In capitalism, there’s only one really important rule. Markets always win. You stand zero chances if you go against the market. Markets determine a big part of your life. If you choose the right markets, things will go well for you; if not, you’ll experience only struggle, pain and failure. You may fight against the market for years and at the end, you’ll probably be brutally knocked out to the floor, no matter how competent you are. You may lose everything and markets will laugh right in your face.
The brutal thing is that even if you don’t want to play the game, you’re playing the game.
In love life, your sexual market value more or less determines the quality of the partner you can attract. It’s usually someone in your range of sexual market value. It’s like you have a number on your forehead. Trends on the job market have a big influence on whether you’ll be employed or not, how much you’ll earn and how quickly you’ll get promoted. You can be the best in something no one wants to buy and you’ll be poor. If you’re an entrepreneur and don’t have customers who want to buy your products, there is no market and there is no business. Most startups fail because there’s no market.
A market is not a nice thing. It’s like a moody, perpetually dissatisfied cruel person leaving no room for negotiations, no room for discussions or compromises. Either you hit the spot and make the market happy or you’re out of the game. You can even make the market happy several times in a row and then fail it, and yet the market won’t spare you any pain. Markets are copy-cats of nature; and nature can be the most beautiful experience in the world or the cruelest one. That’s also why so many people criticize capitalism.
Let’s take a step back now. What is a market, really? Well, it’s nothing but supply and demand. Markets are nothing but people voting with their resources, be it with money, attention, love, sex or anything else.
If you can provide something in great demand and of scarce supply, you’ve hit the spot. If you supply something that’s in big supply and short demand, markets will ignore you and you’ll be poor. Offer something people want, but not many can do, and you shall prosper; offer something anyone can offer, and few people want, and you shall be one of many waiting in a long line, hoping that maybe someone spots you; and they probably won’t.
There’s a good story representing this connection between creating, delivering and capturing value, and markets. An old couple is walking in the park. The grandpa gets a heart attack and collapses on the floor. A young person passes by. Grandma, completely panicked, asks the person if they know CPR. The person responds: “I’m a really good person.” Grandma says that she doesn’t care about that, she only wants to know if the person knows CPR. The person responds again: “I’ve also finished college and work really hard.” That’s nice and all, but can you do CPR?
The point of the story is that markets only care about the things you can supply. Money knows no racism, no borders and don’t care about your history. Markets don’t care if you’re a good person, in love or not, the only thing that the markets care about is the value you can provide.
The formula is simple: no value, no money. Well, it’s not that simple, of course. There are many different types of value a person can produce. It can be social value, attraction value or whatever. For example, a good teacher produces a great social value, but not that much of a financial value, because supply of teachers is quite bigger than demand.
I’m definitely encouraging you to find the right balance between market value and social value, but you should never leave market value out of the equation. When we speak in terms of business (financial markets, career markets, startups etc.), “no unique value proposition, no money” is the golden rule.
The biggest problem with markets is that it’s not easy to be in a position where the demand is great and the supply falls short. It’s one of the toughest things in the world. Most people who hit the sweet spot do it based on pure luck. Others struggle for years before hitting it, after putting huge effort into strategizing, innovating, analyzing and failure; and even then you need to have a lot of luck. The good news is that you have to be right only once, the bad news is that it’s extremely hard to be right even once. But understanding markets can help you a lot to progress faster in life.
Everyone’s dream should be to have a monopoly in some niche market for a short period of time. A monopoly is definitely not good for the general society, but it gives a great advantage to an individual, even if only for a short period of time. Everyone would like to have a monopoly, everyone would like to be on top, maybe just to taste it, even if they don’t admit it to themselves. Monopoly is how you get on the top.
There’s even more. We want to control the markets, not only as individuals but as a society as well. In the same way as we try to control nature. Nature and markets, they both make us feel insecure. That’s why we have the government and government interventions. To control the markets and to control nature (with all its resources, threats, borders etc.).
The sad thing is that most interventions bring a new set of problems, like inefficiency and corruption. Controlling the beast is no easy task, and people more often hurt themselves than not. Going against the markets is hard, controlling them is even harder. Sooner or later, market meltdowns and scandals happen. But that’s how we organized the world.
Now let’s look at the markets from a brighter perspective. What can you do to understand markets more? The first thing you have to do is un-ego yourself. We all have assumptions about the markets. We think other people want what we want, like and dislike the same things, use technology in the same way etc. In most cases, we have wrong assumptions and wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. That’s the main point of the lean startup theory and its first phase of building a startup, which is empathy.
When you un-ego yourself, you become empathetic, you listen to the voices on the market, you observe what people respond to, you search for what people are prepared to pay for.
In the second step, you should stop following your passion and start following your effort. Rather than idealizing life, you look at the hard facts. What markets really want that you can actually provide. There is no place for romance, idealism or egoistic behavior towards the markets. Only supply and demand. The good news is that with time following your effort and seeing all the results passion will also develop. But…
If you ignore the market, the market will ignore you. As already mentioned, you have to be aware that even if you don’t want to compete, you are competing. You’re voting with your resources and other people use their resources to vote on how much value you can provide for them. There’s no escape.
With your birth, you were put on different markets and dealt different cards. Talents, family money, beauty, intelligence, and your hard work, they’re all building blocks of your capacity to prove your value on the market. The more of them you’re born with, the better position you are in. That’s definitely a big advantage in the short term, but not necessarily in the long term. That is to say, good times make soft people, and things like the Dutch disease can happen. And hard and smart work always put talent (or other given things) to shame. It’s up to you how you’ll play game of life.
No matter what, you should respect the markets, learn its rules and play the best game possible. When thinking about markets (financial markets, job markets, consumer markets etc.), you should analyze short-term and long-term trends, you should always stay empathetic, constantly acquire new market insights and quickly adapt to changes. You must know how to manage your ego and your false assumptions by constantly, testing, experimenting and innovating.
Go with the markets, make the markets your best friends and you shall prosper; put ego before the markets and you’ll stay alone and miserable. It’s that simple. Your competences are your downside protection. If you’re very competent, you’ll always make something out of your life. Markets define your upside potential. If you hit the right market at the right time, you can win big. But if you’re competent and hit the right market, something magical can happen.
In the lean start-up theory, there’s a very popular concept called Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The idea is that you don’t build the whole shiny expensive product and then launch it on the market and see the market response (because maybe nobody will buy it and the investment for doing that is big), instead you build the minimum set of features needed to start learning about what the market really wants. The MVP is the smallest thing you can build that tests the value you’ve promised to the market. You build an MVP to start learning about market needs and getting customer insights; or, if you want a fancier definition, a minimum viable product is the product with the highest return on investment versus risk.
An important part of the MVP concept is that you stop thinking about the big picture and about your desired final outcome, and start thinking about immediately creating value and learning about your potential customers. You’ve probably heard Mike Tyson’s quote that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. That’s why you have to test all the small parts of your plan, regularly getting feedback and constantly adjusting. In the lean startup philosophy, that’s also called testing your hypothesis with an MVP (validated learning).
The important emphasis is also that the MVP is not only a crappy or minimal version of your final product, but a strategy and process aimed towards making and selling a product to customers. It’s a process of idea generation, prototyping, presentation, data collection, analysis and learning.
