Blaz Kos

life strategies

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  • Expectations, standards and assumptions

    For a long time, the difference between expectations, standards and assumptions was quite confusing to me. On the one hand, great expectations lead to big disappointments, but on the other, if you don’t aim big you can’t win big. It took me quite some time to figure things out. Read more in this blog post why you should have no expectations in life, but also high standards and always be testing your assumptions.

    Expectations

    Big expectations really do lead towards big disappointments. That’s why you should be as lean and agile as possible. You can’t have control over people and situations, you can only have control over yourself (and even control over yourself is sometimes very limited). That means that things will definitely go into a different direction than you expect, the only question is when.

    • People of whom you expect the least may disappoint you
    • Situations where you expect the biggest benefits may turn out to be big disappointments
    • You will expect life to reward you, just because you exist, and you may be disappointed once again
    • Gurus will teach you how to live, you’ll follow their wisdom and may be disappointed, before finally figuring out that you must find your own way towards success and happiness.

    The power you have is within you, not in controlling the outer world. Rather than having big expectations, you should stay flexible. You should be aware of your desires, goals and things you want to experience in life, and fight for them, but have no expectations when and how this will happen. You should have your endgame in mind, but don’t have any expectations for when and how you’ll get there; because you will bump into obstacles and dead-end roads where least expected.

    You make a plan, but your plan will stop working after the first contact with reality. You should still have a plan, but adapt it regularly, based on the feedback you’re getting from your environment, based on the experiments you make (more about that later).

    And the best way to manage your expectations is to live in the present moment more. Trust the process of getting to the desired event, trust yourself more and regularly reflect to make the necessary adjustments.

    If you have expectations to marry someone and live happily ever after right after the first date, there’s a very high probability that you’ll be disappointed. But if you trust the process of dating until you find the best person and then investing all of yourself into keeping a good relationship, the magical relationship experience you desire in life may happen; or it may not, but the probability is much higher.


    Why we are unhappy – The expectation gap

    Don’t expect that life will reward you. Life owes you nothing. Life rewards those who master its rules. Life rewards those who invest and trust the process leading to the event they desire. So have no expectations at all, but rather have a superior but very flexible life strategy and give your best in every single moment. Who knows where life will lead you and what your path will be. Enjoy the trip as much as possible.

    Let go of any expectations towards people and situations, and life won’t disappoint you anymore. Expectations equal predicting future based on your desires (how you want thing to happen) and you simply can’t predict the future.

    Standards

    Having no expectations towards life doesn’t mean that you just give up and don’t fight for your goals. It only means that you stay flexible and regularly adapt based on what’s happening in your environment. It simply means that you aren’t cocky, don’t see yourself as a big visionary, knowing what and how things will happen (you expecting something means predicting future based on your desires). Because you simply can’t. The world has become too complex, turbulent and changes too fast. As the philosophy of the lean startup goes: you have to give up the notion that you can accurately describe the past, accurately predict the future and manufacture it. All you can do is to have a deep understanding of how the world works.

    But on the other hand, you need high standards in life. You must not be a perfectionist, which is one of the cognitive distortions, but you need to have high standards for yourself and others. You have to improve, you have to fight and struggle, you need passions in life, you need to see and feel your progress and personal evolution. You must never take things for granted and you must never stop trying.

    In order to raise your standards in the long run, you have to do an identity shift. First, you do a few linear improvements until your identity shifts, and that leads to rapid improvements in your life. You see yourself differently and so your standards are higher; then you set them even higher.

    • You will take much better care of your health if you see yourself as an athlete
    • You will take much better care of your money if you see yourself as an investor
    • You will take much better care of your career if you see yourself as a businessperson
    • You will be a much better partner if you see yourself as a valuable and giving person
    • You will be much happier if you also see enjoying life as one of the purposes of living
    • You will take much better care of your skills if you know your strengths and see yourself as a competent person with a growth mind-set

    You have to constantly raise the bar, you have to constantly improve, try to achieve your peak performance. You must become the best possible version of yourself in this life. You must never settle.

    Assumptions

    You should have no expectations towards life and other people. You should have high standards and then set the standards even higher by improving yourself constantly. You should start with an endgame in mind, you should raise your standards and improve yourself to achieve your endgame more easily, but as mentioned before, you should also be aware that the road to your endgame will be much different from what you expect.

    The reason for that are your assumptions. We know two types of realities. One is the objective reality that isn’t accessible to any living being. The objective reality is how things really are in the world. The second reality is your subjective reality. The subjective reality is your own interpretation of the world.

    There are many errors in your subjective reality. Your senses have a limited capacity for capturing information, your brains have a limited ability for processing information, everyone has many cognitive distortions and other errors on the subjective reality map, for example generalization, framing and other biases. Here is a long list of cognitive biases.

    Life Road
    Don’t assume anything. Test everything and who knows where life will take you.

    Assumptions

    Errors in your subjective map of the world lead to wrong assumptions. And wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. You assume something will happen, but it doesn’t. You take action, but you get a different reaction than expected. That’s because the objective world is different from your subjective representation and individual interpretation. Because of this gap, expecting anything leads to a very high probability of disappointment.

