfast, during the time when you work hard at your job, to the point when you come home to relax and read before sleep.

Start writing them down. That’s how you’ll rewire your brain to always pay attention to great ideas.

Besides observing everyday situations, be especially attentive to what goes through your mind during the times when the diffused mode of thinking is active. These are situations like:

Under the shower
Taking a walk, going for a jog or any kind of physical exercise
Driving, cooking
Finding yourself in new environments
Playing (with kids, games etc.)
Thinking about two different topics at the same time

What extensively helps in coming up with great organic ideas is having some kind of domain expertise or even several of them. An idea must be a match for your skills. Knowledge is what really powers brilliant organic ideas.

Consequently, to have good ideas read a lot, develop new competences, become an expert in a certain industry, constantly be curious and study how different things work. Develop T-shaped skills and organic ideas will start to flow in abundance.

Think outside the box

Made-up ideas: Search for triggers that push you into the brainstorming phase

The second way to get to good ideas is to sit down and think of ideas. This way is much harder. You need a lot of discipline. You have to sit down and brainstorm a lot. You need to brainstorm hundreds of shitty ideas to get a few good ones.

That means one of the best exercises you can do to become an idea person is to brainstorm ideas every day. Timebox 30 minutes on a daily basis for brainstorming, take a piece of paper and a pen, and brainstorm at least 100 ideas.

Every single day. After a month, you will become an endless fountain of creative ideas. You will rewire yourself to squeeze out every single drop of the creative juice you possess. Do it as a 30-day challenge and your life will never be the same.

If brainstorming every day takes too much discipline…

Few people who are motivated and disciplined enough to brainstorm ideas every day. That means we need a better solution and it lies in the 3R formula of how habits are formed.

Every habit starts with a reminder (a cue), which triggers a certain type of behavior. In other words, after the triggers fires you do a specific routine – the habit itself. And in the end, you enjoy the reward, the benefit you gain from performing the habit. Reminder, routine, reward.

We already know the routine that you want to perform. You want to sit down and brainstorm ideas. The rewards are also pretty obvious. You want to advance in your career, become more productive, be appreciated for your brilliance, help the company to grow, or make more money.

Triggers are the ones that can really help you become more disciplined with brainstorming. What you need is a list of triggers that automatically push you into the brainstorming mode. Let me give you a few examples that I use in my own life:

Whenever I encounter a problem, I sit down and brainstorm ideas
Whenever I am alone and bored, I take a piece of paper and start brainstorming ideas
Whenever someone beats me in a competition, I start brainstorming ideas for how I can improve
Whenever I get rejected, I transform sorrows into brilliant ideas on how to become even more awesome
Whenever I hear someone complaining about something, I brainstorm potential solutions
When I travel to a new country, I always write down at least 10 new ideas
After I finish a book, I always brainstorm ideas on how to build new content on the shoulders of giants
After watching an inspiring movie, I sit down and brainstorm a few ideas

Think of 3 – 5 situations that could be your potential natural brainstorming triggers. It must be something that happens in your life at just the right frequency (a few times per week at the most), gets your creative juice flowing (usually strong emotional states), and directs your brainstorming to practical solutions.

That’s the secret to having awesome made-up ideas.

When you deliberately brainstorm to make up ideas, there is one more big psychological challenge you have to overcome. What happens is that when you brainstorm ideas, most of the ideas are crap and that is hard to accept.

But among those hundreds of crappy ideas are real gems that can change your life forever. That means there is a price to pay for digging yourself through the best possible ideas. The price is dirt thrown at your ego. You can see the dirt as a gatekeeper, because only the most persistent and bold individuals deserve to have the best ideas.

You must deserve everything worthwhile in life; even brilliant ideas.

What really are great ideas?

To end this chapter properly, if you ever wondered what great ideas really are, know that they are nothing but:

Solutions to problems; so whenever you encounter a problem, start thinking about ideas.
Fulfillments of needs; so pay attention to what people want and desire.
Creations that arouse certain feelings; so think about how you want to make people feel.

That means the best way to come up with good ideas is to be curious (ask questions), observe, and pay attention to people’s problems, needs and feelings. Listen and look around, and ideas will start flowing.

Brainstorming session

Creativity triggers – secrets that will help you make your ideas twice as good

Much like you can have triggers to lead you directly into the brainstorming mode, in the same way you can help yourself with triggers that spark your creativity even further by keeping your mind open.

And at the same time, you have to avoid different kinds of idea killers, since they have the opposite effect from what you want. That’s how ideas are improved.