In the startup world, you learn the most when you have direct contact with a market – with your potential clients or customers, everything else before are nothing but your personal assumptions and assumptions from your team; and as you know, wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups and you’re usually wrong before you’re right. When you have the MVP and are in contact with your market, you can engage in the build-measure-learn feedback loop. You can test and add or remove feature by feature of your product by building it, measuring results with carefully chosen metrics and learning about market response.
MVPs in business can be landing pages (smoke test), explainer videos, e-mail tests, crowdfunding campaigns, concierge MVPs (manual service instead of a product) and so on. A popular method is also called a Wizard of Oz MVP (or Flinstoning), where you put up a front of the webpage that looks like a real working product, but you carry out product functions manually. There are many ideas for testing and comparing your assumptions (subjective reality) to actual market needs (objective realities); the point is that you don’t fully commit and put all eggs in one basket based just on your ego and what you believe is true. Because at the end, the market always wins in business, no matter what your beliefs are.
To summarize, the purpose of an MVP is to accelerate learning about the customers and the market, to be able to test hypotheses (your assumptions) with minimal resources, to reduce waste such as engineering hours and financial resources, to get the product to early customers as soon as possible and to have really good customer insight into which features you should actually build. An MVP is also the basis for the final product. An MVP doesn’t only save you a lot of money and energy before getting a market response and prevents you from failing big, it can also help you avoid becoming a zombie company. A zombie company is a company that finds itself in a situation where there’s no death, no growth, no progress and no moving ahead. It’s consuming an enormous amount of resources and is a terrible drain on human energy. A zombie company is a company stuck in the land of the living dead.
It’s no different in your personal life. You don’t want to fail big in any area of life after a big investment, and you want to become a zombie even less. The MVP concept from the lean startup philosophy can help you with that. Let’s see how.
Using the MVP concept in your personal life
One of the biggest mistakes you can make in life is committing to something that isn’t really you, investing your whole self into something that isn’t your perfect fit. One of the biggest wastes in life is doing something you don’t really want, something that you don’t really enjoy. And people do a lot of that shit. They commit to wrong jobs, wrong people, wrong diets and wrong investments.
In order to not fail yourself and your needs, you must first know yourself and all the options you have in life really well. If you want to be successful in life, you have to know yourself and what you want out of life very clearly, and the best way to get to know yourself and your environment is by experimenting, reflecting and learning. The best way to do personal validated learning is introducing the so-called search mode into your life, testing what your best fits are by using the MVP concept.
The core idea is that when you’re in the search mode, you shouldn’t have any expectations, you shouldn’t have any commitments and you shouldn’t do any hard work. Expectations lead to disappointments and before you understand something, you definitely have expectations that are completely wrong. Commitments lead to heavy energy investments, and you shouldn’t be investing before you know what you’re truly investing into and whether the investment really fits your character. Hard work should always also be smart work, but you can’t work smartly if you don’t have the right map and coordinates.
In the search phase, using the MVP concept, you just try, experiment, observe, reflect and learn about yourself and the world. The most important thing is to have no fixed ideas and no expectations at all in this phase. Your only job is to test the assumptions you’ve written down, correct them, and try different things to find out what suits you best. Your only job is to learn about yourself and the world. No goals. No measurement of progress. Just learning and playing.
To do that, you need MVPs. The idea of MVPs is to not only talk about things (what you should try, what you think you may like etc.), but to go and try them. You don’t assume, you go out and test. Testing and trying is the best way to gain firsthand knowledge about yourself and the world. For every new experience you get, you should decide whether to keep it in your life or not (pivot or presevere). Every new experience should also give you ideas and insights into what to try next. The difference between what you think is valuable to you and what really is valuable for your life creates waste.
Don’t assume anything, try and test everything.
The best thing ever is that today, it’s so easy to test and try everything. You have so many options, access to knowledge and many different disciplines in sports, arts, business and other areas in life you can try and test. You can really have a lot of fun testing and trying in today’s times. The world is basically an endless pool of possibilities.
At the end of the day, you must find your best fits and have your dream life composed like a beautiful mosaic – perfect diet, best exercise, best-fitting career, investments best suited to your character, perfect partner etc. The problem, of course, is that you only have one life and every experiment takes quite a lot of time. That’s why you need to use the MVP philosophy. You need to invest the minimum amount of effort possible into learning if something is your fit or not.
Minimum viable experience and emotional accounting
Instead of calling it Minimum Viable Product, let’s call it Minimum Viable Experience. The idea is that you try as many things as possible in life (your vision list), and based on your physical, emotional and intellectual response, you decide whether you should keepsomething in your life or pivot to something else.
To really use the MVP or MVE concept, you of course need to try something new in life, but you also need a system to measure feedback. The system for measuring feedback and your progress is called emotional accounting. The simple metric is that if you like something, if you enjoy a thing, activity or person, then keep it. If you like and enjoy something, then that thing probably fits you well. You can also set more complex metrics based on your goals, values and what matters to you.
There’s plenty of advice on fitness and diet. You can even find contradictory advice. But you can test what works and what doesn’t work for you as an individual. For someone, being vegetarian is the optimal diet. For others, far from it. There is no single formula for success. You can only try vegetarian, vegan, fruitarian, paleo and other verified diets until you find the one that suits you best. It doesn’t make sense to only read about it or argue about it, you have to try it for yourself and see. With no expectations and by keeping an open mind. After the search phase and finding what works for you best, you can execute (keep, set goals, measurements…) by optimizing details.
In this case, an MVP would be the new diet plan that you stick to for a few weeks. In addition to that, you also need a measuring system. That can be your weight, fat percentage, energy level and so on. Smart scale can be a great help with that. You can record what you eat, how you feel after a certain food and the kind of results you’re getting. You must also take into account that every change brings new stress into your life, so the first few days shouldn’t count as relevant feedback; but after a few months, you should definitely have a clear picture of what works for you and what doesn’t, where to persevere and where to pivot.
The second example would be looking for a new career. Your emotions mirror your complete dissatisfaction in your current career. Here’s how you would tackle this challenge in the first phase of an Agile and Lean Life. In your free time, you write down assumptions for careers you think you could blossom in. You start testing how much passion awakens in you when reading about specific industries, you join forums and attend online courses etc. You take some part-time projects, even for no payment, just to see how engaged you become. You continue experimenting until you find the new perfect fit for you. Then you go into the execution phase. At the end, you may find that design is your thing after trying to prepare an outstanding CV for a completely different industry.
An MVP in this case would be to execute a small project in your free time or do some additional work as a sole proprietor or whatever, just to learn about the industry and the new career you want to undertake. First you have to learn and only then can you fully commit.
Here are some other ideas and examples:
You can try dozens of sports before you commit to any of them.
You can do the same to discover your perfect investment profile, the competences you should develop, the things you enjoy in life, the technology you should use and maybe even a religion or life philosophy you should follow.
Here, you can find many ideas for the areas you should test and experiment in: Your life strategy
Minimum viable partner
The same concept also applies to relationships. You can’t just commit forever when you meet someone for the first time. It should be a process of milestones and small commitments that get bigger with time, much like the definition of an MVP states that it’s not about the product, but about the process.