    Of course the more experience you have in life, the better assumptions and assumption-based decisions you can make. Life experiences lead to making better decisions, but you get life experiences from making bad decisions. Your subjective map of the world gets closer to objective reality with experiences. But no matter how experienced you get in life, there are always errors in your subjective interpretation of reality. The fast-changing world contributes to that even more. Even if you could reach objective reality in a certain moment, an error would occur the next second. Because the world is constantly changing.

    That’s why you need to constantly keep testing your assumptions. You have to see life as a playground, where you have to test what works and what doesn’t. Based on your findings, you have to constantly adjust your strategy and actions. That’s why the search mode is so important. Don’t just assume, experiment and validate. Then take action.

    • Have no expectations towards life and people, stay flexible in how you will achieve your endgame.
    • Have high standards towards yourself and others, and constantly improve, as that will help you to become the best version of yourself and achieve your endgame more easily.
    • In order to find the right way that leads to your desired endgame, don’t act based on your assumptions, but do experiments and test. Validate your assumptions and constantly adjust your life strategy based on validated learning and the feedback you’re getting from your environment.

  • Free your mind with your own digital brain

    In order to innovate, create, improve yourself and enjoy life to the full, you need to be as free as possible. You need to be as free as possible on all four levels – physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. Freedom simply means that you have the power to act, speak, or think as you want; and as you’ve probably figured out by now, we are more often slaves to ourselves than to anything or anyone else; at least as long as you don’t do anything that would be so stupid you end up in prison.

    On the physical level, flexibility, balance, strength and endurance bring more freedom and options. The better your take care of your body, the freer you are from being a slave to yourself. You can reach higher mountains, dive deeper into the oceans, have sex in more positions, do more sports, and so on.

    On the emotional level, cognitive distortions can be the ones keeping you in an emotional prison. Negative thinking very much correlates to negative feelings and negative emotional states. All four levels (body, mind, heart and soul) are connected, and more freedom on one level means more freedom on other levels.

    On the spiritual level, freedom means freeing yourself from expectations, attachments and fear. The greater your capacity for love is, the freer you are. You free your spirit when you realize that having a good trip is better than just arriving. You want to have a trip full of joy, happiness and bliss.

    On the intellectual level, you need to free your mind. One way of freeing your mind is taking control of it. There are only two options: either you control your mind, or your mind controls you. If it controls you, you’re on autopilot, which often leads to cognitive distortions and other mental errors. The best way to take control over your mind is to practice meditation.

    The second way of freeing your mind is getting to know yourself better with reflection. With regular reflection and by analytically thinking about yourself, your environment and your situations in life, you bring things that burden you from the unconscious to the conscious mind. The best way to do regular analytical reflection is to keep journal, and we’ll talk more about that later.

    The third way to free your mind is keeping your brain as unburdened as possible with unimportant things. There are several ways for doing that. One is to keep trivial decisions to the minimum. You have a limited daily cognitive ability, and every decision, thought or worry takes some of that ability away. Entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and the deceased Steve Jobs even go so far that they wear pretty much the same thing every day, just to keep more cognitive power for decisions that are more important than choosing clothes. You should automate as many things as possible, from what to wear, what to eat and so on.

    Another very useful way is to have your own “digital brain”. With a digital brain organized in the right way, you can free your mind from irrelevant information, you can store things for reference, write down ideas and so on. Not only do you have more cognitive power to allocate for the things that really matter, you are also much more productive and creative; because you don’t lose your ideas, you can find your references really quickly and connect different pieces of information better.

    Don’t get me wrong: having a digital brain doesn’t mean that you become lazy; you just don’t burden your brain with information that isn’t important in a certain moment or with an information overload. There is no way you can create if you only consume. Nonetheless, it makes sense to work hard on your intellectual capabilities. Reading, doing mental exercises, making new yet unknown connections, thinking out of the box etc., are all things that increase your intellectual capacity.

    Your digital brain

    Your digital brain is nothing more than an electronic system for note-taking, brainstorming and archiving.

    The structure of your digital brain should be pretty simple. You should write down or save everything you don’t need in a certain moment but may need someday, save your ideas and, of course, keep everything that helps you to organize your daily life. Below are the things you should store in your digital brain at the least.

    Journal, thoughts and reflections

    The first and most important thing you should keep in your digital notebook (brain) is your journal, especially if you don’t want to keep any paper and want to have everything digitalized. Keeping a journal could mean two things. The first one is actually keeping a journal, meaning writing down what you’ve experienced throughout the day, where you’ve been, who you’ve met and so on. Maybe someday, you’ll want to show that kind of a journal to your kids.

    But an even more important journal type is a journal of your daily thoughts and reflections. It’s about analysing and getting to know yourself, reflecting on your decisions and what’s happening to you and so on. It’s about becoming more aware of your beliefs, values, perspectives, thoughts, mood triggers and so on. Regular reflection is the best way to free yourself from emotional and intellectual burdens as well as to get to smart work, because you become more strategic, proactive and less reactive.

