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  • Learning is useless, validated learning is everything

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

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

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

    Validated learning

    Validated learning in personal life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Acquiring knowledge chunks

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

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

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

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

    Immediate implementation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    you have to try

    Validated learning based on metrics

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

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

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

    • External feedback
    • Internal feedback

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

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

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

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

    How you should measure your success in life? Compare…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Theory into practice

    Implementing effective validated learning and a learning queue

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Homework

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

  • Regular daily reflections will change the quality of your life forever

    In the AgileLeanLife Productivity Framework, you don’t just do things because you always did them in a specific way. You don’t just work and execute tasks like a robot.

    Instead, you regularly reflect on why you do certain things, analyze how efficiently you are doing them and, most importantly, you constantly evaluate where your actions are leading you and if you are following your True North.

    If you want to avoid being on reactive autopilot, you have to do regular reflections. The main goal of regular reflections is to ask yourself thought-provoking questions so that you can develop a deeper level of understanding:

    With regular reflections, you want to gain as many important insights 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.

    But that’s not all. One of the biggest values of reflection is that you can change how you see yourself, how you feel about certain situations and, in the end, how you act. New thoughts lead to new emotions and consequently to new actions. That way, regular reflections really help you stay lean, agile, flexible, happy and wise.

    There are several points in your life when performing a reflection is extremely valuable:

    1. After every sprint (bi-weekly planning session) and 100-day plan (quarterly plan)
    2. After every experiment you perform in the search mode as part of validated learning
    3. When big or unexpected changes happen in your environment or relationships
    4. When negative emotions pile up or you sense big negative mood swings
    5. At the end of the day, just before you go to sleep to examine your daily life

    Reflections after sprints, 100-day plans and experiments are called introspections in the AgileLeanLife Productivity Framework.

    Reflections before you go to sleep or when an emotional or situational trigger fires a need for analysis we call short self-reflection. We will discuss both types of reflections in this article.

    But first, let’s answer the basic questions of why, how and when to do reflections.

    Regular daily reflections

    A short daily reflection is nothing but a healthy habit

    Regular daily reflections are a positive habit, like any other healthy and beneficial habit, from exercising to reading and being grateful. Every habit has three key elements.

    There must be a trigger, a behavior you perform and, in the end, a reward you enjoy. If the triggers are strong enough and rewards are big, you have a greater chance of sticking to a habit. That’s what you also need if you want to stick to regular reflections – strong triggers and big rewards.

    Reward – why do short daily reflections

    There are so many big rewards of regular reflections. Everybody doubts it, but then after doing it a few times, they become in love with it. Many times, I had to push people a little bit to do it the first time, but then after performing it a whole new world opens to them.

    They are like “wow, I didn’t know my mind works like that and that I can get so many insights by writing a few of my thoughts down. With reflections, you can finally meet the deep and rich internal world you possess. And now the benefits.

    • You better understand yourself and your actions,
    • You pay more attention to your thoughts and emotions
    • You become aware of your rich inner world
    • You become connected to yourself much better
    • You can more easily see all the ways of how you can properly adjust
    • You can plan how to do things in a better way

    With all that, you gain more control over yourself and you become much more proactive.

    With regular reflections, you explore your needs and wants and become very much aware of them. You explore the fears that are blocking you on your way towards your goal. You can finally understand what kind of conflicts are preventing you from being more assertive in life.

    You can more easily identify all the different toxic thoughts and how they’re hurting you. You can identify competing commitments, internal frustrations and other things that are blocking you in life. Therefore, combining reflections with mindset upgrades is the perfect combination.

    All this removes different inner blocks and releases emotional tensions. Not to mention that these are all the inputs for a superior life strategy.

    Regular reflections help you better understand your environment and its paradigms, including people’s diverse behaviors and changes in their behaviors. You can see and understand your position in your environment exceptionally well and you can analyze how different actions can lead you towards different outcomes.

    Regular reflections enable you to go from reactive behavior to proactive behavior. Regular reflections enable you to go from being miserable to being happy.

    Behavior – how to do short daily reflections

    Doing a short daily reflection is an extremely easy exercise. All you have to do is take a notebook and a pen and start writing down your thoughts. You provoke yourself with a few tough questions, you encourage yourself to look at things from different angles and you ask yourself why dozens of times. Then you dig deep. As deeply as possible.

    Here are examples of questions you ask yourself during reflection:

    • How am I feeling? Why am I feeling like that? Why am I so anxious, angry etc.?
    • What does this situation remind me of? When did I feel the same way as I do now?
    • What am I trying to achieve with my behavior?
    • Why are others behaving towards me as they do?
    • What is the best way to improve my situation? Why am I blocking myself?
    • What am I scared of? Why am I persisting at this thing that doesn’t work?
    • Why does this bother me so much? Why do I really dislike that person?
    • What will happen if I do the complete opposite? How would my life look like if I believed the opposite from what I believe now?
    • After every question you ask yourself why, why, why and dig deep.

    The solemn end of every reflection should always be new insights about you, about your position in the world and how your life relates to different relationships, marketing trends and other environmental elements. After you do a reflection, you should finally understand. There should be many “aha” moments.

    When you do retrospections (after execution), you consciously decide how you will change your behavior and actions. You discipline yourself to follow a new behavioral pattern. On the other hand, in very well performed self-reflections it should all come naturally to you without any force. You should feel it in your bones how you can do things differently and how it makes sense to change.

    Trigger – when to do short daily reflections

    There are many potential triggers that can lead you to do a reflection. Some of them can be planned (after a sprint, before sleep) and some of them can be spontaneous. I suggest you combine both types.

    The strongest and most useful triggers are usually emotional ones. Examples include interesting thoughts or ideas you become aware of, big negative changes in your moods, getting hurt by other people, and so on. In such situations, you go straight to the most painful things a lot more easily.

    The second most common triggers are time- and location-based. You do a daily reflection before you go to sleep. You do a reflection as part of a planning meeting with your team, and so on. You should always have a few strong location and time triggers that naturally lead you towards performing a reflection.

    Napkin sketch

    Introspections – reflections after executions

    Now let’s go a little bit deeper into the concept of introspections.

    Introspections are reflections you do after different periods of execution and after performing life experiments. They are an integral part of bi-weekly sprints and quarterly planning sessions, and their main purpose is to improve your strategy, tactics and actions.

    With retrospections, you want to make sure you’re progressing towards your goal in the best possible way. With regular retrospections, you want to have the smartest strategy and be one step ahead of your instincts, life itself and other people.

    Introspections are otherwise also an integral part of agile software development (SCRUM), where a team reflects on how they work and where they can improve. As I mentioned, introspection is done after every sprint. The things you want to achieve with introspections (you can do it by yourself or with your team if you have one) after sprints and 100-day plans are:

    • Reviewing the tasks done in the previous interval
    • Carefully planning your next sprint
    • Thinking of all the ways you can adjust to achieve your goals faster
    • Thinking of all the ways you can adjust to achieve your goalswith fewer resources
    • Making sure you are going into the right direction (following your True North)
    • Brainstorming how you can do things better and how you can improve and adjust
    • Analyzing all the new ideas you have
    • Better connecting with yourself or with team members if you have a team
    • Updating your life vision or vision of the team
    • Measuring your real progress based on the metrics framework you set for yourself
    • Adjusting the strategy and plan and reflecting on new things that you learned

    Sprint planning and short morning meeting with yourself (and/or your team) are great starting points for execution, and reflection is the perfect activity to end every execution interval.

    The best practice is to combine planning a new execution phase with reflection on the previous one. That way you can really improve yourself on the way from one sprint to another. The simple rule is to never even leave out execution retrospection when planning your next sprint, quarterly plan or an experiment in the search mode. Never. Because that’s what successful people do.

    The bottom lines of introspection are the most important part of the process. If you don’t have the bottom lines, you have a very poorly performed introspection. The mandatory thing is that after every introspection, you have answers to a few very basic, but extremely hard questions:

    • What went well during the last sprint that I/we will continue doing?
    • What could I/we do differently?
    • How can I/we implement the change?

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

    • What should I start doing?
    • What should I stop doing?
    • What should I continue doing?

    After every introspection, you have to change your behavior and your actions. You have to do things differently. You have to improve and grow. If you don’t, introspection was useless. Changes and adjustments are the whole point of it.

    Before we go to short daily reflections, let me once again emphasize the important difference between introspections and self-reflections. The changes and improvements after introspection can be a little bit pushed, you can discipline yourself to do things differently.

    Meanwhile changes after self-reflection must come completely from within, they must feel completely natural. You can train yourself to perform a new behavior, but you become wiser after an epiphany that changes how you see the world in every one of your cells.

    Performing reflection

    Short daily reflections – do them at the end of the day or whenever you feel like doing it

    Now let’s move from introspections to short daily reflections.

    Explained very simply, performing self-reflection means that you take from a couple of minutes to an hour or more to reflect on your goals, beliefs, behavioral patterns, negative and positive emotions, emotional knots and everything else that’s happening in your life.

    The best way is to do it daily by writing a journal. Once you try it, you will see what kind of amazing breakthroughs self-reflection can lead you to. It’s better than any thriller movie once you discover your rich inner world.

    There are two perfect moments for doing a short daily reflection. One is at the end of the day. At the end of the day, you can analyze and compare your plans to what actually happened in reality.

    You can write down what you’ve learned, people’s unexpected reactions and interesting changes in your relationships, how productive you were and how well you completed the three most important tasks that you had given to yourself for that day, and so on.

    The second trigger is when you sense an interesting thought, observation or insight or when negative emotions pile up. When you get extremely moody, when something upsets you, when things don’t go as planned, sit down and start analyzing.

    Use the D.E.A.R. concept in those cases. Drop Everything And Reflect. Or sometimes Drop Everything And Read, you know, to get wiser and more educated.

    A short daily reflection is slightly different from introspection. If you have to force yourself to make a certain decision after self-analysis, you hadn’t done it right. Self-analysis is about understanding yourself and noticing, not judging and forcing yourself into anything.

    There are no “stop doings”, “start doings” and “continue doings”. It’s about changing the course of your life without any force, by better understanding who you are and what you want through analytical thinking.

    Here are a few additional ideas for what you want to achieve with short daily reflections:

    Analyze your day

    Think about how your day went compared to – (1) your daily plan and (2) your ideal day. Analyze if you executed all the planned tasks, especially the three most important tasks for the day. Analyze what went wrong and what went right, what you’ve learned throughout the day, and write down the insights you gained.

    You can also write down all the cool things that happened to you, so you never forget them. In the end, you can also add all the new things you’re grateful for.

    Look for errors in your subjective reality map

    You see the world through your subjective lenses. I call it the subjective reality map or the frame. You operate based on this mental frame, a set of schemas defined by your beliefs, values, way of thinking and many other factors. Subjective lenses are like unique code that runs in your brain. You’re only aware of a small part of it, most of it is subconscious.

    This frame or the subjective reality map is not the truth, even if it most often feels like it. But it’s not the objective reality, it’s only how you interpret the reality with your limiting senses.

    That’s important, because there are many errors in your subjective reality map. From wrong assumptions and cognitive biases to all the things you don’t even know you don’t know. With reflections, you should identify as many errors in your subjective reality map as possible.

    Through analysis, you should notice that you were wrong about something (but first you have to put your ego aside) and then say to yourself: “Oh gosh, I was really wrong about that” or “I can’t believe I was lying to myself so hard” or “I really operated based on toxic behavioral patterns and beliefs, now I see it”.

    With regular reflections, you should come closer to the objective truth and identify all the ways you’re lying to yourself or deceiving yourself.
    Examining-your-mind

    Make subconscious conscious

    By asking yourself tough questions and digging deep, you can find many emotional knots in yourself of which you weren’t aware before. These knots are tied by all the mistakes your parents made in your upbringing. The more toxic the family environment where you were raised was, the more tension there is. Not all family environments are toxic, but many of them are.

    When you identify these emotional knots, they lose some of their power and some tension gets released. On top of that, you can become aware of why you are performing some self-sabotaging behaviors.

    With regular reflections, I identified all kinds of different things, like why I was always late, why I was afraid to start my own business, why knowledge is so important to me, and much more.

