mindfulness

Why you will never find happiness in life
If you’re reading this article you’re probably not a super happy person; or maybe you think you should be happier in life than you actually are.

I assume you already read dozens of articles listing “top ten things you should do” in life to be happier, and they surprisingly didn’t work. Probably you haven’t even tried those ten things, because you intuitively know they don’t work.

Well, let’s build up a case here, see why these things don’t work, with a ray of hope at the end of the blog post for how you may actually find your own piece of happiness in life. If you’re looking for any miraculous solutions, you can stop reading the article at this point.

Other people can’t make you happy

The first wrong assumption is that other people can make you happy. If you hope that other people will make you happy, you’ve put your happiness into very risky hands. Other people will sooner make you miserable than happy, when you put your happiness in their hands.

You may assume, for example, that you will be happy when you fall in love with the right person. Someone who will really love you back and understand you to the bone. And then it happens. And you’re happy all the way up to the first fight. Or the first time your love is in a bad mood. Or they flirt with someone else. Or whatever. Then everything collapses. And you’re unhappy again.

Neither a perfect lover nor a perfect boss can make you happy. Or a new friend. Or an alien. Other people will sooner make you miserable than happy. Many unintentionally and many on purpose. Because they are just humans like you are. Much like you make others’ lives tougher if you’re unhappy. Why? Because people have to listen to all your bitching, whining and complaining, while deep inside they might hope you’ll make them happy.

Much like you make others’ lives tougher if you’re unhappy. Why? Because people have to listen to all your bitching, whining and complaining, while deep inside they might hope you’ll make them happy.

I know it kind of sucks. You can’t make other people permanently happy, other people can’t make you a happier person, but they can surely make you unhappy – an abusive partner or parents, a jackass boss or an ignorant friend or whoever you love.

So here is what you should do regarding relationships and happiness:

First of all, you should at all costs avoid people who make your life miserable intentionally or are zombies or energy vampires. And you should surround yourself with happy, encouraging and supportive people who bring out the best in you. While doing that, make sure you aren’t infecting them with your unhappiness.

Then you should expect that even the loveliest people, even the most positive living beings, will hurt you from time to time. So you should always have a center on yourself, and be aware that your happiness shouldn’t depend on other people (we will see how you can achieve that at the end of the blog post).

You can absolutely be in a bad mood when someone disappoints you, but you should also get yourself back in your center after a short while.

Other people can’t make you a happy person, but they can make your life a little bit happier or completely miserable. So don’t put your happiness in the hands of other people, but make sure people aren’t the ones making you unhappy and miserable.

If you cut out of your life all the negative people who drag your happiness level down, it may be a solution to being happier in life. But unfortunately, that’s rarely the case.

You will probably find other things to be unhappy about or attract other assholes in life who will make you unhappy again. The outside world, including your relationships, only mirrors your inner emotional state and processes.

If you’re unhappy, it’s very hard to have happy relationships. And if you were a happy person, you would have ditched the negative people in your life a long time ago. To sum up:
- Crappy people in your life = May be the reason why you are unhappy in your life
- No crappy people in your life = If you are still unhappy, read on
Shopping will only make you happy for a while

Shopping and fucking is the picture of happiness in the 21^st century. Excuse my French. MTV, reality shows, ads. Shopping and fucking should make you really happy. Let’s dive deep into that assumption.

In the previous epiphany, we already figured out that other people can’t make you happy. That includes their bodies. A lot of passionate sex can definitely contribute greatly to your quality of life, but it can’t make you happy.

Much like any other addiction can’t, from alcohol to drugs and gambling. Right after the climax, you face the reality of life once again.

It’s no different with shopping. Material things can bring you a short-term feeling of happiness. I’m happy like a child when I buy myself a new computer. But after a few days, my happiness level stabilizes to the default level. There is no possession in the world that could make you happy forever.

You won’t believe it, but I did ride a jet ski once and was not very happy.

Research has shown that when extremely good things, like winning the lottery, or extremely bad things, like accidents, happen to people, it only influences their happiness level in the short term. After a while, people are generally as happy or unhappy as they used to be.

So shopping and fucking won’t bring real happiness into your life. At least not in the long term.
- Shopping = Short-term happiness
- Addictions = Short-term happiness
- If you go too far with addictions or, in addition, you get yourself even more in debt for your unnecessary shopping excursions, it’s the perfect recipe for being even less happy in the long term
Money only helps in the beginning

I was really poor when I was young. And I worked hard as hell to save some money on my bank account. Money can’t make you happy, but a lack of it can definitely make your life miserable. If you can’t afford a thing and you’re constantly scared of how you’ll go through the next month, you don’t have time to be happy.

Worry takes everything away. Much like if a lousy boss destroys your day the moment you walk into the office.

You see, it’s the same as it is with people. A shitty relationship will make you unhappy. Lack of money will definitely make you unhappy. But having both will only contribute a little to your long-term happiness level. Go figure.

So yes, money can contribute a lot to happiness to a certain point. It’s an enabler of happiness, like good relationships are. It’s hard to be happy if you are poor and drowning in debt or if you have an energy vampire spouse.

I guess the magical amount of money is somewhere between 2x and 3x of an average salary in your living area (and not drowning in debt) when money still plays a great role in your happiness levels.

With savings in your bank account, there’s still a great probability that you’ll be unhappy at some point, but you are at least not that stressed out. Yes, money can’t buy happiness, but it can make you less unhappy and less under pressure. And it can solve many of your problems.

But after 2-3x of average salary, money has zero contribution to your happiness level.
- Poverty = Definitely a strong reason why you can’t be happy
- You have quality relationships in your life with no zombies, you don’t look for happiness in material things and addictions, you earn 2-3x of average salary, but are still unhappy? Read on.
Accomplishments aren’t happiness

The next thing you may confuse is happiness with accomplishments. When you achieve something new, when there is a new accomplishment to add to your success list, you probably feel happy. But again, only for a while.

Here’s the first issue. Your brain prefers to remember all your failures rather than successes. In a jungle, if you failed to escape a tiger that would have been much more tragic and mandatory to remember than if you won a village coconut tree climbing competition.

Thus you tend to forget every one of your accomplishments very quickly and every failure sticks with you much longer. If you fail at public speaking, for example, your brain will make sure that it’s going to be much harder to step on the podium next time.

That’s what you have to deal with. Success brings short-term happiness and soon you forget about everything. You can experience a failure and it can stay with you for a long time, especially if you don’t gather the courage to manage and overcome your fears.

It definitely helps to have a list of your past accomplishments to remind you how awesome you are. It helps you see the objective reality and it helps to gather courage for new challenges and get out of the comfort zone. But it’s not the recipe for long-term happiness.
- You need accomplishments in life to feel happy and good in your skin
- Accomplishments won’t bring you real happiness in life
Things that increase happiness just a little bit

Research has shown that there are a few things that greatly contribute to your happiness level:
1. Regular exercise
2. Enough socializing
3. Meaningful work
4. Not being overwhelmed by work
5. Gratefulness
These things definitely contribute to your happiness level. You can read more here about these six things that contribute to being a more happy person.

They will definitely increase your happiness level to a certain degree, but they won’t convert you from an unhappy to a happy person. Unfortunately, the doors to eternal happiness are not that easy to open. Again there’s a twisted catch.

If you don’t socialize enough and isolate yourself, you will definitely become unhappy sooner or later. Short-term isolation (like being in monk mode) may sometimes help you advance in life, but we are social beings, so we have to socialize.

If you don’t take care of your body, you will have health problems sooner or later, and health issues will definitely make your life miserable. You will feel great after exercise. But it won’t make you a permanently happy person.

If you work at a job you don’t like, aren’t good at what you do or don’t feel like you contribute, it’s hard to be happy. You spend one third of your life at work. You can’t hate what you do 1/3 of your life and be a happy person. Maybe for a few hours on a Friday night, but that’s it.

