Blaz Kos

life strategies

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  • Process versus event

    There are two ways to get the things you want in life. One way, the very easy one, is that someone gives it to you. You inherit it, you win the lottery, you get lucky, your family or someone else simply gives it to you. You may have gotten good genes, you may have been born in a rich family, you may fall in love with the right person right away, you may have been born with good looks or intelligence. There’s nothing wrong with that, but almost nobody on Earth is born with all their big desires fulfilled; and if there were no other way of getting the things you want, the world would really be very unfair.

    That’s why we know the second way of getting the things we want in life. It’s called following a carefully orchestrated process. We can give different names to the thing you want, we can call it your endgame, your desired outcome, the final event or simply event. But to come to the event you want, process comes into play first. If you don’t respect and follow the process, it’s most likely that there won’t be a final event for you.

    The sad truth is that most people want the big events in their life without investing into the process. Most people look at the few people who were born lucky and feel sorry for themselves, wondering why they aren’t that lucky in life; even more: they see people who put all their effort into the long process as lucky. They see success, but they refuse to see years and years of hard work and the vigorous process that successful people have followed.

    As a consequence, people get mad at life as if life owes them something. But life owes you nothing, it was here first. Disregarding the process and giving away your personal power means giving away your potential to live a full and quality life. It means giving up your desires and dreams.

    You should remember two things. The first is that you’re never given a wish or a desire without also being given the power to make it come true. And the second thing is that life rewards those who master its rules and respect the process.You have to work hard for what you wish for.

    But it’s also true that following and respecting the process isn’t easy. You need a long-term view. First, you need to put in the effort and you only reap the rewards after a long time of investing. Following the process takes discipline, stamina, persistence, resilience, fast learning, competitive mind-set, smart work, hard work and much more. It’s only after years of hard work that the rewards and the events you wanted follow.

    The events you want in your life

    Having desires and needs is in the human nature. It’s in your nature to want things in life, especially avoiding pain and striving towards pleasure. It’s in our bones to progress, evolve, achieve and experience life as much as possible and be happy. It’s true that happiness has more to do with our inner state than outer rewards, but we still need achievements and good events to happen to us. You need to respect your own desires and needs.

    Here are the events most people (90 %) want in life:

    • Health: To have a ripped body and be fit
    • Relationships: To fall in love, have the spouse of your dreams and many honest friends
    • Money: To get rich or be financially well off
    • Career: To be respected and promoted, to have a good job/business
    • Competences: To be really good at something and contribute to the world
    • Emotions: To be happy and strong

    And here are the most important facts of life:

    • Having a ripped body is the final event, but to get fit, you must first follow the process
    • Falling in love with the right person is an event, but to get to that, you must first follow the process
    • Getting rich is the final outcome, but to get wealthy, you must first follow the process
    • Getting promoted is your endgame, but first you have to follow the process that will lead you to the promotion you want
    • Being good at something is the final event, but before that, you have to invest into the process
    • Being a happier person is an event, you can’t just decide to be happier, you must first follow a specific process to get there.

    All these are final events you probably want in life, at least some of the outcomes you might desire. Being aware and knowing what you want in life as clearly as possible is very important and the first step towards a better life. But after you know the events you want, it’s time to follow a carefully orchestrated process. As I already mentioned, the process is usually the thing that creates the events and final outcomes that most people see as luck.

    An interesting fact to mention here is that the same philosophy is the foundation of the lean start-up methodology. To quote Eric Reis, father of the lean start-up movement: “Start-up success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Start-up success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.” The same rule applies to all other areas of your life.

    The process

    Let’s say that again, so you’ll really become aware of it. The process is the overnight success that comes after years of hard work. It’s the effort you put in that leads to the results you want. The process requires discipline, sacrifice, commitment and delayed gratification. The process is your sweat and tears, it’s the life’s test of whether you really want something badly enough. Because if you really want something badly enough, you’ll always find a way, if not, you’ll always find an excuse.

    In most cases, the process consists of:

    • “Bottom lines” or core of the matter
    • Educating yourself and levelling up your skills
    • Searching and experimenting to find the right thing for you, your fit
    • Identity shift and changing your inner world
    • Building a superior strategy with all your creativity and strategic thinking
    • Regular adjustments, staying flexible and constantly innovating
    • Choosing the right environemnt
    • Putting in smart and hard work for years (usually three to ten years)
    • Constant improvements and adjustments

    We can divide the process elements into five phases that are called empathy, stickiness, virality, revenue and scaling. More about the phases in some later post. But now, let’s look at the process elements in a little bit more detail.

    First are the bottom lines. The bottom lines are simple, in most cases eternal, truths about life. They are the core guidelines for what to do, you only have to find your own way for doing it. Here are the bottom lines for the most desired things in life:

    • Health: You have to exercise (aerobic, anaerobic) regularly and mind what and how much you eat
    • Relationships: Mutual value added that has to be in balance, you have to meet enough people
    • Money: You have to spend less than you earn and invest the difference or build your own business
    • Career: The more ambitious career you want, the more people you have to impact (preferably in a positive way), fighting for a cause or providing and delivering the value people want
    • Competences: To be an outlier in life, you have to invest 10,000 hours into something
    • Emotions: To be happy, you have to increase your capacity for love and your feeling of self-worth

    The bottom lines are very simple in theory. There’s no need to complicate them more than that. The problem is that there are unlimited ways of discovering these bottom lines; and everybody has to find their own way.

    Although there are many ways to achieve bottom line results and that can be quite confusing, there are also some other general rules about how to follow the process and what to do.

    First of all, you have to educate yourself and level up your skills. No matter what you want to do or achieve in life, acquiring and applying knowledge is power. Go straight to the best resources and study them carefully. In the information age, we have an inflation of information, and most of it is shit. A copy of a copy of a copy.

