Blaz Kos

practical examples

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  • The biggest impact

    In management theory, there is an important principle – the so called 80-20 rule or the Pareto principle. The principle states that, for many events, roughly 80 % of the effects come from 20 % of the causes. Examples in practice would be that 80 % of your sales come from 20 % of your clients, fixing top 20 % of the most reported bugs also eliminates 80 % of related errors and crashes, you wear 20 % of your clothes 80 % of the time (except if you are minimalist) and so on.

    The Pareto principle is also very important when you are implementing changes in your life. You can decide to do linear or rapid changes in your life. Linear changes are smaller changes you make in your behavioral patterns. You improve your diet a little bit, you wake up a little bit earlier, you decrease the number of hours you spend watching television. You make more effort in your job and ask for a raise, and so on.

    Rapid changes are big changes that totally shift your life to the better, if you do the right change. Instead of watching TV, you start reading books. No TV at all. You go from a standard carbohydrate-based diet to another diet that suits you much better. You get rid of all the relationships that don’t empower you. You shift from being an employee to being an entrepreneur.

    Usually, when you pick a life area you want to improve (health, money, career…), you start with small linear changes. Some changes suit you and others don’t. You are in the search mode, looking for small improvements that lead to a better life. Some changes you preserve, others you discard (pivot). But after a while, every new linear change brings less value into your life. The marginal value of linear changes decreases over time. Then you hit the so called “local maximum”. Every additional change brings no additional value into your life. You run out of ideas for new experiments.

    When you hit the local maximum, it’s time for a rapid change. Rapid change means you try to do things completely differently, looking for another maximum that brings much more value to your life. Usually a rapid change enables you exponential growth. In some cases, your “local maximum” is your highest potential in life, but in others, there could be a much better setting for you and your potential. Sometimes I also call it leveling up your game.

    Now let’s get back to the Pareto principle.

    20 % of all the changes you will make in your life will have 80 % of the positive (or negative) impact on your life. That is to say, what will have the biggest impact on your life are the first few linear changes and the rapid changes you will make. That is where your focus should be.

    In the life areas where you totally suck, you should implement the first few linear changes. They will have the biggest impact on your life. For example, if you are in bad shape, just start doing some kind of exercise you like. If you are completely in debt, just save 1 dollar per day. If you want to change your career, just try a couple of new things to find what suits you best.

    The idea is that when you make the first few linear improvements, other changes will follow by themselves if your motivation to improve your life is big enough. You get engaged when you see the first small benefits, and your human nature will push you to get more. You just have to make the first few linear improvements and stick to them. They will have the biggest impact on your life and the rest will follow.

    If you totally suck at something it is almost impossible to do a rapid change. There are statistical exceptions, but that’s just because some people really find themselves in something, they are naturally good at. But in general, you first have to start with a few linear improvements.

    For example, if you want to get fit and you are totally out of shape, it doesn’t make sense to go straight to bodybuilding and hyper-intensive training. You first have to prepare your body for new efforts. If you can’t get a job, it’s usually not very smart to get self-employed or become an entrepreneur. That is the so-called push entrepreneurship and the success rate in this kind of situations is the worst.

    It’s different for life areas you are already good in. You first have to decide if it’s enough or you want more. If you want more, you should look for potential rapid improvements. You should get yourself into the search mode and start curiously exploring how other, more successful people are doing the same things, whether there is a completely different way you could be doing it, are there any additional leverages you could use and so on.

    For example when you are really good in an industry, have the knowledge, the social network, and know what the market wants, you should switch from being employed to being self-employed. When you master the basics of exercising, you can start with hardcore exercises. When you are able to save up small amounts of money, you can start thinking about big money.

    Local maximum
    Achieving local maximum. But is there a higher hill to climb.

    When making rapid improvements, there is one very important question you should ask yourself, namely what is holding you back. Usually there are one or more personal values that hold you back from doing things in a significantly better way.

    For example, maybe you think that you do everything better than everyone else, thus you don’t delegate. With no delegation, you also do all activities with low value added. Starting to leverage other people’s time would be a big rapid improvement in this case. But first you have to deal with your values.

    And one more thing. The Pareto principle also works in a negative way. That is why you must thoroughly analyze what is strategic testing, experimenting and improving, and what is doing stupid things. Because 20 % of the negative changes will have 80 % of the impact on your life. Some of these changes are very obvious. Starting to drink too much alcohol, eating too much sugar, starting to cheat on your spouse, going into bad debt etc. These are all big negative rapid changes (one big or a series of small ones) that can have the most negative effect on your life.

    When living an Agile and Lean Life, you don’t just do work and execute tasks. You have to think regularly about why you are doing something and how you are doing it, and whether you are making real progress. One of the aspects you have to reflect on is also which change will have the biggest positive impact on your life.

    No matter if you are implementing linear or rapid improvements, always go straight to the best knowledge for ideas how to do it.

    Homework

    The biggest impact on your life

    Knowing that 20 % of the changes will have 80 % of the positive (or negative) impact on your life, you should carefully analyze which changes fall into this 20 %. Based on that, you should update your Kaizen list of improvements.

    Here is what you should do:

    • Open your personal Kaizen list. If you don’t have it yet, you should make one. You can help yourself with the template below and with the article Growth mindset and continuous improvement on how to make the Kaizen list.
    • You should do a general evaluation of every life area, how satisfied you are and how well you are mastering a specific life area.
    • Then you write down all the linear and rapid improvements you should make in different life areas. You note your own suggestions and suggestions from other people.
    • Based on your evaluation, you can easily determine the magnitude of every improvement you have listed.
    • For the areas you suck in, the first linear improvements will already have a big impact on the quality of your life. For the areas you are already good at, rapid improvements will probably have the biggest impact.
    • On your Kaizen list, you should have a maximum of five changes of big magnitude for the next few years. Remember: you cannot implement many changes at once, and the big ones even less so.
    • You should constantly update your Kaizen list and stay flexible depending on the feedback you are getting from your inner self and the environment.

    You can help yourself with the spreadsheet below to do the analysis. You can also look at my own spreadsheet and see how I have done my analysis.

    [sociallocker]

    AgileLeanLife – Kaizen Template (xls)

    AgileLeanLife – Kaizen – Blaz Kos (xls)

    [/sociallocker]

    Practical example

    My own analysis

    As you can see in my spreadsheet, based on my analysis, I have found that the following changes would have the biggest impact on my life. Therefore they will be my focus in the following few years, alongside some other minor linear improvements.

    There is one more thing you should be aware of. Never overestimate what you can achieve in a month and never underestimate what you can achieve in a few years’ time.

    Changes and improvements take time. First you have to sow, then you can reap. So make sure that for rapid changes, you have a long-term goal without a fixed deadline, especially if you are still in the search mode, looking for a perfect fit. What is important is that you make small daily progress. What is important is that you make small steps that accumulate into a much better life. For more guidance, please read the Agile and Lean Life manifesto.

    But now let’s get to my own analysis.

    Learning how to code
    Here I am learning how to code.

    Going back on my own and writing down business ideas

    I was always self-employed or owned a business. It was only after the 2008 financial market meltdown, when I had to close my small venture capital fund and had lost a lot of money (100k€+), that I had decided to get a job. I needed a more stable income and less stressful work for a while. Thus I was in the management board of the biggest technology park in Slovenia.

    I know that entrepreneurship is not for everyone, but I personally feel much better as a freelancer, a business owner or an investor. I am not against having a job at all costs. Well, somewhere in the future I want to experience working for a faculty (educating students), a global blue chip company in ICT, investment banking and some other industries. And those can be all jobs.

    But for now, going back on my own is an important step, an important rapid improvement for me. For me, it means more focused time without many unnecessary meetings, a bigger value added, a stronger motivation and many other benefits. Shifting from being employed to being a freelancer or a business owner is an important big decision towards a rapid improvement for many people.

    I have quit my job in October 2014 and started my own consulting/contracting business. I already have a few clients on the domestic market, but the next big challenge is going international. It was a half-year long process, but I do feel much better now and I already feel the power of being on my own, having a much better control over my life. For this change, I already went from the search into the execution mode.

    I also decided to systematically write down business ideas and to find the next big thing I really want to devote following decade of my life to.

    Update – Nov 2015: I am over a year on my own and it feels great. I am still more or less in the startup business as a contractor, but with the New Year I am making another big change in this area.

    Changing the country/language

    I live in one of the smallest countries in the world. Slovenia only has 2 million inhabitants with a not-so-good economic outlook. It’s a very well developed country, with many life quality benefits, but after doing business here for more than 10 years, I basically know everyone and the additional potential is quite limited. The maximum potential the country could offer to me definitely doesn’t suit my ambitions.

    Therefore an important identified rapid change for me is changing the country or, to be more specific, the language in which I operate. What I have found out in all these years is that small markets only give you headaches. If you want to be really successful and you are from a small country, you have to be globally oriented nowadays.

    The challenge is not easy, since it’s much easier to operate in your mother tongue and the competition on the global market is much stronger, but the unlocked potential is enormous.

    That is why I started this blog. Besides the opportunity for sharing my knowledge globally, it is also a great way to sharpen my skills – from English skills, writing skills to internet marketing. And I can also get some global exposure, of course.

    In the future, I would also like to spend a few years living abroad, but I want to stay flexible – lean and agile. This blog is the first step to a different kind of settings, but it’s still way too early to know what will come out of all this.

    For this change, I am somewhere in-between the search and execution mode. I have done a lot of research, planned my first steps etc. What I plan to do now is make regular adjustments based on the feedback I will be getting from the market.

    Building products

    The work I am currently doing has one big downside: even if I am self-employed, I am still selling my time. Selling your time quite limits your earning potential. Selling products is totally different to offering consulting services. You can sell many products without any time restrictions.

    Right now, I see three ways for how I can capitalize my knowledge via products. The first one are info products like books, e-learning courses, membership forums, premium content. The second one are mobile or SaaS applications related to the subjects I am mastering. The third one is to not only have a blog, but to build a real global media site on personal productivity.

    I have no idea where the future will take me, but I will definitely work hard on one of these options. I am a very hard-working person, but I also very much like passive income.

    At the moment, I am totally in a search mode, not even close to a proper execution. I am researching, testing, getting to know the market, analyzing what the competition is doing, and so on. It may take me a few years to get to the right product, but you know how it is: you only have to be right once.

    Core muscles and flexibility

    The previous four rapid improvements were connected to my money and career. This one is about my health. I have invested a lot of energy into finding my perfect diet and the sports I like, so that I can be as active as possible and live a healthy lifestyle. I still have a few linear improvements to make, but overall I have made big progress in the past few years.

    However, when it comes to my health, there is one rapid improvement I have to make and is really holding me back. That is the flexibility of my body and strengthening my core muscles. I was fat for most of my life, therefore I have always had weak core muscles and a completely inflexible body. Both contributed to a bad posture and, consequently, to many health issues like nerve entrapments, back pain and so on.

