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  • Finding the balance between doing and being for all the workaholic

    There are two modes of human operation. One is doing and the other is being. Doing is work, achievements, recognition, creating value and improving yourself. Being is loving, enjoying and appreciating life. Without any improvements needed. You need a healthy balance of both if you want to be truly happy.

    Doing is a prefect bully of being (and vice-versa as we will see). Doing is a very convincing illusion of escape. You can always start doing something and forget being.

    You can have an endless to-do list. You can always take on more responsibilities. You can take your phone in your hand and check work emails anytime and anywhere.

    You can nicely whine and complain about how busy you are to whoever you meet so you get a little bit of comfort and love. And achievements can always give you a short-term boost of self-worth and confidence.

    I’m extremely inclined towards doing. It’s called being a workaholic and it’s an addiction like any other, helping you run away from yourself and life – from being.

    With becoming older and a little bit wiser, I have been slowly learning to also just be. To only be, without any work. I improved in this sense a little bit and still have a lot of work to do. I know “a lot of work to do” sounds a bit ironic in this case. Well, I have to do less work I guess.

    Anyway, I grasped the theoretical concept of what leads to an ability of only being in the present moment, but implementing it is a completely different story; if you are a natural born workaholic. Actually, nobody is born pure workaholic. You become workaholic usually because of the toxic upbringing.

    If you are a workaholic and struggle with just being like I am, let me share with you a few core concepts that could help you find the right balance between doing and being.

    doing and being balance

    You’re valuable for who you are, not what you achieve

    If your parents told you that they love you only when you did things right and didn’t have your back when you made mistakes, you might have started confusing achievements with love.

    In the same way, if you don’t get enough emotional support and proper care when you are young in general, later in life achievements might become a way to compensate for that; because other people are applauding you and it feels good.

    No matter how hard you work, it will never be good enough for your parents, if it was never good enough in your past. Some problems can’t be solved by only working harder.

    Soon your self-worth gets connected to what you do, not to who you are. That leads to great oscillation in feelings of your self-worth and capacity for self-love. When you achieve something, you feel great about yourself and life, when you don’t win or when you make a mistake, the feeling of your self-worth crashes to zero.

    The tighter the connection between self-worth and achievements, the greater oscillations occur. In a complete extreme, doing any small mistake, like a spelling error or breaking a glass, can immediately make you feel worthless. That kind of a personality characteristic consequently makes you an extremely volatile and labile person.

    You’re valuable for who you are, not what you have

    Unhealthy craving for status can be one type of compensation, greed for money is the other. For emotionally wounded people, money and possessions sometimes seem like the way of filling the void. There are several big problems with that.

    Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction. – Erich Fromm

    The first problem is that net worth fluctuates and consequently your feeling of self-worth also fluctuates. Then we have the problem that there is always someone who has more money than you, and that again provokes your feeling of self-worth. The last problem I would mention among many is that today, you can very easily look rich without actually being rich.

    Seeing your self-worth exclusively through money lenses can drive you to bad financial decisions. People are buying homes, cars and other possessions they can’t afford, often just to feel that they matter. They want to be loved, noticed and seen as capable, and a fancy car seems like the way to get all these things. Obviously it’s not.

    Without money, your life can definitely be miserable. Money is important. You need enough money to live a happy and quality life. You also need status and achievements. But at the same time, focusing on money and achievements too much and putting them way before your health, relationships, integrity and balance leads to poor life choices and misery. Greed is not good.

    You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world. – Tyler Duren, Fight Club

    enjoying life

    You can’t just be if you’re running away

    There are so many things you can be running away from. Your childhood life and your abusive parents. Disliking parts of your personality. Finding yourself in the same toxic relationship patterns as you had with your parents. Feeling like you were a burden to your parents. Not to mention all the fears known to humankind.

    If you have to run away from a single thing, you can’t just be. You can’t be free. You have to move, you have to go forward, you have to be constantly running. Unfortunately, running away from yourself is like running away from your shadow. No matter how fast and how long you run, you can’t outrun yourself.

    If you want to free yourself, you have to sooner or later confront yourself and your fears.

    You can’t just be if you’re caught in severe negative thoughts and emotions

    How can you just be if you’re thinking the same negative thoughts over and over again? How can you just be if you’re feeling lost in severe negative emotions like anger, guilt or sadness? It’s impossible to be, all you can do is to keep busy and try to work away all the negatives.

    The moment you stop working, the moment you stop being busy, negative thoughts and emotions get louder. How can you then stop for a moment and take a deep breath? Because the moment you start to relax, a monster of negative thoughts and emotions start to hunt you.

    If you’re busy, you’re okay. If you stop, you’re not okay. You have to choose the lesser evil in a way.

    And it’s not only that. All the negative thoughts and emotions have to be directed somewhere. They can be directed inwards, toward self-destructive behavior, or outwards. In the latter case, negative emotions can be the drive to achieve, sometimes even by trampling other people.

    With severe negative emotions and thoughts, you can’t just be. They drive you to do stupid things. They drive you to bully yourself or others.

    You can’t just be if you don’t know how to play

    If you had to become an adult too soon and take responsibilities on your shoulders that your parents should have taken care of, or if you were never allowed to really play and do childish things, or even if you were always overprotected and not able to freely explore and water your curious mind, you might have forgotten how to play as an adult.

    If you can’t play as an adult, you can’t enjoy life. If you don’t know how to really enjoy life, you can’t only be. You have to work, you have to be productive, you have to be responsible. But you also have to be capable of stopping and playing. Fortunately, what you’ve unlearnt you can learn again.

    Sense of control

    Doing gives you a great feeling of control and consequently a feeling of safety. You are the one moving things around when you clean your home. You decide how you will perform a specific task. Maybe you can even completely decide what will be on your to-do list. Doing gives a sense of organization, predictability and control.

    On the other hand, being requires leaving things as they are. Being requires you to not bother with how things could be, to not be afraid of not having control, but accepting things as they are and just being relaxed. It’s hard to accept the chaos of life and world as messy as it is.

    That may bring a sense of uncertainty, insecurity and fear. But the moment you start doing again, you gain control at least to a certain extent. You aren’t just passively enjoying life in all its chaos, you are the one moving things around. You have control. But you have no life.

    On the ego level man expresses himself as a creator, on a body level he is the created. As a creator his focus is upon doing. As a creature his role is simply to be. – Alexander Lowen

    Addiction to adrenaline rushes

    If you had a stressful, anxious childhood full of adrenaline rushes or a longer such period in your adult life, there is a great probability that you got addicted to stress, anxiety and adrenaline kicks. Doing things is a very easy way to cause yourself a lot of stress, anxiety and fire-fighting situations.

    One big reason for overdoing in life instead of enjoying can be that you need drama and other negative feelings, because they are something you got used to as your default mode of operation.

    In such cases, you tend to find work and business relationships that are stressful and bring drama to your life by default. You are the one choosing and co-creating your environment. Build yourself motivational environment, instead of a stressful one.

    working hard

    Finding balance between doing and being

    If you want to live a quality happy life, you have to somehow find balance between doing and being. If your feeling of self-worth is wired completely wrong and if you have extremely low capacities for self-love, professional therapy might be the only way to go.

    But if you need just a little bit of adjusting, there are a few concepts and exercises that might help you find the right balance. These exercises are not quick fixes, you have to practice them regularly and usually things get worse before they can get better; especially because you have to stop running away from yourself.

    I encourage you to start with different exercises, building up your self-worth and self-confidence, and measuring results. If regularly performing exercises (regularly is the key word) doesn’t show any results and you can’t see a better balance in your life, I encourage you to decide for therapy.

    Nobody deserves to live a miserable life.

