life vision

Life as a narrative driven by dominant thoughts

When I first encountered cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) along with concepts like cognitive distortions, mental biofeedback and emotional accounting, I started to pay really close attention to all my beliefs, thoughts and everything else that was happening in my mind.

By paying close attention to my thoughts I finally saw the main connections. Your thoughts really are closely connected to your emotions. The more distorted and weak your thoughts are, the more you must deal with self-sabotage, negative feelings and low self-worth.

Your thoughts also greatly influence your future. They’re kind of small instructions or commands for who to become. They impact your selection of words, phrases, responses and finally actions. That’s where the wisdom that you become what you think comes from.

By being more attentive to my own thoughts, I became also attentive to the (expressed) mindset and thinking of other people – the people I coach, people I have intriguing discussions with or even my close friends.

Asking them thousands of questions helped me identify their core beliefs, values and dominant thoughts. Two very interesting patterns emerged.

Dominant negative thoughts

As a rule, people who experienced any kind of severe negative emotions for a longer period of time (anger, sadness, anxiety, greed etc.), also had a very strong inner critic together with impossible standards, and very convincing cognitive distortions supported by false beliefs (and contamination narrative as we’ll see).

Consequently, all the distorted thoughts and impossible standards towards yourself make reality appear much darker than it is. There’s always something that isn’t good enough, no matter how favorable life is. You are constantly at war with yourself.

But over time, I noticed one even more interesting pattern. You have probably heard of the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule. The rule states that for many events, roughly 80 % of the effects come from 20 % of the causes.

Practical examples of the Pareto principle are: 80 % of your sales come from 20 % of your clients, fixing top 20 % of the most reported bugs also eliminates 80 % of related errors and crashes, you wear 20 % of your clothes 80 % of the time.

I noticed that the Pareto principle also rules cognitive distortions (or negative thoughts). There are a few negative thoughts that people think over and over again in a specific time frame.

Some more permanent cognitive distortions are connected to identity (negative self-labeling, for example), other more fluid negative thoughts to specific negative life situations. But even fluid negative thoughts find a way to persist – when one negative situation passes, there is always something new that the negative mind fixates on.

There are negative thoughts that you’re repeating in your head over and over again, every single day. These are your dominant negative thoughts that support your core harmful beliefs. Even more, they often keep you caught in a constant negative emotional state and feeling of low self‑worth.

Beliefs thoughts habits

How to identify your dominant thoughts

Our brains love patterns (we see them even where there none) and negative thoughts are no exception to that. Your brain loves to repeat negative (or positive) thoughts.

The big irony is that even if you think the same thoughts over and over again, you are often not even aware of them. They are just present in your head, they stir your life in a negative direction, but you are rarely consciously aware of them.

Dominant thoughts are the ones that shape your life the most. Positive thoughts in a positive way, negative thoughts in a negative one. Consequently, identifying your thinking patterns can be extremely beneficial. And it’s actually quite easy to identify them. Here are a few suggestions how to achieve that:

Every day, write down your first thoughts when you wake up
Observe your thoughts when you’re alone or when you’re driving in a car
What are your thoughts before you enter the office
Write down your most frequent words and phrases in discussion with people
Identify your thinking patterns when you’re experiencing negative emotions
What are your thoughts when mini frustrations happen – somebody cuts you off on the road, you wait in line for a longer period than others, your computer freezes etc.
What are your thoughts when you meet a person you know
What are you thinking about most of the time

You usually have the same debates with the same people. It can be business, kids, sports, whatever. You talk about 20 % of things, 80 % of the time. People usually complain about the same things over and over again. A job they hate, kids that take too much energy, a lack of money etc.

Every single time you meet them, they bring up the same or very similar complaints. The same goes for you, just from other people’s perspective.

Here are some examples how to identify thinking patterns:

Event trigger	Thinking pattern (automatic thought)	Underlying belief
Somebody cuts you off	What an asshole	I’m being treated unfairly
You see your boss	What an asshole	Nobody respects me
You wake up	Not another day	Life is dull and boring
You make a mistake	How could I have made such a mistake?	I never do things right

After a few conversations with a person, you can quickly identify their main thinking patterns (or your own). Then you can analyze how distorted their thoughts really are, what kind of beliefs they support, and how they drive values and actions. The 5 Whys technique can help you to easily find a connection between automatic thought and underlying belief.

Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next. – Robert Ford, The Westworld

Identifying the main thinking patterns quickly exposes personality chunks like:

Identity – How you see yourself
Beliefs – Main ideas about life that you agree with and validate.
Values – All the ideas that are important to you, things you like or those you tend to avoid
Attention – What you focus your limited mental resources on the most
Behavioral habits – Behaviors that you repeatedly perform
Thinking habits (thinking patterns) – Repeating thoughts that go through your head most of the time
Emotional habits (emotional states) – Dominant emotional states you are experiencing most days

Now do a simple analysis. Write down 2 – 3 things you think and talk about with other people most of the time (career, money, sports etc.) – that’s where most of your attention is. Why are these things important to you? What are the thoughts that you think about these things over and over again? Are they negative or positive? What kind of beliefs and values do these thoughts support?

Then analyze how your actions are congruent with your words. Things that you mention in conversation are always somehow important to you. Find out why. And there is always some gap between your words and actions.

What you talk about is who you ought to be, and what you do is who you currently are.

My thinking patterns are shaped more or less around proving myself with intellectual creating. I constantly ask myself how I can be more productive, which new things I will create, and so on. There’s nothing wrong with that, until it escalates to the point where I forget to enjoy life, or when my self-worth suffers because I don’t get enough praise and admiration.

Understanding what your mind is focused on and what your dominant thinking patterns are can reveal a lot about how your mind is programmed; and that gives you a chance to reprogram yourself. But let’s take everything even a step further. Let’s look at how your dominant thoughts shape your life narrative and your life story.

Life as a narrative

Life as a narrative is shaped mostly by your dominant thoughts

I’m a big fan of the TV show called Westworld. If you don’t know the show, the scene is set in a Wild West themed futuristic amusement park populated by androids called hosts. The park is meant for rich paying customers to live out their fantasies without any consequences. It’s a brilliant conjunction of the past, future, human nature, and technology.

One very intriguing part of the show is how hosts are designed. At first glance, it seems that hosts (AI robots) follow their daily lives in interaction with real people more or less by following carefully prepared scripts with little to no improvisation.

They’re repeating behavioral patterns (or loops) based on the dedicated role in a specific park’s story. But there is much more to the host’s roles, which gives them more human nature. These human elements also help them to slowly develop self-consciousness during the show’s episodes.

Here are the human elements I have in mind:

Purpose: Each host is driven by something particular, something that gives it a purpose. That which gives the hosts purpose, can also drive them mad, if they don’t find a way to fulfill it.
Backstory: The hosts are always given a backstory, with cornerstone memories that anchor their lives. These backstories are usually tragic and painful events. They provide obstacles and the host’s job is to overcome them. These backstories support the fact that a little trauma can be illuminating.
Identity layers: The rest of their identity is built around the backstory, layer by layer. It influences all other aspects of their lives – from beliefs to values, understandings and decision making.
Thinking and behavioral loops: They repeat very similar phrases, react in the same way to similar life situations, and they have a default outlook on life that defines their main emotional states.
Awakening: The main thing that led the hosts to their awakening was suffering explicitly – the central trauma caused by the pain that the world is not as they want it to be.

The dialogues in the show, especially when the park’s creator Dr. Ford is involved, extensively discuss the basics of human nature, especially in relation to droids and how they’re built.

Understanding basic human nature is a very important puzzle of the show’s story, since hosts are slowly developing consciousness and becoming more human-like. Namely, with consciousness comes free will and that also brings the additional burden of primal human instincts.