    Yes, I have to lose a few percentages of fat. Yes, I have to further work on my physical condition. But those are linear improvements that currently won’t bring the biggest value added. What I really have to do are daily exercises for flexibility and strong core muscles. That will be a big improvement for my overall health.

    The thing that is really holding me back is that I feel much better when lifting weights or doing highly intensive training than when stretching and planking. But I know very well that if I don’t work on my core and flexibility, I won’t be able to gain muscle mass and improve my overall health.

    Thus I am going to yoga with my girlfriend every week now, I do some daily stretching, resistance band training, planking and similar exercises. I also try not to overdo it with exercising, since I am only doing damage to my body, because I don’t have strong enough foundations yet.

    I was in a search mode for more than a year in order to figure out where my weak spots are. I visited a few doctors, physiotherapists and other specialists, read many articles on the internet and tried many things to identify the weaknesses and exercises that really help me.

    So for this rapid change, I am in the execution mode. The rapid change was going from weightlifting and overdoing it to doing “girly” exercises for core and flexibility. Now I have to do proper execution. I have to keep a daily routine for a whole year. Then I hope I will be able to switch back and work more on my muscle mass.

    Learning how to code

    The last rapid improvement is connected to my skills. I would like to learn how to code. Many people see that as a big waste of time, but I have a couple of strong arguments for why that would be a big rapid improvement in my life.

    First of all, it’s a big intellectual challenge; and I like that. Secondly, I already have a strong business mindset, but I would also like to install a more engineer kind of thinking into my brain. Thirdly, the skills are really useful, since if you get a new idea, you can just take a focused weekend, execute, and test the market. Fourthly, when I was a kid I was a computer geek, but then somehow business started to dominate my life. Thus this is a wish from my childhood.

    The problem that’s holding me back is a lack of time. Learning how to code isn’t that easy. You need big blocks of time with no interruptions, and fresh brain.

    For this rapid change, I am still in the search mode. My searching is not so much connected to what to do – it’s more about how to do it. I have enrolled into Lynda and Threehouse courses, I am watching videos and trying to do some basic front-end work myself, but I am still far from any serious development skills. I also visited a two months Python course.

    The real question for me is how to do it. I am thinking about three options:

    • Taking one day per week totally off and focusing only on learning how to code
    • Taking one whole week every quarter totally off and really improving my knowledge
    • Going to one of the coding academies for three months

    Since this rapid change is my last priority, I am not yet sure how and when I will go from the search into the execution mode. It strongly depends on how other things will turn out.

    The conclusion

    You change yourself by finding a way to do things better. With changes for the better, you remove waste from your life, thus improving your overall happiness, productivity and quality of life. You can make linear or rapid improvements/changes in your life. Linear ones are the first small steps or final optimizations, while rapid ones are completely new ways of doing things.

    In the life areas where you suck, the first few improvements will have the biggest magnitude. In the life areas where you rock, finding rapid changes is the way to go. Your Kaizen list should have up to five changes of a big magnitude and with a big impact on your life. Based on the Pareto principle, these 20 % of changes that you plan to make will bring 80 % of the new value to your life. You should constantly update your Kaizen list and ask yourself: which improvement will have the biggest positive impact in my life? That should be your focus.

  • Zombie life

    The opposite of a successful startup is a zombie company. The opposite of the Agile and Lean Life is a Zombie Life. Zombie life is being stuck in the land of the living dead. You don’t actually live, you just exist. On the one hand, there is no death, but on the other, there is no growth or moving ahead either. It’s just a terrible drain of human energy, only waiting for life to pass by. I know it sounds horrible, but unfortunately many people are living such a zombie life.

    There are ten areas you have to manage in life (yourself, health, relationships, money, career, emotions, competences, fun, spirituality and technology) and if you neglect any of the ten areas or even several of them, you can get stuck in the land of the living dead very quickly. If you don’t fight and push yourself to make progress in all areas of your life, life itself will transform you into a zombie. Use it or lose it. Up or out.

    Practical examples

    If you work a job you hate, you are already living one third of your life as a zombie. Going to work with resistance, hating your boss, trying to do as little as possible, gossiping and complaining about your job to all of your friends is definitely a zombie life. It’s a waste of your talents, your precious time and your energy. There is a perfect career for you, you just have to find it first. You just have to first invest your energy into finding the right fit.

    If you don’t take care of your health, you land in the zombie land sooner or later. Your health is the most precious thing you have. Good health is a must-have condition for working, enjoying life, feeling good about yourself and having good relationships. In my youth, I was extremely overweight. Now I am trying to take care of my health as much as possible. I still have much work to do but hey – I know very well how it feels to be overweight and I know how horrible of a zombie life that is. No great mountain views, no team sports, a worse sex life and so on.

    If you don’t earn enough money, or if you are in a big debt, the quality of your life is also damaged. There is a lot of arguing over whether money really does bring happiness. Well, it has been scientifically proven that it does. When earning less than 75,000 USD per year, money has a big contribution to your happiness. The less you earn, the more every additional dollar means to you. Of course money doesn’t bring happiness if you earn more than 75,000 USD per year, but have crappy relationships and bad health. You have to optimize your life as a whole. But when considering money, you should fight to earn at least 75,000 USD per year. It greatly contributes to your happiness.

    Your spouse has a great contribution to the quality of your life. As the saying goes: happy wife, happy life. And vice versa. It’s totally unreasonable to be married to someone with whom you constantly argue, you don’t want to make passionate love before going to bed and you are not a good team in handling the household and chores. That is a real zombie life: being surrounded with people who don’t make you happy, don’t contribute to your growth and don’t support you or empower you. And vice versa.

    Same goes for your friends, coworkers and all other relationships in your life. The more shitty relationships you have in your life, the more of a zombie life you live. In movies, I haven’t seen any zombies that would have good relationships.

    Good relationships, stable health, purposeful work, a positive outlook and a full bank account are the foundations for your long-term happiness. You and your competences are the enablers to achieve all that. You need to work on your knowledge, skills, intelligence, emotions, the social network, your mindset and so on. When you stop improving and developing, you start becoming a zombie.

    You can also add fun, spirituality and technology on top of all that. Fun is about enjoying life and “putting down the saw”, spirituality about a more purposeful life, and technology a leverage to achieve more with a greater pace. All three help you not live a zombie life or encounter situations such as experiencing burnout or questioning the purpose of life. Whether you want it or not, you have to manage all ten areas of your life in order to live a happy life.

    Broke vs. Poor

    Being broke is a temporary situation. Being poor is a state of mind. Same goes for living a zombie life. Your current situation in some areas of your life may be a disaster; you may have experienced a big obstacle, a colossal setback or a real downfall. But what counts is a positive outlook and superior strategic plan. If you see the light at the end of the tunnel, if you see the next small step you can make towards a better life (and actually do it), then you are not a zombie. You are a fighter.

    But if you have given up, if there is no desire to grow, no desire to experience life and to achieve, then you have become a zombie. When you settle for the average, you start becoming a zombie, just waiting for life to pass you by.

    You can easily realize you are becoming a zombie when you are escaping from your life into the TV world, the bad parts of the internet or various other addictions, but also situations when you are “helping others” instead of yourself (dealing with problems of other people when you still have so much cleaning to do in your own life) or when you have many other distractions that distance you from your true purpose. You are on your way to becoming a zombie when you are more and more bitter, ignorant, lazy and bored. Bitching, whining, complaining, blaming others and doing nothing.

    Yes, there will be times in your life, when you will be broke. Your relationships will end. You will lose a job you love. You can get a serious health issue. Life is not easy. There are constant challenges and obstacles and changes. But you have to fight. Your duty is to fight. Your duty is to equip yourself with knowledge, people who empower you, design a superior strategy, and start making steps towards improvements and your ideal self.

    Zombie Tools
    Contemporary Zombie Life.

    You have to escape a zombie life no matter what. Because living a zombie life is a waste of the most precious thing ever – life. Even if you are currently broke, never go poor. Always find a positive outlook you can fight for. There is always a move you can make towards a better life.

    Frogs and zombies

    You become a zombie more or less the same way as you would “cook a frog.” You either make sure that (1) the water temperature is so high that when you throw the frog into the water it will perish in a second, before it can jump out, or you (2) cook it very slowly, increasing the water temperature level bit by bit, making sure the frog isn’t even aware it’s being cooked. The same goes for zombies.

    You can become zombie by making:

    • One or several very big wrong decisions (for example choosing the wrong spouse, industry, career, company, driving drunk and causing an accident…)
    • A series of small wrong decisions (unhealthy diet, not saving any money…)

    Most people become zombies without even being aware of it. They live life as they were taught by the primary and secondary socialization (parents, teachers, television, society…), not even questioning whether it makes sense. But an average diet, an average job, average relationships, average education all bring you a very average life. And in reality, an average life is very close to a zombie life. You don’t want to live an average life. You want to live an extraordinary life.

    The solution is simple, but not easy. You have to set higher standards, you need a superior life strategy and you need to start fighting for your goals and dreams. You need to make extraordinary decisions about how you spend your energy, time, money and talent. You definitely need different strategy than an average person. One of the guidelines for a better than average life is an Agile and Lean Life philosophy. Implement it in your life.

    The second path to a zombie life is making one or several wrong big decisions (for example choosing the wrong spouse, industry, career, company, driving drunk and cause an accident…). The setbacks in this case could be so big that you just give up or don’t find the motivation to go on. When making that kind of wrong decisions, it can take years to correct them.

    Going through divorce, declaring personal bankruptcy, trying to change careers and similar challenges are so demanding that most people just can’t cope with them. Sometimes even external factors cause that kind of a situation and we had nothing to do with it (war, markets meltdown…). Life isn’t fair.

    The solution is, once again, logical but not easy. It’s extremely hard but necessary to avoid a zombie life if you find yourself in a big setback. You need to find a positive outlook, you need to have a superior strategy how to get out of your situation, you have to see the first step you can make and then you need to start fighting. You have to cut your losses and turn a new chapter of your life. Some of the Agile and Lean Life techniques can help you to get easier out of these kind of situations.

    Zombie-land

    Your environment can greatly contribute to your potential zombie life – from the macro level, like your country and the industry you work in, to micro elements, like your relationship, diet and the company’s culture where you work. Among all that there are several factors that you cannot chose completely by yourself, especially at a young age. Some of them not even later in life. For example, for most people changing a country is very hard or even impossible.

    Nevertheless, the brutal fact remains that if you want to make progress in your life, you need an environment and relationships that empower you. Yes, there are always some limitations but there are also always steps towards a healthier environment and relationships. At some point you have to make the changes if the environment doesn’t support you enough. You always have to look for improvements, there is always some optimization you can make.