    Don’t just consume information, go for the best knowledge and apply it to your life. Read constantly, keep talking to people who are smarter than you, and never stop educating yourself. And applying knowledge in your daily life.

    Nevertheless, no matter how much knowledge you acquire, no matter how many role models you study, you must find your own way to success. We are all different. Something else works for me than it does for you. Thus you must search and experiment in life to find the winning combination for you only. Life is like a puzzle, you have to build your masterpiece for yourself. You have to be you, since everybody else is already taken.

    After you find your fit, hard and smart work follows. Making an identity shift and changing your inner world. Using all your creativity and strategic thinking to build a superior strategy, which should then be your own personal system that leads you to better odds for success. Making regular adjustments and staying flexible. Putting in smart and hard work for years. Constant improvements and adjustments. You have to focus yourself, you have to push yourself, and you must never give up.

    Sooner or later, the process will lead you to your final outcome. The beginnings are usually the hardest. You first have to set strong foundations, but you’re also doing something new, something you’re not really good at. In the beginning, you may even be surprised about how much innovation and effort it takes to achieve an outcome you desire. But remember, every master was once a disaster.

    When you see your first early wins after starting to follow your process, you’ll get more motivated. Your effort will accumulate, your skills will level up and you will see your progress clearly. Remember that with time, the hard road becomes easy and the easy road usually becomes hard.

    It usually takes from three to ten years of following the process each day to really achieve the final outcome. During the process, there are always setbacks, disappointments and obstacles. They are like little tests to see whether you still really want something badly enough. Sometimes you have to take one step back to take two steps forward. Sometimes your progress slows down. But you don’t have to be afraid of slow progress, what you have to be afraid of is giving up.

    Never give up, always trust and follow the process. Without the process, there is no final event.

    There’s another important thing. If you skip the process, you won’t really enjoy the event as much as you could. If something is given to you, you don’t respect it as much; and even more: you don’t evolve, your skills don’t level up, you don’t improve and become a better person. Following the process has many other benefits besides achieving the desired final event.

    Things that influence the process the most

    There are, of course, many things that influence how fast you can go through the process and how much time it will take you to get to your final event. Here are the six most important things that influence the process and that you have to take into consideration when building your life strategy.

    • Your starting point – The worse your staring position is, the longer the process will probably take.
    • The resources available to you – The more resources you have available, be it inner (intelligence, skills, stamina, knowledge…) or outer assets (money, connections, brand, technology…), the faster you can go through the process. That’s why focusing and acquiring resources is so important in life, and why in the long run, success brings success.
    • Market trends (financial, job…) – Market trends can accelerate or slow down or even stop your progress during the process. Never forget that markets always win, take them into consideration very carefully. Changes create new winners.
    • Your environment – From your country, company and spouse to your friends and colleagues. You’re also the product of your environment. Make sure that your environment supports your process and that it’s possible to achieve your desired outcome in the environment you operate in.
    • Creativity and innovation –. On your individual path to success, you always have to invent and create new things. There’s no successful process without good and creative ideas. If you find yourself stuck, you have to innovate your way out.
    • Rituals and habits – To follow a specific new process, you need a new reward and value system in your life, with new rituals and habits. The more flexible you are and the faster you can upgrade your thinking and introduce new rituals and habits into your life, the faster you’ll start following the new process.

  • Environment you operate in and ideal conditions for you

    I’ve frequently mentioned that you need an environment that supports you at achieving your goals, an environment where you fit in perfectly. To prosper in life, you need to be a part of something that feels like home and natural to you, and enables you to prosper, develop and grow. You need an environment with ideal conditions for you to thrive.

    To better understand what ideal conditions really mean, let’s look at the environmental variables you can choose from and even change if necessary. It’ll help you to clarify what ideal environmental conditions mean for you and how to build such an environment.

    There are two ecosystems that you spend most of your time in, both consisting of space and relationships:

    • Personal environment, with your home, spouse, family and friends
    • Business environment, with your office, co-workers and stakeholders

    The better you know yourself, the better you understand what kind of an environment you need to flourish. It’s good to first do a personal SWOT analysis and reflect on what you like in your current environment and what you liked and disliked in your past environments. Based on that, you can make validated assumptions on which environmental elements support you and which drag you down. You’ll also get an idea of what to test and what to change. It’s the typical Agile and Lean Life process of searching, experimenting and then executing.

    Building an environment that supports you is an important part of your life strategy. Now let’s look at some ideas on which variables to test, experiment with and validate when it comes to your environment.

    Your personal environment

    Your personal environment is your private space where you spend your free time, usually with people who are the closest to you, meaning your spouse, family and friends. There are some major decisions you have to make regarding your personal environment. Even if you don’t make any decisions, life makes them for you. But it’s always better to be the pilot of your own life.

    When doing an analysis and setting goals for the personal environment that would perfectly support your personal goals, you should consider the following elements:

    • Country that suits you best – if there is an option to move, otherwise optimize within
    • Political and macroeconomic stability of the country and the level of bureaucracy
    • Metropolis / City / Countryside – which supports your personal goals best?
    • Local weather and climate (number of sunny days, seasons…)
    • Available infrastructure (for you to commute, travel…)
    • Access to healthcare and social security
    • Opportunities for your personal evolution and growth
    • Access to (healthy) food you like and easy access to sports you want to do
    • Cleanliness of natural resources (air, water etc.)
    • Access to formal and informal education for you and your family
    • How close/far you are/need to be to your primary family
    • Support environment for the elderly population (you’ll get old one day as well)
    • Is this the right environment for you to find the right spouse and build your family?
    • Does the environment support your hobbies and things you do for fun?
    • Access to nature and pets (if important to you)
    • Cultural life (art, music etc.) (if important to you)
    • Access to technology and information
    • Safety of the environment
    • Dominant religion
    • House / Flat / Other – the one that you feel best in and can afford
    • Interior decoration (including visual aids supporting your goals)
    • Tidiness and cleanliness of your surroundings (order, creative chaos…)
    • Other elements

    As you’ve probably figured out, you can’t have everything. Thus you have to choose your priorities and rank every factor based on how important it is to you. After knowing which elements of the private environment are important to you, you can analyse which cities support you best.

