relationship advice

Life metrics and how to define success in life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How you should measure your success in life? Compare…

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

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

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

How to define success and life metrics

Why we usually hate numbers as metrics of success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vanity metrics and fake definition of success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fake feeling of progress

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

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

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

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

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

Health
Money and career
Closest relationships
Competences
Mind and feelings

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

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

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

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

Stay fit to have great sex

Health

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

wealth growth

Money and career

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Career

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

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

Stronger together

Your closest relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understand the process

Competences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Success in life

Controlling your mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking feelings into account

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Start smart

When it comes to success, compete only with yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Life metrics and success in life (PDF)

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

Homework

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

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

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

Do you want to be more successful in life?

Read more about the massive success formula.

The happiness index and the happiness chart
If your body gets hurt, you feel physical pain. One of the roles of physical pain is to tell you what not to do, for example to not hit your head against the wall over and over again or play with fire. Besides having many other functions, emotions can also play a pretty similar role. They can tell you whether you’re on the right path, if you’re following your life vision and what your whys are (even if your emotions are repressed and you aren’t even aware of them) or if you’re going against yourself, marching in the wrong direction and being in the wrong environment with the wrong people.

The compass is simple. A longer period of positive emotions shows that you’re going in the right direction, while negative emotions (anger, dissatisfaction, sadness…) warn you that you aren’t on the right path; negative feelings could be a signpost that you aren’t on the path that’s meant for you. If you are accompanied by constant negative emotions, it means that your soul is suffering.

Just as a reminder, being on the wrong path is one of the options why you are experiencing negative feelings, but there may be many other potential reasons. You must carefully analyze yourself and find out what the real source of your negative feelings is. For example, besides being on the wrong path, cognitive distortions can also cause you to have constant negative feelings. You may be on the right path and just think too negative. But now let’s get back to being on the wrong path.

The good news is that your emotions sense something is wrong and that you aren’t going in the right direction way before you can arrive at the same conclusion with your rational and analytical mind. It’s called instinct. Something either feels right or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t feel right and you still do it, you usually go against yourself and bring misery and unhappiness into your life. Therefore, your emotions are a great predictor of your future and your quality of life.
- If you know you aren’t with the right person, but you still stay in a relationship just because you’re afraid to be alone, you’re going to be miserable.
- If you sense that your bosses aren’t running the company professionally and that it’s just a matter of time before things go south, but still don’t do anything about it (search for a new job), you’re going to feel miserable.
- If you’re driving in a car with a lunatic and you don’t have control, you won’t feel good because you feel that there’s a great probability that something dangerous will happen. But in real life, you have control in the most of situations if you only listen to your emotions, are aware of your personal power and you act.
Happiness Index, Source: Agile trail

Happiness and productivity

If you’re happy, you’re more productive (some studies show you’re around 12 % more productive), you’re more optimistic and have higher level of motivation, you nurture relationships better at home and at work, and you have no problems with expressing gratitude, you are more innovative and creative. You can also enter the workflow without distractions more easily and are more committed to your goals. You also help to create better working or home environments. Nevertheless, there are several issues we have to address, because things aren’t that simple.

First of all, we all love to ignore our emotions and what we really want. Maybe you’re afraid, maybe you’re clinging to safety, maybe you aren’t aware of your personal power, maybe something else. But if we take one step back, you most often aren’t even consciously aware of how you feel throughout the day, you don’t pay much attention to your emotions, you just get mad at your spouse or a coworker, or become grumpy in a traffic jam or whatever, but you don’t ask yourself why; in that case, you unfortunately don’t live, you only exist. You may even be a zombie. So the first important rule is to regularly and systematically monitor your emotions and become aware of them. Then ask yourself why.

The second thing is that there are three areas for monitoring your emotions. One is your home environment. If you don’t have loving and caring personal relationships and don’t feel home at home, you can’t feel happy in life. Home should be like your temple of positive energy, emotional security and deep relationship bonds with people you love the most.

Then we have the working environment. You spend one third of your life at work, so you must have good relationships there (do you have a best friend at work?), you must do meaningful work and fit into the company culture. You can’t be happy in life if you hate your job.

Last but not least, you’re here to grow and enjoy life. You can’t be happy if you aren’t progressing from your real to your ideal self and if you aren’t enjoying life in the moment (while having realistic expectations). The bottom line is that you have to monitor your emotions in all three areas, and if one area is suffering, all areas are suffering.
1. Your home environment
2. Your work environment
3. You
And the third thing is that our emotions are complicated. They aren’t so easy to understand. If you decide to pay attention to your emotions, you’ll have to spend a lot of time dealing with self-analysis and how to live a life honest and true to yourself. It may seem that everything is in order in your life, but you may be totally unhappy and not even aware of it. When you decide to really pay attention to your emotions, you must start living life with courage and full of love towards yourself and others, and always be truthful to yourself. No dishonesty. It’s hard work but it pays off.

