self-discipline

The Milo of Croton story – Start small and never give up
Source: BBC

Croton(e) is a small town in Southern Italy, which was also a Greek colony in the ancient times (6^th century BC). The town was known for producing excellent athletes who dominated the Olympiad.

The last big name of Croton was the best renowned wrestler in antiquity named Milo. Milo of Croton was an Olympic winner six times in a row.

He also won many other prestigious athletic titles, including 32 wrestling competitions, and achieved an important military triumph for his hometown.

Milo had an extraordinary approach to training that we can all learn a lot from. In summary, here are the main lessons from his training:
- In the beginning, people will laugh at you, especially if you take innovative approaches
- Always start small and be consistent
- Slowly progress to bigger challenges and make sure you never give up
- Facing the dips and setbacks are real character tests
- When you reach a plateau, find a new way forward
And two bonus lessons from Milo of Croton’s life:
- Always have a mentor
- Don’t make stupid decisions (the final lesson of how Milo died)
So, what was his training all about?

He decided to carry a newborn calf on his shoulders. Day by day, for more than four years, he carried an animal on his shoulders. While people were laughing at him, the small calf slowly grew into an adult ox and Milo got stronger and stronger along the way. What an awesome idea. Every day, when Milo woke up, he lifted the calf, put it on his shoulders and carried it around all day. After four years, Milo was lifting and carrying around an impressively big ox. By then, people stopped laughing a long time ago, when they saw Milo’s muscles and strength grow.

Do you wonder what Milo did in the end, when the ox was fully grown and he couldn’t life it anymore? Well, he ate it. He didn’t bother why he can’t lift it anymore. He moved on and found new ways to improve himself.

Now let’s look at the main lessons of his training and improvements.

Acquiring any new skill starts with very small steps

Milo didn’t start by lifting a big heavy ox. He started with a calf. That gave him the chance to master the fundamentals.

He went with a smart approach to take on a manageable challenge and slowly develop strength and self-confidence; even though people were laughing at him. Deep down he had a long-term vision that was much bigger than the short-term pain of being laughed at.

No matter what skill you want to learn or which area of life you want to improve, you have to start small. You have to start with the fundamentals. Because you can only build a majestic skyscraper of success on strong foundations.

Think big, have a great vision, but start small. Don’t overestimate what you can achieve in a year, but don’t underestimate what you can achieve in five years.

In five years, you can dramatically improve your health, wealth, relationships, competences, happiness or whatever your goal is. But start by saving a few dollars per day. Start with walks in nature, then progress to jogging, running and weightlifting. Read one page per day and then add an additional one every day. And choose maximum one or two areas to improve at once.

While doing that, don’t compare yourself to other people who are already masters. Beginnings (after the initial motivation wears off) are always hard, but the hard road becomes easy with time. Thus, manage your expectations and keep the long-term view in mind.

And remember, if your expectations are too high when you undertake a new challenge, you will be greatly disappointed and give up sooner or later.

Long-term thinking means that you plan the great results to come in years, not months or weeks. Overnight success comes after years of hard work.

Milo of Croton knew that consistency is key

Hard work beats talent every time. But hard work is hard, since it demands almost bulletproof consistency and focus.

Hard work requires putting effort into your goals on a daily basis. That means you have to cut the bullshit and focus on what really matters. Day by day.

You have to persistently follow a carefully orchestrated process that leads you to your big vision. Consistency and never giving up, while staying flexible, are the key to everything. Milo knew that and thus wherever he went, he never left the growing calf behind.

Practical examples

Here is what consistency means in very practical terms:
- It’s better to exercise five times per week for an hour than one time for five hours.
- It’s better to learn a new skill every day for 30 minutes than for three hours on a Sunday night.
- It’s better to put money in your savings account with every paycheck than to put in what you’re left with at the end of the year.
Consistency is especially important when you face the first setbacks. In the beginning, enthusiasm drives you, but then the enthusiasm wears off and you find yourself in the dip. You realize that achieving your goals will be much harder than you assumed.

You feel like you’re running out of time, money or passion. You fail again and again, and that damages your ego. Persisting in such a situation is hard as hell.

Of course, you have to make sure you persist at the right thing (here is how), but following the process in hard times is what creates great people (and also following the process when you’re already super successful).

What the Milo of Croton story teaches us is that the more adversity you face, the more determined you must become. That’s how you grow and progress in life.

The more adversity you face, the more determined you must become.

Make sure you combine consistency with progressive overload and interleaved practice

Consistency is only one part of the equation. Lift. Carry. Put down. Rest. Pick up. Practice. Lay down. Rest. Day after day. Week after week. Year after year.

The right kind of consistency helps you focus, lay strong foundations and master the basics. The second part of the equation is progressive overload in combination with interleaved practice.

Practicing something with the same amount of effort and in pretty much the same way sooner or later becomes easy. Your comfort zone stretches, and when that happens it’s time to put more effort on your shoulders.

The calf needs to get bigger and bigger. With that kind of an approach, things never get easier, but you always get better.

Scientific research has shown that learning something in the same way over and over again is also not an efficient improvement strategy. It’s better to incorporate different concepts, approaches and techniques in the same learning session.

You have to be on the edge of the learning zone (not entering the panic zone) by adding more load and new ways of practicing.

Milo was definitely adding more load on his shoulders automatically. Let’s hope he also interleaved the practice by carrying the young calf in different ways and doing all different sorts of exercises while carrying the animal.

The best effect of progressive overload and interleaved practice is that they lead to the domino effect and when the time comes to reap the efforts, the rewards can be really great. Improve yourself just a little bit every day, and the accumulated efforts will lead to success.

In sports, there are many ways to add load to your workouts. Here are seven most common ones:
1. Improving your form (it’s always harder to lift when you do it correctly)
2. Increasing the load you are lifting
3. Doing additional sets or reps
4. Performing the same workout in a shorter time
5. Adding additional workouts to your weekly training plan
6. Doing new, more complex workouts or remixing the workout routine
7. Doing more work on the same muscle group
No progression means no muscle growth or performance improvement.

There are also several ways how to interleave practice in sports. For example, in badminton, there are three types of strokes you can do. Blocked practice would mean practicing one stroke throughout the training period. Interleaved practice would mean mixing the practice of all three strokes in one session.

The same rules apply for improving other areas of life. Be consistent. Constantly add load. Interleave practice.

Be prepared to take a step back in order to make two steps forward. That’s how you’ll progress the fastest, no matter at what you want to improve. That’s how you can become the best version of yourself in the fastest way.

As good as the story might sound, progress is never linear

There is one thing that the Milo’s story doesn’t tell. Progress is rarely linear. Usually it happens with “one step back, two steps forward” or even in “a few steps back, one quantum leap forward” way. That means progress is full of ups and downs.

You practice, you work hard, but the progress is really slow. Or maybe you get sick, or a little bit fed up with everything and you simply must take a break. Those kinds of situations can make you extremely frustrated.

But if you keep persisting (maybe by adding one more pause or two), one day you wake up, go to your practice, and suddenly see a big improvement. The reward always follows the effort, if you practice right, it just takes time for things to settle in and for you to reap the rewards.

That’s why following a plan with linear progress rarely works. You have to keep your plan lean and agile. You have to adapt to the feedback you get from your body and your environment.

You have to innovate your way out of setbacks, look for ways that work best for you, and stay flexible without any fixed ideas. With that kind of a mindset, you can always find new ways to improve when you reach a plateau or face a setback.

Non-linear progress is seen in sports very well. Here are a few examples of what kind of setbacks you can encounter, and how you can find a way to go forward:
- You might get sick, and need rest. But that can also be a good time to work on your flexibility and stretch regularly.
- Maybe you get injured and must rest completely. But that can also be a good period to study your competitors, gain new knowledge as well as get some proper rest.
- Sometimes you get fed up with a certain type of workout, and you can try a new sport, just to relax and keep the diversity high.
- From time to time it might seem like you work out like an animal, and there’s no improvement. But then you change your exercises a little bit, and when you try the old exercises after a while, you see great improvement.
There’s always a way to push forward, you just have to keep your mind open. Winning is always based on a superior mindset. In the winner’s mindset, the most important thing is that you don’t give up if you don’t see the results immediately after the first few practices.

The new neurons need some time to grow, and they can’t grow if you don’t plan the proper combination of pushes and breaks. The same approach is needed when the time to break a plateau comes.

In the end, make sure you never give up

If consistency, progression and interleaved practice are the key to success, that means the most important thing is to never give up.

You should never be afraid of slow progress, the only thing you should be afraid of is to stop trying. There’s a simple secret how to make sure you never give up.

The secret is to start with why. You need a strong emotional reason why you want to achieve something. You must empower your doing with a mission, which is greater than any setback on the road. When you find your why, you don’t have a problem with motivation anymore.

Nobody gets motivated by savings or an exercise plan. People get motivated by life visions, missions and meanings.

Emotions are the fuel that drives people forward. You absolutely need a good plan, but even more importantly, you need to feel something deep in your bones. You need to feel that you were born to do something.

Knowing something won’t ignite a change, feeling something will. That’s how change happens.

Always have a mentor and don’t make any stupid decisions

Source: Wikipedia

Milo was supposedly good friends with the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras. Pythagoras was the first man to call himself a philosopher or lover of wisdom.

