The number one advice when you’re learning a new subject or a new skill is to master the basics. The best approach to effective learning is to divide and conquer. You divide the subject into small building blocks and then you make sure you’re really mastering each and every building block. One by one.
By mastering the basics, you set strong foundations, on which you can build complete mastery of a whole new competence.
If you don’t master the basics first and then move on to more advanced topics, you always have to keep coming back to the basics when you get lost. You can easily trip if your core is weak and if you’re making unsure steps.
Even though practice makes perfect, there is always a big dilemma present when you’re learning something new. You don’t want to practice the basics or even any more advanced block of knowledge too little, but on the other hand, you also don’t want to practice it too much.
You have limited time and you don’t want to waste it on something that you’ve already mastered. Thus an important question comes up – how much to practice when you are learning something new, and when to stop it and move on.
We can get a very good answer to that question in, who would have thought, advanced coding principles.
Test-driven development gives us the answer
Test-driven development (TDD) is a special approach in the software development process, where you first code a test based on software requirements and only after that write the shortest possible code that will make the test pass.
First, you write a test to see whether the code is doing what it’s supposed to do, but you know that the test will fail, because there is really no code written yet.
Then in the second step, you write the simplest possible code that will make the test pass. It’s a similar concept to the lean startup, where you visit your potential customers even before you have a finished product.
Writing a unit test ensures that a developer understands the software’s feature and specification really well. This kind of an approach also ensures that the developer isn’t adding unnecessary code to the project. Last but not least, the code is better written in small units that can be easily managed.
There are many interesting principles that follow test-driven development, absolutely worth mentioning:
Get something working now and perfect it later
Keep the test units small and manageable
KISS: Keep it simple, stupid
YAGNI: You aren’t going to need it
Fake it until you make it
Refactor: Regularly clean the code and avoid duplication
There are many lessons we can take from TDD and implement it in personal lives, similar to those from agile development, since they go hand in hand.
First think about what exactly do you want to do – have a use case
That’s all good, but let’s go back to the original question. In more complex programming cases, an important question comes up – how many tests to write, how to know that you’ve done enough?
There are, of course, many tools you can use that measure the accordance of unit tests with code (it’s called code coverage). But there is also a rule of thumb of how many tests a programmer should write, and this rule of thumb also gives us the answer to how long you should practice a new block of knowledge.
How long should you practice?
In test-driven development, there is a rule of thumb to “test until fear turns to boredom”. You can use the same exact principle when you’re learning a new block of knowledge – practice until fear turns to boredom.
Practice a new skill or block of knowledge until fear turns to boredom.
Let’s parse this statement a little bit. When you’re new to something, the probability of making mistakes is great. There is always some kind of fear present that you will do something wrong or fail.
There may be a few examples that you don’t understand very well yet, there may be a tricky way of asking you a question regarding the topic that may quickly confuse you, or part of the knowledge may still be completely alien to you. We can all put that under “fear”.
But after you practice enough, soon there is nothing new to understand and master in that specific block of knowledge. A challenge slowly starts changing into boredom.
When there isn’t a single drop of fear anymore that you might make a mistake, and when every exercise and revision turns into boredom, you can be sure that you’re mastering the knowledge. Then it’s time to move to the next block.
No fear and boredom, these are the signals that you’re a master at something.
This is what super learners do
In the fast food society, we want everything quickly. Learning is no exception in this. People in general don’t want to learn at all after they finish school, but when they do, they want to learn everything fast and easy.
Learning anything worthwhile takes time, effort, energy and a systematic approach.
If you’re serious about acquiring any new knowledge or skill, do it the right way. Slice and dice the subject so you don’t get overwhelmed. Break the subject into small pieces you can master in a respectable amount of time.
Learn the theory and then immediately apply it in practice. Practice each and every block of knowledge until it becomes a part of you, until you can do it in seconds. Practice until fear turns into boredom.
If you master building block by building block, you will soon progress from the beginner to the intermediate level and then all the way to the advanced and master level.
But remember, it takes years to become master at anything. Like Sisyphus, you have to move block by block, repeat the boring stuff again and again, and only then can you shine as an improved version of yourself with a completely new competence. But once you acquire it, nobody can take it away from you.
Use this principle in any area of life
You can use the “building block” principle together with “until fear turns into boredom” in any area of life. No matter what you’d like to learn, this approach works. If you make the building block small enough, it will motivate you to move on. Basic and easy building blocks are early wins that keep you going.
Building blocks start to accumulate and soon you get to the domino effect when things start to make sense. You’re enjoying it more and more. With mastery, passion also slowly develops. Then you want to master even more complex blocks of knowledge.
Practical examples
Want to learn more about a healthy diet? Slice and dice. Shape building blocks like macro-nutrition, micro-nutrition, calorie calculation, food combining, healthy shopping list, food supplements etc. Master them one by one.
Read a few books and a few hundred articles regarding every building block. While you’re mastering every block by itself, you of course also test different things and see what works best for you.
Want to learn how to invest? Again slice and dice. Microeconomics, macroeconomics. Basic investing principles. Different types of investments and different types of investment approaches.
Risk, reward, liquidity, costs and other factors. Trading platforms etc. Master one by one. Make your first small investment. Talk to other investors. Step by step, while keeping a long-term perspective.
Want to learn how to build a successful business? It’s a complex subject, so slice and dice. First learn to brainstorm business ideas and do a simple analysis. Then how to test ideas with customer discovery and other lean approaches.
Then we have team building, fundraising, marketing and sales, and the basics of finance and accounting. First you have to learn how to sell the product, then how to build it and how to form a successful team around it, then other supporting functions.
Want to learn how to code? Again slice and dice. You educate yourself about different programming languages and what they’re used for and dive into one of them. Then you learn the basic fundamentals of coding – syntax, data types, conditions, iterations, collections, debugging etc.
Then you get to know different frameworks and basic coding principles and approaches like OOP, TDD and MVC. And then … well, I don’t know, here’s where I currently am.
You won’t feel overwhelmed with such an approach. You can shape building blocks that fit into your schedule. You can simply timebox learning periods in your calendar. You will train your attention span. You will train your brain. And most importantly, you will acquire a new skill you want to master.
Homework
Pick one subject or skill you want to master, outline the first building block and get going. Revise the building block until fear turns into boredom. Then move to the next one.
For decades, individuals and organizations aimed to optimize their agency for the highest productivity levels possible. Superior organization and disruptive innovation were the front-runners of any success. And it all makes sense.
Both concepts greatly contribute to being different, better, faster, more efficient, or can lead to adding more value, solving problems that were not yet solved or solving them better, and so on. Empires were built on superior organization, disruptive innovation and enterprising.
Nevertheless, the contemporary environment is becoming so complex, turbulent and fast-changing that a third element needs to be added to the superior organization and disruptive innovation of superior entities.
Startup world, as the part of the business world that’s most exposed to the unstable environment, is already adding this new third element – with agile and lean techniques. The sooner you add this third element to your life or the organization you’re running, the better off you’ll be.
I’m talking about flexibility of course, and in this article I will focus on how to develop and keep flexibility in personal life as the ultimate competitive advantage. If you aren’t flexible by nature, this article is a must read. Think about what happened to the dinosaurs only because they weren’t flexible enough.
What does flexibility even mean?
If we want to understand what being flexible really means, let’s first ask ourselves how not being flexible looks like, let’s analyze the opposite. In fact, it’s really easy to notice when you or anybody else is inflexible.
You’re usually doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results, but there are none. So you whine, bitch and complain, but don’t do the only thing that would really help – change your actions. Being inflexible means that you stubbornly persist at something that doesn’t work at all.
Staying flexible on the other hand means nothing but easily being able to dis-invest your resources (ego, beliefs, values, time, energy and money) from one thing and start investing into another that has bigger potential or works better. Being flexible means you have no problem to stop doing one thing, and start doing another.