Even if our emotions are complicated, there are two simple exercises you can do every day, as the first steps towards better understanding yourself and how you feel – they’re called the happiness index and the happiness chart.

The happiness chart

There’s a really simple method of monitoring your emotions and doing basic emotional accounting. It’s called the happiness chart. The main advantage/point of the happiness chart is to never forget about yourself or lose awareness of how you’re really feeling, even if you’re very busy. You put yourself first. Many times, if you aren’t super happy, angry, depressed or feeling some other extreme emotion, you just go through the day like you’re used to. Some people smile because they’re used to it, some people are grumpy all day because they’re used to it, and so on. You wear a social mask out of habit. But you never know what you’re really feeling and why. That’s existing, not living; that’s being a zombie.

With the happiness chart you will:
- Always be aware of your emotions
- Have early alerts for things are going in the wrong direction
- Easily communicate your emotions with others (spouse, team etc.)
- Have a basis for further analyzing your emotions further
- Link your happiness level to your productivity level and see how happiness influences your day
Happiness Index Calendar, Source: Agile Trail

The idea is pretty simple. You have an uncomplicated chart with different indicators showing how happy you are. Every day, when you wake up, go to sleep or while working, you put an indicator on the chart, marking how you’re feeling.

You have three charts on which you indicate the happiness level every day:
- Me (that you share with yourself)
- Intimate relationship (that you share with your spouse)
- Work (that you share with your team)
It makes sense to engage other people to use the happiness chart, of course. For example, you also ask your spouse to mark their level of happiness on the chart and when the mark from you or your spouse goes below a certain level, it’s time to talk and communicate more intensively about what’s going in the wrong direction and why.

After marking your happiness level on the happiness chart, you should ask yourself four questions:
- Mark how happy you are (at home, in a relationship, at work etc.) on a scale from 1 to 10. Why the x number? Watch out that you aren’t always in the average (5, 6, 7, 8). If you are, use only 1, 2, 3 and 9, 10 as a scale. Because you’re either happy or you aren’t. You can even simplify it with three smiley symbols: :) , :| and :(
- What feels right at the moment?
- What feels the worst or wrong right now?
- What should I do to increase my happiness?
When you have your answers to all four questions that should be enough material to do a retrospection (maybe at the end of the week or your sprint), where you answer three additional questions:
- What should I start doing in my life?
- What should I stop doing in my life?
- What should I continue doing in my life?
The most important thing while using the happiness index and the happiness chart is to be really honest and true to yourself. If you’re lying to yourself about your feelings, you repress them and ignore them. But they’re like an evil monster that starts growing if you ignore it. The evil monster keeps growing in you and will come back in times and places you least expect (you start destroying your relationships, become depressed etc.). Therefore kill the monster while it’s still small. The happiness chart will be the first to tell you when a small monster is born. Pay attention to your emotions, because they matter the most!
Extremely good or bad times are real relationships test
In normal, or even slightly good or bad times, anyone can be a good friend, a good business partner or a good spouse. Normal times never show the darkest part of a person’s character, unless the person is an asshole by default. Extremes do. Extremes show whose personality really is larger than life and whose character is lower than a snake’s belly. Well, everyone makes a mistake or breaks from time to time, but if you see consistently atypical behavior in extreme times when interacting with someone, you can see deep down their soul. You don’t even have to look them in their eyes.

When things go really badly, people very clearly show how strong their rational part is compared to their instincts as well as how stable their emotional self is. They show their true nature and how mature they really are to other people. Surprisingly, when things go extremely well, the darker human nature often comes into play even more. You probably heard the quote that nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test man’s character, give him power.

Thus we have two real life relationships test – both extremes, when things go either really well or really badly, put relationships to a tough test, especially the closest ones.

When things go extremely badly

Bad times are usually a very tough testing period for relationships. Any kind of adversity, losses and other tragic situations, big or small, have a huge impact on your life and your relationship with other people. Job loss, money issues, accidents, death of the people you love, you name it.

From what I’ve seen, there are only two possible outcomes when things go extremely badly. Either people turn on each other and start fighting, or the extremely bad situation gives them an opportunity to connect even more and deepen the relationship. The fact is that relationships that endure extremely tough times usually become even more substantial.

In bad times you have only two options in a relationship in your life:
1. You can turn to each other and start fighting
2. You can connect even more and deepen the relationship
I guess the second options is a good thing in a bad thing. But unfortunately people prefer to turn on each other than find a deeper mutual connection. But why? Many times, extremely bad times make you feel bad about yourself, they hinder your self-confidence, and they make you feel more insecure and intolerant. Consequently, your capacity for love decreases.

