self-discipline

If you are a perfectionist, learn to be satisfied with good enough
I am a big perfectionist, often caught in all-or-nothing thinking. They are both (perfectionism as well as black & white thinking) severe cognitive distortions, probably the most frequent ones in the general population, and they hinder the quality of life to a great extent.

A thinking and mindset upgrade to properly manage these two distortions is mandatory, especially for unlocking a whole new productivity and happiness level in your professional and personal life. In this article, you will find the answer to how to successfully fight with your chronic perfectionism.

An illuminating concept that helped me deal with perfectionism and all-or-nothing thinking is called “good enough”. This model of thinking emphasizes that it doesn’t have to be perfect, it only has to be good enough. It completely changed my life.

Now I never go for perfect, I always rather settle for good enough, even if I still aim high.

The idea behind the concept of good enough is that it’s completely acceptable to be reasonably consistent with your goals and not following them 100 % of time to complete perfection; because the latter is simply impossible and only makes you unhappy and miserable.
- You don’t need a perfect job, you need a good enough job
- You don’t need a perfect spouse, you need a good enough spouse
- You don’t need to be filthy rich, you need a good enough financial situation
- You don’t have to eat perfectly healthy, your diet must only be good enough
- You don’t have to be a perfect parent, you have to be a good enough parent
- You don’t need a perfect life, you need to fight for a good enough life
Perfectionist’s greed

The main driving force behind perfectionism is usually a desire to be loved and accepted. You think you can achieve that by being flawless. Perfectionism usually develops if you’re raised by overly critical parents or parents who have low capabilities for emotional care and loving support. To simplify, with perfectionism you usually want to show other people that you are good enough to be loved.

But perfectionism is a very bad surrogate for love. The main problem is that you strive for perfectionism in your achievements to show other people how good you are, but new achievements don’t equal a greater capacity for loving yourself and others. That’s why you always want more and more.

No matter how good the achievements you have, you never feel loved enough. Additionally, there is always somebody better than you and that can quickly humiliate you for not being good enough – ever. Thus you become extremely greedy.

No matter how much you earn, you want more. No matter how good your partner is, you are more focused on their flaws and you want better. No matter how successful your career is, there is so much more you could do.

One cheat meal and your otherwise good enough diet seems like nothing. Even though you just bought a laptop, you know that in 6 months there will be a new model, and the one you have won’t be good enough anymore. A greedy soul that’s never ever satisfied.

If you’re a perfectionist, you’re an obsessive “maximizer”. You want the best in everything. That may lead to greater achievements, but it may also lead to a miserable life (achievements ≠ happiness). Wanting the best all the time is impossible, and that kind of a distortion can only lead to being clinically depressed.

The characteristics of perfectionists and maximizers when it comes to choice-making are the following. According to Barry Swartz and his book The Paradox of Choice, they:
- Have a big fear of missing out on things
- Always compare their decisions with those of other people
- Spend too much time and energy even on small decisions
- Are generally unhappy with their outcomes and constantly want something new
Rather than a maximizer, be a satisfier. Absolutely aim high and have big goals, but also learn to be satisfied with good enough. Learn to recognize and be aware of your greed, and curb it with the new better mindset and by developing a greater capacity for self-love. Learn the difference between happiness and achievements. Become aware when things are good enough for you.

Here are the characteristics of satisfiers, they:
- Have fear of missing out on enjoying high quality of life, in other words being happy
- Accept the good enough concept
- Don’t obsess too much about their options
- Can easily move on after making a decision
- Are generally happy with their choices and outcomes
Don’t constantly beat yourself up with perfect. It’s good enough, now move on.

Slipping from time to time will make you more disciplined

Life is not meant to be perfect. You need imperfection in your life. If everything were perfect, there would be no room for improvement, there would be no room for effort and for the capacity to grow. Without flaws, life would be boring as f*ck.

You need some level of stress so that you’re stimulated to go forward and your brain synapses can grow. You need a little bit of imperfection that drives you towards your new accomplishments. That’s all good and necessary until it’s too much and it becomes toxic.

A benevolent man should always allow a few faults in himself.

And you can’t be constantly 100 % disciplined. You need to slip from time to time. You need a cheat day. You need to reset yourself. Like you take a break during the day, so you need to take a break from your consistent effort from time to time. Progress is always achieved in the form of one step back, two steps forward.

There are no straight lines in nature, and there is surely no straight line on the path to success. So don’t strive for perfection, but see everything together with flaws as perfect. Imperfections enable progress and help you on the way towards your goal by enabling you to not be too tough on yourself and go crazy.

When you slip, just remember that tomorrow is a new beginning. Don’t beat yourself up for your slips and mistakes, but calculate them into your doing and decision-making. They are part of the equation. What matters in the end is that you make many more good than bad decisions.

Don’t beat yourself up for your slips and mistakes, but calculate them into your doing and decision-making.

Don’t make good enough be an excuse for not giving your best

The good enough concept is a potential cure for a perfectionist, not a handy excuse for a lazy person. If you aren’t as motivated as you should be, if you are underachieving in your life, the new better mindset might be going from good to great rather than settling with the good enough. The good enough concept in such a case may even further hinder your ambitions and the will to act. You need to use the right tool for the situation you are in.

It’s not hard to know which tool to use – good enough or from okay to great. Deep down you always know if you are miserable because you aren’t giving your 100 % or because you’re greedy. What you should do is assess where you are based on the life success metrics, measure how fast your progress is, assess how much you trust the process and especially how realistic your expectations are.

Looking at life metrics immediately tells you what is the source of unhappiness.

Find a progress pace that is respectful and realistic – not perfect, but good enough. Make sure you are constantly improving and growing (the kaizen mindset), but also that you aren’t caught in a greedy perfectionist’s mindset that’s never satisfied with anything, where nothing is good enough. Find the middle path that works for you.

Aim high, but define good enough very clearly

It’s not enough to just know the good enough concept. You have to define what an ideal situation is for you and what is a good enough situation. You must have a clear definition of good enough to shut up your inner critic when you’re unrealistically assessing your current situation and your progress.

Defining how much money would be an ideal situation for you and going after the number is great, but also define how much money is a good enough situation. Being rich is probably ideal, but what about owning a house without debt and having savings for 6 months of expenses, would that be good enough for you?

You can make a persona of your ideal partner, the perfect partner, but you also ask yourself what flaws your spouse can have and still be good enough? Cheating is probably unacceptable, but what about them having a bad day from time to time?

Having a magazine cover body, being able to run a marathon, deadlifting 200 kg (400lbs) and no health problems would definitely be the ideal health situation. But what is a realistic good enough health situation for you? Realistically, there are body weaknesses you have to accept, you have to be okay with being ill from time to time, there are sports you are good at and bad at, and so on. Considering all that, what is a good enough health situation for you?

Homework

Please sit down, take a piece of paper or open a notepad on your computer, and define what is currently good enough for you in different areas of life – health, key relationships, money, career, competences, enjoying life etc. Really do the exercise, no excuses. Not doing the exercise is definitely not good enough. ;)

Emotional accounting combined with the good enough concept

I trust that you’ve done your homework above and defined the good enough situation you can happily live with. You have your minimum that should bring pure happiness and satisfaction in your life. Good.

Unfortunately, that’s not enough to fully employ the good enough concept. That’s because your perfectionist mind is like a crazy monkey that tries to attack you at every single opportunity.

So regularly talking back to your perfectionist inner critic is the key. You do that with emotional accounting. To perform emotional accounting, all you need a simple table (you can download the template below). The table for doing the emotional accounting has a few columns. Here they are:
- Toxic thought going through your head (automatic thought, self-criticism and perfectionism)
- Type of negative feeling it’s causing and the intensity of it (emotions)
- Performing a rational response to the toxic thought (self-defense with using the good enough concept)
- New intensity of the negative feeling (outcome)
You simply go from column to column. First you learn to identify toxic negative thoughts and cognitive distortions (I’m not good enough, I don’t earn enough, the Joneses have a better car etc.). Then you try to identify what kind of negative feelings the negative thoughts are causing you (anger, sadness, self-hate etc.).

In the next step, your greatest tool is self-defense, talking back to your inner critic with a rational response and a more realistic situation. That should lead to a big release of negative emotions. The good enough concept can help you with the rational response.

Here’s an example:
- I make so many grammar mistakes. I guess I am a poor writer. (pure perfectionism)
- Negative feelings: Anger, frustration (intensity: 8 out of 10)
- Rational response: Even if I still make quite a lot of grammar mistakes, I have great ideas for articles, my style is improving and so is my grammar, and I get a lot of positive feedback on my articles. I already am a good enough writer and I’m becoming better and better. I am proud of my progress.
- Negative feelings after the rational response: Anger, frustration (2 out of 10), feeling proud
As the first step, I suggest you use the template you can download below. You will soon become such an expert in identifying negative thoughts and performing emotional accounting that you will easily do the exercise in your head, like I do it now all the time.

