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  • Everything you need to know about minimalism as the coolest lifestyle

    In the past 5 years or so, minimalistic living became something very close to my heart and an important part of my life design and superior personal organization. More and more people are joining this movement, since it’s really one of the coolest and most beneficial lifestyles to follow in today’s cluttered world.

    In this article, I will describe my experience of going from a messy person who kept every small useless thing to becoming an unhealthy ascetic person and then finally a healthy minimalist. All that hoping to convince you to also try and experiment with this awesome life design concept.

    Living a minimalistic lifestyle not only makes room for the important things in life, but it’s also a great weapon against being bombarded with products and sales offers all the time. Not to mention that minimalism makes your wallet full and happy.

    After making the first steps towards minimalism, you quickly realize that you don’t need thousands of useless items to be happy, unique and to feel safe.

    You do need a few key things that make life comfortable and you need to protect yourself on a material level and enjoy having possessions, but at the same you must know where to draw the line, so that things aren’t cluttering your life, giving you a false sense of identity and dragging your productivity down.

    So let’s start exploring the world of minimalistic living. Here are the topics covered in the article:

    The world is filled with cheap products and everybody wants you to buy something

    If you turn on the TV, you can quickly see one big downside of today’s world. The mantra that crowds all over the world are following, especially young people, is “shopping & f*cking”.

    Everybody wants to enjoy life through endless hours of shopping, enjoying material possessions, being famous and having fun. The demand on markets is the highest ever in history and people can’t wait to spend their hard‑earned money (or their parent’s money or even borrowed money) on new products.

    High demand leads to even higher supply. That means shopping centers are growing like mushrooms after a rainy day even in small mountain villages, you are exposed to hundreds of ads every day everywhere you go, and the social pressure to own the latest version of a phone, car and fashionable clothes has never been so huge. Everybody wants to get high just one more time by buying a few new possessions.

    At this point a quote from Fight Club serves us perfectly to illustrate the whole picture:

    People buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, to impress people they don’t like.

    The pressure that you are missing out on something if you don’t own everything in fashion, and if you aren’t beautiful, smart, rich, fit and powerful at the same time is very huge. That’s why people want more and more.

    Being exposed to all the shopping centers, products and ads, having easy access to money, yielding under all the social pressure and enjoying the dopamine rush when you buy something new is the perfect combination that makes people into unwise spenders.

    Now, don’t get me wrong, I think that we live in the best times ever. There are so many upsides to today’s world, like the lowest poverty, high mobility, access to information, endless opportunities and high safety levels. We can enjoy all that, at least in most parts of the world.

    But there are also a few downsides – market complexity, information overload, unrealistic expectations towards life and too many options for everything, including options for buying new things.

    Glorifying shopping and the “yolo” mentality are definitely not strong virtues and values of contemporary times. All great things in life were achieved with stoic virtues – frugality, smart and hard work, innovation, superior organization and flexibility. And empires crumbled under epicureanism.minimalism

    Finding the balance between the inner resources and the outer resources

    Minimalistic living is about finding the right balance between possessing inner and outer resources, and finding a balance between materialistic greed and ascetic martyrdom. If we start with the basic segmentation of resources, we know two types of resources – inner (internal) ones and outer (external) ones.

    Internal resources are the sum of all of your competences – knowledge, skills, willpower, creativity, innovative ideas, self-image, self-confidence, your life strategy and how you design your lifestyle, and everything else that is a part of your personality, your mindset and your agency. With inner resources, you have the ability to influence your environment and create wealth (money, healthy relationships, creative works, value added etc.).

    Your outer or external resources are all possessions and wealth you have that is not a part of who you are – money, connections, contracts, assets and all the items you possess. Now here’s why the inner/outer resources division is important for minimalistic living.

    An emotionally healthy person looks for a balance between the inner and the outer resources. Such a person knows that they have to develop their inner resources first, and then with the right inner resources they can always create more outer resources.

    For example, if you learn how to code, you can always undertake a new coding project to make more money. If you develop sales skills, you can always earn more money by selling something. The rarer the skills you possess that are in high demand, the better the position you are in. The right combination of inner resources brings the biggest safety ever; because you can always make more money.

    With the inner resources, you can directly create more external resources. But the formula doesn’t work the other way around. You can’t directly gain more inner resources by possessing more outer resources. That is exactly what people are trying to achieve by owning thousands of items and constantly buying new ones. Let me explain:

    • You hope to feel happier (inner resource) by buying yourself a new thing (outer resource).
    • You hope to be more self-confident (inner resource) by putting on new fancy clothes (external resource).
    • You hope to be seen as an interesting person (inner resource) by buying the latest version of a phone (external resource).
    • You hope that your spouse will love you more (inner resource) by buying him/her a new fancy gift or a bigger car (outer resource).

    You may quickly wrongly assume wrong that more outer resources bring more inner resources. You can quickly identify yourself with your possessions. Different brands may feel like parts of your personality.

    The dopamine rush might seem like you found the way to happiness by making one more purchase. A relationship might finally seem like a happy one when you buy someone an expensive gift, but what about in a few days? Things go back to normal, where they deserve to be.

    External resources absolutely play a great role in developing more inner resources, but not directly, only indirectly. You might definitely look more representative in a nice suit. But you still need personality substance. The suit is only an add-on. You definitely might be more productive with a faster and newer phone. But first you need to be organized as a person in your core lifestyle.

    A nice home can definitely bring you more comfort, but it will never make you permanently happy. The substance, like an interesting personality, resourcefulness, likability, status, they’re all developed by working on yourself, not buying things. They get developed by investing in yourself and continuous improvement.

    That leads us to the second part of the quote from Fight Club: “You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are the all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”

    In other words, you are unique and as unique as everybody else. You don’t need thousands of meaningless possessions to feel better about yourself. Feel good about yourself when you are completely naked. Develop your talents, become a healthy assertive person and know that you deserve love for who you are. No possession can bring you that.

    Minimalism is not the lack of something, it’s the perfect amount of something. N.B.

    Ascetic life

    Ascetic life, the other unhealthy extreme

    Hoping to find happiness, uniqueness and identity in owning hundreds of meaningless possessions (on borrowed money) is one extreme. The other extreme is denying the material world altogether and sliding into an illusion of divine unmaterialistic spirituality, ascetic living and giving up on owning anything that isn’t necessary to survive.

    If changing your lifestyle and following new dogmas is based on emotional issues, you can quickly go from one extreme to another.

    When you find that material things don’t bring happiness per se and that they can’t calm your hungry soul down, you can quickly decide to join the anti-capitalism march hating the materialistic world filled with advertisements and especially the financial system supporting all the corruption, unfairness and depravity. I’ve been on one side and the other.

    Denying the material world is as bad as glorifying it. I’m not saying that the social design is perfect, that the financial system is working well, and that there isn’t a worrying gap between the rich and the poor. I am trying to bring forward the painful truth that the reason why people decide to live the ascetic life and resist the materialistic world or even protest against it are rarely that straightforward.

    If you are constantly obsessed that you own too many things, your mind is still obsessed with stuff.

    For those people who decide for an aggressive ascetic lifestyle, it’s usually too painful to enjoy the material world, or too painful to fight for material things. The source of the pain might be that they don’t believe in themselves enough, inconsiderately acquire competences that are high in supply and low in demand, or have traumatic experiences in childhood that led to developing a false mindset about possessions.

    Being raised in poverty often leads to one extreme or the other – to a greedy soul that’s never satisfied or to a martyr for whom it’s too painful to own anything. I’ve been on both sides, so I know how these extremes feel. They are definitely not the solution and the formula for a happy life.

    Denying the material world is not the answer. If you are constantly bothered by what you own, your mind is still obsessed with stuff, and that isn’t healthy. You have to find the right balance between having enough inner and outer resources, so that you can normally grow, create and enjoy life and easily connect with other people. You don’t want to only survive in the material world, you want to thrive.

    So when it comes to minimalism, you have to avoid anyone claiming that you should own only an x number items to be a true minimalist or that if you own one expensive item you are a traitor to the minimalistic community.

    Minimalism is about possessing the perfect amount of something, be it an outer or an inner resource. Being a true minimalist means that you don’t run away from the material world, but on the other hand you also make sure that you don’t drown in it and waste your life.Declutter your life

    The problem of owning too much stuff and basic rules of minimalism

    Now that we know not to push into any extreme, the question is what to own and what not to own. Let’s analyze what makes sense. All material things have one big problem. They take up space, time and energy. They have a tendency to pile up.

    We all have that drawer full of clutter; and a basement or a garage. And a corner in a room. Things have extreme inertia and tend to stay where they are as dust holders. That’s why all material things need to be managed properly. There are a few rules about that.

    He who buys what he doesn’t need steals from himself. – Swedish proverb

    Don’t buy things too quickly

    By nature, we are all emotional buyers, impulsive buyers. Every purchase gives us a small dopamine rush. That’s why you have to trick yourself into becoming a wiser spender. There’s a simple trick you can do.

    Wait a few days before making minor purchases and a few weeks for bigger purchases. You’ll be surprised at how often you change your mind and foresee that at the end of the day, maybe you don’t need that thing that you wished for so much.

    Properly maintain what you own

    You can extend the longevity of things you own with regular maintenance. It’s better to own fewer things and maintain them properly, than to own thousands of items you forget about or don’t have time to maintain.

    Examples are regularly cleaning your computer from the outside and its operating system, taking good care of your car, protecting expensive items with cases etc.

    Do regular cleanings

    One of the most important things for living a minimalist lifestyle are regular cleanings. You should try to discard the things you don’t need on a daily basis as life goes by, but in spite of doing that, things still have a tendency to accumulate and take up space.

    That’s why it makes sense to do regular monthly cleanings and a major one every half year. Right before winter and summer begin, do a major cleaning. Here I wrote how I do regular major cleanings.

    Designing a space for decluttering

    There are only two types of home design. The one that encourages clutter accumulation and the one that discourages it. Many drawers, shelves, boxes, wardrobes and niches invite clutter and rubbish. You want to avoid that. Minimalistic designs, where there is no place to put a new souvenir, leave you with only one place where the memento can go – trash.

    You can always take a picture of the souvenir and save it on your computer for the memories. But you need to build yourself a motivational environment that encourages minimalistic life design and prevents you from throwing things in the corner where they pile up for months.

    Minimalistic home

    Everything you own either brings value into your life or drags you down

    Everything you do and have in life (material things, relationships etc.) either adds value to your life or drags you down. There is no third option. Things that add value to your life are things that make you happy, lead you to more creativity and greatness, make you healthier and more energetic, develop your talents, and so on.