The more your self-confidence is damaged by an external event, the more your capacity for love decreases. If your perception of value was, for example, strongly grounded in your fancy job and you lost the job, you feel unworthy and thus your perception of your value in a relationship changes as well. By fighting, you usually want to make people love you more and chain them onto yourself in a very aggressive way. It’s a kind of unhealthy compensation for the feeling of lost value.

The second thing that often happens is that it’s much easier to blame others for many types of different failures and bad things happening to you. It’s much easier to blame the partner that s/he didn’t support you enough etc. than it is to admit to yourself that you f*cked up. You protect yourself and your feeling of value by blaming others. Ironically, the easiest way to start a fight is with the people you love and care about the most. That’s the point when relationships start to go south in tough times. You get insecure, aggressive and start accusing your loved ones instead of facing the truth and building even stronger relationships based on more effective communication, mutual care, empathy and understanding. It can be done, but it takes a lot more effort.

When things go extremely well

Much less obvious is why people fight when things go extremely well; well, usually they go extremely well for one person in a relationship or even both parties. Examples of extremely good times are when someone gets a big promotion, enters a new well-known social circle, gets to know new people who rank higher than them on the sexual market value and is exposed to their affection, when business goes really well, when someone acquires larger sums of money etc.

Two things very often happen in that kind of a situation. First of all, outer stimuli (good happening) stroke the ego too much. When the ego gets too much stroking, people often start getting full of themselves, they become cocky and arrogant, and suddenly they feel like they don’t need some people around them anymore so much. They enjoy their extremely good (many times unexpected) situation so much that suddenly they don’t give a f*ck about the people around them anymore or they feel superior to them.

The second thing that often surfaces is the natural human tendency of trying to progress and strive for better things in life. When something extremely good happens to you, you get a new reference point. You feel much better than you used to. So everything around you must be much better than it used to be, from items to people; and so you start looking for things and social circles in the same new league. Because your perception of value increased, you also look for people who have higher value in your eyes.

It’s some kind of The Diderot Effect: The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new (fancy) possession often creates a spiral of consumption which leads you to acquire more new (fancy) things. As a result, you end up buying things that your previous self never needed to feel happy or fulfilled. It happens pretty the same in the relationships.

Both things, the illusion of ego and the new view of higher self-worth, lead to a big relationship test with all the people with whom you had normal and totally good relationships before that extremely good thing happened. But there’s a big trick in this game. You still have some kind of an attachment to the people in your life, which leads to internal conflict. You still care for them but you want to move on at the same time.

Secondly, your new perception of self-worth makes you feel good when you’re with them because you feel superior to them. But they start feeling shitty when they’re around you. Last but not least, there is always also a question of what will happen when good times go away and your luck strikes out, who will you go to then? In movies, you can often see the moment when someone realizes that a good thing is not as shiny as s/he thought, and they come back to old friends.

If that happens once, it’s kind of understandable, but if it happens many times, it’s an ugly form of hypocrisy. There’s nothing wrong with being self-confident, maybe even a little bit cocky sometimes. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to become better and better and be surrounded by better and better people, items and stuff. There’s nothing wrong in deciding to end a relationship if you feel that its expiration date has come because you’ve progressed faster than the other person. It may not be nice, some people would already see that kind of behavior as proof of a lousy friendship, but at least it’s honest.

What definitely isn’t right is (1) having a relationship with someone only when things go bad, constantly leaving them at good times and coming back at bad times, (2) being around someone just to feel superior to them or seeing them as plan B, and what definitely isn’t right is (3) going against someone you love (seeing them as less valuable) just because something good is happening to you.

When things go really well, your instincts should be to share your happiness and success with the people you love, not feeling superior to them and seeing them as less valuable. Even if your emotional self does feel a little better for a second, your rational part should correct your emotions immediately. If your emotions march off, you have to put them back into the right frame with your intellect. Just remind yourself why a relationship with someone is really important to you and what they contribute to your life.

In bad times you have only two options in a relationship in your life:
1. You can share your happiness and success with people you love
2. You can start feeling superior and full of yourself and become a hypocrite (in this case is better to end a relationship)
I have seen it a hundred times in personal and professional lives. Suddenly a business takes off. One partner would like to cash out, the other to reinvest. They don’t communicate enough. Both of them see each other as an unnecessary part of the business and a burden to their own goals and interests. They start fighting. Business goes down. Before, they were best friends. After the first real success, they become the worst enemies. A similar situation often happens in the personal life.