Template

Here you can download the template:

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- Emotional accounting template
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How much is just good enough to be happy in life and successfully move forward?

It may be hard to perform emotional accounting the first few times, but I promise you that it can completely change your life. Combining emotional accounting with the good enough concept can really help you successfully fight your perfectionist nature.

The best battles are the ones you win over yourself, and now you have the tools to fight your inner perfectionist critic. Good luck with your fight.
How to automate good decisions
In some way, living a good quality life is not rocket science. With time, good decisions lead you to a good life and poor decisions lead you to a crappy, stressful low quality life. The better decisions you make, big or small, the better off you are. Good decisions accumulate, and with time they bring great yields.

Examples of good decisions are saving money, not overeating, exercising a few times per day, investing into your knowledge, brainstorming ideas, finding and doing a job you love, and so on. Examples of bad decisions are smoking, drinking excessively, eating too much sugar, getting uncontrollably into debt, buying things you don’t need and staying in an abusive relationship, just to name a few.

On a logical level, it’s pretty simple to understand that but in real life, it’s quite hard to follow good smart decisions; simply because you weren’t programmed to make smart long-term decisions.

You were initially programmed for life in a jungle, which means instant gratification (life was short), laziness (energy needed to be saved), overeating (food was rare) and any kind of domination – material, physical, intellectual (the alpha male/female got it all).

That’s why it’s hard to make smart decisions.

The intellectual, conscious, creative and planning part of you has to override the animal instinct that ruled decision-making for millions of years in our ancestors. And it has to do it over and over again, it never stops.

That’s an extremely hard thing to do. It takes a lot of cognitive power and severe self-control, together with constant curbing of primal needs, and never letting the benefits of reinvesting into your tomorrow out of your sight.

Rare are the people who are mentally so strong that they can follow smart decisions in all different areas of life all the time. That’s why I wouldn’t count on self-discipline too much. In reality, counting solely on your self-discipline is not a superior life strategy.

Sooner or later, you kneel down in front of the laws of nature and genes. That’s why you have to be much smarter than relying on your self-discipline. You always have to be one step ahead of life.

Don’t use cognitive power for good decisions if you don’t have to

One way to be smarter than life is to automate good decisions. The idea behind this is pretty simple. No matter if a decision or a habit is hard or easy to follow, automate it if possible.

If you can’t completely automate it, semi-automate it. Make sure it takes zero cognitive effort, or almost zero, to do something smart. Take transaction costs all the way down, as low as possible. Let it happen automatically.

Make sure you don’t have to think about it, make sure that it takes zero discipline and that smart decisions just happen by themselves. Put good decisions on autopilot. You have to be a little bit creative, but let’s look at few examples of how you can do that.

Money

The easiest way to automate good decisions is with money management. That’s because nowadays, money is nothing but some numbers in an online app, and you can do all kinds of transactions and functions simply by using your computer.

Practical examples

Here are examples of good decisions you can automate:
- Automate transactions to your savings account every time you get a paycheck.
- Make sure you need to get an approval for all costs higher than a certain amount (from your spouse or CFO), especially if you like to overspend.
- As an alternative, you may have a rule that you aren’t allowed to make any big purchases if you don’t sleep it over (for 14 days).
- Don’t have a credit card with you, but only enough money to buy yourself lunch and a healthy snack.
That way, you don’t have to struggle with decision-making, good decisions are already made for you. Every week, money gets transferred to the savings account and you live with the rest. You can’t do impulse purchases, because you need approval or wait long enough for your emotions to stabilize. If you only have enough money for lunch with you, you can’t do small unnecessary purchases that sum up in high amounts of wasted money with time.

Here’s an article that gives a lot of detail about how to make good automatic money decisions. With money, you can really automate being smart. All other areas can be more or less only semi-automated, still following the basic rules of positive automation – meaning that something good happens with the least effort possible.

Health

You can (semi-)automate good decisions in all three areas of health – diet, exercise and lifestyle. Now let’s not pretend and exaggerate: doing one hour of exercise as part of your morning routine is extremely good for you, but it takes effort and years before the habit becomes such a strong part of you that we could call it automation.

Practical examples

Nevertheless, there are many small things you can do for your health that are pretty much semi-automated and easy to follow:
- Subscribe to a weekly fresh delivery of organic vegetables and fruits to your home, and then put it in a visible place. You can also standardize the typical daily meals you like the most.
- Eat a salad for one of your main meals. Don’t think about it, don’t decide about anything, for one of your main meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), just order or make yourself a salad. All the effort it takes is for you to say: “And one salad please” to the waiter. You can do the same with one piece of fruit.
- Have a strict deadline for the hour after which you don’t eat anymore. “You don’t have to decide about anything, you simply don’t eat anymore. (after 6pm, for example). It’s how intermittent fasting works and it can really do wonders for your health. You can do the same by not eating dessert at all. If you don’t eat dessert at all, there is nothing to decide about.
- Every night, prepare your sports bag and take it with you. Just put it in your car. Now, the training bag won’t force you to go to the gym, but it will put additional pressure on you. It’s simple and easy to pack your exercising clothes every night and take them with you. You can automate that. Let’s hope that the rest will follow.
- You can automate for all electronic devices to go into sleep mode at a certain hour, let’s say 9pm. Then you can take a book, read for a while and go to bed early.
There are many decisions regarding your health that you can automate. Yes, they are called healthy habits, but the idea is to take transaction costs as low as possible, so that it takes almost zero effort to follow. At the end of the day, the best habits are the ones with which you can follow through in the long term.

Relationships

An important part of quality relationships is putting in all the necessary effort. You have to water a relationship like a flower, otherwise it starts to wither.

You water relationships with attention, love, affection, understanding, care, good communication, by providing value, mutual support and with many other contributions on a physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, material and social level.

It’s not easy to be consistent in relationships and make sure that your investment levels stay the same all the time or even get stronger. You get drained, you have bad days, and your affection may fluctuate.

That’s why you should try to automate some good relationship decisions. Not to make the relationship mechanic, but to protect yourself from your own weaknesses.

Practical examples

Examples of automating good decisions:
- If you get upset with something, you tell it to the other person immediately and start looking for a solution.
- You never go to sleep on bad terms with your spouse. You always work things out before going to bed. You don’t even think about whether to talk or not, you don’t hold a grudge, you automatically solve the problem before going to sleep.
- Every day when your spouse comes from work, you put away all electronic devices, you stop doing whatever you were doing (no matter how important it is), and you talk for a while about your day – fully present.
- You book a date with your spouse every first Wednesday of the month. It’s in the calendar, it’s automated, there is no rescheduling and you go someplace nice, just the two of you, without any distractions. In the same way, you can automate lunch with your best friend in regular terms.
- You send a creative love message every day to your spouse. Every day, one message, with no exceptions. Get a reminder or alarm saying it’s time to get romantic and creative.
- If you get a message from somebody, you reply immediately in an active constructive way.
There are many ways how you can automate good gestures in a relationship. Yes, you have to make sure things don’t get mechanic and that you really do it because you want to. It’s good to keep a creative component or some kind of effort, even if you automate part of a decision. And at the end of a day, if you don’t want to do it, you can stop at any moment. You have to stay agile.

But the idea is to free yourself from cognitive burden and not to rely solely on your self-discipline. Even more, you don’t want to get indulgent and sloppy in relationships with time, when you settle. You want to invest more and more in quality relationships not less, and automation and semi-automaton can help you with that.

Examples of IFTTT Recipes for automating good decisions

Endless options for smart decision automation

Much like we’ve seen for the core life areas (health, wealth and relationships), you can use the same principle in other life areas. There are numerous ways how you can automate and semi-automate good decisions, not only to make sure that you’re going in the right direction and to save your cognitive capabilities for other life matters, but also to simplify your life and make more room for being relaxed and happy.

Practical examples

Here are some additional examples for automating good decisions:
- Read every day before you go to sleep, and make sure you don’t fall asleep if you haven’t read at least one page of a book.
- Have a few standard outfits for different occasions and put them in a queue. You pick the one that’s waiting first in the queue. Or you can wear the same outfit every day, like Mark Zuckerberg does.
- You check email 30 minutes before your work ends and you reply or delete all emails in these 30 minutes. You don’t check your email otherwise.
- You simply don’t do meetings. When something needs to be communicated, you use your phone or go for lunch with that person, and when something needs to be solved, you organize a workshop with a strict deadline and a goal to be met.
- Every 14 days, you have a planning sprint for the next two weeks. It’s in your calendar, it’s fixed and nothing can get between you and strategic planning of your future.
- Put a web nanny to stop you after an hour on social networks and make sure your computer won’t even start before you watch an online course for 30 minutes.
- Automatically get the things you regularly buy in the same intervals from Amazon Subscribe
Your plan to automate good decisions

The easiest way to automate parts of your life (smart decisions) is to start with money. Log into your bank account and simply set a weekly transaction to a savings account on the day you receive a paycheck.