    Stop running away from yourself

    The first step you can make to go from doing towards being is to stop running away from yourself. You have to stop and start paying more attention to your emotions. Doing this, you may realize that your feelings aren’t as stable and okay as you thought they were.

    Paying more attention to your feelings may show that you’re hurting and trying avoid the pain by being busy. That’s not an easy realization. But sometimes you have to take a step back in order to take two steps forward.

    The best way to start paying attention to your emotions is the happiness index. Build yourself a chart on which you mark how you’re feeling one, two or more times per day. Then examine further what’s causing those feelings. Regularly performing reflection with the happiness index will slowly help you learn to pay attention to yourself and fully focus on yourself.

    Define how much is enough and then go for good enough

    If you want to find a better balance between doing and being, you have to better manage yourself, your time, your emotions and your expectations. One way to do that is by defining very strict limits and going for the good enough.

    The idea behind the concept of good enough is that it’s completely acceptable to be reasonably consistent with your goals and not follow them 100 % of time to complete perfection; because the latter is simply impossible and only makes you unhappy and miserable.

    You don’t need the perfect job, you need a good enough job. You don’t need the perfect spouse, you need a good enough spouse. You don’t need to be filthy rich, you need a good enough financial situation. You don’t have to eat perfectly healthy, your diet must only be good enough. You don’t need the perfect life, you need to fight for a good enough life.

    In a similar way, you can set very strict limits that curb your desire for endless doing. By setting limits, you can very clearly define answers like:

    • How many hours of work per week is a reasonable maximum? The answer should be around 50.
    • How much money do you need in your bank account to feel safe? The answer should be around 6 – 12 of your monthly costs and not drowning in debt.
    • What is the minimum number of hours you deserve per week to just do nothing?
    • When and how is the best way for you to have an hour of power completely for yourself?

    If good enough is good enough, then you don’t have to work so hard. You can relax a little bit.

    Doing is not hard work and being is not lazy

    Our society rewards doing and often sees being as a lazy thing. Laziness and being are not the same thing. And doing is not the same thing as working hard, even less working smart. These are all different categories you mustn’t mix.

    • Being means taking time for yourself, feeling good in your own skin, being able to relax and enjoy and appreciate life, and not connecting your value exclusively to accomplishments.
    • Doing is as important as being. You do it by having an important life mission, providing value, developing your talents and creating. You are here to enjoy life and you are here to create. All in healthy limits.
    • Doing is not being busy. It’s not like the richest people work the most. Doing means working hard and working smart. And also includes knowing when the time comes to rest and recharge.
    • Laziness means that you don’t do things at all. It means overbeing. You’re like a leech, expecting other people to do all the work instead of you. If you aren’t creating value, somebody else has to do it instead of you.

    Being plus action

    There is a nice sublimation you can do to doing. If you really manage to find work you enjoy based on your talents and based on your life vision, life mission and values, and if you find people with whom you love to create value together, you can take doing from doing to being plus action.

    In such a case, you still must take enough time off, you still need to learn how to just be, you still need regular technology detoxes, but you can also be while you do. That is the easiest way for me to just be. Being in action. It’s not completely the same as just being, but it’s close enough.

    In the past, I’ve learnt to not just be busy, but to work smart, have a superior life strategy and follow the concept of being plus action. Now I’m slowly learning to also handle just being.

    Being in action

    Talk back to your inner critic

    Your inner critic is the internalized voice of your parents telling you how nothing is good enough, how you have to try harder, how your accomplishments are nothing, how every mistake is the end of the world, and so on. So you work harder, you try harder, but nothing is ever good enough.

    Your mind can take you to some very dark places. Having constant thoughts that you aren’t doing enough is absolutely such a dark place.

    If you want to enjoy being, you have to constantly talk back to your inner critic. You have to see reality in a clearer way. You have to see that you matter, that you are good enough, that you also deserve to enjoy life and that people can love you for who you are as you are. The way to talk back to your inner critic is with emotional accounting.

    Leave things as they are, relax and just be

    Much like you can get used to the work overload without any margin, stress and not to forget anxiety as a constant in your life, so you can get used to just enjoying life and relaxing.

    You can make the relaxed feeling of being in the present moment a regular constant in your life. You just have to practice it enough. First list different things that you enjoy and make sure they aren’t doing, but just being activities. Usually, they are things considered playing.

    Then regularly timebox playtime and rest-time and technology detox time, and don’t allow work to invade it in any way. Turn off your computer, mobile phone and TV, block any other distractions and just play. Play board games with your kids. Barbecue with your friends. Have a date night with your spouse.

    Enjoying the path

    One destructive concept that might help you stick to overdoing could be saying to yourself, I will enjoy life when … I earn enough money, when I manage to get a better job contract, when I pay off the debt, and so on.

    Usually what happens is that there is always something new that prevents you from enjoying life.

    I understand why people do this, I’ve been there many times. It’s hard to enjoy life if you’re caught in a shitty situation. It’s impossible to relax when you have so much burden hanging over your head. But you can find a way to make things more manageable.

    You can define what you need to do to get out of the worst crisis, and how much time it will take. Then you can slowly start to add being to doing. You can define small “being rewards”, after you innovate your way out of tough life situations by doing or when you reach one of your milestones.

    You have to somehow put yourself in a position where you can enjoy the path while you’re walking, not only think about enjoying life when you reach the goal someday. Because by that time, you may actually be dead.

    You are valuable the way you are

    Being is good. Doing is good. The right balance between the two is the best. Love and work. Work and love. Poor mindset, emotional problems and other psychological issues usually lead to overdoing or overbeing. In the next step, both lead to a poor quality of life, addictions and running away from the true essence – yourself.

    Homework

    It’s not something you asked for, but it’s definitely something you have to deal with. If you’re inclined towards overdoing, there are a few tools you can use to find a better balance. We looked at a few of them, now it’s up to you to apply them into your life. Here they are once again:

    1. Remind yourself over and over again that you matter for who you are, not what you do
    2. Material things are meant to be enjoyed, they are a very poor surrogate for love and for feeling better about yourself
    3. Figure out what you’re running away from and then stop running
    4. Start paying attention to yourself and your feelings with the happiness index
    5. Get used to playing and enjoying life by “forcing” yourself to do it in the beginning
    6. Talk back to your inner critic with emotional accounting
    7. Practice letting go of control and surrendering from time to time
    8. Define strict limits and go for good enough
    9. Don’t see doing as hard work and being as lazy; healthy being has nothing to do with laziness
    10. Find things you enjoy doing in life and practice the concept of being in action, instead of just doing

    It makes no sense to overdo everything to the point of getting attention from the whole world, if in the end you doom your own life. You’re here to be happy, enjoy life, connect, grow and create. That includes doing and being.

    Don’t become your own worst enemy by leaning too much to one side or the other. Choose wisdom instead and make the best out of your life – with being and doing.

  • Stupid decisions that can ruin your whole life in a second

    Your starting point in life matters a lot. You might have been born with good genes or not so good ones. You might have been born in a rich family or a poor one. You might have been raised in a toxic environment or a healthy one.

    These are all things you don’t chose. You didn’t choose your talents, skin color, mother tongue or parents. You didn’t even chose your own name.

    Recalibration of your starting point also matters a lot in life. We can call that kind of recalibrations a stroke of luck that has nothing to do with your effort, or different situations where you gain a lot by investing a fraction of the benefits.

    You win the lottery. Your friend gets a fancy job and hires you, even if your skills don’t match the job. The first person you fall in love with is the perfect fit for you. Recalibrations as your starting point are more or less way out of your control.

    Where you currently are = your starting point + the sum of your past decisions

    You have zero say about where and to whom you are born, and you have no influence on how lucky you will be in your life. Fortunately, there is another part of the equation defining where you are in life – it’s the sum of your past choices.