In summary, these main human instincts presented in the show are:

The will to survive and dominate others: We humans are alone in this world for a reason. We murdered and butchered anything that challenged our primacy.
The urge to be attractive and reproduce: The human intellect was like peacock feathers. Just an extravagant display intended to attract a mate.
The desire to transcend death by creating: An old friend once told me something that gave me great comfort. Something he had read. He said that Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin never died. They simply became music.
Dealing with internal and external conflicts: I have come to think of so much of consciousness as a burden, a weight, and we have spared them [droids] that. Anxiety, self-loathing, guilt. The hosts are the ones who are free.
Character weaknesses: Never place your trust in us. We’re only human. Inevitably, we’ll only disappoint you.

Now let’s explore how these android behavioral designs can help you explore and understand your own life. Seeing yourself as an android (or an AI robot with your body as an avatar) can give you a unique perspective and help you analyze your beliefs, thinking patterns and even more importantly understand yourself better.

Westworld host

Around which things is your identity shaped?

Let’s start with a simple exercise. Take a 3^rd person perspective and imagine yourself as a droid. Imagine that you are a robot, imagine that your body is nothing but a piece of mechanical equipment.

Your current environment is the amusement park where you play a very particular role dedicated only to you. Imagine that someone wrote the code for how you behave and respond, who you encounter and what you experience in life. Nothing is random and everything is carefully scripted.

Now comes the main question – what is your identity shaped around? Especially think about the purpose that is driving your “android” and the backstory around which your identity is built. Take a piece of paper and write down the main narrative, as if you were describing yourself as a droid in the modern Westworld.

You could go very broadly in this analytical exercise. You could list down your main beliefs, the hierarchy of values, cognitive strategy, strengths and weaknesses, list of knowledge and skills and other competences, and so on.

But that is not the point of this exercise, since those are very common self-analytical exercises. You want to discover something new, something that is very focused on how your life is unfolding and towards what your thinking patterns incline.

Thus, focus only on the following:

Your purpose – what drives you through life the most but also sometimes drives you insane
Your backstory – which past tragic or painful situations marked your life the most
Your life narrative – how is your life narrative shaped around the backstory and how are your personality layers built around the events that marked your life the most
Your repeating thoughts, patterns and emotions – what kind of thoughts, responses, habits and emotional states do you repeat throughout the day
Awakening – based on your painful backstory, what do you have to learn about life, which obstacles must you overcome and what kind of wisdom can you develop

Focus exclusively on these five elements. Describe every bullet point in one or two sentences, not more. Try to focus on the main idea of your life’s narrative.

My big realization when I did this exercise was that my childhood was shaped extensively by different kinds of psychological suffering – I witnessed severe versions of all four types of unhealthy psychological coping mechanisms (fight, flight, freeze, fawn), unhealthy attachments and toxic systems.

The backstory is painful, as it ought to be, but it also represents the way to salvation and illumination. It gives me a chance for a unique contribution to the world.

[As humans we can be caught in] A prison of our own sins. ‘Cause you don’t want to change, or cannot change. Because you’re only human after all.

Past and future

The contamination and redemptive narrative

I was struggling to end this article in a more practical way, until an email with a link to “The two kinds of stories we tell ourselves” from the TED blog landed in my inbox at that very moment.

Reading the TED blog post showed me a very solid connection between Westworld sci-fi and a very practical use of life narrative and stories. It’s very surprising how well droid design fits with real life.

Psychological research (or more exactly the research of Daniel McAdams) shows that with storytelling, we make sense of our identities. We put different stories from our life into a narrative, which enables us to understand our lives as a coherent whole. And coherence gives meaning to life.

The coherent story you’re telling yourself about your life is called the “narrative identity”. Like every good story, the “narrative identity” also has positive and negative events that determine the plot, challenges that need to be overcome, people who help and block efforts, and the denouement of some form of pain, conflict and struggle.

Understanding “narrative identity” and stories plays a key role when it comes to human empathy. We share parts of our life stories with others when we want to be understood, and to better understand others, we need to know their life stories. Life stories and identity narrative help you better understand yourself and others.

Even more importantly, your life narrative is not a sum of everything that happened to you in the past. You tend to focus on a few extraordinary events, positive or negative ones.

These are the experiences that shape your personality the most. But a very important difference is how you interpret these life events. That makes the key distinction of how your identity, beliefs, values and life narrative are shaped.

In general, based on Daniel McAdams’ research, your life narrative can unfold in two different ways:

Redemptive narrative: The redemptive narrative tells the story of a life where tragic events brought something good with time. For example, how poverty brought a family closer together. In other words, the suffering and pain bring awakening and redemption.
Contamination narrative: In the contamination narrative, people see tragic events as a turning point where their life went from good to bad. They tend to end the stories with a negative connotation and don’t see the awakening potential in tragic events.

Logically, people who tell themselves a redemptive narrative about their life stories tend to have a stronger meaning (purpose). Even more, their lives are defined by growth, they contribute more to the society, and they are generally more proactive. They are also less prone to anxiety and depression.

The more aware we are of the story we want to tell with our lives, the clearer our choices for the future can be. – Dan McAdams

The best news is that your interpretations of your life stories and narrative (or frame) are not fixed. With cognitive reframing and other cognitive exercises, you can find more positive interpretations of your life stories. You can make small edits that will have a great impact on your life. If you read my life narrative, you can see that it goes from bad to good, it’s focused on redemption.

You have the power to edit, revise and find more positive interpretations of your life stories (in other words re-frame them), while still being constrained by the reality and facts of the past. You can always rewrite your life stories, including tragedies, in a more meaningful and positive way. In the center of everything is finding meaning in your hardships by adopting a positive identity.

Maybe we weren’t talking only about fiction after all?

Contamination or redemptive narrative

Homework

Rewrite your thinking patterns and reframe your life narrative

It’s time for me to share concluding thoughts and for you to do the exercises. First, describe your life narrative, purpose and backstory as if you were a droid; then identify your thinking patterns (negative and positive) that you repeat over and over again. When it comes to negative thinking patterns, you can help yourself with the categorization of cognitive distortions.

After the analysis, it’s time to rewrite your thinking patterns and reframe your life narrative:

With emotional accounting, make sure to turn your negative thinking patterns into positive ones
With cognitive reframing, find a more positive note to your life stories
Finally, make sure that your life narrative is a redemptive one, and that tragic (or positive) events that shaped your life the most lead you towards wisdom and awakening

Remember, your thoughts and interpretations of life events shape your past, present and future. You repeat 20 % of the thoughts (when you are alone, in discussions etc.) approximately 80 % of the time. You can see your extraordinary life events as either positive or negative.

That is driving your life in a certain direction. With different cognitive exercises, you can make sure that the direction is a positive one and that your life is full of meaning.

Valley of Death – where your dreams go to die
Every single startup has to go through the Valley of Death very early after being born. The same goes for personal goals and dreams. Unfortunately, around 80 % or even more businesses die in the Valley of Death; and the same goes for people’s goals and dreams. Getting trapped or lost in the Valley of Death means that startups and people die (inside) or at least turn into zombies, what is nothing but a living hell.

Before entering the Valley of Death, your imagination, visions, optimism, and even a little bit of naivety play a very important role – you need all of them to undertake any kind of adventure and start following your big goals and dreams. Without a dream of a greater life for yourself, you never take the first step.

You need to be a little bit naïve in the beginning, blinded by all the strong motivation and enthusiasm. That’s what leads you into action. But soon after taking a few serious steps, you enter the Valley of Death. There is where visions, imagination and optimism face a harsh and cold reality and often die.

In business and personal lives, people go after their dreams, but soon after figuring out how hard it is, they give up and turn into zombies. Most often only because they give up too soon.

The Valley of Death is a place where it gets tested who has the character to succeed and who doesn’t, it gets tested who really deserves it and who doesn’t. The Valley of Death is a place where you must show that you want it badly enough, that you will never give up, that you will learn, improve, adjust, play smarter and smarter, and somehow find a way through the Valley reaching the safe side.