Being flexible signifies the ability to stop doing an activity that doesn’t work (anymore) and finding a new better way to do something or a completely new opportunity or path that leads to the same goal.
“You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water, my friend.” Bruce Lee
Let’s look at some practical examples. If you’re a flexible person you have no problem (an example):
Changing from one diet that doesn’t work anymore to a new one (from vegan to paleo)
Doing a completely different type of exercise after you injure yourself (from weightlifting to yoga)
Reprogramming yourself to have a more positive approach towards life (going from constantly frowning to constantly smiling)
Learning how to respond more wisely in tough situations (responding calmly instead of losing your temper)
Developing a new set of competences and your talents (the ones that are currently in a much higher demand compared to what your job is at the moment)
Switching to beliefs that are more appropriate in contemporary times (from acting out of dominance to acting out of prestige)
Changing a job, the place where you live or the team of people you work with
Learning a new language or adjusting to cultural differences if you change your environment
Accepting weather as it is and not complaining about it
Using new devices and technology
And so on
I’m very inflexible by nature, so I have to work hard on keeping my mind flexible. That’s why I can also write about it, because I know the difference in the approach and the quality of life if you can keep things flexible or not.
Here’s the story of the last time in my life when I had to remind myself to stay flexible. I spent my summer vacation in Sri Lanka. I had a great time there with my girlfriend, but only after I decided to stay flexible. I couldn’t follow my carb-cycling and intermittent fasting there.
I had the goal that I will read at least three books during my holiday, but I read none, since there were so many other things to do and see. I had a plan to write a few article drafts and I wrote zero, since I didn’t have any energy left after travelling for the whole day.
Bitching, complaining and punishing myself because I wasn’t able to follow my goals there could have easily destroyed my holidays. But only if I stayed inflexible, like many times before.
This time, I decided to stay fully flexible and to maximize other things on my vision list and other opportunities presented by the new temporary environment – I enjoyed the local food and tasted completely new dishes. I embraced and learned about the new culture. I met many interesting new people. I did many exciting activities like safari, diving with sharks, rock climbing, going on a pilgrimage, and so on.
I decided to enjoy my vacation, even if I didn’t read a single page, write a single word, and even if I gained a pound or two and ate too many carbs. That’s what I did and I had a phenomenal time. The day after I got home, I started to following my original commitments again.
It’s a very simple and plastic example, but that’s the way of how you should approach to life in general – in the most flexible way possible. And if you’re a flexible person by nature that may seem funny to you, but yes, if you’re inflexible, rigid, then you have almost zero capacity to adjust to new circumstances. That’s why you go extinct.
I had to completely adjust my goals while travelling.
Now let’s look at a few approaches that will help you stay flexible.
Have many options and alternative paths
If you want to stay flexible, you need many options and alternative paths. Only if you have many alternatives can you switch to following new goals or can easily decide to either persevere or pivot when you encounter a roadblock on the path towards your goal.
Having many options is what brings real safety today, having many options is what keeps you away from being stuck in life. But you must be strong enough to need get burdened by the tyranny of choice.
There are a few general ways of keeping many options in your personal life:
Be a person of value.Develop competences that have a high demand and low supply. Acquire people skills and know how to provide value in key relationships. Maximize your sexual market value and other types of values. The better version of yourself you become, more options you will have.
Be innovative and curious. If you’re interested in many things, if you’re comfortable with many different alternatives of how to potentially design your life, if you’re always prepared to innovate your way out of hard situations, there is always a step you can take forward, there is always a way to maximize your quality of life, based on factors that you control and the ones you don’t. Always stay curious, always stay hungry, always stay foolish.
Avoid the onetis mentality. The number one killer of flexibility is the onetis mentality. The onetis mentality means being obsessed with one single thing – one girl or boy, one job, one car, one investment etc. If there is something that represents all to you and everything else is nothing, it’s only a question of time when you will be miserable and stuck.
In practice, that means you have many items on your vision list and you prioritize them based on your current needs and desires, up-to-date paradigms in your environment, new opportunities you’re exposed to, and so on. You constantly adjust your life strategy based on the feedback you’re getting from the environment.
But be careful, with many choices you can easily catch yourself into the trap of the tyranny of choice. You can get overwhelmed by all the possible options and encounter decision fatigue.
For that to not happen, you have to combine both concepts, keep alternative paths open, but simplify your life in current settings to the point that you aren’t hindered by constantly thinking about the other options you have.
In practice, that means that you know what plan B, C … Z could be, but you don’t overthink it and you act as if they don’t exist at all while you’re following your plan A. When you get stuck, you decide to either persevere or pivot.
When to persist and when to move on is often one of the hardest decisions you have to make. That’s why being flexible isn’t easy.
Don’t have any fixed ideas
If you want to stay flexible, you shouldn’t have any fixed ideas about how things should be, how they will happen and what will be the exact path that will lead you towards your goal.
You should definitely have a life vision, strong mission, superior strategy, but you must be prepared to adjust them at any second based on the instant feedback you get – from yourself (body, mind, emotions, spirit) or your environment (trends, relationships etc.).
Make a small step forward, analyze the feedback and adjust immediately.
Things never go as planned. You set your strategy based on many untested assumptions. The environment is changing so fast, and people are completely unpredictable.So having fixed ideas about how something will happen and when it should happen is nothing but a recipe for misery. Remember, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face by reality.
No matter if you want to get fit, rich or married, accept the following very basic facts of planning and going after your goals:
You will never get to your goal in exactly the same way as you think you will
There will always be an unexpected problems on the path towards your goal
Everything will take much longer than expected
The cost for everything is usually much higher than planned (in effort, money or any other resource)
Your ego will get hurt when you realize how many wrong assumptions you had, but that’s how you learn
If you learn to accept these simple yet harsh facts of life, you will save yourself many grey hairs. You aren’t the only one who has to deal with that kind of harsh reality, everybody does.
Nevertheless, the ones who learn to play the cards of life better under these circumstances are the ones who thrive, especially because they’re staying flexible and aren’t overly optimistic.
Keep your mind agile
It’s very beneficial to have no fixed ideas, but it’s also quite hard to accomplish. There are many exercises that can help you keep your mind flexible. Here are a few of them:
Ask yourself how your life would look like if you believed the opposite, or what would be the result if you would do the opposite? Practice defending the opposite view than you have.
Always try new things. Learn new skills, use new routes on your commute home, constantly meet new people, travel, be open to new life experiences.
Daily brainstorm new ideas, at least 50 of them. Don’t be critical at all when you brainstorm, just make sure you list as many ideas as possible. Keep your mind open.
Practice cognitive reframing, meaning that you put the same situation into a different context and you try to find the context that works best for you to move forward.
Change your environment to encourage new thoughts. You can go for a walk or a run. You can get a cup of coffee or go work in a coffee shop. Many times, changing the environment leads to new creative thoughts.
Imagine life being just a dream, where you can be easily flexible.
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” ― Albert Einstein
Don’t have a problem with being wrong
Your strategy and all of your actions are based more or less on your assumptions; and many of your assumptions are wrong. Now read this carefully: wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups.
That’s why you’re always wrong before you are right; or in other words, you can make good decisions solely based on real-life experience, but you gain real-life experience based on bad decisions.
So don’t mind being wrong. Expect to be wrong. Expect to fail. Be able to fail and move on to the next experiment in a second. That’s real flexibility. I tried x, it doesn’t work, so let’s try y. And you keep trying until you find one variation that works.
That’s also how nature operates. Nature doesn’t make a better version of an organism with every offspring. Nature encourages as many different variations as possible and then lets the best variations survive and thrive.
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas A. Edison
Having no problem failing, being wrong or changing their mind is an important characteristic of many successful people. It’s not easy to develop such a characteristic, but it brings you an enormous competitive advantage.