    The good thing about keeping a journal is that you can always go back, look at your epiphanies, cognitions and thoughts, and re-reflect on them. It’s how you grow and improve.

    Here are some types of documents you should keep in your digital brain:

    • Reflection journal – As mentioned, it’s a journal about you, making the unconscious conscious, understanding your motives, desires, frustrations and other psychological traits.
    • Emotional accounting – It’s about keeping a table to rationalize your cognitive distortions. You simply draw a three-column table, where the first column is the automatic negative thought (“I never do things right”), the second one is the type of cognitive distortion (overgeneralization) out of the ten different types mentioned before, and the third one is your rational response (“Not true, I do a lot of things right”). Keeping everything in one place helps you see how you’re improving.
    • Your life strategy – Your thoughts about your life strategy, from your investment and money strategy to your traveling plans, developing competences and so on.
    • Your optimal environment – Keeping thoughts about the people in your life, the situations you face as well as an analysis of your environment, such as your country, macro-economic trends, your office and home.
    • Minimums and maximums – It’s about setting limits in your life, the minimums and maximums you should achieve to keep the balance and different areas in life in check (for example, the minimum amount of times you should exercise per week or the maximum amount of time you should work on average each day).
    • Desired outcomes – Whatever you do, you should start with an endgame in mind. That’s the list of outcomes you want in life, how you’ll achieve them, what could go wrong and how you’ll adapt and adjust your strategy.
    • Personas – It’s a technique that can help you clarify what kind of people you want in your life and the kind of organizations you want to function in.
    • Personal improvement strategy – It’s a list of where and how you want to improve yourself and when you’ll do it. It’s not only a list, but a document with an important life strategic value. This is probably the most important list in your life and has a deep reflection benefit.
    • Personal SWOT analysis – It’s a good tool for identifying your strengths and weaknesses, and can help you make your personal improvement strategy.
    • Traditional journal – It’s also good to keep a regular journal, into which you write about things like what happened to you on a specific day, where you’ve been, what you’ve seen and what you’ve learned. You can just write a few bullet points in your reflection journal.
    • “Thankful for” and “proud of” document – The two documents you should definitely have in life is a list of things that you’re really proud of in your life, like your achievements, strong personality traits, good deeds and so on, and a list of things that you’re grateful for.
    • Other thoughts and reflections – You can also keep all other types of personal documents and your thoughts, like quotes, positive affirmations, messaging archives, personal e-mail archives, dreams, associations and everything else that strongly impacts your life.

    Cloud computing

    Tasks and lists

    The second thing you should keep in your digital brain are various lists. You don’t want to try to remember everything, and you don’t want to torture your brain to recall everything you have to buy in the grocery store or be mad because you’ve forgotten something. If you help yourself with lists in your daily life, you’ll have much more cognitive power at your disposal.

    Lists also help with one more thing, if you write them correctly. They help you with not feeling overwhelmed. The right way to do it is to have all kinds of lists that free you from anxiety and a feeling that there’s too much to do. You only keep one list (or board), showing what’s in process (to-do list) for the following week. With an approach like that, you try to focus on one weekly or bi-weekly sprint, and you try to live in the moment more.

    Here are some lists you should keep:

    • Your vision list – It’s a big list of everything you want to experience in life. It feels good when you look at a list that shows what you’ve already experienced in life and what else you want to live to see. It empowers you and helps you focus on the positive.
    • Your “maybe someday” list – There are some things for which you aren’t sure whether you want to experience them in life or not. You can keep a “maybe someday” list to prevent burdening yourself too much with all the things that exist in the world. If one day you decide that you want to experience something from this list, you put it on your vision list, if not, you delete it.
    • “Not to do” list and distractions list – You should keep a list of things you know you won’t do or don’t want to do in life. It’ll help you stay focused and say no more easily.
    • Being a minimalist list – It’s a simple list of things you don’t need anymore and plan on giving away, selling or dumping. If you don’t do that as you go along, you can keep a list and then do a cleaning every three or six months.
    • Reading list and wish list – A good list to keep is a list of books you want to read in life. Make sure that you cross a book off the list every two weeks, or at least one per month. You should also keep a list of things you want to buy and have. But think twice before making purchasing decisions.
    • Your shopping lists – Simply a list of things you should buy the next time you visit the grocery store.
    • Daily/Weekly To-Do list – You can have a to-do list, but I recommend visualizing your tasks with a Kanban board. If you don’t want to have a physical board in your life, you can keep it electronically. One way to do it is with a software application like Kanbanery. The other ones are notebook applications that also have post-it notes integration.
    • Other lists – You should keep all other kinds of lists in your digital brain, for example a weekly home cleaning and maintenance schedule, gift ideas, things not to forget, things to do with your spouse etc.