    Things that take value from the quality of your life (aka waste) are the things that bring the negative into your life, to the environment or the society. This list contains clutter, overspending, throwing food away, owning things that only take up space, and so on.

    For every item you own, you have to ask yourself whether it brings value to your life or not really. If it doesn’t bring any real value into your life, you don’t need it. The result you’ll enjoy in the end by throwing away things you don’t need is more time, more money, more physical space and more room for the important things in life.

    • Do you love the item you own?
    • Is the item really useful?
    • Do you feel positive energies when you think about the item?

    Nevertheless, you must be very careful when answering the question of whether throwing something away or not makes sense, because your emotions might quickly mislead and mess with you. You can very quickly find a superficial argument why not to throw something away. Let’s look at how to deal with that.

    I make myself rich by making my wants few. H.D. Thoreau

    don't know what to do

    The mixed feelings you always have when throwing things away

    I did a long self-reflection every time I took a step deeper into the minimalistic lifestyle. I also observed many of my friends and family members doing major cleanings. There’s one interesting thing that I noticed. You can extremely easily find an excuse why not to sell, give or throw something away.

    • The item holds memories or you are somehow emotionally attached to it.
    • You assume that you might need that item someday, even if you haven’t used it for years.
    • You feel guilty at the first thought of getting rid of something, even if you don’t like the item, because it was a gift, you were taught not to throw things away, and so on.
    • Rooms filled with things don’t seem empty, and that means your life must also be more full.

    That’s what usually holds people back. These are the counterforces, battling all the advantages of throwing something away. It feels good to throw something away. It makes room in your life. You get more margin. But it’s emotionally hard.

    When you tidy up your environment, you always feel like you also tidied up part of your inner self – your mind, emotions and spirit. Not to mention the benefits of the workout you do when you carry all the clutter from the shelves into the trash.

    Having more time, more money, more physical space, less stress and more room for the important things in life always feels good and liberating.

    When you do major cleanings, when you have to decide whether to get rid of something or not, there are always doubts and second thoughts. That’s normal.

    And every time you have to convince yourself that the freedom of not owning unnecessary stuff is much greater and beneficial than any emotional arguments that look for superficial safety in owning things. With time, it gets easier to own as little as possible, but there is always a bit of internal struggle when you have to throw something away. It’s normal and we all have to deal with it.

    When you have problems deciding what to do with an item, ask yourself – which moments in your past were the deepest and most fulfilling experiences you had? Which past things made your life really valuable and worthwhile and bring tears to your eyes? It’s probably not an old rusty vacuum cleaner in your garage that you might need some day.

    minimalism - options you have

    All the options you have when doing major cleanings

    Many people assume that when you decide to live a more minimalistic lifestyle, you throw away 90 % of your stuff and that’s it. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Becoming a minimalist is a process. It takes time. You can’t become a minimalist in a single day.

    Becoming a minimalist is like peeling an onion. First you start by cleaning things out of your life that you really don’t need, and then you make the standards for what it makes sense to own and what not higher and higher. You just have to be careful not to go into any extremes, as we discussed.

    In the process of de-owning, throwing things away is not the only option you have. You have at least four options at your disposal for what to do with things:

    • Throw away – You can simply throw away an item for which you know that it has no value at all
    • Give away – Sometimes things that have no value for you have value for other people
    • Sell – If an item has solid monetary value and you don’t need it, liquidate it into cash
    • Rent out – If an item has value and you don’t need it, you can turn it into a cash machine by renting it or getting a co-owner or a co-user

    Other options you have that also lead to more minimalistic lifestyle:

    • Automate – social media marketing, tasks, production …
    • Cancel – subscription, event, appearance, travel, visit, meeting …
    • Delegate – tasks, commitments, chores …
    • Delete – task, functionality, files, online account …
    • Downsize – company, number of relationships, car, house …
    • Forget about it – issue, problem, person …
    • Let it go – emotional problem, emotional issue …
    • Minimize – workload, number of daily decisions, options …
    • Optimize – chores, processes, decision-making …
    • Opt out – newsletters, projects, commitments, meetings …
    • Refocus – reset priorities, define your True north …
    • Remove – people from your life, functionalities, options …
    • Set limits – for mental masturbation, TV watching, the number of things you do simultaneously …

    When I went from one extreme (searching for safety in material things) into the other (not owning anything) I made a big mistake. I threw away and gave away hundreds of possessions that had solid monetary value. A price tag. It was thousands of dollars given or thrown away. Just because I was so eager and enthusiastic to become a minimalist.

    It should have been more than obvious to me that a big emotional burden is behind the change and that I was acting irrationally. As I repeat over and over again, be rational on your way to the minimalistic path. A minimalistic lifestyle is no solution for emotional problems. It’s a lifestyle that can lead to a better quality of life, if you do steps into the minimalistic lifestyle in the right way.

    You don’t own stuff, stuff owns you.

    the first steps towards minimalism

    How to make the first steps towards minimalism

    I hope you’re at least a little bit convinced that living a minimalistic life design make sense. Thus the most important question is: what is the next step. Well, there are simple things you can do to begin a minimalistic lifestyle and then you can escalate from there to the point you still feel comfortable.

    • Give away clothes you don’t wear and need
    • Tidy up your home and make it much more minimalistic
    • Digitalize everything that can be digitalized
    • Downsize your car if you own a car you can’t afford
    • Minimize your reading list, tasks and commitments to the most important ones
    • Start acting more minimalistic towards food and relationships

    Let’s dig a bit deeper into every one of these steps.

    Clothes

    I’m currently looking for a new home, and so I visited a few flats and houses to rent/buy. There was one pattern in all the properties I visited. People had piles of clothes everywhere. On chairs, floor, wardrobes, everywhere. They didn’t even bother cleaning them up and putting them where they belong.

    Clothes are cheap, easy to buy and there is always a new fashionable piece you should own. But then you spend 80 % of the time wearing the 20 % of your clothes that you bought years ago.

    The best way to start a minimalistic lifestyle is to give away clothes you haven’t worn at all in the past few months. And then be very careful when you buy new ones.

    Your home

    You want to have a home filled with laughter, happy family members, good friends and positive energy. You want to have a bright, spacy and clean home, where there is plenty of room for warm relationships. That means your home needs one big cleaning.

    Consider getting rid of all the things you haven’t used in months or even years (that you might need some day) – all the souvenirs, broken items, old books, worn out towels. Who needs all that? Decide to do one big cleaning of your home, and then do it regularly.

    It might be hard to throw the first few things away, but after the fifth item everything will be easier and right after you’re done with the cleaning process, you will feel wonderful. You can even have a garage sale, for example.

    Everything that can be digitalized

    A big enabler of the minimalistic lifestyle is the so­-called asset-light living. Asset-light living means you can digitalize many things you had to physically own a decade ago. CDs, videotapes, audiotapes, photo albums, books, notes etc.; it can all be digitalized or bought in a digital version.

    If you aren’t a professional collector of any of those things, you can free up a lot of your space by organizing a huge part of your life in the cloud. While you do that, you can also clean your files and folders on your computer, you can delete e-mail accounts and social networks you rarely use, and remove all other waste from your life.

    Asset light living
    Everything you need in a small device and your cloud.

    Car

    Car is most often the second biggest expense in a household, right behind a home. You don’t want to be slave to your home, and you especially don’t want to be slave to your car. Buy a car you can afford, regularly maintain it and make sure it’s clean and tidy.

    The best minimalistic move you can probably do right away is to downgrade your car. There are so many hidden expenses in a car, like insurance, gas and amortization. When you want to sell your car it’s worth nothing, and every new car costs a fortune.

    Car is nothing but one big cash consuming machine. Like TV is one big time consuming machine. I don’t even own a car anymore and it feels great.

    Projects and tasks

    The next very important aspect of life where you can do a big cleanup is the number of projects and tasks you have on your to-do list. The majority of people are overwhelmed with work and they are doing it to themselves by committing to way too many things; sometimes to run away from life in doing instead of also being. Don’t be one of them.

    Commit to a few projects where you really bring value and then say no to all the other things.

    Go through your tasks, delete all of those that aren’t really that important, and send a few e-mails out that you won’t manage to deliver what is expected of you so you will rather exit the projects. It takes some guts, but you will feel wonderful afterwards. You will do a big favor to yourself and others, who impatiently waited for you to deliver.

    Things to read

    I really like to read, so it can quickly happen to me to have thousands of unread articles in the RSS reader, ten not­-yet-finished books on my Kindle, and a Pocket app full of to-read articles. Then from time to time when I started to feel overwhelmed, I used to just delete everything.

    I stopped doing that and decided to go for a smarter strategy. Now I only go for the best content with limited to-read in progress. I don’t queue new things or buy new books when the reading queue limit is reached. You should be absolutely minimalistic in organizing your infostructure; otherwise you can drown in information.

    Food

    As much as we look for emotional safety in items, we can also look for it in food. It’s called gluttony and it leads to being overweight, low levels of energy and several diseases. Being a minimalist when it comes to food can greatly improve your quality of life.

    Don’t buy too much food and don’t stockpile tons of food that you then throw away because you couldn’t eat it before the expiration date. Have a standard weekly shopping list, eat standardized dishes and eat less of more quality food.

    Relationships

    Much like you want to be minimalistic with items you possess and food you eat, so you want to be minimalistic with relationships in your life. You want to have fewer relationships, and for those be really quality ones. Key relationships are one of the most important aspects of your life.

    People can make your life on Earth heaven or hell. Make sure you take enough quality time with the few people you really love, and offer each other mutual support and encouragement. Be minimalistic in your relationships.

    A minimalistic lifestyle is always very kind to your wallet, your stomach and your heart.

    Practical examples

    My steps towards becoming a minimalist

    When I earned my first real money as a teenager, I decided to renovate my room. I wanted my architect to put as many shelves, drawers and wardrobes as possible into my room. Then throughout the years, I piled things up. Technology was my biggest weakness.

    I had a PC, laptop, netbook, three monitors, tablet, a few mobile phones, you name it. Books were my second weakness. I had thousands of books lying everywhere. One of my shelves collapsed because of it. Not that I’m against owning books, but I had hundreds of unread books and I was buying new ones and new ones. It’s called intellectual greed.

    I had wardrobes full of clothes I never wore, old magazines were lying around everywhere, I had souvenirs from all over the world on my shelves and desk, and I had hundreds of items I never used. I felt like the room was full of memories and I felt rich in a way. But in reality the room was as cluttered and unorganized as my internal world.