There are around 7 billion people in the world. Most of them aren’t even close to being your fit, but a few are – in business and personal life. And you have to find them. Of course people who fit you best are people who have values and beliefs similar to yours, but are at the same time different enough that they can enable you to grow and learn. But how can you find them?
The key idea is that you first know what you want in relationships. Making personas and then testing your assumptions can help you with that a lot. Soon after experiencing a few relationships, you should know very well what your minimum viable partner is like, what are the mandatory characteristics a person must have in order for you to have a deep relationship with them.
When you know what you like and what you don’t, and what the deal breakers are, you can further explore what the purpose of every relationship in your life is, which relationships you should persevere in and which people you should remove from your life. You should date, meet and engage with as many people as possible. Again, you should have personal metrics to measure whether a relationship is giving you what you expect, be it emotionally, time-wise or however.
Another key point is to commit to relationships gradually. You don’t get married after the first date and you don’t form a joint venture after the first meeting. You can perform little relationship tests to see if a relationship is something you want. Usually that happens spontaneously (talking, first kiss, sex, taking a trip together etc.), but people often commit themselves to relationships too soon; and even more often, people stay stuck in relationships they don’t like (forever).
Since you don’t want to become a zombie, you have to constantly measure the quality of your relationships – what you give and what you get. Even after passing all the minimum viable experiences and fully committing to someone, you should somehow measure if you’re surrounded by people who empower you and make you happy. If not, you’re doing big damage to yourself and others.
Interested versus committed
Being interested in something definitely doesn’t mean being committed. Although interested isn’t being committed, you should only be interested at first. You should be curious, playful, and eager to discover. You should not think about commitment, but only learn and try new things.
But at one point, when you find the right thing, the right person, when you find your fit, you should commit. Really commit; and it shouldn’t be hard. Because when you find your fit, you know that this is exactly what you want and if you really want something, you’ll find a way; if you don’t, you’ll find an excuse. Now go play with the MVEs in your life.
To really understand pivots in personal life, we first have to define and understand what pivots in business are or, to be even more exact, what they are in the startup world. In the lean startup methodology, “pivot” is defined as a fundamental change in a business strategy. The idea of a pivot is changing the direction of your startup while staying grounded in your vision and learned facts. It’s very important to understand that a pivot doesn’t only mean a change or a shift to a new business idea, but a systematic change in strategy while deeply considering all the facts that you’ve learned along the way, especially those about markets, and keeping your business vision as a compass.
When leading a startup, the most important question in this context is when you should make a pivot. A little complicated scientific answer is that you should make a pivot when each additional experiment you do leads to less progress. That basically means that you hit a local maximum. If you aren’t satisfied with the local maximum, you have to pivot to find a new, higher maximum; the highest possible maximum is called the global maximum and if you manage to hit that, you usually become one of the market leaders.
Even if you don’t hit the global maximum, you can probably be satisfied with one of the local maximums. There are many companies that aren’t global market leaders and are doing just fine. If you’re making enough money and you enjoy the kind of business you have, the local maximum is okay.
Nevertheless, there is one more angle to consider as a phenomenon of creative capitalism. In many cases, there’s no normal distribution on the market, but a distribution based on the Pareto principle where a few players take the majority of the rewards. In the past decade, we’ve been able to see an even more tense concentration. It’s basically that 10 % or even fewer players take 90 % or even more rewards. You can see that kind of concentration in almost every industry, from technology to arts and sports. That’s why your ambition must be to hit the global maximum. You will see later why this concept is important for pivots in personal life.
Achieving local maximum. But is there a higher hill to climb?
However, there’s a situation much worse than not hitting a global maximum that can happen in the business world and is actually often even worse than going bankrupt (as the other extreme to hitting a global maximum). It’s called becoming a zombie company. A zombie company is a company that finds itself in a situation where there’s no death, no growth, no progress and no moving ahead. It’s consuming an enormous amount of resources and is a terrible drain on human energy. A zombie company is a company stuck in the land of the living death, a company stuck in some very low local maximum that’s far from the company’s vision, but the founders don’t want to pivot because of fear, ego or whichever reason.
To be fair, it’s not easy to pivot in business or in personal life. It means that you were wrong and it hurts. It means that you have to make a change and we all genetically hate changes. But being agile and lean is about being wrong before you are right.
Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from bad decisions.
To continue, there must be several factors fulfilled to make a successful pivot in business. You need to stay faithful and passionate about your vision. You need to have a deep understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve with your business idea, especially based on past validated learning. You need to know your wrong assumptions, actual falsifiable hypotheses and, on the other hand, you of course need new metrics and targets. Last but not least, you also need resources, energy and passion to make a pivot.
There are ten potential pivots you can make as a startup:
Zoom-in pivot
Zoom-out pivot
Customer segment pivot
Customer need pivot
Platform pivot
Business architecture pivot
Value capture pivot
Engine of growth pivot
Channel pivot
Technology pivot
Most successful startups today pivoted a few times (Dropbox, Groupon, AirBnB etc.) before finding the right product/market fit. They started with the initial idea, created a vision, built several minimum viable products, and then gathered feedback from the market. They made a pivot in their business strategy (or several of them) with superior market insights while keeping the vision and staying passionate about it. They pivoted all the way to product/market fit and customer validation. Afterwards, they started scaling their business. Pivoting in personal life is basically no different.
Much like there’s almost no startup today that didn’t make a pivot or two or even dozens (if founders were passionate enough) before really succeeding, so you have to make pivots in different areas of your personal life sooner or later. Making a pivot in your personal life is basically no different from making a pivot in business. In personal life, you often don’t even have a choice and are forced to make a pivot (your partner breaks up with you, you get fired etc.).
To go back to basics: apivot in personal life is a fundamental change in your life strategy. You change your direction in life, but you still keep the same life vision and you consider the facts you learned about yourself and your environment. The time for a pivot in personal life comes when you hit the local maximum and aren’t satisfied with the result. You try harder to improve and in different ways, but none of the experiments and new ideas lead to any progress. You feel like you’re emotionally stuck.
Basically the solution (that in reality isn’t easy at all) is to make pivots as many times as necessary until you find the perfectly right fit for you. That’s how you get unstuck. The only downside of an action like this is that it gets worse before it gets better. You must go through a before finding fit apathy.
Potential pivots in your personal life
Few people in this world are lucky enough to find their perfect fit right away. They marry and live happily ever after with their first love. They practice a sport that’s written in their genes from a very young age or whatever. Even when that happens, it’s usually only in one or, if you’re super lucky, in a few areas of life. But to live a happy and successful life, you must manage and juggle several areas of life, so nobody is spared changes in life. The point I am trying to make is that all of us have to make a pivot in our personal lives sooner or later.
Here are some major potential pivots you can make (or are forced to make) in your personal life:
Your mindset, beliefs and values
Your spouse
How often you see your family
Relationships with your kids, if you have them, and how you bring them up (but that is the one you should not fu*k up in the first place)
Your social circles and friends
The type of sports you do regularly and your diet
Your career and industry
Revenue sources and investment strategy
Formal education and skill development
Your sex life
Country and home and other environments you operate in
The technology you use
Religion etc.