    Brainstorm ideas

    The only way to keep your creative muscle strong is to regularly brainstorm ideas. If you do it every day, the creative part of your brain will be fit and strong.

    It’s hard to brainstorm ideas every day, but you can still make it a part of your shutdown routine before you go to sleep, just after making a short reflection. In such a case you will never forget to train and stretch your creative muscles.

    An idea that isn’t written down is an idea quickly forgotten.

    Of course you won’t have only brilliant ideas with regular brainstorming, but writing down as many ideas as possible is the only way to get to brilliant ideas. If you write down 100 ideas every day, most of them will be absolutely crappy; but every now and then, a new brilliant idea will be born among all the crap. An idea that might lead you to a new course of life.

    An idea to start a business, to help your company to grow, how to improve your relationships or how to experience life more fully, and so on. One such powerful idea can change your life forever.

    Giving instructions to your subconscious

    Your brain works 24/7. No rest, no holidays, just work. Even when you sleep and enjoy your dreams, that’s your brain at work. One good way to use your brain better is to keep the dreaming function alive during the day as well. It helps you be more creative, stay curious and an optimist.

    Very similarly, but the other way around, it also makes sense to give instructions to your brain what to work on when you are asleep. There are many different types of instructions you can give to your brain. Revealing a part of your subconscious self to you in your dreams, finding a new solution for various problems, experiencing lucid dreaming, and so on.

    As the last step of your daily reflection, just after your brainstorming session and before you go to sleep, give instructions to your brain what to work on while you’re sleeping. Just say to yourself (or to your brain) what you want your cognitive power to be used for during sleep. It will absolutely raise your productivity levels and lead you to many cool new insights.

    Mind Body Spirit Soul

    Homework

    Drop everything and go buy yourself a notebook

    Richard Branson, one of the most successful entrepreneurs ever, always carries a simple inexpensive notebook and a pen with him. He writes down all cool ideas, meeting minutes, observations, and so on. You can do the same just for personal purposes.

    A simple notebook that you always carry with you is the best way to do regular introspections and self-reflections. Because when an interesting thought appears, you can simply sit down and start writing. Whenever and wherever you are.

    You can do it digitally, of course, but there is a special connection between paper, pen, your hand and your brain. So I suggest you go to a stationery shop and buy yourself a notebook you like, a pen that feels comfortable to write with, and start with regular daily reflections.

    The mantra here is to just do it. As mentioned several times, it’s hard the first few times. I have people in my life I care deeply about and it took me years to convince them to try self-reflections. It took me three years to convince somebody I love to do their first self-reflection. Three years.

    The first few times, you always feel blocked somehow. There’s nothing to write down. It feels weird. But you have to be patient with yourself.

    Sooner or later your heart opens and your thoughts start to flow.

    After performing one really deep self-reflection I guarantee you that it will become one of your favorite parts of the day and one of your favorite personal development tools; especially because you will forge a better connection with yourself and you will be able to easily enter your rich inner world that’s hidden deeply inside you. Have courage and start exploring your inner self.

  • Branching and forking – the ultimate way to stay agile in life

    It’s not easy to stay flexible when it comes to personal life; at the end of the day in your personal live, you tend to take things personally.

    If you are wondering why, it’s because your ego and other resources (money, energy, time etc.) are usually heavily invested in certain scenarios, expectations, assumptions and beliefs. The more invested you are into something, the harder it is to make any changes.

    But then when things don’t happen like you planned and wanted, you get shaken up, hurt and demotivated. And unfortunately in life things rarely go as planned. Everybody has a plan until reality hits them in the face.

    If a plan fails it’s not the end of the world yet. It’s only one punch. Much bigger problem is that many times people spend decades persisting at things that don’t work. You need to be smarter than that, you need to be smarter than any static plan or a life strategy that doesn’t bring the desired results.

    Here is what you need not to be knocked-down by reality. A very flexible, but detailed plan that you constantly update and fine-tune. You have to make sure that you stay lean and agile in the whole process. In practical terms that means constantly adjusting your strategy according to the feedback you’re getting from the environment and yourself.

    path_to_success3

    Achieving your goals and visions is never a straight line, but always a path full of detours, setbacks, step backs and adjustments. If you want to achieve your goals, you need many creative ideas for how to overcome different obstacles.

    You often have to innovate your way out of unexpected troubles. Doing the same things over and over again and hoping for a different result is the definition of insanity and absolutely a recipe for big failures and a lot of emotional pain.

    If you want to be really successful in life, you have to be able to adjust in a single second. You stay flexible by having no problem to stop investing your resources, especially energy and time into one thing and start investing them into another thing with bigger potential. But how to do that?

    The best way to stay lean and agile while following your goals is to use the “branching and forking” principle. Branches and forks are two different types of pivots. One is a small pivot, and the other is a big pivot. The principle comes from software development or, more exactly, from versioning control. You can use the same strategy in personal planning to stay more flexible.

    Branching and forking is a great way to strategically brainstorm alternative paths in advance and to have as many different options as possible when you hit a wall. Then you analyze all alternative paths and decide how to adjust best.

    In this blog post, you will learn everything you need to know about branching and forking and how they can help you stay more flexible in life.

    Nature does it, software developers do it, so why wouldn’t you do it too?

    Pivots branching and forking
    You can skip this part if you have no interest in software development whatsoever.

    Branching and forking in software development

    To understand very well how to use branching and forking in your personal life, let’s examine how the two concepts are used in software development. Even if you aren’t a programmer by profession, it’s very easy to grasp the main ideas of these principles.

    You probably worked on a very long and complex document at least once in your life. If more people were involved in the process, you will understand the tracking issues and challenges even better. After working on such a document for a while, you probably had a text with hundreds of comments, suggestions and corrections, not to mention all the different versions of files. It’s easy to get lost in such a case, especially if you don’t use a word processing tool that has a good versioning and collaboration system.

    When a team of people is developing complex software, this kind of problem is even bigger. Not only is the code in several files being constantly added and upgraded by different team members, new ideas for software features are constantly flowing in. Team members want to develop parts of the software in different ways, bugs are constantly getting detected and need to be fixed, and so on.

    It’s a hard task to follow all the ideas and changes and to manage the complex development process. It can easily happen that the code gets broken, things get lost and people confused. It’s a real mess.

    That’s why almost all teams in software development use some kind of a versioning system or the so-called Version Control System (VCS). The most popular VCS in the software development world today is Git together with the online service GitHub (or alternatively Bitbucket).

    Git allows team members to develop code simultaneously without overwriting each other’s changes, it provides historical snapshots of code so you can return to previous versions when things go wrong, and in addition to that it’s free (open-source) and extremely fast.

    GitHub further extends the power of Git. It’s a web-based Git hosting service for distributed revision control of code and source code management. It adds tons of additional functionalities to Git, like issue tracking, collaborative code review, documentation management, team management features, graphs, email notifications, and so on.

    Finally, here’s the main trick. What Git and Github also allow you to do is to diverge from the main code you were writing to test new ideas. You can independently develop new features or take parts of the project to a completely new path, you can play with the project code in a new safe environment without destroying the main code, you can experiment with new technologies, and so on.

    At the end, you can either merge the changes to the main code or not. It’s completely up to you. The two core ways to do that are branches and forks.

    Branches in software development

    Git enables you to create a new branch in any stage of the software development process. A branch is a new line of development. When you get an idea for testing a feature or developing the software in a new direction, you can create a new branch.

    The main branch is called a master branch and you can name the new branch however you want. Actually, you can create as many different branches as you want, naming them as it suits you best.

    When you create a new branch, you then have two branches with the same code and in the next step you can develop each part of the code in completely separate directions. Sometime in the future, you may decide to merge the new branch with the master one, and that often does happen. Other times, you get two or even more separately living projects.

    The important note is that the new branch is always part of the main branch. The new branch depends on the main branch and diversions are tracked very well. A new branch always has parts of the master branch. You do branches with Git.

    Forks in software development

    On the other hand, forks are much bigger diversions than branches. They are more a kind of a social idea, when a group of people wants to take a project to a completely new path or a different level. Forks are a GitHub, not a Git thing.

    GitHub enables you to fork a project (you copy it under your own account). It’s similar to branching a project, with the distinction that the new created fork is completely independent from the original project. It has its own users and permissions.

    Technically, a fork is a completely new entity that gets stored in a separate independent folder or project. You can’t push your changes to the original project unless you have the rights to do so or the creator of the original software accepts the changes (the so called pull request).

    If you fork a project, you can fork it with many branches. If the original project is deleted, you keep your forked copy together with branches, but all the branches in the original project are deleted together with the project. You connect a new fork with the Git versioning control system installed on your local machine with the cloning function. Because forking is more flexible, many developers prefer forking over branching.

    I hope that wasn’t too technical. Even if you didn’t understand all the details, I’m sure you grasped the main idea. You can easily clone a project or make a new branch and take it into a whole new direction, either completely independently from the main code or not. That’s all you need to know.

    Branching and forking

    Using branches and forks in your personal life

    Let’s move from software development to personal life. To use forks and branches in your personal life, you must first have a very well defined and prioritized vision list. Then you develop simple life stories for 5 – 7 items on the top of your vision list to specify what exactly you want, a clear outcome and even more so why.

    In the next step, you build a Goal Journey Map with a strategy for how you will achieve your goal. That’s your main branch, that’s your plan for how you want things to develop. You can read more about the whole process in the “new way to set goals” article.

    The main idea of branching and forking is that you have a rough plan, but you know in advance that the plan won’t work. You know that you are wrong about how things will unfold, because the plan is based more or less on your assumptions. And wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. You have to be aware that you are always wrong before you are right.

    Knowing that, you can do three things with the goal journey map:

    • You can brainstorm potential obstacles and risks you may encounter in different stages.
    • You can brainstorm alternative paths if the obstacles really appear – you build your own branches and forks in advance in your goal journey map by brainstorming potential pivots.
    • You can define very well when it’s time to quit, to not get misled by the sunk costs and other cognitive biases.

    You absolutely can’t predict everything negative that will happen. You absolutely don’t know what will go wrong and what will go right. But you can definitely brainstorm many different scenarios that could go wrong and you can mentally prepare yourself for them.

    Being a smart investor and carefully managing your resources (including your time and energy) means that you go after investments that have high upside potential and a low downside. In other words, you’re looking for low risks and high rewards. If you want to achieve that, you have to know your greatest risks and downsides, and what you will do when they appear.

    You can always think of the biggest risks in advance and adjust to the smaller ones that weren’t anticipated as things go along. You can always brainstorm potential pivots and how to mitigate different risks. And with regular daily reflections, you can always adjust to small barriers that unexpectedly hit you in the face.

    When you encounter an obstacle, you always have the option to:

    1. Stop investing in a project and give up. Sometimes the hardest decision you have to make in life is when to persist and when to give up.
    2. Pivot to something completely new based on what you’ve learned (a new fork).
    3. Change the course a little bit so that it will still lead you to the same goal just by using a slightly different path (a new branch).
    4. Stop doing certain small things, start doing new things, and continue doing what works without any big changes in direction (regular small changes and updates in tactics and operations).

    You can always do these things, you just have to be creative enough to come up with enough potential forks, branches and updates. With such an approach, there is no way you can get stuck in life.

    Maybe you’re asking yourself: why would you put so much effort into regular adjustments and into such hard-core risk management? Well, because that’s part of a superior life strategy. You want to have a small number of goals to which you are completely committed. You want to stay fully flexible about how you’ll get there.

    You want to constantly pay attention to what is happening in your environment and what is happening with your emotions, and regularly adjust. You have to sense all the paradigms in your environment and you have to always pay attention to yourself, because what you think will bring you happiness and what really brings you happiness in life are two different things.

    You don’t want to get stuck, you don’t want to experience big collapses or failures in a way that it will take you years to recover. You want to optimize your life for productivity and flexibility. You want to experience a series of small failures from which you can learn, and that is the only thing that can lead you to be finally right and succeed. The good news is that you have to be right only once.