    • For some, living in New York city centre is optimal
    • For others, living in a small European country in the countryside is better
    • For someone else, a safe city is perfect, just big enough to have enough variety in cultural life

    A factor that’s even more important than the space where you spend most of your free time are the private relationships in your life. Private relationships include your spouse, your primary family, your secondary family, your friends, your acquaintances and your neighbours.

    By far the most important relationship you have in your life is the one with your spouse. Your spouse can make you or break you. If you don’t fit together, if you don’t support each other and have common goals, life is much harder and more complicated. The problem, of course, is that because the people we love are the closest to us, we know their weaknesses and can consequently most easily hurt them when we aren’t satisfied with ourselves. But you should never take your own problems out on your partner.

    In order for you to have a healthy relationship with your spouse, there must be lust and there must be respect. There must be a clear picture of who will do what, who will invest what and what each one expects out of the relationship. If you complement each other, even better. The foundation of every good relationship is communication. If you want to communicate well with your partner, you must know what you want and explain what your expectations are.

    Here are some elements you should be clear about with your spouse (making a persona can help a lot):

    • Basic demographics (age, gender…)
    • Basic psycho-sociological traits (religion, culture…)
    • Must-have values and traits (intelligence, integrity, health…)
    • Key characteristics (kindness, persistence…)
    • Deal breakers (smoking, cruelty)
    • Goals (building a family, )
    • Other

    When thinking about these elements, don’t only consider what you want, but also what kind of a person would have to be by your side in order for you to thrive the most. It’s not only about finding people you feel good with, but also about surrounding yourself with people who push you to prosper and develop as quickly as possible.

    For example, I know how to make money, but I’m lousy at keeping money. Having a spouse who is frugal is a big value added for me. I know I have to eat healthy, so having a spouse who also eats healthy is very important for my optimal health. If I had a partner who loved to bake and cook unhealthy food, I would definitely get fat. Like ultra-overweight.

    You should do the same analysis for your friends, acquaintances, neighbours and other people you meet in your personal life. Ask yourself:

    • Which country would be optimal for my personal goals?
    • Where would I feel the best and prosper (city, space…)?
    • Who is the optimal spouse for me (lust + respect + daily life + being your best)?
    • What kind of a friendship would help me flourish the most?
    • Which visual and other aids in my home environment would motivate me the most?

    Your business environment

    Most of us usually spend even more time in our business environment than at home. Much like you need space and people who support you in your private life, so you need the right environment for your business life and goals. The rule is quite simple. The more ambitious you are, the more you need the right environment that supports your ambitions.

    Working in the office

    Business hubs are usually the right business environment to support great ambitions. They are the geographical areas where talent, technology, tolerance and transparency are concentrated. It’s an environment where the flow of people, money, information and other resources is the greatest.

    Here are some macro-elements of a business environment you should consider:

    • Political and macroeconomic stability
    • Market and job market trends
    • Economical (in)equality
    • International integration
    • Are there enough opportunities to build a career you want and to earn adequate income?

    That is a macro-level view. On the micro level, you have many other decisions to make. Let’s look at some important factors that can support you or stifle your ambitions:

    • Industries that fit your talents, industry trends and opportunities
    • Employed, self-employed, business owner
    • Size of the company (micro, small, medium, big)
    • Level of specialization
    • Opportunities for promotion
    • Level of stress and uncertainty
    • Individual / Pair / Teamwork
    • Responsibility level – decision-making or more of a consulting role

    People you spend time with are also very important:

    • Values and competences of your boss and other superiors
    • Company values and values of your co-workers (should be similar to yours)
    • Stakeholders you’re dealing with

    And last but not least, don’t forget about your office:

    • Cubicle / Private Office / Co-working space / Working from home
    • Technological equipment
    • Visual aids (like Kanban boards)

    You should consider which business environment would allow you to deliver the most value, develop your competences to the full in the long run, achieve the position and the renown you want and, of course, achieve your financial goals. If your business environment doesn’t enable you that, you’ll have to either change it or lower your ambitions.

    I worked in a business environment where I felt really great, had the same values as my co-workers, the market trends were right and so on. It was in the venture capital industry, just before the financial collapse in 2008. The market trends enabled me to progress quickly, I loved what I was doing and I was managing a satellite company of a big investment bank which helped me build my own brand. In my early twenties, it was the perfect spot for me.

    I also worked in a business environment where the market trends were against me, I didn’t have the same values as my co-workers, I did tasks that were no challenge to me, there was a lot of politics, and so on. The end result was that I was completely unhappy, my progress in life was slow andI ended up having health issues.

    Never forget. Markets always win.

    And even more importantly: The culture of the environment you function in eats your strategy for breakfast.

    That’s why you need an environment that’s adjusted to your life strategy and goals. That’s why you need an environment where you can flourish and prosper. What is the optimal business environment for you?

  • Considering and setting limits in life

    A very important part of life management is considering and setting limits. On the one hand, the laws of physics limit you and your potential, while on the other, you must set some limits yourself to keep up with the daily discipline more easily and to more easily achieve your goals. We humans are pattern-based beings, seeing patterns even where there are none, and an important part of patterns are limits.

    Limits are nothing but minimums and maximums in our lives. The especially important ones (with time horizon we can understand) are daily and weekly limits. The simple idea is that we have a minimum and a maximum number of units (time, money…) we’re prepared to spend on a certain activity (work, sports, spouse…). Having limits helps us organize investments of our time, energy and other resources.