Another mistake of how you can chase away happiness is to be drowning in tasks, even if you enjoy your work. It’s an addiction, it’s called workaholism. Sooner or later the stress levels become too high. When you get the feeling that you have more on your plate than you can handle, your nervous system will go crazy, goodbye happiness.

And it’s really hard to be happy if you don’t see what you have in life, and you only focus on what you lack. Gratefulness really can change your perspective on life. But it usually makes you a more grateful (obviously) and peaceful person, not happy.

If you don’t have all these things in life it’s hard to be happy – modest exercise, a job you love, enough socializing, and gratefulness. But even if you have all of them, happiness is not guaranteed.

If you are chronically unhappy all these things may help you a little bit, but in general you will still find 1001 reasons to be unhappy.

So what is the solution then? Wait a moment, before we go to the true source of unhappiness, there’s one more trap.

Gap between expectations and reality

The media world is creating a big gap between expectations and reality. In the media world, everyone is handsome, rich, happy and living their dream. Every day, you’re exposed to thousands of ads showing you all these happy people.

Not surprisingly, that’s also why you connect happiness with buying new things. And you figure out that shopping doesn’t really bring long-term happiness.

Now if you sit on the subway in any major city in the world, you see that the media world is far from reality. Beautiful people are not that common. People have life scars and bruises on their faces. Many people seem sad and depressed. It’s no paradise. It’s a fight.

Accepting reality isn’t easy. Everybody wants to live like a Hollywood star, but only one out of million is that lucky. And not all movie superstars are super happy. Money, fame and looks help live a quality life in a great way, but they don’t bring happiness, as we’ve discussed earlier.

But hoping and expecting that you’ll live the life of a Hollywood star by posting a few photos on social media is a recipe for a happiness disaster. It’s the same as if you expect that love will do all the hard relationship work instead of you or that you will have a six-pack by going to the gym once in a while.

Everything you want to have in life, you have to work hard for. And many times you don’t even get it. Some things are not even accessible to you at all. In some life areas, you’re better off, in others you’re far behind the average, depending on your genes, smarts, inheritance etc.

Life isn’t fair and you have to play with the cards you were dealt. If you don’t accept that, you will always be unhappy. If you will live in a naïve illusion of how the world should be and that you may get lucky someday, you will definitely be unhappy. To be really happy, you have to accept the reality of life.

But if you decide to accept it, there is a big trap you can fall into. Instead of accepting reality, you lower your standards. You give up and decide to not fight. To not strive for progress and improvements.

Instead of accepting that you have to work hard for years to get a good-looking body, to find the work you enjoy, a person who is your perfect fit for a spouse, you simply give up and go where life kicks you. And usually that isn’t any place nice. If you aren’t going forward, you’re going backwards. If you’re going backwards, your unhappiness slowly rises.

It’s a tricky situation again. You have to narrow the gap between your expectations and what is really achievable in life from your starting point.

At the same time, you mustn’t lower your standards and make sure you keep the growth mindset. Not going forward means a disaster in life sooner or later, and disasters are nothing but a big pile of unhappiness.
- Living in a naïve media world of fame of fortune = Fake happiness
- Accepting reality = Hard but the only way of being truly happy
- Lowering your standards and not going forward in life = Unhappiness comes sooner or later
To sum up, here is what you should do to be happy in life, but even if you do it, it’s not a guarantee that you will really be happy. Probably not.
- Having a happiness center on yourself (being aware that you are the only one responsible for your happiness)
- No crappy people in your life
- Lots of socializing and love – spouse, family, friends
- Earning 2x – 3x of the average salary in an industry you love
- Understanding that material things and shopping won’t bring happiness
- You need accomplishments, but they are a different category from happiness
- Be as healthy as possible with regular exercise
- Do meaningful work and don’t be drowning in tasks
- Focus on what you have in life, not what you lack; practice gratefulness
- Make sure you go forward in life with the growth mindset
- Don’t live in a naive fictional world, accept reality as it is
All that, but happiness is still not guaranteed? Now it may seem that everything is hopeless. So let’s try to turn things around a little bit. Here is the right question.

What causes you to naturally do all the things stated above, without forcing yourself to do it? Loving yourself and life. Lack of it is the real reason behind your unhappiness.

The secret to why you aren’t happy in life

Here is a simplified model. When you are born, your mother is your whole world. Read that again. Your whole world. Her emotional availability, her smile, her relationship with your father, her attention to your needs, that’s your whole world.

When you become just a little bigger, your home becomes your whole world. The relationship with your mother, father, siblings and other relatives. Your home becomes your whole world.

You see where this is going. Your relationships with your parents, your home and your early experiences in life become the basic model on which you interpret how the world looks like. Your map. Your subjective reality. Your happiness potential.

If your parents were not happy, if your home was not a happy environment, how could you be a really happy person?

Now here are the two tricks.

You have to see your parents as perfect when you are little, so you feel secure. Because only perfect parents can protect you. Consequently, you project their faults on yourself.

You’re the one responsible for their imperfections – fights, divorce, misfortune and sadness. You think it’s you. The shittier their relationship, the shittier you see yourself. Harder to be happy.

Here’s another catch.

You need an environment that is loving, stable, encouraging, and pays attention to your needs and potentials. If you have all that, you develop trust in life and people, you have a sense of autonomy, you take initiative and you become aware of how you can contribute to the world with your competences.

If you don’t have a stable and loving home, shame, guilt, doubt and inferiority develop.
Have you ever seen a happy person being torn apart by shame, guilt and doubt when following their own goals? No. A happy person:

Likes themselves as they are

Has a strong sense of self and their autonomy

Has no problems with their needs being met

Knows how to express feelings

Knows where they’re going in life and what they want

Is not afraid of conflict and knows how to set boundaries

Takes initiative and contributes creative ideas

If you don’t express and assert yourself in a healty kind of way, no shopping spree, accomplishment or relationship will help you with your happiness levels.
Again, here is a very simplified version of what happens. Over the years, you internalize your mother’s voice and your father’s voice and the voice of other people who brought you up as your inner voice. And you see the world as you saw your “home” environment.

Now, no environment is perfect, there must be friction, because friction causes a desire for personal growth and development. But there is a point where the environment becomes toxic and basically destroys a child’s life and their potential for happiness.

That’s the main reason why you are unhappy. Your inner voice and your subjective map of the world. That can happen in hundreds of different ways, from a depressed mother when you were infant, an unstable home with lots of fights or moving from city to city, an emotionally cold home, overly critical parents, nobody considering your needs etc.

Here’s one more catch. You remember when I mentioned that you have to see your parents as perfect. Well, many people never realize that their parents aren’t perfect. They still think their unhappiness has nothing to do with their home environment. It has.

Unfortunately, if you can’t see this, you often do the same things to your kids. No one can be the perfect parent. But it’s mandatory to not be a toxic parent.

I don’t know how your unhappiness was triggered in your home environment. But I certainly know that every article starting with “10 things you should do to be happier” is misleading you. It may help a little, but it’s not the source of your real problem. To blame your home environment or your past also won’t do any good.

That’s the main reason why you are unhappy. Your cold and critical inner voice and your subjective map of the world where there is no place for your happiness.

There is actually only one thing you have to do, assuming that there is no other solid thing that can be blocking your happiness, like drowning in debt, having a shitty boss etc. You have to change how you see yourself and how you see the world. You need to rewire your brain. You need to finally allow yourself to be happy. There is no outside factor that can make you really happy in life.

You need to reshape your internal perception; you have to upgrade your subjective reality map and your inner voice. The good news is that it can be done. The bad news is that it’s a long and demanding process. But if you’ve read the article all the way to this point I have no doubt that you’re motivated.

Cognitive therapy and emotional accounting

You are unhappy because of your negative inner dialogue. In other words, your negative thoughts. You may not be even aware of it. Your inner voice is constantly there and it’s similar to the environment you were raised in.

It can be a cold voice, a critical voice, a pessimistic one, or negative in any other kind of way. That is what is causing your unhappiness.