It’s true that crossing the Valley of Death is dangerous and tough, but it can also be a daring and exciting adventure, especially if you love challenges. And as you probably know the saying, life can only be either a daring adventure or nothing.

I often found myself in the Valley of Death. When I started my own businesses. When I started to take care of my health and wealth and several other times in the past when I was naïve about how easy it is to succeed at something.

I still am in the Valley of Death with this blog, and I am drawing the map (validated learning, in other words) for getting out of it as quickly as possible. I am even deeper in the Valley of Death in trying to learn how to code. I’m just somewhere in between my imagination of how I could also be a hacker and the reality that learning to code is not that easy at all.

The point is that many times in my past, I walked through the Valley of Death proudly as a winner; and several times, I brutally died and learned hard lessons of how your dreams can be stumped by life with no mercy if you don’t play your cards right. So I want to share a few key lessons for how to successfully walk in and through the Valley of Death and what to do when you realize that you may not make it.

Nobody is born to die in the Valley of Death

Nobody is born to become a zombie. Nobody is born to die in the Valley of Death. Nobody is born to live a miserable life. In the beginning, we all have big dreams for what we want to do with our lives – who to become and what to achieve.

But it’s easy to dream when you are just a kid and don’t yet have any experience with the harsh reality. Then after becoming an adult, two things can happen:

Your life is either a daring adventure …

You learn how to walk through the Valley of Death and you persevere at following your dreams no matter what. You face your fears, you fight, you make smart decisions and put in the effort to get what you want. Sometime you make it, sometimes you get knocked down, but you never give up.

You follow your life vision, without any option to retreat or surrender. When you get knocked down, you know that there must be another way to get to your dream. You know that you can always innovate your way out and you can always make a step towards a better life. You know that beginnings are hard, but with time, the hard road becomes easy.

No matter how hard life is, you decide to live it as a real adventurer. As you have probably guessed, that is a small minority of folks.

… or nothing

Unfortunately, the majority of people are on the other side of the spectrum. The other side of spectrum is not somewhere between a good life and a life that sucks, but on a scale where the only axis is measuring how much life sucks. It can be from being completely miserable and depressed to only somehow unsatisfied (with your job, spouse or life in general) but anyway, no matter where you are on the axis, life still sucks.

Life can only be a daring adventure or nothing, there is no middle path.

You probably know the scenario of how quickly life can become nothing. You give up after the first few failed attempts of going after your dreams and turn into a zombie. A zombie going everywhere life kicks you, hoping for the best. Life rarely kicks you where you really want to be. Such behavior is also known as reactive behavior.

The majority of people give up when they set their foot in the Valley of Death for the first time. Because it seems so hard and scary. Nevertheless, it’s a valley full of CRAP – criticism, rejections, assholes, pressure and other traps.

So people rather turn back and go into the safe zone, often not aware that the comfort zone is turning them into a zombie. That’s sadly where most people are, usually right after graduating and getting their first job.

Comfort zone Valley of Death Success

Zombie mode C.R.A.P. God mode

Even though people turn into zombies, they usually keep dreaming. They keep dreaming of a good life, only without doing anything. They play the lottery, watch TV, subscribe to multi-level marketing from time to time, argue in bars, and so on.

They dream a lot, they talk a lot, but they stay at zero. Because only zero can invite vivid imagination, only zero can keep you in the world of naivety, where you can dream and talk a lot but do nothing, where you can flirt but never go after the first kiss.

Zero is where you can dream, but a single step into the Valley of Death is where your dreaming stops, it’s where your imaginary world meets reality. So you have to decide between staying at zero and keeping your dreams or facing harsh reality.

Zero invites imagination

The easiest thing to do in life is to stay at zero and only dream and talk. Everyone can do dreaming and talking, and most people stay at this stage. You build a kind of psychological defensive system to protect your self-image. You dream like when you were a kid, a kid with zero experience and a vivid imagination.

Practical examples
- If I decided to take good care of my health, I could be on a magazine cover.
- If I decided to take good care of my wealth, I could be a successful investor.
- Someday I will make enough money to buy myself a small house in nature.
- One day I will meet the love of my life.
- I am smart, I can easily learn how to program.
- This is such a good business idea; I could build a successful company around it.
It’s so easy to dream about how fit you could be if you haven’t stepped in the gym a single time. It’s easy to dream about how successful an investor you could be, if you haven’t made a single investment in your life and lost some money. It’s easy to dream about a house you want if you haven’t checked prices in real-estate listings at all or gone to the bank asking even for general loan terms.

It’s easy to dream about the love of your life if you haven’t gone on a single date in years. It’s easy to dream about being a hacker if you haven’t written a single line of code. It’s easy to dream about being a successful entrepreneur if you haven’t tried to sell a single thing ever in your life. Zero always brings vivid imagination.

When you are at zero, you are frankly at the same level as that 7-year-old kid with no real life experiences.

If you don’t have experience with something, you simply can’t know it and understand it. You can talk, you can dream, you can imagine, you can defend your point of view and your assumptions, you can protect your self-image by creating an imaginary world where you are successful as shit, but in reality you know nothing. You are like Jon Snow.

After zero comes beginner’s optimism

You are at zero, dreaming about doing something with your life, and then finally at some point you decide to go after the goals you always dreamt about. Usually there is a trigger – inspiration or desperation.

Mid-life crisis, relationship breakups, losing a job, neighbor buying a new fancy car, best friend starting a successful business, getting a business idea, falling in love and similar events are frequent triggers that kick you straight out of the comfort zone and into the Valley.

And that’s good. Deciding to really make something out of your life and not only dream about it is awesome. But there is usually a big problem. Initial vivid imagination starts turning into beginner’s optimism. You add to your dreams sentences like: It can’t be that hard. If s/he could do it, I can do it too.

Don’t get me wrong, you have to be motivated, enthusiastic and optimistic for every goal you go after. The problem is when beginner’s optimism helps you lie to yourself and continue living in a bubble of imagination now called a fake feeling of progress.

Practical examples
- You go on a diet without really changing your lifestyle and you can’t wait for it to end. You measure your progress only by your weight and no other metrics.
- You invite a salesman of financial products to your home, to present all investment opportunities and advise you on the best ones that will make you the best ROI.
- You create accounts on online dating sites, you chat with folks on Tinder, Snapchat or wherever, but you never really go on a date, you never escalate or make a move.
- You learn the basic syntax of a programming language and then switch to a new one and a new one, never really diving deep into a language and mastering it.
- You write a business plan with a financial plan for how you’re going to earn millions in a few years. You never really try to find customers for your products.
In other words, you do the easy stuff that leads you nowhere. On top of that, you live in a lie of how successful and awesome you are becoming.

Obviously living in a lie is not a superior strategy for walking through the Valley of Death as a winner. That approach is closer to entering the Valley with your eyes blindfolded hoping that somehow you will manage to avoid all the traps. Few are that lucky.

It’s time to face the harsh reality and stare into Death’s eyes

The more you lie to yourself, the harder it is when you have to face the harsh reality. Sooner or later, a trap or a barbed wire bursts your bubble of naivety and you have to deal with real facts.

You have to face the reality that to achieve anything great in life, you have to invest really a lot. You can’t be only interested; you have to be committed, dedicated, persistent, resilient, focused and much more. This is where most people give up, run back into the comfort zone and forever turn into zombies.