Then make sure you don’t spend that money, and watch your savings account grow. Doing automation with money is the easiest because it’s purely based on technology. Starting to automate good money decisions should motivate you to do automation in other areas of life as well.

In fact, you can easily do 100 % automation with all other tech stuff. There are two very popular web apps called IFTTT and Zappier that can automate many of your computer tasks and save you tons of time. With one app or the other you can automate things like:
- Save any email attachment I receive to Dropbox or Google Drive
- If I star an email, remind me to take care of it
- When I’m in a meeting for more than 60 minutes, schedule a phone call to myself and run
- Log my working hours automatically in a Google Spreadsheet
- Back up Facebook photos I’m tagged in to Dropbox
IFFT has something called individual automation functions recipes. If you check their site, you can find hundreds of them. I really like that name. An automation recipe. It’s time for you to get creative and cook up a few good automation recipes, besides tech and money stuff.

I encourage you to take a piece of paper and outline a few automation recipes you can do in your life. Start with the easy things and ideas you can do immediately. You can use the IF – THEN model and sketch out your ideas for automation.

Homework

Make your fist recipe, and then add new recipes as quickly as you feel comfortable following through with them. The lower the transaction costs and the more you can really automate, the less willpower and discipline you need. If complete automation is possible, it takes almost zero effort to introduce a new habit in life. Look for such opportunities. Be smart and automate good decisions.
Imagine Sisyphus happy
Sisyphus is a figure in Greek Mythology, a wise and cunning king who committed crimes against Gods, and was thus condemned to eternal hard labor. His everlasting punishment was to roll a big rock uphill, only to watch it roll back down for the sake of doing the job again and again. Hard, frustrating, exhausting and meaningless labor without end.

From the story, we know Sisyphean tasks as the ones that are hard and futile, the type of tasks that different philosophers found everywhere – from an endless thirst for power, being too attracted and attached to things you can’t have in life or that you will certainly lose someday, to a desire for perfectionism and not to mention general hardship together with absurdity of life.

The absurdity of life and Sisyphus’ condemnation were inspiration for Albert Camus to write The Myth of Sisyphus, where he deliberates over the path to potential salvation. In the world of chaos, disorder and a lack of meaning, a man must become a rebel, the struggle itself must be enough to fulfill a person’s heart, he argues. His concluding thoughts are that the salvation to absurdity is in imagining Sisyphus happy.

Imagining Sisyphus happy – that can be really illuminating.

Accept the absurdity and struggles of life

There isn’t a single person alive who has the privilege of not dealing with a constant flow of problems. Problem after problem. Rock after rock. A big part of life is solving problems. Small ones, big ones, old ones and new ones. In life, you have to be a problem solver, a fixer. Most often the best approach to problem solving is to start with the task immediately.

You pick that rock and start climbing uphill. Because the longer you wait, the heavier the rock becomes, even if it’s only in your mind. You can, for example, easily add weight by feeling sorry for yourself. Sisyphus picks up the rock as soon as they meet at the foot of the hill, and you should do the same with your problems. Rare are the problems that need time to pass in order to be solved. And rare are the problems that go away by themselves with time. Even rarer are rocks other people are prepared to pick up for us.

You should enjoy problem solving, you should enjoy challenges. Problems are nevertheless nothing but challenges. You are born to deal with problems. In TV shows and movies, you watch heroes fighting in tough situations. Sports competitions, video games, board games and crosswords are nothing but challenges.

The only difference is that you see some kinds of challenges as very exciting, and other ones as painful. The ones you don’t choose and that contain your emotional engagement are usually the painful ones. But instead see all kinds of problems, even the toughest challenges of life – like job loss, breakups and so on – only as an opportunity to grow, improve, become better; find meaning in solving the hardest problems of life.

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. – Albert Camus

In the same way, you have to accept the absurdity of life. Death is inevitable, no person knows what happens after we draw the last breath, the true meaning of life is a matter of personal interpretation, it’s impossible to determine which God is the right one and how come we haven’t made contact with aliens yet if there are billions of stars in the galaxy similar to the sun (it’s called Fermi paradox).

Sisyphus’ pain begins when he becomes aware of his condemnation. Because it’s easy to live in a lie, at least for a while. It’s painful to become aware of the absurdity of life and harsh facts. But really happy and wise becomes the one who learns to accept the punishments of life and sees meaning in them, an opportunity to grow, create, contribute and connect with life.

There is no way to escape the absurdity, neither with lies nor with naivety, the only way to confront it is by fighting, you have to be a rebel. Because once you accept the absurdity of life, you realize that any absurdity of life is nothing but an opportunity to design the life you want.

For example, you can create meaning for your life as it suits you best. You can decide what you’ll believe in and what will bring you the highest level of happiness day by day. If it was all known and set, we would all live life on the same terms. Now you can freely decide on what terms you will live your life. You are free to make out of the absurd whatever you want. That is a part of your life strategy – giving meaning to the life absurds.

You can freely decide what benefit you will see in carrying the rock. Does it represent training your body, mind or practicing discipline? Maybe contributing to the world with hard work, learning to love yourself no matter how heavy the rock is or developing resilience? It’s completely up to you. No matter what situation you’re put in, you can always find a way out of the absurdity of life. You can always innovate your way out. Only by looking at things differently.

There is nothing in life but dealing with struggle. You can find happiness in that.

Sisyphus is successful, imagine Sisyphus happy

At the end of the day, Sisyphus manages to push the rock all the way to the summit, again and again. Without any failure. In a way we could say that Sisyphus is successful. Bruce Lee was definitely a Sisyphus, that’s why he said he’s not afraid of a man who practiced 10,000 kicks one time, but of a man who practiced one single kick 10,000 times. I bet Sisyphus became the best mountain rock carrier.

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken. – Albert Camus

If you want any real achievements in life, you have to be Sisyphus in a way. You have to repeat daily hard actions, even if you know that the output you get purely with your effort will be lost. You have to find comfort and meaning in the effort itself, even if it’s futile at the end.
- If you want to be fit and have a great body, you have to do something for your body daily, while minding your diet and rebelling against gluttony and laziness. Even though dust you are and to dust you will return. But every exercise can be so much fun and every healthy meal can fill you with so much gratefulness and energy.
- If you want to be rich, you have to discipline yourself to save every penny and develop your competence levels high, so you can provide as much value to the markets as possible. But in the end, you will leave everything behind. There is no form of money you can take with you to the other side. But you can really find happiness in developing your talents and providing value to the world.
- If you want deep relationships, you have to water them daily like a flower, pull out all the weeds that are trying to stifle your love, but still everything comes to an end and relationships are nothing but broken glass. But relationships are meant for enjoying the present moment, not controlling what will happen with them in the future.
Consistency and daily struggle are the hard road that slowly leads to success. But even if struggle doesn’t make you massively successful, you should find satisfaction in the fact that you revolted and that you fought. It’s the path that matters, not the end goal. The fact that you are rebelling against the absurdity of life is what counts.

Albert Camus suggests three aspects as part of the revolt and fight against the absurd life: Revolt as never settling and accepting any reconciliation in your struggle, freedom as the fact that you are completely free to believe, think, behave and do with your life as you want, and passion as a way out of an absurd life, initiated by the question: if there is no single meaning and one sure direction in life, why not follow a diverse and rich life experience?

Now imagine Sisyphus happy. Be happy.

Attention span – the ultimate advantage today

A big disadvantage of today’s time is the so-called “fast food” characteristic of the society. You can see it in almost every aspect of life. Not only are fast food restaurant chains thriving, people want to get rich overnight, relationships that last years are a weird thing, and the average person unlocks their mobile phone around 200 times per day and locks it back the next second.

We could describe the elements of the “fast food” disease that people suffer from as the following:

I’m a special snowflake; things should come to me easily without any real effort
I want things now and I definitely don’t want to wait
I want to experience everything very quickly and move on to the next thing as soon as possible
I easily get bored or irritated, that’s why I constantly need new stimuli
Everything that distracts me helps me keep busy and feel alive

Fast to get, easy to consume and constantly providing something new together with aggressive distracting notifications is what people are addicted to today. Severely addicted. That’s why reality shows, get-rich-quick schemes and mental masturbation articles are thriving.

The “fast food” society brings many problems – from overspending and overeating to shallow relationships and high anxiety levels. But the mother of those problems is absolutely the shortened attention span.

The vicious circle behind it is quite simple. People consume products or do activities that require almost zero effort, including only a short attention span. Not training the discipline muscle and attention span leads to even shorter attention and general low cognitive performance capabilities. Soon you aren’t capable of reading 5 pages of a book without wanting to go to the toilet or checking the fridge.

Attention span is the length of time during which a person is able to concentrate or remain interested in a task or an activity.

Without proactively directed attention for a longer period of time, you can’t do a single thing that really matters in life. You can’t learn new things, you can’t create in the flow, you can’t form deep relationships, you can’t grow and improve, you can’t choose what to focus on, you can’t complete complex projects and you can’t even follow your own goals, nothing.