The important thing is that you try to make a pivot as scientifically as possible, with the purpose of getting to your perfect fit as fast as possible. That means that no matter how hard a pivot is, you consider what you’ve learned about yourself and your environment. Before making a pivot and starting to look for a new fit, you should carefully analyze all the learned facts. You must be very well aware of how you know yourself better and what you want and you must have superior insights into your environment and what your wrong assumptions were. Every pivot should be a conscious and proactive change in your life strategy.
Your life strategy – read this blog post to get many new ideas for potential pivots in personal life.
How do you know it’s time to pivot in personal life?
There’s a very easy exercise that can be an indicator of whether you should maybe do a pivot in your personal life. The exercise is also a very good way to start with self-reflection. The idea is to make a life-satisfaction chart and assess all the chosen areas of life. All you have to do is first draw a scale from 1 to 10 horizontally, and vertically list the key areas of life or the areas you’ve chosen to assess. You assess every area or category of life from 1 to 10. Below, you can find an example of the chart.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Health
X
Relationships
X
Money
X
Career
X
Emotions
X
Competences
X
Fun
X
Spirituality
X
Technology skills
X
Made-up case as an example, Part I
In the second step, you take another look at all areas you assessed with 4, 5, 6 or 7. These are the areas where you’re averagely satisfied, are indecisive about or for which you haven’t taken enough time to make a sound assessment. Not knowing where you are and what you want does no good. The truth is that life areas either work or they don’t, you’re either satisfied or you aren’t, there are no middle paths.
Remember the Pareto principle and concentration I mentioned in the beginning. It applies to this very well. Averages don’t help you in managing life much, same as markets don’t acknowledge average. You want to really excel in as many areas of life as possible. You want to be in the top 20 % (shape, for example) to reap all 80 % of the rewards (energy, good looks, positive self-image, stamina etc.). Your ambition must be to hit your global maximum and nothing less.
You can’t be in good and bad shape at the same time. You can’t follow an average diet and the perfect diet for you specifically at the same time. You can’t have money problems and be happy with your financial situation. You can’t be depressed and positive at the same time. The idea is that you deserve the best in all areas of life.
You either rock or you suck in different areas of life. Therefore, assess life areas again, but now by using only the numbers 1, 2, 3, 8, 9 and 10. Take more time to really think about the areas you’re satisfied with and the ones you aren’t. Dedicate a few minutes to every area of life, analyze it extensively and then do a realistic evaluation. Listen to your inner voice and facts, but also pay attention to your emotions when deciding on the number to assign to a specific area of life.
Also be careful about cognitive distortions when making an assessment of your life areas. If you’re a perfectionist and aren’t satisfied with anything and have impossible standards, it may look like all your areas of life are miserable. If you put 1 – 3 to most of the areas of life, change your perspective. Rate how much you’ve improved since last year. It may help you to see progress in your life and get a more realistic evaluation compared to your impossible standards. In the same way, your assessment should be adjusted to your starting point in life and the fact that you compete with yourself, not others.
In the last step, highlight every 1, 2 and 3 with red, and every 8, 9 and 10 with green. Now you have a clearer picture of the areas of life you should potentially make a pivot in and make priorities for personal improvement.
Career
Emotions
Technology
The second, superior way to make a pivot is to go immediately from observation to action. You constantly gather feedback from yourself (body, emotions and mind) and your environment (social circles), and adjust your life strategy accordingly. That means that you’re really lean and agile.
1
2
3
8
9
10
Health
X
Relationships
X
Money
X
Career
X
Emotions
X
Competences
X
Fun
X
Spirituality
X
Technology skills
X
Made-up case as an example, Part II
Download a free template of the life-satisfaction chart (table above) that will help you to analyze and assess all the key areas of your life. With performing this exercise you will be able to decide easier on which areas to pivot and also to make sure you don’t become a zombie.
If you’re very unsatisfied with a certain area of your life, things will probably only get worse with time. Problems only grow if you ignore them. You really can get stuck in the land of the living dead, being completely unhappy and miserable, it doesn’t only happen in horror movies. The sad thing is that in most cases, being miserable in one area of life negatively influences all other areas. Being a zombie is a terrible drain on your life energy, with no personal growth, no end to the agony, consuming your emotional, mental and physical resources without moving ahead. You’re stuck and it sucks.
To make a successful pivot in personal life, several factors must be present, same as in a startup company. You need to be passionate about the pivot, there must be a strong and deep desire to make a change in your life. You need metrics and targets, what you really want. You need to have a strong vision that fuels your passion or vice versa. You must be able to answer your why really passionately. You need to really know yourself and your environment based on your previous actions and you have to be aware of what you have done wrong, what your wrong assumptions were. There must be validated learning and you have to see your current situation as only a temporary state – that you’re wrong before you’re right and that you’ll find a new fit for you. It’s the same like being broke is a temporary financial situation, but being poor is a state of mind.
Let’s say you decided to make a pivot in your career– you decided to change your job or even industry. First you must have the passion to make a change, no matter how miserable your situation is. You can’t change things with a victim mindset and by feeling sorry for yourself. Then you need a deep understanding of the problem – yourself and your environment. Do you work at a company and your values mismatch, are industry trends going down, maybe your attitude and competences aren’t sufficient or there’s a complex combination of factors.
Based on your past actions and happenings in your environment, you have to know what you’ve learned. Maybe you’ve realized that working in a startup company is not for you. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe your assumption was that it’s going to be cool and exciting, but you were dead wrong. Maybe you learned that you need a more stable environment – in a corporation or an NGO. Good. Now you need a new set of assumptions, metrics and targets. You need a list of companies you want to work in, you need an outstanding CV, maybe develop some of your competences etc.
It’s just an example. There can be a thousand reasons why you’re unhappy in your career, and you have to know what it is in order to make a successful pivot. Just changing your job won’t do it. You have to do it more systematically and scientifically, by analytically considering all the facts.
Much like there are several different types of pivots you can make in business, so there are different types of pivots you can make in personal life:
A zoom-in pivot would mean dedicating yourself more to something or approaching it from a different angle. Maybe you take more time for your kids or sports, and cancel some other activities and commitments in your life on the other hand.
A zoom-out pivot would mean doing exactly the opposite, for example including new social circles in your life and disinvesting from some other relationships and activities. Here’s another example for both pivots: focusing more on one type of investments (technology stocks) would be a zoom-in pivot, diversifying your personal portfolio would be a zoom-out pivot.
A relationship pivot would mean changing your spouse or business partner or any other important relationship in your life that you can change. This pivot also includes changing your diet or a sport you do. If you believe it or not, you also have some kind of relationship attitude towards food and your body.
A personal need pivot could mean starting to dedicate your time to something new that’s important to you, but that you were neglecting or weren’t even aware you needed until you had an epiphany. It could be hobbies, social causes, travel, sexual needs or whatever. Another fact is that by growing up and getting old, our needs change and so we have to pivot.
A life architecture pivot could mean a change in your beliefs and values, be it setting new priorities or changing religions, political or any other beliefs.
A platform pivot could mean changing your country, the industry you work in, your home or any other of your environemnts.
An engine of personal growthpivot would mean changing the things you read and listen to, your role-models and everything else that has an influence on your personal growth and who you ideally want to become.
A value-capturepivot would mean changing your mindset, going from employed to self-employed or from employed to entrepreneur or investor.
A technology pivot could be changing the hardware and software you’re using, or developing new technological skills. Maybe you could start using or discard different social networks and so on.