The most common creativity triggers are:

Reverse assumptions – How would the opposite look? What if I did the opposite?
Playing with attributes – What different materials can be used, can I make it smaller, cheaper, etc.
The skyscraper technique – How would a 100-times better solution look like?
Traveling into the future – How will the world look like in 10, 50 or 100 years and how will the problem be solved?
Convergences – How can I merge two or more things into one?
Knowledge transfer – How could a solution from one industry be used in another industry? That means you should read books completely outside from your domain from time to time.
Curiosity – Ask thousands of questions why things are as they are.
Modeling – What would [your role model] do? How would [Einstein] think?
Competition research and clever copying – You know, to make existing ideas even better ideas.
Debating and listening to other people – What problems and needs do people really have?
Rejections and conflicts – Rejections can always spark creativity if you know how to direct negative feelings into new ideas for improvements.
Validated learning – Fail, make mistakes and learn from them. Ideas will start flowing.
Changing surroundings – When you change the environment you trigger new thoughts.
Using different creative techniques – Brainstorming, reverse brainstorming, brainwriting, six thinking hats, random words, story board, mind maps, SCAMPER etc. More about that later.
All kinds of art – Music, movies, paintings, digital art, inspirational sites, …
Humor, having fun and making love

As a bonus, one of the best creativity triggers is to spend time with creative people, preferably the ones who are active in other industries than you. If you socialize outside of your normal social circle, new debates and thoughts will take place and that will give you many new creative ideas.

A list of creative techniques that will help you come up with brilliant ideas

One of the best ways to open your mind and improve your ideas is to use different proven creative techniques (obviously they combine different creativity triggers).

The following are the most popular creative techniques that will absolutely help you come up with brilliant ideas or improve them:

Brainstorming: Generate creative ideas through intensive and freewheeling group discussions. You can also do it solo by taking a piece of paper and a pen, and writing down ideas that come to mind.
Reverse brainstorming: Getting ideas by going in the opposite direction. Rather than thinking about how to solve a problem, think of how to cause the same problem. And then how to take preventive measures.
6-3-5 Brainwriting: 6 participants write down 3 ideas in 5 minutes on a paper and then swap their papers clockwise for up to six rounds. Seeing others’ ideas should encourage new idea creation.
Challenge assumptions: Write down all your assumptions and ask yourself: What if [assumption] was not true?
Mind Mapping: Use the mind mapping process to brainstorm or develop your ideas.
Crowd-Storming: Collect ideas, comments and suggestions from people on the internet (or your friends or experts or whoever).
Vision Boards: Build a collection of visual materials around your ideas.
Story Board: Build a collection of visual materials that tell a story of how the idea can be applied.
Role Playing: Take up the role of an ideal persona (user) for your idea and play out how the idea would help the persona in everyday life. You can involve other people in the roleplay.
5W1H method: Use questions Why, What, Who, When, Where and How to develop ideas.
5-Whys: Ask yourself “why” 5 times to identify the underlying causes of the problem and try to solve it on a different level.
SCAMPER: Do the following to your ideas – Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to other uses, Eliminate, Rearrange.
Osborn checklist: How can you adapt, modify, substitute, magnify/maximize, minimize/eliminate, rearrange, reverse, combine or apply one of your ideas to another use?
Harvey cards: Animate, contradict, symbolize, superimpose, transfer, add, substitute, distort, transform, sympathize, analogize, subtract, isolate, disguise, change size, repeat, mythologize, fantasize, combine or make a parody of your idea.
The six thinking hats: Look at the problem from six different aspects – facts, subjective opinion, doubts, positive qualities, alternative ideas and process.
Attribute listing: List as many attributes as possible and play with modifying them.
Morphological box: Build a matrix of possible parameters (attributes) and all the possible configurations for every parameter. Then visualize and analyze all the possible combinations.
Bad2Good: In every bad idea, there is something good. Find it.
Participatory ideas: Invite users to participate in the process of idea generation or improvement.
Forced relationships: Take an unrelated object and force your thinking into finding a relation between that object and your idea.
Free associations: Fire a flow of free associations that will lead you to new ideas. Just make sure you don’t do any censorship, but rather really write down every one of your associations.
Visualizing and daydreaming: Visualize improvements of your ideas, new functionalities, different applications, and so on. Just spin different images in your head.
Idea borrowing: Borrow an idea and make it into something new.
Biomimicry: Think about how nature would solve the problem or look for inspiration in nature’s best evolutionary ideas.
Excursion technique: In your mind, go to an imaginary excursion (forest, museum, train …) and write down 8 – 10 images you saw on the journey. Draw analogies with the problem or idea.
More inspiration: Gather innovations, products and technologies from all possible industries, sectors and domains, and try to apply them to your idea.
Random Input: Select a random noun in a dictionary, open a book on a random page, open a random Wikipedia article. That should spark a new flow of ideas in your mind.
Redefinition: Think of a broader or narrower problem from the original problem you are trying to solve. Look for solutions on those different levels.
Wishing: Imagine life is just a dream. Then start a sentence with I wish or Wouldn’t it be nice if … and of course think of your idea.
Walt Disney Technique: Play with your idea first as a Dreamer with no limitations, then as a Realist minding limitations, and at the end as a hard Critic thinking about how the idea can be improved.