It’s a personality characteristic that helped Tomas Edison go through 10,000 failed experiments and persist until he found a way for a lightbulb to work. Steve Jobs had the same mentality, here is a segment from an interview with him that emphasizes exactly that:
I’m one of this people that… I don’t really care about being right. I just care about success. You will find lots of people who will tell you I had a very strong opinion and they presented evidence to the contrary and five minutes later I completely changed my mind.
Because I’m like that. I don’t mind being wrong. And I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing. Steve Jobs
Don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t be afraid to be wrong. Don’t put your ego in front of learning something new. Don’t put your ego in front of success. Don’t be too ego invested in anything. Instead stay flexible and look for solutions that work and bring success into your life and make you happy.
Search before you execute
The best way to stay flexible is to consciously decide to put yourself in the search mode before you really commit to anything. You consciously decide to be in a phase where you will fail, test your assumptions and learn.
You decide with full awareness that you won’t get yourself ego invested or committed, but just put your assumptions to the test.
So 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 get ego invested too much. Commitments lead to heavy energy investments, and you shouldn’t be investing before you know what you’re truly investing into and whether the investment really fits your character.
Hard work should always also be smart work, but you can’t work smartly if you don’t have the right map and coordinates.
Your only job in the search mode is to test the assumptions you wrote down, correct them, and try different things in order to find out what suits you best – your personal fit. This phase is only for learning about yourself and the world. N
o goals. No measurement of progress. Just learning and playing. And staying 100 % flexible. Because the more you invest yourself, the more inflexible you become.
The sunk costs mentality makes you inflexible
Sunk costs are all the costs that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered. The sunk costs fallacy encourages loss aversion, meaning that you have an irrational tendency to follow through with an activity even if it’s not meeting your expectations, only because you’ve already invested some resources into it.
To simplify, when you start investing into something, you find that you have a strong tendency to keep going, even if the investment doesn’t make rational sense.
The sunk costs fallacy makes you inflexible. The sunk costs fallacy encourages you to make even more bad decisions. That’s why you have to be aware of this cognitive bias very well and manage it properly. The less you’re influenced by the sunk cost fallacy, the more flexible you can stay.
Let’s look at a few examples of when the sunk costs make you very inflexible:
You bought a ticket to see a movie in cinema, but now the movie is boring. What do you do?
You ordered and paid for too much food, should you eat it or not, even if you aren’t hungry?
You bought an expensive MOOC that you find useless and there is no money-back guarantee. Should you watch it until the end or not?
You already invested so much into a relationship, so does it even make sense to switch to a new relationship and start everything from scratch?
You already invested x EUR into your project, house or anything else, and now much more money is needed, but if you already invested so much, why not invest a little more?
What is the best way to turn this into an advantage?
On your way toward your goals, you will encounter small roadblocks as well as complete dead-ends. You can usually go around the small roadblocks with small adjustments.
Dead-ends, on the other hand, require bigger changes in strategy and action plan. Big obstacles usually make you emotionally upset and thus that more inflexible.
When you meet greater obstacles on your way, you can easily start feeling sorry for yourself and put yourself in a position of a victim, thinking how everybody is against you. Of course that doesn’t bring you any good, only additional negative energy and delays in achieving the finish line.
Every time you receive a setback, immediately ask yourself how you can turn this into your advantage.
Therefore, there is one question that can help you a lot in staying flexible in your thinking when you encounter big problems. It’s a simple question based on optimal thinking – what’s the best way to turn this situation to my advantage?
There is always a way how you can do that, if you’re flexible. You can always reframe it, regroup your resources, refocus, adjust, pivot or change settings in any other way. Just don’t get stuck in your mind.
Optimize your life for flexibility in every possible way
Staying flexible will help you not get stuck in difficult life situations and find a way towards your life vision and goals no matter how different the path is from your initial plan.
In addition to that, flexibility will save you many gray hairs and emotional pain. But remember, if you aren’t flexible by nature, you have to constantly practice it.
At first, being flexible may feel alien to you, like you’re betraying your values, beliefs and principles, but it’s not about that – it’s about finding a way that works.
You definitely have to make sure that when you’re looking for alternative paths, you keep your moral standards and integrity high. Nevertheless, you’re looking for long-term wins. But there is no sense in persisting at things that don’t work, only because you already invested so much in them or because you’re simply stubborn. Be flexible instead.
It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself. – Megginson’s interpretation of the central idea outlined in Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species”
Here are a few other ideas how you can make sure to keep your life as flexible as possible:
Drop any 5-year plans about anything
List all potential pivots you can do if you encounter a big obstacle
Be tolerant and open-minded so you can work or be friends with all kinds of different people
Have no problem moving to a country or a town with more opportunities if necessary
Be a minimalist and own as little as possible so that you are mobile and can easily move around
Don’t be overly attached to anything, because nothing lasts forever
Keep your body flexible with stretching, much like you have to keep your mind flexible
In the future, flexibility will be an even more important personality characteristic than it already is today. In a complex, volatile and unpredictable environment, only the most flexible will survive.
Luckily, flexibility is nothing but a skill you can learn. Once you learn to stay flexible, nothing can stop you in life, because you always find the next smart move to make. Be super organized, constantly innovate and stay flexible.
There is a very important fact in the fitness and weight loss industry, emphasizing that you can never out-train your diet. Your losing weight goals are 80 % done in the kitchen and 20 % done in the gym.
Regular exercise is absolutely important and you have to do it if you want to be/look fit and gain some muscles, but for losing fat, an elaborate diet is what counts the most. There is some simple math behind it.
Here’s how many calories you burn (rough estimate) in 30 minutes of exercise:
Walking: 150 kcal
Weight training: 220 kcal
Cycling: 250 kcal
Swimming: 300 kcal
Running: 300 kcal
And here are the calories in some relatively small meals and snacks (again, only rough estimates):
Egg: 80 kcal
Banana: 100 kcal
One slice of pizza: 240 kcal (yes, one slice)
Snicker’s Bar: 250 kcal
Big Mac: 563 kcal
You can eat a Big Mac in 3 minutes, and then you have to go running for an hour to burn it. If we take a step further, 7,700 calories are roughly 1 kg of fat together with water (or 3,500 kcal equals 1 lb of fat). So if you eat 500 calories over your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure), you will gain 1 kg of fat in two weeks.
Now, there is a lot of debating going on out there over how accurate these calculations are, but at the end of the day, if you eat more than you burn, you get fatter and if you burn more than you need, you lose weight. It’s a simple rule that can’t be avoided. And it’s much easier to dam up calories than trying to burn all the excess you consume with exercise.
It’s so easy to eat 500 calories. It’s so hard to burn 500 calories.
The main problem is that when you start to exercise, your appetite goes up. That’s why many people get disappointed when they start to take care of their bodies. They feel much better after exercise, they put in the hard work, but their appetite also goes up and consequently they eat much more and don’t see fat loss as quickly as they would desire.
And even if you stuff your face with healthy food, you gain weight. If you want to lose weight, you simply have to curb your eating appetites. There is no other way.
Tricks to eat less
If you want to lose weight, you have to control how much (quantity) and what (quality) you eat. You do that by making smart big and small eating decisions.
Big smart decisions are the decisions of how you design your eating pattern in general – the number of meals you eat, what time you eat them, the typical meals you like and their size. You have to know your macros and how you will meet them. Besides that you have to know your body very well and how it resonates with different diet approaches. You do that by testing.
Small smart decisions are all the small things that prevent you from eating that one banana or chocolate bar too many per day. They’re small tricks that help you keep the discipline and really stay within the bigger plan (macro calculations, eating pattern). Small decisions are the details you have to be careful about. As they say, God or the Devil are in the details. Diet is no exception here.
Now let’s look at 15+ tricks to eat less that will help you eat less in order to lose weight and be healthier. If you are prone to overeating as I am and your body weight fluctuates like the tide, these tricks may actually change your life.
How to lose weight? Portion control, portion control.
