life strategies

Pivots in personal life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zoom-in pivot
Zoom-out pivot
Customer segment pivot
Customer need pivot
Platform pivot
Business architecture pivot
Value capture pivot
Engine of growth pivot
Channel pivot
Technology pivot

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

Minimum Viable Product and Pivot from Blaz Kos

Pivots in personal life

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

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

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

Potential pivots in your personal life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Health					X
Relationships						X
Money						X
Career							X
Emotions			X
Competences						X
Fun			X
Spirituality						X
Technology skills							X

Made-up case as an example, Part I

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

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

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

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

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

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

Career
Emotions
Technology

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

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

Made-up case as an example, Part II

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

Download

Making a pivot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The emotional challenges of a pivot

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

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

Pivot or persevere, that is the question?

Read more unique productivity ideas, how to implement Agile and Lean Startup techniques in your personal life:

Margin and taking a step back
There’s no doubt that in order to have outstanding long-term quality in life, you need to lead a balanced lifestyle. Yet balance is a word that’s often misused and wrongly interpreted. I also had a wrong perspective on balance a decade ago. I was sure that balance in life is like a calm sea, like a perfect puzzle where everything is in order – you have a partner you never fight with, you exercise every single day, eat perfect meals, everybody respects you at work etc. Every single area of life is precisely planned with just the right amount of everything. I was wrong.

Let me explain. Balance in life is often compared to balance in nature. That’s why I also correlated balance in life to a calm sea in nature. But one day, after a severe storm, I asked myself whether balance in nature really exists. Unbearable cold in the North and South poles on the one hand, and unbearable heat in the desert on the other, things like storms, volcanoes, earthquakes, and many other extreme natural phenomena. I don’t think there’s a place on Earth where the temperatures are perfect throughout the entire year and neither are the wind and other weather conditions; there are always storms, earthquakes or other natural disasters and extremes present.

There definitely is balance in nature, but the balance is not a calm sea, but rather the sum of all different extremes (hot and cold) and quiet periods in between. Balance in nature is the calm before as well as after a storm. It’s a quiet and peaceful feeling after every extreme situation, allowing you to prepare for the next one. Of course there are places on Earth that are more exposed to extremes and others that are less, but it’s the same in life, depending where you live.

Balance in life therefore doesn’t mean having everything in perfect order, a dull life where nothing exciting happens, it means taking a rest after an extreme state and preparing yourself for the next sprint. In other words, life is neither a marathon nor a sprint, but rather a series of sprints with periods of rest in between. By the way, that’s also the fundamental philosophy of agile management. A series of sprints.

Studying for finals, proving yourself at your first job, getting a baby, relationship break-ups, moving away from home, changing a job, improving your physical fitness level, getting a severe illness – everything brings some form of a storm into life, together with its changes and challenges. Some situations are more extreme, some less.

But all situations demand focus, dedication, sacrifice, pushing yourself and so on. You can’t just give back a baby if you’d like to sleep more. If you’re asking yourself why that is so, the answer is quite simple: a smooth sea never made a skillful sailor and one of your purposes in this life is to grow and develop.

But there’s also another side to this equation that you have to understand. As I mentioned, life is a series of sprints with rest periods. Even in nature, the sun shines after a storm every time. That means balance. Everything you do in life excessively for a longer period of time backfires sooner or later. Putting yourself under stress for years is definitely the best way to slowly destroy your life and become a zombie.

Taking a rest is therefore definitely a very important concept in life management. The general recommendation for all workaholics is to take time off at least one day per week, one extended weekend (4 days) for every quarter and additional two full-time weeks a year. On the off days, you should be lazy and do nothing, or do some activities that really relax you – taking care of your garden or pool, travelling, getting a massage, reading magazines, watching TV or doing other things that will completely disconnect you from this world.

In addition to taking a rest, there are two more concepts that can help you manage a series of sprints in life with adequate rest. The first one is called (1) having enough margin in life. The second concept is that (2) you sometimes have to take a step back in order to take two steps forward afterwards. Let’s look deeply into both concepts.

Margin in life

Margin in life has been quite a popular concept in time management ever since the book Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives was published. I really recommend the book, since it provides a very good definition for how to use margin in life for a higher quality of living. I’ll summarize the main points, and then you can decide whether reading the book is worth it.

The idea of margin is that you have physical, mental, emotional, and financial limits that are more or less fixed. When you exceed this limit, it leads to overload and consequently to more stress, intensity and unhappiness. On the other hand, if you let some space between your maximum capacity and how much you take upon yourself it leads to you restoring your emotional, physical, time and other reserves. The space between your maximum capacity and how much you take upon yourself is called margin.

Margin is the space between your load and your limits. Margin is the opposite of overload. R. Swenson

Almost everybody in today’s busy world let themselves only enough space to just get by and nothing more (operating on a daily/weekly maximum or near it) so they are constantly over-stressed and anxious. The right solution is bigger margin that leads to higher quality and happiness in life. With the right margin, you can slow down and give yourself more space to really enjoy life.

Margin is nothing but breathing room, and you need four basic margins:
- Emotional
- Physical
- Time
- Financial
Here are some examples:
- If you need bigger physical margin, cut down on some projects, exercise less if you’re over-training, don’t go to partying every weekend or go to sleep earlier, for example.
- If you need bigger time margin, learn to manage your time better and before you do that (learning how to manage time means taking a new activity and goal), cancel two other activities that are at least as time-consuming.
- If you need bigger emotional margin, you can take a weekend off totally for yourself and isolate yourself from the world and people. This especially goes for introverts.
- If you need bigger financial margin, you can downsize your home or your car instead of taking on another job.
To have the right margin, you simply have to set limits in life. Maximums and minimums. Minimums make sure you don’t under-perform and progress in too low a gear. With maximums, you have to make sure you don’t operate at your upper limit or even exceed it for a longer period of time. You make sure you keep enough margin in life so you can breathe.