They became friends after Milo saved Pythagoras’ life when a roof was about to fall on him. There’s also a possibility that Milo married Pythagoras’ daughter. I’m pretty sure that Milo had the chance to learn a lot of life wisdom from Pythagoras.

That’s another lesson from Milo’s story – always have extraordinary mentors.

But I guess he didn’t learn enough life wisdom to not make a very stupid decision at the end, and so he died a foolish death.

Milo, already an old man, wanted to test his vigor. He found a cleft tree trunk and wanted to split it in half with his fist. But he got his hand caught in the tree trunk and trapped himself. Soon he was devoured and eaten by wolves.

So the final lesson is: absolutely test your boundaries, but never make stupid decisions.
Short-term past is the best predictor of short-term future
You can go to the best fortuneteller in the world, and it’s still impossible to predict the long-term future. Nobody knows what will happen in 10 years’ time, even less what life has prepared for you or for anyone else for that matter.

There are just too many variables. Your values change over time, you have no idea where the global flows will turn and what kind of life opportunities or tragedies will test your character.

That’s why long-term planning is very ineffective. Any detailed planning for more than a year ahead is useless in most cases. You can’t predict where you’ll be in 5 years, 10 years and even less so in 30 years.

The more fixed your mindset is about how your life should unfold, the more disappointed you will probably be. And big disappointments lead to big pain. That’s why the best approach to the future is to trust yourself that you’ll adjust accordingly to whatever happens.

Consequently, the more reasonable approach to long-term planning is to have a life vision – you have a list of things you want to experience in life, but at the same time stay very flexible about when and how you will experience those things.

And if you manage to bring more than half of the things on your vision list to life, that’s more than enough. In the end, there are so many different experiences that life offers.

You mustn’t be too egotistic and stubborn about your future, but instead constantly adjust bit by bit to the external forces and find a way to surrender to the river of life, while still following your true north.

Surrendering is not about being indifferent or passive, far from it. It’s about maximizing your current life quality and happiness. There’s always a way to find an intersection between your goals and what life has to offer. That’s always a move forward you can make.

The long-term future is a complete mystery. But with short-term planning and predicting, we can definitely be more confident and optimistic.

You can play a fortuneteller at least to some extent when it comes to the near future. Are you wondering how? The best way to predict the short-term future is to look at your (or anyone else’s) short-term history.

How people thought future will look like

Analyze your short-term past and you’ll know more than any fortuneteller

Take a pen and a piece of paper, choose a few core life areas (health, wealth, relationships etc.) along with a few life metrics (net worth, savings, body fat percentage, number of close friends etc.) and analyze them for the past 2 – 3 months.

What kind of decisions did you make, big or small, and what kind of behavioral patterns did you follow?

That’s the closest prediction you’ll get for your next 2 – 3 months. Here are a few examples of questions you can use for the exercise:
- Did you save any money in the past 2 – 3 months?
- Did your fat percentage go up or down?
- How many times per week did you exercise on average in the past few months?
- How much time did you spend with the people you love?
- How many books have you read in the past 3 months?
- How many times did you smile?
- What kind of posture did you have most of the time?
- How many hours per week did you watch TV?
Now you probably know where this is going. If you made zero trips to the gym in the past 3 months, you’re probably not going to go to the gym in the next three months. If you’re getting fat, you’ll probably continue to get fatter in the time to come. If you haven’t saved any money in the past few months, there is only a small probability you’ll save it in the near future.

Short-term behavioral patterns and near-past decisions are the best predictors for the short-term future. And it’s quite simple.

Stupid decisions and bad habits lead to a poor future. Smart decisions and healthy habits lead to a bright future.

There are always trends present for all areas of your life, and you must fight to make sure the trends are going in the right direction most of the time.

Old habits die hard, that’s why short-term can predict short-term future

As we said, the only way you can predict anything with a relatively high accuracy is if you have a long and stable history. But there is one more very important element.

The longer and the more stable the history, the more accurately can you forecast the short-term future; and you can also have a better general sense of how the long-term future could look like, unless some disruptive changes happen.

That’s why big established companies have a much easier job preparing short-term and long‑term plans than startups do. But don’t be fooled, even big companies are not immune to wrong long-term predictions.

Like Nokia, most established companies sooner or later experience big setbacks, crashes and with them unexpected market trends and new enemies. That happens especially when big corporations don’t know how to adjust. And trust me, it’s hard to be big and flexible at the same time.

It’s very similar in personal life. The longer and more stable the history, the easier it is to predict the short-term future.

If somebody never ever exercised in their life, there’s a big probability they won’t start tomorrow. If a person never saved a penny in their lifetime, you can have great doubts that they will in the future. And if somebody cheated on all their previous partners, why would you be the exception?

In the same way, you can play with seasonal predictions.

For example, I exercise outdoors much more in the summer than in the winter. I tend to gain some fat during the winter. There is a minimum amount of income I have to earn to save money. And with age, human needs tend to change.

But in general, things stay the same in a short time period. You probably know the saying that old habits die hard or that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. These proverbs do hold great life wisdom.

Look at someone’s past and the more obvious and stable it is, the more confident you can be about their future; and the same goes for your future.

Nevertheless, you have to make sure you don’t get too confident in your predictions. Because people can change or, even more often, life kicks them in the butt and they are forced to adopt new behavioral patterns (people usually out of inspiration or desperation) .

History repeats itself, unless you do something

Behavioral patterns have the tendency to repeat themselves, and consequently they have a great influence on one’s destiny. But luckily you have the power to change your behavioral patterns at any time.

You can start making smarter decisions with your next one. And you can do it out of inspiration, desperation or purely by growing tired of a life strategy that doesn’t bring you any results.

That’s the greatest personal power you have, now and forever. At any time, you can stop with negative habits or reinforce the healthy ones. At any time, you can start making better decisions. That’s the personal power you possess to make history.

From tomorrow on you can:
- Start saving 10 % of your income every month
- Keep your food intake in a moderate caloric deficit
- Take enough time for yourself and exercise two or three times per week
- Spend an hour or two with people you love every day, without any distractions
- Read at least one page of a book before you go to sleep
- Smile at every person you meet
If you’re not doing these things yet, that’s how you’ll turn your life around. You have the power to make sure your short-term future doesn’t look like your short-term past, if it’s a negative one.

Remember that the hard road gets easy with time, and the easy road gets hard. That’s the surest long-term prediction that can ever be made.

Unpredictable external forces

You have the power to change your habits and thus reshape your destiny. But at the same time, you’re also greatly influenced by all the external forces – your environment.

The environment is a very important part of your destiny’s equation. And you (or anyone else for that matter) have a somewhat limited influence on the environment. That’s why it’s so hard to predict the long-term future.
- You might meet an old buddy who will convince you to start going to the gym tomorrow
- You might get ill, and then take extraordinary care of your health
- Someone in your life might die and the experience might completely reshape your values
- There might be a raise waiting for you at your job, and then you decide to save the surplus, even though you might never have done that before
- Or you might lose a job and start your own business
There are so many forces beyond your control, it’s impossible to know what will happen in the long-term future. You know the saying: if you want to make God laugh, make a (long-term) plan.

Life has so many tools for changing your life path. You can get inspired, experience a life collapse, find yourself in a completely new environment, get an unexpected offer, experience unexpected loss or even meet the love of your life on the other side of the planet.

You aren’t completely powerless in these kind of situations, but your power is limited. With hard and smart work, you can increase the number of good things that can happen to you.

You always have the power to let unexpected positive influences into your life and to reject all the bad forces. And in the end, you can always adjust and find your next best move.

Resistance means being inflexible by default. So, don’t resist, but rather adjust. And when life gives you a hard time, you can always reframe it in a more positive way or find a more redemptive narrative.

Your greatest power is to always look at things from the bright side, to find the positive in the negative. That’s how you can deal with unexpected external forces. Don’t try to predict them, adjust to them.

Where is your personal history leading you?

As we said, short-term history is a very good predictor of short-term future. Do a very extensive analysis of how your past decisions and behavioral patterns led you to the point in your life where you are at this particular moment.

Then ask yourself where your current behavioral patterns and decisions are going to lead you in a month, a few months’ time, one year’s time or even further ahead.

The choices you make today have an impact on your life for years. Thus, make sure you make the right choices, make sure your short-term history is leading you into a bright short-term future.

And in the long term you’ll do just fine if you live by a smart life strategy, follow healthy habits, make smart decisions and last, but not least, if you properly adjust to all the experiences that life has prepared for you.
Walk your talk or what happens when you don’t follow your own advice
Last month was quite a terrible one for me. I was sick almost three out of four weeks, lying in bed with a severe cold. Even more painful is the fact that I totally deserved it.

Not because I was unusually rude or committed more sins than other people (based on the popular false assumptions that good things happen only to good people and bad things happen only to bad people), but simply because I made a series of stupid decisions. Very stupid decisions.

I probably infringed on every advice that I blog about. Maybe not every single one, but certainly the main ones. Here are the four things I didn’t follow, even though I constantly preach about them, and that cost me three weeks of my life:
- Know yourself and live in harmony with it
- Stay flexible
- Don’t make stupid decisions
- If you’re doing the same things, don’t expect a different result
Now let’s get to the story.