    The fact is:

    • If you spend most of your time with zombies, you will become a zombie
    • If you work in a zombie environment (country, office, family…), you will also become a zombie, if not completely, then to some extent

    You have to find a way to isolate yourself from negative influences if you don’t have the option of switching to a more positive environment. You have to innovate your way out of the Zombie-land. Maybe by changing your office, maybe by living most of your life in the virtual space (aka on the internet) or in creative co-working spaces, maybe by changing your job, friends, spouse or any other relationship. You know very well what drags you down, you know very well what makes you a zombie.

    What you really need in order to not become a zombie is a positive outlook and a superior strategic plan. Your superior strategic plan should consist of linear and rapid improvments, actions, decisions and moves you will make towards your goals.

    Usually, when implementing improvements, you try to find the local maximum with your current settings, and when you face a real setback but you know that there is still greater potential, you try to find a rapid improvement in a completely new kind of settings.

    When you do a rapid improvement in your life you don’t just do things faster or cheaper, you start doing things in a totally different way. That is how you grow. You grow by finding better ways to do things.

    Whatever happens in your life, never stop growing. Whatever happens in your life, never give up. Whatever happens in your life, remember that there is always a move you can make towards a better and happier life. No matter how difficult your situation is.

    Homework

    There’s a very easy exercise that can be an indicator of whether you are becoming a zombie and you should maybe do a pivot in your personal life and find a better fit. You 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. 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 average is 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. 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. 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. Below, you can find an example of the chart.

    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
    Health X
    Friends X
    Spouse X
    Money X
    Career X
    Emotions X
    Competences X
    Fun X
    Spirituality X
    Technology skills X
    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.
    Download

    Don’t be a zombie. Live your life in the Agile and Lean way.

    Read our manifesto on how to do it.

  • The key principles of the Agile and Lean Life – Have it ALL Manifesto

    This blog post is the Agile and Lean Life Manifesto, setting the foundations and key principles for living the Agile and Lean life. The twelve principles introduced in the manifesto are based on best business practices like “lean manufacturing”, “lean start-up”, “agile development” and other advanced business strategies, transformed so they can be used for managing personal life. In addition to that, a few best personal development practices and my own, already tested, ideas are also included.

    The five most important goals of living an Agile and Lean life are to:

    • Acquire inner assets faster (knowledge, skills, decision-making power …)
    • Create more external assets (time, money, revenue streams, status, energy, relationships…)
    • Have the tools to tackle the biggest challenges in life, such as career change
    • Successfully manage negative situations like anxiety, information overload and indecision
    • Blossom in all areas of life and thus live a more happy and quality life

    The key philosophy behind achieving these five goals is to eliminate waste from your life. Everything you do and have in life (decisions, material things, relationships etc.) either adds value to your life or drags you down. There is no third option. You can either make a return or loss on your every investment.

    Things that add value to your life are the things filled with positive energy and emotions. That means:

    • doing various different things that make you happy and self-confident,
    • doing things that lead to creativity and greatness,
    • having loving and empowering relationships,
    • being a part of a group in which you fit in and prosper,
    • doing things that make you healthier and more energetic,
    • doing things that lead to building up your inner assets and external assets by providing real value to the world, developing your talents and using prestige – a non-dominant approach.

    A very important task for all of you who want to live a more quality life is to eliminate as much waste as possible, with the end goal of making room for things that really matter to you – bring value. Unfortunately today, it is very easy to get distracted by waste, having wrong assumptions about life.

    If nothing else, you are exposed to thousands of ads that are fighting for your attention and assets on a daily basis. As the famous quote goes (and is sadly not far from the truth), before you know it, you can find yourself working a job you hate, buying things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like. This is all a big waste of life that you should totally avoid. That kind of a situation is the opposite of the Agile and Lean Life.

    Eliminating waste is an endless process and, in addition to that, it’s also not an easy task to carry out. But it’s very worth it in the long run. Eliminating waste is an important step towards personal freedom and genuine self-actualization, no matter where your starting point is. The Agile and Lean manifesto sets the foundations and key principles for doing it.

    Too long read for now? Download the PDF file!

    The Agile Lean Life Manifesto Banner

     

    Life can be managed even in today’s complex and turbulent world

    Before we go to the key principles, you have to be aware that it can be done, that there is a way.

    It’s true, life is not always easy. In life, you have to face big challenges, a lack of resources, negative emotional states and disappointments sooner or later. The new digital era has added additional pressure on top of that, with challenges like having too many options and unrealistic expectations, dealing with information overload, extreme market complexity and hardly bearable uncertainty, like no job security.

    But as you know, the world isn’t that dark. We live in the best times ever. Life can be an awesome and beautiful experience. But only if you manage it correctly. Only if you have the formula for facing life challenges and turning today’s disadvantages into advantages; and deep down inside you know that the formula is not posting your happy pictures on social media, no matter the short-term satisfaction you get.

    And don’t forget. There are no second chances in life. You have to get it right the first time.

    But what is the formula? In school, they teach you everything from mathematics and chemistry to history and geography, but almost nothing is said about life management. There are thousands of books written about personal development, but most of them are either too superficial or only offer small insights on how to improve some areas of your life. That may have sounded arrogant, but it is not meant that way.

    Yes, you should definitely read as much as possible in order to gain new insights on life, and there are many great books, but what you also need and is missing out there is a systematic and structured manual for how to live and manage life in today’s turbulent and complex world.

    Life is too short and you want to figure out the formula for success as soon as possible, and then live life to the full. You don’t want to bother with how to live life all the time, making and correcting big mistakes, feeling sorry for yourself while life passes by. You want to achieve as much as possible, have as many good moments as possible, acquire enough assets to fulfill your desires, have deep and empowering relationships and so on – as soon as possible in life.

    It’s true that everything takes time to be achieved, but the Agile and Lean life is about speed. It’s about the formula for accelerating your success. It’s about doing it as fast as possible in the right kind of way, meaning not being an asshole.

    There was a pretty good formula for living life that worked very well two decades ago. The formula was: get a good education, find a safe job, get married with your first love, live by the values of the local church, write down your goals and try to achieve a few of them, and live happily ever after. Jobs were available, markets were booming, education was cheap. The formula worked.

    Unfortunately the formula doesn’t work anymore. The times have changed too much. In 50 years, the world has been turned upside down.

    The businesses were the first ones to be dramatically affected by the new digital age and struck with all the new challenges, from market saturation and globalization to new internet competition and financial markets’ meltdown. They had to adapt, there was no other choice. Adapt or die. Many manuals have been written on how to do it, about running a company successfully in the new digital age. For example, two very popular new age manuals are the “lean production” and “agile development”, while the “lean startup” philosophy offers a new formula for success in business today.

    There is no reason why you shouldn’t use similar techniques for managing your personal life. More on that is written in the About this blog section. This gives hope that it can be done. By adapting the agile and lean philosophy to your personal life, you have access to a new formula for living life and being successful.

    The measurement of success according to the Agile and Lean Life formula is very simple. On your death bed, looking back on your life, you want to say to yourself: “Life was an awesome experience and a daring adventure. I have faced many difficult challenges but I have played the game right. I have made the right moves and have taken the right decisions. It was worth it. And I have contributed to making the world a better place to live in for generations to come.”

    The Agile and Lean Life Manifesto will show you how. You can become happy and successful in life no matter how difficult your life situation is – as long as you have access to the internet and possess sufficient intelligence to comprehend this text. For the rest of the world, we must all work hard so that they will have the same options. By living the Agile and Lean life you may not become the next Bill Gates, but you can definitely make a move towards a better and happier life.

    Before we go to the key principles, you should be aware that:

    • We all have to face many (old and new) life challenges that are not easy at all
    • We all deserve to live a quality life with adequate resources, self-actualization and happiness
    • Life can be systematically and scientifically managed in order to achieve these goals
    • You can do it as well, no matter where your starting point is. You can live a better life.

    The Agile and Lean Life Manifesto is based on twelve principles that successfully replace old life management techniques like setting goals, looking for job security and giving personal power for the important life decisions to other people (formal systems, bosses etc.).

    The twelve principle of an Agile and Lean Life

    1. Search before you execute: Experiment – Reflect – Learn – Execute
    2. Go out and see for yourself, see in order to compose your dream life
    3. Optimize your entire life, not only parts of it
    4. Visualize, simplify and make a move
    5. Move fast and with focus in the execution phase by using the flow
    6. Plan regular intervals with reflections and adjustments
    7. Believe in yourself over looking for outside safety
    8. Relationships and environment over work and tasks
    9. Continuously improve yourself and your environment
    10. Create value, be flexible and modest over having an ego
    11. Life Accounting – measure everything
    12. Live life with love and respect

    1. Search before you execute: Experiment – Reflect – Learn – Execute

    The key to a more successful life is having a superior strategy for how to live it. Your life strategy is shaped especially by your values, beliefs, personal management system, and thus by your decisions about spending your time, energy, money, skills and other resources.

    The Agile and Lean life strategy begins with the old Ancient Greek aphorism “Know thyself”. If you want to be successful in life, you have to know yourself and what you want out of life very clearly.

    But how? The best way to get to know yourself and World is by experimenting, reflecting and learning (here you can find all the techniques how to get to know yourself better). The best way is to introduce a new search mode in life, the phase you should be performing every time before you do any kind of real execution.

    If you execute before you search, you could be climbing a ladder that’s leaned against the wrong wall. Somewhere midway or at the top, you can discover that this is not you, it’s not something you want. The higher you are, the more difficult it is to climb down. Most people never climb down, and instead start living a “zombie life” – a life of constantly running away from reality.

    Therefore in an Agile and Lean Life, you have to divide all activities of all areas of life into two groups:

    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 are truly investing in 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 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 job is only to test the assumptions you have 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.

    After you find your fit in the search phase, you start executing. You set strong foundations, have laser focus, commit fully, start working hard and achieving your goals. You optimize, improve, and measure your progress. But first, you have to find the right thing. You must put the ladder against the right wall before you start climbing.

    After every experiment (action) you do in the search phase, you have to make a reflection. You learn about yourself by reflecting on your actions. Reflection is an insight into knowing yourself and life better. Reflection is an insight into how to do things in a better way.

    Why you need a search phase before execution:

    • To do adequate research and form first assumptions about yourself and life (for example you can write down your assumptions using the persona technique for people and organizations you interact with or you can just write down your assumptions on the spreadsheet)
    • To conduct small experiments and figure out what your best personal fits are
    • To not put pressure on yourself to achieve and do something that is not really you
    • To have fun and try as many things as possible in life and stay open minded
    • To set a realistic execution strategy that you can follow and really implement
    Practical examples

    Let’s look at an example. The old strategy was to write down a goal in a smart way (SMART = Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic, Time-bound). OK. You then write down something like: “I want to lose 10 kg by exercising and dieting in one year.” What usually follows is that after a few months, you look at your goal paper, you step on the scale and feel even worse. No progress at all.

    In the Agile and Lean Life Search phase, there are no goals yet and no pressure at all. The first phase is driven by curiosity. You know that you want to lose weight and you know that you lose weight by exercising and dieting. But instead of setting goals, you ask yourself: Is there a sport that I would really enjoy and wouldn’t even be hard exercise? Is there a diet for me that is tasty, healthy and makes me more energetic? With whom can I try the first sport I think I might like? Then you continue reading, trying and researching. In the first phase, you put no pressure on yourself, you just experiment.