Now comes the hardest question. If life is a series of sprints, should you give it your all in every sprint? The answer is yes and no. The shorter the sprint, with less margin you can survive if you get enough rest after the sprint. The longer the sprint, the more you have to make sure that you have enough margin, even though you’re sprinting. If you know that it’s going to be a long sprint, you definitely don’t do it at your maximum, because you’ll only hurt yourself sooner or later.

A very good thing is that you can be very flexible when it comes to having enough margin in life. You can reschedule your daily or weekly obligations, you can cancel some projects, downgrade something financially demanding, simplify, sell things, outsource, automate etc. The moment you feel overwhelmed, you can do something to increase your margin. Maybe you’ll have a feeling of slower progress, but there’s no point in fast progress if you’re overloaded and completely unhappy in life.

The longer the sprint, the more careful you have to be about setting your upper limit and taking care of your margin in order to have time to breathe.

Taking a step back

The second concept that can help you with a series of sprints in a lifetime is taking a step back. As mentioned before, sometimes you have to take one step back in order to take two steps forward. Neither linear nor rapid improvements really take place in straight or exponential lines. There are always ups and downs along the road, and sometimes just taking a rest isn’t enough, sometimes you actually have to go back. There are no straight lines in nature.

There are four most frequent scenarios when you have to take a step back:
1. When you want more than your foundations can handle
2. When you’re overloaded for a longer period of time without any margin
3. When you have gone too far along the way based on wrong assumptions (climbing the wrong ladder)
4. When there’s a rapid unexpected change in an environment and your strategy is not adequate anymore
Taking a step back is usually not a conscious decision. That’s why you HAVE to take a step back. Most often, life forces you to take a step back; and the more you insist on not taking a step back, the harder life is pushing you back until you seriously hurt yourself.

If life demands from you to take a step back, the best advice ever is to do it. It may be a short-term punishment, but it’s a long-term gift, because if you want something badly enough, you will take care of the essentials and come back to continue the path afterwards. If you’re aware of that, the following quote definitely makes sense in life: “An arrow can only be shot by pulling it backward. So when life is dragging you back with difficulties, it means that it’s going to launch you into something great. So just focus, and keep aiming.”

Here are some examples for each of the scenarios, just for getting a more plastic picture. You decide to start running to be fit. (1) Instead of starting slow and pacing up day by day, you want to run a half-marathon right away. You throw up in the middle of the way and because of all the stress, you simply don’t want to hear about running for an entire month. That’s a big step back. (2) You run every day without taking any rest, your calves and knees start to hurt, the pain escalates, but you still run all the way anyway until your bones get stress fractures. Because of the injury, you can’t run for another few months. That’s a step back. (3) You think that running is easy, something everybody can do, and so you don’t need any knowledge about it – the technique, equipment etc. Because of a wrong technique, you hurt yourself. Again a step back. (4) It’s a cold and rainy day and you don’t feel well, but you go for a run anyway, because it’s written in your plan. The next day, you get a flu or a cold. Again no running.

When life forces you to take a step back, you’re usually quite far along on the wrong path. Before that happens, you get many signals that you’re doing something wrong, but usually you don’t listen to yourself. You ignore a problem, and ignorance only causes it to grow until it really hits you hard and knocks you out.

Pain is an obvious indicator that something’s wrong. Physical pain shows that there’s something wrong with your body. Many times, you may be causing the pain simply by doing something excessively (sports, alcohol, food etc.). “No pain no gain” can be the worst advice you can get in this context. Emotional pain shows you that there’s something wrong in other areas of life.

Remember, it’s not the future that you’re afraid of. It’s repeating the past that makes you anxious. Don’t resist life, you must have learnt that much.

The good news is that if you learn to listen to your body and emotions, you can take a step back by yourself, way before things get serious and life forces you to take a step back. You maybe don’t even need to take a step back if you react fast enough (observation to action), but only need to increase margin in your life. Nevertheless, if you ignore your body and your feelings, life will force you to get some margin in life by kicking you a step back sooner or later.

Learn to listen to your body and your emotions. They’re a compass helping you make the right decisions for managing your daily life and ensuring you quality and happiness. Your body and your emotions can help you make the right decisions for your long-term success. It may take you longer than planned to reach your goals, but to be honest, it’s about the road not the end goal, no matter how hard that is to accept (everyone wants the final event, but only a few respect the process). That’s what being lean and agile is really about.

Make sure you have enough margin in life. The longer the sprint you will undertake, the more careful you have to be about enough margin. If you’ve set your limits wrong and are exhausting yourself, take a step back. Your body and your emotions will give you several signals to take that action and the quiet signals will begin immediately after you start over-burning your system. If you somehow miss all the signals and life knocks you down, respect that and embrace that you’ve fucked up. Take a step back, regroup, make a new plan, adjust, and all that will give you strength to take two steps forward, right after you take care of foundations and essentials. If you won’t take a step back, the knockout will only be more severe next time.
Technology detox
On the opposite side of hard (and smart) work, there are two important concepts you have to follow in life for a long-term success. The first one is called “sharpening the saw”. The idea of sharpening the saw was developed by Steven Covey and it simply means that you shouldn’t only work hard, but also regularly take care of your physical wellness, emotional health, competences and sense of mission. The second important concept is putting the saw down, which means resting enough and that also includes taking the time completely away from all electronic devices.