Ask yourself the questions below. They do sound a little bit silly, but if you know how to be honest with yourself, they’ll tell you a lot about you and your relationships:
- If Jenifer Lawrence/Channing Tatum or whichever famous person is your favorite actor fell in love with you and tried to seduce you, what would you do? It doesn’t even have to be a famous Hollywood star, make it your national or local TV star, or your last crush or whoever you maybe feel attracted to and is out of your league.
- If you won a big amount of money in the lottery, let’s say 10 million EUR/USD, or if your business started generating 30,000 EUR/USD profit per month, what would you do?
Would you stay with your spouse and friends and family or in any other relationship? Would you spend more or less time with them? Would you start fooling around and find new friends or would you share your success with old friends? Ask yourself sincerely and you’ll see very well what would be the relationship test outcome of extremely good times.

If the answer is that you’d keep a specific relationship, or invest even more into it and share all of your success without feeling superior, there’s a very good chance that a relationship would pass that kind of a life test. If you’re tentative and undecided or if questions like that piss you off, you should probably rethink your relationships. We’re talking about only one context here, and that’s what would happen to your relationships if your position were to drastically improve. There are many other elements and angles that influence the quality and duration of relationships, but this kind of a test can still tell you a lot.

When things go extremely badly and extremely well

There’s also a third situation, when things go both extremely badly and extremely well at the same time. In those kind of times, relationships and people’s characters are put to an even harder test.

An example would be when parents die and inheritance has to be split among siblings. The extremely bad situation (and a shocking one) is the parents’ death. Kind of a good situation for many people is the inheritance, and usually there’s a bigger sum of wealth in play because of the real estate. There are so many families where people really had strong bonds with each other, until something like that happened. It’s heartbreaking how many families fall apart because of the inheritance fight.

The same situation often happens in business, when things go well in some ways (generating money, usually), but there are also many challenges present. People are afraid of losing something valuable and they often prefer to blame others than themselves for all the problems. Relationships become relationshits.

Everyone breaks sometimes

We all sometimes make mistakes in relationships. We hurt people and people hurt us. We’re all human and we all make mistakes. That’s fine. What’s not okay is if you start behaving toxically and you cripple your relationships every time something extremely good or extremely bad happens to you.

Those are the times when you should put in extra effort to strengthen the most valuable relationships in your life. If they’re really valuable to you, and not only plan B or a compromise you think you had to make because of your temporary situation, you’ll make sure that extremely good or extremely bad times bring out the best in you and the people you love.

The key takeaways are the following:
- Extremely good and extremely bad times will have a big influence on your ego, self-worth and your perception of yourself and your relationships.
- If a relationship is really sincere, based on love, mutual respect and is valuable to you, you’ll look for ways to enhance, strengthen and deepen the relationship in both extremes. You’ll open yourself up more, you’ll invest yourself more, you’ll communicate more, and you’ll show more loving and tender energies. You should see extremely good and extremely bad situations as an opportunity to build even more quality relationships. Both extremes should bring out the best version of yourself and you should bring out the best in other people.
- Many relationships won’t pass the test. Maybe because of you, maybe because of others. That’s okay, you just have to be fair and sincere, to yourself and to others. Even if it’s time to end a relationship, you can do it the right way. There’s nothing wrong with moving on, but you shouldn’t keep things open. Give a close to a relationship that you think has to end.
- But what you definitely shouldn’t do is start fighting with the closest people in your life only because things go bad for you and it’s the easiest thing to do. Don’t blame or abuse others because of your own sorrows. And what you also definitely shouldn’t do is keep relationships in your life only as plan B or only to make you feel good about yourself, feel all superior, because currently things are going really well for you. That’s an ugly form of hypocrisy.
- The good news is that real life relationships test will help you to keep the relationships that really matter in your life and clean all the others. It may hurt, but in the long run such a relationship cleaning will help you make a room for the new people – people who fit you better in your new period of life.
Positive orientation towards your past
We know three time zones – the past, the present and the future; all three time zones very much define your life, from who you are to where you were, where you are and where you’re going. The renowned psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who was also responsible for the (in)famous Stanford Prison Experiment, found that the way you orient yourself towards your past, present and future defines your level of success and happiness. His suggestion is that you calibrate your outlook on time to improve the quality of your life.

You have two options for your orientation for every time zone (past, present, future). You can focus on the positives or the negatives from your past. You can be a hedonist or a fatalist in the present. And for your future, you can be goal-oriented or oriented towards post-life rewards, like going to heaven.

The best combination for improving your life is having a positive orientation towards the past, being a moderate hedonist in the present and being goal-oriented towards the future; but not so much goal-oriented towards the future that you also live in the future and forget to enjoy the present. That way, the past gives you strong roots and foundations, your present gives you feelings of personal power and proactive behavior, and your future gives you the wings to seize all the things you want in life.