Test a few of these techniques. Find the ones that work best for you. Enjoy a constant flow of awesome ideas. And if this still doesn’t work, organize an idea workshop where you invite all your friends and use a few of these techniques together. I have no doubt you will have lots of fun.

Idea murderers

Protect your ideas from idea murderers

At this point, you know all the awesome tools and secrets for brainstorming great ideas. Now you have to make sure they aren’t murdered.

There are many idea murderers and your job is to protect your ideas from these evildoers. Protecting ideas from murders most often means protecting them from yourself.

These awful idea murderers are disguised as:

Doubt – People won’t like it, it already exists, it’s not a unique idea, …
Criticism – It’s nothing really new, anybody can come up with such an idea, it’s not perfect, …
Fear – I could be mistaken, the idea might fail, we need more research, it’s not my responsibility …
Status quo – It’s too big of a change, let’s keep it under consideration, the current solution works, …
Predicting feasibility – The idea is not feasible, it probably won’t work, it’s not logical, …
Predicting limitations – I don’t have time, it’s too expensive, the market is not ready yet, …

If you want to have really great ideas, make sure you are properly managing all the idea murderers. Here are some weapons you can use:

To deal with doubt, make sure that the desire to grow and individuate is stronger than the need to belong and be average.
To stop criticism, use the thought-stopping method we mentioned (shut up your inner critic) and be satisfied with good enough.
Turn mistakes and failure into validated learning.
Always challenge the status quo and forget about the best practices.
Always put your assumptions to the test. Data is more accurate than any rhetoric or your beliefs.

Tech changes

Great ideas and opportunities come along with shifting paradigms

There is one more secret to having brilliant ideas. Great ideas always address or suggest some kind of a change. Changes are thus the biggest creative and business opportunities.

If you want to have brilliant ideas, look for the changes that are currently happening in your life or the ones you can trigger.

There is a constant flux of structural changes in all of our lives, including:

Technological changes
Social change
Demographic change
Environmental change
Structural changes
Political change
Regulatory change
Market inefficiencies
Industry changes

These changes hide the biggest opportunities. And when you are exposed to opportunities, ideas start to follow. There is a very simple trick you can do. To be exposed to more changes (with the goal of getting more brilliant ideas), expose yourself to a fast-changing environment.

Operating in the right industry is the first step to achieving that. You can absolutely be creative in every industry, but in some industries it’s much harder to come up with brilliant ideas; although the ideas can be much more valuable.

Established industries with a long tradition, existing markets, sustainable innovation and not many changes can be refreshed, but it’s pretty damn hard to do it. Richard Branson has the formula how to do it.

On the other hand, we have young industries with high growth, disruptive innovations, and many unknowns – the so-called blue ocean industries. These are usually the industries that destroy or reshape traditional industries. In such industries, there are many opportunities for testing and trying new ideas.

In short, many times the best thing to come up with great ideas is to be at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field. It’s never only about you. Your environment also matters, even when it comes to ideas.

Select the best ideas

Idea prioritization – among the many, among the dirt, diamonds are hidden

The point of everything we talked about until now is to come up with as many ideas as possible on a regular basis. All the tools, tips and tricks we discussed give you the power to come up with hundreds if not thousands of ideas every week.

But we also said that most of these ideas will be crappy. So what? Among the many, brilliant ideas are hidden.

That leads us to the next stage. An important part of the idea generation process is to identify these gems. In other words, you must have a really good idea prioritization system. What you need is a set of criteria to cherry-pick the best ideas in your arsenal.

The most common criteria for idea prioritization are the following:

Risks and potentials
Passion
Skills
Market feedback
Technological feasibility
Economic feasibility
Timing

Risks and potentials

The two simple questions to begin idea assessment is what could go right and what could go wrong? People usually ask themselves only one of these two questions. Ask yourself both of them. What you’re looking for are ideas with small risk and big potential reward.

What could go wrong?	What could go right?
Small risk	Big potential reward

Passion

As we will talk about in the next chapter, only having brilliant ideas is never enough. You need to push your best ideas, you need to be committed to idea realization and thorough execution.

Positive feedback is absolutely important, but you are the one who has to be passionate about the idea. Thus, ask yourself – are you really honestly passionate about your idea? Provide only a deeply honest answer, otherwise things will backfire in the execution stage later.

Skills

Your ideas must match your skills. Actually, the idea execution must be just a little bit tougher than your competences. That way, idea execution becomes a challenge.