Sharpening the saw

Let’s first say a few words about sharpening the saw. Below are some general minimums connected to sharpening the saw that you should follow each day in order to stay efficient, strong and successfully cope with life challenges.
- Body: Exercise at least 3 times per week for one hour, eat some seasonal fruit every day, eat veggies with every single meal, drink 1 liter of water daily, and minimize your sugar and junk food intake.
- Emotions: You need strong and loving relationships with your (1) family – with as many members as possible, since in most cases, it’s very difficult to get along with all of them, (2) spouse, and (3) a few close friends in your private and business life. These are the three pillars of strong personal relationships and sound emotional health. You also have to make sure you wipe out all cognitive distortions and develop an outlook on life that’s as positive as possible. You should have zero tolerance towards negative thoughts. Zero.
- Intellect: You should read something positive and motivational every day. You should read at least one book per month. You should devote at least two days per month to updating your professional knowledge and analyzing all industry novelties, trends etc. Going to a few seminars or conferences per year also makes sense.
- Soul: Every day, before going to sleep and when waking up, you should think about everything you’re grateful for and why you’re proud of yourself. You should review your life mission at least once a month, reminding yourself why you’re here and how you can contribute to the world the most. You should also donate some of your time or money every month.
Putting down the saw

The second important concept is putting down the saw. You’re a human being not a robot, so only sawing and sharpening the saw, which is also a kind of work, doesn’t lead to bigger long-term productivity. When you push yourself over a certain level of hard work, your efficiency and good mood start to suffer. You start making mistakes, it’s much harder to keep priorities in check, your level of tolerance drops, and so on.

Being a workaholic is an emotional issue, not something to admire and be proud of. I haven’t seen any truly successful person who’s extremely tired all the time, totally burned-out and doesn’t take care of themselves first. So let’s look at some general guidelines for putting the saw down in order to keep long-term productivity and happiness in check:
- Take one day per week totally off
- Take one extended weekend (4 days) completely off every quarter
- Go on vacation for a whole week (8 – 9 days) at least two times per year
An important part of putting down the saw is to really do zero work. That means doing nothing connected to your job and doing no other intense work for your body, emotions, mind or soul. Of course you can go hiking or surfing, which means you’re also taking care of your body, of course you can read fiction, which means you’re also training your mind, you can definitely spend quality time with the people you love, which also means you’re building deep and loving connections, and so on. But the main idea of putting down the saw is zero pressure and zero stress.

However, the “contemporary saw” has one big problem. It’s always with you, no matter if you are working, if you are spending time outside of the office or if you are taking time for pleasure. It’s connected to the internet and it can always interrupt you. Your sawing equipment (all the electronic devices you work with) has become a very capable machine that can either dramatically increase your productivity or, if you don’t manage it properly, stifle it; and you don’t want the latter to happen.

You also need to recharge, not only your devices.

Really turning off and putting down your saw

Your saw (mobile phone, tablet, notebook, desktop PC) is like a slot machine in the casino: the most addictive invention ever. With a simple drag or by pressing the refresh button, you have access to an endless feed of news, entertainment, social connections, mail, work and other information. You basically always take your office (work) with you no matter where you go (except maybe into the pool). And work isn’t the only thing you have with you all the time. Instead, there’s also all the various “social pressures”, which put stress on you if you’re enjoying life more than your acquaintances who are posting selfies on social networks.

So many times you may think you put down the saw, but in reality you did not. Being on vacation and obsessively checking your e-mail, news feeds and social networks doesn’t really mean putting down your saw.

It only means putting down the saw, picking it up, checking the display, putting it down, picking it up, checking the display again, putting it down, picking it up, and so on endlessly throughout the day.

Doing that is the worst possible option, because you’re neither really working nor completely resting. You may recharge your batteries slightly, but not nearly as much as you could if you were resting completely. I’m very aware that jobs are becoming more and more demanding and require you to be available at least on email, even when you’re on vacation, but if you want to stay at the peak of your productivity in the long term, there must be periods when you completely disconnect; and you can easily explain that to your boss, clients, coworkers or anyone else.

I call it “technology detox”. Too much of anything, even good things, becomes toxic. You can even poison yourself and die from drinking too much water. Well, for that to happen, you’d have to drink a huge amount of water in a really short period of time, but you get the point.

An average person checks their smart phone a few hundred times a day. A few hundred times. Doing that continuously day by day, week by week, month by month and even year by year of course leaves negative consequences.

You can find many studies that clearly show that if you don’t manage technology, but instead technology manages you (meaning you have zero discipline about when and how much you use technology), then sooner or later, you may start suffering from an inability to focus, concentrate, and prioritize important tasks. You can also damage your eyesight, your posture gets worse, you lose the connection with your inner self, and so on.

Therefore it’s extremely important that you regularly take the time off and completely away from your digital devices. No smart phones, no notebooks, no netbooks, no tablets, no desktop computers, no smart watches and no TV. The only device allowed is an e-book reader like Kindle, but only for reading books, not for browsing the internet or anything like that.

Here are my minimums for technology detox, when I turn off all devices that need electricity:
- One day every two weeks (two days per month, basically)
- One weekend every quarter
- One or two whole weeks during the summer vacation
Going off the grid isn’t easy, but after a day or two, something magical happens.
- You really become completely relaxed,
- you get more alert to your surroundings (nature, environment …),
- you notice what’s happening around you much better (actions, reactions, connections),
- you can pay a lot more attention to the people you meet, but the best thing by far is that
- you start feeling much more connected to yourself.
- You can think better,
- you can enjoy life by being more present in the moment,
- you stop worrying about other people and
- you can really feel your batteries being recharged.
Try it and you’ll be surprised how much good the technology detox can do for you.