You can only react to what’s happening in your environment. You can’t be really proactive. That’s why you should go into the opposite direction of the fast food society.

Attention span

Producers have an extremely long attention span

In today’s society, we know two types of people – consumers and producers. Consumers only consume, nothing else. They do the easy things. They spend (borrowed) money, play lottery, entertain themselves on social networks and in clubs, go to a job they hate and hope for better times. They do all the tasks and activities that require a short attention span (or a passive attention span, as we will see).

Consumers and short attention span people have no problem:

Talking to a friend over coffee and constantly checking their mobile phone
Working for 15 minutes and then starting to gossip
Visiting a nice tourist destination, but first taking a selfie
Reading an interesting article on the internet and already browsing photos of funny cats
Changing partners faster than underwear
Buying more and more new products (clothes, cars etc.) because they get bored by the old ones
Eating too expensively, daintily, too much or too soon

The average attention span of a human today is 8 seconds. A goldfish has the attention span of 9 seconds.

Producers, on the other hand, are building products, providing services, creating things, forging relationships, innovating, thinking, strategizing, growing, learning, putting together new concepts and providing value to different markets. Producers do all the things that require a long attention span and strong focus. That’s why consumers are getting (mentally) poor and producers are getting rich.

Not to get confused, you have to understand the word producer in a broader sense. Producing is every task that leads to a positive outcome of creating something valuable or beautiful. Producers with a long attention span have no problem:

Talking to a person for hours without checking their mobile phone to forge a multidimensional relationship and to really understand the person they’re talking to.
Working straight for hours or even days in a flow to create a product, service, piece of art or any other valuable thing.
Reading for hours and learning new things and developing their competences.
Building strong and everlasting key personal relationships that get deeper and deeper with years.
Resisting compulsive buying or emotional eating and instead following their own health, wealth and other goals they have in life.

Producers usually live a happy, fulfilling and rich life. Because they put in the effort. They don’t go for the average and they don’t want to become passive zombies with the attention span of a goldfish.

That’s why you have to become a producer and you have to make sure that you can hold your attention on a single thing for a very long period of time. An extremely strong, focused and long attention span will bring miracles into your life. So let’s look at how to do that.

Passive and active attention span

Have you ever wondered how come you can watch TV, browse the Internet or lie on a beach for hours, but you can’t do the same when you’re working, reading or learning something new? How you can focus all your attention with ease when it’s time to binge watch a TV show, but when you are reading a book you get lost on the second page?

Why is it easy to spend hours in front of the TV, completely focused? It’s because we know two kinds of attention – a passive and an active one. Your attention is always directed onto something, except when you’re sleeping (and even that can be discussed). And you’re always doing something when you’re awake, merely by existing.

Depending on the task you do, you can be physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually or socially actively or passively involved in a task. Being passively involved means that you are only witnessing something, you don’t play a very active role. Your effort in the activity, your contribution is low. You are either hibernating while things are happening around you or you are repeating something that is very familiar to you.

Active attention, on the other hand, requires a lot of effort. It requires focus, presence, involvement, discipline, consistency, activation of all senses, engaging your mental capabilities, and so on. Active attention takes place when you consciously put effort into achieving something meaningful.

Something meaningful means everything that’s connected to why we are here on this planet – to grow (personal improvement), to contribute (create value) and to enjoy life and connect with other people. To grow takes effort, to create takes effort, to connect with people takes effort and to be really happy with yourself and enjoy life takes effort; not only effort, but also a long attention span.

Passive attention – Low effort	Active attention – High effort
Low physical, analytical, creative or communicational effort	High physical, analytical, creative or communicational effort
Procrastinating Repeating routine tasks Small talk Watching TV Reading news Playing video games (not all of them) Participating in a low-quality meeting Feeling sorry for yourself Complaining Being indecisive Checking social media Listening to music Gossiping Small talk Eating quickly prepared low-quality food Browsing the internet Playing email ping pong Instant messaging Playing lotto Spending money Going on a miracle diet	Setting and following your own goals Brainstorming and analyzing ideas Creating in the flow Learning new things Developing competences Writing, drawing, programming Organizing & leading a productive meeting Upgrading your mindset Thinking of a solution & following through Making a proactive decision Sharing quality ideas on social media Listening to online courses Really getting to know a person Building a deep and quality relationship Cooking a healthy meal Using the internet to learn new things Replying to an email in the shortest way Meeting new people in real life Starting your own business Saving money Changing your health lifestyle
Consumers	Producers

Doing things that require a short attention span is the easy road. Doing things that require a long attention span means undertaking the hard road. And with time, the hard road becomes easy and the easy road becomes hard. That’s why you have to take the hard road and strengthen your attention span.

It may be true that it’s in our genes to do all the things with the short attention span. Nonetheless, easy cognitive activities often bring instant gratification. For example, easy cognitive activities can bring you short-term benefits like:

Constant happening that’s driving you away from yourself and the pain of life (constantly checking the mobile phone, gossiping etc.)
Instant excess of calories (eating a bag of chips in front of TV)
Saving energy – physical, mental (with zero body or brain exercise)
Fake feeling of connectedness (having 1000 Facebook friends but no real friends)
Getting something for nothing (playing lotto, going on a “miracle” diet)
Zero effort fun (playing video games instead of doing sports etc.)

That may all sound like a good deal. But it’s not. It may have been a good deal back in the jungle (where food, people and distractions were rare), but today it’s nothing but a series of bad decisions that lead to a poor quality of life in the long term.

Doing only activities that require a short attention span leads to being broke, fat, doing a job you hate and spending time with people you don’t like. It may be bearable as long as you have enough distractions, but it’s far from the good life you deserve.

The zombie life is bearable as long as you have enough distractions that help you forget about it. That’s why with time, you need more and more activities that require a short attention span.

That’s why you need to slowly move away from activities that require a passive and short attention span to the ones that require a long active attention span. You need to start building up your focusing capabilities. It may be hard at the beginning, but in the long term it will bring you a whole new level of quality of life.

Training your attention span will slowly lead you to easily do things like:

Not giving up easily and becoming more resilient
Saying no and avoiding any kind of distractions
Strategically planning and setting goals with the long-term view
Increasing your competence level
Brainstorming hundreds of ideas
Creating different kinds of products and art
Working in a flow for hours day by day, even for weeks on a single task
Slicing, managing and finishing complex tasks
Better observing what is happening with you (body, mind, emotions, spirit)
Better observing what is happening in your environment (trends, people etc.)
Making better decisions about your wealth and health
Many other benefits

Building up your attention span and doing activities that matter is a good deal today. The best deal you can go for. That’s the deal you should go after. So let’s look at some practical advice on how to build up your attention span.

There is no person in the world with a short attention span who can successfully deal with life challenges that await us all on the life path.

Training focus

How to build your attention span

Now that we know how important attention span is, let’s look at a few core techniques for how to improve it. As long as you’re at least a bit motivated to improve your concentration, it’s not hard to do it. The techniques to build up your attention span fall into one of the following categories:

Get the experience of how awesome it is to be focused and how good results it brings
Make room in your life and get rid of things that are corrupting your attention span
Deliberately practice your concentration abilities with different exercises
Use things that help with concentration

The best advice is to build up attention span naturally with small additions to your life. Start a new hobby you’re obsessed with. Turn off all notifications on your mobile phone. Try to meditate for a few minutes or challenge yourself with a brain game. Add almonds to your snacks.

By doing small activities like these and consequently building up your attention span bit by bit every day, results will accumulate and you will soon become scary focused superhuman. Now let’s dive deeper into these ideas.

1. Find one productive thing you are obsessed with

If you don’t have the experience (or you had it long time ago) of being concentrated and focused and you’re not aware of what magical results an unbreakable attention span can bring, you won’t see any sense in it. You have to feel it in your bones and see concrete results that come with the ability to focus.

That’s why the number one thing I recommend if you suffer from a short attention span in general is to enter the search mode. Try dozens and dozens of different things (that require active attention), including sports, arts, hobbies etc., and find that one thing (the so-called fit) that will ignite a spark in you. Find that one thing that will awaken passion and utter obsession in you.

Because when you find that one thing, your fit, something magical happens. You become more focused and concentrated without even trying to be focused. You just don’t think about it. You want to do it over and over again. Like a video game or watching TV, only that you are actively present.

For example, if you find a hobby you like, you can devote hours and hours of your free time in the afternoons and weekends to it. You don’t have to struggle. You just do it and get lost in the flow. And as you have probably figure it out, watching TV doesn’t count.