Sometimes it slips out of people as self-dialogue. I’m such a clumsy person. Many people are not even aware of their inner voice. But the extent of your negative inner voice is enormous. It makes you unhappy, your mood slumps, your self-image crumbles, your body doesn’t function properly, your willpower gets paralyzed, etc.

There are 10 different types of negative thinking that make you an unhappy person:
- All-or-nothing thinking
- Overgeneralization
- Mental filter
- Disqualifying the positive
- Jumping to conclusions
- Magnification and minimization
- Emotional reasoning
- Should statements
- Labeling and mislabeling
- Personalization
The first step of becoming aware of your negative inner dialogue is to pay better attention to it. You have to build a better connection with yourself and really hear your inner voice.

You will hear your parents, your experiences, your environment in it. And then you will see how negative it is. How it makes you unhappy. How is never ever anything good enough.

Here’s a simple exercise you should start with. First get familiar with all 10 different types of negative thinking. Then count the number of negative thoughts that pop up in your head every day. Buy some kind of a counter and start counting them. Just to become aware. It’s called mental biofeedback.

If there is no inner smile on your face, you are thinking something negative. Now become aware of it!

When you become a master of observing your inner dialogue, you need to slowly change it. It’s called emotional accounting. You basically draw a table with five columns:
- Negative thought (“I am so clumsy”)
- What kind of a negative feeling it causes and its intensity from 1 to 10 (“Anger, 9”)
- Type of negative thinking (“Overgeneralization”)
- Rational response – correction (“Not true; it does happen to me from time to time, like every other person alive. I am handy at lots of things, for example …”)
- Intensity of the negative feeling after the correction (“Anger, 3”)
The key is to correct your inner voice with a rational response. That way, you slowly begin changing your inner voice to a more positive one. Not surprisingly, you also become a more positive and happy person.

It’s a demanding task, but worth it. If you find it too difficult, you can maybe do it with a therapist. There are many good cognitive therapists that will help you to fix your inner dialogue and give you additional advice on how to become a happier person.

But even with cognitive therapy, there is one more thing you’re missing.

Rewriting your brain with the new experience

Only updating your inner dialogue may not be enough, especially if you do it the wrong way. For example, if you try to force yourself to change your inner dialogue. You only make it even more negative. You reinforce its negativity.

The ultimate way to rewrite your childhood experience is a new experience. An experience of a stable, loving, encouraging and warm environment that pays attention to your needs. You experience a new kind of relationship that becomes your new inner voice.

As you might have guessed, that takes years of work, but it’s probably the ultimate way of becoming a happier person. It’s one of the aspects of how psychoanalysis works. More about it in one of the following blog posts.

If you are unhappy, your unhappiness will only grow stronger with age. I thought it was the hardest in adolescence, but I was wrong. There are a few things you can do to really become a happier person. But they aren’t as easy as many articles suggest.

Nevertheless, if you decide to do something about your happiness levels, it’s time you start doing research and find more information on how it can really be done. Start by researching cognitive psychology and psychoanalysis.

The morning kick-off routine

The second you wake up in the morning is by far the best moment in your day to develop the most important life habits. The reason for that is pretty simple. Every new habit you want to develop in life needs a strong reminder for what you need to do and a big reward for doing it. The reminder is a trigger you need that sets off the new desired behavior.

The biggest issue with the habit loop (reminder – routine – reward) is that the reminder has to be strong, loud and clear so you hear it. If there are too many distractions in the environment or if you’re too tired, chances are that you’ll ignore the reminder and wave goodbye to the new habit.

There are two moments every day in your life that work great as triggers for new habits. It’s when you wake up and before you go to sleep. Before 9 am and after 9 pm, everything is quiet and peaceful. No distractions, no rush, and an opportunity for your reminders to be heard.

Throughout the day, you’re usually extremely busy, running from one activity to a meeting to another task and so on. Your phone keeps ringing; your inbox is filling up and you face many unexpected events. There is no room for reminders and new habits. But mornings and evenings are different. They are perfect for developing a new habit.

The second issue with the habit loop (reminder – routine – reward) is that you need to have enough discipline muscle strength left to perform a new routine. When something becomes a habit, you do it subconsciously, you don’t need to put in a lot of conscious effort.

But when you’re developing a new habit, you need to force yourself a little bit to perform the new routine. That takes a lot of effort, especially in the beginning, before routines turn into real habits.

Daily challenges and decisions slowly eat away your capacity for discipline and cognitive abilities. It’s quite hard to follow any new serious enforced routine during the day when you’re stressed out and burdened with many things and choices. It’s no different after a hard working day. It’s hard to find any motivation and energy to perform new demanding behaviors.

Obviously, if your muscle discipline is still fresh and strong in the morning, you want to develop morning habits that take more effort and discipline. On the other hand, your evening routine should be more about relaxation, reflection and calming down.

Morning kick-off routine

My morning kick-off routine

Now that I’m in monk mode and without a schedule, I can experiment more with my morning kick-off routine. After a month of experimenting, I’ve found a routine that currently works well for me and empowers me to stay sharp and focused through the day.

I do seven things as part of my morning kick-off routine, and it takes me from 1.5 to 2 hours to complete it. I aim for 1.5 hours, so as to not waste too much time on starting my day right. Here they are:

Morning reflection and planning meeting with myself
- Happiness index
- Self-analysis and dream analysis
- One thing I am grateful for
- One thing I want in life
- Things I will create today (the three most important tasks)
- True North
Meditation
Visualization
Morning stretching
Reading something positive
Power breakfast
Cold shower

The most important thing for performing my morning routine is to go to bed early and wake up fresh after getting enough sleep. On rare occasions when I go to sleep late, for whatever reason, I simply don’t have enough motivation to perform the morning routine the next day.

It’s no problem if it happens from time to time, but if it happens too often, you quickly fall out of your routine. So I always go to bed early and wake up early.

I know I need 8 hours of sleep and I always make sure I meet that. By going to bed early, I can’t remember the last time I needed an alarm clock to wake up. And when I wake up, before I do anything else, I brush my teeth and drink a big glass of water to rehydrate my body. Then my morning kick-off routine starts.

Morning reflection and meeting with myself

Morning reflection is the most important thing to do in the morning and it helps me a lot, especially to better understand myself, my feelings and needs, my motivations, the people around me and the environment in general. The first thing I do is take a deep breath, listen myself for a moment and note on my happiness index how happy I am on a scale from 1 to 10.

It’s a great way to begin self-analysis and go through situations that are currently happening in your life, things that bother you, things you like and enjoy, your motivations, behaviors, intentions, feelings and other internal processes.

If I remember my dreams, I include them in my self-analysis, especially focusing on how I felt during the dreaming phase and how that’s connected to current life events. This gives me really good insights, especially into my negative feelings and a small glimpse of my subconscious processes. With time, you have access to more and more of your subconscious material.

In the next step, I write down one thing I’m grateful for. It helps me to keep perspective on how blessed I am in life. It’s easy to forget what you have in life. It takes a minute to write it down and it’s not hard to come up with things you are grateful for. You just write down the first thing that pops up in your mind. At the end of each month, I plan to gather and organize everything in one list (also published online), which will be my updated ultimate gratefulness list.

I also write down one thing I want in life every day. From gadgets, countries to travel, things to experience, etc. This is a different kind of exercise, and it helps me to stay in touch with my needs and wants. The important purpose of your life is to fulfill your needs. If you don’t do that, you become a bitter person sooner or later.

You may be neglecting your needs because your environment (parents) didn’t pay much attention to what you really wanted in life. I mean what you wanted, not what was “best” for you. If you aren’t paying attention to your needs at all, you’re on the other extreme of greed. Both extremes cause depression, bitterness, anger and other negative feelings.

The next thing I do as part of my morning meeting is to analyze what I’ve done the day before and write down the three most important tasks I have to do on a particular day. I also ask myself if there are any obstacles preventing me from achieving my daily working goals and how to remove them. I end my morning analysis by asking myself if I’m following my true north or, in other words, following my real life vision and life mission.

It takes me from 15 to 20 minutes to finish this part of my morning routine.