    Let’s look at another example. In every company that hires you, you are usually on a trial period for a few months. They want to know if you and your skills are actually what you have presented in your CV. It makes complete sense and you should have the same approach towards the company. It’s not enough to just have a job. You must find out for yourself if you really fit in the company culture, if you like the work, if you can develop your talents further and so on. Only then you can decide if you really want to fully commit.

    2. Go out and see for yourself, see in order to compose your dream life

    The second principle of an Agile and Lean life is based on the “genchi gembutsu” philosophy, which means go and see for yourself in Japanese. It is an important concept in the Toyota production system, and is also known as “Go out of the building” in the lean start-up philosophy. The “go out and see” principle is an important part of the search phase.

    It’s a very simple rule in the Agile and Lean Life. Don’t talk about things, but go and try them.Don’t assume, 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 preserve it in your life or not (pivot). Every new experience should also give your ideas and insights into what to try next. The best way to test and try new things is with minimum viable experience concept. 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 keep something in your life or pivot to something else.

    The difference between what you think is valuable to you and what is really valuable for your life creates waste. Don’t assume anything, try and test everything.

    Let’s look again at the previous two examples to prevent things from sounding too abstract.

    There is 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.

    While experimenting, you must be careful you don’t do anything that would really damage you. If necessary, you should consult specialists.

    The second example would be looking for a new career. Your emotions show you complete dissatisfaction in your current career. Here is 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, 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.

    These are two very simplified examples. This phase must be done scientifically and systematically, and on this blog, we will talk a lot about how to do it and which tools to use.

    Your task in an Agile and Lean Life is to find your perfect fits in all areas of life by searching and experimenting. Trying completely different things, hanging out with different kinds of people and so on.

    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.

    If we have started with the Agile and Lean Life rule that you have to search before you execute, this rule is all about you searching for your perfect fits by performing experiments in real life – actually doing and trying, not only talking about it. Talk is cheap and gives zero insight into you and life.

    3. Optimize your entire life, not only parts of it

    You can’t run a successful business if your marketing or cash flow management or any other key business functions suck. You have to optimize the entire business, not only a few business functions. In the same way, you can’t have a happy and successful life if you only focus on some parts of your life and forget about the others. There is no running away from any area of your life. You have to look at your life as a whole, and optimize it on the macro level.

    If one of the life areas collapses, everything else can collapse as well. Your health greatly affects your earning potential and the quality of your relationships. Your income level has a big influence on all other areas of life. There are some periods in life when you have to put more focus on a single area (e.g. when getting a baby), but you should never let the bigger picture out of your sight.

    Ten key areas of life

    You have ten key areas of life you have to juggle:

    1. You
      1. Your personality – knowing yourself, your beliefs, values, behavioral patterns, daily habits, your ideal-self etc.
      2. Your environment – country, city, home, office etc.
    2. Health and primary needs (body)
      1. Diet
      2. Fitness / Sports
      3. Other (sleep, sex, breathing…)
    3. Relationships and people skills (love and belonging)
      1. Spouse
      2. Family (primary, secondary)
      3. Friends
      4. Coworkers
      5. Others
    4. Money and wealth
    5. Career, achievements and respect
    6. Emotions (your emotional body)
    7. Competences – Intelligence, knowledge and skills (your intellectual body)
      1. Formal education (degree, certificates…)
      2. Informal education
    8. Fun, creativity and travel
    9. Spirituality, self-actualization and giving back to the world (your spiritual body)
    10. Technology as a leverage for being more productive on all areas of life

    The Agile and Lean Life formula for managing life at a macro level is pretty simple. You should do constant linear improvements (kaizen) in certain chosen areas of your life, and one big rapid improvement (kaikaku) in one area of your life, when the time is ripe. At the same time, you should maintain all areas that are currently not your priority.

    Out of the ten life areas, you should choose, best in one year time frame:

    • One area where you plan to do a rapid improvement (that is your focus area for the time being)
    • Two to three areas where you will implement a few linear improvements
    • In all other areas, you try to maintain the current level (of course improvements on other levels will, in most cases, also positively affect the areas you are maintaining)

    You cannot implement too many changes in your life at once. You only have a strong enough will to do a few linear changes, and you can only implement one really big change in your life at a time, provided there are foundations strong enough for it. Therefore you should do only a single rapid improvement at a time.

    If you want to live a happy and successful life, you have to optimize your life from all ten perspectives. Of course all the areas are interconnected and consequently improving one area leads to improvements in other areas. The important thing, however, is to not only think about money, sex, fun, career or any other isolated area, but rather look at your life as a whole. First see the woods, then go and cut down trees.

    You should always thoroughly think about how every major decision influences all ten areas of your life. That is the principle number three, and the additional thing you should find out in the search phase.

    You can decrease the quality of your life or even destroy it with:

    • One or several big wrong decisions (for example choosing your spouse, industry, career…)
    • A series of small wrong decisions (unhealthy diet…)

    For every big decision you make, and for all the small decisions you are making almost every day, you should ask yourself where they are leading you and how they impact all ten areas of your life. Short-term history is a good predictor for short-term future. Ask yourself where your past decisions and current behavioral patterns are going to lead you in one year’s time in all ten areas of your life. That is the best technique to use for determining priority areas of your life: where you should be doing rapid changes and linear improvements.

    4. Visualize, simplify and make a move

    Brain neurons for our visual perception account for approximately 30 % of brain’s grey matter. When we look at pictures, our brain can process several pieces of information simultaneously, which means it is processing around 60,000 times faster than when reading a text.

    Therefore you first have to “see” what you want from life before you can have it.

    A very important rule of an Agile and Lean Life is to visualize everything. In the future, we will talk a lot about the fact that in an Agile and Lean Life, you have to do all kinds of creative stuff, from Kanban boards, “want-to-have experience” boards and master list visualizations to outlining mind maps and constantly drawing, sketching and sticking pictures together. Even if you suck at it, like I am.

    Much like the business model canvas is a much more fun experience in the business planning phase compared to a dull business plan, boards and visual materials are similarly a much better and more fun tool in a personal life compared to writing down goals. And they work so much better.

    This rule of an Agile and Lean Life is pretty simple. You must have extreme fun when outlining your life and designing what you want to experience.

    For your better performance you have to visualize everything.

    Besides better clarity and comprehension, you should get two more answers by visualizing and sketching your desired life experiences:

    • Scenario-based thinking: What are all the potential moves I can make and which ones will I try first? With more options, you get a feeling of more freedom and personal power.
    • Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication: What is the simplest thing that would work for every move I can make? You can take action only if you don’t feel overwhelmed.

    Having everything visualized and outlined makes it become obvious to you. There is always a move to make towards a better life. There is always a way to live a better life by implementing simpler and faster solutions. That should give you a feeling of inner security.

    Let’s review

    The next, fifth, principle is a step further from the search mode to the first execution step. So let’s look back at the first four principles we had covered so far:

    1. Get to know yourself by searching, experimenting and trying. Don’t execute and invest yourself strongly before you find your perfect fit. Don’t have any commitments and expectations in the search phase. There is no failure in the search mode. Only playing. That should free your mind of pressure. You should do regular reflections in order to acquire knowledge about yourself and the World.
    2. You have to go out and see for yourself. You have to try things and experience them in order to gain knowledge. Don’t talk about it, experience it. Don’t judge if you haven’t tried it for yourself, don’t assume if you don’t know how it feels. You are here on Earth to experience as much as possible. Do it. Test, try and experiment.
    3. Think about how every action you plan to do influences all ten areas of your life. You have to optimize your whole life to be happy and successful, not just a few isolated parts.
    4. Visualize everything you are doing or planning to do in your life and want to experience. Pictures, sketches, mind maps, boards and so on are the best tools for our brain. Use them and have as much fun as possible while visualizing it.

    5. Move fast and with focus in the execution phase by using the flow

    In the Agile and Lean Life, interested does not equal committed. “Interested” and “interesting” are the two main enemies of real progress in the execution mode, after you have conducted the search mode. No. Try not. Do or do not. There is no try. After the search mode.

    When you find your fit, you have to make more than a hundred percent commitment. You have to move fast, be focused and learn more about which innovations work and which don’t. The more energy you put into a few of your key goals (one major, a few minor ones) the faster your progress will be. In the execution mode it’s all about speed.

    In the Agile and Lean Life, the following is strictly forbidden in the execution phase:

    • Multitasking and other bad time management practices (read The best time management guide ever)
    • Doing too many things and having too many goals at once
    • Not having a place where you can work without any distractions and be in the flow at least once a day for a few hours (you can help yourself to achieve that with No interruptions day)
    • Losing focus because of distractions and urgent tasks, instead of working on the important ones
    • Not working on your goals on a daily basis
    • Not regularly measuring your progress in the intervals you have set with visual elements

    The key point in the execution phase is to work on your goals on a daily basis, and measure progress at regular intervals. An example of the right mindset would be: if your goal is to live a healthier life, there is nothing that can get in the way of me doing my daily exercise.

    Most of the work should be achieved in the flow. The flow is a superior creative and execution phases. The flow is a divine experience that enables you to create, deliver and capture real value added quickly and efficiently. The biggest killers of the workflow, the most productive state for a human being, are distractions. Therefore you need a place for yourself where you can get real work done.

    Laser focus by eliminating all distractions and being in the flow as much time as possible is the formula for good execution results. Use it.

    It’s also very important to break down your “life vision” with all the desired experiments into small steps you can easily take. You should break down all the goals to extremely small tasks that you can perform immediately, and gather feedback to do reflections.

    6. Plan regular intervals for reflections and adjustments

    When living an Agile and Lean Life you don’t just do work and execute tasks. You have to think regularly about why you are doing it and how you are doing it, and whether you are making real progress – the progress that brings value to your life. Being strong and passionate about the reason why is the best motivator you can have in life, and there is always a way to do things better.

    You need regularly planned introspection intervals for:

    • Reviewing the tasks done in the previous interval
    • Connecting with yourself and straightening out your life vision (and whys)
    • Measuring your real progress
    • Adjusting the strategy and plan
    • Reflecting on new things that were learned
    • Gathering new ideas
    • Identifying potential improvements
    • Setting new tasks for the upcoming interval

    First of all, in life things will never go as you assume, think and plan. Even less so in the future, since the environment is becoming even more complex, turbulent and unpredictable. Be prepared to change your strategy frequently and constantly. Your goals will be constantly changing in the Agile and Lean Life. You have to constantly adapt to the fast changing environment.

    The best way is to have reflection days at 14-day intervals. Every two weeks, you take two hours to reflect on your life. You look at all ten areas of life, determine your progress and do strategy and goal adjustments.