    As mentioned, I then went from one extreme into another. One day I read about the minimalistic lifestyle and I just decided to be a minimalist. It made sense to me, it could be a solution for my turbulent inner world. I gave away thousands of books to friends, libraries and secondhand bookshops. I threw away all the souvenirs. I decided to go for one laptop with two external monitors. I minimized the clothes I had.

    I tried hard to really own as many things as possible. Everything I still owned bothered me. A computer cable that I rarely used, a few coins in the drawer, everything bothered me. I searched for peace and salvation in owning as few things as possible.

    Then at some point, I realized the same thing that Buddha taught and was enlightened about. Many times, the middle path is the answer. I figured out that going from one extreme into the other won’t bring me any peace and happiness. So I decided to be a healthy minimalist. Here are the rules I follow now:

    • I prefer warm and healthy relationships over owning money and brutally fighting for more possessions and fancy things. But I don’t deny the importance of money and the benefits of enjoying the material world.
    • I want to experience life more than to own things; but I have no problem enjoying the few material possessions that I do own.
    • I try to own as few things as possible, but I don’t torture myself with how many items I own.
    • If owning something brings a lot of stress into my life, I downsize it or sell it.
    • From time to time I buy myself an expensive thing I really want and I have no problem with it.
    • I give special attention to not enslaving myself with debt.
    • I try to simplify my life as much as possible and make the majority of my life about growth, creating things, connecting with people and doing things I really enjoy, which rarely costs a lot of money.
    • I know that the real path to inner happiness and peace is not through material things. I strive for a balanced amount of inner and outer resources.
    • I try to keep my environment as simplistic and minimalistic as possible.
    • I try to digitalize everything that can be digitalized by following asset-light living and having my own digital brain. I also regularly go on technology detoxes.
    • I am very mindful about the quality of the food I eat, the quality of the relationships I have and the projects I join and really commit to.
    • I very carefully maintain all the items I own. I clean them, protect them, take them to the maintenance shop when needed, and so on. The phone I own looks like new after a few years.
    • I do regular cleanings at least two times per year – of my physical and digital environment.

    You can read more here about one of my minimalistic cleanings that I did not that long ago. I’m always surprised at how I can still manage to find a few bags of clutter even if I’m very careful about what I keep in my life. Without regular cleanings, there is no minimalistic life.

    As I mentioned, today I am a much healthier minimalist, even if I currently don’t own a car or a mobile phone. But I will have no problem buying any of these two items the moment I need them. I always ask myself if something brings value into my life or drags me down. After that, I have a very clear picture of what to do with the item – own it or discard it.

    Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

    do the first cleaning now

    Homework

    Do you have the guts to try the minimalistic lifestyle?

    Now it’s up to you. It might seem scary to get rid of 80 % of the things you currently have, but you can make it less scary by following a carefully orchestrated process that we discussed. The first step is to get rid of one single thing.

    Sell something that has solid monetary value and that you don’t need on eBay. Liquidate it into cash. Then donate a few pieces of clothing you really don’t wear. Play a little bit with different ideas for how you can simplify your life and how you can own less. Experiment a little bit, it’s fun.

    The only thing you have to be careful about is not to go into any extreme. Don’t drown in stuff. Don’t drown in debt. Be more a producer than a consumer. But don’t be only a producer who doesn’t enjoy life and only works, and don’t try to live the extreme ascetic life; you won’t find happiness there.

    The material world is a very important part of the life experience. You are here on this world to grow, create, connect with people as well as to enjoy material things and possessions. Enjoy them, but don’t not look for happiness in them.

    Make sure you know where to draw the line and how to find the right balance – between possessing, being and doing. Now it’s time for you to make your first step towards a more minimalistic lifestyle. Get rid of one of the items you don’t need. It will feel good, believe me.

    If you aren’t sure, you can try minimalism as a 30 Day Challenge. Rent a completely empty flat, select no more than 100 items and try to live for a month. I know it sounds crazy, but it will definitely be an awesome life experience. Something you can tell your kids about.

    Additional resources

    If that sounds too crazy, you can find here a solid 30 Day Challenge plan for how to do one thing every day to get one step closer to a minimalistic lifestyle. It’s a smart plan and an exciting challenge you can absolutely go after.

    And if you are interested in reading more about the minimalistic lifestyle and personal experience that other people had with minimalism The Minimalists, BecomingMinimalist, mnmlist, TheMinimalistMom and Minimalism Subreddit are some of the most popular resources.

  • 30 Day Challenge – One of the best ways to develop new habits

    A 30 Day Challenge is a proven strategy for implementing new healthy habits in life. It’s a great way to try new things, keep life variety high and undertake new challenges without putting too much pressure on yourself.

    People do all kinds of challenges, for taking better care of their health, doing various type of art or pushing themselves through fears that always hindered their life. You can find many success stories online in different blog posts and forums.

    If you’ve never done any 30 Day Challenge, you absolutely have to try one. There is no completely fulfilled life without at least one successfully performed 30 Day Challenge.

    You have to know the extraordinary feeling of being proud of yourself on the last day, right after you complete the 30th repetition; and then you might even stick to the new behavioral pattern, who knows.

    In this article, you will learn everything you need to know about 30 Day Challenges, including:

    • How 30 Day Challenges nicely take away self-doubt and pressure from changing yourself
    • Why 30 days is a period just long enough to assess if it’s worth it to stick to a new habit
    • My personal experience with the last 30 Day Challenge I performed
    • More than 70 ideas for what you can do as your first or next 30 Day Challenge
    • Other interesting insights and facts

    You can do it

    Limited time commitment releases the pressure

    Every desire to permanently change yourself is filled with at least a little pressure and self-doubt. The problem is that doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.

    It’s hard to change yourself. It’s extremely hard to start with a completely new lifestyle and do it forever. Forever! Who can be disciplined forever? That brings a huge pressure into your life. Consequently, you may do nothing instead.

    30 Day Challenges remove the doubts over whether you have the stamina to persist at something new forever. You have to persist only for 30 days, no longer. 30 days is nothing compared to forever. Anyone can persist for 30 days.

    You can absolutely persist for 30 days at any reasonable challenge you set for yourself.

    Great way to experiment with what works and what doesn’t

    30 Day Challenges are an excellent way to do experiments in personal life and test if something works for you as an individual or not.

    Persisting at something for 30 days is a period just long enough for you to get the whole picture of how the change affects your life – physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, socially and materially. It’s like testing a shareware software for 30 days and then deciding if you buy it or not.

    Here’s the thing. Usually when you implement a new change, the following happens. The first two to three days you ride the motivation wave, you’re proud of yourself and your discipline muscle is still functioning. After the first few days, the crisis occurs. The motivation perishes and the only thing left is willpower. You feel more tired, exhausted and emotionally irritated by the change. The crisis can last from one to two weeks.

    Somewhere in the third week, things get stabilized and the crisis goes away. You know that more than half of the challenge is behind you, so you don’t have to persevere for much longer. Somehow you need less and less discipline every day. Your body, emotions, mind, spirit and people in your life get used to the new behavioral pattern. You can start measuring if you are getting the results and changes you want or not.

    At the end of a 30 Day Challenge, you most often have a very clear picture of how good the change is for you. Doing something new for 30 days is usually enough to see the changes on your body, blood, moods, emotional health, social life, financial statement or whichever life metric you want to improve.

    If things go in the direction that you want, you can keep the change in your life, if not, you can simply pivot to something new, for example a new 30 Day Challenge.

    calendar - crossing days

    Consistency is the key to developing new habits

    The good news is that it takes around 30 – 60 days to develop a new habit. After performing a 30 Day Challenge, it’s much easier to persist, towards 100 days, 365 days and then for however long you want to do something new.

    Beginnings are always the hardest. If you slice and dice forever into small 30 Day Challenges and then 1 Year Challenges, you may even get to forever one step at a time.

    The best way to keep consistency and really do a 30 Day Challenge is to visualize it on a calendar (Kanban principle). Stick a really big calendar on a wall in your home, with 30 boxes, one box for every day. Then draw a red cross in a box each day right after you complete the new desired action.

    At the end, you want to have 30 crosses on your calendar. Having such a calendar helps a lot. The moment you wake up and see the calendar you’ll be ultra-motivated to perform the new habit.

    Practical examples

    I just completed a 30 Day Challenge and learned so much

    In August, I decided to write and publish a blog post every day.

    The reason behind it was pretty simple. August is always the worst month in terms of traffic, since people are enjoying their holidays and spending more time outside. I wanted to meet my monthly traffic growth goals, and posting more content was my strategy to achieve that.

    Besides that, it was a great exercise to train my writing attention span. The rules for my 30 Day Challenge were pretty simple. I only followed two: (1) Wake up early and write until you’re spent. (2) Publish a new blog post every day. That’s it. I successfully completed the challenge, and the findings and results were quite interesting.

    I wrote around 150 letter pages. That’s basically a whole book. I successfully published a blog post every day. That was 31 blog posts, one extra since August has 31 days. I had the all-time most successful month regarding traffic to my blog. I definitely strengthened my writing muscle and enjoyed the challenge, but there were also a few downsides.

    One big downside is that I was hurrying all the time to write as much as possible. Style and clarity began to suffer. I don’t like putting quantity over quality, no matter what I do in life.

    Next to that, if you do too much of anything that you love, you start hating it. In the end, I couldn’t wait for August to end, so I could take a break. You can definitely get fatigued if you exaggerate with anything, and it takes all the enjoyment away from the activity. Nevertheless, it was definitely worth it. I only had to do it for 30 days, and that’s always manageable.

    Here are the blog posts I published as my 30 Day Challenge:

    1. Timing is everything – here is how to hit the perfect timing
    2. The 5 Whys technique – dig deep to find the root cause of any problem
    3. Emotional flashbacks – when your emotional response is out of proportion
    4. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving – Book Summary
    5. The execution mode – without execution skills everything is futile
    6. Learning is useless, validated learning is everything
    7. Rapid prototyping for designing a superior life strategy
    8. This is how to do experiments in your personal life (outside the bedroom)
    9. Business Model You – Book Summary – Reinvent your career
    10. Regular daily reflections will change the quality of your life forever
    11. You know nothing, so always put data before rhetoric
    12. Branching and forking – the ultimate way to stay agile in life
    13. Goal journey mapping – The superior strategy to achieve any goal
    14. Short life stories – clear goals with a powerful why
    15. Vision list prioritization or which goals to pursue first
    16. The only goal setting strategy that really works in the 21st century
    17. Immediately stop wasting your life
    18. How much relationship drama is just too much?
    19. Finding the balance between doing and being for all the workaholic
    20. Stupid decisions that can ruin your whole life in a second
    21. Don’t worry about failure, because you only have to be right once
    22. Life is just a dream – not really, but the idea can be useful
    23. A place to escape everyday life and reconnect with yourself
    24. Super healthy foods you simply must eat every day
    25. Hour of power – take one hour daily to invest into your future
    26. Wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups
    27. The proven ways to stop taking things personally
    28. Your mind is like a garden that needs a good daily care
    29. How long you should practice when you’re learning something new
    30. Daily cold showers will make you healthy, attractive and sharp
    31. Optimize your life for productivity and flexibility

    That was a lot of work done.