    Business and other ideas

    Your digital notebook should also be your brainstorming tool. You can get your business and other ideas (like ideas for blog posts, for example) randomly throughout the day and when you do, you should write them down immediately. We can quickly forget ideas, even if they’re really good. So make sure you write down every idea you get, bad or good. Noticing and identifying your ideas throughout the day will also improve the quality of your ideas in the long run.

    The second way is to take time and brainstorm. You should do that regularly, at least on a monthly basis. It’s how you keep your creative muscle strong. Having good ideas is an important part of success in life. The good news is that everyone is creative, you just have to practice enough.

    Here are two additional resources:

    Mind maps and summaries

    As you reflect on yourself, you should also reflect on the things you read, listen or see. For example, after reading a really good book, you should go through your highlights again, making a summary or a mind map of things that fascinated you the most. You’ll get much more out of it and you can go back and refresh your knowledge anytime. I do mind maps in the Mindjet MindManager and then save them in my digital notebook.

    Notes

    You should also keep notes in your digital brain, all kinds of notes. Notes from team and client meetings, classes, phone calls, sales visits, all other types of meetings, the conferences you attend and so on. The good thing is that you can send a note to all other parties involved to confirm everything you’ve agreed on. It’s part of good communication and it helps keep clarity.

    What you can also use are templates for different kinds of meetings or activities. For example, you can have a business meeting template. The purpose of a template is to first maximize the value of the meeting, making sure that the subject is clear etc. as well as to prepare and share the minutes faster.

    References

    You should also keep all different references and resources in your digital brain. The webpages you like, infographics, blogposts, articles etc. Things you’ve read and want to keep, things that you may need again someday and so on. I call my reference notebook Intelbox and I keep all kinds of useful information and good ideas in it.

    Documents and archive

    Last but not least, your digital brain should also be your document archive. You want to keep everything in one place, systematically organized and easy to find. It’s good if you can digitalize everything and keep a no-paper policy. I know it’s not always possible, especially when it comes to the government, but you should keep things on paper to the minimum. You should digitalize as much as possible.

    Since your archive will become bigger and bigger as you go through life, it’s really important to have things organized from the very beginning; you should also do regular cleaning and organizational updates. Your archive can be the place for storing your personal documents, business documents, bills, medication and medical records, etc.

    It’s also good to have different information you only need sometimes in one place, for example the tax ID number, clothing size, different home measurements (window size, quadrature…), manuals, and so on. You can also keep important phone numbers, insurance policy, a “what to pack” list for traveling and so on in your notebook. There are numerous ways of using your digital brain.

    Advanced uses of your digital brain

    Thanks to technology, applications are becoming more and more powerful. With multiple users, sharing abilities, extensions and synchronization across applications, there are many advanced ways of using your digital brain, either all in one application or with different applications synchronized.

    Here are some examples of using your digital brain in an advanced way:

    • Tracking your time
    • Tracking your finances and investments
    • Keeping a digital rolodex (scanning business cards and keeping contacts in one place)
    • Your weekly menu and different recipes
    • Tracking your calories
    • Your fitness and sports journal with a plan and tracking progress
    • Writing blog posts or your own book etc.

    Recommended applications

    I use the following applications to keep my digital brain:

    • Evernote – Evernote is an extremely powerful and popular notebook tool. It gives you everything you need to organize your digital brain. You can encrypt sensitive data, it’s synchronized across all devices and keeps a copy in the cloud, you have an extensive app market with a post-it extension, for example, and so on. There are also many templates available.

    You can easily enter data, for example capture websites, e-mail documents, synchronize applications, and so on. You can directly scan documents into Evernote, you can make audio notes, save pictures, easily share notes you write down and so on. There really is basically everything you need to keep your digital brain structured and organized. I strongly recommend it.

    • Dropbox – I keep almost everything in Evernote, except files. For my files, I use Dropbox, where I have a directory Intelbox and in it, all the different files I may need as a resource or reference one day. From free eBooks to presentations, papers and other materials. By using Dropbox, you can easily access and view files from all the devices you have. Sharing is also very easy.
    • Google Inbox – Another important part of my digital brain is my e-mail client. I keep an archive of my e-mails in my Gmail account. I try to keep it as clean as possible and I try to write a minimum amount of e-mail. I use the Inbox application, which really keeps things with e-mail productive and simple.
    • Other applications – I also use some other applications as part of my digital brain, for example Pocket, Mindjet Mindmanager, WordPress and Twitter. And I must not forget IFTTT, for keeping things as automated as possible. There are many other specialized apps on the market, but I recommend you to keep things as centralized as possible. Evernote is a good place to start.

    If you’re interested in organizing your digital brain with Evernote, here are some recommendations for further reading: How to organize Evernote for maximum efficiency.

     

  • How people fuck up their lives

    There are generally two ways how people fuck up their lives. Don’t get me wrong, I know that many people living in poverty without access to education don’t have options and are forced to do terrible things that don’t bring any good to them and others. But there are also many adults who have all the options and possibilities in the world and still end up fucking up their own lives or lives of people around them. It’s hard to answer why, but it’s very easy to see how.