    In the 14-day reflection intervals, you also set tasks for the following two weeks (the so called sprint) based on your strategy adjustments. You should visualize your two-week execution sprint on the Kanban board.

    • In the Agile in Lean Life you have so called Sprints – 14-day intervals
    • Every single working day within a Sprint you should be working in the flow as much time as possible
    • You start your working day with a short morning meeting with yourself

    The sprint and the flow are your execution techniques in the Agile and Lean Life.

    Let’s review

    After the search phase, you enter the execution mode. We have looked at two principles you have to follow in the Agile and Lean Life execution phase:

    1. In the execution phase, you fully commit. You laser focus yourself. No excuses are acceptable. Most of the work you do is in the state of flow.
    2. You set 14-day intervals in your calendar. Every two weeks, you take two hours to reflect, adjust your strategy and set activities for the upcoming two weeks (sprint). You use visualization tools to have a clear picture of your progress during every sprint.

    Now let’s look at some other important rules that aren’t in the scope of search and execution, but are very important for living a happy and successful Agile and Lean life.

    7. Believe in yourself over looking for outside safety

    If you want to live an extraordinary life, you have to do extraordinary things. If you want to do extraordinary things, you have to extraordinary believe in yourself. You must find your inner security and be aware of your personal power. You must find safety in knowing that there is always a move you can make towards a better life, no matter what kind of a situation you find yourself in.

    The path to an extraordinary and awesome life is full of little risks, experiments and failures. If you cling to your current relationships, especially the bad ones, if you seek job security, if you are not willing to try new things, you will get what most people get: an average life. An average job, an average paycheck, an average relationships. But being average is not awesome, it’s boring and dull. You may even become a zombie.

    Don’t get me wrong. There is a big difference between stupidity and doing extraordinary things. Being certain that you are more productive if you are texting while driving is completely stupid. The probability of causing an accident if texting while driving is pretty similar to the probability of causing one if you were driving drunk. The latter is also very stupid. And you don’t want to do stupid things that can ruin your life. That is forbidden in the Agile and Lean Lifestyle.

    What you want to do is firmly believe in yourself by developing and executing a superior life strategy, as well as taking smart risks (opportunities with low risk and massive potential reward). For that, you need courage, self-esteem and knowledge for mitigating risks and scientifically measuring progress.

    For example, you must have the courage (trust yourself enough) to speak the truth, regardless of how unpleasant it is. Honest communication builds trust. That doesn’t apply only for communication with others, but also with yourself. Lying to yourself and making compromises merely brings hardship in life later on. There are many cases like that in Agile and Lean Life where you need courage and where you have to believe in yourself.

    If you don’t believe in yourself, you will never make a move towards a truly better life. You may make small linear improvements, but you will never gather enough courage to make a quantum leap in the quality of your life. Doubt kills more dreams than failure. Therefore the rule of the Agile and Lean Life is to look for safety in yourself (your inner assets like knowledge, skills, competences…) and not in external things, like relationships, money and contracts.

    In an Agile and Lean Life, there is no external security (although it’s of course good to have safety nets in assets, loving relationships etc.). There’s only the World you must experience to the full. For that, you need to free yourself by believing in yourself. It’s the key enabler for executing a superior strategy for better life quality. Forget about social pressure. Forget about expectations of other people. Forget about rotten compromises. Live life true to yourself.

    Two important mindsets that can help you to believe in yourself better are:

    8. Relationships and environment over work and tasks or money

    The two most powerful influencing factors on your life are your relationships and the environment you work in. They can either drag you down or empower you, thus helping you achieve your goals. The more ambitious your goals are, the more empowering relationships you need, with less room for compromises.

    You can have ambitious goals and high expectations for life, but if you are not in an environment that supports you, you will never thrive. You will never achieve your goals without an adequate support system. You are more a product of the environment than you might think.

    The rule of an Agile and Lean life is to surround yourself with motivated individuals who have goals similar to yours. People you spend time with, including your spouse, are the most important decision in your life. Choose your environment very carefully. Much like your mindset should not be fixed, your environment should not be fixed either. You are the one who chooses your own environment.

    Make sure that the following environmental elements are supporting you in achieving your goals:

    • Market (chosen industry trends, occupation potential, structural changes, market size…)
    • Country (political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental factors)
    • City (logistics, culture, fun, nature, food, education, kids…)
    • Office (possibility of working with no distractions, no need for a long commute…)
    • Home (quality of sleep, room for visualization of goals…)

    Look for environments with 5T: Talent, Technology, Tolerance, Transparency, Transcendence.

    Make sure that the following relationships support you in achieving your goals:

    • Spouse
    • Friends
    • Family
    • Acquaintances
    • Coworkers
    • Business partners
    • Other people in your life

    There are two important things regarding relationships that are a part of an Agile and Lean Life.

    • The basic foundation for good relationships is outstanding communication. You have to communicate honestly, frequently and deeply with people you want to have good relationships with. You need to learn how to be a good communicator. It’s an enabler for the Agile and Lean Life.
    • Coaches and mentors, because no one can succeed alone. You need other people who empower you and help you. One segment are people who surround you, and another are people whom you hire to help you or who you have mentoring exchanges with. In an Agile and Lean Life, you accelerate your progress with your personal mastermind group and coaches for different life areas.

    9. Continuously improve yourself and your environment

    You must never forget that there is always room for improvement, there is always a way to do it better. You should always look to improve yourself and grow. The foundation for an Agile and Lean Life is the growth mindset. You can always change yourself and by changing yourself, you can change your environment and the situations you are facing.

    Don’t be afraid of problems and challenges. Problems and challenges only present opportunities to learn and change. Don’t try to hide your mistakes. Expose them, talk about them and learn from them. But don’t make the same mistake twice. That is a big waste in life. Make sure you learn from mistakes the first time you make them.

    When making changes, knowledge and insights are your greatest assets. You can learn from your own past experiences and experiences of other people by reading, talking, watching, observing, listening etc. When using knowledge and insights of other people, go straight to the best knowledge and learn directly from the best people who achieved what you want to achieve. With the information overload, there is just too much crappy information and too many cheap copies. It’s better to read one really good book than 1000 average blog posts.

    To get the best out of life, you have to learn from the best or in other words learn from the best, forget the rest.

    Linear and rapid improvement

    You change yourself when you find a way to do something better. Self-improvement in your life can be either linear or rapid. When there is no more room for linear improvement, rapid improvement takes place, if the foundations are strong enough and if big enough motivation is present.

    You can only improve your current practice to a certain point. You can optimize your current behavioral patterns only to a certain level. Your current actions will only lead you to a specific level of success (it’s called a local maximum). You know you have reached a plateau when every new improvement experiment leads to an inferior performance.

    If you want to achieve more in that kind of situation, you have to do a dramatic (rapid) improvement. Painful situations and setbacks usually lead you to these kinds of more dramatic changes in life.

    The key questions to ask yourself when doing linear improvements:

    • What are my current values and behavioral patterns?
    • How can I make things faster or better?
    • How can I get the same result by using less resources (money, materials…)?
    • How can I make things simpler?
    • How are other people doing it more efficiently?

    The key questions to ask yourself when it’s time for a rapid improvement in your life:

    • What are my current values and behavioral patterns?
    • What is the best result that this kind of behavior can get me? Is it enough for me?
    • Why do I work like that? How should I work to achieve a quantum leap in productivity?
    • What is really holding me back from changing dramatically? Which values are holding me back?
    • How are other people doing it differently and being much more efficient than me?
    • What knowledge and skills am I lacking to do rapid improvement?
    • How and what would you work if you were totally free of your problems?

    You should also use the 5 Whys Technique when doing a specific linear or rapid improvement. It’s a technique where you ask yourself “why” five times, with the final goal of tackling the cause not the effect. Describe the situation you are facing. And then ask yourself five times: why?

    Question everything. There is always a way to do it better. Constantly push yourself to improve. Try new ideas. Never stop.

    There’s one more important thing for an Agile and Lean Life, regarding improvement and trying new things. It’s easy to be different. But it’s hard to be different and better. Different doesn’t always mean better. Try all the options, even the mainstream ones, and find the ones best suitable to you.

    10. Create value, be flexible and modest over having an ego

    In the Agile and Lean Lifestyle, your ego is the biggest obstacle on your path to a better and more successful life and personal growth. If you don’t believe that you can improve yourself and achieve your goals in a smarter and better way, you are driven by your ego. If you are driven by your ego, you are drawn towards exploitation and dominance. Both principles are short-term survival strategies, which are forbidden in the Agile and Lean Lifestyle.

    There are two options for how to act in life:

    1. You create, deliver and capture value, by serving and solving people’s problems (people pay you for solutions, skills, creativity etc.)
    2. You exploit, meaning that someone else has to create value for you (you take by fraud or force)

    There are two approaches for achieving social status in life:

    1. Prestige, meaning sharing expertise and knowing how to gain respect
    2. Dominance, which encompasses using force and fear over others

    The Agile and Lean Life is about creating value and achieving social status with prestige. You need to have a modest ego and trust yourself to live that way. You should never try to look superior in favor of learning something new and doing well. You must create value for people by using prestige.

    It is also very important that when you are creating value, you are market-centric not ego-centric. Markets always win, therefore you always have to count market structure and trends into your decisions (choosing a career, investing money etc.). You have to be flexible and not fixed in your assumptions about markets.

    The world will not change to be more to your liking. You have to be flexible and change to the point where you find common ground with markets, and then start making the world a better place.

    11. Life Accounting – measure everything

    On the one hand, the Agile and Lean life is all about creating, visualizing, testing and playing, but on the other, it’s life in spreadsheets. You have to very carefully and closely measure the progress you make in all areas of life.

    The most important thing is to avoid vanity metrics and the fake feeling of progress. If you are using olive oil, that doesn’t yet mean that you are living a healthy lifestyle. If you are driving a good car on a lease, that doesn’t mean that you are financially prospering. You want to be rich in life, not only look rich.

    There’s a simple reason behind the need for metrics. Numbers don’t lie and you can manage only what you measure. You should not talk about your progress in life at all, if you don’t have the metrics to show it.

    In the search mode, you should have sufficient insight and gather enough Intel and knowledge to set up basic metrics that need to be monitored. You should also know a few priority metrics and one metric you should focus on the most (the metric that matters). In the execution mode, the more experience you have, the more advanced and detailed metrics you can set and follow.

    12. Live life with love and respect

    The final foundation and the last principle of an Agile and Lean Life are respect and love. Respect yourself by believing in yourself. Respect other people you have chosen to be with or work with by empowering them and learning from them. Be humble and grateful for the relationships you have chosen in your life after the “cleaning” had been done. Lead, follow or just go away.

    Respect Mother Nature. Respect markets. Respect the global flow. Don’t expect them to change. You will have to change yourself first. You can change the world only after changing yourself. Never get cocky, never get full of yourself no matter how well are you doing.