    The idea of limits is to not overdo it or invest too few of our resources into a specific thing. There is an optimal amount of investment needed for everything we do in life. If we invest more, we’re wasting resources or hurting ourselves. If we invest less than necessary, things don’t go into the direction we want. The big challenge lies in the fact that limits aren’t always in line with our instincts and emotional needs. That’s why we need self-discipline.

    Minimum and maximum

    Your body may crave sweets all day. But you can set a limit to only eat one candy per day. You may not feel like exercising at all. But because you know all the benefits of exercise, you can decide to exercise at least two times per week. Your may love your work, but to keep long-term productivity, you can set a maximum limit of 50 hours of work per week and a minimum of 40 hours and so on.

    Limits can really help you organize your life and introduce steady patterns that are easier to manage. Since you are a pattern-based being, limits can help you to stay organized and disciplined. There are two types of limits we have to consider:

    • Physical limits: Our biological and environmental limits that we have less influence on.
    • Willpower limits: Limits we set for ourselves and completely depend on our self-discipline.

    Physical limits

    Physical limits are limits connected especially to physical laws, environmental limits and your energy levels. One important concept of time management is to not only manage time, but your energy as well. There are days when you’re more productive and there are times when you need much more discipline to get things done. Listening to your body and energy levels is very important for your optimal performance in the long run.

    Considering physical limits in your life simply means that you listen to your body. You have to push yourself all the time, but not too far. You have to go out of your comfort zone into the learning zone, but not too far. If you go too far, you enter the panic zone and you do more damage than good to yourself. If you push yourself too hard when working, partying, anything, then you’re doing damage to yourself. It will lead to a setback.

    If you’re doing something wrong, your body and emotions give you feedback very quickly. You get tired, you start experiencing bad moods, you become grumpy and so on. These are all signs that you’re pushing yourself too hard or doing wrong things. Vice versa is also true. You get the same negative signs and your body feels fatigued if you aren’t active enough. Minimums and maximums are very important.

    Thus you should always listen to your body. If your body tells you that you’re pushing yourself too hard, take a rest. If you don’t feel good about yourself because you aren’t doing enough, push yourself a little bit harder. Listen to your body on a day to day basis and adjust your workload to your daily energy state.

    If you push too hard, you know what happens. We have physical limits. Our bodies can break. Our discipline muscle can break. If you are under stress for too long, you definitely experience burnout sooner or later. If you push your body too hard, you will get an injury sooner or later. All that can lead to a setback that takes you many steps back.

    Two more aspects are important when talking about physical limits.

    The first one is that you can definitely influence your energy levels. So physical limits can be expanded. With a healthy diet, regular exercise, positive people around you, believing in yourself, goals that motivate you etc. you have a great influence on your energy levels. Much like you can increase your body performance, same goes for your intellectual, emotional and spiritual capacity. You should definitely have a lifestyle that enables you to maximize your daily potential for work, play, love and creativity.

    While you’re in the learning zone, your comfort zone expands. Your energy levels and daily output potential rise. You push yourself out of the comfort zone again and improve yourself. Your performance is improving step by step. We call that linear change.

    You reach a plateau sooner or later. When you exercise regularly, have an optimal diet, have positive people in your life etc. there is no more room for linear improvements. In that kind of situations, rapid improvements come into play. Maybe you start using leverage (other people’s time and money), maybe you become a minimalist or start meditating etc. You decide to do something in totally different way. Again, your capacity for output increases dramatically.

    The important thing is to do it step by step. You’re looking for small improvements, especially at first. You search for different ways of improving yourself and doing things better. Your soft limits may be very limited at the beginning. You push but you get tired really fast. Don’t worry, just keep it up. Everything is like a muscle, you build it up with time.

    The second aspect is how to optimally expand your physical limits. There is one sure way of doing it. You want small constant improvements, not one big push from time to time. It’s better to do moderate exercise three times per week than to do it once and not listen to your limits and your body.

    No pain, no gain is probably the worst advice you can get when you first start pushing yourself out of the comfort zone. First you crawl, then you walk, after that you run and in the end, you can sprint. The better condition you are in in any area of life, the more you can experiment, the more you can push yourself, the less limiting the soft limits are. But it takes time (years) to build that. You have to let things accumulate over time. The first step is thus the hardest but definitely worth it.

    To sum things up:

    • We all have biological, physical and environmental limits that present our daily output potential
    • We need to listen to our physical limits for optimal productivity in the long term. If we don’t listen to our body, we do damage that leads to a great setback sooner or later.
    • We can expand our physical limits by improving ourselves (diet, regular exercise, reading, brain exercises etc.), sometimes even by changing our environment. By expanding our comfort zone, our physical limits also usually expand.
    • It takes time and effort to expand our physical limits. We need to have long-term perspective. The most important thing is that the whole picture is constant. It’s better to do something every day, but in smaller quantities, than doing something once a week, trying to compensate and pushing too hard. That is how things accumulate.
    • Physical limits are the reason why we cannot achieve everything in life. We often aren’t even aware of how short life is. It is, which is why you should live it to the full.

    Setting limits

    Willpower limits

    Physical limits don’t depend on your will that much and are thus quite unpredictable. You simply don’t know what your natural energy potential will be tomorrow. Maybe you’ll feel super energized or maybe you’ll catch a cold. Thus the only thing you can do is to keep physical limits in mind as life goes by, and adjust accordingly. You have to stay flexible and constantly gather feedback from your body and environment.