Meditation

I definitely need to develop better control over my mind. Meditation is the right exercise for that. So, I’m practicing morning meditation, right after my morning reflection. I use the Headspace app for that. The app is really good and recommended by many sources. Meditating for 10 minutes as part of the first 10-day session was a piece of cake and I really liked it.

Now I’m at 15-minute sessions and am struggling quite a bit. Interestingly enough, after 10 minutes it’s hard for me to keep my mind focused and relaxed for another 5 minutes. On bad days, I even become angry and frustrated for not being able to complete the exercise like I want to. So I take it slowly and take a break if I feel overwhelmed.

The plan is to keep meditating, first mastering the 15-minute sessions and then going up to 20 minutes. We’ll see where meditation practice takes me afterward. I learned to keep my goals lean and agile and not to plan too far.

Visualization

After meditation, I take not more than 3 minutes for visualization I currently have a few important goals in my life and visualization is the most appropriate tool for mental rehearsal of how I’ll get there as well as for adjusting my inner vibrations to my new goals.

It helps me stay focused during the day and not lose track of where I want to go in life. My visualization is especially connected to changing my identity and how I see myself and what I deserve in life.

Reading something positive

As the last step of the kick-off routine dedicated to my mind, I read something positive or eye-opening. I’m addicted to reading and there is no perfect morning without a few minutes of reading and thinking about new ideas.

But I don’t take more than a few minutes for reading something positive (evenings are reserved for that) because there are three more things to do as part of my kick-off routine, dedicated to connecting myself with my body.

Strangely, I’m much more connected to and familiar with my mind (even if it behaves like a spoiled child) than I am with my body. But I intend to change that in the next months or even years. Who knows how long it will take to establish a better connection to my body.

Morning stretch

I don’t exercise in the morning because it’s my brain’s prime time. After my kick-off routine, I go straight to working and creating new awesome things. There may be rare exceptions if my energy levels are too low and I need to recharge or if I need to put my body instead of my mind in motion for any reason.

For example, after an argument, I need a walk because I’m too stressed to think. In the summer, when temperatures skyrocket after early morning, that may also change.

Well, exercising in the morning is currently simply not optimal for me. But as I mentioned, I keep everything in my life open, agile and lean. At the moment, I exercise in the afternoons (a few times per week) when my mind is already tired.

Nevertheless, what I do in the morning are some very basic stretching exercises for improving my posture. Stretching also helps me become more aware of my body and reminds me that I have to take good care of it.

Power breakfast

At this point, I’m usually pretty hungry already. I always make sure to have enough time to make myself a real power breakfast. Far from the standard breakfast, like a piece of bread with jelly. For me, it’s the most important meal of the day. I need a quality breakfast and I need to eat lunch before 2 pm. Everything else can be flexible.

My diet includes carb cycling. When I eat carbs, I eat the majority of them in the morning or after training. So the kind of breakfast I make myself depends on whether I have a carb or a non-carb day. If I’m on a non-carb day, I make sure to get enough healthy fats. If I have a carb day, I eat a healthy breakfast with complex carbs.

The protein level stays the same every morning or, to be more exact, with every meal. I also take core supplements with my breakfast and drink green tea.

Interestingly enough, I started watching Lynda.com educational movies when I eat breakfast. I know that maybe I should pay more attention to food, but I like knowledge much more than food.

It takes me around 30 minutes to prepare myself breakfast and eat it in peace; and I also get around 15 – 20 minutes of learning out of it.

Cold shower

I’m experimenting a little bit with a cold shower as the last step of my kick-off routine. There are a lot of resources and research claiming that a cold morning shower has great positive benefits for your health and your mood.

It makes you more alert, alive and it boosts your immune system. I’m not there yet, I can’t take a cold shower every morning because it’s still too stressful for my body, but I will get there slowly, I guess.

I will let you know if cold morning showers work for me in the long-term as part of my daily routine. Afterward, I end my morning kick-off routine and it’s time to work and create good things. Like writing this article.

To sum things up, here is my morning kick-off routine that I currently enjoy and have set for myself after a lot of experimenting in the past month:

Activity	Time	Level
Morning reflection	20 min	Mind / Emotions
Meditation	15 min	Mind / Emotions
Visualization	2.5 min	Mind / Emotions
Reading something positive	2.5 min	Mind / Emotions
Morning stretch	10 min	Body
Power breakfast	30 min	Body
Cold morning shower	10 min	Body
Total time	90 min

Reminders for morning routine

Reminders

I don’t need a lot of reminders to trigger my routine. I wake up and I know what I have to do. I go to the bathroom, brush my teeth and drink a big glass of water, and when I come to the living room I see my notebook on the table and start with morning reflection.

I have a checklist of what I have to do, in order to not forget anything, and I keep my transaction costs as low as possible, so nothings burden my discipline muscle too much.

For example, I don’t search from scratch for where to read something positive, but I already have a queue of short texts I have to read. My exercise equipment is always at hand; I make sure I have no junk food at home etc.

To be honest, I don’t always perform my morning routine. I figured out that I have to break out of every routine I follow from time to time in order to really stick to it in the long term.

Thus on some days, usually a weekend day, I do completely different things or nothing at all. In the same way, for example, I do follow a strict diet, but from time to time you’ll see me stuffing my face at McDonalds.

It somehow helps me not to feel caught in something and afterwards I can again more easily follow my routine. It definitely works for me. And I know I have enough discipline to not get into any bad habits. I would say that I do it approximately on 90 % of my days, which is enough for me and enough to see constant little improvements in my life.

In much the same way, I’m currently experimenting with my shut-down routine, which is yet far from perfect. At the moment, I only make sure I go to sleep early and that I read before I fall asleep. I have a rule that I simply mustn’t go to sleep without reading at least one page of a book.

I usually read a lot more, of course, but reading at least one page per day is an achievable and reasonable goal every single night, to keep my reading habits sharp.

I will share more with you once I find the shut-down routine that works for me perfectly. In the meantime, here’s some homework for you.

Homework

Go to sleep one hour earlier (instead of watching TV, socializing, etc.) and wake up one hour earlier. Now for one month, try to do four different things from the list below every morning. Try one new thing a week.

Observe yourself and find how different morning habits positively influence your day and your general happiness levels.

See what works for you, develop a habit out of things that work and ditch the things that bring you no value.

Make your mornings a special ritual dedicated only to yourself to celebrate another day of being alive, and see it as an expression of commitment that you will take good care of your mind, body, emotions and the most important relationships in your life throughout the day.

Here’s a list of 50+ things you can try as part of your morning kick-off routine:

Analyze your dreams
Brainstorm 100 ideas
Research business ideas
Clean your computer
Clean your house
Do brain exercises
Do yoga
Get to know new technology
Have sex
Imagine how the world will look like in 100 years
Improve your English
Invent a new machine
Learn a new language
Learn new words
Listen to an audio book
Listen to classical music
Make yourself a power breakfast
Make yourself a veggie smoothie
Meditate
Morning reflection and planning meeting with myself
Organize your desk
Paint, draw or do any other kind of art
Perform self-massage
Philosophy about life
Picture your ideal day
Play chess
Practice belly breathing
Practice to love yourself
Practice your hobby
Pray
Read a book
Read inspirational quotes
Read something positive
Recite affirmations
Review your life vision
Strategize
Stretch
Take a cold shower
Take an online course
Take a walk
Have a deep talk with your spouse or a friend
Think of life experiments you can do
Throw away stuff you don’t need
Try five different teas (without sugar)
Visualize
Watch the sunrise
Watch TED Videos
Write a love poem
Write a message to all the people you love
Write a story
Write down all the things you are grateful for
Write down all your past accomplishments

Life metrics and how to define success in life

Many people will tell you that it’s hard to define success, that you’re operating with a very subjective category. That’s not true. They probably just don’t like maths.

Mathematics as a study of quantities, spaces, structure and change became so very complex and complicated that most people sooner hate it rather than see the beauty in the way it describes the world; including success in life.