    The first way is making one big wrong decision. You marry the wrong person. You take a big bribe. You drive drunk or tired. You cheat. You have a kid when you aren’t ready yet – materially or emotionally. You don’t exercise at all. You rob a bank. One big wrong decision can completely turn your life around, and make a mess out of it. So you should consider all big decisions very carefully and think about the long-term effect that they will have on your life.

    Fuck up your life with one big deciision

    The second way to fuck up your life is regularly making small wrong decisions. They’re called habits. You spend more than you earn. You drink alcohol every day. You stuff yourself with fast food daily. You don’t kiss and hug your spouse. You play Solitaire during working hours. You watch TV instead of reading. You go to a job you hate day by day. Small wrong daily choices accumulate until a crisis occurs. What you choose today has an impact forever.

    In both cases, the worst you can do is avoid the problem even once it’s obvious that you’ve made wrong decisions or are still making them. When you make wrong decisions, decisions that don’t lead towards your progress, improvement and positive (purer) energy, life will kick your butt sooner or later. You get close to bankruptcy. You fall ill or get injured. You’re on the way to divorce. You get fired. You get caught in the act. Once more, the worst thing you can do is to avoid your problems.

    For sure nobody can make good decisions only. After all, good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions. But you have to kill the monster (problem) while it’s still small. If you run a mile away from your problems, they’ll only get worse and they’ll be harder to solve. Don’t stick your head in the sand and hope that the problems will go away. Even if they do, it will only be temporary, life will kick you again sooner or later, this time even harder.

    Fuck up your life with small decisions

     

    That’s how people really fuck up their lives. They wait, feeling powerless and like a victim, until it’s too late. Enough courage and a superior strategy with immediate action are the best things you can do to solve your problems when they occur. You have to make a series of good big and small decisions that prevail over the bad decisions you were making in the past.

    A very important fact you should also be aware of is that this works the other way around as well. You succeed in life because you make some really good big decisions and/or a series of small right decisions. You marry a person that really supports you and empowers you. You find the right job you can shine in. You exercise regularly. You save and invest. You put your integrity above everything else. To make good big and small decisions in life, you need a long-term view and you have to be very clear about what you want in life; you have to fight for it.

    Make the right decisions, no matter how big or small they are. And when you know you’ve fucked up, don’t run away from your problems: the sooner you tackle them, the more control you have over the damage. Face it or you’ll lose by default. Now make as many right decisions as possible.

  • 5Ts – Elements you should look for in your environment

    Your current position in different areas of life is the result of who you are – your genes, behavioral patterns, values and beliefs, decisions etc. and environment, from the people you spend time with to your company culture, the industry you work in, market trends, government, and so on. Your environment determines your potential as much as you determine it with your own personal power. The environment as a system can either empower your ambitions or stifle them.

    In many cases, people who thrive in a certain environment would suffer in another kind of environment. A corrupt politician does better in a country with lots of corruption than he does in transparent and fair systems; meanwhile a person who focuses on creating and delivering value has a hard time succeeding in an environment that respects political connections and bribes more than free markets.

    Thus you should always look for an optimal environment that can support your ambitions and is in line with your values. You may do better either in a big company or a startup, in a technology company or the traditional industry, you may work better as a specialist or a generalist or even an entrepreneur. You may feel better living in a crowded city or far away from the noise and a mass of people. You have to figure out which environment suits you best.

    The good news is that the world is becoming more and more flat. Location doesn’t matter as much as it used to, as long as you’re connected to the internet. You can innovate without having to emigrate.

    Nevertheless, there are five elements that you should look for in every environment and will contribute to your long-term success. These are the elements that encourage creating, delivering and capturing real value by being human and keeping personal integrity, achieving it with prestige, not dominance. A system that supports these five values still has competition, the world is still tough, but also fair, empathic and collaborative. The bottom line is that we’re all connected, we all share one world and for now, only one planet. Hurting anyone else simply means hurting yourself.

    For your long-term success, make sure that both your private and professional life take place in environments with the five values listed below; because the world is changing and those who profit from secrecy and deception will soon discover they only have a few places left to hide. The first three values you should look for in an environment are based on research that dr. Richard Florida did on thriving societies in today’s world, published in his book The Rise of the Creative Class.

    Talent

    The first T is talent. Talent is the basis of everything. Jobs are created where talented people are. Capital follows the talent. A critical mass of talented people creates innovation, out of the box thinking, (healthy) mutual competition, interdisciplinary dream teams, and so on. You need enough expert minds and complex communication in order to encourage creativity. That’s why the best universities in the world are so important for progress – because you’re in a system with a critical mass of talent that empowers you.

    First of all, you should work in a system full of talent. The measurement for that is quite simple: if you’re the smartest person in the room (system), you’re in the wrong room. You want to be in a room of highly talented, educated, skilled and motivated people. Today, teams win, not individuals. Consequently you want to see your connections as part of a larger team that’s trying to achieve something, not only in your professional life but also in your private one (spouse, family…). Talented teams produce innovation and progress!