If realizing an idea is not challenging for you, boredom will take place. But if they are too challenging, you might get scared away. So, look for ideas for which execution is just above your skills in the learning zone.

Market feedback

Every idea has its target market, which can include customers, boss, employees, family members etc. The target market are people who will use the idea. And here comes the most important part of the idea selection criteria.

Never assume what customers will like. Never ever. Always test your ideas with the target market; and you have to do it the right way. Simply asking them whether they like your idea is the wrong way.

You have to show people how their lives will be changed, how things will be more efficient and how problems will be solved. You need to use lean startup practices to test your ideas.

Don’t ask people what they think of your ideas, show them how their lives will be changed.

If you are validating a business idea, you can already do some calculations of the market size (TAM, SAM, SOM), define potential customer segments, analyze competitive solutions, and so on.

You can do basic market research to get a real insight into how good your idea is. It takes a few hours of research to get a really great insight into how original your idea really is.

The steps to do get initial feedback from the market about your idea:

Do customer interviews
Build minimum viable products (more about that in the next chapter)
Analyze all the competitive solutions and ideas
Ask yourself – who would kill (or, better yet, pay) for such an idea right now

Ideas can be completely new or they can be improved existing solutions. They can be targeted at a completely new market (people who never used anything like that in the past) or they can address the existing market (people who use similar solutions). Either way, ideas must be technologically and economically feasible.

Economic feasibility

It’s not rocket science to figure basic economic feasibility. You don’t need a detailed financial plan. For economic feasibility, take a napkin and a pen and write down all the costs that come with idea realization.

Everything you can think off, down to the paper clips. Then multiply the costs with Pi (3.14). That is probably more realistic. Next, think of how long it will take to execute the idea – how many days, weeks or months? Then again multiply it with Pi.

Now you know the costs. The next thing you need are revenues or savings or any other benefits that an idea can bring. If the idea is something that can be sold, check competitive products and roughly determine the price. Now calculate how many items must be sold to cover the costs.

If the idea is about savings or any other benefits, try to put some kind of value to it. It’s very basic math, but it will give you a good overall feeling of economic feasibility. Does the basic math work out?

In the initial stages, it’s much more important to talk to potential customers than to do any kind of detailed financial plans, especially if your ideas are something completely new.

Nevertheless, it’s good to know the risks (costs) involved and all the potential benefits that come with idea execution. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to do such basic calculations.

Technological feasibility

To determine technological feasibility, you should have enough domain expertise or find someone who does and can tell if the idea is feasible.

Today technology is developed to the point where usually a much more important question is whether anybody will use the idea, rather if it can be made (if you aren’t developing a new cure for some lethal virus).

Do some basic research, talk to the experts, build a prototype yourself, and you will soon have the answer if an idea is feasible or not.

Timing is everything

Another important aspect when it comes to new ideas is timing. Timing is everything. If the timing is wrong, that doesn’t mean you should instantly kill an idea. Because timing is rarely perfect. You have to reshape the environment in a way that the timing becomes perfect.

Thus, the right question is not whether the timing is perfect, but how to make the perfect timing. There are several ways how you can play with the timing:

Speeding or slowing down execution
Putting ideas in a different context
Finding ways to reduce friction
Mobilizing additional resources
Reshaping ideas

Take your ideas and put them in time and space; but not only here and now. Play with different spaces and different time dimensions. Think about how you can create a better timing for your ideas. Prioritize those ideas, which will have the perfect timing sooner in the future.

In summary, here is a checklist for validating your ideas:

Is there a manageable risk?	Yes
Are there potential big rewards?	Rate from 1 – 10
Am I passionate about the idea?	Yes
Does the idea match my skills (is it a healthy challenge)?	Yes
Can I easily get feedback from the market?	Rate from 1 – 10
Can I build an MVP fast?	Yes
Does the basic math work?	Yes
Is the technology available yet?	Yes
How good is the timing?	Rate from 1 – 10
Can I start working on the idea tomorrow?	Yes

Use this just as a general framework for cherry-picking your ideas. Adjust it to the time and information you have at your disposal.

Sometimes you won’t have all the data. Sometimes you will only have minutes to assess your ideas. The point of this phase is to select the best ideas you have and then come forward with them. There is still a long process before the ideas come to life and there are usually still many checkpoints.

There are a few other frameworks you can use to assess and select the best ideas. Examples are the COCD‑Box, force-field analysis, hundred-euro test, negative selection and others. If you need a more sophisticated framework, I suggest you do further research on the mentioned options.

Rapid Prototyping

Bringing ideas to life – it all starts with a brilliant idea, but execution matters even more

The final stage of idea development is execution. There is a big difference between “I have an idea” stage and “I will build an initial version tonight” to test it or to show it to the boss or a potential client.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Building prototypes quickly based on your idea and testing them on the market is what leads to success.