Try as many things as possible and don’t give up until you find that one thing that will change your life forever and naturally teach you how to be more focused. Here are some ideas for what to try:

Try 10 different sports and find the one that fits you best and you want to do it every day
Find a list online of all the hobbies and try a few of them
Create something – an article, a poem, a computer program, anything you like and then do it over and over again, day by day
Go to a public library and scan all the sections and books until something really draws your attention (it must feel like a magnet) and then read everything on that topic
Start an online course on something that has always interested you

The catch is that when you have an experience of being utterly focused on something, you will not only train your attention span, your brain will get a model and an experience that can be transferred to other areas of life. You won’t struggle to focus anymore, but will have an easy time devoting your attention to things for as long as you want.

2. Unplug yourself and simplify your life

A very sad truth is that mobile phones are the number one attention span killers, together with other electronic devices. Technology is like fire. You can cook yourself dinner with it or burn yourself. You want to use technology to your advantage. You have to be smarter than the average user.

How to be smarter than a person with an 8-second attention span?

Turn on “do not disturb” when creating in the flow or spending time with other people
Turn off notifications on your mobile phone
Don’t look at your mobile phone the first and last 60 minutes of your day
Delete all mental masturbation apps
Check email and social networks only twice a day in bulk
Get rid of the mobile phone, like I did
Go to regular technology detox sessions

The second biggest executioners of attention span are stress, anxiety and overload. You need to do fewer things and do them in higher quality. No matter how much you train your attention span, it’s still limited. That’s why you have to treat it as a very precious resource. You have to simplify your life and focus on only a few important goals that will really make you successful and happy.

Here are a few ideas for what to do, all leading to increasing your margin in life:

Commit to fewer projects and obligations
Get rid of toxic people in your life and have a few really quality relationships
Cancel unproductive meetings and send fewer emails
Use fewer apps, watch fewer TV shows
Sell things you don’t use, spend less and disinvest

Build up your attention span

3. Deliberately build up your cognitive endurance and attention span

It’s very easy to deliberately build up your cognitive endurance. You do it with gradual progress. Pick an active attention task you like. If you don’t know which one to do, use the search mode as we discussed. Perform it every day. Make sure you do it for 1 – 10 minutes longer every day. Repeat, and in a few weeks you will be impressed with your progress.

Your attention span is like a muscle. You train it and it gets stronger with time. In the beginning, progress is fast, then it slows down and at some point you reach a plateau.

The good news is that the plateau can be doing a thing from the moment you wake up until late hours for weeks or even months in a row. But you don’t need that. If you learn to concentrate for a few hours daily, you are already 10 – 30 times more capable than the average person.

There are so many ways how you can train attention span muscle. Here are only the most popular ones, you can try to:

Read or listen to books
Play brain games or chess
Perform a new cognitive demanding skill (programming, writing, designing etc.)
Meditate
Play an instrument
Practice yoga
Practice observing or mindfulness skills
Cook healthy meals

4. Other things that will help you with your attention span

Things that hinder your cognitive abilities also hinder your attention span. Not taking good care of your body and brain hinders your cognitive abilities and consequently your attention span. So take good care of your body and mind, and you will be rewarded with a better ability to focus.

Learn to manage your emotions better
Use a timer for starting and stopping a certain task
Get enough sleep
Regularly exercise
Drink enough water, at least 2 – 3 liters per day
Make sure you don’t get sugar crashes (by overeating sugar or not eating food at all too long)
Eat brain foods like nuts, berries, eggs, spinach, salmon and oatmeal
Research supplements like Omega 3 Fatty Acid, Ginkgo Biloba and others
Have no-interruption days in your calendar

Now, these things are only aids, they won’t do miracles for you, but they absolutely help. They are like food supplements in general, they can’t save a poor diet, but they are a valuable addition to a healthy diet. The good news is that not only your attention span will get better if you follow these suggestions, your overall health and productivity levels will improve as well.

Homework

Commit to building the longest attention span in the world

Go into a different direction than everyone else. When people are getting more and more lost in distractions and can’t read or create for 8 minutes straight, do the opposite. Be smarter, work smarter and don’t get seduced by the “fast food” paradigm. It doesn’t do any good with years.

Train your attention span so you can easily read a book in a day. And do that several days in a row if necessary. Make sure you have no problem reading a 20-minute article on the internet, like this.
Train your attention span so you can work in the flow on a complex task for days or even weeks from early morning until you go to sleep.
Train your attention span so you can easily put effort into learning a new skill, even if it takes months of daily hard work and practice.
Train your attention span to the point of meditating as long as you want, being completely focused on your body when training and being aware of your emotions all the time.
Train your attention span to the point where you can easily talk with a person for hours, completely aware of their words, feelings, movements, actions and other body language responses. Communicate with people not to respond, but to understand.

Commit to building the longest and the strongest attention span of all humans in the world. Regularly train your discipline and regularly train your attention span. Constantly improve. Make sure you can focus proactively on different tasks and activities for as long as you want; all the way until you earn some rest and you can go into a passive mode for a while. But not for too long.

You aren’t a special snowflake. Work hard if you want results in life. And it all starts with the ability to focus.

The only solution on the table if you are feeling stuck
Many times, we feel stuck in life. You may feel like you are stuck in a relationship, in a job or in life in general. It happens to all of us. It’s a shitty mixture of feeling paralyzed, depressed, overwhelmed, hopeless, being in doubt about the future and many other similar negative feelings.

You may not have suicidal thoughts, but feeling stuck can often go even so far that you may just want things to be over (with your life). It’s definitely not a pleasant feeling.

You usually get stuck after making a series of bad decisions. It can be a few major bad decisions like getting into business with the wrong person, making a big bad investment etc. or several small bad decisions like not taking care of your body daily, drinking too much alcohol, not following your True North, ignoring your feelings etc.

No wonder that people most often feel stuck in their:
- Own body – illness, being overweight
- Mind – bad thinking patterns
- Key relationships – boss, coworkers, spouse, family, social groups
- In a job or career
- In money-related things, or even in negative market trends
- In constant unhappiness
- In a lack of creativity or intellectual stimulation or a lack of hope or having no direction in life and similar.
The most important question is: what should you do when you are feeling stuck?

You are not really stuck, there is something else

Here’s the good news. If you are feeling stuck, you aren’t really stuck. You are only spending your time, energy and other resources wrong. There is nothing else. It’s more than obvious that doing the same things and expecting a different result is crazy. It’s actually the official definition of craziness.

You aren’t stuck, you’re only spending your precious time, energy and other resources wrong. You aren’t following your True North.

In reality, you can’t be really stuck, because life always goes on. Your seconds of being alive are passing by. Everything is moving and going forward, and so are you. You can’t stop time, so you can’t be stuck. You can only be making wrong decisions about spending your resources. You can only be committed to the ill life strategy.

If you are asking yourself why you’re doing that, there is a very simple answer. Because in comparison, the pain of being stuck is smaller than the pain of freeing yourself and doing something about it. There are certain benefits to being stuck you are enjoying. They can be enjoying the comfort zone, emotional security, financial security, being used to people and things, and so on. Deep down, you know very well what it is.

You feel stuck because things are too bad to stay and too good to leave.

Most people wait until the pain of being stuck becomes much bigger than doing something, just anything. And by then it’s usually far too late to constructively solve a problem without severe damage. People wait until they get a serious disease, go bankrupt, the relationship becomes extremely abusive, they burn out or experience a psychological collapse because of work pressure.

Yes, at some point the pain of not acting becomes too strong. But there’s a rule. Kill the monster when it’s still small. Well, don’t kill anything, but you get the point.

The more you ignore the monster, the bigger and stronger it becomes, and it’s going to eat you sooner or later. If you don’t act as soon as possible, a collapse is inevitable, and waiting until the collapse is a sure way to completely destroy your life.

Homework

So the first exercise you should do is to list all the benefits you are enjoying while being stuck. They are usually deep psychological and emotional reasons that drive you to cling to a certain situation. What’s so good about it? What are you really afraid of?

You may feel like you don’t deserve to be happy, that you aren’t good enough, you may be afraid of financial insecurities, that you won’t meet a new person who can treat you better etc. There is always a deep psychological reason why you cling to where you are and you must become aware why you’re doing that. Usually you also lack self-confidence in that area big time.

When you are feeling stuck, solution is in craziness

The solution for freeing yourself when you feel stuck lies in craziness. What do I mean by that? If being crazy means doing the same things and expecting a different result, then starting to do different things will bring you a new result. Yes, it’s that simple – you aren’t stuck, you’re just spending your resources wrong. That means you have to start directing your resources (time, energy, money, creativity etc.) into a new direction.

You must start doing different things and you must start doing things differently. That’s all.

When we talk about starting to do different things, there are two ways you can go. You can start making even worse decisions like start drinking alcohol, blaming other people, start gambling etc. or you can start making better decisions. The latter is what we are looking for, but I hope that is obvious.

What’s really important is that there is a simple solution for feeling stuck that I have seen over and over again. When somebody feels stuck, the moment they start doing a small new task they haven’t been doing before to change their situation, a big burden lifts off their shoulders.

The first step is the hardest but when you do it, a whole new world opens up to you. You can start feeling the energy flowing again. It usually takes only a small kick and the soul boat starts drifting again on the river of life.