    Yes, if you want to be successful in life you want to stay flexible. The greatest killer of flexibility is the so-called onetis mentality. The onetis mentality means being obsessed with one single thing – one potential spouse, one job you just lost, one car you can’t afford, one scenario that failed etc.

    If there is something that represents all to you, and everything else is nothing, it’s only a question of time until you are be miserable and stuck. Forks and branches are the cure for the onetis mentality.

    It’s all about superior emotional management

    Now you know the big value of proper risk management and staying flexible. To summarize in one sentence: the best way to do that is to have many different forks and branches and no fixed ideas.

    Rather than having any fixed ideas, you should think about all the risks and potential alternative paths or pivots you can make when you encounter a problem. You should consider and analyze every possible alternative path, no matter how crazy it sounds.

    The main value of preparing yourself for different scenarios (forks and branches) is in:

    • Keeping your mind flexible and open to different possibilities.
    • Staying emotionally detached when shit hits the fan, because you anticipated what could happen.
    • Not letting your ego destroy your progress and not getting mentally stuck in self-pity.
    • Putting success before being right.
    • Having a list of alternative paths you can take so you can easily choose the next best thing when you have to.

    If you don’t have an alternative path, you can easily get stuck in overanalyzing how unlucky you are, you can put yourself in a position of being a victim, and you can endlessly whine, bitch and complain. But when you already know your next best alternative, you can simply move on, you already have something new to look forward to. You already know your next step.

    Of course you are always emotionally invested in things you care about, you absolutely need time to heal and lick your wounds, but you don’t have to get stuck forever, you don’t have to lose years of your life feeling sorry for yourself just because something didn’t work out as planned.

    An even worse scenario is if you lose motivation and enthusiasm after a few failures, and turn into a zombie. That happens to many people. They try a few times, fail big and then they give up forever. Never let that happen to you.

    There are absolutely types of life disasters (deaths, losses, etc.) where there is no branch or fork that can heal you or lead you forward, and in such situations you need months if not even years to recover. The only thing you can do is to accept things, grieve and wait for better times.

    But problems like that are quite rare, they happen only a few times in a lifetime. For most projects, life problems, obstacles and challenges, you can always innovate your way out. There is always a step forward you can take. Thinking of potential branches and forks is one way that can help you do that.

    Alternative paths

    Branches and forks are advanced brainstormed potential pivots

    A list of potential branches and forks is nothing but advanced brainstormed potential pivots. You can also add new potential branches and forks when you encounter a problem or an obstacle in order to analyze and consider as many alternative paths as possible when you have to choose your next step. Let’s refresh our knowledge of what pivots in personal life are.

    A pivot in personal life is a fundamental change in your life strategy or in a strategy for meeting your goal. You change your direction in life, but you still keep the same life vision and you consider all the facts you learned about yourself and your environment. You make pivots as many times as necessary until you find the perfectly right fit for you.

    There are many different types of pivots you can make in personal life: a zoom-in pivot, a zoom‑out pivot, a relationship pivot, a life architecture pivot, and so on. To successfully make a pivot, you need to be passionate about the new life direction, there must be a strong and deep desire to make a change in your life, you need metrics and targets that will measure your pivot progress, and so on.

    Even if you have no clue what will happen in reality, you already have a few things to rely on:

    1. Your past knowledge and experience
    2. Knowledge and experiences of other people (books, mentors etc.)
    3. A list of risks and things that could go wrong (and things that could go right)
    4. A list of potential pivots you can make (based on the 10 possible pivots)
    5. Alternative visions of your life that work for you as well as the originally planned branch

    The potential pivots in personal life:

    1. A zoom-in pivot: Focusing yourself more in life
    2. A zoom-out pivot: Adding new things in your life
    3. A relationship pivot: Rearranging key relationships in your life
    4. A personal need pivot: Rearranging your priorities
    5. A life design/architecture pivot: Rearanging your values and beliefs
    6. A platform pivot: Changing environment where you work
    7. An engine of personal growth pivot: Changing your role-models and infostructure
    8. A value-capture pivot: Changing the way you make money
    9. A technology pivot: Changing technology you use
    10. Other types of pivots

    Considering all this data, you can brainstorm potential pivots and how you can alternatively get to your goals when you get stuck. Every potential pivot is a new branch or fork.

    When you learn new things along the way, you can always add or delete forks and branches. When you encounter a problem, you can select which new branch or fork to follow. Sometimes you can activate more branches and forks at the same time.

    With that kind of a strategy, you are always prepared for the next move. If a risk comes to life, you already know a few alternatives you can undertake. You can add new ones if necessary, but you will never get stuck mentally. Your mind will already be oriented towards a solution instead of the problems that occurred.

    Now let’s explore the subtle difference between forks and branches.

    Path to success

    Branches in personal life

    Branches in personal life are small deviations from the main path, micro adjustments and mini new experiments you decide to perform in order to find a better way to achieve your goals. They are not-too-big diversions from the main path that don’t require any colossal changes in strategy.

    You adjust, you do a small pivot, but the general way is still the same. Sooner or later you come back to the main path. You may adjust because an unexpected obstacle occurs, you may consciously decide for an adjustment just to try new things, or maybe you decide to implement a potential personal improvement. You should be constantly developing and experimenting with new branches. That’s what they’re here for.

    Practical examples

    Let’s go to an example.

    Your goal is to get fit, so you have a detailed exercise and diet plan. After a few weeks, you unexpectedly injure yourself and you can’t follow your plan anymore. Well, feeling sorry for yourself won’t do any good.

    There are many different branches you can follow:

    • You can adjust your workout plan
    • You can start doing a completely new sport
    • You can stretch and improve your flexibility
    • You can do physiotherapy
    • And so on

    You could also decide to take a year completely off from dieting and exercising, spending that year to only madly educate yourself about health, and that would be a new fork. Here are two examples:

    • You can do different kinds of DNA, blood and other analyses to get to know your body better
    • You can read only health books while you recover

    In all the life areas, you can have many different branches towards which you can unfold your life story. Your friend doesn’t have time for you; you go to a hobby meet-up and get to know new people. You don’t get a raise. You start a business in your free time.

    Your trip got canceled. You decide to invest into your competences. When one door closes, another one opens. Branches, forks and pivots is what should always be on your mind when things don’t go as planned.

    You should always have a list of all the different types of branches or pivots in your Goal Journey Map. Small adjustments, bigger adjustments, switching from one activity to the other, and so on. The only rule is to stay flexible and move forwards no matter what.

    Staying flexible means that you’re able to disinvest your resources (ego, beliefs, values, time, energy and money) from one thing and start investing them into another that has bigger potential or works better in a certain moment. Having many branches enables you to easily regroup and reinvest your resources. No way to get stuck in life, ever.

    Forks in personal life

    Forks are a little bit different than branches. They are bigger pivots in your life. They are bigger changes you make in order to go forward. You take one big project or activity into a completely new direction. You take what you’ve learned, you keep the good parts, but the general direction changes a lot.

    We’ve already seen an example, but here’s one more:

    Practical examples

    You were following a vegetarian diet, you learned a lot about your body, which foods make you feel good and which don’t, but somehow the diet doesn’t work for you. Your blood results get worse year after year. So you decide to switch to the paleo diet and see what happens to your blood. You add meat to your diet, but keep other foods that do you good in your diet plan. You keep what works, you consider what you’ve learned, but you move on to a completely new thing.

    Now, if you have fixed ideas that eating meat isn’t good, you may have a hard time doing a big pivot. In such a case, you have to search for other branches that could solve your problem – adding supplements to your diet, adding more green foods and rice protein powder, and so on.

    A fixed idea absolutely blocks your flexibility. It makes sense to consider all branches and forks, and then you can decide what’s acceptable to you ethically, emotionally, strategically and from other angles.

    You always have many options

    It’s not hard to get ideas for branches and forks. You just have to keep the abundance mentality. You can talk to other people to get new ideas, you can read, brainstorm different options and even try all kinds of crazy things. You should use the search mode to get the first insights into which branches and forks make sense and which don’t.

    Put every idea to the test. Put every branch or fork to the test and see what happens. Of course you have to use common sense while doing it, but this kind of strategy will take the quality of your life to a completely new level. And your life will be much more diverse and exciting.

    When you get results from your experiments based on actionable metrics, you can integrate branches that work into your life permanently, delete the branches and forks that don’t (fail and learn, in other words), and you should never stop trying new things while keeping your mind open.

    When things work you persevere, when they don’t you pivot – to a new branch or fork.

    Make sure that for every item on your vision list, you have a short life story (clear outcome with why), a goal journey map (strategy), and potential forks and branches. Then go out and start trying things. And when you encounter an obstacle, pivot. That’s how you will live your life to the full and sooner or later design the perfect life you want and deserve. That’s how you achieve your big goals.

    Pivots forks branches

    Do you want to know more about goal setting?

    This article is part of the series of how to successfully set goals in the 21st century. It’s part of the AgileLeanLife Goal Setting Framework, which has the following seven steps:

    1. Define your vision list
    2. Prioritize your vision list
    3. Develop short life stories for 5 – 7 items at the top of your list – specify what exactly and why
    4. Create a goal journey map to build a superior strategy and define the process
    5. Use branching and forking to stay flexible with alternative paths
    6. Organize the superior strategy on your to-do lists with a 100-day plan and sprints
    7. Mind the principles in the AgileLeanLife Manifesto

  • Goal journey mapping – The superior strategy to achieve any goal

    Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) is a very popular technique in business to better understand the purchasing process from a customer’s perspective. It’s especially popular for online businesses. It’s a technique that helps companies and organizations improve their customer experience and boost their sales.

    You can use a very similar approach to develop a superior strategy for all the goals you want to achieve in your life. I call it Goal Journey Mapping (GJM) and it’s the most important and the most demanding step in the AgileLeanLife Goal Setting Framework.

    To summarize the steps in the framework, you first define your life vision, then you prioritize the list and select 5 – 7 items from the list. For the selected items, you add a strong why with short life stories, and in the final step you develop a Goal Journey Map out of the short life stories. I suggest you read the intro to the goal setting framework to understand all the steps really well.

    In this article, we will focus on how to prepare a Goal Journey Map. But before that, let’s look at how Customer Journey Mapping is used in business.

    Customer journey mapping and its benefits

    The main idea of customer journey mapping is pretty simple. Every customer goes through a specific process, from becoming aware of a company’s product or service, to properly informing themselves about the offer and deciding to making a purchase or not.

    Through this process, customer’s different emotions, questions, motives and actions arise, and a company has a chance to influence all those psychological elements through different communication channels or touch points. Through touch points, a company can lead a customer into the right direction by optimizing the buying experience.

    Customer journey mapping is a rich visual representation of the purchasing process. It’s a graphic representation of different touch points made over time by a company and a customer, across different communication and distribution channels.

    Customer Journey Map Example
    Customer Journey Map, Source: Adaptive Path

    A very well designed Customer Journey Map should very clearly tell a story about the company’s desired interaction with a customer from the initial contact, through the process of engagement and hopefully into forging a long-term relationship, including after-sales support and assure all potential repurchases. Preparing such a Customer Journey Map has many different benefits for the company.

    It helps the company’s management to better understand milestones a customer should achieve in certain stages of the process and the context from a customer’s perspective – where, when and how it’s happening.

    Understanding a user’s context simply means that you have a clear picture of how the first contact was made, what the user’s expectations are and what the next step in the buying process should be. How and where should you lead a customer.

    Visualisation of the process should give the management a clear picture about customer experience in every step of the sales funnel. For online businesses, the most popular funnel framework is called AARRR. Below is a list of all other benefits of creating a customer journey map – a CMJ helps management understand:

    • How a customer should be treated in different stages across different channels
    • What customers are thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing at different milestones
    • All the possible ways of interacting with a potential customer
    • Ideas of where and how you should lead a customer in every step of the process
    • User experience and how to improve it
    • Customers’ struggles, confusions and frustrations
    • You can define the requirements and resources you need (skills, data, outcomes etc.)