    I did several other 30 Day Challenges in the past (and even 365 Day Challenges). Some of them ended successfully with me implementing a new habit into my life, others gave me mixed feelings, like the writing challenge did. For example, I didn’t drink alcohol for one year. Nothing, not even a sip at big celebrations. It felt great. Then I decided to do something for my body every day for 30 days and it also felt great.

    Once, I also decided to brainstorm business ideas every day for a month. It was an extremely good experience and I found many great ideas. On the other hand, I ate only raw food for a year which ended awfully, and also completed some other challenges that didn’t end so well.

    At the end, it’s all about experimenting and finding what works for you and what doesn’t, where is the limit when you still enjoy the activity and where too much good turns into bad. It’s about finding the right balance between trying new things, being persistent and listening to yourself.

    30 day challenge

    There are so many ideas for a 30 Day Challenge

    There are so many different types of challenges you can do. One thing you can do is to pick one of your behaviors that you don’t like about yourself and do the opposite for the next 30 days.

    You always leave a tip for a waiter, even if they don’t deserve it? Leave no tip to anyone for a month (as a side note, a tip is not a mandatory or always expected thing here in Europe as it is in US). You always listen to your friend complaining? Listen to no zombie for a month. You never initiate a conversation with a stranger? Initiate a conversation every day.

    Life experiment ideas

    Well, you can even do a 30 Day Challenge to try something new every day, then pick the thing you liked the most and do it for the next 30 days. The only thing 30 Day Challenges require is a little bit of boldness, curiosity and creativity.

    They are simple, straightforward and they work. Below you can find 70+ additional ideas for what to try as your first or next 30 Day Challenge.

    Body level 30 Day Challenges

    • Take a cold shower
    • Get up early
    • Get 8 hours of sleep
    • Don’t drink alcohol
    • Don’t smoke
    • Don’t eat anything sweet
    • Go for a walk
    • Run
    • Do squats
    • Do 100 pushups
    • Pick any of the 30 day exercising programs
    • Do yoga
    • Do intermittent fasting
    • Don’t eat meat
    • Take stairs
    • No coffee
    • Gluten-free food
    • Try polyphasic sleep
    • Take bike to work and back
    • Cook healthy dishes
    • Cook with no repeating dishes
    • Sup, skate, longboard
    • Learn to dance
    • No masturbation
    • Drink only water

    Emotional level 30 Day Challenges

    • Smile 10 times per day
    • Hug somebody
    • Make love
    • Keep a journal
    • Do something that scares you at least a little bit
    • Don’t complain
    • No swearing
    • No porn
    • Write a love poem
    • Don’t get mad

    Mind level 30 Day Challenges

    • Read for one hour
    • Read a book summary
    • Write a book (you can do it with joining National Novel Writing Month)
    • Write a blog post every day
    • Upload a YouTube video
    • Draw or create any kind of art
    • Take a photo
    • Meditate
    • Learn a new language
    • Learn interesting facts about one country per day
    • Learn something completely new
    • Go on technology detox
    • Don’t use your mobile phone
    • Don’t watch TV
    • Don’t read any news
    • Watch a documentary
    • Practice a skill
    • Use a new software
    • Write down all of your business ideas
    • Play an instrument
    • Memorize as many Pi decimals as possible
    • Solve IQ tests
    • Study a chosen topic
    • Write with your left hand
    • Use only the keyboard on your computer without a mouse

    Soul level 30 Day Challenges

    • Write down something you are grateful for
    • Write down one thing you like about yourself
    • Pray
    • Read the Bible
    • Do one random act of kindness

    Social level 30 Day Challenges

    • Make your spouse breakfast
    • Learn a new board game (poker, chess …)
    • Call an old friend
    • Meet someone new
    • Ask someone out on a date
    • Don’t lie no matter what
    • Go to a meetup

    Resource management 30 Day Challenges

    • Have no calendar
    • Sell one of your items on eBay
    • Clean something
    • Devote only 10 minutes to e-mail
    • Have no meetings
    • Don’t use your credit card, operate only with cash
    • Use a virtual assistant for 2 hours
    • Say no to everything and everybody
    • Say yes to everything and everybody (just don’t tell people about your challenge)
    • Use only reusable packaging
    • Use only green energy
    • Rent a car you’ve always dreamed about
    • Work on your additional income in the afternoons
    • Take 30 days of vacation

    Challenge accepted

    Homework

    Choose your next 30 Day Challenge and start now

    It’s time for action. One big mental shift you can do is not to be frustrated by obstacles, changes and problems in life, but to see them as challenges you can’t wait to undertake.

    You should love all the challenges that pop up in your life; and you should constantly challenge yourself to grow, create, love and connect with new people. One great way to do that is by regularly doing 30 Day Challenges.

    To sum things up, 30 Day Challenges remove the pressure of being forever disciplined, they’re a great way to experiment in personal life and get first-hand insights into whether something works for you as an individual or not, and they’re also great for tricking yourself into developing new habits. And on top of that, life never gets boring.

    Now you know the concept, you have more than 70 ideas for what to do as your first or next 30 Day Challenge, so the only thing left is to just do it. Don’t wait for the new month to begin.

    Hang a calendar on your wall today, pick the challenge you want or like the most, and draw the first cross on the calendar. Then do it again tomorrow and the day after, all the way until you finish the challenge. Ready, steady, go!

  • Rapid prototyping for designing a superior life strategy

    Finding what fits you best in order to design the perfect life you want and deserve takes a lot of experimenting. You have to try dozens of different things to find the one that works perfectly for you as a unique individual. In addition to that, “fits” are not a static thing. Your values, environment, the type of opportunities that you’re exposed to and the things you appreciate change over time. That means experimenting must be done constantly.

    Experimenting is fun by itself and you can enjoy many benefits doing it, but it’s also demanding and expensive. It takes a toll on your emotions, because you usually have to face a series of small failures in the beginning and you often need to invest at least some money into performing an experiment; besides time, energy and creativity, which are always needed.

    Every experiment does give you a lot – a diverse life experience, gaining insights about yourself and your environment, having lots of fun and putting your creative self to use. Nevertheless, only experimenting is never enough. The end goal of experimenting is to move forward and to progress much faster towards your goals. Experiments must lead you to validated learning that enables you to shape a superior life strategy.

    The sooner you shape a superior life strategy, the better off you will be in life. The idea of how to get to massive success is to move fast and learn fast. You have to conduct experiment after experiment until you nail it.

    You have to experiment all the way until you can finally move from the search mode into the execution mode. The problem is that a high frequency of many different types of experiments leads to using a lot of resources. And you don’t want to drown before you succeed.

    Luckily today with all the technology and tools available, you can do many experiments fast and they don’t cost a lot of money. The concept is known as rapid prototyping and it’s used in business all the time. In this article, you will learn how to use the same principle in your personal life.

    The main idea is very simple. With rapid prototyping in personal life, you want to get to the minimum viable experience as quickly as possible using the fewest resources. Before we go to many different ideas for using rapid prototyping in personal life, let’s quickly overview the main theory behind prototyping.

    3D Printing

    Prototyping and rapid prototyping

    You’re probably familiar with the word prototype. A prototype is a simplified early working model of a final product that demonstrates the key functionalities and benefits that the final product will provide.

    A prototype can be built to test if an idea even works, it can be built to explore additional ideas, for demonstration purposes and learning as much as possible about how to improve the final product so that the targeted segment will really use it.

    When building a prototype, the most important goal is to gather all the data and specifications to build a real working product in the next step. Prototyping is always far away from only talking about theoretical ideas. It’s the first big step towards realizing an idea. It means taking a theoretical idea and materializing it in its simplified form, so you can start learning how well the idea fits into the world.

    Prototype is a simulation of the final product so you can start learning as quickly as possible.

    We know low-fidelity prototypes that are really basic draft versions of a product. They are often only paper based and don’t allow any real interaction between a user and a prototype. The main goal of low-fidelity prototypes is to visualize solutions, explore alternative versions and encourage additional ideas. They are extremely inexpensive and can be built fast.

    And then we also know high-fidelity prototypes, which are much more perfected, exact and evident. They allow test groups at least some interaction and are much more effective in getting feedback. Their problem is, of course, that they demand more resources to be build.

    We also know different kinds of prototypes to gather different kinds of data and do different kinds of tests. There are proof-of-principle prototypes, the goal of which is to prove that an idea can work in real life. Then we have visual prototypes to get a good visual representation of how the final product would look like. A user experience prototype simulates the user’s experience with the final product. A functional prototype, on the other hand, puts visual representation and features to the test.

    With technology developing fast, there is a relatively new technique called rapid prototyping (wiki) that’s becoming more and more popular. With rapid prototyping, you can very quickly build a scale model of your final product or many different versions of it. With techniques like 3D printing, you can basically print dozens of different ideations fast.

    Besides 3D printing, there are many other awesome tools, apps and approaches that enable you to bring models and other representation types of your ideas to life inexpensively and while your ideas are still hot.

    Rapid prototyping means that you can test many different ideas in a short time frame, gather all the necessary feedback and move fast towards the solutions that work the best.

    Don’t talk about it, do, try, experience or show.

    Rapid Prototyping

    Get educated and then start experimenting as quickly as possible

    There are several prototyping phases or, to be more exact, steps before you start prototyping. The standard phases are:

    • Understand
    • Observe
    • Define
    • Ideate
    • Prototype
    • Test

    In the understand, observe and define phase you gather all the data needed to start prototyping. In this phase it’s most often necessary to get well educated. There are rare exceptions when you want to take a fresh look on an old thing, but many times extensive research and acquiring knowledge helps a lot.

    When you have the basic knowledge and landscape, you can better orientate yourself towards what exactly you want to achieve and find out by experimenting. You also have an understanding of what other people have already tried, and even more importantly what they have missed.

    Especially when experimenting in personal life, it’s extremely important to get very well educated and completely understand the risk, rewards, investments needed and the process. When you understand all these things, you can put your creative mind to work. After you get educated and brainstorm all the potential ideas, the goal you want to achieve with prototyping in personal life is to get a real-life experience as soon as possible.