Practical examples
- Losing weight stops after squeezing some water out of your system and then the yo-yo effect happens when you finish with the diet after several weeks. You go to a personal trainer that writes you a dieting and exercising program and when you see that you have to completely overturn your lifestyle if you want to permanently lose weight, you rather go back to your old habits.
- The “once in a lifetime opportunity” investment you were sold by a financial advisor starts losing money. You open a book about investing to get more knowledge why that is and get completely confused by all types of investments, markets and financial products complexity, and simply give up.
- You go on a few dates, get rejected, and when you finally don’t get rejected you figure out that the person is far from your ideal partner, but anyway you somehow settle, because you are too afraid of one more rejection.
- You figure out that a basic (really basic) programming challenge takes a lot of mental effort, hours of intellectual work, googling and fighting with the problem. So you again give up instead.
- Now that you built your shiny product based on the business plan, you finally try to sell it and nobody wants to buy it. You realize on your own skin that “build and they will come” doesn’t work.
All that hurts, but here is the most important secret of life. Every single master was once a beginner. And every beginner in whichever field was in such a naïve and painful situation. That’s normal and that’s natural. It’s part of the process of becoming great.

All great people, all high achievers and all billionaires find themselves in such situations in life – realizing they had no clue what it really takes to be successful. In the startup world, there is a saying that every successful startup goes through a big crisis or two and has to look death straight in the eyes before finding the path to real success.

This tough situation is very nicely described in the saying that in the dark, stars shine the brightest. So the only question is, what do you do next, when you find yourself in a situation full of dark and horror?

In the dark, stars shine the brightest.

You have only two choices, either you face the harsh reality and really learn how to walk through the Valley of Death or you go back to the zero, back into your imaginary world, where you can dream as big as you want, but in reality you aren’t really living life.

At this point, you have to decide to either become a real adventurer or a zombie. Will you take the blue pill or the red pill? That isn’t really a choice, you absolutely have to go for the adventurer option. You only have one life and it’s too precious to live it as a zombie.

Decide to learn how to walk through the Valley of Death

After seeing the gap between your imaginary world and reality, and after realizing that hope and beginner’s optimism are a good beginning but not a superior strategy, it’s time to really learn how to walk through the Valley of Death.

Now, everyone has their own Valley of Death, depending on their goals, environment, life situation and many other factors, but general rules for walking through the scary valley are the same.

It’s not easy, but you have to think long-term

The first fact is that if it were easy, everybody would do it. If it were easy to get fit, rich, fluent in a (programming) language, build healthy relationships etc. everybody would do it. Because it’s not easy, only a minority is willing to put in the effort and commitment. If you read this article all the way to this point, I’m sure that you are part of this minority!

If it were easy everybody would do it.

So for every big goal you want to achieve, know that it will not be easy, but hard. Probably extremely hard. Usually we are talking about years of hard work and dedication.

In the frame of 5 to 10 years, you can usually see big results – in your body structure, bank account figures, business size and profitability or your competences at a mastery level. But although it’s hard, it can be done. Many people have done it and so can you. Just keep the long-term view.

Always carefully manage your expectations

Next to admitting to yourself that it won’t be easy, you have to know that the starting point you have matters a lot. That’s where life isn’t fair, but you have to accept the rules of life and play by them.

Your genes, your IQ, how rich your family is, how well you were raised, where you live, how early you started to work on your goals and so on, it all greatly influences the potential you have and how fast you can achieve it.

The shittier your starting point is and the more ambitious your goals are, the more you will have to work hard and smart and the longer it will take you to get to your goals. That means you have to pick challenges suitable for you and then intensify them gradually.

Compete with yourself, not with people who were given a much better starting point. In the long term, you can catch up to them in most things, but you have to start with the first step that isn’t too big for you. The good news is that along the way, you will learn so much more and you will be richer for the experience of knowing how to get yourself out of a shitty starting point to achieve a certain goal. That kind of knowledge is gold.

Having unrealistic expectations is pretty much the same as going back to zero and starting to daydream.

So manage your expectations wisely. Having unrealistic expectations is pretty much the same as going back to zero and starting to daydream. So instead manage your expectations properly and first build strong foundations, then build your skyscraper of success floor by floor knowing that you have a very strong basis. Even if it takes 10, 20 or 30 years longer than it took somebody who had a much better starting point than you.

Be utterly obsessed with your vision and mission and get educated

Since you have to be 110 % committed to achieve anything big in life, you should carefully choose which dreams to follow. Every action you take has to be based on a really strong emotional vision and mission that will drive you through every single challenge and obstacle on the way.

The best way to measure your true obsession is by how much you read about a specific topic and with how many people you talked about it. You see, only reading is never enough, but getting educated is mandatory to walk successfully through the Valley of Death. And people who are obsessed with something usually read everything that exists on the topic they want to achieve.

The smartest thing to do is to have a vision list and go after a specific dream when the time is ripe. Especially when you have the support from the market trends and key relationships and are competent enough. You have to enter the Valley of Death ready somehow, you have to play your game smart.

Follow the process

When you decide to go after your vision, when you get educated and the time is ripe, there is only one thing you can trust – the process. Every success is nothing but following a carefully orchestrated process. A process means repeating boring things day by day. Following the process means doing something every day that gets you closer to your goals.

If you want to achieve the final event, which is always to get yourself out of the Valley of Death and really succeed, you have to follow and trust the process. You have to put in the daily effort, constantly learn and adjust, you have to continuously improve yourself, find new ways when you fail and never give up.

Always measure your progress, metrics are your map

To know if you are really progressing or not, you need a set of metrics. Actionable metrics are the ones that help you draw a map of the Valley of Death so you can walk through it more easily. Actionable metrics are the ones that help you adjust your process so that you are really going in the right direction.

It’s never easy to measure your progress. Not only does it take additional effort and time, even more so because metrics are the ones that force you out of your imaginary world and show you the harsh reality. But they are also the cure. Actionable metrics are also the bright stars that shine when reality is dark and full of horror.

Metrics are the ones that lead you to success at the end.

So always have metrics you measure and follow, no matter how harsh the reality they show you, especially in the beginning (calculating your net worth, your body fat percentage or whatever). When you see your numbers going in the right direction after you put some effort and commitment into your goals, you will get much more motivated.

Find your fit and stay flexible

When you enter the Valley of Death, assuming you follow the right set of metrics, you soon realize that there is a big gap between your assumptions (imaginary world) and the real world. You’re always wrong before you’re right. When you find yourself in such a gap, you have to accept the harsh reality and start living in the real world.

You have to leave your naïve dream world behind and build new, more accurate dreams based on real facts, not your false ego assumptions.

It’s nice to protect your self-image with illusions, but it doesn’t bring results.

That means you always have to put all of your assumptions to the test. That was one of the strongest characteristic traits of Steve Jobs. Even as a successful leader, he had no problem admitting that he was wrong. Based on new data and facts, he could easily change his opinion.

Many assumptions can be simply validated only by getting educated enough, acquiring new knowledge and talking to people who did what you want to do, but some of the assumptions you have to put to the real life test and learn what works for you and what doesn’t.

Your final goal is to find the fit through the search mode, and then build your success on it. It’s your unique way out of the Valley of Death.

There are many ways out of the Valley of Death, find yours

There are two important lessons in validating assumptions. The first one is that you absolutely have to get educated before you enter the Valley of Death, but you will learn the most out in the real world by experimenting, trying and failing. That is a very painful part of the process, but failure is the best teacher ever. So you must learn how to fail properly and get the most out of every failure.

When you feel it in your bones that you have to do things differently, that’s when you’ve really learned something new.

And the second important lesson is that you always have to stay flexible about how you will get to the final destination. There is no one right path through the Valley of Death. You have to stay flexible, always innovate and keep your mind open for which way to take that will get you closer to your goals. You will have to do many pivots in the Valley of Death to avoid fatal traps.

Practical examples

Let’s go to our first example. You decided to lose weight and a personal trainer wrote you a program and a diet. Instead of giving up, you decide to follow through with the program. You start reading fitness blogs and books. You get madly educated. Besides following the program, you start experimenting on your own with different sports and diets.