Be smart about shopping
There is a saying that fitness professionals repeat over and over again: “5 minutes of willpower in the grocery store is much easier than a week of willpower in the kitchen”. Make sure you aren’t hungry when you go shopping, and buy only healthy food.
Have a list of things you need to buy and don’t get tempted to buy anything that will lead you to a temptation later on. Have a rule to not have junk food or sweets at home at all!
Skip a meal or do intermittent fasting
One great way to eat less is to skip meals. If you ate too much at your last meal, skip the next one. From time to time, skip breakfast or dinner for a few times in a row. Not eating after 6pm at all may also help you a lot.
As an alternative, you can also do intermittent fasting and introduce periods in your days when you don’t eat at all. Test a few different approaches to skipping meals and find the eating pattern that works best for you.
Brush your teeth
When you crave a snack in the evening, go and brush your teeth. It’s a signal to your brain that the time to stop eating has come. Your hunger can go away like that. And if you are a little bit lazy, you know that after eating, you’ll have to brush your teeth again, and who wants to do that?
Drink plenty of water
If you get really hungry, drink lots of water. Well drink lots of water anyway, but when you are hungry, drink it even more. It can also be with a few drops of a freshly squeezed lemon.
Just know that if you do it before sleep, you will go to the toilet several times and that may disturb the quality of your sleep. Drinking a glass of water before every meal can also help a lot. As mentioned the good news is that drinking water is extremely healthy for you anyway.
Always have broccoli in your belly
Organic broccoli is the most awesome and healthy green food in existence. You can see how healthy it is even by only looking at it. Half a kilo of broccoli only has 170 kcal and 15g of protein.
And trust me, you feel very full after eating 0,5 kg of broccoli. If you’re feeling hungry, just eat some broccoli. Make sure you always have some broccoli in your stomach. It’s that simple.
The hunger test
Imagine a really healthy food you like, without sugars or fats (fruit doesn’t count, except for avocado). Preferably a green vegetable – broccoli, spinach, salad, whatever. If you feel real hunger, you’ll have no problem eating your favorite green vegetable.
But if you just go “no, no”, I want pizza, a chocolate bar, French fries, chips or whatever, you’re probably not really hungry. It’s emotional hunger.
If you are really hungry, slice some carrots and pickles and eat them with some hummus. No? Then you aren’t really hungry.
Go for a walk
Feeling super hungry? Distract yourself with a productive and healthy activity. Go for a walk and eat something healthy when you come back. Sometimes distracting yourself works.
Just make sure that you don’t overeat after you finish with the selected activity. There is a thin line when you go too far with hunger and you just want to eat everything afterwards.
Eat slowly, especially when you cheat
This is the hardest one for me, but it does wonders. There is a thing called mindful eating. It means that you eat really slowly, paying full attention to the food. You do slow bites and try to engage yourself in the eating activity with all of your senses.
When you do that, not only do you eat more slowly which is super healthy, you usually also eat less. You pay more attention to when you’re really full.
There are a few tricks you can employ to eat more mindfully:
Closely examine every bite of food before you put it in your mouth – texture, color etc.
Keep switching the spoon from one hand to the other or eat with your non-dominant hand
Take a few bites with your eyes closed
Eat with chopsticks
Make sure you take one bite at a time
Take a break during your meal
Chew 25 times every bite
Be thankful for the meal before you start eating – say a prayer or just think about how lucky you are
The signal to your brain that your stomach is full comes with some delay, so eating slowly helps that the signal doesn’t come too late, when you already eat twice as much as you should.
Always put your food on a plate
To better control how much you eat, always put your food on a plate. Never eat out of a bag. Never just take food out of the fridge and put it in your mouth. And never do it above the kitchen sink, stuffing yourself with fruit, for example (like I do sometimes and my girlfriend doesn’t like it).
On second thought, don’t just put food on a plate. Prepare it. Slice it, cook it, decorate it, whatever. Give yourself time to play with the preparation and while you do it, think about a reasonable portion size.
Always put your food on a plate and always eat only sitting at the table with no exceptions. Especially don’t eat in front of a TV. Eating in front of the TV is the opposite of mindful eating. You get lost in a TV show and just eat and eat, with no idea of how much you ate.
Using smaller plates may also be used as a psychological trick to not put too much food on a plate and to see small portions as big enough.
Under 200 calories snacks
Always have a few “healthy snacks under 200 calories” with you for an emergency if you are really hungry or your sugar levels drop. Never wait until you’re extremely hungry and then eat twice as much as you should.
Instead control your appetite with small non-caloric healthy snacks. Examples of those kind of snacks are:
Small banana with a few almonds
Greek yogurt with a piece of fresh fruit
Carrot with hummus
Cup of blueberries
Avocado
Cucumber salad
Olives and a few slices of cheese
Apple
Shrimp cocktail
Protein bar
Tracking calories
The number one thing weightlifters and gym rats usually regret is not paying more attention to their diet when they started exercising. Most weightlifters claim that tracking calories changed their life and the speed of progress.
Tracking calories significantly helps you stay within your macros (protein, carbs, fat, fiber, vitamins, minerals intake), stay in a moderate deficit (if you are cutting) or surplus (if you are bulking), and it always gives you a chance for a second thought over whether you should eat something or not.
Now, I don’t track my calories daily, but I have a big spreadsheet with all the calculations for my typical meals that I usually eat in a day. Since I like to simplify my life, I have a few typical meals for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, and I have a standard meal plan for high-carb and low-carb days.
I know exactly when I overeat, and I try to balance that by skipping meals. Going through the macros of my typical meals really opened my eyes as to why I had such big problems losing weight. Because food contains so much more calories than you think.
It’s so easy to overeat. A good rule that can help you eat less is: don’t put anything in your mouth before you log it.
Get enough sleep
Getting enough quality sleep is very important for your health in general. A lack of sleep causes stress, puts additional pressure on your body, you usually feel hungrier and it messes with your self-discipline. So if you want to eat less, go to bed early and make sure you get enough sleep.
If you stay up late, you will want to eat more, especially unhealthy snacks. Who likes to cook at midnight? If you’re tired because of a lack of sleep, you will want to eat even more the next day.
Because your self-discipline will be poor, you’ll have no problem eating lots of unhealthy food. You have to be smarter than that. Get enough sleep and your appetite will go down.
Your picture on the fridge
You can also go a big step further to stop yourself from overeating. You can take a photo of yourself in a swimming suit, nicely showing your excess of fat. Make sure that the picture is as unattractive as possible. Stick a photo of you clearly showing the excess of fat to the fridge and it’s going to be a nice reminder to walk away.
Make yourself a cup of green tea
Interestingly, I often overeat because I feel a lack of energy. I want to operate at 100 % capacity all the time, which is ridiculous. My underlying assumption is that if I eat more, I’ll immediately have immediately more energy. It doesn’t work that way, except maybe with sugar, but soon a sugar crash comes and that makes you even more tired.
If you’re like me and you want to eat only because you’re tired, get yourself a cup of green tea or coffee instead, if it’s not too late. A piece of dark chocolate also picks me up nicely and the desire to overeat slowly goes away.
Many people also reported that a chewing gum helps a lot when they’re hungry. Find one caloric acceptable snack that picks you up when you’re tired. Assuming you are already following a healthy diet throughout the day.
My wrong underlying assumption is that I will have more energy if I eat more. What are your false assumptions and beliefs?
Wire yourself to enjoy hunger
If there is one thing I hate, it’s being hungry. Nevertheless, I try to rewire or reprogram myself not to hate it. Much like I hate hunger, I also used to hate broccoli and olives, and now I love them.
Fasting has always been an important part of a healthy lifestyle and even spiritual life. There are many physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual benefits of fasting, if you do some research on it.
With intermittent fasting, I’m slowly learning to love being hungry and enjoy it. I focus myself on feeling light, I can feel how my discipline is building up, and at the end of the day I am very proud of myself for having stayed in a caloric deficit.