    Technology

    The second T you want to look for is technology. Technology is leverage, technology helps with progress and efficiency. Technology is the thing that increases your productivity, connectedness, mobility, quality of life, access to information, knowledge, resources and much more. Technology is also the thing that brings better transparency and collaboration among talented individuals.

    All societies (systems) that thrived in the past and will thrive in the future innovated in one way or another. Talented people created a tool to do something better, faster, more efficiently etc. The future belongs to the creative class, and the creative class creates and delivers value by using technology. That’s why you should try to work in systems that use, operate, leverage, encourage and invent new technologies.

    Tolerance

    The third T is tolerance. You want to live in a diverse, heterogenic, integrative environment that’s tolerant and empathic. Innovation means always trying new things. Maybe you’ll have to try 10,000 options that don’t work before inventing something that does. Failure with validated learning is inevitable in the process of inventing new things. And you need the courage to fail. You need an environment that doesn’t judge failure but tolerates it. You also want an environment that’s tolerant towards people experimenting and trying new things.

    That’s why tolerance is so important in the system you function in. Not only does that diversity encourage you to keep your mind open and try new things, you can also more easily find new connections that weren’t discovered yet, and don’t have a lot of societal pressure judging you if you fail. No tolerance means no innovation, no innovation means no progress.

    Coworking with right people

    Transparency

    A lack of transparency may be a huge political advantage, especially for corrupt acts and unfair benefits; corruption inevitably occurs when a select few have access to important information, which allows them to use it for personal gain. But it’s also true that the world is changing and those who profit from secrecy and deception will soon discover that they only have a few places left to hide. Because a lack of transparency creates unhealthy systems. To quote Dalai Lama: “A lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity.”

    Transparency is simply defined as a lack of hidden agendas and conditions, accompanied by the availability of all information required for collaboration, cooperation, and collective decision-making. Transparency is so important because it’s the essential condition for a free and open exchange, whereby the rules and reasons behind regulatory measures are fair and clear to all participants.

    In a non-transparent system, effort is rarely rewarded. That’s why talent in systems like that has little value. That’s why you want to work in a transparent system. You don’t want to keep questioning how much your co-worker earns, you want to know that you’re paid according to your value added and be sure that your co-workers are as well. The key ingredient of transparency is honest, deep and direct communication. So look for systems that encourage transparency and honest communication.

    Transcendence

    Last but not least, we are at the fifth T. The last T refers to transcendence. Transcendence is about fighting for an important and good cause. Transcendence means having a strong why, a why that’s stronger than all the obstacles you meet along the way.

    Transcendence is about being in an environment that has a big vision, an environment that encourages you to constantly improve and become your best. It’s about an environment where you fit in, because you know you can develop your talents and feel purpose in life.

    It concerns a transcendent environment, where things are not only about you, but about the whole team and the whole ecosystem, even the whole world. It’s about you becoming your best, it’s about you leaving a legacy and it’s about making the world a better place for everyone else.

    It’s about a system that encourages you to be a good person. People are often not bad and evil, but the system and life situations bring out the worst in them. Think about the Stanford prison experiment. There’s evil in all of us, the only question is what kind of a system we’re functioning in, which part of our personality the system brings out.

    You want to be in a system that brings out the best in you. Transcendence is what really defines you as a human being and what separates humans from animals. A transcendent ecosystem is a system that empowers more divine forces in you than animal instincts.

    You can also influence your environment

    What’s important isn’t only that you find an environment that fits you best and empowers you the most, but also that you help to construct and develop ecosystems that encourage talent, technology, tolerance, transparency and transcendence. If you want to achieve your maximum potential and peak performance, you have to find your optimal environment, online or offline.

    But when you do that, it’s your duty to help develop other systems and societies, so that other people will also have more options. You best achieve that by being a role model and by being socially active. Let me illustrate this with a story.

    A man asked Mother Theresa what he can do to promote world peace and make the world a better place. She replied: “Go home and love your family.” A family is the first place where family members should support each other in developing talents, using technology as a leverage, being tolerant to mistakes and trying new things, being transparent and having a strong sense of purpose and mission.

    You are a product of your environment as well, so choose it carefully.

  • A short morning meeting with yourself

    The most popular agile development framework is called Scrum. An important part of the Scrum process is the so-called Daily Scrum. The Daily Scrum is a very short meeting with a team before the work begins, especially meant to coordinate team effort and overcome eventual roadblocks.

    The meeting shouldn’t last longer than 15 minutes and it not only coordinates, it also contributes a lot to keeping a strong working momentum, motivation and communication. The meeting agenda is very simple and straightforward. Every team member answers the following three questions:

    • What have you done since the last meeting?
    • What are you planning to do today?
    • Is there anything preventing you from achieving your goals?

    The purpose of the meeting is not to resolve issues, but just to detect them and bring them to the awareness of all team members. Another very important part is that the meeting should always be held at the same location and at the same time every day, and should start on time.