It’s so easy to become your own worst enemy

I love all seasons except winter. It’s not that I don’t like snow or the holiday spirit, I simply can’t bear months of freezing temperatures and bad weather. The cold outside is like kryptonite to my body and immune system. That’s usually true for all highly sensitive people. That’s what I do know about myself.

But knowing something about yourself and respecting it are two very different things. If I’m even more attentive to my health during the winter time, for example with less stress, warm clothes, staying on a healthy diet, not drinking alcohol and so on, I can survive just fine.

Well, there is one more thing I must avoid at all costs: intensively exercising in cold temperatures. That’s exactly what I did. Not one time, but three times. By not respecting my limits, I became my worst enemy.

It was a lovely sunny winter day outside. I really missed the outdoor training that I do all the other seasons. The temperatures were quite cold, but the sunny day attracted many people to go outside. Thus, I decided to go on a hike.

While hiking, I got the idea to run uphill with the goal of doing proper HIIT training. I ran the desired distance, catching my breath but feeling extremely good and proud. Nevertheless, I knew that inhaling cold air so fast so many times in a row wasn’t good for my body. As simple as summing up one plus one, the next day I obviously woke up with a cold.

It took me five days to recover. I wasn’t even healthy for two days, when I did the same thing. I went running uphill. I simply needed it. I thought to myself: I just got over a cold, of course I’m not going to get sick again. I was wrong, because that’s exactly what happened. Wrong assumptions and stupid decisions always bring some kind of pain and suffering and in this case, they made me stay in bed for an additional week.

To make a long story short, I did pretty much the same thing even the third time. The only difference was that I wasn’t running uphill, but performing an exercise with a bike. But again, I didn’t put limits on intensity, I didn’t listen to my body, and I didn’t respect the weaknesses I have.

By not respecting my limits, I again became my worst enemy.

In summary, I made three big mistakes that I usually manage to avoid and even help other people avoid them:
- I didn’t stay flexible: I wanted to exercise in the same way I do the other three seasons. I just didn’t want to adjust my exercise regime, because who’s going to stop me, right?
- I made a stupid decision in its own right: Reward was really small (a few additional calories burned and endorphins released), but the risks were huge (my health).
- I did the same thing three times and somehow miraculously expected a different result. That’s the formal definition of insanity. I operated based on the wrong assumption with solid proof that I’m doing something stupid, but completely ignored the proof (hard core data).
Smart investors know the most important value investing concept: “Heads, I win! Tails, I don’t lose that much!” Small risks, big rewards. You should follow the same rule everywhere in life.

But why?

I guess the first important question is … but why?

By nature, I’m quite an inflexible person. I like it when things are the way I want them, without any need to adjust. But I figured out quite soon that such a philosophy only leads to big setbacks, failures and suffering.

That’s why I’ve spent years training myself how to be more flexible, and I blog about it. But from time to time, my old habits take over. Hopefully only as a good reminder of what I shouldn’t go back to.

On a more positive side, I’m also quite a smart guy by nature. I can identify a stupid decision or wrong assumption very quickly. Deep down I knew I was taking a big risk with a small reward in play. I got the reward, but the risks didn’t pan out. I lost three weeks of my life. Three weeks that I will never get back; not to mention that being ill sucks a lot.

After performing a short self-reflection, it quickly became obvious to me that the reward was much more than a few extra burned calories and a good workout. I needed fast recognition or approval. My monk mode was running out. I didn’t achieve everything that I had planned. My ego was kind of suffering. And performing an aerobic exercise that not many people can do (I’m fast at going uphill), was a good way to quickly prove myself to myself.

My ego was suffering and pushed me into making a stupid decision. Three times. That’s why. Severe emotions, positive and negative, drive us to make stupid decisions if not under control. The less you know yourself, the less you reflect, the less you put your analytical skills to use, the more it happens on an unconscious level.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling severe emotions. The problem arises when you are not the one managing your mind and emotions, but they are dictating your decisions and your life instead. My mistake in this case was that I didn’t already do the reflection the first time I went against myself. Don’t make the same mistake.

Never go to war, especially with yourself.

Nobody follows their own advice all the time

My winter saga holds another important lesson. Don’t assume that people who write personal development articles and books follow their own advice all the time. Especially when the articles are named 50 things you should do to achieve [x].

We are all humans, not robots. You must have realistic expectations towards life, yourself and others – including people who write self-help advice.

I just gave you an example of how I didn’t follow my own advice. And that is just one example. I can give you a few additional ones, if you will. I lived without a car for a year. But still, on average once or twice per month I borrowed a car from my mother, brother or girlfriend because I needed it.

I eat a very clean diet, but once per month you can see me having a pig-out day, stuffing my face in McDonalds. Sometimes I’m even scared that somebody will take a photo of me and call me a liar.

You have to be very critical towards everything you read. I suggest you quickly categorize personal development articles into something like:
- Author has extensive experience with the topic, it seems like s/he follows the advice most of the time. I should try to implement the same thing in my life and see if the solution also works for me.
- Somebody put together a general article with all the possible advice on the topic. That can help me get new ideas for what to experiment with in my life, but I know that nobody can follow all the advice all the time.
The main point is that you can easily feel frustrated after reading a few personal development articles. It might seem that everybody employs all the possible tools for improving their lives at the speed of light and that they follow an endless list of healthy habits and life wisdom. That’s very far from reality. Those are very unrealistic expectations towards others. Remember, even Jesus got mad.

Make sure you walk your talk most of the time

The last important point is: even though you can’t follow your own advice all the time, make sure you follow it most of the time. Let’s say “80 % and up” of the time. It’s easy to give advice and share wisdom. It’s hard to consistently follow that wisdom and navigate through life with strong values, unbreached integrity, and a smile on your face while achieving your goals.

Actions prove who someone is. Words prove who they want to be.

I once knew a person who loved to share life advice; and the advice was quite solid. But when I asked him why he’s giving advice he isn’t following himself, he replied: “I know they can be better than I am”. I think that was the most hypocritical and double-standard answer I ever heard.

Follow these two simple rules when it comes to life advice:
- Don’t be an askhole – An askhole is a person who constantly asks for advice, yet always does the opposite of what they’re advised. Ask for advice if you’re really prepared to change something in the situation you’re dealing with.
- Walk your talk – Make sure that the advice you give is also the advice you follow and gives you the desired results. You have no right to preach to other people what to do, if you’re not following the same wisdom.
Here is my blog post with a few more things to be careful about when asking for advice.

It’s time to get back on track

The third time I got sick, I had a really bad fever. I was sweating, hallucinating, and felt like my head was going to explode. When things don’t go as planned, feeling sorry for yourself is always a handy thing. And I felt sorry for myself, for a short period of time.

The question, “why do I have to suffer this now” was going through my head, like there was some black-magic misfortune currently present in my life.

But when I honestly answered the why question from a rational, not emotional perspective, it became very clear that in this case I was hit with disease only because I was inflexible, made a series of stupid decisions and didn’t respect my true self. Sometimes that’s all there is, without any actual bad luck.

For me, everything was a good reminder to always walk my talk. Not doing so cost me three weeks of my life. It also led to me being behind with my blogging schedule. But now after the lesson has been learned it’s time to get back on track. Stronger than ever!

If you’re going through hell, keep going – here is how

Rare are the people who don’t face some kind of an extreme catastrophe, collapse or agony at least once in their lifetime. Most people go through several of these kinds of crises in their lifetime.

Breakups, illnesses, accidents, violence, bankruptcy, natural disasters, there are so many ways how life can shake you to the core. Countless are the ways you can find yourself in hell.

Hell is a big part of how life on the Earth is designed. If you watch Discovery Channel or Animal Planet for a few hours, the hell part quickly becomes more than obvious (I have a lion playing with a half-dead zebra in mind).

With technology, laws, knowledge, education, morality, social systems and many other mechanisms, we try to build safety nets for as many people as possible to avoid life-threatening or devastating situations.

Nevertheless, finding yourself in hell several times in your lifetime is still a very likely reality. There are absolutely fewer physical threats than there were hundreds of years ago, but there are many other types of crisis you can find yourself in – from emotional to financial ones.

The main question is: what to do when you find yourself in such devastating situations? What can you do when going through hell?

The answer is quite simple. If you’re going through hell, keep going. Just make sure you’re going in the right direction. It’s that simple. And this blog post will teach you exactly how to achieve that. So buckle up and let’s learn how to travel through hell like a boss.

Have a mission bigger than problems

Possess a vision and mission stronger than any of the problems you face

First, if you find yourself in the middle of hell, you need an emotionally strong vision and mission that keeps you going day by day.

I’m not talking about some dreamy vision of how you will enjoy life on a beach doing nothing after the crisis goes away, but a vision that makes you fight for something greater than life. It’s a mission that makes your current hell only a temporary and obsolete situation.

Your mission can be fighting for your family, a positive change you want to make in the world, a legacy that you must leave behind, something God (or whoever) sent you on this planet to accomplish and so on.

It must be a strong positive cause and you must feel it in your heart and bones. Your mission must be something worth living and fighting for, no matter how hard life is.

When you have a clearly defined mission or the so-called powerful why that inspires you beyond any obstacle, you need a visual reminder that will keep your vision and mission alive on a daily basis.

You need something that you look at every morning (and when you encounter an obstacle) and that reminds you why you must persist. A photo of your family, a mission statement, thank you notes from people you helped or even the Bible.