    To build a customer journey map you need the following elements:

    1. Personas – Personas are fictional characters representing the ideal customer or a typical character for a user segment. It’s about who enters the journey. If you have several different important customer segments, you can make more personas and customer journey maps.
    2. Timeline with milestones and different customer stages – The second thing you need are milestones with different micro conversions (steps leading to a purchase) and macro conversions (final purchase) and other very well defined potential phases of the buying process. It’s about when it should happen and what should happen.
    3. Communication channels and touch points – It’s a list of all the different communication channels that the company is using to deliver value to the customer. When a message is received from the customer, it comes to a touchdown. In other words, it’s about every encounter where customers and the business engage to exchange information, provide service or handle transactions. It’s about where it’s happening and what the expected customer’s behaviours are.
    4. Emotions, questions and actions – This part of CJM is completely focused on the customer’s experience. It’s an illustration of emotions that a customer experiences in different phases of their journey and how to improve the experience to get a desired action from a customer. You write down different customer’s motivations and questions. You can use the “say-do-think-feel” model for that. The customer’s emotions and overall experience are at the end of the main thing that leads to a purchase.
    5. Barriers – In every stage of a customer journey, there are some types of barriers, they can be structural, cost-related, psychological or any other types that need to be overcome. It’s good to know these barriers so they can be removed or managed properly.
    Emapthy map
    Emapthy map to better understand customer, Source: Copyblogger

    You can’t make a good customer journey map without comprehensive research. Gathering information to build a customer journey map especially includes web analytics, focus groups, talking to customers, surveys, anecdotal research, interviews and other data-gathering methods.

    An especially important part of CJM is the analysis of what’s happening in a customer’s head (say-do-think-feel) in specific stages of a process or before a customer reaches a certain milestone. Every milestone is a moment of truth for the company, where customer can move into the next stage or not. Typical milestones in a customer journey are the following:

    • Awareness / Discovery
    • Interest and Desire / Query
    • Negotiating / Pricing / Comparison / Consider
    • Purchase / Commit
    • Post-sales support
    • Upgrades / Renewals / Cross-selling / Retaining

    When you create a CJM, you can clearly see that in every phase, there are different touch points between a company and a customer, made through different communication channels, like a sales meeting, phone call, website, social media, e-mail, post etc.

    Touchdown points are the most powerful tool a company has. The company must make sure that every touchdown leads a customer closer to making a purchase.

    To summarize, the main idea of CJM is to make a clear, coherent, systematic and action-oriented communication plan in different phases of the journey through different communication channels. When you have that kind of representation, you can start optimizing the experience.

    Now that we understand how CJM is used in business, let’s look at how you can use the same approach in your personal life in the goal setting process.

    Goal journey mapping

    Goal journey mapping

    Only having a goal and writing it down is not enough. I will be fit by the end of the year, I will be rich when I turn 40, I will improve my marriage in the next two months, I will become a board member in my company etc. all sound nice and motivating, but they are nothing but wishful thoughts.

    You can write them in the present tense, you can add S.M.A.R.T. characteristics or you can put the list of your goals in your wallet, nothing’s going to really help.

    The only thing that really works and brings results is to build a superior strategy for how you will achieve your goal. A superior strategy is a fighting plan that you constantly adjust, update and improve. It’s a document where you gather all the data, analyze it, make adjustments and decide what your next steps will be. It’s a roadmap showing where you are and where you’re going.

    Building yourself a Goal Journey Map is absolutely the first sign that shows if you’re really committed to a specific goal or not. If you aren’t prepared to take a whole weekend to prepare a master plan of how you will achieve something, I can guarantee you that the chances of you meeting your goal are very small.

    A well-prepared Goal Journey Map considers setting a superior strategy, following the smart work philosophy and also putting in daily hard work. A Goal Journey Map is a system and a process. With such an approach, you never forget the bigger picture and at the same time, you also pay attention to all the details.

    Goal Journey Mapping is a planning system that makes a specific goal the center of your life and even more importantly, it’s the only goal setting strategy that enables you to constantly adjust. It’s the only goal setting strategy that encourages you to stay flexible in the process of achieving your goal.

    Goal Journey Map Elements

    In general, a Goal Journey Map should cover 10 different elements. I call it a general GJM template. Nevertheless, you should stay very flexible about which parts of the template you use for different kinds of goals. Big goals require all ten elements, small goals maybe only an element or two. So if you decide to use the template, adjust it to your needs.

    For example, if you have a goal to read 10 books on a certain topic, you need a research phase to select 10 books, a very well defined process with metrics determining how much you read per day or week, and maybe a reminder as part of the supporting environment. If you are new to reading, you can also add potential barriers, forks (switching to online courses if you don’t like reading), and so on.

    On the other hand, if you decide to take care of your health, wealth or any other major area of life, you need all or almost all of the elements. You need to really consider everything, including a strategy to find your fit, the process you will follow, the resources you need and the things you will buy, very well defined metrics and a mechanism, and so on. You will most certainly also need help in terms of coaches, advisors and people who will constantly motivate you.

    Yes, preparing a Goal Journey Map is not a joke. It’s serious business. Like you are serious about achieving your goals.

    There are only two ways when it comes to your goals. You can be serious about achieving your goals and completely commit or you can be only joking around, wasting time and slowly turning into a zombie. I hope you decide to follow your dream life and put all the energy into preparing the Goal Journey Map(s) for your life goals.

    Goal Journey Map TemplateA Goal Journey Map (potentially) consists of the following elements:

    1. Life story – The final goal you want to achieve and why (all the rewards)
    2. Process phases – Different phases you have to go through, like educating yourself, searching, finding your fit, executing etc.
    3. Process with milestones – Repeating actions that lead to micro-goals and then to the final goal
    4. Supporting environment – Key relationships, trends, motivational installations and other changes
    5. People – All the people who are involved in you achieving your goals (influencers, blockers, mentors)
    6. Insights and Minimum Viable Experience – Experiments for validated learning
    7. Metrics – How you will measure your progress in different process phases
    8. Feedback mechanism – System for gathering feedback from yourself and your environment
    9. Risk-reward factor – Potential barriers, risks, fears and unanswered questions
    10. Branches and forks – Potential small and big adjustments to the strategy

    A short life story

    A short life story is the simplest part. On top of your Goal Journey Map, you write a short life story you want to experience. It’s a short statement describing very clearly the final goal you want to achieve and especially why. By adding a powerful why, you should add a strong motivational charge as well as list all the rewards and benefits you will enjoy when you achieve the goal.

    With a short life story, you should define what and why very well. But you leave out all the specifics like when, how much, and so on, because you want to stay flexible.

    You need just a general idea of what you want to achieve and what you want to experience. By acquiring knowledge and insights, you can regularly update your life stories and make them more specific. Remember, nothing in your Goal Journey Map is fixed.

    Process phases

    In the next phase, you should define the process stages you will go through. For every single goal you want to achieve in life, you go through different process phases where you have to focus on different things and adjust your strategy. You probably have a general idea of where you are and what awaits you. The only important question is where you are in the process.

    They are more or less standard phases. If you are a beginner, you start at the beginning, if you aren’t new to the thing you want to achieve, you may have already passed certain stages. The process phases are:

    1. Acquiring general knowledge and preparing a Goal Journey Map
    2. The search mode
    3. Finding your fit and sticking to it
    4. Identity shift and becoming a better version of yourself
    5. The execution mode and very specifically defining a new set of metrics

    The first three phases (called validated learning) are oriented towards learning about yourself and what your preferences are, gaining insights about the topic or life area you want to improve, learning about the environment and building yourself proper support, performing small experiments and constantly improving your strategy. You learn, you experiment, you search and you slowly build a metrics framework.

    The last two phases are focused on execution. After you exit the search mode you know the process that will lead you to success very well, all you have to do is to put in all the hard work and trust the process. The first three phases usually take 3 – 12 months and the last two up to several years. But then you can finally succeed overnight.

    Process with general milestones

    In this section, you define the process that you will follow together with general milestones you want to achieve. It’s by far the most important part of the Goal Journey Map. The process is all about daily repeating actions that lead you to micro-goals, and the sum of these micro goals you achieve then leads to the final goal.

    In the validated learning phase (knowledge, search, fit), the process includes things like:

    • Books you read, courses you take and seminars you visit (number, frequency, insights)
    • People you talk to (number, frequency, insights)
    • New things you try and experiment with (number, insights, ideas for new experiments)
    • Building yourself a new environment to support your goal (notifications, apps etc.)
    • Simulations, strategies, pivots and any improvements to your Goal Journey Map

    In the execution phase (identity shift, execution), the process includes things like:

    • Daily actions and discipline to achieve your goal
    • Regular adjustments to your strategy based on the feedback

    The process is the part of your Goal Journey Map that takes you straight to the bottom line. And the bottom line is always pretty simple.

    If you want to be fit, you have to exercise (aerobic, anaerobic) regularly, and mind what and how much you eat. If you want to improve your financial situation, you have to spend less than you earn and invest the difference or build your own business. If you want to be really good at some skill, you have to invest 10,000 hours into it.

    In the process section, you define daily or weekly actions you will do without any excuses to achieve your goals. You can add a calendar to it and mark the days on which you performed the action and on which you didn’t.

    When you build your Goal Journey Map and define the process as part of it, you really have to make sure that nothing comes between you and performing that daily activity that gets you one step closer to your goals.

    Supporting environment

    Achieving a goal you’ve set for yourself is unfortunately not only up to you. It’s also up to your environment. You can’t succeed alone at anything. You need a strong supporting environment. Luckily you can influence the environment around you to some extent. And you can adjust to changes that are out of your control.

    The environmental elements that greatly influence your capabilities to achieve a certain goal and how fast you’ll get there are:

    • Your key relationships – spouse, family, friends, boss, coworkers, mentor
    • PESTLE factors – political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental factors
    • General market trends – financial markets, job markets etc.
    • Your company culture and your office space
    • Your family culture and your home
    • The right timing (timing is everything)
    • Other elements (religion, infrastructure, infostructure, motivational installations etc.)

    It’s essential that you build yourself a motivational environment for every goal you want to achieve in life. That’s why you need to define the key relationships that will influence your behavior, and analyze all the people who are involved in you reaching your goals.

    You also mustn’t forget about market trends and other PESTLE elements together with a list of all potential motivational installations and other changes in the environment that can help you achieve your goals. Examples are motivational posters, mobile apps, different reminders, and so on.

    Your supporting environment matters a lot, so make sure you build yourself an environment that will support you in achieving your goals. It must be obvious in your Goal Journey Map that it’s the right timing for going after a certain goal. Because timing is everything.

    Healthy relationships

    People

    Out of all the things that your environment consists of, people are the most important thing. People are the ones who will either encourage and support you, or block and mock you. If you don’t have the right people around you, forget about achieving any goal.

    • People will get jealous or support you
    • People will make fun of you or encourage you
    • People will demotivate you or motivate you
    • People will minimize your efforts or do it together with you
    • People will block you or help you
    • People will give you ill-minded advice or show you how to do it

    Thus you need to list all the people who are involved in achieving your goals. You can segment them into supporters, blockers and mentors. Nevertheless, you will never know who is who until you start taking actions towards your goals and talking with them about your goals.

    Usually the people you least expect turn into blockers and haters. Because they’re scared of losing you or that you will become better than them, and so on. Some even turn from a supporter into the hater along the way. Always pay attention to how other people are influencing your progress towards your goals.

    In the end, there are five things you want to achieve:

    • Surround yourself with supporters and mentors
    • Turn blockers and haters into supporters or neutral figures if they are close to you
    • Get rid of blockers and haters if they don’t want to stop with their destructive behavior
    • Ignore all the haters that are not close to you
    • Make new connections, partnerships and friends if necessary

    Insights and the Minimum Viable Experience

    Under Minimum Viable Experiences, you define all the small experiments you plan to perform in order to learn more about yourself and your environment. It’s a more detailed process of how you will perform the search mode.

    The idea of MVEs is to not only talk or think about things (what you should try, what you think you may like etc.), but to go and try them. You don’t assume, you go out and test as soon as possible. Testing and trying is the best way to gain firsthand knowledge about yourself and the world. Testing and trying is the best way to achieve your goals.

    Will eating before sleep make you fat or encourage your muscles to grow? Who knows, it depends on your genetics, so you have to test it.