    Besides respect, never forget about love, as it is the strongest force in the universe. The opposite of fear is not courage, but love and understanding. Courage is just a tool for managing fear. You cannot have positive and negative emotions at the same time. You cannot live a positive life with a negative mind. Life and happiness can’t occur where death and sorrow take place. Therefore do all things with love and respect. Love is the most powerful positive emotion in life.

    The moments you most remember in life are the moments filled with love and passion.

    It’s not about being happy at every single moment, but about doing things in a positive way for a positive cause. For yourself and for others. Do no evil. Be a good person. Create value. Share. However don’t expect that just because you’re a good person, life owes you something. You will still have to fight for a better career, a deeper relationship, a pay raise or anything else you want in life. Love doesn’t mean being soft and naïve.

    The final question at the end of this manifesto is how to start living an Agile and Lean Life. You simply start with your “life vision” – a list of everything you want to experience in your life. Continue now to the Agile and Lean Life productivity framework.

    Too long read for now? Download the PDF file!

    The Agile Lean Life Manifesto Banner

    Reference:

    • Liker, J. 2004. The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from Toyota. New York: McGraw-Hill.
    • Blank, S. 2013. The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Second Edition. Amazon Kindle Books.
    • Ries, E. 2011. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. New York: Crown Publishing Group, Inc.
    • Cheng JT, 2013. Two ways to the top: evidence that dominance and prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to social rank and influence. J Pers Soc Psychol
    • Dweck, C. 2006. Mindset: The new Psychology of Success. Random House.
    • Agilemanifesto.org

  • Personas – Know what you want

    One thing in life is sure. The more exactly, accurately and the sooner you know what you want from life, the easier your will get it. Usually the most successful people in the world are the ones who know what they want to do in life from a very young age, and have the talent to really do it.

    The best programmers, athletes, businessmen and so on, they all know that they were born to excel at exactly one thing. Knowing what you want in life allows you to focus on that thing only. If you are lucky and the environment supports you to the point where you can invest 10,000 hours into your talent development, then you can become a real Outlier.

    I very well remember one sentence from the movie Limitless, where Bradly Cooper gets the special brain enhancement pills, becomes super smart and goes from rags to riches. When he takes the pill, only one magical thing happens – quoting him: “I wasn’t high, I wasn’t wired. Just clear. I knew what I needed to do and how to do it.”

    Well, that is the secret to a much better quality of life – be clear about what you want and make the strategy for how you will get it. You must know what you want as clearly as possible. You have to see the final outcome you want. Just saying to yourself “I want to be rich” or “I want to have a cute girl/boyfriend” is not enough. You have to be more specific. That is the rule for every aspect in your life. Even for relationships.

    And you don’t need any pills for that. Let’s look at a better technique for being more proactive at choosing your personal and professional relationships – personas.

    Personas in business

    In internet user-experience and marketing expertise, personas are used to represent different user types that might use the product in a similar way. Personas are fictional characters representing the ideal customer or a typical character for a user segment. They are hypothetical users. It is also a very popular method used in lean start-up marketing to help you focus your efforts. You try to imagine everyone who could potentially use your product (customer segments) and then you create fictional characters for either every segment or for the priority ones.

    In user experience, the purpose of defining personas is to more easily make decisions about product features, interaction, architecture and design of the website. A persona is nothing but a substitute for a target user. You create as realistic and reliable representation of the user segment as possible.

    When you are defining a typical persona for a selected customer segment, you are defining their goals, desires, behavioral patterns, buying triggers, limitations and other elements, such as demographics, biographics, geographic and psychographic attributes, and so on.

    Hubspot Personas
    Personas Example. Source: Hubspot

    The most frequently used parameters for defining personas are especially based on what they want to do, how they behave, what motivates them, how they think and what they want to accomplish.

    To be more exact: for every persona, you should define the elements listed below, if you have enough data to back them up. The list is meant to help you with ideas for defining personas in your personal life later on.

    • Fictional name, photo, representative quotes for a better notion of the potential user
    • Demographic and geographic features
    • Professional background, responsibilities and skills
    • Context or a narrative story
    • Behavioral patterns and key characteristics
    • Values, attitudes and beliefs
    • Environment
    • User goals, desires and expectations
      • Life goals
      • Product experience goals
      • End goal of using the product
    • User tasks, activities and workflow
    • Limitations and accessibility issues
    • Buying triggers
    • Needs and pain points
    • Use cases or specific usage pattern
    • Interaction, information, sensory, emotional aspects
    • Typical day in a life
    • Potential customer journey
    • Empathy map

    The biggest benefit of creating personas is personalizing abstract data and therefore better understanding different customer segments and their goals. You “materialize” your assumptions and much more clearly define who your potential customer could be.

    Creating personas helps the product development team to:

    1. focus on creating value,
    2. user experience experts to prevent common (design) pitfalls, thus avoiding “self-referential design” creation which means subconsciously projecting your own mental models on the product.
    3. With personas, you can more easily (3) evaluate product feature ideas, develop wireframes and site architecture, design the overall look,
    4. and of course copywriters can write a better (4) targeted copy.

    Here is a good presentation about personas:

    Before defining the persona, you should also do user research and gather as much data as possible about the selected segment. Data can be gathered by interviews, surveys, different testing methods (A/B), user observations, field studies, and so on. In reality, personas are only as good as the research behind them. The best research is usually based on ethnographic data – ethnography being the systematic study of people and culture. The purpose of research is to find what people do, what frustrates them and what gives them satisfaction. After conducting adequate research, you should be able to identify their behavioral patterns. One technique to do that is user mapping by behavioral variables.

    For every product, more personas are usually created, specific to every customer segment. But even the same customer segment can be represented with more than one persona, for example if there are gender specific roles and use cases. When you create a persona, you also try to imagine a typical day in the life of that persona and, of course, how and when they would use or buy your product.

    All information about the persona should lead to some decisions. In the next step, you can also make scenarios describing a persona trying to do a specific task in a specific environment or context. This is the so called scenario-based design.

    If you don’t have enough research information to create real personas, you can create provisional personas. They are not that detailed and are based on a few best guesses of their needs and characteristics. That is still better than having no personas.

    When creating your personas you can mark different assumptions as:

    • Validated hypothesis (what you already know, is confirmed)
    • To be tested hypothesis (what still needs to be tested)

    Without doing personas, you have the so called “elastic user”. An elastic user can be anyone and therefore no one. The consequence of an undefined user is usually unfocused design with too many features.

    Bad userinterface
    When having an elastic user and not knowing what a customer wants

    Personas tell stories, spark ideas and ignite action. They are the in-put information for marketing and selling activities (sales funnel, customer segmentation…).

    Using Personas in your personal life

    Let’s build a use case based on those two understandings – (1) the first one, that the clearer picture you have of what you want in life, the easier you will get it, and the second that (2) the user experience experts use personas as a tool for visualizing probable users of the product in order to make the best possible user experience.

    The idea behind using personas in personal life is very simple. Based on knowing yourself and your assumptions about yourself, you can make personas for people and organizations you want to interact with in your personal or professional life. Starting with the most important person in your life, your spouse. After making a persona for your spouse, you can also make a persona for your perfect boss, the company you would like to work for (there should be different name for that, since a company is not a person, but that is okay), friends and business partners.

    Benefits of creating personas
    Benefits of creating personas

    Having this kind of personas will help you attract or select only quality relationships and improve the current relationships you have.

    Well, at this point I know exactly what you’re thinking and I totally agree with you. How can this make sense, especially for your personal relationships, if …?

    Attraction isn’t a choice. You are simply attracted to someone before really knowing them. It’s true nonetheless… Maybe you cannot choose who you fall in love with, but you can definitely choose who you will stay in a relationship with and devote your life to. Choosing the right partner is probably the most important decision of your life. You don’t want to make the choice based only on your animal instinct.

    It goes the same for the company you (will) work for, as the second most important decision of your life. You are going to spend approximately one third of your life at the workplace. You don’t want to spend your life working only for those companies that first replied to your received CV or that give you the biggest paycheck. You want to work for the companies that make you feel good, with which you share the same values and where you can blossom.

    Personas can help you with that. Personas can help you move from lottery to strategy.

    With personas, you are more proactive and growth-oriented

    You have two options for how to interact with life. The first one is the reactive way and the second one is the proactive way. Being reactive means that you simply react to things that happen to you in your environment based on your (subconscious) behavioral patterns. You assume that your personal power is quite limited. You are how you were born to be and you live life that was given to you. That is also called a fixed mindset.

    In personal relationships, that means falling in love because of the “greater power”, usually physical attraction. You try to stay together with someone without thinking of how good you two fit together. But if there is no other fit except physical attraction (emotional, spiritual, intellectual, social attractions, sharing the same values…), relationships often become sour and there are many disappointments for both partners.

    In business life, being reactive means sending your CV to hundreds of companies and hoping that one of them will invite you to an interview. In the second step, you hope that at the interview, someone will recognize you as a fit for the company and hire you. In this kind of thinking, people usually don’t even know much about the company. They are only focused (reacting) on being invited to the interview.

    In both cases of reactive thinking, what usually happens is that business and personal relationships can very quickly become relationsh*ts. You expected more, you had the wrong assumptions, you find out that maybe there is no real fit after a big struggle. And remember:

    The hottest hell on Earth is when you are forced to work or live with people who have totally different values than you, with no common ground to build on.

    The solution is pretty simple. You have to know yourself better, you must know better what you want in life and you must be much more proactive. Steven Covey, author of the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People defines proactivity as the act of taking charge of your life. Proactivity means being responsible for your life and taking actions to master it.

    One of the most fun and quick solutions for being more proactive is making a persona – of your perfect spouse, the company you would like to work for, and so on.

    Creating your own personas will help you:

    • Have better focus for who to meet and spend time with, in business as well as in private life
    • Know immediately which relationships you have to discard
    • Decrease the number of pitfalls in relationships (wrong expectations…)
    • Do a quick benchmark of how big the potential of the relationship is when you meet and interact with someone new
    • Be more honest in relationships and avoid many disappointments, like hoping that people will change
    • Quickly identify what you can learn from the other person and where the relationship needs to grow
    • “Market” yourself better, know what to look for and where
    Know what you want
    Be proactive. Go for what you want. Have a strategy , don’t play a lottery.

    In order to use personas in your personal life, for business and pleasure relationships, you should especially define (the brackets contain an example from business as well as personal life):

    • Basic demographics (age of potential partner, size of the company)
    • Must-have values and traits (intelligence, technological company)
    • Key characteristics (company culture, hobbies)
    • Deal breakers (smoking, industries not to work for)
    • Goals (building a family, becoming number one in the industry)
    • Other

    It may sound extremely dull, so let’s look at all the benefits of going from reactive to proactive behavior when creating personas in both cases.