You build a set of metrics you follow every week (calorie counter, body fat percentage, etc.), you get yourself a training partner and join a few sports groups. Every month, you improve your diet a little bit. You face setbacks but you trust the process and do something for your body every day, even if things don’t go as planned. You are 110 % committed to achieve the goal you want. You can find more examples in the AgileLeanLife Manifesto.

Please don’t become a zombie, you matter to me

One of the hardest things in life is to decide when to persist and when to give up. Sometimes after entering the Valley of Death, you may figure out that something is not as important to you as you might have thought. Sometimes you figure out that it’s not worth the effort and that it makes more sense to follow some other dreams. And that’s completely okay.

There is always a gap between what you think will make you happy and what really makes you happy. You can’t know the difference until you try things.

It’s completely okay to let go of some goals. It’s completely okay to give up from time to time. It’s completely okay to fail and move on. For example, I definitely know I’m not giving up with this blog, no matter what, but learning to code is still completely open.

What’s not okay is turning into a zombie. It’s not okay to completely give up on all of your dreams. It’s not okay to stop being proactive, action-oriented and stop growing and continuously improving yourself. It’s not okay to stop fighting for the dream life you want and deserve.

It’s not hard to see the difference between a zombie and a person who decided to do a pivot or goes through a collapse but is still determined to fight for their dream life. You can see it in a person’s spirit, you can see it in their eyes, but most of all you can see it in their actions. You can always see if somebody is a fighter or a zombie with a broken spirit from miles away. Because no matter how hard the knockout was, they stand up again and fight.

Never ever let your spirit get broken.

The Valley of Death absolutely exists. It’s a very harsh and cold place, where more than 80 % of people’s dreams die and where passionate individuals get turned into zombies. Don’t be one of them, please. You only have one life. It’s better to live one day as a lion than decades as a sheep or a zombie.

But to live as a lion, you have to do lion shit from time to time. Fortunately for humans nowadays that only means facing your fears, being assertive and goal-oriented, building a superior life strategy, going into action and following the process. You don’t have to kill and eat a zebra.
It never gets easier. You just get better.
Let’s start with the basics of how to succeed at anything in life. There’s an event you want (getting rich, getting fit etc.) and then there’s a carefully orchestrated process you have to follow to get to that event.

The process is daily hard and smart work that leads to the goals you want in life. The process is the daily discipline, the daily fight and effort invested, that leads to the final outcome you want.

Without following the hard process, there is no real self-made success in life.

Now, there is a common wrong assumption that once you come to the final event, you can stop following the process. That once you achieve your goals, you can just relax and enjoy life ever after. Well, that’s not completely true.

After you achieve the final event you want in life (your goal), you have to either continue following the process (acquirement process) or initiate a new one (management process). Let me explain with examples.

You may assume that once you get a six-pack, you can stop working out. That’s wrong. After you achieve the desired body fat percentage with hard exercise and a strict diet, you still have to follow the process at least to the point to retain the status, and that’s usually still hard work.

But even more often, you initiate a new process, following some other fitness goal, either to improve aerobic performance, become more flexible or whatever. After you become fit by following a carefully orchestrated process, you can’t just forget about your health. The decline is super-fast.

In the same way, you may assume that once you get rich, you can forget about money, start spending it like crazy and just enjoy life. That’s wrong. Money is like a lover, the moment you stop giving it the needed attention and management, it goes somewhere else.

You may just initiate a new process that isn’t so much about acquiring assets, but more about managing them. You have to pay attention to your spending habits and even more to making sure that you don’t make bad investments. And that’s a new process of learning, hard work and persistence again.

If everything starts with a goal in your mind (or a vision) and then you follow a process to get you to your goal, a new process of managing what you acquired starts immediately after you meet your goal. No matter how good you are and where you are, there is no situation where you can just enjoy life, worry-free.

The moment you stop improving, the moment you stop growing, you start declining in some way. That’s why they say that it never gets easier, you just get better.

It never gets easier

It never gets easier. You just get better. Well, to be completely honest, there are a few important details in that quote. Now, the hard road becomes easy and the easy road becomes hard with time. But that’s only true for the challenges with the same level of difficulty.

At the end of the hard road, when it already becomes an easy one, there is always a new hard road that you have to undertake. But by then, you’re already far above the average.

How hard the new road is greatly depends on your ambitions. If you know how to set limits in life, if you are satisfied with good enough, if you don’t want more and more, you can undertake the perseverance road, the road of carefully managing what you have.

Everything is hard, before it’s easy.

It’s still hard work, it still takes constant improvement, but the road isn’t as hard as getting from zero to one. Beginnings are always the hardest.

But if you want to really become the best version of yourself, the hard roads never end. You can’t achieve a completely new level of success with the same mindset, actions and effort that you had before.

Becoming a millionaire or a billionaire requires quite a different mindset, actions and levels of smart work. There are many ways of earning a million and not so many of earning a billion.

It’s one type of challenge to go from not reading at all to starting to read at least one page per day, and a completely new challenge, process and level of organization to read one book per week. And a completely new level of challenge to read one book per day. And again, there’s a completely new challenge in implementing as much as possible from what you’ve learned.

Improvements (Kaizen) are endless. There is always a new hard road, a new goal, a way to improve and become better. It never gets easier. You just become better. At many different life challenges.

But constantly taking the hard road is not only hard work, it’s also a very rewarding road and a road you can enjoy very much, if you just take the time to stop and smile and enjoy the process.

Don’t get greedy and enjoy the process instead

Now, when we’re talking about the hard roads, there are two main reasons why you potentially undertake the hard road.
- The first, a healthy one, is to follow the road of constant improvement and becoming the best version of yourself and enjoying the process and life while doing that,
- and the second, an unhealthy one, is only because you’re greedy and trying to fill the emotional void by having more and more (prove yourself to others at all costs).
In the second case, you don’t enjoy the process, you just want to get to the final goal to show others how much better and superior you are.

Many times, that kind of an emotionally unhealthy approach makes you try to speed up the process with shady tactics, trampling down other people and walking on the edges of legality. That’s not healthy competition and that kind of an approach is good neither for you nor for anybody else.

Absolutely follow the path of constant improvement. Absolutely undertake the hard road that becomes easy with time and after that, find a new hard road. That’s how you will become the best version of yourself.

But do it with joy, do it in a way where you enjoy the process, do it without doing any damage to yourself or others. Do it in a fair, collaborative and loving way. It’s about enjoying life and being proud of yourself, not proving yourself to others at all costs.

Celebrate life while you travel

Make sure that the process you follow towards your goal includes not only many checkpoints to see how your progress is going, but also many stop points where you decide to love life and everything it has to offer. Always celebrate the small wins on the hard road. Be proud of yourself, be proud of your progress.

Take time to breathe and relax, keep your margins high enough. Share your small victories with other people and celebrate with them. The hard road should not be a road absent of pleasures, celebrations and enjoyment in life. Work hard, play hard.

If you learn to enjoy the journey, the hard road is much more rewarding and relaxing, there are many more opportunities to celebrate and really experience everything that life has to offer.

If you have hard time enjoying the road, have a list of your past accomplishments, a gratitude list, introduce personal enjoyment rituals into your life that you don’t miss no matter what, and oh also list of things you enjoy, to constantly remind yourself to work hard, but also to stop and play and appreciate the journey.

Don’t be afraid of hard work. Be afraid of not stopping for a second and appreciating life while you work hard.

Hard road is not really the hard road. Zombie life is the hardest road.

As mentioned so many times before, never become lazy, and always find a way to go forward and to improve yourself. In reality, the road of hard work isn’t really hard. The hard road is becoming a zombie. The hardest road you can undertake in life is to only exist and not really live life.

Hard is having a thriving life on social networks, but a miserable life in the real world. Hard is living an average life without any vision, purpose and fighting for the things you want. Really hard is a life of doing a job you hate and spending time with people you don’t like. Even harder is a life where you’re drowning in debt.