When travelling through hell, you need to carry a life mission reminder with yourself, something that can ignite the fighting spirit you possess in a single second. It’s like an emblem that turns any wussy energies into a “never retreat, never surrender” mentality.

Goal Journey Map Template

Build a superior strategy to get yourself out of hell

Extremely rare are the people who get out of hell by pure luck. I’ve seen it, it can happen. People in financial troubles winning a lottery. People meeting a soulmate a few weeks after a nasty breakup. People having such good genes that they miraculously recover from a severe illness.

But I’ve also seen many people who hoped for a stroke of luck, and yet their prayers weren’t heard. I’ve seen people hoping so strongly for things to get better while drowning in shit and nothing happened. Soon their hope led to them giving up and then transforming into zombies.

I wouldn’t count only on luck when I find myself in hell. It’s much smarter to build a superior strategy that you follow in tough life situations. A bulletproof strategy that leads to the exit. And if luck knocks on your doors while you’re working hard to get yourself out of a shitty life situation, even better.

So, just after clarifying your life mission and your fuel (“why”) to work hard to get yourself out of hell, you need to build a superior strategy for how exactly you will achieve that.

You need to stop and think what would be the best strategy for you to reach the hell’s exit. You need to prepare something like a Goal Journey Map, with a detailed flexible step-by-step plan.

The things that you need to define in your “getting out of hell” strategy are:

Introspection and habit changes – Your firm decision about what you will stop doing (things that got you into hell) and what you will start doing (things that will get you out of hell). In other words, which habits you will change. With self-reflection, you must have a clear picture of what got you into the situation (did you do anything wrong, what have you missed, what you learned etc.) and make sure you don’t repeat the same mistakes.
Process phases – If you want to get yourself out of hell, you must always go through several consequential phases. These can be the emotional stages of overcoming failure (shock, denial, frustration, depression, experiment, decision, integration) or different types of objectives and general milestones you must meet to get yourself out of hell (getting educated, changing habits, finding new supportive people etc.).
Milestones and the process you will follow – This is the most important part of your strategy. Process is the hard work you put in daily to get yourself out of hell. Process are everyday small steps that lead you to great achievements, meeting milestones and finally reaching the exit. More about the process in the next section.
Supporting environment – You cannot succeed alone in life. In the same way, you cannot get out of hell all by yourself. You always need strong support from your environment – trends, people, communities, books etc. Thus, a very important part of the strategy of how to get out of hell is finding and building yourself the right support.
Innovations – Many times, you need to innovate your way out of hell. You need to think about all the creative moves you can play, how can you turn setbacks to your advantage, you need to find a new angle of seeing your shitty situation in a more positive way, and so on. In your strategy, you must brainstorm and define all the innovations you can think of that can help you get out of hell faster or with fewer resources.
Metrics – Metrics are an extremely important part of the strategy and process you follow. They show your progress, they give you hope that you can reach the exit with small daily steps, and they should inspire you to fight even harder. When you see the first few dollars saved, the first few kilograms lost, the first smile on your face, your wounds getting healed and so on, it all gives you additional motivation to continue fighting and digging yourself out of hell. There are many different metrics you can use to follow your progress.
Feedback mechanisms – Together with metrics, you also need a very well set feedback mechanism that gives you all the data from your environment (people, net worth, trends etc.) and your inner processes (feelings, thoughts, body measurements, etc.) to see if you are going in the right direction.
Branches and forks – Every strategy and plan must be as flexible as possible. Branches and forks are potential pivots or changes in your strategy that you can make when your progress stops. You can plan some of the potential pivots from the beginning (your plan B, C or Z) or you can brainstorm pivots when you encounter a new setback. A very important part of any plan is a decision about how you will stay flexible on the road out of hell.

It usually takes 1 – 2 days of calm, relaxed planning to prepare a superior strategy. But when you have the strategy, it gives you additional motivation and zeal to start with all the necessary hard work to get yourself out of burning hell.

Follow the process

As we said, there are two ways you can get yourself out of hell. One is getting lucky and the second is following a carefully orchestrated process based on your superior strategy. The best option is to get lucky while you follow the process.

The good news is that by following the process, you increase the probability of getting struck by luck, based on the saying the harder I work, the luckier I get. So, let’s focus now on the process and what it really means.

There are two categories you have to distinguish – first we have the final event, the goal you want to achieve. That’s getting yourself out of hell, in our case. And the second category is the process, the daily hard work you put in to get to the final event. The process are everyday steps that lead you towards the exit.

The process is what requires discipline, sacrifice, commitment and delayed gratification. The process is your sweat and tears, it’s the life’s test of whether you really want to get yourself out of hell or not.

Because if you really want something badly enough, you’ll always find a way; if not, you’ll find an excuse. And that leads us back to the powerful “why” that you must have.

The powerful why or mission is the fuel to follow the process. Here are a few simplified examples of what following the process means:

Event	Process
	Have a strict limit on	Do every SINGLE day
From obesity to a healthy body Phase 1: Exercise Phase 2: Diet Phase 3: Lifestyle changes	Overeating Eating after 5pm Sugar and simple carbs Junk food Alcohol Cigarettes	Don’t eat for 16 hours Exercise Eat green veggies Eat 3 healthy fatty foods Eat 3 pieces of fruit Drink water Get enough sleep
From bankruptcy to the first$1,000 Phase 1: Costs under control Phase 2: Increase earnings Phase 3: Consolidate debt Phase 4: Save first $1,000	Expenses – Use budgeting Emotional spending	Cut all expenses Find ways to save more money Develop new competences Contribute ideas in your company Network Ask for a raise

Event

Process

Have a strict limit on

Do every SINGLE day

From obesity to a healthy body

Phase 1: Exercise
Phase 2: Diet
Phase 3: Lifestyle changes

Overeating
Eating after 5pm
Sugar and simple carbs
Junk food
Alcohol
Cigarettes

Don’t eat for 16 hours
Exercise
Eat green veggies
Eat 3 healthy fatty foods
Eat 3 pieces of fruit
Drink water
Get enough sleep

From bankruptcy to the first$1,000

Phase 1: Costs under control
Phase 2: Increase earnings
Phase 3: Consolidate debt
Phase 4: Save first $1,000

Expenses – Use budgeting
Emotional spending

Cut all expenses
Find ways to save more money
Develop new competences
Contribute ideas in your company
Network
Ask for a raise

You can’t get yourself out of hell if you aren’t willing to follow a carefully orchestrated process, which usually means a big lifestyle change. Changing a lifestyle is hard, that’s why your vision and mission must be so great and powerful that you have no problem at all redesigning your life and habits.

Injured? Consult with your doctor or physiotherapist and prepare a plan for how you will get to your optimal performance. Then do all the exercises every day, take supplements, stretch, follow the plan, measure your progress and make sure you are surrounded with motivational people when you want to give up.

Nasty breakup? Reconnect with people, analyze what went wrong, read 10 books about intimate relationship management, vent on a piece of paper or in an online forum, and when you are ready, start dating again. Every breakup is an opportunity to connect with new people, you just need to see the steps to getting there with time.

Whatever your “hell” situation is, there were many people in a similar situation before. Find them, consult with them, read the books they’ve written. Get all the knowledge necessary to build the right strategy and then just follow the process. Follow the process, that must be one of your mantras.

When things get tough, just repeat to yourself: follow the process, stand up and fight.

Expectations vs reality — Source: Wait By Why, Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy

Have realistic expectations

People usually overestimate what they can achieve in one month and underestimate what they can achieve in one or five years. Getting yourself out of hell is rarely a task that can be achieved in a week or one month. Usually it takes several months, if not years.

Don’t have unrealistic expectations for how fast you will reach the exit. Unrealistic expectations will kill your spirit and motivation. You must keep the long-term view. Getting out of hell is often a marathon or a long series of many sprints, not only one quick sprint. Small problems that can be solved quickly are not the same as being in hell.

It took me 3 years to get out of debt after I had to liquidate a VC fund during the 2008 financial crisis. Three whole years to get myself out of a really bad financial situation.
It’s the 4th year since I’ve started working on healing my shoulder/ulnar nerve injury. Things are better every year, but they are yet far from okay. It took me thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of stretching and physiotherapy to even be able to exercise.
I’m working hard for the 5^th year to lose weight and get rid of fat once and for all, since I was obese as a kid. There’s a lot of hard work, dedication and setbacks to face. After five years of hard work, I’m still not where I want to be. But I keep going.

Hell is one big place. The devil has many faces. Problems tend to multiply. Going through hell is a very tough and challenging adventure measured in months, if not years. It’s like doing the Ironman, Spartan Race and Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc over and over again.

But remember, soft times make soft people and tough times make strong people. So, when you get out of hell, you will be the real Iron Man.

Don't repeat the same mistakes

Make sure you are going in the right direction

If you’re going through hell, keep going. That’s true. But you also need to check in regular intervals if you are following the right direction. You don’t want to go in circles, it’s too hot in hell for such nonsense.

To make sure you go in the right direction, you need two things – (1) completely new habits and (2) a set of metrics that measure your progress.

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the formal definition of insanity. It’s also the formula for doing circles in hell (if your bad habits got you there).