If you learn to enjoy hunger, you can always control your portions and how much you eat throughout the day.
Minus 20 % rule
A good trick you can use that will help you get in that 500 kcal deficit is to serve yourself 20 % less food. When you have food on a plate, cut away 20 % and throw it away, give it to your dog, share it among others or whatever. At every meal, prepare yourself a full portion and then cut off 20 %. Be proud of yourself when you do that.
If your TDEE is 2500 calories and you do that, you will eat 500 calories less. A 500 calories deficit every day will lead you to losing 2 kg (4 lbs) in a month. That’s the healthy limit of losing weight.
When you do the “minus 20 % rule” just make sure you don’t add additional meals to your eating pattern or somehow else compensate for the food you cut off.
Eat foods that fill you up first
As we said, drinking a glass of water before a meal may help you eat less. Similarly, you can eat a salad or a soup before the main meal. They are both light in calories and fill your stomach quite a bit. Foods with lots of protein and fiber also keep the hunger away for longer.
Avoid empty calories
Last but not least, avoid empty calories at all costs. Empty calorie foods are all foods that contain high amounts of calories and sugars, but have zero nutritional value (protein, vitamins etc.).
They are also very easy to consume as main meals or snacks, and you can almost eat unlimited amount of them. One bite like that too many and you can already be in a caloric surplus. Make a rule to simply not eat foods and drinks with empty calories.
Drink water or herbal tea instead of juices, sodas and other sugary drinks
Don’t eat fast food at all, or only do it on rare occasions
Drink alcohol in moderation
Be really strict about how much sweets and desserts you eat
Watch out for unhealthy salty snacks like chips and pretzels
People really use these tricks to eat less
You may be thinking that this all sounds nice, but these eating tricks are only in magazines to entertain people. That isn’t true. Go to the gym, talk with athletes, join online health and fitness communities, and you will soon realize that people who are fit or lost weight really employed these kinds of tricks. They work, you just have to do it.
I do most of them and they help me lose weight nicely. So pick a few tricks to eat less you like the most and start them doing immediately. Don’t wait for tomorrow or next Monday, don’t wait for the next summer or the perfect moment, do it with your next meal.
Your next meal is an opportunity to make smarter eating decisions and to be more kind to your body. Just do it and good luck. Now you know all the major tricks to eat less.
I am a big perfectionist, often caught in all-or-nothing thinking. They are both (perfectionism as well as black & white thinking) severe cognitive distortions, probably the most frequent ones in the general population, and they hinder the quality of life to a great extent.
A thinking and mindset upgrade to properly manage these two distortions is mandatory, especially for unlocking a whole new productivity and happiness level in your professional and personal life. In this article, you will find the answer to how to successfully fight with your chronic perfectionism.
An illuminating concept that helped me deal with perfectionism and all-or-nothing thinking is called “good enough”. This model of thinking emphasizes that it doesn’t have to be perfect, it only has to be good enough. It completely changed my life.
Now I never go for perfect, I always rather settle for good enough, even if I still aim high.
The idea behind the concept of good enough is that it’s completely acceptable to be reasonably consistent with your goals and not following them 100 % of time to complete perfection; because the latter is simply impossible and only makes you unhappy and miserable.
You don’t need a perfect job, you need a good enough job
You don’t need a 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 have to be a perfect parent, you have to be a good enough parent
You don’t need a perfect life, you need to fight for a good enough life
Perfectionist’s greed
The main driving force behind perfectionism is usually a desire to be loved and accepted. You think you can achieve that by being flawless. Perfectionism usually develops if you’re raised by overly critical parents or parents who have low capabilities for emotional care and loving support. To simplify, with perfectionism you usually want to show other people that you are good enough to be loved.
But perfectionism is a very bad surrogate for love. The main problem is that you strive for perfectionism in your achievements to show other people how good you are, but new achievements don’t equal a greater capacity for loving yourselfand others. That’s why you always want more and more.
No matter how good the achievements you have, you never feel loved enough. Additionally, there is always somebody better than you and that can quickly humiliate you for not being good enough – ever. Thus you become extremely greedy.
No matter how much you earn, you want more. No matter how good your partner is, you are more focused on their flaws and you want better. No matter how successful your career is, there is so much more you could do.
One cheat meal and your otherwise good enough diet seems like nothing. Even though you just bought a laptop, you know that in 6 months there will be a new model, and the one you have won’t be good enough anymore. A greedy soul that’s never ever satisfied.
If you’re a perfectionist, you’re an obsessive “maximizer”. You want the best in everything. That may lead to greater achievements, but it may also lead to a miserable life (achievements ≠ happiness). Wanting the best all the time is impossible, and that kind of a distortion can only lead to being clinically depressed.
The characteristics of perfectionists and maximizers when it comes to choice-making are the following. According to Barry Swartz and his book The Paradox of Choice, they:
Have a big fear of missing out on things
Always compare their decisions with those of other people
Spend too much time and energy even on small decisions
Are generally unhappy with their outcomes and constantly want something new
Rather than a maximizer, be a satisfier. Absolutely aim high and have big goals, but also learn to be satisfied with good enough. Learn to recognize and be aware of your greed, and curb it with the new better mindset and by developing a greater capacity for self-love. Learn the difference between happiness and achievements. Become aware when things are good enough for you.
Here are the characteristics of satisfiers, they:
Have fear of missing out on enjoying high quality of life, in other words being happy
Accept the good enough concept
Don’t obsess too much about their options
Can easily move on after making a decision
Are generally happy with their choices and outcomes
Don’t constantly beat yourself up with perfect. It’s good enough, now move on.
Slipping from time to time will make you more disciplined
Life is not meant to be perfect. You need imperfection in your life. If everything were perfect, there would be no room for improvement, there would be no room for effort and for the capacity to grow. Without flaws, life would be boring as f*ck.
You need some level of stress so that you’re stimulated to go forward and your brain synapses can grow. You need a little bit of imperfection that drives you towards your new accomplishments. That’s all good and necessary until it’s too much and it becomes toxic.
And you can’t be constantly 100 % disciplined. You need to slip from time to time. You need a cheat day. You need to reset yourself. Like you take a break during the day, so you need to take a break from your consistent effort from time to time. Progress is always achieved in the form of one step back, two steps forward.
There are no straight lines in nature, and there is surely no straight line on the path to success. So don’t strive for perfection, but see everything together with flaws as perfect. Imperfections enable progress and help you on the way towards your goal by enabling you to not be too tough on yourself and go crazy.
When you slip, just remember that tomorrow is a new beginning. Don’t beat yourself up for your slips and mistakes, but calculate them into your doing and decision-making. They are part of the equation. What matters in the end is that you make many more good than bad decisions.
Don’t beat yourself up for your slips and mistakes, but calculate them into your doing and decision-making.
Don’t make good enough be an excuse for not giving your best
The good enough concept is a potential cure for a perfectionist, not a handy excuse for a lazy person. If you aren’t as motivated as you should be, if you are underachieving in your life, the new better mindset might be going from good to great rather than settling with the good enough. The good enough concept in such a case may even further hinder your ambitions and the will to act. You need to use the right tool for the situation you are in.
It’s not hard to know which tool to use – good enough or from okay to great. Deep down you always know if you are miserable because you aren’t giving your 100 % or because you’re greedy. What you should do is assess where you are based on the life success metrics, measure how fast your progress is, assess how much you trust the process and especially how realistic your expectations are.
Looking at life metrics immediately tells you what is the source of unhappiness.
Find a progress pace that is respectful and realistic – not perfect, but good enough. Make sure you are constantly improving and growing (the kaizen mindset), but also that you aren’t caught in a greedy perfectionist’s mindset that’s never satisfied with anything, where nothing is good enough. Find the middle path that works for you.