That’s where developing ideas into (business) opportunities and execution come into play. Absolutely the best framework for idea realization is the lean startup. The basic idea of the lean startup is to put the user in the center from the beginning.

Stay flexible about your initial idea and instead develop the final version together with users. At the end of the day, the idea is meant for them.

The lean startup framework is useful for testing all kinds of ideas, not only business ideas. In a short summary, the steps in the lean startup for realizing the ideas are the following:

Build a vision around your idea, so you become passionate about it and infect others with your passion. Your vision must be fueled by a strong why.
Create a business canvas or lean canvas to clarify your assumptions around the idea and its realization, so you can systematically test them on the market.
Do customer interviews to get the first feedback on how painful actually is the problem you are trying to solve for the target market with your idea. During the interviews, find earlyevangelists (supporters) who will help you develop the final version.
Build minimum viable products or prototypes and commit to validated learning from day one to further develop your ideas and add/remove functionalities.
Define a set of metrics that will tell you if you’re developing your idea in the right direction. Use the metrics to pivot (change implementation strategy) when you encounter big roadblocks.

You can read more about these steps in the ultimate lean startup guide. Knowing this framework will take you from being an idea person to being a producer of awesome things with brilliant career potential.

The concluding thoughts on how to get great ideas

If you read the whole article, all the way to this point, congratulations. You really are committed to having brilliant ideas and bringing them to life.

To make sure all the valuable insights really stay with you, here is the summary of the most important facts you always have to remember:

You have 100 billion neurons in your brain and you are a product of billions of years of evolution. You can be creative and have brilliant ideas, you are no exception.
The best way to come up with great ideas is to notice them. Thus all you have to do is be a little bit more observant of your environment, mindful of your thoughts, and disciplined enough to write down ideas that you get during the day.
Use the advantage of habit triggers to brainstorm regularly. Find 3 – 5 triggers that push you directly into the brainstorming mode. There are more than 30 creative methods you can employ to make up brilliant ideas.
Doubt, criticism, fear, status quo, predicting feasibility and assuming limitations are the biggest idea murderers. Protect your ideas from the idea murderers (usually that means from yourself). Commit to putting as many ideas as possible to the test.
If you wish to come up with many great ideas, be curious (ask questions), observe and pay attention to people’s problems, needs and feelings. Listen and look around, and ideas will start flowing. Surrounding yourself with the right people and being in the right industry also helps a lot.
Have a system by which you create and prioritize your ideas. The most common prioritization factors are risks, rewards, passion, skills, market feedback, feasibility and timing.
Everything starts with a brilliant idea, but good execution is even more important. Use the lean startup framework to execute your ideas.

When something annoys you, it’s because you’re living in the future. The more annoyed you are, the more great ideas you should have. Now fix things that bother you with new unique ideas and bring solutions to the present.

How to improve your analytical skills to make smarter life decisions
The post-information age we live in today is called the creative society. The name already implies how important and well-cherished creativity is.

Everybody (including me) talks about constant innovation, having visions for the future, brainstorming brilliant ideas and expressing your unique artistic soul. And all these things that originate from creative self-expressions are extremely important.

Having brilliant ideas can help you advance in your career, and following creative endeavors always gives additional depth to your life. But they are only one part of the equation.

Innovations must be in line with market paradigms and people’s needs, visions must be backed up by strategic plans, brilliant ideas have to be systematically tested, and it’s never enough to only be different, you also have to be better.

That’s where analytical skills come into play. Luckily, much like anybody can become (more) creative, so you can improve your analytical skills.

There is a general belief that some people are more creative and not analytical types (with a strong right brain hemisphere), while others are logical and unintuitive types (with a strong left brain hemisphere). But today, that kind of a division can only be a limiting belief, since such lateralization of brain functions was scientifically disproved.

While some brain functions do occur more in one of the hemispheres, there is no evidence that people have a stronger left or right side of brain. And your intellectual performance is the strongest when both brain halves work together.

For example, while the left brain hemisphere is focused on the language syntax and sounds that form words, the right brain hemisphere pays attention to the emotional features of language.

Of course, we all have different talents and abilities, but you have to make sure limiting beliefs are not preventing you from improving your analytical skills. If we move on, the next very popular axiom is that schools kill creativity. While there is a lot of evidence for that, schools also don’t teach many useful ways how analytical thinking can be applied.

For example, analytical skills can be used to better understand yourself, plan your future, manage your finances and make smarter life decisions. It’s something you have to learn on your own, if you weren’t among the few lucky ones who acquired these valuable skills at home.