Technology is like fire, you can cook a meal with it or you can get burned. If you manage technology and not vice versa, then it’s the best tool and leverage to work, connect, create and have fun. But if you become too addicted and don’t know how to set limits, you can quickly become a slave to technology and to everyone sending you e-mails and poking you on social networks – you start following their agenda. At that point, you stop living your own life and start wasting precious seconds on thousands of people who are competing for a moment of your attention.
Manipulating your discipline with transaction costs
Transaction costs (also known as friction costs) are a very important term in economics and finance, representing costs of participating in the market. In economics, transaction costs are divided into three main categories, such as search and information costs, bargaining costs and negotiations, doing all the legal and paperwork, as well as policing and enforcement costs, representing the legal authorities that make sure everyone sticks to the deal. Transaction costs may also include transportation and communication costs. In short, transaction costs are all the opportunity costs in terms of the time, energy and money it takes to make a transaction on a market.

For example, when participating in the stock market, you have to pay the brokers’ commission, then there are payments to the bank, government fees, and so on. And if you go to buy one item in a different market-store, because the item is a little bit cheaper there, you have to consider transportation costs, that are again transaction costs and have an overall influence on how good deal you get.

Logically, transaction costs decrease the net result and financial returns. If you trade a lot, you want to make sure that transaction costs are as low as possible. Because of their impact on the net result, transaction costs play an important role when we’re deciding whether to make a deal on the market or not.

Very similar every activity that you (want to) do has some transaction costs, and they have a strong influence on your self-discipline. The higher the transaction costs, the more effort and discipline it takes to do a desired activity. The lower the transaction costs, the more easily you take action or enforce a new routine. Knowing that gives you the power to manipulate your discipline by influencing transaction costs. Let’s see how.

Discipline is like a muscle

Firstly, you have to be aware that willpower, discipline and cognitive abilities are like a muscle. You have a fixed daily dose of discipline/cognitive power and there’s only so much you can do to stay organized, disciplined, make good decisions and follow your desired daily agenda. It’s totally true that you can train your cognitive abilities and self-discipline (and you should) like you can train your muscles, but a maximum always exists. You aren’t a robot and once you reach your maximum, you simply have to give yourself a break; unproductive or old bad habits will start to prevail, no matter what.

You probably know the feeling when after following a strict diet for a long time, you say to yourself “I’ve had enough of this s*it” and open a bag of chips.

As I already mentioned, one way to be more disciplined is to train your discipline muscles. When you’re forcing yourself to do something, whether you like doing it or not, you train your self-discipline. You push yourself to stay more focused and better stick to actions that lead to your planed outcome (goals). The more you push yourself, easier it gets to stay disciplined.

Discipline and muscle training are very welcome, but a maximum still always exists. Even if you regularly train your discipline, you achieve your global maximum sooner or later. You simply can’t be disciplined 24/7. That’s why you also have to consider the second part of the equation. The less discipline and cognitive power every action takes, the more good actions/decisions you can do/make given your current maximum.

Let’s say you have 80 units of discipline per day. On average, it takes 5 units of discipline (with transaction costs) to make a good decision and enforce a desired new behaviour. You can make 16 disciplined decisions/actions, but after that, you’re out of willpower. If you train your cognitive abilities and discipline power, you can maybe reach 120 units of discipline per day. That means 24 disciplined decisions, and thus you’re making progress much faster. But if your (global) maximum is 120 units, there’s only one more thing you can do to get even more disciplined. You can lower the transaction costs in a way that every decision takes fewer units of discipline. If you manage to decrease them from 5 to 4, you get 6 new disciplined decisions, that is 30 in total. Going from 16 to 30 means being almost twice as disciplined and productive.

Transaction costs and your discipline

The easiest way to lower the necessary willpower and other resources for making good decisions and following a new desired behaviour is by decreasing transaction costs (or, in some cases, increasing them for undesired behaviour). By doing this, you have more willpower and cognitive abilities available to be more disciplined and organized in other activities during the day.

The formula for manipulating transaction costs is very simple.
- You want to automate wherever possible, and minimize the number of irrelevant decisions to zero, so there are no transaction costs at all.
- For a desired (new) behaviour, you want to decrease transactional costs to the minimum, really going as low as possible.
- For an undesired behaviour, you want to increase transactional costs to the maximum, always putting new obstacles in your way.
Let’s look at some practical examples.

You want to get in shape. Having a bag of chips at home means it takes you almost zero energy to start eating unhealthy food. All you have to do is take the chips out of the cupboard, open the bag and you can start stuffing your face with junk food. The transaction costs are almost zero. If you always have chips and cookies on the kitchen counter where you can just grab the unhealthy snack, transaction costs are nearly zero. Having cookies in your pocket means that transaction costs really are zero. You’re constantly tempted and undesired behaviour takes zero effort.

On the other hand, if you don’t have any junk food at home, the transaction costs are much higher. You have to change your clothes, drive to the grocery store or gas station, decide which junk food to get, buy it, come home, and only then can you enjoy your snack. It takes much more effort and energy, thus transaction costs are quite high. The further you have to drive, the higher the cost. At some point transaction costs are so high, you rather eat an apple than make all the effort to get to the junk food.