Always choosing the easiest road leads to the hardest road ever – the road of a miserable life. So yes, the only miserable life is a life without any hard work, without constantly improving yourself and seeing the fruits of your hard work.

It never gets easier. But you don’t really want things to get easier. Because when things aren’t that easy, you can fight, you can improve, you can celebrate early wins and achieve new heights. But when things get too easy, you soften, you lose focus and sharpness, you start stagnating and soon drown in misery of standing still.

Love the challenges of life. Undertake them with all your zeal.
The power of creative visualization
Visualization is one of the most widespread tools of popular psychology. Despite being a very popular tool, the general public expresses a lot of scepticism over whether visualization can even have a positive effect on your life.

So does visualization work? The answer is yes and no, and it depends greatly on the approach of how you start using visualization in practice.

In this article you will learn:
- What is visualization and what is so special about it
- In which cases visualization works and when it doesn’t
- How you can improve your life with visualization
- A few additional ideas for how you can take advantage of visualization
- How I use visualization
The concept of visualization is pretty simple. You use the power of your imagination to create visions of what you want in life and how you will make them happen. You play a movie (or imagine pictures) in your head of what and how you want something to happen.

It can be a goal you want to achieve, a performance you want to execute, behavioral changes you want to make, or you can imagine a run-through of a success process you’re following (getting rich, in shape, etc.).

The main science behind visualization is that the brain has a hard job distinguishing between what really happens in your life and what you imagine. So when you imagine something, you psychologically create new neural connections in your brain, as they would if the thing you imagined really happened to you.

It’s like having a rehearsal and preparing yourself for performing before it really happens. Not surprisingly, visualization is quite popular in sports, where players imagine how they score and win a game. It’s part of mental preparation.

Before we go on, let’s look at a very clear picture of how visualization absolutely doesn’t work. This is how many abuse visualization, taking it as a shortcut that doesn’t really exist.

Something along the lines of: keep laying in front of the TV, imagine how pretty, rich and happy you are, and all of it will happen all by itself, as long as you visualize it strongly enough. It doesn’t work like that. There are no shortcuts in life.

If you don’t believe me, here’s an experiment you can do. Install some software on your computer that you don’t know how to use. AutoCad or something. Now spend a few days in a row visualizing how you can really master the software without opening it at all. Just visualize hard. After a few days, open your computer, run the software and see what happens.

Research has also shown that only visualizing without taking action can make you into a daydreamer. It relaxes you; you imagine that you already achieved what you wanted (remember, your brain actually thinks that), so you become demotivated. Yes, visualization can be counter-productive.

The false hope of a shortcut and visualization without action are two of the most common reasons why visualization is often the subject of ridicule. If nothing else, such an approach violates the basic spiritual and practical guideline that you reap only what you sow.

If a mental action isn’t supported with a certain physical action, it makes no sense. I haven’t yet met a single person who got fit by watching television with a hamburger in their hand (and visualizing being fit). Quite the contrary, to be fit, you have to invest a lot of energy, time, effort and have iron-clad will.

So, if you’re hoping visualization will change your life as long as you imagine things in your mind over and over again, the answer is, of course, that it doesn’t work. But visualization can be a strong tool if you use it the right way.

It’s a tool with which you can change your internal mental processes, but only if you reinforce everything with direct action. In that case, visualization can work. Let’s look at how and what.

Getting big visions and new ideas through imagination and visualization

The first necessary thing to mention is the power of your brain. Humans are the only living beings on Earth who can visualize things before they are materialized. You can imagine things that don’t even yet exist in reality. It’s an incredible ability and a way to empower visualization.

Imagine how the future will look like and then make it happen. Create things you want to have in future.

This is why Albert Einstein claimed that imagination is more important than knowledge. Everyone has the ability to imagine what has not yet been created as well as the power to create it. It was one of Steve Jobs’ greatest epiphanies.

Everything that surrounds you and wasn’t created by Mother Nature was created by man. You have the power to do the same, to contribute, to create.

Before something was created, it was born as an idea or a thought in someone’s head. Someone imagined a solution in their heads and then made it come true.

And this is also the main mission of every person on this planet: to create (besides enjoying life and becoming the best version of yourself). Every idea is born twice, first in your head, with help of visualization, and then it materializes through work.

The first incredible power of visualization is that it helps you think of new ideas. The second, even more important, leverage of visualization is that you can see a vision before it’s reality. You can imagine how the future will look like. Then through actions, you also have the power to make it come true.

Only individuals with an incredibly strong vision changed the world. The vision has to be so strong that it’s above all the problems you encounter on your way. All problems must become irrelevant when you think of your big vision.

A good example is Henry Ford who had the vision that the car will be accessible to everyone. Before his vision, the car was only accessible to the richest individuals. And he had the vision that the entire planet will be full of cars. If you look around now, you can see that his vision came true.

Visualization like that has an additional advantage. You use your own imagination to wipe away the barriers of limiting convictions. If you know lucid dreaming or if you remember any of your wilder and more unusual dreams, you can immediately recall that in the dream world, physical borders don’t apply. When you visualize, you can dream a little bit – without limits.

I do defend the fact that on our planet, there are laws of physics and not everything is possible. But many barriers are only barriers in your mind. And imagination can help you overcome these barriers. By using visualization to come to a solution, you move things into a different context.

An example are brothers Wright, who lived only to fly in the skies. Because human beings don’t have wings, they of course can’t fly. But brothers Wright found a solution in a device, and became the first mortals to see the world through a bird’s eye view. This is how you can break down boundaries that humans set for themselves and that often limit you.

Changing your inner mental state

Neurolinguistic programming is a branch of psychotherapy that studies how your brain works. With scientific experiments, scientists found out that everyone has a subjective reality map, consisting of different records, whereby internal mental pictures prevail.

The subjective reality map dictates your response to every situation you encounter in life, but it also forms your convictions. Many times limiting and negative ones.

What does that mean? For example, two people have an entirely different reaction to meeting a dog. One person immediately runs towards the dog and starts petting it, while the other one carefully moves away.

Of course the person who moves away either had a bad experience in the past or their parents said that a dog will bite them. Consequently, when they meet a dog, they get a negative picture as a protective survival mechanism and they move away. In this, you have countless situations where your survival isn’t at risk at all, but negative mental patterns that limit your life and luck still exist.

This is why an incredibly useful power of visualization is the ability to identify negative mental patterns. Visualization can help you identify your inner beliefs and negative internal representations. Here’s an exercise you can do.

Homework

Go somewhere where you can be alone, connect with yourself, pay close attention to your reactions and then: vividly imagine that you go to an ATM to check your balance and you have 1,000,000€ on your account. Then imagine that you’re speaking in front of 10,000 people. Thirdly, imagine that you are perfectly fit, with well-developed muscles. Finally imagine that by your side is a partner who is truly physically attractive.

Now it’s time to be honest. Did any of the mentioned ideas make you feel a bit uncomfortable when you imagined them? Maybe only a little, somewhere deep inside you. If we take money, for example, and a potential inner dialogue:

I can’t possibly have that much money on my account, I’m always in the red. Or, this is really a lot of money, 10,000€ maybe, but not more. Maybe you only got a slightly uncomfortable feeling in the pit of your stomach.

What is happening? Everyone has countless acquired negative patterns that prevent you from realizing all your potential (together with negative inner representation, often in shape of photos).

Somewhere deep down is hiding a sincere wish that’s covered with a lot of negativism that you obtain during primary and secondary socialization and through the media.

If you really want something (something positive, of course) and get a bad feeling thinking about it, that means that you have negative patterns that you need to get rid of.

As long as you have a negative picture of a certain thing and as long as 1,000,000€ on your account, for example, releases a wave of feelings such as: I don’t deserve that, rich people are corrupt, I come from a poor family etc., you will diligently avoid such a state with all your actions. So the possibility of that thing coming true in your life is zero or at least very close to zero.