Past Present Future

Positives

Negatives
Hedonist

Fatalist
Goal-oriented

Post-life rewards

Any other combination gives much worse results. If you’re focused on the negatives from your past, you hinder yourself with anger and depression and can’t act in the present, if you’re a fatalist in the present, you never act and you place all your freedom and personal power into the hands of others, and being oriented only towards post-life rewards doesn’t give you any ambition to fulfill your own desires and needs. You must also be careful to not be too big of a hedonist in the present, not thinking about the future at all, or be too goal-oriented, not enjoying the present at all. The latter only brings anxiety and a potential burnout into your life.

If we focus more on the past now, the question is how to switch your orientation towards your past (from negative to positive), especially to see all the positive things that happened to you, not only the negatives.

There are four things that can help you have a more positive orientation towards your past, if you have any struggles with that (I hope you had such a nice past that you don’t, but many people do have struggles). Here they are:
1. Accepting your starting point and being honest with yourself about your limitations
2. Having a list of personal strengths
3. Having a list of your past accomplishments
4. Having a list of things you’re grateful for
Accepting your starting point

If you had a good starting point in life, accepting your starting point is the easy thing to do. The shittier the starting situation you had in life, the harder it may be to accept it. The most important part of your starting point is how much sense of emotional security you have and how much love and affection you received, especially from your mother from when you were born to up to five years of age or so.

Well, it all contributes to the feeling of emotional security – the relationship with your parents, the relationship between them and other primary family members, how stable your environment was at an early age, and so on. Let’s also not forget about the quality of the genes you got and the intelligence level you inherited (nonetheless, this can be developed to a certain extent later on with hard work).

Then we have upbringing. There’s a strong correlation between how much energy your parents invested into your upbringing and your potential for success. The more they read to you, took you to museums, music festivals, art shows, sports games and the more they encouraged your hobbies and confidence, the more talents you could develop and the better picture you got of how the world works and all the possibilities.

If they were too critical, they may have hindered your self-esteem forever; if they never let you overcome challenges completely by yourself, you may feel that you always need someone to push you to do something. Their behavioral patterns for money, running a household, diet and so on, their values and beliefs more or less became a part of your personality, also influencing your destiny.

On top of that, we also have your family’s wealth and their social network, the quality of formal education, the country you were born in, market and social trends, political and economic stability, the technological development level of your country, demographic trends, cultural inheritance and many other factors that define your starting point. Where you were born and to whom are two of the biggest advantages you can have in life.

You starting point may be great, it may be average or it may suck. You can’t change your past, the only thing that you can do is accept it. The good news is that in your adult life, you have the power to change many things. Your starting point may somehow limit your potential, but only to a certain extent. If you take full responsibility for your thoughts, words, emotions, attitude and actions, you can achieve a lot in life, no matter how tough your starting point was. But how can you accept your starting point?

If your past was really traumatic, one way to deal with it is cognitive psychology. With emotional accounting, you can identify cognitive distortions or negative thoughts that influence your dark perception of life and yourself, and correct them. Besides that, there are many other tools for building emotional stability that are more or less scientific, for example psychotherapy, meditation, transactional analysis, trauma release exercises, yoga and many other methods. You have to search and try different options and find the right tool, the right fit that can help you the most with managing your emotions.

If you hadn’t had such a harsh and traumatic past that you need to deal with it with professional help, but still have a hard time making peace with it, let’s look at some less scientific and lighter tools and techniques that can help you see your past more positively.

Seeing what you did get, not only what you didn’t

The first step you can make is focus on the positives. You cannot change what happened, only how you view it. Your past cannot be changed and it may never be forgotten, but it can always be used. No matter how bad your starting point was, there must be positive things you got, be it on the physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual or material level. You should be focused on the thing you did get, not only on what you didn’t. There are, of course, big differences in starting points, but nobody gets everything and nobody gets nothing. Try to find the things that you got, the things you’re proud of, the lucky parts of your past that you’re grateful for. Add them to your gratitude list (more about that at the end of the article).

Your job is to diminish the gap

You have three missions in this life. One is to enjoy life, the second one to contribute (create value) and the third to personally grow, to become the best possible version of yourself. Personal growth is nothing but diminishing the gap between your starting point and who you want to become (your ideal self). Obviously the worse your starting point and the bigger your ambitions, the bigger the gap. But that’s the job you have to do, that’s your mission.

The bigger the gap, the bigger the opportunity for you to grow. The bigger the gap, the more demanding the level you’re playing the game of life in. Consequently, you can become much more skillful and resourceful.

At one point, you realize that you only have two choices in life – the blue or the red pill. You can either feel sorry for yourself for the rest of your life or you take full responsibility for your life and how things are. If you have emotional issues, you talk to a therapist, if you want to progress intellectually, you read, do math or whatever, if you have bad relationship patterns, you read everything about relationships and commit to becoming an authority on how to excel in relationships, if all of your ancestors were fat and you inherited genes that make you gain weight faster, interrupt the unhealthy pattern and become obsessed with being totally fit and living a healthy lifestyle. Whatever it is, you have to take responsibility and deal with it at some point. As I’ve already mentioned, that’s one of your missions in this life, something that life expects from you.