Let’s look at another example from a different perspective. If you live close to the gym, if you always have your training gear near you, if you can just step through your door and start running or jump into the pool, the transaction costs to start exercising are low. It takes a minimum of your willpower, time and other resources to start training. But if you have to drive far to get to the gym, if you always have to call your friends to find a gym buddy, if your sports bag is not ready etc., the transaction costs are high and it takes a lot of effort to start the desired behaviour.

By decreasing or increasing transaction costs, you can manipulate your discipline a lot, especially in the beginning when you’re enforcing new desired behaviour and developing new healthy habits. Make sure that it takes a lot to perform an undesired behaviour and that there are almost zero transaction costs for the new habits you want to develop.

Here are some additional ideas for how you can manipulate your discipline with transaction costs:
- When you get your paycheck, automatically transfer a certain amount to your savings account. Automate paying yourself first.
- Don’t just impulsively buy expensive things with a credit card when you are in the shopping center. Make a system with many check points that you have to cross in order to buy an expensive item. For example, first you have to put the item on a wish list, discuss it with your partner, wait a few weeks, find the best price etc.
- Make your files, folders and apps that lead to your progress easily accessible with shortcuts, bookmarks etc., and delete all entertainment apps and folders that are constantly distracting you. You can also install a web-nanny that blocks your social networks if you use them too much.
- Unplug your TV and change your programs so you’ll never ever turn your TV on again.
- Always have a book with you and put one next to your bed. You can also do the same with banana.
- When you’re doing focused work, turn off your mobile phone (it takes quite an effort to enter all the pass-codes and PINs) and make it hard as hell to open e-mail or any other distraction apps
- Use e-mail templates with Yesware and automation apps like IFTTT.
- You can dress yourself the same every day, like Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs did. That’s how you’ll save cognitive decisions and willpower for other, more important things.
There are many other ways of manipulating transaction costs. Think of the behaviours and habits you want to get rid of and make it as hard as possible to get started. On the other hand, make it as easy as possible to start and perform the good habits and enforce new behaviour. If you additionally manipulate habit triggers and rewards, you will become a superhero of self-discipline sooner or later.
Level up your game
I’m a big fan and promoter of constantly improving yourself, of striving after personal linear and rapid improvements that lead to a better quality of life, especially because this increases your capacity to create, connect (love) and enjoy life. You should always challenge yourself, push yourself out of your comfort zone, try new things, and progress towards your ideal self, step by step. But that is just one side of the coin.

Sometimes improving yourself bit by bit isn’t enough. The improvement process could be too slow and your impatience could lead to you completely giving up sooner or later. Sometimes you wish for something really bad or maybe you simply lag behind so much that you simply have to take a different approach. I call it levelling up your game.

Usually the story goes like this. You set a new goal, something that really inspires you. You take the first step and you see how much it takes to achieve your goal, how long and demanding the process is. You persist for a few more steps and then you give up. You start whining, bitching and complaining about how shitty life is. I’ve seen situations like this many times. Of course this also happened to me several times.

That kind of a sharp ascent (motivational bust) and descent (disappointment) especially happen especially when your skill levels are completely discordant with your big goals and, at the same time, you don’t have the patience to follow the process. Your short moment of impatient arousal leads to facing hard reality and your naivety, then anxiety follows until you finally back off. It’s like trying to run a marathon with sprints when you don’t even know how to walk.

One way to deal with that kind of a situation is, of course, to lower your goals, to take smaller steps and consider the process phases. You take one big step back to make three steps forward somewhere in the future. But what if you want something really bad, what if you’re really impatient and want to speed up the process?

It’s time to level up your game

When you want something really bad, something that’s way out of your league and your skills are way behind, you simply have to level up your game. That’s how you speed up the process. You can basically achieve everything you want in the world (considering physical limits), if you approach it from the right angle, with the right mind-set, strategy, focus, skills and persistence.

Where you are in life and what you currently face is merely a reflection of who you are and how you think. Your past decisions led you to where you are right now. If you upgrade your thinking and your skills, if you become more creative and educated, if you find a new way to achieve something etc., you’re on the path to something I call “leveling up your game”.
- You want to acquire more wealth. Don’t complain about how there are no opportunities and how hard it is to earn money. Start reading books about money and investing, hell, read one book a day, join investment clubs, save every dollar, do research on how to earn extra money, become a producer, develop a skill that’s in great demand on the job market and so on. Focus on money and wealth, and commit yourself to levelling up your game regarding money. If you’re way behind from where you want to be, that’s the only way to do it. From knowledge to markets, everything is accessible to you, the only question is whether you will put yourself in a position of a victim or a winner.
- You want to have a more active sexual life or meet your perfect spouse. Don’t complain about how there are no opportunities and how there are no people that fit you. That’s bullshit. There are 7 billion people on this planet. Many of them can really enrich your life and you can experience awesome things with them. But not if you lock yourself in a room, watch TV, eat popcorn and hope that the perfect person will knock on your door. If you feel that you lack love, sex, friends, perfect spouse or even business partners in your life, you simply have to level up your game. Read all available books on how to approach and meet new people, how to have the best sex of your life, what women/men want in a relationship, how to manage arguments, how to contribute to a relationship, and so on. Become a master of relationships.
- You want a career advancement. Don’t bitch, whine and complain about how life is unfair and how your co-worker got promoted instead of you. Don’t blame life, God, financial crisis or anyone/anything else. Simply level up your game. Study the industry you work in, write down all your creative ideas, analyse the decision makers in your company, make new alliances, contribute more value, learn new skills and competences, bring in new customers (that always helps), learn more executive or diplomatic skills, manage your time better and so on. Simply level up you game.
- You want to become better looking or get into better shape. Don’t complain and comfort yourself with a bag of chips. Simply level up your game. See yourself as an athlete, one way or another. Raise your standards. Find a sport you like, donate 100 dollars every time you eat something shitty, if you can’t do sports stretching, do yoga or pilates, work out with resistance bands, go for a swim or whatever. Buy better clothes, work on your posture, groom yourself, put a smile on your face, and so on. Start seeing your body as a temple you have to take care of (internally and externally) and start respecting yourself more. If you want to become better at a sport you like, again, level up your game. Learn new tricks, train harder and learn faster.
- You started blogging and want to have a successful blog. I do and I’m far from the goal of what I want to achieve with this blog. My skills are simply lagging way behind my goals. I could complain and whine about why I haven’t started blogging in English 10 years ago when the market was still new, why I wasn’t born in an English speaking country, and so on. But that’s simply a waste of time and energy. Complaining never got anyone anywhere. If I want to have a successful blog, I have to simply level up my game. From improving my English, spending more time on distribution, becoming better in search engine optimization, connecting my content to search queries better, writing more catchy headlines, doing guest blog posts and so on. If I don’t level up my game, I have zero chances of making this blog really successful.
Whatever the goal you want really badly is, and no matter how far behind you are with your skills, simply focus on leveling up your game. I like the quote that you’re never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, who cares, what matters is that you believe in yourself and that you believe you can achieve your goals by levelling up your game – becoming more educated, smarter and hardworking, more creative and innovative, better connected, more resourceful and so on.