Basic maths, respect for numbers and, most importantly, measuring are the key tools for every individual who wishes to make progress in personal and professional life and measure real success. You simply have to love numbers and enjoy doing basic mathematical operations when it comes to life metrics and defining success.

While I don’t understand complex math very well, life metrics and measuring success are the things I do love and master. It’s the only way to see your real progress in life, how successful you are and the direction you’re pursuing.

If we want to define success and actually measure it, we need metrics. Numbers and basic math operations.

This is how you should define success in your life and also regularly measure your success progress:

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

How you should measure your success in life? Compare…

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

If the table above is confusing, don’t worry. In this blog post I will explain everything in detail. In addition to that, I’ll try to explain why regaining the love for numbers can help you a lot with succeed in life. Even more, in this article you will learn:

Why you should love numbers and play with them at regular intervals (as the only real definition of success)
Why we’re usually afraid of measuring our real progress and success in life
How numbers can help you avoid the fake feeling of progress
What and how you should measure in your personal life as success factors (with example of metrics)
Other practical advice and a free document you can download (success metrics matrix)
Why you should compare your success and metrics only to your past results, not other people

How to define success and life metrics

Why we usually hate numbers as metrics of success

In the field of management and business, it has long been known that you can only manage the things that you can measure. Every professional plan and monitoring strategy first needs the analysis of the starting point, then the goal or the final outcome, followed by a preordained path, keeping all the agility along the way, and last but not least the desired speed of progress.

All subjective evaluation in that matter is futile. Firstly, because it’s incredibly hard to admit the truth of where you are to yourself and secondly because your brain and intuition are all too limited in their abilities.

Numbers describe by far the most realistic state, everything else is just beating around the bush and avoiding the bottom line. Because numbers reveal the truth, that’s why people are usually afraid of them.

It’s much easier to live a lie than to admit the truth to yourself. Even harder is to measure real progress and how successful you are when you go into action because progress is usually much slower than you expect and want it to be.

Here is the first important lesson regarding life metrics and measuring success in life. The main reasons why we love to avoid numbers and measuring how good we are:

We hate to admit where we stand to ourselves
Progress is usually much slower than we expect
It’s much easier to lie to yourself that things are better than they really are
If you don’t measure things, you can enjoy the fake feeling of progress
Life is already tough, so why be even harder on yourself

Numbers are the ones that force you to face reality and accept it. Only numbers can show how successful you really are. Number are the ones defining success. It may be emotionally tough, but thankfully we have a tool for measuring progress.

You have to see what you get out of numbers and measuring. You may lose your illusions about life and where you stand and how successful you really are, but tricking yourself into believing that you’re improving something even though you’re staying in the same place doesn’t make any sense.

Here’s an example. A tough one, but it makes a point. People love to avoid numbers, even when things relating to their health start to get really serious. Do you know how many diabetes patients don’t measure their blood sugar levels and watch their diet? Even when people risk losing their sight or getting their limbs cut off. Their body is in real danger, but they still tend to avoid numbers that could help them manage life better.

Vanity metrics and fake definition of success

Besides avoiding measuring altogether, here is another more or less emotional trap of defining and measuring success. When we start measuring, we all like to measure things that are giving us a feeling of progress and fake feeling of success.

We like to measure things that make us feel good about ourselves and how successful we are, even if it’s only a fake progress or fake success.

Therefore you must be very careful how you set your life metrics and how you measure success in life. With vanity metrics you can lie to yourself about how hard you’re working towards the goals, but you’re actually choosing the easier path that doesn’t lead to any real results.

You’re running in a hamster wheel and at the same time measuring your false effort only to feel a little bit better.

Here’s an example – a scale. A lot of people get excited when, after a few days of starving, they lose a couple of kilograms, but in reality they did a lot more damage than good to their body.

Losing water and muscle mass that results in a scale showing less weight is an unrealistic display of progress. So you always need a real combination of metrics that reflect your actual progress and success. In your personal as well as your business life.

In business, a CEO who only monitors how much money the company has in the bank and the income statement just before the year ends in order to optimize the profits is a very lousy CEO. With all the technology available and existing science on how to monitor business progress, from the financial, customer, marketing and other business functions’ aspects, it is very sad that someone would steer the business ship with extremely limited information.

It’s no different in personal life. A successfully set system of measuring progress and success presents an incredible advantage in life, because it enables real discipline and consistent validated learning about yourself. And validated learning means faster progress because you get insights into what works best for you.

Only real, actionable metrics can help you figure out which approaches lead to what you want the fastest and which approaches can maybe even bring setbacks in your personal case.

Therefore, a part of your success metrics must always also mean experimenting in the search mode.

If we go back to the previous example of a scale. You decided to lose weight and get fit. You don’t measure only how much a scale shows, but also your fat percentage, cardiorespiratory capacity, muscle strength and endurance and so on. With the right set of metrics you can change your workout and diet every few weeks and see what gives you the fastest progress.

The bottom line is, you want to avoid vanity metrics of success because of the following reasons:

You don’t want to look rich (while having lots of debt); you want to be rich.
You don’t want you and your family to just smile for the picture but really be happy in everyday life.
You don’t want your scale to show a number as low as possible, but be really fit .
You don’t want to just have a job, but you want a job you love and make a good living out of it.
You don’t want to gossip in a bar about world news and happenings, thinking how smart you are; you actually want to read a book a week and improve your knowledge and competence level.

Fake feeling of progress

It’s right to grow fond of numbers and measure progress and success in both personal and business life. This is the only way to admit your actual starting point to yourself (where you are), make a plan of where you want to go while staying completely flexible on how you’ll get there.

Loving numbers and metrics can also help you measure how fast you’re progressing towards being really successful in life and, equally importantly, enable you validated learning about yourself and the World (with experiments and tests that you do). And validated learning means having insights into how to shape your superior life strategy to make sure your progress is the fastest and to achieve your maximal potential and success.

Numbers are the ones that show that you aren’t only doing meaningless work but rather forging results. When you get to numbers and bottom-lines, all bigmouths run away. When you look at numbers you know how successful you really are.

When talking about personal development and success in life, there are five basic areas that you should regularly measure in one way or another. What and how you will actually measure greatly depends on your life strategy, but measuring and progressing on all five areas at some point will really help you to achieve your peak potential and be ultra successful in life.

Here are the areas you should measure and greatly contribute to success in personal and professional life:

Health
Money and career
Closest relationships
Competences
Mind and feelings

I should, of course, warn you that there is a big chance that you’ll be disappointed when you first start following metrics and figure out your real state and your starting point. As I mentioned, we love to lie to ourselves about where we stand in different areas of life.

The way psychology works is that you often describe yourself to yourself a lot better than the actual state is. This is why we all like to avoid measuring success so much.

Still, the sooner that you admit the truth to yourself, the faster you can make progress; the truth itself often motivates you for work. And it’s not all that dark. As you will see, you stand better in some areas of life than others.

Now let’s dive a bit deeper into each of the five mentioned areas.

Stay fit to have great sex

Health

Health is the first area where you need to make use of maths skills and measure your success in life. Much like you take your car for regular car service and much like financial statements show the health of your company, you have well-developed metrics that show how healthy your body is. A

healthy spirit can only live in a healthy body and hundreds of pages have already been written on the benefits of a healthy lifestyle.

There are a few key areas you should measure when it comes to your health:

Potential progress of any illness you have
Managing your body’s weak points
Regular blood tests (one a year)
Body composition (% of fat etc.)
Aerobic endurance
Muscular endurance
Muscular strength
Flexibility
Other biofeedback you can gather with devices and are interested in

In the past, I personally strongly neglected this aspect, but now I’m trying to slowly take care of my health a lot better. If you neglected your health in the past, progress is incredibly slow and demands a lot of iron-clad will, endurance and discipline.

Statistics show that incredibly few people manage to lose weight in a healthy manner and even fewer have enough willpower to get fit.

The state of your fitness level is often a lot worse than you imagined. One visit to the gym can quickly show that you’ve been neglecting your body for years and years. And if you decide to get into shape, it’s right that you get help from experts (personal trainers), together with the right metrics, professional work programme and consistent measuring of progress.