    An important part of the Goal Journey Map must also be how you will immediately take action. What are the easy targets, what kind of experiments you can do immediately and how you can apply theory to practice as soon as possible. You can define that under this section.

    A very important part of this section are also all the insights you gather along the way. It’s a database of everything that you’ve learned about yourself, your environment, what works for you and what doesn’t, and so on. After you try many different things, you may get a little bit confused about what worked and what didn’t. A systematic overview of all the insights helps a lot.

    To summarize, in this stage of planning, you should list:

    • Experiments you plan to perform
    • Early wins and low-hanging fruit you can go after
    • Insights you acquire along the way and things you already know

    Metrics and resources

    You need a set of metrics for every goal you want to achieve. Actually, you need two sets of metrics. One for the search mode and one for the execution mode. Metrics are the ones showing you if you are progressing towards your goals or not. A very important part of building your Goal Journey Map is to put data before rhetoric.

    Metrics help you decide what to do next. You have no idea where you are and where you’re going if you don’t have any metrics. There are many different metrics you can follow and with time, you always improve them. Just make sure you aren’t relying on vanity metrics, but actionable metrics that show you true progress, even though seeing how much you suck might be painful at the beginning.

    Here are examples of life metrics you can use:

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

    Besides metrics, you should also define all the resources you need to achieve your goal. These are different internal resources, from knowledge, competences and values, to all different outer resources like money, connections, and so on.

    The more resources you have, the easier and faster you can usually achieve your goals. But if you don’t have the resources, you are forced to be more innovative and smart.

    Feedback mechanism

    The main idea of the Goal Journey Map is that you constantly update it based on acquiring new knowledge, getting more competent and even more based on the feedback you get from your environment and yourself. When I say “yourself”, I mean your emotions, thoughts, body metrics etc.

    Achieving your goals is not only about aggressively going after what you want in life. It’s about being a healthy assertive and flexible person who can adjust and find new win-win combinations. For that, you have to listen to yourself and to other people and pay attention to what’s happening in your environment.

    Your ego together with fixed ideas is the greatest enemy to staying flexible.

    That’s why you need to somehow gather feedback, do regular reflections and based on that, make adjustments to your strategy of how you will meet your goals. You should also add the happiness index as part of your reflection process.

    Risk reward factor

    On the path to every goal, you will meet many barriers, you will have many unanswered questions and sooner or later you will have to face your deepest fears.

    The fact is that if you aren’t failing at all and if you aren’t even a little bit scared, your goals aren’t ambitious enough. You don’t want to get bored in life, you want to have high goals, but you also want to be very smart about it.

    You want to constantly pay attention to the risk-reward ratio. You want to make sure that you know your downsides and that they are manageable. At the same time, you want to go after realistically big upside potential. Big rewards, small risks. It’s not easy to achieve that, but it can be done.

    Under risk-reward questions you should define:

    • What the potential risks are, how big they are and how you can manage them
    • All the barriers you can think of that may block you on the way towards your goals
    • Open questions you have or things you know that you don’t know
    • All the fears you’ll have to face going after your goal
    • When is it definitely the time to give up (not to be influenced by the sunk costs)
    • Other factors that influence the risk-reward ratio

    Pivots, branches and forks

    The final section of the Goal Journey Map are all the potential pivots you already know you can make if you get blocked somehow. Pivots, branches and forks are potential small or big adjustments to the strategy you can easily make in order to not get stuck.

    They are alternative paths you can take every time you encounter a roadblock on your path towards your goals. The main idea is that when you’re preparing the Goal Journey Map, you already know that your plan won’t work, that’s why you keep it dynamic and always have alternative paths that enable you to go forward.

    Today any static planning doesn’t work anymore.

    A pivot in personal life is a fundamental change in your life strategy or how you plan to achieve a certain goal. You change your direction in life, but you still keep the same life vision and you consider the facts you learned about yourself and your environment.

    You make pivots as many times as necessary until you find the perfectly right fit for you. You can also make a pivot later in the execution mode if it comes to any bigger changes in the environment. There are 10 typical potential pivots you can make. I call small pivots branches and bigger pivots forks.

    Branches in personal life are small deviations from the main path, micro adjustments and mini new experiments you decide to perform in order to find a better way to achieve your goals. They are not too big diversions from the main path that don’t require any colossal changes in strategy.

    Forks, very similarly to branches, are bigger pivots in your life. You take one big project or activity into a completely new direction. You take what you’ve learnt, you keep the good parts, but the general direction changes a lot.

    The limitations of Goal Journey Mapping and putting it to work

    There are a few very important things regarding the Goal Journey Map. As mentioned, for the small goals the framework is obviously an overkill and you have to simplify it. You have to use common sense to decide which parts to keep and which to delete for different types and sizes of your goals.

    The second important fact is that a Goal Journey Map is a living thing. You have to constantly update it. You have to constantly improve it, add or remove things, and do upgrades. You have to make adjustments to your map and to your strategy on a weekly if not daily basis.

    Even more importantly, the map must become a part of your life. You have to basically live inside it. It must become your bible. It does take quite a lot of work to set it up (maybe a weekend or so), but then you have a superior strategy that will help you achieve all the goals you always wanted to achieve.

    If you have such a map and follow it, there is nothing that can stop you on the way to achieving your goals. Nothing. Because the map itself will motivate you. And that’s what you want and need. In the end, you need a new map for every one of your goals. For smaller goals you can greatly simplify it and for bigger goals you make a completely new map with all the sections.

    Goal journey map

    Do you want to know more about goal setting?

    This article is part of the series of how to successfully set goals in the 21st century. It’s part of the AgileLeanLife Goal Setting Framework, which has the following seven steps:

    1. Define your vision list
    2. Prioritize your vision list
    3. Develop short life stories for 5 – 7 items at the top of your list – specify what exactly and why
    4. Create a goal journey map to build a superior strategy and define the process
    5. Use branching and forking to stay flexible with alternative paths
    6. Organize the superior strategy on your to-do lists with a 100-day plan and sprints
    7. Mind the principles in the AgileLeanLife Manifesto

    You’re at the bolded article and kindly invited to read the rest of them when they will be published.

    * The Goal Journey Map Template Image was made by using Blueprint Wireframe Kit on Behance.net made by Göksel Vançin’

  • The only goal setting strategy that really works in the 21st century

    I have been testing and experimenting with different goal setting strategies for more than 15 years. I tried more than 10 different systems and they all let me down.

    Most techniques do help you clarify what you want out of life, but many times they’re nothing but wishful thinking and close to useless exercise. Even more, with every day that passes by, these standard goal setting techniques are less effective.

    The reason is quite simple. The times have become too complex, volatile and fast-changing. The pace of technological, social and political changes is accelerating. The new post-information creative society is bringing a mixture of completely new values, possibilities and threats.

    Especially the rate of technological change is skyrocketing. In a few years, we will have self-driving cars and in a few decades, we will populate Mars and maybe even other planets.

    If you know that the environment will be unimaginably different in a few years, how can you set long-term goals? You can’t. The old ways of goal setting are like writing a business plan. It doesn’t work anymore.

    Tech changes

    Nobody can accurately forecast the future. You have no idea what life has prepared for you. You have no idea how things will be shaped in a few years. But not everything is dark. What you can do is to give your best every day to go towards your goals and then regularly adjust to how things in the environment are changing.

    No static superficial plan survives the first contact with the reality.

    And there is more. If we go from outside changes to your feelings, what often happens is that when you meet a goal set in the traditional way, you may find out that it doesn’t make you happy. It’s not something that you really wanted, you just went after it because you read it in some magazine that is cool to have it.

    Achieving a written-down goal on time and as planned has no value if you don’t enjoy it and if it doesn’t make you happy. Things that really make you happy and things you assume will make you happy are two different things. Thus you must assume nothing.

    Wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. When you set goals in the traditional way, you make a bunch of assumptions about yourself, others and the environment paradigms.

    That’s why a new framework for setting goals is needed. A modern goal setting framework that works. This article is exactly about that. You will learn how to set goals in a way that is efficient and effective, makes sense and won’t make you feel like a failure if something didn’t work out as planned.

    Before we go to the new framework, let’s sum up why the old traditional goal setting techniques don’t work and look at a few practical examples from my own experience of how I failed in traditional goal setting.SMART goal setting

    • Reality never unfolds according to plans.
    • Your S.M.A.R.T. goal is nothing but a bunch of untested assumptions.
    • There is no room for failure and adjustments in traditional goal setting.
    • In the beginning, you have no real idea what will be the process that will take you to the goal, what kind of effort it will require, how long it will take and how much other resources will be needed. The best you can do are educated guesses.
    • There is a difference between what you think is valuable to you and what really is valuable to you and makes you happy, and in traditional ways there is no room for discovery and exploration.
    • Everything is changing too fast to make any detailed plans for more than a year.
    • You have to focus more on the process, your habits, your environment together with people around you than on the actual goal. It’s more about the carefully orchestrated process, not the final event.

    These are all the problems that the new framework solves. And now let’s go to all the funny or sad stories from my life.

    The old way to set goals in life

    The best way to explain the old non-working ways of goal setting is through my personal experience. In my early twenties, I decided to do something out of my life. So I started to read personal development books and there is practically no self-help book that doesn’t mention goal setting.

    In the first year that I started to set my goals, I used the most superficial technique. Well, it was the easiest one to begin with. For New Years’ Eve, I wrote down 10 goals I wanted to achieve in the upcoming year, placed the list in an envelope, sealed it and put it in my drawer. I had read in a book or an article that with such an exercise, you put your subconscious mind to work and at least 8 of 10 things you write down should come true. I know, I was young and naïve.

    I opened the envelope a year later, looked at my goals and crossed 1 out of 10 goals from the list. I felt like a complete failure. I almost gave up on myself.

    But then I read about the S.M.A.R.T. goal setting technique. You write down goal statements in first person (I have, I am…) as if they already came true, but in a lot more detail. You have to make sure that your written down goals are Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Relevant and Time-bound.

    I went from 10 goals to seven, followed all the S.M.A.R.T rules and even put the list with my goals in a visible place. I looked at the goals every day and felt bad, because I wasn’t moving towards the goals as quickly as I wanted. I was focused more on the goal itself than on the process of how to get there.

    A goal I thought will take me only a few months to achieve took me years in reality, years after I gave up the S.M.A.R.T. goals technique. When you have zero experience in something, everything seems realistic and achievable. You can write a book in a few months right, it’s no big deal? You can’t know it if you don’t have any experience with it. Period.

    When you have zero experience with something, everything seems realistic and achievable.

    I tried many other different goal setting techniques. I had a vision notebook with pictures of yachts, villas and expensive watches. Now that I know myself better, I know I don’t want any of that. I had a fancy car and only had headaches with it.

    Now I don’t own a car and I feel much better. I spent many holidays on yachts and sailing boats until I figured out that I don’t really like it. It’s not what motivates me or what would bring me happiness in life. Back then, I just didn’t have any better ideas and I didn’t know myself that well. But let’s move on.

    Too many goals

    One year, following another technique, I wrote down where I see myself in one, five, ten, twenty and fifty years. What I wrote down for where I see myself in 10 years and what really happened are two completely different things.

    There was a big financial crisis in these 10 years that hit me bad. Back then it was normal to have your first kid in your early 20s and today it’s not – at least in my country. These are only two changes in the environment that brought me to a completely different situation than planned.

    Today I know that planning for more than a year is impossible, and what will happen in twenty years is a complete mystery. Maybe I will live on Mars or maybe I will be long dead because of WW3. I hope that the former will come true, but that’s nothing but wishful thinking.

    You can focus on the process in the present moment, you can plan the next quarter, you can have a rough idea of what you want to achieve in a year, but everything after that are only wishful visions for which nobody knows if they will come true.

    I tried many other different techniques and approaches. The one that worked best for me was to choose one life area for a year and completely focus on drastically improving it. It’s a technique that somehow moves attention from the goal you want to achieve to the daily process.

    For a year, you do every day something for your health, wealth, happiness or whichever life area you’ve chosen. Only one area with complete focus. The approach is also part of a system I will soon describe. But only focusing on one area for a year wasn’t enough. I needed something better and more sophisticated.