    No matter where you start, with time good choices lead to a better life and bad choices lead to a low quality of life. You make choices constantly, consciously and unconsciously, and they have a great impact on your life.

    The more you’re aware of your choices, the more control you have over your life and its outcome. Thus one very important job you have in life is to make as many unconscious behavioral patterns as possible, conscious.

    That’s how you move from reactive to proactive agency. You can achieve that by getting to know yourself, self-reflection, analyzing your environment, psychoanalysis and other psychological and analytical tools. You want to be consciously in control of your choices, because that is the greatest power you have in life.

    dont be stupid

    The big impact of decisions on your life

    Your past decisions have had a great influence on where you currently are in life. Your decisions from this moment on will have a great influence on where you will land in the future. In general, we can divide decisions in four ways:

    • Good decisions – smart, healthy, positive ones
    • Bad decisions – stupid, unhealthy, negative ones
    • Big decisions – rare decisions that have a big impact on your life
    • Small decisions – daily or very frequent decisions that have a small impact, but accumulate over time (aka habits)

    You endanger your future by making bad decisions – big and small ones. Big bad decisions are not‑that‑frequent, but very important events that you encounter in your life and have a big influence on your future, where you don’t decide well. You make a bad choice and it has huge negative consequences.

    Here are examples of big bad decisions: You marry the wrong person. You take a big bribe. You cheat. You have a kid when you aren’t ready yet – materially or emotionally. You rob a bank. One big bad decision like that can completely turn your life around and make a mess out of it.

    But you also make daily small decisions every minute or so. They’re called habits. Making daily poor decisions slowly leads to a poor quality of life. Examples of small bad decisions are: You spend more than you earn. You drink alcohol every day. You stuff yourself with fast food daily. You don’t kiss and hug your spouse. You play Solitaire during working hours. You watch TV instead of reading. You go to a job you hate every day.

    Small wrong daily choices accumulate until a big crisis occurs. Remember, what you choose today has an impact on your life forever. Sometimes the sum of small bad choices has even more devastating effects than big bad choices. You have to be careful about the details in your life.

    What you choose today has an impact on your life forever.

    Be an outstanding decision maker

    The biggest power you have in your own hands for your bright future is making smart choices – big and small ones. The smarter choices you make, the better the direction your life is headed in. For a happy and successful life, your smart choices must greatly outweigh the bad ones.

    It all starts with small daily decisions. Habits, as mentioned. Saving money, regularly exercising, minding your diet, expressing love and communicating deeply with the people you love. These are all smart habits that with years lead to an increasingly better quality of life.

    Big smart life decisions are also part of a superior life strategy. Much like big bad decisions can very quickly destroy your life, big smart decisions can improve your quality overnight.

    Examples of big good decisions are: You choose very wisely who to marry. You take smart calculated risks with little downside and huge upside. You’re extremely picky about who you accept as a friend. You consciously decide which is the best place for you to live. You save large sums of money you inherit. And so on.

    Surrounding yourself with the right people, exposing yourself to many opportunities, developing competences that are in high demand and low supply are all examples of good big smart decisions. Together with small good decisions – health habits, they form the most powerful tool for living a quality life.

    Experiences lead to better decision-making

    There is a saying that good decisions are a consequence of experience and experience is a consequence of bad decisions. In other words, you make a mistake, you learn, and next time you make better choices.

    That kind of logic makes complete sense. You always start by being wrong, you’re always wrong before you are right. That way, you develop true wisdom with years.

    There is no other way. You have to fail in life, you have to make mistakes and you always have to try new things, which leads to many missteps. It’s completely okay to fail, it’s completely okay to take smart risks and it’s completely okay to experiment. Sticking only to safe has never led to a successful and happy life. We are made to explore.

    Stupid decisions have nothing to do with failure and learning. Stupid decisions are plain stupid.

    But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn and gain experience in a smart way. Stupid decisions have nothing to do with failure and learning. Stupid decisions are plain stupid. You can always tell the difference between a smart risk that didn’t pay off, validated learning based on failure, and a stupid decision.

    You want to be smart about making mistakes. You should make mistakes in a controlled, manageable and risk-reward justifiable way. Last but not least, you want to start making good decisions as soon as possible, because they accumulate over time and accumulation gives you a great unfair advantage, like a good starting point does.

    But now, let’s turn the focus from mistakes to stupid decisions instead.

    stupid decisions

    There are many stupid decisions that can destroy your life in a second

    Stupid decisions are decisions with very small gains and a possible colossal negative impact on your life.

    Stupid decision = high risk, small reward

    They’re the opposite of smart risks, which are risks with a small downside and a huge upside. With stupid decisions, you can destroy your life in a matter of seconds. You do one action that you might regret for the rest of your life.

    Examples of plain stupid decisions are:

    • Driving drunk
    • Jumping into the water without knowing how deep it is
    • Not wearing a safety belt
    • Dangerously driving any kind of vehicle, like speeding and so on
    • Engaging in a physical fight (if you aren’t really protecting yourself)
    • Sleeping with a prostitute or your best friend’s wife
    • Having unprotected sex
    • Cheating on taxes or breaking the law in any other kind of way
    • Taking on a huge debt just to enjoy a lavish lifestyle
    • Travelling to a country with dangerous diseases or war zones
    • Marrying too soon
    • Exposing yourself in an investment you don’t understand
    • Quitting your job without having a strategy of what you will do next
    • Cheating on your exams
    • Having somebody else write your diploma thesis or copying it from somebody else
    • Stealing at your job or cheating at your company in any other way
    • Getting into business with people you don’t know

    All these decisions have small benefits and huge potential damage. By driving drunk you may save some time and a few dollars for a cab, but you can kill yourself and others. Fines are only a small thing in the whole picture.

    Poor choices lead to a poor life with time. Stupid choices can make your life miserable in a second. Maybe sometimes you get away with them. But it needs to happen only once that the downside comes true and then it might take decades or even more of your happy and perspective life away. You can drown in the misery of your own stupid choices. So try to make as few of them as possible.

    Avoid stupid choices like the plague.

    Even if you play your cards smart, accidents never sleep

    We’ve learnt that you want to make as many smart choices as possible and you want to avoid stupid decisions at all costs. But if we are completely honest, you’re only human, you make errors in judgement and accidents never sleep. We all make stupid decisions from time to time. We all encounter misfortune.

    Much like luck strikes you from time to time, in the same way bad things happen to good people every once in a while. Sometimes misfortunate events are entirely not your fault at all, and sometimes they are a consequence of your choices or you have somehow partly influenced the negative outcome.

    It’s a shitty thing that can happen to anyone. When that happens, you don’t want to hide but act as quickly and wisely as possible. You should try to minimize the damage, build rapport with all the damaged parties, apologize, admit, and do whatever it takes to repair the bad choices.

    But there is only so much you can do, and in the end you usually still have to pay the price and live with it. Sometimes the emotional price is the highest.

    Always do a quick calculation of where your choices are leading you

    It’s impossible to thoroughly analyze every single decision’s impact on all of your areas of life and lives of other people. That goes especially for the small decisions, because there are simply too many of them. But you can quickly assess what the potential downsides and upsides are.

    You can quickly analyze what could go wrong and what could go right. You can quickly assess potential dangers that are out of your control. The closer a decision gets to a stupid one, the more it needs to be avoided.

    It’s not about being scared of everything and living life wrapped up in cotton wool. You want to go out, you want to experiment and try new things, you want to experience the diversity of life. But you also want to do everything in a smart way.