There are definitely many other pivots you can make in life, the ones listed above are just ideas and examples so you can get a clearer picture of what a pivot really means. What’s important, one more time, is that you consider the learned facts before making a pivot. If you decide to pivot to another spouse, make sure you know what you liked and what the deal-breakers of your relationship were. Doing a change without any validated learning is not a pivot, but just a shift or a change. Without doing it systematically, it may take decades before you really find your fit or you may even never will.
The emotional challenges of a pivot
The hardest part of any pivot is usually of an emotional nature. First of all, when you’re in the position to make a pivot, you probably had great expectations for something, you were sure of something beautiful that would have happened in your life, but it went rough. It’s not easy when your dreams collapse. The second thing that hurts, besides the painful gap between expectations and reality, is that you were wrong. Ego gets damaged when you’re wrong. It’s not easy to be wrong. Last but not least, if there are relationships involved, which there usually are, there’s additional pain from a breakup that’s always present, no matter how tough you are. Pain, pain and pain.
No matter how painful the situation, there’s a positive side to it and usually you only see that positive side with time. Time heals emotional pain and when the pain goes away, you have to take a few things out of that pain. You have to become aware of what you learned about yourself, what you really want, how the world and the environment you operate in work. You’re always wrong before you’re right. The idea of several pivots is to really find your perfect fit so you can be happy and shine bright like a diamond. If it’s time for a pivot, you aren’t sticking to the right thing or its expiration date has come. Nothing in life lasts forever, everything changes, and that’s why you have to stay lean and agile.
I’m a big fan of minimalism. A few years ago, I decided to own as little as possible. I downgraded and bought a small car. I cleaned out all the wardrobes, drawers and shelves in my home. No souvenirs, no items I don’t regularly use, no excess of clothes or anything else. All digital things were transferred to a cloud and I’ve started with asset-light living as a big part of minimalist lifestyle. No CDs, photo albums, and as little paper as possible.
It feels good as shit. It makes so much room in your life. You get new margin and space to focus on things that really matter. A lot has been written about the minimalist lifestyle and there are so many stories of how people freed themselves from material prisons; I encourage you to find those stories on the internet and give minimalism a try. It’s not about ignoring the material world or not giving a damn about money, but about setting the right priorities.
The less you own, the less owns you.
Well, one of the most important things for living a minimalist lifestyle is regular cleaning. I try to discard the things I don’t need on a daily basis as life goes along, but in spite of that, things have a tendency to accumulate and take up space. That’s why I do regular monthly cleanings and a major one every half year. After every major cleaning, I feel like I’ve also tidied up a part of my inner world; I feel refreshed and ready for new achievements.
I’ve just performed a major half-yearly cleaning and it took me an entire weekend. I usually do major half-yearly cleanings after every summer (August/September) and after every winter (March/April). Here’s what I’ve done over the past weekend. I have…
Cleaned out my closets and donated five big bags of clothes to charity. I donated all the clothes that I don’t really wear or that have become a little worn out or that I don’t feel good wearing. I really try to own as few clothes as possible and there’s still so much to give away every year.
Cleaned out all the drawers and threw away all the things I don’t use, like pens, notebooks, paperclips, loyalty cards and other stuff that gets stuck in drawers.
Cleaned and tidied up my car.
Took care of all the paperwork and administration, and threw away all the papers I don’t need. I try to have as little paper as possible. You cannot totally wipe it due to tax and legal reasons, but I try to get rid of all other paper or digitalize it.
Formatted my computer with a fresh copy of Windows 10, cleaned all the folders and files and, of course, made an archive beforehand. Now my computer is like new and everything is organized as it should be according to time management best practices.
Took my netbook (Asus Transformer) to service because of a hardware fault. I use the netbook only for traveling and haven’t yet decided if I really need it enough. It will stay with me for the next six months and then I’ll see what to do with it.
Cleaned my iPhone and got rid of all the apps I don’t need or use frequently enough (I has four screens of apps, and now only two). I also archived and organized photos, music and other digital assets.
Arranged my contacts, social network profiles, passwords and other digital parts of my life.
Canceled various subscriptions to apps and magazines I don’t use frequently enough. Many are good apps or reads, but if I don’t have time to use it, it’s time to lose it.
Put some technical equipment I don’t use on eBay to sell it, and threw away some cables, CDs etc. I used to prefer to throw away things (because it’s easier) rather than put them on internet markets, but now I first try to sell all the things if I can set the price for at least 15$. I’ve figured out that almost everything holds value for someone.
Canceled some mini projects and commitments in order to make more time to focus on work and tasks with the most value added.
Arranged RSS feeds, organized eBooks and music and some other digital stuff as part of my minimalistic and asset-light living.
I donated around 50 business books to one of the NGOs. Five years ago I had like 1000+ books. I sold, donated and gave away most of them. Now I have the last 7 physical books, that are my favorites. I need a little bit of time to get rid of them because of an emotional connection.
Cleaned my master task list (backlog) and deleted a few tasks I wanted to do but aren’t that important. By deleting some of the tasks, I got some instant margin in life and it felt so good.
Much like I’ve deleted a few tasks, I’ve also deleted a few hundred articles that were in the “to read” folder, but that I haven’t touched in the past few months. Deleting them felt good with no regrets at all.
I’ve reordered and optimized my browser bookmarks and tidied up a few other little things to have my life and the environment as clean as possible.
Since I’ve done all that work, me and my girlfriend also had a major apartment cleaning and now everything feels new and fresh.
You can do the same with your garage, the food in your refrigerator and other places in the kitchen, the basement and all the other places where junk gets accumulated. When you get rid of all the stuff you don’t need, you simply make room for new things. You make room for new, better things you can fight for; somehow cleaning feels like an exciting experience, being in touch with your past, remembering it one more time and, in the future at the same time, thinking what new you will attract to your life.
The purpose of this blog post is to encourage you to try a minimalist lifestyle or, if that seems like too big a step, try to make some space in your life with the purpose of attracting new, better things. You can do that with material things, but you can also clean up and reorder relationships in your life, business and personal, in pretty much the same way, all with the purpose of focusing on those that really matter.
Make minimalism a part of your life strategy. Happy cleaning.
There’s no doubt that in order to have outstanding long-term quality in life, you need to lead a balanced lifestyle. Yet balance is a word that’s often misused and wrongly interpreted. I also had a wrong perspective on balance a decade ago. I was sure that balance in life is like a calm sea, like a perfect puzzle where everything is in order – you have a partner you never fight with, you exercise every single day, eat perfect meals, everybody respects you at work etc. Every single area of life is precisely planned with just the right amount of everything. I was wrong.
Let me explain. Balance in life is often compared to balance in nature. That’s why I also correlated balance in life to a calm sea in nature. But one day, after a severe storm, I asked myself whether balance in nature really exists. Unbearable cold in the North and South poles on the one hand, and unbearable heat in the desert on the other, things like storms, volcanoes, earthquakes, and many other extreme natural phenomena. I don’t think there’s a place on Earth where the temperatures are perfect throughout the entire year and neither are the wind and other weather conditions; there are always storms, earthquakes or other natural disasters and extremes present.