    Luckily, I had the solution right in front of me. I was working with startups as a venture capitalist and it became the general opinion in the startup world that business plans don’t work anymore.

    Business plans are nothing but a set of business goals that founders set in a very traditional way – five year forecasts that have no basis in reality. Business plans have the same problem as traditional goal setting does in personal life. As an alternative, new dynamic planning approaches started taking place. The so-called lean startup and agile development techniques.

    At some point, I asked myself: if these techniques are proven to work over and over again for starting and managing businesses, why wouldn’t they work as a goal setting technique in personal lives? So I decided to take these techniques and apply it to my personal life. I tested the framework over and over again until I built something that worked for me.

    It’s a slightly complicated and very dynamic goal setting framework. Not to mention that you have to feel comfortable with long-term uncertainty. But it works. It gives you the freedom to stay agile, listen to yourself, adjust to opportunities in the environment and focus more on the process than the final goal.

    Because in reality, you have no idea how and when you will arrive to the desired destination, unless you have a very accurate and stable history in the shape of valid data that can somehow predict short-term future. And even that is considered in the framework.

    AgileLeanLife Goal Setting Framework

    The new way to setting goals in life

    The AgileLeanLife Goal Setting Framework considers all the important paradigms, trends and limitations of reality and how we humans operate. These facts are:

    It’s impossible to accurately describe the past, predict the future and even harder to manufacture the future exactly as you imagine it at a certain moment. This is why planning for more than a year makes no sense. There is no such thing as a visionary, only people with a superior life strategy. The only thing you can really do is to focus on the process.

    We are in times of constant changes. You have to constantly deal with new challenges, unexpected obstacles and unknown problems. Thus you have to constantly improve, grow, add capabilities to your competence list and even more, you have to constantly adjust. You must have no problem crossing a planned activity from your list in a second and adjusting the course of your life into a new direction.

    In addition to that, you can only set accurate goals when you know yourself really well, understand your environment and have accurate historical data that can somewhat predict short-term future. The more validated knowledge and data in terms of metrics you have, the more detailed goals you can set.

    Considering all these facts, we can say that any worthwhile goal setting technique today must consist of:

    • a lot of testing, experimenting, and trying different things in the beginning
    • managing small failures that lead to validated learning and new insights
    • constantly adjusting the strategy according to environmental changes
    • constantly adjusting the strategy according to your internal world and feelings
    • slowly transitioning to more traditional goal setting when you have enough data and insights

    Practically, that means that you begin in the search mode, experimenting and building a strategy that will work for you as an individual and only once you have all the necessary data and insights can you transit to the execution mode and set the goals in a more standard way. You can be in the search mode for months or even years before you enter the execution mode. The good news is that you only have to be right once.

    And there’s nothing wrong with that. Because the byproduct of the search mode is getting to know yourself better, madly educating yourself, defining actionable metrics you will measure and thus making sure you avoid different vanity metrics, you shape the process that you will follow, you forge new connections with people with the same goals or who will support you, and so on.

    There are seven steps in the AgileLeanLife Goal Setting Framework:

    1. Define your vision list
    2. Prioritize your vision list
    3. Develop life stories for 5 – 7 items on the top of your list – specify what exactly and why
    4. Build a Goal Journey Map to build a superior strategy and define the process
    5. Use branching and forking to stay flexible with alternative paths
    6. Organize the superior execution with a 100-day plan and bi-weekly sprints
    7. Considering all the principles of the AgileLeanLife Manifesto

    Now let’s dive deep into every one of the steps.

    Define your life vision

    Write down your vision list

    Everything starts with your life vision. Your life vision is the hope for what your life could be and something you can share with people you deeply care about, want to spend time with, and who support you and empower you. The vision is your true north, the final destination to keep in mind.

    Your vision should be huge and exciting and breathtaking. Your vision should be your biggest inspiration in life. It’s what makes you ready for a new adventure every morning. The life vision is your true north, the final destination to keep in mind, the sum of all different life experiences. Your life vision must be greater than any problem you encounter on the path towards your goals.

    To define your life vision, you should answer three simple questions:

    • Who do you want to become (your personal evolution)? … and make your ideal-self persona.
    • What do you want to experience in life (and how to enjoy it)? … and make a list of it.
    • What kind of a legacy do you want to leave behind (what will you create)? … and write down a strong emotional statement.

    You can help yourself by browsing through different online bucket lists, Pinterest boards, magazines, you can ask other people what they’d like to experience together with you, you can get inspired by achievements of your role models, there are many ways that can help you prepare your vision list.

    If you take enough time, browse for ideas in these several places I mentioned and answer the three vision questions, you should have 50 – 150 items on your vision list. Nevertheless, the vision list is not a static document. Your life vision constantly changes. At least every quarter, you should update the list by adding new items, removing some of them, reshuffling your priorities and hopefully crossing one or two items from the list.

    As important as it is to regularly update your life vision, you must also be aware that you can’t achieve everything at the same time. Your life vision is a sum of everything you want to do with your life in decades or, to be more exact, for as long as you’re going to live on this planet and let’s hope it’s for a very long time.

    Your vision list is not something you have to achieve in a few months. But you are going to die someday and that should be motivation enough to realize as many items on your vision list as possible.

    The purpose of the vision list is not to put pressure on you about how your life should look like in ten or twenty years. The vision list is just a list of what you want to experience in life, encouraging you to fight for a diverse life experience, without any time pressure for the most of the items (for some there are biological or other limits).

    The most important thing is that you stay lean and agile about your vision list. You have to know how to correctly prioritize items on your vision list. And that’s the next step.

    • Here is more about how to prepare vision list.
    • Here is an example of my vision list.
    • Now prepare your own life vision list!

    Prioritize your vision list

    Prioritize your vision list

    If you did the previous exercise, you should have a vision list with 50 – 150 items and when you look at these items, you should feel excited. If you manage to realize half of what’s written on the list in your lifetime, you will feel happy, fulfilled and have zero regrets on your deathbed.

    But since you can’t achieve everything at once, you have to prioritize items on your vision list. And you have to do it in a very smart way.

    When you decide for priority items to go after, you have to take several factors into consideration. You prioritize items on your vision list based on the following factors:

    1. Your current life situation – Your current life situation greatly influences what you should consider to be your priorities. Life areas in which you suck or are dragging you down should definitely become your priorities. Different life situations (like expecting a baby, losing your job or getting ill) all severely influence your priorities. We must also not forget any biological or other limitations. Write down your current specific life situation and how it influences your vision list items.
    2. What’s currently the most important thing to you – At every point in life, you have a slightly different set of values. You always feel that achieving something particular is the most important thing to you at a certain time. When you are young it may be partying, then acquiring your own home, then wisdom in later years, and so on. Ask yourself what is currently most important to you when you’re prioritizing your vision list.
    3. What kind of opportunities are showing up in your environment – Setting goals is not only about you, but also about the opportunities that show up in your life and about the people that currently surround you. You want environment paradigms and your key relationships to greatly support you in achieving your goals. Nobody can succeed alone; you need a lot of outside help. So analyze market trends, how people that surround you can help you, what are currently the greatest opportunities in your life, and so on. Make sure you always consider these things when prioritizing your goals.
    4. What kind of key relationships you currently have –Your key relationships have an especially important influence on your goal setting and goal achieving. You become the average of the five people you spend most time with. Thus you want to spend your time with ambitious people who support you. And you want to make sure that positive traits of other people have a positive influence on your goal achieving. For example, if you just started dating a very sporty girl, of course improving your fitness is a smart goal. You will have big support in achieving that goal. Analyze how your current relationship can empower you in meeting your goals, what new relationships you must forge and maybe even which relationships to abandon.
    5. Your internal resources and external resources – When you begin with anything new, you suck at it. You have no knowledge, skills and experiences, so goal setting is very hard. Slowly, by acquiring knowledge and experience, you can more specifically define your goals and daily activities that lead to your goals. That’s important, because you can’t focus on several new areas at once. Every big goal or improvement takes an enormous amount of time, effort and other resources. One big goal, several small goals is the rule. You want to be making ten steps in one direction, not one step in ten directions. Internal and external resources also define how much you can expose yourself to new investments and how fast you can progress towards your goals. The more resources you have, the bigger risks you can afford and the more you can invest into your progress. Count that in when you prioritize.
    6. Your greatest weaknesses and strengths – You always have some weaknesses that are preventing you from progressing in life and achieving your goals. For example, starting your own business could take you a big step further in terms of finances and career, but you’re really scared to start your own business, because you’re afraid of uncertainty. These kinds of weaknesses should always be a priority to be dealt with. Your fears show you where you have to grow in life. Sooner or later, you have to face what you fear. The sooner you do it, the better. And of course, you need to build your success on your greatest strengths.
    7. Your yearly focus – Last but not least, you have to focus your efforts. Every year you should focus on one or maximum two areas of life you want to really improve. Greater focus means greater progress. So you should always choose one life area every as your focus every year, influencing how you re-prioritize your vision list.

    When you’re prioritizing your life vision items, you should have 3 – 7 items that you plan to realize and meet in the next 3 – 12 months. You should print out a list with these chosen items and put it in some visible place.

    In the next step, you need to add a strong why to every one of the prioritized items. You need to add a powerful emotional charge to every one of the selected items. You do that by developing every vision item into a short life story.

    Develop life stories

    Develop life stories for 5 – 7 items on the top of your list – specify what exactly and why

    After you have a very well-prioritized vision list with 3 – 7 items that you want to achieve in the following 3 – 12 months, it’s time for a more detailed definition of every selected item. Applying user stories from agile development to the task is the perfect way to do it.

    The goal of this step is to describe more clearly what exactly you want to achieve, discuss it with all the important parties involved and even more, to clarify why exactly you want to achieve it. A powerful why will give you a sense of mission, excitement and value. Together with your life vision, it’s something that drives you through all the obstacles you encounter in life.

    By writing life stories based on your vision item list, you achieve the following:

    From all the benefits listed above, a strong why deserves a special emphasis. Only a life vision is never enough, you also need a powerful why. A powerful why motivates you when you wake up in the morning and encourages you to think about your goals before you go to sleep. A powerful why is what gives you stamina, resilience, persistence and a feeling of fulfillment.

    Here are just some of the benefits of having a powerful why in your personal life:

    • You feel more alive and valuable
    • You can connect more easily and communicate with people much more passionately
    • You can innovate and be creative much more easily
    • You can feel the impact you’re making
    • You can inspire other people to work with you
    • You are a more charismatic and energetic person when following your goals and you’re probably happier as well

    A simple exercise you have to do ad this point is to take each prioritized bullet point from your life vision and develop it into a short life story describing why. A short life story can be one sentence or a few sentences. You can simply write a life story on a card, a piece of paper or a post-it note, and then put it on your personal Kanban board and make sure it’s always in a visible place. It’s great to corroborate the story with visual elements.

    To write a life story, you need the following pieces of information and then you write a statement as if you’ve already achieved it:

    • Who – obviously you, but is there anybody else with whom you want to experience part of your life vision.
    • What exactly – a very well-defined outcome you want to achieve. You have to imagine a final scenario very well.
    • Why –you need a strong why for every one of your goals. In addition to that, you can list all the pains and gains that will add additional motivation and emotional charge to the goal.

    Here are two examples:

    As a curious person, I know how to speak Japanese fluently to understand their culture really well and make new friends from there. I will feel much better about myself speaking one more foreign language and will be a step closer to my ideal-self.

    As a creative worker I have graduated to having more employment options and won’t spend my whole life feeling like I didn’t give closure to my studying years.

    When you have your short life stories prepared, you break them down into a Goal Journey Map.

    Goal journey map

    Goal journey mapping (GJM) and a superior strategy

    When you have your short life stories and a clear picture of what you want to achieve (a clear outcome), you have to outline a superior strategy for how you will achieve your goal. A superior strategy is a fighting plan that you constantly adjust, update and improve. It’s a document where you gather all the data, analyze it and make adjustments.