You also have to know that accepting your past is not a one-time event, it’s a process. It’s a process of ups and downs; the harder the past, the longer the process with all its highs and lows. But it can be done. If we look at the bottom line, your past may shape your present, but it can’t control it.

Having a realistic perspective of wealth

Your family’s wealth is, of course, a very important part of your starting point. But you must have realistic perspective of where you stand. Usually people are in a much better position than they think. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have ambitions to earn more and acquire more wealth in the future, but when we’re talking about the inherited wealth and your family’s wealth, you should know where you stand.

These figures may not be totally accurate, but just so that you get the general picture and a feeling of how poor the word really is. If you have around 2,200$ in the bank, you’re in the top 50% of the wealthiest people in this world. If you have 60,000$ of assets, you’re among the 10% of the richest adults in the world and if you earn 25,000$ or more annually, you’re in the top 10% of the world’s income-earners. If you have more than 50,000$ of income per year, you’re in the top 1% of the world’s income earners and if you have more than 500,000$ in assets, you’re part of the richest 1% of the world (source: MSN Money).

GlobalRichList may help you see your more exact wealth position. The point is: it doesn’t matter if your parents helped you financially or not, you’re probably the lucky one from the macro perspective, and you should be thankful for that.

List of your personal strengths

Your past is the reason behind who you are, with all your strengths and weaknesses. You may not like certain parts of your character, but you should definitely be proud of your strengths. And let me repeat that again: your strengths are a consequence of your past.

A smooth sea never made a skillful sailor. Good times are only producing soft people. So your strengths more or less developed from the tough times in your past. The stronger you are, the more difficult situations you probably had to encounter.

Therefore you should definitely perform a personal SWOT analysis, in which you list all your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats; you should see all the strengths you acquired as the aftermath of the battles you fought in the past.

Last but not least, you mustn’t forget. Strength aren’t only muscles and power and being better than others at something. The strengths also mean admitting all the limitations you have, being humble and knowing also how to be interdependent relationships, and being loving and caring towards others. Love and tenderness are the biggest strengths you can have in life. To act out of love is not the same as being soft and naïve.
- Here you can find my personal SWOT analysis as an example.
List of your past accomplishments

Your brain has a function that can sometimes protect you from dying, but often also clouds your self-image and self-esteem. What am I talking about? Your brain functions in a way that you remember bad events that happened to you much better and vigorously than good events from your past. Delivered a good speech on a stage. Okay, whatever. Delivered a bad speech. Oh, let’s really remember it, especially before speaking the next time.

Back when humans were still living in a jungle, your brain had to make sure you really remembered everything dangerous – from meeting a tiger to touching fire. The more the world we live in develops, the fewer times you encounter life-threatening situations. Despite that, the same biological mechanism still applies, but instead of meeting a tiger you really remember all the times when you’re in a really stressful situation (like public speaking or whatever) or you failed at something that caused you a lot of emotional stress. Your brain, together with all the strong negative emotions, remembers those moments very well and tries to protect you from doing the same thing again. That is also why comfort zone is so cozy.

On the other hand, all your achievements, moments of success and victories are not that special because they aren’t life-threatening. So there’s no need for remembering them. You tend to quickly forget about all your past victories, especially in the long run. In the short term, victories encourage you to achieve even more and boost your self-esteem, but when the first failure comes, you can quickly forget about all the past victories you achieved and see only your past failures.

A good solution for focusing your brain on the right things is to have a list of your past accomplishments. When your self-esteem goes down or you feel bad after a failure, you should look at the list, just to remind yourself that you’re a winner and that you have many past accomplishments. Every single person on the planet has bigger or smaller accomplishments in their lives that they can list and that can definitely help them see the past in a more positive way.
- Here is the list of my accomplishments as an example.
Gratitude list

The last technique that can help you to see your past more positively is a gratitude list. Many times, you simply forget how much you already have and all the things that you can be grateful for.

Gratitude shifts your focus from what your life lacks to the abundance that’s already present. Research in psychology has shown that being thankful makes you happier and healthier, it reduces stress and makes you stronger and more resilient. If you remind yourself what you are grateful for every morning, it will definitely increase your level of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, optimism and energy in everyday life.

If you don’t know what to be grateful for, here are some ideas. You can be grateful that you woke up this morning, breathing and with a heartbeat. Life itself is a precious gift. You can be grateful for your health, spouse, family, friends, the employment or business you have, the value you’re able to create, your genes, looks, the outdoors, the technology you can use, the things you own, food and shelter, free time, things you enjoy and so on. If you need additional ideas, you can find many good ideas online, simply search for things to be thankful for in life, although it’s much better if you write them down straight from your heart.