All the benefits that analytical skills can bring you

If you’re not a scientist, detective or mathematician, what good can analytical skills do for you? Well, there are many advantages to possessing strong analytical skills.

In general, analytical skills are about breaking down complex information, events, situations and other bits of information to find patterns, causes and effects and to identify other connections.

Gathering, processing, organizing, structuring, and presenting data in a certain context to make it useful is achieved with analytical skills. It’s how information is turned into data, and then further transformed into new knowledge.

At the end of the analytical process, you should be richer for an insight, answer, solution or overall conclusion. You should better understand why things are as they are or what are the underlying paradigms.

Consequently, that should lead to you making better decisions. In today’s complex, turbulent and fast-changing world, constantly using analytical skills can help you be one step ahead of changes.

Besides that, the two best ways to acquire new knowledge is (1) by properly learning a body of knowledge that others have created with deductive or inductive reasoning, and (2) by producing knowledge on your own with the use of analytical skills.

If we make a step to an even more practical level, here are all the ways analytical skills can be used:
- Identifying patterns and seeing why some things are repeating themselves
- Evaluating the current situation and predicting the trends
- Planning and forming strategies
- Better problem solving and decision making
- Understanding yourself, others (empathy) and the world
- Explaining your beliefs, values and points of view more clearly
- Performing life experiments in the search mode
- Building frameworks and processes that can simplify your life
- Performing certain types of intellectual tasks – logical thinking, mathematics etc.
One of my greatest strengths are precisely analytical skills. They always helped me greatly advance in life.

For me, analytical skills are especially important for better understanding how the world works (from the human psyche to global trends) as well as for finding unique ways to achieve completely new levels of productivity and personal performance.

That’s why I’m constantly training my analytical mind. And when you find your why, I’m sure you’ll have no problem applying some of the ideas below in your everyday life.

Practical exercises you can do to develop your analytical skills

I’m pretty sure you don’t have a spare hour every day to train your analytical skills. That means the best way to train is while you are already performing other everyday tasks you must do anyway or that can bring other benefits to your life.

If you put just some additional effort into these tasks to make your brains sweat a little bit more, it will be more than enough to improve your analytical skills.

Make lists, mind maps and spreadsheets

The easiest way to start practicing analytical thinking is to regularly use different very basic but practical analytical tools – lists, mind maps, spreadsheets and project plans are the most common examples. These tools can also greatly help you manage and organize yourself, so we can say that there’s a double benefit.

Start training your analytical mind by building yourself all kinds of lists like:
- Life vision list
- Daily to-do list
- Not-to-do list
- Reading list
- Movie list
- Travel list etc.
You can first do research on how other people structured their lists and what they have put on them, then you can systematically brainstorm your ideas and review your lists with your peers. In the next step you can use the lists to better navigate your life.

In the same way, you can build yourself spreadsheets for personal finance management or your weekly diet plan (here are some of my templates), or you can build a mind map every time you finish a book or want to get an overview of a new subject. These are all great analytical exercises and many of them are also fun to do.

Turn gossiping and criticizing into practicing empathy

We’re all easily drawn into criticizing and gossiping about other people, although it’s a complete “lose‑lose” situation. Criticizing and gossiping is a form of severe negative thinking that creates distance between people and turns friends into enemies.

It’s a way of expressing the emotional pain of self‑worth issues that does great harm to you and the people around you.

A simple trick you can do is to turn criticizing or gossiping into practicing empathy. Empathy might seem like an emotional exercise, but it’s more an analytical one. You mustn’t confuse empathy with sympathy or support.

Sympathy refers to the capacity to feel the same way as somebody else. Acting in a tender, understanding manner and standing by their side is a form of support.

On the other hand, empathy means being able to precisely understand other people’s thoughts and actions, and where their actions and behaviors are coming from. When you deeply understand the context, you know the motives and what is really going on behind the curtains in a certain life situation.
1. Permit yourself to understand the other person without judging and being afraid how understanding might change you
2. Open as many channels as possible through which others can communicate their thoughts and feelings
3. Fully accept the other person and don’t rush into fixing them
Practicing empathy means you must invest mental effort into understanding the circumstances the other person is acting under and how they are experiencing the situation together with their thoughts, needs, desires and actions.

You can additionally analyze who is supporting or blocking them, what their other options are, how they reacted in similar situations in the past, and so on.

Next time, rather than gossiping or criticizing other people, observe and try to understand every detail of why the person is acting as they are or where their personality characteristics came from. And in the end, ask yourself: how would you act in the same situation under the same circumstances?

5-Whys in analytical thinking

When you’re practicing empathy, don’t forget to apply the 5-Whys technique into your analytical thinking. Ask yourself “why” a few times to find the real cause behind the effect.