    In the AgileLeanLife Goal Setting Framework, it’s called the Goal Journey Map. For every one of your goals or stories, you make their own Goal Journey Map – it can be a spreadsheet, a document, a physical map or anything that suits you best. The concept is based on User Journey Mapping.

    The Goal Journey Map consists of the following elements:

    1. Life story – The final goal you want to achieve and why (as we’ve discussed)
    2. Process phases – Different phases you have to go through, like educating yourself, searching, finding your fit, executing etc.
    3. Process with milestones – Repeating actions that lead to micro-goals and then to the final goal
    4. Supporting environment – Key relationships, trends, motivational installations and other changes
    5. People – All the people that are involved in achieving your goals (influencers, blockers, mentors)
    6. Insights and Minimum Viable Experience – Experiments you will perform for validated learning
    7. Metrics – How you will measure your progress in different process phases
    8. Feedback mechanism – System for gathering feedback from yourself and your environment
    9. Risk-reward factor – Potential barriers, risks, fears and unanswered questions
    10. Branches and forks – Potential small and big adjustments to the strategy

    Life story – On top of your Goal Journey Map, you write your short life story. We already know that a short life story is the final goal you want to achieve and why you want to achieve it; you add a strong motivational charge and list all the rewards and benefits.

    Process phases – Every single goal you want to achieve in life goes through different process phases. They’re more or less standard phases. Examples of such phases are educating yourself, searching, finding your fit, executing and finally meeting your goals.

    Process with milestones – Defining the process together with milestones is by far the most important part of the Goal Journey Map. It’s about daily repeating actions that lead to micro-goals and then to the final goal. In the search mode, that might be a list of all the things you will try, and in the execution mode, it’s the daily discipline and hard work you put into achieving your goals.

    Supporting environment – You can’t succeed at anything alone. You need a strong supporting environment. That’s why you need to define key relationships that will influence your decision or are involved in reaching your goals, market trends and other PESTLE trends.

    You also need to list all potential motivational installations and other changes in the environment that can help you achieve your goals. Examples are motivational posters, mobile apps, different reminders, and so on.

    People – Out of all the things that your environment consists of, people are the most important thing. People will encourage you, people will block you and people are the ones who will support you. If you don’t have the right environment, forget about achieving all the goals. Thus you need to list all the people who are involved in achieving your goals (influencers, blockers, mentors).

    You need to analyze their behavior and changes in their behavior when you’re following the process of achieving your goals, you need to set a strategy of how you will turn blockers into supporters or get rid of them, and so on. Maybe you also need to make new connections in order to meet you goals faster.

    Minimum Viable Experience – Under Minimum Viable Experiences, you define all the small experiments you plan to perform in order to learn more about yourself and your environment. The idea of MVEs is to not only talk or think about things (what you should try, what you think you may like etc.), but to go and try them. You don’t assume, you go out and test. Testing and trying is the best way to gain firsthand knowledge about yourself and the world. Testing and trying is the best way to achieve your goals.

    Metrics and resources – You need a set of metrics for every goal you want to achieve. Actually, you need two sets of metrics. One for the search mode and one for the execution mode. Metrics are the ones showing you if you are progressing or not. Metrics help you decide what to do next. You have no idea where you are and where you’re going if you don’t have any metrics. Besides metrics, you can also define resources that you need to achieve the goal, from knowledge to money, connections etc.

    Feedback mechanism – The idea of GJM is that you constantly update your strategy based on acquiring new knowledge and even more based on regular feedback that you get from the environment and your emotions. You have to write down new insights and based on that, decide what you will start doing, stop doing and continue doing.

    Equally important is that you can’t pay attention to just the hardcore metrics, you also need to consider your feelings, happenings in your environment and you want to always keep the bigger picture in mind. That’s why you need to do regular reflections and then adjustments in your strategy. Besides the process, this part is the most important one in the Goal Journey Map.

    Risk-reward factor – On the path to every goal, you will meet many barriers, risk levels will change, you will have many unanswered questions and fears to face. There will always be risks to mitigate and you will always have to pay attention to the risk-reward ratio. That is definitely one thing to include into your Goal Journey Map.

    Pivots, branches and forks – Pivots, branches and forks are potential small and big adjustments you can make to the strategy in different process phases. They are alternative paths you can take every time you encounter a roadblock on your path towards your goal. You know that your plan won’t work, that’s why you keep it dynamic and you always have alternative paths that enable you to go forward.

    There are a few very important things regarding the Goal Journey Map. For small goals, it’s obviously overkill and you have to simplify it. Considering the type of a goal you have, you should use common sense to decide which parts to keep and which ones to delete. For bigger goals, like getting fit, wealthy, starting your own business, learning a new hard skill and similar, including all the elements into the GJM makes sense. Especially because big goals require big commitments.

    If you have such a map and follow it, there is nothing that can stop you on the way to achieving your goals. Nothing. The map itself motivates you. And that’s what you want and need. Your Goal Journey Map can be a spreadsheet, a document, a physical notebook or a bunch of sketches together in one place. It has to become something you always carry around and it’s like your bible that you won’t let out of your sight.

    A very important issue is also to build your Goal Journey Map step by step. You start small with what you know and then you constantly upgrade the document, add new elements, delete outdated things and make new notes. It’s a living document that constantly gets updated.

    Now let’s say a word or two more about pivots, branches and forks, because they’re the things in the GJM that help you stay flexible.

    Pivots forks branches

    Pivots, branching and forking to stay flexible with alternative paths

    You’ve built a very detailed plan in the Customer Journey Map, but you know in advance that the plan won’t work, you know that you are wrong about how things will unfold, because the plan is based more or less on your assumptions.

    Knowing that, you can do a few things within the Goal Journey Map:

    • You can brainstorm potential obstacles you may encounter in different stages.
    • You can brainstorm alternative paths if the obstacles really appear – you build your own branches and brainstorm potential
    • You can also specify very clearly when to give up, not to be misled by the sunk costs.

    You absolutely can’t predict everything that will happen. You absolutely don’t know what will go wrong and what will go right. But you can definitely brainstorm many scenarios that could go wrong and you can mentally prepare yourself for them.

    You can always think of the biggest risks in advance and as things go along you adjust to the smaller ones that were not anticipated. You can always brainstorm potential pivots and how to mitigate risks. You do that with branches and forks.

    Pivots, branches and forks – what?

    A pivot in personal life is a fundamental change in your life strategy or a strategy for how to achieve a goal. You change your direction in life, but you still keep the same life vision and you consider the facts you learned about yourself and your environment. You make pivots as many times as necessary until you find the perfectly right fit for you.

    A list of potential branches and forks are in advanced brainstormed potential pivots. You can also add new potential branches and forks when you encounter a problem or an obstacle in order to have as many options on the table as possible.

    There are two types of pivots:

    • Branches
    • Forks

    Branches are small divergences from the main path, micro adjustments and mini new experiments that you decide to perform in order to find a better way to achieve your goals. They are not too big diversions from the main path that don’t require any colossal changes in strategy.

    Forks, on the other hand, are bigger pivots in your life. You take one big project or activity into a completely new direction. You take what you’ve learnt, you keep the good parts, but the general direction changes a lot.

    If you don’t have any alternative path when you encounter a problem, you can easily get stuck in overanalyzing how unlucky you are, you can put yourself in the position of being a victim, and you can endlessly whine, bitch and complain. But when you already know your next best alternative, you can simply move on, you already have something new to look forward to.

    Operational plan

    100-day plan and sprints

    In the Goal Journey Map, you should have all the required data to take everything to the operational level and define the actions and tasks you will perform daily to achieve your goals. This step is about putting the process to daily work. Based on the data in your Goal Journey Map, you define:

    • 100-days backlog – Milestones you will achieve in the next 3 months
    • Bi-weekly sprints – Tasks you will complete in 14-days sprints
    • Daily 3T – The three most important tasks for a specific day

    100-days backlog: 100-days backlog is the package of all activities (items) you plan to accomplish in the upcoming 100 days or three months. That’s just enough time to see progress and to gather enough data to make any necessary adjustments and pivots.

    So every 100 days comes the time for new improved tactics, prioritizing, reflection, and taking the upcoming 100 days dead serious. Like they’re the first 100 days. Every time. Every 100 days. Every 100 days, you make a big update to your GJM.

    Bi-weekly sprints: Out of the 100-Days Backlog, you then choose tasks for each of your 14-day sprints. The sprint is a 14-day period in the execution mode where you work hard as hell to complete all selected items from your backlog.

    All selected items have to be broken down into tasks and visualized on your Kanban board. There has to be a post-it note for every task and throughout the two weeks, you move your tasks from “to-do” to “in progress” and “done” status.

    Daily 3T: Every single day, you should start your working day with a morning meeting with yourself and then also do the same with your team, if you have one.

    In the morning meeting, you do a short reflection where you ask yourself what you did yesterday, what 3 tasks you plan to do today and whether there’s anything preventing you from achieving that. You also put a mark on your happiness index. Then you create in the flow.

    • Here you can read more about how to organize yourself with to-do lists

    General principles

    Considering the main principles from the AgileLeanLife Manifesto

    On top of the Goal Setting Framework, we have to add the main principles and good practices of achieving goals in contemporary times. These are the principles from the AgileLeanLife manifesto:

    • Limit your work in progress: The most important rule is to limit your work in progress. You can’t go after too many goals at once. One big goal and several small ones in a year is the maximum. Be smart about it, don’t overwhelm yourself and don’t try to achieve too much too soon.
    • Find your fit: The prerequisite for being successful and to really meet your goals, no matter what kind of goals you’ve set for yourself, is finding your own fit. Values are what determines whether you fit with something or not. When you find the right fit, passion awakens in you. You find yourself in something. You know that you can be successful in this. You see potential. Finding your fit means that you start climbing the right wall. You find your fit using the search mode.
    • Search before you execute: In the search mode, you shouldn’t have any expectations, you shouldn’t make any commitments and you shouldn’t do any hard work. Expectations lead to assumptions, and before you understand something, your expectations are definitely completely wrong. In the search phase, you just try, experiment, observe, reflect, and learn about yourself and the world. The most important thing in this phase is to have no fixed ideas and no expectations at all. In the search mode, you just learn, reflect and regularly upgrade your Goal Journey Map strategy.
    • Visualize everything: Brain neurons for our visual perception account for approximately 30 % of the brain’s grey matter. When we look at pictures, our brain can process several pieces of information simultaneously, which means that it’s processing around 60,000 times faster than when reading a text. That’s why you have to visualize as many things as possible when it comes to your goals. The principle is called Kanban. Have photos of what you want to achieve, have Kanban boards to visualize your working flow, and so on.
    • Constantly improve: You must never forget that there is always room for improvement, there is always a way to do it better. You should always look to improve yourself and grow. The growth mindset is how you really become successful and meet your goals. You constantly improve yourself based on Kaizen rules. And you must constantly upgrade and improve your Goal Journey Map.
    • Trust the process: The final goal you want to achieve is the final “event” that you experience and then cross from the vision list. That is the finish line. But to come to the finish line, you have to focus on the process. Process is the daily hard work, the daily sweat. Process is one step after another, slowly leading you towards your final event. When things get really hard, remember to trust the process.
    • Optimize your entire life, not just parts of it: If one of the life areas collapses, everything else can collapse as well. For example, your health greatly affects your earning potential and the quality of your relationships. There are some periods in life when you have to put more focus on a single area (e.g. when getting a baby), but you should never let the bigger picture out of your sight. You don’t want any collapses in your life. You mustn’t become so obsessed with one goal that you forget about the other areas of life.
    • Don’t look for outside safety: If you want to live an extraordinary life, you have to do extraordinary things. If you want to do extraordinary things, you have to extraordinarily believe in yourself. You must find your inner security and be aware of your personal power. There is no more outer safety, the world has become too uncertain, complex and volatile. The only real safety are your competences and your self-confidence.
    • Live life with love and respect: Respect yourself by believing in yourself. Respect other people you’ve chosen to be with or work with by empowering them and learning from them. Respect Mother Nature. Respect markets. Respect the global flow. Don’t expect them to change. You’ll have to change yourself first.

    Happy goal setting

    Now you know the goal setting strategy that really works.