How to level up your game

You want something really bad. The thing you want is way out of your league. You decided to level up your game. Good. Now let’s look at some general guidelines for how to approach the situation when you decide to level up your game. This is how your master plan should look like:

There is nothing that can come in between

The first and most important thing is your mindset. The one and only mindset you must have when leveling up your game is that there is nothing that will come between me and leveling up my game. No distractions, no temptations, no obstacles, nobody and nothing. In order to level up your game, you simply have to commit yourself 100 %. You have to put yourself in a state of complete focus.

Trust me, there will always be temptations, there will be distractions when you decide to focus. You will get invitations to events, you will be tempted by many different goals that seem a lot easier to achieve, and you will even be tempted to give up. But if you really want something badly enough, you will keep yourself focused and disciplined, showing only determination, iron will, and you will give no mercy to anything that could come between you and your leveling up your game. Of course hurting other people, doing any kind of damage to yourself, to others or to the environment isn’t allowed.

Get educated

Acquiring and applying knowledge is power. If you don’t have the most advanced knowledge in the area you want to achieve your goal in, you will stay in the amateur league. The rule is simple: go for the best knowledge there is. There is too much information, too many fakes, copycats and misleading gurus. Simply go for the best knowledge there is. It’s not hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.

The knowledge you acquire should be eye-opening, it should change how you look at the world, your behaviour patterns, your values and beliefs. The best knowledge should encourage you to apply it as quickly as possible. By acquiring and embracing the best knowledge, you should basically feel how your mind is being upgraded.

When you decide to level up your game, read about a certain specific topic all the time. Focus your information consumption and forget about everything else. Read when you wake up, read before you go to sleep, when you stand in queues and whenever you have a minute of free time. Take a speed-reading course and read even more and faster. Read one book per day, if necessary. Listen to audio books, take online courses or whatever else works best for you. Get educated like a pro.

Build an environment that supports your leveling up

When leveling up your game, you need to redesign your physical environment to the point that it completely supports your mind-set and skills being upgraded. Change the wallpaper on your computer, install new apps on your smartphone, always take a book (or Kindle) with you wherever you go, put posters and reminders in your home and car. Build an optimal environment that will support you in leveling up your game.

In addition to that, manipulate transaction costs. Transaction costs are about how much energy it takes you to start and stop doing something. For example, if you don’t have any shitty food at home, there’s a much bigger probability that you won’t eat it, because you have to get out of your pyjamas, drive to a grocery store, and all that takes time and energy. The transaction cost is high. On the other hand, if you have a bag of cookies in front of you all day, you will constantly be tempted, and sooner or later your discipline will fail. The transaction cost is basically zero. Make sure that transaction costs support your new desired behavior and leveling up your game.

Surround yourself with new people

Besides reading, the fastest way to acquire new knowledge and to stay motivated is to surround yourself with new people, with people who have already done what you want to do or are way ahead on the path towards it. Spending time with people who have more knowledge and more experience will put you on a fast-track to leveling up your game.

The good news is that most people love to help others, and usually all you have to do is ask. Join clubs and online forums, go to seminars, meet up groups, register for trainings, there are many ways of meeting new people and joining new social groups – online and offline. If you aren’t good at socializing, first level up your game in this regard. It will help you a lot with all your other goals.

Throw yourself into the water

Last but not least, you have to throw yourself into the water. Not too deep water, so you don’t drown. But the key is to apply the acquired knowledge into practice as soon as possible. You need to start gathering feedback from your environment immediately, you need to start testing new approaches and experimenting with different mind-sets. That is how you will learn the most and progress the fastest.

You can read thousands of books about riding a bike but at the end of the day, the point is to actually sit on a bike and enjoy the ride. The actual experience is where you learn the most and what the point of leveling up your game really is – playing the game on the master level. You have to remember that it’s not only about the goal or the endgame you want, but also about enjoying the path towards it.

Failure is not an option

We’ve started this blog post by talking about the mindset, and so we should also finish with it. When you really commit to something, when you concentrate all your time, energy, stamina, willpower and other resources on one thing, that thing will grow fast. Magic happens. You will be able to see how fast you improve and how you are playing the game on a totally new level.