Aim high, but define good enough very clearly
It’s not enough to just know the good enough concept. You have to define what an ideal situation is for you and what is a good enough situation. You must have a clear definition of good enough to shut up your inner critic when you’re unrealistically assessing your current situation and your progress.
Defining how much money would be an ideal situation for you and going after the number is great, but also define how much money is a good enough situation. Being rich is probably ideal, but what about owning a house without debt and having savings for 6 months of expenses, would that be good enough for you?
You can make a persona of your ideal partner, the perfect partner, but you also ask yourself what flaws your spouse can have and still be good enough?Cheating is probably unacceptable, but what about them having a bad day from time to time?
Having a magazine cover body, being able to run a marathon, deadlifting 200 kg (400lbs) and no health problems would definitely be the ideal health situation. But what is a realistic good enough health situation for you?Realistically, there are body weaknesses you have to accept, you have to be okay with being ill from time to time, there are sports you are good at and bad at, and so on. Considering all that, what is a good enough health situation for you?
Homework
Please sit down, take a piece of paper or open a notepad on your computer, and define what is currently good enough for you in different areas of life – health, key relationships, money, career, competences, enjoying life etc. Really do the exercise, no excuses. Not doing the exercise is definitely not good enough. ;)
Emotional accounting combined with the good enough concept
I trust that you’ve done your homework above and defined the good enough situation you can happily live with. You have your minimum that should bring pure happiness and satisfaction in your life. Good.
Unfortunately, that’s not enough to fully employ the good enough concept. That’s because your perfectionist mind is like a crazy monkey that tries to attack you at every single opportunity.
So regularly talking back to your perfectionist inner critic is the key. You do that with emotional accounting. To perform emotional accounting, all you need a simple table (you can download the template below). The table for doing the emotional accounting has a few columns. Here they are:
Toxic thought going through your head (automatic thought, self-criticism and perfectionism)
Type of negative feeling it’s causing and the intensity of it (emotions)
Performing a rational response to the toxic thought (self-defense with using the good enough concept)
New intensity of the negative feeling (outcome)
You simply go from column to column. First you learn to identify toxic negative thoughts and cognitive distortions(I’m not good enough, I don’t earn enough, the Joneses have a better car etc.). Then you try to identify what kind of negative feelings the negative thoughts are causing you (anger, sadness, self-hate etc.).
In the next step, your greatest tool is self-defense, talking back to your inner critic with a rational response and a more realistic situation. That should lead to a big release of negative emotions. The good enough concept can help you with the rational response.
Here’s an example:
I make so many grammar mistakes. I guess I am a poor writer. (pure perfectionism)
Negative feelings: Anger, frustration (intensity: 8 out of 10)
Rational response: Even if I still make quite a lot of grammar mistakes, I have great ideas for articles, my style is improving and so is my grammar, and I get a lot of positive feedback on my articles. I already am a good enough writer and I’m becoming better and better. I am proud of my progress.
Negative feelings after the rational response: Anger, frustration (2 out of 10), feeling proud
As the first step, I suggest you use the template you can download below. You will soon become such an expert in identifying negative thoughts and performing emotional accounting that you will easily do the exercise in your head, like I do it now all the time.
How much is just good enough to be happy in life and successfully move forward?
It may be hard to perform emotional accounting the first few times, but I promise you that it can completely change your life. Combining emotional accounting with the good enough concept can really help you successfully fight your perfectionist nature.
The best battles are the ones you win over yourself, and now you have the tools to fight your inner perfectionist critic. Good luck with your fight.
In some way, living a good quality life is not rocket science. With time, good decisions lead you to a good life and poor decisions lead you to a crappy, stressful low quality life. The better decisions you make, big or small, the better off you are. Good decisions accumulate, and with time they bring great yields.
Examples of good decisions are saving money, not overeating, exercising a few times per day, investing into your knowledge, brainstorming ideas, finding and doing a job you love, and so on. Examples of bad decisions are smoking, drinking excessively, eating too much sugar, getting uncontrollably into debt, buying things you don’t need and staying in an abusive relationship, just to name a few.
On a logical level, it’s pretty simple to understand that but in real life, it’s quite hard to follow good smart decisions; simply because you weren’t programmed to make smart long-term decisions.
You were initially programmed for life in a jungle, which means instant gratification (life was short), laziness (energy needed to be saved), overeating (food was rare) and any kind of domination – material, physical, intellectual (the alpha male/female got it all).
That’s why it’s hard to make smart decisions.
The intellectual, conscious, creative and planning part of you has to override the animal instinct that ruled decision-making for millions of years in our ancestors. And it has to do it over and over again, it never stops.
That’s an extremely hard thing to do. It takes a lot of cognitive power and severe self-control, together with constant curbing of primal needs, and never letting the benefits of reinvesting into your tomorrow out of your sight.
Rare are the people who are mentally so strong that they can follow smart decisions in all different areas of life all the time. That’s why I wouldn’t count on self-discipline too much. In reality, counting solely on your self-discipline is not a superior life strategy.
Sooner or later, you kneel down in front of the laws of nature and genes. That’s why you have to be much smarter than relying on your self-discipline. You always have to be one step ahead of life.
Don’t use cognitive power for good decisions if you don’t have to
One way to be smarter than life is to automate good decisions. The idea behind this is pretty simple. No matter if a decision or a habit is hard or easy to follow, automate it if possible.
If you can’t completely automate it, semi-automate it. Make sure it takes zero cognitive effort, or almost zero, to do something smart. Take transaction costs all the way down, as low as possible. Let it happen automatically.
Make sure you don’t have to think about it, make sure that it takes zero discipline and that smart decisions just happen by themselves. Put good decisions on autopilot. You have to be a little bit creative, but let’s look at few examples of how you can do that.
Money
The easiest way to automate good decisions is with money management. That’s because nowadays, money is nothing but some numbers in an online app, and you can do all kinds of transactions and functions simply by using your computer.
Practical examples
Here are examples of good decisions you can automate:
Automate transactions to your savings account every time you get a paycheck.
Make sure you need to get an approval for all costs higher than a certain amount (from your spouse or CFO), especially if you like to overspend.
As an alternative, you may have a rule that you aren’t allowed to make any big purchases if you don’t sleep it over (for 14 days).
Don’t have a credit card with you, but only enough money to buy yourself lunch and a healthy snack.
That way, you don’t have to struggle with decision-making, good decisions are already made for you. Every week, money gets transferred to the savings account and you live with the rest. You can’t do impulse purchases, because you need approval or wait long enough for your emotions to stabilize. If you only have enough money for lunch with you, you can’t do small unnecessary purchases that sum up in high amounts of wasted money with time.
Here’s an article that gives a lot of detail about how to make good automatic money decisions. With money, you can really automate being smart. All other areas can be more or less only semi-automated, still following the basic rules of positive automation – meaning that something good happens with the least effort possible.
Health
You can (semi-)automate good decisions in all three areas of health – diet, exercise and lifestyle. Now let’s not pretend and exaggerate: doing one hour of exercise as part of your morning routine is extremely good for you, but it takes effort and years before the habit becomes such a strong part of you that we could call it automation.
Practical examples
Nevertheless, there are many small things you can do for your health that are pretty much semi-automated and easy to follow:
Subscribe to a weekly fresh delivery of organic vegetables and fruits to your home, and then put it in a visible place. You can also standardize the typical daily meals you like the most.
Eat a salad for one of your main meals. Don’t think about it, don’t decide about anything, for one of your main meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), just order or make yourself a salad. All the effort it takes is for you to say: “And one salad please” to the waiter. You can do the same with one piece of fruit.
Have a strict deadline for the hour after which you don’t eat anymore. “You don’t have to decide about anything, you simply don’t eat anymore. (after 6pm, for example). It’s how intermittent fasting works and it can really do wonders for your health. You can do the same by not eating dessert at all. If you don’t eat dessert at all, there is nothing to decide about.