There definitely is balance in nature, but the balance is not a calm sea, but rather the sum of all different extremes (hot and cold) and quiet periods in between. Balance in nature is the calm before as well as after a storm. It’s a quiet and peaceful feeling after every extreme situation, allowing you to prepare for the next one. Of course there are places on Earth that are more exposed to extremes and others that are less, but it’s the same in life, depending where you live.
Balance in life therefore doesn’t mean having everything in perfect order, a dull life where nothing exciting happens, it means taking a rest after an extreme state and preparing yourself for the next sprint. In other words, life is neither a marathon nor a sprint, but rather a series of sprints with periods of rest in between. By the way, that’s also the fundamental philosophy of agile management. A series of sprints.
Studying for finals, proving yourself at your first job, getting a baby, relationship break-ups, moving away from home, changing a job, improving your physical fitness level, getting a severe illness – everything brings some form of a storm into life, together with its changes and challenges. Some situations are more extreme, some less.
But all situations demand focus, dedication, sacrifice, pushing yourself and so on. You can’t just give back a baby if you’d like to sleep more. If you’re asking yourself why that is so, the answer is quite simple: asmooth sea never made a skillful sailor and one of your purposes in this life is to grow and develop.
But there’s also another side to this equation that you have to understand. As I mentioned, life is a series of sprints with rest periods. Even in nature, the sun shines after a storm every time. That means balance. Everything you do in life excessively for a longer period of time backfires sooner or later. Putting yourself under stress for years is definitely the best way to slowly destroy your life and become a zombie.
Taking a rest is therefore definitely a very important concept in life management. The general recommendation for all workaholics is to take time off at least one day per week, one extended weekend (4 days) for every quarter and additional two full-time weeks a year. On the off days, you should be lazy and do nothing, or do some activities that really relax you – taking care of your garden or pool, travelling, getting a massage, reading magazines, watching TV or doing other things that will completely disconnect you from this world.
In addition to taking a rest, there are two more concepts that can help you manage a series of sprints in life with adequate rest. The first one is called (1) having enough margin in life. The second concept is that (2) you sometimes have to take a step back in order to take two steps forward afterwards. Let’s look deeply into both concepts.
Margin in life
Margin in life has been quite a popular concept in time management ever since the book Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Liveswas published. I really recommend the book, since it provides a very good definition for how to use margin in life for a higher quality of living. I’ll summarize the main points, and then you can decide whether reading the book is worth it.
The idea of margin is that you have physical, mental, emotional, and financial limits that are more or less fixed. When you exceed this limit, it leads to overload and consequently to more stress, intensity and unhappiness. On the other hand, if you let some space between your maximum capacity and how much you take upon yourself it leads to you restoring your emotional, physical, time and other reserves. The space between your maximum capacity and how much you take upon yourself is called margin.
Margin is the space between your load and your limits. Margin is the opposite of overload. R. Swenson
Almost everybody in today’s busy world let themselves only enough space to just get by and nothing more (operating on a daily/weekly maximum or near it) so they are constantly over-stressed and anxious. The right solution is bigger margin that leads to higher quality and happiness in life. With the right margin, you can slow down and give yourself more space to really enjoy life.
Margin is nothing but breathing room, and you need four basic margins:
Emotional
Physical
Time
Financial
Here are some examples:
If you need bigger physical margin, cut down on some projects, exercise less if you’re over-training, don’t go to partying every weekend or go to sleep earlier, for example.
If you need bigger time margin, learn to manage your time better and before you do that (learning how to manage time means taking a new activity and goal), cancel two other activities that are at least as time-consuming.
If you need bigger emotional margin, you can take a weekend off totally for yourself and isolate yourself from the world and people. This especially goes for introverts.
If you need bigger financial margin, you can downsize your home or your car instead of taking on another job.
To have the right margin, you simply have to set limits in life. Maximums and minimums.Minimums make sure you don’t under-perform and progress in too low a gear. With maximums, you have to make sure you don’t operate at your upper limit or even exceed it for a longer period of time. You make sure you keep enough margin in life so you can breathe.
Now comes the hardest question. If life is a series of sprints, should you give it your all in every sprint? The answer is yes and no. The shorter the sprint, with less margin you can survive if you get enough rest after the sprint. The longer the sprint, the more you have to make sure that you have enough margin, even though you’re sprinting. If you know that it’s going to be a long sprint, you definitely don’t do it at your maximum, because you’ll only hurt yourself sooner or later.
A very good thing is that you can be very flexible when it comes to having enough margin in life. You can reschedule your daily or weekly obligations, you can cancel some projects, downgrade something financially demanding, simplify, sell things, outsource, automate etc. The moment you feel overwhelmed, you can do something to increase your margin. Maybe you’ll have a feeling of slower progress, but there’s no point in fast progress if you’re overloaded and completely unhappy in life.
The longer the sprint, the more careful you have to be about setting your upper limit and taking care of your margin in order to have time to breathe.
Taking a step back
The second concept that can help you with a series of sprints in a lifetime is taking a step back. As mentioned before, sometimes you have to take one step back in order to take two steps forward. Neither linear nor rapid improvements really take place in straight or exponential lines. There are always ups and downs along the road, and sometimes just taking a rest isn’t enough, sometimes you actually have to go back. There are no straight lines in nature.
There are four most frequent scenarios when you have to take a step back:
When you want more than your foundations can handle
When you’re overloaded for a longer period of time without any margin
When you have gone too far along the way based on wrong assumptions (climbing the wrong ladder)
When there’s a rapid unexpected change in an environment and your strategy is not adequate anymore
Taking a step back is usually not a conscious decision. That’s why you HAVE to take a step back. Most often, life forces you to take a step back; and the more you insist on not taking a step back, the harder life is pushing you back until you seriously hurt yourself.
If life demands from you to take a step back, the best advice ever is to do it. It may be a short-term punishment, but it’s a long-term gift, because if you want something badly enough, you will take care of the essentials and come back to continue the path afterwards. If you’re aware of that, the following quote definitely makes sense in life: “An arrow can only be shot by pulling it backward. So when life is dragging you back with difficulties, it means that it’s going to launch you into something great. So just focus, and keep aiming.”
Here are some examples for each of the scenarios, just for getting a more plastic picture. You decide to start running to be fit. (1) Instead of starting slow and pacing up day by day, you want to run a half-marathon right away. You throw up in the middle of the way and because of all the stress, you simply don’t want to hear about running for an entire month. That’s a big step back. (2) You run every day without taking any rest, your calves and knees start to hurt, the pain escalates, but you still run all the way anyway until your bones get stress fractures. Because of the injury, you can’t run for another few months. That’s a step back. (3) You think that running is easy, something everybody can do, and so you don’t need any knowledge about it – the technique, equipment etc. Because of a wrong technique, you hurt yourself. Again a step back. (4) It’s a cold and rainy day and you don’t feel well, but you go for a run anyway, because it’s written in your plan. The next day, you get a flu or a cold. Again no running.
When life forces you to take a step back, you’re usually quite far along on the wrong path. Before that happens, you get many signals that you’re doing something wrong, but usually you don’t listen to yourself. You ignore a problem, and ignorance only causes it to grow until it really hits you hard and knocks you out.