When you see rapid progress like that, you simply know that failure is not an option anymore. And that motivates you even more to become an even better master of something. It’s so simple to bitch, whine and complain, and to put yourself in the position of a victim. But that’s such a waste. You only have one life and so much to experience. Instead, decide to level up your game. Decide that you’ll play with the people in the best league the world knows; and for that, level up your game. Start now!
Be more of a producer than a consumer
Today, we live in an extremely materialistic world, where we are programed to be a subconsciously obedient consumer from a young age onwards. You’re exposed to a few hundred marketing messages on average each day, and most advertisers try to convince you to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like with hard-earned money from a job you may even not like.

But there’s more than that. Productivity has risen dramatically in the past two decades. An average worker creates more value than ever. Nevertheless, wages aren’t going up, they are remaining steady or even decreasing. All of the benefit (or extra profit, if you want) goes to employers or business owners. That’s why rich people are getting richer, and poor people are getting poorer.

It’s true that an average inhabitant of the world can afford more and more material things. The material abundance has never been as high as it is today. But the profoundly sad truth is that the material status isn’t improving because wages and productivity are higher, but because it’s much easier to access debt. People enslave themselves to debt more and more, just to afford another thing they probably don’t even need.

Being an obedient consumer

There are many reasons and motivators why you should buy something new. Because you get the instant good feeling of gratification, because you deserve it since you work hard, because you’ll feel a little bit better about yourself or other people will notice you more, because a new thing will bring short-lived excitement into your life, and so on.

It’s so easy to spend money. Your hard earned money is just an electronic figure. Your fastest connection to that figure is a piece of plastic; doesn’t even feel like a real money. Just some numbers. You see something you like. You just swipe your plastic and you feel a little better for whatever reason.

You don’t have enough of your own money? No problem. You have a few more decades to live and you’re going to work hard, for sure, and earn some money. Lenders know that, and they want a piece of your future earnings. That’s why it’s so easy to borrow money and just buy something you want. With a single signature.

A big screen TV you can’t actually afford. A fancy nice car. A big modern home. Dozens of shoes and coats and other clothes. Vacations you haven’t taken for so long and you definitely deserve. A big expensive latte. Restaurants and drinks and parties. There are so many options to spend money, and it doesn’t matter whether you actually have it or not.

You can swipe credit cards and take more and more debt until reality kicks in. The easier road sooner becomes hard. The good short-lived feeling of owning something new becomes a long-term catastrophe; because debt means slavery. Possessions you cannot afford destroy your freedom and your potential, and sooner or later your health and relationships as well, because of all the stress. The more things you buy that you cannot really afford, the longer your jail sentence is, the more enslaved you are.

One of the problems is that things are rarely as they seem. Maybe your neighbor has a bigger house than you, drives an expensive car, wears expensive clothes, has a nice motorbike and I don’t know what else, but in reality, he may be an enslaved person working a job he hates just to pay the debt he owes. The material things are just his short escape from reality.

Having material things in life doesn’t really mean neither wealth nor happiness. Almost anyone can go to a bank for a consumer loan to buy a few fancy things and enslave their own future. But sooner or later, you don’t own things anymore. They own you. Your freedom goes away, your happiness goes away, and all you do is work hard to pay off the debt. Everybody earned money except you. Remember: if you don’t know who the fool in the room is, you’re probably that fool.

The easiest way people see for getting out of a financial hole is by earning more money. But sooner or later, they realize that more money is rarely a solution for poor financial management. You just can’t buy more financial discipline. That’s why most lottery winners go broke soon after winning the money. You must financially discipline yourself, no matter how much you earn. Because money follows management.

Don’t try to only look rich, work hard and be disciplined to really become rich. Buying stuff on credit means slavery. Living a modest and frugal life and not spending money like crazy, especially not by taking debt, means freedom. You have more choices and more choices mean more freedom. You have more options to pursue your dreams and the things you really want in life.

The opposite is also true. The hard road becomes much easier with time. If you save money, you’ll become a winner sooner or later. Because a free cash flow will allow you to become an investor, a business owner or lender. Cash in your bank account will give you more options and possibilities.

Being an innovative producer

The large majority of people are consumers. Most of them afford their lifestyle by taking debt. They enslave themselves and limit their options. But logically, this planet has another type of people – the ones who are selling the products to this majority. These are the people with a completely different mindset. They’re called producers. They’re driven by the force to innovate, to produce to solve problems and to create beautiful shiny products and services that provide value.

Every one of us has the capacity to innovate, create something new, provide value and produce different products and services. Every one of us has a much greater potential than to just go to work, take debt and spend money as the easiest way to escape reality and its challenges. Not everyone is made to become an entrepreneur, but you can also become an investor, sole proprietor, freelancer, you can produce and sell stuff in your free time, partner up etc. There are numerous ways of becoming a producer.

You can break free from being only a consumer by becoming a producer as well. The sooner you switch sides, the sooner life becomes easier. You get more ideas, you see more opportunities, you’re more immune to all the advertising messages, and even more importantly: the will to create and contribute awakens in you. Switching from a consumer to a producer mindset can be one of the greatest things you do in life. First you produce and provide value, which makes you rich, and then you consume. Producers get rich and consumers go poor. That’s a fact.

Think about providing value to the world. See yourself as an innovator, entrepreneur, businessperson, visionary, creator and producer of added value. See yourself as an investor and business owner. Instead of spending money, invest money, save money and produce.