    When designing a prototype, you try to get to the minimum viable experience as soon as possible with the fewest resources with which it can be done. The sooner you start building, the more motivated you are, and immediate implementation enables you to start learning from the beginning of the process.

    When you’re in the prototyping phase, you should also explore several options and ideas. You mustn’t get emotionally attached to only one potential solution. After defining your hypotheses and ideas for how you will perform an experiment, you have to start prototyping different solutions, test them and move on before you get fixed on any specific ideas.

    In the prototyping phase, you must keep your divergent thinking active, you must completely shut down your inner critic and keep your mind open.

    When you’re prototyping you are looking for two things – the ways to (1) improve current ideas and (2) completely new ideas. The first approach is called serial prototyping, which is a progressive method of upgrading known ideas. It means that you are looking for new versions of the same solutions.

    The second approach is called parallel prototyping, where you are looking for ideas in completely new directions. You are looking for something that doesn’t exist yet at all.

    Minimum Viable Experience is a process of idea generation, prototyping, presentation, data collection, analysis and learning about yourself and your environment.

    No matter if you are doing serial or parallel prototyping, you want your prototypes to be simple, provide rapid feedback, help you embrace change and, last but not least, prototyping should be fun. You may be more limited when you’re experimenting and prototyping in personal life than when you are dealing with business ideas, because you’re rarely building a new product, but instead you just want to experience something new.

    Nevertheless, if you are creative enough, there is always a way to acquire new experiences without diving in fully and risking everything. Even in personal life there is always a way to first test something in a controlled way with some kind of a prototype.

    The most important knowledge and feedback you’re looking for from conducting experiments with prototypes are:

    • Main insights
    • What worked
    • What didn’t work
    • New questions and doubts
    • New ideas for experiments
    • New ideas in general

    Examples of rapid prototyping in personal life

    The main goal of performing an experiment in personal life is very simple. You want to learn in a very controlled environment or in a very controlled way if something (an idea) works as planned, or you want to better understand how the world works.

    You want to get one step closer to the objective truth and get rid of your subjective cognitions and wrong assumptions. You do that by employing the search mode concept and undertaking a scientific approach to experimenting.

    You set hypotheses, define how you will collect and analyze data, and then you perform experiments and draw conclusions. Consequently, you validate or disprove your hypotheses. That leads to validated learning and insights.

    You can make decisions and take actions based on more accurate data. Prototyping is one of the ways how you can perform the data-gathering part of an experiment. Luckily, there are many different types of prototypes that can help you achieve that.

    Below are listed the most popular prototyping techniques together with a few ideas for how you can use each technique in your personal life.

    1. Genchi Genbutsu
    2. Pen and paper
    3. Mockups and models
    4. Wizard of Oz test
    5. Storyboards and use cases
    6. Video prototyping and simulations
    7. Role-playing
    8. Mind-mapping
    9. Scenarios and flow charts
    10. Templates and guidelines

    Genchi Genbutsu

    Genchi Genbutsu

    Genchi Genbutsu is not really a prototyping technique, but the main way of experimenting in personal life. It’s means “go and see” or “go out of the building” to gain first-hand knowledge. In other words, try it and see for yourself whether something works for you or not.

    The highest number of experiments you’ll probably do in life are the ones where you try and experience something new and then observe metrics – either your body metrics, your feelings, your capabilities or any other type of life metrics. You try a new behavior and then observe yourself and your environment. In today’s times, you can try many different things easily and inexpensively. All you need is a little bit of courage.

    Practical examples

    You can try many different sports, diets, types of arts and everything else life has to offer. You live in the best times ever to discover yourself and find the things you are really good at and that you enjoy. You can test different kinds of behaviors in real life and what kind of feedback they give you, you can test different types of habits, technology and careers.

    There are almost no limits to what you can try. You can rent an expensive bike for a downhill ride. You can join a hobby group and try any kind of art or other discipline. You have so many resources to try coding. You can join an afternoon project in an industry you’re attracted to. Genchi Genbutsu.

    Pen and paper

    Pen and paper

    Using pen and paper is the fastest and cheapest form of prototyping. It can be done anywhere and anytime, as long as you have paper and a pencil somewhere at hand – which I absolutely recommend that you do. When an idea comes to mind or when you need to develop one, you simply sketch it on paper. As an alternative, you can also use the origami technique to present some ideas with paper.

    The freedom of pen and paper often encourages experimentation and generation of new ideas. There is a special connection between your mind, hand and pen. You don’t have to be Picasso to sketch, it’s only about giving shape to your ideas and doing many iterations fast. Nobody will judge your prototypes.

    Practical examples

    You can use pen and paper to brainstorm ideas. You can use pen and paper to do self-reflection and understand yourself better. You can draft a flat or a house you desire. You can draw a persona or write an essay about your perfect spouse or ideal self.

    You can easily draw a table with all the pros and cons for a certain decision so you can decide more easily. You can outline what kind of a personal blog you’d like to have. You can try to write a poem or a love letter. You can sketch different ideas.

    lego model mockup

    Mockups and models

    Mockups are slightly advanced representations of ideas. They are 3D illustrations or models that represent the core design and simulate at least some functionalities of the final product. Mockups are an extremely popular design prototyping technique. There are many different types, like models or even wireframes that represent an idea of how a website should work.

    You can use many different approaches and techniques to do mockups. You can use different software applications, you can build physical models from cardboards, paper, woods and other materials. Not to forget 3D printing. You can take advantage of to print actual models of the ideas you have.

    Practical examples

    I’m currently testing a standing desk with nothing but a simple model. The model is made out of a wardrobe and a rack. Many do-it-yourself things would fall into this category of prototyping. From office organization and storage solutions to 3D printing of the things you like, there are many ways to use simplified solutions, models, mock-ups and creative innovations instead of buying expensive products and solutions.

    At this point, we should also mention crowdfunding and crowdsourcing ideas to get feedback from the community or even to fund your ideas. Today you can easily show your ideas to the world and get immediate feedback. With Minimum Viable Products, you can also easily test market interest for your ideas.

    Wizard of oz

    Wizard of Oz test

    The idea behind the Wizard of Oz test is that you somehow fake a functionality you want to build. You do that primarily to save resources. The technique is used extensively in software development.

    For example, you can test a new software functionality, but instead of coding it and having a computer perform the functionalities and all the interactions, it can be done by a human with remote control technologies. A tester doesn’t know that, of course.

    Practical examples

    Examples of Wizard of Oz tests in personal life would be to inexpensively try something you want in order to see if it really brings you happiness. Rent a Ferrari for a day and imagine it’s yours. Try to live in a foreign country for a month before you finally move there. Go to a tech store and spend an hour playing with a computer you want to buy.

    Or, for example, you can learn 100 most popular phrases of a new language, try to use it on the street and see how it feels to speak a new language. Sometimes you can fake it until you make it; or decide to not make it at all, because it’s not for you.

    Story board

    Storyboards and use cases

    With a storyboard, you can describe the whole desired user experience through a series of sketches and images. Storyboards are a great way to brainstorm additional ideas, think of alternative scenarios and all the ways how things can go right or wrong.

    You can also use storyboards to describe different use cases of ideas and products; or you can employ use cases as a standalone prototyping technique.

    Practical examples

    A Kanban board is kind of a storyboard representing your sprint or to-do list. You can use a storyboard to describe how you could/should act in certain situations – when your boss criticizes you, for example. You can outline all the ways how you could use a specific product or how certain ideas could improve your life.

    You can use storyboards to prepare yourself for public appearances or how you will tell your kids a story in the best way possible. You can sketch life stories with storyboards. And you don’t need any drawing skills for storyboards, there are many online solutions that can help you with that.

    video prototype

    Video prototyping and simulations

    The idea of video prototyping is that you illustrate your main idea using video or by making a movie. You can prepare a short movie or a different kind of visual representation. An alternative to videos are also interactive or non-interactive simulations.

    Practical examples

    Make a video of your perfect life or your perfect self. Design a short motivational video clip on the topic of why you want to be rich. Prepare a video as part of your CV. Open a YouTube channel to connect with like‑minded people. Prepare a video simulation of your dream house.

    Role playing

    Role-playing

    Role-playing is a great way to develop empathy. You take on a role of another person and try to experience a situation or use a product from their perspective. It helps you understand their point of view. When you’re role-playing, it makes sense to focus on what the person you are impersonating would say, do, think and feel.

    Practical examples

    You can role-play with your spouse to better understand each other. You can play a role of what kind of a person you would be with a certain characteristic you currently don’t possess and how your life would unfold in the future (the so-called Fixed Role Therapy). You can role-play an action you’re afraid of doing, especially involving authorities that make you freeze up.

    Mind map

    Mind-mapping

    Mind-mapping means using diagrams to visually organize information. It allows you to represent different hierarchies and relations between elements. Mind-mapping is a great way to brainstorm ideas and outline complex structures. It’s also a very suitable technique for how your brain works. Many smart people use mind maps to learn faster, brainstorm and do analytical work.

    Practical examples

    You can use mind maps for brainstorming ideas, breaking down complex subjects or grasping the main ideas of the book you just read.

    You can use mind maps for strategic planning, personal project management, problem solving, job searching, as a life planner, to-do list, travel plan, risk management or even a personal training plan. There are basically unlimited options for how you can use mind maps.

    Flow chart

    Scenarios and flow charts

    Flowcharts are used to explain a process, algorithm or workflow. Steps of the process are visualized with boxes and arrows showing connections between different steps.

    An important part of every process are also decisions that need to be taken in order for the process to be completed one way or another. Decisions are usually visualized in diamond-shaped boxes in the chart. By using a flowchart, you can easily understand the process from the beginning to the end.

    Scenarios, on the other hand, aren’t diagrammatic representations of a process, but a written description of a sequence of desired events, illustrating all the activities that need to be performed in the real-world environment to achieve a specific goal.

    With scenarios, you can describe in detail how a certain system, process or application already works and why it’s important, or you can describe hypothetical scenarios of what could happen in different settings with different products, knowledge, people etc.

    Practical examples

    You can prepare a flowchart of how you will get your job or find your perfect spouse. You can combine the flowchart technique with the AARRR funnel. You can prepare a flowchart for how you will get fit or rich or prioritize what you will learn first in your hour of power.

    With flowcharts, you can define different milestones in your relationships or life in general, analyze in which directions your big decisions could lead you or prepare a step-by-step career development plan.

    You can do pretty much the same by using scenarios as you can do with flowcharts. It all depends on which technique works better for you. With scenarios, you can prepare detailed descriptions of how your life would look like in different settings; for example, if you lived in a flat or a house.