By practicing everyday gratitude, you’ll put your life into a more positive perspective, you’ll realize how much you already really have and you’ll definitely accept your past more easily. With your personal gratitude list, you’ll constantly be aware of the wonderful things in your life.

It may be hard to begin, but you should see gratitude as an emotional muscle that will grow and strengthen with use. There’s always something to be grateful for, so make your list. Last but not least, the more gratitude you have in your life, the more you open yourself up for abundance, meaning getting even more excited about your future.

If you think successful people don’t do that kind of stuff, you’re wrong. Extraordinary results demand an extraordinary way of thinking and actions, that’s a fact. Average people only read about it, successful people really do it. Let me give you an example.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, sets himself annual challenges. In 2010, he committed to learning Mandarin, in 2011 to eating only animals he slaughtered himself, and in 2013 to meeting someone new each day. And guess what, in 2014 he wrote at least one well-considered thank you note every day (Source: Bloomberg).
- Here is the list of things I am grateful for as an example
Multidimensional relationships – how to build the deepest bonds possible
A very important realization in life is that there’s no absolute good or bad. Everything has a good side and a bad side. Everything has its own advantages and disadvantages. One side may be more dominant (good or bad), but it contains at least a drop of the opposite nevertheless. Even more than that: one side cannot exist without the other. Good cannot exist without bad. Life cannot exist without death. Happiness cannot exist without sadness. These dynamics of life are best represented by the yin and yang symbols, from the very well-known Taoist philosophy.

Understanding the duality of life without any absolutes can help you with at least two things. The first one is keeping your mind open. As Scott Fitzgerald said, the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Money is good and bad. Each of your personal characteristics is a strength and a weakness at the same time. A clock can go clockwise or counterclockwise at the same time, depending on your perspective. You cannot be both at the same time, but if you change perspective, you can change the interpretation. Changing perspective can lead to either manipulation of truth or better understanding, and you should strive for the latter.

The second thing you can take from this philosophy is understanding the bad sides of three main cognitive distortions. Understanding duality and non-absolutism can help you deal with perfectionism, all-or-nothing thinking and disqualifying the positive. No perfect thing exists in life, never has and never will. If you can only be satisfied with perfect, you’ll never be satisfied. Because of emotional dissatisfaction, you will waste your life. Maybe good enough is already a level that should bring you a feeling of satisfaction.

You can also better understand that there’s always “all in nothing” and “nothing in everything.” Life flows somewhere in the middle, not in having it all or having nothing. Life is colorful, not black and white. And last but not least, the duality of life helps you understand that there’s always something positive in the negative. Sometimes you can see the brightest stars in the darkest night.

Being aware of duality and absolutes can help us a lot in understanding the dynamics of life. But there’s a step further we can take, above duality. It’s the concept that brings life from a mere gray mixture of black and white to a colorful rainbow, full of different experiences and levels of connectedness. I call it multidimensional relationships, be it relationships with people, animals, nature, things and even ideas. The concept best applies to personal relationships, but there are many other situations where understanding the concept of several dimensions can help us enrich our lives.

Multidimensional relationships

Relationships are always multidimensional and the more dimensions present, the richer and the more varied they are. You often experience or build relationships only on a few of the easiest and most obvious dimensions. But why stop at a certain point, if life is offering so much more. Only a greater awareness and a bigger investment into relationships can help you build newer and newer dimensions and thus an even stronger bond with someone over time.

What am I talking about? If you have a one-night stand with someone, the relationship only has only one dimension – physical, and even that in a sort of a limited way. If you have a friend with benefits, there may be two dimensions – physical contact and friendship. If you also share a flat with someone like that, there’s yet another dimension, sharing resources.

It’s obvious that we usually have the most dimensions with our chosen spouse, but even so, many people experience far from all the dimensions that they could in their closest relationships.

Here are only some of the dimensions you can experience in an intimate relationship:
- Tenderness and other soft physical contact
- Erotic touch and sexual intercourse
- Tantric and other spiritual kinds of erotic experience
- Intellectual stimulation and information exchange
- Emotional experience with a different palette and depth of feelings (negative and positive – see the picture below)
- Co-development and personal growth based on common hobbies and goals
- Sharing economic resources
- Friendship
- Teamwork and mutual support in life and in career development
- Running a household or a side business
- Joint spiritual or religious experience
- Experiencing the world together – traveling, mountain climbing etc.
- Having fun together – playing games, cooking etc.
- Raising a plant, an animal or a child etc.
- Socializing in larger groups and helping other people together etc.
With other people, outside your intimate relationships, there may be fewer possible dimensions, but many people still neglect numerous dimensions, consciously and unconsciously, consequently hindering the relationship potential and growth potential of both people involved.