You can even take being a producer to a totally new level. If you have a consumer mindset, you only think about what you’ll buy for your spouse on Valentine’s Day. Producers prefer to think about what they can sell on Valentine’s Day. They see millions of spenders who just want to buy stuff as proof of their love.

Consumers buy things in shopping centers, producers sell them. Consumers buy products on TV, producers sell them. Consumers borrow money to buy stuff, producers lend money. Consumers buy things for every holiday and special occasion, producers see special occasions as opportunities to sell things to needy people.

Think about all the needs people have. Think about how you can provide value to the world. Think about how you can solve problems for people. Think about all the business ideas you have; and if you don’t have them, brainstorm. Think about your dreams and talents, and how you can monetize them. Think like a producer and a creator of value.

“You look at the world, when you buy a sandwich or a beer; you are a consumer where you trade money for a certain type of good. I think money is fundamentally an exchange of value. So, how can you be the guy that produces the value so that people can use that to give you the money? When you see that way, then you kinda see the matrix. That’s the biggest switch you probably have to make.” Terry Lin, Baller Leather, Your Own Way Out Interview

Changing from a consumer to a producer mindset

Changing your mindset from being a consumer to being a producer is not an easy job, but it can be done. Here are some tricks that are going to help you change perspective.

Whenever you want to be an obedient consumer, do the following:
- Whatever you buy, multiply the price by ten. That’s the actual cost of your purchase. If you were to invest that money, that is approximately how much money you’d make in twenty-five years with an average return on your investment.
- Everything you buy doesn’t only cost money. It also costs you your freedom, your space in life, your future and the number of your choices. See how you’re enslaving yourself with every purchase, especially if you’re buying things on debt.
- Whenever you get a paycheck, Pay yourself first. Have a savings account and put some money aside for your future. See it as part of your expenditures and consumption. Feel instant gratification when you save money. Whenever you see your neighbor’s fancy car and feel bad, look at your savings account and it’ll make you feel better instantly.
- For bigger purchases, wait two to three months, don’t make impulsive decisions, especially not for big purchases. If you still need the new thing, maybe you should buy it, but rather not. Time will curb your consumption desires.
- Rather than buying things you won’t use in a few weeks’ time and that only start collecting dust, live a minimalistic life. Remove all waste from your life.
- If you really have problems controlling your expenditures, find a spouse with better money management habits than you. It will be a good influence on you and you’ll be able to save much more money.
Tricks to acquiring a producer mindset:
- Become a smarter consumer, educate yourself, compare prices, understand taxes and the monetary system, read financial statements, become financially educated. Try to see everything you buy as a business deal with room to negotiate.
- Read investing and business books, as this will motivate you to save more and to produce more value for the world; besides learning new things.
- Spend more time with investors and producers. Join business or investor clubs, make new friends, and go to conferences.
- Invest in yourself, unless you don’t think you’re a good investment. But you are. Leveling up your skills, upgrading you mindset and having a better life strategy is the best investment you can make.
- Have a long-term approach. It takes years to change your mindset, to learn new skills and to really become a producer and then produce something of real value. The good news is that you only have to be right once with the right product (to get rich), but you can’t just switch sides, it’s not that easy. You must learn about the markets, you must develop new skills, expand your social network, and so on. The learning curve is long and takes a lot of effort, years of hard work, but it’s worth it. Not only because of a better earning potential, but also because of the feeling that you created something and contributed to the world.
- Start creating something small and try to sell it. Maybe you can start with selling things you don’t need at home. Try to identify small opportunities for making some money. Make your first dollar, then ten dollars and continue like that.
- Go to the Arab part of the world and practice bargaining and negotiating. Most people feel uncomfortable negotiating and getting the best possible price. If you can’t do it, partner up with someone who can.
- Make sure your spouse understands your goals and supports them. If you try to save, invest and produce, and your spouse only wants to spend and consume, things will not work out very well. Besides investing into yourself (you), your spouse is the most important choice you make in your life.
- Think about what else you consume that’s unnecessary, like news, TV, unhealthy food etc. Try to see your time and energy as precious resources you can either waste or invest wisely.
- Try to think about how to create products with real value. If you want long-term success, you need to create value that people really need and respect. Try to build products you’d proudly put your name on. Don’t try to just to make a quick buck or scam people.
My friend Robert Rolih wrote two reports that are great if you are new to investing:

That’s also what I do. I’m not rich (yet) but my material status is improving every year. I drive an average car (which I even downgraded a few years ago) and I live in a small but cute flat I can afford. I spend as little as possible on clothes. I don’t buy any unnecessary stuff. I try to live as minimalistic of a life as possible.

I have a spouse who knows how to save money and she motivates me to spend even less. She is a really good influence when it comes to money. My major expenditures are investments into myself (books, seminars, MOOCs…), healthy food, technology and sports. All that I see more as investments than costs.

Seven years ago, I wasn’t even close to being careful with my money, because of my false mindset. That’s changing for the better every year; especially by reading books and socializing with the right people, and it feels so much better. Still, I’m not obsessed with money and I value relationships and doing good much more than financial benefit.

I see myself much more as a producer than a consumer. I produce things I’m good at, things like writing articles, doing workshops, managing complex projects and delivering consulting work. I’m just in the process of switching from producing value for the local to the global market, while my plan is to also create some products so I can progress from only trading my time for money to also having some passive and portfolio income.

It may take me the next decade to really do it, but I have no problem investing into the process and trusting it. Despite all that, I really enjoy what I’m doing. It’s not only about the final event, the path alone pretty much has the same value and importance.