    No stupid decisions. Safety first. Protecting the downsides. Never going too far from the learning zone to the panic zone. The bigger the choice, the more calculation it requires. Paying attention to your decisions is absolutely a big part of a superior life strategy.

    Your choices today and tomorrow will have an impact for years in your future; some even for the rest of your life. At the end of the journey, you are more or less where you choose and deserve to be; if we subtract big strikes of luck and misfortune and, to be fair, we also have to consider your starting point.

    At the end of the day, even if not everything is under your control, make sure that the destination your choices will get you to is something you can be proud of.

  • Don’t worry about failure, because you only have to be right once

    In almost every blog post, I emphasize that you have to search for your personal fits before you commit to or brutally focus on anything.

    The reason for that is to not set your life strategy based on naivety and wrong assumptions, but to really get to know yourself and your environment with mini experiments, which enables you to shape your life strategy based on superior insights, immediate feedback and actionable metrics.

    Consequently, you can adjust more quickly and focus on what really brings progress, success and happiness.

    It’s very well proven that agile and lean strategy works not only in the startup world, but also among big brands, non-profit organizations and other business entities as well as in personal life as this blog teaches you. And we must not forget that the agile and lean methodologies are taught at the best business schools in the World.

    There is only one huge problem with this strategy.

    You must have the guts to experiment, you must have the courage to try hundreds of different things and you must be prepared to fail. You must be prepared to learn through failure and put your ego aside. You have to admit to yourself that you’re wrong, that you don’t know anything. At least in the beginning.

    In addition to that, you also need a little bit of scientific nature. You must be curious, you need the desire to try different things, to understand the world as well as possible, and you must be eager to gain superior insights about yourself and what you want out of life. You also need a set of metrics and a framework to decide when to persevere and when to pivot.

    You almost always have to face some kind of apathy before you find your fit, which means that following the AgileLeanLife strategy requires quite a lot of resilience, persistence and faith in the process. But there is some very good news when we talk about apathy.

    Much like there’s the rule that you are always wrong before you are right, in the same way there is a rule that you only have to be right once. Once you find your fit, you definitely still face different problems and challenges, but your life gets much easier. You know why and for what to fight. Your life mission becomes more important and huge than anything else in life.

    Let’s go step by step and build the case for why you only have to be right once.

    Why does finding the right fit matter so much?

    The only way to be really successful in any area of life is first finding your own fit. Some people are lucky enough that their parents, teachers or mentors see their potential and orientate them onto the right path towards their fit, but in most cases you have to find it once you enter the adult life.

    Values, which show what’s important to you and what you value, are what determines whether you fit with something or not. And your talents and other personality traits also play a big role. Anyway, when you find the right fit, you just know it.

    When you find it, passion awakens in you. You find yourself in something. You know that you can be successful in this. You see potential. You start to flourish and consider yourself lucky.

    I’ve seen people working in companies where they fit in and where they don’t. The difference in their level of happiness, productivity, motivation etc. is like night and day. I’ve seen people struggle with a sport just because it was supposed to help them lose weight the fastest, and people who were doing a sport they’re talented for and really like. The first ones gave up very soon, the second ones made real lifestyle changes.

    I’ve seen people who settled for the first partner they dated as well as people who made up their minds about what kind of a partner they want and then started searching until they found someone close to that. The probability of long-term happiness is much higher for the latter. That’s why finding your personal fit is so important.

    So here’s the first rule of success in life and the road to living a good quality life.

    Find the right person to build an intimate relationship with. Find a person for whom all the struggle is really worth it; and it will be worth it. Find a career that really suits you best, one that you’re passionate about and where you can really deliver the value added. In the same way, find your perfect diet, a sport you like, a group of people who support you and where you fit in, and so on.

    In every single life area put in the effort to find your perfect fit, the thing that is part of your DNA and on which you can build a successful life. Successful people find their fits, unsuccessful people are trying to be something they’re not or do things that lie far away from their talents.

    Hitting target

    You find your fit through the search mode

    I hope finding your fits makes sense to you. But how do you do that? You find your fit using the search mode.

    The idea of the search mode is that you consciously prepare yourself through a series of failures that will hurt a lot, but will open to you the path to validated learning about yourself and your environment. The search mode represents a mindset and a somewhat scientific and systematic approach to finding your fit.

    • You go to a several dates that don’t work out
    • You work at a few companies that just aren’t for you
    • You try a few different occupations and suck at them
    • You buy yourself a thing in hope that will make you happy but it doesn’t
    • All these things hurt, but they enable you to learn about yourself

    The first characteristic of the search mode is a special mindset. In the search mode, you shouldn’t have any expectations, you shouldn’t make any commitments and you shouldn’t do any hard work.

    In the search phase, you just try, experiment, observe, reflect and learn about yourself and the world. The most important thing in this phase is to have no fixed ideas and no expectations at all. The key thing is to not to get too ego invested.

    The second special characteristic of the search mode is the approach. Your only job in the search mode is to test the assumptions you’ve written down, correct them, and try different things. The key is to stay 100 % flexible and open-minded and, as mentioned, not invested in anything. Because the more you get invested, the more inflexible you become.

    In practical terms, that means you should have a spreadsheet or a list of paper, where you write down:

    • What your assumption about yourself or the world is (I think the vegetarian diet would work for me)
    • How you will put your assumption to the test (I won’t eat meat for 3 months.)
    • How you will measure results (blood test, happiness index, energy levels etc.)
    • In which case you will decide to persevere and in which to pivot
    • A list of additional experiments you can make after you finish this one

    The key thing you have to do is to do regular reflections when you’re performing the experiments. That is the most valuable part of the process.

    Before marking a hypothesis as validated or rejected, you should ask yourself what you’ve learned, what you’ll test next, how you’ll change your plans, and so on. A search mode without deep and systematic reflection has very little value.

    Again, if you don’t have a piece of paper with the key findings and insights, and if you don’t write down what you’ve learnt, you’re missing the point of the search mode.

    Only after you find your fit in the search phase do you start executing. Sometimes it may take a few months to find you fit, sometimes a few years. After you find your fit, you go from the search mode to the execution mode. You set strong foundations, have laser focus, commit fully, start working hard and achieving your goals. You optimize, improve, and measure your progress with very detailed and execution type of metrics.

    There are five big problems you have to face in the search mode:

    • You can easily get stuck in the analysis-paralysis.
    • You see learning only as a good excuse and thus there is no real validated learning.
    • You have emotional problems dealing with uncertainty, because you don’t trust the process, yourself or others enough.
    • You stick to things that don’t work, because your mind is not flexible enough or you get tired.
    • You expect short-term results that are rarely achievable.

    All these five problems aren’t easy to deal with. But by far the hardest thing you have to face is the apathy before finding your fit.

    In the search mode you really have to face apathy

    The process before you find your fit is really painful and psychologically demanding. It’s called the apathy before finding your fit. Here are the main reasons that cause apathy:

    • You try a new thing and it doesn’t work. You try a new one, failure again.
    • Then you think you’ve found something good, but in the next step, you realize you haven’t.
    • From time to time, you realize how delusional and wrong you were and your ego suffers.
    • It almost always takes longer than expected and it costs more than you plan.
    • You need to sit down, analyze and be very systematic. Not to mention all the rejections you have to face.

    This search phase really is best described with the quote that success is going from failure to failure without giving up. The whole process before finding your fit sucks even more in the beginning; because in the beginning, you’re a newbie and your competences and skills aren’t that good.

    For example, you’ve just gathered the courage to start dating, but your dating skills suck, so you get rejected again and again.

    But apathy is the necessary part. It’s the life test of whether you really want something and whether you’re prepared to fight for it. It’s a test of whether you’re able to get out of the Valley of Death or not. The alternative is not good.