Progress can be slow, but in a few weeks, you will see the first results, as long as you stick to the set training program. The good news is that the first results will motivate you to continue on your path of becoming fitter. This is how you become more and more successful regarding your health and fitness.

If you’re a newbie in taking care of your health, please really do start with certified trainers who have good references. Otherwise you can do serious damage to your health, especially in the gym. Afterward, when you take care of strong fitness foundations with a personal trainer and you’re ready to exercise on your own, there are many apps (nutrition trackers, exercise trackers, etc.) that can help you measure your real progress.

wealth growth

Money and career

By far the clearest benefits of measuring things in your personal life are shown in the financial field. Money is already connected to numbers by its very nature; it’s after all a piece of paper with a couple of numbers printed on it. And you either manage your money or you always have a lack of it. That’s usually the rule.

Money is definitely one of the success factors in life. And you either manage your money or you always have a lack of it.

There are two categories you should measure when it comes to your money and how successful you are:

Personal income – How much money you make and keep after your spendings
Net-worth – How many assets you own (after deducting all the debt)

If you’re good at acquiring and managing money, both numbers should be increasing over your lifetime. There can be temporary situations when they don’t. You start your own business, an accident happens, you make a bad investment, a financial crisis comes, etc. It’s a part of life. Remember, being broke is a temporary state, but being poor is a state of mind.

But only having enough financial literacy, together with proper measuring and management, can tell you if you’ve made a stupid decision regarding your money or were just unlucky; and how much damage has been done to your wallet and financial situation.

Well, despite the occasional ups and downs, you want to be in as good financial health as possible. Thus you want to manage your money very carefully. If you want to do that, you have to measure.

As with all the measuring, a consistent analysis of where you are financially comes first. You wouldn’t believe it, but many people don’t have a clue. I hope you are not one of them. Technology today enables you to track your money consumption and your net worth very easily. You should always know what kind of a financial shape you’re in and how your spending habits look.

The interesting thing is that when you first start to track your spending habits, a few additional good things usually happen:

A consistent analysis quickly shows that you spend way too much money on certain things you don’t need. Expensive coffees, snacks, lumber, clothes, You get data about where and how you can save more money.
Additionally, budgeting, entering and tracking every individual cost contributes to you giving another thought to whether you really need something new to buy. As a result, you spend less money, especially on stupid things. You start to manage your potential emotional purchases At the end of the day, the main idea is that you spend less than you earn.
You start paying yourself first, which is the most important rule of successfully handling money. You become so intrigued by personal finance and managing your money that you want to take care of your investments before you spend your money on anything else.

Even more demanding, but consequently also a lot more useful, is managing your wealth and seeing how your net worth grows. You can quickly realize that achieving decent yield with your investments is incredibly difficult, and increasing your wealth is a strenuous and long-lasting process.

Actually, there are two paths to financial abundance in your personal life:

You take care of income explosion and cost control by starting your own business, for example, and consequently make so much money with one move that all your future financial needs are covered. It’s a risky business, but it can be done.
You slowly and carefully make sure that your savings grow and that you make good investments. This path is a lot more difficult if you don’t measure your progress regularly. But luckily a slightly bigger net worth every month means a lot bigger wealth in the long term, if you invest smartly enough.

Again, it all depends on your life strategy. Nevertheless money is definitely one factor of success. Thus you should become really good at managing it.

Career

Besides money, career is also one of the life areas where metrics and management are a necessity. It’s slightly more difficult to measure career progress, because you also have to use slightly more subjective metrics, but it can be done.

There are many metrics you can choose from and they greatly depend on your career goals. Examples are how much you earn, your position in the company, public influence, social media influence, how much you enjoy your work, the number of professional connections you have, etc. If your career is important to you, you can always find a set of metrics that show realistic progress in your career life.

Stronger together

Your closest relationships

The quality and depth of every (intimate) relationship depends primarily on the number of hours you spend with the person enjoying positive, playful emotions. This includes planning, creating things together, following common goals, doing things you both love, relaxing and enjoying life and, in the case of intimate relationships, we can also add making love.

The only time that really counts and contributes to the relationship quality and depth is the time you spend together full of positive feelings. Fighting or sitting in front of the TV doesn’t count. Everyone immediately knows when there is positive time spent together with other people and when there isn’t.

Once you measure how many quality hours you spend with your intimate partner and other people you love, you can quickly get embarrassed. You realize how people who mean the most to you in the world you sometimes unintentionally neglect and consequently also don’t live the entire potential of the relationship.

Many times, you may even have a false belief of how much quality time you spend with the people you love. But when you subtract sleep, working hours, commuting, housework, fighting, you may find that you spend way less time with people you love than you should. If you don’t measure, you don’t know.

A simple analysis can show that things are even worse. After analyzing data, you may figure out that you spend more time with people that give you headaches in life and aren’t even close to you (like work, toxic relationships, etc.) rather than spending it with people who bring love, happiness and joy into your life.

Maybe because you need emotional drama in life, maybe because you’re addicted to work, or for whatever other reason. It’s something you don’t want to do. Numbers help you manage such things.

Measuring how you spend your time also shows your priorities and values. Only by actually measuring how you spend your time can you figure out what your values or priorities in life are and where they’re leading you. If your close relationships aren’t at the very top of your priorities, there’s a big possibility that you have lousy relationships in your life. And it’s hard to be successfull in life without deep and meaningful relationships.

Besides measuring how much quality time you spend with the people you love, there are many other things you can measure. Here are a few examples:

How much you do for your partner (investment in a relationship)
How much you get out of a relationship (giving and receiving must be in balance)
How often you say I love you
How often you give a compliment to your partner
How often you make love
Number of close relationships you have in life

Same goes for children. Children spell love as T-I-M-E. Spent quality time together. And not only children, same goes for all other relationships you care about.

Now, the point of measuring is not to take all the romance out of relationships. It’s not like you have to write down every single thing you do and every minute you invest. It’s more about taking a week or two every once in a while to observe yourself and other people you care about, and becoming aware of what’s going on with your relationships based on fundamental relationship metrics.

Are you getting closer to the people you love, or is there an increasing distance? Do you enjoy the time you spend with the people you love or are you constantly fighting? Love won’t miraculously solve your personal relationships; proper management (day by day) will.

Understand the process

Competences

Now let’s move on to developing your personal competences. The first thing you should measure is how much time you spend on the idiot box, also known as the multi-media ad player or even better known as the television, and how much time you spend lost on the internet.

They are the two biggest enemies of your personal development and progress and success in life. Including acquiring new competences. You’ll be surprised at how much of your time they take. Unless you’ve already dealt with these big time wasters.

An average person spends at least 10 to 20 hours a week in front of the TV, programming themselves into a diligent consumer, wasting their precious life. The only people who get anything from the television are those on the other side of the screen.

In the second step, compare the time you spend watching TV and browsing the internet to how many hours a month you invest in your knowledge and the development of your other competences – by studying, going to seminars, reading books and similar. You’ll also probably be surprised.

An average person is close to zero investment in themselves, those who give their best maybe get a few hours a week. That’s very lousy considering how many competences and talents an individual can develop and how important they are in the knowledge-based society.

Compare 0 or 1 hour of reading per week to 20 hours of watching TV. It’s a very bad ratio.

Once you openly admit to yourself how little you invest in yourself and your progress, you quickly change your perspective on time wasters. Remember, you should invest into yourself, because it’s the best and ultimate investment that exists.

There’s power in knowledge, and in the creative knowledge society, you strongly lag behind if you don’t invest into yourself. In the long term, whining about how tough and unfair life is won’t help at all, but competences undoubtedly will. With competences, the world is your oyster. Only with competences you can really succeed in life.