So, the first thing you have to do is make sure you don’t repeat your past mistakes – all the behavioral patterns that got you into hell. If you got yourself into hell based on several small stupid decisions or one big stupid decision or even both, you must stop making stupid decisions.

Nothing helps if you persist at things that don’t work.

Maybe wrong decisions got you into hell, maybe it was only bad luck. No matter the reason, you need a set of metrics that clearly show your progress and how you are taking baby steps towards the exit. Only things that are measured can be managed.

There are many different life metrics you can measure, depending on what kind of hell you are facing. There are also several things you want to achieve by having a clearly defined set of metrics:

Knowing exactly where you are and having realistic expectations about how fast you can progress
Making sure you’re going in the right direction
Avoiding any fake feeling of progress
Gaining additional motivation when you see that hard work pays off
Having a compass on what to focus on and how to set priorities

Healthy habits, set of carefully set metrics and consistently following the process is what will get you out of hell.

Never retreat, never surrender, that is the law

When you have a carefully defined strategy, process and metrics to follow, the hard work begins. At this point, your mantra should be never retreat, never surrender. Every day, you just make sure that you perform all the actions that will get you one step closer to the hell’s exit.

When going through hell, there are always tough days, there are always days when you want to give up; especially when you have to take one step back, in order to take two steps forward later. You see other people who are luckier, you have to face unexpected setbacks and challenges, but you must never give up. Never ever give up.

Every time you encounter an unexpected setback, every time you lose motivation, you have to take a deep breath, adjust your strategy, stand up and keep fighting. Day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, until you reach the exit point.

Sometimes you’ll slip back to your old habits and sometimes you will feel exhausted. Sometimes you’ll be fed up with all the shit you must overcome and sometimes you’ll cry about how unfair life is.

But you can always take a day or two off, forgive yourself for not being perfect, look at your past progress, and then stand up and go back to fighting. Every day is a new beginning and thus an opportunity to take one step closer to the exit doors.

Imagine Sisyphus Happy

Dig yourself out of hell only with creative, positive and assertive energies

Negative feelings can be a great motivator to find the way out of hell as quickly as possible. Fear makes you run extremely fast. Anger can make you fight with all your might. But here is one big catch – negative feelings always backfire.

Buddha said that holding on to anger (or any other negative emotion) is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else. In the end, you are the one who gets burned.

Of course, you are caught in extremely negative feelings when you find yourself in hell. There is almost nothing else but a pile of shit and negative feelings. But you must be very careful about what you do with all the negativity.

If you suppress it, you will get depressed, bitter and fatigued. If you express it in an unhealthy way (losing temper, trampling other people, doing extreme sports etc.), you will only hurt yourself and others.

Thus an important part of getting yourself out of hell is learning how to deal with all the negative emotions. If you don’t learn to deal with negative emotions, you can quickly out yourself in even worse situation.

Thus you must employ different psychological techniques, such as taking walks in nature, practicing proper breathing, writing a self-reflective journal, going to group or even individual therapies, or whatever else it takes to neutralize negative feelings. You have to build your future on positive emotions and actions, not on negative ones.

It’s easy to smile when you are in heaven. It’s hard to smile when you are in hell. But that’s exactly what builds character. Imagine Sisyphus happy.

Focus on the positives and manage your mind properly

Much like you must properly manage your emotions, so you must properly manage your mind in tough life situations. When you are in hell, cognitive distortions tend to pile up.

It’s simply too hot to think straight. You often only see the negative things and consequently you grant your mind the permission to take you to the darkest corners in hell. You don’t want that to happen, you want to march towards the exit, not into even darker corners.

That means you have to even more consistently manage your mind. From doing emotional accounting and cognitive reframing exercises to focusing on all the positive things and things you are grateful for as well as employing optimal thinking and the abundance mindset.

These are all extremely useful mind exercises when you find yourself in hell. They are your core survival tools that help you not go insane and completely lose your mind when the atmosphere gets too hot.

Some things need time to heal

In general, there are two types of hell. One type of hell are the situations that only get worse if you do nothing (bankruptcy, obesity etc.). The second type of hell are the situations where only time is the real healer (injuries, breakups, loss of dear ones etc.).

This second type of hell carries a special life lesson, which is the following: Many things are way out of your control and you must learn to accept them.

In many life situations and especially in relationships, there is nothing you can do to improve the shitty situation. In such cases your strategy shouldn’t be to fight, but to surrender.

You can only reframe how you see the situation and/or actively grieve until all the negative feelings pass by. In some cases, only time can get you out of hell. It’s something all human beings must accept.

When you are neck deep in shit, don’t let your head down.

If you’re going through hell, keep going

If you’re going through hell, keep going – The guide summary

Hope is not a strategy. Giving up won’t get you anywhere. Drowning in self-pity won’t solve your problems. There are no miracles on the horizon. You might have to let some things go, you might have to say “f*ck it” to release some tension, but at the same time you have to stand up and fight (or surrender is some cases).

Now you have the exact steps for what to do when you find yourself in the middle of hell:

Have a vision and mission that is stronger than any obstacle on your way out of hell.
Build a superior strategy of how you will get to the exit point.
Every day, follow the process and have realistic expectations about how long it will take to reach the exit.
Define a set of metrics that will clearly show your progress, and be proud of every step forward.
Smile and enjoy all the warmth hell provides – learn to transform negative energies into a healthy assertive and fighting spirit. Think of the peaceful warrior mentality.
Don’t let your mind take you to even darker places in hell. Manage your mind properly.
Make sure you never retreat and never surrender, keep on fighting every day. And remember: some situations only get worse if you do nothing, while others demand from you to actively grieve and let go.

Good luck on your journey!

30 Day Challenge – One of the best ways to develop new habits
A 30 Day Challenge is a proven strategy for implementing new healthy habits in life. It’s a great way to try new things, keep life variety high and undertake new challenges without putting too much pressure on yourself.

People do all kinds of challenges, for taking better care of their health, doing various type of art or pushing themselves through fears that always hindered their life. You can find many success stories online in different blog posts and forums.

If you’ve never done any 30 Day Challenge, you absolutely have to try one. There is no completely fulfilled life without at least one successfully performed 30 Day Challenge.

You have to know the extraordinary feeling of being proud of yourself on the last day, right after you complete the 30^th repetition; and then you might even stick to the new behavioral pattern, who knows.

In this article, you will learn everything you need to know about 30 Day Challenges, including:
- How 30 Day Challenges nicely take away self-doubt and pressure from changing yourself
- Why 30 days is a period just long enough to assess if it’s worth it to stick to a new habit
- My personal experience with the last 30 Day Challenge I performed
- More than 70 ideas for what you can do as your first or next 30 Day Challenge
- Other interesting insights and facts
Limited time commitment releases the pressure

Every desire to permanently change yourself is filled with at least a little pressure and self-doubt. The problem is that doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.

It’s hard to change yourself. It’s extremely hard to start with a completely new lifestyle and do it forever. Forever! Who can be disciplined forever? That brings a huge pressure into your life. Consequently, you may do nothing instead.

30 Day Challenges remove the doubts over whether you have the stamina to persist at something new forever. You have to persist only for 30 days, no longer. 30 days is nothing compared to forever. Anyone can persist for 30 days.

You can absolutely persist for 30 days at any reasonable challenge you set for yourself.

Great way to experiment with what works and what doesn’t

30 Day Challenges are an excellent way to do experiments in personal life and test if something works for you as an individual or not.

Persisting at something for 30 days is a period just long enough for you to get the whole picture of how the change affects your life – physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, socially and materially. It’s like testing a shareware software for 30 days and then deciding if you buy it or not.

Here’s the thing. Usually when you implement a new change, the following happens. The first two to three days you ride the motivation wave, you’re proud of yourself and your discipline muscle is still functioning. After the first few days, the crisis occurs. The motivation perishes and the only thing left is willpower. You feel more tired, exhausted and emotionally irritated by the change. The crisis can last from one to two weeks.

Somewhere in the third week, things get stabilized and the crisis goes away. You know that more than half of the challenge is behind you, so you don’t have to persevere for much longer. Somehow you need less and less discipline every day. Your body, emotions, mind, spirit and people in your life get used to the new behavioral pattern. You can start measuring if you are getting the results and changes you want or not.

At the end of a 30 Day Challenge, you most often have a very clear picture of how good the change is for you. Doing something new for 30 days is usually enough to see the changes on your body, blood, moods, emotional health, social life, financial statement or whichever life metric you want to improve.

If things go in the direction that you want, you can keep the change in your life, if not, you can simply pivot to something new, for example a new 30 Day Challenge.

Consistency is the key to developing new habits

The good news is that it takes around 30 – 60 days to develop a new habit. After performing a 30 Day Challenge, it’s much easier to persist, towards 100 days, 365 days and then for however long you want to do something new.

Beginnings are always the hardest. If you slice and dice forever into small 30 Day Challenges and then 1 Year Challenges, you may even get to forever one step at a time.

The best way to keep consistency and really do a 30 Day Challenge is to visualize it on a calendar (Kanban principle). Stick a really big calendar on a wall in your home, with 30 boxes, one box for every day. Then draw a red cross in a box each day right after you complete the new desired action.

At the end, you want to have 30 crosses on your calendar. Having such a calendar helps a lot. The moment you wake up and see the calendar you’ll be ultra-motivated to perform the new habit.