    If you do a persona for your perfect spouse, you can:

    • Know yourself much better, and be more aware of what you want out of the personal relationship
    • Get new ideas for where and how to meet a potential spouse (hobbies, online dating…)
    • Make a better personal “sales pitch”
    • Evaluate the potential of the relationship really quickly (common goals…)
    • Know what the deal breakers for you are
    • Be honest about the potential, avoid hurting yourself and others (we can just be friends…)
    • Talk about what you like or dislike in other people and what the deal breakers are
    • See what you can work on in your personal relationship to make it even better
    • Identify common hobbies and start doing things together
    • Based on all the facts above, you can more easily “attract” someone that fits you better

    If you do a persona for the perfect company to work for, you can:

    • Know better where you would like to work (size of the company, culture…)
    • Prepare a list of companies you would like to work for
    • Do detailed research for your targeted companies (company goals, board members…)
    • Better customize your CV and personal presentations
    • Think of ideas for selling yourself to the companies, bypassing traditional approaches such as sending a CV and hoping they will invite you for an interview
    • Write down numerous ideas for how you can add value to the company
    • Develop new skills you know the companies you are targeting are looking for
    • Monitor all new information about the targeted companies via Google Alerts and so on

    As mentioned before, you can do the same for other relationships in your life (friends, boss, business partners…).

    The more experience you have in life and the more often you reflect on your past choices the more clear picture you should have what you want in your life. Thus more persona assumptions should be marked as validated, not to be tested.

    There is no perfect match in life

    Of course even if you do make your perfect personas, you will never find a perfect match. If there were a perfect match for you, then there would be no room for growth and learning. And life would be very boring without any challenges. But you can definitely find a close fit to your likings.

    There is no straight lines in nature or life.
    There is no straight lines in nature or life.

    On the other hand, you also shouldn’t fear that there is no close fit for you. There are more than 3 billion people of the opposite sex living in this world, and we have more than 100 million companies. Statistically, it is very probable that you can find your fit, a place or a person where you feel extremely good and you can blossom.

    The only thing holding you back is not knowing what you want, a lack of strategy, and fear. Life is too short and too precious for that kind of nonsense.

    And last but not least: personas should be dynamic. Your preferences and values do change throughout life and therefore your personas can become outdated. The expiration date of your personas usually depends on how fast you grow in life and how fast people in your life grow with you.

    Thus you should regularly update your personas. A good compass for when to do it is when you feel that it’s time for a change in life, when you want something new or you are very frustrated with current relationships. Extremely good times or extremely bad times usually accelerate even more relationship transitions and are real relationships tests.

    The more you want to experience in life, the more you change and grow, the faster your environment is changing, including people you are spending your time with. Thus you will have to update your personas more often. But it doesn’t take long. It’s just a short exercise to clear your mind, define what you want and focus yourself.

    Your ideal self-persona

    There are some relationships in your life that you cannot choose by yourself – especially your kids, your mother and your father. Making a persona for them should be done from a different perspective. You should move from what kind of relationships you want in life to how you can help them and empower them to become what they really want.

    You can do the same for yourself. If you don’t like spreadsheets and the personal Kaizen table (a list of personal improvements you have to make), you can make a persona of your ideal self. In psychology, the self-discrepancy theory talks about how everyone has an ideal self and that is what usually motivates you to change, improve and achieve more. Having a clear picture of your ideal self will definitely help you focus, set the right priorities and grow faster.

    For your Ideal self-persona you can make a mind map, a list, a Pinterest board or a notebook with pictures, quotes and attributes for the direction you wish to grow in. You can expand the context of what kind of person you would like to become, what kind of skills you would like to develop, what you would like to have, in what environment you would wish to create and so on.

    Homework

    The first three steps you can make for creating Personas as a technique to help you know better what you want in life is concretizing and visualizing:

    1. the ideal spouse you would like to have in life and,
    2. the ideal company you would like to work for (or what kind of business would you like to have) and of course,
    3. you should make a Persona for your ideal self (if you don’t already have your Kaizen list).
    Practical examples

    My example

    Here are two examples from my life as guidance to help you with the whole process. I have used the mind-mapping technique in order to create Personas.

    Company Persona Me Example

    Below you can download two files, one for my ideal spouse and one for my ideal company.

    [sociallocker]

    Persona of my ideal spouse

    Persona of my ideal company

    In user experience, personas should often tell stories, which means you can make a life or relationship story instead of a mind map or list. Be creative and use the tools in a way that inspires you the most.

    [/sociallocker]

    Enjoy playing and creating your personas!

  • When asking people for advice

    Advice as past decision justification

    There is one really important thing you should know when asking people for advice. In most cases, people will give you advice that justifies their past decisions or reflects their personal experience.

    Practical example

    Let me give you an example. A few years ago, I’ve started taking better care of my health. Since I had not done any exercise for 30 years, I had had very weak core muscles. Consequently, I have damaged my hand ulnar nerve. Bad posture contributed to nerve entrapment in my spine.

    Now if anyone asks me whether they should exercise more, I start explaining how good it is, but that you must be careful that you have strong core and don’t overdo it. There’s nothing wrong with the advice. But it was my own individual experience that justifies my current decisions – working more on my core. Not all people start exercising with such a weak core.

    Luckily the damage has been more or less manageable, but I could have had such a bad experience that I would stop recommending exercise to people at all. Yes, we shape our opinions and therefore also advice according to what happens to us as a consequence of our decisions.

    Therefore don’t ask an employee if you should become an entrepreneur. And don’t ask an entrepreneur for career advice if you want to be a successful scientist. Maybe you can ask an entrepreneur for advice if you want to be more business oriented in your scientific work, but then also expect some suggestion why you should be more an entrepreneur than scientist.

    Don’t ask a person feeding themselves with fried chicken what they think about healthy lifestyle. And don’t ask people who never needed their university degree if you should get one. Except if you share the same viewpoint and are only looking for adherents.

    Find people who have already achieved exactly what you want to achieve, and listen to their advice. But only if they are happy and successful doing it, otherwise they will merely explain how hard it is and why not to do it.

    When you are receiving advice, always ask yourself about the context of the advice that the person is giving to you, and if the same applies to your life.

    And at the end, remember: even when you find the right person and get some really good advice, you still have to find your own path. Nothing can be achieved in the same way twice.

    Don’t look for safety when asking for advice

    The second important thing regarding advice-giving is that people usually ask for advice just to get outside confirmation, not because they really want a piece of advice. Thus people often take an advice that agrees with what they have already decided to do.They don’t believe in themselves enough, and just want to hear that they are doing the right thing from someone else.

    I have seen this so many times with people asking for business advice and hoping to hear, “yes, you are doing the right thing and here are some additional ideas”. After that, they immediately forget all about the additional ideas and go back to doing the same thing as before, feeling a bit better.

    It’s the same in personal life. When someone asks you for advice, they are often looking for someone to listen to them and understand them, hug them and share sorrow with them. Not many people are actually looking for advice. Even if you give it, they will ignore it.

    Therefore when someone asks you for advice, make a quick judgment if they really want advice or just comfort. Give them what they are really looking for. And when they really want advice, remember that you will give them a piece of advice that justifies your past decisions. If possible, try to distance yourself from your past, and put yourself in their shoes and their context.

  • Fit

    The magical word in lean start-up entrepreneurship is product/market fit. When starting a new company, you may have the most competent people, the best management in the world, enough capital, the best business plan, the right market trend etc., but if you don’t have the product/market fit, none of the things listed above can really help you.

    Product/market fit means that you have the right product for the right market. It means that you are solving a problem that people are willing to pay for, or that you are satisfying a certain segment of customers with a very specific need. All this in a way that’s different to the competition. It means that you have good knowledge of the market needs and are flexible enough that when it comes to your business idea, you can adjust it according to the customer’s demands.

    As an entrepreneur you know very well when the product/market fit is achieved in the phase of development of your business idea. Namely, it’s when you stop needing to ask yourself whether you have a product/market fit. On the right market, customers themselves are the ones to help you find the right solution. When you are facing all other problems except for a lack of inquiries, you have found the right product/market fit.

    Find your personal fit

    Personal life is no different. In my younger years, I visited a fortune-teller as a joke, and asked if I’m dating the true love of my life. She had answered that if the love were true, I would know and wouldn’t be asking her that. Of course, this is an extreme example, since life isn’t entirely black and white, but it’s not that far off from the truth either. When you find the right fit for you, you don’t need to question yourself about meaning anymore (“Is this the one?”).

    Practical examples

    A prerequisite for a successful partnership is simply a partner/partner fit. It starts with a physical fit, just being unable to keep your hands off each other (and having extraordinary sex). It continues with an emotional, intellectual, spiritual one; that is to say, with conversations and tenderness late into the night. Well, it can also be the other way around or in any other order (physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual matching). Then it of course further continues with joint activities, sharing views on life, family goals, organizing household chores…

    You can wish for a relationship to succeed as much as you’d like, you can try to “fix” stuff, but if two people don’t belong to/with each other, there are no basic foundations for building a successful relationship.

    Same goes for work. You can work for one of the most respected companies in the world, are the best in your field, get paid well and enjoy many benefits, but if you don’t fit into the organization (in the company’s culture), you will be miserable and won’t feel good deep down inside. No matter how strongly you are trying to convince yourself otherwise.

    You want to get rich? Find a cash flow that’s most suitable to your character and competences. This can be entrepreneurship, the stock market, network marketing, show business, sports… When you find the right cash flow fit and combine it with hard work, focus, new ideas and perseverance, then success happens.

    Being physically fit is also incredibly important for the quality of your life and your potential. If you want to have more energy, enjoy the best sex of your life, feel well, have the ability to withstand more stress and pressure, be more attractive, feel better in your skin, you have to be fit. You have to find a sport that’s perfect for you.

    Feeling good
    You feel good and happy when you find your perfect fit.

    Same goes for all other areas of your life. The prerequisite for being successful, no matter the field, is finding your own fit. Values (what you find important) are those that determine whether you fit with something or not. When you find the right fit, passion awakens in you. You find yourself in something. You know that you can be successful in this. You see potential.

    You can easily hear something about a person who had found their fit. They were the right person at the right place at the right time. They were born to be a salesman. They’re really good at math. They hold the crowd’s attention with their sexuality and voice. They’re an excellent politician. They wield the racket extremely well. If only I knew how to do that…

    Searching and trying is what causes you to fit with something. Once again: searching and trying (in start-up lingo we know the so called “search phase” or “the search mode”).

    This brings about a lot of situations in which you don’t feel fit and have to go away – from people, organizations and situations. You have to admit a small failures to yourself over and over again. And each time you have to move on, it means pain. But this is only a step towards success; a step to the right fit. Finding your fit is a process. The cure for that kind of pain is appreciation – appreciation for having been able to try something and realize it’s not right for you.

    One more important thing. The saying to fit in is mostly said with a negative connotation. Because it primarily concerns situations in which you are trying to be a part of a group, but wherein you still have your own values, inconsistent with those of the group. Think about the stereotypical situation of a high school girl trying to fit in with cheerleaders club and she is unhappy until she finds where she really belongs; and that is usually not the cheerleaders club.