Here is what you should be measuring when it comes to developing your competences and success in life:

How much time you spend reading (and other ways of developing competences)
Domain knowledge you possess
The number of skills you master
Your IQ (if you dare)
Your EQ

Success in life

Controlling your mind

And finally the most difficult one. The quality of your life and how successful you are strongly depends on whether you control your mind or your mind controls you. That’s the basis of Buddhism and a few other, especially Eastern, religions and philosophies.

The main tool of strengthening control over your mind is meditation. Measure how much time you can spend sitting in the same spot, focused on one point (or thought or your chakra) and you’ll find how strong your control over your mind is.

If you don’t meditate regularly, you’ll be very disappointed. After a few minutes, thoughts will start forcefully entering your mind, parts of your body will start itching, you’ll feel incredibly uncomfortable.

The less time you can do this for, the more your mind controls you. If something is not really itching you. ;) The more the mind controls you, the more negative thoughts this usually means. The more negative thoughts, the lower the quality of life. The more suffering in life, the lower the level of consciousness.

The positive thing is that the more you meditate in life, the more you strengthen the muscle of control over your mind. And if you do all this with an inner smile and not with struggle, you’ll also be able to live a much happier life in general. You learn to carry the inner smile with you.

Here is a simple measurement then. The longer you can meditate, the more control you have over your mind. The more successful you are in life. Now sit down somewhere quiet and test yourself. Face the ultimate metric of mind control.

Taking feelings into account

Your feeling are closely connected to your thoughts, so here’s the place where we should mention them. People love to neglect their feelings. The best way to give more attention to your feelings is by regularly observing them, listening to them, understanding them as well as managing them.

The best way of listening to your feelings better is the so-called Happiness Index. Every morning or evening you mark how you feel on a scale.

In the next step, you try to figure out why you feel the way you feel. If you figure out that negative feelings are the consequence of negative thoughts (which they usually are), then it’s right that you face negative thinking.

The best way for this is the so-called emotional accounting as one of the central tools of cognitive psychology.

To sum up, here are a few things you can measure when it comes to your mind and emotions:

How well you’re able to control your mind (your maximum meditating time)
Your daily Happiness index
Number of negative thoughts daily (using emotional accounting)
Dominating cognitive distortions

You can’t do everything at once, and the first steps

Not everything can happen at once. Setting the goal that you will integrate all the life metrics at once and measure how successful you are is unrealistic. You have to make progress step by step, preferably by focusing on one area.

Too many demanding goals lead to you doing a lot of things badly, which is the same as doing nothing. So step by step, gradually and slowly start with basic metrics in one area and then add new metrics of success. Once you master one field, you move on to the next one.

It’s by far the best to start with health, since improving health always very positively influences all other areas. But you can also choose the area where you’re currently facing the most problems or you’re doing the worst.

Once you use measuring and life metrics to integrate new behavioral patterns into your life, area after area, you can also notice the incredible transformation of the overall quality of your life. All the effort that you put in slowly pays off.

You must never forget that with time, the hard road becomes easy and the easy road becomes hard. Choose the more difficult road that leads into a brighter future of your life. And the more difficult path is the one supported by actual metrics and measuring real progress.

Start smart

When it comes to success, compete only with yourself

Please take another look at the table below. It should be immediately obvious to you why success is not a subjective category at all and that you can indeed measure it, but the only thing that makes sense when measuring your success level is to compete with your previous self.

Compare your position now with your position a month or a year ago. That’s how you should measure your success; make sure you’re becoming better version of your self step by step. Make sure you improve a little bit every day and every month and every year. That’s how you will become successful and great.

But by comparing yourself too much to other people, you’re doomed from the very beginning. Why? Because there will always be someone better than you are, in every single area of life. Other people should be a kind of a reference point for you and people who perform better should motivate you to become even better version yourself, but when you compare yourself to others too much, you can quickly start putting yourself in the victim and self-pity mindset, ruminating how life is unfair.

For example, you can’t compete with someone who inherited millions in assets, if you’re starting from financial ground zero. You can’t compete with someone who has been an athlete their whole life, with the right sportsman DNA and incredible muscle memory, if you didn’t ever exercise. You can’t compare yourself to a monk meditating for hours after your first meditation.

Compare your metrics with the ones from the previous month or year. Compete only with your previous self. That’s how you can measure your real success in life.

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

* Internal asset – Can grow only linear. Learn more
** External asset – Can grow exponentially. Learn more

Below, you can download the table I call the life success metric matrix (PDF), completely for free:

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Life metrics and success in life (PDF)

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Enjoy numbers and monitor the progress that you’ll definitely be proud of! And keep track of this blog, because in the future, a lot of time will be devoted to the actual metrics of each individual area of life. This is the only way to really measure your success.

Homework

Now you know how to define success and measure it, so take action

Now it’s time for homework. Knowledge without action is useless. So here’s what you should do:

Choose one life area (health, money, career, relationships, competences, mind/emotions). If you don’t know where to begin, start with your health or wherever you lag behind the most.
Set some basic metrics of success for the chosen life area. Below is the summary of metrics you can start measuring as the beginning in different life areas.
Set a system of how you will measure your progress (Excel, apps, frequency,) and set all the necessary reminders that will help you keep consistency.
Also, prepare a list of books you will read in the chosen life area, so you will acquire new knowledge and upgrade your set of metrics when you’re ready. Use the rule that you always go straight for the best knowledge.
Measure your progress at regular intervals.
After every measurement, make sure you do self-reflection and make a decision on what you will stop doing, what you will start doing and what new experiments you will try.
Enjoy your progress and be proud of the discipline you’re keeping. Not many people can pull that off.
Never compare yourself to other people. Only compare your progress to your previous self.

Do you want to be more successful in life?

Read more about the massive success formula.

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.
Emotional roller-coaster

It’s widely known that building a startup is like a wild emotional roller-coaster ride. One moment, you’re in the depths of despair and the other, you’re on top of the world; and in between, you’re hopefully enjoying an adrenaline filled journey.

It can even happen that you’re at the peak of positive emotions and at the very bottom a few times in a single day.

You get a new client. Excellent. One of your biggest clients starts complaining about your service. Yikes. You release a successful update for your product. Hooray. Someone in your team has a bad day and nags and spreads doubts. Sucks. You just got a new order. Yes. And so on.

But starting your own business isn’t the only thing that can be represented by an emotional roller-coaster ride. Actually, all the things we consider important in life are more or less nothing but wild roller-coaster rides.

You have a baby. You’re super happy and it changes your life forever. Pure emotional peak and happiness. But then you don’t sleep and it demands an extraordinary amount of energy and attention. Maybe even more than you expected. But then your baby smiles. And you forget everything. Roller-coaster ride.

You fall in love. You go crazy. It’s like being on drugs. And then the first fight comes. How could that happen? But then also the make-up sex. And then your loved one has to travel somewhere. An abstinence crisis occurs. But then you see and hug your love again. Roller-coaster ride.

You decide to take care of your health more. You go jogging and you feel wonderful. Then you want more and faster results. You see more results and you’re on top. Yes! Then you injure yourself. And you go straight to the bottom. You have to rest, but you want to train. And then you heal. And you start training again. You feel great.

Now you take it slowly, all the way until you overtrain again and injure yourself. And this time, you also decided to improve your diet. And you just ate a cookie. And you’re mad and you can’t train. But it’s okay because you know that tomorrow is a new beginning. The next day, you do much better and you’re proud of yourself. Roller-coaster ride.

You start investing your money. You’re super excited. You’re going to be an investor. You make your first investment. And you lose money. You go buy a few books and invest in your knowledge. You get motivated again. You make an investment. You lose money again. You’re disappointed and it hurts. You feel stupid, but you don’t give up.

You have the last thousand dollars to invest. Then you make a small ROI. Hope gets stronger. But after that, you make a really good investment. Doors to heaven open up. And then you get cocky. And you bet everything on an investment that’s a total disaster. You can’t believe you did that. You start again, this time in a more mature way, even when you make ROI. Roller-coaster ride.

Let’s stay with investing for one more second. The first and the most important rule of investing is “don’t lose money”. As important of a rule as that is, don’t let emotions get out of your control. Always manage your emotions, especially in extremes. Bears make money, bulls make money, pigs get slaughtered. Pigs are greedy investors who stop managing their emotions and get greedy.