Practical examples

I just completed a 30 Day Challenge and learned so much

In August, I decided to write and publish a blog post every day.

The reason behind it was pretty simple. August is always the worst month in terms of traffic, since people are enjoying their holidays and spending more time outside. I wanted to meet my monthly traffic growth goals, and posting more content was my strategy to achieve that.

Besides that, it was a great exercise to train my writing attention span. The rules for my 30 Day Challenge were pretty simple. I only followed two: (1) Wake up early and write until you’re spent. (2) Publish a new blog post every day. That’s it. I successfully completed the challenge, and the findings and results were quite interesting.

I wrote around 150 letter pages. That’s basically a whole book. I successfully published a blog post every day. That was 31 blog posts, one extra since August has 31 days. I had the all-time most successful month regarding traffic to my blog. I definitely strengthened my writing muscle and enjoyed the challenge, but there were also a few downsides.

One big downside is that I was hurrying all the time to write as much as possible. Style and clarity began to suffer. I don’t like putting quantity over quality, no matter what I do in life.

Next to that, if you do too much of anything that you love, you start hating it. In the end, I couldn’t wait for August to end, so I could take a break. You can definitely get fatigued if you exaggerate with anything, and it takes all the enjoyment away from the activity. Nevertheless, it was definitely worth it. I only had to do it for 30 days, and that’s always manageable.

Here are the blog posts I published as my 30 Day Challenge:
1. Timing is everything – here is how to hit the perfect timing
2. The 5 Whys technique – dig deep to find the root cause of any problem
3. Emotional flashbacks – when your emotional response is out of proportion
4. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving – Book Summary
5. The execution mode – without execution skills everything is futile
6. Learning is useless, validated learning is everything
7. Rapid prototyping for designing a superior life strategy
8. This is how to do experiments in your personal life (outside the bedroom)
9. Business Model You – Book Summary – Reinvent your career
10. Regular daily reflections will change the quality of your life forever
11. You know nothing, so always put data before rhetoric
12. Branching and forking – the ultimate way to stay agile in life
13. Goal journey mapping – The superior strategy to achieve any goal
14. Short life stories – clear goals with a powerful why
15. Vision list prioritization or which goals to pursue first
16. The only goal setting strategy that really works in the 21st century
17. Immediately stop wasting your life
18. How much relationship drama is just too much?
19. Finding the balance between doing and being for all the workaholic
20. Stupid decisions that can ruin your whole life in a second
21. Don’t worry about failure, because you only have to be right once
22. Life is just a dream – not really, but the idea can be useful
23. A place to escape everyday life and reconnect with yourself
24. Super healthy foods you simply must eat every day
25. Hour of power – take one hour daily to invest into your future
26. Wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups
27. The proven ways to stop taking things personally
28. Your mind is like a garden that needs a good daily care
29. How long you should practice when you’re learning something new
30. Daily cold showers will make you healthy, attractive and sharp
31. Optimize your life for productivity and flexibility
That was a lot of work done.

I did several other 30 Day Challenges in the past (and even 365 Day Challenges). Some of them ended successfully with me implementing a new habit into my life, others gave me mixed feelings, like the writing challenge did. For example, I didn’t drink alcohol for one year. Nothing, not even a sip at big celebrations. It felt great. Then I decided to do something for my body every day for 30 days and it also felt great.

Once, I also decided to brainstorm business ideas every day for a month. It was an extremely good experience and I found many great ideas. On the other hand, I ate only raw food for a year which ended awfully, and also completed some other challenges that didn’t end so well.

At the end, it’s all about experimenting and finding what works for you and what doesn’t, where is the limit when you still enjoy the activity and where too much good turns into bad. It’s about finding the right balance between trying new things, being persistent and listening to yourself.

There are so many ideas for a 30 Day Challenge

There are so many different types of challenges you can do. One thing you can do is to pick one of your behaviors that you don’t like about yourself and do the opposite for the next 30 days.

You always leave a tip for a waiter, even if they don’t deserve it? Leave no tip to anyone for a month (as a side note, a tip is not a mandatory or always expected thing here in Europe as it is in US). You always listen to your friend complaining? Listen to no zombie for a month. You never initiate a conversation with a stranger? Initiate a conversation every day.

Life experiment ideas

Well, you can even do a 30 Day Challenge to try something new every day, then pick the thing you liked the most and do it for the next 30 days. The only thing 30 Day Challenges require is a little bit of boldness, curiosity and creativity.

They are simple, straightforward and they work. Below you can find 70+ additional ideas for what to try as your first or next 30 Day Challenge.

Body level 30 Day Challenges
- Take a cold shower
- Get up early
- Get 8 hours of sleep
- Don’t drink alcohol
- Don’t smoke
- Don’t eat anything sweet
- Go for a walk
- Run
- Do squats
- Do 100 pushups
- Pick any of the 30 day exercising programs
- Do yoga
- Do intermittent fasting
- Don’t eat meat
- Take stairs
- No coffee
- Gluten-free food
- Try polyphasic sleep
- Take bike to work and back
- Cook healthy dishes
- Cook with no repeating dishes
- Sup, skate, longboard
- Learn to dance
- No masturbation
- Drink only water
Emotional level 30 Day Challenges
- Smile 10 times per day
- Hug somebody
- Make love
- Keep a journal
- Do something that scares you at least a little bit
- Don’t complain
- No swearing
- No porn
- Write a love poem
- Don’t get mad
Mind level 30 Day Challenges
- Read for one hour
- Read a book summary
- Write a book (you can do it with joining National Novel Writing Month)
- Write a blog post every day
- Upload a YouTube video
- Draw or create any kind of art
- Take a photo
- Meditate
- Learn a new language
- Learn interesting facts about one country per day
- Learn something completely new
- Go on technology detox
- Don’t use your mobile phone
- Don’t watch TV
- Don’t read any news
- Watch a documentary
- Practice a skill
- Use a new software
- Write down all of your business ideas
- Play an instrument
- Memorize as many Pi decimals as possible
- Solve IQ tests
- Study a chosen topic
- Write with your left hand
- Use only the keyboard on your computer without a mouse
Soul level 30 Day Challenges
- Write down something you are grateful for
- Write down one thing you like about yourself
- Pray
- Read the Bible
- Do one random act of kindness
Social level 30 Day Challenges
- Make your spouse breakfast
- Learn a new board game (poker, chess …)
- Call an old friend
- Meet someone new
- Ask someone out on a date
- Don’t lie no matter what
- Go to a meetup
Resource management 30 Day Challenges
- Have no calendar
- Sell one of your items on eBay
- Clean something
- Devote only 10 minutes to e-mail
- Have no meetings
- Don’t use your credit card, operate only with cash
- Use a virtual assistant for 2 hours
- Say no to everything and everybody
- Say yes to everything and everybody (just don’t tell people about your challenge)
- Use only reusable packaging
- Use only green energy
- Rent a car you’ve always dreamed about
- Work on your additional income in the afternoons
- Take 30 days of vacation
Homework

Choose your next 30 Day Challenge and start now

It’s time for action. One big mental shift you can do is not to be frustrated by obstacles, changes and problems in life, but to see them as challenges you can’t wait to undertake.

You should love all the challenges that pop up in your life; and you should constantly challenge yourself to grow, create, love and connect with new people. One great way to do that is by regularly doing 30 Day Challenges.

To sum things up, 30 Day Challenges remove the pressure of being forever disciplined, they’re a great way to experiment in personal life and get first-hand insights into whether something works for you as an individual or not, and they’re also great for tricking yourself into developing new habits. And on top of that, life never gets boring.

Now you know the concept, you have more than 70 ideas for what to do as your first or next 30 Day Challenge, so the only thing left is to just do it. Don’t wait for the new month to begin.

Hang a calendar on your wall today, pick the challenge you want or like the most, and draw the first cross on the calendar. Then do it again tomorrow and the day after, all the way until you finish the challenge. Ready, steady, go!
Branching and forking – the ultimate way to stay agile in life
It’s not easy to stay flexible when it comes to personal life; at the end of the day in your personal live, you tend to take things personally.

If you are wondering why, it’s because your ego and other resources (money, energy, time etc.) are usually heavily invested in certain scenarios, expectations, assumptions and beliefs. The more invested you are into something, the harder it is to make any changes.

But then when things don’t happen like you planned and wanted, you get shaken up, hurt and demotivated. And unfortunately in life things rarely go as planned. Everybody has a plan until reality hits them in the face.

If a plan fails it’s not the end of the world yet. It’s only one punch. Much bigger problem is that many times people spend decades persisting at things that don’t work. You need to be smarter than that, you need to be smarter than any static plan or a life strategy that doesn’t bring the desired results.

Here is what you need not to be knocked-down by reality. A very flexible, but detailed plan that you constantly update and fine-tune. You have to make sure that you stay lean and agile in the whole process. In practical terms that means constantly adjusting your strategy according to the feedback you’re getting from the environment and yourself.

Achieving your goals and visions is never a straight line, but always a path full of detours, setbacks, step backs and adjustments. If you want to achieve your goals, you need many creative ideas for how to overcome different obstacles.

You often have to innovate your way out of unexpected troubles. Doing the same things over and over again and hoping for a different result is the definition of insanity and absolutely a recipe for big failures and a lot of emotional pain.