Every night, prepare your sports bag and take it with you. Just put it in your car. Now, the training bag won’t force you to go to the gym, but it will put additional pressure on you. It’s simple and easy to pack your exercising clothes every night and take them with you. You can automate that. Let’s hope that the rest will follow.
You can automate for all electronic devices to go into sleep mode at a certain hour, let’s say 9pm. Then you can take a book, read for a while and go to bed early.
There are many decisions regarding your health that you can automate. Yes, they are called healthy habits, but the idea is to take transaction costs as low as possible, so that it takes almost zero effort to follow. At the end of the day, the best habits are the ones with which you can follow through in the long term.
Relationships
An important part of quality relationships is putting in all the necessary effort. You have to water a relationship like a flower, otherwise it starts to wither.
You water relationships with attention, love, affection, understanding, care, good communication, by providing value, mutual support and with many other contributions on a physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, material and social level.
It’s not easy to be consistent in relationships and make sure that your investment levels stay the same all the time or even get stronger. You get drained, you have bad days, and your affection may fluctuate.
That’s why you should try to automate some good relationship decisions. Not to make the relationship mechanic, but to protect yourself from your own weaknesses.
Practical examples
Examples of automating good decisions:
If you get upset with something, you tell it to the other person immediately and start looking for a solution.
You never go to sleep on bad terms with your spouse. You always work things out before going to bed. You don’t even think about whether to talk or not, you don’t hold a grudge, you automatically solve the problem before going to sleep.
Every day when your spouse comes from work, you put away all electronic devices, you stop doing whatever you were doing (no matter how important it is), and you talk for a while about your day – fully present.
You book a date with your spouse every first Wednesday of the month. It’s in the calendar, it’s automated, there is no rescheduling and you go someplace nice, just the two of you, without any distractions. In the same way, you can automate lunch with your best friend in regular terms.
You send a creative love message every day to your spouse. Every day, one message, with no exceptions. Get a reminder or alarm saying it’s time to get romantic and creative.
If you get a message from somebody, you reply immediately in an active constructive way.
There are many ways how you can automate good gestures in a relationship. Yes, you have to make sure things don’t get mechanic and that you really do it because you want to. It’s good to keep a creative component or some kind of effort, even if you automate part of a decision. And at the end of a day, if you don’t want to do it, you can stop at any moment. You have to stay agile.
But the idea is to free yourself from cognitive burden and not to rely solely on your self-discipline. Even more, you don’t want to get indulgent and sloppy in relationships with time, when you settle. You want to invest more and more in quality relationships not less, and automation and semi-automaton can help you with that.
Examples of IFTTT Recipes for automating good decisions
Endless options for smart decision automation
Much like we’ve seen for the core life areas (health, wealth and relationships), you can use the same principle in other life areas. There are numerous ways how you can automate and semi-automate good decisions, not only to make sure that you’re going in the right direction and to save your cognitive capabilities for other life matters, but also to simplify your life and make more room for being relaxed and happy.
Practical examples
Here are some additional examples for automating good decisions:
Read every day before you go to sleep, and make sure you don’t fall asleep if you haven’t read at least one page of a book.
Have a few standard outfits for different occasions and put them in a queue. You pick the one that’s waiting first in the queue. Or you can wear the same outfit every day, like Mark Zuckerberg does.
You check email 30 minutes before your work ends and you reply or delete all emails in these 30 minutes. You don’t check your email otherwise.
You simply don’t do meetings. When something needs to be communicated, you use your phone or go for lunch with that person, and when something needs to be solved, you organize a workshop with a strict deadline and a goal to be met.
Every 14 days, you have a planning sprint for the next two weeks. It’s in your calendar, it’s fixed and nothing can get between you and strategic planning of your future.
Put a web nanny to stop you after an hour on social networks and make sure your computer won’t even start before you watch an online course for 30 minutes.
Automatically get the things you regularly buy in the same intervals from Amazon Subscribe
Your plan to automate good decisions
The easiest way to automate parts of your life (smart decisions) is to start with money. Log into your bank account and simply set a weekly transaction to a savings account on the day you receive a paycheck.
Then make sure you don’t spend that money, and watch your savings account grow. Doing automation with money is the easiest because it’s purely based on technology. Starting to automate good money decisions should motivate you to do automation in other areas of life as well.
In fact, you can easily do 100 % automation with all other tech stuff. There are two very popular web apps called IFTTT and Zappier that can automate many of your computer tasks and save you tons of time. With one app or the other you can automate things like:
Save any email attachment I receive to Dropbox or Google Drive
If I star an email, remind me to take care of it
When I’m in a meeting for more than 60 minutes, schedule a phone call to myself and run
Log my working hours automatically in a Google Spreadsheet
Back up Facebook photos I’m tagged in to Dropbox
IFFT has something called individual automation functions recipes. If you check their site, you can find hundreds of them. I really like that name. An automation recipe. It’s time for you to get creative and cook up a few good automation recipes, besides tech and money stuff.
I encourage you to take a piece of paper and outline a few automation recipes you can do in your life. Start with the easy things and ideas you can do immediately. You can use the IF – THEN model and sketch out your ideas for automation.
Homework
Make your fist recipe, and then add new recipes as quickly as you feel comfortable following through with them. The lower the transaction costs and the more you can really automate, the less willpower and discipline you need. If complete automation is possible, it takes almost zero effort to introduce a new habit in life. Look for such opportunities. Be smart and automate good decisions.
There are two variables that lead to different outcomes and results in life, positive and negative ones. The first one is your character, together with your personality traits, behavioral patterns, level of awareness, quality of decision-making, and so on.
The second one is your environment. To a big extent, you are a product of your environment. Different types of environments bring different parts of your character to life. So an important part of personal development is also dealing with your environment.
Where you currently are = Your starting point + Your character + Your environment
I’ve seen it over and over again. A weak character in a strong environment, with lots of support and positive role models, starts to flourish. On the other hand, the strongest and brightest character in a bad environment gets corrupted and shady.
I experienced both options. I was a really bad student in high school. A real rebel. But I attended an elite high school dedicated exclusively to nerds. So even if I was a bad pupil, I was still a good one compared to the national average. Small deviancies were already really bad behavior in such a positive environment.
The outcome would have been completely different if I hadn’t been in such a healthy environment. Maybe I even would have ended up in prison, because I was a really pissed-off teenager.
On the other hand, I worked for companies with really bad culture, years after I built a strong character and high competence levels. No matter how good and efficient manager I am, it took me an enormous amount of energy to not get involved in gossiping, malicious politics and other deconstructive behaviors.
When everybody is doing it, you’re naturally drawn to do it too. At the end of the day, we are also monkeys trying to fit into our social circles.
The environment around you is leading you to a certain kind of outcomes, because it influences your decisions and which part of your character gets emphasized. So it makes sense to deal a lot with the environment you operate in as part of continuous improvement and personal growth. Especially because you also have the power to change it to a certain extent. Much like you are a product of your environment, so is the environment a product of you.
Your environment can bring out the best or the worst in you.
When I talk about the environment you operate in, I especially have the following elementsin mind (you can find a more extensive list here):
Your key relationships – spouse, family, friends, boss, coworkers, mentor
General market trends – financial markets, job markets etc.
Your company culture and your office space
Your family culture and your home
Other elements (religion, infrastructure, infostructure)
These are all the things that extensively influence your spirit, your behavior, your potential, what you can achieve in life, how happy you are and the general quality of life.
You become who you spend the most time with. You always internalize some of the culture around you. You move together with markets. You are only a wheel in a greater system that’s called your environment.
The bad news is that you don’t have an influence on many of those factors. You didn’t choose the country you were born in. It’s not that easy to move to a foreign county, not psychologically and sometimes not even legally. You didn’t choose your family and your family heritage or how wealthy your family is. You didn’t choose your genes and talents. You often end up in certain jobs or markets based on the randomness factor or based on pure (un)luck.