    If you don’t manage to get out of the Valley of Death, you turn into a zombie and your life turns to shit. On a more positive note, the apathy phase is also the part of the process where you learn and grow the most.

    One more thing you must keep in mind. The worse that your starting position is, the more time it’ll take to find your fit. The worse that your starting position is, the longer the apathy will probably last.

    A worse position simply means that you don’t yet know yourself and what you really want, that you lack resources, competences, leverages, and so on. In other words, you have to work harder for success if your starting point sucks.

    The best news and a motivational thought to deal with apathy is the fact that you only have to be right once.

    You only have to be right once

    But you only have to be right once

    You need to develop ONE competence based on your talents that is in high demand and low supply. You need to find ONE spouse who fits you perfectly and you can build a dream life together. You need to find ONE sport that you don’t dislike and have no troubles doing daily. You have to find ONE diet that enables you to maintain weight and feel energized. You need ONE business idea that works.

    When you find your fit, you have something you can build your success on, which can last for years or even a lifetime. In addition to that, when you find your perfect fit, there is more room for common human errors (well, some of them). The perfect fit is the best cure for your mistakes.

    Don’t worry about failure; you only have to be right once.” – Drew Houston, Dropbox founder and CEO

    But here’s the thing. The moment you’re right, all the bitter past failures turn into a winning strategy. You finally manage to climb to the top of the world.

    Other people see you as lucky, but you know that finding your fit was a very carefully orchestrated process. You know you deserve it, because you put in all the hard and smart work. You know you succeeded because you joined the club of people who are willing to go through the apathy of the search mode.

    Apathy and failure aren’t something that lasts forever. It’s something you pass by, if you learn quickly enough. You are wrong and wrong until you are right. Then you become a true winner. Luckily, you only have to be right once.

  • A place to escape everyday life and reconnect with yourself

    We humans are social animals. We need to belong, love and be loved, we need to thrive, create and grow with other human beings. Long periods of isolation lead to nothing but depression, loneliness, poor self-image and other related mental issues.

    If you want to be happy in life, you need a team of people with whom you work and create on meaningful projects, and where you feel that your contribution is respected, and you need a group of people in your personal life where you share love, affection and have fun together.

    There are six key relationships in your life (spouse, family, friends, boss, coworkers and mentors) and the deeper and healthier these relationships are, the richer your life usually is. That’s why you need to choose and nurture relationships very carefully. People are the ones making your life on Earth heaven or hell.

    Since we’re all different, for someone two good friends, a coworker and family are more than enough to feel socially satisfied, while others thrive only in interaction with many people. You need to know yourself very well and discover what works best for you in different periods of life. There is no wrong or right answer when it comes to designing your life.

    Much like socializing is important, so is regular temporary (active) isolation. If you’re an introvert, temporary isolation is probably something that feels very natural to you. You need it to refill your energy and you have no problem blossoming when you’re alone with books, your thoughts or something else you love and doesn’t involve other people.

    But even if you’re an extrovert, you can benefit from short-term isolation a lot. It may be a little bit harder to do it in the beginning, but once you see all the benefits, I’m sure you’ll have no problem sticking to it. Let’s look at the main benefits of temporary (active) isolation and how you can easily do it.

    A place to escape

    When you feel the urge to be alone, it’s already too late

    The main problem with short-term social isolation is the following. When you feel that you need to isolate yourself, it’s usually already a little bit late. In the same way like thirst is a sign that you should have drunk water way before you got thirsty.

    As you can easily forget to drink enough water throughout the day, so you can very easily loose the connection with yourself, without even being aware of it. You get a little bit too busy for a week or so and the connection with yourself gone.

    Unfortunately, the majority of people live like zombies and have zero connection with their core self. Life is a very busy thing and so you can easily forget about yourself.

    Regular isolation is the only way to keep the connection alive. Like you satisfy your thirst by drinking water, so you can only keep your core burning alive with regular active isolation during which you pay full attention to yourself.

    Isolating yourself with the goal of devoting full attention to yourself is nothing but a habit. And as every habit, it needs a trigger and a reward to be performed. Potential rewards are colossal.

    The benefits and triggers of active isolation

    After performing active isolation, you understand yourself better, you personally grow and become just a slightly better version of yourself.

    In addition to that, there is nobody there to bother you so you can create without any interruptions, and if you don’t feel like creating you can improve your competence level (with reading for example), get familiar with a new topic and much more. It all depends on your goal.

    As for the trigger, there are three best triggers that can take you into active isolation:

    • Time trigger – you timebox time in your calendar for when and where you do active isolation.
    • Thought trigger – you get a thought that leads you into a rich internal world of thinking, analyzing, brainstorming and thus you completely lose your sense of time and your environment.
    • Location trigger – you have a specially dedicated place where you go work in solitude. I call it a place to escape life.

    The time trigger is the most common one. You save a block of time in your calendar for active isolation. It can be time dedicated to planning, working on a meaningful project, reading or whatever.

    You can be in your office or at home, it doesn’t matter. When the time comes, you close the door behind you and don’t want to be disturbed. The key is that you’re really alone and that you’re performing a mentally active task that’s connected to your core self.

    As an interesting note, I’ve noticed that my time alone is not that quality and deep if there is another person in the room or in a room next to mine. I need to be really alone, knowing that there is nobody who can disturb me. So test if there is any difference for you if you actively isolate yourself when people are present in the room next to yours or when you’re really completely alone.

    A thought trigger is when you get completely lost in your own world. I think you know exactly what I mean by that, but let me still give you an example. Here is what Maye Musk, Elon’s mother said about him: ‘

    He goes into his brain, and then you just see he is in another world. He still does that. Now I just leave him be because I know he is designing a new rocket or something.’ Maye Musk (he = Elon)

    You can get yourself isolated, even if you aren’t alone. But you need a vivid internal world and strong inner focus, to not get disturbed easily and to block all other stimuli.

    The third thing that has the ability to lead you to active solitude is location – a place to escape. Many successful people have a place where they go alone in order to think, create and reconnect with their true core.

    Sometimes they go to such a place based on a plan, a timeboxed time, in other cases spontaneously when they feel like it. They just drop everything and go to the place where they can pay full attention to themselves. A place like that can really do wonders for you.

    The main reason for having a place specifically dedicated to active isolation is that you don’t want to run away from yourself and life with drugs, overworking, daydreaming and other addictions, you want to do the opposite.

    You want to run towards life and your true self by closely examining who you truly are and what meaningful things you can do with your life. Active isolation is a tool exactly for that. And it’s also the perfect tool to create.

    “My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. Creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones.” — Isaac Asimov

    Always have a place to escape life and listen to your thoughts

    Albert Einstein took long walks on the beach so he could listen to thoughts in his head. Nikola Tesla discovered very soon that being alone is the secret to invention. Pablo Picasso stated that without great solitude, no serious work is possible.

    Many successful people had or have a place where they devote complete attention to their true self. Then they use their pure essence to create new masterpieces the world has never seen before.

    Knowing that you have a place where you can always go to regroup, reconnect with yourself or analyze and create brings a special feeling of meaning and power into your life.

    You know there is a place you can “escape” to, a place where you can be only with yourself and bring your true core to life. It’s a place that belongs only to you and you belong to that place. There are so many different options of how a location can be a trigger for active solitude.

    Practical examples
    • You can have a “man cave” or a “she shed” where you work with no distractions
    • You can go to your favorite coffee shop or restaurant where it feels like the perfect place to create
    • You can take long walks on the beach or in the forest to listen to your thoughts
    • There might be a place you rent for an extended weekend to have alone time
    • The road or, to be more exact, driving in a car can also be a great place to reflect
    • Another way to do active isolation is to travel alone
    • Or maybe you can have a creative corner where you sit when you need time for yourself

    Options for where to do active isolation are endless. You can have several of them.