If you want to be really successful in life, you have to be able to adjust in a single second. You stay flexible by having no problem to stop investing your resources, especially energy and time into one thing and start investing them into another thing with bigger potential. But how to do that?

The best way to stay lean and agile while following your goals is to use the “branching and forking” principle. Branches and forks are two different types of pivots. One is a small pivot, and the other is a big pivot. The principle comes from software development or, more exactly, from versioning control. You can use the same strategy in personal planning to stay more flexible.

Branching and forking is a great way to strategically brainstorm alternative paths in advance and to have as many different options as possible when you hit a wall. Then you analyze all alternative paths and decide how to adjust best.

In this blog post, you will learn everything you need to know about branching and forking and how they can help you stay more flexible in life.

Nature does it, software developers do it, so why wouldn’t you do it too?

You can skip this part if you have no interest in software development whatsoever.

Branching and forking in software development

To understand very well how to use branching and forking in your personal life, let’s examine how the two concepts are used in software development. Even if you aren’t a programmer by profession, it’s very easy to grasp the main ideas of these principles.

You probably worked on a very long and complex document at least once in your life. If more people were involved in the process, you will understand the tracking issues and challenges even better. After working on such a document for a while, you probably had a text with hundreds of comments, suggestions and corrections, not to mention all the different versions of files. It’s easy to get lost in such a case, especially if you don’t use a word processing tool that has a good versioning and collaboration system.

When a team of people is developing complex software, this kind of problem is even bigger. Not only is the code in several files being constantly added and upgraded by different team members, new ideas for software features are constantly flowing in. Team members want to develop parts of the software in different ways, bugs are constantly getting detected and need to be fixed, and so on.

It’s a hard task to follow all the ideas and changes and to manage the complex development process. It can easily happen that the code gets broken, things get lost and people confused. It’s a real mess.

That’s why almost all teams in software development use some kind of a versioning system or the so-called Version Control System (VCS). The most popular VCS in the software development world today is Git together with the online service GitHub (or alternatively Bitbucket).

Git allows team members to develop code simultaneously without overwriting each other’s changes, it provides historical snapshots of code so you can return to previous versions when things go wrong, and in addition to that it’s free (open-source) and extremely fast.

GitHub further extends the power of Git. It’s a web-based Git hosting service for distributed revision control of code and source code management. It adds tons of additional functionalities to Git, like issue tracking, collaborative code review, documentation management, team management features, graphs, email notifications, and so on.

Finally, here’s the main trick. What Git and Github also allow you to do is to diverge from the main code you were writing to test new ideas. You can independently develop new features or take parts of the project to a completely new path, you can play with the project code in a new safe environment without destroying the main code, you can experiment with new technologies, and so on.

At the end, you can either merge the changes to the main code or not. It’s completely up to you. The two core ways to do that are branches and forks.

Branches in software development

Git enables you to create a new branch in any stage of the software development process. A branch is a new line of development. When you get an idea for testing a feature or developing the software in a new direction, you can create a new branch.

The main branch is called a master branch and you can name the new branch however you want. Actually, you can create as many different branches as you want, naming them as it suits you best.

When you create a new branch, you then have two branches with the same code and in the next step you can develop each part of the code in completely separate directions. Sometime in the future, you may decide to merge the new branch with the master one, and that often does happen. Other times, you get two or even more separately living projects.

The important note is that the new branch is always part of the main branch. The new branch depends on the main branch and diversions are tracked very well. A new branch always has parts of the master branch. You do branches with Git.

Forks in software development

On the other hand, forks are much bigger diversions than branches. They are more a kind of a social idea, when a group of people wants to take a project to a completely new path or a different level. Forks are a GitHub, not a Git thing.

GitHub enables you to fork a project (you copy it under your own account). It’s similar to branching a project, with the distinction that the new created fork is completely independent from the original project. It has its own users and permissions.

Technically, a fork is a completely new entity that gets stored in a separate independent folder or project. You can’t push your changes to the original project unless you have the rights to do so or the creator of the original software accepts the changes (the so called pull request).

If you fork a project, you can fork it with many branches. If the original project is deleted, you keep your forked copy together with branches, but all the branches in the original project are deleted together with the project. You connect a new fork with the Git versioning control system installed on your local machine with the cloning function. Because forking is more flexible, many developers prefer forking over branching.

I hope that wasn’t too technical. Even if you didn’t understand all the details, I’m sure you grasped the main idea. You can easily clone a project or make a new branch and take it into a whole new direction, either completely independently from the main code or not. That’s all you need to know.

Using branches and forks in your personal life

Let’s move from software development to personal life. To use forks and branches in your personal life, you must first have a very well defined and prioritized vision list. Then you develop simple life stories for 5 – 7 items on the top of your vision list to specify what exactly you want, a clear outcome and even more so why.

In the next step, you build a Goal Journey Map with a strategy for how you will achieve your goal. That’s your main branch, that’s your plan for how you want things to develop. You can read more about the whole process in the “new way to set goals” article.

The main idea of branching and forking is that you have a rough plan, but you know in advance that the plan won’t work. You know that you are wrong about how things will unfold, because the plan is based more or less on your assumptions. And wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. You have to be aware that you are always wrong before you are right.

Knowing that, you can do three things with the goal journey map:
- You can brainstorm potential obstacles and risks you may encounter in different stages.
- You can brainstorm alternative paths if the obstacles really appear – you build your own branches and forks in advance in your goal journey map by brainstorming potential pivots.
- You can define very well when it’s time to quit, to not get misled by the sunk costs and other cognitive biases.
You absolutely can’t predict everything negative that will happen. You absolutely don’t know what will go wrong and what will go right. But you can definitely brainstorm many different scenarios that could go wrong and you can mentally prepare yourself for them.

Being a smart investor and carefully managing your resources (including your time and energy) means that you go after investments that have high upside potential and a low downside. In other words, you’re looking for low risks and high rewards. If you want to achieve that, you have to know your greatest risks and downsides, and what you will do when they appear.

You can always think of the biggest risks in advance and adjust to the smaller ones that weren’t anticipated as things go along. You can always brainstorm potential pivots and how to mitigate different risks. And with regular daily reflections, you can always adjust to small barriers that unexpectedly hit you in the face.

When you encounter an obstacle, you always have the option to:
1. Stop investing in a project and give up. Sometimes the hardest decision you have to make in life is when to persist and when to give up.
2. Pivot to something completely new based on what you’ve learned (a new fork).
3. Change the course a little bit so that it will still lead you to the same goal just by using a slightly different path (a new branch).
4. Stop doing certain small things, start doing new things, and continue doing what works without any big changes in direction (regular small changes and updates in tactics and operations).
You can always do these things, you just have to be creative enough to come up with enough potential forks, branches and updates. With such an approach, there is no way you can get stuck in life.

Maybe you’re asking yourself: why would you put so much effort into regular adjustments and into such hard-core risk management? Well, because that’s part of a superior life strategy. You want to have a small number of goals to which you are completely committed. You want to stay fully flexible about how you’ll get there.

You want to constantly pay attention to what is happening in your environment and what is happening with your emotions, and regularly adjust. You have to sense all the paradigms in your environment and you have to always pay attention to yourself, because what you think will bring you happiness and what really brings you happiness in life are two different things.

You don’t want to get stuck, you don’t want to experience big collapses or failures in a way that it will take you years to recover. You want to optimize your life for productivity and flexibility. You want to experience a series of small failures from which you can learn, and that is the only thing that can lead you to be finally right and succeed. The good news is that you have to be right only once.

Yes, if you want to be successful in life you want to stay flexible. The greatest killer of flexibility is the so-called onetis mentality. The onetis mentality means being obsessed with one single thing – one potential spouse, one job you just lost, one car you can’t afford, one scenario that failed etc.

If there is something that represents all to you, and everything else is nothing, it’s only a question of time until you are be miserable and stuck. Forks and branches are the cure for the onetis mentality.

It’s all about superior emotional management

Now you know the big value of proper risk management and staying flexible. To summarize in one sentence: the best way to do that is to have many different forks and branches and no fixed ideas.

Rather than having any fixed ideas, you should think about all the risks and potential alternative paths or pivots you can make when you encounter a problem. You should consider and analyze every possible alternative path, no matter how crazy it sounds.
The main value of preparing yourself for different scenarios (forks and branches) is in:

Keeping your mind flexible and open to different possibilities.

Staying emotionally detached when shit hits the fan, because you anticipated what could happen.

Not letting your ego destroy your progress and not getting mentally stuck in self-pity.

Putting success before being right.

Having a list of alternative paths you can take so you can easily choose the next best thing when you have to.
If you don’t have an alternative path, you can easily get stuck in overanalyzing how unlucky you are, you can put yourself in a position of being a victim, and you can endlessly whine, bitch and complain. But when you already know your next best alternative, you can simply move on, you already have something new to look forward to. You already know your next step.

Of course you are always emotionally invested in things you care about, you absolutely need time to heal and lick your wounds, but you don’t have to get stuck forever, you don’t have to lose years of your life feeling sorry for yourself just because something didn’t work out as planned.

An even worse scenario is if you lose motivation and enthusiasm after a few failures, and turn into a zombie. That happens to many people. They try a few times, fail big and then they give up forever. Never let that happen to you.