Kick yourself a little bit in the butt and life will start flowing again.

If you want to live the life you want, you have to put yourself first, be a little bit rebellious and stand up for yourself. You’re feeling stuck because you are putting yourself in a position of a victim. It’s the worst kind of mindset you can operate from. So push yourself out of the victim mindset.

Nobody gets the quality life they want handed to them on a silver platter; we must all fight for it. Life owes you nothing, it was here first. The important fact is that life rewards those who master its rules. And one of the important rules of life is acting or, according to the Nike slogan, “Just do it”.

But when you act, you have to observe the feedback you are getting from the environment and from your inner self, and if it’s not working, you have to act differently. It’s that simple.

Answer three simple questions and do one small thing

Homework
So if you’re feeling stuck, gather all the energy, motivation, will and determination that’s left in you and make three simple choices, answer three very simple questions:

What are you willing to stop doing?

What are you willing to start doing?

What is the smallest single step you can take into a new direction?
This one single step is really important. It can be getting a massage as a signal to life that you are putting yourself first, it may be updating your CV and then sending it to a few companies, it may be showing with your behavior that you have enough of being abused, or it might simply be reading a book.

It may be getting up a little bit earlier and meditating, it can be deciding to let it go or anything else that will serve as a signal that you aren’t stuck anymore.

One small act is usually the tipping point that gets you going again. You have to do one single thing you haven’t ever done since feeling stuck, and then piggy-back further positive changes on that one epiphany moment.

One single act is often the only thing you need to start feeling unstuck. So do it now!

Why does it work? Because it’s a simple reminder that you possess all the power necessary to change your life situation. At any time and in any place. Nobody can take that away from you. You are the one who chooses who to spend time with, where to focus your energy and what you will do with your life.

You are the one who can take action, innovate your way out of shit and take a step towards a better life. You already possess all the power needed.

If you are deep in shit, stop digging.

Understanding global and local maximum when feeling stuck

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

In mathematics, there is a concept known as local and global maximum. It’s an important concept that can also be applied to a personal life.

A global maximum is the point where you would enjoy life the most, achieve your true peak performance and maximize all the potentials you have.

Honestly, it’s pretty hard to achieve that point and it takes a special kind of character. It takes an enormous amount of experimentation through the search mode, and you often have to change many diets, partners, careers and behavioral patterns.

Then there is the local maximum. The local maximum means maximizing your quality of life and success levels in different areas with your current life settings. You search for a position and behavior for yourself that gives you the most out of your current life situation.
- Global maximum: Completely changing your life settings – you make one or several new big decisions (like changing a job, getting a divorce, saving all the money possible etc.)
- Local maximum: Maximizing your quality of life in current life settings – you start making small better decisions (like letting go, getting a new hobby, changing your behavior towards a person, slowly paying off your loan according to a plan etc.).
Now, why are those two concepts important? Many times, it’s obvious what the best thing to do is when people are feeling stuck. You don’t like your job, change it. Your partner is abusive, leave them.

But the problem is that things rarely get so bad that the pain of staying would be greater than the pain of doing something and leaving. The benefits of staying (either emotional, material or whichever security) are bigger than the effort necessary to act in a big way.

It’s kind of a “too good to leave, too bad to stay” situation, but most people decide to stay. Because things aren’t painful enough, even though they are getting worse. So acting is absolutely better than doing nothing.

If you know that going after a new maximum is just too much for you (changing a job, getting a divorce etc.), do something small that will maximize your current situation. There is always something you can do to be in a better position.
- You can change yourself
- You can negotiate
- You can communicate differently
- You can start treating yourself better
- You can set strict boundaries
- You can strategically protect yourself
It’s a no-brainer that you are feeling stuck if you see your only option as leaving or giving up on something that is dear to you, but at the same time you know you can’t do that, it’s just too hard. Well, admit that to yourself and do something to maximize your quality of life in current life settings.

If you can go after completely new life settings and draw the line in the sand, do it. But if you know you can’t undertake a different road to get unstuck, do something new and small that will get you to feel unstuck in current life settings.

To find out whether you should go (if you are ready to go) for a new maximum or stay at the local maximum, simply employ optimal thinking. Ask yourself: What is the best thing I can do in my current situation to get back on track? Your intuition will tell you what to do.

“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” Will Rogers

Nevertheless, if you decide to stay at your current life settings, make sure you protect yourself. Things will probably get worse and you must be ready for it. Make sure you’re building options for yourself in current life settings. If things get much worse at some point, the transition will be smoother. If not, learn to enjoy life under current settings, but be prepared. Play your cards smart.

Homework

If you’re feeling stuck, start playing and free yourself

To get unstuck, you have to be more assertive, there is no other way. An important truth of life is that if you want to function well, you have to be a healthy assertive person.

A healthy assertive person is a person who likes themselves as they are, has a strong sense of self and their autonomy, has no problems with their needs being met, knows how to express feelings, knows where they’re going in life and what they want, is not afraid of conflict, knows how to set boundaries, takes initiative and contributes creative ideas.

There is no stuck in the definition of an assertive person.

So you have to start treating and listening to yourself better. You have to stop abusing yourself or letting yourself be abused. When feeling stuck, there is nothing but a lot of abuse.

Instead start loving yourself, build up your self-confidence, become assertive and start playing again, like a kid. A kid who plays, can’t be stuck. If you are really so stuck that you have zero ideas on what to do, here’s a few of them:
1. Challenge your fears, just a little bit
2. Break your routine with something new
3. Change the way you think and look at things
4. Start communicating with a new behavior
5. Do something extremely fun or take a trip
6. Start exercising
7. Volunteer for charity
8. Get a pet
9. Get yourself a small garden
10. Write a novel about your being stuck situation
11. Draw a picture about your being stuck situation
12. Make new friends
13. Analyze yourself and get to know yourself better
14. Figure out if you are maybe a chronic procrastinator
15. Try doing the opposite just to see what happens
16. List all the possibilities you have, and keep an abundance mindset while doing it
17. Take an online course or read a book about your life problem
18. Do one thing that you really enjoyed as a child
19. Write down 50 ideas on how you can help your company to perform better
20. Find a mentor
21. Increase your margins and disinvest yourself
22. Do all the mind exercises to think better
Now go out and play, do something new. You only have one life. And remember, you aren’t stuck, you’re just spending your time, energy and other resources wrong. So shape a better life strategy. You only live once.
Valley of Death – where your dreams go to die
Every single startup has to go through the Valley of Death very early after being born. The same goes for personal goals and dreams. Unfortunately, around 80 % or even more businesses die in the Valley of Death; and the same goes for people’s goals and dreams. Getting trapped or lost in the Valley of Death means that startups and people die (inside) or at least turn into zombies, what is nothing but a living hell.

Before entering the Valley of Death, your imagination, visions, optimism, and even a little bit of naivety play a very important role – you need all of them to undertake any kind of adventure and start following your big goals and dreams. Without a dream of a greater life for yourself, you never take the first step.

You need to be a little bit naïve in the beginning, blinded by all the strong motivation and enthusiasm. That’s what leads you into action. But soon after taking a few serious steps, you enter the Valley of Death. There is where visions, imagination and optimism face a harsh and cold reality and often die.

In business and personal lives, people go after their dreams, but soon after figuring out how hard it is, they give up and turn into zombies. Most often only because they give up too soon.

The Valley of Death is a place where it gets tested who has the character to succeed and who doesn’t, it gets tested who really deserves it and who doesn’t. The Valley of Death is a place where you must show that you want it badly enough, that you will never give up, that you will learn, improve, adjust, play smarter and smarter, and somehow find a way through the Valley reaching the safe side.

It’s true that crossing the Valley of Death is dangerous and tough, but it can also be a daring and exciting adventure, especially if you love challenges. And as you probably know the saying, life can only be either a daring adventure or nothing.

I often found myself in the Valley of Death. When I started my own businesses. When I started to take care of my health and wealth and several other times in the past when I was naïve about how easy it is to succeed at something.

I still am in the Valley of Death with this blog, and I am drawing the map (validated learning, in other words) for getting out of it as quickly as possible. I am even deeper in the Valley of Death in trying to learn how to code. I’m just somewhere in between my imagination of how I could also be a hacker and the reality that learning to code is not that easy at all.

The point is that many times in my past, I walked through the Valley of Death proudly as a winner; and several times, I brutally died and learned hard lessons of how your dreams can be stumped by life with no mercy if you don’t play your cards right. So I want to share a few key lessons for how to successfully walk in and through the Valley of Death and what to do when you realize that you may not make it.

Nobody is born to die in the Valley of Death

Nobody is born to become a zombie. Nobody is born to die in the Valley of Death. Nobody is born to live a miserable life. In the beginning, we all have big dreams for what we want to do with our lives – who to become and what to achieve.