    I have an office called the “man cave” where I work without any distractions. No phone, no email, no visitors.

    I have no problem getting lost in my mind in a single second no matter where I am, thinking about the outline of my next article or a new idea I want to play with.

    I climb mountains to completely lose myself and relax. I take almost daily long walks to listen to my thoughts.

    Now I’m even thinking about having extended weekends only for myself. I’m just searching for the perfect place I could rent every quarter. I want to always be in the same place to anchor the location to active isolation.

    In my case, I’m an interesting mixture of an introvert and an extrovert. I need the time alone to think and create, but I also have a strong urge to be connected with other people. I thrive in a funny mixture of solitude and teamwork. So I do both, strategically and planned.

    Consistency is the key to not losing connection with yourself

    Much like you have to drink water daily to stay healthy and avoid thirst, in the same way you need to take regular time in active isolation if you don’t want to lose the connection with yourself.

    Consistency is the key to many things, and the connection with yourself is no exception. There are several patterns for assuring regularity:

    Homework
    • Take an hour of power every day, existing in active solitude.
    • Turn one day of the weekend or at least a few hours to be completely with yourself.
    • Have a place where you go alone for several days in regular intervals, like every quarter.
    • Devote 6 – 12 months of your life at some point to be in monk mode and create like never before
    • Use all the options or a few of them to construct an active isolation pattern that works best for you.

    If you’re a complete extrovert and being alone is something alien to you, you might be asking yourself what can you even do when you’re alone.

    Here are only a few ideas for what to do in a place that’s devoted only to you (as you’ve probably figured out, I call it active isolation):

    • Think
    • Read
    • Reflect
    • Create
    • Write a journal
    • Plan
    • Analyze

    Alone time

    It’s not easy, but it’s definitely worth it – here is why

    For an introvert, it may be easy to be alone and recharge, reading a book or doing any similar activity. For many extroverts, it’s already hard to take time to be alone.

    But for both types it’s usually extremely hard to be in active and creative isolation, if you aren’t a naturally born artist. At least at first. With time, it gets easier and when you realize how rich your internal world is, you become kind of addicted to it. You need it like you need the air to breathe.

    You are here on this planet to grow, enjoy, connect and create. For the creating part, to really put your talents to work, I think there are two mayor approaches that work by far the best. Almost every great artist, engineer or thinker used these two approaches.

    Testing thousands of ideas and creating in solitude, that’s what great minds master.

    The first approach is to regularly create and create a lot, I mean really a lot. (1) You have to write down thousands of ideas, outlines, concepts and creative thoughts. You must have no problem with failure, with the fact that the majority of them are nothing but crappy ideas.

    But in the flood of thousands and thousands of ideas, one of them is a very original and brilliant one from time to time. And that’s enough. Many times, you only need to be originally creative once.

    (2) The second approach is to work and create in solitude as we’ve discussed. Active isolation gives a special edge to understanding yourself, being connected to yourself and expressing yourself in the most genius and unique ways possible.

    Both concepts are hard to follow and implement, but they’re the one thing that distinguishes great minds from the rest of the world. You also have a great mind and now you know how to put it to use.

  • Hour of power – take one hour daily to invest into your future

    You rockThere is one single investment with the highest potential yield ever. It’s an extremely profitable investment you simply can’t miss out on. The best news in the whole story is that this investment is also reachable to you. Immediately.

    Because this investment is you. You, together with your talents and potentials, should always be your number one investment priority. That’s where the potential for really big profits lies. Unless you think you’re a bad investment opportunity, which I hope is not the case.

    There is no easy money, at least not legally. And there are no extremely profitable investments if you don’t put in all the hard effort and smart work – gaining control, analyzing competition, innovating, delivering surpluses of added value, being in an unfair position of high demand and low supply, and so on.

    In the same way, you have to put the effort in if you want to become an extremely profitable investment.

    You become a profitable investment only in one single way – you take at least one hour daily to do something for yourself, for your future. One hour, every single day. Every working day, every weekend, every super busy day, no matter what, you just have to do it.

    On an average work day, after deducting worktime, sleep, commuting, eating, bathroom time etc. you are left with approximately 4 – 5 hours of free time. So there is more than enough time to take one single hour for yourself. More than enough. The only thing preventing you from it is laziness.

    If you think you don’t have enough time, measure for one week how much time you spend watching TV, browsing social networks, reading news, and we can also add the time spent on different apps on your mobile phone, out for coffees and meetings.

    In an average person’s life, that sums up to 30+ hours per week being wasted. You can very simply make a little bit of room to invest in yourself with a few time management tricks. If nothing else, you can listen to audio books when you commute.

    Hour of power

    Why would you do it?

    There is always a way, if there’s a will. If you want to really commit to the daily hour of power, you must have a strong why. But that’s a really simple one.

    I think you don’t want to have a shitty job, crappy relationships, a bank account in red, poor health, crappy fitness, and so on. I assume you don’t want your potentials to be wasted and your life thrown away. Then you need to grow.

    Not only does everything get harder with years if you don’t invest in yourself, you’re going to die someday. It’s not as far away as it may seem. That should be big enough motivation by itself.

    You only have one life and if you want to live a good life, you have to invest in yourself. There is no other way, at least not one that would work in the long-term. On top of that, it feels good.

    It feels good to see your potentials realized. It feels good to have a healthy and fit body full of energy. It feels good to have a sharp mind that can solve many intellectual challenges.

    It feels good to have many competences you can offer on the market, and a full bank account. It feels good to be happy in life, being able to manage negative emotions and destructive thoughts and to have deep fulfilling relationships.

    One of the best feelings in the world is being a resourceful person of value. You feel good in your own skin, people love to spend time with you, you have no problem finding the dream partner, you have many job opportunities, you name it.

    But you can only become a resourceful person of value if you regularly invest in yourself. Don’t be lazy, don’t be scared, believe in yourself and just do it. If none of these reasons are strong enough for you, find one for yourself that will be. I can find thousands of them.

    You want to leave a legacy behind. You want to be a good role-model to your kids. You want to test your limits. You want to live a diverse life experience. You want to feed your curiosity. You want to become the best at something.

    You want to prove your parents wrong. You want to contribute to the world. You want to have enough money to travel the world. You want to free yourself from your negative past.

    There are hundreds of different reasons why you should invest in yourself. Find one so strong that nothing will come between you and your daily hour of power.

    You can only become a resourceful person of value if you regularly invest in yourself.

    Nothing will come between me and my hour of power attitude

    You eat every day for your energy levels to stay high. You sleep daily to recharge your batteries. You go to the toilet (hopefully) every day so your body doesn’t drown in its own dirt. These are all physical needs you have to satisfy or you won’t survive. Your hour of power should become one of these needs.

    You should feel like you’re going to die if you don’t invest one hour per day into yourself; or at least you should feel as uncomfortable as when you don’t go to the toilet for a long time because you’re constipated. The closer you are to the end of the day, the sicker you should feel if you haven’t invested in yourself yet.

    You have to wire it into your brain, feel it in your bones and beat it in your heart. When it comes to investing in yourself, you need a no-matter-what attitude. You have to make sure that nothing comes between you and investing in your future.

    Here are a few additional ideas of how you can achieve that:

    • Timebox an hour of power into your calendar
    • Make it a part of your morning kick-off routine or evening shut-down routine
    • Use the D.E.A.R. concept – one hour before you go to sleep? Drop Everything And Read.
    • Stay flexible about where and how you do it, life is somehow unpredictable

    There are so many things you can do

    There are so many different ways you can invest into yourself. Basically they break down to four levels – taking care of your body (physician dimension), mind (mental dimension), heart (emotional dimension) and soul (spiritual dimension). People also often call these things sharpening the saw.