    The meeting should also be a stand-up meeting. Meetings can be big time wasters, especially if people aren’t on time, there’s a lot of small talk, there’s no clear agenda and purpose to the meeting and so on. But if you stay standing up, the meeting members are definitely not tempted to exceed the time limit.

    Your short morning meeting

    In agile development, the Daily Scrum has many planning and clarifying benefits. It doesn’t take long, the investment is small (if it’s done right), and the rewards are big. That’s why you should also have a short morning meeting with yourself, because you want to:

    • Be constantly connected to yourself and listen to your mind, body and emotions
    • Align your daily tasks and effort with your sprint and endgame
    • Keep momentum and motivation
    • Detect and consider roadblocks in the process you follow and keep a flexible mentality
    • Focus yourself for the rest of your day

    The best thing to do is to make your short morning meeting a part of your morning kick-off routine. Because you should hold this meeting at the same time every day. Before you start working, you take 5 to 15 minutes, open a notebook or word processor, and answer three very simple questions:

    • What did I do yesterday?
    • What do I plan to do today? (Limited to three to five important things you can do in the flow…)
    • Is there anything preventing me from achieving my goals?

    By answering these three simple questions, you’ll refresh what you were doing in the past to keep the momentum, you’ll focus your activities for the upcoming day and you’ll think about the potential roadblocks that you can encounter through your day. Being aware of the roadblocks makes it easier to handle them later.

    While having your short morning meeting, make sure that you don’t listen only to your mind, but also to your body, spirit and health. Consider your level of energy as well as your emotions, intuition, mission and other feedback you get from yourself and your environment.

    If you visualize your progress, don’t forget to move sticky notes on your Kanban board.

  • Morning and evening habits and rituals

    You make hundreds upon hundreds of smaller and bigger decisions about your life and your future every day. A lot of those decisions are more or less the same every day. They’re called habits and we are creatures of habits. Our habits are what defines us most, especially in the long term; because they accumulate.

    There are actually two ways of succeeding in your life or messing it up:

    • You make one big right or wrong decision (for example what you study, who you marry, the friends you choose, the markets you operate in, etc.)
    • You make right or wrong small decisions each day (for example you go for healthy or junk food, how much money you spend, do you watch TV or prefer to read etc.). Let’s now focus on these small decisions you make every day, called habits.

    Positive habits, like brushing our teeth regularly, exercising, reading, trying new things, analysing ourselves, etc. lead to our constant improvement and evolution, and thus increase our capacity for productivity, creativity, longevity, income and so on. On the other hand, a lack of positive habits or negative habits like smoking, drinking, clinging to anger or depression, watching TV and so on, decrease our capacity to create, truly enjoy life and contribute.

    Don’t get me wrong, we all need to relax and release some tension from time to time, just let it go. That isn’t a habit, that’s perfectly normal and it leads to better long-term performance. For example, resting and doing “nothing” one day per week makes other six days of the week much more productive, especially in the long run. We all need to give ourselves a break from time to time.

    The problem is a lack of daily positive habits, since for some people they don’t even exist at all. Not doing things that improve your body, mind, emotions and spirit on a daily basis means going back, not forward. It means throwing away your potentials. It means lagging behind and making your position worse. When you take a very passive approach to living in that kind of way, life kicks your butt from time to time – you know, you lose a job, you break up etc. – but it’s usually not enough to really change. It’s just a reminder that you constantly have to struggle, fight and push yourself.

    As already mentioned, positive daily habits accumulate through time. You become a little bit better every day and in the long run, it makes a huge difference. With a new positive habit, you can become a completely new person in a few years. With a new positive habit, you can upgrade your body, mind, emotions and spirit in the long run, and that’s what really leads to a better performance and happiness.

    Of course the big challenge is developing a new positive habit. It’s usually true that motivation gets you started and habit keeps you going. That’s why you first need a strong why and then follow the process through which you also develop new habits.

    Nevertheless, developing habits really is very hard, so let’s look at a few tricks for developing a new habit. Before we even begin with the tricks, remember that you can’t implement too many changes in your life at once; and habit is change. Thus you should implement one new healthy habit at a time. One positive change usually represents an early win and that will motivate you to implement even more new habits. For example, when exercising gives you the first results, you will automatically also be more motivated to eat a healthier diet.

    But now, let’s look at the tricks. Every habit starts with a reminder, a trigger. After the trigger, the routine starts, your subconscious autopilot. At the end, there is the reward. The reward brings you pleasure; but the key question is what kind of a pleasure you’re focusing on. There’s usually a conflict between short-term gratification (immediate pleasure) and achieving long-term goals (true pleasure). If you change focus from the former to the latter, your life will change dramatically.

    Habit 3R
    Source: The Power of Habit. James Clear

    Here are three tricks you should do:

    The first one is having a “why” that’s so strong it puts instant gratification to shame. Your long-term pleasures must dominate your short-term appetites. You have to see instant gratification as pain, and following your true goals as pleasure. Let me give you an example.