For example, you may not have the talent for becoming a coder, so you will probably have a hard time finding a job in the IT sector, even if it’s growing fast and there are plenty of jobs. Maybe you had to go study something you never wanted because your parents pushed you.
The good news is that at some point in life, you do have an influence on many of the environmental factors. The more you understand yourself and your talents, the more aware you are of your personal power and the more you know what kind of an environment is the best positive fit for you, the more you can shape your own destiny. The more capable you are at influencing your environment, the more free will you have, if any.
Many times, we contribute too many success reasons to personality traits and too few to positive environmental factors, even if the latter can be pure luck.
How to build yourself a motivational environment
If your environment really influences your behavior to a great extent, you logically want to have strong support from your environment in a way that will help you achieve your goals. You need an environment that supports your life vision, mission, specific goals, desired lifestyle and high quality of life.
Even more, you want to build yourself an environment that brings out the best in you and leads you to the best possible outcomes. To achieve that, we have to get familiar with a few concepts related to environmental elements.
The scale
There are elements of the environment you can easily influence and others that are much harder to change or it’s even impossible to do so. Here is a very general scale from the easiest to the hardest elements of your environment to be influenced:
Your possessions
Your home decorations
Your office decorations, if there is no company policy that’s preventing you from doing it
Your mentor
Your friends
Your spouse – depending if you are married or not, and how long you’ve been in a relationship
The company you work for, your coworkers and your boss
Your primary family culture
Market trends
PESTLE factors – if you don’t decide to change the country
This is no rocket science. You can easily sell the things you possess or buy new ones (that you can afford), you can decorate your home more or less as you want. On the other hand, your vote for changing the political or economic system doesn’t have a really big influence. If you don’t start a revolution, there is not much you can do. In the same way, it’s easier to switch to a new car than to change your friends or family members.
The point is that there is a scale of how hard it is to change specific elements of your environment. That leads to a simple conclusion. Start with the easy ones and then build up slowly. It’s the number one rule of changing your environment.
Your options
After understanding the scale, it’s time to analyze all the options you have. In reality, you only have two options when it comes to reorganizing your environment, and they are based on the level of control you have over a specific environmental element. The two options are:
Change: Organize your environment differently. Reorganizing your environment will lead you to more positive behavior. We can say that changing your environment will change you.
Adjust: Some environmental elements you can’t change. You can only change yourself and your environment will change because you’ll see it differently.
Behind the two options is the level of control you have. There are elements you have control of and there are elements way out of your control. For the elements that fall into your control zone, you have the ability to proactively organize them so that they work in your favor.
For the elements that are out of your control, you can only adjust and look at them from a different angle. The elements you don’t have control over, you can only reframe in your mind so that they somehow work in your favor.
When it comes to your environment and life in general, there is an important quote that goes something like this: “Lord, grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
The harsh reality is that some things you can’t change in life, you can only change how you see them and how you react to them. You can only change your mindset about them. You can decide to see or interpret things differently. And in some cases, that’s your greatest power.
Know when to redesign your environment and when to redesign your way of thinking.
It’s time to start designing
Now you know the basic principles. You are a product of your environment to a certain extent and you can only achieve your dream life and your goals in the right environment.
You need an environment that supports you, that brings out the best in you and accelerates your way to success. Much of your environment was determined when you were born, but when you become an adult you can change many of its elements. So let’s start redesigning.
Before we start redesigning, please also keep in mind that as we discussed, there are many elements of your environment that you can change easily, but some you can’t change at all, you can only change the way you look at them. It makes sense to start with environmental elements that are the easiest to change and then tackle tougher ones.
Examples of the easiest ways to positively change your environment:
Change your desktop wallpaper to a motivational one (on your phone and computer)
Stick post-it notes to your mirror, car etc. as a cue to perform a specific habit
Set alarms and notifications to follow your habits
Decorate your home or office with motivational photos
Declutter your home
Install an app to better manage your health or wealth
Sell things that annoy you
Put fresh fruit on the kitchen counter instead of chips
Buy yourself a faster computer
Every single small thing in your environment serves as a trigger for certain behaviors and moods, and that’s how habits are formed and executed. So pay very close attention to every small thing that’s part of your environment and to what kind of behavior it contributes. If it’s not a positive one, change it.
Now let’s go to slightly more challenging ways to change your environment:
You can get rid of your TV, for example, to read more
You can find one positive person who will support you at your goals or find yourself a mentor
You can delete a social network or a time-wasting app
You can find a new more ambitious friend or stop spending time with somebody who’s an energy vampire
You can switch from owning a car to a bike (it’s good for your health and wallet)
If small things influence your behavior in small ways, big things do it in big ways. Big environmental things are especially your key relationships and market trends. You especially want to carefully choose these two environmental forces and make sure they have a positive influence on you.
To achieve that, you have to sometimes make more radical and thorough changes in your environment. Examples of more demanding changes for building yourself a more motivational environment are:
Joining a new social circle (business club, hobby meet-up etc.)
Introducing a new location to your life (gym, co-working space etc.)
Finding a new spouse who’s a better fit for you
Switching to a job where your talents can really shine
Changing a career and finding more perspective markets
Moving to a different country
The final question is what to do with the environmental forces you can’t change but can only look at differently. In such cases, the best thing to do is to focus yourself on better managing your thoughts, feelings and behavior.
You can do that by using many different mental tools like cognitive reframing, focusing on the positive etc. By changing yourself, you then also change your environment.
Examples of changing yourself in order to change your environment:
You stop fighting with a family member and consequently they also have to stop fighting with you
You stop resisting market trends and accept them by adjusting your actions accordingly
You focus on the positives in an economical system you don’t like (capitalism, socialism etc.) and build a superior strategy to work well in the system, even if you dislike it
The more successful you want to be, the more support you need from your environment. The more successful you want to be, the more people you need who support you and believe in you (success is teamwork), you need better support from market trends and you need a general motivational environment that drives you through the times when your spirits are dampened.
Sometimes if you can’t beat them, you have to join them.
Things to look for in your environment
At the bottom line, you want to have an environment that will:
Make you feel good; that includes everything from bringing out the best in you to knowing that you fit in and can shine brightly with all your talents and efforts. It’s not hard to sense which environment you feel good in and where you don’t.
Encourage you to make small right and smart choices every day, which will accumulate into success over time. Examples areriding a bike instead of going by car, eating an apple instead of chips, saving money etc.
You want to have elements in your environment that will drive you towards making good big decisions in life. For example, starting your own business if it makes sense, moving to a new better location or country etc.
And in the end, you want to make sure that environmental forces are accelerating your success. For example, if you are working for a company that’s growing fast, there are usually many more opportunities to get a promotion.
An encouraging positive environment usually has many talented people who work together, it’s very well developed in terms of technology and other PESTLE elements, there is a high level of tolerance towards differences and failure, everything is very transparent and people work based on intrinsic motivation with a strong sense of purpose. We can also add solid market growth and an absence of bozos and zombies.
Homework
Express your power by changing your environment
It’s time for homework. It’s time for you to become aware of the power you have by changing your environment to just a slightly more positive note. Do one small thing that will make your environment more supportive of your goals. Be a little bit rebellious, show who’s the boss – in a positive way. And do it now.
Hang a motivational poster
Stick a post-it note on your bathroom mirror
Clean your home
Write to a person you respect and ask if they would mentor you
Delete an app
First do one small thing so you can start feeling the power you have and how you can sometimes easily change your environment to a more positive one. Then follow the next steps:
Analyze which parts of your environment are positively influencing you and which aren’t
Brainstorm how you can reinforce all the positive influences of your environment
Rank all negative environmental influences from the easiest one to change to the hardest one
Start redesigning your environment and redesigning your life settings in a way that you will have all the support needed to achieve your goals and dreams.
Your environment already had a big enough influence on you. Now it’s time for you to start shaping your environment. May the force be with you.