But it’s easy to dream when you are just a kid and don’t yet have any experience with the harsh reality. Then after becoming an adult, two things can happen:

Your life is either a daring adventure …

You learn how to walk through the Valley of Death and you persevere at following your dreams no matter what. You face your fears, you fight, you make smart decisions and put in the effort to get what you want. Sometime you make it, sometimes you get knocked down, but you never give up.

You follow your life vision, without any option to retreat or surrender. When you get knocked down, you know that there must be another way to get to your dream. You know that you can always innovate your way out and you can always make a step towards a better life. You know that beginnings are hard, but with time, the hard road becomes easy.

No matter how hard life is, you decide to live it as a real adventurer. As you have probably guessed, that is a small minority of folks.

… or nothing

Unfortunately, the majority of people are on the other side of the spectrum. The other side of spectrum is not somewhere between a good life and a life that sucks, but on a scale where the only axis is measuring how much life sucks. It can be from being completely miserable and depressed to only somehow unsatisfied (with your job, spouse or life in general) but anyway, no matter where you are on the axis, life still sucks.

Life can only be a daring adventure or nothing, there is no middle path.

You probably know the scenario of how quickly life can become nothing. You give up after the first few failed attempts of going after your dreams and turn into a zombie. A zombie going everywhere life kicks you, hoping for the best. Life rarely kicks you where you really want to be. Such behavior is also known as reactive behavior.

The majority of people give up when they set their foot in the Valley of Death for the first time. Because it seems so hard and scary. Nevertheless, it’s a valley full of CRAP – criticism, rejections, assholes, pressure and other traps.

So people rather turn back and go into the safe zone, often not aware that the comfort zone is turning them into a zombie. That’s sadly where most people are, usually right after graduating and getting their first job.

Comfort zone Valley of Death Success

Zombie mode C.R.A.P. God mode

Even though people turn into zombies, they usually keep dreaming. They keep dreaming of a good life, only without doing anything. They play the lottery, watch TV, subscribe to multi-level marketing from time to time, argue in bars, and so on.

They dream a lot, they talk a lot, but they stay at zero. Because only zero can invite vivid imagination, only zero can keep you in the world of naivety, where you can dream and talk a lot but do nothing, where you can flirt but never go after the first kiss.

Zero is where you can dream, but a single step into the Valley of Death is where your dreaming stops, it’s where your imaginary world meets reality. So you have to decide between staying at zero and keeping your dreams or facing harsh reality.

Zero invites imagination

The easiest thing to do in life is to stay at zero and only dream and talk. Everyone can do dreaming and talking, and most people stay at this stage. You build a kind of psychological defensive system to protect your self-image. You dream like when you were a kid, a kid with zero experience and a vivid imagination.

Practical examples
- If I decided to take good care of my health, I could be on a magazine cover.
- If I decided to take good care of my wealth, I could be a successful investor.
- Someday I will make enough money to buy myself a small house in nature.
- One day I will meet the love of my life.
- I am smart, I can easily learn how to program.
- This is such a good business idea; I could build a successful company around it.
It’s so easy to dream about how fit you could be if you haven’t stepped in the gym a single time. It’s easy to dream about how successful an investor you could be, if you haven’t made a single investment in your life and lost some money. It’s easy to dream about a house you want if you haven’t checked prices in real-estate listings at all or gone to the bank asking even for general loan terms.

It’s easy to dream about the love of your life if you haven’t gone on a single date in years. It’s easy to dream about being a hacker if you haven’t written a single line of code. It’s easy to dream about being a successful entrepreneur if you haven’t tried to sell a single thing ever in your life. Zero always brings vivid imagination.

When you are at zero, you are frankly at the same level as that 7-year-old kid with no real life experiences.

If you don’t have experience with something, you simply can’t know it and understand it. You can talk, you can dream, you can imagine, you can defend your point of view and your assumptions, you can protect your self-image by creating an imaginary world where you are successful as shit, but in reality you know nothing. You are like Jon Snow.

After zero comes beginner’s optimism

You are at zero, dreaming about doing something with your life, and then finally at some point you decide to go after the goals you always dreamt about. Usually there is a trigger – inspiration or desperation.

Mid-life crisis, relationship breakups, losing a job, neighbor buying a new fancy car, best friend starting a successful business, getting a business idea, falling in love and similar events are frequent triggers that kick you straight out of the comfort zone and into the Valley.

And that’s good. Deciding to really make something out of your life and not only dream about it is awesome. But there is usually a big problem. Initial vivid imagination starts turning into beginner’s optimism. You add to your dreams sentences like: It can’t be that hard. If s/he could do it, I can do it too.

Don’t get me wrong, you have to be motivated, enthusiastic and optimistic for every goal you go after. The problem is when beginner’s optimism helps you lie to yourself and continue living in a bubble of imagination now called a fake feeling of progress.

Practical examples
- You go on a diet without really changing your lifestyle and you can’t wait for it to end. You measure your progress only by your weight and no other metrics.
- You invite a salesman of financial products to your home, to present all investment opportunities and advise you on the best ones that will make you the best ROI.
- You create accounts on online dating sites, you chat with folks on Tinder, Snapchat or wherever, but you never really go on a date, you never escalate or make a move.
- You learn the basic syntax of a programming language and then switch to a new one and a new one, never really diving deep into a language and mastering it.
- You write a business plan with a financial plan for how you’re going to earn millions in a few years. You never really try to find customers for your products.
In other words, you do the easy stuff that leads you nowhere. On top of that, you live in a lie of how successful and awesome you are becoming.

Obviously living in a lie is not a superior strategy for walking through the Valley of Death as a winner. That approach is closer to entering the Valley with your eyes blindfolded hoping that somehow you will manage to avoid all the traps. Few are that lucky.

It’s time to face the harsh reality and stare into Death’s eyes

The more you lie to yourself, the harder it is when you have to face the harsh reality. Sooner or later, a trap or a barbed wire bursts your bubble of naivety and you have to deal with real facts.

You have to face the reality that to achieve anything great in life, you have to invest really a lot. You can’t be only interested; you have to be committed, dedicated, persistent, resilient, focused and much more. This is where most people give up, run back into the comfort zone and forever turn into zombies.

Practical examples
- Losing weight stops after squeezing some water out of your system and then the yo-yo effect happens when you finish with the diet after several weeks. You go to a personal trainer that writes you a dieting and exercising program and when you see that you have to completely overturn your lifestyle if you want to permanently lose weight, you rather go back to your old habits.
- The “once in a lifetime opportunity” investment you were sold by a financial advisor starts losing money. You open a book about investing to get more knowledge why that is and get completely confused by all types of investments, markets and financial products complexity, and simply give up.
- You go on a few dates, get rejected, and when you finally don’t get rejected you figure out that the person is far from your ideal partner, but anyway you somehow settle, because you are too afraid of one more rejection.
- You figure out that a basic (really basic) programming challenge takes a lot of mental effort, hours of intellectual work, googling and fighting with the problem. So you again give up instead.
- Now that you built your shiny product based on the business plan, you finally try to sell it and nobody wants to buy it. You realize on your own skin that “build and they will come” doesn’t work.
All that hurts, but here is the most important secret of life. Every single master was once a beginner. And every beginner in whichever field was in such a naïve and painful situation. That’s normal and that’s natural. It’s part of the process of becoming great.

All great people, all high achievers and all billionaires find themselves in such situations in life – realizing they had no clue what it really takes to be successful. In the startup world, there is a saying that every successful startup goes through a big crisis or two and has to look death straight in the eyes before finding the path to real success.

This tough situation is very nicely described in the saying that in the dark, stars shine the brightest. So the only question is, what do you do next, when you find yourself in a situation full of dark and horror?

In the dark, stars shine the brightest.

You have only two choices, either you face the harsh reality and really learn how to walk through the Valley of Death or you go back to the zero, back into your imaginary world, where you can dream as big as you want, but in reality you aren’t really living life.

At this point, you have to decide to either become a real adventurer or a zombie. Will you take the blue pill or the red pill? That isn’t really a choice, you absolutely have to go for the adventurer option. You only have one life and it’s too precious to live it as a zombie.

Decide to learn how to walk through the Valley of Death

After seeing the gap between your imaginary world and reality, and after realizing that hope and beginner’s optimism are a good beginning but not a superior strategy, it’s time to really learn how to walk through the Valley of Death.

Now, everyone has their own Valley of Death, depending on their goals, environment, life situation and many other factors, but general rules for walking through the scary valley are the same.

It’s not easy, but you have to think long-term

The first fact is that if it were easy, everybody would do it. If it were easy to get fit, rich, fluent in a (programming) language, build healthy relationships etc. everybody would do it. Because it’s not easy, only a minority is willing to put in the effort and commitment. If you read this article all the way to this point, I’m sure that you are part of this minority!

If it were easy everybody would do it.

So for every big goal you want to achieve, know that it will not be easy, but hard. Probably extremely hard. Usually we are talking about years of hard work and dedication.

In the frame of 5 to 10 years, you can usually see big results – in your body structure, bank account figures, business size and profitability or your competences at a mastery level. But although it’s hard, it can be done. Many people have done it and so can you. Just keep the long-term view.