    Let’s say that you want to eat a really unhealthy meal and it’s right in front of you. You can get instant gratification from eating it. It smells so good, it tastes excellent and your cravings are strong. The short-term reward you get from eating a fast-food meal is immediate. The pain of getting fat and getting a medical condition is somewhere in the future. And when we’re hungry, our brain couldn’t care less about our long-term goals and our future.

    Now let’s turn things around a little bit.

    Let’s say your goal is to train your body and become really fit. You’ve found the sports you like and the diet your body best responds to in the search mode, you’ve decided to follow and trust the process; and the process doesn’t include eating fast food.

    You have a greasy, unhealthy meal in front of you. With your goals and process in mind, that meal should represent pure pain for you, not pleasure. You should see how not eating that meal is a reward for you and eating it is a big misery. By having a strong enough “why” (why you want to become fit, in this case), that should be easy. But you’re still hungry… and that’s how we come to the second trick.

    The best way to develop a new positive habit is by exchanging a bad habit for a new, positive one. Every time a trigger comes into play, decide for a new routine, have a new personal reward system in mind. That’s the best way to develop a new healthy habit.

    Every time a hamburger is put in front of you, just nod your head, and order a super healthy meal; eat a carrot or a banana or whatever. Every time someone turns on the TV, go read a book. Every time someone orders an alcoholic drink, order yourself a smoothie or a lemonade. Every time you want to buy an expensive latte, put the money in your piggybank instead. Every time you want to buy yourself a new fancy car you don’t need, go study investments you’re going to make.

    The third trick are the cues, triggers. There are two points every day in your life that work great as triggers for your healthy habits. It’s when you wake up and before you go to sleep. Throughout the day, we’re all usually extremely busy, running from one activity to a meeting to another task and so on. Your phone keeps ringing, your inbox is filling up and you face many unexpected events. Daily challenges slowly take away your capacity for discipline and cognitive abilities. It’s quite hard to follow any new serious habit during the day (well, it can be done, for example if you have a no-interruptions day, but it’s harder to do something new).

    But before 9am and after 9pm, everything is quiet and peaceful. They are the two time blocks of a few hours that you can really dedicate to yourself and your long-term goals. It’s even better if you connect the trigger of your routine for waking up and going to sleep with a healthy habit. Then you’ll definitely be a winner in the long run.

    Your own personal rituals

    Your morning and evening habits should be more than just habits. They should be your personal rituals, something, you never miss, no matter what. Your personal rituals for keeping inner peace, focus, personal development, life planning, health and happiness.

    The best thing you can do in life is to first take care of yourself, and your personal rituals are the best way to do it. Because rituals are something divine and nothing should come in the way you of performing your rituals. You should put yourself first. Because if you’re happy, people around you will also be happy.

    • You can call your morning rituals the kick-off routine and
    • You can call your evening rituals your shut-down routine

    Make sure you have visual aids that remind you and help you stick to your morning and evening rituals. Have a Kanban board, a checklist or whatever works best for you. Another very important thing is to have zero distractions when taking time to carry out your morning and evening routine.

    Last but not least, your willpower is the strongest in the morning. That’s why your morning routine can be a little bit more demanding, and your evening routine should be more about relaxation and reflection and calming down.

    Since your willpower is the strongest in the morning, you should also plan to do your most complex and difficult tasks right after your morning routine.

    Ideas for morning rituals or kick-off routine

    Here are some ideas for the best morning rituals you can introduce into your life:

    • Be grateful for a new day and reinforce positive emotions, read a positive quote or two
    • Brush your teeth
    • Drink a glass of water first (with some lemon if that works for you)
    • Meditate for 10 minutes or more
    • Exercise or stretch if you don’t have time to exercise
    • Eat a healthy breakfast
    • Take a shower or a bath (end of the kick-off routine)
    • Daily stand-up meeting for planning

    Ideas for evening rituals or shut-down routine

    And here are some ideas for the best evening rituals you can introduce into your life:

    • Have an alarm on your phone to trigger your shut-down routine (9pm for example)
    • Meditate or do yoga
    • Read, read and, one more time, read (but not on electronic devices, exception being an e-reader); if you read right before going to sleep, read something lighter and not too intellectually demanding
    • Reflect on your day
    • Visualize your goals
    • Take a shower or a bath (end of the shut-down routine)
    • Be grateful for the day you had

    You first make your habits and then your habits make you

    Never forget that you first make your habits and then your habits make you. Your personal culture (values, beliefs, habits…) eats your strategy and goals for breakfast. An important part of your personal culture are also rituals. The more positive rituals you have in your life (in quantity and quality) the better; because you only have two options:

    • You either take good care of yourself or you neglect yourself
    • You either burn more calories than you consume in a day or not
    • You either spend less than you earn or you’re probably accumulating debt
    • You either improve and evolve, or you lag behind and waste your potentials
    • You either go up or out

    Make sure you have daily positive rituals in your life, as they will accumulate through time and lead to the things you want to experience in life. Having strong rituals is an important part of trusting and following the process that will lead you to your goal, your endgame. Strong rituals in your daily life are what prayers are to every religion; they are a must so you can stick to the process more easily.