Pain is an obvious indicator that something’s wrong. Physical pain shows that there’s something wrong with your body. Many times, you may be causing the pain simply by doing something excessively (sports, alcohol, food etc.). “No pain no gain” can be the worst advice you can get in this context. Emotional pain shows you that there’s something wrong in other areas of life.
Remember, it’s not the future that you’re afraid of. It’s repeating the past that makes you anxious. Don’t resist life, you must have learnt that much.
The good news is that if you learn to listen to your body and emotions, you can take a step back by yourself, way before things get serious and life forces you to take a step back. You maybe don’t even need to take a step back if you react fast enough (observation to action), but only need to increase margin in your life. Nevertheless, if you ignore your body and your feelings, life will force you to get some margin in life by kicking you a step back sooner or later.
Learn to listen to your body and your emotions. They’re a compass helping you make the right decisions for managing your daily life and ensuring you quality and happiness. Your body and your emotions can help you make the right decisions for your long-term success. It may take you longer than planned to reach your goals, but to be honest, it’s about the road not the end goal, no matter how hard that is to accept (everyone wants the final event, but only a few respect the process). That’s what being lean and agile is really about.
Make sure you have enough margin in life. The longer the sprint you will undertake, the more careful you have to be about enough margin. If you’ve set your limits wrong and are exhausting yourself, take a step back. Your body and your emotions will give you several signals to take that action and the quiet signals will begin immediately after you start over-burning your system. If you somehow miss all the signals and life knocks you down, respect that and embrace that you’ve fucked up. Take a step back, regroup, make a new plan, adjust, and all that will give you strength to take two steps forward, right after you take care of foundations and essentials. If you won’t take a step back, the knockout will only be more severe next time.
I will sound a little bit harsh in this post because it’s a difficult truth, but most people are very judging towards others and very indulgent towards themselves (for the same things), at least in a few major areas of life that define the quality of living – health, wealth, relationships etc. and that are, in their essence, very hard to manage. It’s not easy to have a six-pack, even less so to get rich or have really close and deep relationships with family, friends and your spouse.
As an exaggerated example: people think that if they use olive oil and take a walk once a month, they live a healthy lifestyle, even though they stuff their faces with hamburgers at the same time; or maybe they think they’re wealthy because they can lease an expensive car or whatever. At the same time, they’re very critical towards others who basically do the same, although maybe just in a slightly different way; for example, people who feel better about themselves because of olive oil are very critical towards their friends who think they live healthy because they use brown sugar and a sauna belt.
Many studies have shown that people see themselves as much better than they are. One of the studies showed the same with individuals who rated the driving skills of themselves and others; almost everybody rated themselves to be a very good driver, much better than they really were. On the other hand, they’ve rated other drivers much worse compared to the objective reality. It’s called illusory superiority.
I somehow understand that since life is hard, having a good opinion about yourself and your skills can help you go through life, even if the subjective standard / reality is far from the truth. It may be easier to live with being sparing towards yourself, but it can also lead towards you lowering standards and not achieving your maximum potential in different areas of life.
There’s no doubt that I have the same cognitive bias from time to time, but overall I’m wired a little bit differently, with all the advantages and disadvantages that go with it. I’m actually the exact opposite type of person, very critical towards myself and often ascribing to other people much more than they deserve , at least in the beginning when I’m getting to know somebody new.
A little bit of black humor about that: When I die, I want the people I did group projects with to lower me into my grave so they can let me down the last time.
Back then, it was quite a shocking realization for me that most people are more or less talkers, and only a few are really doers. My rough estimate today would be that only one or two people out of ten are actually doers, and others only talk, discuss, dream, but never do shit for making their life better or meeting their commitments. Sometimes even when they do commit verbally, they don’t deliver their end of the bargain.
That’s why I don’t pay that much attention to what people say anymore. Instead, I prefer to observe what people do.
It’s a concept from the lean startup. Marketers have figured out that surveys don’t give you real answers for whether people would buy something or not, because they don’t even know themselves. That’s is why in the lean start-up methodology, you try to simulate a real-life buying scenario with a minimum viable product.
Anyway, with time it became obvious to me that people who are doers perform much better in life. They really improve themselves, get promoted, start their own business, run marathons and progress in many different ways they desire in life. All the really successful people are definitely doers. On the other hand, not all doers are successful, but the ones who do smart work, instead of only hard work, definitely are.
Next to getting their hands actually dirty and focusing on results, most doers have two outstanding abilities that make outliers and ultra-achievers out of them:
The first one is promptly testing new ideas, and implementing and keeping the ones that work in their lives.
The second one is observing and getting feedback from their environment and adjusting strategy accordingly.
The first one is about the essence of constant improvement and self-growth. In practice, every improvement means nothing but doing things differently, in a different way from before. The second one is about staying agile and not acting only based on ego and assumptions, but also calculating outside forces into the strategy to achieve a certain goal.
From an idea to testing and execution
As I briefly mentioned before, talkers only discuss ideas, exchange their opinions, dream about things, but at the end of the day, they don’t do shit to really progress in life. When they see someone actually doing things and getting dirty, they criticize them.
S/he definitely walks on water because s/he can’t swim.
That’s the big majority of people. When they don’t have something (because it can’t be leased), they dream about it. Expensive home and car. Luxury travel. Hot body. Having their own business or whatever. On the other hand, what they do have, they put on a pedestal, without any high standards. And many times those are the things that were given to them or that they acquired by luck.
Here’s a good video that explains how people ignore lucky circumstances and falsely contribute the winning to their competences more than the circumstances (good genes, inheritance, country etc.). Many of them even become cocky in the process.
[ted id=1897]
It’s not always like that, I don’t want to be too critical and negative, but many times that is the case; to be honest, I’m exaggerating a little bit to make a point. But even the very famous quote explaining that “small minds discuss people, average minds discuss things and events, and great minds talk about ideas” is misleading about success from the point I’m trying to make. Talking about ideas is definitely better than talking about events and things, but only talking about ideas and having a great mind won’t get you anywhere. You need to take a step further, you have to be a doer, not only a talker or thinker.
Doers are usually quite different from talkers. Many doers don’t talk much and prefer to let their work speak for itself. No real king has to tell people that he’s the king. Doers like to talk about ideas, to get new insights and clues for new potential life experiments, but what they like even more is real progress and concrete results. They prefer to swim rather than only discuss different swimming styles.
Doers are the ones who test and quickly implement ideas into their lives. They hear, read or see a new thing they like, and they test it immediately. If they like it, if it gives them a result they want, they put in all the effort necessary to keep it in their lives.
When doers hear a new idea they like, they’re aware they have to test it out for themselves first. Because what works for one person may not work for someone else. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. What’s important is that the best doers test everything in small steps and in a very smart way. So as to not get burnt or too invested in something that’s not proven on their own skin yet.
When best doers test something new, they observe what’s happening inside (body, mind, heart, spirit) and outside them (environment), and if the idea leads to personal improvement and faster progress towards their goals, they put in the effort to form a new habit; all the way until they find a new, even better idea. If it doesn’t work, they discard it.
Immediate testing and (if it works) implementation is the key to execution, it’s the secret sauce of doers and their progress.
Talkers discuss how good it would be to save money, doers hear about the automation of saving and try it with the next few payments they receive. If it works, they keep the system going.