    You can develop alternative paths for your life when you’re making big decisions to have detailed representations of where each decision would lead you. You can prepare scenarios as an input for visualization.

    Excel template

    Templates and guidelines

    Templates and guidelines are a kind of framework for better decision-making or performing certain actions in a very standardized way. A template is a layout that you can use over and over again to save time, energy, decision-making power and other resources.

    Guidelines are nothing but general rules, pieces of advice and principles that you follow. Templates and guides should help you work smart, not only hard.

    Practical examples

    You can prepare a budgeting template that you use to manage your finances. You can prepare work guidelines or time management guidelines or guidelines for how you will raise your kids in order to agree on the main parenting things with your spouse.

    You can prepare household guidelines with clarifications of who does what. A personal not-to-do list is a type of a personal guideline.

    Homework

    It’s time to start prototyping

    There are so many ways how you can prototype; and there are so many tools you can use for it. Specialized apps and online tools, boards, paper only, pen and paper, spreadsheets, text editing software, 3D printing, building models at home from different materials, “go out and see” philosophy, PowerPoint presentations, 3D modeling tools etc. The options are endless; you just have to be a little bit creative.

    By knowing all these creative endeavors for living a more diverse and fulfilling life, you simply can’t get bored. There is always something to build, something to test, there are so many different things you can try and do. There are so many different ways how you can play and progress fast at the same time.

    You don’t have to be a creative genius. You just have to appreciate life enough, be curious and nurture a desire to live a rich life experience. If you can’t find enough motivation, remember that you are going to die someday. Your time here is limited, so don’t waste your life.

    It doesn’t matter if your prototypes aren’t as good as the ones from Apple. But what does matter a lot is how full is the life you’ll live and what your life strategy will be. I suggest you decide for a smart and superior life strategy. The one that works in the 21st century. So start creating, prototyping and experimenting.

    Brainstorm what would be the coolest first prototype you can design and then go into action. Go out and see, be bold and start playing.

  • This is how to do experiments in your personal life (outside the bedroom)

    When you hear the word experiment, you probably think of a crazy scientist sitting in his laboratory and mixing some kind of chemical compounds. There also must be an explosion, I guess.

    While experiments are most often linked to science, they are very useful in many other disciplines, from arts to business and sports. By following the AgileLeanLife Productivity Framework, experiments should also become a very important tool in your personal life.

    The purpose of performing an experiment in science is very simple. You want to either see if something (an idea) works as planned and desired in a very controlled environment or you want to better understand how the world works, you want to get one step closer to the objective truth.

    With experiments you want to gain new knowledge, innovate and better understand the truth.

    Here’s the question: aren’t all these things also extremely useful in personal life? They absolutely are. That’s why a scientific approach to life pays big dividends. By conducting a series of experiments in personal life in the search mode, you can enjoy benefits like:

    • Better understanding yourself and what you want
    • Better understanding other people and how you can forge better relationships with them
    • Finding something that is really your fit and you can build massive success on
    • Discovering your talents and things you are good at
    • Exploring crazy ideas that can accelerate your massive success
    • Identifying trends and patterns in your environment
    • Setting a realistic execution strategy based on superior insights about your environment
    • Designing the perfect lifestyle you want and deserve
    • Having fun, trying as many things as possible and living a diverse life experience

    Isn’t that cool? And you don’t need a lot. A hypothesis, an idea how to perform an experiment, metrics, and some guts. No, you don’t have to be a crazy scientist. Well, maybe a little bit. By reading this article, you will learn everything you need to know about conducting experiments in your personal life in order to build yourself a superior life strategy.

    From the easiest to the toughest experiments in personal life

    You’ve probably heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is portrayed as a pyramid with six different types of needs, from the most basic and primitive ones to the cosmopolitan and higher ones. The most basic ones are physiological needs like air, water, food and sex.

    Then we have safety needs like personal and financial security. The next ones are needs of love and belonging to family, friends and a spouse. Then self-esteem comes into play, giving a sense of contribution and value. The final ones, on top of the pyramid, are self-actualization needs.

    Maslows Hierarchy Of Needs

    Why is that important? Well, because on the lower level of the pyramid, you already conducted several experiments in your past, even if you didn’t call them experiments. Here’s what I have in mind:

    • You probably tried holding your breath for as long as possible underwater.
    • I assume you haven’t eaten only one type of food in your whole life. You probably tried many different foods and dishes until you found your favorite ones.
    • I know it depends on where you live and on your religion and family values, but there is a great chance you experimented a little bit in your sex life. At least with a few different positions or partners.

    These were all very basic life experiments. You tried something new and then decided whether it works for you or not. Your taste, your emotions and your body were the feedback mechanism. Now, the question is why does experimenting after food and sex becomes less frequent.

    Ego investments prevent experimenting

    Performing experiments in personal life becomes less frequent because of the risk-reward ratio and because you’re heavily invested in specific behavioral patterns with your beliefs, emotions, money and other resources. I will give you an example of being invested in religious values, because it’s just the most obvious example and since we already talked about food and sex.

    If you’re an atheist in the developed world, you can experiment with many different dishes and cuisines, with all the healthy foods known to humankind. If your religious beliefs forbid you from eating certain types of meat, you are emotionally invested in your beliefs and that limits the number of experiments you allow yourself to do. With sex and religion, everything becomes an even more delicate thing.

    Now, I’m not encouraging you to start breaking your moral, religious or any other kind of view, I just want to show how you’re invested in something with your ego, beliefs, and values. What’s more important is that everybody inherited thousands of different beliefs from their primary and secondary socialization.

    Some of these beliefs work and some of them don’t. Some of them make sense and some of them don’t. Some of them fit your character well, others only bring you frustration and prevent you from finding your perfect fit.

    There are many different types of inherited beliefs and learned behavioral patterns that may do you good or on the other hand that may be preventing you from finding a better way to live life. Here are examples of the bad ones:

    • Beliefs about yourself or the so-called self-labels: I am lazy; I am hardworking; I am not that smart …
    • Beliefs about money: I will never be rich, money is bad, investing is not for me …
    • Political beliefs: Everybody is entitled to own a gun, we don’t need a social system …
    • Beliefs about the opposite gender and other people: All men cheat, people are bad …
    • All different kinds of beliefs and values, especially the things for which you are 100 % certain you’re right about

    There are absolutely good beliefs, values and social norms that must be respected. Not breaking the law, respecting other people, taking care of the community etc. But all of us also have many toxic beliefs in which we are invested, and they prevent you from designing the perfect life you want and deserve and limit all the things you can try and experiment with.

    With false investments, we can become our own worst enemies.

    Here are a few more examples how limiting and toxic beliefs usually prevent you to experiment:

    If you’ve always seen yourself as a lazy person, it may be hard for you to work hard as hell for a month as an experiment. But what if you’d enjoy it? On the other hand, if you always strongly believed that you must work hard and earn money for yourself, you may have a problem enjoying social benefits from the government when you lose a job or asking for help when needed. But what if people are willing to help and you are not on your own?

    If you were taught to always go for a safe job, you might not even think about starting your own business, even if you’re a talented entrepreneur. If at home, vegetarians were always seen as weird people, you probably won’t ever experiment with a vegetarian diet. If you believe people are bad in general, how can you experiment with different levels of trust?

    Believe in yourself, but doubt your beliefs. Instead try and see.

    Get out of the comfort zone

    The risk-reward ratio and experimenting

    The higher you move on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the worse the risk-reward factor is. At least instinctively and at the first glance. Much like you are invested in your values and beliefs, so you are also emotionally, financially and in many other different ways invested in your current life settings.

    If you want to change your life settings, you have to take some risks, you have to move out of the comfort zone. You have to either change and improve yourself, or invest your energy into new things. But rewards aren’t even that certain. You may find a better position or you may not, who knows. What am I talking about?

    • If you stay in a relationship, you know the short-term risk-reward ratio pretty well, but what if you break the relationship and go find a person who’s a better fit for you? It’s a big risk, and rewards aren’t that certain.
    • If you stay at your current job, again you know the short-term risk-reward ratio. You have a contract that determines it. But what if you quit the job and start your own business or try to find work that you enjoy more? It’s quite risky and rewards aren’t that certain.
    • At the top of Maslow’s hierarchy is self-actualization. What does that even mean, at the end of the day, you have bills to pay.

    Disinvesting yourself from one thing and investing into a new one is risky. Because there are many unknowns. You need to be bold and brave, having an explorer’s soul to experiment on the higher levels.

    You must be really determined to make the most out of your life and find who you are together with what fits you perfectly. Only extremely flexible people have no problem disinvesting their resources from one thing and investing them into another.

    But luckily, today the risk-reward factor is greatly improving to your advantage.

    Experiments in personal life

    You are lucky, today experimenting is easy for the first time in history

    Not everything is so dark. There’s some big good news. We live in the best times ever to experiment. At least in most parts of the world. Today you have so many options, so many ways to try new things without any huge risks and without serious investments of your resources.

    You only have to be smart about it. In experiments, you can always more or less properly mitigate the risk-reward ratio. It’s not like you are risking your life, like you used to. Today you can always conduct experiments in a very controlled way. You can always take a step back if things don’t go into the right direction.

    You just have to learn to manage your ego properly and you have to nurture your curious soul that desires to explore and find itself.

    You can easily try dozens of sports to find the one that works best for you. You can easily try several different diets in a very controlled way to find the one that fits you best. You can try many different occupations and jobs in your free time to discover your true talents and what you’re good at.

    You can easily try many different investments. You can even practice many different religions to see what gives you the best results (without getting killed). You can experience many different relationships, try many different hobbies, experiment with different cuisines and dishes, you can try several types of arts, you can easily acquire all sorts of knowledge online, there are so many ways to make the world a better place.

    You can try dozens of things to find your fits that work best for you. Your fits in different areas of life should become like small mosaics in the canvas on which you design your perfect life. I follow this philosophy all the time. I tried all kinds of different things to find my fits.

    I discovered my favorite sports, diet, dishes, people, industries, talents, personality characteristics, intimate preferences, thinking techniques, technology, home settings, how I work, creative endeavors, everything. And it’s awesome, you really live the life that’s meant for you, and you get to live the richest life possible.

    Because in the end, you only have two options. Your life can be either a daring adventure or nothing. Your life will definitely be nothing if you don’t have the courage to get off your sofa and explore a little bit. You have to try different things and see what works best for you. Don’t assume, try.

    Today, the times are too great to settle for the first job you get, for the first partner you date, for the default behavioral patterns that you inherited, for the foods you always ate at home and for everything else that comes to your life by default. There are exceptions, but in most cases it does pay off to go out and explore. It does pay off to go out and see how varied the world is. It does pay off to experiment. Now the only question left is how to do it.