Until you believe, deep down inside, that you can’t achieve something, you will not work in that direction. Even if you did achieve it, you’d feel uncomfortable and make sure that you’d lose it quite quickly (check lottery winners statistics for that). A positive belief usually also means positive internal representations on your subjective map of reality and a positive feeling associated with it.

This is how we come to the most important leverage of using visualization. By visualizing different feelings in a certain situation you want (by imagining a positive photo or a movie), you can change your internal state (your beliefs). It’s how visualization can help you do an identity shift – with a combination of visualization, action and enforcing new beliefs and behavioral patterns.

If you don’t only imagine that you have 1,000,000€ on your account but also that you deserve such an amount, that you feel great being rich and how you will come to this kind of money, your internal reality map will change. And you will make an identity shift. You’ll see yourself as a wealthy person. And you’ll feel good about it. Only once you accept something inside can that thing also materialize, never before. And as mentioned many times before, you have to take action besides dealing with your internal state.

The outside always mirrors the inside.

So visualization is an incredibly powerful tool. If visualization changes your internal reality map from negative imaginings to positive ones, your thoughts will also change, which will consequently change your actions and this will lead to a different result.

Thus, visualization supported by actions that stem from your will to do something for the quality of your life can have an incredibly positive effect on you reaching your goals.

This is why many different fields of life have successful stories from people who helped themselves with visualization. A successful sales meeting, an incredible performance in front of a public, a winning match, a new successful company, and so on. Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, many successful people used visualization as one of their success tools.

Life experiment ideas

Here are a few best ways of practising visualization:

Visualization as a morning or evening habit

When you wake up or when you go to sleep (as part of your morning or evening habits) visualize a goal you want to achieve or how you perform in a certain situation or how you change your habits. Envision yourself physically in action, and use all of your senses.

When you do it, you also have to feel positive emotions. That is a must. See yourself achieving what you want and how good you feel about it. If you feel bad about it in the beginning (like “I can never achieve that”), practice more and with time, your feelings will change. You wouldn’t believe it.

Vision board

Visualizing as many things in life as possible (to-do lists, schedules, workflows, prototypes, etc.) can dramatically increase your personal productivity. It’s part of the Kanban theory and practice. In the same way, you can also visualize your goals by having a vision board.

You simply hang a wooden board on a wall where you can see it as often as possible, and you put photos of things that represent success to you on that board. When you pass by the board you stop, and you visualize yourself achieving all the things you have on your board. One by one. With actions and positive emotions.

Maybe you can also use Pinterest for that if you have too many goals, but it probably won’t work as effectively.

Changing your internal representations

Imagine something that you fear, a person or a situation like public speaking. Now think of it and try to identify what kind of an internal picture you have as a representation of that fear. Your representational image is probably scary or dark.

Try to change that image. If you’re afraid of your boss, for example, your internal image may be one of how s/he yells at you. Now create a picture of your boss being happy and kind to you. Or how you stand up to your boss or aren’t scared. Or him or her on a toilet. Play with it. Exchange the dark picture with a new one. Mentally, like you would with photo-editing software.

Your boss won’t miraculously change, but changing your internal representation may help you manage your fear better and become more self-confident and proactive.

As a bonus, here are some creative ideas for using creative visualization as an experiment:
- Think of an unhealthy food you can’t avoid. Now imagine how its taste sucks, over and over again. Do it for a month and see what happens. And don’t eat it while you do it.
- Take one of your worst personality traits. Like anger issues or being late. Now imagine how you react calmly when somebody pisses you off. Think of a person who pisses you off the most and imagine reacting calmly.
- Imagine believing the opposite. Think of one of your strong political, religious, sexual or cultural one. Or a belief about yourself. Maybe even something that limits you a lot. Like believing you aren’t good with computers. Now imagine your life having an opposite belief or thinking the opposite about yourself. How does your life look like? What are you afraid of? Play with it.
- Face your fears. What are the top 3 irrational fears you have? Public speaking, talking to the opposite gender, asking for a raise. Imagine doing it over and over again in your head. See what happens.
Visualization and spirituality

When speaking of visualization, you can also stray into slightly more spiritual spheres. I agree that this is incredibly shaky ground. But my work is based on the thought that it’s necessary to try as many things as possible and then keep those that benefit and work for you, and get rid of those that don’t hold any value added. I also believe it’s my duty to mention these things.

My experience from a more spiritual perspective is kind of that you do not get a single wish without also getting the power to make it come true. When you want something strongly enough, situations also start unfolding in such a direction that things come true.

One part can, of course, be explained with the previously mentioned facts. When you want something strongly enough and you start working in that direction, your new actions lead to a new result.

But it often happened to me that even without any action, my environment changed so that I was able to realize my vision more easily. I’m not talking about any miracles, but about simple and practical things. The outside always mirrors the inside.

Let me give you a few examples. I thought of a new project and started meeting people who helped me. For example, when I decided to start writing this blog and was making the first steps in that direction, a lot of things started unfolding all on their own.

And it has happened to all of us that we thought about someone after a long time and then met that person or got a phone call from them.

After a lot of similar experiences, I don’t believe in coincidences anymore. I’m closer to believing that life, the universe, God or whoever you want, support you in your wishes. If you truly want something and if you also start working in that direction, things start happening.

It feels like visualization has the power to change your inner vibrations and to start radiating your new course to the universe. When you share your new vibrations with the World, the right people, ideas, knowledge, and situations can come into your life.

Sometimes support even comes in the shape of new challenges as a test, so that it becomes clear if you truly want something or not, and sometimes it means meeting the right people, coming to the right place at the right time. When the student is ready, the teacher appears.

The main takeaways

Here are the main takeaways:
- Visualization doesn’t work if you want to employ it as a shortcut to success.
- Visualization isn’t about fantasizing how you can achieve something without any effort and without overcoming obstacles. You have to be careful that you don’t only daydream, but also take action.
- With visualization, you can get to know yourself better and unravel your inner beliefs (imagine something and observe how you feel).
- Visualization can help you make an identity shift to see yourself differently (imagine something for so long that you start to feel it as part of yourself).
- You can use visualization as a kind of rehearsal to boost your self-confidence by clearly imagining an outcome you want and how you will perform to achieve it.
- Visualization can help you adjust your inner state to a new vibrational level and attract the right people and opportunities in your life. And when you expect good, good things do happen to you.
Regret Minimization Framework

Sometimes you have to make hard decisions in life. Maybe you have to decide whether you should quit your job and start your own business, end a relationship or maybe move to another country. Big decisions like that are the ones you have to make completely by yourself. Having the support from your environment is a big advantage, but at the end of the day, you’re on your own. You are the one who has to make the move or not.

Jeff Bezos was in the same position just before he quit his job and founded Amazon. He had a well-paid Wall Street job, with a stable career, good boss and a balanced life. But he had this crazy idea of selling books online and starting his own company. He had full support from his wife and the people around him thought he had a good idea. He had to make a decision.

It was a tough decision, so he searched for theories and recommendations on how to make that kind of big decisions. Because he didn’t find good advice on the topic, he came up with a framework to help him make the right choice. He gave it a nerdy name: Regret Minimization Framework.

The idea behind the Regret Minimization Framework is pretty simple. Project yourself forward to the age of 80. Looking back on your life, you want to minimize the number of regrets. If you project yourself to the age of 80 and think about your potential regrets, things get a lot clearer. It also helps you to remove a few pieces of confusion in the present caused by alternative paths. It helps you make the right decision more easily.

For Jeff, the decision became simple. He knew he would regret it for the rest of his life if he didn’t participate in one of the biggest revolutions the world has ever seen – the information revolution. He knew he would regret it at 80, not trying to realize his idea for selling books online. He knew he wouldn’t regret failing, but he would definitely regret not trying. When he thought about it that way, the decision became easy. He quit his job in the middle of the year, and even walked away from the yearly bonus. He founded Amazon and built one of the most successful companies in history.