    • Body: Exercise, lift weights, stretch, do yoga or tai chi, get a massage etc.
    • Mind: Read, take an online course, play chess, write, learn a new skill, do brain games, meditate, learn to breathe properly, etc.
    • Heart: Write a self-reflective journal, examine your past, have a deep talk, volunteer
    • Soul: Pray, learn to forgive, be grateful, write down your life mission, forgive somebody

    You can use 60 minutes to do one thing or you can divide it into 2 or 3 blocks. One day, you may read for 60 minutes, another day may be perfect for 20 minutes of reading, 20 minutes of exercise and 20 minutes of meditation. You can do all three at once or with breaks. It doesn’t matter, stay flexible, just make sure you do it.

    The only important thing is that you aren’t doing 100 different things. You want to be making 10 steps in one direction, not 1 step in 10 different directions.

    Consistently repeating the same thing leads to accumulation. It leads to the success spiral – you get better and better at something, you see the results, you become more self-confident and thus you want to invest even more. So search for a few things that fit you best as ways to invest into yourself in a certain period of your life, and then stick to them.

    Invest in yourself

    Your investment in yourself will start to accumulate

    The basic principles of life are pretty simple. One of them is this: it’s hard to start with something, but with time things get easier and after a while, results start to accumulate.

    The first few hours are the hardest, but then in a few weeks you start seeing the first results and after a few months, real accumulation begins. Just make sure you don’t overestimate what you can achieve in a few weeks and underestimate what you can achieve in a few years.

    Do pushups every day and in few months, you’ll be able to do more pushups than 90 % of people. Learn to code every day (or a new language) for an hour and you’ll gain a new competence in a year or so. Read every day and in a few years, you’ll see a vast improvement in your knowledge. Run every day and soon you will be able to run a marathon.

    By far the best advantage you can have in life is to develop the ability to consistently practice one thing every day. Consistency and repetition are the key. You need a focused attention span for one single hour, not more. Most people are too lazy to do that and the average person has an attention span of 8 seconds.

    So if you’re wondering what will take you far above the average, now you have the answer – consistently invest into yourself. Everyone knows the benefits, but most people just aren’t hungry enough. Don’t be one of them. Don’t become a zombie.

    The main idea of the daily hour of power is to help you keep consistency and repetition.

    Eight hours for survival, four hours for success

    If you’re really committed to extracting the highest possible yields from yourself, in other words if you want to be massively successful, there is a way to take everything even a step further. Don’t invest one hour per day into yourself, invest more. As much as possible.

    Many successful people follow the “eight hours for survival, four hours for success rule”. They work for 8 – 9 hours at their job or in their business to earn enough money, but then they invest almost all of their free time into their future.

    They exercise for an hour, read for an hour and then they plan, brainstorm ideas or do other things that will lead to a brighter future and will make them even more successful. Eight hour for survival, four hours for success. I suggest you start with one hour and then you can scale up from there.

    Homework

    Enough theory, it’s time to put things to practice. Drop everything and immediately take one hour completely for yourself with the goal of investing into your brighter future. It’s definitely something you will never regret.

  • Wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups

    One day, I was hiking in the mountains with my girlfriend. On the way back, we got a little bit lost and I decided to put my survival skills to work. It didn’t take long for me to find the trail. I assumed that this was the trail we followed to get up to the summit. I was sure of it. I remembered. I saw the same trees. Of course the trail wasn’t the right one and we got even more lost. It took us hours to get back on the right track.

    Almost a decade ago, I spent a few months in California. I saw that every elite university has an alumni club and graduates are its proud members. When I returned home, I decided to found an alumni club of my high school, since it was an elite one. I strongly assumed that the school will see the benefits, people will love it and everybody will be happy. The school blocked it, people ignored it and it became one of my failed projects.

    A few years back, I decided to get fit. I never did any sports, and healthy living was something alien to me. On top of that I was super fat. It made complete logical sense to me that to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, you only have to go to the gym a few times and mind your food a little bit. Maybe you eat a cup of protein powder from time to time. Now more than three years have passed and I still don’t look anywhere near like Schwarzenegger.

    In all three stories, I was operating based on wrong assumptions. I was 100 % sure that I knew what I was doing, but I was wrong. Meeting reality wasn’t easy. And you have to meet it sooner or later in one way or another.

    Life works in a way that in many cases, you have no other choice but to rely on your assumptions. But it helps a lot if you know that they are nothing but assumptions that need to be tested as quickly as possible. Because wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups.

    Don’t doubt yourself, but absolutely doubt everything you assume.

    Subjective objective reality

    Two realities

    We know two types of reality – the objective and subjective one. The objective reality isn’t accessible to any living being. The objective reality is how things really are in the world. We try to come as close to it as possible, especially with science.

    Nevertheless, complete objective reality will probably still be inaccessible for a long period of time, because there are always things for which we don’t know that we don’t know them. Artificial intelligence may be the first one to come as close to objective reality as possible.

    Here is an example of how complicated it may be to get to the bottom of objective truth:

    • People used to believe that you got ill because you became possessed by evil spirits.
    • Then doctors believed that illness was caused by an imbalance of the four humors.
    • Now we “know” that viruses and bacteria cause a big portion of diseases, but the question is if maybe there even exists something else that we don’t know yet and that causes real illness? In hundred years, will a pill be seen as a primitive solution, like a herbal potion mixture is seen today?
    • And many times, the placebo effect can help you get better, so it’s not only about drugs.

    The second type of reality is your subjective reality. The subjective reality is your own interpretation of the world. It’s the lens through which you see the world, the frame in which you operate.

    The lenses of how you interpret the world are created by your beliefs, values, past experiences, upbringing, environment and other similar factors, including your assumptions. These lenses are the primary source of how you make your decisions in life.

    As we’ve learnt, there are many errors in your subjective reality. Your senses have a limited capacity for capturing information, your brains have a limited ability for processing information, there are many things you don’t know or lack experience, everyone has many cognitive distortions and there are numerous other sources of errors in the subjective reality map.

    One big family of errors in the subjective map of reality are cognitive biases. It’s something you can’t avoid, but you can become aware that they’re part of your thinking. From stereotyping, conformation bias and anchoring to projection, transference and the halo effect. The list of cognitive biases is very long.

    Ironically, many of the cognitive biases exist to support your survival. They serve to help you protect your self-image, to deal with optimization, to help you make complex decisions, judge probabilities and avoid danger.

    They may often provide you with psychological safety and protection, but they also often help you hide behind lies or drive you to make stupid decisions.

    The other big family of errors in the subjective map of reality are wrong assumptions. You assume something will happen, but it doesn’t. You assume you know something, but you don’t. You take action, but you get a different reaction than you expected.

    That’s because the objective world is always different from your subjective representations and unique interpretations. Because of this gap, expecting anything leads to a very high probability of disappointment.

    Wrong assumptions

    The world of wrong assumptions

    You make assumptions all the time, you can’t avoid this phenomenon. It’s the way we humans operate, it’s how our brains function. Therefore, it’s impossible not to make any assumptions. The problem arises when you believe that your assumptions are the truth. But they are not, they’re only assumptions.

    It’s impossible not to make assumptions, but you can become aware that they are only assumptions, not the truth.

    There are so many different types of assumptions you make. Let’s look at just a few of them.

    Practical examples

    You assume you communicated something clearly, but maybe you haven’t. You assume other people know what you want or that they have the same values as you. But they probably don’t. You make different assumptions about what might work and what might not. In reality, you never know.