Source: Plutchik

For example, many people focus only on a few dimensions when raising a child. Be it education or play or something else. But there are so many dimensions you can build in a relationship with your kid. A physical dimension, like doing sports, cooking healthy food etc., a strong emotional bond and security, an intellectual connection, passing on all your experience and knowledge, letting the kid have their own opinion and go their own path, and so on. There are so many relationship dimensions you can experience, if you only open your mind and let love be the center of it.

The good thing about multidimensional relationships is that in most cases, you don’t lose anything if you give more. If a relationship is built on the right foundations (respect/boundaries and love/positive energies), the more you give, the more you receive. For example, if you’re happy and you put someone in a good mood, so they’re also happy, there’s a high probability that you’ll simply stay happy afterwards, assuming the relationship is not of an abusive nature.

The key thing is that when you’re spending time with someone, you should try to activate as many dimensions as possible. For example, if you’re playing with your kid, don’t let it be only play. It can also be an opportunity to enrich your emotional bond and the child’s inner sense of security, provide intellectual stimulation, and so on. You should try to activate as many dimensions as viable, possible and sensible in a specific relationship.

If you go mountain climbing with your spouse, there can again be many dimensions you can experience. It’s a physical experience of taking care of your body, it can also be a healthy competition, intellectual bonding, emotional bonding (if there are any thrills on the path), maybe you can even have sex at the top of the mountain. The idea is that you don’t climb a mountain just to kill time with someone, but to engage as many dimensions of a relationship as possible in everything you do.

In order to do that you have to, of course, turn off your phone, let all your worries go, and completely focus on the present and on a specific person or group. In a relationship, you have to be present with your body, heart, mind and soul. Fully present. Otherwise you’re blocking some of the dimensions and thus killing the relationship potential.

While doing that, don’t forget that relationships are a two-way street. The more you invest, the more the other person should invest. The more dimensions you try to activate, the more dimensions the other person should try to activate. There are many people out there who will only try to take advantage of your surplus investment. Thus you also need to know how to set boundaries and you need to have as realistic expectations as possible. Some people don’t have the capacity to go really deep, others just won’t. That’s why you need to find your perfect fit and work hard from there.

Other multidimensional perceptions

Not as important as personal relationships, but still a powerful concept, is having a multidimensional perception of other things in life. The more usage you can see in something, the more valuable that thing becomes to you or, even more than that, you understand it better. Let’s look at a few examples.

For example, money can have many functions alongside the standard four, namely being a medium of exchange, a measurement of value, a standard of deferred payment and a store of value. Based on these standard four functions, you can see it as only something you work for in order to buy goods after earning it. But to understand it better, you can also see money as an idea – a piece of paper with numbers. Money can also be an employee that works for you (investing) – for example to make more money or to realize your ideas. Money can also be a way to contribute to the society (donating). You can also see money as the measurement of your value added to markets. You can see money as energy or an interpreter of your mindset. You can see money as a generator of social clusters, and so on.

You can see your home as only a place where you come after work or whatever. But there are so many dimensions you can add. You can see it as a meditation temple, an art project, a place where you hang out with your loved ones, a place of security, the biggest financial investment of your life, an opportunity to meet new people in a neighborhood, a joint project with your spouse, and so on. Home can have many different dimensions and can thus hold different meanings to you.

As for the third example, you can start your own business only to get rich or make extra money. But you can also start a business to bring your ideas to life, to employ people and develop yourself as a boss; you can start a business to have better control over your time, you can see it as a tax shield/shelter or a vehicle for leveraging other people’s money. There can be many dimensions how you see your business and it can serve you with many different purposes.

The more dimensions you see, the clearer the picture you can have about something, what it means to you and how you can extract value from it. Even more importantly, you usually enjoy it more, it enriches you and makes you into who you really are. That’s why understanding the multidimensional side of life is so important.

There are four options regarding your perception of dimensions:
- You are aware of an important dimension in a relationship (good, continue building on it)
- You are not aware of a dimension that already exists (become aware of it)
- A dimension could exist and you know about it, but it doesn’t (build it)
- A dimension could exist, but you are not yet aware of it (observe, read, learn)
Since we started with duality and absolutes, we should also finish on the same note. Nothing is only good and bad, and so there’s also no pure gold in multidimensional relationships. The more dimensions that exist, the more we’re usually invested into a relationship and the more value it has for us; thus it also holds a bigger potential to hurt us once the expiration date comes. As Taoism teaches us: nothing lasts forever. But that shouldn’t stop us from living life with courage and engage with as many dimensions as possible. Nothing lasts forever, but what we’ve experienced stays, and we should be thankful for that.
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.

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.

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

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
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.

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.

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

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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.

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Enjoy playing and creating your personas!