    Willpower limits, on the other hand, are a completely different story. Willpower limits totally depend on your self-discipline. You don’t have 100 % control over your willpower limits, because of the influence of physical limits, but your control is definitely much better. You may not know how you’ll feel tomorrow, but in general, you know your daily potential. You know the average amount of hours you have available every day for a certain activity, your skills, your leverages etc. You have a pretty good picture of what you can achieve on your average day or in your average week or in your average month.

    Based on that, you can set willpower limits in your life. They should still be flexible, but it’s about the minimums and maximums you should do each day or each week on average for a specific thing or activity. Knowing your physical limits enables you to stay flexible, while having willpower limits enables you to maximize your long-term performance based on your self-discipline.

    Willpower limits are like your bank account

    Why do you need willpower limits? Well, every area in your life is like a bank account. You can do only two things. Either you withdraw money or deposit it. It’s the same in every area of your life. With every action, you either deposit or withdraw capital. Let’s look at an example.

    If you go exercising, you do a deposit on your health bank account. If you eat pizza and get drunk, you make a withdrawal. If you spend quality time with your kid or spouse, you deposit units into relationships. If you go too far in flirting with others while you’re in a relationship, you make a withdrawal. If you read a quality book for an hour, you invest into your skills and competences. It’s a deposit. If you watch reality shows, it makes you a little bit stupider. It’s a withdrawal.

    Now we can go a step further. You can have a lot of money on your bank account. If that’s the case, a withdrawal every now and again isn’t that painful. For example, if you’re an athlete, you can afford an unhealthy meal without doing any serious damage to your health. You can also have a lot of money on your bank account and do something so stupid that you go bankrupt. For example, if you’re an athlete, text while you drive, have an accident and sustain an injury that prevents you from training and competing. It can be a total bankruptcy.

    As mentioned, your bank account balance can also be negative or you are even close to bankruptcy. It’s like smoking a cigarette when you have lung cancer. The fewer units you have on your bank account, the more painful every withdrawal is and the more welcoming every deposit.

    That’s why you want to have a good balance on your account. You don’t want to go bankrupt, you don’t want to struggle “financially”, but on other hand you also don’t need billions to live a happy and successful life. Setting minimums and maximums can help you a lot with keeping adequate balance.

    Deposit

    Of course your minimums and maximums should be flexible, depending on your goals, on the current state of different areas of your life and so on. It’s good to review your minimums and maximums every three to six months, and adjust them based on your life situation and goals.

    Nevertheless, your willpower limits should be a steady and important part of your life. They concern all the activities that bring you long-term happiness, so any changes to your maximums and minimums should be minor.

    For example, you can decide to not exercise for a month, because you just had a baby, but it should be a short-term decision if you want to stay healthy; you also don’t need to run a marathon two months after having a baby, but you can definitely start walking, stretching etc. to reach your weekly health minimum.

    Now it’s time to sit down and consider the willpower limits you should set in your life and stick to them in the long term. For every area of life, analyze and think hard about your current balance in the account, how much you can start depositing (investing) and how you are going to keep discipline. Below, you can find the general direction of your minimums and maximums to help you out.

    And another important thing: if setting minimums and maximums in your life means making big changes, take things a little bit slower. You cannot implement too many changes in your life at once. Choose one area, set minimums and maximums, and stick to them for a month or two. Then go to the next level. If you try to implement too many changes in your life, you won’t change anything in the end.

    Here are the general directions for your minimums and maximums:

    Standard minimums

    The minimum amount of units you should deposit into different areas of your life weekly/monthly:

    • You (planning, reflection etc.): 2 hours per week
    • Exercising: 3 x 1 hour per week
    • Diet: Two pieces of fruit and vegetables at every main course daily and much more
    • Sex: At least three times per week, better daily ;)
    • Spouse and family: One to two quality hours a day + one whole day during the weekend
    • Friends and socializing: At least one evening per week
    • Money and wealth: Save at least 10 % of your salary each month
    • Career: Work at least 40 hours per week
    • Competences and informal education: Read/learn for at least 5 hours per week
    • Fun, creativity and travel: Travel at least once per year, do something fun every week
    • Donating (your time or money): At least 1 %

    Standard maximums

    The maximum amount of units you should deposit into different areas of your life weekly/monthly:

    • You (planning etc.): 3 hours per week, otherwise you can get caught in analysis-paralysis
    • Exercising: 6 x 1 hour per week (if you aren’t a professional athlete)
    • Diet: Afford one shitty meal per week.
    • Sex: Well… no limits I guess :)
    • Spouse and family: No limits, but you need to keep balance and have a spine.
    • Friends and socializing: Three evenings of socializing per week should be enough
    • Money and wealth: Saving 50 % of your salary per month
    • Career: Working 70 hours per week at the most

  • Different speeds in life

    A very useful concept in life to understand is that you don’t have to do everything with the same speed. Sometimes going fast means being the least productive at all. Knowing how to slow down enables you to enjoy life more, build a better life strategy and, in the long run, allows you to be even more productive. The concept of using different speeds in life is important in personal as well as business life.

    Different speeds in your personal life

    There are things in life that you should do extremely slowly and there are things you should do extremely fast. The measurement for that is pretty simple. The more enjoyable an activity or a person is, the more your senses are engaged, the slower your pace should be. In situations like that, we’re unproductive if we rush, because we’re simply missing life. Stopping in the moment, engaging all the senses and enjoying life to the full is the most productive thing we can do sometimes.

    You can throw a tasty meal into yourself, just to make sure you’ve eaten something, or you can slow down, be grateful for the food, taste every bite and enjoy your meal to the full. You can just spend some time with your kid/spouse because it’s expected of you, or you can slow down and really pay full attention to a person with your body, mind, emotions and soul. You can just climb the mountain to conquer it or you can stop at the top and really enjoy the view.

    There are also things in life that you should do extremely fast. There are things in life you should automate. There are things in life you shouldn’t give any attention to at all. You should still do everything professionally and as it should be done, but you should make sure that it takes a minimal amount of your time, money and effort. Things like cleaning, bureaucracy, worrying, procrastinating etc.