    You make assumptions about what other people think and what will they probably do. You even make assumptions about what other people think of you. You make assumptions about which ideas will work and which ones won’t, how it would be like to live in another country and so on, you make assumptions practically about everything.

    The key question is: if you can’t avoid making assumptions, what can you do about it? First of all, as we said, don’t mistake assumptions for the truth.

    Be aware that you are making nothing but assumptions. Then put assumptions to the test as soon as possible. Do a series of actions and experiments that will get you closer to the objective truth.

    Put your assumptions to the test

    The best cure for those errors in your subjective map of reality that you make because you assume things is to put assumptions to the test. You conduct a series of small actions and experiments that slowly lead you to a better understanding of the objective reality.

    You will never completely reach the objective truth, but you don’t have to. All you need is a superior understanding and key insights on which you can set your actions.

    There are many ways how you can do that. Before we dive into different approaches to testing assumptions, or hypotheses to sound more scientific, you must make sure that you become aware of the assumptions you’re making. You do that in two simple steps:

    • You say to yourself: I am only making an assumption, I don’t know the truth.
    • Then you ask yourself: how can I validate or reject my assumptions, how can I put them to the test?

    After becoming aware of the assumptions you’re making, there are several ways how you can test them. Here are a few most common approaches:

    1. Ask questions and get educated
    2. Get out and gain experience
    3. Search before you execute
    4. Actionable metrics
    5. Random experiences
    6. Research techniques

    Ask questions and get educated

    The first thing you can do to put certain types of assumptions to the test is to ask questions. Don’t be shy, just ask.

    You assume s/he doesn’t feel the way you feel? Ask. You assume a person doesn’t like you? Ask if that’s true and why. You don’t understand something? Ask. When you’re in a dilemma and you can ask a person to give a clarification, do it, don’t hesitate.

    A quick important note, when you ask people about clarifications make sure you also observe their behavior, not only listen to what they have to say. What people do is often more important than what they say. Because everyone lives in their own subjective reality, where we don’t even know the truth about ourselves.

    The second thing you can do is to get educated. Read books on the topic. Talk to people who have already achieved what you want to achieve. Subscribe to an online course. Model other people.

    Knowledge is not as valuable as real-life experience, but it absolutely makes sense to get very well-educated first and then you immediately apply knowledge to practice.

    There are always “aha” moments when you start educating yourself. You say to yourself many times, oh I didn’t know that is so, I imagined it (assumed) a lot differently. Ask questions, get educated, doubt every statement; but believe in yourself.

    Go out and gain first-hand experience

    First-hand experience acquired by small carefully set experiments is definitely a very good way to test the majority of assumptions. There is no better teacher than reality.

    Meeting reality can be harsh, but it really enables you to understand the world and yourself better. That’s why you have to do small manageable experiments. In other words, you have to be constantly in the learning, not the panic zone.

    There is a saying that you make good decisions based on experience and you gain experience based on bad decisions. That saying exposes very well how gaining real-life experience works. You’re always wrong before you’re right. You take a small step, you fail, you learn, you stand up again and then you continue in a new direction; you go from failure to failure until you succeed.

    You assume you have a good business idea? Build a landing page and send some traffic to it. It costs you a weekend of work and a few hundred dollars. You assume you don’t like to travel? Try it. You assume you’re a bad lecturer? Give it a shot. Today, you can luckily test almost everything, quickly and inexpensively.

    Experiments in life

    The search mode

    The search mode is nothing but a systematical series of experiments for finding your perfect fit in a specific area of life. You consciously decide that you will search for a thing that works for you and you don’t stop until you find it.

    In the search mode, you shouldn’t have any expectations, you shouldn’t make any commitments and you shouldn’t do any hard work. Expectations lead to disappointments and before you understand something, your expectations are definitely completely wrong. In the search phase, you just try, experiment, observe, reflect and learn about yourself and the world.

    The most important thing in this phase is to have no fixed ideas and no expectations at all. Your only job is to test the assumptions you’ve written down, correct them, and try different things in order to find out what suits you best.

    This phase is only about learning, nothing else. No goals. Just learning and playing. After every experiment you conduct, you decide whether to persevere or pivot.

    If you want to be in the search mode, you have to meet the following criteria:

    • You consciously decide that you will enter the search mode
    • You write down what kind of experiments you will make
    • You set “search mode” metrics and define very well how you will measure your progress
    • Every experiment needs to be validated or rejected based on the set metrics
    • You write down what you’ve learnt after every experiment
    • You make a decision whether you will pivot or preserve
    • Everything needs to be written down, otherwise you can quickly forget what you’ve learnt

    Use actionable metrics

    Science conducts a carefully orchestrated set of experiments to better understand how the world works. In order for the experiments to be as accurate as possible, there are many different rules to follow – deduction, induction, hypotheses, variables, control groups etc.

    In most cases, some kind of metrics are involved – you have to measure to either validate or reject your assumptions.

    That’s why metrics go hand in hand with experiments. Metrics, at the end of the day, are the best indicator of how accurate your assumptions are. Thus you have to base most of your agency and learning on life metrics.

    You have to measure when you’re right and when you’re wrong. You have to measure when you’re progressing and when you’re lying to yourself with the fake feeling of progress.

    There are many ways how you can measure things. From your physical responses and emotions, to the feedback you get from your environment and the monetary value you create.

    So first become aware when you’re making assumptions, then brainstorm what would be the most appropriate experiment to put assumptions to the test and in the end, have a set of metrics that will guide you into the right direction.

    Examples of actionable metrics in a personal life:

    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)

    Random experiences

    From time to time, it makes sense to go for a random experience, especially for things where you assume you’ve found the fit that work best for you. Because sometimes a completely new experience opens a whole new world to you, a world you didn’t know even existed.

    What you think you like and what you actually like are two different things. That’s why it always makes sense to go for a rich life experience and try new things when you get the opportunity to do so.

    An example would be considering your favorite dish. You’ve tried many different foods in the past and now you know that you like pasta Bolognese the most. Then you travel to a completely new place and they have your favorite dish on the menu and a dish you’ve never eaten before, but it’s their bestseller.

    In the same way, I encourage you to try different sports, investments, get to know different cultures, life settings, read things you never read before, try new hobbies, and so on. Sometimes do it strategically by employing the search mode, other times do it when the opportunity pops up, and sometimes just go proactively for a random experience.

    You will never know until you try and you will never know if you always stick to the same things.

    Research techniques

    For some of your assumptions, especially in business, you may need a professional scientific approach to testing assumptions and employing different research techniques like interviews, surveys, split testing, card sorting, contextual inquiry, mental models, different types of analysis and many other similar research techniques.

    Scientists use these techniques in their daily work to better understand the world, and there is no reason why you wouldn’t use them in your personal life while keeping the same goal in mind.

    You can use these techniques to test your (business) ideas, assess different investment opportunities, when you analyze your environment and its paradigms, when you study people’s behavior and in many other cases. Keep your mind open and use different tools at your disposal when an assumption needs to be tested.

    Tech changes

    Life changes and so testing assumptions never ends

    No matter how experienced you get, there are always errors in your subjective interpretation of reality. The fast-changing world contributes to that even more. Even if you could reach objective reality in a certain moment, an error would occur the next second. Because the world is constantly changing. And it’s changing faster and faster.

    Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

    That’s why you constantly need to keep testing your assumptions. You have to see life as a playground, where you have to test what works and what doesn’t. Based on your findings, you have to constantly adjust your life strategy and actions.

    That’s why the search mode is so important. That’s why regular reflections are mandatory. That’s why you have to adjust your course of action and how you will get to your goal on a bi-weekly basis, if not even more frequently. That’s how you stay lean and agile.

    Don’t just assume. Experiment and validate. Only then take action.