    Subjective assessment

    How to do experiments in your personal life

    It’s very easy to perform experiments in your personal life. The most important thing is that you write down all the things and insights, and that you do it in a very systematic way. You especially can’t rely only on your memory because you quickly tend to forget things, especially important details.

    Here’s what you need:

    • A notebook: Digital or physical one to write things down.
    • A purpose or a goal: A short description of what you’re trying to achieve and targeted improvements.
    • A hypothesis: It’s an educated guess based on your prior experience and knowledge.
    • Data collection and methodology: A plan for how you will collect data and what kind of experiments you will perform. It’s very frequent that you conduct an experiment several times and that you also have a control group to compare the results with.
    • Data analysis and conclusion: You perform the experiments, you analyze the data and come to certain conclusions.
    • Insights: Beside the conclusions, it pays off to write down all kinds of different insights you gained while performing an experiment and all the new ideas you got along the way; especially which new experiments to perform.

    The purpose or the goal of experiments in life is quite clear. You want to find a job you enjoy and are good at. You want to find a diet that will enable you to have stable weight and enjoy high levels of energy. You might want to lose weight. You might want to find your dream partner or improve your financial situation. You want to improve your life somehow.

    There are many different types of goals you can achieve by experimenting in your personal life. If you aren’t sure where to begin, prepare a prioritized vision list (or you can find ideas at the end of this article). Now let’s look at the next steps after you define the goal you want to achieve.

    Breaking down a big goal into small experiments

    You want to break down your big goal into a series of small experiments. You should try to break down your overall goal into such small experimental pieces that you isolate your variables as much as possible and that you can really measure the things you want to measure.

    The best way to show you how to do this is by example.

    If you want to improve your financial situation, you might do the following breakdown: there are two general ways of experimenting for improving the money situation – one is saving more money and the other is earning more money. You can break down these two general ways into several experiments:

    “For saving money, I will experiment with automatic transfer of 10 % of my money to a savings account, spreadsheet budgeting and waiting for a week before doing any big purchases in order to manage impulse buying. I will try each of these ideas for a month. And for earning more money, I will try to start an online business in my free time or get an additional job.”

    Health assessment

    Getting educated

    When you’re breaking down your big goals, writing ideas for different experiments and setting your hypotheses, there is one more important step to make. You have to get educated. You have to get madly educated. Whatever you want to improve in your life, the first step is always to get educated really well.

    You need to do research, read a few books, write down everything you know about yourself and others, and then decide what you expect, what you think will happen. Since you aren’t doing real scientific experiments, your subjective evaluation will play a vital role in the process. Nevertheless, you should try to design your experiment as objectively as possible. But first always get educated.

    Writing down hypotheses and defining the experiments

    Now you educated yourself. You’ve broken down your big goal into a set of small goals, small experiments that you can perform with variables that are as isolated as possible. While getting educated and breaking down your goals, you also have to write down the hypotheses for every experiment and define the general terms of how you will perform the experiment.

    Practical examples

    Here’s an actual example from my personal life (simplified in order to not make this article too long):

    Hypothesis 1: I prefer individual sports over team sports. To prove the hypothesis, I will try three individual (fitness, hiking, golf) and three team sports (basketball, volleyball, hockey). I will do every sport five times for one hour. I will measure my overall satisfaction, how good I am at a specific sport, and how it helps me with my health goals, like gaining mass for example. Validated – I like individual sports more.

    Hypothesis 2: The individual sports that would suit me best are fitness, running, boxing, crossfit, golf, karate, swimming and hiking. I will do every sport five times for one hour. I will measure my overall satisfaction, how good I am at a specific sport and how it helps me with my health goals, like gaining mass for example. The individual sports that I like and that meet my other goals best are fitness, hiking, swimming. These three were validated, other rejected for various reasons.

    Hypothesis 3: Since I’m in bad shape, I will be too tired if I start training three times per week. I’ll train three times a week for two weeks and measure my energy levels. Rejected – I can work out three times per week without a problem. My energy levels are even higher. I will try training four times per week after 1 month.

    Hypothesis 4: I will make better progress with a personal trainer in the gym. I will buy a package to work with a professional trainer for a month and compare my performance results to one month of training by myself. Validated – Personal trainers show me how to do exercises correctly and boost my motivation. My progress is also 10 % faster. After two months, I will see how well I work alone, following a new program prepared by a personal trainer.

    Hypothesis 5: My motivation is better if I have a buddy to work out with. For 5 times, I will try to work out alone in the gym, and for 5 times with a training partner and compare my results. I will measure my motivation levels, the quality of the workout and other factors. Rejected – Scheduling, talking and drinks after the workout aren’t really helping me.

    I suggest that after writing down a hypothesis, you go into details of how you will measure results, what kind of data you will collect, what are the terms for a hypothesis to be validated or rejected, how you will perform the experiment, and so on. It’s extremely fun to play with designing experiments and then actually doing them.

    Comparing two options test

    Data collection and analysis

    There are several ways you can gather and analyze the data and measure results when conducting experiments in your personal life. Here are a few examples of different types of metrics:

    • Actionable metrics – metrics that help you make decisions and improve yourself
    • Vanity metrics – metrics that only stroke your ego and don’t help you at all
    • Qualitative metrics – insights you gather
    • Quantitate metrics – information that can be measured with numbers
    • Exploratory metrics – speculations about what could happen
    • Reporting metrics – comparing actual results to a plan
    • Leading metrics – predicting the future
    • Lagging metrics – describing the past

    I call all qualitative, exploratory and leading metrics soft metrics, because they give you just a general sense of where you were, where you are and where you’re going. On the other hand, quantitative, reporting and lagging metrics are hardcore metrics, because they show you the truth if measured correctly.

    As you will find soon, the quantitative metrics are the coldest ones, because they always show the truth. But you have to avoid vanity metrics at all costs.

    Here are examples of metrics for different areas of life you can use:

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

    How you should measure your success in life? Compare…

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

    There are many ways how you can gather data. You can make your scores on individually prepared tables like the happiness index. You can use many different apps and devices for biofeedback. You can measure and note data in a spreadsheet and then analyze it. You can perform interviews or even do online surveys and tests.

    Here are a few ideas for gathering data and conducting experiments (with examples):

    • Try and do rating (rate how much you like a certain sport or a diet or people’s characteristics)
    • Conduct an interview or organize a focus group (how it’s like to work at a certain occupation)
    • Do an online survey (how to name your book, what kind of a service people would buy from you)
    • Role-playing (to understand how somebody else is feeling)
    • Diary analysis (analyze your diary to see with whom you feel the best)
    • A/B tests (writing down all the pros and cons of two computers you want to buy)
    • Cognitive walkthrough (imagine yourself with completely new life settings)
    • Competitive testing (analyze how well you are qualified for a certain job compared to the competition and where you need to improve)
    • Idea crowding (gather ideas for how you can improve from people you know and trust)
    • Historical data (analyze your weight for the past three months to see where you’re going)

    There are so many ways how you can experiment in life. You just have to be a little bit creative. The more experiments you do, the more ideas you get for testing new things. As always, the first time is the hardest, but then a whole new world opens to you.

    Homework
    Template

    Help yourself with the template and do your first experiments in personal life

    To make things much easier for you, I prepared a template for you, as always. I suggest you choose one of the experiments listed below, open the template and design your first experiments. Get educated, break your big goal down into small experiments, write down hypotheses and how you will perform the experiments, and then just start playing.

    I promise it will be fun.

    Here you can download the template:

    [emaillocker]

    • Experiments in personal life – Template (xls)

    [/emaillocker]

    The best ideas for your first experiment:Einstein Albert

    • Finding one exercise you dislike the least and that you can perform three times per week
    • Finding two extremely healthy foods you can add to your diet and eat every day
    • Finding one extremely healthy dish you can cook all by yourself
    • Finding one way to earn more money
    • Finding five ways to save more money every month
    • Finding one topic that interests you to the point where you can read one book per month on the topic
    • Finding one way how you can improve the relationship with your spouse
    • Gathering and ranking all the ideas for improving yourself
    • Gathering and ranking 50 ideas for how you can help the company you work for grow faster
    • Finding one way how you can play and relax more in life
    • Finding one way how you can improve your productivity

    Good luck with experimenting. Just please don’t turn into a crazy scientist.

  • You know nothing, so always put data before rhetoric

    There is no way to avoid conflict in everyday life. Sonner or later, you encounter some kind of incompatibility between you and another subject or force. Conflicts always brings tension and drama, but they aren’t necessarily bad.

    Actually, conflicts are mandatory for new, better and more creative ideas to arise. The main prerequisite for conflicts to be productive is to keep them under control.

    We know several main types of conflicts:

    1. Man against self
    2. Man against man
    3. Man against society
    4. Man against nature
    5. Man against god/faith
    6. Man against supernatural
    7. Man against markets
    8. Man against robots (with the rise of AI)

    There are many different ways to keep conflict under control and prevent its escalation. Show respect to all other parties involved. Don’t criticize ideas, use them as an input to be even more creative. Don’t focus on blame, instead focus on finding the best solution.

    You don’t have to be always right and you should never put your ego in front of learning or trying something new. If you don’t understand something, ask for clarification and follow other guidelines of good communication. Use humor, stay kind but express your opinion, and so on.

    Nevertheless, by far the best advice that doesn’t only keep tension under control, but also leads to the fastest progress possible, is putting data before rhetoric.

    Data before rhetoric

    Superior rhetoric skills must present zero advantage

    Scientific research has shown over and over again that very heterogeneous interdisciplinary teams perform by far the best in non-routine challenges. I strongly believe that this fact applies to business teams as well as to teams in personal life, for example family or a specific group of friends.

    For a group of people to function, there absolutely have to be common interests, visions and goals, but the greater the diversity of members, the crazier are the ideas, solutions and suggestions that have the chance to arise.

    Nevertheless, diversity brings tension. Some people handle verbal tension better than others. Even more, some people have great advantages when discussions get heated. Because some people are verbally more assertive than others, and a few people are shy introverts (like I am) who get scared to the bones in big arguments.

    Usually every group of people includes one or two individuals who are very assertive communicators and have an ability to strongly fight for why their arguments make the most sense; even if they might not. They verbally overpower other team members and that kills the collective brainpower. It’s a disaster.

    In any team that wants to perform well, superior rhetoric mustn’t be any advantage. Team culture must allow a shy introvert to speak as much and as passionately as the verbally strongest extrovert. Google did a big research on the best performing teams, and their data indicated that psychological safety was critical to making a team work, more than anything else.