Actually, applying the 5‑Whys method can help you practice analytical thinking in many different situations, like better understanding yourself, properly solving a business problem, breaking down recommended procedures and best practices at the workplace, and so on.

Think of life as a strategic game in which your plans must stay flexible

I’m pretty sure that there is a strategic game you enjoy; maybe chess or poker or any interesting strategic video or board game. Think of life in a way that’s similar to how you approach these games.

From the macro perspective, the narrative is pretty simple. You are put into a certain challenging situation, with a specific skillset and potential. You and your allies are playing against several opponents. Your job is to acquire resources and achieve certain goals.

To play any strategic game well, you must understand the rules (and which ones you can break), all the other players and their goals, you need a smart strategy for how you will achieve those goals and you have to make sure that your strategy is flexible enough.

By keeping your strategy flexible, you can constantly adjust as a proactive response to other players. Then you need practice, persistence and patience. It’s no different in real life.

Your body is just an avatar playing a very realistic strategic game. The only difference is that there is no “start again” button, so you have to play your cards smart the first time. Here are a few ideas for what you can do to train your analytical mind if we compare real life to a strategic game:
- Analyze your life strategy – Your life strategy is especially shaped by your beliefs, values, personal management system, and thus by your decisions about spending your time, energy, money, skills and other resources.
- Analyze your own character, together with all the strengths and weaknesses (SWOT), set of competences, main characteristic traits and other details.
- Build a persona (psychological profile) for all the main characters that are playing the game of life with you (allies and opponents).
- Analyze your environment, together with all the opportunities and trends that are working in your favor and against you.
- List all the important rules that you think apply to life. What rules should you follow to play the game of life smart and what are the rules you can break?
- List all the potential pivots (or branches and forks) you can do if your initial strategy or plan doesn’t work. How can you adjust your plans during the play?
You have to play the game of life anyway, so why not play it like a pro with a superior strategy.

Take a moment to practice mindfulness and become extremely observant

An important part of being a good analyst is paying attention to detail (and seeing the big picture at the same time). The Devil or God are in the details.

The problem is that in today’s information overload and busy times, it’s quite hard to pay attention to all the details. All the obligations are usually forcing you to run from task to task hoping not to drown in work. How can you then pay attention to detail?

Luckily, it’s in your power to stop that.

With a few time management tricks, by simplifying your life, doing no‑interruptions days and making sure you always have enough margin (the space between your capacity and workload), you can unburden yourself to the point where there is enough time to take all the details into consideration and consequently make better decisions.

The best first step towards learning how to pay more attention to detail is mindfulness. Mindfulness is about completely focusing your attention on what is happening in the present moment internally (your thoughts, feelings and other processes) and externally, in your environment.

Mindfulness is about concentrating your attention on a single thing in the present moment to capture and understand the experience better.

To get even more practical, here are a few ideas how to practice analytical observation skills by being mindful:
- Mindful eating (extended version of the raisin method): Eat one meal per day completely alone, without a phone, company or any other distraction. Make sure you prepare your own food and then pay attention to every bite – the color of the food, the taste, how well you prepared it, what your body responses to it are, and so on.
- Mindful listening: Mindful listening is a form of active listening where you don’t listen to respond, but listen to really understand. You pay attention to all the possible details when talking to the other person, from body language to tone of voice and the words chosen.
Start teaching something you’re good at and earn some additional income

I’m a big fan of sharing knowledge. The more you share, the more you receive. In addition to that, sharing your knowledge is a great analytical exercise.

If you want to lecture on a certain topic, you must do proper research, structure the body of knowledge, think about all the potential questions, prepare presentations, and practice your appearance.

Explaining complex ideas to people who know nothing about the topic is one of the best ways to train your analytical mind.

I’m sure there is a certain topic you already mastered or if maybe not, you would love to know everything about it or are really talented for it. Why not to become an authority on that topic and maybe you can also earn some additional income or status in your society?

Today there are so many different channels and ways you can teach. You just have to choose a topic you are passionate about and the most appropriate medium (video, text, live presentations etc.), and you can start building your personal brand, while your brain is becoming more and more capable.

Here are some additional ideas for how teaching others can help you improve your analytical skills:
- Start a blog and with every (well-structured) blog post you’ll train your analytical mind
- Share your knowledge on any of the social networks
- Organize workshops in your community on a topic you’ve mastered
- Explain complex things and topics to kids and other people who know nothing about it
- Write a fiction or non-fiction book
Other ideas for developing your analytical skills

If you apply all the mentioned ideas into your life, you will definitely see big improvements in your analytical thinking in a few months’ time.