    We also shouldn’t forget about things that you should sometimes do fast and sometimes slowly, depending on the situation. For example, having sex or doing sports. Doing it at different paces brings a whole different life experience. Maybe you should introduce a day into your life when you perform things that you usually do fast slowly and vice versa, just to be creative and to experience life in a new way.

    It’s not easy to slow down, especially if you were just doing something with maximum speed. Usually, you have to first consciously decide that you’ll slow down. It helps if you have, for example, a thing that you do as a signal to your body and mind to slow down, like taking five deep breaths. The second thing you usually have to do is unplug yourself from all communication devices and distractions. And thirdly, you have to trust yourself that everything will be okay, even if you slow down. You are not missing anything if you slow down when necessary – you start missing things if you don’t.

    Different speeds in your professional life

    Using different speeds is also very important in the business world. First of all, the concept of time management doesn’t only deal with managing your time, but also your energy. Thus it’s very important to adjust your speed to the energy level you have on a specific day.

    Sometimes you have a day when you’re extremely productive, other days it simply doesn’t work. Forcing yourself to work at your maximum speed when your energy levels are low only means hurting and doing damage to yourself. In the long run, your productivity decreases if you push yourself too hard. You have to sharpen the saw from time to time.

    It’s definitely true that it’s almost impossible to be successful and respected if you aren’t hard-working, fast, productive and you don’t deliver results. Execution skills, efficiency and speed are an important part of success in today’s fast moving and constantly changing world. But it’s also true that it’s not the hardest-working people who are at the top. A lot of research has shown that success doesn’t come only from being competent and hard-working.

    You also need to work smart. If you want superior results in life, you need a superior strategy. But to build a superior strategy, you need to slow down, you need to take time, you need to think, you need to self-reflect on your actions. In situations like this, slowing down means going the fastest possible. What good is it if you are rushing in the wrong direction?

    An important part of a superior strategy and success are also innovation and creativity. If you want to be successful, you have to be different and better. Creativity rarely happens when you’re rushing or you’re tense and in an anxious state. Creativity happens when you’re in the flow. Again, slowing down when you need to be creative may be the best move that brings you to the optimal speed.

    Going slow in the search mode

    When you’re in the search mode, you should definitely slow down. The search mode is about trying new things and reflecting on whether something works for you or not. To reflect well on something, you need to be in touch with yourself, you need to listen to your inner voice and to your emotions. You have to understand what a true part of you is and what inherited or social bullshit is. To do that, you have to go as slowly as possible. In the search mode, you play and you usually play relaxed and slow.

    But when you find your fit and start executing, you must accelerate. Speed is very important for winning, if you use it at the right time. Nevertheless, when it’s time to go fast, you should also constantly have a feedback mechanism that tells you if you’re going into the right direction. When the feedback tells you that you aren’t going in the right direction, you need to slow down and go back to the search mode to do reflection, build a new strategy and adapt. You should be prepared to speed up and slow down as many times as necessary in life.

    Driving through a day with different speeds

    The most important part of everything we’ve talked about is becoming aware that going through a day is like driving, in professional as well as private life. There are moments when you have to drive fast because you are on a highway, there are moments when you have to wait in a traffic jam, there are moments when you have to refill the gas tank and there are moments when you have to stop, just to take in the amazing view or have a chat with an awesome person.

    Don’t do everything in life fast or slowly. Don’t do everything in life with the same speed. Accelerate when necessary, or slow down. It will enable you to be much more productive, happy and successful. Different situations, different activities, different speed. Life is not a marathon or a sprint. Life is a combination of all kinds of running as well as taking a rest. For every activity you do, ask yourself: what is the optimal speed I should be going with?

  • Setting strong foundations

    The higher the skyscraper you want to build, the stronger foundations you need. Without strong foundations, the skyscraper will collapse sooner or later. It’s the same with achieving your goals in life. The more ambitious goals you have, no matter in which area of life, the stronger foundations you’ll have to build.

    The secret to setting strong foundations lies in Bruce Lee’s quote:

    “I fear not the man who has practiced 10000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10000 times.”

    Building strong foundations is a process. It takes patience and time, and you must do all the boring work over and over again. The skyscraper that everyone admires is the final result. Without the process, there is no final result.

    We all want the final result without the process. We all want our skyscraper without putting the effort into building it floor by floor and even more than that: we want it without setting strong foundations. Because it’s hard to set strong foundations. Extremely hard. But without strong foundations, without putting in the effort to build firmly floor by floor, there is no skyscraper to admire. At least not in the long-term.

    The stories in the media may fool you. There are exceptions in the world. Hollywood actors, teenagers selling their start-up for millions, winners of talent shows etc. But Hollywood is also a city of broken dreams. Silicon Valley is also a place of broken business dreams.

    There are thousands of failed start-ups for every one that had been sold, you can see millions of talented people on every talent discovery show but there are only a few who become famous. People love to read and watch overnight stories, because they give hope that it can be done without hard work. But hope is not a strategy, setting strong foundations is. It’s a strategy that brings overnight success, but only after years of hard work.

    Setting strong foundations

    Setting strong foundations in different areas of life

    It’s time to look at some practical examples.

    If you want to have a fit and healthy body, you must build strong foundations first. No pain, no gain could be the worst advice ever, if you don’t have strong foundations. You can seriously hurt yourself. Believe me, I’ve experienced it.

    Practical examples

    Health

    Going to the gym and pushing yourself to the maximum, doing hyper-intensive training, cross-fit or any other extreme form of exercise will break your body sooner or later, if you lack strong foundations. Your skyscraper will collapse and you’ll go many steps backwards.