    It’s a strategy that considers smart work and daily hard work. It’s a goal setting strategy that considers the bigger picture and all the details. It’s a strategy that makes a goal the center of your life and even more importantly, it’s the only strategy that enables you to constantly adjust. It’s the only goal setting strategy that encourages you to stay flexible.

    It’s absolutely not the simplest framework ever. It takes some time to understand all the steps and elements but once you do, it’s extremely easy to apply it. I use this framework constantly. For my health and fitness goals, for my blogging goals, now I’m building it for my financial goals, and so on. I use a simplified version of it for my traveling plans, relationship goals, and so on.

    I hope the framework helps you too to achieve your goals faster. Try it, experiment with it. Open a spreadsheet and begin prototyping.

  • The proven ways to stop taking things personally

    You were just badly insulted. You’re raging inside. You need to talk to somebody immediately. You call your best friend, explain the crappy thing that happened to you, and their wise words to calm you down are: “Just don’t take it personally”.

    Right after that, you can hear solid statements and arguments like: it’s not about you, it’s about them, you can’t control what other people think or say, you need to have thick skin in life, and even that what others think of you is none of your business. That’s all well and good, but it still hurts.

    Why is that? Because when you take things personally, you’re emotionally hurt and offended. A wise rational statement may help you a little bit, but it’s far from enough. Taking things personally is about emotions, not logic.

    What you have to do is to dig a little bit deeper into your emotions and personality to uncover the source of why you’re really taking that specific situation personally. Only then can you detach yourself from the negative situation.

    In this article, you will learn how to really stop taking things personally. So let’s start digging deep into the emotional reasons of why sometimes cheeky words hurt much more than usual. Here they are:

    • Deep down, you agree with the critique
    • You experience an emotional flashback
    • You perceive being treated unfairly in the situation
    • You may feel excluded
    • You have unrealistic expectations

    Feeling offended

    Deep down, you agree with the critique

    The first and most frequent reason why you take something personally is because deep down, you silently agree with the person who is criticizing you. If you have no doubt in yourself and in what you’re doing, and if you know that the hater is only delusional, you have no problem to just move on.

    But if deep inside you, there is just a small sliver of doubt, a single thought that they might be right, it will hurt you and you’ll go straight into a defensive and crying mode.

    Losing your temper is always an indicator of a core that isn’t solid enough. Losing your temper shows that there are doubts present.

    Actually, there are three scenarios when you can silently agree with a critic:

    • What they’re saying is true and there’s nothing you can do about it.
    • What they’re saying is true and you know it, because you follow the “fake it until you make it” philosophy or you are work in progress.
    • What they’re saying is not true but you just aren’t self-confident enough.

    The critic is right and you can’t or won’t do anything about it

    The first situation is the hardest somehow. Let’s say that somebody insults you that you’re fat and it’s true. You only have two options. Change it, which leads us to the second bullet point. Or accept it. If you are bald or short on the other hand you can only accept it.

    When you learn to accept reality as it is, you can’t take it personally anymore. So in such cases the only thing you can do to stop taking things personally is to accept reality, move on and focus on the positive.

    But it’s easier to say that than to do it. Sometimes the mantra “to forget is the next best thing to forgiveness” might help. And more about accepting reality in one of the following blog posts.

    • Solution: It’s time to accept the harsh reality; or if there is something you can do about it, start improving.

    When you are work in progress

    If you find yourself in the second situation (when you are work in progress), you need to have a vision and a mission greater than any life problems or any hurtful words a hater can say.

    You have to trust in the process of hard and smart work, see how you’re constantly improving, and be aware that you’re a work in progress. You can ease the pain by looking at the list of your past accomplishments, things that you’re grateful for or at life metrics that clearly show your progress. Ease the pain, but don’t engage in a fight. If you engage in a fight with a hater, only more pain waits for you.

    Never wrestle with pigs. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it. George B. Shaw

    If the critique is justified from a boss or somebody you respect and it hurts, you can ask for a clarification and make an action plan of how you will do better in the future. Having the growth mindset and a desire to improve yourself is the way to go in such a situation. If you have the growth mindset you can’t take things personally, because you know you can easily improve and that effort is the road to mastery.

    • Solution: Compare a critique to your improvements and have a vision stronger than any problem.

    When you only lack self-confidence

    In the last case, if what they’re saying is entirely false but you have doubts, there is an easy exercise you can do that will wash away the pain immediately.

    Make a list why you don’t agree with their statement. It will help you see the objective truth, trust more in yourself and distance yourself from the comment. Such a list will also help you build up your self-confidence.

    • Solution: Make a list why you don’t agree with the statement that you’ve taken personally.

    You experience an emotional flashback

    The next most frequent reason for taking things personally is that you experience an emotional flashback when somebody criticizes you, doesn’t agree with you or shows you no support.

    An emotional flashback is when a current life situation reminds you of past traumatic life experiences, especially from your early childhood. Maybe your parents constantly criticized you or they abandoned you, and now in the adult age a single small critique reminds you of all the past emotional pain.

    All the past pain combined together can erupt like a volcano in such situations. Then you may ask yourself how could such a small thing upset you so much.

    Emotional flashbacks aren’t an easy thing to deal with. The first thing you have to do is to become aware of them. You can do that with the following exercise:

    • Ask yourself: is your emotional response proportional to the critique? I guess if somebody pokes you a little bit, it doesn’t make sense to completely lose your temper and destroy an otherwise nice day.
    • Ask yourself: of whom or of what thing from your youth does the situation remind you? Don’t censor your thoughts, note the first thing that comes to your mind. It should be something like “My mother always criticized me, and now this.”

    Becoming aware of emotional flashbacks will somewhat disarm the tendency to take things personally. But to completely wipe out such emotional flashbacks, it’s necessary for you to do hard work on your mindset.

    You can do many different mind upgrades on your own, but sometimes professional therapy is the way to go. Analyzing emotional flashbacks will also help you understand what easily pushes your buttons.

    What are you saying?

    You perceive being treated unfairly in the situation

    There is one thing we hate the most. We hate it in our bones, every internal organ and in every situation possible. We hate being treated unfairly. We hate unfairness.

    If you weren’t treated properly as a child and in your youth, the judgment towards unfairness is even stronger – because it’s combined with an emotional flashback.

    If somebody criticizes you, you can very quickly see it as unfair. You fight for something, you put in all the hard work, long hours and all the effort, and then some unimportant hater dares to throw mud at you and diminish your efforts. That is so unfair. Injustice – what we hate the most.

    Well, in reality it’s not. You must become aware that you aren’t being treated unfairly. Haters are a fact of life. They’re a byproduct of success. They always existed and they always will. You have to start dealing with them the moment you go above the average. No exceptions. Everybody has to and there are many reasons for that:

    • There may be a clash of interests
    • People have different values
    • People have many personal issues or act based on stereotypes
    • Many people might envy you
    • Bad communication is a frequent reason for haters
    • Some people are just assholes

    Just go to a few blogs, YouTube or Facebook pages of public figures and you’ll immediately see a ton of hateful comments. No matter the industry, no matter how good the cause it is, there are always haters present. You aren’t alone in this game, so don’t see it as unfairness towards you.

    There is a saying haters gonna hate. There are many reasons why somebody might not agree with you or wants to engage in a fight with you. Everyone has their own opinions based on their belief system and there’s nothing wrong with that.

    It’s impossible for everybody to have a belief system where they like you and adore you.

    If you encounter people who are against you, that doesn’t mean that life is treating you unfairly. That only means you stood up for something important and that people with different belief systems who have poor communication skills exist and can’t express their opinion in any other way than insulting you. Nothing else. So don’t take it personally.

    You’re probably doing the same to other people, just in a subtler and more civilized way. If you’re trying to change other people, that means you don’t really like them as they are.

    Your belief system is different from theirs, and you have different values and preferences. That’s why you’re trying to change them. Luckily, there is a level above not agreeing with people in a respectful manner and trying to change them – accepting people as they are. I practice that a lot.

    You may feel excluded

    We are social beings. As such we need to belong. We can’t survive alone. We can’t succeed alone. So if somebody tries to exclude you from a social group, there is no other way but to take it personally. Again, it can be mixed with an emotional flashback, if you didn’t feel accepted at home. A few decades ago that might have been a big problem, but today it’s not.

    All you need is the abundance mindset. You have to see that there are so many different social groups, clubs, associations, meet-ups, hobby gatherings etc., that you should have no problem finding a few social groups where you completely fit in.

    Usually the only obstacle preventing you from finding the right fit for yourself in different social groups is laziness, fear and a desire to stay in the comfort zone. Don’t hope for others to change. Don’t hope that the world will change to be more to your liking just because of your ego. Find people where mutual respect is present and where you can shine.

    Your environment matters a lot. And being who you are matters a lot. Don’t take it personally if you don’t fit somewhere, instead find a group of people who will accept you with wide open hands and hearts. Don’t be a nerd trying hard to fit in with the cheerleaders. And don’t be Penny trying to become a nerd.

    Much like it goes for social groups, so it goes for individual relationships. You’re the one choosing your key relationships in life. So choose them wisely. Don’t spend time with people who don’t support you, believe you and encourage you to become the best version of yourself.

    You have unrealistic expectations

    One more source of taking things personally are unrealistic expectations, especially regarding relationships. In life, you must never go against markets or human nature.

    There is a saying that relationships are like glass, but the glass is already broken. There is no perfect individual and there is no perfect relationship. People lie, people cheat, they try to control you and manipulate you. Usually they hurt you because they themselves are hurt or afraid.

    But it doesn’t matter, these are all the things that happen in a relationship. They aren’t an exception; they’re more of a rule. And strangers aren’t the ones doing them. People you like, people you love and work with will do that to you.

    Many times, you act the same way towards others. That’s the reality of life that you have to accept if you don’t want to take things personally. Like you have to accept your flaws and learn to love yourself the way you are, where you have no power to change things or to improve.

    Stop taking things personally

    Homework

    Simple exercises to stop taking things personally

    There will come a time when people won’t agree with you, they will play against you or even throw shit at you. To happily and calmly continue with your day and not drown in misery, you have to learn how to not take things personally.

    We already mentioned a few core weapons that will help you with that:

    1. Make a list of arguments for why you don’t agree with the statement.
    2. If a critique is justified and it hurts you, ask for clarification and make a battle plan for how you will improve yourself. Keep the growth mindset no matter how harsh the critique is. You can and will improve.
    3. Ask yourself about the proportion of your response to the critique and what the critique reminds you of. Analyze whether there may be an emotional flashback involved.
    4. Analyze how many critiques other public figures receive and realize that there is no unfairness happening to you, it’s just life. Not all people can agree with you and love you
    5. Find a group where you really fit in and where you can blossom. Don’t try to fit in and work with people who simply don’t resonate with you.
    6. Have realistic expectations towards people. We may be civilized animals, but deep down we are still nothing but animals. Sooner or later, the people you love will hurt you and you will hurt others.

    In addition to that, there are several other things you can do that will help you not take things personally:

    1. Make sure you don’t give people any solid reason to trash talk about you. Then you always have the greatest power in your hands – transparent evidence that they’re wrong. Make sure you are always transparent and that you always act out of good intentions.
    2. In most cases, completely ignore the evil people. Don’t think about the evil people, don’t talk to them or write to them. Never gossip about them or God forbid that you try to give them advice. Maybe from time to time, you can turn their critique into a joke or defend yourself in a professional way with arguments and transparency when your reputation or ego is at stake.
    3. Make sure you aren’t a hater. Respect other people. Only give constructive criticism and share your positive ideas with others. State facts with solid proof and don’t only share your vague opinions or insults. Practice empathy and put yourself in other people’s shoes. Treat other people like you want to be treated.

    If you 100 % don’t agree with the statement, if you don’t experience an emotional flashback, if you always keep realistic expectations and if you know that it has nothing do with unfairness, you have nothing to take personally no matter how tough the words that are pointed towards you.

    When you learn to not take things personally on the emotional level, your life will be much calmer and you’ll be able to go more smoothly towards your goals even through the days when somebody is throwing shit at you. Now you know how to not take things personally. Use it, apply it, enjoy it.