But if you want even more, here are some additional ideas for how you can train your analytical skills:
- Describe different processes in your life – You want to keep your working memory as fresh as possible throughout the day. One way to achieve that is by standardizing steps and procedures for things that you do regularly . Take a piece of paper and describe a process (standard procedure) for how things should be done. Write a recipe for your favorite dish, define a process for home cleaning or how you maintain your car. You can also help optimize processes where you work to make the company more efficient.
- Analyze what is going on in a room full of people, preferably if you don’t know them. Analyze relationships, intents, communication etc. See yourself as a detective who’s trying to figure out what is going on in the room. It can be in a club or a waiting room or any other place when you find yourself in a group of people.
- Be a mediator when it comes to fights in your community – Many times, people fight just because of a lack of quality communication. You can play a mediator when your family members or coworkers are in each other’s hair. Talk to both sides, analyze their perspective and point of view, brainstorm possible solutions and then present them to both sides while leading them to the most productive conclusion. Just be prepared that sometimes you’re going to be in the middle when sh*t hits the fan.
- Skim 100 articles on a certain topic and write down the bottom lines – It’s a great exercise for getting an overview of a certain topic and expanding your knowledge. When you skim the articles, pay attention to repeating and unique ideas in structure, semantics and clarity of language.
- Start a hobby that encourages analytical thinking – There are so many hobbies that encourage analytical thinking. You can play strategic board games or video games, you can watch a procedural, play chess, collect things, analyze sports events, do puzzles etc.
- Play with angles when you’re reading books and other texts – When you read, be an active reader. Think about the psychological profile of all the characters, what their position in a situation is, what could be their next move, how you would act in a similar situation etc. When you are learning new things, always connect new knowledge to what you already know.
- Practice self-reflection and introspection – Self-reflection is about making unconscious things conscious, it’s about understanding yourself better. By asking yourself tough question you can better understand your motives, feelings and thoughts. It’s one of the best ways to train your analytical mind and you can greatly benefit from it. In the same way, you can do introspections after each of your actions to analyze the outcome and how things could have been done better.
- Perform an experiment to improve yourself – Become a crazy scientist with the goal to improve the quality of your life by performing regular experiments. Write down your assumptions and how you can test them and then perform an experiment. For example, if you always have a fight with your spouse when a specific topic is brought up, next time hug your wife instead and tell her that you love her. Write down an assumption for what her reaction will be, and then test it. Maybe you won’t have a fight ever again. Then brainstorm all other potential experiments that can lead you to finding new better ways to do things.
- Arguments and counterarguments – Take one of your moral beliefs that you firmly believe in. Then list all the arguments why you believe so. In the next step, list all the possible arguments against your belief. Try to defend the opposite view. Here is what you will achieve based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”.
- Learn to code – Knowing how to “communicate” with machines is one of the most valuable skills that a human can possess today. Coding is also intellectually and analytically very intensive. When I stared to learn how to code, my overall analytical skills greatly improved. Your brain might hurt at the beginning, but in the long term … well, you will know how to communicate with all the robots that are about to enter our lives.
Your creative skills can help you have brilliant ideas, create impressive things and be unique. Your creative skills can help you stand out. But creative endeavors and innovations must always be backed by a proper implementation strategy and perfect execution.

That’s when analytical skills come to your aid. Analytical skills are the basis for building a flexible plan and a feedback mechanism that enables you to install your uniqueness in your environment with the greatest acceptance and least resistance.

life skills

Top 10 ways to learn or improve any skill fast

1. Get emotionally, financially and timewise invested in the skill

2. Make sure a lack of talent isn’t your excuse

3. The best advice ever is to get a mentor or a coach

Role models can also be a great help

4. Have realistic expectations when learning a new skill

5. Set very specific goals for what you want to master

6. Preliminary research and a skill acquisition plan

An example of a skill acquisition plan

7. Build yourself a supportive environment

8. Immediate implementation and feedback system

9. Respect the best learning practices

Four stages of the learning process and the dip

10. List the skills you want to master and rank them properly

In summary – the best tips, tricks and recommendations to learn or improve any skill fast

Learn how to model successful people to accelerate your own success

Modeling others comes naturally to human beings

Practical use of modeling in everyday life

Limitations of modeling and why modeling is not copy-pasting

Different stages of modeling successful people

Things you must pay attention to when modeling other people

Personality chunks and dimensions

Perspectives and questions that can help you accelerate the modeling process

Questions to ask successful people worth modeling

The final stage of modeling – implementation of the model in your own life

Different types of intelligence and why your IQ is not fixed

Is IQ really fixed or can you become smarter somehow?

How improving your intelligence might work

How improving your IQ absolutely doesn’t work and what hinders your intelligence

Nine independent and different types of intelligence

The g factor and ten different intelligence domains

CHC model of intelligence

Fluid and crystallized intelligence – that’s what really matters

Environmental influences

If you can influence your intelligence, that means only one thing – grow