There are absolutely types of life disasters (deaths, losses, etc.) where there is no branch or fork that can heal you or lead you forward, and in such situations you need months if not even years to recover. The only thing you can do is to accept things, grieve and wait for better times.

But problems like that are quite rare, they happen only a few times in a lifetime. For most projects, life problems, obstacles and challenges, you can always innovate your way out. There is always a step forward you can take. Thinking of potential branches and forks is one way that can help you do that.

Branches and forks are advanced brainstormed potential pivots

A list of potential branches and forks is nothing but advanced brainstormed potential pivots. You can also add new potential branches and forks when you encounter a problem or an obstacle in order to analyze and consider as many alternative paths as possible when you have to choose your next step. Let’s refresh our knowledge of what pivots in personal life are.

A pivot in personal life is a fundamental change in your life strategy or in a strategy for meeting your goal. You change your direction in life, but you still keep the same life vision and you consider all the facts you learned about yourself and your environment. You make pivots as many times as necessary until you find the perfectly right fit for you.

There are many different types of pivots you can make in personal life: a zoom-in pivot, a zoom‑out pivot, a relationship pivot, a life architecture pivot, and so on. To successfully make a pivot, you need to be passionate about the new life direction, there must be a strong and deep desire to make a change in your life, you need metrics and targets that will measure your pivot progress, and so on.
Even if you have no clue what will happen in reality, you already have a few things to rely on:

Your past knowledge and experience

Knowledge and experiences of other people (books, mentors etc.)

A list of risks and things that could go wrong (and things that could go right)

A list of potential pivots you can make (based on the 10 possible pivots)

Alternative visions of your life that work for you as well as the originally planned branch
The potential pivots in personal life:
1. A zoom-in pivot: Focusing yourself more in life
2. A zoom-out pivot: Adding new things in your life
3. A relationship pivot: Rearranging key relationships in your life
4. A personal need pivot: Rearranging your priorities
5. A life design/architecture pivot: Rearanging your values and beliefs
6. A platform pivot: Changing environment where you work
7. An engine of personal growth pivot: Changing your role-models and infostructure
8. A value-capture pivot: Changing the way you make money
9. A technology pivot: Changing technology you use
10. Other types of pivots
Considering all this data, you can brainstorm potential pivots and how you can alternatively get to your goals when you get stuck. Every potential pivot is a new branch or fork.

When you learn new things along the way, you can always add or delete forks and branches. When you encounter a problem, you can select which new branch or fork to follow. Sometimes you can activate more branches and forks at the same time.

With that kind of a strategy, you are always prepared for the next move. If a risk comes to life, you already know a few alternatives you can undertake. You can add new ones if necessary, but you will never get stuck mentally. Your mind will already be oriented towards a solution instead of the problems that occurred.

Now let’s explore the subtle difference between forks and branches.

Branches in personal life

Branches in personal life are small deviations from the main path, micro adjustments and mini new experiments you decide to perform in order to find a better way to achieve your goals. They are not-too-big diversions from the main path that don’t require any colossal changes in strategy.

You adjust, you do a small pivot, but the general way is still the same. Sooner or later you come back to the main path. You may adjust because an unexpected obstacle occurs, you may consciously decide for an adjustment just to try new things, or maybe you decide to implement a potential personal improvement. You should be constantly developing and experimenting with new branches. That’s what they’re here for.

Practical examples

Let’s go to an example.

Your goal is to get fit, so you have a detailed exercise and diet plan. After a few weeks, you unexpectedly injure yourself and you can’t follow your plan anymore. Well, feeling sorry for yourself won’t do any good.

There are many different branches you can follow:
- You can adjust your workout plan
- You can start doing a completely new sport
- You can stretch and improve your flexibility
- You can do physiotherapy
- And so on
You could also decide to take a year completely off from dieting and exercising, spending that year to only madly educate yourself about health, and that would be a new fork. Here are two examples:
- You can do different kinds of DNA, blood and other analyses to get to know your body better
- You can read only health books while you recover
In all the life areas, you can have many different branches towards which you can unfold your life story. Your friend doesn’t have time for you; you go to a hobby meet-up and get to know new people. You don’t get a raise. You start a business in your free time.

Your trip got canceled. You decide to invest into your competences. When one door closes, another one opens. Branches, forks and pivots is what should always be on your mind when things don’t go as planned.

You should always have a list of all the different types of branches or pivots in your Goal Journey Map. Small adjustments, bigger adjustments, switching from one activity to the other, and so on. The only rule is to stay flexible and move forwards no matter what.

Staying flexible means that you’re able to disinvest your resources (ego, beliefs, values, time, energy and money) from one thing and start investing them into another that has bigger potential or works better in a certain moment. Having many branches enables you to easily regroup and reinvest your resources. No way to get stuck in life, ever.

Forks in personal life

Forks are a little bit different than branches. They are bigger pivots in your life. They are bigger changes you make in order to go forward. You take one big project or activity into a completely new direction. You take what you’ve learned, you keep the good parts, but the general direction changes a lot.

We’ve already seen an example, but here’s one more:

Practical examples

You were following a vegetarian diet, you learned a lot about your body, which foods make you feel good and which don’t, but somehow the diet doesn’t work for you. Your blood results get worse year after year. So you decide to switch to the paleo diet and see what happens to your blood. You add meat to your diet, but keep other foods that do you good in your diet plan. You keep what works, you consider what you’ve learned, but you move on to a completely new thing.

Now, if you have fixed ideas that eating meat isn’t good, you may have a hard time doing a big pivot. In such a case, you have to search for other branches that could solve your problem – adding supplements to your diet, adding more green foods and rice protein powder, and so on.

A fixed idea absolutely blocks your flexibility. It makes sense to consider all branches and forks, and then you can decide what’s acceptable to you ethically, emotionally, strategically and from other angles.

You always have many options

It’s not hard to get ideas for branches and forks. You just have to keep the abundance mentality. You can talk to other people to get new ideas, you can read, brainstorm different options and even try all kinds of crazy things. You should use the search mode to get the first insights into which branches and forks make sense and which don’t.

Put every idea to the test. Put every branch or fork to the test and see what happens. Of course you have to use common sense while doing it, but this kind of strategy will take the quality of your life to a completely new level. And your life will be much more diverse and exciting.

When you get results from your experiments based on actionable metrics, you can integrate branches that work into your life permanently, delete the branches and forks that don’t (fail and learn, in other words), and you should never stop trying new things while keeping your mind open.

When things work you persevere, when they don’t you pivot – to a new branch or fork.

Make sure that for every item on your vision list, you have a short life story (clear outcome with why), a goal journey map (strategy), and potential forks and branches. Then go out and start trying things. And when you encounter an obstacle, pivot. That’s how you will live your life to the full and sooner or later design the perfect life you want and deserve. That’s how you achieve your big goals.

Do you want to know more about goal setting?

This article is part of the series of how to successfully set goals in the 21^st century. It’s part of the AgileLeanLife Goal Setting Framework, which has the following seven steps:
1. Define your vision list
2. Prioritize your vision list
3. Develop short life stories for 5 – 7 items at the top of your list – specify what exactly and why
4. Create a goal journey map to build a superior strategy and define the process
5. Use branching and forking to stay flexible with alternative paths
6. Organize the superior strategy on your to-do lists with a 100-day plan and sprints
7. Mind the principles in the AgileLeanLife Manifesto

self-discipline

The Milo of Croton story – Start small and never give up

Acquiring any new skill starts with very small steps

Milo of Croton knew that consistency is key

Make sure you combine consistency with progressive overload and interleaved practice

As good as the story might sound, progress is never linear

In the end, make sure you never give up

Always have a mentor and don’t make any stupid decisions

Short-term past is the best predictor of short-term future

Analyze your short-term past and you’ll know more than any fortuneteller

Old habits die hard, that’s why short-term can predict short-term future

History repeats itself, unless you do something

Unpredictable external forces

Where is your personal history leading you?

Walk your talk or what happens when you don’t follow your own advice

It’s so easy to become your own worst enemy

But why?

Nobody follows their own advice all the time

Make sure you walk your talk most of the time

It’s time to get back on track

If you’re going through hell, keep going – here is how

Possess a vision and mission stronger than any of the problems you face

Build a superior strategy to get yourself out of hell

Follow the process

Have realistic expectations

Make sure you are going in the right direction

Never retreat, never surrender, that is the law

Dig yourself out of hell only with creative, positive and assertive energies

Focus on the positives and manage your mind properly

Some things need time to heal

If you’re going through hell, keep going – The guide summary

30 Day Challenge – One of the best ways to develop new habits

Limited time commitment releases the pressure

Great way to experiment with what works and what doesn’t

Consistency is the key to developing new habits

I just completed a 30 Day Challenge and learned so much

There are so many ideas for a 30 Day Challenge

Body level 30 Day Challenges

Emotional level 30 Day Challenges

Mind level 30 Day Challenges

Soul level 30 Day Challenges

Social level 30 Day Challenges

Resource management 30 Day Challenges

Choose your next 30 Day Challenge and start now

Branching and forking – the ultimate way to stay agile in life

Branching and forking in software development

Branches in software development

Forks in software development

Using branches and forks in your personal life

It’s all about superior emotional management

Branches and forks are advanced brainstormed potential pivots

Branches in personal life

Forks in personal life

You always have many options

Do you want to know more about goal setting?