Always carefully manage your expectations

Next to admitting to yourself that it won’t be easy, you have to know that the starting point you have matters a lot. That’s where life isn’t fair, but you have to accept the rules of life and play by them.

Your genes, your IQ, how rich your family is, how well you were raised, where you live, how early you started to work on your goals and so on, it all greatly influences the potential you have and how fast you can achieve it.

The shittier your starting point is and the more ambitious your goals are, the more you will have to work hard and smart and the longer it will take you to get to your goals. That means you have to pick challenges suitable for you and then intensify them gradually.

Compete with yourself, not with people who were given a much better starting point. In the long term, you can catch up to them in most things, but you have to start with the first step that isn’t too big for you. The good news is that along the way, you will learn so much more and you will be richer for the experience of knowing how to get yourself out of a shitty starting point to achieve a certain goal. That kind of knowledge is gold.

Having unrealistic expectations is pretty much the same as going back to zero and starting to daydream.

So manage your expectations wisely. Having unrealistic expectations is pretty much the same as going back to zero and starting to daydream. So instead manage your expectations properly and first build strong foundations, then build your skyscraper of success floor by floor knowing that you have a very strong basis. Even if it takes 10, 20 or 30 years longer than it took somebody who had a much better starting point than you.

Be utterly obsessed with your vision and mission and get educated

Since you have to be 110 % committed to achieve anything big in life, you should carefully choose which dreams to follow. Every action you take has to be based on a really strong emotional vision and mission that will drive you through every single challenge and obstacle on the way.

The best way to measure your true obsession is by how much you read about a specific topic and with how many people you talked about it. You see, only reading is never enough, but getting educated is mandatory to walk successfully through the Valley of Death. And people who are obsessed with something usually read everything that exists on the topic they want to achieve.

The smartest thing to do is to have a vision list and go after a specific dream when the time is ripe. Especially when you have the support from the market trends and key relationships and are competent enough. You have to enter the Valley of Death ready somehow, you have to play your game smart.

Follow the process

When you decide to go after your vision, when you get educated and the time is ripe, there is only one thing you can trust – the process. Every success is nothing but following a carefully orchestrated process. A process means repeating boring things day by day. Following the process means doing something every day that gets you closer to your goals.

If you want to achieve the final event, which is always to get yourself out of the Valley of Death and really succeed, you have to follow and trust the process. You have to put in the daily effort, constantly learn and adjust, you have to continuously improve yourself, find new ways when you fail and never give up.

Always measure your progress, metrics are your map

To know if you are really progressing or not, you need a set of metrics. Actionable metrics are the ones that help you draw a map of the Valley of Death so you can walk through it more easily. Actionable metrics are the ones that help you adjust your process so that you are really going in the right direction.

It’s never easy to measure your progress. Not only does it take additional effort and time, even more so because metrics are the ones that force you out of your imaginary world and show you the harsh reality. But they are also the cure. Actionable metrics are also the bright stars that shine when reality is dark and full of horror.

Metrics are the ones that lead you to success at the end.

So always have metrics you measure and follow, no matter how harsh the reality they show you, especially in the beginning (calculating your net worth, your body fat percentage or whatever). When you see your numbers going in the right direction after you put some effort and commitment into your goals, you will get much more motivated.

Find your fit and stay flexible

When you enter the Valley of Death, assuming you follow the right set of metrics, you soon realize that there is a big gap between your assumptions (imaginary world) and the real world. You’re always wrong before you’re right. When you find yourself in such a gap, you have to accept the harsh reality and start living in the real world.

You have to leave your naïve dream world behind and build new, more accurate dreams based on real facts, not your false ego assumptions.

It’s nice to protect your self-image with illusions, but it doesn’t bring results.

That means you always have to put all of your assumptions to the test. That was one of the strongest characteristic traits of Steve Jobs. Even as a successful leader, he had no problem admitting that he was wrong. Based on new data and facts, he could easily change his opinion.

Many assumptions can be simply validated only by getting educated enough, acquiring new knowledge and talking to people who did what you want to do, but some of the assumptions you have to put to the real life test and learn what works for you and what doesn’t.

Your final goal is to find the fit through the search mode, and then build your success on it. It’s your unique way out of the Valley of Death.

There are many ways out of the Valley of Death, find yours

There are two important lessons in validating assumptions. The first one is that you absolutely have to get educated before you enter the Valley of Death, but you will learn the most out in the real world by experimenting, trying and failing. That is a very painful part of the process, but failure is the best teacher ever. So you must learn how to fail properly and get the most out of every failure.

When you feel it in your bones that you have to do things differently, that’s when you’ve really learned something new.

And the second important lesson is that you always have to stay flexible about how you will get to the final destination. There is no one right path through the Valley of Death. You have to stay flexible, always innovate and keep your mind open for which way to take that will get you closer to your goals. You will have to do many pivots in the Valley of Death to avoid fatal traps.

Practical examples

Let’s go to our first example. You decided to lose weight and a personal trainer wrote you a program and a diet. Instead of giving up, you decide to follow through with the program. You start reading fitness blogs and books. You get madly educated. Besides following the program, you start experimenting on your own with different sports and diets.

You build a set of metrics you follow every week (calorie counter, body fat percentage, etc.), you get yourself a training partner and join a few sports groups. Every month, you improve your diet a little bit. You face setbacks but you trust the process and do something for your body every day, even if things don’t go as planned. You are 110 % committed to achieve the goal you want. You can find more examples in the AgileLeanLife Manifesto.

Please don’t become a zombie, you matter to me

One of the hardest things in life is to decide when to persist and when to give up. Sometimes after entering the Valley of Death, you may figure out that something is not as important to you as you might have thought. Sometimes you figure out that it’s not worth the effort and that it makes more sense to follow some other dreams. And that’s completely okay.

There is always a gap between what you think will make you happy and what really makes you happy. You can’t know the difference until you try things.

It’s completely okay to let go of some goals. It’s completely okay to give up from time to time. It’s completely okay to fail and move on. For example, I definitely know I’m not giving up with this blog, no matter what, but learning to code is still completely open.

What’s not okay is turning into a zombie. It’s not okay to completely give up on all of your dreams. It’s not okay to stop being proactive, action-oriented and stop growing and continuously improving yourself. It’s not okay to stop fighting for the dream life you want and deserve.

It’s not hard to see the difference between a zombie and a person who decided to do a pivot or goes through a collapse but is still determined to fight for their dream life. You can see it in a person’s spirit, you can see it in their eyes, but most of all you can see it in their actions. You can always see if somebody is a fighter or a zombie with a broken spirit from miles away. Because no matter how hard the knockout was, they stand up again and fight.

Never ever let your spirit get broken.

The Valley of Death absolutely exists. It’s a very harsh and cold place, where more than 80 % of people’s dreams die and where passionate individuals get turned into zombies. Don’t be one of them, please. You only have one life. It’s better to live one day as a lion than decades as a sheep or a zombie.

But to live as a lion, you have to do lion shit from time to time. Fortunately for humans nowadays that only means facing your fears, being assertive and goal-oriented, building a superior life strategy, going into action and following the process. You don’t have to kill and eat a zebra.

self-discipline

If you are a perfectionist, learn to be satisfied with good enough

Perfectionist’s greed

Slipping from time to time will make you more disciplined

Don’t make good enough be an excuse for not giving your best

Aim high, but define good enough very clearly

Emotional accounting combined with the good enough concept

How to automate good decisions

Don’t use cognitive power for good decisions if you don’t have to

Money

Health

Relationships

Endless options for smart decision automation

Your plan to automate good decisions

Imagine Sisyphus happy

Accept the absurdity and struggles of life

Sisyphus is successful, imagine Sisyphus happy

Attention span – the ultimate advantage today

Producers have an extremely long attention span

Passive and active attention span

How to build your attention span

1. Find one productive thing you are obsessed with

2. Unplug yourself and simplify your life

3. Deliberately build up your cognitive endurance and attention span

4. Other things that will help you with your attention span

Commit to building the longest attention span in the world

The only solution on the table if you are feeling stuck

You are not really stuck, there is something else

When you are feeling stuck, solution is in craziness

Answer three simple questions and do one small thing

Understanding global and local maximum when feeling stuck

If you’re feeling stuck, start playing and free yourself

Valley of Death – where your dreams go to die

Nobody is born to die in the Valley of Death

Your life is either a daring adventure …

… or nothing

Zero invites imagination

After zero comes beginner’s optimism

It’s time to face the harsh reality and stare into Death’s eyes

Decide to learn how to walk through the Valley of Death

It’s not easy, but you have to think long-term

Always carefully manage your expectations

Be utterly obsessed with your vision and mission and get educated

Follow the process

Always measure your progress, metrics are your map

Find your fit and stay flexible

There are many ways out of the Valley of Death, find yours

Please don’t become a zombie, you matter to me