    When you think of fit in as negative (“I am really trying to fit in”), you aren’t honest with yourself what you really want in life and there will be no light at the end of the tunnel, meaning you will feel worse and worse over time among this specific group of people. In that case you definitely hadn’t found your fit. But when you feel extremely good saying it loud and clear, that you have found your fit, you are on the right track.

    You have to search for it

    Things used to be more or less obligatory, commanded – by the country, parents, the local church and whoever else (your environment). A larger part of our destiny had been defined, no matter the fit level. Once, it was expected from you to suffer, even though you weren’t fit for something. You simply didn’t have many options.

    “The non-believer who will go to hell” – in case of being more interested in a different religion than your local community. “The betrayer of the country and the nation” – if you moved to a different country liking it much more than the country where you were born. “The unreliable individual who changes jobs without a reason” – if you simply didn’t want to do the same job as your parents or didn’t feel good in a series of companies. “The neighbor who got divorced” – my parents got divorced in the 80s and it was perceived as a very negative event. But in reality if they didn’t they would probably kill each other. And so on. I am exaggerating of course, but just to make a point.

    Today, it’s clear that it’s not right for you to suffer. The other side (partner, company, country…) is suffering as well if you are suffering. The whole world is suffering. There is no combination for a positive result.

    Let me give you an example. If you work for a company where you don’t fit in, what will happen? You won’t be motivated to work hard, you will be talking negative about the company to your colleagues and other people, and you won’t like and encourage coworkers, you will hate your boss and so on. The company will be suffering as well as you. It’s a clear lose – lose situation that doesn’t make any sense.

    Today, in the world of many options, you yourself is often the only reason for suffering the non-fit. Your character. Your decisions. Your lack of adaptability. Your stubbornness. Your fears. Your infatuation with the fact that the world should change right where you are standing, instead of you finding those parts that fit you best.

    When you find your fit, this doesn’t mean that all your problems are solved. Finding your fit isn’t a miracle solution. Far from it. It only means that you have found something that holds true potential. You find something you can build upon and look forward to it. It is then that you pass on from searching to hard work.

    There’s also never a one true fit, regardless of all Hollywood movies and the promised shortcuts that appeal to our laziness. There are always parts where frictions exists, and that’s good. These small bumps that don’t fit are an opportunity for growth.

    But if you are somewhere where you totally don’t fit in, this is slowly killing you inside, until you become a zombie and kill your own dreams, ambitions, motivations, energy, and potential inside you. Then you are in a situation when you die before you are actually dead. You become bitter, tired and search for a way out. And that’s something you don’t want, trust me.

    Search for your perfect fit
    Search and you will find. Conquer your fears.

    This is why life has equipped you with a compass that shows you whether you are on the right path. Life gave you a sensor that tells you whether you fit in and you have only to work hard to reach your goals, or whether there is no fit and you will remain miserable and dissatisfied no matter how much you try, regardless of all your moves; if you don’t invest your energy into finding the better fit of course.

    The compass is your feelings. Positive feelings mean that you are going in the right direction, regardless of the difficulty of the challenges, the amount of demanded input, the obstacles in front of you and possible failures. Negative feelings, such as sadness, depression, apathy, unhappiness, ignorance, lack of motivation, all show you that you aren’t in the right place. Behavioral patterns such as procrastination, indecisiveness etc. also indicate the same.

    Fear shows that you have to face something in life, envy shows what you potentially want and where you potentially fit in, and anger can either show that you aren’t in the right place, aren’t doing what you want (anger at yourself), or that you have to try harder and find a new path (anger at others). If you listen to your heart and carefully observe your feelings, you know. The best way to observe your feelings is with the happiness chart.

    Be proactive and find your fit

    When you come to a point in your life where you realize all this, you are often already caught, stuck to certain parts, people and situations that don’t belong in your life.

    The only employer who answered your request for work. The first partner you fell in love with or the first one who talked to you. The industry in which you have landed completely by accident. The first investor who offered you money for your business opportunity.

    But the first options are rarely the right ones. The idea of love at first sight is a shortcut that appeals to human laziness, fear, comfort zone, and robs you of dignity to try for something better. You also want different things throughout your lifetime, thus no fit lasts forever. Every time you are dishonest with yourself or choose the easier path, negative feelings are waiting for you. Separation is never easy, but it is sometimes necessary and part of life.

    You only have four options in a non-fit situations.

    1. The first and the hardest one is nirvana. The state in which all wishes and self-awareness disappear. You love everything the way it is, and feel perfect. But so far, 150 billion people have lived on our planet and only a handful reached nirvana. Maybe two, three. Good luck. Although the Zen mindset can help you a lot in everyday life.
    2. The second option is reactive behavior – staying where you are and suffering. You can decide to die before actually being dead, and resign to living like zombies; settle for what “you are given”, for what happened to you. But at the same time, point fingers at life and everyone else, saying how they are at fault for your misfortune because they aren’t the very thing that you want them to be.
    3. The third option is as popular as the second one. You naively hope that other people will change. You hope that the boss will be nicer. You hope that your partner will be more attentive to you and stop cheating, and that this weird period of theirs will end. You hope that your parents will understand you better. You hope that you will spontaneously find yourself in a better situation; because you deserve it, since you have such a good heart.

    And yet. People don’t change. An organization’s values don’t change. Countries don’t change. The world doesn’t change. Situations don’t change by themselves. It’s ironic that the only constant of the world are changes, but in its essence, everything stays exactly the same. Only the mask is different. We advance, but we don’t change. People don’t like real authentic change.

    It’s true that we all are equipped with more and more knowledge. It is true that we try to tame the human nature into an increasingly more positive direction, with laws, transparency etc. It’s true that we have more and more advanced methods of communication, living, transport etc. But the foundations of humanity remain the same.

    Let’s look at example. What used to be smoke turned to a letter, then IRC, then Messenger, is today Facebook and will be something else tomorrow. But in fact, all of these cases are actually ways of communication, only increasingly better and more efficient. Same goes for an individual’s character, which mostly stays the same in its essence. Rarely do individuals realize that they have to change something with themselves.

    Just really think deeply of what it takes for someone to change. Usually a life or death experience. Maybe prison. Managers needs years of work and inhuman efforts to just slightly change the values of an organization. In countries, use of force, implementation of new laws or even a war are necessary for changes or new patterns of behavior. Internet has shown the biggest technological progress in the history of mankind. Millions of people contributed to its development, and yet more than 30 years were needed for it to reach the level it is at now.

    If you are hoping that someone will change soon, and will be more to your liking – good luck with that. If you live with the conviction that you will change someone by nagging, badgering, whining, binding, fretting, dominating, and simultaneously achieve a positive relationship result, you are very wrong. It’s much more likely that people will push you away or start hating you. So you make even a step further away from the right or better fit.

    4. The best and most sensible option is proactivity – finding a better fit. Sadly, or luckily, the case remains that the younger you are, the less locked into your life, the easier it is. It is also true that the more financial, intellectual, psychological, sexual and any other capital you have, the easier it is.

    But regardless of everything, you always have a choice, you can always make a decision, there is always a move you can make to find things and people in your life that are a better fit.

    Courage is needed for this. Willingness to face small failures. Readiness to survive disappointments. Preparedness for a broken heart. Again and again. You have to be willing to sail away from your comfort zone into the ocean of possibilities and opportunities. You have to be prepared for the adventure of life. Seek and you shall find. Where there is a strong enough will, there is always a way.

    Practical examples

    Your personal values aren’t (any longer) consistent with those of your partner, company you are working for, or your country. The voice inside you is telling you that this isn’t it. You experience negative emotions when you think of doing the same thing you are doing today, or being in the same situation in ten years. There is no interest for development by the other party.

    You have four options, as described previously:

    • Meditate away (change your view of the world and yourself)
    • Suffer (and point fingers)
    • Hope for others to change (suffer and prepare for a big disappointment)
    • Try to change others by nagging and fretting (double the disappointment above)
    • Find a better fit and distance yourself where that isn’t possible

    But when you are making big changes like that do them as fair as possible for all the parties. Nevertheless if something isn’t your fit, pivot!

    What if there is no fit for me?

    At the end one more question appears: what if there is no right fit for me? Oh well. The world has about 3.5 billion people of the opposite gender, millions of organizations that are employing, dozens of religions, sports, subcultures, industries, diets, possibilities for income etc. The only obstacle preventing you from finding the right fit for yourself is usually only laziness, fear, comfort zone, a lack of resources at a given moment, and other similar reasons.

    Have faith
    Yes, there is fit for you too! On all areas of your life.

    Basically you transfer the power (and decisions) from your hands into those of a higher power, the country, parents, boss or whoever else there might be. You put yourself in the position of a helpless victim. Don’t do that, keep all your personal power.

    Experience the wide variety of options

    Don’t hope for others to change. Don’t hope that the world will change to be more to your liking just because of your ego. Don’t suffer deep down inside, and don’t blame others for situations that don’t meet your standards. You have decided for this yourself. A big exception are children in dysfunctional families, people living in poverty, and people who suffered from accidents. In these cases, the task for all of us is to give opportunities and options; offer support to all those who find themselves in such a situation and don’t have the possibility of choice.

    In short, for everyone else – gather courage and embark on an adventure. Systematically, gradually, without compromise. Find a better fit in all areas of life. And then build an even better one.

    Build something you will admire and be proud of. But in the meantime, prepare for searching, trying and of course, a disappointment here and there. Maybe even a lot of disappointments. Nevertheless, this is the only path to the dream partner, dream job, the perfect environment and fulfilment in life.

    Look at the world as an infinite varied palette of possibilities; as a park or a playing field where all of us can connect, create, contribute, learn, experience, meet, change. Especially with those people who have similar values, with those people who share your vision, who are prepared to grow and try new things.

    Fit in is paradise and non-fit is hell on Earth.

    First fit in. Then stand out.

    Finally, you find yourself wondering whether it is not more sensible to stand out than to try to belong with a group. It’s absolutely not right to try to conform to a group. As said before, you have to find something that’s close to you and then build on it. By adding value, you essentially have to stand out, create something new.

    It used to be that an individual was simply able to step away from “average” by being different from something that was commanded or expected. Today, no things are specifically expected or commanded like that. Today, the developed world already has diversity.

    Today you stand out by piecing your life together completely individually, like a puzzle, from all that fits best for you. And on top of that, you add value with your innovativeness, unique outlook and hard work.

    Homework

    Here is a homework you should do. Analyze if you have found your fit on the all areas of life listed below. As we mentioned in the beginning, you can always feel when fit isn’t happening on a certain area of your life.

    1. Your environment – country, city, home, office etc.
    2. Your diet
    3. The sports you do
    4. Your spouse
    5. Your friends
    6. Your coworkers
    7. Your career
    8. The way you earn money
    9. Your investments
    10. Your competences
    11. Things you do to enjoy life
    12. Your religion or spirituality
    13. Technology you use
    14. Other areas important to you

    First fit in. Then stand out.