Talkers tell other people how great their partner is and how they’d spend more time with them if they could, but they’re so busy, doers make room to take their spouse on a date at least once per week, without any distractions.
Talkers brainstorm how good it would be to have a business, doers write down their business ideas, analyze and prioritize them, build MVPs, test what works and what doesn’t, and improve their idea until they find the right product/market fit.
Talkers complain how hard and without value college is, doers finish a college and while doing so, build an awesome business network, acquire extensive work experiences and do other stuff that makes their CV look ten times better compared to all other schoolmates.
The only downside to testing all different ideas is not sticking to anything. There’s one group of people, who are neither talkers neither real doers. They try and test all different things, but never stick to anything. Usually there’s some kind of fear behind that, most frequently a fear of failure or a fear of success. You definitely want to stick to the best behavioral pattern you currently know for a specific thing you want to achieve in life. Only searching, thinking and overanalyzing without any discipline and implementation is a big waste in life.
What you need is to have a system in place that works for you, but in addition to that, you should always be testing and trying new things in order to improve the system (and your behavioral patterns). Most of the time, you do small linear changes, but from time to time, you get disruptive ideas that can help you make a rapid change and get to a totally different level of operation (for example going from being an employee to being an investor etc.).
From observation to action
The second important part of immediate implementation is constantly adjusting strategy based on the feedback from an environment. The fact is that you’re part of a larger system and every single action of yours triggers a reaction from the environment. The environmental reaction can either (more or less) accelerate your motion or block it.
There are always forces that work to your advantage and to your disadvantage, but at the end of the day, what matters a lot are the final direction and the magnitude as a sum of all forces. The difference of progress when an environment supports your actions or blocks them can be enormous. Something doers always count into their strategy.
In business, there’s a saying that markets always win; markets as an example of one of the very important outside forces, besides legislation, politics, influencers, social trends, technological paradigms, and so on.
Ego is the only thing that really stands in your way of observing something happening in the environment and consequently adjusting your strategy and action. It’s hard not to be right, but the gap between the objective and subjective reality always exists. If you don’t accept that and you let your ego prevail, you build your actions only on untested assumptions and you should remember that wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. The bigger the gap, the bigger the potential fuckup.
At the end of the day, it’s an easy choice. (1) You can act based on your assumptions and ego (“I can’t be wrong”), hoping that the gap between the objective and subjective reality isn’t too colossal or not even admitting to yourself that the gap could exist. Nevertheless, experience very clearly shows that it’s only a matter of time before you fuck something up in a big way because you rely on your personal interpretation too much.
It may feel good to be sure that you’re right and to stroke your ego with mantras like “my way or the highway”, but the pain after being wrong is then so much greater. The more you build your life strategy or business strategy or any other strategy based on your ego and untested assumptions, the bigger your ego gets (because you put all faith in it) and the more it hurts when the bubble bursts; and sooner or later it will burst, because nobody is right 100 % of time.
The second path you can take makes much more sense. (2) You know that your interpretation of the world is wrong and that there are big errors present. You know that your brain has very limited information and an even more limited capacity for processing captured information and that on top of that you are biased from many different angles. Even the collective brains’ processing power of outstanding teams is quite limited. You know there’s a big gap between the subjective (how you think things are) and the objective reality (how things really are).
Because you know all that, you consciously decide that you’re wrong (before you’re right). You list your assumptions but make baby steps to test them one by one. You regularly gather feedback from the environment and adjust your motion based on the feedback. You keep your vision or goal in mind, but stay totally agile on how you’ll achieve your goal.
That’s what “from observation to action” means. You have a system of gathering information from your environment based on every smaller or bigger action of yours, and you also decide on your next step based on the feedback you get from the environment. It may hurt your ego that some of your assumptions were wrong, but your awareness that you’re always wrong before you’re right has to be stronger and give you the courage to stay adaptable and continue with testing all the way until you have enough data to understand the objective reality as closely as possible and thus achieve your goal more easily. Sometimes better understanding the environment with testing (superior insights) enables you to achieve something you want.
Besides ego problems, the challenge to stay adaptable is also that much greater because of the following two factors:
None of us like rapid changes and none of us like to change themselves rapidly because it hinders our sense of security and identity. But you can learn to like change. Being agile and adaptable means constantly changing yourself. Your mind has to be like air or plasma.
In addition to that, we believe that bad things only happen to people on TV or far away from us. It’s not easy to admit that the world is a harder place to live in than it may seem at a first glance. That’s why we build naïve ideals we believe in, that’s why a change in an environment must be really colossal before we act (adjust) and consequently, we usually act too late.
Here are some classic examples:
An industry you work in goes down, people start losing jobs, the future market outlook is very pessimistic, but you somehow hope everything will be alright without acting in any way. After a short period of time, you’re fired and mad as hell at the economy, politics etc.
You see big behavioral changes in your partner (hiding their phone, staying late at work etc.), but you assume that your partner really couldn’t cheat on you because s/he is so special. After a few months, you’re shocked when your spouse tells you that s/he is leaving you.
Your crush gives you signals that s/he likes you, but you don’t do anything, because you assume that if s/he would really like you, s/he would make the first step. Consequently, nothing happens but maybe you’ve just wasted the best potential relationship of your life.
The same goes for your money, business relationships, health or any other area of life that’s interdependent and related to the outside environment.
Burying your head in the sand and hoping that something bad will go away or that luck will strike you somehow is naïve. Problems and changes are like monsters. You have to kill them when they’re small, because they only grow bigger and are harder to solve with time.
Therefore, to be more agile and adaptable, you must have shorter intervals of gathering and analyzing feedback from your environment and be regularly adjusting your strategy and action. Monthly adjusting intervals are probably okay, but weekly ones are even better, depending on which area of life we’re considering. You’re the captain of your life and you always have to observe what’s happening in your environment.
You see your body fat percentage go up on a smart scale. That’s an observation that needs action in terms of diet and exercise.
You noticed that your spouse is getting more and more moody. That’s an observation that needs action in terms of better communication, spending more loving time together, more lovemaking or whatever.
You observe that your wealth manager is charging you bigger and bigger provisions while your returns are getting worse and worse. It’s an observation that needs immediate action, maybe by negotiating a better deal or changing your wealth manager or even starting to manage your money on your own.
Have you read a book and got an idea for getting more productive? That’s a realization that needs to be tested and, if it works, immediately implemented into your life.
You’ve noticed that you envy someone something? Good, that means you have a compass for what you want in life. Now study how that person got the thing you want and implement the insights into your life strategy.
You have a friend that’s really good at making money, getting good grades, flirting or whatever. Observe how s/he does it, learn, and in the next second, test the same ideas and behavior yourself, adjusting them to your personal situation.
The key is that when you get an idea, when you experience an epiphany, when you acquire new knowledge or when you observe changes in your environment, you act as quickly as possible. You change how you behave, act, and where and how you invest your resources. Remember that you grow by doing things differently and you can’t grow if you only think and observe without acting.
Just do it is probably the best slogan ever, but you have to do it in a smart scientific way, regularly measuring your progress. Be inspired. Test and experiment and test. Implement and keep what works. Observe and adjust your actions based on observation and feedback. Be a doer, not a talker.
An MVP doesn’t only save you a lot of money and energy before getting a market response and prevents you from failing big, it can also help you avoid becoming a 