    All arguments are equal until they are put to the test.

    There were two indicators of psychological safety: firstly, team members spoke in roughly the same proportion, in other words there was equality in the distribution of conversational turn-taking (introverts, extroverts, shy people and the strongest rhetoric).

    Secondly, all the good teams had high social sensitivity, meaning team members were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, facial expressions and other nonverbal cues.

    Agreeing to always put data before rhetoric is a great way to set the basic rules of teamwork, indicating that all arguments are equal until they’re put to the test. Every idea counts, and all the main ideas should get tested.

    There is no need for tension to escalate when you put data before rhetoric

    Humans get creative ideas. Humans have inspirations. Humans have opinions. Data and metrics do the validation. Instincts are experiments and data is proof.

    Zero always invites imagination and when you are at zero, there is a huge space for egos, opinions and arguments to fight based on assumptions. But wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. That’s why every assumption and prediction needs to be tested. With one exception.

    Instincts are experiments and data is proof.

    The only way you can predict things with high accuracy is if you have a long and stable history. The longer and the more stable the history, the more accurately you can forecast short-term future.

    And there is no way to predict long-term future. Nobody knows what will happen in 3 years. But short-term history is in many cases a good basis for predicting short-term future.

    Practical examples

    If you haven’t exercised for the past three months or even years, there is a high probability that you won’t exercise tomorrow. A partner who cheated on all of their exes is very likely to cheat on their next partner.

    But when you’re trying new things, experimenting and brainstorming new ideas, you rarely have accurate historical data you could rely on. Thus all the ideas, arguments and convictions are nothing but untested assumptions – hypotheses. Nobody really knows what will work and what won’t. That’s why assumptions need to be tested.

    Here’s an example. There is a lot of conflicting advice regarding diet online. Do calories matter or does only the type of food you eat matter? Does eating meat make you more tired or not? Should you eat before sleep to gain muscle or is it the number one way to gain fat? Should you eat five small meals or two large ones?

    For every argument, you can find scientific studies, testimonials of fitness professionals, people claiming that this one piece of advice changed their life etc. At the same time you can find scientific studies and testimonials for the opposite advice to work perfectly. You can find dozens of studies why tomato is healthy and why it’s not.

    So what is the best solution, to listen to the loudest message out there or to put things to the test and see what works for you as an individual?

    When you decide to put everything to the test, there is no need for an argument. You can have a heated discussion to brainstorm the best ideas and inspirations, but then you just have to do experiments to find the thing that enables you the fastest progress towards your vision and goals.

    There is never one single way to the goal and there is no single success recipe that would work for all people.

    Instead of wasting energy in a pissing contest, direct the team’s energy into the following:

    1. Gather all the ideas and make sure they’re as diverse and crazy as possible
    2. Rank the ideas in the order they’ll be tested in (set a system that makes sense depending on your goals. Have a voting system or any other kind of system, don’t allow that one person with the strongest ego to tell you how things should be ranked.)
    3. Define metrics that will measure real progress
    4. Define with what kind of experiments you will get the data
    5. Perform the experiments, gather the data and see what works better
    6. Re-rank ideas and do additional experiments
    7. Never stop experimenting, doubt and test everything

    Today, technology can do a lot of measuring for you. You have so many different devices, apps and tools to measure feedback.

    To determine how you are progressing, you can employ different life metrics, biofeedback metrics, you can do split tests, online experiments or even use subjective things like scales from 1 to 10 or the happiness index. You don’t need anything really complicated to measure your progress, you aren’t trying to win a Nobel prize, you’re just trying to make better decisions based on better data.Machine validate

    Other benefits of putting data before rhetoric

    There are many other benefits of putting data before rhetoric. Not only do arguments based on opinions get reduced, you also:

    • Don’t get lost in a fake feeling of progress,
    • can only manage things that you measure,
    • get the answers to what really works and gives you the fastest progress, and
    • in the end, metrics should drive your behavior.

    Metrics are what should be leading you to decide what you will start doing in life, what you will stop doing and what behavioral patterns you will continue to perform. Metrics are the ones that should tell you if you persevere at something or pivot to something else.

    The painful fact is that you are forced to face reality when you put data before rhetoric, but living in a lie or in an illusion brings only short-term comfort and much bigger long-term pain. The sooner you admit to yourself where you are, the faster you can start to progress and improve.

    Only metrics can show you the hard reality and only metrics can take you from dreaming and being at zero to measuring your real progress, performing and achieving massive success.

    Testament to put data before rhetoric

    You can’t just put data before rhetoric. People’s egos are just too strong. Even if you’re performing an experiment on your own and there are no other people involved, your ego will always block you and give you headaches. So you must consciously agree on some very basic rules.

    The first rule you must become okay with is that it’s not about being right, it’s about finding the fastest way to validated learning and progress. You shouldn’t have any problem being wrong. You should expect that you’re wrong.

    And then you shouldn’t have a problem accepting a different view, angle or action that works better than yours. Because you’re always wrong before you’re right. Steve Jobs had no problem being wrong, and you shouldn’t have a problem with it either.

    The next rule is that almost all ideas should be put to the test. Especially the crazy ones. I know it’s a matter of resources and you can’t test truly everything, but the point is to never ditch ideas that sound crazy or for which the majority thinks they won’t work.

    I did dozens of online A/B tests (ads, landing pages etc.), where I was completely sure that A will work better than B, but then the reality was a lot different. You never know what will work better.

    Thirdly, you need to gather real valid data and then make decisions based on this data. You have to perform experiments scientifically, at least to some extent (that’s not as horrible as it sounds). You need to write down hypotheses, you need metrics and you need to conduct experiments.

    When you get the results, the data must help you make a decision about what to do. If a metric only strokes your ego, it’s probably not a good metric. If metrics show you one thing and you do something else, you aren’t data-driven.

    After performing an experiment, you need an answer to the question: what will I do differently based on this information?

    Practical applications and examples

    Before we look at a few examples, I have to emphasize a few more important facts regarding metrics. If you want for your metrics to make any sense, they need to be comparable and understandable.

    Usually, they are a ratio or rate and are connected to the core part of your goal. Metrics set in the right way illustrate cause and effect, and lead you to what to do next. Nevertheless, they aren’t a magical solution; they just point you to the step to take next.

    The big downside to putting data before rhetoric is that it takes a lot of additional effort, time and creativity to perform the experiments and gather the metrics. But s/he who progresses the fastest, succeeds the fastest. The effort pays off sooner or later. Putting data before rhetoric is part of a superior life strategy, it’s why some people are successful and others are not.

    Now let’s look at a few examples for where and how you can put things to the test, instead of arguing what works and what doesn’t with other people.

    Argument Counterargument Let’s find out
    Learning to code is easy and everybody should do it. Learning to code is extremely hard. Dedicate 100 hours of intensive learning to coding and do an online test (solve challenges) to see how good of a programmer you’ve become.
    Coffee is the best anti-oxidant with many health benefits. Coffee makes you anxious, you can’t sleep at night and it’s bad for your stomach. Drink a cup of coffee for one month in the morning and observe what’s happening to your body, sleep, productivity etc. You can measure how long you can work in a day, you have devices that measure the quality of your sleep …
    If you eat before sleep, you will get fatter. It doesn’t matter when you eat as long as you’re in a caloric deficit. Eat before sleep for 4 weeks and don’t for 4 weeks, keep the same calorie levels and see what happens to your fat percentage.
    Meditation will make you a calmer person. It’s impossible to meditate in today’s busy life and you only get nervous sitting in the same place for 20 minutes. Try to meditate for a month and mark from 1 to 10 how difficult it is to follow and how calm you are before and after.
    You can’t make money out of a hobby. There is always a way to make money out of a hobby. List all your hobbies, for every hobby write down several business ideas, pick the best one and try to make some money in your free time. Measure how much money you make. You can even test more ideas.
    Life without a mobile phone in the afternoon is much more peaceful and calm. It’s impossible to live without a mobile phone in today’s society. Turn off your mobile phone after you get home from your job for two weeks and measure your calmness level.
    Too much attention in a relationship is not good. There always has to be a bit of distance. You should regularly invest a certain level of attention into a relationship to develop it to the deeper levels. Spend an additional hour with your partner without any distractions and technology, talk, touch, make love, tell each other jokes or whatever you like, and every day, mark on a scale how good your relationship is.

    These are all simplified examples to illustrate the way to apply theory to practice. When you write down the hypotheses, you also need to define very well how the experiment will be performed and what kind of results will lead to what kind of conclusions.

    When you’re defining metrics, note that there are metrics that are hard-core data (like body fat percentage) and there are data that are very subjective (like the happiness index). Here you can find more than 40 life metrics as additional ideas for experiments. Just make sure you aren’t using vanity metrics.

    All others bring data - Deming quote

    Homework

    Do your first data-driven decision

    Think of an argument you currently have in a team, with your friends, with your spouse or with any other person that’s part of your key relationships. Instead of continuing with the ego battles and opinions, decide for a different approach, the “data before rhetoric” approach. It will be fun.

    Propose to the parties involved that you do a scientific experiment to find out which different arguments that people are having can be validated and which can’t. Think of metrics and what could be the experiment.

    The moment you start talking about metrics and experiments, you will disinvest your ego, stay flexible in your thinking more easily, and more agile in angles of how you see life. On top of that, conducting an experiment will be super fun, as I mentioned.

    Do experiments, gather and analyze the data, and see where it points. It’s not about who’s right, it’s about what works. In the last step, decide with all the parties involved how you will change your behavior, team culture or with what actions you will proceed.

    After conducting the first few experiments, you will soon see every one of your beliefs, convictions, assumptions and ego opinions as nothing but hypotheses that need to be put to the test.

    If you’re interested, here are my slides on the topic of metrics and putting data before rhetoric in startups. Maybe you’ll get some additional ideas for how to use these principles in your personal life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    path_to_success3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Branching and forking in software development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Branches in software development

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

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

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

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

    Forks in software development

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

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

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

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

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

    Branching and forking

    Using branches and forks in your personal life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    It’s all about superior emotional management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Alternative paths

    Branches and forks are advanced brainstormed potential pivots

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

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

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

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

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

    The potential pivots in personal life:

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

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

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

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

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

    Path to success

    Branches in personal life

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

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

    Practical examples

    Let’s go to an example.

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

    There are many different branches you can follow:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Forks in personal life

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

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

    Practical examples

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

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

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

    You always have many options

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

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

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

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

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

    Pivots forks branches

    Do you want to know more about goal setting?

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

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