    Strong foundations regarding your body are strong core, flexibility, good condition, warming up and cooling down, doing enough stretching, preparing your body for effort, increasing the amount of weight you lift bit by bit, good posture etc.

    Yoga and Pilates and planking and swimming and doing some sports in nature, like hiking, can help you build strong foundations. If you’ve been doing sports from a young age, maybe your strong foundations are already there; if not, you’ll have to start with the basics.

    Wealth

    The same goes for money. It doesn’t matter how much you earn, the thing that matters most is how much you save. If you can’t save money when you earn a little, you’ll never save money when you earn a lot. There’s a saying that if you can’t save money, the seeds of becoming wealthy are simply not in you.

    That may be true, but it’s also true that you can always improve, grow and change your behaviour. So if you don’t have it yet, you can seed the seeds in greatness in you with self-improvement.

    Look at the statistics for lottery winners. Most of them go back to being broke in a few years. Because they don’t have strong foundations. They start spending like crazy and have no money management skills. The large amount of money brings them happiness only for a short period of time. After they go broke, they’re usually less happy than before winning the lottery. Strong foundations are the ones that work in the long term.

    To lay down strong foundations regarding money, you have to start small. Pay yourself first. When you get your paycheck, put a small percentage of it to your savings account. Sell stuff you don’t need, start curbing you impulse buying decisions etc. Read about different types of investments.

    Become financially educated. Challenge your beliefs and money blueprint. There are many things you can and should do. Step-by-step, feeling proud of yourself for having a strategy and sticking to it.

    Career

    Let’s continue. If you want to have a promising career, you need to build strong foundation. Strong foundations are hashtag (#) shaped skills. You need to develop soft skills, like good communication skills, team work, networking skills and all other soft skills that are very important today.

    You also need general knowledge about a specific industry you’ve chosen to create in and add value to. These are your strong foundations. Based on that, you need to become an expert and develop a specific skill for which there is a great demand on the market and a short supply of. If you have two different kinds of expert skills that you can combine, your career potential is probably even better.

    Realtionships

    In order to have good key relationships in your life, you need strong foundations. That means having good communication skills, a great capacity for love, empathy and so on. If you want to receive, you have to know how to give.

    If you want to be empowered by other people, you must empower other people. If you want to be loved, you need to love yourself first.

    Why setting strong foundations is hard

    Setting strong foundations also means tackling all the problems that prevent you from building your beautiful skyscraper that everyone will admire. If you want to lay down strong foundations, you have to dig first. You have to dig deep and while doing it, clean all the shit out (but don’t confuse this metaphor with the saying that you have to stop digging if you are in troubles).

    I’m talking about all cognitive distortions, fears, mental bugs and other inherited and imparted psychological crap we all have to face. Much as you have to build a strong foundation on the physical level to be healthy, so you have to build strong foundations on your mental, emotional and spiritual level to be successful in all other areas of life.

    Setting strong foundations can also be fun, not only boring and straining. For example, you can improve your intellectual capacity by learning how to play an instrument, trying to draw, playing Scrabble, reading books, solving Sudoku or crossword puzzles, maybe you can learn how to program and so on. There are many ways for how you can train to lay down strong foundations; and you may enjoy some of these ways.

    For finding exercises that you enjoy in life and that will help you to lay down strong foundations, you can use the search mode concept. You can try, you can experiment, you can reflect and listen to yourself, to see what suits you best.

    Your skyscraper is never really finished

    It doesn’t matter if you’re setting strong foundations, building your skyscraper floor by floor or fine polishing on the roof, you should know when you are in the search mode and when you are in the execution mode.

    Even after setting the strong foundation, there are always new challenges in life, new setbacks, new obstacles, new ways of doing things etc., that require of you to go back into the search mode and learn. You have to continuously improve yourself. Your work is never really finished until your last breath.

    Homework

    Everything starts with a strong foundation. Use the search mode concept to help you identify all the activities that will help you lay down strong foundations. Execute it and build them to be as strong as possible. Strong like concrete.

    Go back to the search mode and experiment and learn about what would be the best way for you to build the skyscraper as high as possible. Execute it, with agile sprints and by being in the flow. When you face a setback, go back into the search mode and by experimenting, discover new ways of building your skyscraper even higher. That is a superior strategy in life.

    And remember, if you start to feel like your skyscraper is shaking, climb down, look at your foundations and strengthen them if necessary. Don’t let your life collapse because you’re greedy or want too much too soon. Don’t be afraid to progress slowly, be afraid to stop.

    Now start digging and building concrete strong foundations in the area of life you’ve disregarded the most.

  • First go after the low-hanging fruit

    An important fact in life is that with time, the hard road becomes easy and the easy road becomes hard. If you don’t make steps forward in life, you go backwards. If you don’t improve, you regress. By putting in extra effort and stepping out of your comfort zone, you level up your skills and become more competent.

    It’s also true that to achieve your maximum potential in life, you must have a long-term perspective and the will to curb your desires for instant gratification. But to stay motivated, you also need to see the results of your hard work as soon as possible.

    To stay motivated, you need to see the results of your hard work as soon as possible.

    That is why business knows the so-called concept of “low-hanging fruit”. The low-hanging fruit are simply targets and goals that are easily achievable. It’s the concept most often used in sales, meaning that you first try to sell your products to the customers that are the easiest to sell to.

    It’s obvious that there’s not a lot of low-hanging fruit. Sooner or later, it runs out and you must start putting in more and more effort to meet your goals. Thus a completely wrong approach is to go only after the low-hanging fruit. Nevertheless, going after the low-hanging fruit first and then intensifying the effort with a long-term view in mind makes a lot of sense. It’s probably the winning combination.