Don’t let emotions get out of your control. Always manage your emotions, especially in extremes.

The picture is pretty much the same in all other important areas of life. You ride the emotional roller-coaster. Wealth, health, relationships. If you want to successfully finish the ride, you have to learn how to manage your emotions. All in order to not get lost in depression and self-pity, and to not believe that any of your successes are a predictor of future successes. You have to stay Zen, Stoic, cool and calm.

Actually, there’s nothing wrong with feeling severe negative emotions when you fail. There’s nothing wrong with being super excited and proud of yourself. But you have to manage your emotions to the point of staying down to Earth when you’re making your next move. You have to make sure that emotions don’t distort your subjective reality to the point where you don’t see things as clearly as you should and where you start making bad decisions.

You have to make sure that emotions don’t distort your subjective reality to the point where you don’t see things as clearly as you should and where you start making bad decisions.

You start emotionally abusing your kid, because they demand so much energy and attention; or you’re so mesmerized by their smile or feel so guilty when they cry that you don’t set any boundaries.

You exaggerate with training to the point of really hurting yourself. Or you stop training at all when the first pitfall occurs.

You’re so confident in your investment that you put all eggs in one basket. Or you get completely depressed when you lose some money.

It’s completely natural to have severe feelings after successes or failures, but you have to first deal with your emotions by calming yourself down and making sure that they don’t cloud your rational judgment.

Whatever your goal in life is, if it’s an important and big one, you’ll experience highs and you’ll experience lows. The more the goals matter to you, the more you care, the more you want something, the more intense the extremes are.

The more intense extreme situation in life mean nothing but better knowing how to handle your emotions.

No matter how extreme the situation you are in, never see the world as black and white. There is no pure success and pure failure.

Besides never seeing the world only as black and white, by far the best solution for managing your emotions is to take a scientific approach to everything. You see life as nothing but a bunch of experiments, tests and experiences where some things work for you as an individual and for your relationships, and others don’t.

You stop doing what doesn’t work, keep in your life what does work, and regularly adjust to the changes in your environment.

The point of life is to experience the whole emotional palette, from the most negative to the most positive emotions. You just have to be careful to not get stuck anywhere on the palette.

The things that work for you, you have to preserve in your life and be grateful without getting your judgment clouded by too positive emotions. And you must know that nothing lasts forever.

For things that bring you sorrow, you either have to pivot to a different fit, change your perspective, level up your game, deal with cognitive distortions, innovate your way out or something else. There is always a move you can make.

And again, nothing lasts forever, neither the positive nor the negative. Just don’t get stuck. If you’re going to wait for the negative to pass without fighting, you may wait all the way until the end. Because life wants you to fight.

Well, it’s time for you to go after the best that life can offer. The first step is to embark on the roller-coaster called life. It may be a bit turbulent and uncomfortable at the beginning, but when you learn how to manage your emotions and become more skillful at it, the ride can truly become unforgettable.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. So enjoy the wild emotional roller-coaster ride.

You can fly high only if you care. But it can also hurts the most, when you care.
A year without a schedule
This year, I will have a year completely without a schedule. I got this time management idea from the famous Venture Capital investor Marc Andreessen.

He got the idea from Arnold Schwarzenegger or, to be more exact, from a book called A Perfect Mess, which explains how having no fixed schedule contributed to Arnold’s success.

It’s one of the quite radical and messy productivity techniques. But it can give you great results.

The main simple idea is that you don’t commit to any meetings, appointments or activities at any set time or date in the future. The idea is pretty crazy and radical, probably impossible for most standard and structured jobs, but if you can afford it, it can dramatically raise your productivity.

Having no schedule and no calendar enables you to work on the most important things or on the thing that interests you the most every single day. Even more importantly, it enables you to maximize your work in the flow or in the zone, the most productive godlike state, where you just learn, create and enjoy life.

You can also listen to your gut instinct about priorities every day. You can easily make themed days with no interruptions, and spend the whole day learning, writing, coding, designing, researching, brainstorming or working on a project you like. If you also turn off your phone and close your e-mail client, you can really have a whole day without any interruptions and distractions.

When people call you to set a meeting, you have a few options after explaining that you don’t keep a fixed schedule:
- Sorry, I won’t be able to join a meeting, simply not interested
- Sorry, I won’t be able to join a meeting, is there any other way I can contribute
- Do we even need to have a meeting (or can you just let me know now what it’s about)
- Let’s meet right now (if it’s really important)
- Call me the same day you plan the meeting and I’ll let you know if I’m available
- Call me 30 minutes before the meeting and I’ll let you know if I can join
As I mentioned, few people in the world can afford such a time management technique and be completely without a schedule or a calendar. Even if you’re the boss and make decisions for how to spend time with stakeholders and your team, it’s close to impossible to pull off such a thing, if not even harder than for other non-executive jobs.

You have to be in a really unique position with a unique kind of job to pull that off. Since I’ll be in monk mode the whole next year, I can definitely do such a thing. That will be one of my experiments.

Well, to stay open-minded, you can also have a less radical approach with this technique. You can use the “no-schedule philosophy” only to better focus yourself and to more easily say no to commitments and appointments that aren’t the best use of your time.

On the other hand, you can still keep a schedule of really “must do” appointments. But to be as productive as possible, you try to group all of the appointments on the same day. That way, you maybe can have 3 or 4 days without a schedule and 1 or 2 working days full of appointments.

But to be as productive as possible, you try to group all of the appointments on the same day. That way, you maybe can have 3 or 4 days without a schedule and 1 or 2 working days full of appointments. Here is an example how you can organize your schedule if you can’t afford to have no schedule at all.

Here is an example how your schedule should be organized for maximum performance.

I will maximize this technique in 2016 and see the results. My hypothesis for the experience is, to quote Marc Andreessen, “there is nothing more liberating than looking at your calendar and seeing nothing but free time for weeks ahead to work on the most important things in whatever order you want”.

I’ll let you know if that’s also valid for me.

Homework

Homework

There are definitely improvements you can do in your schedule to be more productive and to keep more completely free blocks of time for maximizing creating, delivering and capturing value. Here’s what you should do:
- Open your calendar and analyze the past few months.
- Look at every meeting and analyze whether the meetings were really necessary, if you had to be present, if the work could have been done in a more efficient way etc.
- Brainstorm on how you could group your meetings to have as much free time in your calendar as possible.
- Timebox a no-interruption day(s) where you forbid yourself to schedule any task or appointment.
The bottom line is, try to clean up your schedule as much as possible. If you’re super lucky, you may schedule a period in your life completely without a schedule. If not, try to group appointments on the same days in order to have as many free days as possible to create in the flow. If that doesn’t work, try to keep at least one working day as a no-interruptions day.

But really, stay brutal and precise when cleaning up your calendar.

mindfulness

Why you will never find happiness in life

Other people can’t make you happy

Shopping will only make you happy for a while

Money only helps in the beginning

Accomplishments aren’t happiness

Things that increase happiness just a little bit

Gap between expectations and reality

The secret to why you aren’t happy in life

Cognitive therapy and emotional accounting

Rewriting your brain with the new experience

The morning kick-off routine

My morning kick-off routine

Morning reflection and meeting with myself

Meditation

Visualization

Reading something positive

Morning stretch

Power breakfast

Cold shower

Reminders

Life metrics and how to define success in life

Why we usually hate numbers as metrics of success

Vanity metrics and fake definition of success

Health

Money and career

Career

Your closest relationships

Competences

Controlling your mind

Taking feelings into account

You can’t do everything at once, and the first steps

When it comes to success, compete only with yourself

Now you know how to define success and measure it, so take action

The power of creative visualization

Getting big visions and new ideas through imagination and visualization

Changing your inner mental state

Visualization as a morning or evening habit

Vision board

Changing your internal representations

Visualization and spirituality

The main takeaways

Emotional roller-coaster

A year without a schedule

Homework