On the pure top of your life vision list should be all the things you know you would regret deeply if you haven’t at least tried to achieve them in your life. We all have a few things, be it a specific country to visit, a mountain to climb, a certain thing to create, a specific adventure with other people to undertake or whatever else we deeply want to experience. Don’t let fear and compromises stop you from really experiencing things that you will regret someday. When an opportunity appears, use the Regret Minimization Framework to help you make the right decision.

But beware, don’t let pretty motivational stories like this fool you. You don’t want to use the Regret Minimization Framework as an excuse to do something stupid. Everyday small decisions (what you eat everyday, how you spend your money etc.) and important big decisions (who you marry, where you work etc.) are an integral part of either your success or destroying your own life. So have a list of your potential regrets, but always take your current level of competences, the right timing, environmental factors and other forces into consideration. Don’t look for perfect conditions, but stay adaptable. Here is a quote from Jeff that can help you with that:

We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details. – Jeff Bezos

The Regret Minimization Framework should help you make yes/no decisions easily. But if you decide for yes, make sure you have a superior strategy, you know your risks (you want to have low risk with a massive potential reward), you have support from the environment – from market trends to your closest people, you have enough knowledge and other competences, and so on. I have no doubt Jeff had all these things.

Be bold. Live life without regrets. But be smart about it. Have a superior strategy.

This is my 100th post on this blog by the way. I knew I would regret not starting this blog. So here we are and expect many interesting blog posts in the future.
Markets always win

In capitalism, there’s only one really important rule. Markets always win. You stand zero chances if you go against the market. Markets determine a big part of your life. If you choose the right markets, things will go well for you; if not, you’ll experience only struggle, pain and failure. You may fight against the market for years and at the end, you’ll probably be brutally knocked out to the floor, no matter how competent you are. You may lose everything and markets will laugh right in your face.

The brutal thing is that even if you don’t want to play the game, you’re playing the game.

In love life, your sexual market value more or less determines the quality of the partner you can attract. It’s usually someone in your range of sexual market value. It’s like you have a number on your forehead. Trends on the job market have a big influence on whether you’ll be employed or not, how much you’ll earn and how quickly you’ll get promoted. You can be the best in something no one wants to buy and you’ll be poor. If you’re an entrepreneur and don’t have customers who want to buy your products, there is no market and there is no business. Most startups fail because there’s no market.

A market is not a nice thing. It’s like a moody, perpetually dissatisfied cruel person leaving no room for negotiations, no room for discussions or compromises. Either you hit the spot and make the market happy or you’re out of the game. You can even make the market happy several times in a row and then fail it, and yet the market won’t spare you any pain. Markets are copy-cats of nature; and nature can be the most beautiful experience in the world or the cruelest one. That’s also why so many people criticize capitalism.

Let’s take a step back now. What is a market, really? Well, it’s nothing but supply and demand. Markets are nothing but people voting with their resources, be it with money, attention, love, sex or anything else.

If you can provide something in great demand and of scarce supply, you’ve hit the spot. If you supply something that’s in big supply and short demand, markets will ignore you and you’ll be poor. Offer something people want, but not many can do, and you shall prosper; offer something anyone can offer, and few people want, and you shall be one of many waiting in a long line, hoping that maybe someone spots you; and they probably won’t.

There’s a good story representing this connection between creating, delivering and capturing value, and markets. An old couple is walking in the park. The grandpa gets a heart attack and collapses on the floor. A young person passes by. Grandma, completely panicked, asks the person if they know CPR. The person responds: “I’m a really good person.” Grandma says that she doesn’t care about that, she only wants to know if the person knows CPR. The person responds again: “I’ve also finished college and work really hard.” That’s nice and all, but can you do CPR?

The point of the story is that markets only care about the things you can supply. Money knows no racism, no borders and don’t care about your history. Markets don’t care if you’re a good person, in love or not, the only thing that the markets care about is the value you can provide.

The formula is simple: no value, no money. Well, it’s not that simple, of course. There are many different types of value a person can produce. It can be social value, attraction value or whatever. For example, a good teacher produces a great social value, but not that much of a financial value, because supply of teachers is quite bigger than demand.

I’m definitely encouraging you to find the right balance between market value and social value, but you should never leave market value out of the equation. When we speak in terms of business (financial markets, career markets, startups etc.), “no unique value proposition, no money” is the golden rule.

The biggest problem with markets is that it’s not easy to be in a position where the demand is great and the supply falls short. It’s one of the toughest things in the world. Most people who hit the sweet spot do it based on pure luck. Others struggle for years before hitting it, after putting huge effort into strategizing, innovating, analyzing and failure; and even then you need to have a lot of luck. The good news is that you have to be right only once, the bad news is that it’s extremely hard to be right even once. But understanding markets can help you a lot to progress faster in life.

Everyone’s dream should be to have a monopoly in some niche market for a short period of time. A monopoly is definitely not good for the general society, but it gives a great advantage to an individual, even if only for a short period of time. Everyone would like to have a monopoly, everyone would like to be on top, maybe just to taste it, even if they don’t admit it to themselves. Monopoly is how you get on the top.

There’s even more. We want to control the markets, not only as individuals but as a society as well. In the same way as we try to control nature. Nature and markets, they both make us feel insecure. That’s why we have the government and government interventions. To control the markets and to control nature (with all its resources, threats, borders etc.).

The sad thing is that most interventions bring a new set of problems, like inefficiency and corruption. Controlling the beast is no easy task, and people more often hurt themselves than not. Going against the markets is hard, controlling them is even harder. Sooner or later, market meltdowns and scandals happen. But that’s how we organized the world.

Now let’s look at the markets from a brighter perspective. What can you do to understand markets more? The first thing you have to do is un-ego yourself. We all have assumptions about the markets. We think other people want what we want, like and dislike the same things, use technology in the same way etc. In most cases, we have wrong assumptions and wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. That’s the main point of the lean startup theory and its first phase of building a startup, which is empathy.

When you un-ego yourself, you become empathetic, you listen to the voices on the market, you observe what people respond to, you search for what people are prepared to pay for.

In the second step, you should stop following your passion and start following your effort. Rather than idealizing life, you look at the hard facts. What markets really want that you can actually provide. There is no place for romance, idealism or egoistic behavior towards the markets. Only supply and demand. The good news is that with time following your effort and seeing all the results passion will also develop. But…

If you ignore the market, the market will ignore you. As already mentioned, you have to be aware that even if you don’t want to compete, you are competing. You’re voting with your resources and other people use their resources to vote on how much value you can provide for them. There’s no escape.

With your birth, you were put on different markets and dealt different cards. Talents, family money, beauty, intelligence, and your hard work, they’re all building blocks of your capacity to prove your value on the market. The more of them you’re born with, the better position you are in. That’s definitely a big advantage in the short term, but not necessarily in the long term. That is to say, good times make soft people, and things like the Dutch disease can happen. And hard and smart work always put talent (or other given things) to shame. It’s up to you how you’ll play game of life.

No matter what, you should respect the markets, learn its rules and play the best game possible. When thinking about markets (financial markets, job markets, consumer markets etc.), you should analyze short-term and long-term trends, you should always stay empathetic, constantly acquire new market insights and quickly adapt to changes. You must know how to manage your ego and your false assumptions by constantly, testing, experimenting and innovating.

Go with the markets, make the markets your best friends and you shall prosper; put ego before the markets and you’ll stay alone and miserable. It’s that simple. Your competences are your downside protection. If you’re very competent, you’ll always make something out of your life. Markets define your upside potential. If you hit the right market at the right time, you can win big. But if you’re competent and hit the right market, something magical can happen.

So start learning about the markets. Here’s a nice set of videos with all the basic information: https://wetheeconomy.com/films/cave-o-nomics/