    The low-hanging fruit

    The low hanging fruit are your early wins

    Early wins are very important, because they boost your self-confidence. Early wins motivate you and show you that it can be done. Early wins push you to go forward and achieve more. Early wins help you to go from the search to the execution mode. Early wins help you to overcome fatigue before achieving your final goal.

    On the other hand, early failures can dampen your spirits. They can make you regret that you’ve even tried. Early failures usually happen because you go way out of your comfort zone into the panic zone, or because of naivety, lack of focus, lack of strategy or lack of flexibility.

    In the search mode, it’s expected of you to fail and learn. But when you find your fit and start executing, you really do need early wins.

    Besides the low-hanging fruit, there are several other options to help you with the transition from the search mode to the execution mode. Here’s a list of what you can do to keep yourself motivated:

    • Low-hanging fruit and early wins
    • Motivating environment (pictures, reminders, wallpapers…)
    • Like-minded people (new friends, mentors, coaches…)
    • List of pains and gains for achieving your goal
    • List of your past achievements
    • Gratitude
    • Visualization and affirmations
    • Other mechanisms

    But now it’s time to go back to low-hanging fruit.

    Low-hanging fruit in different areas of life

    Let’s look at different areas of life, how and why the low-hanging fruit is so important.

    We can start with health. First, as advised on this blog, you should enter the search mode – read about different diets, try different foods and sports, talk to people, listen to your body, gather information and feedback. You should try to find your best fit. After that, you should decide to stick to a specific new diet and practice the selected sport regularly every week. You decided to go from the search mode into the execution mode.

    Okay, let’s say that you’ve been in the execution mode for a week. You can clearly see that it takes a lot of discipline, effort, time and even money to make changes regarding your fitness and health. It’s clear that it will take weeks if not even months to see a real body transformation and an improvement of your fitness level. But you need motivation through all these weeks before seeing real results. You need motivation to keep walking after your first step.

    You can definitely stay motivated by changing your computer wallpaper, finding an exercising buddy, making a photo of yourself every week to see progress and so on. But you should also consider low-hanging fruit that can help you with your transition.

    Here are some ideas for low-hanging fruit:

    • Before doing any serious exercise, take a walk every day with your best friend, just to feel better and to see how good it is to be filled with oxygen. At first, it shouldn’t feel like hard exercise at all.
    • Groom your body to look better in the mirror.
    • Go to a spa or a massage to connect with your body better (or do yoga).
    • Drink a lot of water so your body will cleanse and you’ll feel better.
    • Start using olive oil, brown sugar, Himalayan salt etc. as reminders that you eat healthier.
    • For once, don’t eat that hamburger, order a healthier meal and feel good about yourself etc., you will start feeling proud of yourself and strengthen your willpower

    The domino effect

    Small decisions will lead to greater changes and they will accumulate. It’s called the domino effect or compunding interests. With employing this strategy you’ll start seeing progress and feel better even in a very short period of time. Other people will start to see your progress and after the first compliments, your desire and will for improvement will grow even stronger.

    Practical examples

    It’s the same in all other areas of life. The low-hanging fruit for money is to save a little. Don’t buy one item you always buy in the grocery store, maybe ask for all the change back, maybe there’s something you buy every day out of habit but don’t really need, you can reprogram your debt etc.

    On the other hand, you can sell things you don’t need, you can ask for a raise, you can do some extra work etc. You can make small changes without any big shock. When you see money piling up, you’ll become motivated to implement bigger changes.

    If you want to improve your relationships, for example by meeting new friends or spouse or being more social, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. The easiest way to meet new people is to be introduced to friends of your friends. It’s also very easy to renew relationships with some of your old friends you’ve lost contact with. It’s also very easy to make new friends by using social networks and so on.

    As you can see, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in different areas of life. The problem, as mentioned before, is that you run out of it very fast. But the purpose of low-hanging fruit and early wins is not to make life completely easy, but to motivate you more and to keep you on the right track.

    For every new thing you want to do in life, first enter the search mode to make the map of the terrain and then think about the low-hanging fruit that can help you with the transition into the execution mode and keep you motivated on the path to achieving your final goal.

    Low-hanging fruit for this blog as an example

    There is another example we can look at. It concerns this blog. Because the market is saturated, with more than 2 million blog posts being published per day, it’s very hard to acquire organic traffic. And you need thousands of dollars to get any real visibility by using paid channels. It’s a challenge that can test your motivation.

    In the long term, both paid and organic traffic are the ways to go, but in the middle, some low-hanging fruit is essential. To start seeing first results, to make different tests and experiments, to stay motivated, to keep writing articles and marketing the blog, the low-hanging fruit is the first step to do.

    Here is a list of 20 ideas for low-hanging fruit I tried when I started my blog:

    1. Writing to people in my address book and telling them that I’ve started a new blog
    2. Linking to my blog from all my Slovenian pages
    3. Posting blog posts on social media (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter)
    4. Starting to follow people on Twitter and getting some traction
    5. Making and pinning images with quotes on Pinterest
    6. Publishing summaries of articles on LinkedIn influencers
    7. Writing a few short guest posts per month
    8. Finding and posting on productivity and personal development forums
    9. Writing comments on productivity and personal development blogs
    10. Answering questions on social media like Quora
    11. Posting blog to all directories, aggregators, RSS lists and other similar sites
    12. Making and posting Agile and Lean Life slides on SlideShare
    13. Adding a signature to my e-mails
    14. Sharing blog posts on social groups (Facebook Groups, Reddit…)
    15. Submitting an article to PDF sites
    16. E-mailing people who I think would be interested in the content
    17. Using people on fiverr to help me gain traction
    18. Posting on Scoop.it and Squido Lenses
    19. A little bit of paid traffic won’t hurt
    20. Making a blog exchange network could also be a way to go

    Stay motivated and keep going towards your goal by first picking up the low-hanging fruit. Bon appétit.